Introduction:

Famed director Steven Spielberg once stated that “every war movie, good or bad, is an anti-war movie,” implying that war is so horrendous that every depiction of it is intrinsically anti-war.  Unfortunately, his assertion ignores a prevalence of film which overtly glorifies violence, or simply fails to adequately convey antiwar messaging to its audiences.  The difficulty of responsibly depicting mass violence may have been more accurately articulated by filmmaker François Truffaut, who asserted that “there is no such thing as an antiwar film.”  Given such disparate opinions, we have to break down the initial question “What is an antiwar film?”  The word “War” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country,” so the simple answer would be that an antiwar film opposes that form of conflict.

But of course, the real answer is not so simple.  War itself encompasses far more than just “armed conflict.”  It is a collective state of hatred and violence, and in war, there is collective trauma.  There is collective suffering. There is mass murder and death.  Likewise, for a film to functionally oppose war, a filmmaker cannot just state that opinion in the film.  It requires, at a minimum, opposition to the vast majority of smaller forms of violence as well.  Thus effective antiwar film should just as easily be referred to antiviolence film.  Further, as a film exposes itself to a variety of audiences, realistically many might leave with a pro-war interpretation.  Is a film it still “antiwar” then?  These considerations all combine to form the central question that I will be exploring in this paper –  Given that narrative film is a medium that leaves the final determination of meaning to the audience, is it even possible for filmmakers to broadly encode antiwar messaging?  And if so, what are the strategies that help ensure this messaging

Literature Review and Methods:

My research methods revolved around my viewing of three films which, as stated by their directors, attempted to encode antiwar messaging – Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, Come and See.  During my repeated viewings, I evaluated them on partially on their inclusion of antiwar narrative strategies listed by film studies professor Dennis Rothermel in his work “Anti-War War Film”, in addition to suggestions in the research article “Is there any such thing as an anti-war film” by Tom Brook.  Rothermel’s criteria recommends that directors “depict war as experienced by soldiers who endure fear, horror, injury [etc.]…, show how soldiers never acquire a clear sense of purpose… of the war… show how the culture of a nation contributes to the eagerness that young men exhibit for war… avoid fixing blame… upon individuals, nations, or institutions” in addition to nine other specifications.  Generally his work focused on how a film’s narrative can more accurately depict the plight of a soldier (Rothermel 2007 80-95).  Tom Brook’s article also cites, among similar suggestions, professor Sheril Antonio hope that a film should “show both sides” of the conflict (Brook 2014).  With these suggestions in hand, I began my viewings, taking note of the criteria in relation to my own notes and subjective feelings, which I felt would just as strongly inform my evaluations.

For issues that I will elaborate upon in my analysis, I found my intial criteria did not even begin to cover the overall experience of these films, having been focused so heavily on accuracy of soldiers’ narratives and other explicitly textual elements.  The film Come and See notably did not focus on a soldier narrative nor were the textual recommendations useful for describing many elements of the film.  Additionally, Brook’s article reported that even the films that passed Rothermel’s criteria, such as Full Metal Jacket, were criticized for potentially leaving a seductive impression of “wartime combat” on “teenage boys” (Brook 2014).  This phenomenon of young boys finding enjoyment in violence also extended to Apocalypse Now, despite its brutal portrayal of the soldier experience.  The film Jarhead famously included a scene wherein U.S. Marines found intense enjoyment in watching Apocalypse Now for its violence.  Given this information, I concluded that I would need to develop new criteria which reflected this potential for an audience interpretation that endorsed violence.  Thus, I developed my own theories, based on notes from each film, for why Come and See seemed effective while the others were not.  This was combined with a broader research base that varied from studies on violent media in relation to aggression to psychological studies on empathy.

Studies into the potential effects of violent media on its users have never boded well for proponents of “responsible depiction.”  One study entitled “Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults” found that, upon exposure to violent media, many adults will experience strong feelings of aggression due to “prior existence of a well-encoded network of aggressive scripts, beliefs, and schemas” (Bushman et al 2006).  This effect is even more pronounced than in children, at least in the short term.  In the long term, the study “Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence” discovered in a study that sampled college students, that those with medium to high levels of past exposure to movie violence experienced some physiological desensitization (Mrug et al 2015).

Beyond exclusively violent media, other academic works research the various forms of emotional responses with which audiences may respond to the language of narrative film.  Keith Oatley, in his work “How Cues on the Screen Prompt Emotions in the Mind,” describes how film attempts to guide an audience’s emotional response by portraying a number of thematic cues.  “When a schema is invoked by a cue, we project our schema (our understanding of love, fear, angry conflict, or whatever it might be) onto the scene,” imagining how we would respond had we been in the story ourselves.  This imagining is guided by the filmmaker’s use of shot juxtaposition, which in effect is “a suggested progression through a series of the audience member’s emotions” (Oatley 2013).  Carl Plantinga’s “The Affective Power of Movies” detailed how audiences will often develop allegiances to certain characters, often to the point of experiencing “projection: the desire to emulate a character, typically incorporating both strong sympathy and allegiance, but extending to cognitive and affective activities and responses beyond the viewing experience.”  Ultimately, filmmakers may try to manipulate with whom an audience emotionally align themselves, but this response is, in the end, left to the viewer’s bias (Plantinga 2013).

However, filmmakers have developed quite effective methods for directing the audience’s empathic response, which follows along the guidelines of empathy development.  First, by depicting a world as experienced by the protagonist, the filmmaker invites us to partake in what psychologists Erie and Topolinski call “visuospatial perspective-taking” or imagining ourselves in another’s visual circumstances.  Their research also suggests that this visual process is an effective stepping stone to psychological perspective taking i.e. imagining how that person thinks (Erie et al 2017).  Other film strategies for invoking empathy include the close up shot on a person’s face, which may prompt an audience’s psychological response of emotional mimicry. The paper “Emotional mimicry signals pain empathy as evidenced by facial electromyography,” suggests that, in particular relevance to antiwar film, seeing another person’s face in pain prompts a mimicked reaction, implied to be an indicator of the empathic process (Sun et al 2015).

