Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America

Author(s): John Bodnar

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Jun., 2001), pp. 805-817
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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 AHR Forum
Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America

JOHN BODNAR

THE RELEASE IN 1998 OF Saving Private Ryan by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg
has revived again the debate over war and remembering. In this case, audiences
have flocked to see a story of American troops, led by a dedicated captain, John
Miller (Tom Hanks), attempt to rescue a young private from the field of battle just
after the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Some reviewers have stressed how
Spielberg's film is the first to truly show the horror of battle, especially in its
opening scenes, which depict the American landing on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.
Modern technology has allowed the filmmaker to reproduce the frightening sound
of German gunfire and the brutal reality of exploding body parts. American soldiers
are shattered and maimed on the beachhead, and some fall apart emotionally from
the stress of battle. As many reviewers have suggested, the movie counters images
of heroic warriors by disclosing the real terror of combat and is in many ways an
antiwar story.1
Ironically, while the Spielberg film reveals the brutality of war, it preserves the
World War II image of American soldiers as inherently averse to bloodshed and
cruelty. The war was savage; the average American GI who fought it was not.
American men in this story are destroyed by war, and only a few actually enjoy
killing Germans. At its rhetorical core, the story's argument would have seemed
very familiar to audiences in the 1940s: the common American soldier was
fundamentally a good man who loved his country and his family. He went to war out
of a sense of duty to both, and he wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Rather than being a natural-born killer, he was a loving family man who abhorred
the use of extreme force but could inflict it when necessary. This point is made well
in the figure of John Miller. A high school teacher and part-time baseball coach
from Pennsylvania, he disdains brutality and says that every time he kills another
man he feels "farther from home." Traumatized himself at times by battle, this
common man still has heroic potential and is always up to the task of taking on the
German war machine. It is a model found in dozens of wartime films that depicted

1 See Jeanine Basinger, "Translating War: The Combat Film Genre and Saving Private Ryan,"
Perspectives 36 (October 1998): 1, 43-47. Basinger suggests that Spielberg meant to speak to the "me"
generation when Ryan asked his wife at the end of the film if he had earned the life that those who
sacrificed themselves for him gave him. For Basinger, the film asks if one individual is worth the effort
it took to save him (p. 47). See also Phil Landon, "Realism, Genre, and Saving Private Ryan," Film and
History 28, nos. 3-4 (1998): 58-63. Landon calls the film a "morality play" because it raised the question
of what obligations war survivors and subsequent generations have to the soldiers who gave their lives.

805

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 806 John Bodnar

average guys from Brooklyn or Texas who loved their everyday life in America or
the girl next door. Miller is ultimately a representation of the brand of common-
man heroism that infused the culture of wartime America. Without a doubt, a
platoon of men like him could save Private Ryan and win the war. Norman Corwin's
famous radio broadcast of May 8, 1945, on the occasion of Germany's surrender,
makes the case for the courageous possibilities of the ordinary person. "Take a bow,
GI. Take a bow, little guy," Corwin told his listeners. "The superman of tomorrow
lies at the feet of you common men this afternoon."2
Although anguish and bravery share narrative space in this film, they do not do
so on an equal basis. The pain of the American combat soldier is revealed but is
ultimately placed within a larger frame of patriotic valor. Some American soldiers
in this story question the war effort and their superiors' decisions, but in the end the
nation and its warriors are moral and honorable. The fact that combat was so
frightening serves mainly to reinforce our admiration for these soldiers and their
gallantry. The entire narrative, for that matter, is immensely "reverent" toward the
nation and its warriors, attempting to uphold its patriotic architecture with opening
and closing scenes at an American military cemetery in Europe. The very design of
these sites of remembering was originally driven by the desire to proclaim the unity
of the American nation, with their rows upon rows of white crosses, and to serve as
"permanent reminders to other nations of the sacrifices made by the United
States." If other nations were expected to recall their debt to America, Spielberg's
film makes the additional claim that survivors of the war (like Ryan) and
subsequent generations of Americans need to recognize their obligations to these
brave combatants. Thus, at the film's end, Ryan can only look back over his life and
the graves of the heroic dead and express the hope that he lived a life that merited
the sacrifice his comrades made for him, one that consisted of devotion to family
and country. In this veneration of patriotism and self-denial, the story takes us back
to dominant political and moral values of the 1940s, which advocated collective
goals over individual ones.3
But, as Spielberg remembers, he also forgets. Forties' calls to patriotic sacrifice
were contingent on assurances of a more democratic society and world. Govern-
ment leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt took pains to make democratic
promises in pronouncements like "The Four Freedoms." And the Office of War
Information (OWI) told Hollywood producers to make films that not only helped
win the conflict but reminded audiences that it was "a people's war," which would
bring about a future with more social justice and individual freedom. The
democracy for which "the people" fought, in fact, was a cultural blend of several key
ideas: tolerance, individualism, anti-totalitarianism, and economic justice. The
representation of open-mindedness was aimed particularly at reducing ethnic

