The Blog with no name

Thursday, October 19, 2006

A quote by Mary O’Hare on War

"You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs" (Slaughter-House-Five, p. 14).

What Mary O’Hare is trying to say here is that wars are fought by men who are many times only eighteen. This in her mind is too young an age for them to be fighting and killing others like themselves. She also believes that the movies cause people to become pro war. However this is not true. I have not seen too many war movies in my life, at least not recently. One war movie I do remember seeing is Glory and it definitely does not promote war.
Glory is set during the civil war. It shows how our nation was torn in civil war. In this war the people who fought were really children. In some cases brother fought against brother. Families were split apart by the war. It was not a particularly gory movie but there was a lot of killing in it. Such dramatic scenes as people being shot or blown to bits by mortars certainly do not promote war.
In contrast, I believe that the films of the past such as in the 1930's would have been more pro war than today’s movies. One reason is because of the technological advances between then and now. Today movie makers have all types of special effects equipment at their disposal which they did not have back in the 30's. This allows today’s film makers to more realistically portray war. Also back then the idea of a movie was still relatively new and would have been very popular perhaps even more so than today. It is for this reason that movies back then might have been used to promote war. Other than Glory I have not watched many other war films, besides bits and pieces. From what I have seen all the other films seem to be against war because of the brutal scenes they protray.

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