Projecting the Enemy

The concept of projection is used in many areas of our life. On one hand, we know that the movies we see are a series of images projected onto a large screen using a powerful light source focused through a series of lenses. The term projection is also used in the arena of war - bullets and missiles are called projectiles; generals study projections of troop movement, casualties and battle plans. A projectionist is "one who operates a motion-picture projector" or "a mapmaker."1 To project is to throw forward either an object, an image or a plan of attack.

Projection is also used in the field of Psychology to describe both healthy and unhealthy behavior of the individual.

Projection is the process by which individuals attribute to others those thoughts, feelings, motivations, or fantasies they themselves possess.2

My contention is that all these modes of projection are intertwined and locked in a vast tapestry that echoes all around us.

Film, I believe, is an example of a healthy process of projection. We project our thoughts and ideas outside of us and onto a large screen in a darkened room where other people are watching. We use film to project our inner world outward so we may share it with others, who we hope will be entertained, inspired and enlightened.

The normal use of projection may include the projection of positive feelings or attributes, and may result in empathy.3

On the other hand, war is an example of an unhealthy process of projection, which begins with the individual who becomes paranoid.

Feeling inferior or defective, the paranoid projects onto other people the impulses, wishes, or fantasies that are too painful to his or her self-image. The most common and dangerous feeling is hostility...4

When this paranoia reaches the level of a group of individuals, they try to separate themselves from their own darker impulses by projecting this darkness onto other groups around them. Then they label them the 'enemy' and the war begins.

I believe that the movies and our wars and almost everything we do or say is merely the process of separation and projection.

Society as a whole has developed in such a way that it is broken up into separate nations and different religions, political, economic, racial groups, etc. Similarly, each individual human being has been fragmented into a large number of separate and conflicting compartments, according to his different desires, aims, ambitions, loyalties, psychological characteristic, etc., to such an extent that it is generally accepted that some degree of neurosis is inevitable, while many individuals going beyond the 'normal' limits of fragmentation are classified as paranoid, schizoid, psychotic, etc. The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.5

The endless conflict and confusion that the idea of separation has helped to cause, can be seen to be at the heart of war.

My contention is that the great wars of this century, in which America has fought, represent our attempts to separate our national and individual darkness’s from ourselves and project them outward. This process of separation has been incremental. World War I shows our darkness projected to its farthest point, manifesting in country versus country. By the time we get to Vietnam, the war is being fought in our own minds, where the darkness originally began.

The American war movie, being of a similar process, reflects this pattern of separation and projection and can help shed some light on the overall picture of war in the Twentieth Century.

WORLD WAR I

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

After the turn of the century, as the boundaries between us grew smaller and smaller, we became increasingly more frightened of each other. Colonial expansionism and the advances in communication and transportation of the Industrial revolution combined to bring the people of the world into closer contact with one another.

Never before had it been so easy, cheap, or quick to move men or goods from one part of the globe to another.6

As each Empire's economy became more closely interdependent, fear of loosing economic and political power caused them to become paranoid of one another.

...the paranoiac sees an aggressor in everyone around him; thus, the paranoiac treats others as projections of his own unconscious hostility. His alienating behavior incurs the hostility of others, resulting in a spiral of psychopathology. A psychotic delusional system results as a defense against feelings of rejection and inadequacy. Feelings of inferiority are replaced by delusions of superiority, grandiosity, and omnipotence.7

The industrial revolution gave the world two major advances that helped to inflate these delusions of grandeur.

The first of these new departures was the development of precision manufacture and mass production. The second was the internal-combustion engine. Between them, they made mechanized war possible, and the world will never be the same again.8

This increased capacity to produce great armies, gave the leading industrialized nations, who had been arguing and fighting with each other for years, the sense that they now had the power to win and expand their Empires.

