Specters of War: Hollywood's Engagement with Military Conflict 9780813553993

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SPECTERS OF WAR

SPECTERS OF WAR Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict elisabeth bronfen

rutgers university press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bronfen, Elisabeth. Specters of war : Hollywood’s engagement with military conflict / Elisabeth Bronfen. p. cm. Includes filmography. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-5398-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5397-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5399-3 (e-book) 1. War films—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.W3B76 2012 791.43⬘6581—dc23 2011048992 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2012 by Elisabeth Bronfen All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

To Isabel Capeloa Gil and Daniela Janser

Contents Acknowledgments — ix

Introduction — 1 1

Unfinished Business of the Civil War — 16 Gangs of New York Gone with the Wind The Birth of a Nation Major Dundee Glory Ride with the Devil

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Home and Its Discontent — 43 Glamour Girls of 1943 Since You Went Away Tender Comrade Swing Shift From Here to Eternity The Deer Hunter

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War Entertainment — 74 The Glenn Miller Story Golddiggers of 1933 Footlight Parade This Is the Army Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song White Christmas Apocalypse Now Redux

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Choreography of Battle — 107 Let There Be Light Normandy Invasion The Longest Day The Birth of a Nation All Quiet on the Western Front The Big Red One Saving Private Ryan Sands of Iwo Jima Band of Brothers

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Reporting the War — 144 Guadalcanal Diary Back to Bataan Battle of San Pietro The Story of G.I. Joe Full Metal Jacket Standard Operating Procedure

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Court-Martial Drama — 169 Paths of Glory Judgment at Nuremberg A Few Good Men The Caine Mutiny Rules of Engagement

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War’s Sustained Haunting — 196 The Best Years of Our Lives Key Largo Somewhere in the Night Act of Violence Flags of Our Fathers Miracle at St. Anna Gran Torino Conclusion — 233 Notes — 243 Selected Bibliography — 265 Filmography — 271 Index — 275

Acknowledgments Conversations with others equally fascinated by the troubling interface between Hollywood films and war were very much part of writing this book, and I want to thank Isabel Capeloa Gil for the spirited intellectual exchange that took place while this project was in its inaugural stages. Equal gratitude is due Daniela Janser for her keen critical eye and her sustained support throughout the writing process. For her seminal suggestions regarding the overall theoretical argument of the book, I want to further thank Gesine Krüger. For individual pointers that ended up changing the direction this project took, allowing me to fine tune my argument as well as insisting on the inclusion of material I might otherwise have left out, I am grateful to Garrett Stewart, Anton Kaes, David Slocum, Andreas Huyssen, Norbert Grob, Griselda Pollock, Martin Jaeggy, Sermin Meskill, David Punter, Siegfried Weichlein, Barbara Straumann, Emily Sun, Alexander Markin, and the astute Rutgers reader who remains anonymous. On a more personal level, I want to express my debt to my sister Susan, who helped me formulate the autobiographic impulse that has, from the start, inscribed this undertaking. For his encouragement throughout and his meticulous help with the illustrations, I want to thank Johannes Binotto. For her help with copyediting, my thanks also go to Danielle Hickey. I am, as always, grateful to the students who participated in diverse seminars on the subject of war and cinema given at New York University, at the Catholic University of Lisbon, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Zurich. They allowed me to test many of my ideas before committing them to paper. A research leave granted by my home institution made it possible for me to finish the manuscript in good time, and for this I want to thank those colleagues who supported my application, in particular Andreas Fischer, president of the University of Zurich, who expressed his impatience at seeing the finished product, and to Daniel Wyler, dean of research, for a generous grant. Finally, deep appreciation goes to Leslie Mitchner, my editor at Rutgers University Press, for commentary that was always pertinent but above all for her persistence in seeing this project through.

SPECTERS OF WAR

Introduction The final sequence of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) compellingly images the haunting specter of war. Seamlessly, we move from a close-up of the hand of his hero, Paul Baumer, who has just been shot by an enemy sniper, to a gripping superimposition. On screen, death can be reversed, the young men who have died in the trenches of World War I resurrected. Once more we see Paul and his companions marching into combat. The montage is such that their bodies are juxtaposed over and thus visually bleed into the crosses of a massive cemetery, marking their own burial site. The future they are moving toward is overshadowed by our knowledge of the demise they will find, the historical mass death in the trenches of World War I from which the film draws its authority. The young men on the screen are revenants, actors playing undead soldiers who will not stay in their graves. The charm of this resuscitation is bleak. This final image sequence fades into darkness while the platoon is still marching forward, steadily traversing their own graves. They have returned to life again to walk forever into battle. Yet they also have a message for the survivors. As Paul moves past the camera, he turns and looks over his right shoulder, fixing us with his gaze. Seven of his comrades do the same. The visual doubling the montage affords, giving a spectral presence to soldiers whose bodies we know to be buried beneath the crosses they are marching over, is, however, even more complicated. This final image sequence reduplicates an earlier scene. The platoon’s first nocturnal encounter with enemy fire was introduced with the exact same shot of Paul and his friends, marching forward while looking back over their shoulders. The first time, however, their backward gaze had been interspliced with a shot of the truck, which, having brought them to this part of no-man’s-land, was now returning back to the camp. Already, then, the soldiers’ gaze was deeply ambiguous, suggesting an uncertain anticipation of battle awaiting them, a longing to return with the truck rather than move forward, even a sense of abandonment to danger as they were left alone on the darkened front with only the security of their war-seasoned squad leader’s commands. When the shot is repeated at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, the meaning of their gaze has changed. We see only the resurrected dead looking back. Because we are offered no reverse shot to indicate what the soldiers are looking at, it becomes clear that they are explicitly targeting us with their gaze. The introductory title card to the film had announced: “This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.” While the resuscitated Paul and his comrades may not be accusing us, their survival as spectral bodies on screen is an

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appeal to us to look back at them. We are faced with a curious collapse of time and space, a blurring of reference and image surface. With these young men forever going to battle, anticipation of death and resurrection from death come to be conflated. Arrested within the same frame we have the before and after of battle, while all actual horror is elided, merely evoked as the vanishing point of any cinematic representation of war. The montage suspends the soldiers between life and death. They are neither fully gone nor fully returned, present only by virtue of their marked absence from the ordinary. Yet with their gaze, they take possession of us, calling upon us to acknowledge an experience of war we share only by proxy, in the darkness of the movie theater. Milestone’s closure holds no redemption from their history. It tarries instead with their demand to be taken notice of, their claim to our attention and our compassion. I begin my introduction with this moment from a classic war film because it encapsulates what is at stake in my own project. My entire book revolves around this haunting gaze. My claim is that cinema functions as a privileged site of recollection, where American culture continually renegotiates the traumatic traces of its historical past, reconceiving current social and political concerns in the light of previous military conflicts. As a shared conceptual space, cinema sustains a reflection of and on the past. Indeed, in the course of the twentieth century, Hollywood emerged as the site where American culture thinks about its implication in the traumatic history of war by offering personalized narratives of rites of passage that reflect (and reflect on) the ever-shifting stakes in this collective conversation about national identity. My inquiry into Hollywood’s rich and strange engagement with military conflicts, in turn, aims at explaining the appeal this reimagination of war on screen has persistently had, the claims this return to and of the past continues to have on us, neither accusing nor judging, instead fascinating us even while making an urgent request. If many of the readings of individual films offered in this book focus on the opening and closing sequences, they do so to foreground the idea that the resolutions found for personal conflicts stand in for a national experience of (or desire for) recuperation. The self-identity regained through violence is everything but a private affair. While the images and narratives that the motion picture industry provides reconceive the past according to the cultural needs of the present, they do so by drawing attention to the way war experiences have found their most effective afterlife in dramatic spectacles that can only ever be approximations of actual events. We come to terms with our violent political past first and foremost by engaging with the representations that have come to inform our way of conceiving war. As David Slocum notes, war cinema consistently reflects and shapes the ways we see and understand war in the actual world, so that cinematic narratives of military conflict need to be approached as being intrinsically related to U.S. political involvement in actual violent conflicts. Films frame the nation’s deployment of violence in the name of order and civilization.1 I am less interested in the far-reaching implications this has for understanding military history and current politics. Instead, given this mutual implication between actual historical events and Hollywood’s

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recapturing of military conflict, this book is about its aesthetic experience. I am particularly concerned with the space around the screen, rendering complex both the issue of reference (events implicitly behind the cinematic rendition) as well as the affects elicited from the audience (sitting in front of the events projected on screen). We are drawn into a visual drama of war that we know is a reconceptualization in hindsight. War films provide a reencoding of the actual military conflict they reenact according to subsequent evaluations of the events by scholars, journalists, and military strategists, even as they cinematically refigure these in relation to the technologies available, along with visual styles and dialogue conventions currently in use. Seminal for my theoretical approach, is, therefore, Robert Burgoyne’s insistence that we take note of the way war films are fundamentally double-voiced. They use genre memory to transport recollections of the past into the present, reimagining and reconceptualizing history from the position of the contemporary now.2 The process of reworking is a form of working through, both psychologically and aesthetically. Indeed, functioning as a conceptual space, the cinema screen not only straddles a historical event with a presence it claims to speak to but also illustrates that the present is speaking for a past that, in fact, can only find articulation by proxy, as well as belatedly, at a different site, and in a different media. As such, the cinema screen is suspended between a then and a now, between the troops fighting “over there” and those at home waiting for their reports, between actual action on the battlefield and its re-creation in the movie theater. The events of war referred to, as well as the effects these have had, ineluctably pertain to real history, drawing their authority from the horrible carnage they invoke. Our access to this experience of destruction, as it comes to be recaptured on screen, is, however, equally irrevocably relegated to our imaginary capacity. We are forever dealing with reports that come to us from the war zone, with our need to comment on and judge what we have no direct firsthand knowledge of. Throughout this book a persistent claim is that films engaged with representing war are particularly self-reflexive. The curiously resilient alliance between military spectacle and cinematic reenactment, but also between the way we reconceive war on screen and the way this helps us understand it in the actual world, is such that both thrive on a capacity for movement. The camera’s mobility, attesting to the technical innovations of the medium, along with the visual movement produced by montage, is deployed to celebrate the choreographed movement of actors in space in correspondence with military and industrial mobilization in war zones and on the home front. The moving pictures on screen are self-consciously deployed to mobilize the spectator by extending the space of the screen forward, unconditionally drawing the viewers into its passionate display. I take my working premise of the analogy between military and cinematic spectacle from Samuel Fuller, himself a veteran of the European campaign during World War II, famous for saying, “film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in a word, emotion.” Yet I also propose inverting his proposition, arguing that films that recapture both the experience and effects of war might fruitfully be conceived as cinema par excellence.3

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Indeed, a further premise of this book is that by reenacting on screen the spectacle of war—be it actual battle, the war effort on the home front, the internal battles waged in a war zone or after homecoming, or the war recalled in a courtroom—many of the films chosen draw attention to the way war can only be represented. This is not simply because the troops stand in for a political idea or a nation, nor because to understand war we need a narration focused on individuals whose personal involvement renders abstract conflicts concrete. The equation of military spectacle and cinematic reenactment I am concerned with is also predicated on the aesthetic dimension of transmitting the intense emotions war elicits. War films selfconsciously revisit past experiences not exclusively, of course, but to a large degree, for an audience that was not there. By sharing the personalized stories they dramatically depict on screen, we have access to a secondhand knowledge of the past that is first and foremost affective. The experience of others becomes ours because it has come to be refigured in genre codes and visual iconographies familiar to us, embodied by stars with whom we identify. Taking my cue from Ulrich Keller’s work on war photography, I argue that the evidence given by Hollywood’s recapturing of war invariably hovers between authentic record and aesthetic reformulation. As the films invoke the visceral intensity of battle, the blatant carnage and destruction of lives, along with the physical pain and psychic anguish all fighting entails, in the sense of genre memory they tap into conventions of previous narrative genres and visual iconographies concerned with representing war in other aesthetic media such as painting and novels. My point is not that on screen what comes to be screened out is the real horror of war, but that this force, both physical and emotional, is contained by the aesthetic formalization in both senses of the word “contained.” The actual impact war has is restricted, even while the visual and narrative refiguration comprises the emotional intensity effected, having the capacity to ward off what it also holds, preserving what it restrains. If, then, recapturing war in the codified language of popular cinema functions like a protective fiction, mediating violence by blocking out its full impact and transposing its force into the conventions of genre narratives, this apotropaic shield is inevitably tarnished. Though doing so only obliquely, cinema’s mediation articulates the violence it refigures; it gives evidence of the actual horror it diffuses, albeit in a more palatable register. While the aesthetic formalization cannot help but hold at bay the actual horror of war, a shared knowledge of past national violence keeps its hold on us. Hollywood’s resilient imaginary reconceptions of past and current wars make up our cultural possession, functioning as one of our most salient measures for national identities. I foreground the issue of haunting in my discussion, because of my conviction that these representations also take possession of us. We may not have any direct access to the experience of war, yet the force of Hollywood’s aesthetic reformalization resides in the fact that it becomes impossible for us to ignore the real referent adhering to the play of light and shadow on screen. These events really happened and insist on being recalled, even if only as representations.

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What Hollywood’s obstinate engagement with military conflicts thus attests to is that wars of the past remain unfinished business. As we are called upon to continually reimagine the political violence that has come to shape and define America, we implicitly take part in a cultural haunting. To remember, after all, entails giving life again to a past by returning to it. Ensuring that the experience of war will not be lost means reinserting it into the present. Each revisitation of war Hollywood undertakes places a given military conflict in dialogue with those preceding as well as those succeeding it. The narratives of war Hollywood provides may revolve around returning to battle, so as to finish up what was left undone, or they may nostalgically invoke the logic of a past campaign so as to foreground the confusion of a current one. Alternatively, cinema’s stories of war may also imagine the future reworking past wars. The world to come may be projected either as the site where unresolved conflicts from the past will find ultimate closure, or, in our most optimistic conception of national promise, as the imagining of a time when we will have overcome all possibility of war ever erupting again. In all cases what is decisive about the analogy between military spectacle and a perpetual cinematic resuscitation of our national history of violence is the following: if we cannot forget the way wars have written themselves into the very fabric of both personal as well as collective identity, then it is in part because we do not want to forget. As terrible as the carnage war calls forth may be, to commemorate this mass destruction of individual lives and, in some cases, entire ways of life is a cultural debt we continually remain attuned to; it is an obligation we owe, in the sense of a belated reparation, to those who died fighting for the nation. Indeed, Hollywood’s resilient engagement with military conflict makes claims to the past and about the past, at the same time that wars recaptured on screen also make claims on us. Therein lies their appeal. Confronted with cinematic reconceptions of our national experience of violence, we are never impartial. We are called upon to respond, regardless of where we stand politically and how we have come to judge these historical events in hindsight. For this reason, I have chosen to treat a set of films—bringing together, as I discuss in more detail below, the conventional combat film genre with documentaries, melodramas, musicals, and film noir—as specters of war. At issue for me throughout the book is to draw attention to the way martial conflict and its effects appear on screen both as a haunting apparition and a threatening possibility. Hovering between past and present (as do Milestone’s phantom soldiers), films engaging with military conflict at different thematic locations juxtapose commemoration and projection. To speak of cinematic reenactment allows me to place my own critical stress on how cinema can come to serve as a conceptual space where history is repeated with a difference, revisiting the past under the auspices of current obligations in an effort to think what redeeming oneself personally and collectively from this debt might require. For this reason, I move beyond treating only the classic combat films to include melodrama films about the home front, musicals about troop entertainment, as well as reports war correspondents give of the war and films about the sentence a war crime court

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passes. The apparition of war that returns on screen invokes for us the danger of war again, so that we can negotiate our attitude toward this traumatic past. I underscore that cinema’s narrations of war invariably entail a belated reiteration and refiguration, performing history by reconceptualizing it under the auspices of present concerns. There is nothing before this belated recollection. Even the most accurate documentary of battle is a representation. Indeed, those in a war zone can come to understand their actions only once the fighting is over. Engaged in the fog of war, they have no view, only experience. This explains why Hollywood’s reenactment of war is so important even to veterans. On screen they are able to see the war they viscerally remember. The prefix “re”—marking in this case both a temporal and spatial shift, pertaining to the renewal of the past as a reaction to it—is the critical point. Specters of War differs from existing scholarship such as Robert Eberwein’s The Hollywood War Film, Guy Westwell’s War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line, or James Chapman’s War and Film in that it is emphatically not a critical history of war cinema but a book about Hollywood cinema and war. It does not attempt to offer a chronological discussion of different phases of the war film, nor is it concerned with the combat film as a distinct Hollywood genre, an issue Jeanine Basinger has exhaustively explored in her book, The World War II Combat Film. Instead, given my proposal that Hollywood be conceived as a privileged site of cultural transmission, I am interested more generally in the fascination with war that cinema has brought into cultural circulation. Foregrounding the way Hollywood addresses, feeds into, and sustains the notion of war as an unfinished business, relentlessly haunting the present, I limit myself neither to a particular war nor a particular period in film history, nor do I explore the way film critics came to evaluate these films when they were released. Instead, the comparative readings I propose in each of the seven chapters are meant to trace thematic lines of connection ranging from early cinema to the present. I take the inheritance of history seriously by rendering these correspondences qua points of revisitation visible. My decision to privilege thematic analogies rather than historical chronology derives from my conviction that the resilient afterlife of images and narratives is conditioned on the fact that our critical reading of past representations can never be severed from the refigurations they have encountered in the subsequent course of time. My claim is that if all current war films are seen as engaging with previous cinematic formalizations of war, then we can only read these earlier films through the lens of the present. In this I follow Mieke Bal, who has persuasively called an investigation into the recycling that images from the past have undergone in contemporary culture, doing a “preposterous” form of reading history. While the word “preposterous” literally means contrary to nature, reason, or common sense, Bal offers an ingenious spin on the term. To look preposterously at the visual culture of the past through later refigurations that have colored our conception of this past means drawing attention to what remains hidden when one limits oneself to more conventional intertextual influences. Such a revisitation of past art works does not collapse past and present “in an ill-conceived presentism,” nor does it “objectify the past and

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bring it within our grasp, as in the problematic positivist historicism.” Instead, this “reversal, which puts what comes chronologically first (‘pre’) as an after-effect behind (‘post’) its later recycling,” for her entails a way of doing history, of dealing with the past today.4 Applying her notion of preposterous history to Hollywood’s recycling of war allows me to foreground how images of past wars persistently catch up with us even while they can never fully be subsumed into or consumed by the contemporary moment. Precisely because these images attest to history’s unfinished business, they are everything but fixed in their historical time. They continue to reverberate in the subsequent representations they have engendered. Mapping a “preposterous” history by treating what came before as an aftereffect of visualizations that come later is particularly useful regarding war since—as Milestone’s final image sequence suggests—we can grasp only the anticipation of battle and the subsequent evaluation of this event, while the actual experience of carnage belongs to the domain of a traumatic real that exceeds any conceptual grasp. My own idiosyncratic approach to the troubling but fascinating interference between military spectacle and Hollywood cinema is to treat these films as a splice between a collective reimagination of and a critical intervention in the traumatic history of war, which has always already come to us through its representations. By foregrounding a poetics of haunting, I seek to draw attention to the way an affectively charged reenactment of the past on screen transfers intense emotions into an aesthetic form so that its traumatic impact can be apprehended in both senses of the word—arrested and understood. We need aesthetic formalizations to endow coherent meaning to the ungraspability of war, even while we know that this is a negotiable process of signification, requiring constant adjustment to current cultural concerns. Remembering is always contingent on forgetting. Given my claim that Hollywood offers a symbolic substitute for a historical past we can grasp only through its subsequent representations, I propose neither to judge the films (as contemporary film critics would be called upon to do) nor to write about the wars they phantomatically bring back to the screen. Instead, my intuition is to pay attention to the transferal of contingent historical knowledge into aesthetic form. If, to become meaningful, the history of war must be transformed into coherent narratives, this reformulation entails a degree of regulation. At stake in my own “preposterous” map of Hollywood’s engagement in military conflict is thus a double gaze: I seek to draw attention to the subsequent affective effects any aesthetic reconceptualization of the violent history of war can afford even while critically reflecting on the evidence such reenactment produces. The rhetorical wager of this book consists in what I have come to call a crossmapping of seven chapters, which are conceived as “panels.” Each of these panels charts thematic correspondences between films that read thematic aspects of war “preposterously” through the persistent cinematic recycling these have come to experience. Taken as a whole, these chapters form an atlas of sorts, in the sense of a book of individual mappings juxtaposed and held together by a common critical concern.5 Though Stanley Cavell never wrote on war films, his insistence on the philosophical impact of cinema, treating above all classic Hollywood as one of the

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privileged sites where American culture thinks about itself, has deeply informed my own thinking. I particularly take from his work a reliance on montage as the force guiding cognitive mapping. Charting Hollywood’s reconceptualization of war involves making unexpected connections that need not be based on any solid evidence of a relation between texts. Instead, my interest resides in isolating and relating events in films for which significance needs to be assigned because they correspond thematically. I, above all, take from Cavell his insistence on exploring the conceptual consequences of such discovered relations. What does a thematic correspondence sustained over time render visible? What does it compel us to assign meaning to? At the same time I follow him in asking, given such discovery of analogies and similarities, what differences ask to be taken note of when a previous aesthetic formalization of war comes to be recycled?6 The crossmappings I undertake in this book, treating Hollywood as a conceptual space that incessantly produces refigurations of the traumatic history of war so as to reconceive this past in light of the cultural aftereffects it has had, is equally indebted to Aby Warburg’s memory project. Concerned with a duplicitous movement contained in aesthetic formalizations of transient but overwhelming emotions, he notes, punning on the German word for griffin (Vogelgreif): “Under the darkly whizzing beating of the griffin’s wings, suspended between apprehension (Ergreifung) and profound emotion (Ergriffenheit), we dream the concept of consciousness.”7 What I take from Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, the set of panels in his library onto which he came to chart the cultural survival of pathos formulas of antiquity (incessantly changing the arrangement of his mappings), is the claim that any experience of art involves a productive tension between a state of being overpowered by an aesthetic experience and the ability to intellectually grasp it (Begreifen). At the same time, any art work whose pathos overtakes the spectator, even while containing this intensity, is itself an aesthetic formalization of an earlier experience of overpowering emotion, which had already captured pathos by transferring this intensity into a formalized image. I find the concept of pathos formula useful for my own discussion of apprehending the ungraspable intensity of war on screen because this critical term strikes a balance between comprehending an intense emotion by tapping into one’s imaginative capacity and offering a conceptual presentation of it. It allows me to discuss how films about the furor and terror of war grasp the intensity of powerful emotions by virtue of aesthetic formalization. My own critical reiteration of Warburg’s terminology is, however, equally indebted to Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the survival of pathos formula as a poignant symptom of cultural haunting. To map the emotional intensity embodied in the movement of an expressive gesture, he suggests, entails “a knowledge in extensions, in associative relationships, in ever renewed montages, and no longer knowledge in straight lines, in a confined corpus, in stabilized typologies.”8 To claim that, with any subsequent resuscitation, an image formula gives expression to the very emotional intensity that had initially come to be contained in it, presupposes an unconscious memory that keeps erupting. The image formulas that

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reemerge are taken as evidence that we continue to be haunted by the past. At the same time, such survival of traces from the past through the incessant revival of past pathos formulas is best charted by tracing unconventional or unexpected correspondences. At stake is a more transversal knowledge of the inexhaustible complexity of a history we feel compelled to revisit because it insists on being taken note of. What I take from Didi-Huberman for my own atlas of Hollywood’s pathos formulas of war is, thus, the hermeneutic gesture of montage and the way it articulates a “desire to reconfigure memory by refusing to fix memories—images of the past—in an ordered, or worse, a definitive narrative.”9 There is, however, a further line of connection between my own project and Warburg’s discussion of the survival of pathos formulas, given that his emotional and intellectual response to the events of the Great War are obliquely inscribed in the project of his Mnemosyne Atlas. While he never experienced the daily horror of the trenches, he reorganized his research so as to apprehend what he came to call the great psychomachia of monstra and astra, by pitting against the irrational fury playing itself out in the actual theater of war his conceptual work with images of contained violent passion. His theater of retrieved memory was his answer to the cultural afterlife of the actual horror of World War I. As Didi-Huberman notes, “Warburg quickly realized that war survived or outlived, psychically, culturally and politically, the silence of the weapons. The war was finished, yet it was an interminable war: finished in the eyes of Clio (history) but interminable in the eyes of Mnemosyne (memory). Interminable as a war of mourning, but also as a war of images.”10 I follow Warburg’s intuition that one of the most adequate ways for tracing the residual effects war has on culture is to do so by mapping those representations of war through which this passion persistently survives. My atlas, of course, differs from his in that the reimagination of the past I am concerned with deals not with embodied gestures fixed within a frame, but with moving images. The pathos formulas I chart pertain not to the survival of singular passionate movements, but to the recycling of plot functions and stars bodies, which is to say to thematic clusters and figural constellations that embody the intense pathos of war, its physical, psychic, and ideological movement. By treating Hollywood as a cognitive site, where cultural energies pertaining to America’s traumatic history of war are sustained, transformed, brought back into circulation, and reconceived, I am interested in uncovering the vicissitudes of pathos formulas of war that transfer resilient affects into effective cinematic signs. By using my chapter panels to map correspondences of the afterlife of pathos formulas of war (foregrounding their common will to formalize and give aesthetic shape rather than historical chronologies and intentional influences), I am making a claim for an affective response on the part of a textually constructed, implied spectator. The critical intervention I propose is concerned with a belated viewing effect, ascribing to cinematic texts an agency that goes beyond concrete authorial intentions. This agency can be attributed neither to the director, the screenplay, nor the producer alone. It is a summation of all the parts that make up the text of the film within a historical context revisited in hindsight. Thus, guided by my own sense of

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coming to these films after the fact, I read cinematic representations of war with the place they have taken up in our cultural imaginary in mind, which is to say in light of the resilient cultural afterlife they can be seen to have had. At issue in the correspondences I unfold in each chapter, as well as between the seven chapters that make up my atlas, is a desire to open up a conceptual space for a critical retelling qua recollection of the rich and strange alignment between military and cinematic spectacle. My idiosyncratic rearrangement and montaging of texts (or textual moments) repeats the claim for memory work my project is grounded on: looking back on a century of cinematic representations of war from the position of my contemporary critical concern. The past that haunts us is also a past we can never fully master. Instead, to restage the past on screen is to make present the cultural memory that shaped contemporary society. For this reason, historical recollection is always already a reenactment. My own interest in the concept of reenactment is that it revisits our wish to patrol the borderlines between fictional reconceptions and historical truth by bringing the imaginative process into play. Iain Calman and Paul A. Pickering speak of an affective turn to describe the twofold desire “to learn from the literal recreation [sic] of the past and, at the same time, a yearning to experience history somatically and emotionally.”11 From their work I take the notion that an affective encounter with the painful suffering of war reenacted on screen narrows the distance between then and now. I share with them (as with Bal) the intuition that the affect that theatricalization taps into produces an authenticity that overrides all questions of realism and verisimilitude. My own project, however, foregrounds a double movement implicit in the affective turn reenactments thrive on. I began this introduction with the closing sequence of All Quiet on the Western Front to foreground that we are haunted by war and by films about war. If we always come after the event resurrected on screen, we also look back at war through the lens of its subsequent representation on screen. The reenactment doubles the past event and the images already in place refiguring it. Particularly in the case of war’s cinematic representation, it remains ambiguous what comes first, the event or the images. The imaginary refiguration, one might say, predates not the actual military occurrence but our conceptualization of the event. I am not treating Hollywood as a time machine, making claims about how the films discussed speak about and of the past. Instead, I treat cinematic reconceptualizations of war as loaded images, imbued with their own history of processing historical and personal violence.12 At issue for me is not a historical analysis of the effect war films have had but an analysis of the affective turns each war’s imaginary reconception has taken. On my atlas of Hollywood’s engagement with military conflicts, I map the effects of war in the twofold sense of the word “effects.” I treat history as a cultural estate, even while addressing the consequence of accepting this heritage. Coming to terms with the traumatic history of war for me entails looking at both the way a century of cinema has come to reflect on war and what the history of its representation on screen says to us today.

