(NOTE: No, I don't know quite what to make of this one either. It went somewhere I was not expecting, primarily because Tyrone is ceaselessly unexpected. But until I crawl free of my 14 hour writing days, this is what I got for you ...)
John: Civil War re-enactments.
Tyrone: Good Lord, what?
John: At what point do you think we'll finally be able to have Word War Two re-enactments? Groups of American and German enthusiasts getting together for barbecues and mock charges in the Ardennes. American tourists storming the beach at Dunkirk, then falling down on cue when the flashpots go off. Japanese and American week-enders with period flamethrowers on Iwo Jima.
Tyrone: About ten more years. Got to wait until all the real veterans of the war are dead. Then the pretend veterans can get to work. (pause) You know, you go buy yourself some land now, you can get in on the ground floor of the WW II re-enactment boom. And schools will bring tours of kids - I think you have a real money machine here.
John: What about Vietnam?
Tyrone: No, we lost that one.
John: But the South lost the Civil War!
Tyrone: But America won, so it's okay. Or at least I think that's the rationale.
John: So there's nothing to stop the Vietnamese, however, from starting their own re-enactment fetish.
Tyrone: I smell franchise.
John: Where will they get the American participants?
Tyrone: There are plenty of actors that'll take any job.
John: But that doesn't count. That's just my point, actually -- what makes the re-enactment fetish creepy is the amateur/hobbyists status of the participants. I think, maybe, we're already doing professional WW II re-enactments by proxy, in videogames and in movies, but there's something so magnificently creepy about the dress-up/fall-down/beer and burger mix to the weekends.
Tyrone: Money. Machine.
John: Pretending to be gutshot for fun on Omaha Beach, or pretending to be gutshot for fun at Gettysburg -- I know that one is morally unspeakable, and for some reason I agree that the other is socially acceptable, but for the life of me I cannot see the difference.
Tyrone: The difference is ten more years.
John: I don't think I want to live in the future.
Tyrone: Move to Alabama. It won't be a problem.
53 comments:
I think you're on to something with the video game re-enactments. Who wants to go outside and get dirty and risk social interaction when you can just pretend to kill Nazis and Japanese soldiers in the comfort of your own home.
Since WWII re-enactments are morally unspeakable, as you say, but Civil War ones are okay...what about Civil War video games? Would those be acceptable?
Incidentally, when you say 14 hour writing days, how much of that day is actually spent typing? Not trying to be snarky. Just curious about the thinking-to-writing ratio.
Hate to tell you this, but Vietnam War reenactments are already taking place in the United States.
WWII re-enactments go on all the time. Not on Iwo or at Caen, but that's a long way to shlep.
Last summer, I went to two airshows. At the first, in Geneseo, N.Y., they had two encampments of re-enactors, one Allied, one German (I guess the Italians aren't cool enough). The second airshow, near Ottawa, had a mock battle between a Canadian platoon with Universal Carrier and 6pdr against a German position with a PaK 38.
As you might guess, I do my share of WWII gaming. As part of that, I've met famous pilots like Gabby Gabreski, Franz Stigler, and others at gaming conventions. They may think we're a bit odd, but they respect the respect we have and display, and appreciate it.
Don;t forget the Superbowl episode of Grey's Anatomy and its bazooka-pierced re-enactor.
See, that's what's curious. I'm an avid strategy gamer - in fact, one of the weirdest moments I've had as realizing in Operational Art of War that I'd found my grandfather's unit in the Ardennes campaign, and spent two weeks desperately trying to get him out fo the assualt that he damn near died in. And failing, by the way.
A bit of a jump from that to dressing up and rolling around on the sand, though. And air shows are different -- showcasing specific flying skills and tactics is different than marching in a field ...
... or is it? As I said, I offer this one as is. I'm not sure if I even figured out what was bothering me, or the inherent contradictions in my own attitudes. But there's a nub of something there.
