Citation

Crim BE. Film and History 2018; 48(1): 4-14.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The setting is April 1945, less than a month before the collapse of the Third Reich, but the Sherman tank nicknamed "Fury" has miles to go. Concerned that his replacement assistant tank driver lacks the brutal resolve to kill the enemy, Staff Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) drags Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) to the site of a mass suicide of Nazi officials and their wives. The room is adorned with Nazi paraphernalia, and a regal portrait of the Führer looms over elegantly dressed corpses surrounded by champagne bottles. "Why did you bring me here?" asks Norman. "Ideals are peaceful," Wardaddy responds solemnly, "History is violent."1 This disturbing contrast at the heart of Fury (2014) might sound like regressive warmongering, especially suited for "The Good War," but Fury portrays a fragile and threatening masculinity that is perhaps unique to a film about the Second World War. Its protagonists simultaneously demonstrate the intimacy of men in combat and the corrosion of their humanity in the face of war's horror. In writer-director David Ayer's view, films about WWII nearly always fall into the rut of depicting an external fight between good and evil. Even Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the HBO series Band of Brothers (2001), which famously strive for verisimilitude in their battle scenes and for a fraught nobility in their protagonists, ultimately retreat from the shocking moral ugliness that war breeds in otherwise good men. On the ground, in the heat and blood of battle after battle, WWII was still, according to Ayer, just "two drunks at a bar just slugging it out."2 At the level of the man, the level of the individual mind and body, the war was not "good" or "evil"; it was "fury." After three continuous years of experiencing and inflicting dreadful slaughter on two continents, Wardaddy and his tight-knit crew bear this secret, which can never be communicated without subjecting others to the same nihilistic violence they embrace. Fury is calculated to reveal that painful secret. © Center for the Study of Film and History. All rights reserved.

Language: en