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Valkyrie: A Wonderful Gift No One Wants
Valkyrie is rich movie, proud and dark and grieving, offered as a gift to a nation hanging by a thread, at the time of year when it seems even the sun itself can be defeated, not only a terrific thriller but a richly nuanced masterpiece of moral and emotional complexity.
If you admit that Valkyrie is a fine movie far above the action/adventure/thriller genre, you must listen to it speak—with beauty and power and dignity—of what it means, under the most terrible conditions, to be a citizen. You must admit that this fine cast of actors—some, like Tom Cruise, too old to reinvent themselves; others, like Kenneth Branagh, known for serious work for small audiences; Carice van Houten and Halina Reijn struggling to escape the artistic limitations imposed upon their gender; others young actors just starting out—knew that they wanted to have a serious conversation about what it means for us to live as citizens in our world today.
Therefore the critics largely hate it, especially because Valkyrie was made by a popular director and a popular star for a popular audience. For Valkyrie trusts its viewers to watch and listen, then go home asking: What do they mean? And then engage in an act of moral and intellectual imagination, based upon fact, not fantasy, to develop and use the answer, in our public and personal lives. How dared they? you can almost hear the critics demand, baffled and afraid.
Because this is a movie that shuns the coarse, the ignorant, the base, the vulgar and the trivial. This is a popular movie offering pure quality, rejecting the common intellectual—the common American—belief that the way to make money is to feed people garbage for their bodies and garbage for their souls.
Valkyrie is not the first time the "guardians" of popular culture have turned away from a masterpiece set in the military realm that has implications—moral or political—far beyond the military.
An enormous number of people across the political spectrum were delighted to dismiss Admiral James Bond Stockdale, Ross Perot's 1992 running mate, as a doddering old man whose hearing aid had cut out. Stockdale was not only a military hero who had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for helping American POWs maintain their self-respect under the most degrading of conditions in the Hanoi Hilton, he was a genuine Stoic philosopher. Had we taken Stockdale seriously as a Vice-Presidential candidate, we might have had to take him seriously as a philosopher whose writings were as applicable to our ordinary lives as to his extraordinary one. Likewise, Ike: Countdown to D-Day is a stunning film, full of extraordinary acting, the best of which is Tom Selleck's amazing, masterful performance as General Eisenhower. Ike is all about the moral weight of high command and the relationships—emotional, intellectual, political—amongst the men who must make those decisions. Combat and its human consequences are the constant theme of the movie, yet the pornography of violence is thankfully absent, and for this, the critics hated it.
I am personally familiar with this response: in 2004 and 2005, I went to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I was embedded with combat troops, in order to write Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military (Seal Press, 2006). I began by examining what US servicewomen are really doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. I ended by considering what it means to be a woman and an American citizen in the tradition of the Republican political philosophy of the Founders. This made a lot of people, starting with my publisher, very, very nervous: people will say utterly bizarre, factually untrue, things about the book. But at least people will talk to me about it. Sometimes. I'm currently working on The Doves, a love story set in the Chechen Wars. Most people read a snippet of that and I never hear from them again because my Doves are primarily military personnel, deeply concerned with an issue they're not supposed to worry their pretty little heads about. The individual's right, a right so complete and profound that it is an absolute obligation, to contribute to and preserve civilization. To make judgments, then execute those judgements.
Civilization and its preservation, then, is the great theme of Valkyrie, and the more you admit that Valkyrie the movie speaks to you, the more you must take your measure against the conspirators of Valkyrie, the real life plot to end Hitler's rule. The question is not, what you would have done
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