How We Mold Men — “Fury”

by Gabriel Valdez

There is a review for Fury in my head that I will never write. I’ll try to tell you why:

Fury follows a tank crew pushing into Nazi Germany late in World War 2, but this is merely what happens. It’s not what Fury is about. I could call Fury the best war movie since Clint Eastwood made his Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima double feature. I wouldn’t be wrong, but it doesn’t hit the nail on the head. Instead, I’ll call Fury one of the best movies about indoctrination since A Clockwork Orange.

You see, Brad Pitt’s Sgt. Collier, the tank commander who leads four young men into battle, cannot be called a “good guy.” If beating his subordinates or forcing them to shoot unarmed prisoners helps them to survive, then that is what he’ll do. If allowing his crew to blow off steam by assaulting the local women helps them to survive, then that is what he’ll allow.

When Collier’s tank gets a new assistant driver, a fresh-faced clerk named Norman (Logan Lerman) with zero combat experience, Collier will beat him, emotionally abuse him, and force him to murder and rape. The strange thing is – the utterly difficult thing about this movie – is that writer-director David Ayer forces you to understand Collier. His only goal is to keep his crew alive. His every decision contributes to this. Everything outside that tank – enemy, civilian – is only there to keep his crew breathing that much longer.

There are beautiful, fleeting moments when Pitt lets you see the toll this takes on Collier’s conscience. This is a man who’s made a judgment that his crew’s survival is worth every other moral transgression. Later in the movie, it’s revealed he knows the Bible verse-for-verse, yet he’s kept this hidden. Why? Because he’s rejected its applicability. Living morally in war, he believes, will get the men around him killed, and they are his responsibility. His duty is to mold men and make them hate – him, themselves, the enemy, it doesn’t matter so long as that hate takes away any hesitation before pulling a trigger.

One of the most nerve wracking scenes involves Collier playing house during a lull in combat. He uses Norman and two German women hiding in an apartment to create a pale reflection of a normal family supper. It’s Collier’s momentary reprieve from war, and yet it’s terrifying for these two women.

Are the things Collier does wrong? Of course they are. But to make men kill each other for years on end and then be shocked that they’ve committed sins is perverse: judging them for it is perverse, not judging them for it is perverse.

Fury is rousing, its tank battles brilliantly intense. Collier is among Pitt’s best characters. Lerman, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal deliver nuanced, touching performances as the tank crew, and of all actors, Shia LaBeouf is going to make you cry.

Fury is not interested in being an easy movie, nor a palatable one. It is difficult. There are no good guys by its end, just men who judged for themselves what sacrifices they were willing to make of others, and in their own souls, in order to keep the men beside them alive.

And though many young men aren’t faced with platoons of enemy soldiers, we are often brought up to act as if we will be, to believe the shortest route to strength is in hating some perceived weakness in ourselves or in others. We’re often taught to be manly is to bury sentimentality and sensitivity and mercy in order to make our way in the world.

There is a review for Fury in my head that I will never write, because in some way, every young man grows up with the expectation that we will be willing to trade those pieces of our soul in order to survive, that emotion makes us weak and exerting our willpower on another makes us strong, that our flaws can be cured with our worst behavior. We’ve each been taught our own small portion of perversion. In its own way, Fury lays that bare.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Fury have more than one woman in it?

Yes. The two women in the apartment with whom Collier tries to play house.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Briefly.

3. About something other than a man?

Possibly. Some of their German is subtitled. Some isn’t.

Truth be told, I’d have to watch again to see if they talk only about the soldiers, or if they discuss something else. Most of their interaction is silent because they are so terrified – there’s not much dialogue at all and whether they pass or don’t pass the third rule is essentially immaterial. Their conversation takes place under the fear of being raped, so even if they are talking about dinner, they’re not really talking about dinner.

Can it be forgiven? No, nothing in Fury can be forgiven, and that’s the point. Plot-wise, it’s a movie about a World War 2 tank crew, which were only composed of men. Thematically, it’s a movie about men molding other men by threatening them with violence, making them commit violence, and using peer approval and women as the prizes for doing right (i.e. killing without hesitation).

World War 2 is often considered one of the last righteous American wars. This doesn’t mean it was any easier for those involved. What Fury does best is make us still feel for the men who do these awful things – not just to the enemy, but to each other and to innocent bystanders. We begin to understand why, not to give it a pass, but to comprehend just how mad and hellish struggling for one’s life day after day can become.

