Virtual Warriors

Nostalgia, the battlefield, and boomer cinema

Michael Valdez Moses from the January 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

In an interview Spielberg granted when Saving Private Ryan was released, the director summed up his view of the great conflict. "I think it is the key -- the turning point of the entire century. It was as simple as this: The century either was going to produce the baby boomers or it was not going to produce the baby boomers. World War II allowed my generation to exist." There you have it. The ultimate benefit, the highest justification and sanctification of the greatest, if not the bloodiest, war in human history: the birth of the baby boomers.

The World War II films of the last three years have been popular in part because they employ the most advanced special effects. The spectacular dimension of these films -- the opening scenes on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan, the scenes on the Volga in Enemy at the Gates, and the elaborate recreation of the Japanese surprise attack in Pearl Harbor -- overwhelm the audience with visual and sonic power. No dialogue is necessary and little is supplied. In the age of the global audience, contemporary studio executives understand what their predecessors in the silent era surely appreciated: Visual spectacle and music cross borders easily.

Nonetheless, these films represent more than a triumph of special-effects technology. They also exhibit an impulse to remake the image of the generation that fought the second world war so as to flatter the values, beliefs, and mores of the baby boom generation. By reinventing their parents as an idealized version of themselves, the boomers have not so much memorialized the "greatest" generation as presented a glorified image of its successor.

Recent World War II epics have, a la Scott, allowed the boomers to dress up in their parents' vintage clothes and parade the dominant cultural and political ethos of the 1990s in the garb of the 1940s. In Pearl Harbor, the prevailing sexual mores of the 1990s, to some degree a cultural legacy of the 1960s, are peremptorily thrust back into the 1940s. Indeed, the film's main characters' casual embrace of premarital sexual relations is conveniently depicted as the inevitable result of a world crisis. If not for Hitler's aerial assault on Britain, Lt. Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) and Capt. Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) would not have to rush matters, nor would Evelyn have to console herself, not long after Rafe apparently perishes in the Battle of Britain, in the arms of her beloved's fellow flyboy and best friend, Capt. Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett). You don't like free love? Blame it on history. And if not for the fiendish Japanese bombardment of what looks more like a holiday paradise than a functioning naval base, an attack that precipitates a series of events culminating in the death of bachelor #2 (that's Danny) in faraway Manchuria, our poor heroine might never have been able to make up her mind.

Of course, all ends happily when Evelyn and Rafe are ultimately reunited, with daddy Capt. Rafe nobly adopting as his own the son Evelyn and Danny had enthusiastically conceived amid billowing satin parachutes in a conveniently vacant airplane hanger. (Pleased with the return to family values? Thank history.)

The basics of this tangled romantic plot might have been pulled wholesale out of a Scott novel such as Old Mortality, in which the heroine finally marries the hero when his rival and friend is conveniently killed off in the last skirmish of the Scottish religious wars of the 17th century, despite the hero's best efforts to save him. But whereas Scott seemed genuinely interested in Scotland's 17th-century religious politics, the makers of Pearl Harbor -- screenwriter Randall Wallace of Braveheart fame (who likely knows his Scott) and director Michael Bay -- seem interested in the war mainly as a backdrop to their 1990s romantic fable. If Scott personalized the political to make it more accessible, Bay and Wallace simply reduce the political to the personal and leave it there.

As my female companion at the screening described it, Pearl Harbor is just your standard chick flick with vintage planes and heavy ordnance thrown in for effect. But the film does deliver a message of sorts: The non-traditional neo-nuclear family of the 1990s, which embodies in the bio-genetic diversity of its children the varied and liberated romantic pasts of its parents, is transferred to the 1940s, where it is comfortably situated within the American grain. Thus, in the final scene of the film, Evelyn, Rafe, and little Danny Walker Jr., back on the family farm in Tennessee (where Rafe grew up with his boyhood pal, Danny Sr.), are cinematically sanctified in a final visual tableau worthy of Norman Rockwell.