Russia, Japan, Britain, Germany, France were impinging on China; Russia, Italy, Britain, France, and the Balkan States were impinging on the Ottoman Empire. In each case this impact stimulated a nationalist revolution, which in turn was accompanied by other separatist national revolts within these ancient empires.9

The idea of separation by way of nationalism swept the globe, fueling revolts against the Imperial empires that had previously ruled a great portion of the world. The lines were drawn. It became country against country, vying for economic, political and industrial supremacy.

The process of separation and projection was complete. Just as the individual separates himself from his own fears by projecting them onto others, a nation projects its collective darkness onto other groups or nations.

This idea of nationalism runs deep through the films that deal with World War I.

...the rip-roaring, flag-waving, crowd-pleasing hoopla that brings a tear to the patriot's eye and a lump to his or her throat.10

In King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925), our hero is swept up by the grandeur and fervor of the big parade as everyone goes off to fight nobly for his country in the Great War. In Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a German schoolmaster convinces his innocent students to go to war for the glory of the Fatherland. In Howard Hawk's Sergeant York (1941), Gary Cooper must give up his religious pacifism to save his country. This is visually exemplified when he stands on top of a mountain and puts the bible and a book on American history together and the trumpets of war resound. The war took many years, cost many lives and left Europe a wasteland. As in the end of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Big Parade, there was no sense of winning or victory. Men came home with one leg missing and the memory of horror in their eyes (The Big Parade) or they didn't come home at all (All Quiet on the Western Front).

After the war, it was apparent that the boundaries of country versus country were just as foolish as Empire vs. Empire. The problem was that there was no real definable enemy. The projecting of our darkness onto other nations just didn't hold up under the reality of war. So it was realistically an unsuccessful war for all parties. It left the world in a state of chaos. World economies collapsed.

Disenchantment with the economic systems of the times and the failure of national separatism combined to give communism and socialism a new foothold. As these internal revolutions and economic depressions plagued many nations, the fascist movement also found its place.

In a narrow sense, fascist movements represented a reaction of fear against the spread of communism. In Italy in 1922, in Germany in 1932, in Spain in 1936, they were in part strong-arm movements formed among ex-servicemen or military groups to fight the growth of communism. They drew support from all who feared an attack on private property and capitalism, and they particularly exploited nationalist grievances.11

Internal violence plagued the streets of many countries. People were driven to economic and moral extremes, as man sent himself into a deeper darkness than he had ever previously imagined.

No country was more susceptible than Germany to this depression, since American loans to and investment in Germany immediately ceased, and the demand for German goods dropped sharply. The figures for unemployment rose.12

And so in this new Germany, where the moral and financial base was totally destroyed, a man came to power who was to become the world's ultimate manifestation of Evil...Adolph Hitler. At the same time, this darkness came alive in Japan and Italy in the forms of Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito.

WORLD WAR II

Patton (1970)

Japan, Italy and Germany, under control of this new generation of dictators and warlords, began their own era of expansionism. Their technology and their ruthlessness had grown to gigantic proportions. Their minds were filled with the hatred and anger of the past, combined with an idealized sense of power and superiority. They were the perfect projection of everything inside of us we dare not face. For the people that followed these leaders, their projection of power merely shifted from a country to one man who represented superior strength and safety. But for us, it was no longer nation against nation, now it was the forces of good against the forces of evil. An evil that grew out of the post WWI darkness and brought its vengeance into the world.

The United States, Britain, and Russia made a great alliance to combat this darkness that was attacking all of us. In the European theater, it meant driving Hitler out of Africa, Italy, France, Austria, Poland and Russia. In the Pacific, it meant stopping Japan from taking over the entire region, which all too closely touched the United States and Russia, not to mention the British and French colonies still held over from the first World War.

Thus was born World War II: the perfect war, a clear cut war, a war in which the sides were undeniable, where the lines between good and evil could not be questioned. Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese War Lords were the perfect enemy.