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To regard history as unfinished business allows one to draw attention to unresolved issues in the hope of retrieving cathartic value from this revisitation of the past. Regardless whether collective guilt comes to be assuaged, and even if any imaginative reconceptualization can never fully capture the past event, the affective turn reconceptualizations of war on screen afford tap into expresses a cultural longing for closure. My discussion of cinematic representation of war differs from actual historical restagings (as discussed by Calman and Pickering) in that by treating the reenactment memory affords as an expression of cultural haunting, I am implicitly working with a psychoanalytic framework. By restaging events that bring the history of war back into public attention, the very injury they are meant to assuage is recalled. Throughout this book I implicitly use this psychoanalytic insight into the double articulation psychic symptoms afford to argue that aesthetic refigurations of the horror of war apotropaically shield us from traumatic experiences too hard to face directly. The work of fantasy, as I understand Freud, serves as a protective fiction, giving voice to this threatening knowledge through the detour of aesthetic forms. I invoke the rhetoric of the fetish because it most clearly illustrates that at issue is a mode of representation that explicitly acknowledges that such rhetoric never fully corresponds to what it represents. Fantasies protect the subject against any damaging effects, the very recognition that the translation of affects into fiction also affords. The double articulation at issue is such that reconceptualization offers a psychic compromise. Reformulating Freud, I argue that Hollywood’s cinematic wars screen out the knowledge of actual wars’ trauma even while offering up oblique articulations of its force. But my debt to Freud’s thinking is also thematically informed. Writing his timely thoughts on war and death one year after World War I began, he draws attention to a rich and strange alliance between the world of fiction and the world of war. While we tend to exclude mortality from our quotidian calculations in times of peace, its ubiquitous presence can no longer be denied in wartime. “We are forced to believe in it,” he explains. “People really die.” In war, death can no longer be seen as a chance event, but must be perceived as a necessity. Astonishing is the conclusion he draws from the changed attitude toward death war calls forth: “Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content.”13 His own stance is fraught with ambivalence. If being compelled to acknowledge mortality as an inevitable truth of human existence makes life recover its full content, then implicitly the exclusion of death from peace is based on a lack. Furthermore, Freud introduces his astonishing claim by invoking the world of fiction as the site where in times of peace we find compensation for the denial of death civilized culture is predicated on. “There we still find people who know how to die—who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else,” he contests. “There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact.”14 The compensation fantasy can afford itself proves to be duplicitous. The world of fiction can harbor the death we seek to deny in everyday life

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with impunity, because it renders the knowledge of our mortality compatible with our need to believe in our own immunity from death. By implication, the world of war becomes transmittable when it is dealt with as a world of fiction. Therein also lies the appeal of Hollywood’s rich and strange engagement with military conflict. In line with the psychoanalytic insight that even while the traumatic experience of death and destruction in war escapes direct representation it can find oblique articulation in the world of fiction, I have recourse to Fredric Jameson’s work on the political unconscious. Himself a student of Freud’s theory of trauma, Jameson foregrounds the notion that history, in the sense of actual events occurring in a specific time and place, is diametrically opposed to any imaginary apprehension of it. History, he explains, is “what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” Apprehendable only through its effects, history can never be directly grasped as some reified force. “History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification,” he concludes, “we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.”15 War is, of course, a particularly poignant manifestation of the struggle that underpins the movement of history as a universal category—the internal force or will to power propelling it forward. In a more recent article, “War and Representation,” Jameson places war among collective realities such as nation, general will, or multitude, calling it “a manifold of consciousness as unimaginable as it is real, indeed a collective reality.” While collective totalities such as war exceed representation fully as much as they do conceptualization, he explains, “they ceaselessly tempt and exasperate narrative ambitions, conventional and experimental alike.”16 Our access to the real atrocity of war is only through the textual effects it produces even while eluding their grasp. Any claim that war can only be represented also means drawing attention, as Jameson proposes, to the various forms the impossible attempt to represent war has taken on screen. Regarding the overall structure of my argument, each of the seven chapters is to be thought of as a panel that maps thematic connections between films as well as their correspondence to theoretical concepts. I speak of my crossmappings as a “preposterous” atlas of Hollywood’s rich and strange engagement with military conflict to signal that I understand my book to be a collection of maps, allowing the reader to move back and forth between the seven panels, while each individual chapter charts points of connection. The sequence of the chapters is predicated on my critical intuition not to relate a history of the war film but to track aspects of wars’ transference onto the screen. The first chapter takes the unfinished business of the Civil War as its object, so as to discuss the way popular cinema offers history lessons that rewrite both the violent struggle on which America was refounded as well as the cinematic representations of this national narrative, with each subsequent director bringing into play issues his predecessor elided.17 I use as my point of departure Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), so that, by varying the chronology, I can foreground how residues of earlier films have written themselves into the film language of this latest one. I foreground the issue of repetition not

Introduction

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least of all because, in hindsight, we have come to understand the Civil War itself as a moment of historical repetition—a war fought among brothers to rectify unfinished business of the War of Independence, namely the exclusion of African Americans from the Constitution. Like the first chapter, dealing with war fought on home ground, the following two chapters turn to the way war is conducted under the ideological auspices of a vaunted idea of home. Chapter 2 looks at the home front as the base of operation for a mobilization of women, called upon to do their share in supporting the fighting abroad. In the films I have chosen to crossmap, this home front also emerges as a site of internal difference from which going to war liberates soldiers, replacing domestic gender battles with combat overseas. In chapter 3, home as a celebrated ideal is invoked in films about war entertainment, offering the troops in training camps, United Service Organizations (USO) canteens, and, most important, at the battle front a touch of home away from home. At issue in these readings is the way troop entertainment serves to reflect actual battle, with the musical enactment of the spirit of war serving to shield the spectators—in front of the stage and in front of the screen—from the real danger constantly hovering on its edges. While this chapter is predicated on an analogy between military musical show numbers and war spectacle, my next chapter treats battle choreography on screen as a spectacular theatricalization of military campaigns. Using as my thematic cluster the cultural survival of the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day in our collective image repertoire, chapter 4 discusses the authenticity effect of battle that comes to evolve as each director picks up and refigures the aesthetic formalization of this symbolic turning point in the European theater of war. I have thus placed in the center of the book a discussion of how films reconceive the heat of battle, during which the fog of war prevents all clear sight. Even though I foreground that our access to battle is through the images we have of it, I treat these historical reimaginations of an actual battle as my example for the closest Hollywood can get to the real of history. While my chapter on battle choreography thus revolves around a blind spot in any cinematic transmission of war, the final three chapters return to the point made by the final sequence in All Quiet on the Western Front. Regarding war, there is anticipation, and there is belated reflection. I move from the ungraspable intensity of the actual carnage of battle to panels dealing with the way battle can be recalled, commented on, and judged, and how memories of it continue to resurface, albeit obliquely, for many decades to come. The three last chapters take as their conceptual frame of reference Michel Foucault’s insistence that war, as residual force, is inscribed in any peace it has brought about. War, he insists, “is the motor behind institutions and order.” It goes on beneath peace, which itself is a coded war: “A battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently.”18 These chapters look at films that reconceive the experience of war in relation to home, not, however, as in the earlier chapters, in the sense of a counterworld, a state and site of exception, reflecting and contesting the ordinary world of home. Instead, I draw out correspondences between films in which reports about military actions overseas are brought home by an eyewitness to an audience in need of such

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reporting. Looking first at films about war correspondents, chapter 5 explores how their subjective testimony reencodes the incomprehensible experience of war for those who remained at home. Their appeal to the compassion of those who were not in a battle zone finds a correlation in my discussion of court-martial dramas in chapter 6. The testimony brought back from the war zone in these films highlights the thin line between sanctioned violence in battle and war crimes, now appealing to the audience to pass judgment on war by making their own decisions about the legal sentence a court comes to pass. Picking up on the equation of spectacle and war discussed in the chapter on battle choreography, I focus on the way the courtroom is transformed into a scene of renewed battle, now between defense and prosecution. At issue in the resolution that court-martial dramas offer is the fact that while the law must find closure to criminal cases left open from the war, fictional narratives insist that, on ethical grounds, the traumatic history of the nation is something that can never be resolved. Chapter 7 returns to the question of war continuing by other means in times of peace. Not only does the world of film noir posit crime as the site where war spills over into the fabric of postwar civility, but films about soldiers haunted by a war experience they either will not or cannot share with others attest to the cultural survival of war decades after all actual fighting is over. They call upon us to acknowledge the national history of violence we would prefer to overlook. With this final chapter I return to my opening argument that cinematic narratives about the Civil War help renegotiate the current state of the nation in relation to wars that defined it, bringing back into play the complex psychic protection Hollywood’s reenactment of wars affords. Conceived in relation to the haunting they perform, the last films discussed in this book—William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), along with a selection of films noirs, ending with a crossmapping of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008)— disclose war and its aftereffects as the imaginary geography of shared stories, characters, and pathos formulas that hold the nation together. These three final panels of my atlas are thus concerned with what it means to recall war while coming after the event, self-consciously writing a gap in knowledge into the haunting they resurrect on screen. While this introduction has sketched the theoretical positions subtending my project, throughout the following discussion I enlist theoretical concepts primarily as they illuminate certain inferences and ironies in the films themselves. My intuition is to place such theoretical claims alongside the films that I propose as a critical intervention in their own right—whether in support of a national war effort or seeking to disclose either the horror of battle or the corruption of the war machine. The idiosyncratic mappings I propose seek above all to make the films themselves speak—as historical evidence not only for the ungraspability of war but also our awed fascination, our enchanted horror. War films, I repeatedly argue, are about the transmission of war. Its reenactment on the level of cinematic representation is a repetition that engenders historical reality as a narration of past events to be reconceptualized in a desire to find redemption from them, but also—and more

Introduction

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prominently—as a capacity for revisiting the past. The imaginative recapture occurs first and foremost on the level of affects produced by the self-reflexive mode of the aesthetic reformalization. If our point of access to war is through what Burgoyne calls our capacity for historical reimagination, then at issue is not just the constantly elusive reference of these representations but also the emotion and knowledge they do convey. This book seeks to trace how Hollywood’s visual resuscitation of war on screen develops pathos formulas of its own so as to grasp the ungraspable intensity of war. Cinema represents this unimaginable collective reality by maintaining a cultural survival of our national history of violence in a twofold manner. The films I have chosen to discuss remember war as formalized pathos. By tapping into dramatic visualizations of military conflict previously deployed to contain the overwhelming experience of war, on the front lines and at home, their stored affective energy comes again to be released. My point is not that cinematic representations distort historical events or that they obscure their actual impact. Instead, I make a far stronger claim for the authenticity effect inscribed in representations of what we know to be unrepresentable. To insist that we are always already in the realm of an imaginary reworking draws attention to the way the cinematic narratives Hollywood provides not only implicate the way we understand military conflicts in the real world. These films also take effect by virtue of the emotions they mobilize. By resuscitating previous pathos formulas of war, self-consciously recapturing all actual military conflicts in relation to representations that have already come to culturally disseminate them, they either pay homage to previous films by reiterating them, or they conceive of themselves as interventions necessary to correct previous representations. In either case, cinema emerges as a conceptual space where the cultural survival of war can be tracked as a constant recycling of its aesthetic formalizations. To take possession of the past, as I am suggesting Hollywood’s engagement with military conflict consistently does, implies seeking to acquire the knowledge it holds in store for us. Yet even as we exert influence on a history of violence that will not remain silent, it also comes to take hold of us, gaining an influence of its own by taking possession of our imagination and our compassion. In this book I speak of specters of war to underscore that, in the realm of aesthetic refiguration, any desire for closure is impaired. The point of invoking our capacity for reimagination so as to revisit past and current wars entails sustaining their haunting. As the past is sought out again, it comes, once more, to pervade our present. While the visual narratives of war Hollywood provides us with articulate a collective need for restitution, there is no redemption in sight. The specter of war will not forget us, however much we might prefer to overlook this cultural effect.

1

Unfinished Business of the Civil War

Set during the New York draft riots in 1863, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) uses this civil insurrection as a backdrop for its narrative about the violent origins of New York City. In a particularly chilling scene, Scorsese depicts the arrival of masses of immigrants getting off the boat that brought them across the Atlantic. They are met at the pier not only by a Democratic politician, who calls them “the building of the country” because he hopes to gain their votes, but also by the angry jeers of working-class natives, fearing for their jobs in the face of this new wave of cheap labor. Waiting for them as well, however, are officers from the Union army, who single out the young men, offering to turn them immediately into U.S. citizens, so that they can be enlisted. The camera pans along the line of men, who, having just signed up, are each given a package containing their new uniform. As the camera continues its circular movement, it captures a different queue of men, these men now fully dressed for war picking up their muskets and getting back on a new boat, which will take them to Tennessee. As they arrive on deck, the coffins of those who have already died on the battlefields of the South are being lowered onto the pier, signaling what lies ahead for these freshly “born” Americans. While the North invades the South, one newspaper headline asserts at the beginning of the film, the Irish invade New York, as though they, too, were an army of sorts one had to contend with on one’s home turf. One way to do so, the film’s narration cynically suggests, is to let them move seamlessly from one invading force to the next. In Gangs of New York the lines of demarcation are even more complexly drawn. After receiving the casualty list for the Sixth Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, the anger of a working-class mob of mixed ethnicity ignites over the first conscription act in the history of the Union. Its violence targets the free blacks living in the city, whom they blame for a war now explicitly about slavery, the politicians who support conscription, but also the rich, who for $300 are able to buy their way out of the draft. Embedded in this national political strife is yet another war, raging between two New York gangs—the Natives of British and Dutch origin and the Rabbits of Irish-Catholic descent. This, too, is a civil war, waged, however, among working-class brothers over the question of who owns the streets of Five Points, a notorious slum area of Lower Manhattan at the time. Scorsese’s choice of genre is the melodrama, and his hero is Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young man recently returned home to take revenge on the man who killed his father, “Priest” Vallon, during a previous gang war sixteen years earlier. Imitating the parallel editing D. W. Griffith came to perfect in his own Civil War melodramatic epic,

Unfinished Business of the Civil War

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Figure 1 Gangs of New York. Recruiting immigrants for war. Digital frame enlargement.

The Birth of a Nation (1915), Scorsese’s film splices together the separate scenes where two different rebellions are being set in motion. While the names are drawn from the lottery on the first day of the draft, erupting in antiwar demonstrations, members of the Natives and the Rabbits meet to determine the terms of their personal battle. While the next morning the mob gathers its weapons to protest against what it perceives as a rich man’s war, Amsterdam and his opponent, the Butcher, prepare themselves for their personal feud of vengeance and retribution. Parallel editing shows the Seventh Regiment marching down the streets of Lower Manhattan until it stands opposite an angry mob that will not follow the order to disperse, while the two gangs march toward each other, until they, too, are lined up for a battle that has nothing to do with the official Civil War. For the Federal troops, the gangs are indistinguishable from the New York rebels, and, at the precise moment that the Rabbits are about to charge, the artillery from gunboat Liberty and ironclad Passaic, lying off the foot of Wall Street, open their cannon fire. While the other gang warriors begin to flee from the approaching Union soldiers, their personal feud seamlessly subsumed into a national war, which to boot unleashes the horror of modern technological warfare on clueless civilians, Amsterdam stabs the Butcher in a gesture that has suddenly become an anachronism: dying at the hands of a personal, utterly familiar enemy. In this melodramatic narration, this noble death by duel invokes precisely the nostalgia for a lost world that, as will be discussed further on, most films about the Civil War intone. Yet like his predecessors, Scorsese also insists that any exalted individual experience of war must be shown as occurring in the context of a horrific anonymity of slaughter. Only then does it gain the full resonance of affect it aspires to. As he buries the knife with which he successfully took his revenge next to the gravestone of “Priest” Vallon, Amsterdam delivers what is clearly the film’s elegiac message: “My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation. And so then too, was our great city. But for those of us what lived and died in them furious days, it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away. And no matter what they did to build this

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city up again, for the rest of time it would be like no one even knew we was ever here.” As the camera moves back, we see that Amsterdam has buried The Butcher next to his father, so that united in death the two enemies rest together as brothers. Then, even before he and his lover, Jenny, have walked out of the frame, their bodies have vanished, as though they had never been anything other than spectral figures. The camera, however, tarries with the derelict gravestones of forgotten dead, showing us the skyline of Lower Manhattan growing until it includes what, at the time of filming, also no longer existed, the Twin Towers.

The Violent Birth of the Nation Gangs of New York sets the tone for the theoretical point to be pursued throughout this chapter. Ascribing a primal scene of violence to the birth of New York City, by transforming the historical draft riots into an individualized story of personal revenge, the film enacts Benedict Anderson’s claim that in the course of the nineteenth century, cultural fictions had come to be successfully deployed so as to allow people to imagine the special community that is the nation. These narrations of the nation work by screening out aspects of actual events too traumatic to be dealt with directly. Instead, they commemorate the violence of history as meaningful stories, adaptable to the cultural concerns of an ever-changing present. By varying the chronology, my presentation foregrounds a core thematic concern of Specters of War, namely the question of historical unfinished business. The past incessantly haunts the present, with each new wave of filmmakers called upon to engage with the military conflicts that have so forcefully shaped the narrations of the American nation. The notion of unfinished business is, however, also invoked to underline my treatment of these cinematic refigurations as partaking of a “preposterous” reading of history (Bal). To begin by looking at the latest in a line of succession means thinking about all the earlier films through the lens of their subsequent recycling. It entails treating each subsequent film as responding both to the unfinished business of the Civil War and to issues that preceding films left open. Indeed, a vast entertainment industry has allowed Americans to remember/ forget the hostilities of 1861–1865 as a great civil war between brothers, not least of all because the melodrama of family members divided and reunited through the sacrifice of collective death proved to be particularly useful for regenerating the Union after the extraordinary bloodshed of a war that had cost more than 620,000 lives. To trace the way several generations of Civil War films have remembered by forgetting the violent origins of the American nation, Gone with the Wind (1939) serves as a point of departure. The focus is on how this film underlines feminine empowerment during times of war by pitting a battle between the sexes against the battle of brothers. In so doing the film recycles by rewriting the melodramatic mold of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which had cast a political struggle in terms of a family feud and its resolution as the restoration of a bond between white brothers. Two films that foreground the issue of racial empowerment in and through the Civil War follow. Major Dundee (1965) draws attention to the conflict among brothers involved in acknowledging African Americans as subjects in their own right in a

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battle for their emancipation. Glory (1989), in turn, is the first film in which African American soldiers are not spoken for but appear as a unified regiment in their own right. The final example, Ride with the Devil (1999), adds yet another layer to cinematic reconceptions of the nation divided against itself by focusing on those who belong to neither side—the liberated slave and the European immigrant’s son. By moving through several generations of Civil War films, at issue is the claim that Hollywood has functioned as one of the privileged sites where this melodramatic narrative has come not only to be recycled but also reconfigured, so as to keep addressing the importance the Civil War has for any current sense of national identity. Forgetting plays a constitutive role in any imaginative return to the past. As Anderson notes, “all profound changes in consciousness bring with them amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.” Precisely because an event cannot fully be remembered, it must be narrated. In order for collective imagination to take hold, a partial forgetting of the historical event is necessary. When the narratives about imagined communities, however, pertain to a nation’s biography, Anderson adds, they cannot be fashioned along a procreative chain of begettings, since nations, in contrast to individual persons, have no clearly identifiable births. Instead, stories about the birth of nations are “marked by deaths, which, in a curious inversion of conventional genealogy, start from an originary present. World War II begets World War I” and both beget the Civil War.1 In contrast to Amsterdam’s foreboding that he and those who fought with him will be forgotten, the deaths that structure the cultural fictions about the birth of the American nation out of violent rebellions are precisely not the anonymous ones modern war technology produces. As the final image of Gangs of New York illustrates, from the cemeteries of unknown fighters, Hollywood’s cultural imaginary snatches, as Anderson puts it, “exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars,” because to serve a narrative purpose, “these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as ‘our own.’”2 Although films such as Griffith’s America (1924) bring the Revolutionary struggle on screen, for the specifically American engagement with its violent origins it is above all the Civil War that has emerged as the most resilient marker of death, rewriting this national narrative to fit the needs of each subsequent historical moment. As Shelby Foote emphatically notes in his interview with Ken Burns: “It is very necessary, if you’re going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the nineteenth century. It was the cross-roads of our being.”3 From the start, the narrative that would serve as the dominant symbolic fiction used to justify the war was as divided against itself as the symbolic house Lincoln invoked in his speech in Springfield, Illinois, to defend the preservation of the Union at all costs. One side of this dual narrative revolved around the fact that the difference in worldview, which the secession played through, meant that the Union was not so much coming together as coming together again. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln proclaimed that “this nation, under God, should have a new birth of freedom.” At stake was the idea of returning to an earlier moment of national birth out of

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violence that had to be repeated before the Constitution it produced could be considered to have been truly fulfilled. A return to war proved necessary so as to fulfill the promise of equality and freedom, which had served as a point of departure for the claim to American exceptionalism, and to insist on the perpetuity of the Union founded in 1776. Significantly, both political concerns—emancipation of African Americans and the sustaining of national unity—were best served by a religious encoding of the declaration of war against the Confederacy. The dominant fiction, endowing the ugly reality of war with some redeeming value, was one that proclaimed a need for “national sacrifice” to atone for the “national sin of slavery,” even while claiming that the secession was a sinful violation against the God-ordained mission of America. At the moment of its military catastrophe, the Confederacy offered its own religious counternarrative, with the South, martyred in a “lost cause,” sacrificing its aristocratic, heroic qualities and moral supremacy in a hopeless battle against the materialist and morally degenerate urbanized North. As Barbara Fields insists, it was the battle for emancipation, which “ennobled what would otherwise have been meaningless carnage into something higher.”4 Significant for Hollywood’s persistent recycling of Civil War narratives is that it also seeks to endow with allegedly redeeming characteristics what was, in reality, a horrific slaughter of human lives. The films to be discussed inevitably support the narrative of cathartic regeneration of national self-definition arising from the experience of the Civil War, albeit with a growing awareness of its ambiguities. Even though they do not all come down on the same side of the narrative of national sacrifice, they all forget/remember this historical trauma of a nation, divided against itself. Hollywood’s sustained reenactment of the Civil War reveals it to be a point of cinematic unfinished business as well.

Revisiting the Civil War On Screen American culture, as Robert Burgoyne puts it, must “reenact the narrative of the nation in terms of its tributaries, in terms of stories of ethnic, racial and gender struggles to reshape the national narrative.”5 By making different experiences of the Civil War a formative and necessary part of the reconfiguration, what emerges are plural and conflicting stories that address a shift in cultural awareness, indeed speak to the cultural needs of the times in which they were produced. For this reason I am less concerned with the accuracy of (or omissions in) the historical reconstruction these films undertake. My interest instead is how a set of films engages with the cultural concerns of the present by revisiting the past.6 These films have been chosen because in all of them the war that defined the United States as a nation is used to renegotiate national identity at historical moments of transition. As discussed in more detail below, Griffith’s epic war melodrama appeared while Woodrow Wilson’s isolationist policy sought to keep the United States out of World War I. Even more poignantly, Gone with the Wind premiered three months after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and as such reconceived the Civil War through the horrific slaughter the American forces ultimately came to experience in the trenches of

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northern France once the United States entered World War I. It also equated the lost cause of the South with the demise of precisely the Old Europe its producer (David O. Selznick), its first director (George Cukor), and its composer (Max Steiner) had emigrated from. There is, however, a further reason for this particular choice of films. Insofar as they revisit the birth of the American nation out of the Civil War, so as to foreground the gender, racial, and ethnic struggles that were always (even if only tacitly) inscribed in the dominant national narrative, they do so by refiguring Griffith’s notoriously racist inaugural cinematic reenactment. Given that the Civil War is a point of unfinished business in the American cultural imaginary, a national trauma that must continually be remembered in the melodramatic mode of family tragedy and rebirth (even while the war itself meant redressing a point of unfinished business in the ratification of the Constitution regarding its claim to a universal freedom for all Americans), these films themselves perform a twofold return. They revisit the violent origin of the American nation, even while they also revisit previous films that had already translated this decisive event into a cinematic narrative. These films engage a historical moment that was in itself already the revisitation of an earlier one (the constitutional convention). Even while addressing the “sin of slavery,” they also mark a desire on the part of Hollywood to redeem itself from the shame of Griffith’s vexed enmeshment of cinematic innovation and reactionary racial and gender politics. In the sense that Griffith’s epic came to be regarded as the film that gave birth to the classic Hollywood film epic, it can also be conceived as the primal scene of a cultural guilt, which movies succeeding it must redress.7 In a memo insisting on expurgating the explicit racism of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick wrote: “In our picture I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger.”8 Admittedly, his epic melodrama offers only supporting parts to its black characters, such as the forceful Mammy, for which Hattie McDaniel would be the first African American to win an Oscar. Coming out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the other three films to be discussed turn the issue of race into the linchpin of a rite of passage of national importance, be it the return of a renegade soldier to the Union flag (Major Dundee), the transformation of a group of enlisted black soldiers into a formidable combat unit (Glory), or the freedom of a former slave and his German immigrant friend to determine their future beyond all questions of wartime alliances (Ride with the Devil). Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory provides a useful way to discuss this recycling of the Civil War, as each new generation of directors returns to and revises previous films that had already adapted this historical event into a cinematic reenactment. Genre, he argues, while living in the present, always remembers its past. It is to be thought of as a “representative of creative memory in the process of literary development.”9 Picking up on this definition, Burgoyne suggests thinking of film genres “as ‘organs of memory’ that embody the worldview of the period from which they originated while carrying with them the ‘layered record’ of their

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changing use.” Genre memory is a particularly useful narrative tool to carry social experience from one generation to another, recalling the past even while making its “resources and potentials available to the present.”10 Reiterating aspects of the Civil War earlier films had either left open or screened out, the succeeding films themselves take part in an unfinished business, destabilizing their predecessors as much as they refigure them. If Gangs of New York rethinks a seminal moment of rebellion during this war in response to 9/11, it is worth noting that at three moments the film also explicitly references Gone with the Wind. When, early on in the film, Amsterdam tells himself that with $300 he could buy himself out of the draft, only to add, “but who has three hundred dollars, for us it might as well have been three million,” he is quoting Scarlett O’Hara on the $300 tax that has been imposed on Tara. In a later scene, when the casualty lists from the Sixth Army of the Potomac are posted, the camera moves first into a close-up of the last names of men killed or amputated, and then into an extreme close-up, now focusing only on the words “killed,” “dead,” repeating the exact same shot Gone with the Wind uses for the Confederate dead at Gettysburg. Finally, Amsterdam’s lover, Jenny, fleeing down the streets of New York during the mob uprising, recalls Scarlett doing the same down the streets of Atlanta just before Sherman’s army enters the city. When she shoots a woman about to attack her with a knife, she shows the same cold-blooded acumen as Scarlett does when a Federal soldier comes to loot Tara. With these citations, Scorsese admits that his debt as a filmmaker is divided between two previous cinematic enactments of the Civil War. While, on the level of formal style, the use of parallel editing marks a tribute to Griffith, on the level of narrative, the two survivors of his tale are aligned with Selznick’s ruthlessly resilient heroine. Gangs of New York reiterates the specifically feminine point of view of the war Gone with the Wind foregrounds. Indeed, with the very first scene, the state of Georgia, which will soon emerge as one of the key battlefields, is shown to be the stage for two competing wars. As the camera pans toward Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) sitting on the porch of her plantation, she declares to her two beaus, “War, war, war. This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream.” She will have no more talk of war, she insists, and even when the next day, during a barbeque at the neighboring plantation of Twelve Oaks, war is, in fact, declared and all the young men run off enthusiastically to enlist, she continues to be concerned only with her personal lost cause, the battle for Ashley Wilkes’s heart. Molly Haskell calls her a “generalissima on the battlefield of courtship and marriage. Sherman has nothing on the deadly belle-then widow as she cuts a swathe through the rolls of Georgia’s most eligible bachelors.”11 We are shown neither troops gallantly marching nor the waging of battle, only its casualties: the wounded lying in hospitals, exhausted soldiers fleeing alongside other refugees, Atlanta burning from the fires set by both sides, and then the one stray Federal soldier, coming to loot Tara. As befits the genre of melodrama, Selznick’s production is concerned less with a nation divided against itself than with the antagonism between men and women, to be resolved in the personal reunion of marriage. Although his heroine commits herself to foolhardy charges, as she fights for a man who clearly does not love her and

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Figure 2 Gone with the Wind. Scarlett’s private cause. Digital frame enlargement.

wards off the one who does, she is a cunning strategist when it comes to courting those whose money she needs to survive. Similarly, while turning a blind eye to the suffering of others, she climbs over the thousands of wounded lying in front of the train depot in Atlanta, led on by a single-minded mission—calling out for the doctor, who will help her deliver Melanie’s baby. The camera moves into a long shot, so as to visualize the competing narratives occurring simultaneously. While the poor gallant fools, who had boasted they could win the war in a month, are lying in the red dust of Georgia, with a tattered Confederate flag flying above them, a single woman in a pink dress, desperately clinging to her sun hat, walks upright among them on a mission that has nothing to do with the dying of the Civil War. Even during her flight from Atlanta, with her own personal troopers, Melanie, her newborn baby, and Prissy in the back of her wagon, Scarlett shows nothing but annoyance for the swaggering and boasting of the menfolk that got them all into this mess. In this battle between the sexes, at issue is not which side of the fight one comes down on, but rather whether one chooses a side at all. Against the red sky of burning Atlanta, just before they are about to cross the bridge that leads to Tara, Rhett Butler stops the wagon and explains that because he has a weakness for lost causes, once they are really lost, he has decided to join the Confederate army for its last stand. In the role of a soldier of the South, he can finally declare his passionate love for Scarlett and insist on a kiss, so he can take this memory with him into battle. “Never mind about loving me,” he explains, “you’re a woman sending a soldier to his death with a beautiful memory.” Selfish to the last, Scarlett refuses this sentimentality, freeing herself from his embrace and slapping him. She puts an end to this romantic scene, not because she has no melodramatic pathos in her, but because hers pertains to a different narrative. Once she has returned home to find Tara stripped of all its possessions but not destroyed, we find her standing on the ruined soil, looking up at the sky. In stark contrast to the men of the Old South, her passion is decidedly not for lost causes, but for victorious survival. “As God is my witness,” she declares, “if I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill . . . I’ll never go hungry again.” The final image of the first act of Gone with the Wind shows her black silhouette against a sky slowly being flooded with the red of dawn, heralding the new day being born out of the defeat of the South.

