The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

12. Saving Private Ryan Too Late

12 Saving Private RyanToo Late Krin Gabbard A S T H E T W E N T I E T H century was coming to an end, so were the lives of many of the men who fought and survived World War II. For many of their children, anxiety about a dead or dying father may have precipitated a new view of the war years. Some honored their fathers as “the greatest generation,” suggesting that their own generation had achieved less. Steven Spielberg went even farther, directing a film that implicitly blames his peers for renouncing those values that led their fathers to victory in 1945. As has often been the case in Spielberg’s career, his conservative message paid off. Saving Private Ryan was the number two box office hit of 1998 and was honored with five Academy Awards. Spielberg’s revisionist project begins only a few minutes into the DDay landing sequence that opens Saving Private Ryan and that shocked many with its graphic depictions of violence. When the front of the first landing craft drops open, virtually all the infantrymen in the boat are immediately hit with machine gun fire. When several men jump into the sea as they try to escape from another landing craft, two are shot underwater and a third drowns under the weight of his backpack and gear. These are the film’s most powerful images of war, exploding conventional notions of heroism and the role of the individual soldier in battle. At this point Saving Private Ryan seems to suggest that war is senseless slaughter, something that pacifists and antiwar artists have been saying for a long time, especially during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. But after the opening minutes of the first battle scene, the American soldiers in Saving Private Ryan begin to fight back, and we get to know them. For the rest of the film the slaughter ceases to be senseless . As in the vast majority of war movies, the possibilities for heroism 131 and the contribution of the individual soldier are constantly available. Spielberg departs from the more recent paradigm of war films in the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting, sentimentally and without irony, that war is about building character and not about brutality and stupidity. Most disturbingly, he joins those who have promoted conservative retrenchment through nostalgia for the war years. In this context, the figure who has been continually brought forth to authenticate Spielberg’s vision of war in general and of World War II in particular is Stephen Ambrose, the author of hagiographic biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and a harsh critic of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam years. Ambrose has also written a collection of books about World War II that now amounts to a mini-industry . In July 2000, clicking on “Stephen Ambrose” at the Amazon.com Web site brought up ninety-three items, most of them about the European theater in World War II and at least half of them published or republished since Ambrose was prominently mentioned in the publicity for Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg and Robert Rodat, who is credited with the film’s screenplay, found many of the details for their script in Ambrose’s work, especially his best-selling books Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and D-Day June 6, 1944.1 Written in a style so colloquial as to be sometimes incoherent, Ambrose ’s books build sketchy histories of Americans in World War II around anecdotal accounts from veterans. Ambrose does not hesitate to catalogue the horrific and antiheroic aspects of the war, even the criminal incompetence of those who made command decisions, but he consistently glorifies the individual behavior of the men who fought. He is especially fond of stories about the industriousness of American soldiers who tinkered together ad hoc solutions to problems they encountered in the field. In writing Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg and Rodat have relied on Ambrose’s approach when, for example, they show Captain Miller using chewing gum to attach a mirror to a bayonet so that he can look around a corner and safely observe a German machine gun nest, or when he instructs his men on the bricolage technique of making “sticky bombs.” John Gregory Dunne has suggested that Spielberg, trying to avoid a plagiarism suit like the one that sullied the reception of his previous film Amistad (1997), invited Ambrose to a preview screening of Saving Private Ryan.2 Ambrose’s...