December meme: military fandoms and me
There are still lots of open days if you want to ask me anything!
For today,
executrix asked why I like military fandoms.
I have to start my answer by borrowing a phrase from
oursin: it's all more complicated. I wouldn't say that I like military fandoms in general. I'm only interested in a small subset of them: those set during either the First or Second World War and focused on Britain, or at least not on the United States. Stories about wars more recent than 1945 tend to engage my political brain and make me angry, whereas WWI is distant enough that I can see it as tragedy, and while I do have political thoughts about WWII, essentially I believe that both the Nazis and Japanese imperialist expansion had to be stopped. And stories that are primarily about the US experience of those wars don't appeal to me, partly because of my Anglophilia (I might as well openly admit it) and partly because I strongly dislike the way American involvement in the world wars is presented in American popular culture and popular history. The U.S. did not save the world either time, nor did we make great heroic sacrifices; our involvement in both wars was comparatively limited. To the extent that we did play a crucial role in WWII, it was mostly due to our industrial capacity, which kept both Britain and the Soviets armed. The country that came closest to single-handedly stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union, but even now the hangover of Cold War politics makes that almost impossible to say in the US in a popular medium. Basically, I think U.S. war stories are parochial and very often jingoistic. British war stories can be both those things too, but it's less common and less blatant. (I said in another post that the difference between U.S. WWII films and British WWII films is that in U.S. ones, the hero lives and triumphs; in British ones, he dies. That sums up the different attitudes fairly well.)
Having said all that, the question still remains: why am I attracted to war stories at all? I'm not a militarist, although I'm not a pacifist either. I find the culture of professional militaries fairly skeevy. And in fact that's part of the reason why the world wars draw me more than other military stories: most of the people who fought in those wars were not professional soldiers. They'd had other lives before they were combatants, and expected if they lived to resume those lives afterwards. They hadn't voluntarily chosen a military culture of absolute obedience. (Now that I think about it, there are exceptions to this for me--I'm very interested in the professional German officer class during WWII, who to various degrees accommodated Hitler, despised him, and tried to resist him--but for the most part I prefer stories that don't focus on the military caste.)
I'm interested in war as an extreme form of experience. I don't think war builds character, or turns boys into men, or any of that propaganda, but I do think that it can push people to the limits of their endurance, and also can provide an intensity of experience, both good and bad, that people may never have in other circumstances. And every experience happens in the shadow of death. That makes for interesting stories.
War stories also, at least if they're good stories, have moral ambiguity of a kind that interests me. Millions of people, most of whom are not violent in their ordinary lives, are trained to kill. People drop bombs over cities full of civilians. Generals send men out to be killed in operations they know to be only diversions. Combatants follow orders they may believe to be foolish or downright immoral. People who themselves are basically decent fight, sometimes, for indecent causes. Sometimes people refuse to kill, or refuse to go to war at all, and suffer for it. And no one who participates in a war emerges morally unscathed, even if they're fighting for their own survival.
Of course I'm also drawn by the male bonding that happened in the world wars, when except in Russia during WWII there were very few women in combat positions. War has for a long time in western culture been positioned as one circumstance in which men can love other men without shame. The ideology of military bonding insists that this love isn't sexual, but in practice that often isn't true, and even non-sexual love between men in wartime seems to have a particular intensity denied to most male friendships in other circumstances. In terms of fandom, war stories are quite often, for me, a relief from compulsory heterosexuality. The insistence on giving every male character a heterosexual love interest isn't as pervasive (although this is less true, sadly, of modern stories set during the world wars than it is of older ones) and the ways men relate to other men are less shaped and stereotyped by homophobia and its code of acceptable manly behavior. Historically, some men have found in war a freedom to care for other men in ways they never before dared to, or never knew they wanted to; I find an analogous narrative freedom in war stories.
Finally, I like the sadness of war stories. This doesn't necessarily mean an unhappy ending, although characters dying and other characters grieving is more common in war fandoms than elsewhere. It's more that there's a deep melancholy in a lot of the war fandoms I like, a sense of the cruelty of war, the suffering, the moral failure. And there's also a resistance to that melancholy: people grieve and suffer and doubt themselves and for the most part they get on with whatever they have to do. I'm less interested in obvious acts of heroism than I am in endurance, and my favorite war fandoms provide that.
I'll end with a few recs in case any of this has piqued your interest. Colditz has been my favorite fandom for some years now: it's a British drama that aired in the early 1970s about the eponymous high-security POW camp and the men who lived in it, sometimes escaped from it, and more often failed to escape. Wings is another British drama, this time about Royal Flying Corps pilots in the early years of the First World War. It has its flaws, but at its best it's wonderful. Manhunt is a 1969-70 British drama about two French resistance members and a downed RAF officer trying desperately to escape from occupied France; it's slow to get going and can be offensively sexist, but it gets better, has some consistently great acting and intermittently excellent writing, and its final episode packs a hell of a wallop. Secret Army is yet another 1970s British drama; it focuses on the members of Lifeline, a Belgian underground organization that helps downed Allied pilots escape back to Britain; it's bleak, bleak, bleak, and after series 1 it gets bogged down in its creator's anti-communist views, but the first series is great. Almost everyone with any interest in WWI had read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, but if you haven't, do. Mary Renault's The Charioteer is well known, but worth thinking about as a war novel as much as a gay novel. And I like Susan Hill's Strange Meeting, an exploration of the tender friendship/love that develops between two young British officers in WWI.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
For today,
executrix asked why I like military fandoms.
