Arthur Chrenkoff
The savage and bloody story of the Quixotic rescue of Private Ryan has become the surprise world-wide movie hit of 1998. While Steven Spielberg has never been a stranger to commercial success, his more serious and worthwhile works (The Colour Purple, Empire of the Sun, Armistad, and even Schindler’s List) have never achieved the same box-office status as ET, Jurassic Park or the Indiana Jones adventures. Hence the surprise that these two and a half hours of almost unrelenting carnage played out on the beaches and fields of Normandy have attracted such huge crowds of cinema-goers in towards the end of a decade that likes its movie entertainment fluffy and harmless, violence cartoon-like, and endings happy. Few now doubt that at the next year’s Oscars Saving Private Ryan will make a clean sweep, adding peer recognition to its critical acclaim and financial success.
Like all memorable movies, SPR is not free of controversy. While hardly anyone faults the film on technical grounds or criticizes the levels of violence, pundits, movie critics and other assorted social commentators debate the film’s contents and ponder on its message. This is hardly surprising; historical movies of late tend to become subjects of political discussion (think of Dances With Wolves, J.F.K., or Michael Collins), mostly because the apparent left-wing agendas of their makers open them to criticism of historical revisionism (Braveheart is perhaps the most astounding offender in this category - albeit without any ideological bias save for the anti-English sentiment - aside from the main character’s name and geographical setting hardly anything else in the film is not fictional). SPR does not fall into this category; Spielberg has been almost obsessively attentive to historical detail and the only criticisms of this type tend to be of a nit-picking quality (a US Army Captain would not wear his officer insignia on his helmet, Rangers would not be so stupid and careless as to move along the ridge silhouetted against the sky, etc.). What Spielberg’s latest has experienced is quite rare in the history of culture wars: being caught in a cross-fire between both the left-wing and the right-wing critics.
The criticisms from the left belong largely to two schools: the anti-American and the affirmative action ones. How anyone can see SPR as an exercise in jingoism and flag-waving is hard to see, unless one judges any film about the Americans, particularly winning ones, to be an example of cinematographic nationalism (the American flag itself in the film is rather sickly pale and washed-out; its fluttering in the wind hardly inspires the movie-goers to spontaneously raise from their seats and start singing the Star Spangled Banner). Spielberg himself is hardly a conservative patriot with all his liberal (in the American sense) activism, fundraising for the Democrats, and rubbing shoulders with Clinton. Even he, though, must surely frown at the suggestion that in the interest of de-jingo-ising his film he should make both sides look more alike. The post-modernist, relativistic age likes all things gray but that is one thing that the Second World War never was: the Allies were fighting the good fight and should be deservedly proud of their effort, the Germans weren’t and shouldn’t.
The grievances of the historical equal opportunity school of thought are hardly any more credible. Some accuse Spielberg of making the Second World War (or specifically the Normandy operation) appear as if there has not been anyone else involved in it but the Americans. The fact is SPR is a film about the American soldier. While there were five beach-heads established on the D-Day, two of them - Omaha and Utah - were given exclusively to the US Army. No wonder there aren’t any Brits or Canadians around; they were busy on Juno, Sword and Gold. The choice of Omaha beach for the opening sequence also make cinematographic sense; it was there that the fighting was hardest and that’s where the Americans suffered their heaviest casualties (the bulk of their 1,000 killed for the 30 thousand that landed on the two beaches, versus, for example, over 300 dead Canadians out of a landing force of 3,500). When Captain Miller and his men go inland in search of Private Ryan, there too they have, from the historical accuracy point of view, little chance of encountering anyone but their fellow Americans. Only American and British airborne units were parachuted behind the enemy lines in Normandy, and if Ryan is the object of the exercise Captain Miller and company will naturally go to where the 101st Division has been dropped.
The second criticisms is even more politically correct: why aren’t there any blacks in the movie? Apparently for the affirmative action eagles the composition of Miller’s squad (a Jew, a Southerner, an Italian, an All-American boy, etc.) is not diverse enough (one almost expects to hear demands for inclusion of women and disabled in the rescue mission). The reason why there are no black soldiers in the movie is not that Spielberg is a racist (The Color Purple and Armistad certainly prove otherwise); it’s that they simply were not there those fifty four years ago. In 1944 the American Army was still segregated and the black enlisted men were for most part kept out of the actual fighting. While there were around 130,000 black American soldiers in Great Britain on the eve of the D-Day, virtually all of them were concentrated in the Service of Supply. No black soldiers landed on Omaha and Utah, no black soldiers were members of the elite paratrooper units parachuted behind the German lines. One might now cringe at the racism of the American top brass but to put the black soldiers in the midst of D-Day fighting would have been a sad exercise in rewriting history to assuage the white guilt.
The left-wing critics were not the only ones to set SPR in their scopes; numerous conservative commentators (John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard and John Simon of National Review among others) were also not impressed by Spielberg’s latest; the film even created a lively discussion on our very own LiberalYouth e-mail group.* The right-wing critics don’t so much care about the contents of the film; their criticisms concern the movie’s message; being either a negative one, or non-existent at all. For all its duration SPR bombards the viewer with unrelenting violence; ordinance explodes, guns rattle, body parts fly, soldiers die by the dozens in most varied and gruesome ways, all in a carnival of gore that lacks any sort of historical or moral context. At no point in the movie is it made clear, or even alluded to, why these men were sent to fight, and to die, in this foreign land. No mention of liberation of subjugated nations, no mention of the struggle of Western freedom and democracy against the horrors of Nazi totalitarianism. To some it might all come to resemble a big screen version of “Doom” where the only point is to kill another enemy and to move another few metres ahead. In such a contextual vacuum the movie’s heroes are left to wonder whether saving Private Ryan will be the only decent thing they might get a chance to do during the whole war.
Christopher Caldwell writes in Commentary: “In any war there are two narratives: the narrative of civilization which wages war, justly or unjustly, for reasons of state and/or out of considerations of honor, and on-the-ground narrative, which basically consists of men killing one another. There can be overlap between two narratives.”** There is no such overlap in SPR, which probably often leads the viewers to conclude that even this historically “good” and just war is nothing but a senseless slaughter. It can be debated to what extent this nihilistic and ignorant viewpoint truthfully reflect the reality as seen through the eyes of an average American GI fighting in Europe in 1944. It is certainly quite conceivable that despite saturation propaganda campaign by the Allies, its soldiers - and we have to remember that most of them were not budding intellectuals from New York but boys from the slums of Chicago and young hillbillies from Kentucky - still didn’t understand, or at least didn’t care, what they were fighting for. Maybe from such a perspective the film is again a testimony to Spielberg’s love of historical accuracy, but for both the Baby Boomer and the Gen X viewers, in their perilous ignorance of history, it sends a powerful message that every war is a meaningless carnage. And if saving Private Ryan was all there was to fight and die for, then the undistinguished Ryan wasn’t worth it, regardless whether or not through his good and virtuous post-war life he “earned it” in the dying words of Captain Miller. What is dangerous then, is not that for some of the movie’s characters the war has no sense; it is that for none of them it is really worth fighting.
Every reasonable person knows that war is hell. Now, thanks to Spielberg’s picture, our spoiled, cynical and unthreatened generation knows it even better. What they still don’t know, again thanks to Spielberg, is that regardless of all the horror, some values have to be defended, some principles upheld, and therefore some wars fought. Maybe for that to happen SPR should be watched in conjunction with Schindler’s List. But with the modern attention span whoever remembers Schindler’s List anymore? In the meantime a washed-out, colourless Star-spangled Banner keeps on fluttering over Hollywood.
