"If you can't talk about it, you can fight", this sound has been very popular in recent days.
But to be honest, unlike the hot-blooded youth on Weibo, I was particularly afraid of war, after watching "Hacksaw Ridge".
I can say it's reading... I mean reading countless anti-Japanese films, and since childhood, I have had that sense of substitution, that is, walking through the rain of guns and bullets, killing the enemy several times without false hair and being unscathed, and occasionally having life and death around me will only be the kind of battlefield pride of "sacrificing more than one ambition".
The most brutal battle scene I have ever seen is to directly tear the devil apart in "Anti-Japanese Strange Hero". First, although it was torn in half, not a single drop of blood was seen; second, it was Little Japan who was torn apart, not our people.
I was ten years old at the time.
Ten years have passed, and what has changed my kind of war fairy tale is "Bright Sword", the Jiangdongmen Memorial Hall and the anti-Japanese films made by the US imperialists. Like Hacksaw Ridge, it gave me a completely different feeling. I've never seen that flesh-and-blood scene, the real concrete details of a broken leg, an intestine flowing out of my stomach, and blood spurting straight out.
Our war films, here have ruled out those anti-Japanese dramas that refresh the lower limit, and the whole is obsessed with freehand. For example, when I write about the cruelty of war, I always have this picture in my mind: the flag on the top of the mountain pierced by bullets, fluttering in the sunset and wolf smoke. Even with corpses strewn across the mountains, the grand scene lacks details, and it is always difficult to feel the horrors of war.
The question is, is there a possibility of whitewashing death and poetic warfare?
The details have their own power. I often suspect that the moral dilemma mentioned in the Strategic Task Force, the reason why I prefer not to sacrifice those two children, is because I can see them, them alive. And the million civilians, their lives and deaths and their families torn apart, are details that the film does not present and that I cannot see. So, it probably dictated my choice.
Because they can't see the details, those cruel details, will make many people think that war is easy, once and for all, even poetic, so they will resort to the means of war at any time. They don't know that the dead are covered in flesh and blood, and the living are tortured.
By extension, it is difficult for us to obtain that direct experience of empathy if we have not experienced it. But this is not an unsolvable proposition. Books and images, history and literature, the indirect empirical role they transmit is this.
I didn't go through that decade, but I could learn about Yu Luoke's story from the book, so I could also have a bone-chilling antipathy to that kind of origin theory.
But when these historical details are omitted, where can we get them from?