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Frames of Reference on the Geopolitical Stage: Saving Private Ryan and the Second World War/Second Gulf War Intertext

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14650040590946575

1557-3028

Andrew Crampton, Marcus Power,

Military and Defense Studies

Abstract As sequels go, Gulf War II: Unfinished Business was a popular and omnipotent movie spectacle. The very process of naming the conflict implied a notion of watching a second episode and encountering the war from afar, whilst numerous media commentators likened their experience of the war to that of watching a movie, or even a movie of a movie. In turn political leaders from the ‘coalition of the willing’ were regularly able to call upon a stock of filmic cultural reference points in their representations of unfolding events in the Gulf. With Hollywood in a long-established role as geopolitician and film as a key geopolitical site, the latest conditions of conflict in the theatre of international politics could be (re)staged for the viewing American public. These events raise some important issues about the production of subject positions through cinema and highlight some of the ways in which film is cast in the role of director on the world geopolitical stage, writing the scripts of global politics as theatre. In the staging of the Second Gulf War and its multiple plots and dramas we argue here that there was an important intertext with the Second World War and its various associations with virtue. We focus in particular upon the figure of the geopolitician co-ordinating the production of the stage of international politics for a viewing subject and extend this into an analysis of how Hollywood narrates contemporary geopolitical space. Allied to this is a concern to explore how audiences make sense and meaning of the films they watch and the conflicts represented therein. Notes T. Pollard, ‘The Hollywood War Machine’, New Political Science 24/1 (2002) p.133. G. Ó Tuathail, ‘The Effacement of Place: US Foreign Policy and the Spatiality of the Gulf Crisis’, Antipode 25 (1993) pp.4–31 G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, (London: Routledge 1996). J. Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Oxford: Westview Press 2001) p.xv. Ibid. p.201 D. Sterritt, ‘War Stories: From Patriotic Flag-waving in the 40s to the Re-release of “Apocalypse Now”, War Movies still Resonate with American Audiences’, The Christian Science Monitor (2001). accessed 14 April 2003. The Numbers, ‘Saving Private Ryan: Box-office and Production Data’, 2003 accessed 19 August 2003. J. Mathews, ‘The Good War, in Dying Color’, Newsday Part II/Weekend (1998) p.BO3. J. Verniere, ‘Movie Review: Guts and Glory; Brilliant, yet Flawed, “Saving Private Ryan” will Shake you to your Core’, The Boston Herald, 24 July 1998, SCE p.503. T. Lawson, ‘Tall Soldiers Action-packed and Profoundly Moving: Saving Private Ryan Salutes American Gallantry and Ponders Deeper Questions’, Detroit Free Press Features (1998) p.1D. R. Cohen, ‘A Reminder from Speilberg’, The Washington Post, 28 July 1998, p.A15. A. Auster, ‘Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 30/2 (2002) p.100. C. Weber, ‘Flying Planes can be Dangerous’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31/1 (2002) pp.129–47. S. Zizeck, Welcome to the Desert of The Real(London: Verso 2002) p.16. P. Virilio, War and Cinema (London: Verso: 1989) p.1. Ó Tuathail (note 3) p.30. Ibid. p.29. J. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1986). Ibid. p.16. S. Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1993). Film has not only supported hegemonic geopolitical representations but has also served as a medium of resistance in films like Dr Strangelove (1964), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Three Kings (1999). Virilio (note 15). Ibid. p.58. Ibid. p.3. Ibid. p.1. Ibid. p.4. Ibid. p.1. J. Der Derian, ‘Simulation: The Highest Stage of Capitalism?’, in D. Kellner (ed.), Buadrillard: A Critical Reader (Oxford, Blackwells 1994) pp.189–209. From its very beginning in the nineteenth century and its development as a medium alongside trade fairs ‘cinema became the major site for a trade in dematerialization’; Virilio (note 15) p.32). It is the ability of films to superimpose themselves on to geostrategies that is important here: ‘when Around the World in 80 Minutes shone in lights outside of cinemas in the 1930s, it was already clear that film was superimposing itself on a geostrategy which for a century or more had been leading to the direct substitution, and thus sooner or later the disintegration, of things and places’; Virilio (note 4) p.47. Before the advent of cinema panoramas had been popular, particularly in some of the great imperial exhibitions of the early nineteenth century. Spielberg, cited in R. Ebert, Chicago Sun, 19 July 1998. Spielberg, cited in S. Hunter ‘“Private Ryan”: Steven Spielberg's Unflinching Tribute to the Men who Conquered Hell’, The Washington PostStyle (Friday, July 24, 1998) p.B01. Spielberg, cited in R. Lyman, ‘True to the Timeless Fact That War is Hell’, New York Times, 19 July 1998, p.11. See C. Cohn and C. Weber, ‘Missions, Men and Masculinities: Carol Cohn Discusses Saving Private Ryan with Cynthia Weber’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 1/3 (1999) pp.460–75. As Cohn and Weber put it, ‘one of the things that's striking about the Ryan war scene is that it was not shown through anyone's eyes’ (p.472). Hunter, ‘Private Ryan’ (note 30) p.BO1. Spielberg, cited in (Entertainment Tonight/July 21, 1998) . S. