A new movie, “12 Strong,” depicts the first U.S. military offensive in Afghanistan after 9/11.
But even though the film depicts indisputable American war heroes – in this case, 12 Green Berets who went into battle alongside members of the Afghan Northern Alliance, against the Taliban, leftist are fuming over the movie’s “backward” message.
In an editorial in The Intercept, columnist Peter Maass slammed the film as “glorify[ing] outdated models of masculinity,” and said that the American public should “wage war against war movies” like “12 Strong.”
“Boys and men develop their notions of masculinity from a variety of sources that include the films they watch (the extent to which this is true is, of course, open to debate),” wrote Haass. “The time has come for Hollywood to turn away from war movies that, while satisfying to both a studio’s bottom line and a flag-waving concept of patriotism, perpetuate a model of masculinity that does violence to us all.”
“Don’t get me wrong, soldiers often do brave things and shouldn’t be denied credit for it…” he continued. “That’s not the issue. What matters is that well into the second decade of our forever war, the combat movies that populate our multiplexes and our minds are devoted to a martial narrative of men-as-terminators that should have been strangled at its birth a long time ago.”
But, despite claiming that there “is hope” that the movie industry may eventually move away from lucrative war movies, that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon.
“Who is at fault for the lucrative war chum that Hollywood tosses into our Saturday nights – the movie studios or the movie-goers who love to consume this masculine nonsense?” Haass wondered. “I’ll gladly answer that question: both.”
Only in liberal Hollywood would someone complain about a studio delivering content that’s popular with the American people.
AAN Staff
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