Strange Reaction - They Shall Not Grow Old

[Deleted]

I was excited to find Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" available for purchase on the movie channel for Apple TV. I just got done watching it and I was underwhelmed.

I could relate to a lot of what I saw. It showed many differences between what we went through over my career and what the WWI veterans endured, but many similarities. "You learn how to take care of yourself," was the one phrase that resonated the most.

That said, the whole movie was kind of bland to me. That has me wondering how jaded I must be. This thing got rave reviews, and I couldn't connect. Strange, and I am sure I am not explaining the dissonance I feel right now well at all.

[aquaduct]

That's one that never captured my imagination. Just could never develop an interest.

Guess I was right.

[t-bob]

I saw that memos are too underwhelming. it seems like the visuality is good. maybe I should just leave it ,,,, muting

[AlanC]

Mar 22, 2019 19:34:38 GMT -5 @pauls said:

I was excited to find Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" available for purchase on the movie channel for Apple TV. I just got done watching it and I was underwhelmed.

I could relate to a lot of what I saw. It showed many differences between what we went through over my career and what the WWI veterans endured, but many similarities. "You learn how to take care of yourself," was the one phrase that resonated the most.

That said, the whole movie was kind of bland to me. That has me wondering how jaded I must be. This thing got rave reviews, and I couldn't connect. Strange, and I am sure I am not explaining the dissonance I feel right now well at all.

Ditto.

I actually got out of the woods and drove an hour to a theater that was showing it. Faithful Wife and I were both underwhelmed for some reason. I'm not sure what I expected but that wasn't it

[Marshall]

Haven't seen it. But from the hype, it was supposed to humanize those stilted B&W photos and films we've always seen of the era. To make them seem more real like us.

The title itself builds it up to be compelling drama. But it takes more than just colorization and computer editing to make a good film. I haven't seen it so I can't comment on those. But your reports makes is sound like the directors fell a little short on their storyline job.

[TKennedy]

I still want to see it.

[millring]

That era could never live up to the myths we believe about it.

[RickW]

Mar 23, 2019 11:15:02 GMT -5 millring said:

That era could never live up to the myths we believe about it.

I guess I don’t see either the first or second WW as mythic. Whenever I think about them, I think of the sheer awfulness and horror. I cannot imagine being one of those poor sods being told to run up hills, covered in barbed wire, being machine gunned, falling into muddy holes and dying. There is just nothing romantic about it. We learn all about the Canadian army’s great victories, and they were great victories, but still, tens of thousands of men left dead in the mud, to take one hill. My father in law was an infantry captain in Italy in WWII, and he slogged up the entire peninsula, terrified of dying, watching his men and friends die, getting new people in and sending them out to die. They got drunk every night they could find something to drink, trying to deal with it. It broke him, quite badly.

I’m always reminded of Clint Eastwood’s characters quote on the battle he witnesses at the bridge, during the civil war, “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly.”

[Russell Letson]

I suspect that the myth of the Great War never took hold on those who experienced it, and there was immediate direct testimony and eventually a full historical record of how insane and destructive it was. My tiny personal window on it comes second-hand, from family stories about my maternal grandfather's experiences. (I think I've reported some of this before, but the whole arc is instructive.)

My grandfather was a spoiled, selfish kid who wound up not in the trenches but as a driver/mechanic, delivering supplies to the front lines and loading up bodies like cordwood for the return trip. Even so, he was committed to a mental hospital when he was demobbed and my great-grandfather (a Somebody in the GOP) got him sprung. He clearly exhibited some of the signs of what we now call PTSD and even then was recognized as shell shock--crawling under the bed when awakened by thunder, binge drinking, flash-temper violence, irresponsible behavior (e.g., racing trains to a crossing with his family in the car). My mother told me that when Pearl Harbor kicked off WW2, she came home to find him in his chair by the radio, weeping. This from a man I knew years later as a mean-spirited, bullying, selfish son of a bitch.

That's my myth of WW1, reinforced by the poetry of eyewitnesses such as Wilfred Owen. The other myth is recruiting propaganda left over from earlier wars and replaced by postwar bitterness and disillusion:

Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” ...

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

--Ezra Pound

[AlanC]

We have heard a lot about how bad the trenches in Europe were but I didn't know about Gallipoli till recently. I saw a documentary about that 6 months or so ago. OMG! The stupid, arrogant Home Office tried a half-assed invasion which was repulsed. So they doubled down on the stupidity, put a larger invasion force ashore and there they stayed till the end of the war. One stupid, pointless slaughter after for years. The suffering on both sides was horrific.

It's amazing how stupid people can be.

[Russell Letson]

I'm still working my way through The Guns of August--slowly because it's lucid but extremely detailed and also because it's profoundly depressing. Non dulce non et decor, indeed.

