We live in the middle of some mighty imaginary worlds. In one corner, you’ve got Star Wars, turning out toys and videogames; over there, Marvel is taking over Hollywood and churning out half a dozen Avengers books a month. Lego seems to launch a new property every week, and while J. R. R. Tolkien’s been dead for decades, his name plus an “-esque” still seems to define half the fantasy properties that ship to this day. And then you’ve got Japan. Don’t even get me started on Japan; I’m too old to catch up and I know it.
You have your pick of alternate realities to dwell on, all of them creative powerhouses that spin a simple idea into multiple multi-million dollar channels of product. But I wanted to pick one. I figured if I could single out one transmedia world as somehow greater than the others, it would serve as an example for all the ideas we’ve been talking about. And luckily, it wasn’t that hard. In fact, I had absolutely no trouble settling on the one property that most dominates our culture and all of our media. And I will name it after the jump.
The story starts with a far-off land, ancient but familiar. A war breaks out. A relentless enemy rolls its armies across one country after another. On the other side of the world, its ally starts a war with its neighbors and threatens to throw the entire globe into turmoil. Things are looking grim – until suddenly, there’s a new hope: a new country, young, a little naive, but brave and strong, jumps into the fight.
The tide starts to turn. Our heroes in this plucky upstart nation win one battle after another. But the bodies are piling up, and the final foe – ruled by an almighty Emperor who claims divine power – refuses to surrender. And then all of a sudden, a miracle weapon appears, an almost science-fictiony superbomb that can end the war in one fell swoop (or okay, maybe two). It’s so perfect it’s almost corny, a deux ex machina, but it fits the myth: the young, brave and true heroes defeat the Emperor and finally bring peace to the world.
In broad strokes, this is the story of World War II. It’s a true story – our grandparents lived through it and everything – but it is also the greatest imaginary world we have.
Let’s count the reasons.
It’s a fight between good and evil. The Axis powers were the bad guys. They were really bad. The Allies beat them. That was really good. This is a clear conflict between well-defined adversaries, and it’s easy to latch onto.
Around this clear core, thousands of stories are possible. Let’s take a look at just a handful of stories from around the world and across the decades that are all united by the era and the context of this single war. Catch-22. Gravity’s Rainbow. The English Patient. Castle Wolfenstein. Captain America. The Thin Red Line.. Saving Private Ryan. Atonement. The Diary of Anne Frank. City of Thieves. Velvet Assassin. You’ve got heroic stories and anti-heroic stories. Comedy and tragedy. Stories of people on the fringes of the conflict; stories of the people who set it in motion. New perspectives, alternate histories, works of experimental or fantastical fiction – all united by the core mythos of the biggest conflagration our planet’s ever seen.
World War II was filled with strong personalities, but it didn’t depend on them. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Patton – you can rattle off a lot of names from the War. But the War went on even when, for example, Truman replaced Roosevelt. Like our last point, this is the key difference between a world and a story: you have plenty of heroes and villians, but this is not the story of any one of them.
Likewise, you can tell a story with your own characters without injecting any of the big names into it. In most properties, if you create a new storyline in a new locale, your central characters at least need to make a cameo. Most new Marvel comics throw in Captain America or Spiderman. The world of The Last Airbender barely exists outside Aang or Zuko. But in World War II, you can tell vast stories about the men on the front without sticking in a big-name general. We know we’re in the War, and that’s enough.
Nazis. Who’s worse than the Nazis? Who’s worse than Hitler? Pundits keep fretting that if we keep wheeling out the “so-and-so is as bad as Hitler” analogies about every single leader we don’t like, we’ll start to wear it out. But it hasn’t happened yet. It doesn’t get any worse than Hitler.
And yet, so broad and mature is this property that it also holds up under satire. I could wheel in one of those Hitler rant videos that’s been making the rounds of YouTube, but this is still my favorite:
Character is action, and there was plenty of action. A professor of mine once told me that military history and biography are the lowest form of history writing. It’s not hard to write a book about a bunch of tanks rolling from point A to point B; and likewise, it’s not hard to inject drama into a situation where millions of people are dying. This is why there are dozens of videogames set in World War II, and pretty much none set in hipster coffee shops.
… And you can tell a great story without action, too. The suffering on the homefront, the plight of refugees, the wives left at home waiting for letters from their husbands – the quiestest stories get more dramatic against this backdrop. Nobody needs to slap you in the face every other page and remind you what’s going on at the front; how could you forget?
Awesome technology. From codebreakers to submarines to the A-bomb, there are plenty of reasons to geek out over the war and the tech it produced. People like gadgets, and the inventions of the war were instrumental to its progress and its conclusion.
