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Thursday, February 05, 2015

"American Sniper" and the Philosophy of War

-“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.” -John F. Kennedy

-“I don’t regret any ot it. I’d do it again. At the same time, war definitely changes you.” -Chris Kyle (American Sniper)

American Sniper ('Movie of the Year' AFI Award winner) has become a true phenomenon after surpassing the $250 million box office mark, its political repercussions being agitatedly discussed. Even First Lady Michelle Obama has joined the debate, commenting on the movie’s “wrenching stories” and “complex journeys.” Despite of being the recipient of irate attacks and polemic diatribes, Clint Eastwood insists his film was conceived as a character-study, chronicling real Navy SEAL veteran Chris Kyle’s experiences (a sniper who boasted a record of over 160 confirmed kills during his 4 tours on Iraq, author of the bestselling memoir American Sniper published in 2012).

Touching barely on the political issues, Eastwood’s film is a thrilling biopic which doesn’t shy away from showing us the darkest physical and psychological effects suffered by Kyle and his fellow soldiers, although, according to its detractors, it doesn’t fully answer the total implications that could have been explored in the wider sociological, doctrinal and military context. Although we see the conservative faction gleefully enjoying the celebration of the film's pro-American angle, the oppressive and austere tone from several thought-provoking scenes will be valued on the left side of the spectrum.

Jason Hall (who wrote the American Sniper screenplay) points out in Rolling Stone: “The beautiful part is that while everyone on the left is arguing with everyone on the right, and they seem to get further and further apart, it’s the guys in the middle that this was for. It’s hitting them in the exact right spot.”

Chief Chris Kyle’s memoirs are laid out in a fervent, prideful style in fourteen chapters with titles like Takedowns, Five Minutes to Live, Sniper, Dealing Death, Family Conflicts, The Punishers, The Devil of Ramadi, Man Down, Mortality and Home & Out, whereas the style from the film is predominantly restrained and somber. Even the long action scenes in Iraq lack the typical gung ho approach so many Middle East blockbusters use to build up the adrenaline highs during the battle.

Carrying a surplus 40 pounds, Bradley Cooper embodies the controversial figure of Chris Kyle, the son of a church deacon and a Sunday school teacher, who grew up developing an instinct for protecting the “sheep.” Shooting guns and riding horses were the early passions of this Texan ‘cowboy at heart’ turned decorated sniper. While having a blast in the saddle bronc bustin’ circuit, he attracted attention from the rodeo groupies or ‘buckle bunnies’ (there is a dramatized scene in the first part of the film when Chris confronts a cheating girlfriend).

In San Diego, after finishing his BUD/S training at the Navy, Chris meets Taya Renae (whom he defines in his autobiography as ‘the love of my life and better half’) at a bar, translated on screen in a very effective scene made memorable by an inspired Sienna Miller, when Kyle unveils the chinks in Taya’s armor during a funny banter session about beers, rednecks and American ideals.

Deployed in Nasiriya (Iraq) in 2003, Chris executes his first target about 50 yards away (his record would reportedly be 2,100 yards). He continues his mission with a overzealous faith towards his duty, although in the film we witness Chris’s increasing anguish when his threats on Iraqi ground happen to be children and women (in contrast with his more blunt “I deeply hated the evil that woman possessed” remark from the book). Later Chris is sent to Fallujah, Ramadi (where he’s tagged ‘the Devil of Ramadi’ by enemy forces who offer a bounty on his head) and Baghdad, the conflict escalating all over and the individual losses of his platoon more frequent.

Chris becomes ‘the Legend’ within the SEALs due to his devoted and fearless nature. In the film, Marc Lee (Luke Grimes) asks him: “You got some kind of saviour complex?” and Chris replies: “No. I just want to get the bad guys, but if I can’t see them I can’t shoot them.” But the dark effluviums from the conflict left behind are as viscous like oil, as wasted like blood, and can annihilate the combatant’s spirit even entrenched in safety back home.

Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle & Kyle Gallner as Goat-Winston 

Some viewers may believe Steven Spielberg, who was originally going to direct the film, might have handled the ideological subtext better, but I find many of the charges of ‘propaganda’ against the film preposterous, since it’s clearly devoid of self-congratulation and it never feels frivolous — no chirpy soundtrack or banal Hollywood camaraderie.

While it’s not unusual to interject  sexual references into a bellicist epic, usually raunchy stuff, here this material is more sensitively displayed, following the traditional meet-cute path and featuring a tender courtship with nuances of intimacy between Chris and Taya.

I think one great difference between American Sniper and other contemporary war films as Black Hawk Down, Jarhead and The Hurt Locker is the romantic relationship between Chris and Taya, the underlying warmth at the core of American Sniper, which allows us to feel empathy without ever losing our critical eye. One example is Taya warning her husband: “If you think that this war isn’t changing you you’re wrong. You can only circle the flames so long.”

The impression Chris Kyle gives in his book, of being a gun-obsessed, resilient, judgemental war professional, is quite different from his filmic counterpart. Bradley Cooper’s outstanding performance forges a portrait of a fundamentally good-natured, compassionate and vulnerable man who loves his country and its foundational principles that he’ll defend until death. The real Chris had an eccentric side, sometimes replacing his official headgear for an old Longhorns baseball cap and customizing his uniform; he could be idealistic (“Helping each other out – that’s America”) or borderline fanatical (“Everyone I shot was evil. They all deserved to die”); he was a fan of John Wayne (“Rio Bravo may be my favorite”) and Clint Eastwood. The duelo scene between Chris and Iraqi sniper Mustafa pays homage to the Western genre in renewed fashion through a portentously shooting sequence.

What Cooper prodigiously attains is a balanced sense of right and wrong, love and hate, family and duty, projecting a personality the real Chris probably imagined in himself at times, a noble, superior warrior with a golden heart. Cooper hits all the right notes —macho swagger, anger, PTSD-laden hero— so it’s heartbreaking when the camera, playfully but ominously, frames Chris Kyle’s final moments in company of his wife and kids. Bradley Cooper won the 20th Critics’ Choice Award as ‘Best Actor in an Action Movie’ and has been nominated to an Oscar. He’s not the Academy Award front runner but I wouldn’t be too surprised if he pulled an upset. “Something about him was beautiful,” Cooper says of Chris Kyle (from whom he gleaned “a real authenticity” during their only phone call) in a NPR ‘Fresh Air’ interview, highlighting “the fact that 22 veterans commit suicide each day.”

British humanist John Stuart Mill wrote: “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks nothing is worth a war is worse.”

Another British philosopher, Roger Scruton, in his essay “Immanuel Kant and the Iraq War” (2004), contemplated: “We are confronted with a state that is manifestly despotic. Suppose there is a larger power, motivated perhaps by some version of the Ideal of Reason that Kant puts before us in ‘Perpetual Peace.’ Suppose this larger power is confident it can destroy the despotic state… then ask Kant the question: would it be right to go to war? There is no question of having to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction, or anything else beyond the known facts about the despotism’s past behaviour. The US is of course not a fully achieved republic in Kant’s sense — but as Kant would have been the first to admit, nothign created from the crooked timber of humanity is a fully achieved anything, still less an instance of what is, after all, an Ideal of Reason.”

Harking back to Plato’s Laws (360 B.C.E), we find: “in reality, every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not, indeed, proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting. All men everywhere are the enemies of all, and each individual of every other and of himself.” In Plato’s Thrasymachus (Republic Book I), we are told “justice is the interest of the stronger,” an argument which could be aducced by those who condemn unfair military interventions or the imperialistic ambitions of America’s oligarchy.

Let’s finish our ruminations about the philosophy of war with the persuasive words of George Washington (first President of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War): “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”


Note from Weirdland: Jason Hall, the screenwriter of "American Sniper", messaged me saying my article was "a great piece, with a deep insight, in the same league than Richard Brody's for The New Yorker", I'm very flattered, because I loved Jason's fantastic job at translating Chris Kyle's memoirs to the screen.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Ida Lupino's Anniversary, Oscar Race, Lolita's Anniversary, Bradley Cooper video

Happy Anniversary, Ida Lupino!


