War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.
Interpretation
Some individuals find a sense of excitement and purpose in war despite its destructive nature.
In this quote, Kathryn Bigelow highlights the paradox of war: while it brings devastation and suffering, there are individuals who are drawn to it, perhaps due to the adrenaline, camaraderie, or a sense of duty it offers. This complex relationship between humanity and conflict suggests that not everyone views war solely as a tragedy, illuminating the darker aspects of human nature and the allure of violence.
In practice
In a discussion about the realities of war, one might use this quote to emphasize the unforeseen allure some individuals find in battle.
Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
I'd love to just think of myself as a filmmaker, and I wait for the day when the modifier can be a moot point.
I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist; film was not.
If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.
There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible.
In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, further confuse the fighting man's moral senses.
If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.
I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.
War loses a great deal of its romance after a soldier has seen his first battle.
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