The War Movie Genre

            Blood and guts and severed limbs; who could take pleasure in a graphic and bloody depiction of war? The issue is, at what point does movie violence exceed the bounds of propriety? I know that such things happen and that at times men and women have to face horrible things, but I don’t consider that to be a valid form of entertainment.

There is a moral issue involved. How does the depiction of violence affect the soul, the interior man? Does it harden him against what is honorable and true? For some it may create courage, for others terror, but for others a distaste bordering on disgust. Some by sad experience have become inured against the horrors of war and regard it as entertainment. After all when you have watched a bloody death, what’s a few more?

            Is such a process of hardening a healthy thing for the ordinary person, or does it draw him needlessly into a dark place where he ought not to have gone without special preparation? Take, for instance, the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Many defenseless people who feed on the violence and immorality depicted in that type of film will eventually come to accept it as within the bounds of normal and acceptable morality.

            During the Vietnam War we saw the first graphic video clip of murder when Vietnam's chief of police, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, shot a suspected Viet Cong collaborator in the head. Now that kind of violence is the everyday bread and butter of American cinema. Let me quote a friend of mine who walked out of a showing of Band of Brothers, and said, “That’s too violent for me. I don’t need to expose myself to that.” That is a wise man with a healthy respect for his everlasting soul.

            There is violence in many books that to my mind is almost too edgy. Even at that the word pictures that spring to mind are only those that can spring from your own imagination. Mind you that can be terrifying enough. But in a graphic and violent movie you are subjected to things that extend far beyond word pictures, and the movie feeds your imagination with new and terrifying images far beyond your control. In that sense a picture is worth a thousand words.

           Eventually we become what we continually behold. That is a sound spiritual principle. The question is, “Do you really want to do that to your inner person, your soul?”