How We Waste

NBN is a little embarrassed to admit this: We once loved the movie “Platoon.” If we stumbled upon a Platoon YouTube, regardless of the matter at hand, we dropped what we were doing and watched.

Particularly the scene where sergeants Barnes and Alias argue over the night ambush. We admired the deliberate sense of duty in that life and death decision-making without questioning the purpose.

And then, a few scenes later, Sgt. Barnes’ completely heartless eulogy over the lifeless body of Pvt. Gardner was awe inspiring. “Out here assholes, you keep your shit wired tight at all times.”

Lately, our awe is more like annoyance as the strength portrayed in this movie increasingly seems more like weakness. Not in the characters, but the audience for so easily allowing Hollywood script writers to sway our emotions and convictions in favor of a pointless war that killed millions and cost trillions.

What the movie is about isn't always what the audience sees

While aiming to provide an unflinching look at how the US’s first deeply unpopular war played out for those fighting it, Oliver Stone’s epic ends up as just another war movie with better writing and more believable explosions. Ultimately the violins rise as the movie fades to black with a wounded Pvt. Taylor reflecting on the sacrifices he's made and the lessons he learned serving his country. The bodies, bad decision and bulldozers are forgotten and the nobility of fighting for one’s country lingers in the minds of impressionable 18-year-olds and nostalgic baby-boomer voters.

Hollywood Hypocrites

Let’s take another movie that activates our ADHA like a light switch whenever we’re rummaging through YouTube. In “The Big Short” the ultimate victory of mental mavericks Michael Burry and Marc Baum over Big Banks stirs primeval sentiments that harken back to David and Goliath. Yet, those mavericks we admire are just doing what the big banks do: profiting grotesquely at the expense of people’s homes, jobs, retirement savings, and pensions, as Brad Pitt’s character Ben Rickert says.

Like “Platoon,” the high-minded purpose in “The Big Short” is to illustrate the virtues of creativity and independent thinking but the payoff is still the same as that which drives those without. Traditions we are meant to question through these heroic characters end up being reaffirmed by script writers who know what sells at the box office.

In Hollywood you make money telling people what they want to hear, not moralizing. The screen adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s brilliant but disturbing book “Johnny Got His Gun” sold about three tickets because it dared to be what Platoon is not: a truly unflinching look at the stupidity, waste and otherwise unacceptable costs of war.

Before we paint the entire industry with this sinister brush, not all script-writers looking to make a buck cheat their audiences so wantonly. The classics “Do the Right Thing,” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” illustrate brilliantly the conflicts and compromises required to be human and humane. Still, we suspect Spike Lee’s moralizing masterpiece was profitable as much for its superb depiction of 1980s black Bed-Sty life and less for the hardships of folks actually living it. We also suspect the unparalleled song-writing and violin in Fiddler upstage the timeless pain, sadness and uncertainty of abandoning centuries of life-defining tradition in the face of present-day realities.

We’re sure that The Devil has a seat in Hell for the politicians and priests in our triumvirate of evil, but if there is a god, the holier-than-thou in Hollywood are getting the front row because they have much more powerful, enduring pulpits. In countless 1950s WWII movies, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Jimmy Stewart et al. soothed the souls of hundreds of thousands who may have thought otherwise about serving in Korea and Vietnam. And how many millions of baby-boomer smokers died decades early of lung cancer after watching Bogie and Bacall light-up in Casa Blanca? Let’s face it. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions it most certainly runs through Hollywood and The Duke will be meeting you at the Pearly Gates. In the meantime sit back, relax and enjoy the show. And pass the popcorn, pilgrim.

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The moral of these stories do not run counter to the characters delivering it as in Platoon and The Big Short, but it certainly yields to it. So what’s wrong with using theatrics and manipulating emotions to make a buck? Hey, everyone does it, right? We have “pastors” buying private jets from the proceeds of providing reassurance to old, poor people terrified of dying. We have politicians abandoning their constitutional oaths to move in on the priests’ action by promising the frightened protection from the less pious threatening the moral fabric of the country.