On War and its Audience

There exists no subject more eternal than war. It has followed us seemingly since our conception with cuneiform tablets, such as the Stele of Vultures, writing of conquest and battle as far back as 2400 BCE. The very fact that a story as old as Homer’s Odyssey, writing of the Trojan War, can still be adapted in modern cinema today while maintaining an equal relevance to our modern times is a testament to the timelessness of its subject. We often even go as far as to say that it is baked into our very nature; Hobbes prophesized that without a state or a semblance of political organisation, if we were truly left to our primal urges, there would exist a vicious state of bellum omnium contra omnes or a “war of all against all.” Thus, it would seem the human race would understand war in its entirety, that it can be so lucidly imagined in our minds for it seems it is so commonplace; however, this is not the case. The fact that wartime atrocities have recurred throughout time show how little we truly comprehend its barbarity; consequently, there are only a few works of cinema that remind us of this. One such film in particular is Oliver Stone’s 1986 magnum opus Platoon, a work that shocked a nation in its depiction of a war that many thought they understood. 

Set during the humid chaos of the Vietnam War, Stone tells the moral tale of an American platoon following enlistee Chris Taylor’s loss of innocence in the politics of jungle warfare. Oliver Stone, a veteran who served between 1967-73, was uniquely suited to directing a film of this nature, providing what one can say is an insider view of the often over-adapted conflict. Over the course of the film, Stone constructs for the viewer two opposing moral forces that clash for not only the leadership of the actual platoon but also for the ideological triumph of one morality over another. The first is personified in Elias, a seasoned veteran of 3 years by the time Taylor arrives, who exemplifies himself as a symbol of a common societal morality. The other is Barnes, who exemplifies a sordid impulsiveness, a morality that many would argue to be non-existent. This moral conflict is shown most saliently in one of the film’s most horrific scenes where the platoon burn a civilian village to the ground. What ensues is a series of brutal atrocities carried out by many of the soldiers.Taylor, however, is only there to watch as they rape and kill civilians to regain a sense of control over the people that they are meant to be serving. The centre of it all of course is Barnes who ends up murdering a Vietnamese woman under the pretense that she was working with the Vietcong. Soon after, Elias comes in to protest against what is a blatant illegal killing and the battle of words soon shifts to a physical fight between Barnes and Elias. When they return, Elias reports the killing to his superior officer who promises consequences on Barnes that we never see actualise.

Stone in this moment establishes an outcome that constantly returns throughout the film, that Elias cannot triumph over Barnes because Barnes’ morality is fundamentally consistent with the reality of the war itself; that the few good men will always fail, and the Barnes’ of the world can go on continuing their cycles of violence with the civilians caught between having to suffer because of it. Indeed this culminates in Barnes killing Elias behind enemy lines, representing Barnes’ material victory over Elias’s sense of good. Finally Barnes, striding with victory, confronts Elias’ followers and monologues the film’s most infamous line: “I am reality.”

When Platoon was released it was instantly rife with controversy. So much so that the Pentagon itself published a statement condemning it for being “inaccurate” to the realities of the war. Though fundamentally, what made Platoon such a controversy was that it subverted a fundamental trope of American conceptions of the war at the time. When most films depicted the American soldiers as protaganistic victims of the ovararching evil of war itself Platoon instead portrayed the American army as the antagonistic force that, through their incompetence, allowed the truly evil members of it to commit acts of extreme brutality on the Vietnamese nation, leaving the few good soldiers to watch or die at their hands. 

Ultimately, today as we see conflicts as close as over our borders in Myanmar or farther in Sudan, what Platoon offers us is a reminder that whatever we read or see of these distant wars we cannot even begin to imagine the reality of the war itself. As Jean Baudrillard argued in his work The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, we create “simulacra” of wars, imitative imaginations based on pruned portrayals of its reality. Thus in many ways the conflict in Myanmar, Gaza, or Ukraine did not take place to us, to us what did take place is the simulacrum that we have created that cannot even begin to tell of the Barnes’ or Elias’ that truly do exist or do not exist. Indeed Baudrillard’s notion still remains inescapably true in conversations on war in the 21^st century, and sadly its truth incurs a constant debt to all the injustices that we are still yet to hear of. Of course, over time, we will begin to piece together what’s left of the sad realities that we imitate, but let us hope our relative ignorance is not at the cost of forgetting what we will uncover.