Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

In April 2003, Saving Private Ryan enjoyed a resurgence as it was appropriated and modified in order to provide a narrative frame for the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq. The operation was presented in the American media as a "daring" rescue mission providing a dramatic example of American expertise and dedication, and character pieces about Lynch and her family were supplemented with film from a "combat camera crew that accompanied the assault team and produced eerie, green-tinted images through a night-vision lens that were seen on television around the world" showing "soldiers hustling the stretcher bearing Lynch toward the Black Hawk and freedom" (Wilkinson). Although the film simply showed Lynch being carried away, US Central Command underscored the fact that the team faced heavy enemy fire getting in and out of the building, and the combination of a dramatic firefight with a touching human interest story prompted Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, to "praise the operation as demonstrating the 'heart and soul' of the military." Beyond the constant mainstream media coverage, A&E produced a documentary entitled "Saving Private Lynch" mapping out her capture and rescue, and NBC is rushing to translate the story into a TV movie before public attention fades (Boston Globe).

The popularity of the Lynch story transcends the fact that it plays as if scripted for television. With a rather ambiguous and problematic victory in Iraq resulting in widespread looting, a popularization of Islamic fundamentalism, US soldiers shooting anti-US demonstrators, and a continued lack of gas, electricity, telephones, food, water, health care and jobs in most parts of Iraq, the expectation of a liberation of Iraq that was supposed to be greeted with flowers and bags of rice was projected onto the liberation of a young, white, attractive female soldier which allowed the American public to feel good about the war effort (it's really about saving damsels in distress, not dropping bombs on marketplaces) and retroactively demonize the Iraqis, who were heartless enough to take her prisoner in the first place. Along these lines, Lynch's story also resonates as "the latest iteration of a classic American war fantasy: the captivity narrative," which can be traced from the Indian Wars of the mid-1600s up to the Iran hostage crisis and the moral outrage generated by American POWs from the first Gulf War (McAlister). The heroine in crisis comes to symbolize the broader community, with a confused and vulnerable Lynch being rescued by Special Ops paralleling the American culture of fear being "defended" by a militaristic foreign policy directed by the chickenhawks in the Bush administration, with her happy-ending rescue foreshadowing the United State's inevitable triumph. The Lynch story produced a feel-good spectacle positioned as legitimating the administration's narrative of a humane and precise war, encouraging continued political consensus enforced by an appeal to a passive and consumerist brand of patriotism.

However, a number of absences and contradictions structure the Lynch story, most notably the relative silence about her roommate and fellows soldier, Lori Piestewa, "the first Native American in the US Army killed in combat and the only servicewoman to die in [the Iraqi] war" (Younge). As a single mother of two and an ethnic minority, with a story that ended in a tragic death rather than a dramatic rescue, Lori wasn't as televisable as Lynch, especially in a culture marked by an increasing fear of racialized "Others," including "superpredator" blacks, "invading" Hispanics, "terrorist" Arabs, and "freeloading" Indians. Shawna Johnson, a black female prisoner of war in Iraq, also wasn't worthy of a branded story or a TV movie, even though she was one of the POWs featured in the Iraqi broadcast that prompted so much emotional outrage, and she was also successfully rescued. Her story would actually be more representative of the broader military experience, since in the Army black women, who make up only 16% of the female civilian population, actually outnumber white women, comprising 48% of the women in the Army (Halbfinger). However, threatened white women function as a common narrative trope in American popular culture and film, stretching back to the first feature film, Birth of a Nation, where an innocent Southern belle is menaced by a dehumanized black soldier. The rescue of Private Lynch reiterates the notion of white feminity threatened by the racialized Other, one of the central narratives justifying colonial invasions and expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries (Goldberg).