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In the following years she will become a competitive and shrewd businesswoman, as money driven as the Gilded Age itself, willing to stop at nothing if it will increase her profits. “For all her Southern belle qualities,” Haskell notes, “Scarlett possessed precisely those ‘Yankee’ virtues—ambition, greed, industry, and materialism—associated with the New South and despised by Lost Cause romanticists.”12 In this she is not only fashioned in the sign of the free-spirited, self-determined modern American woman of the 1930s, who had to survive the deprivations of the Great Depression. Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett is also a hybrid figure, splicing together a nostalgic past with a somber present, which spectators could identify with across the North–South demarcation line. Significantly, the film does not end with the reunion of couples in marriages. Instead, it takes the death of another woman to put closure on both of the wars fought in Gone with the Wind. Over Melanie’s dead body, the Old South, and all its grace and beauty she had embodied, comes to be buried, but with it—and this is the astonishing twist in the narrative—comes an awakening for Scarlett. When Ashley confesses that with his wife’s death he has lost the only dream he ever had that did not fade in the face of reality, Scarlett is finally forced to admit what her stubborn single-mindedness had allowed her successfully to deny along with the horror of war. She may not have fallen prey to the South’s gallant defense of its lost cause, but she did allow herself to believe in something else that never really existed, Ashley’s desire for her. When, minutes later, her husband, Rhett, admits that he no longer gives a damn what is to become of her, leaving her standing on the threshold of her home as he walks into the fog, she is forced to acknowledge that she is the lonely survivor of two catastrophes, the capitulation of the South and her own defeat in love. Yet although she had mocked Ashley for always dreaming instead of following common sense, in her radical insistence on self-reliance she herself embodies a national dream, namely the one Emerson meant when he wrote about America as a project that was achievable, but not yet achieved. While the two men she has been struggling with either give themselves up to a past irrevocably destroyed or move into a nebulous day, with no purpose other than to leave a situation that has become intolerable, Scarlett stands for an American trust in the future. Ashley had been the one who had assured her that there was something she loved more than him, namely the ground of Tara. Gone with the Wind refuses marriage as a trope for a successful reunification of the nation. The hope it offers instead pertains to a notion of home as a land in constant need of rebuilding after waves of destruction have washed over it—Tara as emblem for a national project, whose fulfillment irrevocably lies in a future still to be achieved. The historical context for Scarlett’s gumption cannot be overlooked. Coming out of the Great Depression, Americans may have been anxious about entering another world war. Yet the struggle and survival during a national catastrophe, embodied by Scarlett, could be seen as anticipating women on the home front taking charge as they had in World War I, while their fellow Americans were engaged in fighting for their collective dream of home. Her resilient belief in being able to solve the problems of the present in a future that was still undetermined would

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prove useful to the morale booster Hollywood would become, once Americans needed to be encouraged in supporting another war effort. Finally, if we remember that it is Mammy with whom Scarlett will share this future, the one person who was allowed to contradict her throughout her willful battling, and whose critical gaze offers a silent but pointed running commentary on her mistress’s ruthless selfinterestedness, we recognize that the imagined community of the nation revolving around this resourceful female American dreamer had become racially hybrid as well. As Thomas Cripps notes, “by standing astride a moment between the Great Depression and a world war during which American social attitudes changed, in part prodded by forces released by wartime propaganda calling for national unity across ethnic lines, the movie provided a punctuation mark between the last era in which racial matters were considered to be purely local and a new era when they resumed a role in national public policy.”13 In hindsight, the casting of Leslie Howard, who was soon to return to Europe for entertainer goodwill tours while working for British intelligence, proved to have been prophetic. As the character who repeatedly insists that the end of the war would also bring “the end of our world,” his Ashley implicitly gives voice to an anxiety about whether the British and the rest of free Europe would hold out against the Nazis.14 Howard was to die in June 1943, after his plane was shot down by Nazi German Junkers. In Gone with the Wind, he portrays a melancholic officer whose old world nostalgia will ultimately lose out not only to the invading Federal troops but also to Scarlett’s self-reliance. Yet the battle between them articulates another line of demarcation the film sets up only to trouble. Selznick’s megaspectacle begins with an opening paragraph Ben Hecht explicitly wrote for the film, superimposed over a pastoral scene of black field hands bringing the cattle home in the evening: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. . . . Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. . . . Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave. . . . Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.” The world about to unfold in brilliant Technicolor is explicitly introduced both as irrevocably lost, so that it can only be remembered, and as the representation of a dream to be found in books, not a historical reality. Pitting Scarlett’s realistic appraisal of her situation against the elegiac sentimentality of her gallant cavaliers, the film comes down on neither side, even while the escapism it proclaims is self-consciously two-faced. Revisiting the “land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields” allows for an imaginary negotiation of the harsh social realities no one could turn their eyes away from in 1939. The Nazis had already invaded Poland. The film deftly deconstructs its own fictional status, insisting that a nostalgic enjoyment of an explicitly mythic revision of the Civil War is precisely the narrative that will help the nation get through another horrific slaughter rising on the horizon. Indulge in the dream of gallant men fighting a cause always already lost and glamorous women defending their homes, it proclaims, because the battle for freedom we may well be about to engage in will be neither gallant nor glamorous, and above all must not prove to have been a lost cause. The harsh self-reliance

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Scarlett requires to survive all catastrophes may, in its unequivocal optimism, be part of the escapism of the film, yet it is the symbolic fiction the nation will need in order to get through the war everyone is anxious about. At the same time, both— and in this, too, Selznick’s megaspectacle is unequivocal—are dreams to be remembered, or rather to be found reenacted only on the screen. In this insistence on the fictionality of the Civil War and Reconstruction it reenacts, Gone with the Wind reiterates but also significantly reworks the point of departure of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Looking at the earlier film with its successor in mind one notices: this inaugural epic melodrama also begins with a preface, referencing a mythic scene, though one that posits a primordial state of purity. After the first title card expresses the hope that the depictions of the ravages of war to follow will provoke abhorrence in the spectators for all future wars, the next title card, introducing a slave auction, reads: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” The original community of Americans is imagined as a prelapsarian garden, lacking discord and strife. By giving a name and body to the force of history that brought difference to the harmonious cohabitation of brothers, installed is the fantasy of the nation contaminated by an external body of people, which, if eradicated, would eliminate all disunion and restore a prior unity. The narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction that follows focuses on the story of two families, the Stonemans from Washington and the Camerons from South Carolina, representative of the house of the nation, divided against itself. Given that the emergence of an unnatural enmity is ascribed to a foreign agent, namely the abolitionists with their demand for the emancipation of slaves, personal friendship among these white brothers, fighting for different sides, overrides their political allegiance. When the younger Stoneman son meets one of the Cameron sons on the battlefield, rather than killing him and moving on to the next enemy, he rejoices at their reunion and is himself fatally shot. With the battle still raging behind him, he falls to the ground and, smiling, embraces his former friend, forming a dual corpse: the Confederate soldier fully lit appears excessively white; the Union soldier lying in shadow has taken on the hue of the alleged agent of disunion, the American slaves. Similarly, when, in the battle of Petersburg, Capt. Phil Stoneman sees that the final assault is being led by his former friend, Col. Ben Cameron, he interrupts the fire to rescue the wounded man, so as to have him safely transported to a hospital in Washington. After the Civil War is officially over, the reunion of these two families requires a second surge of violence, now pitting allegedly disenfranchised Southern whites against black aggressors and those leading them on with the promise of political emancipation. In this narrative of restoration, the Northern and Southern families find themselves on the same side, even while their reunion is reborn out of a sequence of killings. Stalked by a former black soldier, Flora Cameron jumps to her death from a mountain ridge. This self-sacrifice incites several retributive raids on the part of the Ku Klux Klan, recently founded by Ben Cameron, to rescue his family from particularly vicious black soldiers attacking them in a hut, as well as his beloved Elsie from the sexual onslaught of Silas Lynch, the mulatto protégé of her abolitionist father.

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Figure 3 The Birth of a Nation. Family reunion. Digital frame enlargement.

The narrative resolution shows the actress Lillian Gish, together with the one remaining daughter of the Cameron family, riding at the head of a new invading army of masked Klansmen. They parade down the streets of Piedmont in imitation of the departing Confederate army at the beginning of the film. Reducing emancipated slaves to embodiments of uncontrolled sexual lust vindicates the disenfranchisement of black voters and justifies the disarmament of black soldiers in the final sequences of the film, even while this newly created political disunion is justified by a scene of melodramatic family reunion. Sitting by the sea’s edge, each of the daughters is coupled with the other’s brother, in a dual marriage emblematically joining together the North with the South, now allegedly cleansed of all racial contamination. As Linda Williams succinctly puts it, “white men need white woman to be sacrificed to keep both blacks and women in their place.”15 Significant for my reading the earlier film through the lens of its subsequent refiguration is the following: this place at the side of a racist husband is what Leigh’s Scarlett will most emphatically refuse in the wake of the Second World War. Yet Griffith’s narrative resolution itself serves as a stand-in for a complex array of gender, ethnic, and class conflicts troubling the nation in 1915. Even though Elsie ultimately ends up as the demurely proud wife of a Klansman, she, like Flora, is shown to elicit, albeit unwittingly, the forbidden sexual desire of the racial other, so that her near rape by Silas Lynch can also be read as a punishment of the New Woman and her demands for

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suffrage and sexual liberty that correlate with the political demands of the emancipated slaves. On the eve of World War I, with the growing immigration of eastern European Jews, anti-Semitism as well as anger at the newest wave of Irish-Catholic immigrants ran in tandem with the racism prompted by the northward migration of southern blacks, placing all ethnic others into one pot in order to challenge the progressive melting-pot narrative of American identity. Woodrow Wilson was nervous about the divided loyalties of hyphenated Americans, arguing that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.”16 Ironically, Griffith’s narrative pitches against hyphenated American identities (which aspire toward the breakdown of differences between black and white, native and immigrant, female and male) an insistence on redrawing lines of demarcation based on racial and gender difference. Nowhere is this curious flipside to cultural hyphenation more visible than in the deployment of blackface in The Birth of a Nation. While Griffith cast black actors in supporting roles, such as Jennie Lee as Mammy, the vainly ambitious and sexually violent villains are played by white actors passing as black. Insofar as the same actors who rode under the Klan sheets also put on blackface, Michael Rogin asserts, the “contrasting disguises, which point to the common identity they aim to hide, expose the projective fantasized character of Griffith’s blacks.”17 He goes on to quote Joseph Henaberry, explaining: “In one sequence I played in a group of renegade colored people, being pursued by white people—and I was in both groups, chasing myself through the whole sequence.”18 In blackface, the film’s parallel editing (reiterated in Gangs of New York) finds its ideological counterpoint, especially when this splices together the attack by black soldiers on a hut, sheltering whites of both sides along with their loyal former slaves, with the Klansmen riding to the rescue. It allows white actors to perform both the unencumbered sexual desire and rampant violence it ascribes to blacks, as well as the agents of punishment and retribution. Given that blackface fails to disguise the white actor beneath the mask, “it reveals that the Klansmen were chasing their own negative identities, their own shadow sides.”19 The aggressive black male proves to be nothing other than an exteriorization of the white man’s fantasies, as though the enemy were, in fact, oneself, not ethnically other at all. The consequences of this hyphenation between black aggressor and white savior are twofold. One the one hand, it appropriates all racial difference into a homogenous white masculinity. By the end of the film, the emancipated slaves have been successfully disenfranchised again, and, as Williams points out, “black men are quite literally wiped from the screen.”20 On the other hand, this expurgation of blackness cements the very difference represented by the hyphenated American it seeks to obliterate. Blackface leaves no doubt that all the white actors we see are themselves split between two racial designations, their own and that of the demonized other. They affectively identify with what they call upon us to hate. Vilified blackness comes to stand as a trope for all other immigrant bodies. But if blackness can be impersonated, then it destabilizes all notions of an uncontaminated whiteness as well. Particularly on the level of fantasy, on which all cinematic

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narrations of the nation operate, a prior fraternity of like-minded men and women, uncontaminated by racial difference, proves to be impossible once you can exorcise your internal enemy only by impersonating him. The nation that is born at the end of Griffith’s narrative out of both the violence of a civil war and a Klan rebellion is not the reunion of the house divided against itself, but a nation split into an official, democratically differentiated reunited Union, claiming equality for all, and a homogenous, embedded, clandestine society, a secession of sorts, insisting on the moral supremacy of white rule. Read with Selznick’s racially more sensitive film in mind, the Klansmen’s desire for a return to a mythic point of original purity emerges as an anamorphotic distortion of the American dream Scarlett so resiliently embodies. Ben Cameron’s fantasy is of a return to a state of ethnic purity, not yet achieved, and, one must add, never achievable except in the dehistoricized mythological site of the cinema. The implicit acknowledgment of the failure of its own racial politics adds a disturbing ambivalence to the final tableau of The Birth of a Nation. Introducing a scene in which the god of war, mounted on his horse and slaying the multitudes with his terrible swift sword, is replaced by Christ, blessing those who dance beneath his feet, the title card reads: “Dare we dream of a day when bestial war shall rule no more. But instead—the gentle Prince in the hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace.” While Selznick’s reiteration of such a mythic framing at the beginning of his Civil War megaspectacle insists on its own fictionality, history would turn Griffith’s dramaturgy into precisely the reality his film’s pacifist (and isolationist) message sought to screen out. As one of his assistant cameramen, Karl Brown, remembers, once the United States was compelled to enter World War I, American troops would think of themselves as reenacting the run to the rescue so effectively inaugurated in The Birth of a Nation—“a typical Griffith production on the most gigantic scale: all Europe under the iron heel of a monstrous enemy, with the rescue now coming from the massed might of America.”21 On screen, the dream of “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!” that the final title card proclaims may belong to the reunited white couple, Elsie and Ben Cameron, to whom the film gives the last image. But it was not the political reality facing the nation in 1915, and, as Selznick tacitly acknowledges when he, too, makes his Civil War epic on the eve of another world war, the massed might necessary to fight for these American virtues was always ethnically differentiated, even if the troops remained racially segregated.

Reconfiguring the Civil War in Terms of Vietnam The films that follow upon Gone with the Wind engage with the imaginary resolution only the fictions of cinema can offer by pointedly addressing the difference The Birth of a Nation forgets/remembers in its celebration of a white insurgence coming to the defense of helpless women and civilians. They, too, refigure history into a meaningful narrative of the nation befitting the cultural needs of their specific historical moment. They, too, have recourse to a nostalgic tone, yet the loss they are concerned with is not for a civilization irrevocably gone with the wind. They look to the past so as to answer an open question. With the “sin of slavery” in mind, as

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well as the wars against the American Indians that came to a climax during the backwash of the Civil War, could the American project, with its claim for universal freedom, liberty, and justice, be regained, or was it forever tainted by self-inflicted violence? As Stanley Cavell wrote during the Vietnam War, when the country was once again divided against itself in a civil rights movement, “of the great modern nations which have undergone tragedy, through inexplicable loss of past or loss of future or self-defeat of promise, in none is tragedy so intertwined with its history and its identity as in America.” If the Civil War, he goes on to argue, was about secession and unity, “neither of these points was settled, nor has either been lost.” Although the nation’s self-knowledge is of indefeasible power and constancy, he adds “its fantasies are those of impotence, because it remains at the mercy of its past, because its present is continuously ridiculed by the fantastic promise of its origin and its possibility, and because it has never been assured that it will survive.” Since it asserted its identity in a war against secession, he concludes, “union is what it wanted. And it has never felt that union has been achieved.”22 Coming together as a nation after the ravages of the Civil War is a common theme in the western genre, notably in John Ford’s famous cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950). In what Richard Slotkin has called a “violent rite de passage between one stage of political, economic development and another,” the internal antagonism that divided the nation against itself is exchanged for a new violence, serving to reassert the fantastic promise of the American project against an allegedly external enemy, the Native Americans.23 Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee has been chosen as an example for this particular narrative of reconciliation, because the “unofficial” raid against an Apache chief during the last year of the Civil War is explicitly conceived through the lens of political mistrust at the time of the Vietnam War.24 The film’s conflicted soldiers stand in for a cultural climate in which allegiance to the American flag had become a contested issue. In the opening sequence of the film, Maj. Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston), surveying the casualties of Chief Charriba’s raid on a cavalry post in New Mexico, comments, “I’m a long way from Gettysburg.” As officer in charge of Ft. Benlin, a Union prison camp, he is so in more than one sense. His transfer to this post was a disciplinary action for an unspecified act of recklessness a fellow officer calls fighting his own war at Gettysburg. By deciding to go after the Apache chief, Amos Dundee is about to engage once again on a dangerous mission he has no orders for, this time, however, out of the ambition to redeem himself. He is not the only man divided first and foremost against himself. One of his prisoners is his former comrade Ben Tyreen, who, accused of killing a fellow officer during a duel, got cashiered from the Union army. Because Ben believes Amos to have cast the decisive vote against him, fighting for the Confederate cause is in part his personal revenge against a military institution he feels betrayed by. The command of soldiers the major ends up putting together reflects the hyphenated Americans who were fighting in Vietnam: black soldiers who volunteer immediately because they finally want to see battle, Apaches who feel discouraged by their own chiefs, and Hispanics finding themselves involved more by accident than conviction.

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Above all, however, Amos needs Ben to join up with a group of his best men, since only they are trained cavalrymen. As in The Birth of a Nation, former friends find themselves on opposite sides of a battle, yet their reunion is not enacted as a happy embrace in death. Although Ben claims the Union is no longer his country, he ultimately agrees to join the command because he hopes to make it back to where the real war is being fought. Insisting on wearing his Confederate uniform, he rides out of the fort with his men in tow, after having made it clear that their loyalty will only hold until Chief Charriba is taken or destroyed. What the film narrative (commenting on its contemporary moment) underscores is how fragile any command inevitably is in a world in which everyone is willing to turn against former friends and renegotiate short-term alliances to fulfill personal ambitions. As they depart, each group sings its own song, and the ensuing cacophony is a foreboding that only an external enemy can hold this command, divided against itself, together. The evening after they cross the Rio Grande into Mexico, the internal enmity indeed erupts when a Confederate soldier tries to relegate one of the black privates to the status of his personal slave. After one of the Union men stands up in defense of the black private, everyone in the unit takes sides until all are pointing their guns at each other. They are about to resume the Civil War on foreign soil, when Ben intervenes to compliment Pvt. Aesop and the other black soldiers on how they handled the river crossing, signaling to his men that they are to be treated as equals. When, in the private conversation that follows, Ben assures Amos that such a racist incident will not happen again, the latter wryly points out that what happened is what the war is all about. The film refigures Griffith’s stereotype of the vicious black soldier by having both commanding officers insist that no member of the command is to be designated as a foreign body. Clearly, unity can be regained (and maintained) only through force. Yet the black soldiers, though an intrinsic part of the command, are shown to have no agency of their own. Others must come to their defense to demonstrate that racism will not be tolerated in their midst, even while it is clear that at best race tensions can be pacified, not resolved. As Amos and Ben counter each other’s views on the Civil War, the problem of black emancipation is once again subsumed into a discussion about a battle between two conflicted men who were once brothers. Ben accuses Amos of having taken his kin to fight against their own neighbors, while the latter retaliates by accusing Ben of having betrayed his country when he joined Lee’s army.

Figure 4 Major Dundee. Brothers divided against each other. Digital frame enlargement.

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Peckinpah’s version of a nation fighting an irresolvable internal division is primarily concerned with the way the Union splits those fighting in its name. Earlier that afternoon, when Ben could have rejoined the Confederate cavalry, trailing them as they were leaving Texas, he did not because he felt obliged to keep his word to the major. While both men can agree on a code of military conduct, they differ on what notion of the nation they are fighting for. When Ben defends his lost cause by saying he will not fight for a country that asks him to kill men who were his friends, Amos counters by pointing out that his best friend was killed by Confederate soldiers at Chickamauga. He also accuses Ben of being a “would-be cavalier, an Irish potato farmer with a plumed hat fighting for a white-columned plantation house you never had and never will.” Their argument clearly does not run along any simple line of demarcation between the North and the South. Nor is Amos merely caught between personal preferences and political allegiances. The film instead picks up on Selznick’s reference to the Old South as an imagined world when he discloses his renegade Confederate as being suspended between two symbolic fictions—his word to a fellow officer and his loyalty to the idea of a country that for him was never a reality. Nevertheless, Ben also has the last word. He pointedly asks his contestant whether he ever stopped to think why they made him a jailor instead of a soldier. Amos can only respond by walking away in silence. He, too, is split in his loyalties between an obligation to the military and his own investment in a personal fantasy of self-vindication. The narrative pattern that evolves is one in which, whenever the soldiers face an external enemy—be it the Apaches or the French army they have a skirmish with while searching for provisions—they come together as a command, even while theirs remains a fragile union, with fault lines constantly erupting. Peckinpah’s bleak response to Griffith’s narrative of regeneration through violence is that internal divisions can never be fully obliterated by virtue of sacrificing individual members of the group. Enmity is inscribed into the very fabric of this command’s self-definition, a stand-in for the mutual implication of violence and vitality in the culture at large during the Vietnam War. Major Dundee and his men need to engage an external enemy not only to come together to fight in a unified cause. Only the continual threat of external danger keeps at bay the violence that continually threatens to erupt within. As Amos explains to his lover, Teresa, who, working as a doctor in a Mexican village, has watched many different armed men pass through: “Men can understand fighting. I guess maybe they need it sometimes. The truth is, it’s easy. Forget about your problems, responsibilities, just let someone feed you and tell you what to do.” Far from sharing Scarlett’s selfish lack of interest in the war, Teresa is nevertheless also a distanced observer of this masculine need for battle. Like Gone with the Wind, this film also refuses marriage as the melodramatic resolution to personal and national conflict, instead designating its heroine as the one to pass judgment on the irresolvability of the antagonism sustaining national unity. When Amos suggests they might get together again because the war will not last, Teresa laconically responds, “It will for you.” The open future of a perpetual war she names is far less optimistic than the one Scarlett appeals to—a perpetual war because it is the one condition American men understand.

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Figure 5 Major Dundee. Brothers reunited in battle. Digital frame enlargement.

As a resolution to a battle among brothers, Peckinpah offers instead of marriage the glory of dying in battle for a cause one once again believes in. After succeeding in destroying Chief Charriba and his men, Amos and Ben have one last enemy to confront together before they can settle their personal score. Ben’s anagnorisis is staged as a rite of baptism. They are attacked by the French as they are about to cross the Rio Grande and return to Texas. Seeing one of the French officers seizing the American flag from the black man bearing it, Ben charges to its rescue and with it in hand proudly calls out to Amos. For one brief moment, with the battle raging around them, both mounted men are in standstill, poised next to each other in the middle of the river, as the one passes the flag on to the other, a mutual recognition passing between them as well. Then Ben receives a shot in his arm, and, in imitation of the fateful strategy the South employed at Gettysburg, he charges back alone to the other side of the river so as to distract the French cavalry and help his comrades reach the shores of Texas safely. The sacrifice this narrative requires is not that of a defenseless Southern woman who will incite violence. Peckinpah’s renegade Confederate has finally returned to his initial allegiance to the Union. This remains a fragile resolution. While Ben may have found personal peace in his glorious last charge and the others satisfaction in admiring his gallant bravery, nothing assures us that without further violence this command might not fall apart again. Edward Zwick’s Glory, produced at the end of the Reagan era, shows a very different command coming together. By focusing on the first black regiment of the Army of the Potomac, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, it commemorates the contribution of black people fighting in the Civil War. It also offers a revision of American military engagement in Southeast Asia. As Jim Cullen suggests, “By returning to the very roots of the Civil Rights movement—and portraying it as a good war—Glory reshaped the parameters of Vietnam conventions.” The moral this film reintroduces into popular discourse is characteristic of a conservative era,

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“portraying a moment of social redemption but using war as the vehicle of it; depicting collective action by African Americans as effective, if supervised by whites.”25 While critics have taken fault with the film for foregrounding the white perspective of Col. Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick), even while lauding it for pushing the question of race into the center of its narrative, it is because of this focalization that Glory effectively refigures Griffith’s aggressive and lascivious soldiers in blackface. With its predominantly African American cast, it reintroduces into its narration of the nation those black men who were wiped off the screen in The Birth of a Nation, even while admitting that any refiguration of history requires an engagement with the very prejudices it seeks to overcome. The redemption from the guilt over slavery at stake for Zwick seeks to endow the black soldier with dignity. It also traces the change in vision necessary on the part of white commanding officers to produce a situation in which such valor can both unfold and be remembered. Shaw, son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, having been wounded in Antietam, accepts the challenge of commanding the first black men to enlist in the Union army. Explicitly reiterating classic war films from the 1940s, and with it looking back toward World War II as perhaps the most unequivocally “good war” fought in the name of freedom, the film focuses on four prototypical men representing the black nation at large, thrown together to share a tent: Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins (a former gravedigger played by Morgan Freeman), Trip (a runaway slave from Tennessee played by Denzel Washington), Sharts (a stuttering South Carolinian field hand played by Jihmi Kennedy), and Thomas Searles (an educated free black from Boston and childhood friend of Shaw played by Andre Braugher). Following the code of the boot camp, which turns a disorganized group of individual men into a disciplined combat unit, the soldiers undergo the emotional stress of harsh drilling to become disciplined and ready for battle. The important racial refiguration of the genre consists in the fact that for an African American man to put on the blue Union uniform and carry a rifle is more than the conventional education sentimental. It is part and parcel of the process of becoming a subject both on a personal level and on the level of a collective political myth. Although the film seems to deny singularity to these four men by treating them as prototypes, it does so because at stake is more than an individual story. Their success, Glory claims, is emblematic. The fact that Shaw, the only actual historical person, is the focalizer of the narrative, describing the progress of his new command in his letters home to his mother, serves to underscore the idea that while the white officer’s interest in succeeding runs parallel to that of his men, his is a different story. Not unlike Peckinpah’s Dundee, he has accepted this mission to redeem himself of the guilt of slavery but also out of personal ambition. He wants to be the first American to command a black regiment that does not just march and do manual labor, instead proving itself valiantly in battle. Partially out of a selfish desire for honor, he will ultimately volunteer his regiment as the one to attack Ft. Wagner in the first decisive charge, fully cognizant of the fact that the casualties will be extreme. He can be sure that the country’s attention will be drawn to this particular battlefield. He hopes that his demonstration of the courage of the men under his command will prove to be the

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turning point for all future deployment of black troops—in hindsight not just in the Civil War but all future American wars. The film Glory, in turn, is a turning point in the cinematic reenactment of the Civil War as well, given that it is the first one to move beyond a story about brothers divided against each other, by giving voice to those in whose name the war was fought. While in Major Dundee the black soldiers are spoken for, the argument of Glory is that they must speak for themselves; their fighting is a performative speech act of racial empowerment. Zwick, aware of the complexities contained in the process of gaining national recognition, enmeshes the rite of passage of Shaw with that of his black troops to show that union can only come after internal antagonisms have been openly addressed, rather than held at bay with the help of an external enemy. Within the context of a military apparatus, where his regiment is taunted by other white soldiers and commanding officers will not provide him with sufficient equipment because they do not believe black soldiers will ever see battle, Shaw finds himself repeatedly forced to face up to his own ignorance about the men he is commanding, admitting in his letters that he remains an outsider to their culture. To assert his authority he needs discipline from his black troops but also a loyalty that transcends a racial line of demarcation that can never be obliterated. Internal division can only be subsumed into a shared mission—to fight for the emancipation of slaves—after all acknowledge that they come to this union with radically different histories, dividing not just Shaw from his men along race lines but also his friend Thomas from former field hands along class lines. Though not divided against itself, this command must reenact and in so doing contend with the very stereotypes that have defined the relations between black and white Americans (as well as between black Americans of different classes). Rawlins at one point explains to the most recalcitrant of the men, Trip, that if he continues to be so full of hatred against everyone that he cannot accept the interpellation of a white commander, he will not become a “man,” which in his idiom means being able to fight the battle white men have been fighting for him for the last three years; he will forever be the “nigger” that racist discourse has designated him to be. That this can only be a painful birth of subjectivity, leaving its own scars, is enacted most pointedly in the scene in which Shaw finds himself compelled to have Trip publicly whipped after being caught off base, allegedly deserting when he was, in fact, looking for shoes. Shaw is caught between the demands of army protocol and his personal disgust at finding himself employing the same punishment used by Southern slave owners. Yet to make exceptions would mean not taking his men seriously as Union soldiers. As the drillmaster commences to whip the man, who already has scars on his back, Zwick slowly pans into a close-up of the two contestants, splicing together two facial enactments of emotional conflict. Shaw must contend with the way his need for authority as commander compels him to inflict on a black man that which his enemy has for centuries inflicted. Trip, in turn, must contend with the fact that, though the forms of punishment are the same, to be publicly whipped as a soldier means to be treated not as another man’s possession, but as a legal subject who transgressed the law. The camera tarries uncomfortably in a

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close-up of Trip’s face as he endures the lashes in silence, while tears of pain roll down the right side of his face. Zwick deploys this gesture of pathos to visualize that, on an affective level, past denigrations can never simply be elided. If Trip takes the punishment because he recognizes that this interpellates him as a legitimate member of the regiment, Shaw receives lashes of his own. Focalized through the gaze of Shaw’s conflicted response, we not only feel compassion for both men’s pain. Through Shaw we are forced to recognize our complicity in a history of public humiliation. Though as commanding officer he has no choice, he is still the one inflicting the shame, and we, as spectators, are visually enjoying it. The choice of mise-en-scène reveals this to be a moment of recognition in which Shaw sees his guilt about slavery reflected back to him in the eyes of a former slave who has accepted this acknowledgment. Only because Trip complies with the protocol, which is to say only because he can distinguish between being treated as a slave and as a soldier, do both men become subjects of this painful scene of the history of Southern slavery, repeating itself in a Union camp. As in Major Dundee, the final anagnorisis occurs in the heat of battle. Seeing that their colonel has been fatally wounded, Trip reaches for the Union flag lying in the sand before him and calls upon his fellow soldiers to follow him in what is clearly a hopeless charge. As whiplashes turn into bullets, the process of becoming an agent in his own history finds completion, even if, or precisely because—and therein lies the pathos of melodrama—it leads to a glorious death. In an earlier conversation with Shaw, Trip had refused to bear the regimental colors. Now, he, like Ben Tyreen, is finally willing to acknowledge his allegiance to the Union flag, and, like Peckinpah’s renegade Confederate, he takes command of a sacrifice aimed toward an open future. In its fateful assault on Ft. Wagner, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts lost over half its number, and yet, as one of the final title cards of the film explains, “President Lincoln credited these men of color with helping turn the tide of the war.” Zwick’s narration is not ambivalent on the point that by accepting to die for the birth of a new freedom, these men had gained precisely the equality that had been initially denied to them when they enlisted. However, the glory he intones is ambivalent. In his earlier argument with Shaw over bearing the regimental colors, Trip had explained that he did not think anybody would win, asking what black people will get when the fighting was over. Shrewdly, Shaw replies, “Well, you won’t get anything if we lose.” In answer to the question of how they can get clean of this conundrum, Trip equally shrewdly responds, “We ante up and kick in, sir.” In contrast to Peckinpah’s cynicism, we are left not with men who fight because it is what they understand, but because it is the only choice they have. Yet both directors share—and in this they emphatically contradict the final tableau of The Birth of a Nation—the sobering insight that conflicts will remain even after battles have been lost or won.

