Basic Understanding

Fyne | Basic Understanding Robert Fyne Kean University RJFyne@aol.com Basic Understanding Philip D. Beidler. The Good War's Greatest Hits: World War Il andAmerican Remembering. The University of Georgia Press, 1998. (220 pages; $29.95) IfWorld War II is the century's fulcrum, then motion pictures have become its sage. It is the screen—not the textbook or first-person oral narrative—that testifies to the conflict . Everyone watches movies and the distorted content of most World War II photodramas skews the facts in favor of the director. How many Americans feel smug—after watching Saving Private Ryan—because now they know what really happened on Omaha Beach? Why shouldn't the entertainment industry keep the public educated? What is next? Maybe a situation-comedy about the Katyn Forest. How about an extravagant musical, complete with leg-kicking chorus girls, glamorizing the Rape of Nanking? Sounds a little farfetched? A little insensitive ? Maybe. Maybe not. What, then, is the legacy of World War II? How is it remembered? What images are frequently recalled? These are some of the McLuhanist issues Philip Beidler examines in his new study, The Good War's Greatest Hits: World War II andAmerican Remembering, a book, he quips, that could easily be retitled "How DeWitt Wallace, Henry Luce, and the Department of Defense Rewon the War." As Professor Beidler explains, the information and entertainment industry constitutes—for most Americans—their basic understanding of this global conflict, and much of its sinuous content emerged from Reader's Digest, Time, and photoplays that received the DOD's blessing. Sometimes labeled the 'Good War" or the "Best War Ever," this worldwide conflagration soon turned history into entertainment (or was it the other way around?) as the memory process diminished. Why is it, Professor Beidler ponders, that in 1949, just seven years after Pearl Harbor and three years after Hiroshima, Tin Pan Alley could transform the fighting against the Japanese into a long-running, Broadway musical? How could the media moguls render the subtext ofhorror largely irrelevant in its runaway blockbuster , South Pacific? Why is it that so many American vacationers —strolling the beaches of the predominantly Japanese-owned island of Kauai—peer out toward the west to catch a glimpse of the real Bali Ha'i? How about Life—the weekly magazine famous for lavish, chiaroscuro photographs—that basically turned the War into a blue-chip industry with its many publications that one way or another might be called "The War According to Henry Luce?" As Beidler reiterates, it was Life, that once major hostilities were in progress, coined the term "World War II" and began to construct all occurrences, as they appeared in the magazine, according to the Lucean world view. Years later, in 1950, the decade's literary, cultural icon, Life's Picture HistoryofWorld War II, spilled forth all these events (from the magazine's photo department) to tell audiences that Life and memorywere the same thing. To keep the ball rolling, this multimedia giant—in the 1960's and '70's—reassured readers that Life and the War according to Life were intertwined in such elaborate titles as Life Goes to War and Life's World War II. As for the moving pictures, the postwar served up an ironic twist. Moviegoers, weaned on the propaganda films produced during the conflict, now witnessed a different ideology . Major titles such as The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, and From Here to Eternity were explicit in their depiction of racism, fascism, and the American military services' caste system. Senior officers—generals in particular—reeked ofarrogance, decadence, class oppressions, and anti-Semitism. Did this new image matter? Not at all. Since cinema had now replaced literature as the primary medium , the Hollywood productions became the reified body of World War II memory. What difference did it make if a couple ofGeneral Hearns made life miserable for a bunch of EM's? How did the movie end? Who won the War? Who cares ifhistory and entertainment had oxymoronically meshed? As a nation's collective remembrance of the 1940's reshapes itself, the representation of the War, not the War itself , eventually became the historical fact...