2 Norman Corwin, "On a Note of Triumph, " audiocassette available from Lodes Tone, 611 Empire
Mill RD, Bloomington, IN 47401.
3 The term "reverent" is taken from Stephen J. Dubner, "Steven the Good," New York Times
Magazine (February 14, 1999): 38; USA Today (May 22, 1998): 7A. On the planned role for American
military cemeteries in Europe, see G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington,
D.C., 1995), 129; see James Jones, "Phony War Films," Saturday Evening Post, March 30, 1963, for an
argument that the depiction of war as a site for the realization or development of character is
misleading.

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 Saving Private Ryan 807

tensions at home. American individualism was venerated in the call for personal
freedoms and even in the rhetoric of military recruiters. They promised that army
life would not destroy a man's self-interests but would preserve the same balance
between individualism and teamwork that Americans experienced in their sporting
endeavors. Frank Capra's series "Why We Fight" (1942-1945) was a vivid example
of the use of anti-totalitarian images to encourage support for the war. And slogans
like "Freedom from Want" acknowledged the popular desire for economic security
after the 1930s.4
Spielberg's turn to the moral individual in heroism and in pain at the expense of
the moral or democratic community, however, suggests just how much this film is a
product of the late twentieth century and not of the 1940s. The attainment of
democracy rested in the 1940s on a sense of reciprocity between individuals and the
institutions that governed their lives. In a totalitarian state, government and
institutions dominated individuals; in a democracy, a relationship of mutual respect
existed between citizens and institutions. People served the nation because they
believed the nation would serve their democratic interests in return. Narratives that
endorsed this relationship, such as those found in many wartime films, effectively
linked the fate of the individual with the fate of the nation. Today, however,
narratives and images about the destiny of individuals command more cultural
space than those about the fortunes of nations. As a result, both political speech
and commemoration have more to say about victims or people who have met tragic
fates. Spielberg's memory narrative of moral men represents very much the late
twentieth century's concern with the singular person in the past, present, and
future. Cohesive narratives that effectively link personal stories to collective desires
for progress are harder to find. Those that exist are disrupted by images of victims.
Heroism and patriotism remain, but they must fight for cultural space with the
claims of those who have sorrowful tales from the past or those who insist on
redress rather than self-denial. Many believe that, since Vietnam, it is harder to
commemorate gallantry and victory or to suppress individual subjectivities at the
expense of collective ones. Thus delineations of victims-from Vietnam, from the
AIDS epidemic, from racism, from child abusers, from rapists, from drugs, even
from World War II-now command more cultural space. Statements of what was
lost now eclipse expressions of what was gained.5
This tension between the old patriotic narrative about the fate of the nation and
the new expression of individual suffering and loss is expressed clearly on the
Washington Mall, a central site of American cultural memory. In recent times, the
process of nationalizing the representation of emotional shock and private pain
appears arrested. The images of the old public history, dominated by powerful
statesmen who were devoted to the nation, have been substantially modified by the
appearance of victims. Names (and possessions) of dead soldiers constitute the

4Benjamin L. Alpers, "This Is the Army: Imagining a Democratic Military in World War II,"
Journal of American History 85 (June 1998): 129-63; Robert B. Westbrook, "I Want a Girl Just Like the
Girl That Married Harry James: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World
War II," American Quarterly 42 (1990): 587-614.
5On the declining cultural power of narratives of nationalism to efface realities of loss and trage
see Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Arthur Goldhammer, trans., 3 vo
(New York, 1996-98), 1: xxiii, 5-7.

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 808 John Bodnar

1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, known simply as "The Wall." Statues of

