Virtual Warriors

Nostalgia, the battlefield, and boomer cinema

Michael Valdez Moses from the January 2002 issue

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The film ultimately revolves around scenes that ask whether the shooting of unarmed German prisoners by American GIs is morally justified. No doubt such things took place during World War II, but Spielberg breaks new ground in anchoring his narrative in this issue. Spielberg's greatest generation, in spite of its bravery and patriotism, acts in a manner more closely resembling that of American troops at My Lai than that of John Wayne in World War II epics of an earlier age.

However, Spielberg is careful not to give away the game too easily. The audience is made to question Capt. Miller's compassionate decision to release a German prisoner rather than have him summarily shot by vengeful and disgruntled GIs. In the film's final battle scene, it is this same German soldier who fatally wounds Capt. Miller, and it is the most ethically upright and law-abiding member of Miller's squadron who subsequently kills the German. (Spielberg also takes pains to depict American soldiers helping, if thereby unintentionally and unnecessarily endangering, French civilians caught in the crossfire of the Normandy invasion). Critics argue that Miller's GIs should have shot the unarmed German when they had the chance, that the brutal killing was, in the context of battle, the moral thing to do. Spielberg thus implicitly justifies the behavior of his generation in Vietnam by making the case for battlefield conduct unavoidably shaped by the brutality inherent in all war. But perhaps Spielberg also suggests that one reason that American soldiers in World War II have been more favorably portrayed in the popular media than their sons in Vietnam was that the former conveniently faced a truly evil enemy -- German fascists and anti-Semites -- rather than one about which liberal members of Spielbergs's generation have felt considerable ambivalence (Vietnamese communists).

Saving Private Ryan also serves to assuage the guilt of the Vietnam generation through another sleight of hand. If Miller's men are Vietnam-era soldiers dressed in World War II general issue, Pvt. Ryan nonetheless refuses an opportunity to avoid danger -- an opportunity that so many members of the Clinton, Gore, Quayle, and Bush Jr. generation sought.

In the midst of a military conflict, Ryan is offered the chance to avoid combat, to go home, and to do so with the full approval of his government. Of course he refuses, and stays to fight alongside a new set of unfamiliar comrades whom he nonetheless will mourn and memorialize as an old man, accompanied by his loving wife, children, and grandchildren. Rather than functioning as an implicit criticism of Spielberg's generation, Ryan's choice serves, I would argue, as a kind of compensatory fantasy.

Ryan lives out (and also lives to reflect upon) an experience of war and national service that so many of Spielberg's fellow boomers were anxious to avoid. Spielberg offers a virtual salve to his audience and himself: If once more given Ryan's choice (and his good fortune to draw a truly diabolical opponent), he and his generation really would have served bravely, rather than demurred or objected, however conscientiously. Spielberg's narrative genius offers an apologia for his generation that in equal measure assuages guilt and glories in self-justification, if not self-heroization.

In his book The Campaigns of Alexander, the second century Greek historian Arrian records the visit of Alexander the Great to the tomb of Achilles at the ancient site of Troy. Alexander is supposed to have described Achilles as "a lucky man in that he had Homer to proclaim his deeds and preserve his memory." Alexander understood that even the greatest political and military feats do not speak for themselves, they become truly important, memorable, historical, only insofar as they are recorded, interpreted, and subsequently appreciated by an audience.

Alexander's comment thus acknowledges that the fate of the hero rests not entirely in his own hands, but also in those of the artist or historian. Arrian's (perhaps apocryphal) tale casts much light on the murkier recesses of the cultural psyche of the boomers.

The boomer generation might well have been the first raised in an era in which history manifested itself primarily and most powerfully through the medium of the silver screen. Having come upon the stage of history too belatedly to fight World War II, the cultural elite of the boomer generation could nonetheless make movies about it. Or to be more precise, they could remake and revise the WW II films of their youth. For in a crucial respect, the WW II films of the '90s ultimately have less to do with the second world war per se than with earlier cinematic representations of the event.

The real (though invisible) antagonist of recent WW II films is not so much the German fascist or the Japanese imperialist as the specter of John Wayne, the larger-than-life self-image of "the greatest generation." Just as the epic deeds of Achilles in Homer's Iliad inflamed the envy and hubris of Alexander the Great, so too have the cinematic images of the Duke's heroic feats fed the jealousy and stoked the historical ambitions of the boomers.

The baby boom generation, for better or worse, is the first fully committed to the view that to control the visual representation of history is to control history itself, and thereby one's own destiny. This is a cultural reality that, for all of his anti-modern religious enthusiasm, even the malign director of the spectacular attacks of September 11 fully appreciates.