Hollywood and Desert Storm: Judgment Postponed : Movies: No consensus exists on the Gulf War, so studios are staying mute. It took years for incisive films about Korea and Vietnam to be made.

The other day, walking past the office where the Writers Guild registers scripts, I saw a line extending out the door and halfway down a hallway to the street. My first thought was of a rush to register treatments with titles like “Storm Over Baghdad” or “Desert Warriors.”

But a spokeswoman for the guild said that so far as she knew it was normal traffic and she was unaware of any such specific rush. The Motion Picture Assn. of America’s title registration office in New York says that only two titles relating to the Persian Gulf War have been registered so far. What they are the office would not reveal.

The late literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote essays about what he called patriotic gore (from a line in “Maryland My Maryland”), the fervent writings about war and warriors in the American past. There is certainly a film literature of patriotic gore, from the silent films about World War I to several hundred films made about World War II just before, during and soon after the conflict.

But wars are not what they used to be, and the decisions to base movies on them are nothing like as simple as they used to be. In both of the world wars there was no trouble about playing to a consensus. The rightness, the inevitability of those wars was never seriously in doubt.

The movies, and now television, must by definition attract the widest possible audiences, in part by treating themes on which there is the widest possible agreement, as that motherhood is good, murder is bad and comedy best of all.

The movies, with few exceptions, require--or at least hope for--a consensus, subject matter that will not enrage any sizable portion of the potential audience. When no consensus exists, or when indeed there is a violent rift in the society, as during the Vietnam conflict, the movies play safe and stay mute.

Stanley Kramer tried hard to make a Vietnam film during the Vietnam War but could find no property that would both serve the truth and not terrify potential financial backers.

The best films about the Korean conflict, “Pork Chop Hill” (1959) and “War Hunt” (1962), both appeared well after the shooting stopped. Like “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), made more than a decade after the armistice that ended the First World War, both films looked at war less as exercises in patriotic gore than as tragic tolls.

What we now think of as the classic films about Vietnam--”Go Tell the Spartans” (1978), “The Deer Hunter” (1978), “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Platoon” (1986) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989)--all followed the American withdrawal by four to 15 years, the withdrawal itself reflecting the existence by then of a consensus on the war, or at least a resolution. None would qualify as unambiguous patriotic gore.

Operation Desert Storm is not like Korea or Vietnam. The troops are supported even by those who oppose the action, which was not quite the case in Vietnam. Yet the same kind of division exists in society about the wisdom of the American presence, along with a Vietnam-like worry over a deepening, lengthening and enmiring involvement. Even more than with Vietnam, there are long-range worries: about the situations of the United States and the Middle East generally in a post-Saddam Hussein world.

The likelihood of the movies coping with these issues now, or reflecting them, is fairly remote. And although there are already heroes in place and will be more before Desert Storm has passed, the heroics of “Wake Island” (1942), one of the best of the patriotic films of World War II, or “Back to Bataan,” which starred John Wayne in 1945, seem somehow inappropriate or premature in the Persian Gulf. The times are not as simple, and neither are we.

With its saturation coverage of the news of the war, television itself presumably finds itself better off providing antidotes to the bomb bursts and the gloom rather than fictionalized versions of the struggle. And Hollywood, too, must feel a considerable hesitation in attempting a fictional gloss on the realities, shaped and censored as they may be, that we can experience in the living room any hour of every day.

The material for thoughtful films is there. Eventually, with the perspective they have shown in treating other wars, the movies and television can help us to see this one better. If we are fortunate and they are ingenious, the media may be able to help bridge the awful and deadly gulf of ignorance and misunderstanding between the Arab world and the West.

The seeds of all wars are planted in a succession of yesterdays when nobody is paying quite enough attention. With their uncommon power of particularizing history rather than lecturing about it, films and television can (although not amid the pressures of battle) help us see where we’ve been, and how we got there. They may help us all to heal our wounds.

But what we need most, from whatever source, is to learn enough about history to stop being victimized by it.