American troops reveal men moving cautiously through a battlefield scene from
Korea (1995); they appear fearful that they could be killed or hurt at any moment.
Figures standing in Depression-era bread lines or listening for words of hope
command attention at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial (1997), and,
nearby, thousands of images pertaining to Holocaust victims have been mounted for
exhibit (1993). Explanations for this transformation remain elusive. Some attribute
the change to the impact on American culture of the Vietnam War and traumatic
events such as the AIDS epidemic. The overall effect of the Holocaust cannot be
discounted. Certainly, the nation's ability to manage discourse about the past has
withered, as many more voices-including the mass media-have joined in the
production of culture.6
Contests over public remembering were certainly not pervasive in most nations
after World War II. Many countries were able to limit the representation of war
trauma and homegrown victimization in their societies for a very long time after the
war. In Japan, a long-term effort to conceal that nation's culpability for atrocities
in China or for starting the war in the Pacific has fallen apart only in recent years.
To some extent, this campaign was sustained by silences in Japanese history books
and by memorials to the Japanese dead that tended to remember them as innocent
victims, not brutal warriors. In postwar Germany, the Holocaust was substantially
denied in public; in many instances, Germans referred to themselves as "victims" of
Nazi aggressors, denying the realities of German-sponsored brutality toward others.
In France, for some two decades after the war, citizens tended to recall the conflict
in terms of a patriotic narrative: brave French Resistance fighters under Charles de
Gaulle waged an unrelenting campaign to free their captured nation from the
Germans. This version of the war had elements that were true, but it failed to
acknowledge completely the role of some French citizens who collaborated with the
Nazis in sending French Jews to death camps. In much of the Western world, in
fact, the contemporary memory of the Holocaust as an act of unparalleled
barbarism did not emerge fully until the 1960s: publicity surrounding Adolf
Eichmann's trial and the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War for a time recalled images of the
death of Jews.7

6 For an account of how the large loss of life from World War I challenged forms of heroic national
memory in France, see Antoine Prost, "Monuments to the Dead," in Nora, Realms of Memory, 2:
307-30. On the popularity of the Roosevelt Memorial, see the Baltimore Sun (August 3, 1997): 2F;
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 8-9.
7 Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York, 1992);
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Arthur Goldhammer,
trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Omer Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews,
and the Holocaust," AHR 103 (June 1998): 771-816; Peter Novick, "Holocaust Memory in America,"
in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, James E. Young, ed. (New York, 1994), 149-65;
see also Sturken, Tangled Memories, 2-3. Julia A. Thomas, "Photography, National Identity, and the
'Cataract of Times': Wartime Images and the Case of Japan," AHR 103 (December 1998): 1475-83,
suggests that Japan still has a difficult time in recalling certain traumatic aspects of the war. Claudio
Fogu treats the managing of the memory of World War I in "II Duce taumaturgo: Modernist Rhetorics
in Fascist Representations of History," Representations 57 (Winter 1997): 24-29. For a discussion of
how individual memory can challenge the goals of public forms of remembering to "tame the past," see
Vera Schwarcz, Bridge across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (New Haven, Conn.,
1998), 92-93.

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 Saving Private Ryan 809

In this essay, however, I want to argue that the narrative of heroism, patriotism,
and democracy that permeated wartime America-the story that Saving Private
Ryan seeks to restore only partially-began to decompose immediately in the
aftermath of World War II. This would not be so apparent if one looked only at
official commemorations and public monuments, such as the one dedicated in 1954
to the costly American victory at Iwo Jima. Mass culture, however, was more
responsive to the range of personal emotions and recollections that resided in the
hearts and minds of the people, and it frequently challenged "reverent" narratives
by the late 1940s. Although limitations of space prevent a full discussion of the
impact of mass culture on society, the central point must be made that mass cultural
forms undermined disciplinary institutions (such as governments or churches) in their
goal of managing the public expression of human wants. Films, for instance, thrived
because they were able to broadcast the full range of human desires and emotions.

LONG BEFORE Saving Private Ryan or even the Vietnam War, American mass culture
was flooded with a torrential debate over the violence unleashed by war and, more
importantly, over the turbulent nature of American society itself. Scholars have
documented both political opposition to the American atomic build-up in the late
1940s and cultural expressions of anxiety over the possibility of world destruction by
atomic weapons throughout the Cold War era. But this line of analysis is grounded
too much in Cold War issues and fails to sufficiently appreciate the overall impact
of World War II and the memory of violence and trauma that it generated. The war
showed Americans that their fellow citizens were as capable of inflicting brutality as
citizens of other nations, and it led them to search for the sources of such behavior
within the home front itself. Public anxiety over victimization was as likely to be
grounded in fears of dangerous impulses in the hearts and souls of fellow citizens
as in fears about powerful weapons. The anxiety that linked popular nervousness
over brute force in both wartime and peacetime America was articulated especially
in the cinema and in literature. There, writers and directors challenged the
sentimental views of the nation and the perspectives of the Office of War
Information. In this oppositional view, American men and, for that matter, women
were not inherently patriotic and loving but were domineering and ruthless. In its
recognition of evil in the hearts and souls of "the people," this construction of the
nation and its citizens worked against the hope of a more democratic and
prosperous future. Once it was demonstrated that violence could be homegrown
and did not reside only in the visions of dictators, it followed that America itself
could produce victims as well as patriots, treachery as well as loyalty.8
From its inception in the eighteenth century, the nation-state has been haunted
by visions of degeneration, chaos, and anarchy. Those potentially responsible for

8 On Cold War anxieties, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture
at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, 1985); and Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove's America:
Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1997). See also Craig Calhoun, "Introduction:
Habermas and the Public Sphere," in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.,
1992), 21-22. On the official ideology of World War II, see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black,
Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (1987;
Berkeley, 1990), 168-69.