[Cosmic Wonder]

It's not on my radar at all. And judging from the above comments, it never will be.

Mike

[Marshall]

Mar 23, 2019 11:15:02 GMT -5 millring said:

That era could never live up to the myths we believe about it.

Ho hum. Just another war.

[Chesapeake]

I haven't seen it either, but I intend to. Maybe I won't be as disappointed, because I'm not going expecting a structured movie story. I just want a chance to see as I've never seen before realistic color[ized] moving images, with actual speech (or good approximations of) of people who were alive in an era so different from mine. I suspect just that experience in itself will be enough for me, a reminder that except for their clothes and accouterments, they were very much like us. Making the whole WWI story itself even more complex and moving, as I imagine myself as one of those who appear in front of the camera. I suspect it will also have extra meaning for me because I had an uncle who served in the infantry in Belgium, and came back with what we now call PTSD. He died before I was born, but I grew up hearing talk about how he was never the same after he came back to the family farm in North Carolina. I wonder if he could have been one of those faces.

[Marshall]

I'm thinking PTSD would have been high in WWI. The nature of the war, as we know it, was on a man to man level. WWII and beyond were more mechanized. A little more detached. A little more quicker. But WWI was trench warfare with bodies being thrown against the enemy for extended periods of time. To be in that meat grinder would have been particularly traumatic, I expect.

[brucemacneill]

Having been to a war, although I was more of a spectator than a fighter, I don't tend to watch war movies of any war. I can save money by just going to sleep.

[Deleted]

Mar 23, 2019 15:37:42 GMT -5 Marshall said:

I'm thinking PTSD would have been high in WWI. The nature of the war, as we know it, was on a man to man level. WWII and beyond were more mechanized. A little more detached. A little more quicker. But WWI was trench warfare with bodies being thrown against the enemy for extended periods of time. To be in that meat grinder would have been particularly traumatic, I expect.

I would expect you have it wrong. The lingering expectation of harm is omnipresent, regardless of the war. The omnipresent expectation that one's decisions will result in harm to others, either "friend or foe or neutral", exacerbates the effects. How one processes that depends upon many things. It is counterintuitive, but the less opportunity one has to "shoot back" at a perceived threat, the more debilitating the stress becomes.

[Russell Letson]

Marshall, do some reading on trench warfare, the effects of constant shelling and machine-gun responses to mass assaults on enemy lines. Then there's the gas and no-man's-land strung with barbed wire. WW1 was the first fully mechanized large-scale war, though rehearsals started with our Civil War and continued through the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). My strong suspicion is that both politicians and citizens were thinking of warfare of the cavalry-charge kind when WW1 began, but those delusions of glory were pretty much stomped flat by what happened in Belgium and France. That understanding is what reduced my miserable bastard of a grandfather to tears on Pearl Harbor Day.

[dradtke]

Mar 23, 2019 12:25:38 GMT -5 AlanC said:

We have heard a lot about how bad the trenches in Europe were but I didn't know about Gallipoli till recently. I saw a documentary about that 6 months or so ago. OMG! The stupid, arrogant Home Office tried a half-assed invasion which was repulsed. So they doubled down on the stupidity, put a larger invasion force ashore and there they stayed till the end of the war. One stupid, pointless slaughter after for years. The suffering on both sides was horrific.

It's amazing how stupid people can be.

I only saw the fictional movie Gallopoli, an Australian movie featuring a young Mel Gibson. Amazing movie. I recommend it.

And I see Russell mentioned the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. That's the one where my grandfather deserted the czar and sailed for Baltimore. Thanks, Grandpa.

[RickW]

Mar 23, 2019 17:23:50 GMT -5 @pauls said:

Mar 23, 2019 15:37:42 GMT -5 Marshall said:

I'm thinking PTSD would have been high in WWI. The nature of the war, as we know it, was on a man to man level. WWII and beyond were more mechanized. A little more detached. A little more quicker. But WWI was trench warfare with bodies being thrown against the enemy for extended periods of time. To be in that meat grinder would have been particularly traumatic, I expect.

I would expect you have it wrong. The lingering expectation of harm is omnipresent, regardless of the war. The omnipresent expectation that one's decisions will result in harm to others, either "friend or foe or neutral", exacerbates the effects. How one processes that depends upon many things. It is counterintuitive, but the less opportunity one has to "shoot back" at a perceived threat, the more debilitating the stress becomes.

I remember reading, years ago, an article from someone who had done a story on WWII, and interviewed a large number of veterans. She said very many were obviously traumitized, some were okay, but who knew what they were bottling up inside. But the writer said that for a small percentage, it was the most incredible time of their lives. She didn’t know why, what it was that made is so. The excitement, the thrill, the adrenaline rush of being in a fight, or the sense of power that came with killing? All of the above. We are all wired very differently.