Context

In the last year we have had multiple opportunities to see Steven Spielberg’s much lauded movie Saving Private Ryan, a movie which returns us to a certain narrative ground—the war saga set in the battlefields of Europe during WWII—for what seems like the first time since Burt Lancaster and company put all of those hoary conventions emphatically to rest in the surreal Castle Keep.

I have discussed the movie with several distinct groups of friends as, it seems, many viewers of the film have, both in the privacy of our homes and on the messy public airwaves of “talk radio.” I have been surprised that my friends—intelligent, sophisticated people on the whole—had no idea what I was talking about when I elaborated my understanding of the film’s “lesson.” At one level, Private Ryan is about a command not to kill a German prisoner who then goes on to kill several members of an American platoon. Thus the movie’s frightening lesson (one that I’ve come to think of as archetypically North American) is: Always choose death, for if you do not, death will come anyway, later, multiplied.

When I called my friends’ attention to the fact that Spielberg had chosen to have the initial decision not to kill made by a multi-lingual intellectual (and coward!), their response was usually along the lines of “what’s Spielberg got to do with the fact that he was a coward”; “I didn’t like that guy”; “he was a coward.” What I finally had to conclude was that while I was treating the character of the intellectual Upham as a part of Spielberg’s artifice, as an important element in an artistic structure, which structure once in place could be asked to reveal its meaning (and perhaps Spielberg’s ideological baggage), my friends saw these characters as . . . real people. They understood them in the same way that they understood the cashiers who sold them their tickets and popcorn out front.

In short, my ominous conclusion was that they didn’t know how to read the film. That is to say, they didn’t know how to read (understood as the ability to abstract the integuments of structure from a piece of narrative art in order to begin to talk about how the thing means (i.e. “creates a moral world”)).

And if my intelligent, sophisticated, art-savvy friends didn’t know how to do this, what was going on with all of the blunt teenage receptors (mostly boys) that filled the theater on the first evening that I saw the movie? “BOOM!” Was that it? Or should I have worried that the message about the imperative to choose death was also at some sub-pineal level oozing in and around their minds?

And where—in God’s name!—does Spielberg fit in this? Is he a sort of modern-day Albert Speer? A brilliant technician in the service of sinister ideals? Or is he just mouthing a bunch of dumb platitudes and aping conventional gestures with no more awareness of the meanings his story creates than his bluntly-receptored audience?

All of which is to say that our simple movie-going experience had become a crisis of both political and literary scope. What does it mean when the most sinister ideological notions pass virtually without comment in mass culture narratives because the audience is unable to decipher what is in the film?

For a literate culture which wishes to understand that our narratives do serve to construct what we are, what our “content” is, and which trusts that the citizens to this culture know in some ultimate way what it means to “read” so that we may have some basis for moving among narrative options, this all implies a crisis of proverbially nightmarish proportion (oh, a quiet crisis, to be sure, in between the simulated explosions of mortar shells and other forms of synthetic, orgasmic, cinematic bliss). But without the self-consciousness that Reading provides, we are merely (as Louis Althusser would have it) dumbly “interpellated” into subject positions in a very mechanical State Apparatus. In short, being able to read is a large part of what it means to be human as opposed to being a mere social function.

So, I’m going to “read” Saving Private Ryan. I think a reading can expose this film for what it is, a crypto-fascist work of historical revision. It’s not even revision. It’s: “Remember what we used to think? About patriotism? The glory of war? Let’s think that again, and really mean it, so that it will be harder than hell to dislodge next time.” Which is to say, this is a very dangerous movie.

Opening Credits. Dreamworks. A little boy perched on a crescent moon, fishing. Images of Huck Finn and Walt Disney. In fact, thinking of Spielberg as our Latter-day Walt Disney is accurate. The man who provides our national fantasy so that we aren’t bothered by the obligation to have imaginations ourselves. Why be bothered with the non-productive work of fantasy when the Unca Walts of the world can do it for us and stay neatly inside the ideological lines? By the way, has anyone seen Walt’s cryogenicized corpse recently? I’m not implying anything. Just asking.

The American Flag. The first and last images in this movie are of the American flag, translucent, brilliant, rippling in the wind.

How are we to understand this flag? Why is it in the movie? Is it ironic? I’ll just go ahead and tell you, no, it’s not ironic. Nothing in this film undercuts or asks us to think about the flag’s traditional, weepy appeal. This movie is yet another announcement of the death of ‘60s style “thought.” This is not Zabriskie Point, not Slaughter House Five, not Catch 22, and certainly not Castle Keep. This is The Big Chill take ∞.

Or is the flag present in this movie because, well, flags are always in WWII movies? It’s a purely generic concession. That would be really stupid, were it the case. It is therefore very possibly the case.

