Thursday, January 21, 2010
In The Valley of Elah
Best Buy has deep-discounted this movie so I picked it up as it relates to The Hurt Locker and Stop-Loss.
This is a movie in which the chief character appears only in flashback. His father, Hank Deerfield spends the movie’s entire two hours searching for his son just returned from Bosnia. Being an army brat it seems in no way prepares one for the traumas of the real thing.
Just how indoctrinated and obsessive Hank is gets brought home emphatically when he checks into a motel and precedes to remake the bed in proper military fashion.
As with the afore-mentioned movies this one again is about post traumatic stress syndrome and the toll it exacts not just on the soldiers who serve in war zones but the poeple around them when they return and in particular their families and loved ones. It has been posited that the after-care of troops commited to war zones will be at least twice the cost of waging the engagement in the first place. At that rate the price of America’s present wars will be twelve trillion dollars over the next forty years. The price of neglecting to provide that care would be even greater. And as this movie demonstrates the costs spill over into society at large. There is an awful cost in human terms in forcing soldiers to adapt to inhuman circumstances.
The movie was intended and succeeds in making an audience feel uncomfortable. Those such as myself who have never experienced battlefield conditions could not possibly understand the mental and psychological stresses that led to the acts that are here-in revealed. Again, I say, the costs of war continue long after the wars are over. I, for one, question whether those costs can be justified on any terms.
# posted by garthmailman@gmail.com @ 1:47 pm 
