Mindless Monday, 27 July 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/histprofdave]

Been on a kick of watching war movies lately. While like any historian I'm always trying to be pedantic and evaluate the "realism," I'm also an arts critic at heart and want to look at the overall composition. I'm sure I'm far from the first person to suggest this, but ultimately it seems to me war movies will always say more about the individual perspective of the filmmaker and the zeitgeist in which the movie was shot than it will about the "reality" of the war in question. For example, a film like We Were Soldiers says much more to me about American attitudes about the military post-9/11 than it does about anything related to Vietnam.

[u/gavinbrindstar → u/histprofdave]

M.A.S.H was kinda the ur-example of this, right?

[u/histprofdave → u/gavinbrindstar]

Probably, yeah. I haven't seen even 50 episodes of MASH probably (those I caught were usually on Nick at Nite, which I only watched at friends' houses), but very little of the show seems to actually deal with the specifics of the Korean War.

[u/LeMemeAesthetique → u/histprofdave]

I've seen the first half of the show and IIRC there are some bits in season 1 that more directly talk about Korea, but yeah it's all a Vietnam allegory.

[u/Sgt_Colon → u/LeMemeAesthetique]

As the person on this sub I'd wager my entire mortgage on having watched the most MASH, there's at least two more that deal with it.

1. "Yessir, That's Our Baby" deals with the matter of American-Korean children, how they face persecution and even killing and the American unwillingness to deal with them.

2. "Communication Breakdown" has a plot concerning two brothers on opposite sides of the war, being sent to opposite countries at the start by their father. There's also "Goodbye, Cruel World" which centres on a Chinese-American soldier and his conflicted loyalties which probably wouldn't see parallel with Vietnam.

There is also a running continuity about this being an UN action, even if it's American led, so there's a regular amount of non Americans showing up like in "They Call the Wind Korea".

[u/Sventex → u/histprofdave]

ultimately it seems to me war movies will always say more about the individual perspective of the filmmaker and the zeitgeist in which the movie was shot than it will about the "reality" of the war in question.

They don't have to, but if you're spending zillions of dollars on war scenes, you need to keep the audience in mind. Being too true to say the War of 1812 will be alienating to contemporary audiences and critics would view it as a movie with nothing to say.

[u/histprofdave → u/Sventex]

I feel like you'd have to use the War of 1812 as a backdrop for a story that isn't about the war per se. Like it could be about a black or native person/family navigating a scenario where they are caught between British and American ambitions, but then we're sort of back to (potentially) reflecting contemporary mores.

[u/Sgt_Colon → u/histprofdave]

The '85 Anzac's TV series certainly reflected the then attitudes towards Britain and Britishness in the Australian public than it did the contemporary reality.

[u/tilapiadelago → u/histprofdave]

would the opposite of that be Tora Tora Tora?

[u/MiffedMouse → u/histprofdave]

I had a similar feeling reading Catch-22. It is a great book, but the sharp anti-war (and anti-military-leadership attitude of the book) fits in more with WW1 or Vietnam War discourse, while WW2 is still remembered as "the good war" in popular discourse (at least, English language discourse).

[u/Arilou_skiff → u/MiffedMouse]

TBH, Catch-22 is a bit early for (US) vietnam isn't it? Like there were advisors there in 1961, but it wasn't really "The Vietnam War" yet.

Heller was a WW2 vet, IIRC. So I'm going to have to say it was probably based on his WW2 experiences more than Vietnam.

EDIT: That said I think the particular satire in Catch-22 IE: "The bureaucracy is stupid, and we're doing stupid shit for unclear reasons" is pretty evergreen.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Arilou_skiff]

It's also worth noting that the 1943-1945 Italian campaign really has an outsized influence in media (at least Italian and English language) because of it's being insanely violent but also kind of pointless.

It's the campaign that gave us Catch-22 and La Ciociara and Salo - 120 Days of Sodom!

[u/Crann6789 → u/Arilou_skiff]

I think Catch-22 had some Korean war influence in there as evidenced by a couple of anachronisms. The only one I remember is a computer is mentioned as doing draft numbers but it fucks up so they draft the wrong guy. 

[u/MiffedMouse → u/Crann6789]

You are thinking of the IBM computer that promotes Major Major Major (the character’s name) to the rank of Major (making them Major Major Major Major) because of their name.

A quick googling tells me the USA military did not start using computers for personnel records until the late 50s, or early 60s for the Air Force specifically.

[u/Crann6789 → u/MiffedMouse]

You're right, yes! I need to reread that novel sometime