Opening Scene. Normandy. The aging WWII vet totters toward the grave of . . . we know not whom. Behind him comes his family. There’s something interesting about this family. What the camera most encourages us to see are the three granddaughters, in their late teens, arm-in-arm, blonde, sweaters stretched over large (but not improperly large), round breasts. Ooh, they are well-titted, these little American wonders. They are the fruits of victory. Here, the answer to the film’s purported “big” question “Have I led a good life?” is answered. Hell yes. Look at these blonde babes my genes have launched. It’s Aryan eugenics hybridized with Hollywood’s sense of the good life. If the Nazis had won, and Hitler had settled down in Burbank, he wouldn’t have thought any different.

The Flashback. We look into the still-nameless vet’s eyes. They take us back to the beach. Omaha beach. Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller.

This is a brilliant moment. One has to pause and admire Spielberg’s shrewdness. First, casting Hanks (a notorious softy) in this role was extraordinarily smart. He softens all the hard edges of this “war film.” He reassures us that this will not be another Pork Chop Hill or Ballad of the Green Berets. Sure, Spielberg remembers Vietnam. He wouldn’t make some macho war flick. Hanks is no John Wayne. Therefore, the film cannot be another VFW hack-piece.

Also, there is the narrative stratagem, the slight of hand. We move from the eyes of the old man (who is in fact Private Ryan) to the viewpoint (which Ryan could not possibly know) of Captain Miller. This is inspired cheating! Through it he maintains the narrative question: who is the old man?

The Landing. Truly horrific (with the exception of a few near-goofy Monty Pythonesque special effects of guys fightin’ on without arms). These first minutes of the film are visually stunning. War’s horror (or a techno-wizard’s version thereof) is really captured. The claustrophobia of the landing boats and the water. The slaughter of the good guys into whose angular faces we had just been looking. These were authentic American faces right out of Dorothea Lange’s Farm Security Administration photographs of the 1930s. In a time like our own when country boys, oh hell, when boys, line up in order to take their part in the next mechanized slaughter (of little brown men, mostly, from Iraq or some other land-of-little-brown-people), this could be the opening of a morally engaging movie.

But it’s not.

The tableau of the beach scene is stunning. Beautiful to see on the screen. Kubrick-like in its grandeur. Incongruous, too, given what has just preceded. These men and machines integrated with the green and grey of nature. As the Italian Futurists used to say, “The deaths do not matter as long as the gesture is beautiful.”

I think that just about every American movie expresses the conviction that there’s something beautiful about death. Especially violent death. It’s in depicting death that our cinema can most be said to have a style. A flair of its own. This is true even of oughta-know-better directors like Martin Scorcese, and it’s certainly true of the rag-tag rest.

The Plot. A platoon is sent behind enemy lines to rescue the last of four brothers three of whom have already been killed in action. Some guy who looks frighteningly like Bob Dole playing a four-star general reads a letter written by Abe Lincoln and everybody breaks down in tears and hysterics of patriotism and love of mother. Never mind that the letter doesn’t make any sense in the context. In fact, the logic of Lincoln’s letter ought to be encouraging the mother to say, “Well, hell, take the last one too. On that fucking glorious field of battle you talk about so purtily.”

Forget this plot. It’s a red herring. A sentimental red herring, if such a thing can be imagined. It’s a cover for the real story.

The First Execution. Early in the movie, and immediately after taking the beachhead at Omaha, two surrendering Germans, hands held high, are shot by two American soldiers.

Soldier 1: “What did he say?”

Soldier 2: “Look, I washed for supper.”

This cynical and murderous moment is of course the companion to the critical moment later in the film when Upham intervenes in the execution of the German prisoner. Writers pair similar moments in narrative in order to make clear their intentions, to emphasize a theme, or provide self-commentary. How does the light of this first scene—which is disturbing in its cynicism and callousness—help us to understand Spielberg’s moral purpose in the second and central execution?

The Second Execution. This scene (a depiction of a desperate human clinging to the threads of his life) is as well delivered by the actor as any in memory since John Turturo’s tour de force performance in Miller’s Crossing. The actor brilliantly captures the idea of the Enemy-Other-as-Human. His pathetic attempt to render “The Star Spangled Banner”: “Oh say can I see.” One sympathizes with the decision to let him go. One sees the moral rightness of Upham’s argument. What allows Upham’s argument to persuade Captain Miller is the fact that Miller is an intellectual himself (he quotes Emerson). He is unlike Upham only in that he has by force of brute will obliged all cowardice from his own body except for his symptomatically quaking right hand. This hand, foregrounded again and again, is synechdoche for the general cowardice of intellectuals that he will not allow to dominate him in particular.