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1993) p.48. P. Molloy, ‘Theatrical Release: Catharsis and Spectacle in Welcome to Sarajevo’, Alternatives 25 (2000) pp.75–90. Cited in Molloy (note 37) p.84. Mathews (note 8) p.BO3. Ibid. B. Weinraub, ‘“Ryan” Lands with Impact in Theaters across US’, The New York Times, 27 July 1998, p.E1. B. Weinraub, ‘At the Movies; Ryan Headed for an Oscar?’, The New York Times, 24 July 1998, p.E14. P. Fussell, ‘The Guts not the Glory of Fighting the “Good War”’, The Washington Post, 26 July 1998, p.C01. K. Gabbard, ‘Saving Private Ryan's Surplus Repression: Film Review Essay’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 81(2000) p.177. D. Ryan, ‘Appraising the Value of Life in a Sea of Blood: Saving Private Ryan is Virtuosic’, The Philadelphia Enquirer Features Weekend (July 24, 1998) p.3. J. Bassinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 2003). Der Derian, Virtuous War (note 4) p.166. Pollard (note 1) p.129. L. Menand, ‘Jerry don't Surf: Review of Saving Private Ryan’, New York Review of Books 45/14 (24 September 1998) p7. J.I. Brennan, ‘Filmmaker Launches a Tough Defense of the R-rated “Saving Private Ryan”, which Contains Grisly Images of War’, The Los Angeles Times, 15 July 1998, p.1. Spielberg, cited in ibid. p.1. Ibid. V. Canby, ‘War Movies: The Horror and Honor of a Good War’, New York Times, 10 August 1998, p.E1. E. Rothstein, ‘Rescuing the War Hero from 1990s Skepticism’, The New York Times, 3 August 1998 p.E2 Canby (note 52) p.E1. C. Krauthammer ‘Debating Pvt. Ryan’, The Washington Post, 14 August 1998, p.A25. Basinger (note 45); Pollard (note 1). Women only appear in the cemetery scenes and ‘back-home’ in Iowa. Indeed, the film's tag-line ‘The mission is a man’ has been the subject of some debate by feminist writers such as Cynthia Weber and Carol Cohn who have highlighted its ‘purging of the feminine’; Cohn and Weber (note 33) p.461. M. Wilmington, ‘Apocalypse then: Steven Spielberg's Violent “Saving Private Ryan” Depicts both the Horror and Humanity of World War II’, Chicago Tribune, 24 July 1998, p.2. Auster (note 12) p.102. J. Bodnar (2001) ‘Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America’, The American Historical Review106/3 (2001) p.805. Miller's character is also the most idealised of old American soldiers in SPR, with a paternal imago, filling in for the father of the missing Private Ryan. The captain fights not because of a love of war and fighting but because of the time-tested wish of every American GI to return home to his wife and family. For Gabbard there are thus many ‘Oedipal issues’ underlying Spielberg's work here. Corporal Upham (with whom Spielberg was said to most identify) comes to symbolise the large numbers of baby boomers who sat out the war and thus refused to be tested in the crucible of battle. See K. Gabbard, ‘Film Review Essay. Saving Private Ryan's Surplus Repression’, International. Journal of Psychoanalysis 81 (2000) pp.177–9; see also T. McCarthy, ‘Combat Viewed through Visceral Cinema’, Variety Magazine, 20 July 1998, p. 45. Bodnar (note 60) p.805. J. Hodgkins. ‘In the Wake of Desert Storm: A Consideration of Modern World War II Films’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 30/2 (2002) pp.74–84. Canby (note 52) p.E1. S. Hunter, ‘Strafing “Private Ryan”’, The Washington Post, 9 August 1998, p.G1. See also ‘Saving “Private Ryan” from the Conservatives’, Ken Masugi copy available at . Basinger (note 45) p.262. Cohn and C. Weber (note 32) p.469. P. Landon, ‘Realism, Genre and Saving Private Ryan’ Film and History 28/3–4 (1998) pp.58–63. Bodnar (note 60) p.807. Ibid. Ibid. p.817. Wilmington (note 58); Basinger (note 45). Gabbard (note 61) p.178. Der Derian, Virtuous War (note 4) p.156. This might also include Spielberg's fascination with the Second World War, which he has spent a good deal of his career trying to make sense of. Like many of the 1960s boomers he grew up watching Combat (1962–1967), the hit TV show directed by Robert Altman about a squad of soldiers fighting in Europe during the Second World War; Verniere (note 9), which was itself one of a number of popular sources of this notion of a ‘good war’. As a 14-year old budding film-maker he directed a movie (cast with friends and neighbours) called ‘Escape to Nowhere’ about US–German battles in the Second World War. He has since returned to the war obsessively with two Indiana Jones films (1981, 1989), with Empire of the Sun (1987), with Schindler's List (1993), the comical 1941 (1979) and Always (1989) as well as SPR (1998). He added yet another wartime film for the HBO television network in 2001 with the SPR spin-off series Band of Brothers. His current projects include a film version of Arthur Golden's best-selling Memoirs of a Geisha and again returns to the Second World War era. Greenberg even argues that this is Spielberg's way of working through his relationship with his father; H.R. Greenberg, ‘Dulce Et Decorum: A Review of Saving Private Ryan”, 1991, copy available at accessed 3 December 2003. Der Derian, Virtuous War (note4). 