Film: The Use Of War In American Cinema

War in American Cinema
War has been present since the beginning of human history. Likewise, war movies have been present since the movie industry began. Just like most other genres of film, war films have been created as a form of entertainment to profit a person or organization. More people are willing to spend their money and time on a feeling of action, excitement, heroism, and patriotism than gruesome and horrid images of real and common human destruction. Propaganda has been used by governments for a very long time and when motion pictures came into existence, governments almost immediately saw the new medium as an opportunity to influence the public. Governments such as the United States of America, cooperate with the movie industry to …show more content…
The purpose of this method is to humanize the soldiers. It is much more difficult to establish a relationship between an audience and trained killing machine as opposed to someone’s father, son, or husband. Even when a certain character, such as Charlie Sheen’s role as Chris in Platoon, does not have a family or any loved ones to talk about, the audience can connect with the feelings of loneliness and rejection that the character has just revealed. The cast of allied soldiers in war movies often comes from a diversity of backgrounds, religions, and cultures. A couple good examples of this diversity can be seen in the movies The Hurt Locker and Platoon. The soldiers in these movies come from different cities and states, many of them are different in ethnicity, some are completely new to war, and others are very experienced and have been in multiple wars. Despite these differences however, the characters generally respect their comrades and commonly find friendship amongst them. This characteristic of diversity is almost exclusive to movies about American soldiers. This combination of positive diversity and feelings of loneliness and rejection in war movies gives the impression to the audience that the U.S. Military is a welcoming home to people who are lonely or consider themselves rejects and …show more content…
This technique is used to dehumanize the enemy to make the audience rejoice or feel apathetic about the murder of these human beings. One extreme example can be found throughout the plot of the movie 300 when the Spartan soldiers go to war against the Persian army. In the movie the Spartan soldiers fight against the masked enemy soldiers of the Persian army and when they kill these masked enemies there is a disassociation between the enemy and human life. This happens because the audience has not been exposed to the enemy’s face. The face is intentionally hidden by a mask in many movies to prevent the viewer from realizing that the enemy is human and can show the human emotions and feelings of being in excruciating pain or being terrified. The movie does not stop at dehumanizing the enemy soldiers, but also dehumanizes the enemy emperor showing him as extremely tall and covered in piercing and gold. When war movies dehumanize an enemy soldier, it makes killing just and when war movies dehumanize the enemy leader it makes the war just. This perception that war can be considered just, so long as the enemy is dehumanized and portrayed immoral is taken advantage of by governments. Government press releases along with the news media use this perception to keep public opinion of a war positive and support for a war strong. This is a problem because when people have this perception they do not question as much