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Feb. 27th, 2009 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickNetflix for last night was Das Boot which I 'd never seen before. (Yeah, yeah. The holes in my education are simply stunning. Sometimes I try to fill in the occasional pothole. This was one of those times.) It's about a WWII German submarine and its crew. They go out and skulk around the North Atlantic or whatever, attempting to disrupt shipping convoys run by the Brits.
Now, for the slow-of-thinking and those people who didn't pay attention in history class (where, to be fair, they made boring one of the more interesting wars of recent history), WWII was the one where the Germans were locking up the Jews and the queers and the gypsies and whatever else people they did not like and gassing them or shooting them or doing experiments on them and *then* gassing them or similar. There were mass graves of relatively innocent people. Buchenwald. Auschwitz. Dachau. (And, unfortunately, etc. There were more.) It is very, very difficult to look upon Germany-the-country as "the good guys" during WWII. Pretty much, they were the bad guys. (This is not to say that the other countries were entirely blameless. Other countries did wrong things, too -- it's the rare country that comes out of a war with clean hands. For example, during that war our happy little country dropped nuclear weapons on civilians in Japan. Twice. I was gonna say "nonmilitary targets" but in the end, everything is a military target.)
So, this is a movie about the bad guys from a war where it's pretty easy to tell the bad guys from the not-so-bad guys. (It's a war, again. People are all shooting each other. Nobody is really occupying the moral high ground because I don't think you can stand there if you're shooting back. Hrm. Does this mean that the appropriate course of action is sometimes the less-moral one? Yes. It's like chopping off the head of Lorenzo the Kind. The moral high ground would have had him live but he was the sort of thing that really needed to die.) The movie was made well after WWII and the people making it had to know that everyone watching it would be aware that the Germans were the bad guys in that war... but they're not exactly the bad guys in this movie.
They're just guys. And that, there, is the salient point of Das Boot. Doesn't sound like much, I guess, but it's a big and important point. See, they could have made this movie about any country, any war, but they made it about the Germans of WWII, who were pretty clearly the bad guys what with the full force and atrocity of the Nazi party and its orderly, efficient genocide behind them. And them, those guys, most of 'em were just guys.
Like us.
Now, for the slow-of-thinking and those people who didn't pay attention in history class (where, to be fair, they made boring one of the more interesting wars of recent history), WWII was the one where the Germans were locking up the Jews and the queers and the gypsies and whatever else people they did not like and gassing them or shooting them or doing experiments on them and *then* gassing them or similar. There were mass graves of relatively innocent people. Buchenwald. Auschwitz. Dachau. (And, unfortunately, etc. There were more.) It is very, very difficult to look upon Germany-the-country as "the good guys" during WWII. Pretty much, they were the bad guys. (This is not to say that the other countries were entirely blameless. Other countries did wrong things, too -- it's the rare country that comes out of a war with clean hands. For example, during that war our happy little country dropped nuclear weapons on civilians in Japan. Twice. I was gonna say "nonmilitary targets" but in the end, everything is a military target.)
So, this is a movie about the bad guys from a war where it's pretty easy to tell the bad guys from the not-so-bad guys. (It's a war, again. People are all shooting each other. Nobody is really occupying the moral high ground because I don't think you can stand there if you're shooting back. Hrm. Does this mean that the appropriate course of action is sometimes the less-moral one? Yes. It's like chopping off the head of Lorenzo the Kind. The moral high ground would have had him live but he was the sort of thing that really needed to die.) The movie was made well after WWII and the people making it had to know that everyone watching it would be aware that the Germans were the bad guys in that war... but they're not exactly the bad guys in this movie.
They're just guys. And that, there, is the salient point of Das Boot. Doesn't sound like much, I guess, but it's a big and important point. See, they could have made this movie about any country, any war, but they made it about the Germans of WWII, who were pretty clearly the bad guys what with the full force and atrocity of the Nazi party and its orderly, efficient genocide behind them. And them, those guys, most of 'em were just guys.
Like us.