It was a war of logic, of maps and dates, with villages and towns to liberate and people to save. It was the ultimate us against them. The World War II movies reflected this logic. There was always a sense of place and time, as we moved across land and sea on our way to the heart of each of our enemy's homelands. In Destination Tokyo (1943) we get a feeling of this time and space reality of WW II, complete with objective, maps and a time limit. The submarine must cross the Pacific, enter Tokyo bay and radio a report to enable the fleet to attack. In Patton (1970), as Patton stands high atop a barreling half-track, a soldier asks the great General where he's going, and he responds: "I'm going all the way to Berlin to personally shoot that God damned paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch!"13 Not just destined for a place, Patton, shown as a great man on the side of goodness, is heading to attack the evil enemy that is no longer merely a country, but is now represented by an evil leader and his followers. In Wake Island (1942) the Jap enemy is shown to be so merciless that he even shoots down a parachuting pilot, to the horror of all us yanks watching. In Sahara (1943), Humphrey Bogart takes a rag tag team through the desert to end up at a dried up oasis where they face an onslaught of Nazis. They shoot down a Nazi pilot and this evil being causes them unceasing frustration and anger.

But then the war ended. We had won against the evil enemy outside us, yet we had still avoided dealing with the true enemy inside ourselves. Old wounds between us crept in under the surface, as the allies divided up the world and new lines were drawn.

Memories of the policy of appeasement on one side, of internment activities and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 on the other, fostered deep suspicions as soon as the common enemy of Hitlerism had been destroyed.14

While new treaties were being signed, international organizations like NATO and the United Nations were being born, the dark cloud of paranoia slowly reappeared, helped by the appearance of the Atom Bomb.

This thunderbolt as the clock was striking twelve brought new fears and tensions between the Soviet Union and her Western Allies.15

Under the shadow of the Atom bomb and the tension created between the new East and West borderlines, grew the beginnings of the Cold War.

After August 1945 it was known that the United States had the secret of the atomic bomb, and for a time she alone had it. If this greatly enhanced her prestige in the world, it also caused the deepest resentments and fears in the Soviet Union.16

Besides having the secret to the ultimate weapon in the world, the United States had also become the leading economic power.

Russian industrial capacity was seriously injured by the war, whereas that of the United States increased by half, and her agricultural output rose by more than one-third.17

The Soviets became paranoid because of our economic superiority and our secret of the bomb. They tried to expand, in order to protect themselves and attain greater power, while they tried to find our secret.

An exhausted and war-torn Europe, a turbulent Near East and Far East, an awakening African nationalism, offered new opportunities for communist penetration: temptations which Stalin seemed likely to find irresistible.18

We became paranoid of them. They were paranoid of us. Each projected onto the other the fearsome power and darkness we both held.

If Russian territorial and political expansion was great, the United States was the main factor sustaining world economy.19

Thus was born...the Cold War: A war of ideas and labels, Pinko against Capitalist pig, freedom vs. totalitarianism, democracy vs. communism. The evil was no longer a man, but was a thought, an idea that anyone could hold in his or her minds. Your next-door neighbor could be one of THEM. So the great post-war American dream, in which a man and woman had a home, a TV, a refrigerator, two cars and 2.2 children, was laced with constant paranoia and fear. It was fear of the end of the world, fear of the Atom Bomb, and fear of the red threat destroying our world of comfort and security. Out of this world of a rosy dream-like surface mixed with the undercurrents of fear and paranoia, came the post-war babies; a generation uncertain of truth.

KOREAN WAR

MASH (1972)

Korea was our first attempt at taking a country, drawing an imaginary line across it and saying, this side is commi and this side is free. Luckily we got out with the pretense of winning, although the conflict still continues to this day.

In the atomic age, war between nuclear powers is suicidal; wars between small countries with big friends are likely to be inconclusive and interminable; hence, decisive war in our time has become the privilege of the impotent.20

War no longer had any clear lines or boundaries. There were no maps or plans. It became a war of ideologies for the politicians, a war of power playing for the Generals and a war of survival for the individual soldier. Lost in the middle of all this were the Koreans, demoted to being puppets to the super powers who were using their country as their new battle arena.