I have to start my answer by borrowing a phrase from
oursin: it's all more complicated. I wouldn't say that I like military fandoms in general. I'm only interested in a small subset of them: those set during either the First or Second World War and focused on Britain, or at least not on the United States. Stories about wars more recent than 1945 tend to engage my political brain and make me angry, whereas WWI is distant enough that I can see it as tragedy, and while I do have political thoughts about WWII, essentially I believe that both the Nazis and Japanese imperialist expansion had to be stopped. And stories that are primarily about the US experience of those wars don't appeal to me, partly because of my Anglophilia (I might as well openly admit it) and partly because I strongly dislike the way American involvement in the world wars is presented in American popular culture and popular history. The U.S. did not save the world either time, nor did we make great heroic sacrifices; our involvement in both wars was comparatively limited. To the extent that we did play a crucial role in WWII, it was mostly due to our industrial capacity, which kept both Britain and the Soviets armed. The country that came closest to single-handedly stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union, but even now the hangover of Cold War politics makes that almost impossible to say in the US in a popular medium. Basically, I think U.S. war stories are parochial and very often jingoistic. British war stories can be both those things too, but it's less common and less blatant. (I said in another post that the difference between U.S. WWII films and British WWII films is that in U.S. ones, the hero lives and triumphs; in British ones, he dies. That sums up the different attitudes fairly well.)
Having said all that, the question still remains: why am I attracted to war stories at all? I'm not a militarist, although I'm not a pacifist either. I find the culture of professional militaries fairly skeevy. And in fact that's part of the reason why the world wars draw me more than other military stories: most of the people who fought in those wars were not professional soldiers. They'd had other lives before they were combatants, and expected if they lived to resume those lives afterwards. They hadn't voluntarily chosen a military culture of absolute obedience. (Now that I think about it, there are exceptions to this for me--I'm very interested in the professional German officer class during WWII, who to various degrees accommodated Hitler, despised him, and tried to resist him--but for the most part I prefer stories that don't focus on the military caste.)
I'm interested in war as an extreme form of experience. I don't think war builds character, or turns boys into men, or any of that propaganda, but I do think that it can push people to the limits of their endurance, and also can provide an intensity of experience, both good and bad, that people may never have in other circumstances. And every experience happens in the shadow of death. That makes for interesting stories.
War stories also, at least if they're good stories, have moral ambiguity of a kind that interests me. Millions of people, most of whom are not violent in their ordinary lives, are trained to kill. People drop bombs over cities full of civilians. Generals send men out to be killed in operations they know to be only diversions. Combatants follow orders they may believe to be foolish or downright immoral. People who themselves are basically decent fight, sometimes, for indecent causes. Sometimes people refuse to kill, or refuse to go to war at all, and suffer for it. And no one who participates in a war emerges morally unscathed, even if they're fighting for their own survival.
Of course I'm also drawn by the male bonding that happened in the world wars, when except in Russia during WWII there were very few women in combat positions. War has for a long time in western culture been positioned as one circumstance in which men can love other men without shame. The ideology of military bonding insists that this love isn't sexual, but in practice that often isn't true, and even non-sexual love between men in wartime seems to have a particular intensity denied to most male friendships in other circumstances. In terms of fandom, war stories are quite often, for me, a relief from compulsory heterosexuality. The insistence on giving every male character a heterosexual love interest isn't as pervasive (although this is less true, sadly, of modern stories set during the world wars than it is of older ones) and the ways men relate to other men are less shaped and stereotyped by homophobia and its code of acceptable manly behavior. Historically, some men have found in war a freedom to care for other men in ways they never before dared to, or never knew they wanted to; I find an analogous narrative freedom in war stories.
Finally, I like the sadness of war stories. This doesn't necessarily mean an unhappy ending, although characters dying and other characters grieving is more common in war fandoms than elsewhere. It's more that there's a deep melancholy in a lot of the war fandoms I like, a sense of the cruelty of war, the suffering, the moral failure. And there's also a resistance to that melancholy: people grieve and suffer and doubt themselves and for the most part they get on with whatever they have to do. I'm less interested in obvious acts of heroism than I am in endurance, and my favorite war fandoms provide that.
I'll end with a few recs in case any of this has piqued your interest. Colditz has been my favorite fandom for some years now: it's a British drama that aired in the early 1970s about the eponymous high-security POW camp and the men who lived in it, sometimes escaped from it, and more often failed to escape. Wings is another British drama, this time about Royal Flying Corps pilots in the early years of the First World War. It has its flaws, but at its best it's wonderful. Manhunt is a 1969-70 British drama about two French resistance members and a downed RAF officer trying desperately to escape from occupied France; it's slow to get going and can be offensively sexist, but it gets better, has some consistently great acting and intermittently excellent writing, and its final episode packs a hell of a wallop. Secret Army is yet another 1970s British drama; it focuses on the members of Lifeline, a Belgian underground organization that helps downed Allied pilots escape back to Britain; it's bleak, bleak, bleak, and after series 1 it gets bogged down in its creator's anti-communist views, but the first series is great. Almost everyone with any interest in WWI had read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, but if you haven't, do. Mary Renault's The Charioteer is well known, but worth thinking about as a war novel as much as a gay novel. And I like Susan Hill's Strange Meeting, an exploration of the tender friendship/love that develops between two young British officers in WWI.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.