Rethinking the Civil War on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century The title card Ang Lee uses as the motto for Ride with the Devil reads: “Allegiance to either side was dangerous. But it was more dangerous still to find oneself caught in

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the middle.” The theme in the movie of this Taiwanese American (himself working between two cultures) is not the glorious coming together in battle, but the desperate guerrilla war the Bushwhackers fought against pro-Union Jayhawkers on the western frontier of Missouri. Implicitly invoking the famous ride of Griffith’s Klansmen with his title, the film returns to the question of hyphenated Americans so troubling to President Wilson at the beginning of the twentieth century. The film’s claim is that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, a narration of the nation should foreground the spaces in between affiliation and displacement. One is reminded of Homi Bhabha, who argues that because in postmodernity forces of social antagonism or contradiction can neither be transcended nor dialectically surmounted, the nation emerges as a site internally marked by heterogeneous histories of contending people, with counternarratives “that evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries.”26 The son of German immigrants, Ang Lee’s hero, Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), has joined the Bushwhackers out of loyalty to the people he grew up with, even though his father presciently warns him that this is not his war, because he will always be a foreigner, a “Dutchman,” to them. His will prove to be the cruelest example of what it means to be caught in the middle. Though the father Roedel remains an unconditional Unionist, he will be killed by a former neighbor in retaliation for his son having joined the band of renegade fighters. Like Peckinpah’s Tyreen, Roedel must come to emotionally disengage himself from the fantasy of owing allegiance to a “people” that he never fully belonged to in the first place, not, however—and this is the decisive difference—by rejoining the Union army. The America he ultimately returns to is one beyond a nation divided against itself, emphatically including those who cannot take sides because they belong to neither. As in Major Dundee, this rite of passage is played through as a narrative enlacing Roedel with a double, in his case a former slave, whom one of his fellow Bushwhackers, George Clyde, grew up with and bought out. Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) is also someone caught in the middle, between loyalty to his childhood friend and the recognition that, as a black man, he will always be a foreign body in a combat unit of Southern white men. In contrast to Roedel, he harbors no false fantasy of belonging to this renegade community. His allegiance is exclusively to the man to whom he owes his freedom. Ang Lee underscores this conflicted position by repeatedly inserting Holt’s silent gaze as a critical counternarrative to the stealthy violence the Bushwhackers unleash on their enemies. Once Roedel, who had himself initially admitted to being nervous at seeing a black man handling a gun, begins to bond with Holt, he gains insight into what the war looks like to a former slave. In a subtly jolting scene, Jake reads aloud one of the letters they took from a dead soldier carrying Federal mail, and finds himself intoning an abolitionist mother, arguing for emancipation: “Confederates claim that we strike at their liberty and rights, but what kind of liberty is it that takes liberty away from others.” Clearly uncomfortable, Roedel folds up the letter. By identifying with the perspective of one who is irrevocably apart, he comes to recognize his own displacement. The film’s melodramatic argument uses a recognition of cultural and racial difference to claim that it is in an acknowledgment of separateness that a bridge

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between those who will never share the same past can be found for the future. Shared compassion with someone he knows to be irrevocably separate from his own cultural background allows Jake to recognize his own separateness from the band of brothers, who, under the leadership of the guerrilla fighter William Quantrill, have come together to raid Lawrence, an abolitionist town in neighboring Kansas. The night before, during a poker game, one of the players uses two “nigger scalps” as collateral because he is short on cash, and a second player follows by throwing in a “Dutch scalp.” Without saying a word, Roedel leaves the game and saunters over to Holt, asking him to share a glass of whiskey with him. His gesture declares a bond, which at this point cannot yet be articulated in words. That night, while Jake lies next to him, his face covered with his hat, Holt remains awake, staring into space. Lee uses this image to lead into Quantrill’s vindictive speech, asking the guerrilla fighters to ride with him to vindicate the women who died in a Kansas City jail. As in The Birth of a Nation, men are held together by the fury of vengeance, only the scene pointedly includes the voice of difference. The camera picks out Roedel standing next to Holt, while the others fanatically cheer their leader. Conflicted, he half-heartedly joins in the battle chant, yet his black double only gazes silently at those around him, emotionally aloof from their blind anger. During the raid, neither will partake in the looting and random killing of civilians. Instead, the scene again inserts Holt’s silent gaze to unequivocally judge this massacre. From a pile of murdered black civilians the camera cuts to a close-up of the former slave, pondering the personal meaning this carnage has for him, and then to Roedel, who interrupts the painful scene by suggesting they both get themselves some breakfast. The two come together not by sharing in the violence, as Peckinpah’s heroes do, but by resisting it. After the raid, the internal division they represent can no longer be overlooked by the others, and only the arrival of Union soldiers keeps this antagonism from erupting. Yet in Ang Lee’s narrative of the nation, the external enemy, fighting in the name of freedom, proves to be the force that, to his two heroes at least, brings release from a cause not only lost, but at this point also one whose racist injustice they can no longer identify with. During Quantrill’s retreat into Missouri, George Clyde is shot. Holt, unwilling to let go of the man he has been bound to all his life in a complex homoerotic love, must be forcibly wrested from the bleeding body. This is staged as a scene of parturition. Out of the sacrifice of the man who bought him out of slavery, Holt can be born as an autonomous subject. Only over Clyde’s dead body can he shed the name “George Clyde’s nigger,” the hateful designation that had also protected him from other guerrilla fighters. Because they have reached a point of no return, both Holt and Roedel turn their backs on the other Bushwhackers and ride instead to the farm where they had left Sue Ellen, the woman who had been bringing them food while they were hiding out during the winter. In their absence she has given birth to the child of Roedel’s childhood friend Jack, who died while going after Jayhawkers responsible for the death of her father. Once they have returned to this site between war zones,

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Holt is finally able to put into words how the day George Clyde died changed him. As in Glory, we have a dialogue between two young men of different races, trying to make sense of the conflicted situation in which they find themselves. After Holt admits he feels something he had never felt before, namely free, Roedel asks, “I thought that’s what George gave you when he bought you out.” His friend frankly replies, “That wasn’t really his to give now, was it?” At this point he can finally name what his silent gaze has been articulating all along, namely that in the context of a racial discourse, being a white man’s loving friend can never be different from being his “nigger.” As the camera once more moves into a long close-up, Holt declares, “I ain’t never again going to be nobody’s nigger.” Being bought out of slavery is not enough. Holt must also self-confidently learn to recognize himself as being a free man. Roedel comes to acknowledge his maturity by entering into a marriage with Sue Ellen. While Holt decides to go to Texas in search of his mother, who was sold into slavery there, Roedel takes his wife and child in a wagon to California. Befitting the genre demands of melodrama, this marriage functions as a trope for the rebirth of the nation out of civil war. This union, however, is less about overcoming an enmity among brothers and more about bringing together two people who, owing to the ravages of war, are left with nothing but the possibility of a shared future. In contrast to The Birth of a Nation, no return to a prior state of harmony is possible, because the world they have left is irrevocably lost. Committing oneself to a new home and family yet to be achieved also means relinquishing all past grudges. In Major Dundee, Ben claimed he would kill Amos once their joint struggle against the Apaches was over, only to opt for a gallant suicide instead. Roedel claimed he would kill Pit Mackeson, one of the most fanatic Bushwhackers, who had shot at him during the retreat from Lawrence because he saw him as an internal enemy. For this reason, Holt remains with Roedel until this final confrontation can come to pass. To signify that he has indeed moved into a mature subjective position, no longer enjoying the violence of guerrilla war, Roedel refrains from killing his brother-enemy when the two meet for the last time. While Mackeson rides away, Roedel explains to Holt, “It ain’t right and it ain’t wrong, it just is.” The open present Lee’s narrative of the nation celebrates entails moving beyond taking one side against another, which is to say relinquishing the tragic cycle of mutual revenge and retribution.27 All the films discussed tell the story of a melodramatic rite of passage so as to snatch from the cemeteries of unknown fighters of the Civil War poignant martyrdoms and sacrifices. It is, however, the closure each affords that helps us remember/forget these emblematic stories as our own. What, then, do these final images look like? In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett, the film’s embodiment of a will to survive, remains alone, crouching at the foot of the grand central staircase of her Atlanta home. She begins to hear the voices of her father and Ashley, reminding her what all her struggle has been about. She slowly rises, and the camera pans forward into a close-up of her ecstatic face, as she calls out “Tara! Home!” Resiliently declaring that tomorrow is another day, we see her face illuminated with the promise of a

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Figure 6 Gone with the Wind. Scarlett’s home front Digital frame enlargement.

future that she can determine, superimposed over her black silhouette facing the sky over Tara at dawn. She embodies an unbroken belief in the American dream always yet to be achieved, particularly in the face of catastrophe. In Major Dundee, turning their back on the valiant officer who has sacrificed himself for their survival, the soldiers ride back into Texas. The cannon fire of the French irregulars no longer reaches them. Once they have regrouped into columns of twos and begun to move out, Amos calls to his bugler to play them a tune. Although the group is as diversified as before, no one begins a competing song. Instead, they become indistinguishable in the cloud of dust they leave behind them. They are still far from Gettysburg, and yet the Union they are returning to has become a fraction less conflicted owing to their joint battle against an external enemy. The openness of their future, however, implies less a safe homecoming than the possibility of relapses into new internal violence. In perhaps its most explicit citation of The Birth of a Nation, the final scene of Glory pans across the casualties the morning after the fateful attack. Then we see the Confederate flag once more raised over Ft. Wagner, while soldiers begin to gather the defeated dead and throw them into a mass grave. In slow motion, first Shaw glides into the sandy pit, then Trip slides on top of him, united in death not with a former brother, turned enemy, but with a contested white officer he has come to acknowledge. The bleakness of this final tableau mort, Burgoyne notes, consists in the fact that instead of celebrating “a privileged moment of decisive

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Figure 7 Left: The Birth of a Nation; right: Glory. Brothers reunited in death. Digital frame enlargement.

social change in which black and white came together,” it remembers the Civil War “from the viewpoint of the present, with its awareness of the relapses, resistance, and reactions that continue to plague the course of the struggle for racial equality in this country.”28 The only conciliation Zwick finds for his narration about black emancipation as a fulfillment of the promise of a democracy still to come is the commemorative war memorial used as background for the final credits, so as to signal that this is the film’s own intention. If the struggle is not over, at least we can—and must—remember the violent deaths at its founding moment, as a narrative belonging to all of us. In the final scene of Ride with the Devil, Holt and Roedel address each other for the first time with their full names as they take leave of each other. The day has just begun to dawn, and Roedel’s wife and child are still sleeping in the back of the wagon. As the camera moves into a long shot, we see Holt galloping off toward the rising sun, while his friend follows him with his gaze. The radical heterogeneity of this final tableau is such that we see the two men, whose stories have made the Civil War into our own, moving on. They are departing in two directions: one to build a new family in California, the other to refind the family lost to slavery in Texas. Though welded together by their shared history of the Civil War, their paths now part. The story of the rebirth of the nation we inherit from them is not one that foregrounds the irresolvability of national conflict. In a decidedly unnostalgic way, it celebrates the openness of the landscape as a site for plural and heterogeneous narratives about America as a nation achievable but not yet achieved. In Ride with the Devil, racial, ethnic, and gender difference resides in the fact that what we remember/forget are conflicting stories that, having intersected, come to separate. In the final tableau, the camera can for one last moment hold these diverse narratives together and capture them in a coherent image, albeit one that also commemorates the moment of their redivergence. This chapter has shown how a set of films about the Civil War partake in an ever-changing effort to rewrite the narrative of the American nation as being born out of the traumatic history of its Civil War. Seminal is the way each subsequent film remembers what previous films forgot or elided, even as each recasts this military conflict as the melodramatic struggle of families standing in for the nation.

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Figure 8 Ride with the Devil. Parting ways after battle. Digital frame enlargement.

Equally important is the way each film addresses an array of gender, ethnic, and class conflicts troubling the nation at the time it was made by revisiting the war out of which the nation came together again. While with the next chapter I continue tracking the way war functions as unfinished business in the American cultural imaginary, I no longer limit myself to the depiction of one particular war. In the next set of films under discussion, home once more emerges as the site for an internal battle, now, however, of the sexes, with the women on the home front mirroring but also contesting the men fighting abroad. If, in this chapter, at issue was what it takes to come together again as a nation, the focus will now shift: how does the imaginary community called home relate as a vaunted ideal to the wars fought in its name? And while this first chapter tracked the progressive visibility and agency of African Americans as subjects of a war fought in the name of their emancipation, the next chapter brings the role of women, only obliquely addressed in Civil War films, center stage.

2

Home and Its Discontent

The opening sequence of Glamour Girls of 1943, a documentary short produced by the Office of War Information (OWI), shows a troop of smiling civilian women led by a male officer of the U.S. armed forces as they enter a stately administration building. From this they soon reemerge in uniform, indicating that they are about to join the men already fighting on the front lines. As these newly enlisted soldiers turn into an entire platoon of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), marching in perfect formation, the male narrator adds that it is not only in the field of military operations that women are pulling their weight. So as to shift our attention instead to the massive industrial mobilization necessary for national defense, he begins to describe the type of work women have also begun to undertake in the defense plants on the West Coast. The battle of production at home, we are given to understand, serves as the essential counterpart to the battle played out in theaters of war abroad. While we see several female workers riveting on the wing of a B-24, the film brings a second analogy into play. Work on the assembly lines of the war industry is not much different from the domestic work these women used to perform before they were called upon to serve their country. As the narrator explains, “Instead of cutting the lines of a dress, this woman cuts the pattern of aircraft parts . . . instead of baking cakes, this woman is cooking gears.” While images of women recruited to work in different sectors of aircraft, tank, and munitions factories unfold on screen, the voice-over continues to reassure us: “After a short apprenticeship, a woman can operate a drill press just as easily as a juice extractor in her own kitchen and a lathe will hold no more terrors for her than an electric washing machine.” Particularly regarding their work in shipyards, however, the narrator is at pains to underscore that the women, filling in for the soldiers who have been called away, are doing the same job as men, “tough rugged work that they toss off like veterans.” This brings into focus the two sides to the industrial mobilization, which, by early 1945, over six million women would be part of. On the one hand, in order for this call to arms on the home front to be effective, the women working in war plants needed to be presented as being equal to the men they were replacing, with almost no limit to the work they could be trained to do. On the other hand, their feminine traits had to be reiterated. The massive mobilization of women into the military industry was, after all, conceived as nothing other than a temporary shift in the gender demographics of the national workforce. Another documentary short, Women in Defense (1941), implicitly stages female war workers as crossdressers in the theater of home defense. While Katharine Hepburn, narrating the script written by Eleanor Roosevelt, explains that “women working in industrial

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plants need costumes which are comfortable and safe around machinery,” we watch a fashion designer at work on a uniform that would meet these needs. As the mannequin she is dressing seamlessly transforms into an actual model wearing her costume, we initially see only the model’s high-heeled shoes and the bottom of her pants, tightly fastened together at the ankles. Then, as the camera begins to glide upward, she deftly closes the zipper on her right hip, while opening the one on the top of her shirt so as to adjust its collar in a way that exhibits her feminine neckline.1

Home Fronts: War’s Domestic Theater Being comfortable and safe around the assembly line had to go in tandem with retaining a degree of feminine charm not least of all because the War Department’s appeal to women to take on war jobs brought with it a double fear. Asking women to leave their homes for the assembly line changed the face of domestic life in the 1940s but also raised the specter that they might want to remain there after the war. To assuage such anxieties, Glamour Girls of 1943 inserts newsreel footage from the First World War recalling how women, already then wanting to take an active part in the war, were not restricted to the conventional nursing of men at base hospitals overseas, but had successfully worked in factories, at railroad yards, and on farms. To cement the fluid boundary between home front and front lines, but also the troubling repetition between the present and the past, the film’s narration draws attention one last time to the all-encompassing mobilization of a female workforce in the face of this return to a national state of emergency. As we see Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the assistant secretary of the navy, reviewing female troops that would anticipate the WAAF of World War II, the narrator claims, “Those were the true glamour girls of the last war, remembered with affection and appreciation for the work they performed when the world then as now was in peril.” Superimposed over the same shots of uniformed female soldiers marching in drill formations with which this documentary began, we see once more vignettes of the different jobs in the defense industry the film has been promoting. Visually juxtaposing women who have already begun to fill the jobs left vacant by men called to the colors with those who are about to fight side by side with them, the film’s final montage places its hope in feminine adaptability. Cross-dressed as “soldiers without guns” on the home front who can move effortlessly from their homes to the assembly lines, the appeal to them in 1943, when their work in defense was as vital as that of their sisters in arms, is to stand by their men by standing in for them. Invoking the spirit of a past war to reawaken the patriotic furor for a current one was already at play, as I argued in the previous chapter, in the depictions of wartorn Georgia in Gone with the Wind. With her ruthless self-reliance, Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara recalled the energetic struggle women put up on the home front during World War I, even while anticipating the valuable resource female workmanship would indeed, once again, prove to be when the United States actually entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Selznick’s fearless Southern plantation owner, with her racially mixed troops, is clearly a mythic screen fantasy. By the early 1940s the magical charm this band of

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sisters had put on display while jointly combating catastrophe had moved from the movie set to the production lines. There, as newsreels and war propaganda ceaselessly put on display, women, working in teams that crossed gender, class, race, and generational lines, were welding, riveting, or assembling war matériel. As Michael Renov reminds us, these were elite jobs that, “while physically demanding, paid well above the national average and brought with them a glamour and status absent from the majority of tedious and/or poorly paid jobs” in the civilian sector.2 Documentary films foregrounded the excitement and allure of the war factories so as to convince ever more women to take war jobs, and yet this new workplace also caused a second, internal front line to open up. Already before this massive industrial mobilization sets in, Scarlett, on screen, had embodied an idiosyncratic experience of war. In Gone with the Wind, this consisted in sustaining her personal battle of the sexes by not only successfully warding off all enemy soldiers that found their way into her home, Tara, but also proving that, when it came to working on her plantation, she was as good as any man. Her resilient spirit of enterprise also gave a foretaste of the gendered work competition that would become a reality once women unexpectedly found themselves center stage in the battle of war production. Like Scarlett, they, too, would come to refigure the home front in their favor, using this current national state of emergency to assert themselves against the prevailing prejudice that women belonged exclusively in the home. This chapter focuses on the way a call to arms plays off the notion of home both as an actual place and a persistent idea in the name of which troops fight. Given the cultural alignment of femininity with home at issue is the home front as a complex site of gendered conflict. The two sides of this battle of the sexes, already touched on in my reading of Gone with the Wind, are as follows: home in Hollywood is the place where women make demands on men regarding the particular happiness of the family over and against an investment in abstract values such as the glory of defending the nation. The male bonding on which war (and the war film) is traditionally predicated comes to be seen as a liberation from this gender trouble at home. In the absence of fighting men, the home front transforms even more into a site of feminine empowerment. The point of departure for this discussion is Rosie the Riveter (1944), a musical comedy that addresses the cultural ambivalences raised by the mass mobilization of women in the World War II war effort. Two classic melodramas of the time, Since You Went Away (1944) and Tender Comrade (1943), help explore how Hollywood came to pit icons of feminine fortitude and compassion against Washington’s glamorization of women in defense. Even while the heroines of these films make an appeal to preserving the imaginary notion of “home, sweet home,” these films are cognizant of the fact that the domestic reality has been irrevocably changed by war. Filling in the gap left open by both the propaganda shorts and the melodramas of the time, Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift (1984) revisits this historical moment to foreground the real battle of the sexes on the assembly line and the way the home, to which the veterans returned, could not be the same as the one they left. Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), in turn, explores the domestic battleground

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framing actual battle oversees, serving as both a point of departure and return. His Hawaii, an island marking the outer margin of the nation, emerges as an embodiment of the threat posed by the feminized domestic sphere. This film emblematically illustrates my claim that home is the space of constraint from which war liberates men. The battle with a clearly defined external enemy comes to alleviate the complexity of battling with internal enmity, such as gender difference and domestic political corruption within the army. Finally, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) looks at the threat a feminine claim to home poses to masculine bonds through the lens of post–Vietnam War sobriety. The abstract notion of America as a shared imaginary geography in the name of which men fight is both critiqued and reinstalled. In this film, waking up from the dream of war proves to be tantamount to acknowledging the irresolvable gender battle at home. To understand how Hollywood came to glamorize defense work, it is important to recall that the main incentive for employers to hire women in jobs that had previously been male bastions was, of course, economic profit. With lucrative military contracts for bombs, guns, ships, and planes propelling American industry out of its economic depression, companies were willing to use anyone left behind on the home front. For many women seeing the main breadwinners of the family joining the military, one of the compelling motivations for answering the government’s call to join the labor force was the high wages this promised. Suddenly, as Emily Yellin notes, “the standard idea of seeing women as fragile creatures, illsuited for work outside the home, much less for hard labor, seemed a peacetime luxury.”3 The home front would emerge as a double site of feminine struggle. As women did their share in battling the enemy by becoming a vital part of the industrial mobilization, they also enjoyed a sense of self-empowerment that would set in motion an unprecedented demand for emancipation. Rosie the Riveter, the mythic figure who most prominently came to embody this extraordinary recruitment campaign, thrives on a twofold gesture of crossdressing: a female soldier who bears not a rifle but a rivet gun, even while wearing a masculine outfit to signal that she is successfully doing a man’s job. She first emerged in a song, written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1943, whose lyrics introduce her as the woman putting all those sitting in cocktail bars to shame, because “all day long, whether rain or shine, she’s part of the assembly line, she’s making history, working for victory.”4 On May 29, 1943, Norman Rockwell drew Rosie the Riveter for the cover of Saturday Evening Post as a majestically muscular red-haired woman, dressed in denim overalls, with an array of awards and identity buttons decorating her breast. We see her face in profile, her helmet and goggles pushed back to reveal the self-confidence with which she gazes resolutely over her right shoulder. Sitting in front of the American flag on a wooden post, her feet resting on a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, she is eating a hearty sandwich. Her brawny arms are deftly balancing the lunch box on her left hip, which has the name “Rosie” written on it in large white letters, while her heavy, work-battered rivet gun lies sideways on her lap. While the overall pose bespeaks a double feminine defiance, aimed at victory over both dictators abroad as well as those men at home who are

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questioning that she is fit to do a man’s job, one small detail brings her femininity back into our field of vision. Protruding from her right pocket we see a white powder box and kerchief, visually complementing her light-red lipstick and rouged cheeks. Even while putting on display her pride at working for victory, this trooper is unequivocally aware of her feminine allure. In the musical comedy Rosie the Riveter, the cultural ambivalence surrounding the empowerment of women in defense work finds an equally ambiguous staging. Desperately in need of a place to stay, Rosalind and her friend Vera come up with an ingenious plan to procure the last available rental room in town. They convince Charlie and his buddy Kelly, two men working the other shift at the same defense plant, to alternate in sharing their living space as well. Initially, a jovial gender battle ensues, as the two couples fight not over their rightful place in the factory but rather the limited privacy their curious cohabitation allows. Inevitably, the morally risqué living arrangement is resolved into a twofold declaration of love, negotiating the covenant between the nation and its loyal citizens as personal marriage vows to which all four protagonists end up committing themselves. While we rarely see Rosalind and her friends on the assembly line, the final sequence of the film refigures their defense work as an elaborate song-and-dance routine. The factory workers are putting on a show to celebrate the fact that their aircraft plant has been given an award for excellence by the U.S. Army. Charlie, now in uniform because he has joined the marines, lifts his Rosie up onto a wooden ledge placed at the back of the stage, so that, as addressee of the song, she is also the privileged spectator of the performance. Then a troop of alluring female war workers, dressed in denim overalls that leave legs, midriff, and arms exposed, yet wearing workmen’s caps and carrying mock rivet guns, appears on stage, tap dancing to the tune of “Rosie the Riveter.” So as to signal that everyone is united in solidarity in this work for victory, they are supported by four women in real work uniforms, standing among the audience, singing while firing imaginary rivet guns, with a second group of uniformed singers soon emerging on the fuselage of the plane they have assembled. As the song reaches its final stanza, our protagonists abruptly leave the stage. Rosalind and Charlie jump into a jeep and drive off, implicitly to consummate their marriage before her man goes off to war, while Vera and her partner remain behind waving. Manifestly serving as a backdrop for this double couple-building, the show on stage has reached its extravagant acme. Some of the showgirls have donned airplane wings, embodying the very planes they are helping to assemble as though to signify that they have been completely subsumed by their defense work. Given the visual placement of the two couples in the foreground of the screen, we are also to understand that all this frisky riveting is only temporary—the unusual circumstances on which wartime marriages are based. Putting powerful work tools into the hands of women is as much a state of exception as the war itself. Yet even though the musical finale raises the expectation that Rosalind will return to her allegedly rightful position in the home when her Charlie returns from war, the final image we are given is of a multitude of Rosies, dancing on stage with each other in high-spirited