And for 14 hour days, this late in the stretch, it's almost precisely 48 minutes an hour typing/rewriting. I use a timer. An hour off for each meal.
sickest thing i ever saw on ebay were mock-up zyklon b cannisters, which, according to the post, were "...great for historical re-enactors." i'm not making this up.
re-enactors?? i mean, what the fuck?!?
What about WW1 - the war to end all wars? Are there re-enactments of that? Are there even video games for that? I know trench warfare isn't exactly appealing to most of us, but is there a hardcore group of people out there fighting the Kaiser?
I'm waiting for them to re-enact the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima.
Yup, WWII re-enactments are pretty prevalent and can become quite involved. I know of groups owning Shermans, half-tracks, and even a Tiger just to use in re-enactments.
Some of these groups are extremely good at what they do and are often asked to take part in shows for the History or Military channel. The group one guy I know is in even appeared in Band of Brothers. They're a great asset in that you not only get extremely competent extras but also a group of experts to advise you.
I'd also add that the majority of the people that do WWII re-enactments do it out of a love for history and respect for those that served. They do it to educate and to ensure that anyone that cares to watch it will not forget the sacrifices those men made.
So if you were looking for an inherent contradiction, ask yourself this: Is it creepier or less socially acceptable to sit around in your underwear playing general or grunt purely for your fun and entertainment than to put on a uniform and recreate a battle with the motivation of educating and paying respect for their ancestor's sacrifices? You justify WWII movies by saying they're "professional re-enactments" and therefore more acceptable when 95% of the time Hollywood gets it completely wrong. These re-enactors roll their eyes and laugh at how wrong most movies get it, yet they're the amateurs? How so? Because they don't profit or make a living from it? These are they guys Hollywood hires to consult them when authenticity is of concern.
Perhaps you should look towards motivation before other arguments.
I smell franchise.
Tyrone: Move to Alabama. It won't be a problem.
Damn straight. I reached temporal escape velocity from that sucking anomaly the better part of a decade ago, and I'm still trying to explain to my family what moving to the future is like.
We didn't even get the good 50s, where smartly-dressed chaps in gray suits and fedoras strut around with an almost disturbingly cheerful look about them, certain that Men of Science would soon answer all the Important Questions, likely in the form of something Atomic, and where nobody bothers to lock their doors at night because it's just That Sort of Place.
Nope, we got crack and smack and crime and teen pregnancy and the same general putative decay of civilization as everyplace else, only Southerners have the luxury of sitting around blaming That Other Race (for either value of That Other Race) for not trying to make things better, and pretty much both agreeing that the real solution is to sit around and wait for Jesus to fix it.
Regardless, nowadays I internally breathe a little sigh of relief every time I try to fess up that I'm from "The South" and somebody says, "San Diego?"
Interesting perspective on a weird social activity in the US. Civil war re-enactors are like grown up kids who still want to play guns. I don't get it. Maybe you have to be a conservative republican to grok the concept. They like guns. . . you know, the whole "out of my cold dead hands" Charlton Heston speech!
These re-enactors roll their eyes and laugh at how wrong most movies get it, yet they're the amateurs? How so? Because they don't profit or make a living from it? These are they guys Hollywood hires to consult them when authenticity is of concern.
Perhaps you should look towards motivation before other arguments.
That may well be what's bugging me about this. Motivation seems to be all. Where is the line between glorifying war and honoring warriors?
Also, there's something interesting about the difference between WW2 movies and re-enactors. I'm a bit too swamped to get into this right now, but one certainly can't point to say Band of Brothers as anything less than a slavishly sincere hagiography. Is each "amateur" (and I certainly don't use that as a perjorative, but strictly in the technical sense) re-enactor creating a personal narrative for each person he's taking the place of in the battlefield? Or are they somehow transposing themselves into that place? Should they do so? Paid actors know that they're playing a part, and only the most offensively indulgent try to get the shine of the role to stick to their real-life persona. How much personal/emotional involvement crosses the line to something ... unseemly? Or does it ever?
