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On Feb. 5, New York University professor, Dr. Marilyn Young, gave a lecture on how films can depict and embody images of war. While her speech focused on figures pertaining to the Korean War, it also initiated reflection about our current crisis with Iraq and its visual representation by the media. This lecture, titled, “In the Combat Zone,” was sponsored by the history department and was its first in a series of upcoming presentations.

Dr. Paul Steege introduced Young, stating that “given the current state of affairs and the current discussions…the image, imagination and representation of war and what war is and what war might mean is certainly a very timely topic and provocative issue.”

Young began her lecture by highlighting aspects of the Korean War and its implications on United States culture. This conflict was “a war that would go on and on and on, and meant that the United States would live always with peace as a sometimes thing and war a constant thing.” She explained her purpose was to describe “what it was like in the United States and in Korea, and the movies that marked it, to give you a sense of what it felt like here.”

After emphasizing that “I love movies and am obsessed by war,” Young discussed common concepts about the Korean War, and how they operated between the conflicts of World War II and the Vietnam War. She highlighted the idea that the Korean War is often either forgotten, unknown, or simply unable to be accurately remembered. “I want to try to understand what it was like during the war,” Young said.

Prior to discussing specific films, she remarked that “of all the possible artifacts of popular culture, I think movies are the most sensitive reflectors of social moods, tensions and contradictions…movies are representations of the country to itself and they are themselves representations of the country… [these] films are braids of manifest meaning.”

Young then focused her presentation on movies such as “Steel Helmet,” “I Want You,” and “Bridges of Toko-Ri,” and their corresponding themes of public indifference. Young also remarked that each film also attempted to answer questions about why the United States was involved in the Korean War. She noted the closing lines of “Steel Helmet,” that read: “There is no end to this story,” and observed that with this line, “Americans might feel that they were reading the future.”

After describing these selected films, Young responded to a number of audience questions. She expressed her opinions on various other Korean War films, such as “Pork Chop Hill,” and “One Minute to Zero,” as well as contemporary pieces such as “Saving Private Ryan,” and “A Thin Red Line.” She explained how these particular films have operated to influence public sentiments about war, some more successfully than others.

Young is a scholar of American foreign affairs and has written at length about both the Korean and Vietnam War. She received a doctorate from Harvard University, and now teaches at New York University. Her 1991 work, The Vietnam War: 1945-1990, was awarded the Berkshire Woman’s History Prize. She currently is working on another project about the Korean War.