With this new information, I revisited each film, checking specifically for severity of depictions of violence, which we’ve noted can have a desensitizing or aggression invoking effect.  Additionally, I looked for close up shots and shots that seemed invite taking a visuospatial perspective.  Finally, given that audiences will often project themselves onto the main protagonist, I asked myself about the psychological and moral implications of empathizing with those characters’ experiences.

Results and Analysis:

Spielberg’s assumption about war film’s innate antiwar messaging manifests itself in the more problematic elements of his film, Saving Private Ryan.  While purportedly an antiwar film, Spielberg’s grimy portrayal of an ill-fated WWII rescue mission by American soldiers contains several textual elements that undermine its intent.  Take for example the film’s bridge battle scene; though we as an audience, feel for the death of each American soldier, the battle itself is dramatized as a sort of last stand, generating cinematic excitement and violent catharsis rather than dread.  Or note the final moments of the film, wherein Ryan, our secondary protagonist, does a military salute to his fallen comrades, and then the film fades to black on a shot of an American flag as uplifting stringed ensembles play.  This finale leaves audiences with a confusingly jingoistic impression of the violence depicted, tying the soldier’s personal struggle to a romantic image of the entire U.S. army.  The film’s attempt to balance Hollywood entertainment value and the realistic horror of war fell on the side of the former.

To his credit, Spielberg went to great lengths to depict battlefield violence in a realistic manner.  The camera work is disorienting, the battle scenes are hyper realistic, and characters demonstrably experience real trauma.  The film itself follows an Army captain, whose visual perspective the camera often takes, followed by close-ups of his shocked reaction.  This invites the audience to take the perspective of a soldier traumatized by the violence of war and guides them to an empathetic response.  However, the graphic violence itself, while shown to be traumatic to our main character, is often depicted as a one-sided tragedy.  There are scenes that depict the emotional perspective of a German, but generally there is little emotional weight placed on their  deaths.  This may mirror the experience of the American soldier, who were not supposed to empathize with the enemy, but that fact reveals a shortcoming of military based war film.  By adopting the mindset of the dutiful soldier, the viewer can certainly empathize with the trauma of his experience, but without other textual measures, they also adopt the perspective of a person trained to kill without empathy.

Similar textual and subtextual problems revealed themselves during my viewings of Apocalypse Now.  The film acts as a satire of the U.S.’s role in the Vietnam by placing the audience in the mind of a soldier driven to madness by a mission.  However, the film runs into a problem intrinsic to satire, namely the fact that if you aren’t aware of the central conceit, the film opens itself to wildly disparate interpretation.  This problem might explain the aforementioned Jarhead situation, wherein it was used as pro-war military propaganda, directly undermining its antiwar intent.  The film depicted violence against Vietnamese people without explicit criticism, so it failed to challenge some pre-held notions of its audience.  Additionally, from a narrative standpoint the film failed to account for the fact that “madness” is often romanticized in American culture, so the close-up shots of the increasingly violent protagonist have little deescalating effect.   Dangerously they may even encourage a similar violent mindset, as per the mimicry response to close ups.  The film never places its audience into the perspective of the Vietnamese victims, leaving viewers to wallow in the mindset of a soldier who is explicitly desensitized to the violence.  Nothing about the film conveys empathy.  It unwisely assumes its audiences are already empathizing with the invaded population, and as a result, leaves them vulnerable to further dehumanization by the film’s viewers.

The final film on my viewing list, Elem Klimov’s Come and See, does not follow the typical antiwar formula.  Rather than conveying the plight of a soldier, it explicitly invites its audience to not only see, but project themselves into the horrific experience of a child in war.  Textually, the film’s narrative has an expressly antiwar message, portraying the horrific experience of a fourteen-year-old Belarusian boy Florya’s at the hands of Nazis.  The audience sees his starting position as a boy with romantic notions of joining the Red Army.  But once the war actually arrives at his doorstep, his perspective of violence changes from romantic notion to legitimate horror.  His village and family are massacred, his attempts to help the partisans are brutally cut short as his friends die seemingly at random, and he ends up the sole survivor of a village that is burnt to the ground, without ever getting the chance to fire a shot.  In this film, the costs of war to the innocent are devastatingly apparent.

After his victimization at the hands of Nazis, the film’s climax dangles the possibility for Florya, and by extension the audience, to experience vengeful catharis.

Upon the offscreen capture of many of the most prominent Nazi characters, the commander of the partisan forces asks three different soldiers to explain their actions, each providing a different story.  “We are not facists.  We were forced to fight” says one.  “I have never harmed anyone.  I wish to see my family again” says a medic, followed by the most disturbingly fanatical soldier asserting “some nations don’t have the right to exist.”  The commander, as well as a Red Army soldier, try to use their justifications to motivate the devastated villagers to enact revenge against the Nazis.  Florya offers them a can of oil, which one Polish Nazi proceeds to pour on his former comrades.  Florya, for the first time, receives the opportunity to kill his victimizers.  Yet before he can light the flame, a woman villager screams “enough” and firing a gun directly at the prisoners, sparing them from being burned alive.  The film denies the devastated Florya and the audience, their attempt to recapitulate sadistic violence against even the most “deserving.”  Every act of violence comes with the full emotional weight of its consequences, no matter the target.

After this scene, Florya finds a framed photo of Hitler floating just above the surface, and Florya, enraged, unloads his gun into the image.  He fires over and over at the photo, and the film then juxtaposes his face with a montage of Hitler’s rise to power in reverse.  From the initial invasion, to the Nazi rallies, to Hitler in the military, Florya continues to fire upon the frame, until finally we reach an image of Hitler as a child and then a baby.  Florya stops.  The film zooms in on a close up of the baby’s face and cuts back to Florya’s.  They look similar.  Florya lowers his gun, seemingly disgusted with himself.  Again, Klimov dangled the possibility of catharsis for us, and followed up by damning that very inclination.  The film justifies self-defense, but clearly implies that even the most horrific humans, even Hitler, cannot ethically become an outlet for vengeful sadism, lest we become like them.

