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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 September 2016
How do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello that anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.
1 William Shakespeare, Henry V, 4.1.
2 Mitchell, David and Webb, Robert, ‘Nazis’, The Very Best of the Secret Policeman’s Ball: the Greatest Comedy Line-Up Ever (Amnesty International) (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2013), p. 381 Google Scholar.
3 See Tanaka, Yoshifumi, ‘Treaty obligation to promote public education and the teaching of international law’, European Journal of Legal Education, 4:2 (2007), pp. 135–147 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pp. 136–9). For a survey of popular knowledge of and attitudes towards IHL, see ICRC, The People on War Report: ICRC Consultation on the Rules of War (Greenberg Research, Inc., 1999)Google Scholar.
4 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: a Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 2001 [orig. pub. 1977])Google Scholar; McMahan, Jeff, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 6–7, and McMahan, Jeff, ‘Rethinking the “Just War”’, New York Times (11/12 November 2012), available at: {http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/rethinking-the-just-war-part-1/}Google Scholar; {http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/rethinking-the-just-war-part-2/} accessed November 2012.
5 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 44ff.
6 McMahan, Killing in War, pp. 3–7.
7 The ICRC (The People on War Report) found high levels of awareness of the Geneva Conventions, especially in the UK and Israel but also in the US and France.
8 Weber, Cynthia, Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p. 5 Google Scholar.
9 ICRC, The People on War Report, p. iv, n. 2.
10 McMahan, Killing in War; Fabre, Cécile, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Jeske, Diane, ‘Review of Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice (eds), Ethics at the Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2011’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (9 November 2011)Google Scholar. Only one essay in the book examines a war film but the theme has received some attention from International Relations scholars, for example, in Gow, James, ‘Strategic pedagogy and pedagogic strategy’, International Relations, 20:4 (2006), pp. 393–406 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 21.
13 Though see McMahan, Killing in War, ch. 5; Fabre, Cosmopolitan War, ch. 2.
14 See, for example, McMahan, Killing in War; Fabre, Cosmopolitan War.
15 See, for instance, Crown Prosecution Service (UK) legal guidance on ‘Self-Defence and the Prevention of Crime’, available at: {http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/self_defence/} accessed 23 April 2016. For a discussion of both Common Law and the Model Penal Code in the US, see Josh Gilliland on George Lucas’s controversial re-editing of Star Wars IV (1977): ‘Han’s Justification for Shooting Greedo First’ (2012), available at: {http://thelegalgeeks.com/2012/08/20/han-shot-first-a-legal-discussion/} accessed April 2016). Lucas’s motivation for altering the 1997 version to make Greedo shoot before Han Solo kills him was partly pedagogic: ‘when you’re John Wayne’, he says, ‘you don’t shoot people [first] – you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to’. Quoted in Hank Stuever, ‘George Lucas: To feel the true force of “Star Wars”, he had to learn to let it go’, Washington Post (5 December 2015), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/george-lucas-to-feel-the-true-force-of-star-wars-he-had-to-learn-to-let-it-go/2015/11/27/d752067a-8b1f-11e5-be8b-1ae2e4f50f76_story.html} accessed April 2016.
16 McMahan, Jeff, ‘The morality of war and the law of war’, in D. Rodin and H. Shue (eds), Just and Unjust Warriors: the Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 27 Google Scholar. Fabre sets aside the question of laws to concentrate on purely moral analysis (Cosmopolitan War, p. 12).
17 McMahan, ‘The morality of war and the law of war’, p. 27ff; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 41; on Schmitt’s idea, see Slomp, Gabriella, ‘The theory of the partisan: Carl Schmitt’s neglected legacy’, History of Political Thought, 26:3 (2005), pp. 502–519 Google Scholar (p. 509).
18 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 41.
19 McMahan, ‘The morality of war and the law of war’, p. 22. Retribution plays no part in such justifications on McMahan’s theory.
20 For thorough analysis of the effects of knowledge, evidence, and duress on responsibility, see McMahan, Killing in War.
21 Doherty, Thomas, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II (rev. edn, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 295–296 Google Scholar (p. 279). ‘World War II in Europe [is] the paradigm’, for Walzer, ‘of a justified struggle’ (Just and Unjust Wars, p. xxii).
22 Clive Stafford Smith, Director of Reprieve, recently suggested: ‘If you ask people which wars of the 20th century were genuinely worth fighting, most of them would say, only the second world war. We have a collective psychosis that war can solve problems. To that extent, movies [that reinforce this idea] can be dangerous’ (in Henry Barnes, ‘Death from above’, Guardian G2 (15 April 2016), pp. 4–7 (p. 7).