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camaraderie, markedly in the absence of any men except those in the audience.5 The final tableau, by assembling the dancing riveters and the planes they are constructing into one monumental insignia of national defense, also pays homage to the carnivalesque interruption of ordinary domesticity, and with it the disturbance of gender equilibrium, on stage and off, on World War II’s home front.6 The romantic struggle Rosie the Riveter puts on display, hinging as it does on two men and two women competing over a shared bedroom, is an emblem of Hollywood’s reel fictions, covering up a real battle of the sexes less easily resolved because this one consists of pitting men against women in actual competition on the assembly lines. Throughout this musical comedy, we repeatedly see the two men forced to leave their bed when the women come home exhausted from their work shift. This obliquely signifies that they are making room for them on the work front as well. The historical backdrop for this frivolous wartime romance is the national consensus that women have the power to get men to make way for them, so that, like the eroticized Rosies in the final show number, they can remain center stage in the battle for production. The fact that they were being told by the government that when it comes to military mobilization, there is no work they are not able to do, also meant that for the duration of the war at least, they could do anything. This sense of urgency to participate, propagated by entertainment and propaganda films alike, was, however, barely able to screen out the anxiety that the feminine resolve, which had to be tapped into for the home front to be efficient, would not readily be cast off again in times of renewed peace. In the same year that Rosie the Riveter came to America’s movie theaters, Vice President Truman presciently warned: “Let no one imagine that the women will permit themselves to be shunted out of these jobs which they have demonstrated so well their capacity to do.”7

Wartime Homes As though to offer an assuasive counterpart to this extraordinary national empowerment of the female workforce, Hollywood’s most prominent World War II melodramas came to pitch a counter-icon of feminine fortitude, for whom the base for her war effort is first and foremost the domestic home itself. Offering an inversion of the documentary shorts produced by the War Department, these melodramas called upon their audience to weep over the pathos of the self-sacrificing home-keeper precisely because it stood in radical contrast to women’s real wartime lives. On screen, the confines of the domestic space so many women had actually been called upon to leave was transformed into a site of enduring feminine resilience and unconditional solidarity, even if, owing to the changed circumstances, the members of the household were randomly patched together. Selznick, who wrote the screenplay for Since You Went Away, relocates the vital force of the home front to the residence of Capt. Tim Hilton. The introductory title card of the film, superimposed over a typical small-town house on a rainy evening, elucidates this choice of location: “This is a story of the Unconquerable Fortress: the American Home . . . 1943.”8 Standing in for the nation at peril, this mythic site is cast from the start as far more than simply a dwelling place. The household Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert) holds together

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against all odds stands in for the environment of security, compassion, and refuge in the name of which her husband is fighting. As the base of operations for her relentless show of civilian resilience, this home is both an actual site and a persistent idea. In its most general sense, the mythic American home, invoked by the opening tableau, signifies the nation as the esteemed place one belongs to and whose cultural values one shares. Yet the home Selznick’s female soldier without guns defends is also conceived in individual terms. It is an affective site, waiting for the head of the family, who has been called away, to return to at the end of the war.9 Serving as a composite image of such domestic waiting, the opening pan shot of Since You Went Away connects the family dog lying anxiously at the foot of an empty leather chair, Tim Hilton’s house keys left behind, and a photograph of Anne and her two daughters, Jane and Brig, smiling brightly into the camera. Once Anne, having left her husband at the train depot, enters the home she will now be solely responsible for, Colbert’s voice-over sets in, foregrounding that all her subsequent actions are pursued explicitly under the auspices of her departed husband’s spectral gaze. Having gathered together two photographs, a recent one of him in uniform and an earlier vacation snapshot, she enters her bedroom and places them at either side of the mirror on her dresser. For the duration of the war, we are given to understand, she will always see her own face framed by photographs of the absent man. The vocal apostrophe framing the film narrative as a whole consists in a promise she makes as she cradles in her arms the bathrobe Tim has left behind: “I’ll keep the past alive like a warm room for you to come back to.” The elegiac tone underwriting her promise attests to the ambivalence of the narrative about to begin. While the household Selznick’s heroine will try to preserve is as much a thing of the past as the husband who has gone away, the mythic promise it makes is that its spirit, at least, will successfully resist the particular everyday changes about to take place on the home front. Along with the two daughters, who cheerfully fall in line with all the economic curtailments their mother is forced to impose on her family, their African American maid, Fidelia, decides to commit herself to maintaining this domestic fortress as well, remaining with them even though Anne Hilton can no longer pay her anything other than food and lodging.10 To make up for the loss of her husband’s wages (but implicitly also helping with the housing shortage), Anne takes in a lodger, the retired Col. Smollett, who has been called back as adviser to the U.S. Army. The American home front, we are also given to understand, is a union of sentiment above and beyond race and class, even while allowing for living arrangements that transcend the classic nuclear family. Given that her self-declared objective is to keep the spirit of home alive while waiting for her husband to return, Anne also temporarily gives a room to her husband’s best man, Tony, whose work for the navy has brought him to town as well. Her resolve in resisting his playful romantic advances deflects all worry of moral laxity, attesting, like the star hung out on the window, to the unwavering personal loyalty toward the soldiers in the family expected of female troops on the home front.

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Throughout Since You Went Away, Colbert uses her special woman’s touch to hold everything together in a world threatening to fall apart. In part, this entails mitigating the obduracy of her lodger, drawing the old bitter man ever closer into the spell of shared sympathy she has cast over her home. At other times she is the figure of compassion who gives strength to those who have lost loved ones to the war effort. While her older daughter, Jane, soon enlists as a nurse, and by so doing directly confronts the visceral and psychic casualties of war, for most of the film’s narrative, Anne stays closer to home. Her idiosyncratic experience of the home front involves above all staunchly reforging sentimental bonds over and against a war she is aware of only by virtue of the increasing persistence with which it encroaches on her domestic reign: the shortage of food supplies, the sight of ever more men leaving, while wounded troops return along with refugees who have irrevocably lost their homes. Although she is unequivocally in command of her household, the film’s heroine serves to diffuse any anxiety regarding the war’s emancipation of women. While Anne is lauded for the solitary strength she exhibits in combating each new obstacle, she is consistently shown to do so emotionally in relation to the absent man of the house. Even after she has received the news that her husband is missing in action, he remains spectrally present by virtue of the sustained voice-over, which casts the film’s narrative as a diary she is writing for him to read when he finally comes back to her. Her most significant battle occurs in her own living room, allegedly the last bastion against global aggression. It concerns women’s moral obligation to accept social changes in the face of war, prompting Anne, even if only at the very end of Since You Went Away, to leave the safe confines of her residence. She will herself finally join the multitude of war workers because of a vicious altercation with her neighbor Emily. As the one character who refuses to curtail her upper-middle-class lifestyle, limiting her war effort to attending canteen dances, Emily has been serving throughout the story as Anne’s pejorative double. On this particular occasion, having interrupted a party to celebrate Col. Smollett’s birthday as well as Tony’s brief return home on furlough, Emily launches her complaint that it is unseemly for Jane, as a young unmarried woman, to be working in a hospital. Her claim that past codes of living are compromised when well-brought-up girls have intimate contact with wounded men targets Emily as not only selfishly unpatriotic but also, more important, blind to the reality of changed mores on the home front. Jane counters by insisting that while her war work may be risqué, she is, in fact, “simply helping with the wreckage.” She not only successfully undermines her opponent’s position but also discloses a disturbing truth her mother’s home fiction has been at pains to screen out. In the face of war’s unremitting destruction, any belief that the codes of their prewar civilian life can be retained is morally unsustainable. Though Emily immediately takes flight, positioned as the cowardly internal enemy on what Anne only half in jest calls “another front here at home,” her attack has left its mark. Anne is forced to admit that any self-righteousness on her part is ill advised, given that she, too, has made no real sacrifices. In the conversation with Tony that follows, Anne is forced to confront a second, far more subtle figure of internal opposition, because his claims are to the very

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Figure 9 Since You Went Away. Female welder. Digital frame enlargement.

force of sympathy she has been representing throughout. While Tony admits that his reason for having reenlisted is the simple, corny idea of “home, sweet home,” Anne takes up the argument for women’s work where her daughter, who has also fled this domestic battlefield, left off. Jane’s unmitigated invocation of the actual human wreckage of war has brought on Anne’s recognition that she can no longer, as she herself puts it, continue living “in a dream world.” Simply holding things together at home is not enough. Once again, her feminine charm allows her to deflect Tony’s effort to limit her power to her domestic war effort, tapping into the same patriotic fervor he had just intoned regarding his own reenlistment. As she asserts, she has decided to take a defense job not out of economic necessity, but to imitate both her daughter and her husband who have gone off to fight for the sentimental notion of home they all share. The narrative acknowledges the need for this heroine to leave the domestic fortress she has been occupying for most of the film so that she, too, can play her rightful part in fighting in its name. Yet her work in the shipyard is limited to one scene. Only for a brief moment do we see Anne on the assembly line, while her voice-over explains to her husband: “Yes, tremendous changes have taken place in the pampered woman who was your wife. It’s hard even for me to realize I’m studying to be a lady welder.” Her transgression of the code of middle-class propriety Emily had invoked is, once again, premised on the bond of feminine sympathy. For the woman she befriends at the shipyard, Anne represents what she has stood for throughout, namely the resilience of feminine compassion. Continuing with her apostrophe to her absent husband, Anne confesses that Zofia Koslowska, a refugee from Nazi Europe, had said a most thrilling thing to her while sitting in the factory canteen: “You are what I thought America was.” As the film moves back to the Hilton residence, showing Anne writing at night in her

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diary, her voice-over seamlessly connects this utterance from a fellow riveter to “the other thrilling words” she hopes to be worthy of: her husband’s declaration of love made many years ago as the foundation of their marriage. Even while his heroine has woken from her prewar dream of a life of domestic leisure, Selznick sustains his mythic dream of a traditionally feminine home front. Colbert’s resiliently loyal wife emerges as a perfect emblem of patriotism because it is over her body that we have the ideal of home as the place where national and individual refuges come to be conflated. Tim Hilton remains a spectral presence until the end of Since You Went Away. When, on Christmas Eve, Anne receives the call that he is finally coming home, the camera discreetly tracks back into a long shot of the Hilton residence, now covered in snow. Soon we can barely see the woman of the house joyfully embracing her two daughters, now merely tiny figures behind one of the lit windows. The audience is left anticipating the soldier’s return, because the unconquerable fortress that Selznick claims the American home to be was, from the start, a mythic site outside actual space and time: a location projected on screen, signifying the hope that a place was waiting for those who went off to fight to come back to, even if only in fantasy.11 Showing Capt. Tim Hilton’s actual return would be tantamount to waking up from this dream so as to confront the far more disturbing fact that the actual home front had been irrevocably transformed while the men and women fighting in its name were away. In many of Hollywood’s World War II melodramas, pitting the immutable domestic home against the changes on the home front served as an imaginary refiguration of the ideology of total mobilization perpetrated by the War Department and its educational films. Not only did these fiction films reclaim for women their function as guardian of the home. These melodramas also argued that when it came to preserving the idea of home, the man’s seminal position remained uncontested, while willing to grant that women were needed to fill in for the men who had been called to arms. Even while home-front films attest to the way the wartime experience “produced conditions which rendered the American woman a far more vocal and visible participant in the social affairs of the nation,” as Renov suggests, “the woman’s presence, boldly and brightly figured as it may be, can be displaced even by the male’s absence.”12 The ubiquitous use of photographs of absent husbands, lovers, and sons, and the reading aloud of their letters, as well as the insertion of the waiting woman’s voice-over, addressing the man whose place she is holding inside and outside the home, serve to frame, and thus contain, the very feminine empowerment these war melodramas also seek to espouse. If men fight in the name of home by taking leave from it, their spectral presence is insistently invoked to attest to the second part of the proposition. Women keep the home together, if only in spirit, in the name of the men who have left it. Yet even if the men at the front mark a powerful absence in these films because all the action on the home front is explicitly conceived in reference to their return, they take on an ambivalent role. By incessantly invoking those they shared their home with before the war broke out, indeed living their own wartime lives under the auspices of this past life, the women who have remained at home are themselves

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caught up in the rhetoric of haunting. The past civilian world they are still affectively making their own claim on is one they sense will not be sustainable once the war is over. Such a double articulation of home, conceived as a past that can be retrieved on the level of imagination to frame the irrevocably changed present, can be found at the center of Edward Dmytryk’s Tender Comrade. Jo (Ginger Rogers), leadman at the Douglas Aircraft Factory, convinces three of her fellow workers to rent a house with her and hire a European refugee to do their domestic chores while they are working on the assembly line. Even though, in contrast to Anne Hilton, these women are shown from the start to be enjoying the emotional freedom that goes in tandem with holding a war job, this empowerment is also portrayed as a temporary shift, a response first and foremost to the national state of emergency. As in Selznick’s melodrama, though celebrating the self-reliance of his heroine and her fellow riveters in keeping alive the idea of “home, sweet home,” after the opening sequences Dmytryk’s narrative confines them to the makeshift household they have come to forge for the duration only. The decisive difference to Since You Went Away resides in the way the film discloses the fact that Jo’s autonomous resolve, casting her as the leadman in this domestic arrangement as well, was already the source of gender trouble in the home she shared with her husband, Chris (Robert Ryan), before he enlisted in the army. Tender Comrade reflects far more openly on the battle of the sexes that, well in place before the war began, has simply been put on hold for the duration. At various turning points in the film, Jo turns to the photograph of her absent husband. Dmytryk uses this address to move into a flashback, relating their shared domestic life before the war to her current independence. While this can be read to signify how traces of the civil home spill into its wartime counterpart, one might surmise that only as a photograph to be appealed to, and thus as a recalled image of the past haunting the present, is the authority of the absent soldier uncontested. Put in more sinister terms, the absence war dictates helps preserve the fantasy regarding the soldier’s twofold ability to combat dictators abroad and hold his own at home amid the troubling demands imposed on him by his wife. Leading into the most telling of these flashbacks, Jo flees into her bedroom to find comfort in an imaginary conversation with her husband after a vehement argument with one of her housemates. In the course of a debate over wartime rationing, which Barbara, one of the other riveters, described as an unnecessary curtailment of her lifestyle, Jo had accused her of endangering the security of the homeland with her unpatriotic talk. Moments later, a radio announcement informed them that Barbara’s husband was among the casualties of Midway, rendering their domestic altercation cruel. Prompted by her sense of guilt, Jo now sits in her darkened bedroom, as though in her private cinema, and addresses the photograph of her husband, recalling a similar verbal sparring match in their prewar living room. In the flashback, we see Chris, having finished helping her with the dishes, settling into his armchair in the living room to read an article about the probability of an American entrance into the war in Europe. Mentally already on the front lines, he is oblivious to his wife, who comes up with ever more radical methods to get him to notice her. Only when

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she resorts to violence, using her knitting needle to remove a splinter she has discovered in his left hand, does he stop reading. The domestic battle that ensues revolves around her annoyance that, on the few evenings he even comes home for dinner these days, he pays no attention to her. Confined to the home and responsible for all the domestic chores, Jo feels she is nothing more than a “cheap substitute for a housekeeper.” Chris defends himself by asserting that he is working overtime at the plant so that he will have enough money saved up to see his wife through once he enlists. Jo’s counterattack is what finally gets Chris to drop his magazine and rise from his chair. To her threat, “Either you give up this night work and spend your evenings with me or I’ll go out tomorrow morning and get myself a job,” her husband angrily retorts she will do no such thing. For a few moments they hover around each other as if in a boxing ring, until, overwhelmed by her resolve, he declares her the winner of this domestic fight. Their romantic embrace seals his promise that he will give up his night work, yet the scene draws out the ambivalence inscribed in this temporary cease-fire. America’s entrance into the war will turn his absence from her home into an irrevocable fact and compel Jo to do what he explicitly forbids. By standing in for her husband at the plant, she is finally liberated from being confined to precisely the domestic work she had determined to be the cause of her marital discontent in the first place. The peacetime home she reinvokes as her emotional compass during wartime is one shown to be riddled with discord. Although each of the arguments her flashbacks bring to the screen as scenes from a domestic battlefield end with a reconfirmation of the sentimental bond between the couple, the changed social conditions of the home front, separating husband and wife while placing Jo in charge of a troop of women at the workplace and at home, are presented not as a break with but a continuation of gender trouble preceding the outbreak of the war. While, in her flashbacks, Jo acknowledges her independent spirit to have been the source of all their disagreements, the film also casts this self-assertion as the emblem of feminine fortitude necessary for women to successfully meet the challenges of the home front. The melodramatic resolution of Tender Comrade sustains this duplicity when, in the final sequence, Jo receives the telegram informing her that Chris has died in action. Once more she flees to her room for a solitary meditation, only now she addresses not only her husband’s photograph but also the son she has borne in his absence, sleeping in his cradle. To foreground the spectrality of the idea of home that Jo needs to help her come to terms with her real loss, this scene significantly does not move to a final flashback but instead includes a voice-over of the dead man. As Jo invokes the memory of the father for the son who will never know him, we return vocally but not visually to previous scenes in which Chris had imagined the home they would build upon his return. These verbal insets punctuate her own passionate appeal to her son to remember that his father died for a good thing, culminating in Robert Ryan’s voice-over murmuring, “It will be great to live with you, with enough food and our own home. That’s what the war’s about, I guess.” As her personal tragedy fires Jo’s patriotic pathos, a seamless shift in address occurs. Although she is holding

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her son in one arm and his father’s photograph in the other, Jo is no longer addressing an absent man, now literally a ghost. With her appeal not to forget that the fight American men and women are putting on display overseas and on the home front is justified by the collective dream of America as a free nation, she is, first and foremost, addressing the audience beyond the screen.13 By telling her son that his father’s sacrifice, along with his fantasy of the home he had wanted for his son, is an inheritance he must not betray, she is also speaking about the sacrifice asked of all those who, like her, have remained at home. The fortitude she puts on display regarding her personal tragedy is a call to them to do the same. At the end of her patriotic aria, she puts her son back in his cradle and, disregarding the fact that he has begun to cry, leaves him in the dark bedroom, closing the door behind her to again join the others downstairs. For a brief moment she hesitates at the top of the stairs, finally breaking into tears. Then, admonishing herself to “think of him and you’ll come through,” she again pulls herself together. Although we hear Ginger Rogers’s voice, telling her character Jo to “take it on the chin like a soldier’s wife,” the mise-en-scène remains ironic. For the first time in the film, the heroine’s inner apostrophe is directed not to the absent man but to herself. While she begins to walk down the stairs, stoically composing herself, a smile begins to spread across her face. She is leaving behind the darkened bedroom, site of her sustained communion with her absent husband but also the place where flashbacks brought to the screen a past now unequivocally irretrievable. As emotionally painful as this turning away from the imaginary dialogues that have sustained her emotionally throughout the narrative may be, it is the mark of liberation. Walking down the stairs she is also turning her back on the remembrance of the troubled home fantasy, which, repeatedly spilling over into her wartime life, had haunted her current claim to autonomy. When Ginger Rogers walks past the stationary camera, positioned on one of the stairs, her movement jolts the image, as though to signify that what sort of woman she will become in the face of her loss is as yet uncertain (recalling Scarlett’s final scene). There may be a discrepancy between the voice-over’s appeal to the soldier’s wife and the close-up capturing her confident smile, yet this sequence ends on the note of a dual gain. Unabashedly in line with OWI’s propaganda, Jo’s final monologue delivers the story the home front needs to survive the hardships of war, even while, on a more personal note, she has also stabilized all memories of the past into the assuaging image of her husband as war hero. Domestic battles can no longer trouble this memory. In death, Chris is perfected as her tender comrade. We can read the final close-up of Ginger Rogers’s smile either as a trope for the stoic acceptance of death war necessitates or as a trope for the claim to independence female war workers had achieved. In either case, ambivalence is written into the dual voicing that Hollywood’s reconception of the home front invariably taps into. Part of the affective force of these war melodramas lies in the fact that, even as they reimagined the emotional rewards of a secure home on screen, in reality as many as twenty million people had left their actual homes, going to military camps and then overseas, or to cities hitherto unknown to them to take jobs in war

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plants.14 These films thrive on a further discrepancy. As site of an unprecedented feminine empowerment, the home front took women outside the very home that Hollywood’s melodramatic imagination also claimed was their affective domain, making them the placeholders of both sites at once. Once D-Day signaled a turn in the tide of the war, the government launched an equally skillful advertising campaign to cast the mythic figure of Rosie the Riveter aside in exchange for the rebirth of the leisured domestic housewife, whose rightful place was only in her home with her family. While many former riveters were forced to acknowledge that people were no longer interested in hearing their stories once the war was over, they themselves never forgot. It would take another historical moment of social turmoil, the civil rights movement in the wake of Vietnam, to foreground that the war-workers’ experience of freedom, shared camaraderie, taste for making their own money, and pride in their accomplishments had been the watershed for latetwentieth-century feminism.15

Domestic Camps of War With Swing Shift, Jonathan Demme returns to this extraordinary moment of women’s empowerment from the position of hindsight, reconceptualizing their autonomy on the home front through the effects it was to have had. Where the melodramas discussed so far use the visual and vocal invocation of the men fighting overseas to hold together the fantasy of the home as a site of affection and refuge they can return to after the war, this film self-consciously erases this spectral frame. The shift in perspective he offers consists in drawing our attention to the way the exhilarating experience of independence, which women had enjoyed since their men went away, was something the veterans, and with them the culture at large, needed to address, if only belatedly. Looking back at this historical moment of social change through the lens of post–Vietnam War disillusionment, the film brings back into focus what the American audience in the 1950s was as equally uninterested in hearing as the stories of war trauma haunting the war veterans themselves.16 While the war was still going on, Selznick could plausibly bring an immutable spirit of home to the screen, so as to give imaginary respite from the real changes everyone was drawn into in wartime America. Demme’s own revisionary impetus consists of imbuing his revisitation of this past with a nostalgia of his own. From the shadows of our cultural memory he seeks to retrieve the double victory achieved by the women fighting on the home front. Set in Santa Monica, California, Swing Shift traces the awakening of Kay (Goldie Hawn), once the husband she used to do everything for enlists. Although her husband, Jack, has forbidden her to work, she is utterly transfixed by a newsreel asking women to take on war production work. The scene splices together a close-up of Goldie Hawn’s beaming face with original footage from the OWI short Women in Defense, positioning the story about to start as a continuation in the real of the patriotic glamour she has seen on screen. Kay immediately signs up for a job at the McBride Aircraft Company not so much out of economic stress than to live the dream inspired by this vision. Demme signals that his own imaginary reenactment

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of the battle of production will bring into our field of vision what the war propaganda films screened out, even while parodically reiterating their key lines of appeal. From the moment Kay is shown standing in line with women of different race, class, and age, we find ourselves on a domestic battleground. From inside the factory, the older male workers who have remained in the plant are viciously taunting them. During her first class, Kay’s riveting instructor, explicitly reiterating the male narrator of Glamour Girls of 1943, explains, “Believe me ladies, as strange as this may seem, after training, you’ll use these tools as easily as you would a can opener or a sewing machine needle at home.” Given Demme’s shift in perspective, in his film the seamless move from housework to work in defense takes on a more ironic tone. It will foreground the battle of the sexes that must be fought before any sense of familiarity at the workplace can set in. Once both Kay and her neighbor Hazel (Christine Lahti) start working the swing shift from 4 p.m. to midnight, they find themselves beleaguered by their fellow workers, who openly tell them that they do not belong in the plant. They call them patsies and repeatedly make them the butt of jokes, and in an effort to obstruct their work give them inadequate tools. The front lines between the oldtimers and what they call “fly-by-night women” could be read as the realization of Kay’s own husband’s prejudice against his wife working, but the film pitches the voice of national defense against this overtly unconstructive rivalry from the men. For a second time we see Kay in a movie theater, watching a newsreel, only now she has been joined by Hazel. Together they draw mutual confidence from the visual depiction of a victorious battle overseas for their own domestic battle in the aircraft plant. Once more, the film screen is positioned as a double instrument of war propaganda. While on a collective level it perpetuates the national dream that victory can be won, on a personal level it allows Kay to conceive of herself quite literally as a soldier, in her case with a rivet gun, called upon to win her individual battle on the production line. Focalized through the eyes of a moviegoing heroine, the home front is presented as a domestic counterpart to the war’s front lines. Of equal importance for her personal victory is the solidarity Kay is able to muster among the women workers.

Figure 10 Left: Swing Shift; right: Tender Comrade. The female star as defense plant leadman. Digital frame enlargement.

