As recreation while teaching a new course on World War II, I was watching The Great Escape, and it occurred to me, this is the same movie as Cool Hand Luke except Cool Hand Luke has rednecks in place of Nazis.

Which suggested the possibly wrong or maybe trivially true observation that the echt World War II movie is a pop culture treatise on existentialist philosophy, and not about the war at all. Or rather, it is about the war as an existentialist experience and not as a world-historical event. [click to continue…]