Subtextually, Come and See matches its intended messaging far better than most other antiwar film.  The music, color schemes, cinematography, and setting get progressively more disgusting as war’s violence rears its head in Florya’s life, allowing no real entertainment value. However, unlike most war movies, explicit violence is rarely depicted on screen.  There are no battles, avoiding the pitfalls of desensitization.  Instead much of the cinematography focuses on the increasingly pained face of the young Florya, invoking the natural empathetic mimicry that comes from viewing others in pain.  This framing begs we empathize with an innocent person viewing violence but spares us from seeing the graphic horror for ourselves.  Thus the film avoids prompting the potentially short term aggression that comes with viewing violent media, as per the Bushman study.

Additionally, because Florya never actually adopts the soldier mindset, it avoids the pitfalls of allowing a potentially violent audience to project themselves into the role of violent actors.  Instead it projects the audience solely into the victims of violence and frames them in a manner that matches their emotional experience.  And in forcing the viewer to visually empathize with the face an infant Hitler, using the same facial mimicry as for Florya, it names violent inclinations in all of us itself as the primary antagonist.

Significance:

At the risk of revealing my personal politics, I must preemptively state my stance in opposition to war.  Additionally, it is my belief that we are at a historical point wherein, the world may witness a rapid resurgence in extreme violence as a result from global instability caused by climate change and refugee crises.  Given these positions, the importance of artistic messaging for peace cannot be understated.  Every communicative medium has the ability to promote this message, but film is uniquely privileged in its ability to combine visual, audio, and timed sequencing, evoking meaningful and lasting emotions in an audience.  As such, filmmakers taking on this important role have a responsibility to ensure their work stays true to intent.

With the rise of the unregulated internet and exposure to violent media at an all time high, I worry that young people with high levels of exposure to this media may be more vulnerable to the normalization of violence.  But I also believe in the power of media to have a positive effect on its users, provided they have the analysis tools to break down it down.  Violence in media, even when shown with the most positive intentions, can so easily backfire and cause harm.  Come and See is an incredibly strong example of of visual art that considers the potential negative consequences of depicting such sensitive subject matter.  It stays true to the goal of condemning violence, and even more importantly, imparting empathy for the most terribly victimized.

Unfortunately, I cannot see film’s like Come and See being created with any level of c0nsistancy soon, at least in American studios.  While this film was incredibly popular with those who experienced the pains of Nazi occupation, it made little headway in the United States.  The experience of an antagonistic occupation is foreign to most Americans.  Additionally, Hollywood today tends to demand entertainment value over critical substance, often with the cost of negative messaging. But the U.S. is seeing a rapid resurgence of violent right-wing politics today, and the film’s warning about collectively adopting that hateful mindset needs to be imparted in some way.  Though the Come and See itself will likely not make a resurgence, due to its age, subject matter and foreign language, the lessons from each of these films’ successes and failures should be of critical importance to antiwar communicators.

Conclusion:

When considering how to dissect “antiwar” film, one cannot simply consider the filmmaker’s intention or the explicit textual elements.  The language of film goes far deeper than screenplay.  The decision of whose stories are told is just as important as the stories themselves.  As real audiences’ interpretations of these films demonstrate, antiviolence is an incredibly difficult message to impart in film.  Even if a filmmaker ensures that not a single positive thing is said about war or violence, a film may still unintentionally impart the violent mindset of a violent character.  It may invoke the same desensitization to violence the filmmaker explicitly condemned.  And, most dangerously, it may accidentally frame violence in a manner that inspires similar violent behavior in the audience.  To responsibly encode antiviolence into a film, every textual and subtexual choice must be consistent with that intension.

According to Elem Klimov, the original title of Come and See was going to be “Kill Hitler.”  It is difficult to imagine film with that title could be antiwar, given its apparent call for violence.  However, Klimov once elaborated on his speculative title, stating “the goal of this film is to kill Hitler, not the person, but the idea.  That everyone should kill the Hitler in themselves.”  In its final moments, Come and See begs the question “would you kill Hitler as a child, as he did to other children.”  The response provided by Florya is no.  Florya who in his traumatic rage had every conceivable motivation to enact revenge, saw the face of a potential victim, and could not fire the final shot. Antiwar film will likely never convince everyone to oppose violence, but films like Come and See demonstrate that the most effective antiwar visual strategy is not encoding the message “war is horrific.”  The most effective strategy is encoding the message of “why war is horrific,” and that requires an incredibly amount of empathy, even for those that lack it themselves.  Humans have the programmed capabilities to both empathize and to commit violence.  If filmmakers want consistent messaging, they can choose to impart only one in their films.

References:

Bertrand, P., Guegan, J., Robieux, L., Mccall, C. A., & Zenasni, F. (2018). Learning Empathy Through Virtual Reality: Multiple Strategies for Training Empathy-Related Abilities Using Body Ownership Illusions in Embodied Virtual Reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5. doi:10.3389/frobt.2018.00026

Brook, T. (2014, July 10). Culture – Is there any such thing as an ‘anti-war film’? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140710-can-a-film-be-truly-anti-war

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2006). Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 160(4), 348. doi:10.1001/archpedi.160.4.348

Erle, T. M., & Topolinski, S. (2017). The grounded nature of psychological perspective-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(5), 683-695. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uoregon.edu/10.1037/pspa0000081

Mrug, S., Madan, A., Cook, E. W., & Wright, R. A. (2014). Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 44(5), 1092-1108. doi:10.1007/s10964-014-0202-z

Oatley, K. (2013). How Cues on the Screen Prompt Emotions in the Mind. Psychocinematics, 269-284. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862139.003.0014

Plantinga, C. (2013). The Affective Power of Movies. Psychocinematics, 94-112. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862139.003.0005

Rothermel, D. (2010). Anti-War War Films. 75-109. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/281326/Anti-War_War_Films

Sun, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, J., & Luo, F. (2015). Emotional mimicry signals pain empathy as evidenced by facial electromyography. Scientific Reports, 5(1). doi:10.1038/srep16988

In our current era of media specialization, where television series cater to smaller niche audiences, few comedy programs have reached any significant level of cultural prominence in America.  No modern comedies have quite reached the same level of mass cultural appeal as Seinfeld or The Cosby Show, nor shape culture in the same manner as those programs.  However, the modern allowance for specialized humor has allowed many series to flourish despite not resembling the traditional sitcom formula; series that appeal to a young Americans who have grown up in conditions wildly different than any generation before it.  For proof of this phenomenon we do not need to look any further than the current top rated comedy among people under 34 in America, Rick and Morty.