The North Koreans were unable to defeat South Korea so long as the United States was willing to support the South...and the South Koreans could not defeat the North so long as China and the Soviet Union were willing to render assistance. Thus the Korean War ended with the frontiers virtually unchanged. The main difference was the large number of dead Koreans on both sides.21

Samuel Fuller's Steel Helmet (1951) truly captured the futility and confusion of the Korean situation. A disoriented war complete with fog and smoke, no maps or idea of where we are, and a world lacking in any traditional sense of logic. Dead bodies are booby-trapped and Monks are snipers. Also the film is direct in revealing that this is a war of ideas, personified in a captured communist officer who tries to talk all the minority soldiers into joining his ideology.

But more importantly, we see a cynical attitude toward beliefs, the director's deep-seated distrust of the new ideals of East and West.22

Then, of course, M*A*S*H (1970) ultimately captured this new war arena of madness with a dark humor that made one uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Starting with the opening shots of choppers flying in the wounded while we hear the title song "Suicide is Painless." Then in the first half-hour we are faced with a constant flow of people talking at one another all at once, sending us into layers of verbal confusion. During this time, every sacred tenet known to modern man is made fun of, from God and Commanding Officers to male genitalia. The best personification of the times was the character of Major Burns: a true paranoid-schizophrenic Cold Warrior, whose bible fearing and commi hating patriotism was constantly being undermined by his repressed sexuality turned loose by Nurse 'Hot-Lips' Hoolihan.

At home, the cold war had failed because the paranoia became too visible for the people to run from. So McCarthy was cut down from his finger-pointing pulpit, and the cold war became the secret war of espionage between the acronyms CIA and KGB.

VIETNAM

Apocalypse Now (1979)

After Korea, the line between wars becomes faint and hard to find. During Korea, we were financing the French in Indochina. While a truce was formulating in Korea, the French signed a treaty that split Indochina into Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The 17th parallel was drawn splitting Vietnam into North and South and Ho Chi Min was given the North, with a promise of future elections. Afraid that Ho Chi Min and the Communists would win an election, the United States backed Diem to declare the South a Republic and bypass any form of democratic election. This developed into our second attempt at imaginary line drawing wars. It is here, in the jungles of Vietnam, where we crossed the line that separated us from our own darkness.

In 1963, within three weeks of one another, both the Presidents of Vietnam and the United States were assassinated. The post-War babies had come of age but many were unwilling to fight for the schizophrenic world of their parents. Television brought the war home, and in the streets and on the college campuses another war erupted. No longer could we escape our own projections.

We [were] coping with enveloping madness by becoming a part of it. We fiercely [preserved] all our competitive instincts, but [made] expendable our ability to reason and make moral judgements.23

In Vietnam, the soldier was faced with an enemy he could not see and he could not justify the killing he was told to commit. Sometimes women and children were the enemy. Sometimes his own generals were the enemy.

In Platoon (1986) our hero is faced with choosing to follow a good Sergeant or an evil Sergeant, both men in his platoon yet one of them is really the enemy. All throughout the film, one gets the sense that the enemy is ourselves, from our panic blasting of grass huts to the bunkers being used for drug dens.

Just as in Korea, there were no villages to save or beaches to take. It was a war of search and destroy. In Vietnam, however, we had the added element of limited tours of duty. No longer was a soldier in the battle from start to finish. With each year, new grunts were shipped in and old grunts were shipped home, either in a body bag or wounded in body and/or mind. This rotation shifted the context of the war for the individual soldier away from any sense of overall purpose to merely his own short-term survival. It became a war of body counts and kill ratios, a war of madness, a war in which the idea of winning and loosing had lost any value at all.

