Rather Dear, Those Boys: Care Ethics in The Unknown Soldier (2017)

Abstract

This thesis examines how soldiers express care towards each other in Aku Louhimies's 2017 film The Unknown Soldier (Tuntematon sotilas), the largest production in Finnish film history and a central work of Finnish national war commemoration of the Continuation War. While the Unknown Soldier canon has been extensively studied in relation to national mythology, collective memory, and cinematic representation, the interpersonal and affective relations between soldiers, especially the ways men at war tend to, depend on, and sustain one another, have received little scholarly attention. This thesis addresses that gap by asking: how do the soldiers in Louhimies's film express care towards each other?

The analysis draws on two complementary theoretical frameworks: Joan Tronto's (1993; 2013) political ethics of care, which provides an analytical vocabulary of five phases and moral qualities of care, and Tiina Vaittinen's (2017) concept of care as a corporeal relation enacted by needs, which foregrounds the vulnerable body as the political starting point of care. The empirical material is analysed through qualitative, theory-guided content analysis of six selected scenes, using the principles of film analysis established by Bordwell and Thompson (2017).

The analysis finds that care is expressed across all five of Tronto's phases, from attentiveness to shared comradeship, though it appears in uneven, constrained, and at times absent forms. Vaittinen's framework reveals that the most decisive care relations occur precisely when soldiers are most physically vulnerable and least able to articulate their needs. A central finding is that care and violence are not opposed in the film but structurally entangled. Care emerges from and operates within violent conditions, and this paradox shapes both what care can achieve and what it cannot. The thesis concludes that care ethics offers a productive lens for analyzing fictional war deciptions, making visible relations and values that nationalist framings of war tend to ignore.