Hymns for the Fallen: Combat Movie Music and Sound After Vietnam by Todd Decker (review)

A few years ago, I was sitting in New York's Washington Square Park on Memorial Day when there walked by a navy sailor–looking like he'd just stepped straight out of On the Town or Anchors Aweigh to begin a fun-filled spell of shore leave. An American sitting next to me welcomed him enthusiastically to the city and thanked him profusely for his service in a way that reminded me of the open veneration of the military, and its overt links with national self-identity, common in US political and civil rhetoric. This attitude is arguably far more sublimated in UK public discourse, and the unattributed saying 'Two countries divided by a common language' sprang to mind as I pondered the scene unfolding before me. I was reminded of this experience, though, when reading Todd Decker's Hymns for the Fallen, which explores film and television as sites for the memorialisation, celebration, and (to a certain extent) critique of US military culture–and which examines the role of music and sound in contributing to that work. In so doing, the book chooses to examine a subgenre of war film that Decker identifies and designates the Prestige Combat Film–or PCF as it quickly becomes. These are post-Vietnam films and television series that 'tell stories of [low-ranking] US soldiers fighting abroad in actual historical conflicts' (p.11) yet in placing their adult viewers into complex contexts that rise above generic action-movie fare, they are also often rewarded with critical success. The result is a small-ish subgenre of thirty-three films and two television series (Band of Brothers and The Pacific) that Decker argues are 'thoroughly musical' (p.5), much more so in fact than those war films produced before the Vietnam War. The selection includes not only familiar films such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, and Black Hawk Down but also more unusual fare such as 84 Charlie MoPic, and such recent movies as American Sniper. Decker suggests, then, that the advent of the PCF constitutes an identifiable generic shift in war movies post-Vietnam that transformed American movie theatres 'into public spaces for the memorialization of wars past and present' (p.239). Hymns for the Fallen, then, is no mere survey of a subgenre, but a project that has significant implications for a study of American cultural identity and its ongoing relationship with two formative traditions: the military and the world of commercial film.

Decker certainly knows his material well: discussion ranges freely and confidently across examples, and parallels are drawn and contrasts noted in an effort to more clearly define the PCF as an identifiable subgenre and to identify its sonic strategies. Moreover, in the tripartite division of his book, Decker has the laudable aim of treating music, sound, and dialogue on an equal footing–even if the dialogue section is rather less about the sonic properties of voice than I had hoped, and the sound section largely avoids exploring the implications of changing reproduction technologies. Of these three sections, the music chapters constitute the strongest, though the relative lack of music examples and screen captures makes Decker's argument sometimes challenging to follow for those unfamiliar with these films: nonetheless, Decker's outline of the elegiac register (chapter 11)–which he claims to be an invention of the PCF–stands alongside the fascinating discussion of the veil and beat-driven registers explored in chapters 8 and 9, and provides an undoubtedly useful way to organise critical responses to the musical content of these films. Indeed, Decker makes the point that while 'other aspects of the representation of soldiers might have changed by "degrees," in the expressive realm of film scoring, the advent of the PCF initiated a change in "essence"' (p.175). The music chapters may be the strongest, but sophisticated points are also made in...