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Faced with a clearly targeted mutual enemy, the women realize that only if they support each other can they fulfill the expectations placed on them regarding national defense, and thereby win self-esteem. The two demands are shown to be conjoined when, standing outside the plant, Kay, surrounded by her fellow riveters, watches a fleet of bombers take off. Giving voice to their shared pride, she exclaims: “We made those.” Ultimately, Kay will be made leadman because her particular woman’s touch comprises not only standing up for the rights of other women in the plant but also having the presence of mind along with a dexterity of body to intervene when she sees one of the workers almost smothered by a propeller that has come unhooked. Staged as the fulfillment of the dream that began in the movie theater, we see her, after her promotion, driving in a cart above all the other workers, pointing out the movement of the production line to the director of the plant. This is Demme’s homage to Ginger Rogers in the only factory scene in Tender Comrade, driving above the planes being assembled and signaling to her friends. Where, in Dmytryk’s war melodrama this was the starting point for a narrative about five women’s makeshift wartime household, in Swing Shift it marks the acme of the film’s focus on how female camaraderie forged in the defense plant also leads to changes in domestic life. Given their growing solidarity at work, Kay and Hazel come to share the intimacy of their living rooms as well, drinking, joking, and dancing together, unabashedly enjoying each other’s company in the absence of their men. Although we see Kay writing letters to Jack, he has no marked spectral presence. For the duration at least, she has abandoned the role of woman in waiting. Instead, the morally risqué makeshift alliances that World War II melodramas only obliquely gesture toward are explicitly played through. Swing Shift includes the extramarital affair Selznick’s Anne so staunchly resists. Kay finally gives in to the persistent advances of the leadman Lucky (Kurt Russell), allowing him to fill in for her husband in the privacy of her home as she is filling in for Jack in the defense plant. Suspending the morality of prewar codes further, the film repeatedly shows Kay, Hazel, and Lucky sharing their recreational fun between the shifts. Liberation regarding sexual mores as well as new definitions of female friendship are presented as an extension of the awakening in self-esteem Kay comes to experience in the defense plant. The nostalgic tone Demme gives to his postmodern refiguration of the World War II home-front films is based on the fact that, even before the war is over, the carnivalesque overturning of prewar conceptions of femininity is shown to have been a limited opportunity. When Jack unexpectedly comes home on furlough, his actual presence in the home calls forth a sobering awakening for both. He is forced to confront the fact that, as a leadman in a defense plant, his wife now stands implicitly in economic competition with him. Regarding their sexual life, she has also refused to confine herself to waiting for him to return. In the quiet despair with which he responds to her admission, “I’m not the same and neither are you,” she finds herself compelled to recognize the emotional toll her own battle on the home front has taken. Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom, Kay reads the note Jack has left before returning to his unit prematurely, and while we see her image

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doubled, Goldie Hawn’s voice-over reads out loud the betrayed man’s words of moral confusion: “I’m different, you’re different, the whole world is different. I don’t know what’s right anymore.” The dream of self-realization she has been living ever since she joined the McBride Aircraft Company now stands doubled by her moral obligation to the man who went to war for her, yet whose demands on her she had to screen out in order to achieve her own emancipation. Jack’s spectral presence—and in this the film returns to the rhetorical premise of the earlier war melodramas—has now irrevocably inserted itself back into her life, in Swing Shift, however, standing next to without eclipsing her presence. One last time, Demme inserts a reference to the visual culture of the historic home front, only this time he reshoots in black-and-white film stock—but with contemporary actors—scenes from an educational film produced by OWI to convince women war workers to give their job back to the returning GIs. We first see a woman on the assembly line, who, when asked whether she will continue working after the war, brightly assures the audience that when her husband comes back she will be busy at home. The mock educational film then moves to a spokesman for the plant, officially declaring the end of the exceptional presence of women in the workforce. Sheepishly grinning, he declares: “You girls and women, you’ll go home, back to being housewives and mothers as you promised to do when you came to work with us. Your lives will return to normal.” At stake is the discrepancy between the screen version, implying that returning back to the domestic home will be as seamless as leaving it had been, and the discontent this new appeal raises. In this instance, the film is screened in the plant itself, where the ubiquitous excitement of the V-Day declaration is overshadowed by the sense of personal disappointment on the part of the women at having been so readily fired. Yet even if Kay and her fellow riveters are forced to wake up from their dream of selfempowerment, traces remain of the social changes the topsy-turvy world of the home front helped forge. The wife to whom Jack returns is a woman who can speak openly about her sexual transgressions and reaffirm their marital bond not least of all because he has come to acknowledge the independence she has achieved since he went away. In response to her admission that she was laid off, Jack laconically says, “That makes two of us. We’re both out of a job.” Swing Shift ends with a two-faced affirmation of restored civility. The former riveters have come together for a party in one of their new homes. While their men are getting acquainted in the living room, the women convene in the kitchen, recalling their first day on the job. One woman admits how scared she had been that the men might laugh at them, and Hazel somberly reminds them, “They did laugh at us.” Then Kay, leadman to the last, lifts her glass and declares, “Well we showed them,” with all of them joining her in her elegiac toast. In the living room, Hazel’s husband proposes a second toast, placing the reunion of those who went away and those who stayed at home under the auspices of a mutual forgetting: “No more war and one hell of a future.” As the couples begin dancing, Kay signals to Hazel to meet her outside to talk. The final comment on the home front is one significantly staged outside the house. One last time, the two women share an intimacy

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known only to each other. As they embrace, Kay tearfully appeals to her friend, “We showed them, didn’t we?” and Hazel responds, “Boy, did we ever.” The final images of Swing Shift are two freeze frames, capturing first Christine Lahti’s affirmative smile and then Goldie Hawn’s ecstatic face. For the two women, the victory they want to celebrate is the one they won on the production line. In his reconception of the home front, Demme’s two heroines found an autonomous selfexpression on screen, and this final diptych confirms the resilience of their claim. It is a tribute to the shift in gender conceptions their war brought with it, which his film also strives for. In the war films of the 1940s and 1950s, Michael Wood argues, “home is what we know we ought to want but can’t really take.” He adds, these movies “bring the boys back, but stop as soon as they get them back, for home, that vaunted, allAmerican ideal, is a sort of death, and an oblique justification for all the wandering that kept you away from it for so long.”17 So far, we have seen the role home plays in narratives of war, focusing on the home front and the way women were doing their part in fighting for this ideal. Shifting the focus to the perspective of the men themselves, the next film brings life on an army base into focus, because, like the defense plants, this replaces the ordinary domestic home. As surrogate home, the army base offers a temporary refuge and base of operation under the auspices of a shared dream of home one is about to fight for: a countersite to the home front, located outside yet also reflecting on the actual civilian home, which, according to Michael Wood, Hollywood’s heroes cannot really bear. Like the screen riveters who perfect their role as guardians of the home in wartime precisely when they leave it, soldiers also need to put real domesticity at a distance so as to fight, with prowess, in its name. While, to this day, Hollywood shows soldiers to be encumbered by any actual inhabitation of the family home, empowerment can be regained by turning one’s back on it. These temporary home replacements also mirror the actual battle on the front lines because they reconfigure notions of enmity. Like the women on the home front achieving solidarity in the face of male opposition, soldiers living together on an army base—in anticipation of battle—overcome internal differences in the face of a clearly targetable external enemy. There is, however, more to the analogy. For the women in defense plants, the struggle is with the men sharing their workplace. Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity also revolves around a gender antagonism. His heroines may not openly be competing with their men, yet, with their individual claims to happiness, they pose an equally perfidious challenge to the solidarity among the soldiers. Both heroines take on the role of an internal enemy that the community at large creates for itself, so that by suppressing their feminine demands, it can shift its united energies to the universal military struggle at hand.18 Men are shown to be justified in fleeing from their proposition of a shared world of sentiment because such claims to domesticity distract from the more general cause of national defense. The appearance of the Japanese bombers at the end of the film, implicitly at least, serves a welcome liberation from all internal strife, including that within the military base itself, because it can be answered with

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a direct declaration of war in a way not possible on the domestic front. Home as a celebrated ideal proves to work most successfully when it remains an imaginary geography, adored at a distance. As Wood suggests, at issue in relocating a domestic battle of the sexes overseas in a combat zone is that if women are the ones who assert the myth of community in the movies, by proposing the world of home life with its porches, kitchens, gossip, and schools, a world from which the American hero is decidedly on the run, “it is men in groups who represent a temporary, wishful exemption from this grim destiny.” They do so by replacing the feminine community with “corporate masculine adventures, of which war is the most common and most easily available.”19 Set in the Schofield Barracks on Hawaii in 1941, From Here to Eternity is predicated on overcoming various intertwined articulations of internal enmity. When Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift), having just been transferred to G Company, introduces himself to his new commanding officer, Capt. Holmes, he discovers that his assignment was not accidental. Holmes needs him as a middleweight for his boxing team to win this year’s finals, hoping thereby to be promoted to major. Although Prewitt insists that he quit boxing over a year earlier after accidentally blinding his partner during practice, he is warned by Sgt. Warden (Burt Lancaster), the captain’s right hand, that to refuse this offer is tantamount to inviting persecution. The scene stages Prewitt’s persistence in not ceding to these officers’ threats as one of two disturbances to their rule of illicit deals regarding personal promotions on the base. As Warden walks out of the building with his recalcitrant private, Holmes’s wife, Karen (Deborah Kerr), drives up in her car. Although her photograph stands on the commander’s desk throughout this initial altercation, she represents the other staunchly independent figure troubling the clandestine homosocial regulations governing this military community. Warden will prove to be the one connecting both. For one, he will condone but also contain the hazing of Prewitt that immediately sets in. Under his supervision, the other members of the boxing team humiliate Prewitt, the drill sergeant torments him, and Holmes himself tries to get a court-martial going—all in the hope of breaking his spirit. Relegated to the role of knowing witness to these illegal actions, Warden will himself transgress moral codes by having an adulterous affair with the wife of his supervisor, known around base for her sexual laxity. Throughout From Here to Eternity, Prewitt insists on staying true to his personal convictions, even while accepting the hazing to be part of the homosocial bond that holds the army together. His friend Maggio (Frank Sinatra) embodies a soldier’s stubborn pursuit of individual happiness at odds with the spirit of self-discipline, and thus a feminized figure. He refuses the voluntary subjugation on which all contracts between individual soldiers and the military community at large are based, regardless of whether these codes of loyalty are fairly implemented. His is the voice of internal difference that cannot be assimilated. His insubordination causes the covert practices of humiliation used to discipline Prewitt’s obstinacy to erupt in an overt expression of illegal violence. Positioned by the film as the anamorphotic counterscene to the boxing that Prewitt, on base, refuses to take part in, Maggio,

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off base, gets in a bar fight with the head guard of the stockade. Warden intervenes in what “Fatso” Judson, having pulled his switchblade, calls “a private affair.” Any attack on one of his men, Warden explains, concerns the integrity of G Company and is his affair as well. The scene is crucial because, although Warden succeeds in terminating this internal quarrel before either of the men gets hurt, he can do so only by himself threatening to wound “Fatso” with the broken bottle he has grabbed as his weapon. Killing, we are given to understand, is clearly what these soldiers want, trained as they are for violent combat that, during peacetime, can find no release on the army base. The cease-fire Warden is able to broker, in a quarrel that renders the boundary between public and private affair blurred, is fragile at best. Once Maggio is court-martialed for walking off guard duty and finds himself sentenced to six months in the stockade, nothing can prevent “Fatso” from finishing off their personal fight under the auspices of punishment officially condoned by military law. Maggio will ultimately escape from the prison, using his individualistic spirit to outwit his jailor and reunite with his company. He has, however, been wounded during the torture inflicted upon him, so that when he finally reaches Prewitt he only has enough strength left to describe what his tormentor has done to him before dying in his buddy’s arms. His corpse is the first human casualty of the film, attesting to the necessity of war to harness the transgressive violence inherent to the military community. Significantly, the scene is introduced by a nocturnal conversation between Warden and Prewitt, pointing to the other site of contention that is necessary in order to contain war. When Maggio suddenly appears out of the dark, the other two men are sitting in the middle of the road, both drunk. Warden has just confessed: “I got the biggest troubles in the whole world . . . take love.” While the military community in From Here to Eternity is ultimately able to regulate internal corruption by punishing its rogue members, the civilian community is perceived as bringing with it unmanageable emotional entanglement. The claims women make on soldiers in the name of love can only be regulated by being refused. The specter of a feminine home this melodrama raises proves to be the dark inversion of the World War II melodramas’ celebration of the invincible fortress called the American home.20 The trouble posed by women is that they ask of their men to be emotionally in two places at once, straddling the expectations of the army with their demands for proper marriages and family life. As lethal as the masculine corporate enterprise of war may be (with the human casualties lost in the Pacific an explicit historical intertext for this 1950s revisitation of Pearl Harbor), it is the refuge these men will ultimately prefer over all romantic alliances. The film deploys parallel editing to introduce this second articulation of internal difference at home on the eve of war. In the same nightclub in which Maggio criticizes “Fatso” Judson’s piano playing, setting his own destruction in motion, Prewitt meets the young woman who will try to wean him away from the army. Although Prewitt calls himself a “thirty years man,” claiming he is “in for the whole ride,” Alma (Donna Reed) proves to be alluring enough to provoke his jealousy when she, being paid to be nice to all of the customers, starts flirting with another man. Leaving

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the private alone, sulking in his chair while waiting for another chance to approach the woman he has fallen in love with at first sight, the sequence moves to the second romantic couple. Warden, himself well into his career as a military man, is equally fascinated by Karen Holmes. In order to be together with the company commander’s wife, he is willing to risk personal demotion. After having met on the boardwalk, these two clandestine lovers proceed to the beach, take off all but their bathing suits, and swim off together into the setting sun. While, back at the club, Alma leads Prewitt into a private parlor to signal her willingness to treat him differently from the other men, the other newly formed couple consummates their passion on the beach. On the most extreme edge of the homeland, Karen will also have to contend with her lover’s jealousy, finding herself compelled to tell the story of her broken marriage and the miscarriage of her child before Warden can see beyond the gossip he has heard about her. In perfect symmetry, Prewitt’s own confession about the terrible guilt he still harbors at having accidentally blinded his sparring partner is what ultimately dismantles Alma’s reticence at getting intimate with a soldier. Her plan is to go back to her hometown in Oregon so that, with the money she has earned entertaining troops in Hawaii, she can rehabilitate her family name. Prewitt also finds himself torn between two emotional allegiances. Although, given that he lost his parents early on in life, the army is the one home he has, he accepts the key to Alma’s house. It is in this makeshift site of domestic refuge that their personal battle of the sexes takes place. Prewitt proposes marriage, suggesting that, if he were to box after all, he could get his promotion to sergeant and return to the States with her before reenlisting. Alma refuses his proposal, insisting that she will not be the wife of a soldier. Their irresolvable gender difference is predicated on two incompatible dreams of what it means to feel safe. She wants a respectable civilian home to screen out the poverty she came from and the social ostracism that came with it. He wants the emotional security only the army, with its clear regulations and focused purpose, can afford. In the same spirit, Karen also pitches her personal pursuit of happiness against Warden’s allegiance to his company. She wants him to become an officer, so that, while she gets her divorce from a man she no longer loves, he, with his new commission, could transfer back to the States, where they could marry. For both women, the army base in Hawaii serves as the carnivalesque site outside the ordinary, where they can try to arrange things such that, upon returning stateside, they might realize the home of their dreams: in Alma’s case a rehabilitation of her family name, in Karen’s a more felicitous marriage. For their lovers, Hawaii, on the eve of war, is the site where they can actually choose between the world of home and the corporate masculine adventure the army promises. When Karen meets her clandestine lover one last time on the boardwalk where their erotic adventure began, she is forced to discover that Warden has not signed the papers applying for his commission because he feels he can be nothing other than an enlisted man. Karen, forced to wake up from her dream of a shared home with him, laconically admits what he cannot himself say: “You don’t want to marry me. You are already married, to the army.” As she leaves him, Karen passes under a road sign before she

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Figure 11 From Here to Eternity. Parting ways before Pearl Harbor. Digital frame enlargement.

moves out of the frame. The scene stages this parting in such a way that we see her walking in the exact opposite direction of the sign pointing to Pearl Harbor. Her future and Warden’s are diametrically opposed. After killing “Fatso” Judson, so as to avenge the death of his buddy, Prewitt once more seeks refuge in Alma’s living room. Although this murder is a private affair, it has a collective resonance for the narrative. Like Maggio, whose playful trickster insubordination would be a liability in real warfare, so, too, would the prison guard’s personalized aggression be a hazard. Both characters—and in this the film aligns them with the women and their personalized ideas of happiness— function as internal enemies the military community needs to create, so as, by relinquishing these individualistic players, it can come together as a homogenous unity. The film’s narrative underscores the analogy by having Prewitt remain AWOL in Alma’s house, waiting for his wounds to heal, while Warden, covering for him, does not list him as missing. The sergeant condones this illegality (sensing he killed Judson) as he did the hazing because it, too, is in the spirit of army solidarity. It is from this multiple articulation of internal strife that the Japanese air strike on December 7 liberates Schofield Barracks, refocusing all passions on one mutual external enemy. Put in more sinister terms, the eruption of war is staged as a welcome deliverance, allowing this community, on the outmost periphery of the homeland, to draw clear lines of demarcation between officially declared front lines of war and a temporary home, riddled not with honorable war casualties but with

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perpetrators of adultery, illicit torture, and murder. The narrative needs this crisis, so that, rather than destroy themselves in individual fights, aligned with the feminine position because they follow the satisfaction of particular desires instead of a national appeal, soldiers can die in the name of a universal cause. The attack harnesses all articulations of domestic tension, regulating internal strife in relation to an even more perfidious external enemy. The Pearl Harbor sequence splices together documentary footage with studio reenactment of the disaster of the surprise attack. In this postwar melodrama, the war that has finally come to American shores recalls an actual historical event, even while deploying a cinematic reconstruction to tell its story about military revitalization. The enormous numbers of casualties unfolding on screen signify the counterviolence, coming from outside the base, that, by drawing everyone together, also remasculinizes our heroes. To underline this point, Warden, once faced with real combat, is shown to have the resolve of an officer, even if he refuses the title. Confident, as well as strategically savvy, as he takes charge of his men in the absence of Holmes, he is able to dispense commands with an authority no one dares question. He even breaks army regulations to get at the ammunition necessary for their defense against the assault from the air. A curious effect of the montage the sequence deploys is the fact that Warden, now fully empowered in his role as leader of his men, viciously fires his machine gun at the incoming enemy planes. At times we see behind him documentary footage from the actual attack on Pearl Harbor. One has the sense Lancaster’s sergeant is in the process of asserting himself as a mythic figure of the reenergized soldier against all actual combatants, whose fallibility is recorded in the actual footage. Prewitt, in turn, leaves Alma’s home in an effort to rejoin his company—like Warden, he is unequivocally married to the army. In his civilian clothes, running along the beach after curfew, he will be shot by a military patrol because they cannot identify him as one of their own. His corpse is the last emblem of internal enmity, where his buddy Maggio’s was the first. From Here to Eternity displays a double voicing of its own. Even while disclosing the lethal corruption inherent to army life on home shores, it ultimately ends by celebrating the valor of men undivided in their loyalty to the corporate adventure of military campaigns. The army is the real home for these soldiers, to be privileged over any claims their women make to dreams of marital unity. The final scene of the film offers a curious ironic twist to this narrative resolution. The lover whom Prewitt left crying in her living room, blacked out for curfew, is now standing next to Karen on the deck of the ship taking them back home. Alma tells her that her fiancé, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, was killed on December 7, claiming he was a bomber pilot hit as he tried to leave the airfield and awarded the silver star.21 The closure grants the last word to this feminine reconstruction of the morally dubious events that took place at Schofield Barracks, even while showing us that Karen knows this to be a fabulation. Bitter irony lies in pitting this protective fiction against the film’s rehabilitation of the U.S. Army, signaling an oblique analogy. Composed under the sign of women’s assertion of home, Alma’s fiction once again displaces the soldiers’

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presence, so boldly depicted in the previous battle scene. Declaring herself to be the legitimate mourner of a dead war hero she herself has created, she has achieved her wish. She will return to her home a respectable woman. Prewitt’s staunch loyalty to the army no longer conflicts with her desired self-image but rather sustains her ambition of achieving social recognition. If her home would have meant death to this soldier, in for the full ride of lifelong enlistment, in death he can be assimilated into her dream of proper domesticity with impunity.

Back Home Compelling about Michael Cimino’s discussion of home both as a celebrated ideal and the place of gender battles in The Deer Hunter is that the conditions of homecoming from Vietnam he stages rejoin men and women on the home front in a collective waking up from all dreams of war. The film begins with vignettes of men working the night shift in a factory in Clairton, Pennsylvania, welding at the blast furnaces. Their faces shielded by helmets recall those of the riveters in the World War II educational films. Only when, in the early hours of the morning, their shift ends and they go to the shower room does Cimino draw attention to their highspirited camaraderie. Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage) are about to be shipped out to boot camp, while the men staying behind cheer them on. Then, together with their two closest buddies, the draftees head not home but toward their local bar. As they walk, they discuss whether it is crazy to go hunting one last time, given that this joint trip would follow immediately upon the celebration of Steve’s wedding. To deflect the argument, Mike taunts Steve, declaring that “life is over” once a man commits himself to the world of family obligations. Nick, equally critical of the containment marriage means to the American man’s dream of freedom, assures him it will be alright, because they, his buddies, will all be there with him. In the bar, this homosocial bond is further cemented by the bets they start placing on the football game being shown on TV. On the home front, the pleasures the men, about to go to war, share with their childhood buddies consist of major league sports and tunes from the juke box, which they sing along to as they play billiards and drink beer. Yet, from the start, The Deer Hunter also brings into play disturbances of their boisterous bond by three women, each asserting her own idea of home. The mother of the groom soon intercepts this all-male revelry, resolutely pulling Steve out to the street to berate him for his choice of a bride, whom she will now have to take into her family since he is going off to fight. As the witnesses to this emasculating domestic battle, his buddies stand in the door frame, goading Steve on until he puts an end to his mother’s barrage by declaring his unconditional love for Angela. Cimino, however, has already shown us the bride standing in front of the mirror above her dresser, nervously checking whether her wedding gown successfully hides the fact that she is pregnant. Finally, also spliced into this opening sequence of ribald male exhibitionism is a further scene of domestic violence. When Linda (Meryl Streep), dressed as bridesmaid, brings breakfast to her father who has come home drunk, he calls out “all fuckin’ bitches” to a phantom enemy

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and then proceeds to beat his daughter. In her own version of feminine resolve, Linda will leave her paternal home that morning, never to return. Carrying only a small suitcase, she goes to the house her lover, Nick, shares with Mike, asking him whether, for the duration of their combat overseas, she could use their place to stay. During the Vietnam War, the American home as unconquerable fortress is far less harmonious than in Since You Went Away. It is the place where a father viciously beats his daughter and a mother tries to prevent a marriage, which the bride, in turn, uses to cover up the result of a previous sexual relationship, implicitly with Nick, her bridegroom’s best man. The Deer Hunter complicates the home front further by including a place separate from these gender battles occurring in the domestic homes. Just before Linda comes to make her request, Mike reminds Nick of their shared hunting code: “One shot is what it’s all about. A deer has to be taken with one shot.” As Nick counters, declaring that it is above all the magical beauty of the mountains and not their boyhood ritual that he will remember, Mike brings into play the second part of their code: “Without you, I’d hunt alone.” In Cimino’s war melodrama the Alleghenies, and not the domestic home as site of feminine fortitude, take on the function of a mythic world beyond any concrete place and time. Representing the celebrated ideal of home, in the name of which these two men will fight in Vietnam, this mountain range conjoins a regionally distinct location with a base of operation for a highly ritualized masculine sport. Here, the heroes can replace the constraints that the world of home and family impose on them with a collective adventure they have been partaking of since they were adolescents. By placing the hunting sequence between the wedding ceremony and the three friends’ departure into the army, the film’s narrative foregrounds the way the Alleghenies come to signify a place of temporary refuge from two different articulations of strife. This is the only location on the home front unencumbered by feminine demands. It is the geographic emblem of the American ideal of masculine freedom they will carry with them, so that this memory might protect them while fighting overseas. At the end of the film, it is also the place Nick will return to alone, so as to retrieve the self-confidence he needs in order to both overcome the trauma of his imprisonment in Vietnam and find his way into the feminized home he, in the opening scene, jokingly declared to be the end of a man’s life. Cimino foregrounds the fact that these mountains are the stage for an elite version of male bonding, outside the ordinary lives Mike and Nick share with their buddies in the factory and the bar, by having these two men separate from the others, even casting off all joking once they reach their familiar hunting grounds. As they climb among the rocks, enveloped in the fog of early morning, their rifles alertly poised, they enter a quasi-sublime landscape, concomitant with the unique mutual trust Mike invoked during their conversation on the morning of Steve’s wedding. To cement this far more private male bond, Mike kills his deer with one shot, while Nick, the sole witness to his prowess, looks on. As in Rosie the Riveter, the wedding itself is celebrated under the auspices of war. The banner over the stage, where Angela and Steve perform the secular part of the

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wedding ceremony, drinking wine together from a silver cup while trying not to spill a drop, reads “Serving God and Country Proudly.” Throughout the feasting, the camera repeatedly draws attention to the oversized high school portraits of the three enlisted men, decorated with flowers and American flags. The vows that are ritually enacted during both the church ceremony and the subsequent feasting attest to the personal commitment one of the men is making to his woman as well as to the collective commitment this community of Russian immigrants is making to the defense of the nation. The wedding ceremony serves to cement the gendered lines of demarcation on the home front, which, in turn, serves as emblem of the curtailment of autonomous masculinity from which the three men have been delivered by their country’s call to arms. Mike, standing apart from the other men’s wild, drunken dancing, is cast as the onlooker of the spectacle, calmly watching from the safe distance of the bar. Even after Nick presses Linda to share the dance floor with his housemate, he will not stay there long, asking her instead to have a beer with him. Nick, though far more comfortable with women, is cast as a fickle lover. Implicitly the father of Angela’s child, he is also hesitant about committing himself to Linda. Although he impulsively asks her to marry him after she catches the bride’s bouquet, he pointedly corrects himself when she, without hesitation, says yes: “What I mean is if we get back from . . . I mean, when we get back.” As in From Here to Eternity, going to war liberates these blue-collar men from the claims women make on them. Noteworthy is the transition Cimino offers between the war in Vietnam and that other corporate masculine adventure, the deer hunt. Having returned to town in the evening after Mike’s successful shot, we see the men once again enter their local bar, albeit in the absence of Steve, who is celebrating his short honeymoon. Their last raucous bout of group drinking gradually falls silent after John, the bar owner who will be staying behind, has begun to play a Chopin nocturne on the piano. Knowingly, Nick and Mike smile at each other, while all men come together to share this elegiac moment, with the camera panning from one face to the other. Even after the song is finished, they remain silent, and yet, although the camera tarries with them, we already hear the sound of a helicopter propeller. The mise-en-scène suggests that the adventure in the Vietnamese jungle about to unfold on screen is conceived as an ominous dream of war these men share. Like the hunt and the collective singing of pop songs, it both reflects and refigures the domestic conflict, which the first part of The Deer Hunter has so lavishly put on display. The prisoner of war (POW) camp that the film moves to after a cursory battle scene is to be taken less as a realistic representation of imprisonment than an anamorphotic distortion of the far more benign masculine corporate adventure of hunting shared on the home front and the internal enmity from which it serves as an escape. As with any dream narrative, even when it revolves around the horror of torture, the camp sequence satisfies a wish, namely the reassertion of male bonding, which Steve’s wedding has shown to be in jeopardy on the feminized home front.22 In the face of an unequivocally pernicious enemy, the three soldiers ultimately emerge as the heroic winners in a lethal game that splices together the betting in

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Figure 12 The Deer Hunter. Dream of a corporate male adventure. Digital frame enlargement.

the bar with the hunting of deer. In analogy to the Alleghenies, where the men find refuge from their women’s demands, the POW camp is a refuge from actual battle. As an interim site, the adventure of escape played out there replaces both the world of home and the world of actual battle. By homology, the game of Russian roulette conducted by the commander of the camp is to the military campaign in the actual theater of war what the shooting of deer is to the gender trouble on the home front. This lethal gamble, which Mike is able to turn to their advantage by refiguring it along the code of hunting he shares with Nick, reveals a further, equally sinister implication between home and war. The POW camp emerges as an anamorphotic distortion of the imprisonment marriage means for the male hunter, with the Viet Cong guards this fantasy’s obscene refiguration of the forces promising to end the life of the American man at home. Mike can turn the gun against his torturer with impunity in a way he cannot against Linda, who has encroached both emotionally and physically on the intimacy he shares with Nick. Ironically, Nick is the one who tells Steve, utterly traumatized by the obscene betting they are forced to watch through the barbed wire of their holding cell, “Think of something else, think of home.” As was the case during the wedding celebration, he maintains a degree of emotional distance, a cautious hunter even in the heat of danger, able to calculate the risks of the situation. This sangfroid allows him to come up with the ruse for their escape. To play with three bullets by playing with each other is his gamble, pitched against the frantic betting among the guards. By placing all his luck in the skill of his partner, this wager also reconfirms their hunting bond. In the decisive moment, Mike, in a curious mixture of unbridled violence and blind trust, begins to grin, explaining to Nick, “Now we’ve got ourselves a game, you and me.” Taking up the gun a third time after both of them have already drawn blanks, he begins laughing madly, raises it to his head only to change its direction and fire at his assailant. As in the hunt, perfect timing and swiftness of movement during the ensuing shootout is what allows the American prisoners to gain the upper hand. As Fiedler notes, the gun becomes an instrument of deliverance rather than destruction, even while revealing how, in this reconception of the Vietnam War, the Americans themselves have from the start been the beast behind the viewfinder of their weapons.23 If, in classic war films, at issue is bringing the boys back home, The Deer Hunter, by not finishing as soon as the men get back, redirects the standard narrative. It asks

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instead what it might mean for everyone to wake up from the dream of war conceived as a corporate masculine adventure. To read the POW sequence as a nightmare scenario, covering for Mike’s actual combat that we see only briefly on screen, allows me to underscore that for this lone hunter, the obscene gambling he was privy to, like all dream work, has the function of working through the psychic conflict for which going to war was an escape but not a cure. Upon first returning to Clairton from Vietnam, Mike cannot bring himself to enter his former abode where Linda has organized a welcome home party, spending the night instead in a motel. Once he does finally step over the threshold of the house in which, like Selznick’s Anne Hilton, Linda has been waiting, he slowly allows her to draw him into the reality of home she asserts over and against all mythic values connected with the ideal home. The compassionate gaze with which she accompanies her suggestion that they go to bed to comfort each other, given that their mutual friend, Nick, is still AWOL in Saigon, ultimately wins him over. During the long sequence of his war hero’s readjustment to a home as changed as he is himself, Cimino repeatedly uses a close-up of Meryl Streep’s face silently compelling the man she has chosen to replace the one she has been waiting for, to commit himself to the ordinary. As in Swing Shift, at issue is the move beyond the gender division upon which rituals of everyday life in this blue-collar community are based. Fiedler argues that defeat in the war has delivered Mike and his buddies from the “false utopia of irresponsibility, male bonding, booze, casual sex and justified murder.” This is a liberation by the very claims of women with which, to escape from, this illusion was initially maintained.24 The Deer Hunter draws on but also refigures the cultural ambivalence regarding the empowerment of women on the home front. In contrast to the Rosies of World War II, Linda already has a job at a market when her childhood pals go to war. In her case, it is her decision to take their place in their home for the duration of the war, which gives her the self-confidence necessary to win Cimino’s lone hunter. The claim to ordinary domesticity she makes, reconceived from the other side of war’s horror, is no longer cause for Mike to retreat into the safety of his solitary adventures. On the contrary, it is this veteran, heavily decorated for deeds of valor the film only obliquely gestures toward, who comes to acknowledge the authority of the world of women and, in their name, will bring the other boys back home. The second part of the film offers three scenes to embellish this arduous passage of personal and communal restoration. Mike will return to the Alleghenies, and, as nimble as ever though now without his partner, he will track his deer. When he finally has his prey perfectly positioned behind the viewfinder of his gun, he shoots into the air, calling out as though in reconciliation, “Okay?” This noble adversary briefly regards him before blithely moving out of his sight again. By not killing, Mike puts closure on the dream of adventure, which at its darkest center had the hunter putting the gun to his own head. The second moment of restitution is doubly framed. Leaving Linda alone in the bed they now share, Mike looks at the antler of a deer hanging on his bedroom wall before he places his call to Steve.