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 810 John Bodnar

such destructiveness have been located both inside and outside national bound-
aries. Ideally, the nation was imagined as a united community that would protect its
members, grant them rights, and foster their material progress. In the consciousness
of nations, citizens entrusted powerful men with civic affairs and the defense of
boundaries. Serving as statesmen, patriarchs, or dedicated warriors, these men
merited the admiration and gratitude of females and others dependent on them. It
was understood that leaders and warriors might sometimes need to suppress
savages on the frontiers of the nation or even minorities within it. But hints that
they themselves were bloodthirsty or cruel could not only weaken their elevated
status but threaten the cultural stability of the nation itself.9 Consequently, war
always involves cultural risks even if the nation wins. Omer Bartov has observed
that modern warfare and the massive trauma it generated incited feelings of anxiety
in all participants and prompted a wide search for enemies and victims.10 This is
what happened in much of the domestic politics of Cold War America and in the
aftermath of Vietnam.
Even more central to my argument is the point that, after 1945, recognizing the
war's incredible scale of brutality caused ordinary Americans and probably people
elsewhere to connect the cruelty of warfare with other forms of malevolence in their
lives and society. Once war exposed how savage men could be, it did not take much
of a cultural leap to see that everyone was threatened by warlike behavior wherever
it was manifested. This process had distinct implications for remembering the war.
Dominick LaCapra suggests that extremely traumatic events often force the
imagination to employ extravagant metaphors, invoking terms such as in one's
"wildest dreams or most hellish nightmares." In a sense, both the mind and the
culture must find ways to confront the "unimaginable magnitude" of what took
place. Thus the search for extraordinary models of enemies and victims displaced
the wartime representations of a democratic nation and common-man heroism, and
it undermined future attempts to represent the national society in a positive
manner.1-
This argument moves away from standard paradigms regarding the relationship

9 On the relationship between gender and the construction of the idea of a nation, see George L.
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (1985; rpt.
edn., Madison, Wis., 1988); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America (New York, 1992), 10-13, 627-55; Robert B. Westbrook, "Fighting for the American
Family: Private Interests and Political Obligation in World War II," in The Power of Culture: Critical
Essays in American History, Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. (Chicago, 1993),
199-201. On the debate over the proper behavior of women in the British nation during World War II,
see Sonya Rose, "Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain," AHR 103 (October 1998):
1161-64; on the tendency of women and other German citizens to displace accounts of German-
inflicted violence from their stories of World War II, see Elizabeth Heineman, "The Hour of the
Woman: Memories of Germany's 'Crisis Years' and West German National Identity," AHR 101 (April
1996): 354-60; on the rise of a dominant form of white male supremacy in the early American
nationalism, see Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity
of White Men (Durham, N.C., 1998), 2-7. The problem of representing and taking responsibility for
violence is discussed in Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American
Identity (New York, 1998), 13-14.
10 Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims," 771-816.
11 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 180-81. Daniel J.
Sherman, "Bodies and Names: The Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France," AHR 103
(April 1998): 443-66, explores the tension since World War I in European commemoration between
collective and personal history.

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 Saving Private Ryan 811

between trauma and memory. It accepts and notes that trauma can lead to a "lapse
or rupture" in the memory of emotional shock but contends that this form of
repression is incomplete. The psychoanalytic study of trauma has revealed that the
painful event usually returns against the victim's will and only after an initial period
of suppression or "absolute numbing"; the victim must first move away from the
event before returning to it. This certainly appeared to happen to some extent in the
public culture of the warring nations after 1945. But I will also offer evidence that
a substantial amount of the trauma and anxiety, at least in the United States, was
not restrained as much as it was displaced into the narratives of mass culture. One
scholar has written that "the historical power of trauma is not just that the
experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its
inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all." I would amend this position by
claiming that, to a considerable extent, both the personal anxieties and the
collective concerns over the violence of war never really left American culture at
all.12
Some observers who have studied the impact of the Holocaust on postwar culture
are impressed by the fact that the cultural suppression of trauma involved in
"acting-out" the past in a nostalgic sense (something that suppresses the reality of
pain) now appears to take place alongside the practice of working-through or
confronting emotional disturbances. Nostalgia and mourning coexist. In looking at
the films of postwar America and a modern feature like Saving Private Ryan, we
clearly see what LaCapra calls "interaction, reinforcement, and conflict" between
the need to forget and the desire to confront what happened.13 In its opening
scenes, Saving Private Ryan confronts the horror; in later scenes, when GIs go off on
an adventure to save one individual, it often lapses into play acting and a desire to
fight the war over again. The same sort of tension was noticeable in American films
about the war in the decade after 1945, although the narrative resolution of
contradictions was not always the same. In Ryan, patriotic sacrifice as a frame of
remembrance stands above both trauma and democracy. But in the immediate
postwar era, some films effectively contested patriotic ideals. They often displaced
the representation of trauma from the combat zone to American society or to a
distant past, but the discourse over the pain of war was real. Thus, between 1946
and 1949, hardly any combat films of the war were made. Many features, however,
were issued about the devastating consequences of the war on Americans as well as
the potential Americans had to inflict harm on others. Moreover, combat did not
disappear completely but was often exiled into the genre of the Western. The most
thoughtful of these latter films actually located savagery in the character of the
American cavalrymen and not Native Americans.14

