Forrest Gump goes to war
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
With Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon
In major cinemas from August 24
Review by Louis Proyect
The only thing surprising about Saving Private Ryan is how conventional it is. I fully expected a much more "noir" vision of World War II, along the lines of Oliver Stone's Platoon. What I saw was an updated version of the 1950s classic Walk in the Sun, written by Robert Rossen, a Communist Party of the USA member who named names.
Walk in the Sun, also known as Salerno Beachhead, just about defines this genre. A group of GIs out on a patrol get killed off one by one. The enemy is faceless and evil. Our soldiers are good boys who are just trying to get home.
Communist Party members were so adept at turning out this sort of patriotic pap because they had bought into the myth of the "fight for freedom". So patriotic were the CPers that they backed the decision to intern Japanese-Americans.
The buzz about Spielberg's movie is clearly related to his decision to make battle wounds much more graphic than ever before. This decision roughly parallels the breakthrough made by Bertolucci in Last Tango in Paris to depict sexuality openly and honestly. The question of what is more jarring — Brando in full-frontal nudity or a soldier's intestines spilling out of his mid-section — I will leave to others.
A war movie ultimately relies on the same dramatic tensions as slasher or science-fiction movies. The audience is at the edge of its seat waiting for the next sniper's bullet to tear through the flesh of one of the "good guys".
The suspense is similar to that which awaits us for the next moment when Halloween's Jason will come barrelling out of a closet with a kitchen knife in hand. Who will get slashed in the throat next?
The most interesting variation on this theme is the film Aliens, which blends monsters from outer space and Walk in the Sun war movie conventions. The acid-spitting monsters are stand-ins for Nazis or "Japs". All the soldiers want to do is complete "their mission" successfully and return home.
Since the aesthetic dimensions of Saving Private Ryan are so under-whelming, the more interesting question becomes Spielberg's motivation in turning out such a retro movie. What would compel a director working in 1998 to recycle themes from the immediate post-World War II period?
It is not really too hard to figure out. When Spielberg is not turning out escapist fantasies like the lovely E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he is functioning as a latter-day Frank Capra spinning out morality tales to mould public opinion.
Movies like Amistad, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan all put forward the same message: the wealthy and the powerful are the ultimate guardians of what is decent and humane.
In Amistad, this role is assigned to John Quincy Adams, who stands up for the slaves. In Schindler's List, it is the industrialist who delivers the Jews.
General George Marshall, while a secondary character in Saving Private Ryan, puts the dramatic narrative into motion through his decent and humane decision to remove Private James Ryan from the battlefield after his three brothers have been killed in action. Marshall tells his fellow officers that he didn't want to be in the same situation that faced Lincoln when he informed a mother that all of her sons had been killed in the Civil War.
Once this decision is reached, Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and a group of soldiers are sent on their way to track down Private Ryan and send him back home. Their trek through hostile territory is familiar to anybody who has sat through the 1950s classics.
Unfortunately, Saving Private Ryan does not even achieve the level of character development in Walk in the Sun. The stories about life back home are much more interesting in Rossen's screenplay. This should not come as any great surprise because the "Hollywood reds" were some of the most accomplished writers ever to work in tinsel-town.
Standing above this film like a canopy are a whole set of assumptions about "decency". Not only is Marshall decent enough to rescue a single GI from the fighting, the GIs themselves are also more decent than the despicable Nazis.
There is one plot device that drives this point home. Hank's men have captured a German soldier. They want to kill him, but Hanks says that this would not be right and sends him off. In the climax of the film, this soldier turns up again and plunges a knife into one of the good guys. After he is captured once again, a GI shoots him in cold blood.
The moral of the story is that it is forgivable to shoot Germans in this manner because they are embodiments of pure evil, just as they were in Schindler's List.
Patriotism
There is no doubt that Spielberg decided to make such a patriotic movie because he is concerned about the widespread erosion of confidence in elected officials in US society.
The reason that World War II is so important to Spielberg is that this was the last time when genuine national unity prevailed. People rallied around their president and were willing to lay down their lives. Good workers were like good soldiers — they went to work in the factories without demanding "excess" raises. Anybody who went on strike during World War II was a traitor.
After World War II, the "bad guys" changed identity. No longer was it the sneering blond beast of the Wehrmacht; it was the fanatical Chinese soldier or Russian super-spy.
To get people thinking in this mode once again, Spielberg cannot churn out conventional narratives in the 1950s style. Now they have to be gussied up with trendy camera work and a pulsating music score. It is also necessary to draft the most likeable actor in Hollywood to play the lead.
After Hanks' recent gee-whiz promotion of Nazi party official Werner Von Braun's NASA, and this latest patriotic pap served up by Spielberg, it seems that Hanks is angling to become the new John Wayne.
[Louis Proyect is the moderator of the US-based Marxism List e-mail discussion list. For more information, visit <http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html> or e-mail <lnp3@panix.com>.]