And getting back to narrative and meaning - the entire point of a narrative is to invoke emotion (at least, personally), which is one of the reasons I accept artistic license in adapting true life tragedies. Emotion in a war narrative comes from suspension of disbelief, empathy, fear that the character will loose his life. But in a re-enactment, the re-enactors are safe, and the safer the better.
So who's processsing the emotion? Is there a difference between re-enactors with an audience and without one?
I completely get the educational purpose of re-enactment. But there's still something there, underneath ... in a society that seems to be grasping at war as a force that gives us meaning (to steal a phrase), is it symptomatic of some addiction to a heroic ideal rather than heroic actuality? If the purpose of re-enacting is to "make sure that no one forgets the sacrifice of those who served", how do you properly convey that sacrifice without the narrative element of death?
As my old friend Pam raises -- why NOT World War One? Granted, the operative metaphor for WW I is sitting in the mud, then dying after running ten feet -- not so showy. but is there something about how we as a culture perceive the Civil War and World War Two which make them attractive to re-enactments? And if that's true, what does that say about the rationalization that the act is purely for historical preservation?
Again, this one turned out more odd than funny, and I think for the reasons we've explored.
I think part of the reason why Civil War reenactments are as popular as they are is not because the Civil War ended such a long time ago, but rather because in some ways it hasn't entirely ended.
All the southern states used to denounce Memorial Day and they all to this day still celebrate Confederate Memorial Day or Decoration Day. Did the Civil War truly end in 1865 or was it still going on with the Civil Rights battles 100 years later? Ole Miss had to ban flagpoles as a "safety measure" just to prevent Confederate flags frome being waved at football games.
The South is just different... Not better, not worse, just different. While I was reared in the "North" and live in Michigan, politically I'm much more of a Red Stater than Blue. I even have a peculiar fondness for NASCAR and Waffle House. However, as much as I enjoy the South, I keep in the back of my mind that part of that difference called "culture" and "heritage" is a big middle finger pointed up north.
It's an interesting question but one where the answer stretches back millenia. Man has re-enacted great battles probably since we learned how to express it to each other with grunts and motion. Is it a learning experience? Bonding? Celebration? You could make a case for any of those arguments.
Friday night at the Austin Film Festival we were hanging out in the Driskil bar (btw... you should come one year) and were getting ready to go grab a slice down the street. About a dozen people we know come in with their slices shouting animatedly. While they were standing in line for their pizza, two white guys beat the shit out of some black guy right next to them and one of them had tried to break it up.
We listened to them recount their experience, blow by blow, for the next twenty minutes before heading down to get our slices. The cops were there slapping cuffs on the two white guys, the black guy and another being treated in the back of an ambulance. There was a huge crowd still standing around watching. Hell, even Danny Trejo had his back pressed up against the wall one door down from the pizzeria taking it all in with a bit of a smile on his face. By the time we got back, the group that witnessed it was still going on about it. And they'll recount it time and again for years to come. "You remember that time Murray tried to break up that street fight?"
So it doesn't even have to be a war. People recount combat they have witnessed or experienced all the time for any number of reasons.
I'd say that if you boiled it all down you'd reach the conclusion that it's simply storytelling. Some people stand around the water cooler, some write books, others make movies, etc. and some dress up and re-enact wars. All are storytellers but each chooses the medium that suits them.
As far as WWI, I could only speculate. I suppose it is entirely to do with drama. Trench warfare doesn't lend itself to many dramatic moments. You don't see WWI re-enactments just like you don't see WWI war movies concerning ground warfare.
John,
"Granted, the operative metaphor for WW I is sitting in the mud, then dying after running ten feet -- not so showy"
To be fair, that's the metaphor for a lot of Civil War battles, too. Granted, trench warfare wasn't as prevalent, but some of the siege fighting (Vicksburg, to name one, and hell, the siege of Petersburg was 9+ months of trench warfare), was very much like that. I don't know much about CW reenactments, so I don't know if they do anything related to Vicksburg or Petersburg.