12 Cathy Caruth, "Introduction," in Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, 1995),
4-8. LaCapra, History and Memory afterAuschwitz, 9-21, partially accepts the notion of repression but
makes a more complex case for the idea that individual and collective memory exist within a dialogic
framework, each testing and confronting the other. For insightful observations of how the scale of
death in World War I and World War II prompted a search for an appropriate language of mourning,
see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1995), 5-10.
13 LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 10-46.
14 Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York, 1986), 153;
Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 334.

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 812 John Bodnar

Wartime films were not without their own set of contradictions, to be sure,
although patriotism, unity, and democracy dominated the stories. In tales about the
war and gender relations, women were assigned crucial roles of support for the men
they loved with devotion. This point was made clear in films such as Since You Went
Away (1944) and Pride of the Marines (1945). Ethnic cooperation was fostered in
numerous depictions of American platoons, such as Bataan (1943). Hatred for
authoritarian regimes was certainly prevalent in movies such as Sahara (1943), and
patriotic sacrifice was venerated in films such as Wake Island (1942), which evoked
memories of American heroism at Valley Forge and the Alamo. The grim reality of
war, the random and unheroic nature of much death, and the sometimes futile
plight of the common soldier broke through in creative stories such as A Walk in the
Sun (1945), but its cynicism was rare. More common was a film like Air Force
(1943), which effectively merged personal interests and collective needs. In this
film, men love their mothers and wives, naturally want to defend their nation, kill
the treacherous Japanese, and fight bravely in the Pacific. A tailgunner who feels
that he has not been treated fairly in the past eventually lets go of his anger as he
joins the fight. The entire film is framed by a preamble from Abraham Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, suggesting that the military struggle is ultimately about "a new
birth of freedom" and the need to preserve "government of the people, by the
people, and for the people." Saving Private Ryan, by contrast, invokes the memory
of Lincoln as an expression of the ideal of patriotic sacrifice, not as a call to work
for more democracy.15
Postwar films moved away from wartime censorship and immediately into a
discourse over how the violence unleashed by the war could wreak havoc with the
American future. The suggestion that dangerous impulses resided in the souls of
Americans themselves was at the core of film noir features of the later 1940s. In
both mood and story, these films countered sentimental and optimistic assessments
not only about the future but about Americans themselves. The 1946 film The Killers
made evident the "ubiquity" of viciousness and victimization in everyday American
life. The central character, played by actor Burt Lancaster, is drawn into a life of
crime, betrayed by a woman, and gunned down in the symbolic space of American
democracy-the small town. So much for the potential of stable gender relations.
Dana Polan has argued that the war was a "disciplinary moment" in which diverse
discourses came together to "empower a particular social reality." But it was
increasingly clear in the immediate postwar period that critical images of America
and Americans could no longer be domesticated and that, as Polan writes,
"discourses of commonality" had reached the limits of their persuasiveness.16
The productions of film noir did not always connect despair directly to the event
of World War II, but the popular classic by William Wyler, The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), certainly did. In this story, servicemen return home with deep

15 Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 34-37; Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollyw
American Culture, and World War II (New York, 1993), 122-48. Saving Private Ryan invokes a letter
(traditionally ascribed to Lincoln) to a mother whose five sons "died gloriously on the field of battle."
16 Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York,
1995), 238; Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, 1994), 12;
Dana B. Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New
York, 1986), 70-71.