To watch characters who commit atrocities and still feel for them, to cry over their internal struggles and shake as their fates are decided…it’s a rare experience in any form of storytelling. The point isn’t that these things are forgivable. It’s that they aren’t, and yet we force soldiers into situations where they will increasingly choose the unforgivable just to stay sane.

By extension, what does it say that we use these same tactics to train and reward men for being “manly” in times of peace, or at home during wartime? To be manly, must we always be in a constant state of war with someone, must we always be finding something new to hate in order to draw strength, must we always beat down the sensitive among us until their own window to hate is opened, so they can become manly like us?

The most important way you can understand Fury is to not forgive it. Ayer and Pitt and those involved have created these characters and moments to be unlikeable for a reason. It’s no mistake that the last person in the world you’d ever expect to show mercy is the one that does. It’s the only time two characters connect in the film, understand each other with all the B.S. removed, see in each other what they’ve lost along the way.

Can Fury be forgiven? I’ll be troubled if it is. It’s the rare piece of art that wants you to talk about why it can’t be.

Wednesday Collective — Is Historical Accuracy on Film Important?

Today’s Wednesday Collective is a special edition. I want to highlight an ongoing conversation that’s been taking place across a few different sites, namely between Sam Adams at IndieWire, A.E. Larsen over at An Historian Goes to the Movies, Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press, and myself. It regards the need for historical accuracy in movies and whether that accuracy should be a quality that critics evaluate.

“Please Kill The Expert Review“

This all started when Sam Adams, editor for IndieWire, posted a rejection of the “expert review,” the kinds of articles that declare “What Noah Gets Wrong About the Bible” and “What House of Cards Gets Wrong About Money in Politics.” Half the time, these “expert reviews” fail at their own game, overlooking some pretty simple facts, or assuming some historical intent on the part of filmmakers that isn’t there. For instance, Noah isn’t based on Noah and the Flood alone, it’s based on Jewish religious stories, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Abraham and Job and Moses, and Asian flood mythologies. And House of Cards is based on Kevin Spacey eating you alive.

“Wednesday Collective – Films of Excess, Black Widow, & All Your Ark Are Belong to Us”

We highlighted Adams’s article in a “Wednesday Collective” that also featured some other great articles and a pretty broad Something Awful reference all of two people picked up on. I didn’t altogether agree with Adams that expert reviews need to be eradicated. I did agree that expert reviews have become so widespread and inaccurate that it’s inevitable many of them are written by non-experts. They might think half an hour of hitting up Wikipedia is the equivalent of doing enough research to post a 1,000-word article (hint: it’s not). After all, “expert reviews” get clicked on. They appeal to our curiosity. They appeal to our desire to have even more to discuss about the film we just saw, and our desire to impress others by doing so. They appeal to some pretty basic schadenfreude we feel when famous people do something wrong. So they persist.

“Why Historical Accuracy on Film Matters”

A.E. Larsen at An Historian Goes to the Movies wrote a rebuttal to Adams’s original article, detailing the importance that evaluating historical accuracy has. If we cut out that evaluation, Larsen argues, we avoid discussing some pretty important artistic decisions and the social, cultural, and political consequences those decisions can cause in the real world. He cites the rise of the powerful independence movement in Scotland as a reaction to Braveheart, and the effect crime procedurals like CSI have had on both the taxpayer expense and burden of evidence necessary to carry out criminal trials in The United States. It’s worth noting that Larsen also considers it important for films to sometimes forgo historical accuracy, such as in the narrative and costuming in The 13th Warrior. Accuracy isn’t always important, Larsen says, but discussing it is.

“On History, Historicity, and the Responsibility of Art”

Chris Braak at Threat Quality Press sought to separate history from historicity, further expanding on Larsen’s argument while also putting the onus of responsibility on artists themselves. The issue as an artist isn’t to always be historically accurate, Braak says, but rather to have a reason when you aren’t. Many artists use history as a backdrop to talk about modern-day issues. If that’s what you’re doing, decisions can’t just be made willy-nilly – they each carry into the messages that viewers take away. Braak uses Shakespeare, Philadelphia theatre, and Larsen’s example of Braveheart to write a fairly brilliant article.

