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Thoughts on Remembering War
Prompted by Watching
the Canadian film “Passchendaele,”
a few days after Remembrance Day
a November 2008 essay by Bill Casselman
excerpt: “The entire film is acted and choreographed in a style that S.J Perelman used to call “fire in a whorehouse.” In the trenches of Paul Gross’s “Passchendaele,” exploding corpses zoom through the air until trench warfare resembles a field rehearsal for The Flying Wallendas.”
Summary of this 3,200 word article
1. A review of the Canadian war movie “Passchendaele”
2. Remembrance Day as blackmail: haven’t we remembered enough?
3. How pro-battle sentiment influences Canada’s Afghanistan policy
Film Review: Epic as Difficult Story Mode
Paul Gross’ mediocrity as a writer sinks his movie “Passchendaele.” Gross is an actor whose success in television has permitted him to assemble the money to make a movie and to surround himself with merdivorous toadies and softly cooing yesmen who spaniel after him all day whispering, “You’re a genius, Paul. Really. No, truly, I mean it, dude. Sincerely, you are a god.” Shucks, thinks Paul bashfully, maybe I am.
On this project, Gross was in dire need of people unafraid to offer judgment, people who could read the Grossian scenario and say to him, “Paul, this is bad writing. It’s soap opera; emotional hooey; the improbable piled on the unlikely; crocodile tears mixed with rancid treacle. In short, pal, unbelievable crap.” But no such corrective purveyor of impartial analysis was permitted within ten feet of our aging golden boy.
And Paul Gross could not have picked a harder row to hoe.
When a mediocre writer tackles epic form, the result is disaster, but, of course, disaster on an epic scale.
The epic that works as immediate art and endures the usual disdain of the ages is scarce in all media throughout history for a very cogent reason. The epic is among the most difficult modes of the storyteller’s art.
Ask yourself: why is there seldom more than one great epic story in the entire long history of a nation?
Ancient Greece had one resonant war epic: The Iliad. The Odyssey is a sentimental travel fantasy, ultimately about running home to Mommy who awaits you, tits out, but dressed as your wife, Penelope.
Rome had The Aeneid, pro-imperial political propaganda disguised and “pseuded up” as poetic history.
In English, the war of battlefields is replaced by the war between spiritual good and evil, giving us a masterpiece, the high-water mark of English epic poetry, John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Cinema has few successful epics. Each moviegoer may keep a very short list. My list of effective film epics includes David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” Coppolla’s “The Godfather: Parts One and Two,” Sergei Eisenstein's “Ivan the Terrible,” John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” even though Hollywood softens the rigour of John Steinbeck’s story. Perhaps I’d add Terence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and William Wyler’s “Ben Hur.”
What all of the above epics began with is: compelling story masterfully written. But Paul Gross is no Steinbeck. His tepid concoction of First World War clichés is watery broth indeed.
Scope out this wee plotlet: Wounded Canuck is sent home from WWI battle, back to early twentieth-century Calgary. Soldier Boy meets Miss Angel Glow, a nurse. Their love is thwarted by cruel fate, including Angel Glow’s TRAGIC FLAW. She’s a nurse addicted to morphine. In one of the most pathetically inadequate scenes of “Passchendaele,” Soldier Boy rescues Angel Glow from the flesh-wasting, eye-hollowing clutch of morphine by locking the damsel up in a Calgary roominghouse bedroom and hugging her all night. Angel Glow, shaking off the equivalent of heroin addiction, never cracks so much as a bead of sweat, but stays improbably as peachy-cheeked as a pre-Raphaelite madonna. Paul Gross, wrestling the evil drug that has imprisoned his sweetheart, never even musses his 200-dollar razor-cut hairdo. I know it’s a movie but – for corn’s sake: muss the silly fucker’s hair a little bit. Spray some sweat on Angel Glow for a moment.
In the morning the Alberta sun shines brightly through the tattered blinds of the cheap hotel and ---behold, o happy fate! — our solider boy has kissed Miss Dopey Veins to a cure. Hey, after all, rehab is a snap, right? I mean, half of all movie crews have kicked the cocaine monkey, so, gimme a big wet sloppy kiss and everything’ll be all better.
