Peace as Style

From 2004 SolPix Webzine, still a relevant read:

If popular films have dealt with issues of peace, they have often done so within the context of war films: Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (both about Vietnam), and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (the aftermath of WW II) being three prime examples. These films heighten or even satirize the reality of war in order to rail against it, or to critique the unrelenting tendency of war to dehumanize. Both Platoon and Apocalypse are in a sense cop-outs, however, in that they are addicted to the power of violence as a dramatic device, use it to the utmost, squeeze us emotionally and mentally through the unrelenting presence of it, but yet do so in a way that fundamentally reminds us that violence is dehumanizing.

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D.R. Thompson is a producer and essayist. His latest book of essays, A World Without War, is available from Del Sol Press here.