In Apocalypse Now (1979) we follow a soldier, Captain Willard, down the river on a mission to kill one of his own people, a Colonial who's "gone beyond the domain of any acceptable human conduct." As we travel to this man, Kurtz, we travel deeper and deeper into the darkness of the jungle, watching our own forces growing more primitive. It gradually becomes apparent that this journey is actually Willard's own descent into madness. When we reach the end of the river, and Kurtz and Willard look into each other's eyes, we see the true face of war and it is our own.

In the end, Kurtz asks Willard: "Are my methods unsound?" and Willard responds: "I don't see any method at all."24

POST WARS

Overall, it seems to me, this progression of wars is a very good sign. In each one, we have striped away one level of projection after another. In World War I, our darkness was projected into a war of country versus country. In World War II, it became Good versus Evil or Good men versus Evil men. In Korea and the Cold War, we faced a war of idea versus idea. And in Vietnam we were faced with our own madness, a war of illusions fighting illusions. Our films have reflected the mirror of these wars back at us, aiding in our collective understanding and hopefully our collective healing. As these films reveal, war is not just waged on the battlefield, but also in the hearts and minds of all of us.

OVERVIEW:

LEVELS OF PROJECTION IN WAR

WW I was country vs. country

Die for your country

WW II was good vs. evil / man vs. man

Save the world from evil

Korea was us against them / ideas vs. ideas

Stop the spread of communism

Vietnam was us against ourselves / madness

All of the above = Join the army, travel to exotic foreign lands, meet new and interesting people and kill them.

HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGY OF

TWENTIETH CENTURY WAR

1914-1918 WORLD WAR I

1921 - Reparations payments demanded from Germany

US loans Germany money to pay back its loans

Period of false security = wave of prosperity

1922 - Lenin & Communist Party reign in Russia

Russia & Eastern Europe sever world economic ties

1922 - Fascists takeover in Italy

1924 - War debts and loans increase

Gold payments from Europe to US

1927 - Paper currency decreasing in value

1928 - Agricultural depression, wheat prices up

1929 - World economic crisis = Europe defaults on loans,

US paper currency flow stops, stock market crash

1930 - Germany cuts Social Services

Nazis and Communists win major seats in government

Street battles between Nazis & Commis

1932 - 5,000 US banks bankrupt

European banks default and close

Fascists come to power in Germany - Hitler

1933 - Germany and Japan leave the league of nations

Hitler made Chancellor of Germany (coalition)

1934 - Hindenburg dies, Hitler total power

1935 - Hitler breaches Versailles treaty - builds up army

1936 - Fascist takeover in Spain

Rome-Berlin Axis - Hitler and Mussolini

1938 - Hitler takes Austria

1939 - Britain and France align with Poland

Nazi-Soviet Pact

Hitler invades Poland

Britain and France declare war

The partition of Poland, Russia/German

Hitler takes Czechoslovakia

1939-1945 WORLD WAR II

1945 - Yalta treaty signed/Europe divided

Roosevelt dies

US reveals the ATOMIC BOMB

Japan surrenders

Potsdam treaty signed/occupation of Germany

1946 - Soviet fortifies Eastern Europe

1947 - Truman Doctrine - Aid to countries threatened by Communists

The Marshall Plan

1948 - Stalin's absorption of Czechoslovakia.

Berlin blockade by Russians

1949 - Soviet Union attains atomic bomb

NATO established to stop Soviet advances in Europe.

Mao Tse-tung takes power in China

1950 - North Korea attacks the South

US & UN decision to repel attack

Decision to cross 38th parallel

MacArthur's drive to Yalu River - China provoked.

Material aid to France in Vietnam

(believed to be fighting the communist threat)

China backs Ho Chi Min

1953 - US increases military assistance to France

(funding half the war in Indochina)

Korean conflict winds down

1954 - French ask for US military help in Indochina, we say no.

Geneva Conference, treaty signed

France pulls out of Indochina

Indochina split into Laos, Cambodia & Vietnam

17th parallel drawn in Vietnam, split North & S.