Additionally, reports have started surfacing in the international media that the military's presentation of events is somewhat less than accurate. According to doctors at the hospital, Iraqi troops had withdrawn two days before the raid, they had originally tried to take Jessica over to the US troops but had to turn back because they were fired on, and that only medical staff were in the building when the US stormed the hospital, destroying doors and medical equipment. The doctors and nursing staff also discussed how they bonded with Lynch and treated her wounds using one of three platinum plates they had left to set her leg and letting her use a special bed because she was developing a bed sore (Potter). Other doctors recounted how they ventured out during bombing raids in order to obtain supplies and lied to retreating Iraqi forces in order to keep her safe, only to later hear about American media claiming that the hospital staff abused her (Wilson). In this way, the historical complexity and lived reality of the Lynch story is largely elided by an appeal to the "authenticity" of the tape of her rescue and a reduction of the frame of analysis to her individual story as recounted by the US Central Command, who has so far prevented her from speaking about her ordeal in public.

This individualization and privatization of war, as well as the equation of aesthetic realism with historical accuracy also describes the film that provides the emotional reference for the Lynch rescue, Saving Private Ryan. Employing an individual narrative in order to provide an understanding of or affective investment in a broader and more abstract social or historical process is certainly nothing new. As Robert Rosenstone points out, "one may argue that film tends to highlight individuals rather than movements or the impersonal processes that are the subject of a good deal of history (Rosenstone). Although Rosenstone rightly points out that this narrative frame reflects a bourgeois (or neoliberal) aesthetic and that "it is possible to make films that avoid the glorification of the individual and present the group as protagonist," the "directness" and affective force of the dramatic film offers rather unique possibilities for mobilizing and engaging history. Debating whether or not film offers more or less 'accurate' depictions than other historical modes (such as historical narratives, epigrams, scholarly history, etc.) fails to provide much productive work, since every history involves "processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification," as well as transformation and forgetting (White). However, we can't simply end with this insight and declare all histories equal, but rather, we need to engage how films employ these processes to legitimate and privilege certain narratives, voices, values, identities and memories. In particular, Saving Private Ryan presents a cinematic representation of neoliberal ideology expressed through the war film, collapsing the public into the private, privileging the individual over the social, and prioritizing following orders and a pedagogy of consensus over questions of ethical responsibility, collective action, and the public good.

Traditional war films used the milieu of the platoon or company as both a microcosm for American society and a lens into the broader structures and implications of history and war. Various cultural critics have mapped out how the traditional cinematic military company features a diverse group of individuals (as diverse as young, white men can be, of course) that learn to appreciate and respect one another by facing common hardships, struggles, and goals. This narrative arc was characteristic of the films of the forties and fifties, reflecting the broad mobilization of the American public in the WWII war effort (even though it remained deeply marked by racial, gender, and class biases and exclusions, most dramatically apparent in the continued racial segregation of American society and the armed forces, and the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps) and the Keyesian/liberal consensus of post-war America that provided an uneasy alliance between labor, corporations, and the state up to the sixties, with America's unique role as the only world superpower largely unscathed allowing all of these sectors of society to enjoy rising profits and increasing standards of living. The war films of the seventies and early eighties also used individual narratives, but they primarily functioned to expose the absurdity, hypocrisy, and terror of war and society, an attitude informed by the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the prolonged economic crises of the Seventies, the Wategate scandal and an emerging culture of cynicism, and the almost instantaneous backlash to the gains of the civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements and the social programs of Johnson's Great Society.

Saving Private Ryan marks the re-emergence of the pro-war film, but employs a dramatically different narrative emphasis than the more traditional films. In Saving Private Ryan and subsequent films such as The Patriot, We Were Soldiers, Hart's War, Windtalkers, Tears of the Sun, and even putatively critical works like Three Kings and Black Hawk Down, the individual actually displaces the historical and socio-politcal context and becomes central to both the film and the history that it represents, often providing the motivation for the actions taken on screen. These are essentially neoliberal war films, with history reduced to privatized and individualized missions and objectives, and prompted not by any sense of the social or political but mother-love or the revenge of a son. This privatization is naturalized and sanctified by a simultaneous appeal to aesthetic realism, which becomes synonymous with historical accuracy, in the broadest sense of representing a "sense" or "feel" of the event, and a notion of duty and historic inevitability operating as a revitalized and retrofitted manifest destiny. In this way, the neoliberal war film constitutes a cultural formation that resonates both with the expansion and transformations of global capitalism and an emerging consumerist patriotism articulated around a politics of consensus, the reformulation of the welfare state as a garrison state, and a culture of perpetual fear.

