Jesse-Justin Cuevas, Columnist
Ideology: Independent | Writing from: Brooklyn, NY
Stephen Marche’s “A Thousand Words About Our Culture” is my favorite part of Esquire magazine. Every month I look forward to his snarky commentary and his original cultural juxtapositions. His column always makes me laugh, but it also always makes me think. Although Marche bitches about the Academy, celebrity suicide and John Mayer’s recent blunder, his own game of connect the dots speaks to a louder and more important concern with American morale. While many of us, myself included, talk down to Perez groupies and Us Weekly aficionados, Marche reminds me that just because ours is a society a little too interested in celebrity culture, our heads aren’t entirely in the clouds.
Every day—or every hour, even every few minutes, depending on your habitual news intake—the world slams us with differing visions of war. Written publications feed us war politically, filtering our consumption to important names, dates and places of news incumbents, policy legislation and V- and D-Day approximations. News anchors arrange and rearrange much of these same written news stories over and over again, with the additional photo or video of the goings-on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to these visual snippets, gamer-like images of blurry soldiers in action dance around in our heads.
And then there are the movies—the previews at the theatre, the online trailers, the commercials between your prime time television favorites and, of course, the theatrics themselves. War movies have been an American favorite for decades, grossing millions at the box office and receiving critical acclaim at award ceremonies like Sunday night’s Oscars. This month, Marche’s A Thousand Words About Our Culture brought the differing archetypical war stories into the limelight. Coining them the “virtuous struggle of good over evil,” the “moral minefield” or the “thrilling nightmare,” he asks the question, which war are you watching?
As expected, war movies change as the wars we fight change. Psychological dramas and thrillers about war and its mental caveats replace realist action epics like Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down. Today’s Iraq War based HBO series The Pacific and the this year’s Green Zone explore the tumultuous moral conundrum of the American soldier in Iraq. Even the romance is bleak in today’s war films. Remember Pearl Harbor, the box office hit in which two best friend heartthrobs share a girl when the original boyfriend is presumed dead? Well, this year’s Iraq War version, Brothers, is far darker, capturing the dismal mindlessness of our generation’s Vietnam.
The days of war when the good guys and bad guys wore easily distinguishable uniforms are over. We craved the viscerally realist depictions of war, as Marche describes, back when “the conflict had a clear beginning, middle, and end, throughout which the U.S. was the ultimate hero.” We could stomach trench warfare because after the war was over, the movie reminded us that after all that bloody gore and guts, “America taught the world the true meaning of victory, rebuilding its enemies with magnanimity, generosity, and wisdom.” But these days the heroic tales of World War I and II may be too kitschy for the current hopeless deathtoll. 
The Academy’s underdog, The Hurt Locker, took home many awards Sunday night, including Best Picture, making Marche’s question a very important one. The Hurt Locker laid the smack down on the highest grossing movie in the history of cinema, Avatar. Somehow the “bravery versus bravado” drama about the challenges of the human psyche under fire proved impervious to James Cameron and technology’s ten-year love child. The Hurt Locker’s official website described the film as a “gripping portrayal of real-life sacrifice and heroism, and a layered, probing study of the soul-umbing rigors and potent allure of the modern battlefield.” Apparently, that’s the kind of war we want to watch today—one that legitimizes our psychological crisis. Today’s war fields are mental battle zones, and glorifying our confusion on the silver screen somehow exonerates us.