The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq by Daniel Binns (review)

Daniel Binns is a lecturer in media studies at Melbourne’s RMIT University. He also works as a writer, producer, and consultant for film productions. His monograph on the Hollywood war film is not the first book on this subject or even the first with this title, but he brings a more theoretically-informed and less historicist approach to bear on the topic than previous scholars. He draws thoughtfully on the best and best-known works on the topic, including those by Paul Virilio, Jeanine Basinger, and Robert Eberwein. Over the course of an introduction and four chapters, he works to elicit a new understanding of the war film genre and, in the process, of generic formation more generally. Yet the book is organized historically and ultimately makes an argument about how the Hollywood war film genre has evolved over time. Each of the first three chapters focuses on a broad cultural moment: World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, and ‘Conflict in the Middle East.’ The final chapter traces the working of the war film genre across media, specifically into video games and comic books. That final chapter contains the book’s most original and interesting insights.

Binns describes an overarching trajectory of the war film genre and its relation to what he calls, drawing upon Jean-Francois Lyotard and Hans-Ake Persson, a “grand narrative,” specifically, a myth of American national supremacy. Simply put, in the Hollywood war film, the “grand narrative can be both a representation of former glory, and a powerful inspiration for or justification of future engagements” (15). In Binns’s account, films about the World Wars instantiate this grand narrative in cinema and are typically epic in scale. They portray war as glorious and necessary. But different wars beget generic shifts, and this period of the genre ends with Patton (1970). Hollywood’s depictions of the wars in Korea and Vietnam still belong to the genre, but strain it; they tend to express “fear and frustration” through portrayals of “loneliness, quietness, and introspection” (56). While films of the World Wars tend to be organized (as Jeanine Basinger has demonstrated) around a platoon of representative Americans, films about Korea and Vietnam instead typically focus on a single individual. After the Gulf War, Hollywood war films return to the grand narrative and again portray war(s) in the Middle East and Afghanistan as necessary and sometimes heroic.

While this overarching chronology makes sense at a macro-level, it leads Binns to make his least convincing points. Particularly problematic for me as a scholar of World War I film is his conflation of films about World War I and II. Those are two entirely different wars and cultural moments in the United States, and as such they receive dramatically different treatment in film. But perhaps because he’s primarily interested in laying a groundwork for his final claims about where the genre has gone most recently, he paints this section with rather large brush-strokes. He uses Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) as a primary example of what he describes as “the cinematic message of World War I” that “combat is glorious and victory is sweet” (25). That claim is pretty hard to accept. The film was famously banned in Germany precisely because it was seen to portray war as an obscene waste of life by the nationalist state. Perhaps aware of the stretch he’s making, Binns vacillates; in some places he softens his overarching claim and admits that All Quiet “portrays war for what it is: violent, hard, and futile” (30) only to reiterate a page later that it and other films about World War I suggest that war, for all its brutality, “is ultimately necessary for the greater good” (31). Binns’s local observations about Milestone’s film are interesting, particularly as he points out its tendency to...