Hi friends! I’m happy to report that the grand experiment worked: taking a month’s hiatus from this newsletter and other work allowed me to finish the book despite my editors’ insane deadline, and even left me with enough brainpower to enjoy my vacation (though my observations were mainly limited to “snow pretty” and “what if whiskey and hot chocolate???”) I happened to be vacationing with the sort of friends who enjoy watching and yelling about movies and TV, so we did a fair bit of that, and since one friend is a historian by training if not by profession (who can even get a job in academia these days, amirite) we ended up watching Napoleon (2023)1 and Masters of the Air, both fascinating examples of History Dad Cinema and also different approaches to the age-old problem of how to depict war on screen without glorifying it.
Having just written a wholeass book about the problems of assuming that other people can be easily misled by fiction, while you and me—the smarties—are not, I don’t necessarily want to touch the subject again for a bit. But on the other hand I can’t avoid it, it’s everywhere. The fear of other people getting the wrong message and worshipping the wrong characters has infected tons of filmmakers, even Ridley Scott, who has otherwise railed against the kids these days and their simplemindedness. Somehow his Napoleon is the most tumblrista shit I have ever seen—or, at least I think it’s the most tumblrista shit I’ve ever seen, because if Scott had an intention for this film besides saying “Napoleon was bad, ACTUALLY” my friends and I could not figure out what it was (and we yelled about it at length, I assure you.)
Napoleon, as portrayed by a joyless Joaquin Phoenix, is ugly, clumsy, awkward, bad-mannered, charmless, and a terrible lay. This is by deliberate director/actor choice, not artistic sloppiness. This Napoleon chews with his mouth open. He jackhammers Josephine from behind while she yawns. He screams at the English ambassador, “You think you’re so great because you have BOATS!” He isn’t sexy, or eloquent, or charismatic, or even especially commanding. In fact—as my friend B noticed—he’s barely even ambitious. He does indicate that he wants power in order to impress Josephine, but for the most part, various political successes just fall into his lap. Other characters approach Napoleon and tell him he ought to be First Consul, he ought to be emperor, and he acquiesces. Except for his military successes, he’s largely a passive figure: an unrefined, nearly autistic, grunting horndog who slumps weirdly in chairs. This is a problem of course for historical accuracy, given that Napoleon was famously charismatic, and also a major problem for the plot (i.e., the historical events that actually happened.) How exactly did Napoleon win the fanatical devotion of his soldiers and conquer most of Europe—or break Josephine’s heart by setting her aside for an Austrian princess—if he wasn’t even a little bit likable?
But of course if Napoleon were to be likable, even a bit, then the dumb-dumb viewers might think he was good, and that can’t be allowed. This is also why Phoenix’s Napoleon is the wrong age, or rather, why he doesn’t age. When the movie came out last fall, I saw historians complaining that Napoleon, who is depicted in the first scene witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette, wouldn’t have been there—and even if he were, he should have been portrayed by a younger actor, since Napoleon was only in his twenties at the time. I figured this was just a matter of historians being pedantic: yes, Joaquin Phoenix is nearly fifty, but there’s this little thing called makeup (or god forbid, de-aging CGI) and surely the filmmakers would make their lead actor look the appropriate age at the appropriate times. But no, Napoleon arrives at Marie Antoinette’s execution looking fifty and haggard, and proceeds—in a film that zips over nearly twenty years—to look exactly the same. By the time he’s imprisoned in St. Helena, he gets a bit of shaggy grey stubble, maybe some darker circles under the eyes—and that’s it. Aging is changing, and change means growth, and growth might mean *gasp* likability—therefore, Napoleon never changes or grows. He dies as weird and grim and baffled at the end as he was at the beginning, while supertitles list the number of people who died in his various conflicts, lest you think for a minute that war is good, or that battles are cool.
The battles are cool. They are, in fact, Ridley Scott’s biggest problem: his best instincts have always been for visual setpieces, and as much as he wants to resist making Napoleon look good, he can’t help but make the battles look dope as fuck. Napoleon’s early military successes are portrayed simplistically in the film (he uses cannons, while other people don’t I guess???) but the battle of Austerlitz displays his actual, historical military genius: the enemy army is lured out onto the ice, until Napoleon’s hidden artillery fires down from the heights, shattering the ice and drowning soldiers one by one. Scott chose to heavily desaturate the colors in this scene, so that we mainly see grey ice, white snow, brown-black uniforms, and the dark red of blood in the icy water. It’s gorgeous, definitely the standout sequence of the film—and so Scott quickly throws us back into the plodding court intrigue of Napoleon vs. Josephine, or Napoleon talking to another head of state, all the safely boring and very uncool behind the scenes stuff that just leaves us jonesing for more cool battles.
