Is Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge war porn?

As a director, Mel Gibson has specialised in the blood-soaked, with his blood-drenched Braveheart, blood-sodden Apocalypto and even blood-thirsty bible-bashing in The Passion of the Christ. His new movie might deal with a pacifist named Desmond Doss in the Pacific theatre of World War II, but of one thing we can be sure: there will be blood.

On the release of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg told a Newsweek interviewer that “all war movies, good or bad, are anti-war movies”. Francois Truffaut said the exact opposite in an interview with Gene Siskel: “I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be anti-war, but I don't think I've really seen an anti-war film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” The director of The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller, came out of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket snarling to critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that he’d just seen “another goddamned recruiting film”.

When I saw Saving Private Ryan, I found the first 20 mins of the film traumatising, but Max, a friend sitting beside me, laughed all the way through it. Max was from Eastern Europe and had been a soldier. I don't know if he'd seen any 'action' – I didn’t even know whereabouts in Eastern Europe he was from – but he saw something funny in the carnage, something exciting. The shock and awe led me to naively mark the film down as anti-war, but that same carnage gave Max a rush.

In Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's chronicle of his life as a US Marine, Swofford describes how when he and his fellow grunts got the news they were to be sent to the first Gulf War, they rented out all the war movies they could find, spending three days watching them over and over. All films are pro-war in Swofford's eyes, “no matter what the supposed message.” He states: “Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what a filmmaker wants his film to be – the intentional fallacy – it matters what the film means to audiences. And audiences differ dramatically, even within themselves. As appalled as I was at the horror of Spielberg’s movie, when I saw it with Max, it was my second viewing. I had been so horrified by my first, I had to get back on the roller-coaster and do it again.

Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge targets both the anti-war and pro-war tendencies within us with almost cynical élan, even at the level of casting. For the mushy peaceniks, doe-eyed English luvvie and former Spider-Man Andrew Garfield plays Desmond Doss, the real-life hero who fought for his right to go into combat unarmed and serve as a medic. For the more gung-ho, NRA poster boy Vince Vaughn co-stars as the hard-ass Sergeant whose contempt for Doss turns into admiration.

A preliminary chunk of the movie deals with the Waltons-like early life of Desmond Doss, growing up near the Blue Ridged Mountains of Virginia. This backstory seeks to explain Doss’s pacifism as a biographical quirk, a reaction to his violent father. There’s a pasty love affair and then some barrack room lawyering, but it’s only when we get to the titular battlefield that the movie – and the audience – genuinely perks up.

The original claim that movies such as Saving Private Ryan and Full Metal Jacket are anti-war rests on the assumption that prior war movies sanitised warfare. If we see battle portrayed realistically – by which we mean explicitly – we will be repulsed, the argument goes. These films are not the bloodless patriotic adventures of John Wayne, but rather severed limbs, guts spilling out into hands, young men burning to death, that kind of thing. Weirdly, since Ryan these images have become commonplace, even clichéd, along with the desaturated colour and the shell-shocked sound design, deafened in the midst of the fight. Spielberg’s movie has also had a lasting impact on video game aesthetics as well.

Gibson employs a smorgasbord of such effects for his extended sequences of all-out battle. Realism and authenticity aren’t as important as numbing onslaught and gouts of ruby red blood. His aesthetic is informed by his sadomasochistic enjoyment of bodies being torn apart, sanctified by the occasional prayer card ray of sunlight through the smoke.

The violence is undeniably thrilling. I had an opportunity to speak with Gibson at the Venice Film Festival and asked him how he filmed the battle sequences: “You have to approach it like a sporting event. It sounds mercenary to say that about battle but if you’re not able to follow it, the strategies involved in what is happening on the screen in front of you, then it’s less entertaining and you’re less involved.”

(SPOILER: I also asked why the Japanese hadn’t simply cut the net the marines use to climb up the rock face. “You’re the first person to ask. I hoped you wouldn’t notice.”)

Doss with his pacifism is a holy fool, to be admired but not emulated. His pacifism is necessarily dynamic – a muscular Christianity – but in the fog of war that ceases to actually matter. Other combatants continue to kill each other even while he’s dragging them to safety. In a particularly telling moment, a mystified soldier recounts to a superior how among the wounded Doss has even rescued some injured “Japs” – and they are only ever Japs here. The soldier immediately assures his superior that the enemy wounded “didn’t make it”, however. Wink, wink. Pacifism is all well and good, except when it gets in the way of killing.

In Full Metal Jacket, Joker (Matthew Modine) wears a helmet that has a peace button attached to it while also being daubed with “Born to Kill”. When reprimanded by an officer, he offers that he was trying to express “the duality of man – a kind of Jungian thing, sir”. All war films embody that duality, mixing repulsion and attraction. Some ostensibly anti-war movies, no matter how hard they try, can’t escape the gloss cinema gives to violence. However, Mel Gibson’s new movie – notwithstanding its real-life inspiration – doesn’t really try at all.

---

Hacksaw Ridge – nominated for six Oscars, including best picture, best director for Gibson and best actor for Garfield – is in cinemas now.