melannen | (no subject)

This week's sunday night movie and crafting was "Sharpe's Company" (I skipped a couple of weeks due to sister being home and then backpacking.) It turned out by sheer chance to be the one that comes right after Sharpe's Dragon, which I had just re-read and is a favorite of mine. "Sharpe's Company" had a lot fewer dragons for some reason. Did have about the expected quotient of worryingly young and very shirtless Sean Bean though.

It was fun but I didn't find it quite as compelling as the Hornblower one, possibly I think because Sharpe is actually damn good at his job, and loves his job, and knows it, which was terrifically fun to watch, don't get me wrong, this is a great series for competence porn, but the catharsis was less, because you knew that if they just let Sharpe get on with doing his damn job everything would be A-OK. Being infantry based it also had a different sort of ethos around the concept of war than the Navy ones I know more about, which I'm still thinking about.

Promised analysis of backpacking pack is going up on Tumblr because, augh, DW is so much better for so many things, but not having to mess with photo hosting counts for a lot.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Being infantry based it also had a different sort of ethos around the concept of war than the Navy ones I know more about

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about this.

I'm not really sure I have the words (or context) to unpack it accurately, but, eh.

So Sharpe is, on the one hand, a lot more in-your-face about the gore, and mud, and especially about the civilian cost of war, since it's actually down in the gore and mud and among the civilians. It's also (at least, in this episode) a lot more vicious about the idea of an honorable glorious death in battle, or that there's any justice in who dies and who lives. I mean, Hornblower doesn't exactly buy into that one either, but Sharpe seems to take vicious glee in puncturing it as horribly as possible at every opportunity.

So it's not exactly that Sharpe glorifies war any more than the Navy ones; they both take on their share of ambivalence about the concept.

But on the other hand. It's inescapable that what Sharpe and his men do - what they are really good at - is killing people. On the Navy ships, they fight, yes, but a lot of what they do is keeping each other alive on a tiny wooden tub that really shouldn't be seaworthy with inadequate supplies and not enough space or skilled men, and their goals are often to deliver supplies or messages, or guard cargo ships, and even when they're fighting the ultimate aim (at least in the fiction, not capable of judging the reality) is to destroy/capture the enemy ships, not particularly kill the crews.

What Sharpe and his men do is kill people.

In fact they're special elite sharpshooters, so what they do is kill people really well and they even get excused from a lot of the non-killing-based grunt work of the infantry, and they take pride in this.

So the show seemed to be trying to do this, like, 20th century public television critique of war as stupid and wasteful and the opposite of glorious, and the good men are there because Classism and Tyranny Forced Them, not because they wanted to go to war, or if they did go for the fancy uniforms they quickly changed their minds, and so on. You are probably very familiar with that narrative.

And in p. much any modern war movie there's going to be an uneasy balance between that and the fact that, you know, you're making a movie about war because people *enjoy* stories about glorious battle, and they all strike that balance in different places. Which is probably part of the reason I don't have a huge number of other war movies in my repertoire to compare with.

But I felt like with Sharpe (at least in this episode, etc.) there was a really apparent register shift when we switched from most of the movie, which was about, like, the pre-battle pettiness and drudgery and people trying to make a life among an ongoing war, and then Sharpe leading his men into battle, at which point he's suddenly rallying them with the same macho warrior culture BS that the movie's been critiquing previously, and everybody is buying it. And because they were spending so much time on the "war is shit" lesson at the beginning, they didn't really build any groundwork about why it was or wasn't necessary to fight this battle.

And then it becomes super-obvious that what these people are good at is killing other people and that they are really enjoying it - maybe not the death, they don't enjoy the death, but the having a chance to finally do what they're good at, yes, and to win through in the end, christ it's glorious - and I got hit with this huge cognitive dissonance.

And I'm not saying that as a critique of the film? Far from it, really. That fundamental cognitive dissonance between "why the hell are we here this is pointless misery" and the high of battle is probably a pretty accurate portrayal of war.

But it's something the Navy ones really don't have to show in the same way, because of the way that fighting with capital ships lets you have a little distance from the fact that what war is, is people killing each other with great gusto for no particular reason. Even when it comes down to battle, ordinary Navy guys are fighting first and foremost to keep their ship from sinking, so you as a storyteller don't need the same rhetoric of "now into the breach for king and glory!" when you can go instead for "fuck if we don't keep the mast from falling everybody's dead".

(Also the above is mostly BS and I am way overanalyzing, but it's what I came out of the film thinking about.)

That was very interesting, thank you for writing it out.