[In honor of Veterans’
Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important
American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and
contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On nostalgia and nuance in one of our best recent representations of war.
I’ve written before, in this post on images and representations of World War II, about historian Michael Kammen’s categories of remembrance and commemoration: the former an attempt to capture the past with more accuracy and
complexity; the latter a more simplified and celebratory representation of history.
Particularly interesting, I’d say, are the cultural texts that seem to include
both types, and it’s in that category that I’d put Steven Speilberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998)—the film
opens with the famous extended D-Day sequence that is absolutely gripping in its realistic depictions
of the battle in all its chaos and horror, a section that exemplifies genuine remembrance
of such a historic event; but then the film segues into a larger narrative
that, while still featuring realistic battle sequences, feels far more driven
by various war-film cliches and commemorative ideals.
Spielberg’s follow up World War II work, produced along with his film’s
star Tom Hanks, was the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). From its
title and famous promotional image on, the miniseries certainly reflects a deeply commemorative perspective
on the men of Easy Company and, through them, on
World War II soldiers and the Greatest Generation to which they belonged. Like Ryan, the series is unsparing in its
depictions of the violence and horrors of war; but outside of one peripheral
character, the company’s over-the-top and ultimately unfit-for-battle training
officer (played to crazy perfection by David Schwimmer), its portrayals of the soldiers are overtly and
consistently celebratory. And one of the series’ most unique and effective
touches—the choice to begin each episode with interviews with the surviving Easy Company veterans whose characters are represented onscreen—would seem to
add one more compelling layer to those celebratory depictions.
But in fact I would argue the opposite: that the veterans’ interviews tend
to comprise the series’ most nuanced remembrances of the war and its histories.
The men talk openly and frequently, for example, about fear and exhaustion and
apathy and other less-than-ideal emotions, reminding us that these were not
Hollywood heroes but simply average young men thrust into an often horrifying
and always uncertain world. And particularly striking are the group of
interviews in which the veterans talk about Nazi soldiers, recognizing that
they were similarly young and scared and human, and reflecting on what was
asked of each group (to try to kill each other, to put it bluntly). Like the
similarly striking choice to include in the series’ final episode a speech
delivered to his men by a surrendering German general, these veterans’
perspectives complicate the kind of good vs. evil narratives that are necessary
for pure commemoration, and remind us that remembrance of the war—any
war—includes the histories and stories of all the involved nations and
communities.
Next post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other
stories or images you’d share for the weekend post?
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