Compelled. Yes, that's the word precisely. See, the thing is, for the better part of the last month, I've returned home from yet another long session of media ingestion and, turning the golden housekey, stepped into the apartment only to find myself compelled, a palpable compelling force like a hand at the back of my spine pressing me toward my television, to its glow, its curved glass lit with the light of yet another anti-war film.

I should add that this hand is palpable, fleshy, and strong, like the hand of the late Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, and that each day it pushes me again towards the compellatory screen. I've watched dozens of peace-inducing films. These occasions are in fact so compellable that, should the I lack actual, tangible anti-war media, I sit instead staring straight before me, daydreaming a pacific plot of my own making, often some hackneyed story with a cast of amputees. It's not a pretty picture.

And believe you me, these daily compellings can teach you a thing or two, for example, what should and shouldn't be stepped upon (mines) and I've come to some sweepingly broad conclusions about anti-war-ism. Primarily, I should say the key anti-war ingredient is this: the plot must resist any and all binary Good vs. Evil paradigms, those moralistic structures that so pervade our General's general rhetoric. In other words, the anti-war picture tosses a mighty monkey wrench into our simplifications, grinds militant justification to a halt, and puts lastly to rest the Machiavellian myth of the just war.

There are many ways to complexify, anti-warily speaking, but perhaps the most common sort of argument points toward the military cost of war. What I mean is, should you picture a typical anti-war film you, like I, will probably imagine one of those exhaustively violent battle scenes like the cannonball battle in Glory, the kind where masses of choreographed, gun-toting men lay utter waste to one another, the camera swooping low over ground strewn with limbs and craters. Most anti-war movies offer up just this sort of unadulterated spectacle, bringing to life that old truism that "war is hell," and then beating that truism into a bloody pulp, as if it was a zombie from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. And admittedly, bloodthirsty orgies can be compelling (I need only recall the shock of my sweat-stained seat after Spielberg's half-hour D-day scene from Saving Private Ryan). I'm afraid though, that while they might help you think twice before donating four years of your life to the Marines, these blood-soaked epics utterly fail to meet stringent anti-war standards. Alas! their battle scenes are married to glorification, their gore internally reinforced by noble causes, and one usually comes away believing that some sort of transcendent end justifies no end of horrific means.

But I've learned something, too. Of all the anti-war films that have compelled me, Robert Altman's M*A*S*H stands out like Yao Ming at a munchkin convention, not only because of its lifetime of syndicated fandom, but also because of the delightful way it combines wartime zaniness with 70's beatnik-ity. And while at first glance the film comes across as pure farce, somewhere between early 40's Jerry Lewis and Pauly Shore's In the Army Now on the war-comedy family tree, M*A*S*H's latent message is a rather nice surprise. I'm reminded of Twelfth Night, with Robert Duvall playing the role of a scapegotten Malvolio, only here there's a serious anti-war-like backbone, a spine revealed each time the Animal House hijinx come face to face with the harsh-tactical world of medivac surgery.

And not to harp on current events, but the suggestion of similarities between military and fraternity culture seems to be gaining currency in the harsh light of the Iraqi prison scandals. The photos of Abu Ghraib resemble nothing if not hazing rituals, for example I hear that the Bush/Kerry Skull and Bones society features some rather provocative humiliations, where the newbies are compelled to prostrate themselves before the assembled cult of power. I hesitate to say: Paging Dr. Freud?

For my money, it's the chasm of disconnect that lurks between military culture and military purpose that fuels the most provocative moments of Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, which I recently marched off to see. I couldn't help it: its compellatory anti-war-ness was magnified by my fascination with Mr. Moore's stubble, though with all the press that this film has gotten recently I really shouldn't even mention it. That said, the film's finest anti-war moments come when Moore's abutments give way to actual events and people. (Oooohh, how documentary!) For example, I found both the interviews with the soldiers where they describe the kickin' stereo systems of the M-1 tank, and the eerie shots of a Gestapo-esque night raid during a Baghdad Christmas, quite compelling.

But the real heart of Moore's movie is located near his condemnation of social inequality. About three years ago, Republican talking points decreed that any time someone made an argument about wealth, it was to be dismissed as something called "class warfare." Today, ironically, one of the most effective arguments against both the war and the Right Wing is an indictment of the class structure of actual warfare, a message that Moore's movie takes some pains to deliver. Following military recruiters around a Wal-mart parking lot, or getting harassed in front of the Saudi embassy, its hard not to make broad conclusions about privilege, though (once again) Moore's attention is too diffuse to focus on on any specific conclusion.

In the old days, by which I mean before the Cold War, it was much easier to talk openly about class structure, especially if you happened to be European. I mention it only because my chronologically oldest compeller, Renoir's masterpiece, The Grand Illusion, is preoccupied with just these sorts of issues: militant classism, social democracy, noblesse oblige. Seemingly, from the very opening of the film, Renior starts beating his drum about privilege, cutting to scene after scene of monocle'd officers drinking VSOP round the POW table. The film is bizarrely incongruous, half Hogan's Heroes, half War and Peace, though all I could think about was Marie Antoinette looking at herself in the mirror while holding a Little Debbie snack cake. Renoir's point seemed to be that the real common ground exists, not among the various turfdoms of nationalism, but along socio-economic lines.

And you need only to remember the great Christmas Truce of 1914, where the opposing sides of the Great War's trench paused to sing carols together, to realize how potent this argument can be, and that most people who actually do the fighting must, whether by threat of death or poverty, themselves be compelled.