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Because both of his legs have been amputated, his buddy wants to remain in the Veterans Administration hospital, another site of corporate masculinity replacing the domestic home, though decidedly less glamorous than the others. Although Steve pleads with him not to take him home, Mike refuses to give in. As resolutely as he carried his wounded buddy out of the POW camp, he now pushes Steve’s wheelchair out of the hospital, while the film immediately cuts to the final scene of rescue, taking its hunter back to Saigon.25 During their nocturnal conversation at the end of Steve’s wedding, Nick had asked Mike to promise him, whatever happened, not to leave him “over there.” The Russian roulette game Mike finds him now playing for money in a clandestine club in Saigon, while the rest of the city is burning, serves as The Deer Hunter’s final fantasmatic distortion. As unrealistic as the POW camp, it splices together the previous masculine adventures into a call to wake up from all games of war, both personal and national. As Mike enters the den, Nick initially refuses to recognize his hometown friend, forcing Mike to reenact the game they played in the POW camp; each again pointing the gun to his own head so that together they might once again escape. Although his intentions may be ambiguous, Mike’s demand that his friend stop playing the game of life and death that war had introduced them to emerges as a false choice. Wedded to this masculine adventure, Nick cannot shed the role of the classic war-film hero, for whom coming home would be the end of his psychic life.26 For him, the vaunted ideal must remain on the level of a wish. As Mike with ever growing passion pleads with him to just come home, Nick seems to awaken from what is in part a drug-induced dream of lethal gambling. Mike speaks back to him the words with which, at the beginning of the film, he had described the beauty of the Alleghenies, and Nick suddenly begins to smile. Then, responding with their shared mantra, “one shot,” to signal that he is fully cognizant of his actions, he undertakes the radical ethical gesture of drawing death to himself. Laughing out loud to signal that this nostalgic image has lost its draw on him, he points the gun to his head and without hesitating pulls the trigger. One shot is indeed all it takes to make sure that only in death will he return home. This derailed soldier’s self-destruction is as much a comment on the American experience of the Vietnam War as one of lost innocence as it is the emblem of the sacrifice necessary to atone for the vast loss of foreign lives this military campaign incurred. It is also the mark of a bond. Over Nick’s dead body, the community at home can finally move beyond the gender divide. In the final scene of the film, the men once more enter the local bar to have breakfast after Nick’s funeral, only now it is a place they share with their women. Mike, in full army regalia, furtively tries to catch Linda’s attention, while everyone solemnly helps set the table. Angela breaks the nervous quiet from which all music and boisterous camaraderie is now markedly absent, noting, “It’s been such a gray day.” Then John, whose piano playing had inaugurated the transition to Vietnam, still in the kitchen scrambling their eggs, begins to sing “God Bless America.” As he joins them out front, his friends all chime in, with Meryl Streep’s clear voice leading. As in a classic World War II melodrama Tender Comrade, those who have survived

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Figure 13 The Deer Hunter. Waking up from the dream of war. Digital frame enlargement.

the war and those who remained on the home front come together in relation to a man now dead. Honoring his spectral presence prompts a final commitment to what Selznick’s naval officer had called the corny idea of “home, sweet home.” As Fiedler notes, they pledge allegiance not to the national anthem, but to a Tin Pan Alley tune, whose lyrics assert the values of middle America, which their immigrant parents had already painfully learned to assimilate.27 The imaginary geography of mountains, prairies, and oceans white with foam is an idea of home they can still agree on, even after they have woken up from all the illusions of masculine escapism the war stood for. Now it is Linda with whom Mike shares his knowing glance before he proposes a toast to Nick. As in the nocturnal scene leading into Vietnam, Cimino splices together three close-ups, moving from Robert De Niro to John Savage and ending with Meryl Streep, who, as she raises her glass, smiles radiantly before the camera pans back and the scene turns into a freeze frame. With its sober promise, this close-up recalls Ginger Rogers, smiling as she moves past the camera. It attests to the recognition that, along with these reunited friends, the film audience also needs narratives of imagined community over and against all real losses. The optimism contained in Meryl Streep’s appeal that their “home, sweet home” be divinely protected is far more bleak than in the closing moments of Tender Comrade. Yet it, too, insists that this shared vision is one to be trusted in at all costs, or especially when—and this was Dmytryk’s point—one is attentive to the disjunction between the imaginary reconception of home and its ordinary domestic reality. Home, as a song we can agree on, refers to the function of cinema itself, casting a particular geography as the trope for a sense of personal security and happiness as well as a national idea.28 In all the films discussed, the screen serves as the site of a shared adventure, replaying to an audience implicitly transcending divisions of gender, race, and class the hazardous experience men and women embark on in times of war to replace the ordinary home. My claim has been that these film narratives disclose the home front to be another theater of war by self-consciously drawing attention to what lies at the heart of Hollywood’s

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engagement with military conflict. The home in the name of which battles are fought is a mythic site beyond concrete space and time. The shared dream the characters fall back into—be it Selznick’s and Dmytryk’s resolute mothers, Demme’s riveters, Zinnemann’s cast-off lovers, or Cimino’s sober survivors—is the corporate adventure of cinema itself. By moving from the unabashedly patriotic war effort of the early 1940s, through Zinnemann’s and Demme’s posterior elegiac revisitations of this historic moment, and ending with Cimino’s lyrical sobriety, this chapter sought to trace: the feminized home, already troubled by gender difference before men join the war, becomes, in the absence of the fighting troops, a site of irreversible feminine empowerment. Returning home, soldiers must contend with the loss of the home they knew before they went away. The focus has not been on what coming home from war entails, but on what it means to recognize that this corporate masculine adventure is a fantasy, undertaken in the name of home. In The Deer Hunter, successful homecoming requires a waking up into domestic reality, acknowledging women’s demands and the irresolvable conflicts of the everyday. By contrast, in all the films discussed about the World War II home front, the final tableau reinstalls the dream of home as a shared imaginary geography, even if From Here to Eternity discloses the fantasy of its heroine to be not only personal fabulation but also, given the knowledge the audience has of the tremendous casualties of World War II in mind, a self-conscious protective fiction necessary to 1950s culture at large. The next chapter will tarry with the notion of home as an imaginary geography appealed to by military propaganda. In the films about troop entertainment to be discussed, reconceiving home in relation to war assuagingly frames the actual carnage on the battlefield even while implicitly invoking it. These films pitch musical spectacle as a particularly forceful metonymy of the idealized notion of home. Yet entertainment, like the dream of home discussed in this chapter, is not merely deployed as the cultural criteria all those fighting share. At issue, also, is the curious implication between military spectacle on the battlefield and musical entertainment that reenacts insignia of battle on stage, with both predicated on a capacity of movement. Troop shows also bookend the action in real theaters of war. The home away from home they perform is both a point of departure into battle and a point of return from its horror.

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The reason Glenn Miller gave for enlisting in the army in September 1942, rising to the rank of captain before his plane disappeared over the English Channel on December 15, 1944, resonates with much that Hollywood scripted for screen celebrities in its own grand-scale war effort after Pearl Harbor: “I, like every patriotic American,” the band leader explained, “have an obligation to fulfill. That obligation is to lend as much support as I can to winning the war.”1 After assembling his own Army Air Force (AAF) Orchestra, Miller engaged in bond drives, made Victory discs for the troops oversees, broadcast his music through the newly created Armed Forces Radio, and went on camp tours both at home and abroad. His successful war commitment draws attention to the powerful role that popular music played in World War II once entertainment came to be endowed with a national purpose. “As swing became enmeshed in the conflict,” Lewis A. Erenberg notes, “it signified that the defense of popular values nurtured during the depression and imbued with particular conceptions of American life—rather than an ideological or militaristic crusade—would be the basis of the war effort.”2 Indeed, convinced that GIs wanted “as narrow a chasm as possible between martial and civilian life,” Glenn Miller had insisted on infusing old-fashioned military marching music with the rhythm and instrumentation of contemporary swing, so as to recruit troops and lift their morale.3 Transported to the war zone by radio, records, and live performances, the familiar “sound” specific to his big band arrangements was meant to appeal to a nationally unifying patriotic spirit by intoning the contemporary popular music associated with the superior benefits of American everyday life. So as to underscore in hindsight how vital Glenn Miller’s music had been for the war against the Nazis, Anthony Mann includes an audacious montage sequence of the landing at Omaha Beach in his biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1954). Only a few bars into “American Patrol,” which James Stewart’s Capt. Miller and his AAF Orchestra are performing in a military radio studio, the headline from the London Bulletin, “INVASION Begun by Allies,” is superimposed on the image of the musicians. While the background of the montage sequence stays focused on the orchestra, the headline is replaced by a superimposed close-up of a loudspeaker, drawing our attention to the fact that this particular song is being heard on one of the battleships heading for the coast of Normandy. First we see an officer, solemnly turning toward the loudspeaker, then two sailors, silently looking at each other as they listen to the song. At this point, the film sequence cuts seamlessly to documentary material from newsreels recording the landing on Omaha Beach, while Miller’s song vocally holds together footage from the actual battle scenes taken in June 1944 with a fictional reenactment of the band leader’s involvement in it. In the biopic,

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made a decade after the invasion of Normandy, “American Patrol” serves as the rhythmic musical background for the images of one of the most costly battles of World War II.4 The spectacular montage welds together the swing sound of the instruments with the cannon fire of the U.S. Navy, so that the noise of the rockets and bombs fired in advance of the infantry itself takes on the function of an additional instrument in the soundtrack accompanying the invasion. Once the first wave of troops have successfully taken the beachhead, we again see newsreel footage depicting the Allied forces, now moving on toward Paris, with newspaper headlines once more superimposed offering a running commentary on their success: “Invasion Armies Storm France,” “Iron Ring of Tanks and Men Closing in on Enemy,” “7000 Allied Planes over France.” Glenn Miller’s “American Patrol” continues to serve as the soundtrack to the military operation, until the headline “Paris Liberated!” gives way to a top view of the streets of the French capital, crowded with people celebrating their victory. What the film sequence produces by superimposing “swing sound” onto the “real sounds” of war, which the documentary footage provides along with its images, is a troubling authenticity effect. While the newsreel images and the superimposed headlines bear witness to the fact that the scenes of war they depict and comment on really occurred, the music on the soundtrack adds a second layer of referentiality. By deploying “American Patrol” as the soundtrack to a sequence of newsreel images, Mann’s biopic reminds us that the soldiers we see might well have had this song in their inner ear while exposed to the barrage of battle. The interplay between the real images and sounds of war with a song that evokes the invasion of Normandy by association aesthetically transforms the actual butchery of D-Day into a cinematic scene in which military units move as a unified force to the rhythmic sound of swing music. The anonymous troops themselves seem affectively moved and literally propelled forward in their terrible business by the drive of Glenn Miller’s song. The movement of the troops appears as though it were a harmoniously conceived and structured battle choreography.5

Swinging the Troops Fusing news images of military strategy with swing sound, Mann’s musical rendition of the invasion of Normandy depicts the individual soldiers as though, comparable to dancers on a stage, they were part of a collective movement, swept along by the vital force of battle. This enmeshment of dance music and war event does not screen out the real horror of battle because the “sound” of cannon fire, rockets, and machine guns has been spliced into the “sound” of Glenn Miller’s orchestration. Instead, it is in conjunction with the distinctive swing sound that the newsreel images of the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris appear affectively more powerful than if seen on their own. While, ten years after the actual landing on Omaha Beach, the pathos of this cinematic reenactment thrives on the drive of swing music, the usage this particular sequence makes of “American Patrol” appeals to the mythic encoding of World War II as the “Good War,” which had become prevalent by the mid-1950s. The deployment of this song also draws our

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attention to what big band music of the 1940s shared with the patriotic furor of the Allied troops, namely the enthusiastic sense of being on the move. The sequence’s montage of the real newsreel sound of war with swing music underscores the self-consciously ideological coloring of Glenn Miller’s war entertainment. The fact that Mann chooses to foreground this curious interface in relation to what, after the Allied victory, has come to be celebrated as the symbolic turning point of World War II draws attention to the question of war memory. Swing came to write itself into the fabric of postwar culture as a symbol of American victory precisely because it was rooted in the memories of those who survived the war. Implicitly, songs like “American Patrol” were the soundtrack that conjoined an individual experience of war with the collective national ideology supporting the war effort. By way of this musical invocation, World War II as a viable moment of nostalgia for national unity can be recollected. While the mystery surrounding Glenn Miller’s death became, as Lewis A. Erenberg notes, “a metaphor for the lost lives and interrupted careers of all GIs,” the music he stood for raises the larger question of the role troop entertainment played in winning this war. His AFF Orchestra helped strengthen troop unity and boost the morale of GIs by offering them a tangible tie to the home they were fighting for and dreaming about while engaged in diverse theaters of war oversees. This biopic implies that because Glenn Miller’s music had functioned as a symbol for the American way of life in the name of which the war was fought, it is also in relation to his music that the war is remembered. The affects popular music and Hollywood films reinvoke are one of the most resilient cultural aftereffects produced by war.6 This chapter showcases the strangely resilient interface between military spectacle and war entertainment. Although the majority of the examples chosen revolve around the fantastic alliance between Hollywood and the War Department during World War II, my point of departure is a military musical on the eve of Pearl Harbor, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), and the appropriation of the marching drill by musical theater it puts on display. Moving even farther back in time, Busby Berkeley, who was the first to treat his showgirls like troops and design dance routines to recall military marching drills, serves to further excavate this alliance. Michael Curtiz’s This Is the Army (1943), in turn, even more radically blurs the boundary between the military extravaganza on stage and off, reenacting on screen one of the most popular all-soldier shows of the World War II home front, while using real soldiers about to be shipped oversees. The next thematic site entails a move from military drill on stage to troop entertainment on the ground, first Hollywood Canteen (1944) and then Marlene Dietrich’s work for the USO throughout the war. While Berkeley’s showgirls merely imitate troops, Dietrich turns the front into a stage by herself becoming one of the troops. White Christmas (1954), coming out the same year as The Glen Miller Story, deploys yet another boundary blurring, not bringing an illusion of home to the front but bringing World War II front entertainment back home one decade later. As in This Is the Army, we have a gesture of reenactment on screen, filmed through the lens of nostalgia that temporal distance affords. The affective turn employed no longer involves an appeal to the audience to be part

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of the mass mobilization of the war effort. Instead, it is aimed at commemoration. Finally, Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) again troubles any restorative pathos. The troop entertainment gone awry serves as a trope for a military action in the Southeast Asian jungles equally out of control, along with the loss of any nationally unifying patriotism troop entertainment might sustain. To return to my opening example: what the splicing together of swing music with actual battle footage draws our attention to is that, historically, an aesthetic dimension had been written into warfare forms well before the mass culture of modernism. As Ulrich Keller reminds us, “looking back through the filter of 20th century war experiences from Verdun to Vietnam it may sound frivolous,” but a perversely beautiful aspect was attributed to historic battles up to the Crimean War. In that they “required to be viewed and depicted in sophisticated ways,” the “modalities of contemporary visual appreciation form an integral part of its history.” While military display has a long history, it was innovations such as “modern habits of cultural consumption that gave the traditional visual symbolism a new lease on life and helped to construct martial spectacle on an unprecedented, technically enhanced scale.”7 Given that civilians wanted to take part in front line battles without direct involvement, the orchestration of military events as spectacles came to serve as a strategy for making the business of war bearable. Along with military balls as well as drives to enlist soldiers and sell war bonds, the most compelling of such spectacles has always been the military parade, displaying troops marching in perfect formation alongside the grand show of powerful war weaponry. Sidney Lanfield’s musical You’ll Never Get Rich, released two months before Pearl Harbor, draws on the marching drill as the link between the military’s deployment of entertainment and Hollywood’s fascination with the martial spectacle. Waiting at Grand Central Station for the train that will take him to his boot camp, the choreographer Robert Curtis is surprised by his troop of showgirls who have come to see him off. As they storm into the main waiting area of Grand Central Station to form a chorus line behind their former boss, Fred Astaire begins to sing “I’m shooting the works for Uncle Sam.” While his hands repeatedly anticipate the rifle shooting he is about to be initiated into, his feet deftly merge the steps of a complicated tap dance routine with the rhythmic regularity of military marching. Once he and his showgirls have reached the track where his train is already waiting for him, the camera moves into a medium close-up of his feet. While the soundtrack continues to play Cole Porter’s song, the film image seamlessly moves to a different take of Astaire’s feet. He is still dancing the same routine, only now he is wearing army boots and is shuffling on the dirt road of the training camp. In what functions as a cinematic chiasm, the final number of the show Curtis ultimately puts on at this boot camp reverses the move from show number to army drill, relocating the military spectacle back to the musical stage. In an extravagant staging of the military wedding, we initially see soldiers with rifles dancing with their brides dressed in white in front of the red and white stripes of an enormous American flag. As Stanley Cavell has argued, marriage has long stood for the political bond between the American people and their nation, with cinema negotiating

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Figure 14 You’ll Never Get Rich. Icing on the military cake. Digital frame enlargement.

this cultural narrative by celebrating the bond between two stars.8 In Lanfield’s final number, the backdrop of the stage opens up to reveal Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, who had been leading the chorus line, now dancing together alone on top of an enormous white tank. The other couples soon join in, taking their designated place along the lower tiers of this extraordinary stage set, until the final tableau offers us a long shot of an extravaganza of a military wedding cake, propped up against the stars of the American flag, the dancers now reduced to animated figurines, holding their pose. War entertainment may well be the icing on a military cake, screening out even while invoking the violence of real battle that needs to be mitigated to make the business of war not only bearable but also profitable for civilian consumption. One of the seminal concerns of Hollywood during World War II was the sale of war bonds. Yet the marriage You’ll Never Get Rich celebrates, with its final tableau of a unified troop of show dancers, is as much a canny cover-up for the war institution as it is a troubling disclosure of what lies beneath the military spectacle on stage and off. As Paul Virilio notes, “war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instill the fear of death before he dies.” Once we think of weapons not just as tools of destruction but also as tools of perception, he concludes, war comes to consist “not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the ‘immateriality’ of

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perceptual fields.”9 While I, too, presuppose a mutual implication of cinema techniques and industrial warfare, my own discussion of the interface between martial spectacle and war entertainment is less concerned with what Virilio calls the cinematic artifice of the war machine. Instead, I focus on the transcoding of the spectacle of war into stage entertainment as a viable strategy for igniting patriotic passion, distracting from the real violence of war but also remembering its drive. In Hollywood films, the spectacle of war entertainment emerges as a tangible site between home and front line, between the before and after of fighting, which it both anticipates and recalls, even while diverting the actual battle to another scene. In my discussion of the interface between troop entertainment and the spectacle of battle, I foreground a different point Virilio makes, namely that “the capacity for war is the capacity for movement.”10 What kind of political but also psychic mobilization does the musical spectacle of war entertainment engender? How might one come to understand the energy it puts on display in relation to the affects it evokes? In what way does this spectacle address the danger and distress of war even while screening out its real effects? Is it a remedy for the fear of battle or for traumatic remembrance? If, furthermore, we speak of war entertainment as serving a tangible tie to the home those oversees dream of, what happens when, in Hollywood’s reenactment of troop entertainment, the front line and home are no longer distinguishable? Or when entertainment and the drive of war collapse to such a degree that the idea of home one is fighting for is precisely what one is also fighting not to return to?

Busby Berkeley’s Show Troops Martial spectacle is both critiqued and celebrated in the final number of Gold Diggers of 1933. Using the conjunction of marching unit and chorus line, Busby Berkeley’s “Remember My Forgotten Man” offers a bitter comment on the plight of war veterans once the Depression caught up with them. After giving her cigarette to a vagabond, Joan Blondell, mournfully leaning on a street lamp, recalls how her life fell apart when the army took her man, put a rifle in his hand, and sent him far away to fight a war in France. Berkeley then moves to the first part of a complexly encoded dance routine. A black curtain opens to reveal 150 extras, dressed as soldiers, about to embark for battle. Walking on a conveyor belt, they march in perfect formation along the stage while the crowd cheers them on. The black curtain opens once more to the same troops, only now they are marching grimly through the rain and mud. As Berkeley moves from close-ups of individual faces to a long shot, we recognize that the stage has now been divided into two conveyor belts. To the right of the men moving forward, others are falling back, carrying or leading the wounded and shell-shocked. The curtain opens a third time to show the sad transformation of the weary war veterans into unemployed vagrants, waiting shivering and hungry in a bread line. With the spectacular final tableau of this show number, Berkeley visually and dramaturgically welds together the before and after of war: the patriotic cheers that screen out the destruction awaiting the soldiers and the social disregard with which

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Figure 15 Gold Diggers of 1933. Remembering the Forgotten Man. Digital frame enlargement.

they are treated once they return home. As the dark curtain opens one last time, we are confronted with a triple-tiered wheel contraption, running along the entire width of the stage and crowning the exit of an enormous bridge leading from the back of the stage to a large staircase at the front. While the soldiers carrying their rifles march along the backlit arches of the wheel, recalling how they had been sent to war, a chorus line of veterans in civilian clothes emerges from the bridge. They begin to move onto the staircase, where, together with the civilians who are waiting for them as they descend, they take up Joan Blondell’s appeal that one must remember the forgotten man. The musical number has answered their collective call. The unacknowledged veterans of World War I have been returned to their families, but in a troubling reiteration of the rhetoric of the military spectacle. As the men and women reunite in front of the bridge, now opening out to a brightly lit white backdrop (as though to signal the open possibilities that lie ahead of them), the soldiers above them have come to a standstill: a spectral embodiment of what they were like before they went to war, but as such also a sharp reminder of what they no longer are. It is as though Berkeley could stage his promise of an open future only under the auspices of, and in reference to, the resurrected bodies of the proud soldiers before they became tarnished men. Offering a belated recognition to the forgotten men of World War I means reinvoking their appearance as soldiers. Also being paid tribute to, however, is the military spectacle of the marching troops Berkeley’s musical narrative has sought to

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disclose as a patriotic furor, screening over the damage war inflicts, which marks forever those who return home. Richard Dyer has argued that the central thrust of entertainment is utopianism, because it offers “the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.”11 Playing with this optimism, Berkeley’s choreography undoes war’s destructive force by resurrecting on stage an image of the soldiers before they saw battle. It also draws attention to the ambivalent implication of martial spectacle inscribed in the democratic dream of self-perfection that musical entertainment can offer. Though marching to the tune of restitution, his chorus line both on and above the bridge that opens on to a better tomorrow is still marching in perfect formation. The circular movement of the marching soldiers might well not only signify the return of what has been lost (recalling Milestone’s final image sequence). More bleakly, Berkeley anticipates as early as 1933 that war may well repeat itself and a new generation of men once again be called upon to fight as their fathers did. The returning veterans are not facing the open vista that lies before them but have turned back to the audience. By calling upon us to remember all that was lost with the war, they are turning toward the past. Berkeley’s fascination with martial spectacles can fruitfully be connected to his own military experience. As a graduate from the Mohegan Lake Military Academy, he had immediately enlisted when the United States entered World War I, requesting officer’s training in the artillery. He soon received his commission as a second lieutenant in the 312th Field Artillery of the Seventy-Ninth Division to teach American troops about French howitzer rifles. While he was never to see actual battle, part of his duties consisted in conducting the parade drill. As he recalls: “I got tired of the old routine, and to make things more interesting, I asked the Colonel to let me try something different. I had worked out a trick drill for the twelve hundred men. I explained the movements by numbers and gave the section leaders instructions for their companies and had them do the whole thing without any audible orders. Since the routines were numbered the men could count out their measures once they had learned them. It was quite something to see a parade square full of squads and companies of men marching in patterns, in total silence.”12 Berkeley initially stayed on in Europe once the armistice had been signed, organizing and directing camp shows for U.S. personnel waiting to return home. This twofold experience with martial entertainment—military parades and troop entertainment—would become his trademark once he began working in Hollywood. As Joan Blondell recalls, he would rehearse his showgirls like a general his army. There are photographs of him gathering his chorus girls around a blackboard, so as to illustrate for them their movements with diagrams as though he were giving instructions for a military attack. Yet Berkeley’s military training left its traces on the way he conceived his elaborate show numbers as well. His showgirls were not merely drilled as though they were his musical troops. They also performed the marching patterns of military parade formations on stage. In the same vein, his signature head shots can be traced back to his training in aerial reconnaissance at the end of the war. An equally seminal

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residue from his army training is the fact that he was the first musical director to give close-ups to his showgirls, recalling that while the army puts the same uniforms on all its soldiers, these do not make the men and women wearing the same outfit uniform. On stage, as on the battlefield, only a flexible interplay between individual and group makes for successful performance. “Shanghai Lil” from Footlight Parade (1933) is one of his most virtuoso refigurations of military spectacle for the musical stage, with the entire number revolving around how choreographed body movements produce visual patterns of perfect formations. When asked in an interview with André S. Labarthe to characterize his experience as drill commander, Berkeley had foregrounded the abrupt transition from stillness to animation. Bodies, he explained, that were fixed in space suddenly become animate: “that is the army.”13 Invoking precisely this gesture of sudden animation of bodies, Berkeley has James Cagney, who has jumped ship in search of his beloved Lil, begin a brawl in a steamy bar in Shanghai. Within moments, the languid immobility of the other guests erupts into a mock battle, with sailors and civilians hitting each other, until the crowd is dispersed by military police. Reemerging from behind the bar in his sailor’s costume, Cagney finds himself alone with his loyal buddies. Suddenly out of a trap door Shanghai Lil appears, to inaugurate a second wave of animation. At first Ruby Keeler and James Cagney tap dance alone on the bar counter. Once the bugler has called out for the sailors to return to their ship, a second opulent dance routine sets in. An entire company of sailors, with rifles over their shoulders, momentarily comes together and begins marching in precise formation to the command of several drill sergeants, while the crowds cheer them on, waving hundreds of American flags. For a brief moment Berkeley interrupts his long shot of this military spectacle to move from the uniform unit of marching men to his two stars. Keeler, who has broken the ranks of the marching sailors to ask Cagney to take her with him, is immediately engulfed by a group of showgirls wearing Chinese straw hats, who have come to join the parting troops. As Berkeley’s camera moves into his signature head shot, we see the sailors and their girls releasing pieces of cloth from the rifles, so that their collective body comes to form a composite image of the Stars and Stripes. This embodied image is soon reanimated as the dancers in the center flip over the cloth they have been holding above their heads to produce a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once more the tableau vivant comes undone almost immediately, so as to unfold in the third and final head shot a composite image of the American eagle, whose stillness, too, is broken once the chorus dancers in the outside line take up their rifles and shoot. As the showgirls separate out from the marching sailors, the aerial shots of embodied insignia dissolve completely, and Berkeley’s camera once more isolates his individual stars. Keeler has slipped into a sailor’s costume and is marching alongside Cagney toward his ship. Recalling that the capacity for war is the capacity for movement, one can understand Berkeley’s fascination with relocating military spectacle to the musical stage. Entertainment quite literally emerges as the utopian site where symbols of patriotic pride, including the portrait of the American president, can be shown to

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Figure 16 Footlight Parade. Embodying the nation. Digital frame enlargement.

transform into each other to indicate a unified nation on the move. Even while Berkeley transposes the rhythmic precision, symmetry, and rigorous construction of the military drill into a show routine that revolves around the formation of bodies moving through space in perfect alignment, it is visual motion itself he seeks to re-create. The capacity for musical choreography, like that for war, consists above all in the capacity for movement, and the agility he is concerned with is as much that of the chorus line as of his camera. While the dancers, like the soldiers whose drill they mimic, must hold the chorus line with utter precision, there is nothing static about Berkeley’s perfectly calculated choreography. His camera is dancing along with the composite body image, which, to boot, is constantly in the process of transfiguring into new formations. It is in the sudden eruption of animation, attesting to the dexterity of the camera and the dance precision of the chorus line along with the stars leading it, that Berkeley celebrates the link between entertainment and war. Once the United States had entered World War II, Berkeley continued to invoke military drill on the musical stage. In For Me and My Gal (1942), which he considered to be one of the best pictures he ever made, he returns both to his own military experiences and his first musical refiguration of the affects of war in Gold Diggers of 1933.14 The altered mood of his wartime audience is reflected in the fact that the fascination for martial spectacle moves from the stage back to the actual front lines. In one of the final sequences of the film, Berkeley, as though reiterating

