War is never healthy: A movie review (of all things)

I've never been a great fan of Japanese film, but there are Japanese films that I like. The Seven Samurai figures high on my list, which was remade in the United States as The Magnificent Seven. Throne of Blood, a retelling of MacBeth, is another of my favorites. But down there among the usually forgotten is a gem called Fires on the Plain, which asks the question: Is there a point beyond which civilization and humanity is no longer possible?

I was reminded of that film this week while watching HBOs The Pacific, which tells the horrendous story of the Marines who fought World War II on one miserable island after another. It's a good series, brought to us by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also produced Band of Brothers.

As might be expected of American film, The Pacific is expensively and beautifully produced with an eye to the small details and the kind of in-your-face battle scenes that place you in the midst of the action albeit with a magnificent soaring score. However, it lacks the kind of grit that Clint Eastwood managed to imbue in his two movies on the same subject and Fires on the Plain. I think, oddly, that the problem, if it is a problem, is that The Pacific is in color, while Eastwood bleached his colors so that his film had the feel of old photographs or news film. Fires on the Plain is done in stark black and white. It is also an anti-war film and not as overtly manipulative as Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (which is really a buddy-road film with explosives).

The film follows the grim progress of one Japanese soldier through a doomed wasteland of desperate men caught in the losing battle for the Philippines. If a bullet doesn't kill the protagonist his tuberculosis will. There are no victors in this film, also no food, no medicine, and no way out. There is the relentless reality of what war means and the ends to which men will go to survive. The ever advancing American soldiers are the least of their problems.

No one has ever survived a war without carrying some permanent scar on his or her soul. Warriors return home either in victory or defeat and are required by society to resume their antebellum life without exploring how this experience has forever changed them. We prefer the John Wayne approach in which warriors are cosmetically grimy without ever being shown as filthy, always heroic, everlastingly cheerful, and unscarred by what they've seen or done. And yet how does a man embrace his family with the same hands that carried a gun and killed people? Don't we, as the people for whom these warriors ostensibly fight, have the responsibility to accept them as irrevocably changed?

My father, a World War II veteran, confined his stories to what was amusing (including his characterization of Patton as "that SOB who tried to get me killed"). It was only later, as he lay dying, when he told us one horrendous story that I realized that his war was always with him. To a large extent his experiences created the man who was my father and it explained a great deal. Like most of the men of his generation, my dad returned home, settled in and lived out his peaceful life. But he had terrible dreams for a time and terrible memories for the rest of his life. Although my dad initially supported the Vietnam conflict, his attitude changed when my brother's number rolled to the top. "I've been to war," he said, "and it is not for my son."

It doesn't matter whether the war is popular or not and it certainly doesn't matter who won. Victor or vanquished form a brotherhood of men and women who have seen the worst that man has to offer and survived. We who have never been to battle cannot possibly understand. Perhaps it is easier to accept if you are a victor because then everything you have experienced or done seems worthwhile. Or maybe not.

Yes, most people who survive a war, whether as civilians or soldiers, move on. But I don't think they ever recover from the savagery and depravity that they have seen or maybe in which they participated. There is a reason why some US Marines covered the portholes of the ships that took them home from the Pacific. They did not want to look back.

War is not good. All it does is destroy real estate and kill people. It rarely resolves the issue, because the problems remain under different names and in different times. I suppose I must accept that war is sometimes unavoidable and inevitable. But I cannot help but think that there are other ways of dealing with problems.

In any event, if you are interested in gritty, unrelenting, and grim, grim, grim war films I recommend Kom Ichikawa's 1959 war classic Fires on the Plains. The action in this film is strictly from the Japanese point of view. The actions are taken by Japanese soldiers against Japanese soldiers. It is not possible nor will this film erase memories of Japanese atrocities but you will be haunted by the story and its vision. You may need to watch it more than once to ingest the story.