A&E Biography Of The Great Ida Lupino. Featuring Interviews with Roddy McDowall, Gena Rowlands & other Friends & Family. Narrated By Peter Graves.

Ida Lupino, promotional portrait for Woman in Hiding (1950)

Nineteen fifty was a phenomenal year for Lupino. With the release of Not Wanted, Never Fear, Outrage, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful, she became Hollywood's golden girl again, as she had been a decade before. As recognition of her new industry status, she was asked to present the Oscar for best director at the 22nd Academy Awards ceremony. Applause swept over her as she stepped to the podium. She announced Joseph Mankiewicz as the winner for A Letter to Three Wives. Said Mankiewicz: "Miss Lupino is the only woman in the Directors Guild, and the prettiest." The press hailed her extraordinary talent. Holiday magazine gave Ida a special award in recognition of her artistic courage: "To the woman in the motion picture industry who has done the most to improve standards and to honestly present American life, ideals and people to the rest of the world."  -"Ida Lupino: A Biography" (1996) by William Donati

Ava DuVernay got sensational reviews for Selma but she did not make the list of nominees for Best Director. However, she did make Oscar history as the first African American woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture. David Oyelowo, who amazingly played Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and also got sensational reviews, did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In over 80 years of the Academy Awards, less than 10 women have been recognized in the category of Best Director.

Let's talk Hollywood history and another trailblazing woman: Ida Lupino. She directed films and TV shows after establishing herself as one of Hollywood's best actresses. Back in the late 1920s and the 1930s, there was one female director in Hollywood. She was Dorothy Arzner. She was the first woman to direct a performer to an Oscar nomination.

Actress Ruth Chatterton, known to many classic film fans as the actress who played the vain, exasperating wife in William Wyler's Dodsworth (1936) was a Best Actress nominee for 1930's Sarah and Son, directed by Ms. Arzner and co-starring Fredric March.

Then came actress Ida Lupino. She started making Hollywood movies in the 1930s. Although she slammed across some solid screen performances, she was never nominated for an Oscar. Although she was a pioneer for women in the field of television as a director, she never received a Lifetime Emmy. She opened the door for future actresses who also became directors. Women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster and Penny Marshall. Ida should've been given a Lifetime Emmy. She was an actress, scriptwriter, director and a producer. I still feel a film/TV scholarship award for women should be named in Ida Lupino honor. Source: bobbyriverstv.blogspot.com

Bradley Cooper believes the debate surrounding American Sniper is a good thing; Eddie Redmayne's Golden Globe was stopped during baggage check at the airport; and Patricia Arquette felt like a grown-up at Disneyland when she heard she was nominated for an Oscar.

These are just some of the insights and anecdotes shared by the Best Actress and Best Actor hopefuls before they entered the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon on Monday afternoon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon and nominees from all 24 categories caught up with each other at the luncheon Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

"There is a realistic chance that American Sniper could ambush the Oscars," says Tom O'Neil of awards website GoldDerby.com. Because it broke into the race late, no one knows Sniper's strengths yet. But Saturday's Directors Guild Awards will be a great test for whether it can emerge victorious Oscar night, O'Neil says. If Eastwood wins best film, "then Sniper could emerge as the front-runner."

Dave Karger says it's conceivable that Cooper could "pull off an Adrien Brody". However, Golden Globe winners Michael Keaton (Birdman) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything), who also won a SAG award, are possibly a little too far ahead.

Actor Eddie Redmayne won a SAG Award, and if history is any judge, it makes him a strong contender for a best actor Oscar. O'Neil sees a chance for Cooper, however, because he has all the Oscar elements important to win: He portrays a real-life person, plus there's an impressive physical transformation involved. "He put on 40 pounds, facial hair and a Texas twang. He has a lot going for him."

Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock says the actor category is the best chance for a Sniper upset, mostly because of Cooper's two previous nominations for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. "I can't imagine it gets shut out," he says of the movie. "That'd be a pretty sweet reward." Source: www.usatoday.com

Bradley Cooper reading "Lolita" to Suki Waterhouse in a Parisian park, August 2013. Cooper is 17 years older than his girlfriend British model Suki.

