Last weekend, I watched one of my favorite old movies, The Guns of Navarone. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you immediately add it to your Netflix queue. It’s a 1961 wartime adventure starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn as commandoes tasked with destroying a Nazi artillery emplacement that guards a vital sea passage.
As the cliche says, they don’t make ’em like this anymore. War movies these days, on the rare occasion that somebody actually makes one, tend to be self-important, self-conscious, and burdened with the need to say Something Important. Guns isn’t like that; it takes its subject matter seriously enough, even allowing David Niven’s character to make a couple speeches about the pointlessness and horror of it all, but the film’s overarching goal is to entertain, not to enlighten, and it succeeds wonderfully in that regard.
I did notice something on this latest viewing that’s had me thinking, though.
There’s a scene about midway through when our heroes have been captured by the Nazis. They are questioned first by a regular army (Wehrmacht) officer who comes across as reasonable, courteous, even friendly. They refuse to answer his questions, naturally, and so in comes the SS man, who is, just as naturally, a stereotypical sadist. The SS man quickly identifies the most vulnerable member of the team — the guy with a broken, gangrenous leg — and proceeds to do exactly what you’d expect a sadistic Nazi to do, i.e., rough up the wounded man’s leg in order to make him talk. The Wehrmacht officer is outraged; he tries to get his SS colleague to stop what he’s doing, only to receive a verbal bitch-slapping for his compassion.
Moments later, our heroes turn the tables on their captors. As they’re preparing to leave, Gregory Peck tells the Wehrmacht officer he’s decided to leave the wounded man behind, and he expects him to receive decent medical care. The German officer smiles and says something to the effect of, “Of course. We’re not all like that SS creep.”
Peck then asks where the Nazi radio room is located. The Wehrmacht man refuses to tell, so Peck draws his gun. There is a tense moment before the German says, “You won’t use that. And even if you do, I still won’t tell you.” Peck allows himself a hint of a smile, puts the gun away, and leaves the room.
Contrast that with, say, a typical episode of 24, in which the question isn’t whether Jack Bauer is going to shoot out somebody’s kneecaps, but when, then ponder where we’ve come as a culture in the 40 years since Navarone and what it says about us.
Now, I’m not so naive as to imagine that Americans didn’t torture Nazis in real life, for information, for revenge, or for any other reason you could think of to hurt an enemy in your captivity. But they didn’t used to do it in the movies. I think pop culture is a pretty good gauge of how a society views itself at any given moment in history, and according to the one of the biggest movies of 1961, Americans at that time thought of themselves as a pretty decent lot. They were conflicted by what war made them do, but ultimately they managed to get the job done without becoming overly nasty about it. In our own imaginations, there were lines we just wouldn’t cross. There were lines that even regular-army Nazis wouldn’t cross. Torture was the province only of the dastardly SS.
Now, fast-forward to 2006, where Jack Bauer routinely tortures people in the course of his 24-hour action marathons. A good kneecapping in exchange for vital information is usually presented as the only option available because of that inevitable ticking clock that opens and closes every segment of the show, and Jack himself never has any qualms about it. He’s just doing his job, doing what he thinks is necessary to save lives before the time runs out.
Is that really how Americans view ourselves in the post-9/11 era? Do we now think ourselves as willing to do what only the SS used to do, and that it’s okay so long as you have the justification that it will save lives? Gregory Peck’s team in The Guns of Navarone was under a time constraint, too, and also worried about the lives of Allied sailors and soldiers that would be threatened if the mission failed, but they still backed away from the precipice of torture. Our modern-day pop-culture heroes aren’t so noble. And again I ask, what does it say about us as a culture?
