On the eve of Remembrance Day I was thinking about what films I would watch tomorrow in honour of the men and women who gave their lives. I’ve had a long-standing love of war movies, and most men have the same strange fetish for witnessing blood, gore, bullets, and bombs, but I had never put my finger on the reason why that is. It finally dawned on me today that the reason men like war movies is the same reason that women like chick flicks: It’s because they’re romantic.
“Pishaw!”, you say, “War isn’t romantic! War movies are all about explosions and death.” I say look again, more closely this time. There is a man leaping over his protective barrier in the face of intense machine gun fire to drag another man to safety. There is another on level ground totally unprotected with a red cross on his arm administering medicine to a someone whose guts are spilling from his belly, while bombs fall all around. There’s one leaping in front of a hail of bullets to protect his friend, consequences be damned.
Still not romantic, you say? Then look at it this way: You’ve got men depicted living out the remainder of their lives with little more than the safety of their comrades in mind, with the will and the willingness to trade their own life for the safety of another. You’ve got people risking everything, wanting little more than to give of themselves so that someone else — a comrade they love (yes, I said it) — may go on living via their sacrifice. And you have near-hopeless struggle against a ruthless aggressor who can only be defeated by unyeilding resilience and absolute devotion to a noble cause.
If love, self-sacrifice, and a struggle against all odds for something you believe in isn’t romantic, then my definition of romance and your definition of romance must be very different. These are quintessentially romantic notions, captured in a format that I daresay when done properly is more intense and affecting than any chick flick.
The upshot of all of this is that it’s plain to me that any man who likes war movies is a romantic, whether he would care to admit it or not. We men simply prefer our romance couched in violence, rather than tears.