28 May 2001. President George W. Bush presents medals to 21 Navajo Code Talkers during a ceremony honoring their military service at the US Capitol, 26 July 2001 (Windtalkers released June 2002). Speaking on Veterans Day, 6 November 2002, Bush said of veterans that ‘these patriots have inspired our nation with their courage, compassion and dedication … securing the blessings of liberty’ and called on all US citizens to remember these sacrifices and to rededicate themselves to today's challenges of securing an enduring peace; G.W. Bush, ‘By the President of the United States of America: A Proclamation’, Veterans Day press release, 2002, . Auster (note 12) p.104. Spielberg, cited in S. Stark, ‘A Close Encounter with Spielberg: Director shows his Mastery with WWII Epic’, Detroit News Film Reviews, July 25, 1998, p.1. B. Williams, NBC News, 2 April 2003. J. Adler, ‘Jessica's Liberation’, Newsweek, 14 April 2003, p.42. A. Stanley, ‘A Nation at War: The TV Watch’, The New York Times, 18 April 2003, p.B9. J. Katz, cited in J. Thomas, ‘Rescued POW to Face a Bigger Enemy’, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 9 April 2003, p.D1, copy available at . J. Hodgkins, ‘In the Wake of Desert Storm: A Consideration of Modern World War II Films’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 30/2 (2002) pp.74–84. Ibid. p.76. The celebratory tone and spectacle of the whole Jessica Lynch episode can be criticized for the downplaying of the 11 US servicemen and women who died in the events that lead to Lynch's capture by the Iraqis. Ali Fleischer, cited in T. Wilkinson and G. Miller, ‘War with Iraq/Midnight Rescue’, Los Angeles Times, 3 April 2003, p.1. During the first Gulf War, the first American woman prisoner, Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, was reportedly treated like a celebrity by Iraqi captors: They compared her bravery to Sylvester Stallone's and her beauty to Brooke Shield's, and fed her so well she actually gained weight in captivity; Adler (note 83) p.42. Soon after the First Gulf War had finished, numerous agencies packaged the narrative into videos and CD-ROMs for our viewing at home in case we missed it first time round. J. Neuman, ‘Lynch Now Network's Objective’, Los Angeles Times, 22 June 2003, p.22. Stanley (note 84). Ibid. Ibid. Katz, cited in J. Thomas, ‘Rescued POW to Face a Bigger Enemy in Media’,Boston Globe, 8 April 2003, available at accessed 3 December 2004. J. Morse, ‘Saving Private Jessica’, Time Magazine, 14 April 2003, p.66. Harry Warren cited in J. Morse, ‘Saving Private Jessica,’ Time Magazine, April 14, 2003, p.66. Cited in J. Kampfner, ‘The Truth about Jessica’, The Guardian, 15 May 2003, G2, p.2. Ibid. Virilio (note 15) p.11. C. MacCabe, ‘Bayonets in Paradise’, Sight and Sound, February 1999, p.14. Der Derian, Virtuous War (note 4) p.158. Pollard (note 1) p.138. Ibid. p.139. E. Cohen, ‘What Combat does to Man: Private Ryan and its Critics’, The National Interest Winter (1998) pp.82–8. Ibid. p.88. In a review of critics responses Cohen discusses the opening sequences as reality as whether they match up to reality or not; and overwhelmingly they do. Cohen, for example, argues that on a second viewing the opening scenes reveal ‘a particular improvisation and determination that, in the end, made the landings a success. A thread of tactical skill, only intermittently visible to those watching, underlies the wiping out of a German bunker’; ibid. p.87. J. Wrathall, ‘On the Beach’, Sight and Sound 8/12 (1998) pp.34–5. Weber (note 13). Wrathall (note 108) p.35. Auster (note 12). Ibid. p.104. Ibid. Some 37 US troops were killed in Iraq in the month of November alone and more US troops have now been killed since 1 May 2003 than died in the hostilities during the invasion of Iraq itself. Some 19 British troops have died since the end of hostilities on 1 May 2003, bringing the total number of British servicemen that have died in Iraq to 52 (BBC News, 10 November, ‘US Warns of more Iraq attacks’, ). H. Shinoda, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy in International Relations: A Critical Examination of NATO's intervention in Kosovo’, Alternatives 25 (2000) pp.515–36. Easter Sunday Sunrise Address, Sydney Opera House, Reverend Dr Gordon Moyes, Wesley Mission 2002. MacCabe (note 101) p.14. T. Appelo, ‘Iraq War: The Movie’, Seattle Weekly, 2 April 2003, p.23. M. O'sullivan, ‘Spielberg wins Battle, not War’, The Washington Post, 24 July 1998, p.N37. Ibid.