23 Doherty, Projections of War, pp. 295–6 (p. 279).
24 Mitchell and Webb, ‘Nazis’, The Very Best of the Secret Policeman’s Ball, p. 384.
25 On which, see Lev, Peter, Twentieth-Century Fox: the Zanuck-Zkouras Years, 1935–1965 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), pp. 237–239 Google Scholar, regarding The Longest Day (1962).
26 By contrast with Matthew Evangelista’s rich analysis in Gender, Nationalism and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), I’m particularly interested in films as a possible influence on public attitudes.
27 Mulhall, Stephen, On Film (2nd edn, New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 4 Google Scholar.
28 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Just War Against Terror: the Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 54 Google Scholar.
29 Ebert, Roger, ‘Review of Saving Private Ryan’ (24 July 1998)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/saving-private-ryan-1998} accessed April 2016. Nigel Morris comments on ‘the ethical and military niceties debated so assiduously within the film’ in The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 294.
30 On exculpation and inculpation, see Kutz, Christopher, ‘The difference uniforms make: Collective violence in criminal law and war’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33:2 (2005), pp. 148–180 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Dir. Henry Hathaway, prod. Nunnally Johnson (DVD), (UK: Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1951).
32 Quoted in Lev, Twentieth-Century Fox, pp. 188–9.
33 Etheridge, Brian C., ‘ The Desert Fox, memory diplomacy, and the German Question in early Cold War America’, Diplomatic History, 32:2 (2008), pp. 207–238 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pp. 207–8); Bosley Crowther, ‘Curious twist: now a German General is heroized on screen’, New York Times (28 October 1951).
34 Lev, Twentieth-Century Fox, p. 189.
35 Dir. Edward Dmytryk, prod. Alexander Lichtman (DVD), (UK: MGM Home Entertainment, 1958).
36 Dirs Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki (DVD), (UK: Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1962).
37 Dir. Richard Attenborough, prod. Joseph E. Levine (DVD), (UK: MGM Home Entertainment, 1977). There are some similarities in the treatment of Anthony Quayle’s character in J. Lee Thompson’s Ice Cold in Alex (1958).
38 Lev, Twentieth-Century Fox, p. 238; see also Hoberman, J., An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New York: the New Press, 2011), p. 178 Google Scholar and Etheridge, ‘The Desert Fox, memory diplomacy, and the German Question’ on Cold War contexts for US war films with sympathetic German characters. Also Stephen E. Ambrose, Spielberg’s historical advisor for Saving Private Ryan: ‘The Longest Day offered a kind of exculpation … for a worthy, chastened, and now useful former foe’ (‘The Longest Day (US, 1962): “Blockbuster” history’, in John Whiteclay Chambers II and Culbert, David (eds), World War II, Film and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 105 Google Scholar).
39 Crowther, ‘Curious twist’. On chivalry and duties of obedience, see Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 34–7 (pp. 38–9).
40 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [orig. pub. 1887])Google Scholar, First Treatise.
41 Written by Alan Bleasedale and directed by Uwe Janson (BBC2 broadcast, 2011).
42 Walzer also discusses the Laconia (Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 157–61).
43 Lev, Twentieth-Century Fox, p. 187. A similar scene occurs in The Desert Rats (1953). Cf. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 38.
44 De Vitoria, Francisco, On the Law of War (1539), in Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (eds), Vitoria: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 313 Google Scholar. Cf. Fabre, Cosmopolitan War, pp. 80–1.
45 On the omission of any reference to genocide in The Longest Day, see Lev, Twentieth-Century Fox, p. 238; also above, fn. 23. Littell, Jonathan, The Kindly Ones (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009)Google Scholar.
46 In The Sinking of the Laconia, Hartenstein declares, ‘I have no political role, or actually interest … I have no concern but the safeguarding of my nation and the safety of those under my command.’
47 Etheridge, ‘The Desert Fox, memory diplomacy, and the German Question’, pp. 207–8.
48 Quoted in Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 39. Compare the translation in Vitoria, On the Law of War, p. 311.
49 Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784), in Kant: Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 18 Google Scholar.
50 I make no claim, one way or the other, as to the validity of this argument. I assert only that it is an argument and, moreover, a sophisticated one.
51 Cf. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 21.
52 Vitoria, On the Law of War, pp. 307–8; McMahan, Killing in War, p. 65.
53 The Big Red One: the Reconstruction, dir. Samuel Fuller, prod. Gene Corman (DVD), (UK: Warner Bros Entertainment Inc., 2004).
