99. DUNE BUGGED ME - On Being Bored of War

I was already angry at the movie, Dune, when the three hour movie began and the words “Part One” came onto the screen.  I have this thing about spoilers, and like going in to movies “fresh” (to coin a phrase from Seinfeld’s, Frank Costanza) so hadn’t read any of the press for the movie.  I hate long movies as a rule, but knowing that even after three hours my experience with Dune wouldn’t be over and I would have to watch another lengthy movie sometime down the road made me feel trapped into a time-commitment someone had forced me into against my consent.  But by the movie’s end I was angry for far more rational reasons.

Don’t worry - this post does not contain spoilers (if it’s even possible to “spoil” something whose original novel was published decades ago?), I will talk in general terms rather than specificities.  But Dune made me angry because it is yet another movie about a people at war.  As the “bad” guys said their “bad” guy things and the “good” guys vowed their “good” guy revenge, the familiarity of the promised violence brought to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil”.  A reason I cannot spoil Dune by telling you that it is about a war is because we’ve all seen this movie before.  We saw it in Harry Potter, when the heroes of Hogswarts came together to ward off the evil forces of Voldermort and his Death Eaters.  We saw it in both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, where the third movie in each franchise does nothing but show us the big battle the previous two movies have been building to.  We saw it, of course, in Star Wars and its never-ending collection of war-focused sequels and prequels.  We saw it in The Matrix, whose warfare is apparently set to return to cinemas again soon, and The Avengers literally had an infinity war.  Franchise after franchise, the story is the same: a big evil has to be overcome with violence.  There is no choice but to join the ranks of the resistance and fight.  The only hope for peace being the death of the enemy and its supporters… “A tale as old as time” as the teapot from Beauty and the Beast might put it.  So what’s the problem?  

The problem, as I see it, is the constant normalising of the narrative that such wars are inevitable.  It is not the fighting itself that bothers me, and this is not a rant against cinema violence.  It is rather the impact of this sustained myth-making that is troubling.  The films always begin with a sense of knowing - knowledge that trouble looms ahead and hard choices will have to be made.  Sacrifice.  Courage.  Slaughter.  A sense of destiny and duty.  This war will one day come, sooner than you expect, and when it does you must be ready…

We are undeniably shaped by the stories we tell ourselves and I can’t help but wonder whether decades of telling ourselves that such battles are coming might have contributed to the current hostile state we are in. Are we looking for the battle we have been told will one day come and, by doing so, seeing possible enemies in every corner?

An important factor of these movies, and our experience of watching them, is that we are never watching from the perspective of the futile victims of war (if we did, the film would just end, suddenly, unexpectedly, with no resolution or purpose, cut short mid-narrative - as if a bomb just took you out of your innocent life).  Nor can we really watch them from the enemy’s point of view, even if a clever film-maker attempts to do just that.  The empathic nature of film viewing, and our need to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we watch, means that even when we do have a movie set from the perspective of the “bad” guys, they soon become our bad guys.  People we understand and relate to, including understanding their “enemies” - the “good” guys - to be the “bad” guys now.  While perhaps flipping the focus feels transformative, picking to emphasise with one side over another in a war doesn’t actually critique the war itself.  So long as the broad strokes are that there are people out there we cannot let live, the narrative myth-making continues.

I watched Dune and I thought of all those other war-narratives I have consumed.  I thought of the TV shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead ,and Sons of Anarchy which more or less follow the similar pattern.  I thought of all the video games out there that people are playing - shooting virtual enemies on online battlefields - and how even I, someone who hates such games, have played enough of them to know how to aim and fire a weapon on any controller.  How all I need to do is sit with it for a few minutes and get to grips with which pixels I should be killing and which pixels I should be saving and I can slot right into the mayhem.

Then I thought of the way various news events are framed to us.  The fictitious “culture war” which has been made reality by repeating it into existence.  The “us vs them” mentality between right and left on all political stories that has mushroomed into seemingly intractable real-world schisms between people.  The “threat” of Russia, of China, of the Taliban, of the EU, of our neighbours, our children…  We couldn’t even face off a global pandemic without bringing in unhelpful war rhetoric and descending into teams of the vaccinated and the anti-vaxxers, the masked and the unmasked…

We have been primed to be ready for war.  We have been conditioned to expect it imminently.  We have been told that a time will come when we have to pick a side and that we may not even be able to trust our closest friends.  We have been fed the ideological norms of conflict escalation and had massacre and genocide normalised.  All in the name of entertainment.  To assume such repeated and sustained messaging will have no impact is to ignore the evidence of all other successful marketing strategies.  But what does recognising this constant background noise of war-mongering mean?  That, perhaps, it is all leading somewhere very, very bad?  That storm clouds are brewing and end-times are drawing near?  An apocalyptic demise spawned from our own self-fulfilling prophecies?  That perhaps the heroic few need to do something now to fight back and shift the narrative?  Battle the evil forces preaching conflict and war?  Even in this blog post, might we be perpetuating further this harmful narrative of inevitable violence and needing to take a side?

Ultimately, we need to break the cycle of paranoia and think about alternatives to war.  Imagine any of the films I have named in this piece ending not in battle, but in reconciliation?  The real banality of evil lies in the fact that there is no such thing as evil, merely individuals reacting to circumstances and making good and bad choices.  That we can’t imagine Voldemort breaking bread with Harry Potter instead of Harry destroying him, or a declaration of Star Peace made instead of more Star Wars, or the Avengers chatting to Thanos about sustainable development and humanity, superheroes and supervillains all coming together in recognition that if they do not change their behaviours around the environment a far more deadly “snap” is coming than was experienced in Marvel’s “blip”, is just testament to how impoverished our imaginations have become after the constant assault from our culture.  It is insane to think that all of us would rather watch a massacre on the cinema screen than sit through a serious airing of the grievances from both sides and a film-ending decision to just forgive and forget.  Such a movie wouldn’t test well because we have been too-long-trained into recognising drama as conflict, not as cooperation.  How often  do we ask ourselves if such “truisms” about what drama “is” are true only because we have been educated to make such a connection.  That were we told, instead, that real drama lies in the resistance to conflict and the discovery of pathways to mutual aid, we might see our current cultural offerings as inept, ridiculous and dull? That we might seek out conversation instead of conflict, discourse instead of death?

As we once again find ourselves in November, yet again making the increasingly empty gesture of marking Remembrance Day as wars continue to be waged not only around the world but in our daily fantasies and entertainments, perhaps it is finally the time to think seriously about the way we depict and think about war in our culture?  Finally time to stop normalising conflict as inevitable?  Finally time to start thinking about peace instead?   

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.