November 5 2009

American writer Stephen Crane was born after the Civil War ended, so he never saw combat in that conflict. Still, his 1895 novel about the American Civil War (titled The Red Badge Of Courage) was one of the first books to portray war with grim realism rather than glamorizing it. The main character in Crane's novel was a naive young man who thought the war was going to be glorious, but who was forever scarred by the horrors he experienced during it.

Since Crane's time, the spectre of the tormented war veteran has haunted American literature and movies. In films like The Best Years Of Our Lives, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home and Taxi Driver, we see him returning maimed in body or in spirit. He comes home tortured by memories of the unspeakable things that he has seen or has done. Locked into his own world of pain and guilt, this survivor from Hell steps back into a civilian society that is now as alien to him as life on another planet.

Of course, compassion for war victims can be a very one sided affair. We will probably never see any American films that show the suffering of German or Japanese civilians during the Allied bombings of World War 2. No Hollywood movies will be made about the agony of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians during the Vietnam War nor will there be any requiem for the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in the current Iraqi conflict. After we demonize another people as "the enemy", then we don't care about how much they bleed.

The mentally or physically disfigured war veteran continues to stalk the American imagination because the United States has been almost perpetually at war since the nation was founded. For people who claim to love peace, Americans seem to get into an amazing number of firefights.

One of the darkest movies ever made about war veterans is Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle comes home from Vietnam physically whole but psychologically crippled. He is restless, haunted by nightmares and incapable of establishing the most basic relationships with other human beings. Bickle begins driving a taxi at night to escape his personal demons, but nothing can stop his slow slide into violent madness. The happy ending tacked onto this grim film is so out of step with the rest of the movie that it is like putting a Bugs Bunny cartoon at the end of Schindler's List.

Now that the United States has waded into yet another quagmire in Afghanistan, Taxi Driver looks less like a dated film from the 1970s and more like a prophesy of things to come. As the Iraq and Afghan veterans come home, there will be thousands of Travis Bickles in America and in Canada. The only thing different this time is that some of these tormented veterans will be women.

The Public doesn't like to think about the cost of a war while it's still raging, so films about Iraq or Afghanistan have tanked at the box office lately. There has been no military draft, so these wars have been fought by the children of the poor and they are not top of mind issues for most North Americans. The definitive movie about Iraq or Afghanistan may not be made for another ten years, after passions have cooled and people have the perspective of history.

The one thing certain is that our society will continue to generate corporate profits by cranking out weapons and then we will need to find enemies everywhere to use them on. Meanwhile, the ghost of Travis Bickle wanders the landscape, brooding and alone.

What do you think?

George

PS: Visit my website at www.checkmatefiction.com for some free short stories.