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137 Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) ends as James Ryan (Harrison Young), an old man accompanied by his wife, children, and grandchildren, stands at the gravesite of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) in Normandy and salutes. In some ways the distance between Ryan and the nameless hero of Love and War (James H. White, 1899), who is also surrounded by his family at the film’s end, seems closer than that between him and the disillusioned Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal ) in Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005). Jarhead is an anomaly in relation to war films of the last ten years or so because of its atypical depiction of rage about the inability to kill and function sexually. Unlike that film, virtually all of the other recent major war films have supported and confirmed the kinds of conceptions about masculinity and sexuality associated with films made at the height of World War II, especially recent works specifically about that war such as Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), Hart’s War (Gregory Hoblit, 2002), and The Great Raid (John Dahl, 2005). Films about later wars illustrate the same practice: We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001), Spy Game (Tony Scott, 2001), and Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001). There are several possible reasons for this. Some critics have singled out a desire to look back at certain stabilizing social and cultural values in order to reinvigorate respect for the “Greatest Generation” named by Tom Brokaw. Others see this focus as motivated by a fear of changes in the makeup of society and the shifts of power to women and minorities. It may be that the crisis in masculinity cited by various scholars describing the late 1890s has a counterpart today in a corresponding fear about a crisis in sexuality, with the prevalence, acceptance, and public visibility of gay men. To the extent that suggestion can be entertained as a hypothesis, possibly the number of recent war films valorizing fatherhood can be seen as a way of affirming heterosexual values and turning away from the spirit of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” As we saw in chapter 6, the one Fathers and Sons  c h a p t e r e i g h t openly gay soldier in a film in which that policy is mentioned by name is despicable. The Greatest Generation One explanation for the emphasis on the family and generations in these war films is to see it as an example of an ideological operation supporting and valorizing conservative patriarchal values in American culture. Certainly the three films about World War II (Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Hart’s War) directly evoke those who fought in what Studs Terkel designates “the good war.”1 Catherine Kodat’s observation is relevant: From the first word in the dialogue of the film (“Dad?” the aging Ryan’s son exclaims as his father crumples to the ground before Captain Miller’s grave) to the last (“Tell me I’m a good man,” Ryan asks his wife, who firmly replies,“You are”), Saving Private Ryan casts itself as a reverent tribute to our fathers’ generation, a gesture Spielberg sought to underline when, upon receiving the 1999 Oscar for Best Director, he thanked his own father, a World War II veteran, “for showing me that there is honor in looking back and respecting the past.”2 Jeanine Basinger suggests one possible explanation for the“reactivated . . . combat genre” as a result of “male directors who watched combat films as boys and now want to make their own; a new conservatism that takes us backward to simpler times, the millennium that makes us want to reevaluate the century.” She concludes with a provisional advisory that “until we see a full decade of the new combat films, however, we cannot really know what they will add up to.”3 Thomas Doherty sees Saving Private Ryan as “not just a motion picture event but a cultural milestone, an occasion for another solemn encounter with the meaning of World War II and perhaps the last chance for a face-to-face salute to the surviving warriors.”4 Albert Auster sees the film serving as a corrective to the United States’ limited successes in foreign wars in the 1990s. He finds World War II “the indispensable symbol of American patriotic virtue and triumph. . . . Saving Private Ryan was a perfect anodyne to the somewhat equivocal glory of the low-key American victories...

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