"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, page 14).
Mary O'Hare is a brilliant woman. I don't need pages and pages of descriptive characterization to prove this opinion of mine. She may be fictional, but the above quote makes her real to me. For the most part, I believe Hollywood glorifies war, much like Hollywood glorifies sex, drugs, murder. However, I don't believe the glamourization is intended to make people yearn for war. The writers and directors are doing their job: creating a convincing storyline to please their audience. Obviously they've succeeded if their project influences adolescents to join the army. I think movie-makers need to realize how gullible humans are, how easily influenced we are as a species. Pearl Harbor, for example, is a war film that i feel definitely gives a misleading perspective of war. Of course young men are going to want to go to war if it resulted in them being a hero and winning the gal. however, i do believe that man is partially to blame for these misinterpretations. If they would think about war, about what they have to do in war, before they go to war, maybe their hopes wouldn't be shattered.
personally, I can't imagine killing people would be too glamorous.
this is an assumption, but i don't think there are many veterans who come home from war with love stories and happy endings, who feel as though any act of courage they may have performed made them a hero.
I think in the past, it was expected of men to want to fight for their country, more so than it is today. So, I think film-makers had every intention of making war some type of desired illusion. Also, in the past, those who spoke out against war were generally assumed to be against the government. The Cold War, for example, anti-war folks were thought to be communists and they were arrested, sometimes executed.
Like Mary O'Hare, I don't believe in war. Too many young people throw their lives away, she's right. Many soldiers are just children. It's a little hypocritical, isn't it? Here in America, such a fuss is made when a child somehow gets ahold of a gun, or a seventeen year old decides to shoot some of his peers at school, the ones he finds to be distasteful. Yet, it would be perfectly acceptable for that seventeen to wait a year, join the army, and blow the heads off the people our government has decided is the enemy.
SARAH.
GIRL.
SEVENTEEN.
SENIOR.
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