With the passage of time, reality can lift into fantasy. The PlayStation exclusive Valkyrie Chronicles emulates the themes and era of the War, but its world is made-up and magical. The recent Wolfenstein lets us shoot zombie Nazis. And then there’s this:
There’s just one drawback to my choice: World War II was real. It took the lives of millions of our relatives, and starved millions more. It paved the way to the Cold War and set America for a several-decade fall from whatever innocence we imagined we had.
World War II is a world, but it’s not strictly a “fictional” world. And yet it sets the stage for millions of works of fiction. All its complexities have been boiled down to a narrative as linear as the one in Avatar: The Last Airbender. All of these made-up worlds aspire to the same complexity, the same drama and the same importance as this single, several-year conflict. Every time Star Wars tries to be more than the story of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, every time Lord of the Rings throws a bazillion orcs at a fortress, every time a writer tries to scare us with the ultimate evil, and every time a sci-fi story tries to make us believe that this miracle weapon that appeared in the last act is more than a convenience; every time a publisher tries to stretch into more and more media, and bring us more and more entry points into their property; every time anyone waves a screen at you and says, “Seriously dude, this is important! This isn’t just any war! This is like, a war for the whole world!” – every single time, they’re reaching for the bar that was set over sixty years ago.
I don’t know why Hollywood hasn’t cooked up a sequel.
As someone with a BA in history with a specialization in the Second World War I’ll have to respectfully disagree with your professor
Every type of history can be reduced to a series of actions, at which point it becomes a timeline.
Anyway, great post! I’m wondering now if the reason I love the war (I mean I’m interested in it as a subject) is because I’m such a huge “fantasy world” nerd. I basically spent all of high school playing games and reading Star Wars EU and fantasy books. Maybe the leap to studying WW2 in university wasn’t so strange.
I’m not sure to what extent this narrative was intended to be ironic, but it is worth noting that the “plucky upstart nation” that really beat the Nazis was not the United States but rather the Soviet Union. Had the U.S. never entered the war, it might have taken a few more years and God only knows how many more lives — not so much because of the U.S.’s contributions on the battlefield as its economic aid — but the outcome would have been the same. (Except that it would have left behind a world where Stalin — who does give Hitler a pretty good run in the Ultimate Evil sweepstakes — controlled all of Europe.) And then there are other pesky details, like the fact that the plucky Americans rarely won a battle in which they did not substantially outnumber their enemies.
I’m American myself, and I know well the fascination World War II can hold, particularly on impressionable, escapism-prone young minds. I got interested as a boy — I swear to God — because of Star Trek and the original Battlestar Galactica. You know how the Galactica was sort of like an aircraft carrier in space? Well, suffice to say that from there I went to the real things. I have a lingering fascination to this day with the big carrier battles in the Pacific.
I think Americans glorify war in general so much, and World War II in particular, because they have suffered so comparatively little from it. Some Americans did of course suffer and die heroically for an unambiguously just cause (the last war the U.S. has been involved in, alas, about which I can make that claim), and they should be honored for their sacrifices. But our casualty figures were ridiculously low in comparison to just about any other combatant, and many GI’s returned home with memories of the war as a sort of grand adventure. And of course no American cities were bombed into rubble, and no Americans found themselves in death camps because of an accident of birth.
In Europe, where I live now, the war is remembered quite differently, and much less enthusiastically — even in Britain, whose refusal to give up in the face of the German onslaught is as good an example of pure, glorious heroism as I know in history. I was back home during the 4th of July celebrations last year, and I kept wondering why we don’t also celebrate having given the world jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, and hip-hop instead of being proud only of how many guns and fighter planes we have.
I went with the oversimplified good guys vs. bad guys thing because as you say, that narrative, and the idea that this was a “good war,” helps explain why it still has a hold on our imagination in the US – and why WW II videogames that cast the player as the hero are so much more prevalent than games about Vietnam.
The narrative of “the US stepped in and won the war” is definitely problematic, so I don’t disagree with you at all. The U.S. committed plenty of bad acts on its own – the internment of Japanese-Americans for example – and I also agree that celebrating our music makes more sense than celebrating our military.
I substantially agree with this post; I think that as wars go, World War II has a distance that is useful for games, while still having a force which gives it meaning (as well as a long-lasting impact on culture, primarily through other media). It has a moral clarity that as you point out, Vietnam (and perhaps more recent conflicts?) lacks. Its distance is helpful to me, personally, as I found myself rather discomfited by playing Modern Warfare in a way that earlier Call of Duty games didn’t bother me. In fact, one of my most compelling memories from gaming comes from that first CoD — when I inadvertently committed fratricide while we passed through buildings on the outskirts of a little town. It’s one of a handful of gaming memories that have really stuck with me.
