A full-on battle or mere fray?

You will be pleased or displeased -- depending on your political viewpoint -- to know that when it comes to show business, the Pentagon is all business. If a studio wants to borrow soldiers or some expensive materiel for a military epic, the Department of Defense carefully vets the movie’s script, making sure that, minimally, it contains nothing that brings discredit on our armed forces and, maximally, serves as a sort of recruiting poster for our voluntary military.

This seems scandalous to David L. Robb, author of “Operation Hollywood.” His argument against Defense Department pre-censorship of movies cites the 1st Amendment (“Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.... “), invokes the horrors of the North Korean dictatorship (which keeps the country permanently ready for war with its endless propaganda) and suggests that more than half a century spent cinematically celebrating the military may have made the United States more prone to waging preemptive wars. He calls on everyone from Congress to the Writers Guild to do something about this situation.

Robb may have a point, though his irony-free book, consisting largely of short anecdotal chapters giving the specifics of Defense Department interference with movies (mostly at the script level), reiterates it to ultimately numbing effect. Does a movie version of an American ambassador speak disparagingly of our defeat in Vietnam? Out goes the offending line. Does a World War II movie show a Marine taking the gold fillings from a dead Japanese soldier’s teeth? Out that goes too -- even though the historical record shows this sort of thing was common (on both sides) in the Pacific Theater. For a long time, the Pentagon had a censor who didn’t like to hear military personnel cussing in the movies, which did not much help the cause of realism in film. This same man successfully demanded deletion of a scene in which two officers are seen drinking heavily on duty, at their post. And then there was the matter of a soldier embarrassed to relieve himself in the foxhole he was sharing with G.I. Jane in the Ridley Scott movie of the same name. The scene was, of course, excised.

Many, if not most, of these script squabbles strike me as less than threatening to the cause of free speech. There is, in fact, occasionally something rather touching -- oh, all right, simple-minded -- about the military’s hypocritical gentility. The Pentagon’s bureaucrats must know that, in reality, its troops swear, booze and, from time to time, pursue cheesy sexual relations. It is really rather sweet of them to try to protect the public -- which, of course, includes millions of veterans who know differently -- from discovering that soldiers, sailors and airmen are human like everyone else.

But there are much larger issues that this book does not address. The most crucial of them is this: When it seeks military cooperation on a war film, Hollywood is asking the Pentagon to spend millions supplying the troops and equipment -- including, often enough, Blackhawk helicopters, F-15 fighters and nuclear submarines, costing many millions of dollars each -- necessary to make the movie. It seems to me that given the cost and inconvenience involved in this cooperation, the military is, in fact, entitled to have its say about the content of the film. That it generally seems to use its oversight privileges in stupid and persnickety ways is almost beside the point. It is only doing what any civilian institution permitting filmmakers to intrude on its property and borrow its equipment routinely does -- especially given that a movie producer can always proceed without military cooperation, which, in the age of digital special effects, is relatively easy to do, if somewhat more expensive.

That’s a choice producer Jerry Bruckheimer embraced when he was making “Crimson Tide.” It’s about a mutiny on a nuclear submarine that has received ambiguous signals about launching its missiles and cannot clear up the confusion by radio. The commanding officer (hard-nosed Gene Hackman) wants to launch; his executive officer (the more thoughtful Denzel Washington) wants to wait. Eventually the latter relieves the former of command, discovers that he was correct to hesitate but still faces court-martial for his action. Fictional mutinies are always a no-no to the Navy, and this one was particularly abhorrent. It did not want the public thinking that an overzealous officer might set off a nuclear holocaust without proper authorization, insisting that there were plenty of fail-safe conditions preventing that eventuality. Bruckheimer and his people disagreed, citing obscure regulations, applicable to nuclear submarines alone, that in certain circumstances permit a ship’s commander to fire his weapons on his own recognizance. Everybody argued back and forth for a while, until Bruckheimer, unwilling to abandon a suspenseful and potentially profitable moral dilemma, decided to go it alone.

This is an option every moviemaker has, and it is one in which the 1st Amendment rules absolutely. It is virtually axiomatic that every great war movie is, in the end, an antiwar movie, going back to, say, “What Price Glory?” in 1926 and including, subsequently, “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), “The Big Red One” (1980), “Platoon” (1986), “Three Kings” (1999) and Stanley Kubrick’s great trilogy on the topic, “Paths of Glory” (1957), Dr. Strangelove” (1964) and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987). What you do is hire armies of extras, sew their costumes, build what closed sets you need, rent what open spaces you require for the big battle scenes and let your movie rip, free of officious interference. That is, shall we say, the American Way.

Or maybe I should say the old-fashioned American way, before everyone started looking for handouts in all the wrong places. A law professor named Jonathan Turley contributes a hot and bothered introduction to Robb’s book in which he argues that it should “outrage most Americans and lead to hearings in Congress,” which, he says, has never authorized the military “to engage in ... self-serving efforts to shape its public image.” It is, he says, a “new” version of censorship, “crafted to operate in the shadow of the First Amendment.”

I don’t know about “new”: The military has been crafty about not lending personnel without receiving something in return at least since World War II. And I don’t know about stirring Congress to uproar over this issue, not as long as the stuff Hollywood wants to borrow for its military adventures belongs, at least in theory, to all the taxpayers of the United States, many of whom, discouraging as this may be to some liberals, tend to take an uncomplicated view of our fighting men and women. I myself tend toward that opinion. Deploring the current administration as I do, I cannot help but think well of the uniformed people who, embracing a hard and dutiful code of conduct as well as an unforgiving lifestyle, are obliged to serve the lunatic policies of their civilian masters (which in certain other times, lest we forget, have not been so lunatic). In any case, whether we get to see a soldier having trouble urinating in front of Demi Moore doesn’t seem particularly germane here.

What’s most deeply wrong with Pentagon-endorsed war movies is that they elide the terrible human costs of war and stress instead heedless and heroic self-sacrifice. This is not a matter much on Robb’s mind, but if that’s the kind of movie you want to make, you probably have to crawl into the rack with the Pentagon. If, however, you value hard truth more than your cost-benefit analysis, you have to bunk down somewhere else. Over the course of movie history, there doubtless have been many more films celebrating our soldiery than criticizing it. But, curiously, the ones we remember best and honor most are the ones that present war in a tragic light and those who wage war on our behalf as its first victims. *