Men at War by Christopher Coker

Author:Christopher Coker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Dr Strangelove: A Thermo-Nuclear Zero Mostel Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick

Many of the works that are discussed in this book have been the subject of films, some good, the majority indifferent. One is Catch-22, another The Red Badge of Courage and then there is Wolfgang Peterson’s torrid mini-epic, Troy, which subverts the entire story by having Achilles enter the city in the famous wooden horse, only to die as the city falls.

Let me identify three differences between a novel and a film that are especially germane to the theme of this book—the existential core of war.

First, a film simply cannot catch the secret centre of a man’s life, which is a secret even to himself. One example is the epiphany, which only a novel can evoke, the moment of transcendence or awe, for example, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace when Pierre goes into battle at Borodino. Pierre discovers from the moment he steps out of his carriage and climbs up the hill from where the battle is visible a certain aesthetic awe. The sun shining overhead makes the field look like an amphitheatre. For a moment he is transfixed by the spectacle.

It was the same panorama he had admired from the mound the day before, but now the whole prospect swarmed with troops, smoke clouds from the guns hung overhead and the slanting rays of the bright sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, filled the clear morning sky with rosy glowing light and long dark shadows. (Tolstoy, 1982, 937).

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