The brainchild of showrunners Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, Rick and Morty follows the sci-fi misadventures of alcoholic mad-scientist, Rick, considered the smartest man in the universe, and his average, teenage nephew, Morty.  The show mimics the typical family sitcom formula by centering around the unremarkable middle-class Smith family, which also includes the father, Jerry, mother, Beth, and teenage sister, Summer.  But unlike the typical sitcom, Rick and Morty is irreverent, violent, black-humored and, above all else, cynical.  Drawing from the sci-fi traditions of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, which “emphasizes the terror of that which is outside our grasp to comprehend,” a typical Rick and Morty episode will pose some version of the question “what gives life meaning,” allow its protagonists to explore some possible answer, before returning to the unceremoniously absurd conclusion that their lives are insignificant.

A running motif within Rick and Morty is its brutally uncaring universe, a longstanding trope of cosmic horror but a radically new addition to mainstream American culture.  In addition to the culture of American exceptionalism, the post-WWII economic benefits in the United Sates allowed for a sense of optimism that permeated until the end of the century.  However, as other nations have developed their economies in the globalized markets, the United States has lost its advantage.  In S1E6, Close Encounters of the Rick Kind, Morty learns that there are infinite versions of him across multiple universes and that Mortys are generally considered disposable by their uncles.  Morty’s realization mirrors that of many young Americans whose lived experience directly contradicted the exceptionalist narrative.  Following the Great Recession, younger Americans, fed a narrative that a degree meant a fulfilling job, often found themselves unemployed or valued very little by downsizing corporations.  Unlike older white Americans, millennials were the first in the television era to collectively experience the uncaring nature of global Capitalism.

Though the show’s main protagonist, Rick, suggests nihilism as a response to politics, the series’ most acclaimed episode to date, S3E7 The Ricklantis Mix-up, suggests that pessimism is the main draw.  A bottle episode, The Ricklantis Mix-up focuses on a distant planetary civilization constituted of exclusively Ricks and Mortys.  Their society is revealed to have alienated workers, corrupt cops, oligarchical capitalism, spectacle elections, and immense poverty.  There is even a group of soon-to-graduate Mortys who do not have faith that their lives will improve upon exiting school.  This is clearly coded as unjust by the episode’s narrative, betraying a progressive political core of the show’s writers.  Distinct from a show like Seinfeld, which does not suggest an underlying moral ideology, Rick and Morty seems to assume its viewership cares about injustice but are also cynical toward existing political structures.  This assumption reflects the known political attitudes of young people, who are generally progressive but are not likely to vote.

To further understand how Rick and Morty appeal to younger Americans, we must examine the shows ties to internet culture.  To many older Americans, the show’s dark humor and extreme violence may offend, disturb, or even traumatize.  However, these elements rarely can surprise anyone who grew up with the internet.  The internet not only reflects much of humanity’s strangest, most bigoted, and most violent impulses, much of that behavior is even favored by major site algorithms to the point that almost young people have some internet horror story. The character, Summer Smith, encapsulates this experience after her mother complains about young people being coddled, retorting “bitch, my generation gets traumatized for breakfast.”  Also a radically bold departure from the sitcom formula, the show makes frequent references to and jokes about depression and suicide.  Rick, whose nonsensical catchphrase is said to mean “I am in great pain,” is in a continuing state of depression and once attempts to kill himself.  While suicide and mental health have generally been taboos to Americans, Rick and Morty reflects a very recent shift by young people in removing that stigma, often through internet meme humor. This may be due to the collective, though mostly hidden, anxiety that life in America is slowly getting worse.

A show like Rick and Morty, which seemingly mocks the traditional sensibilities of Americans (religion, optimism, corporatism, etc.), could not had such positive reception without a major shift in the national culture.  The writers can only suggest that its audience reject those values, but what caused such a massive group of young people to accept their offer?  As previously established, much of the millennial generation may be economically worse off than their parents, or downwardly mobile.  A study by Stijin Daenekindt seems to suggest that moving downward socially may increase people’s “social disorientation,” or confusion regarding their circumstances and “individual utilitarianism,” or rejection of social structures towards individualism.  This may not only imply that downwardly mobile people are more likely to question their society’s beliefs, but also that they are more likely to focus on their individual happiness out of cynicism.  This exact shift is also evident in a similarly cynical art movement, Dadaism.  “Dada was born out of World War I and embraced a philosophy of rejecting societal views of progress and rationalism defined by technological advancement.”  Following Dada’s example, many German middle-class youth rejected the horror of politics, war and science, and instead looked inward for meaning.  In line with than rejection, Rick doesn’t use his own technology for societal advancement so much as his own intense drug use and personal entertainment.   And millions of young Americans, disgusted by the effect’s recession and political stagnation, have delighted in Rick and Morty’s model.

American television, and its culture at large, has always promised its youth that their lives would be better than their parents.  And until the late 2000s, that promise always seemed feasible.  But as young Americans have woken up to the new economic, environmental, and social state of being, that promise has become a source of anxiety rather than hope.  As products of an individualistic culture, to not make due on that expectation seemed like a point of personal failure, no matter the surrounding circumstances.  Rick and Morty resonates with young people because it rejects the traditional model of meaning, in addition to almost all others.