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 Saving Private Ryan 813

emotional and physical scars. One is haunted not only by the memory of flying
bomber runs over Germany but by the realization that his wife had been unfaithful
while he was away. In other words, he was victimized by events both abroad and at
home. Another veteran, who drinks excessively upon his return, manages to
advance the cause of a just society; through his job at a bank, he makes it easier for
ordinary veterans to get loans that will help them rebuild their lives. Trauma is
acknowledged; the hope of a democratic future still persists.17
The most powerful cultural attack on the sentimentality and heroic quality of
wartime culture came in Norman Mailer's 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead.
Mailer was a veteran himself who had served in the Pacific and had seen firsthand
some of the destruction caused by the atomic bomb in Japan. His narrative is one
that centers not so much on the war as on the nature of American society and the
patterns of male behavior it engendered. Stationed on a fictional island in the
Pacific, Mailer's GIs are not particularly capable of patriotism or virtue. Rather,
they are consumed by personal quests of power and destructiveness. A minor
character on the island expresses the Roosevelt administration's view that the
conflict is a "people's war" that will lead to a more democratic world for all
mankind, a point that the OWI worked assiduously to inject into wartime films.
However, General Edward Cummings, a major character in the story, envisions a
postwar world dominated not by democracy but by the "Right" and the "Omnip-
otent Men" who will lead America. Clearly, Mailer saw an innate drive for power
and dominion in American men that Spielberg does not. For Mailer, this drive was
realized not only in the massive retaliation against the Japanese but in the lives of
domineering men like Cummings, whose father had been sent him to military
school to make him "think and act like a man."'18
Cummings's perspective frames the novel's unflattering portrayal of American
manhood, and Mailer contends that the male drive for dominance could be found
in democracies as well as dictatorships. When someone suggests to Cummings that
men would fight out of love for their country, he dismisses the notion as a "liberal
historian's attitude." For Cummings, it is not democracy that motivates American
men to fight. Instead, they learned to be aggressive from living in a society of
unequals in which most men were trying to climb upward from humble origins.
Mailer's story is important not only because it represents a critique of the official
views of why America fought and of the romantic images of the American fighting
men but because it connects narratives of victimization from the 1930s with those
of the 1940s. That is to say, he suggested that both experiences, economic conflict
and war, can destroy lives. American culture in the postwar era still reverberated
with the aftershocks of the Depression and with notions that revealed the pitfalls of
capitalism. In fact, many conservatives had attacked the OWI during the war
precisely because of its liberal orientation, which connected the idea of a "people's
war" to the need to respect labor as much as business in narrative films. Numerous
films continued to reveal the manner in which the nation's fundamental economic
system destroyed as many individuals as it rewarded. In All My Sons (1948), an
industrialist decides to place profits before patriotism, resulting in the production

17 See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992), 77.
18 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York, 1981), 174.

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 814 John Bodnar

of planes with faulty parts. When American airmen lose their lives as the result of
his decisions, the man is traumatized enough to take his own life. In Champion
(1949), a man throws away relationships with people who care about him for a
chance to become a boxing king. In this story, the boxing ring becomes a metaphor
for the marketplace pursuit of wealth and fame.19
Remembering war as the progenitor of victims rather than heroes was central to
a number of films in the late 1940s. In Crossfire (1947), soldiers bring their brutal
ways back home. Some are described as capable of going "crazy" once there is no
one around to give them orders. They engage in drunkenness and murder and even
acts of anti-Semitism. In general, they do not seem to have the clear sense of
purpose that soldiers in Saving Private Ryan exhibit regarding the desirability of
resuming domestic arrangements or serving their country. Before Crossfire ends,
one soldier even kills another.
Two years later, Home of the Brave (1949) connected the respective trauma-
inducing abilities of war and society. In this tale, an African-American soldier,
James Moss, suffers severe emotional distress due to the brutality of racism in the
United States and the effects of combat. Moss undergoes treatment for what a
military psychiatrist calls "traumatic shock." (In reality, the discovery of psychiatric
stress during the war had a profound influence on the way the military treated this
problem. Entering the war, the common assumption was that emotional break-
downs in battle were the result of a weak or less than manly character.) Moss is
depicted as deeply disturbed by the insults he received in civilian life and from racist
soldiers in the military. When he hears his good friend being tortured by the
Japanese on a secret mission and is forced to leave his partner to die on an island
in the Pacific, he breaks down and cries. The psychiatrist gives him a drug that
allows him to relive and, therefore, to come to terms with his combat experience.
He realizes that war trauma is shared equally by people of all races. As he goes back
home to open a bar with a white friend, we get a hint that the success of a postwar
future will depend not only on putting the trauma behind us but on resolving
inequality and prejudice as well.
Even more traditional war films of the period were reluctant to temper the
anguish of battle with simple images of bravery and valor. In Battleground (1949),
the point of view of the ordinary fighting man was stressed. War for these "battered
bastards" was confusing and painful. Some are looking for a "good clean flesh
wound" that will get them out of battle and back to a field hospital and, perhaps,
home. As Private Holley, actor Van Johnson claims that the PFC, or private first
class, in his military rank stands only for the fact that he is "praying for civilian"
status. In this film, there is no cataclysmic battle or talk of democracy or patriotism,
only an intent focus on fighting to stay alive or to take a small piece of ground.
There is dogged determination on the part of American troops in this film against
superior enemy forces and bitterly cold weather, but Battleground tries hard to say
that the average GI was uninterested in putting any sort of political frame on an
experience that he detested.
By 1950, a popular war film such as The Sands of Iwo Jima went a bit farther than