And there wasn't a battle that didn't have a group of guys (on both sides) charging a wall of fire and guys not making it 10 feet. Still, that doesn't answer why not WWI.
Maybe, at least in this country, it's because the Civil War was a much more significant event in the cultural consciousness of our nation. And maybe, WWI was very much the same, though psychologically different, in Europe, and perhaps Europe is none-too-quick to relive it. In this country we tend (I think) to have pretty short memories (a lot of us, anyway). Also, someone said we're still fighting the Civil War, and in some ways, I think that's true.
But then there's WWII enactments, and that is even closer in memory, so I don't know what differentiates it. I really don't.
Robert
All the southern states used to denounce Memorial Day and they all to this day still celebrate Confederate Memorial Day or Decoration Day.
I've lived in the south almost all of my life adn I've never heard of CMD or DD so no, we don't all do it.
And regrading reenactment I do think that for the vast majority it's an excuse to dress up and play with guns, not strictly speaking a Republican only desire. I can imagine people who do this laughing at LARPers.
I personally witnessed a civil war reenactment on a field in outer London. And yes, I do mean U.S. civil war. I still don't get how there could be enough U.S. civil war buffs in the UK to stage such a thing.
Also, http://www.amazon.com/CivilWarLand-Bad-Decline-George-Saunders
Band of Brothers a hagiography? Gosh, I just watched it and I was very surprised at how frank they were at showing the human failings of all characters. Not all combatants were perhaps as brave or committed, but we are talking about an elite unit. They show Winters commanding them to fake a patrol report. They show soldiers stealing stuff. They show the sargents undermining the CO. They show prisoners being shot.
By the way, you don't have to be a right winger or a Republican to contemplate becoming a re-enacter of the Civil War. I'm neither, but I'd participate given the opportunity.
The more I learn about the Civil War, the more I come to like many of the men involved. Regardless of side. There are a few that I find despicable, even though talented. (cough)Nathan Bedford Forrest(cough)
WW2 was something the US more or less was forced into, but the Civil War was something we chose to do. So I think it's important to reenact it, to keep the worst battles fresh in our minds, just so we don't go there again.
but is there something about how we as a culture perceive the Civil War and World War Two which make them attractive to re-enactments?
Absolutely.
The Civil War and World War II (and the American Revolution), but not WWI or 1812 or Vietnam or Korea, were Crisis-era wars that transformed (North) American society in large-scale ways for decades to come. There may be Vietnam War re-enactments, but I bet they won't last the way Civil War re-enactments have.
Yeah, I'm an old lefty. When do we get to start doing reenactments of Chicago '68?
As someone who has done one re-enactment, and have two good friends who do them on a regular basis:
It is an excuse to play dress up and make lots of things go boom. (The people who do it wouldn't laugh at LARPers, for they are generally not the people who know what LARPing is, although they are, in fact, doing just that.)
However, there have been re-enactments of all sorts of Civil War battles for a LONG time in this country. Even while there were veterans still alive. The joke a lot of the re-enactors make is that they look more like the veterans/re-enactors of the Civil War in the 1900s and 1910s than the veterans while they were actually fighting the battles (a good deal of the soldiers then were hardly older than 16 or 17, which was also true of WWII, for that matter).
For some, it is a way to refight these battles so that the South might win this time. For others (my friends included) they are just really into American History of that time period.
And I think Matthew e is right. The Civil War and WWII made DRASTIC changes on American society in ways that WWI didn't and that Vietnam only sort of did (and since we lost that one, we'll just rely on Rambo II to feel better about ourselves.)
The ww2 re-enactors often use Army training grounds - sometimes at the same time as the Army is using them. It is difficult to overestimate the weirdness of leading your patrol through a wood at night and having to go to ground and box around because there are some Panzer Grenadiers having a quick cup of coffee with the 101st Airborne twenty metres in front of you.
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