On May 24th, 2022, I sat on my couch in front of my TV and was about to begin my usual evening routine of picking a movie. What was different about this evening, though, was that earlier that day a gunman had entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and massacred 19 children and two teachers, injuring 17 others and emotionally scarring an untold amount of people in the process.
I found out about this massacre by accident. True, I would have heard about it sooner or later (probably scrolling the news while laying in bed the next morning), but I’m not on social media, I hadn’t gotten any breaking news emails about it, so when I saw that the first thing on my Hulu homepage was a live news broadcast I thought, “Sure, let’s watch the news. How bad can it be?” (No, seriously).
It took me a moment to digest what I was seeing. Instead of a reporter stationed at a desk telling me the latest updates on the war in Ukraine, I was assailed with footage of crime scene tape flapping in the breeze, what seemed like acres of empty emergency vehicles with their lights flashing, and a hollow-voiced team of reporters. It was probably about 5 or 6 PM and the description on the bottom of the screen still read “12 children feared dead,” despite the shooting having played out hours earlier. In short, it was a chaotic scene, presented mechanically and repeatedly in a way that only the 24-hour news cycle can provide.
I was struck dumb. This fresh horror combined with the barely scabbed-over tragedy that occurred in a supermarket in Buffalo only 10 days earlier shot through me in a way that I was unaccustomed to. “I feel like I should cry,” I said. And so I did. I coughed up sobs and spiraled until I pulled it together enough to call my mom and ask how are we supposed to live like this, how do you return to your daily existence after something like this ricochets through you. She said, “You don’t move forward, you sit with it. Also, turn off the news.”
I knew I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else that night and I didn’t want to think about anything else. That is my approach to tragedy: get close to it. For whatever reason, I decided a long time ago that knowledge is the antidote to fear and ever since I’ve been staring into the abyss. So, with the massacre on my mind, I went looking for a violent movie to watch.
I’m sure it seems like a counterproductive way to cope with something as horrible as a mass shooting at an elementary school. However, it’s not like I could watch Notting Hill and forget it ever happened. The day was already marked with blood and I wanted to open myself to the horror of what happened. I am not naturally an empath, which is why I have to make myself one.
Let me explain my relationship to war movies. As I’ve become more interested in history, and therefore more acquainted with the particulars of war, I’ve softened from my suburban, pacifistic “everyone in the military is evil” view to one that is far less black and white. There are a few universal truths about humanity, and one of those is that the strong will always manipulate the weak. I realized it wasn’t the rank-and-file foot soldiers who deserved my anti-militaristic wrath, but the men at the top ordering troops around on a map. The more I learned about war, the less naïve I became and the less I villainized the masses tasked with fighting the war. I began to empathize with these people as victims of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism, same as most everyone else. The more I learned about war, the more I realized how impossible it was to imagine it. So, I started looking to war movies to help me grasp even a fraction of what that chaos and confusion might feel like, instead of just judging the participants without taking their nightmarish experience into account.
That’s how I stumbled across Fury.
I love watching Brad Pitt fight Nazis. Anyone fighting Nazis, really, is just one of the most clearcut good versus evil situations, in my opinion. And sometimes it feels really good to align yourself with the side of good, even if it’s not in a Walt Disney kind of way. That simplicity is one of the things that I find comforting in war movies. The second thing that comforts me about war movies is how basic, universal, and primeval everything boils down to: man fights man, man experiences true fear, man curses God, man confronts death.
Another thing I love about war movies, and Fury in particular, is the dialogue. It’s economical, often darkly funny, and based purely around survival. There’s a resilience that comes across in the dialogue of this film, something indicating the ability to continue living despite coming face to face with all the horror man has to offer. There’s just something about watching these men laugh, quote the Bible, and refuse to give up that resonates with me, especially during a time as violent as this. It would certainly be easy to criticize me for even associating the modern-day United States with the Western Front of WWII, but in the scope of history, all violence boils down to the same thing: “Wait until you see…What a man can do to another man.”
Fury loses its realism in the end, with a last-ditch effort to scrounge up some heroism in a god-forsaken landscape. It’s an unfortunate but expected choice, considering the appetite of the American public. War (and war movies) is supposed to be about success and glory, not confronting the stark realities of man.
You could watch Fury solely for Brad Pitt, solely for Shia LaBeouf, solely for Michael Peña, or solely for Jon Bernthal (Logan Lerman is basically a non-entity), because the performances are amazing. You could watch Fury simply to learn more about tank warfare and the invasion of Germany. You could watch Fury because of the fact that war movies also boast some of the best pyrotechnics, make-up, sound-editing, and special effects in Hollywood. You could watch Fury because war movies are horror movies, in the truest sense of the term.
I don’t watch movies like Fury for heroism or patriotism or even for historical interest. I watch them because they’re often well-researched, focused on accuracy, and are prime landscapes for me to project my imagination onto. I watch them because things like this happened, people suffered this way, and it only feels right to acknowledge their experience the best that I can, especially if I intend to take part in discussions surrounding conflict. I watched Fury because I don’t want to #prayforUvalde or #prayforUkraine or #prayforBuffalo; I don’t want to become numb.