As Catherine Kodat points out, the question of context and the "necessity of contextual understanding" is a central theme in Saving Private Ryan, with the apparently memorial impulse of the film constituting a history of the present that "simultaneously expresses and seeks to contain the sharp political and economic anxieties peculiar to its moment of production" (Kodat). The film is framed by both the broad notion of "America," captured in the billowing flag that has become a commonplace on cable news, and an invocation of family, which becomes both the impetus for the mission to save Private Ryan (to preserve what remained of his mother's family) and its retroactive justification (through Private Ryan's family). On his way to find Ryan, Tom Hanks grumbles "this Ryan better do something…cure cancer, or invent a longer lasting light-bulb." However, what finally legitimates Ryan is his initiation into patriarchy as the venerable head of an extended family, validated at his moment of uncertainty by his otherwise silenced wife, who is there to answer "you are" when he asks her to tell him he's a good man. The film itself is deeply patriarchal, with Hanks playing a surrogate father figure light-years removed from the abusive drill sergeant of Full Metal Jacket or the fratricidal officers of Platoon, with Hanks positioned as Ryan's paternalistic guardian acting on the unspoken and unseen desires and fears of his mother, who is constantly evoked even as she is cinematically erased. This patriarchal arrangement is generationally transmitted, visually represented by the elder Ryan leading his family through the memorial in the opening scenes of the film. World War II is represented as essentially about preserving the white, middle-class, traditional nuclear family, which via the juxtaposition with the flag stands for America itself, resonating with neoliberal demands for a return to traditional American rugged individualism typified by the frontier family.

Another instructive context is the juxtaposition of the search for Private Ryan with the D-Day invasion, with Spielberg implying that they are equally important, and in light of the identification of America with an idealized notion of the American family, the two missions become practically synonymous. Fighting to secure a democratic and egalitarian future or preventing the spread of genocidal racism (as Kodat suggests, the film neatly dodges the profound contradictions of a segregated army fighting a racist dictator) becomes subordinated to the preservation of a mythical nuclear family, literally in the case of the Ryans and allegorically in the broader context of the film. This cinematic equation of the battle that began the liberation of Europe to a mission to find and rescue one private is underscored by having Hanks lead both missions, and the connection is spelled out by his commanding officer who tells him "It was a tough assignment. That's why you got it. I've got another one for you, this one straight from the top." The brief interchange between Hanks and his CO illustrates both the patriarchal and hierarchal structure of the Army reflecting that of an increasingly polarized and militarized American society, and how the broader social and political implications of an event like D-Day are collapsed into a completely privatized (in a double sense) mission.

Of course, the tension between the broader context of World War II and such an individualized mission is one of the driving dramatic forces of the film. The rank-and-file of Hanks' company point out that they all have mothers who will also suffer if they die, which would seem to multiply rather than reduce the maternal loss used to justify the rescue. The sniper also points out that it's a serious "misallocation of military resources," that actually has nothing to do with the real objectives of the war. These comments are framed by the company heckling a corporal, co-opted into the force to serve as translator, for working on a book that describes the 'bonds of brotherhood' formed by soldiers in combat, further challenging any notion of the social or collective action organized around shared struggles or adversities. However, Hanks counters these objections by reminding them that it is their "duty as soldiers…we have orders, and that supersedes everything else." When asked by a soldier if that applies even when "you think the mission is F.U.B.A.R.," Hanks remand him "especially if you think it's F.U.B.A.R." Positioned as the metaphorical father, Hanks justifies the mission by invoking the patriarchy that they have been mobilized to preserve, with unquestioning obedience to authority overriding critical engagement or democratic deliberation. This pedagogy of consensus is underscored by the fact that Hanks is not only the symbolic father, but an actual teacher, effectively schooling his men in the proper relations to power and authority defined by the "name of the father" and secured by citations of mother-love. Hanks is justified after the fact by both the emotional connection that he and his surviving men form with Ryan, and the fact that their quest to save him ends up in them providing reinforcements to a strategically significant, if not pivotal, battle against the Germans, mirroring the neoliberal ideal that the most effective and efficient way to serve the public is by focusing on the private and "rational self-interest."

