It’s one of the great philosophical questions about cinema: How much does reality shape the movies we watch, and how much do the movies we watch shape our perception of reality? Long-time Shepherd Express film critic Dave Luhrssen takes on that question with his latest book, "War on the Silver Screen," along with another classic question proposed by the great Detroit philosopher Edwin Starr: War, what is it good for?

After tackling topics like Elvis and Obama in the past, Luhrssen’s latest book – a collection of essays, released earlier this month, tackling several key movies spanning across several wars – asks about the relationship between war and film, and how what we see on screen changes or alters the public’s perception of war, history and reality.

OnMilwaukee.com sat down with the author and critic to discuss the public’s love/hate relationship with war films, why he picked the movies he did and whether there really is such a thing as an anti-war movie.

OnMilwaukee.com: Why write a book about war movies?

Dave Luhrssen: Well, the idea for the book actually came from Glen Jeansonne. He and I have written several books now, including a biography of Elvis and a biography of Obama. He had the idea of a book about how we really remember and think about wars more from movies and how they’re depicted on film than the reality of them. Even people who took part in World War II or Korea, often times those people’s memories are shaped by the movies we constantly see than by their own experiences to some degree. It’s certainly true of the general public, even people who lived through the war on the homefront.

OMC: Why did you choose the particular movies that you selected for the book?

DL: I wanted to pick movies that, first of all, had to have some resonance with the public later on. Like "All Quiet on the Western Front," the vast majority of people have never really seen that movie, but everybody who’s sort of a film buff or history buff knows about it. So minimally, movies had to be a part of the DNA of our cultural understanding. Better yet if the movie is really familiar.

The one point where I indulged myself a little bit maybe was "Saboteur," the Hitchcock movie which is not one of his best known movies, but it’s one of my favorite movies. I linked it with "The Best Years of Our Lives" in tandem because "Best Years" was, of course, a big movie and well remembered, while "Saboteur" is not. I was originally thinking of doing "Lifeboat," which would have been a good choice too, but I just remembered seeing "Saboteur" for the first time on late night broadcast TV many years ago and thinking, "Wow, what an interesting movie on so many levels." So I thought I’m going to indulge myself and sneak that one in there.

Other than that, I think all of these movies are unmistakably recognizable in their area. With a book like this, one of the criticisms will always be, "How could you leave that movie out?" It was designed to be a compact book, not a "2005 War Movies You Have To See Before You Die" kind of thing. A lot of picking and choosing had to go into it. There would certainly be more Vietnam movies if this was a bigger book, and you could have had chapters on World War II. The number of World War II movies out there – and most of them suck actually – but there are a number of good ones.

Some of it came down to what movies am I most interested in sitting down and watching carefully again and writing about. Because I had to make the project fun for me as I went along with it, rather than making it needlessly tedious. So I picked either important, large or meaningful movies that I was either most familiar with or most intrigued by.

There were some movies that I wrote about – like "All Quiet on the Western Front" – that I had never seen before I wrote about it in this book, or that I hadn’t seen in a long time, like "Lawrence of Arabia." 

OMC: What was the most interesting rewatch or revisit of a movie for you in this process?

DL: Maybe we can start with "Lawrence of Arabia," because in some ways, I’m not sure the movie is as great of a movie as some people at the time thought it was. My impression seeing it again was that certain scenes are very impressive. It puts you into a certain place; the environment of it and the look of everything in this desert and the enormity of it is really fantastically done, but in some respects, the storyline seems a little creaky to me in seeing it again for the first time in years.

Of course, one of things I’m doing with this book is comparing, whenever possible, the reality of the situation to how it was depicted in the movie. And "Lawrence of Arabia" certainly makes Lawrence seem like a much more important figure than he was. He didn’t singlehandedly take down the Turkish empire; he was running a sideshow that had important repercussions later on, to even today. But as a military campaign, the movie makes it look like he played a more decisive role than he really did.