60th Anniversary of Lolita (1955) - Nabokov finished Lolita on 6 December 1953, five years after starting it. The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret, by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. After these refusals and warnings, he finally resorted to publication in France. Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors". Eventually, at the very end of 1955, Graham Greene, in the (London) Sunday Times, called it one of the three best books of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the (London) Sunday Express, whose editor John Gordon called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." Today, Lolita is considered one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it came fourth in a list by the Modern Library of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century.(Wiki)

What makes Lolita “flame” is first of all a love affair with the real America. (“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity…. ”) It is an America where language and event make a seamless web of wonders, terrors, revelations, and portents. English, for Mr. Nabokov, is an instrument for the wildest and most mysteriously fitting shifts of tone, the most cheerfully extroverted, slang-relishing, literate verbal tomfoolery. Lolita’s chief actor, Humbert Humbert, a Swiss “salad of racial genes,” is afflicted with about equal degrees of wit, ennui, taste, and a hideously overt form of nympholepsy; the disease of Ruskin and Lewis Carroll given free and tender rein in a wilderness of American motels, suburbs, and progressive institutions. Lolita is a burlesque of Freudianism that Freud would have had to enjoy. I am inclined to think that the burlesque takes one more turn, at least, than we would expect of any previous example of the “confessional novel” or “roman noir” (Mr. Dupee’s terms). All Mr. Nabokov has to confess, I think, is imagination enough to project the charms of a Phedre or Cleopatra into the skin of an odious suburban bobby-soxer. Source: www.newrepublic.com


Bradley Cooper (You're the Reason) video featuring pictures and stills of Bradley Cooper, with his co-stars Heather Graham, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Sienna Miller, with girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, etc.

Friday, January 30, 2015

American Sniper: list of top-grossing war films, Bradley Cooper video

American Sniper has set its sights on another record: Within a matter of days, it will overtake Steven Spielberg's WWII classic Saving Private Ryan to become the top-grossing war-themed film of all time in North America, not accounting for inflation. Clint Eastwood's history-making movie jumped the $200 million mark on Sunday,

putting it ahead of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, another WWII title, which topped out at $198.5 million domestically in 2001. American Sniper is distinct from those two film in being set during a modern-day conflict.

Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, earned $216.7 million domestically. Taking inflation into account, that would equal roughly $312 million in today's terms. But a record is a record, and the history-making Sniper will cross $216 million sometime this week for Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow.

American Sniper is benefiting from a massive turnout in America's heartland, as well as from its six Oscar nominations, including best picture and best actor for Bradley Cooper's performance as the late Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who fought in the second Iraq war. In celebrating Sniper's $200 million milestone, Warners domestic distribution chief Dan Fellman said that Eastwood "created a gripping drama with a rare insight into the toll of war that has resonated with audiences in almost every demographic." Here's a rundown of how films addressing post-9/11 conflicts, or terrorism, have performed, according to Rentrak:

Lone Survivor
Release: 12/25/13
Rating: R
Gross: $125,088,651

Zero Dark Thirty
Release: 12/19/12
Rating: R
Gross: $95,720,716

Act of Valor
Release: 2/24/12
Rating: R
Gross: $70,012,847

Jarhead
Release: 11/4/05
Rating: R
Gross: $62,696,152

The Kingdom
Release: 9/28/07
Rating: R
Gross: $47,536,778

Green Zone
Release: 3/12/10
Rating: R
Gross: $35,497,337

The Hurt Locker
Release: 6/26/09
Rating: R
Gross: $17,017,811
Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

On stage, Bradley Cooper plays Joseph Merrick, a disfigured man whose life story has been made into multiple theatre productions and a film. It is reported that the actor will next be heading to London for another run of The Elephant Man after it wraps on Broadway. While in New York Bradley has made a ritual of taking the subway to rehearsals and performances on a regular basis. But as he continues to enjoy public transport his career has taken off with not only an Oscar nod for his performance in American Sniper but also box office success. The total haul for American Sniper, which is up for six Academy Awards, stands at $200.4 million. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Bradley Cooper in Vanity Fair magazine, January 2015


A video featuring pictures of Bradley Cooper, his co-stars Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Sienna Miller, girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, etc., and scenes from "American Sniper".

