Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Sunday, December 07, 2003 The Enemy Below I watched a movie on cable the other day which I hadn't seen for years. It was a 1957 WW2 movie called The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens. It's a submarine vs. Destroyer movie, and a good one, but I was taken aback by the philosophy of the film. This is 12 years after the war when it was made. The German U Boat captain is presented as a sympathetic, war and world weary man who has no love for Hitler. He's simply doing his duty as an officer. Robert Mitchum plays a former Merchant Marine captain whose English wife was killed when his ship was sunk by a U Boat, who transferred to the Navy and commands a destroyer. In a conversation with the ship's doctor (foreshadowing the shades of Dr. McCoy?), he professes to having no animosity to the Germans who killed his wife (in an unemotional manner he relates his tale as if that could be possible for a manly man who won't shed a tear recalling how his wife was killed while he watched). In the course of the movie both captains make a single mistake which leads to the destruction of each's vessel, with the American captain saving the German captain (and friend who subsequently dies). At the end, both captains are budy-budy as if the shared experience of war, and sympathy for the adversary overcomes all other emotions. When I watched this movie as a child, I thought how noble and wonderful are warriors who share the same sort of fate -- that is, who knows which will win on a given day or battle, but the ethos of fulfilling one's duty is equal. (I learned this from Homer at an early age.) But watching this movie now, I am astonished that the scriptwriter could dare to make WW2 a matter of moral equivalence. I can accept that both captains are good guys, but I can't accept that the American captain doesn't hate his enemy. This is like saying that Pres. Bush doesn't hate Osama Bin Ladin or Saddam Hussein. That somehow they are identical as commanders and leaders. In one sense, you could say it's true. You have one leader of a people against one leader of another people. But this is BS. It is like saying the Devil is the same as Christ because they both lead factions and groups who have their own interests. I wonder if this movie was a kind of harbinger of the leftist - we're all wrong until we are one world - kind of thing. The 60's established in the West the idea that America and Russia were simply two sides of the same coin. People in Europe actually insisted that there wasn't any real difference between America and Russia. That we had identical goals, but opposite philosophies which made us adversaries. People on the Left assumed that the Cold War was all about power, when it was all about freedom. For many stupid people, they would like to see our current war against terrorism as an equivalence between Christian faith and Muslim faith (two irrational and non-sensical things); or rather that Christian civilization is not unblemished, and ought to be abolished as an anachronistic extravagance which intelligent and sane people can dispense with. Interestingly enough, the doctor in conversation with the American captain tries to oppose the captain's nihilism (which sees war as inevitable, and constant as the Greeks did) with a holy notion that war will eventually be eliminated as a human action. He finds faith in the future -- war is bad and humanity will outgrow it. Was it possible for Hollywood screenwriters and producers to be this naive at that time? I guess so, since so many are still convinced that war is some weird anomaly of human nature, and that we're all meant to live in utopian peace -- any day now real soon. (The vapor-ware of intellectuals.) On Earth, war in inevitable and will never cease, and the enemy is always hateful. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:55 AM | |
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