54 Cf. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 36.
55 Dombrowski, Lisa, The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), p. 189 Google Scholar.
56 Richard Schickel, Audio Commentary on The Big Red One.
57 Cf. Private Doll’s voiceover in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998): ‘I killed a man. Worst thing you can do … Nobody can touch me for it’. ([Blu-ray] UK: Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment). Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting this example.
58 Again, cf. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 41.
59 On the difficulties determining war’s beginning and ending (especially the Second World War) and the legal implications for criminal cases, see Dudziak, Mary L., War Time: an Idea, its History, its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, ch. 2.
60 Rousseau, J.-J., The Social Contract (1762) in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, book I, ch. 4; cf. Kutz, ‘The difference uniforms make’.
61 Judge, Michael, ‘A Hollywood Icon Lays Down the Law’: interview with Clint Eastwood, Wall Street Journal (29 January 2011)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703293204576106080298279672} accessed March 2016.
62 Ebert, Roger, ‘“All War Stories Are Told By Survivors”: an Interview With Samuel Fuller’ (17 August 1980), available at: {www.rogerebert.com/interviews/all-war-stories-are-told-by-survivors-an-interview-with-samuel-fuller}Google Scholar accessed April 2016.
63 In Judge, ‘A Hollywood Icon Lays Down the Law’.
64 Cf. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 36; on duress as an excuse, see McMahan, Killing in War, sections 3.2.1 and 3.3.2.
65 A Bridge Too Far also shows paratroopers meeting the dazed and smiling escaped inmates of a mental hospital.
66 Rachel Cooke, interview with Samuel Maoz, Israeli film director, The Observer (2 May 2010), pp. 18–20 (p. 20).
67 Harries, Rhiannon, ‘A ship goes down, but Bleasdale’s writing wins the day for BBC drama’, The Independent (9 January 2011)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/the-sinking-of-the-laconia-bbc2-thursday-amp-fridaysun-sex-and-suspicious-parents-bbc3-monday-2179621.html}.
68 Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), pp. xxiiGoogle Scholar, 54, 79. On the psychological tendency to demonise enemies in war, see Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 2.2.3.2 (though cf. 2.2.5.10 on respect for POWs).
69 Dir. Steven Spielberg (DVD), (UK: Paramount Home Entertainment, 1998).
70 Dir. David Ayer (Blu-ray), (UK: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2014).
71 Neff, Stephen C., War and the Law of Nations: a General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 46–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on ambiguity between ‘just war’ and ‘holy war’ in medieval thought, see Russell, Frederick H., The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 2 Google Scholar.
72 Cf. Oliver Cromwell’s speech in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 67–8, on ‘that enmity that is in him against whatsoever is of God’. Philip French notes that the actress who plays the elderly Ryan’s wife as he visits a war grave previously played the angel who welcomed the souls of fallen Allied soldiers to heave in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), perhaps further reinforcing the theology. See French, ‘Ryan’s slaughter’, The Observer (13 September 1998), available at: {http://www.theguardian.com/film/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer/0,4267,36480,00.html} accessed April 2016. John Hodgkins suggests the references to God reflect George Bush Sr’s religious rhetoric ( Hodgkins, John, ‘In the wake of Desert Storm: a consideration of modern World War II Films’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 30:2 (2002), pp. 74–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 77).
73 Hodgkins, ‘In the wake of Desert Storm’, p. 77. Weber (Imagining America at War), argues that a particular conception of the family is offered in US cinema as what American soldiers are fighting for which sheds some light on the way Ryan provokes audience indignation at German aggression (threatening ‘sons’ and ‘husbands’).
74 Pat Reid, ‘Empire Essay: Saving Private Ryan’, Empire Magazine (1 January 2000), available at: {http://www.empireonline.com/movies/empire-essay-saving-private-ryan-2/review/} accessed April 2016.
75 On apparent interchangeability of individual enemies in Ryan, see Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg, p. 293.
76 Reid, ‘Empire Essay’.
77 French, ‘Ryan’s slaughter’. Early in Band of Brothers, Ronald Speirs executes German prisoners, establishing an ambiguous character that his comrades (and through them, the audience) eventually learn to admire. In Pacific too Eugene Sledge progresses from restraint to vengeance against enemy soldiers.
78 Gabbard, Krin, ‘Saving Private Ryan too late’, in John Lewis (ed.), The End of Cinema as we Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties (London: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 123 Google Scholar.
