War and Britain: The Mainstream Inheritance
In the one hundred years between the late Victorian era and the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcherâthe decades that saw the meteoric rise of cinema around the world, as well as its gradual decline as a publicly exhibited form of entertainmentâGreat Britain was in a state of continuous transition. During this time, the British Empire went from the most powerful supranational entity in the world to a junior player in a standoff between two colossal, ideologically opposed superpowers; went from being a geographically massive group of allied nations, one of the biggest empires the world had ever seen, to wheezing into the 1980s as a lean parliamentary democracy under an economic pinch; and went from boasting a modern army and an unsurpassed navy in the nineteenth century to a small, all-volunteer (though still highly professional) army by 1980.
These sweeping generalizations only give a broad outline of British military and political exploits during this century. From Queen Victoriaâs âlittle warsâ of Imperial maintenance (campaigns in India, Russia, and China) in the nineteenth century, Britain eventually found itself on the front line of The Great War (1914â1918), a stalemated struggle that brought previously unimagined loss of life to the public eye (Farwell 1985). After a period of worldwide economic depression and gradual arms accumulation, World War II followed, this time as a response to the conquering antagonisms of fascism. Britain and her allies won a hard-fought victory in 1945, emerging broke and under the auspices of strict material austerity, but with what Kenneth O. Morgan calls âa new kind of consensus,â under Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee, âa social democracy based on a mixed economy and welfare state which took Britain well enough through the difficult post-war transformation and endured in its essence for another generation or moreâ (2001, 633â634). While a general economic consensus held until the âreformsâ of Thatcher (the bullying rise of free markets and the privatization of everything), Britainâs boom and bust decadesâthe mid-1950s through the late 1970sâsaw plenty of argument, discontent, protest, and outrage, a social revolution greeted by attenuate aesthetic experimentation.
Although Britain never again fought on the scale of 1939â1945, war and military culture persisted in the national imaginary. From Britainâs emergence from austerity in the 1950s until Thatcherâs orchestrated revival of old-school patriotic militarism with the Falkland War in 1982, the culture of war provided a set of remembrances, memorializations, wish fulfillments, exploitations, marketing ploys, exercises in nostalgia, and genuine historical investigations that formed an important narrative niche about national self-imaging.1 This recourse to war was both genuine social expression and, peripherally, an ongoing facet of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously called âthe culture industry,â the reification and commodification of expression sold to the public in pre-digested packets (1997, 120â167). How Britainâs conflicts and military history got presented to the nation, and the world at large, often fell into predictable themes and clusters, some more sweeping and normalized than others, such that the business of showing war came to be as much about genre codes as about original points via provided by individual ideas and experiences.
War representation in Britain is tied to commodity culture and to notions of citizenship and sovereignty. Graham Dawson has identified the primary ideological trend in war representation, especially in the post-World War II period, as the âpleasure culture of war,â a set of texts across media in which the figure of the soldier-hero provides a site of identification for young men (the rhetoric explicitly targets constructions of masculine action) that builds on nostalgic notions of the stability of Britain and its empire (1994, 3â4, 282). Michael Paris reads this favored cultural relationship to war as âteaching that war was moral, legitimate, and above all, exciting and romanticâ (2000, 9). How war gets talked about, circulated, framed, and visualized determines its pedagogical function as a locus for notions of duty, deference, and self-sacrifice. The values of âthe pleasure culture of warâ interface with dominant values of citizenship, with lessons applicable even to those who do not follow martial careers.
The dominant consensus of framing war as ethically necessary, dutiful, and politically justified is especially strong in film and television. As relatively expensive and labor-intensive enterprises, film and television works made for commercial purposes and for popular audiences often hew especially close to longstanding agreements of good taste, genre decorum, and narrative intelligibility. In cinema and television texts, the positions of heroism and the righteousness of war frequently accompany a set of similarly codified types of style and construction, including a broad recourse to the conceits of the Classical Hollywood Style (editing and narrative geared toward motivated clarity, unity, harmony, continuity); narratives motivated by clear goals of individuals that do not dwell too extensively on abstraction or collectivities; and stories punctuated by scenes of violence that feature attempts at recreating the excitement of combat, usually through a mixture of physical effects, convincing equipment, and legible and unobtrusive framing and lighting.2 War is almost uniformly represented in narrative terms, as a coherent story with an inevitable end, rather than as a random, chaotic sequence of loosely aligned events and counter-events. In other words, film and television texts that express the history and culture of war or military life through the common values of âpleasure cultureâ notions are often (erroneously) granted equivalent status to the genre itself. By this logic, scholars, critics, and everyday viewers make the rhetorical move of categorizing British representations of war in film and television with dominant, loudly expressed cultural values that mask more essential features of genre organization like iconography, historical themes, and subtle formal/stylistic choices.