But of course all this is called into question later when the German prisoner kills Melish with the same Hitler Youth dagger Melish had earlier claimed as a war souvenir. (Melish is a Jew. Now, what’s this structural irony about? A condensation of the entire holocaust?) It’s another brilliant dramatic moment. Just as the German is forcing home the dagger and muttering soothingly in German, as if to persuade Melish that it is time to stop struggling and accept death (as the German himself was certainly never willing to do), Melish asks, “Stop! Stop! What did you say?” as if he might reasonably provide a translation, and as if that translation might provide Melish with something he needed to know before passing on. Or is it his own version of a ploy to extend his life? Then the German softly presses forward, saying, “Shush, shush,” as if to his child. An amazing, awful scene. Incoherent in the context of the film, but affecting anyway.

To compound matters (and here is Spielberg’s deus ex machina at its extreme), it is this same German whose rifle shot kills our heroic Captain Miller. The German seems to nod in satisfaction. It was a good shot. Fuck that American schweinhundt. Him and Betty Boop. Meanwhile, the coward intellectual Upham cringes in a crater, hugging his feckless rifle as if it were a favorite and comforting doll. The contempt we feel for him. Our self-disgust at once having sympathized with his intellectualization. Our national sorrow that the great man, Captain Miller, must die as a consequence of Upham’s lack of manliness.

The Great Change. Immediately following Miller’s death (and the arrival of the “cavalry” in the form of P-51 tankbuster airplanes and legions of allied soldiers; how is it, by the way, that the planes couldn’t have arrived a little earlier than the foot soldiers? too inconvenient to the needs of the plot?), Upham experiences a great change. It is as if Miller’s courage has flowed over to Upham at the moment of his death. The son Upham becomes the father Captain Miller. Upham leaps from his crater—all nervousness gone, rifle at the ready, the very image of resoluteness, of experience—and improbably persuades six or seven Germans to drop their weapons (instead of shooting the hell out of him). One of these soldiers is, of course, our German prisoner, the guy upon whom Upham had wasted his powers of compassion and ethical reasoning. Hopeful that again his naive advocate would aid him, the German gestures hands forward and says, “Upham!” Buddy! At which point Upham murders him. In the logic of the film, he does what should have been done the first time.

Emotionally, it is clear that Spielberg anticipates that the audience’s response to Upham’s act will be full-throttle approval. “Yeah! At last! Revenge is sweet! Just what the treacherous Kraut deserved.” (I really never imagined that I would ever again be given license to hate Germans. But for the length of this movie, at least, they are again Krauts. Their appeals to their common or shared humanity are all duplicity and self-interest. They are what they are: Nazis. Krauts. If death is theirs, it’s fitting.)

Thus the film’s murderous thesis is fully disclosed. Self-survival, the survival of the good, requires that one always choose death. The cynicism and brutality of the first execution back on Omaha beach is excused in its fact if not in its style. Bad table manners, perhaps, but in murdering the prisoners the American soldiers did what they had to do. This is advocacy of international vigilantism and no whit more self-reflective than any Dirty Harry narrative.

It’s the sort of moral imperative that ought (and how contrary is this ought!) to make us understand why those on the wrong side of our self-righteousness and sidewinder missiles (“pharmaceuticists” in the Sudan and other Muslim countries, for example), have this imponderable desire to blow up our embassies. Could it be because they understand (as well they should!) our national logic better than we do? Aren’t they saying to us, “You know, it’s easy to choose death for other people.”

Closing. With the words of Abraham Lincoln echoing in the background (pride, sacrifice, glory, freedom—it’s 1915 again and we’re all dying sweetly pro patria!), the weepy vet returns to the screen. We know now that the man is Ryan. And the question he asks (a question that is really a narrative non-sequitur given the film’s foregrounding of the Upham story) is: “Have I lived a good life? Have I been a good man?”

Well, with his granddaughters’ lovely bosoms still hanging like a majestic sunset in the background, how can we say anything but yes?

Or, more reasonably, well, how the hell are we supposed to know if the poor son of a bitch led a good life? His wife doesn’t look beat up. But that nose! How much gin did you knock back, papa? How much TV did you watch? How many peaceniks did you rail against during Vietnam? How many Nazis did you help elect to Congress, with your little democratic ballot, so like a bullet to the rest of the world? What do you think of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich? Do you hate the eggheads as much as Spielberg seems to think you should? How many times did you curse the EPA because it got in the way of some concrete you wanted to pour?

Sorry if these questions are inappropriate, if they interrupt this orgy of amour propre uniting VFW dads and their contrite middle aged sons. (Hasn’t that been a scene at the local cineplex!) I’m patient. I can wait for your response. I’ll be sitting here whistling something incorrigible. Say, Frank Zappa’s “Bow Tie Daddy.”

Don’t try to do no thinkin’
Just go on with your drinkin’
Have your fun, you old son of a gun
And drive off in your Lincoln.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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