Then, by a happenstance badly written and ineptly conceived, Soldier Boy, drummed out as a wounded soldier, goes back to Europe to fight again. And in the trenches, one day, totally out of the blue (except in a Paul Gross script) who does he meet? Why it’s Miss Angel Glow, nursing away, morphine-free, and so he does what all soldiers would do in the midst of bombs blowing up, mud-choked gullies of torrential rain, rifle fire everywhere killing his buddies: Soldier boy grabs Angel Glow, yanks her into a shed and pumps her until she squeals like a bagged squirrel. Ain’t love grand?
The entire film is acted and cinematically choreographed in a style that S.J Perelman used to call “fire in a whorehouse.” In the trenches of Paul Gross’s Passchendaele, exploding corpses zoom through the air until trench warfare resembles a field rehearsal for The Flying Wallendas, a daredevil aerial act of circus days gone by.
The hypertrophied carnage ruins the film. Yet it is presented as positively balletic, as if Diaghilev had slipped blotter acid into Nijinsky’s strawberry milkshakes or denied sex to the entire corps of Les Ballet Russes by not letting them fuck one another to exhaustion every night after Swan Lake, but then finally relenting to permit them to indulge in a fratricidal binge of gut-swagged massacre. It all ends in a visually comic mess with pretty well everyone dead except for the shell-shocked who are playing mud bunny in the Belgian ditches. Not once did I feel regret or loss.
It Makes a Feller Proud to be a Faggot
Whether or not their inclusion was designed to make Paul Gross appear even more manly than he is (thurely that can’t be pothibble?) there are a goodly number of young actors in this film with 20-inch reflexible wrists, purring and lisping away, to no discernible purpose. Anyway, guess what? War ‘n’ fightin’ will make those suckhole little pantywaists into real men, who can then bravely return to Alberta and do what real soldier men do: become alcoholics and spend the remainder of their days in sodden nostalgia guzzling suds at the Legion or leaning against bar-room walls, stiff as boiled owls, all bleary for the golden days of war yore when they bit through a kraut’s eyeball. Oops. That too was left out of this war film.
The casting throughout is jaw-droppingly appalling. Old stage hams like Jim Mezon lumber hulkingly on camera, wooden as Jim Flaherty’s heart. Mezon is allowed to shake his fat wattles yet again in one of his dreadful charades as an evil, British-acccented Canadian officer. I thought the Shaw Festival had passed a law that Mezon would never again be allowed to drag that tired old act on stage or in front of a camera.
Let us Leave the Art of Acting to Trained Seals
So. Paul Gross can’t write. As an actor, Paul Gross is passable on television, where high def veils mediocrity in a polychrome spritz of pixels. As anyone who watches an evening of current television can attest, clarity can be empty. Clarity may cheat by containing nothing but definition and no other content. That’s what we viewers get most nights on TV:
focus designed to fuck us.
Paul looks like a lumpish, once-kinda-cute male model whose career specialty might have been Canadian Tire work shirt ads. But Paul Gross is not “big” enough to inhabit cinematic space. He will never be a movie star. There is no radiance, no magnetic aura which even the dumbest real movie star lunkheads possess. Think of that brainless, no-talent smirk of narcissism that is Brad Pitt. Showbiz fate is dirty. Fate is mean. Fate is unfair. Paul Newman had it. Paul Gross never had it and couldn’t give it away with free boxtops of Lovely Head Male Shampoo. When the camera moves in close on that bland Grossian face, cosseted by years of self love and far too many facial massages, and sees those unreflective eyes in whose limpid pools no thought has ever dogpaddled, the moviegoer sighs and feels — nothing.
So. Paul Gross can’t movie-act.
A Flea Circus Would be Too Large a Venue for Paul Gross as Director
Paul also directed this collapsed soufflé. He gives the other inept actors not clue one about how to save bad writing. Most of the actors can’t speak in a realistic manner anyhow and have no idea what to do when the nasty camera moves in for the truth-telling close-up. Arm-flailing is big in this movie, and is so overdone that, by the end, the group scenes are reminiscent of an outbreak of spastic hypertonia in a flamingo colony. Will you please keep your arms down, actors, so we can watch your bad facial expressions!