In S1E8 Rixty Minutes, Summer falls into a state of a panic.  She has just discovered her parents very nearly aborted her, and now she is unsure of her place, her concept of self, her life’s meaning.  Morty takes the moment to reassure her:

“Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”  Every young person watching joins in the collective sigh of relief.

Bibliography

Bauer, Jared. “The Philosophy of Rick and Morty – Wisecrack Edition”. Filmed December 2015. YouTube video, 17:38. Posted December 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWFDHynfl1E.

Bridle, James. “Something Is Wrong on the Internet – James Bridle – Medium.” Medium. November 06, 2017. https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2.

Daenekindt, Stijn. “The Experience of Social Mobility: Social Isolation, Utilitarian Individualism, and Social Disorientation.” Social Indicators Research 133, no. 1 (2016): 15-30. doi:10.1007/s11205-016-1369-3.

Lorenz, Taylor. “Why Does Everyone on the Internet Want to Die? How Suicide Memes Took over the Web.” Mic, Mic Network Inc., 11 July 2017, mic.com/articles/181752/why-does-everyone-on-the-internet-want-to-die-how-death-memes-took-over-the-web#.yhCUxw4cX.

Sironi, Maria. “Economic Conditions of Young Adults Before and After the Great Recession.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 39, no. 1 (2017): 103-16. October 2017. doi:10.1007/s10834-017-9554-3.

Kirshner-Breen, Stanley. “Dadaism and The Rejection of Reason – Stanley Kirshner-Breen – Medium.” Medium. August 03, 2017. https://medium.com/@kbreenconsulting/dadaism-and-the-rejection-of-reason-7ce4bd8c26f6

Abstract:

In recent historical assessments of genders’ role on both sixties collegiate antiwar activism and Second-wave feminism in the United States, some have postulated a causal relationship between the two movements. Specifically, certain historians have theorized that the combination of women’s frustration with antiwar groups’ behavior and the New Left’s proliferation of oppression-based analysis contributed to the rapid rise of Second-wave feminism at the turn of the decade. This paper expands on this theory, which to this point has only examined national trends, by demonstrating in depth how this relationship operated, on a single college campus University of Oregon. Employing diverse source materials, ranging from student diaries and notes to public op-eds, club documents, and press materials, this paper reconstructs the narrative of exclusion faced by two groups of antiwar women: non-activists with antiwar sympathies and the activists of the New Left. The New Left alienated the former through their liberal drug use, “free love” hypersexuality, and increasingly violent tactics and the latter through gender based work assignments, limited leadership opportunities, and lack of care for female centric issues. While female alienation curbed the effectiveness of UO antiwar activism, it spread amongst the female student body a subconscious awareness of gender oppression, whose confrontation only required the arrival of its name. Upon arming themselves with a framework of their own oppression, UO Second-wave feminists set reformative goals that not only addressed sexism on campus, but the discrimination women faced within UO New Left organizations.

Gender and University of Oregon Campus Life in the 1960s

While University of Oregon had achieved balanced gender representation in its undergraduate student body by the early sixties, a combination of campus policy and implicit societal expectations segregated UO down gendered lines. On-campus housing, which by 1966 sheltered 47% of female students, had policies mandating all student dormitories be exclusive to one’s own sex. This policy extended to every UO accredited student organization, with the exception of student council, which fluctuated one and two female members. Major department selection, while not gendered in legal writing, fell into traps of stereotypical gender roles. Female students gravitated in mass towards education, nursing, and art, while male students constituted the near entirety of liberal arts and business departments. This issue only worsened at the staff level, with an vastly underrepresented female faculty, six entirely male taught liberal arts departments, and only one female represented in the UO administration. Due to this extreme separation, male students rarely, if ever, encountered women holding positions of power, showcases of female student intellect, work requiring cooperation with women, nor women in a casual environment.

Modern analysis of one particular student’s publication reveals the separation dynamic’s resulting culture of gender disconnect, and further defaults to female objectification and body shaming. In 1964, the Daily Emerald published male student, Stephen Green’s, letter-to-the-editor that expressed his feelings campus dress standards, specifically that of female students:
“While enjoying [campus dinning] … 250 pounds of co-ed oozed past my table in a stretch pants and a T-Shirt…. As I continued to gaze around the room, I saw many clear-cut reasons for retaining my bachelor status. There were shorts exposing hairy legs and knobby knees that would put any football team to shame, slacks that looked as if they contained potatoes instead of the ‘beautiful female torso.’ Many of the girls looked as if they had been poured into their clothes… at dinner I think that all students – particularly the women – have an obligation to dress as if someone cared. For believe me girls, we do”

This passage exposes not just blatant body shaming, but Stephen’s underlying expectation that every encounter with women have been sexual in nature. Despite the casual context of the dining hall, he found himself unable to allow woman the benefit of matching the setting. Instead, angry at the women’s apparent lack of acknowledgement of his and other men’s sexual desire, Stephen dubbed the women “potatoes” for not dressing in more visually pleasing wear. This indicates not just an inability to distinguish females from sex, but anger at the female students’ for even trying to separate themselves. Given the horrific implications of this letter, one may wish to dismiss this as a lone misogynist’s ramblings. But we must note both the “we” in his final statement, and the Daily Emerald’s choice to publish without critique. These, in combination, likely indicate a broader campus expectation that women not even try to be anything more than objects of male pleasure.

This mentality manifested itself in similar publications, which also revealed a culture of domestic expectation, and invalidation of women’s intellect. Another UO endorsed publication, the 1967 Oregena yearbook, featured tandem articles entitled, “Apathy: A Big Problem for the Freshman Girl/Boy,” which provided an overview of the expected freshman experience for the separate sexes. The male article offered two types of freshman men, one having been the “ultimate of suave… with the latest campus beauty on his arm,” the other having had the “sole intention is to top the campus record for the best grades.” Meanwhile the female article assumed that, while some were “testing their ability to function independently” the majority were “marriage-minded girls [seeking] an education in order to be somewhere near the intellectual level of their future husbands.” Evidently, the male author determined male student’s value to have been either in academic achievement or in the ability to seduce women. In contrast, he reduced the female student to either having struggled to find independence or, more positively, the slightly less intelligent partner of a man. In combination with female students’ trend towards education degrees, male students seem to have concluded that a subservient nurturance role was the only viable path for women.

