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Romancing the sword (2)

War, that most horrible practice invented and mastered by humanity, remains nevertheless a fascinating subject in literature and art throughout the ages.

It is as though the immense guilt of organizing mutual slaughter, the utter pain of violent death, the terror of close-quarters combat, can be easily exorcised through literature, painting and sculpture, music and theater, games, and in our day, through film.

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I fell into such a morbid fascination with war at a young age. I guess it was expected of most boys of our generation. After all, we read about war in comic books and trading cards (teks before the cellphone era). We watched it on TV as regular weekend fare – remember Vic Morrow as Sgt. Saunders in the TV series Combat? We played with toy guns and swords, and formed teams that competed in street-wide war games using slingshots and paper pellets.

My childhood obsession with vicarious war ran deeper. At 10, my most treasured books were several military books given by older cousins: a US ROTC training manual, a US Army manual of artillery and infantry weapons, and a two-volume compilation of World War II stories.

I devoured all the stories, and spent long hours mentally playing out the battles, complete with intricate tactical maneuvers that I thought must have been second nature to infantry COs. From high school onwards, a modest allowance enabled me to buy more books on world war history and to watch more war films on the big screen.

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It took some effort on my part to stare at real-life photos of dead soldiers, twisted as they were into grotesque poses, and staring back at me with dreamy eyes half-closed. Some post-combat scenes replay themselves with persistence inside my head, such as that of a wounded grunt who turns incongruently talkative as others deperately patch his bleeding chest, until he lapses into shock and dies in the arms of his comrades. (This “soldier’s death up close” sub-genre is explored to the fullest in Platoon and Saving Private Ryan.)

Nothing prepared me, however, for the full-adrenalin scenes of massed sword battles and close-up carnage pioneered by Alfred the Great (1969) and later perfected by the recent batch of sword-and-sandal, sword-and-armor, and sword-and-sorcery films (Braveheart, Joan of Arc, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Last Samurai, Kingdom of Heaven, et al.).

Even with repeated viewings, they never fail to wrench me deep in the guts – the way war drums and battle yells signal the start of the massed assault by phalanxes of sword and spear, accompanied by thunderous hoofs of cavalry, all in a mad dash towards a deafening crash as the two opposing waves of armored soldiery consume each other.

With racing hearbeat and sweating palms, I grip my viewer’s seat and watch every excruciating detail. Sharp steel hacking into flesh and bone. Body parts heaved asunder by the sheer impact. Croaks and groans of sweating, grappling, dying men. The nauseous sight of butchery on the dusty ground.

It is as if I am a futuristic reporter in the middle of the battle, barely shielded from the carnage by a timewarp bubble. But I force myself to watch it all.

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Now, modern conventional wars are generally more violent than ancient wars, in the extent of death and destruction.

On D-Day alone of the 1944 Allied invasion in France, terrifyingly depicted in the film Saving Private Ryan, most estimates (none of them exact) place total Allied dead at around 5,000, German dead at about 10,000, and French civilian dead (mostly through Allied bombings of Norman cities and towns) at a whooping 19,000.

In comparison, in the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge where Scottish forces under Wallace slaughtered the medieval English army, the total casualty was less than 6,000 killed (mostly English, plus some Scots and local civilians).

Yet why does it seem that movie scenes of sword battles affect us more than those of modern firefights? Why do most of us flinch and turn our eyes away from scenes of blades or points piercing flesh, but not so much when movie soldiers are hit by bullets or shrapnel? I don’t know about you, but at least it does so in my case.

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While we try to search our collective psyche for scientific reasons, let me offer a simplistic explanation:

When we were kids (and up to now among rural children), handling bolos, knives and other bladed or pointed tools for daily chores was a routine skill. Accidental cuts and pricks were not uncommon. We were familiar with the pain and blood. Sooner or later, most of us learned to avoid them, but the primal pain remained in our subconscious, as a contant reminder to wield our tools (or weapons) with great care.

In other words, more people have experienced injury by blade-like or spear-like objects, at some point in their lives, than people who have been wounded by bullets or shrapnel. The traumatic memory of the former is thus embedded in more people. I think it is this common pain that is so easily evoked by cinematic sword battles.

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Now here’s the twist.

I now observe less and less kids in the urban areas undergoing the same experience, with the routine use of knives relegated to the kitchen, especially to housewives. In a crowded city street, carrying a bolo no longer signifies that you’re a hard-working farmer; it makes you – in the eyes of cops at least – a potential criminal if not an outright crazed fanatic.

More and more, urban kids see the reality of swords and knives only in comics, films, play cards and computer games. They have only the barest idea of the physical skills and careful use that these tools (or weapons) require. Young generations are losing the normal caution and queasiness associated with sharp steel blades, and enjoying them more through movies and games suffused with surreal magic.

In short, swords and knives are increasingly receding from our reality and becoming more and more part of fantasy. To urban youth, our Muslim brothers are now seen not as fierce wielders of kris and kampilan, but of DVD and VCD.

“Is that the reason why Encantadia is so popular now?” asked Kabsat Kandu.

My spunky neighbor is of course referring to the current GMA7 primetime blockbuster. This sword-and-sorcery series, reminiscent of the Lord of the Rings, is now becoming serious discussion theme even in university classes.

And he was exactly right on the mark. Elementary school kids now know a lot more about Princess Pirena than about Princess Urduja. They now know more about the magical kabilan than the historical kampilan. #

Romancing the sword (1)

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