Cheating on the “Cheat Scenes”
Other directorial decisions that make the viewer reconsider breakfast include his “cheat scene” choices. Cheat scenes arise when one can’t get the desired shot, so everybody pauses to consider how to “cheat” it, a common, perfectly legitimate filming procedure. Of course, it helps if the cheated scene works for the story. One egregious flub in “Passchendaele” has Soldier Boy and Angel Glow perched erotically on a cliff top high above a winding Alberta river as sunlight bathes the rolling hills in a pre-lust glimmer. For whatever reason, the framing of the shot omits to show the moviegoer precisely what the lovers are sitting on. The camera is set way too high. There are many modes in which to photograph the rolling hill country of Alberta, but “shooting down” is NOT one of them. A high camera angle flattens all the features of the landscape that make it resonant. The angle of the shot of the two lovers actually makes the viewer uneasy. We can’t see what they are sitting on. Are they going to fall off? Is that a rock upon which they perch? Jeepers, when he grabs her left tit, will Angel Glow plummet over the declivity and scuff her Revlon lips on the way down to a watery bye-bye? One can only hope. But we are not shown.
That whole scene is strictly amateur night. Professional moviemakers catch such errors on location as they watch after-shot replays. Perhaps Gross was too busy checking his haircut. But, Paul, don’t worry. Throughout your movie, you look darling, dear, simply darling. The only way you failed in “Passchendaele,” is as director, producer, writer and actor.
Part (2)
In Flanders Fields, the Blowhards Blow.
Remembrance Day?
Haven’t We Remembered Enough?
Canada has a century-long reluctance to ask any ironic or analytic questions about war, about Canadians who wage it, about those who demand that we keep remembering it, demand that Canadians kowtow forever in obeisance and bury any misgivings under a fool’s comforter of plastic poppies.
Are soldiers the only people who ever mattered in Canadian history? Dead soldiers killed in wars? Did World War One create modern Canada? Is that how Canadians came to define themselves? By killing people? So say historians like No-Star General Jack Granatstein. I say “General”Jack is full of shit. I say inventing a way to make insulin to help diabetics is one beacon that, woven with other positive advances, helped Canadians to define who we are. Not knifing krauts in the mud.
But tedious old bores like enemy-stompin’ Jack Granatstein want people to remember constantly for many reasons. One of Jack’s reasons is so that the vengeful old hawk can get the funds to keep building war museums. Every time a Canadian turns around, history professor Granatstein has wasted our taxes by building another god-damn war museum, filled with the same exaggerations, lies and exclusions we’ve been subjected to for decades. Jack’s jingoistic blatherings about our glorious soldiers (Jack being a soldier, by the way, and thus partaking of the glory he seeks daily to generate) always remind me of another well-known Canadian, a movie director who never stops whining that Canadians don’t celebrate Canadian artists with sufficient noise and glory. By which this movie director meant: Canada has not celebrated ME and my talent enough. Oh really, well, here’s one Canadian reader and writer who thinks we’ve heard quite enough immodest horn-blowing from both Norman Jewison and Jack Granatstein.
Is there one nano-crumb of proof that Remembrance Day EVER stopped the next war? Not one.
Every single participant in a Canadian war was a hero who wants only to be celebrated every day of every month forever. Well, that’s quite remarkable. I guess the two families I know best are the only families in Canada’s war history who contained grifters, losers and what I call veteran conmen. Let me tell you about two.
One relative I will call my “Uncle Stan.” Tragic figure. Uncle Stan came home from WWII with shell-shock. The whole family of lesser, war-deprived beings got down on their knees and kissed his beer-stained puttees. Just awful that shell-shock. Made Uncle Stan gulp down a quart of Captain Morgan’s rum every day for the next forty years — just for ballast.
“You Gutless Pussies!”
Uncle Stan loved to blare one-upmanship routines at all the younger males in the family, along the lines of “You gutless pussies never had to flick open a kraut’s carotid artery and make sure it stayed open. You can never be men.” Uncle Stan, wreathed in a boozy aura of rum, used to lean down and scream this into the face of a nine-year-old boy who was not even an embryo when the war began. How do I know? That little boy was me.
After 10 years of his delirious dick-wagging, braying out "Taps" on a tin whistle, all the while lying under the dining room table and screaming abusive taunts, a relative and I finally looked up Uncle Stan’s war record, seeking innocently to understand Stan's tragic neurasthenic deficits all the better.