Other recent World War II films have served similar ends. In Enemy at the Gates, Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) is a talented young Russian sniper posted to besieged Stalingrad. He competes with his friend and patron Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a propaganda officer working for the internal Russian security service under the command of Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins), for the affections of Tania (Rachel Weisz), a Russian-Jewish resistance fighter. Our young Russian hero must fight on two fronts. In addition to facing off against the top sniper in the German army (who comes to Stalingrad to pick off Vassili), he must worry about his friend Danilov picking off Tania.

Co-written and directed by the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Annaud -- born in 1943, just ahead of the baby boom -- the movie panders to the sizable American market despite its focus on a pivotal battle in which the U.S. played no significant role. Setting aside the question of the combat status of Russian women at Stalingrad, we might note that Enemy at the Gates reassures those worried about the fighting capabilities of a new unisex army. Women will, it seems, honorably take their place alongside their male counterparts on the front, even if they must assume a variety of uncomfortable postures when consorting with their beloved comrades-in-arms in crowded bunkers.

By encouraging a contemporary American and Western European audience to identify with its Russian heroes and heroines (much as Hollywood propaganda films of the early 1940s generated American and Western European sympathy for our Soviet allies), Enemy at the Gates clearly signals a post�Cold War realignment of political sympathies. The Russians are no longer our ideological and military foes, just patriotic individuals fighting for their homeland. Even Danilov, the propaganda officer, turns out to have ambivalent feelings toward the official Stalinist line that Khrushchev viciously enforces. Fascism turns out to be the one truly malignant force, for unlike even the most committed members of the Red Army, German officers are willing to kill children in cold blood.

Perhaps the most striking revisionism in Enemy at the Gates is its transformation of one of the longest and bloodiest battles of World War II into a private duel between two superstar snipers that is most meaningfully played out in the Soviet (and presumably German) press. By keeping its audience in the dark concerning the military strategies and large-scale engagements that actually determined the fate of Stalingrad, focusing instead on Danilov's propaganda war, the film reduces the battle of Stalingrad to a media campaign. Though the decisive Russian military breakthrough came in November of 1942 -- prior to the "climactic" duel depicted in the film -- Enemy at the Gates reflects a post-Vietnam sensibility that understands the "winning of hearts and minds" as the most important and strategically significant undertaking in any military conflict. Even at Stalingrad, image is everything.

Paraphrasing what André Gide once said of Victor Hugo, one might concede that Spielberg is, alas, the greatest director of war films in his generation. Saving Private Ryan is at once the best and most cunning of the recent World War II epics. It artfully disguises its revisionist aims by virtue of its scrupulous attention to the gritty and unsavory details of combat.

In his successful bid to one-up Darryl Zanuck's 1962 epic The Longest Day, Spielberg has dazzled civilian and military audiences (including D-Day veterans) with his uncompromising depiction of slaughter on the beaches of Normandy. Taking his cue from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Oliver Stone's Platoon, and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (Spielberg has recently claimed to have channeled the spirit of the late auteur), he seems to have combined the graphic realism of the Vietnam film with the seemingly traditional patriotism of the World War II saga.

But it might be more accurate to say that Spielberg has reinterpreted the experience of the second world war in light of that of Vietnam. The result is an exoneration of the conduct of Spielberg's generation and a subtle diminishment of the heroism of that of his parents. For if the visual center of Saving Private Ryan is the assault on Omaha Beach, the narrative center, as the title of the film suggests, is the saving of a single private in the U.S. Army.

In their efforts to rescue Ryan (Matt Damon) from behind enemy lines, the small patrol led by Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) endures a series of harrowing confrontations with the enemy that have more in common with Apocalypse Now than with The Longest Day. Miller's troops quarrel relentlessly among themselves, pointedly call into question the very purpose of their mission, and even threaten to mutiny or desert before they've rescued Ryan.