Of Basterds and the Greatest Generation: The Limits of Sentimentalism and the Post-Classical War Film
2016; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoTHE PROBLEM ADDRESSED BY THIS ARTICLE concerns the utility of considering films, or sequences, as when we as critics and theorists examine the representation of real historical events or periods. The article focuses specifically on two treatments of combat during World War II, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), and demonstrates how they can be profitably differentiated in terms of their recourse to sentimentality. The purpose of such comparisons not to evaluate the artistic merit or quality of these films, but rather to analyze and interrogate these films' distinct appeals to emotion and moral virtue as contemporary American depictions of wartime sacrifice and trauma. The article seeks not, in other words, to favor one over the other but considers rather what gained or lost by contemporary rhetorical variations in the war/ combat film (Langford 107), particularly in its post-classical phase. It argues in particular that a more sentimental such as Private Ryan , through its reverential honoring of fallen Allied soldiers, serves to clarify the moral legitimacy of warfare in a way that still challenges the moral indeterminacies and aporia of Basterds' revenge fantasy. The article speculates thus on the feasibility of Basterds' approach as any kind of affective alternative to Private Ryan, while ultimately asserting the importance of understanding both films as postmodern, or post-classical, films.A crucial emphasis for this article relates thus to the temporal dimensions of sentiment, specifically in cinema's nostalgic but no less complex invocation of mythic pasts, or ages. Christine Gledhill, among others, has argued that Hollywood melodrama follows a dual logic, showing that which is alongside that which should have been, often doing so through affirmations of a golden (21). In many ways exemplified by the depiction of World War II's Greatest Generation in numerous war films, this particularly Hollywoodian form of rhetoric has also been discussed by Jim Collins with reference to certain films of the 1990s. Films displaying New Sincerity are, for Collins, hyperconscious of the postmodern (256) of images circulating in contemporary image culture, and they respond through a nostalgic reassertion of lost authenticity (257), revealing spaces that are anterior to the world's and cinema's own commodification of images. Thus, [r]ather than trying to master the array through manipulation, these films attempt to reject it altogether, purposely evading the mediasaturated terrain of the present in pursuit of an almost forgotten authenticity, attainable only through a sincerity that avoids any sort of irony or (Collins 257).In films such as Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams (1989), Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990), and Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), the recovery of a never-never land of pure wish fulfillment (257) symbolically redresses for Collins the problems of the present through the longed-for return to an imaginary and impossible past. Needs for self-actualization, often on the part of male characters who have lost a sense of direction in middle age, impose themselves on the rewriting of past folk culture (260), as represented by the idealization of Native Americans, early baseball players, or childhood itself. Through the fetishizing of 'belief' rather than irony as the only way to resolve conflict (259), such texts posit escape and fantasy as alternative responses to ironic mastery of the postmodern array, on the part of both characters and spectators.Collins thus notes a distinction between modes of address where eclecticism predominates (his examples include Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future Part III [1990] and Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise [1991] and Blade Runner [1982]) and those alongside which paradigms of a forgotten, abandoned virtue are foregrounded. …
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