Made You Look: Towards a Critical Evaluation of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan

Ditmann | Made You Look: Towards a Critical Evaluation of Steven Spielberg's Laurent Ditmann Spelman College Lditmann@spelman.edu Made You Look: Towards a Critical Evaluation of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan In Saving Private Ryan,theAllies begin to gain a foothold on Omaha Beach during the massive D-Day invasion of Normandy. 64 I Film & History Regular Feature | Film Reviews "Actually, The Dawn Patrol was the first dramatic talkie made without a lot of overacting .... It was just a different way ofplaying, you see. I was saying that they had been emoting too much and by underplaying we got away from that .... The thing to do is to go along quietly, then let loose the fireworks, and then drop back again. * Howard Hawks' "In what you played, there was beauty and there was novelty. Unfortunately, what was new was not beautiful, and what was beautiful was not new." Attributed to pianist Alfred Cortot, responding to a young composer. To begin with, a note ofwarning: it is doubtful that what follows genuinely constitutes a review ofSteven Spielberg's magnum opus—to date—SavingPrivate Ryan. With preemptive apologies and a due sense ofintellectual dread, I merely wish to submit some summary considerations to Film & History's readership in the form ofa highly subjective reaction piece or semischolarly conversation primer. In all honesty, I am not sure in which terms to discuss, much less assess, a work of art at once intense, rich, and compelling, but also trite, formulaic, and downright predictable (do we not know what happens in every war film where a soldier takes position in a church steeple?). I am not sure which critical vocabulary can be adequately utilized to attempt an explication ofa picture which pushes the limits ofcinematic semiosis so far that, to paraphrase a French poet, they finally circumscribe everything and its opposite. I am not sure which aspects ofthe film to comment upon, simply because some ofthem are so utterly brutal and disturbing (Private Mellish's apparently unscripted and bizarrely sexualized stabbing death comes to mind) that they become what linguists term unglossable traits. Besides, everything, it seems, has already been said by press-reviewers whose responses are almost unanimously enthusiastic. D-Day Historian Stephen E. Ambrose, whose debatable appraisal ofthe Normandy invasion has assumed gospel status in the general public, has given the film his endorsement and plaudit, and in the wake a public relations onslaught verging on propaganda, audiences have already consecrated the film as a bona fide box-office blockbuster. This makes it difficult for any commentator to avoid epithets other than the billboard blurbs "awe-inspiring," "stunning," "soul-stirring ," and "gut-churning." While those words indeed describe the film, they do not help the would-be scholar in assigning it to a neat category or genre. Is this a psychological drama? A war epic? Or should A/ien-like narrative motifs and chilling special effects suggest a closer kinship to the horror species? I naturally assume that by the time this is published, readers will be at least familiar with the odyssey ofseven U.S. Army Rangers and an infantryman leaving blood-soaked Omaha Beach to find and extricate the recipient of a ticket back home, one paratrooper, James F. Ryan. As is often the case with simple stories, their journey makes so many levels of interpretation immediately accessible that I am not entirely sure where to begin my examination. I find this predicament no reason for shame since no one appears to agree as to whether this a pro or anti-war film, an oldstyle hymn to patriotism,2 a tribute to a vanishing generation, a vacuous rhapsody in 90's filmic gore, or a historical warning, in the same way that the final, "Earn this" uttered by Tom Hanks' Captain John H. Miller's—the only character allowed to die imparting some sort of "message" upon us—can be interpreted both as a curse or as a peace offering. Some critics —Tom Shales, for one, in a particularly scathing NPR broadcast —have seen the film as pointless, which is quite unfair. It belabors the simple point that combat is above all an unbelievably horrible individual experience, making war...