“‘Accuracy is the Poor Man’s Authenticity’: (A Few) More Thoughts on the Expert Review”

Finally, Adams featured Larsen’s rebuttal, as well as two others, in a piece that contained far too much punctuation in its title and met him halfway. He still sticks to his guns, but he admits he just had to get “Please Kill the Expert Review” off his chest. He also says that art doesn’t have a responsibility to stick to fact. I have a tendency to agree with Braak – art does have that responsibility, except when there’s a reason to choose differently. So the conversation has paused by putting the burden of responsibility on the artist, but it did begin by calling out critics. That still needs to be addressed.

My Own Take

The value of making movies that are historically accurate should be self-evident – failure to do so can lead to the rewriting of history itself. The single, most offensive episode of TV I’ve seen all year did just this, in an ill-advised attempt to trade historical accuracy for scientific, as if you’re only allowed to allot a certain number of accuracy points between the two.

Art’s ability to turn history on its head does offer unique opportunities, however, the way The Monuments Men seeks to champion art’s value to a society that’s busy cutting arts education left, right, and center. Or the way Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained change history entirely to create power fantasies for the historically maligned. In this way, they empower and engender pride today while challenging typical ethnic portrayals and culturally training us to see hate and racism for the wholly ridiculous things they are. By making villains who literally tent their fingers and twirl their mustaches, and KKK members who whine about the imprecise tailoring of their white sheets, we begin to associate the very same positions in the real world as childish and cartoon-esque.

What’s a critic’s role in this? To evaluate the historical accuracy in Inglorious Basterds is a fool’s errand, yet in evaluating the details and nuances director Quentin Tarantino does include, we might better see the craft behind the image. In art history, you’re taught to examine every nuance – the painters whose work has lasted centuries rarely included useless details. Even brush strokes can communicate something – where the painter seeks to turn your eye, and the relationships between different characters.

And what should the requirements for the critic be? I try to review a movie’s success with some degree of isolation from it’s background. I want to know what the movie’s saying or failing to say. Under the Skin and Children of Men and A Clockwork Orange (I just came up with the most depressing triple-feature ever) say completely different things from the novels on which they’re based. Does that mean they’re failures? Absolutely not, but why they have completely different messages is important.

Likewise, Basterds, Django, Braveheart, and Monuments Men divert completely from history to make their points, and why they choose to do so is the most important component in each of these films. That requires analysis, which requires pointing out the historical details those films overlook or change.

Even so, I agree with Sam Adams on his broader notion that the proliferation of a certain type of “What X gets wrong about Y” review isn’t doing criticism any good. I don’t think he’s talking about the “expert review,” however. The expert review, such as what A.E. Larsen does at An Historian Goes to the Movies, is a crucial component to understanding movies as an art and storytelling form. I believe what Adams criticizes should be called the “inexpert review,” in which critics feel pressure to be all things to all people, and often evaluate the accuracy of topics on which they aren’t really familiar.

Critics should not pretend to know everything. It’s one reason I do “Wednesday Collective.” It’s the reason I seek out other writers to feature here, like Vanessa Tottle and Russ Schwartz. You can’t read a critic in a vacuum; you need other input. One of the most valuable things you can do as a critic is admit what you don’t know. It’s academically honest, and it will let readers know that if you do have a point to make, you’re only making it when you know what you’re talking about.

Go back and look at Roger Ebert’s archive of reviews and essays – it’s easy to select the ones he wrote from a drop-down menu up-top. Ebert was an incredibly smart writer, yet again and again, he prefaced his viewpoints with what he didn’t know, either on an academic subject or another culture’s storytelling techniques. This allows you to be aware of exactly what he does know. Being aware of his perspective and his knowledge gives you more information, gives you a better sense of how to understand his opinions.

The expert review doesn’t need to stop. The inexpert review needs to stop. Critics need to admit when they don’t know something, not pretend they know everything. We need to talk about film from our own perspective, from our own experiences and knowledge. We need to be proud of our specialties, and seek out others to complement them, to refer to when we don’t know something important. Pretending to be an expert in a field you don’t know about is a way of being ashamed at your lack of knowledge. I’d rather be proud about what I do know, and honest about what I don’t. It’s the only way criticism survives as something more than top 10 lists and Metacritic scores. The only way.