Films about war, shorn of the bone crushing fear, the putrid stench of the corpses, the deafening noise of explosions, the constant exhaustion and the nervous anxiety that comes with trying to understand what is happening in the terrifying chaos, are pale and inadequate reflections of the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter. And these are the good films, of which there are only a few.
Most feature war films and documentaries, from The Sands of Iwo Jima to Saving Private Ryan, are war pornography. They romanticize those wielding the terrible instruments of death. They justify the unjustifiable. They pay homage to the war machine. They entice naïve young men and women into becoming cannon fodder. They distort the public’s perception of war, leaving those who return from war and attempt to speak the awful truth alienated and ignored.
Those in war who do the fighting, endowed with a god-like power to kill, are a minority. The real face of war is the hardship and grief suffered by civilians caught up in the maw of destruction. Their stories are hard to hear. Their fate is hard to see, which is why images from war are always sanitized. If we truly saw war, it would be so shocking, so disturbing, so disgusting, war would be hard to wage. The best accounts of war, for these reasons, eschew scenes of combat.
The documentary “20 Days in Mariupol,” a chronicle of the first 20 days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, captures what I witnessed as a war correspondent in Central America, the
— source chrishedges.substack.com | Chris Hedges | Jul 22, 2023