The Pacific, and Why I Love War Stories

I’m so happy I was able to watch the new TV series on HBO Asia, “The Pacific” labeled as the most expensive TV production in history with the astounding $200 million budget.  Produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, in collaboration with HBO, Seven Network Australia, Playtone, and Dreamworks, the series aired last April 03, 2010, at 9pm (Holy Week!) on HBO.  I was able to feel an equally spiritual catharsis brought about by Pacific and the Easter season.

Seriously, this is James Badge Dale, and not someone else...

The Pacific is a ten-part miniseries about World War 2 which stars James Badge Dale as Robert Leckie (He looks a lot like the Glee guy! Go figure!) and Jon Seda as John Basilone – two of the many Marine soldiers who fight in the Pacific during World War 2.  The Pacific echoes another HBO TV series entitled Band of Brothers, first released in year 2001 (I was only 12 years old during this time!), only the latter was about US Army soldiers in European theater of war.  In fact, The Pacific is usually referred to as “the companion miniseries” of the Band of Brothers, maybe because these two hit TV series were both spearheaded by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks (as you must know, Spielberg and Hanks once work with each other in a war movie Saving Private Ryan).  Band of Brothers was based on a novel by the historian/biographer Stephen Ambrose and on some combatants’ memoirs in Easy Company veterans, and the series centered on the lives of US soldiers in E (Easy) Company of the 2^nd Battalion, 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment as they were assigned to the 101^st Airborne Division in the US Army.  The Pacific, on the other hand, was based on two accounts of two Marines.  One was Eugene Sledge’s classic account of the Marines in his work With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. This memoir, published in year 1988, accounted for Sledge’s experiences while he was in a part of the Company K, 3^rd Battalion, 5^th Marines, 1^st Marine Division and the wars he fought with other Marines at Peleliu and Okinawa.  Another one was Robert Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow, a retelling of the war of US against Japan.  The two memoirs centered on the lives of the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific.

The first two episodes were directed by Tim Van Patten (episode 1) and David Nutter (episode 2).  The battle on Guadalcanal where the Marines tried to cripple Japanese fleet was featured.  After I watched these episodes, I could already feel how provocative the series for it contained the undertones that were familiar in many realist films, the riveting tale of a stirring war story.  I noticed that I’m beginning to root for war stories and movies because I believe that one can find the most profound human experiences of life.    I’ve read war books like Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, Theory of War by Joan Brady, The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle and many more, and my favorite war movies include Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg.  I realized that what drew me to these war stories is the profundity of human experience – the astute psychological explanation on how a war can shape Man’s consciousness about death and living.  Life is never the same again, I say.

Recently, I came across with a philosophy book about treatises about wars.  In his essay “The Greatness of War”, an excerpt from Politics, German historian Heinrich von Treitschke once said that in a war setting “…the individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole, he must recognize how negligible is his life compared with the good of the whole.” That is what I distinctly find common in war stories.  Everyone becomes one to function as a whole.  Even more than that is the exploration on how does it feel to sleep in trenches and dreaming about home, sick, half-starved, over-fatigued, terrified, being pressed against the demands of what to do and what you don’t like to do, and being confronted by real situational features when friends become foe, the sudden change of behavior of men at war.  These conditions, one way or the other, foster Man’s view on human fatalism and compound Man’s doubts about humanity.  Then Man will be depicted as a skeptical creature in the backdrop of war, the savage, brutal, and violent activity.

Even though some people see this as a kind of negativism, I appreciate war stories because it moves me and it brings out the necessary cathartic feeling that a person should feel once in a while.  Sigh.  Harrowing stories are considered tour de force, and war stories are probably the best manifestations for that.

 

Even more interesting about The Pacific: the musical score by Oscar award-winner renowned film score composer and music producer Hans Zimmer, notable for the film score he made for war movies like Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor,

Steven Spielberg

The Last Samurai, The Thin Red Line, Tears of the Sun, etc.  He deftly creates an atmosphere for The Pacific, so that viewers would be able to feel the many layered tones brought about by different scenes of the miniseries.

In an interview about the making of The Pacific, Steven Spielberg said, “It’s brutal, it’s honest, and it’s

right in front of your face.”  True, it’s a realistic depiction of a war tale.  Something to expect from Spielberg.  I wish the Japs can produce something on their own too, if ever they may feel that US filmmakers might dwell too much on the realms “that concerns them”.