Ultimately, women at UO lacked a viable avenue to voice their concerns with these behaviors and harmful expectations during the whole of the sixties. The dismissive mentality towards female intelligence extended to all the way to the administration, as made evident by Professors, Joan Akker, Joyce Mitchell, and Jane Gray’s 1970 report, “The Status of Women at the UO” which indicated unmitigated discriminatory hiring practices and harassment of female faculty. This pattern had also gone unchecked “for years,” despite the University having had data on the subject, and simply did not bother to organize it. Because the male dominated campus devalued female voices at every level, those who faced demeaning conditions had little sense by which to validate themselves, let alone each other. The roots of sexism ran very deep at the UO, so much so that when leftist progressive activism arose in response to the United States’ increased involvement Vietnam, even they were not immune to this pattern of gender based discrimination.

The New Left Movement and Female Students’ Antiwar Activism

When the United States began increasing troop involvement in South-East Asia, they prompted swift backlash from a formerly underground student group of Civil Rights activists, referred to under the catch all “New Left.” This umbrella term included amalgamation of national peace groups, such as Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom(WILPF), the War Resisters League, Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and college campus organizations including members of Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the Free Speech Movement (FSM), Young Democrats (YD). The New Left’s most notable group however, was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). While starting out as a student civil rights group, the SDS rose to national prominence mostly from “campus popularity… as a vehicle for antiwar protest.” The New Left operated under a pretense of equality and wide platform, with the mostly Marxist leaning “intellectuals and militants [of] the antiwar movement” including people of “different colors and sexes.”

As the sixties wore on, however, the SDS and other New Left organizations began to show cracks in their unity. National historians point to the movement’s tension of a lack of diverse leadership contributing to the growing perception of antiwar activism as a man’s movement, as they “moved to assert their authority over an issue that greatly affected them.” Despite SDS attendance lists fluctuating between 32 and 39 percent women, women held 6% of executive leadership positions in 1964 and dropping. “The women who worked within SDS and other antiwar organizations [began to] recognize that men set the tone and that few women could demonstrate the verbal aggressiveness so highly prized.” As the SDS grew rapidly in the face of a growing draft, early feminist leaders, such as Jenette Rankin, and pacifist groups broke off of the movement to focus on their own issues. The decentralizing and increasingly male group “veered towards greater militancy in tactics and rhetoric in the second half of the 1960s,” which backfired in 1970, as a wave of negative press brought the movement to a halt.

At the University of Oregon, the SDS began in the same tradition as the national movement, initially populated by a closely-knit community of civil rights activists and leftists, such as CORE member Laura Bock. Bock, after participating in CORE’s Freedom Summer in 1965, arrived as a sophomore at UO during fall term’s outbreak of student antiwar activism. Under the UO culture of objectification and body shaming, Bock felt “very shy” and “self-hating” amongst her all female dorm, and when meeting men on campus. Bock dedicated substantial amounts of her sophomore year to YD, but did not find a group with whom she identified until joining the SDS. Describing the group as feeling “like a family,” the SDS was remarkably integrated, and diverse by UO’s standards when Bock arrived. Upon joining, she and other members organized the Faculty Commission Against the War in Vietnam, which notably elected male and female faculty as its first co-presidents. The early UO SDS, while eccentric, held a level of respect from the university, holding teach-ins about the war, keynote speakers, and the occasional protest. Like many early SDS members, Bock felt welcome in the group’s diversity relative to campus, but stayed upon finding “it was very supportive” of her when the campus was not.

Despite the family like atmosphere of the early UO SDS, Bock, like many other female SDS members, eventually noted an unpinnable feeling of discomfort with her role in the UO SDS. Most group leaders held underlying assumptions of “the position that… young women were given” Bock explained. Despite the progressive theoretical underpinnings of the SDS, “in 1967, women in the movement were still licking envelopes.” Club rosters of the SDS, YD, and FSC demonstrated a pattern of gender based labor in the antiwar movement. Amongst the six secretarial roles dispersed over three years, female members held five of the positions, in addition to Bock’s role as secretary of the FSC. While remarkably more progressive than the whole of the university, the equality minded women of the New Left likely knew they were capable of more than the work group leaders assigned to them, despite not yet having the Second-wave Feminist theoretical framework to criticize their role.

The increasingly male dominated UO New Left exacerbated the SDS women’s misgivings about the group, made more apparent by the rising gender awareness of SDS women. During Bock’s tenure, SDS events always featured a roster of mostly male speakers, but as the movement progressed, the already dominant male wing overtook the entire leadership of the New Left groups and its message with it. Only one woman, the FSC co-chair, held a non-secretarial position of leadership amongst thirty-one offices listed by various UO New Left organizations. Local news media’s portrayal of the movement reinforced this masculine perception, as most protest photos focused on male participants. Cemented in a belief that the antiwar movement was theirs to lead, the SDS and YD leaders evidently dropped all input from women on club direction, drafting platforms that neglected even the most obvious issues affecting primarily women, such as abortion, sexual assault, education, and child care. The New Left had become another entry in the list of male dominated UO institutions that denied women a platform.

