The Servant-Leader on the Battlefield: Themes of Home, Ambition, Ethics, and Death in the Film <em>1917</em>

Abstract

Film provides a unique medium in which the audience can be engaged through many senses, asking viewers to participate in the storytelling beyond a passive consumption of the artform (Barsam & Monahan, 2016). As art acts as a reflection of reality and the human connection to the great unanswered questions, studying film is a powerful case-study device for leadership scholars and practitioners. “No well-made film is unable to teach us something about leadership because leadership is about conflict, choices, and integrity” (Carey, 2005). Leadership studies often looks at military structures and other perilous situations for leadership lessons in success or failure (Kellerman, 2018; Northouse, 2015). 1917, as a military movie, provides several themes that touch on the personal leadership journeys each of us possess while attempting to live meaningful lives while achieving our passions. “In great films truly generative dialogue can be engaged with modern-day prophets and servant-leaders seeking to better understand the nature of the human condition through the stories we tell each other” (Walsh, 2020). I will discuss the film language used to construct four themes from the film 1917: home, ambition, ethics, and death. One of the two main characters, Lance Corporal Schofield, in traversing a dangerous mission to deliver a message across no man’s land through German occupied France in World War I learns to become a servant-leader. 1917, can be considered a spiritual sibling to the writing of Henry David Thoreau, whose essay Walden deeply influenced Greenleaf’s (1998) thematic understandings of the lasting values which motivate disruptors of an apathetic mode. By finding the conception of home as a tranquil and transcendental value for his mission and motivating ambition, instead of an innocent entity to avoid being corrupted, Schofield, like Thoreau, learns to embrace a slow, steady, and death laden road towards the future. The lessons that Schofield learns are attuned to the primary distinction that Greenleaf (1977/2002) makes in Servant as Leader, the servant-leader is subversive to the Western dominant paradigm of leader first by affirming the connection, wholeness, and process of being servant first.