So that was interesting. I was just fun kind of forcing myself to see these movies again. With what I do as a film critic, I’m bombarded with a constant stream of new things coming out, and I don’t really have the time to say, "Oh, I think I’m going to watch ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I think I’ll dig that up." So I forced myself to see some of these great movies that I’d been looking forward to seeing again and never made the time for.

OMC: Do the movies owe it to be real or hue to reality?

DL: I think they owe it to be good storytelling; that’s the crucial thing. And they owe reality enough that they should be true to the spirit of events. I don’t think that it’s necessary or even possible when making a film based on a real situation that you can get everything exactly right. Exactly right would involve so many details, it’s impossible to condense it into one film.

Or you have things that just aren’t cinematically right. I remember "Pearl Harbor," which is not a very good movie. There were some war buffs that were complaining that the Japanese airplanes were not painted the accurate color they were at the time. The reason they were painted that way was that they would show better on screen. That’s the kind of decision I think the filmmaker has every right to make. If something is boring looking, and it’s important to the movie, you don’t want it to be boring looking.

And "Schindler’s List," the real story is more complicated – and I try to get into that in my essay on the movie. But it’s already a longer-than-average movie. How do you tailor this stuff to tell a story? Yeah, of course it trims this out, and Schindler’s background is far more complicated, but then you’re going to have a 12-part miniseries instead of a feature film.

OMC: In the past decade, war movies were almost a guaranteed box office failure. That kind of shifted recently with "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Lone Survivor" doing well. Do you see a turnaround culturally there?

DL: I don’t know; how’s "Fury" doing? Maybe these things are kind of cyclical. I mean, Iraq became such a depressing war after a while. There was this myriad of documentaries about it, and they found limited audiences I’m sure.

It’s like why aren’t Westerns as popular as they used to be. The Western used to be so prevalent; you couldn’t go anywhere in a movie theater or turn on the TV without finding a Western. Now, there are very few of them made, and there are some really good ones being made, but most of them don’t do exceptionally well at the box office.

I would imagine that the problem right now with war movies is that there’s too much war-related anxiety in the news – and by news, it could be anything you can find on your smartphone. We’ve been living in a war that’s been going on for a long time right now. So I suppose "Fury" might be very cool for some people not only because it has Brad Pitt, but also it’s a war that people generally feel good about. We knew not only where the enemy lived, but we knew that they were the bad guys. There was no ambiguity in our minds about that. So maybe World War II movies could have a comeback.

OMC: What was one of the most interesting ways you found that war movies and society coincided?

DL: One thing that I found in writing this book: The Korean War is the forgotten war, and I’m convinced that it’s in part because there was no memorable, big-selling movie about the Korean War. I looked around into that, and there were some good movies that I could recommend, but none of them were really big films. No one really remembers them, and the one movie that was sort of popular, "The Bridges of Toko Ri," was a terrible movie for the most part. There are other reasons for it, but I think if Korea had had its great movie, maybe Korean War veterans could walk around feeling like people understood what they went through.

OMC: Truffaut once reportedly said that there's no such thing as an anti-war film, that what you’re seeing – no matter what – glorifies or romanticizes the idea of war. Do you agree with that statement?

DL: I don’t know if it romanticizes the violence, but it aestheticizes it. You’re turning violence into an aesthetic depiction of some kind, unless you just have some kind of splatter movie about a war – which very few people would want to watch probably and would probably be unable to tell us as much about the war. The aesthetics of depicting something that’s awful are very important, because without that – whether it’s a Goya painting of a war in Spain in the early 1800s or a film – I don’t think it would have the same impact or meaning.

So you’re aestheticizing something that’s often very horrible, and a lot of movies do romanticize this. I’m not going to accuse Hollywood of being worse than other cinemas; Hollywood certainly has had a tendency to do that, but I think there are war movies that don’t romanticize war. I don’t think "The Hurt Locker" does. "Pearl Harbor," on the other hand. So no, I don’t think that’s true as a blanket statement, but I think it’s true a lot of the time.