Ho Chi Minh gets the North until 56 election

1955 - Afraid election would bring communism, US supported Diem to take over and declare republic.

Ho Chi Minh visits Moscow & Peking

1956 - Promised elections not held.

Ho Chi Minh trains his troops for battle

US increases support for South

1960 - 1000 US military advisors in S. Vietnam

Increased military aid

1963 - President Diem killed in S. Vietnam

President Kennedy assassinated

17,000 Americans in Vietnam

1964 - US ships in Gulf of Tonkin fired on

(claiming they were in free water)

US bombers raid N Vietnam

1965 - VC attack US barracks

US troops to Vietnam

US bombs N Vietnam unrelentlessly

1968 - NV Tet offensive

500,000 US troops in Vietnam

FILMOGRAPHY

WORLD WAR I

The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925)

All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone, 1930)

Sergeant York (Hawks, 1941)

WORLD WAR II

Wake Island (Farrow, 1941)

Sahara (Korda, 1943)

Destination Tokyo (Daves, 1944)

Patton (Schaffner, 1970)

KOREAN WAR

Steel Helmet (Fuller, 1951)

M*A*S*H (Altman, 1970)

VIETNAM WAR

Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)

Platoon (Stone, 1986)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adair, Gilbert. Vietnam on Film: From the Green Berets to Apocalypse Now. New York: Random House, 1981.

The American Heritage Dictionary. 2nd College ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983.

Bakeless, John. The Economic Causes of Modern War. New York: Garland Publishing, 1972

Barash, David P. and Judith Eve Lipton. The Caveman and the Bomb: Human Nature, Evolution, and Nuclear War. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985.

Bernard, L.L. War and its Causes. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1944.

Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate order. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983.

Bush, Vannevar. Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.

Cornwell, R.D. World History in the Twentieth Century. 2d ed. England: Longman Group Ltd., 1980.

Cousins, Norman. Human Options. New York: Norton Press, 1981.

Denton, James. Production Notes: Patton. 20th Century-Fox Film Company, 1969.

Doyle, Edward and Samuel Lipsman. The Vietnam Experience. Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1981.

Kagan, Norman. The War Film. New York: Pyramid Communications, Inc., 1974.

Keen, Sam. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986.

Morella, Joe, Edward Z. Epstein, and John Griggs. The Films of World War II. New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1973.

Michener, Charles. "Finally, 'Apocalypse Now'." Newsweek, 28 May 1979.

Murphy. "Patton." Daily Variety, 21 January 1970.

Stoessinger, John G. Why Nations Go to War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

Thomson, David. World History from 1914 to 1968. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Walker, J.I. and K.W. Brodie. Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry III: Paranoid Disorders. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1980.

FOOTNOTES

1 The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd College ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983).

2 David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, The Caveman and the Bomb: Human Nature, Evolution, and Nuclear War. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985), 82.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983), 1.

6 David Thomson, World History from 1914 to 1968 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 23.

7 J.I. Walker and K.W. Brodie, Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry III: Paranoid Disorders (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1980), 79.

8 Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 10.

9 Thomson, World History from 1914 to 1968, 20.

10 Barash, The Caveman and the Bomb, 103.

11 Thomson, World History from 1914 to 1968, 89.

12 R.D. Cornwell, World History in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (England: Longman Group Ltd., 1980), 46.

13 Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North, Patton, Directed by Franklin Schaffner, 20th Century-Fox, 1970.

14 Thomson, World History from 1914 to 1968, 132.

15 Ibid., 130.

16 Ibid., 133.

17 Ibid., 132.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War (New York: St. Martins's Press, 1982), 206.

21 Ibid., 207.

22 Norman Kagan, The War Film (New York: Pyramid Communications, Inc., 1974), 75.

23 Norman Cousins, Human Options (New York: Norton Press, 1981)

24 Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius, Apocalypse Now, Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Zoetrope Studios, 1979.

University of Southern California,
School of Cinema and Television
1988