In this period where we can openly attacked the ideals that surround issues of war we find war stories like The Pacific a provocative and dauntless film.  The series reverberates Plato when he said that “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.” And I like it so much this way.  🙂

Bullet Updates

A brief rundown of updates about me lately:

1. I just saw the list of candidate students for graduation – and yes, I saw my name in there but that doesn’t assure me anyway.  Why? I still don’t know my final grade in my Philosophy class (probably by far, the hardest class I’ve been into this semester) at least, not until April 5.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  I failed my second exam by one point, and I tell you, it’s disheartening.  Life goes on though, and I’m not being philosophical this way.

1. I’m currently busy managing the final bound copies of my thesis collection, which is a collection of seven stories.  It’s entitled On Their Own Willful Departures and the title was taken from a line from one of my stories.  Lately, I realized my title was too long to fit the spine (I’m talking about the gold-plated lettering engraved on the spine) and so I have to shorten it too Willful Departures, although the front cover still retains the full title.  I figured out it would be weird to shorten it to On Their Own, and thanks to Mau for making me realize that.  She’s my personal mobile person, the person you can contact with any time of the day.

1. Holy Week this week so I’m busy going in and out of the monastery.  For those of you who are not yet familiar with my spiritual outgoings, yes, I do serve our monastery here in our place (don’t worry I will blog about my search-in experience soon!).  Just this morning I went to the monastery to prepare for tomorrow’s Easter Sunday.  And I’m quite happy that the head priest actually set the thanksgiving mass for graduate students tomorrow.  It makes me happy, of course, and apprehensive at the same time.  I do hope I can graduate this month.

1. No more school stuff to do (other than processing my graduation and clearance slips) so that means I got to see lots of movies for the past few weeks.  Some of the movies I’ve seen were:
   

   The Corleones

   1. The Godfather – Yes, I’ve been rooting for this movie eversince as it’s usually voted as the number 2 best film ever, next to Citizen Kane (which I haven’t seen yet.)  Al Pacino, the calm and collected Michael Corleone really rocked my boat.  I loved this movie.  I’ve read The Godfather novel by Mario Puzo first to prepare myself from this movie.  I’d say the movie live up with its grandeur that was there in the novel.

By the way, I love Sonny Corleone’s character, played by James Caan.

1. 1. The Godfather 2 – As good as the first godfather movie.  The rise of Michael Corleone.
   2. 21 – The first parts were promising scenes, but I don’t like the ending though.  I got a copy of the book, and I’m currently reading it.
   3. Yes Man – Feel-good kind of movie.  And why not.
   4. Body of Lies – a Ridley Scott movie.  I don’t understand it wholly, but I love it anyway.  Blame it on Leo.

I’m looking forward to other movies as well.  HBO Asia didn’t air The Godfather 3 but my friend says it’s okay because he’d like to pretend that movie didn’t exist.  Something tells me it’s a kind of let-down movie.  But at least now I know why Francis Ford Coppola is a legend.  I also love his film, Apocalypse Now.

The Pacific

I’m also looking forward for the back-to-back TV premiere of The Pacific on HBO every Saturday, 9pm.  Also, a couple of anime shows like Romeo and Juliet and Maid-Sama on Animax, and more TV premiere of movies like The International, Ghost Town, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Bedtime Stories, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Race to the Witch Mountain, Valkyrie, Killshot, Superhero Movie, Crossing Over, and many more – movies that I missed because I was too preoccupied with my studies.

1. Blackout madness – Blackouts make me nuts these days.  A series of power interruptions here in Mindanao that usually last in 5 hours is kind of devastating for me.  Blame it on the energy crisis and El Niño.  It’s so hot these days.  So when a blackout strikes, I either sleep or pour myself over stacks of books.  Something productive to do on what seems like unproductive hours.

Medea, as a Woman

The exploration of the politics of gender is indeed evident in the play Medea by Euripedes.  The play is about a passionate woman named Medea, a sorceress and a princess, who faced a dilemma when she was abandoned by her husband Jason.  This in turn fueled Medea’s revenge that led into a horrifying series of murders.  The play is likely to be seen as a feminist material, but it can be also seen and analyzed in the misogynist point of view.  More importantly, it’s an exploration of the psychological state that women undergo every time they were rejected by their lovers, or faced with extreme anger or alienation.