19 See Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, on the OWI.

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 Saving Private Ryan 815

the cynical commentary articulated in Battleground by mounting a direct attack on

some of the men who won the war, even as it sustained heroic notions about them.
John Wayne starred as a dedicated Marine sergeant capable of training soldiers and
leading them into battle. This film was supported extensively by the Marine Corps,
which supplied it with an array of military hardware, and it is often seen as a pivotal
representation of the heroic American war myth. But there is considerable irony in
this narrative. Shots of brave American fighting men attacking the Japanese on
Tarawa and Iwo Jima are countered by expressions of regret over the fact that men
like Wayne (Sergeant Stryker in the movie) ultimately elect the ideals of military
life over those of domestic life. Unlike John Miller in Saving Private Ryan, Stryker
is a zealous soldier who has little interest in maintaining close ties to his wife and
family. War is brutal in this film, and men get killed, although 1950s film technology
could not achieve the sense of fear that Spielberg's does. The Sands of Iwo Jima also
made a much more determined attempt to work through the impact of war on men
and to address the concern that military life exacerbated natural impulses toward
violence, which would have devastating consequences for American society. Unlike
the Spielberg film, The Sands of Iwo Jima made a specific plea to American men to
put the violence of wartime behind them. Audiences watched as a young marine
tells Stryker that he wants to raise his son to read Shakespeare, not the Marine
manual. And they saw Stryker come to regret the way he mistreated his wife and
son. Film historians astutely note that when Stryker is killed near the end, the
heroic and violent warrior of World War II is symbolically destroyed. Ryan only asks
us to honor these men and "earn" the freedom they have left us. Presumably,
pacifistic pleas are unnecessary because in Spielberg's world these men are not
inherently violent.
By the middle 1950s, it was clear that a far-reaching contest over how to recall
and forget the war was under way. At the dedication of the Iwo Jima Memorial,
citizens gathered to venerate victory and the men who earned it. This was by no
means a suppression of popular sentiment. The memorial represented well the
belief that ordinary men fought gallantly, that the war was worth the sacrifice, and
that the trauma could be put behind us. The same point is made in the film To Hell
and Back (1955), which depicts a brave and decorated soldier who is close to his
family. But members of the wartime generation continued to represent some
veterans as brutes who had no place in peacetime America in films such as A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Peyton Place (1957), and No Down Payment (1957).
During the war, women had already expressed fears that military experiences
incited men to misogynistic behavior. In 1954, Harriet Arnow articulated another
critique by writing a novel, The Dollmaker, of how the war (and capitalism)
destroyed the independence of a woman.
For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War pressures reinvigorated heroic
images of American men and quelled some of the cultural divisions that had
marked the immediate postwar era. In 1962's The Longest Day, the prowess of the
American military and men of all ranks was validated. This movie of epic
proportions lavished attention on the planning that went into the Allied invasion of
Europe in 1944 and the extent to which the "biggest armada the world has ever
known" was firmly under American leadership. A small amount of space was turned