What did we discover?
Uncle Stan had spent the entirety of World War Two as a typist at Comox on Vancouver Island.
So I asked Uncle Stan finally, “How precisely did shell shock afflict you? You mean, the bombs went off in Japan or the South Pacific and traveled under the ocean all the way to Vancouver Island and then – O God! – shook the rum bottle right off your typewriter table there in Comox? How tragic! Is that what really happened, you useless, lying, bullying waste of protoplasm? I guess that’s why your chief accomplishment after the war was maintaining a 40-year-long alcoholic stupour?
We copied Uncle Stan’s glorious war record and mailed it to every member of the family we could locate. Why? Lest we forget.
Inebriate Number Two, Advance and Be Recognized!
Another lifelong boozed-up souse and member of my family, Cousin Bozo, had deep dents in his forehead in 1946, which he always pointed out on every Remembrance Day. “I fought and was torn apart, so you yellow-bellied suckababies, cringing at home, could enjoy our wonderful Canadian way of life.” Cousin Bozo’s war record was finally researched under the freedom of information act by one of his own children.
Bozo had two notations of interest. One night in the winter of 1943, after the army camp bootlegger had closed, during midnight check at a maritime basecamp hospital, the enterprising Bozo had been apprehended by military police in the act of licking alcohol swabs off other soldiers’ leg wounds. I’m sure Bozo had expected the Carruthers Medal for Nocturnal Derring-Do. Instead he drew two weeks at hard labour for conduct unbecoming a drunken fucking asshole.
Dents for the Dense
The other tale concerned the origin of Bozo’s prominent forehead dents, which, in later years, he never ceased to claim caused him deep pain and loss of consistent nooky. Bozo’s son discovered that his father's indenture (so to speak) had happened, not dodging Nazi bullets on the cliffs of Dunkirk as Bozo told, but after a night of vomit-flecked indulgence, when Bozo had taken a header off the tailgate of a troop transport truck in Halifax harbour, drunker than a rodeo goat, on the way to the ship that never took him overseas because his head wounds had been serious enough to keep him in Halifax for the duration of the war.
My deep shame is that my family is the only family in Canadian history that had veterans of that kind, cowardly titsucking ning-nongs of the most abject life station. Isn’t that odd? Only my family? I feel so bad. Every other Canadian soldier was a hero.
One thing many of these “professional veterans” will tell you in their cups, should you ask them exactly how much fawning praise and bootlicking do you guys require? They will answer: more, we want more. Because the ego wounded in childhood can never get enough of the healing balm of unending praise, even if it is totally unmerited.
In my life I actually met several honest returned veterans. I always asked what was the Second World War like?
The gist of what both confessed was this:
“The Second World War was the best time of my life. I was a backwoods clod, pining in rural boredom, hot to leave the farm. I’m one farm boy who signed up to escape thousands of nights of prairie darkness because we couldn’t afford a candle; lying alone for your entire adolescence, with nothing to do but hold your dick in your sock and fantasize that Betty Grable, all dressed in white with a physician's parabolic mirror strapped to her forehead, had just grabbed your balls, leaned over, and whispered in your ear, “Cough, dear.” I did chose to get shot at, to get out of a non-place with no books, no challenge, no sweet-fuck-all except a farmer father who wanted me to grow up and be his plough horse. Screw that! So, I yelled, “Bring on those Nazi bastards. Ride over those battlefields, you dyed-blonde, corpse-buggering Valkyries, here I come, Adolph!” World War Two gave me adventure in spades. I got French pussy, Dutch food and German stiffs. I got to shoot krauts every fucking day. It was the greatest, most exciting time in my life, and, after demobilization, my life back in Canada sucked big time. Life was never again that sweet.”
Put that on just one cenotaph, you lying old drunks.
Let’s see that text on the ribbon of the next wreath you lay at the Tomb of the Unknown Liver, you cirrhotic, Cyrano-nosed buffoons.