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Donna Reed's Anniversary, World War II's Hollywood Pin-Ups

Happy Anniversary, Donna Reed!

"Forty pictures I was in, and all I remember is 'What kind of bra will you be wearing today, honey?' That was always the area of big decision - from the neck to the navel." -Donna Reed

They gave Donna Reed the best supporting actress Oscar (Sinatra got supporting actor, too), and so they should have. But there she was in this scene, there was Donna Reed, gazing into the depths of life with shocking bleakness and talking about how one day she’d go home and get married and join the country club and do all the “proper” things for the “proper” people.

The scene jumped out of the picture—how did Lorene and the lovely, sweet Donna Reed get all that self-loathing and contempt on screen? Well, maybe she was more interesting than anyone guessed. I looked the picture up in the collected reviews of Manny Farber and, wouldn’t you know it, he said this in The Nation in 1953: “Miss Reed… is an interesting actress whenever Cameraman Burnett Guffey uses a hard light on her somewhat bitter features.”

In truth, the scene is better than Farber suggests, and it leaves Montgomery Clift’s Prewitt (the self-conscious emotional heart of the picture) somewhat at a loss. Because Reed’s face has seen a truth that exceeds the rest of From Here to Eternity. In addition, the film was boldly cast: Deborah Kerr (it was going to be Joan Crawford) is a surprise as the disillusioned wife, Karen; Burt Lancaster is subtle as Sergeant Warden; Clift is Clift; and then, there was Frank Sinatra, who knew this was his title shot and wasn’t going to let it get away. -David Thomson


Maggio (Frank Sinatra) busts in on Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) and Loreen (Donna Reed) as they try to get to know each other in this scene from FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.

World War II pinups appeared in many forms, from fighter and bomber nose art and bomber jacket art to calendars, postcards, matchbooks, and playing cards. The term pinup was coined during World War II, when soldiers would "pin up" these idealized pictures on their barracks and foxhole walls, and sailors did the same to lockers and bulkheads. There were photos of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, and hundreds of other calendar girls and Hollywood starlets whose only claim to fleeting fame was their image seared into a GI's brain from a ragged page of YANK or Esquire magazine. Servicemen soon began to create their own pinup art, decorating the noses of their planes and their bomber jackets with more primitive paintings of shapely babes. Source: www.skylighters.org

Servicemen would purchase such publications as Yank — the soldier’s magazine — which proudly displayed centerfolds of lovely young women in seductive poses, typically adorned in bathing suits, which the boys would “pin-up” on their barracks walls. However, prior to World War II and before the age of the photographic lens, soldiers and fighting men didn’t possess the luxury of hording an eight-byten image of their idol. Established stars such as Myrna Loy and Ida Lupino would hand out sandwiches at the Hollywood Canteen to soldiers on blackout assignments.

Penny Singleton, the pin-up girl of the Marine Corps — she was married to a Marine captain — established an alterations and repair community for the servicemen, which she called the “Sew and Sew Club.” The fair-haired actress, best known as the lead in the many Blondie pictures, enlisted a number of Hollywood personalities to assist her in this free-for-the-troops endeavor.

Such alluring cheesecake models as Marlene Dietrich, Jinx Falkenburg, Candy Jones, and Carole Landis entertained troops in foreign settings, and the troops were eternally grateful for their sacrifice. Little meant more to the American fighting man than to know that the ladies had them uppermost on their minds. To be greeted by a pin-up girl and given a fond farewell by her, before departure into war, was a gesture of profound magnitude. Linda Darnell, although a stunning pin-up girl whose beauty was out-of-this-world, enlisted in the Women’s Ambulance and Defense Corps of America and even took lessons on motor vehicle repair in her spare time.