Here’s the thing about making a biopic about a historical personage you apparently despise: no one is making you do it. Napoleon feels written from the point of view of an English aristocrat who’s boiling over with contempt, so much contempt that he can’t even allow Napoleon to possess real ambition and therefore moral agency for his actions. If there’s a self-insert character here it’s Wellington, played by Rupert Everett with an upper lip so stiff I fear it got stuck that way. My friend B pointed out that the movie goes out of its way to make everyone (besides the very hot Josephine) look ugly and unpleasant; even former 90s hunk Rupert Everett gets de-yassified. We do get a brief glimpse of General Dumas (that’s right, Alexandre’s dad!) played by Abubakar Salim who is too handsome for this film apparently, since he’s offscreened immediately. But his presence begs an interesting question: if the intent of the movie is to show that Napoleon sucked and was bad, why not make someone else the main character? General Dumas would work: he served Napoleon but clashed with him too, which opens up lots of interesting narrative possibilities. Talleyrand would be another good choice for a point-of-view look into the Napoleonic era: he went everywhere and took every side; we love ourselves a protean sumbitch. If you don’t want to glorify a killer, don’t foreground him; if you want to de-mythify a famous man, don’t make him your star. No amount of uglification and lifeless writing will ever make a Great Man protagonist not the protagonist, or war less attractive; it just leaves a confusing mess.
Meanwhile, in Masters of the Air, America’s greatest hunks of the 100th Bomber Group band together to save the world. This is such an old Hollywood cliche for WWII stories that Kate Beaton reposted her decade-old comic on the subject without alteration. But at the same time, Masters of the Air is…an anti-war story? Sort of? Or at least, it’s figured out how to use the perennial cliches of war stories—men of action are hot, violence looks cool—to upend rather than cement the genre.
When we first started watching Masters of the Air I joked online that the show was seriously testing my ability to tell the difference between brown-haired white guys: there are a LOT of nearly identical young actors in this show, often with similar haircuts and mustaches, and of course they’re nearly always wearing identical uniforms. Their backstories are thinly sketched, if at all: two characters have nearly the same name (Buck and Bucky). Six episodes in, I’m starting to think this is all, grimly, the point. The men of the 100th die all the time. Their planes explode; German guns punch through the hull and into their bodies; they get trapped in the turret and can’t parachute out. You get to know a character a little bit, and he dies or goes missing; in the next episode a new character who looks much like him will take his place. These men are fungible. It’s awful.
My husband’s grandfather was a pilot in the 100th—he flew two missions on D-Day, and lived. My great-uncle was an engineer on a bomber, and he died—he was shot down somewhere over Germany. I don’t know if he was in the 100th specifically; I don’t know much about him. He was my grandmother’s only sibling and she almost never talked about him. I’d actually never thought much about him until this show: it never occurred to me that he was probably stationed in the U.K., and would have had some experiences there; or that he must have been extremely scared all the time, and that he flew missions anyway. There’s a character in Masters of the Air who, like my great-uncle, is Jewish and from New York; like him, this character was motivated to sign up because of Nazi atrocities. The show is certainly hitting me a lot harder than expected, and not just because it’s personal: but also because it portrays warfare as something so fundamentally scary and impossible that you would only feel justified in engaging in it if you really felt it was necessary.
When movies and TV shows glorify war, they tend to do so not through merely depicting a battle, but by making battle seem easily survivable. Napoleon ordering his troops to fire on the ice at Austerlitz looks cool because it’s a clever tactic of course, but also because he and his artillery are located at a relatively safe remove. He’s also a main character, a protagonist of history, and people like that rarely just die in random fights. The characters in Masters of the Air are not famous people and the battles are filmed in such a way as to make you feel like you, personally, are in them too, and that you are going to die. “I could not do this,” my friends and I kept saying to each other as we watched. “I would be killed immediately.” I don’t think I could even successfully hoist myself into one of those planes; even if I managed to do so, I would be like the airsick narrator Crosby, and vomit everywhere.
Crosby, being the narrator, is the only character who has plot armor. Nobody else is safe, no matter how handsome they are, or how much screentime they get. There’s a wonderful (horrible) scene in the second episode where the American ground crew is joking and chatting with two local British kids who are obsessed with planes; one of the boys is missing a hand, a fact which so far has not been explained (the result of a German bomb maybe, or an accident). And in the background of this relatively peaceful, fun little scene, a plane suddenly crash-lands and explodes. Everyone, foreground or background, can be injured or killed at any moment. It makes the stakes feel very, very real, and drives home the horror of even a justified war in a way I’ve rarely seen.
Not to give away too many spoilers for my upcoming book, but one thing I cover in detail—particularly in the fascism chapter—is the way we assume that other people’s reading lacks agency. It’s still possible that a fascist could watch Masters of the Air and come away with the impression that war is cool, even a war fought against the fascists. But I see that as less a fault of writing, and more the fault of fascists, who make an active choice to interpret everything they see in a way that flatters and supports their worldview. There’s simply no way to idiot-proof the glorification of war from people who choose to believe in war as glorious. It’s interesting that Napoleon—which stripped its anti-hero and other characters of moral agency, portraying war as an inevitability and mass death as a thing that just happens—ends up being a little bit fascist. Trying to save people from bad reading sometimes only guarantees it. But the far more heroic Masters of the Air, with all its brave and terrified hunks, portrays war as a matter of active moral choice; and it’s the existence of choice that gives historical events their depth and horror, and moves us with their awful reality.
We also watched part of the 1927 Abel Gance Napoleon, which is fun but weird, and more than a bit fash.