Canadian Art Too Remains Dishonest or Silent in the Face of Our War Record
In all of Canadian art, there is scarcely a moment of analysis or irony about the whole cumbrous war-remembering machinery that clanks along each year, spewing out plastic poppies and edited memories of warfare. Oh, we have dozens of written passages on the horrors of war, and whole libraries on the unrescindable nobility of every soldier who ever donned Canadian brown. But there is little mention of cowardice, of fragging your own officer, of death by friendly fire, of falling on your own bayonet when blind-drunk.
One Canadian play, filmed once, “Wedding in White” features a couple of nasty old buggers, professional Canadian veterans, who attempt to destroy the life of a young girl once they return from the killing fields. But, aside from that, Canadian writers always end their war novels in a French ditch. Canuck artists seem to pull a shroud of “no comment” over all the beastly enormities committed by returned veterans back here in Canada. There is seldom any attention paid to the unending glut of martial bullshit that veterans' descendants have had to abide.
How Harper's Pro-War Sentiment & Government Propaganda
Influence Canada’s Afghanistan Policy
I have written elsewhere about my total disagreement with Canadian soldiers being sent to Afghanistan to be killed.
One recent defense of this useless slaughter came from the lordly hawk, John Manley, such a guaranteed warmonger that Conservative Prime Minister Harper chose a former Liberal cabinet minister,Manley, to write a pro-war report about why we should keep flying Canadians to Afghanistan to be shot. I nearly barfed when Manley was on TV the day he released his report. He actually said that one of the reasons Canadian mothers and wives and fathers should offer up their children to be shot, blown up and murdered was so that Canadians abroad, such as John Manley at some French banquet, could hold their heads high in pride, that Canada too was sending its sons and daughters to die in agony, their guts splattered over Afghani trenches. Listen, John Manley, you pink-eyed snotfuck, send your own kids. Leave mine the fuck alone.
How dare you and that swine Harper ask Canadians to sacrifice their children in unwinnable wars. Alexander the Great could not conquer Afghanistan. The Russian Army could not conquer Afghanistan. But Stephen Harper can?
The whole Remembrance Day charade, in which a nation annually bows in humility before dead liars, plays directly into the hands of the government draculas who will eventually send your children to die. So every time you buy a poppy, like a stunned yoyo, remember that you may indirectly someday finance the death of your own grandchildren. Please consider stopping these government beasts from mauling Canada’s future. It’s quite simple. Stop voting for them.
The old proverb is correct: "the first casualty of war is truth."
And it's the most persistent casualty.
---written by Bill Casselman, November 15, 2008
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Finally somebody telling the truth. I am a former service member (I refute the term veteran -- the only thing I'm a veteran of is the phony 'Cold War').
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While I'm not ashamed of my service, let's be real. I joined the 'peacetime' air force for the adventure and because my old man told me to buck up in school or get a job. I did gain a useful trade -- thank christ I didn't go army.
I have attended remembrance day services for years out of a sense of duty and respect. This one past will be my last. I viewed this year's event through completely new eyes and with with increasing abhorance. It was nothing but a public christian celebration of war (I never realized this before until I started thinking for myself - thanks internet!). The 'ceremony' consisted of the old shop-worn formulatic mentions of the cannon fodder, and then on to the real reason for the gathering, namely the continuing self-aggrandizememt of the remaining vets, (many of whom probably fit the descirption of your two uncles), along with the militaristic jingoism surrounding the current batch of 'heroes in the making' in Afghanistan. Not a word of the millions of innocents slaughtered -- no preaching on the immorality and horrors inflicted by the 'total war' doctrine, such as death camps, terroist bombing of civilians, use of WMD, etc. No firm moral statement calling for reflection on the evil of it all, or a call for it's final demise.
What we got instead were the empty platitudes droned out in a 'reverend Lovejoy' fashion for about 45 minutes of a one hour "production".
Your analysis of the Passchendael movie was bang on. (Wish I had that18 bucks back). Gross was an embarassement to Canada in his 'Dudley Do Right' role in the ridiculous Due South homage to another over-rated Canadian institution. They're just cops fer chrissakes, and increasingly incompetent ones at that -- enough of the hero worship already -- get the hell over it! And that goes for firefighters, ambulance people, etc. It seems anyone with a uniform is eligible for this adolescent adulation. Who's next, Canada Post letter carriers?
Thanks again Bill -- made my day.
November 18, 2008 6:34 PM