79 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, ‘On beautiful souls, Just Warriors, and feminist consciousness’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5:3–4 (1982), pp. 341–348 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the German television series, Generation War (2013), Friedhelm Winter undergoes a similar transformation from the ‘poet’ to war criminal.
80 Pace Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg, pp. 294–5. The phrase is from Hodgkins, ‘In the wake of Desert Storm’, p. 78.
81 Ouran, D. L., ‘Evil Ryan’, Sight and Sound (1 March 1999), p. 64 Google Scholar.
82 Ebert, ‘Review of Saving Private Ryan’. On Ryan’s permissive ethos and the escalation from executing soldiers ‘spontaneously’ to doing so ‘calculatedly’, see Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg, p. 292.
83 Cf. Gates, Philippa, ‘“Fighting the Good Fight”: the real and the moral in the contemporary Hollywood combat film’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22:4 (2005), pp. 297–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 307). See also Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg, p. 281.
84 Emphasis added.
85 (Blu-ray), (UK: Universal Pictures UK, 2009). Tarantino misspells the words of his title to distinguish it from Enzo G. Castellari’s film, released in the US as The Inglorious Bastards (1978). Tarantino’s film includes various nods towards the earlier movie and to the wider ‘Inglorious Bastards’ genre with which he associates it along with Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). See ‘A Conversation with Enzo Castellari and Quentin Tarantino’ on Inglorious Bastards (DVD), (UK: Optimum Releasing Ltd, 2009).
86 On the reception of Inglourious as ‘Jewish revenge porn’ as well as sources criticising the film along these lines, see Ornella, Alexander Darius, ‘Disruptive violence as a means to create space for reflection: Thoughts on Tarantino’s attempts at audience irritation’, in Robert von Dassanowsky (ed.), Inglourious Basterds: a Manipulation of Metacinema (London: Continuum, 2013), pp. 226–227 Google Scholar. Thanks to Steven de Wijze for emphasising the theme of revenge in Tarantino’s revenge films.
87 Compare Ornella’s reading (‘Disruptive violence as a means to create space for reflection’, pp. 322–3), which also notes Rachtman’s courage and the ambivalence viewers are likely to feel as their complicity in murderous voyeurism is highlighted.
88 On the other hand, Shosanna Dreyfus is a good deal less ambiguous and more sympathetic. In fact, her conspiracy to kill Hitler and the German leadership renders attempts to do so by the Basterds unnecessary.
89 By contrast, Ayer seems to redeem something of Raine in the more sophisticated (polyglot) tank commander of Fury. Raine’s behaviour towards German soldiers is recalled by our first sight of Wardaddy ambushing a German officer and killing him with the knife he keeps in his boot.
90 The scene also recalls the beach scenes in Ryan.
91 Note that this doesn’t necessarily affect the viewer’s attitude towards Shosanna Dreyfus’s plan to avenge her murdered family and defeat the Nazis, which is entirely independent of the Basterds’ story.
92 Controversy over Seth Rogan’s Tweet about American Sniper’s resemblance to Nation’s Pride suggests Roth’s movie raises painful questions for those seduced by the morally one-sided cinema discussed in the first part of this section. See Christopher Rosen, ‘Seth Rogan clarifies “American Sniper” Tweet’, Huffington Post (19 January 2015), available at: {http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/19/seth-rogen-american-sniper_n_6503586.html} accessed April 2016. Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention Rogan’s comment.
93 Young, Desmond, Rommel: the Desert Fox (London: Collins, 1950)Google Scholar; Walzer cites a 1958 edition of the book (in Just and Unjust Wars, p. 339, n. 4).
94 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xvii.
95 Rosen, ‘Seth Rogan clarifies “American Sniper” Tweet’. On apologetics for US assertiveness post-9/11 in cinema, see Dunn, David Hastings, ‘ The Incredibles: an ordinary day tale of a Superpower in a Post-9/11 Worlds’, Millennium, 34:2 (2006), pp. 559–562 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
96 Gates, ‘“Fighting the Good Fight”, p. 298.
97 Interviewed by Richard Schickel, available at: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP5BhK_xMlA} accessed 5 July 2016 (from Pickup on South St., Dir. Samuel Fuller [DVD], [US: Criterion Collection, 1990]).
98 McMahan, Killing in War, pp. 3, 6–7.
99 Hodgkins, ‘In the wake of Desert Storm’, p. 78.
100 ICRC, The People on War Report, pp. xi, 19.