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 816 John Bodnar

over to the heroics of the British and the French resistance, but the "star" of the
feature was the collective effort of the Americans. The Nazis in this feature were
disorganized; the sons of democracy were eager and united in purpose. Heroism
crowded out serious discussion here of personal trauma or the emotional and
political longings of ordinary soldiers.
In 1970, the release of Patton again reaffirmed the brilliance of American military
strategy and leadership, although this film also took an extended look at the
psychological traits of a heroic leader as well. Neither Patton nor The Longest Day
paid much attention to 1940s concerns about democracy or the potential for
brutality of Americans themselves. For General George Patton, war was less an act
to save democracy than it was an opportunity to realize his dream of becoming a
brave combatant-a certain type of man. "All real Americans love the sting of
battle," he reportedly told his men. He was famous for his intolerance of
subordinates who were traumatized by battle, who failed to relish killing the enemy
as he did, and who lacked the fighting spirit to be a brave warrior. That is why he
loved so much leading the triumphal parades of victors into liberated towns in
Europe. Cheering crowds reaffirmed his sense of what war and men were all about.
Catch-22 (1970) appeared at the same time Patton did, however, and it suggested
that the cultural effort to laud the World War II experience of Americans was in
deep trouble. Certainly, the impact of Vietnam was crucial here, but it should be
recalled that the story was drawn from a novel authored by a World War II veteran
(Joseph Heller), as was the film of The Naked and the Dead (1958). This cynical view
of the American military in World War II Italy completely debunked not only the
integrity of military leadership but any effort to look at the war in heroic or
sentimental terms. In this story, American soldiers use their spare time looking for
cash or sex and actually question orders to drop bombs on innocent civilians. One
U.S. serviceman kills and rapes an Italian woman. The central premise of the
narrative is an antiwar statement, pure and simple. Captain Yossarian, the central
figure, wants doctors to declare that he is insane so he can get out of the war
completely. The "catch" is that the wish to escape from war is a perfectly sane idea
and, therefore, cannot be a basis for judging someone to be insane.
Today, stories of glorious rises and tragic falls dot the landscape of American
cultural memory. The celebration of personal dreams is discussed more widely than
collective destinies. Images of a proud nation are contested by those of a society
capable of inflicting pain and suffering. In this culture of contradictions and
silences, cultural memory is subjected, in the words of Griel Marcus, to "an anarchy
of possibilities"' and, in the terms of Pierre Nora, to a "series of initiatives with no
central organizing principle."20 But that "anarchy" is fiercely contested in the
Spielberg film, not to restore the vision of a democratic nation but to rehabilitate
traditions of good fathers, patriotic men, and self-sacrifice. Miller and Ryan do not
challenge moral conventions, are not inherently violent, and are willing to
relinquish personal dreams. They recognize that the fortunes of the nation take

20 Griel Marcus, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (New York, 1991), xvii; Pierre Nora,
"The Era of Commemoration," in Nora, Realms of Memory, 3: 615; Antoine Prost, "Verdun," in Realms
of Memory, 2: 377-401. Prost demonstrates how a "national memory" repressed a "veterans' memory"
for a time after the bloody battle of Verdun in 1916. Ultimately, the pain and tragedy of the veterans,
however, came to reassert itself in French culture.

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 Saving Private Ryan 817

precedence over their own futures. The film Saving Private Ryan does not say that
personal sacrifice is glorious as does Patton or that wars are free of death and
trauma as does the Iwo Jima Memorial. Distinct boundaries between cultural
categories, like the tropes of heroic soldiers and personal pain, have generally been
difficult to maintain since 1945. But the film chooses to take sides in the modern
culture of opposites by protecting a sentimental view of American men that was
seriously disrupted by both World War II and Vietnam. In fact, it basically
suppresses a critical view of American society as well, preferring to suggest that the
American future will best be fashioned by moral individuals rather than by
democratic reforms.
Postwar films tended to treat the American warrior and American society in a
more evenhanded way. They shared with Saving Private Ryan a tendency to
remember the turmoil and stress. This is not an invention of the 1990s. Postwar
films and culture actually went further, however, in exploring the consequences of
the war, which is exactly what Bartov argued when he claimed that the acknowl-
edgment of victims impelled individuals to find reasons for the suffering.21 Because
the Spielberg film attempts to preserve the memory of patriotic sacrifice more than
it desires to explore the causes of the trauma and violence, however, it is more
about restoring a romantic version of common-man heroism in an age of moral
ambivalence than about ending the problem of devastating wars.
The failure of Saving Private Ryan to evoke the memory of "a people's war,"
moreover, reveals the film's conservative politics. Past, present, and future are now
contingent on standards of individual behavior rather than on democratic ideals
such as the quest for equality, a just capitalism, or citizen participation in political
life. Spielberg's film about trauma and patriotism suggests why the contemporary
turn to memory, anguish, and the testimony of victims is about more than the
demise of the cultural power of the nation. It also has a great deal to do with a sense
of disenchantment with democratic politics and with turning political life over to
"the people." Visions of a democratic community are feeble in this story, which
remembers individuals in a more exemplary way than they were understood by their
own generation.22
21 Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims," 775.
22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
rev. edn. (London, 1991), 144. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 15, discusses the
relationship between memory and a loss of faith in democratic politics.

John Bodnar is Chancellors' Professor and Chair of the Department of History

at Indiana University, Bloomington. Bodnar's publications include The Trans-
planted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985) and Remaking
America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth
Century (1992). He has also edited Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their
Patriotism (1996). In 1994, he held the Florence Chair of American History at
the European University Institute; in 2001-2002, he will be a fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.
He is currently completing a book on the representation of working people and
American political traditions in Hollywood film.

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