Much is being made of the box office failures that have been the so-called Iraq War films. Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Reese Witherspoon-starrer Rendition and now, Robert Redford’s star-powered Lions for Lambs have all tanked, struggling to attain anything they could call respectable box office tallies. Politics aside, these weren’t good films in the first place (though I can’t speak to Rendition, which I avoided, but does have a lousy 55/100 on MetaCritic.com).

There’s a broader cultural imperative evident in these failures and the successes of other films. Why is American Gangster a big box office hit, and now potential Oscar-contender, while films so overtly in tune with the political landscape continue to flounder? The easy answer is escapism. But as films are a reflection of the culture, we can’t help but pay attention to the films that have made an impact while America was at war.

Here are a few: A History of Violence, The Departed, Million Dollar Baby, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Children of Men, Mystic River, Grindhouse, Saw, 300, Sin City, Kill Bill, and a brand new vision of the superhero Batman. Throw in the onslaught of fantasy films and even musicals since 2001 and you have a genuine idea of how we really are responding to the post-9/11 world.

When America is at war, there is no single genre of film that resonates with an audience, be it popular or elite. In WWII audiences were drawn to war films because it was a war worth fighting, but also because those were the films the market demanded. Most of those films are classics even today, including the seminal propaganda romance Casablanca. As the medium grew its escapist quality combined with serious cultural reflection resulted in war time movies being the ones we still hold dear today. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, all of these conflicts resulted in films that have maintained their position as classics. We rally around film when we are at war and the artists behind these films produce their most enduring works.

There are exceptions of course, but looking at the rise of the fantasy genre, the return of the movie musical and an obsession with violence, torture and zombies since the start of our war against the Taliban and continuing into Iraq, we see again the culture rallying behind the medium. The films of the mid- to late-1990s can’t hold a candle to the films that have been produced in the early 21st century, much like the films of the 1980s couldn’t compete with the quality of the Gulf War films (1990-1992).

With these Iraq War films, we are seeing, quite abundantly, a betrayal of the audience by filmmakers and studios and people are not responding. The segmented, polarized audience of the past few years had decidedly adopted two opposing viewpoints, one of black and white, good versus evil and one of extreme moral ambiguity in the face of evil.

So what’s an Iraq War film? It’s the hopeful, yet bleak Children of Men and not Lions for Lambs. It’s the internal conflict of characters in The Departed and not that of the characters in In the Valley of Elah. It’s the discussion of the morality of torture in Saw and not that same discussion in Rendition. It’s a return to the realistic, sober, socially conscious films of the 1970s with Michael Clayton and the upcoming release of the most violent musical to ever hit the screen with Sweeney Todd. We’re watching Iraq War films all the time. And when you get right down to it, the only films that aren’t our Iraq War films are the films actually about the war.