As Kodat suggests, the linkages to Marshall and the situating of the film as an extension of the Civil War coded as a struggle for liberation and free markets mark it as a justification of neoliberal global capitalism. It also rationalizes the gross inequalities that this system entails, exonerating the hardships and deaths it precipitates by making the world safe and pleasurable for a "few good men." The idea of an entire company dying to save one man parallels an iniquitous social order where

"The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people." In the United States alone, where 33 percent of all children will be poor at some time in their childhood, Bill Gates in 1998 [the year the film was released] "amassed more wealth than the combined net worth of the poorest 45% of American households." (Giroux)

The film shrouds this reality in gestures of filial piety and an emotional appeal to "the greatest generation," rewritten as fighting to make the world safe for an American version of global capitalism.

All of these themes help explain why the film was adopted as a narrative context for "Saving Private Lynch," and the second Gulf War more generally. As Giroux points out, it is imperative that cultural critics and educators engage in analyzing

how films function as social practices that influence everyday life and positioning them within existing social, cultural, and institutional machineries of power, as well as examining how the historical and contemporary meanings that films produce align, reproduce, and interrupt broader ideas, discourses, and social configurations at work in society (Giroux).

Saving Private Ryan resonates with a number of conservative American ideologies, including the reduction of the social into the private sphere, a benevolent and moralistic notion of the military state, the preservation of a patriarchal and hierarchal social order, a belief in neoliberal global capitalism as natural and libratory, and a consumerist patriotism (of which Saving Private Ryan is one object) articulated around a politics of consensus and a culture of fear. Cultural texts like Saving Private Ryan, combined with racialized fears of contamination and invasion, increasingly standardized and corporatized forms of education, the militarization of domestic space and foreign policy, and the positioning of the market as both the primary site of public life and the model for all other social spheres construct a cultural formation that lends itself to the conservative discourses and expansion of the garrison state that define the current administration. A manipulation and affective investment in public memory, particularly a sanitized version of the Amerian involvement in World War II, is employed to secure moral legitimacy and political assent to Bush's policies at home and abroad, with the media transferring the cathartic associations of Saving Private Ryan and 'the greatest generation's' war onto an illegal and ideologically motivated invasion of an already devastated third-world country already suffering under a ruthless dictator and a devastated social infrastructure stemming from the first Gulf War and a decade of US-led sanctions and bombings. This use of film to provide an emotional identification underscores the importance of engaging how movies and other cultural texts function as public pedagogies that legitimate and privilege particular narratives, voices, identities, and ideologies, and how they function as sites of public memory and history that entail material social and political consequences by shaping consciousness, identities, and the experiences of everyday life.

Works Cited

"A&E Plans Program on Rescue of POW." The Boston Globe 16 Apr. 2003: C6.

Giroux, Henry. The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: p. 57.

Goldberg, David T. The Racial State. London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Halbfinger, David and Steven A. Holmes. "Military Mirrors a Working Class America." The New York Times 30 Mar. 2003: A1.

Kodat, Catherine. "Saving Private Property: Steven Spielberg's American Dreamworks." Representation 71, pp.77-105, pp. 78-79.

McAlister, Melani. "Saving Private Lynch." The New York Times 6 Apr. 2003: 13.

Potter, Mitch. "The Real 'Saving Pvt. Lynch.'" The Toronto Star 4 May 2003: A1.

Rosenstone, Robert. History in Images/History in Words, 31.

White, Hayden. Historiography and Historiophoty, 1194.

Wilkinson, Tracy and Greg Miller. "Saving Private Lynch; An Informant's Tip Puts a Daring Plan in Motion to Rescue the Wounded, Frightened Prisoner." The Los Angeles Times 3 Apr. 2003: 1.

Wilson, Bruce. "Doctor Attacks US Spin on Lynch Rescue." Courier Mail 17 Apr. 2003: 10.

Younge, Gary. "War in the Gulf: What About Private Lori?" The Guardian 10 Apr. 2003: 10.

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