Hollywood Goes To War...Or Not

One Andrew Klavan asks why Hollywood is not producing any war movies, given the fact that we are at war.  I suspect his reasoning is largely correct: America in general and Hollywood in particular has lost the self-confidence to make patriotic war movies.  I would also note that the supposedly more patriotic war movies of recent times, namely Saving Private Ryan and We Were Soldiers or the mini-series Band of Brothers, are subtly subversive in that the central argument of the films is that the soldiers were not fighting for a cause but simply for their fellow soldiers.  In fact the two feature films mentioned almost explicitly say that there was no higher cause worth fighting for, thus the only nobility in the fighting was fighting for your comrades in arms.  Private Ryan is eerily divorced from the wider clash of ideologies at the heart of the Second World War.  It may be true that soldiers fight for each other and not for causes.  I just don't know, although my knowledge of the Civil War tells me most of those soldiers had a pretty good idea what they were fighting for. But nations do indeed fight for causes.  We need stories that show the nobility of our nation and the nobility of fighting for freedom and against tyranny.  But that suggests that we think America is on the side of freedom and our enemies are on the side of tyranny.  It also suggests that America has the moral authority to lead such a fight.  The question is whether we buy these two propositions.  I suspect our storytellers do not.