By the time Bock graduated and left the SDS in 1968, she had developed major grievances about changes in the SDS’s culture. In the late sixties, the UO SDS leadership moved to embrace its hippie image, and began hosting public LSD trip events called “Peace Trips,” in an attempt to “expand the minds” of potential members Despite common perceptions depicting antiwar activists as hippies, in reality “those who dedicated themselves primarily to ending the war in Vietnam” believed embracing a countercultural image would hurt the cause. Bock, a dedicated activist, felt disappointed with the trend after formerly active members “started dropping out… and smoking pot all the time.” Meanwhile, Bock also observed some friends become convinced that property destruction would be a more effective attention grabber, having grown frustrated by administrative inaction. Former SDS members joined the group “Weather Underground,” which threw “fake blood” and conducted “weapons testing” on certain buildings in protest. Though Bock seemed to understand the reasoning behind escalation, explaining how “people could be sent to Vietnam to be fodder,” yet the public would only respond if “a building burned down.” Still, despite understanding the reasoning behind the shift, the move to radicalism alienated the pacifist wing of the group, which by 1970, had lost most moderate activist dissent. Subsequently, the competitive masculinities of the SDS leaders began not only trying to outdo each other in verbal aggression, but in physical aggression as well.

Radical Escalation: Alienation of the Peace Movement

The growing toxic masculinity in the New Left only worsened as the Vietnam war escalated. As further draft rounds pulled more angry students into the war resistance, “the pacifist movement, internally divided by the mid-1960s over questions of coalition politics, exclusionary policies… could not provide a clear alternative to SDS’s swing towards violence.” The public learned about the Mai Lai Massacre in November of 1969. The UO SDS, having lost much of its democratic socialist/pacifist wing, reorganized and decentralized. Now 150 strong and angrier than ever before, the group set its radicalized sights on a local target – the removal of the campus ROTC.

The 1970 SDS, larger and less communal than in previous years, pressured unwilling, often female students to participate in their drug and “free love” cultures. One freshman woman, Riki, described in a diary how her hippie acquaintance often ignored her unease, both with drugs and sex. Her roommate, an SDS member, often denounced less sexual women by ranting how “virgins… killed her. Running around thinking they are God just to save their purity.” At parties, her leftist friends “always tried to get [her] stoned” despite her objections, pressure to which she eventually succumbed. Riki herself was raised in a conservative household and often fixated on retaining a sense of modesty. The antiwar students, in Riki’s own words, “had a passion for inserting all the filth they [could] into one sentence.” Rather than turn her on to progressiveness, the liberal student body’s pressures on Riki made her fear she “was the only innocent one left” While the progressive students felt liberated by the counterculture, their pressures on the more conservative women to abandon modesty showed a lack of respect for their values. Though the New Left preached values of liberation and equality, male leaders only considered what those values meant in their own minds.

The reorganized UO New Left’s lack of respect for female preferences, especially regarding sex, extended itself into the realm of female objectification. One former SDS member described a pattern of male members introducing their girlfriends as “[their] chicks,” implying ownership. Riki, at a hippie friend’s party where she was one of two female attendees, felt shamed by “the eyes of all” the men’s fixation on her. Riki experienced this and worse. She wrote how “one of the more dominant members” of her SDS friend group, M, “decided [she]… would be [his] girlfriend,” and later exploited her for sex, “[ignoring her] by day… but [becoming] very nice when he [got] horny.” Riki expressed the crushing effects of this treatment as feeling “dehumanized to an object.” Eventually, Riki, “sick of greasy guys propositioning [her]” and “tired of being used, molded, ordered and generally treated like an object,” concluded she was “not really satisfied with the underground world of radicals.” By 1970, the UO antiwar crowd had lost the flawed, yet supportive atmosphere that made them attractive to women like Laura Bock. Instead, they devolved into slightly more liberal version of the broader sexist campus culture.

In the spring, the SDS adopted more extreme rhetoric and considered peace activist’s input less and less. In spring of 1970, the UO SDS organized its usual teach-ins, with the addition of sit-ins and rallies. Amidst this however, an unidentified group broke into and ransacked President Clark’s office, followed shortly by an act of arson in the ROTC building. Additionally, the radical factions of the SDS organized a riot outside a Mac court rock concert. Some SDS members tried to assure peaceful resistance, with one insisting “although we are mad enough to do it, the consequences you get from throwing rocks isn’t worth the consequences” but the de-escalation did not last. When campus protests broke out in response to Clark’s decision to support ROTC, the local police responded by tear-gassing the whole assembly. At the subsequent SDS rally, furious students hurled insults at “the university” and the “pigs” (police), who they claimed, “wanted to destroy [them].” One student cautioned against this language, fearing this would alienate their community support, to which one female student replied “fuck the community! The community gassed us this afternoon.” Much like the national SDS abandonment of early feminist groups, the new antiwar movement left behind UO peace activists in the growing student fury.

By late April, the disconnect between the antiwar factions the surrounding community’s demand for law-and-order seemed irreconcilable, frustrating largely female peace advocates. In response to campus riots, conservative community members wrote letters condemning “communist indoctrinated” students as “espousing the downfall of government,” with “mob tactics.” Others called for a government crackdown in support of the silent, “long suffering taxpayers… tired of the lack of respect for authority,” demanding UO fire protesting professors, and expel SDS students. Reading these types of community responses in the Sunday Oregonian, Riki expressed feeling conflicted about the whole affair: “I get the feeling we’re just digging ourselves deeper into the ground by arousing hostility from the older people… But how can I call myself a human being if I just sit while people are getting killed[?]… In three years my brother will be ripe for slaughter.” These feeling was evidently shared by a large portion of the female student body. In early May, four female students presented President Clark a petition containing 2,600 student signatures that condemned the rioters’ damage to school property. Two female student wrote letters to the Register Guard in response to the riots, one supporting the cause while asking them to leave her studies alone, the other calling for peace vigils instead of riots. Women at UO had no shortage of sympathy for the Peace Movement, but most preferred the movement be peaceful itself.

