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Chapter 10 Up Close and Personal: Faces and Names in Casualties of War Deborah Thomas “It was that shame we knew so well, the shame . . . that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.” —Primo Levi (1987, 188) For obvious reasons, war films—especially those centered on the battlefield—are likely to be unbalanced in terms of their treatments of gender. The absence of a significant female presence in American films about wars fought overseas is due in part to the fact that their far-flung battlefields and home front are geographically split apart to a much greater extent than in certain British examples, say, where a female presence may be more strongly foregrounded in male characters’ more frequent movements between battlefield and home, and where home itself comes under fire. However, rather than this implying that American war films comprise a masculinist genre of tough action at the expense of the tender feelings that women would provide, it could be argued that the frequent scenes of men dying in each other’s arms allow male emotion considerable display. Indeed, men’s feelings may actually be freed up by the absence of women who might otherwise “do the feeling” for them. American films of the home-front variety—e.g., Since You Went Away (1944) or Gardens of Stone (1987)—reverse the tendency of American combat films and typically keep the battlefield almost wholly offscreen, with a consequently greater emphasis on women, even if some have argued that they therefore barely qualify as i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 135 12/13/11 11:17 AM 136 Deborah Thomas war films at all. Thus, in Steve Neale’s description of the war film, “scenes of combat are a requisite ingredient” (2000, 125). American war films of the type Neale allows may open with pre-war scenes of “normal” life or of departures overseas, and they may end with returns to wife and family, but once we are in the midst of battle, we tend to stay there (or nearby) for most of the film. Any remaining women are represented largely as foreign victims of the war, or perhaps as nurses or other ancillary personnel. They may provide romantic interest, but most often they inhabit the screen only briefly and exhibit little decisive narrative agency. Casualties of War (1989) is a partial exception: even if its most important female character has a typically brief onscreen presence and is a passive victim to whose subjectivity we have little access, she is crucial to our emotional involvement with the film. What interests me is that her appearances are both compelling and a linchpin to the film’s effects, and yet difficult to characterize in terms of identification , regardless of how we understand this term. I intend to explore this while drawing on my own reactions, though, since they respond to a number of the film’s strategies, it is likely they are shared. Why do we care about this character so deeply when any sense of her interiority is so steadfastly withheld? Why is her treatment at the hands of the American GIs so gut-wrenching when we know so little about her? If identification is not the source of our emotional involvement with her, then what is? Finally, is there anything about the war film and its concerns that shapes our responses in generically specific ways? Brian De Palma’s Vietnam film of 1989 concerns a patrol of GIs who, during a reconnaissance mission, kidnap, rape, and murder an innocent Vietnamese girl, a story that is embedded in another story about how one of them, Private Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), who tried unsuccessfully to prevent these events, eventually brings the others to justice. This second narrative is in turn embedded in the film’s brief framing scenes of Eriksson back home after the war, thus providing us with a double look backward, from the postwar framing scenes to the earlier court martial, and from the court martial back to the events for which the men are on trial. One might even describe this as a triple look backward, since the film itself was made years after the setting of its most recent scene. However, our sense of the director...

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