It’s interesting, though, that very compelling fiction has been written about each and every war, Vietnam included. There is an enormous raft of books and films on the subject, some of our most compelling national literature and film. Is it too close for games? Too morally complex?
Jimmy, Russia only survived because of the American lend-lease program and the American troops in Italy drawing troops away from the Eastern front. I really don’t see how you can claim the war would have been won without the US. The invasion of Italy would have failed (if it was attempted at all), the Battle of the Atlantic would have been lost and Britain starved to near-death, an invasion of Normandy would have been an impossibility. I don’t think you realize how close the Russians came to losing and even how close the invasion of Normandy came to failing WITH full US support in France and Italy.
By the way, I’m Canadian (and a bit of a historian) so hopefully not too biased. I’m extremely proud of what my nation’s troops did in Italy and the Netherlands and elsewhere but I recognize that it would have all been impossible without American allies.
Michel,
The two times during which Russia really did, at least to external observers, seem close to capitulation were those first two horrible winters of 1941 and 1942. After Stalingrad, which happened long before the invasion of Italy or even Sicily, Germany never had any real hope of victory, in the East or anywhere else. The last concerted, strategically sound offensive operation of the war for Germany (as opposed to desperate rolls of the dice like the Battle of the Bulge) was at the Battle of Kursk, which tore the heart out of the Germany army just as the Western allies were invading Sicily as a prelude to the invasion of Italy proper. There are in fact many historians who say that the whole Italian campaign was a waste of time and resources that could have been better spent on an earlier invasion of France. As I acknowledged in my previous post, American economic aid to the Soviet Union was very significant, likely more significant than its actual military operations, and grew more significant as the war went on. I don’t believe, however, that the Soviet Union could not have ultimately won without it, as the two points where the question REALLY hung in the balance both occurred before the industrial spigot had been more than cracked open.
Actually, I don’t really disagree with most of your other points. Britain very likely would have been starved out of the war, or at least out of taking any active role in it, without U.S. aid in the Atlantic. And Normandy would not have failed; it would never have been attempted. Britain simply didn’t have the resources to even contemplate such an operation alone, particularly if the rest of the Commonwealth was prevented from aiding her by the German U-Boat fleet. But this would not have changed the ultimate outcome of the war for Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union would simply have rolled over Germany from the east instead of meeting the Western allies in the middle, and kept on going until it reached Normandy — from the other direction.
Oh, I do have one more quibble.
This business about Normandy “almost failing” is bandied about quite a lot, but it’s not really correct. It’s true enough that it was a pretty close thing on a couple of beaches for a number of hours. However, there were five beaches, and the Allies did not need to be successful on all five to achieve their goal of establishing a foothold from which to mount an invasion. In fact, they had not anticipated being successful everywhere, and were quite surprised and pleased with their 5 and 0 record when all was said and done — and also surprised at how light their casualties were for the operation as a whole. Many planners had expected things to be much, much worse, with vastly greater casualties and perhaps three beaches secured.
As a wise man once said, the victors get to write the history after a war, and the situation in North America and Western Europe was further muddied by the fact that the Soviet Union promptly replaced Nazi Germany as the Ultimate Evil as soon as the war ended. I hope, though, that as the Cold War also fades into history we can replace the Stephen Ambrose school of World War II with one that acknowledges the important role that the U.S. did play without always making us into the “plucky upstarts” that saved the world.
But I’ve probably said too much about this already; I’m sure Chris would rather be talking about storyworlds. So, I’ll let you have the last word if you want to take it, and we’ll leave it at that.
It’s really debatable whether Russia could’ve won the war on its own. Similarly, it’s also arguable that the war couldn’t have been won if Britain capitulated to Germany. The war itself is far too complex to be broken down into a few turning points. For instance, had Germany not persisted in waging a war on three fronts, they would’ve been far more successful on the Western Front.
I was talking about the actual invasion failing, not D-Day and the taking of the beaches. It was touch and go the first several weeks, with a very real possibility that they would have had to retreat back across the channel.
And I know people have historically dismissed the Italian Campaign as pointless, but that’s a very narrow-minded and, well, wrong view. Its value wasn’t in liberating Italy or pushing towards Germany, but chewing up German soldiers and taking them away from other fronts. If there was no invasion of Italy then Germany would have had about 1 million extra men they could afford to put on the Eastern front. According to wikipedia the Germans/Italians had 658,000 casualties in Italy. If we’re going to play this speculative history game then we have to put those soldiers somewhere else. On the Eastern Front, they destroy Russia. Period.