Medea

The play also challenged the power play between man and woman in the context of strong patriarchal context.  Medea at the early part of the play didn’t have any choice when her husband left her and resolved to cry and lament all day.  Jason can reject the domestic responsibilities that concerns with her former relationship with Medea, and was free to marry the daughter of King Creon.  But as the play progressed the change is evident in Medea’s temperament – from weakness to revenge, suicidal to sadistic fury, feminine to masculine.  In the end, Medea defied gender inequality as she assumed a masculine disposition. She denied her husband Jason to bury their children after murdering them, aggravating his pain.

In Medea’s soliloquy in the early part of the play, I couldn’t help but sympathize with her – she was a woman unreasonably rejected by her former lover, ordered to be banished by the king, a woman who rebels against her own wretchedness.  But the rage in her heart would not disappear without a certain kind of release, to which revenge is only the proper to do it and the most likely to happen.  So as a reader I began to feel what Aristotle’s concept of ‘fear’ in a tragedy would feel like, especially when Medea was brewing her plans to avenge herself.  With cleverness and natural devious attitude, she began to maneuver the course of the play, the gruesome manipulation of her own children in her horrifying revenge that led to their pitiful deaths.

What the play shows us was that human beings are the sole authors of their own misfortunes.  God or any divine being was not responsible for any consequences of the horrible actions that the characters need to bear and endure.  The limits of human knowledge is indeed obvious in the play – this serves as the dramatic irony – the audience are more aware of the deceit of a character to another character than anyone else.  A woman such as Medea, passionate and once deeply in love with her lover, can turn into violent vengeful woman because of her all-consuming love.

The Art of Poetry by Horace

The Art of Poetry by Horace is one of the most famous discourses on the aesthetics of literature, the customary procedure in the art not only limited in poetry, but applicable in any genre in literature as well.  This is considered to be a good advice for writers, and there are lots of quotable lines that are easily retained by its readers.  The treatise is written in the form of poetry and although it is sometimes hard to follow (it doesn’t have chapters and the writer sometimes leaps from one topic to the other) this work became the convention in the art of writing.  The lines, “If I cannot or know how to keep | The different rules and tones of poetry | Why greet me as a poet?” become the whole idea for this treatise.

The treatise talks about lots of things – major divisions for discussions about the importance of unity (“To put it briefly, work at what you will | If only it be uniform and whole.”), poets (“You poets, take a subject in your power | Reflect at length how much your shoulders will | Or will not bear.”) words (“All mortal works will die; much less the grace | And charm of words will stay alive and sure.”), consistency in characters (“Our interest is always fixed on traits Appropriate and fitted to their age.”), dramatic meter (“If only you and I can finger how to scan a proper verse.”), revision process (“In fact the power of Rome would no more rest | On courage and nobility of arms | … | had not each one | Among her poets all too hastily | Rejected the slow labor of the file.”), the aim and function of poetry (“The poet’s aim is teaching or delight | Or to speak both with charm and benefit.”), and insincere critics and mad poets (“…like a leech | That will not leave the skin till full of blood.”).  It resonates just like Aristotle’s Poetics, but Horace poetic lore is even more appealing and the images are more memorable: purple patch, Homer nodding, mountains in labor, etc.

I have already come across with this treatise when I was taking my Criticisms I where it was in the form of prose, and if I to recall, it was very hard to read.  Perhaps, I never fully appreciated it that time; I was not yet ready to receive the contentions of the writer.  Also, I didn’t have sufficient background to deal with the work – aside from the intimidating language and length, the treatise is heavily laced with allusions of Greek drama and characters (eg. discussions about Thespis, Achilles, Medea etc) which made the work almost inaccessible.  When I read it lately, the discourse in poetic form becomes clearer to me, the metaphor and the images stronger, and the mature sentiments of this philosophical poetic style of the writer was even more resounding than ever before.

Fairs!

Recently I just passed by a trade show about fashion stuff made up of indigenous materials.  I find them really innovative and resourceful, not to mention, chic and creative too.   You might think that with the onset of the internet (being able to put on sale stuff on Facebook, Multiply, etc) trade shows might be considered rare nowadays.  But I don’t think so.