102: Action vs. War

Summer's coming, sooner than ever. I just planted vegetables and a blueberry bush in the backyard, almost a month earlier than I should if I'm going by the almanac, but the temperature sensor on my soil probe doesn't lie. The weather's turning warmer faster, and so are the summer movies (Godzilla × Kong came out, like, a month ago). The action movies are coming.

I've been thinking about the delineation between action movies and war movies for quite some time now, though it came to a head this past week when I watched Alex Garland's Civil War (which is not, strictly speaking, a war movie). Action movies are tied to the actions of the individual; war movies tend to be about the individual trapped in a geopolitical situation much bigger than them that they cannot influence or control by themselves, though they can turn the tide through limited collective action (with their fellow soldiers), or through heroic sacrifice.

Obviously there's a spectrum and not a strict binary; the Fast & Furious movies are fanciful action driven by the collective unit of the Toretto extended family, whereas Patton is a portrait of an influential individual caught up in a rivalry fueled by the machinery of war. War movies tend to be more closely tied to historical events and imagery than the action genre, which is why Rogue One–the only "real" war movie in the Star Wars franchise–made such an impression when it first came out: the setting's pure fantasy, but it's about a small squad of soldiers trying to influence the tilt of history. Its imagery is still derivative of pictures from the Vietnam War, and from movies about the Vietnam War; war movies tend to quote their images rather than invent new ones. (The inventions come with new ways of presenting historical material: Christopher Nolan's nested timelines in Dunkirk, or Roger Deakins' illusion of 1917 being filmed in a single shot.)

On paper, I should like war movies more than I do. At their best, they're about big ideas of nationhood, alongside the on-the-ground perspective of foot soldiers fighting in the mud. But I can't get past the war-is-hell imagery, nor the paradox of the war movie glorifying war. I like action when it has no real-world consequences, which is to say, I prefer the pretty lie of the American action movie, with beautiful individuals sweating their way through fight scene after fight scene, no ideology at play except their own. It's easier to shut off my brain and not think too hard about what I'm watching when the only motivation is a personal grudge, and the ability to balance the scales simply by scrapping.

A bit of a postscript: I always feel a little betrayed when the superhero-movie formula turns in the third act to a group of people fighting to turn off a beacon of light shooting up into the sky, partly because it's a tired repetition of every superhero movie from the last fifteen years, and partly because, in the end, the movie has switched genres from individual action into war, without earning or acknowledging the change in focus.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I unpacked my (mostly positive) response to Alex Garland's Civil War.

What I cooked:

It's ramp season in Chicago! I don't forage, but I do subscribe to a local CSA box that includes ramps at least once a year. I'm also not the world's strongest cook, but I make up for that by knowing how to fry things in butter. Dinner Friday night was sautéed oyster mushrooms and ramps with scrambled eggs over rice, topped with lao gan ma chili crisp.