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70 David A. Gerber Heroes and Mis‹ts:The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in The BestYears of Our Lives With a sharply divided consciousness that both honored the veteran and feared his potential to disrupt society, Americans in 1945 prepared to receive and reintegrate millions of demobilized men. The return of the disabled veteran gave rise to particularly acute anxieties, for his dif‹culties in adjusting to civilian life would be compounded by his injuries. During the war, experts in social work, the military, and the social sciences had begun to prepare the public for the likelihood of a major social crisis prompted by the sudden demobilization of millions of men, able-bodied and disabled alike. These experts also attempted to mobilize American women on behalf of an effort, at the level of the individual family and household, to take responsibility for assisting veterans in their readjustment struggles. There was nothing new, let alone unique to America, in this divided consciousness about veterans. We ‹nd it in classical narratives of Western antiquity. In the movies, however, American society now possessed a powerful agent for representing its anxieties and for instantly and cathartically resolving the anticipated problems that prompted so much expert and lay concern. One of Hollywood’s best-loved and most commercially successful movies, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), served this function for its postwar audience. The narrative elements of the movie closely follow the expert discourse of “the veterans problem,” both in its depiction of the able-bodied and disabled veterans’ readjustment dif‹culties and in its dependence on gendered prescriptions to resolve them. The movie’s most brilliant and, for its audience, most unanticipated representations involve the struggle of Homer Parrish, a navy veteran and bilateral hand amputee who uses two metal prosthetic hooks in place of the hands he lost in battle. Homer, portrayed by Harold Russell (a bilateral hand amputee), faces a tremendous reintegration struggle, which results as much from his attitude toward his disability as from the attitudes of others. He moves painfully and slowly toward spiritual rehabilitation as he sets his life with his family and his girlfriend , Wilma, on a positive course. His struggle culminates in a conventional happy ending, their marriage, which sends a powerful message of hope and reconciliation. After brie›y reviewing the con›icting representations of veterans— particularly disabled veterans—and analyzing the expert discourse about World War II veterans, this essay examines Homer’s reintegration struggle. I view The Best Years of Our Lives as a cultural event, deeply rooted in its time and in the conventions of the Hollywood system, through which we may locate the consensus of beliefs and attitudes surrounding the ‹gure of the disabled veteran. The movie broke new ground in its use of a severely disabled actor and in its realistic visualization of severe disability. Because of the imaginative limitations imposed by the conventionalized, romantic narrative that envelopes Homer and Wilma, however, the movie did little to challenge the long-prevailing stereotypes of people with disabilities that prompt pity and fear.1 The divided consciousness of Americans contemplating the return of World War II servicemen re›ects an abiding tension in the response of Western societies to the recently demobilized veteran. On the one hand, the veteran ’s heroism and sacri‹ces are celebrated and memorialized, and debts of gratitude, both symbolic and material, are paid to him. On the other hand, the veteran also inspires anxiety and fear and is seen as a threat to social order and political stability. This second, much less of‹cially acknowledged response is based on a plausible, though greatly exaggerated projection: remove young men from the restraining in›uences of educational institutions , employment, and family; provide them with advanced weapons training and send them off on a violent adventure; expose their minds and bodies to horri‹c injuries; and then attempt to return them speedily to the life they had previously known, and you have a prescription for individual and social chaos. Aspects of this tension in Western perceptions of the return of the veteran may be traced back at least as far as the Homeric narrative of Odysseus. This tension emerges especially strongly in twentieth-century American representations of veterans.2 Contemporary Americans are most acquainted with it in connection with the return of Vietnam veterans. Few are aware that the same divided consciousness accompanied the prospect of the return of World War II servicemen. In contrast to the Vietnam...

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