Veronica Lake acquired over fifty sets of wings from cadets on one junket, as admiring gents surely wanted to pin their brass wings on the stunning Miss Lake’s dress. The wearing of military paraphernalia by pin-up girls became a common practice, for the gals showed the men in the armed forces that their simple little admiring gifts did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. -"The Pin-Up Girls of World War II" (2013) by Brett Kiser

US and British military culture in World War II promoted this preoccupation with sex. Over 5 million copies of Life magazine’s 1941 photo of Rita Hayworth (captioned the “Goddess of Love”) were sent out to US soldiers. Such “pin-ups” were ubiquitous among US forces. They were published not only in men’s magazines but in service publications like Stars and Stripes (or for Britain, Reveille).

The appeal of the “undisputed leader,” Betty Grable, “was less erotic than as a wholesome symbol of American womanhood,” based on a “carefully groomed exploitation of her good-natured hominess by 20th Century-Fox.” Hayworth, however, the “runner-up” to Grable, “exuded the sultry sex appeal of a mature woman” whose “appeal was more erotic than wholesome.”

Jane Russell’s “flamboyant sex appeal made her pin-ups wildly popular with GIs overseas.” Her large breasts were shamelessly exploited by movie producers as “the two great reasons for [her] rise to stardom.” Moralists at home opposed the pin-up craze. In 1944, the Postmaster General banned Esquire with its Vargas Girl fantasies, and Congressional hearings ensued. However, officers decided that pin-ups contributed to soldiers’ morale. In Britain, meanwhile, the cartoon heroine “Jane” boosted morale during the Blitz and thereafter by taking her clothes off during periods of bad news. “It was said that the first armored vehicle ashore on D-Day carried a large representation of naked Jane.” The comic-strip Jane “finally lost the last vestiges of her modesty during the Normandy campaign” in 1944, and soldiers said, “Jane gives her all.”

Behind the lines, by contrast, sex flourished in World War II. By one calculation, the average US soldier who served in Europe from D-Day through the end of the war had sex with 25 women. The peak was reached after the surrender of Germany in 1945. Condoms had to be rationed at four per man per month and medical officers considered this “entirely inadequate.” Over 80 percent of those who had been away over two years admitted to having regular sexual intercourse. In US-occupied Italy, three-quarters of US soldiers had intercourse with Italian women, on average once or twice a month.

War stories that focus on the front rarely discuss sex. For example, historian Stephen Ambrose gives detail-oriented accounts of battles, but only a vague mention that Paris after liberation in 1944 “over the next few days had one of the great parties of the war.” Ambrose mentions that German soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge were motivated by being told that hospitals in Belgium contained “many American nurses.”  When the huge bureaucracy of the US Army’s Services of Supply moved to Paris, “a black market on a grand scale sprang up… The supply troops… got the girls, because they had the money, thanks to the black market.” Ambrose can take for granted that “girls” were a commodity in wartime cities. Aside from these occasional references, however, Ambrose bypasses sex, presumably because it does not matter at the front.

By some reports, “war aphrodisia” – common among soldiers in many wars – extended into many segments of society during “total war.” The million and a half US soldiers who filled England before D-Day in 1944 had a well-deserved reputation as “wolves in wolves’ clothing.” They were, in one British phrase of the time, “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” England’s men were absent in large numbers, and its women had survived blackout and Blitz. The US soldiers’ presence contributed to a shake-up of British sexual mores, already under strain from the war. Back in the United States, “Victory Girls” gave free sex to soldiers as their “patriotic duty.”

The ill-defined “‘victory girl’ was usually assumed to be a woman who pursued sexual relations with servicemen out of a misplaced patriotism or a desire for excitement. She could also, without actually engaging in sexual relations, was testing the perimeters of social freedom in wartime America. According to FBI statistics, the number of women charged with morals violations doubled in the war years. A “surprising number were young married women.” Detroit banned unescorted women from bars after 8 pm. In Germany too, as social control disintegrated at the end of World War II, civilian gender limits expanded. In the Rhineland in 1945, advancing Allied forces found “Edelweiss gangs” of young men in pink shirts and bobby-sox, who “roamed the rubble hurling insults and stones at the Hitler Youth – when they were not trading sexual favors with willing girls.” Source: www.warandgender.com