After the Kent State Shootings in May, violent activism sharply declined as students grew fearful of retribution by the government, school, or surrounding community. President Clark, fearful of riots in response to the shooting, canceled classes for three days after. However, rather than riot, UO students held a candlelight march in solidarity. Vietnam veteran and antiwar student protester Earl Steven described his devastation at the shooting: “it’s just very upsetting to be in the shoes where you’ve just left a battlefield,” and then have such an “unbelievable thing… happen… what did you earn the right to do with your service? To protest.” Rather than continue with the evident danger of rallies, antiwar students expressed a desire for understanding from the community; Wallace Duncan, wrote to Register Guard how most students “[were] ashamed of the conduct of their fellow students” but argued that the cause of students, “if to end war, is very just.” Still, many SDS members found the public perception of the movement hard to ignore, and dropped out. On October 2nd, 1970, a bomb detonated in the basement of PLC, but rather than attract attention to the antiwar cause, near all sides, including the rapidly shrinking SDS, condemned the action. On October 11th, the Register Guard posted an article declaring the National SDS “dead.” By the end of the 1970 fall term, the SDS had largely dissolved, leaving behind a mixed legacy and an opening in the progressive public consciousness.

Change in the Fem Focus: Antiwar to Antisexism

The women of the University of Oregon wasted no time filling the activist void. Amidst the campus chaos in the spring, Montreal sociology professor Marlene Dixon, presented to a packed symposium of roughly 100 students the main arguments of the socialist Women’s Liberation Movement. Over the summer, those arguments evidently took hold, so much so that in the fall, a large group of students created an unofficial Women’s Liberation club. Also during that term, Professors Acker, Gray, and Mitchell persuaded President Clark to commission and publish their report detailing faculty discrimination and harassment. By 1971, the Women’s Liberation club had evolved into the officially recognized University Feminists, backed by local feminist magazine, the Eugene Women’s Press. By November 1972, they, along with a coalition of female faculty, established the EMU University Feminist Office, the Women’s Studies Steering Committee, with over 100 students expressing interest in the program. In effect, UO Second Wave Feminism had cemented its place at the University of Oregon in just two years of existence.

Unsurprisingly, many of the reforms pursued by UO feminists were direct reactions to the sexist conditions that most women faced on campus. The 1970 “Status of Women at UO” report made explicit recommendations to combat years of discrimination experienced by female faculty. In addition, it advocated UO take “more aggressive recruitment of female undergraduate and graduate students into [male dominated] disciplines” to break down the barriers of gender separation. The Women’s Liberation club explicitly condemned their frequent subjection to sexualized “public humiliation (whistling, hooting).” Former SDS member Laura Bock also fought this culture of objectification off campus. Since her graduation, Bock became a queer feminism and body acceptance activist, a direct response the gender segregation and body shaming that had made her feel so unwelcome at UO. Because the broad issues of gender separation, objectification, and faculty discrimination harmed the majority of women on campus, UO feminists treated these as high priorities in their advocacy.

While many reformative steps taken by UO feminists connected to the broader sexist environment of the campus, some addressed sexist conditions specific to the New Left. In a Women’s Liberation document describing indicators of chauvinism, the writers explicitly denounce men who “dominated conversations, especially between women” and dismissed females “organizing because ‘other struggles’ were more important.” Both of these complaints can only describe patterns of behavior in men of the New Left, organizations unique on campus for their level of integration between sexes, and their description of advocacy in terms of “oppression” and “struggle.” Additionally, the dismissal of women centric conversation and women’s advocacy altogether connected to a national trend in the New Left, one best described in historian Sara Evans’ account of the SDS National Conference’s Workshop on Women:

“When the women’s workshop convened it included both men and women, but it gradually broke down into three or more subgroups… The men and women remaining in the lounge of the Student Union began to argue about whether there was an actual “problem.” Some women took the position that men held a set of attitudes toward women, analogous in thrust and content to those of racists. Both men and women disagreed, some on a theoretical level and others more personally; “Not me,” “I’m not a problem.” For a number of the women it seemed clear that the discussion they wanted to have could not happen in a context where they had to debate the need to talk at all. Soon there was a mixed group at one end of the lounge… an all-female group at the other, and some of the men, left alone, fumbled about for something to say.”

Due to frequent male dismissal, feminist groups that grew out of the New Left were keenly aware of the problem of discussion derailment. The UO Women’s Lib club’s decision to include those specific complaints indicates a local knowledge of this problem as well.

Male derailment of female issues connected to a broader problem in the UO New Left, specifically the assumptions of male and female limitations. The New Left men often failed to see any limits in their ability to lead the New Left, to construct comprehensive platforms, to fully understand the issues, and to offer relevant information to any discussions. Consequently, they led the movement with toxic competitiveness, ignored criticism, and constructed faulty platforms at the expense of women’s issues. “In belittling the work of women activists [by] assigning them grunge work” and in competition with each other, “men acted to prove their masculinity.” Meanwhile, many women overestimated their limitations to a crippling degree, believing they had little to offer beyond secretarial work. Laura Bock’s testimony indicated this exact phenomenon at the UO: “I think that’s a lot of why second wave feminism came about, because of the dissatisfaction of many of us within the antiwar movement… and the civil rights movement: the position that we as young women were given and the things we were assumed that we would do and would not do.” Once women began breaking these assumptions, such as when Bock lobbied YD to appoint her as a representative abroad, the masculine construct began to crumble.

When the antiwar men failed to breakdown their “masculinity-based anxiety” about admitting limitation by promoting leadership equity, the frustrated women left to form their own organization.
For the departed female members of the SDS, feminism was the natural evolution of their ideals, simply applying New Left theories, values, and terminology to gender advocacy. The UO feminists still were fervently antiwar, promoting solidarity with the female victims of violent conflict, and anticapitalistic, treating it as the root of oppression. Their main thought framework and terminology centered around the traditions Marxian oppression theory. The New Left’s favorite slur, “fascist pig,” updated to “chauvinist pig.” Additionally, in response the male dominated SDS leadership’s reluctance to confront gender roles, the University Feminist official platform promoting the reversal of learned feelings of inadequacy and oppressive gendered expectations through female empowerment. The blatant contrast of the New Left’s stated opposition to subjugation and unhealthy competition with its actual practices, displayed more clearly than ever, the need for female centric activism at the University of Oregon. Because the New Left male leadership failed to recognize the incredible potential of its own female activists, as made evident by the rapid successes of UO feminists, the campus antiwar movement only has itself to blame for the death of their cause.

Bibliography
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