Why is it so hard to watch war movies?
As the only female critic here at Filmwell, I know this might be just my own problem, and the others can chime in if they like. But I have never been able to get excited about watching a war movie – whether it’s about an ancient mythical battle, an epic tale of historical triumph, or a politically-charged telling of a present-day story.
When I was considering this question the other day, I first imagined the obvious: I don’t like watching war movies because of their brutality. When I sit down to watch a movie, I don’t necessarily expect to be entertained, but I do at least hope that I finish and think, I’m glad I watched that. Bonus points if it provoked a smile or chuckle along the way, or if it was lovely to look at. But brutality on the battle field is not lovely or smile-provoking.
War films can, and generally do, tell an intensely human story, one that brings the full range of human emotion into play. And in fact, I will gladly watch a film that has other kinds of brutality if it’s any good (and I have a soft spot for movies in which Things Blow Up). I’ll watch a film that makes me sad because of the things humans do to each other.
The fact is simply that I don’t like war, and I especially have avoided war films over the past few years, as I’m tired of talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, even though I know some of those films need to be made. It’s just too hard to watch something that hits close to home so soon (which, incidentally, is the same reason why I’ve avoided seeing World Trade Center).
War is ugly, heartbreaking, and very messy – and that mess becomes compounded, at least for me, when it is in the middle east. So Under the Bombs sat on my shelf for a while before I finally stuck it in the DVD player.
The film tells the story of Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat), a Lebanese woman searching for her six-year-old son just after the 2006 Lebanese war, in which a conflict between Hezbollah and the Israeli military resulted in many tragic civilian deaths and the destruction of entire town. Zeina is aided by Tony (Georges Khabbaz), a cab driver who agrees to take her south to the war-torn region to hunt for her son. As Zeina and Tony form a tenuous relationship, they begin to open up to one another, and it becomes clear that the tragedy in their own lives is not just because of the war.
It’s a hard story to watch. Though it’s a fictional tale, the film was shot on location, so these blown out roads and bombed out apartment buildings are the real thing. Most of the actors are not in fact actors, but people who actually live in this region and were there for the war, so recently that it is still raw in their memory.
Under the Bombs – which, the director states in the post-film epigraph, was made for the innocent people whose lives were destroyed or lost entirely in the war – explores what living under these circumstances of intense loss and suffering can do for the civilian parties, who can rightly feel helpless and unsure of where to place the blame. Zeina, riding in the taxi for days looking for her son, says this as a kind of mantra:
My son is lost, everybody’s looking for him, all this terror, these bombs – the madness of some. It doesn’t matter; we must search. Many have died. It doesn’t matter, everything can wait. We must search. My son is lost. What did he do wrong? We have to fight back. It’s not important. First we must search. Then we’ll resist. Have I been a bad mother? It’s not important. We must search.
War, terror, madness, death – all must be set aside for the most important, immediate thing, which is to find the missing child.
The entire story is made even more tragic as the film wears on, especially when Zeina and Tony recount the various wars they’ve lived through and how long they think it will be before there’s another. Even when there is no war, they live beneath the bombs.
Which brings me back to watching war films. I think it’s difficult for me because I don’t really want to have to deal with the possibility that I, too, could someday experience war first-hand. With the exception of the terrorist attacks of 9-11 – which, truthfully, rather pale in comparison next to what so many people around the world will suffer in their lifetime – I’ve never been close to war. And tragedy on such a grand scale is too hard to fathom. I have experienced and can understand personal tragedy – death of a loved one, dissolved relationships, failure, depression, all these things – but war is just too big to understand.
And that is why I need to keep watching films like Under the Bombs.