Movies like ‘12 Strong’ and ‘The 15:17 to Paris’ exemplify military valor without considering the cost of war.
In December of 2012, the movie Zero Dark Thirty — a captivating telling of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden — was released. Within months, reports surfaced that during production its filmmakers, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, might have been privy to classified information. A recent New York Times Magazinepiece on the 9/11 trial defendant Ammar al-Baluchi alleges that the movie’s opening scene even echoed al-Baluchi’s torture reports.
Zero Dark Thirty suggests that enhanced interrogations led directly to information on Bin Laden’s whereabouts, a contention that has never been independently proven. The movie, then, is an implicit, horribly-misguided defense of the US torture program
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There’s one persistent “military space” content trope that’s largely escaped critical attention. If you’ve been on YouTube or caught an episode of internet-punch-drunk Ellen at any time in the last five years, you’ve probably seen a military-family-reunion video. The format is simple and quick. Unsuspecting family members are filmed (in a living room, on a basketball court at half-time, at a talk-show studio) under some false pretense. Unsuspecting family members are then surprised with the arrival of a father or mother or brother or sister (but usually a father) from an overseas deployment. Unsuspecting family members break down with joy.
These videos are crushing. The emotions of these family-members are real and earned. Watch one and you’ll find it hard not to weep yourself. They’re also a free commercial for the army.
“If your stance is anything that acknowledges the existence of the US military in a way that doesn’t explicitly condemn it is propaganda, then you’re going to see a lot of propaganda out there,” Harris tells me. “To me that’s a little bit ‘to a hammer everything looks like a nail.’” That’s an important stipulation. But these videos are not just a non-critical representation of the military. They’re aggressively uncomplicated and irresponsibly sweet. All they show is the relief. They’re glowing.