This imagined ideological and national consensus about war appears across subgenres and decades. Despite visible social change across periods, this dominant approach to war representation retains stable features. For instance, The First of the Few (1942), a biopic of Spitfire inventor R. J. Mitchell directed by and starring Leslie Howard, is presented both as a war film that shows the professionalism of fighter pilot crews in the present and as a retrospective re-reading of the life of a noted expert. The most popular British film of 1942, it is, to use David Edgertonâs phase, âa vindication of the armament firm Vickers,â Mitchellâs employer, and couches his workaholic attitude as a symptom of his total dedication to British defense (2011, 154). Whatever his individual genius, all is sacrificed for the good of the nation. Malta Story (1953, Brian Desmond Hurst), a melodramatic dramatization of the defense of the island nation of Malta, a key logistical location between North Africa and Italy, makes a similar appeal, offering the eccentric Peter Ross (Alec Guinness), a reconnaissance pilot, as the redeemer of this area of the war.3 His personal lossâas a patriot, and as a man engaged to be married to Maltese woman Maria (Muriel Pavlow)âpersonalizes the war, yet stands in as a proxy for a wider set of tales about redemptive selflessness. Even something like Where Eagles Dare (1968, Brian G. Hutton), despite its use of spy and thriller tropes like betrayal and double-crosses, ultimately tells the story of elite professional soldiers who execute a daring mission against a Nazi Alpine redoubt, showing a set of actions that become equivalent to the enacted moral superiority of the Allied troops. In each of these three films, war is justified, it is âwonâ in a way that gels with an audienceâs preconceived ideas about the virtues of the fairly fought âgood war,â and a stress is put on a relatively uncomplicated representation of the world, a slightly heightened form of bourgeois realism that naturalizes the actions of those it depicts.
War Representation: Expanded Theaters
This construction merely tells part of the story of the history of British war representation. What about films that show war as a failed or unjustified enterprise? What about television programs that downplay the adventure of war in favor of its basic monotony and all-encompassing boredom? What about texts that belittle, deflate, or satirize war and warmongering? What about allegorical or symbolic treatments of war? Instead of war as triumphant and life-affirming, what about films that construct it as tragic and emotionally stultifying? Instead of war representation as expressed through narrative and visual modalities like melodrama and realism, what about war as imagined as fantastic, or even surrealistic?
This book argues that seemingly outlier and anomalous trends in war representation are actually central to understanding the range of attitudes toward Britainâs military past that competed during the postwar period, especially as relates to the history of film and television, but also generally, as pertains to cultural trends writ large. As with the general historical narrative in the history of British cinema (from stability during and immediately after World War II to a disrupted, unsettled production base, a changing audience, and the loss or modification of old genre traditions by the 1970s), war representation is best understood as a fracturing, diversifying phenomenon (Newland 2010, 12â13). Even as dominant representational registers persistâtales of heroism, patriotism, national heritage, the inherent necessity of warâa staggering range of oppositional voices sound-off. This book repositions the comparatively unpopular, obscure, and offbeat. These neglected films from one of Britainâs most long-lived genres bring a remarkable polysemy to what is often considered to be a monotonous and intellectually rote type of filmmaking. In general, this book seeks to restore messiness to the story of British war representation by looking at films about war that do not fit any neat generic definitions; films by expatriate filmmakers operating in Britain (and bringing to bear outsider sensibilities on an insular culture); and films that question every aspect of the military and war, in the process scrutinizing traditional class roles, deference, hierarchies, and the stiff upper lip.
In War and Film, James Chapman writes about the arbitrariness of the âwar filmâ genre and instead organizes his investigation of war in film not as a matter of delineating precise boundaries, so much as mapping representational trends across many different modes (2008, 8â9). This contrasts with the approach in Ivan Butlerâs foundational The War Film, which differentiates the âwar filmâ (âconcerned either directly with the actual fighting, or very closely with the effects and aftermath of a conflictâ) from âfringe filmsâ (e.g., cold war spy movies) (1974, 11). The tendency to break down the genre into groupings that create a hierarchy of relevance, or a generic centrality, is best explored in Jeanine Basingerâs work. In World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (1986, revised in 2003), Basinger constructs a dominant version of what a war âcombat filmâ looks like, even as she problematizes the very concept of genre (which she refers to as an âalive,â âfickle and inconstantâ way or organizing) (2003, 252). The kind of war film that looms largest in the popular imaginary of the Anglophone world is the squad-based combat film in which an ethnically mixed group of soldiers overcomes its own internal obstacles and succeeds against a largely faceless, abstract enemy in a struggle that confirms the opposing ideological nature of the different sides, and affirms the preconceived political notions of its established audience (56â57). That World War II has become the most recreated war in human history, and that its favored genre template has been so successful a guide to films about other conflicts, suggest that the conflation of âwar filmâ with âcombat filmâ likewise invites a comparison between the ideological work of this type of war film and the very raison dâetre of the genre i...