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the first part of the dance routine of “Forgotten Man,” shows soldiers marching along the street cheered on by a jubilant crowd. The marching men are shot with the same visual techniques as the chorus line in his previous films, only in this case we are not meant to forget that the battle they are moving into on the diegetic level of the film is a real one off stage. Berkeley here, also, works with a troubling authenticity effect. Scenes showing his two stars, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, providing troop entertainment are interspliced with real news footage from World War I of U.S. troops embarking on trains, driving in trucks along a country road, or entering small French villages to the cheering of the local population. Berkeley includes a staged sequence of soldiers marching through rain and mud. He now does so not to critique a national call to arms that fails to acknowledge its soldiers when they return home psychically wounded. Instead, the point of his film narrative is that, in times of war, the show stars must put their patriotic duty to their country before all personal ambitions. His two stars will achieve the happiness they have sought throughout the film (marriage and success on Broadway) only after they have done their share in the war. In his show numbers throughout the 1930s, Berkeley foregrounds the visual analogy between martial spectacle and musical extravaganza. His explicit treatment of troop entertainment in For Me and My Gal draws our attention to the way the analogy between entertainment and war also relies on what I am calling the shared affect of being moved by the movement of music. On the diegetic level of the film’s depiction of troop entertainment, Garland and Kelly may be playing to soldiers on the French front lines in 1917. Their costumes and songs, however, indicate that they are appealing to the men and women fighting overseas in the Allied forces of World War II. Their entertainment, far from functioning as escapism or disguising its political message by repackaging it as a sequence of song-and-dance numbers veering toward a romantic happy end, explicitly positions itself as ideology. The utopian release the song and dance affectively invoke is self-consciously meant to translate into patriotic furor, to move the audience into further support of the war effort. The most successful marriage between the war effort and the musical film, however, was Curtiz’s This Is the Army, featured in The March of Times newsreel “Show-Business at War.” Thriving on a narrative repetition, the first part deals with the all-soldiers show Yip Yap Yaphank, directed during the last year of World War I by the musical entertainer Jerry Jones (George Murphy) and performed on Broadway. Then, more than two decades later, his son Johnny (played by Ronald Reagan, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army at the time) enlists after the attack on Pearl Harbor and, during his own training at the same boot camp his father went to in upstate New York, gets the order to stage an all-soldiers show of his own, which, like the previous one, is based on tunes by Irving Berlin. He even includes a drill number in which the veterans of World War I reenact the tap dance they had performed on stage just before being shipped off to France. Despite this reference to repetition, the son’s production differs dramatically from that of his father. This Is the Army is not limited to Broadway. With a brief montage sequence, the film illustrates that

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this all-soldiers show toured the nation, ultimately raising over $2 million for the Army Emergency Relief Fund. The tagline of the film, “It’s your own army—in the Army’s own show!” bespeaks to the spirit of total mobilization of Roosevelt’s war effort. Rather than limiting the performers to a group of friends from one boot camp, the film includes another montage sequence showing how enlisted men are drawn from diverse stations and brought together at Camp Upton in a special assignment, entitled “This Is the Army Detachment.” Overriding the segregation still in force in the U.S. Army at the time, this interim battalion includes African American soldiers.15 The most seminal difference, however, consists in the way the film reenacts the two shows on screen. The first part of This Is the Army culminates in the final show number of Yip Yap Yaphank. Under the command of Jerry Jones, we see a troupe of men marching in front of an enormous ship while cheerfully singing “We’re on our way to France.” Outside the theater, a real military convoy has assembled to transport them to the actual front. For this final performance, the routine has been changed so that the men end up marching with full field equipment through the audience out to the trucks, waiting to take them to New York harbor. For the final performance of the son’s all-soldiers show, whose last stop is Washington, D.C., Curtiz has chosen a very different final tableau. Instead of the surprise element contained in performers transforming back into soldiers as they march through the audience, an officer of the U.S. Army walks on stage to inform the audience that the performers will be ordered back to their combat units once the curtain goes down. Again dressed in full field equipment, this far larger show troupe proceeds to embark on a military drill routine addressing the issue of unfinished business. Initially, the solo singer, intoning regret, reminds the audience that, even though at the end of the last war Americans thought all international fighting was to be over forever, the nation finds itself “in a war that wasn’t won.” In contrast to any naively cheerful anticipation of battle at the end of Yip Yap Yaphank, the finale Berlin wrote for This Is the Army is far more fiercely determined. As the camera moves back to show a united troupe of over 400 actual service men, drilling in unison, their guns repeatedly pointed directly at the audience, the solo singer fires them on with the refrain: “This time we are out to finish a job we started then, clean it up for all times this time, so we won’t have to do it again.” Fixing their bayonets, the entire chorus joins in, intoning the refrain “dressed up to win, dressed up for victory.”16 Curtiz has them marching across the stage not in front of a transport but a vast sculpture of the American eagle and Uncle Sam. This vast troupe ultimately comes to face the audience—a corporate embodiment of these insignia of the nation, framed on both sides by the flags of all the Allies they are about to join oversees. In contrast to the closing touch to Yip Yap Yaphank, these performers, transformed back into being soldiers, do not walk into the audience. Aimed at moving its spectators into joining their war effort, the unified movement on stage is maintained. The conveyor belt along which the front rows of soldiers is marching allows the entire troupe to stay poised in motion. Both the audience in front of the stage and the audience in front of the screen are called upon to partake of the thrill

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of war by being drawn into the midst of those responding to the national call to arms. Then the curtain closes on the last line of the refrain, promising a fight to the finish, so that the nation will never to have to fight again, while the troupe of soldiers, about to stop being performers, keeps marching on. Michael Curtiz’s reel reenactment of this all-soldiers show pitches its own final tableau—and therein lies the poignant shift beyond a prewar musical like You’ll Never Get Rich—on a far more somber note, explicitly invoking the causalities to be expected from any reentry into war. While in hindsight we know of the real butchery many of those about to embark would encounter, the audience in 1943 was already aware from newsreels what their troops could expect abroad. Given its thematic concern with the issue of repetition, the film also includes a scene from the trenches of World War I, to show how Jerry Jones got the leg injury that made it impossible for him to continue with his dancing career once he returned home. To underscore the affective force behind the American entrance into World War II, also included, however, are documentary shots of the attack on Pearl Harbor taken from black-and-white newsreels but presented in color for this Technicolor film. These images bespeak to the event that prompted the son to enlist in the first place. Real war is thus explicitly positioned as the backdrop and catalyst for this reel war entertainment. The issue of memory work is taken a step further in that the show numbers pay homage to Berkeley not only by imitating his drill choreography but by also using the reenactment of the drill number from Yip Yap Yaphank to place real veterans of World War I (including Irving Berlin) on stage again. In so doing, the film redresses the accusation regarding their cultural oblivion Berkeley had already staged with his show number “Forgotten Man.” In This Is the Army, remembering those who had fought once before serves to unleash a new war furor. Furthermore, by having George Murphy join the other veterans in this reenactment of a show routine they had performed just before going to the trenches of World War I, tap dancing with his leg brace and cane to support him, this particular scene in the film makes it impossible for us to avert our gaze from the terrible consequences inscribed in a call to arms, in which sons take up where their fathers, with whom for the duration of the show they had shared the stage, left off. Given that practically all the performers are actually members of the armed services, the entertainment functions both as the interim before going to the real theater of war and as the place where veterans once again come to be noticed and acknowledged, in a temporal loop that splices together a traumatic past with a future promise in a moment of anticipation. To underline how the reenactment of boot camp on stage thrives on framing actual battle, bringing together those who have returned from war with those about to embark, the film also foregrounds the fact that the passionate soldier is a costume one puts on. In one of the early comedy numbers we see a ragged bunch of men from all walks of life take off their civilian clothes in exchange for their uniforms. Even when it turns this transformation into the butt of a joke, war entertainment is shown to be a powerful tool in a national call to arms, where the boundary between civilian and soldier can never neatly be drawn. To be “dressed up for victory” implies that for the duration of the war,

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Figure 17 This Is the Army. Real soldiers on stage. Digital frame enlargement.

being a soldier and performing the part are one and the same thing. Yet more is at stake in this staging of civilians, who, by claiming they are “dressed up for victory,” assume the identity position that goes along with the costume to form an embodiment of national unity. In the finale, with which the show and the film end, This Is the Army not only blurs the boundary between reel and real soldiers but also explicitly merges African American soldier-performers with their white brothers in arms. While the other show numbers had been as segregated as the army, with only one all-black routine (while others include blackface), this scene pointedly includes a medium shot of four African Americans of different skin shades. The utopian spirit of the musical genre for a brief moment gives voice to the utopian hope for equality on the part of troops of color once more poised to fight for their nation, as they had during the Civil War and World War I. In hindsight we know that this return to arms will not have been the last one, much as the promise of racial integration would require more battles, especially on the home front.

Soldiers in Greasepaint As Thomas Schatz has amply documented, once the United States entered the war in December 1941, it did not take long for the movie industry to give evidence of its wholesale commitment to the war effort. Under the auspices of the Hollywood Victory Committee, film theaters were used for bond sales, salvage drives, blood donations, and Red Cross campaigns, while celebrities appeared in newsreels to call

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upon their fans to contribute money and materials to the war effort. By creating the Office of War Information (OWI), President Roosevelt was also able to enlist the movie industry in helping produce films on war-related subjects. These were meant to explain the political issues at stake in fighting the war, address the enemies and allies of the war, and depict production on the home front as well as the actions of the U.S. armed forces abroad. Among the most popular and commercially successful films of the war period, even outranking the patriotic combat films of the time, however, were those that either used the entertainment organized by the USO as the backdrop to their narration or offered a filmed version of the widely publicized camp tours (such as the original all-soldier show This Is the Army).17 Founded on the request from President Roosevelt in April 1941 by six private organizations—the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the National Catholic Community Service, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the Traveler’s Aid Association, and the Salvation Army—the USO was conceived as a nonprofit organization meant to lift the morale of the members of the U.S. military wherever they might be by providing on-leave recreational services. By opening libraries and music rooms, holding dances or showing movies, local USO centers and clubs provided time-out either from military training or actual battle overseas. Young female volunteers would serve free coffee and doughnuts, dance, or just talk with troops, representing the most wholesome aspect of the world the troops had left behind, so that the USO came to be known as the GIs’ home away from home.18 Significant for the interface between military and musical spectacle that sustained the World War II war effort is the fact that, from the outset, the USO was a privileged arena for the entertainment business. As M. Paul Holsinger notes, within the first week of the USO’s inception, the Broadway impresario Billy Rose had conceived the idea of putting on army camp shows across the country, inaugurating a vast entertainment enterprise. Between 1941 and 1945, the USO would ultimately entertain more than 161 million servicemen and women, sending 702 different troupes of “Soldiers in Greasepaint” on tour to army camps at home and abroad. By the end of the war, the USO had emerged as one of the most successful theatrical producers in the history of American show business.19 To bring a touch of home to American soldiers at camps both across the country and around the world, makeshift cinemas were erected where movies could be shown months before their theatrical release in civilian theaters. Each unit had its own local radio station from which to transmit shows by short wave or recorded on V-discs, even while Special Branches also supplied them with manuals on how to put on their own entertainment. Steven Cohan notes that in not only taking the burden off local canteens but also taking home on the road, the entertainment produced at USO camp shows forged ethnic and class distinctions into the unified national identity necessary to sustain Roosevelt’s war effort by self-consciously nurturing “a sense of patriotic identification with America through popular entertainment.”20 Members of the American Theater Wing War Service also set up the Stage Door Canteen on Broadway, where, alongside famous theater stars, young actresses and showgirls worked as hostesses, serving food to servicemen, talking and dancing

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with them, while musicians and comedians offered free entertainment.21 Similar canteens opened up in other American cities, including the Hollywood Canteen on the West Coast founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield in 1942 for soldiers about to be shipped to or newly returned from the Pacific theater of war. Here, as in the local USO canteens, soldiers found momentary escape from both the war and their homesickness; stars offered them laughter, music, a sympathetic ear, but above all something to remember. In contrast to local USO clubs functioning as an extension of ordinary hometown recreation, the presence of celebrities transformed the Stage Door and Hollywood Canteens into heterotopic sites, which, according to Michel Foucault, are places utterly different from the ordinary, everyday world they also reflect and refer to. These other sites are actually realized utopias, in which other “real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable.”22 Because, in addition to performing, stars cleaned in the kitchen, waited on tables, served food, as well as talked to and danced with soldiers, the Hollywood Canteen both banked on and broke down the very distinction celebrity culture is based on. Soldiers could literally touch movie personalities they had previously encountered only as larger-than-life characters on screen during their Saturday night out at the movies. As though in a fairy-tale narrative, the relation between star and fan was reversed, with movie people eager to serve the soldiers they thought of as the stars of a different theater, namely that of war. Delmer Daves’s Hollywood Canteen (1944) foregrounds the heterotopic charm that enters the equation when stars run recreational centers for servicemen by beginning his narrative with GIs stationed on an island in New Guinea, watching a film starring Joan Leslie. When Corporal Slim Green and his buddies, returning to Los Angeles on furlough, find themselves in the Hollywood Canteen, the fantasy of home that has sustained them while fighting in the South Pacific jungles comes true. Joan Leslie, who, in his daydreams, had come to displace his hometown sweetheart, literally renders Slim’s romantic fantasy real. As the millionth man to enter the canteen, he wins a weekend with her as the star of his choice. On first sight, of course, the film narrative seems unfittingly simplistic in its presentation of awestruck, naive GIs taken in by the glamour of Hollywood celebrities, even while the happy end, promising marriage between the army corporal and his beloved star, clearly relocates the story in the realm of Hollywood fantasy.23 Yet one might also read Slim as a wartime Alice, who has entered the wonderland of Hollywood Canteen, which reflects both the ordinary home he has left (and will not return to until the war is over) and also the extraordinary battlefront (for which he is about to once again embark). In such a reading, the Hollywood Canteen emerges as a privileged site out of the ordinary, rather than a home away from home. Here the dream of popular entertainment, which implicitly connects the battlefront with home, can, for a brief moment, be realized. The film narrative needs a clueless GI to render visible the political ideology Bette Davis and John Garfield explicitly sought to perpetrate with the help of the live performances at their canteen as well as the fiction film that documented their

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work by splicing it into an escapist romantic narrative. In Hollywood Canteen, the movie industry’s collective war effort, with everyone unequivocally dedicated to the cause, translates into the fairy-tale narrative of Bette Davis and her troupe, conspiring to make the one GI, who stands in for a million others like him, realize his fantasy. By having GI Green calling out the names of the stars he recognizes, the screenplay is perhaps less interested in the dumbstruck awe this address allegedly gives voice to than an implicit roll-call, attesting to the breadth of Hollywood’s troops. When one of the clueless soldiers falls for Sidney Greenstreet’s and Peter Lorre’s ironic reiteration of their roles in Maltese Falcon, unable to differentiate between these stars and their roles, we have yet a further authenticity effect. Even while Daves documents the actual entertainment offered at this star-studded canteen, his film is also self-consciously about the intended force of Hollywood’s war entertainment. At one point, one of the soldiers admits that while they were out in the South Pacific jungle he resented these canteens and the guys lucky enough to be there, only to add he no longer does. He is speaking as an actor, playing the part of a GI who has seen action, gesturing to the charm of film entertainment itself. Fully aware that the story he is part of is as out of the ordinary as any other Hollywood narrative, he is speaking about what it means to be moved by cinematic magic. The escape it affords in the specific case of war entertainment is that it knows it is framed by the threat of real danger. Hollywood Canteen ends with the pathos gesture of an exchange of mutual recognition, enmeshing troop entertainment with the reality of military action it both invokes and momentarily shields from. The first comes from our clueless hero, speaking in the name of all the servicemen and women at the canteen, who thanks the people from the movie industry for making them forget where they have been or where they are going. “I think,” he adds, “we’ll remember longest that most of us arrived here lonely. But after coming to the canteen, we weren’t lonely anymore.” Bette Davis responds by offering her own collective gratitude, “You’ve given us something we’ll never forget. And wherever you go, our hearts go with you.” With its closing scene, the film reiterates this affective bond, superimposing a close-up of Bette Davis over footage depicting GIs walking out of her canteen, only now she is addressing an audience beyond the cinema screen, implicitly on the front lines. The national unity she is invoking is negotiated through the film roles she represents, but even more poignantly in relation to her personal engagement, lending authenticity to all cinematic effect. The authority the real living presence of celebrities at USO camp shows lends is what also explains the resilient force of the entertainment they put on display there. As many of the stars who went overseas during World War II recall, they saw themselves as bringing home to the boys out there, by re-creating for them the popular entertainment they had been used to before the war. What sustained the trick of re-creating an affective home in the midst of war was not just the fact that by coming out to them the entertainers were signaling that the soldiers on the front were not forgotten. Because, as celebrities, they represented the songs and laughs all Americans could share regardless of class and regional and ethnic diversity, these soldiers in greasepaint could also make their enraptured audience feel at home, wherever they happened to be.24

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Yet the home conceived as common cultural ground, which the material presence of Hollywood stars gave substance to at the USO front camp shows, thrived on a different heterotopic drive than the canteens stateside. In distinction to the live entertainment in Hollywood Canteen, where soldiers from the front took center stage, these performances turned the front into a stage, reflecting and contesting war as theater. By coming so close to the front lines, the stars shared their real live entertainment with the GIs, but also the real live danger of the war zone. Following Freud’s claim that “limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment,” one might surmise that the escapism provided at the front was even more poignant than in a regular USO canteen because an actual threat of death hovered quite literally on the edges, sometimes forcing the show to stop altogether because of incoming fire.25 If the glamour of the Hollywood Canteen produced a realized utopia outside both the ordinary home and the reality of battle, the makeshift stages of overseas USO camp shows were sustained by different authenticity effect. Fully cognizant of the transience of the illusion, the entertainers transformed what was unequivocally out of the ordinary—a war zone in a foreign place—into a familiar site: almost like they were at home and yet a mere reflection of home, erected against the shared knowledge that the brief interval was nothing other than a respite from battle. In this liminal site, the tangible contact with stars, emissaries from home, effected entertainment in its purest form. Because the audience responded with an intensity that dissolved the parameters of an ordinary stage show, what was enacted was more than just a perfectly choreographed dialogue between those on stage and off. Beyond all shared patriotic narratives, the collective passion that connected the performers and the troops was the sense of a need for entertainment in the face of an immanent danger no one could screen out. Perhaps no star was as resiliently concentrated on the attention she gave to the troops, crowding around her stage, addicted to their gratitude even while satisfying their desire for her real-life presence, than Marlene Dietrich. A captain in the U.S. Army, she spent more time entertaining troops oversees than any other entertainer, ending up with three stripes on her uniform to indicate that she had been on the front lines for over ten months. Daughter of a Prussian army officer, she had immigrated to the United States and out of her passionate hatred of Hitler become an American citizen in 1939. I take her as my example for troop entertainment in the field because, more than any other American entertainer, her dedication to the war effort was deeply personal, especially risky, but above all something she would recall throughout her postwar career. Participating energetically first at war bond rallies and then at the Hollywood Canteen, she was also recruited in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) so that her voice, familiar to German troops, might be used as a weapon to undermine their morale. For Soldatensender West, Dietrich recorded popular American songs in German, boosting the American way of life. Most famous was her version of the marching song “Lili Marlene,” which she would be associated with for the rest of her life. A soul-wrenching tune about a lonely soldier pining for his girl at home whom he fears he has lost, the song was ultimately banned by Goebbels because it made German soldiers feel melancholic and lose faith in the war.26

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From April 1944 to July 1945, Dietrich, initially under the auspices of the USO, went to all the locations in the European theater of war, until, attached to Patton’s Third Army, she was able to be with the first U.S. troops to occupy Germany at Aachen. As David Riva admits, the motivation behind making his film Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song (2001) was to unravel what he had discovered to be the key to understanding his grandmother’s passion as a performer. To the end of her career, Dietrich maintained that her front line entertainment was her defining musical moment, even while she would also not let others forget this war. Riva’s film begins with her introduction to “Lili Marlene” during one of her last concerts, at the New London Theater in 1973. “This song is very close to my heart. I sang it during the war,” she explains, accompanied by the sound of a lone bugle. “I sang it for three long years. All through Africa, Sicily, Italy, through Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, through England, through France, through Belgium and Holland, through Germany and through Czechoslovakia.” This melancholy marching song is her signature song because, in the legend this media savvy celebrity forged for herself, her singing and what she came to call “her war” are irrevocably spliced together. Capacity to movement in her case means moving with the U.S. invading forces through Europe, by transforming the front line into a very particular stage for affectively moving her audience.27 For the boys she came out to entertain, she was more than a star turned into a real flesh-and-blood person. In part she was there simply to guarantee with her bodily presence the goal she was after in embarking on America’s musical warfare, namely to bring a war she found atrocious, yet also just, to an end as soon as possible. In one of the few newsreels that has been preserved of her camp tours, we see her on a makeshift wooden stage, recently recovered from pneumonia and thus unable to sing. As she explains, she has joined the front line in Italy simply to pay her respect to the Fifth Army. The manner in which she reads her script transforms her message into a poignant speech act. If morale is kept as high as she has seen it during her visit, she assures her enrapt audience, “I’m certain that we can look forward to a speedy victory.” The final words she utters, “Good-bye, good luck, Godspeed,” looking up at this point from her script, bespeak a compelling humility. Well over forty years old when she joined the USO, she offers with maternal gentleness her familiar voice as an apotropaic gift to shield and encourage the young men and women sitting in front of her, but also to move them into action. Her idiosyncratic equation of military and musical entertainment meant not only bringing glamour to rugged makeshift camp stages. Taking the USO mandate of real live entertainment to an extreme, she opposed the organized entertainment that flew Hollywood stars in and out of camps, with a press team in tandem. She wanted instead to be a soldier like those at the front. As “Buck” Dawson, one of the veterans interviewed by David Riva, remembers fondly, “She just stayed with us and stayed so, eventually, she became an integral part of our fabric, part of the whole war. We all felt very strongly about her being one of the group.” Upon arriving in Africa, she very quickly exchanged her USO outfit for an array of army, air force, and paratrooper uniforms, ultimately even replacing the

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mandatory USO arm patch with one of the Eighty-Second Airborne, her favorite division.28 To document Dietrich’s glamorous interpretation of the role of simple soldier she had chosen for herself, Riva includes a photograph of her sitting on a bunk bed. On her left foot, firmly placed on the bare wooden ground, she is wearing a combat boot, while with both hands she is clasping her right leg in the process of putting on a high-heeled shoe. By playfully revealing her perfectly shaped leg, she endows a simple war moment with screen magic. In contrast to the charm of her presence at the Hollywood Canteen, Dietrich’s glamour at the front lines was a mobile force, allowing her to transform every site she visited into her own personal stage. While photographs document her friendship with the celebrated generals of the European invasion, it is above all the photographs showing her roughing it with “her boys” that have entered our collective image repertoire of World War II. In Riva’s film we see her standing on a makeshift stage in a silver lamé dress or sitting with her musical saw between her elegantly exposed legs. We also see her poised on a jeep that bears her name, with a shovel in her hand digging her own foxhole, behind a machine gun or on top of a tank surrounded by GIs, or in front of her tent using her upturned GI Joe helmet as her wash basin. Dietrich thought of herself first and foremost as a soldier in her own right. If one of the purposes of war is to produce a magical spectacle, capturing soldiers by enticement, she knew how to put this military art to use in a very particular way. Utterly approachable, she came to share her aura as a star with the GIs, and turned the horror of war at the front lines into a personal movie set she was asking them to be part of. As the director of this personal military spectacle, she chose them as her beloved chorus line. What is so compelling about her idiosyncratic interpretation of military entertainment, bleeding into the fabric of war’s reality, is that in her role as simple soldier, Dietrich made the soldiers she came in touch with part of her glamour narrative. In his interview with Riva, Col. Barney Oldfield explains that she took the boys “out of the uniform, which reduced them to a statistical anonymity, and they suddenly became individuals again, had a personality, each his very own”—her personal parade of faces. By touching the GIs, literally and affectively, she found a way to blend into the war zone as though she were one of the guys precisely because they all knew she was not. “Marlene had a way of captivating all the guys. The ultimate glamour girl, we all had worshipped her from afar,” Dawson recalls. “When she came to spend all that time with us, and on a common basis, well not very common, but very uncommon basis, why it was just terrific . . . she did so much for our confidence.” The captivation was a mutual exchange. If she was their glamour dream come true, they allowed her to fulfill her hope for a rapid victory against the Nazi regime. The quintessential Dietrich war photograph is one taken by a GI in Berlin at the end of the war. Wearing her Eisenhower battle jacket, with badges, pins, and campaign ribbons she has collected along the same route that she was singing “Lili Marlene,” she is beaming lovingly at the boy behind the camera. To the end of her life she would speak of her army days with an ambivalent reverence, recalling in an interview with Swedish television in 1971, “It was a hard time, it wasn’t easy, but it

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Figure 18 Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song. A star on the front lines. Digital frame enlargement.

was wonderful.” Dietrich’s interpretation of the Allied soldier was not only her favorite role as well as her most emotionally effective performance. Her bitter hatred of the Third Reich along with her staunch loyalty to the GIs would remain with her all her life. As Maria Riva recalls, “My mother had never quite gotten over what she had seen in the war, and I don’t think anyone who was in the war, or in any war, ever gets over it. . . . Wherever you go and whatever happens in your life, you sort of relate to that. And for her, this was extremely important.” Annoyed with an American postwar culture willing once again to turn war veterans into forgotten men, Dietrich resiliently cast herself in the role of veteran celebrity, who insisted on remembering them. Her daughter describes the tremendous mutual devotion between Dietrich and the ex-GIs she continued to call “my boys” during her concerts in Las Vegas. It was a love affair sustained well after the war was over “between thousands and thousands of young American boys and one woman who wanted to do it.”29 By singing again the songs she had sung for them in the war, she reminded them that she had wanted to be a soldier with them, and in so doing reenacted their bond. The nostalgia this final version of her personal take on the military spectacle invoked was also mixed with critique. She continued singing her World War II songs so as to be remembered in relation to her work for the USO, but also because she wanted to remind people of all that had come to be lost and destroyed by war. Her rendition of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” came to reflect her anger and frustration at the thought that the Second World War, too, may not have been fought to end all wars. Burt Bacharach, who wrote the orchestration for her, remembers that she liked the pizzicato he wrote for the violins, encouraging him, “Yes, make them more like gunshots.”30 As she would insist in her interviews after the war, her musical warfare was undertaken because she found war ridiculous, not least of all because it keeps repeating itself. Recollecting on stage her role as front

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line entertainer was a ploy to use the memory of the devastation of the past war to prevent future wars. By continuing to sing those songs that, like Glenn Miller’s swing, had been a soundtrack to the Allied invasion, she insisted that her audience stay in tune with the unfinished business of World War II. Taking her show on tour to Europe and Israel, her “Lili Marlene”—in its strange splice of a German soldier song, used first as anti-Nazi radio propaganda and then as the voice of Allied victory—continued to haunt the stages of the world as a real live reminder of the remains of war in peacetime. Throughout her life Dietrich insisted that her work as an entertainer during World War II was the only important thing she had ever done. In recognition not just for service rendered but also for bravery shown at the front lines, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the American government and the French Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. One of the few newsreels of her USO camp shows captures her wishing Godspeed to the men and women of the Fifth Army. One of the few documentary films of her concerts after the war shows her bidding farewell to her audience at the end of her last performance in Warsaw, in 1966. With a voice that hardly rises above a whisper, she confesses, hesitating slightly as she utters each of her words, that she needs to tell them why parting from them makes her cry: “I admired your courage during the war.” Her final words, “and I love you, good-bye,” are accompanied not with a beaming maternal gaze, promising a speedy victory, but with a sober tenacity, mournful but never sentimental, commemorating mutual gratitude. In Marlene Dietrich’s ABC we find under the entry “war” the note, “If you haven’t been in it, don’t talk about it.”31 If you have, however, been in the war and returned, this experience may be the only thing you need to talk about, even if you can do so only by singing.

Reenacting Front Line Entertainment Where USO camp shows worked on the premise of bringing a touch of home to the boys at the front, White Christmas offers a belated refiguration of how, a decade later, the war came to be remembered in relation to the musical spectacle accompanying it. The film is concerned with the curious fondness with which the American public in the 1950s came to look back on World War II, but also with the nostalgia that brings a star like Marlene Dietrich to claim in retrospect she was never as happy as when she was in the army. The twist Michael Curtiz offers to this narrative is that precisely by reenacting a scene of camp entertainment one can bring a touch of the front lines back home. His film begins with the title “Christmas Eve 1944” superimposed on a painted image of a small New England town, covered in snow. As the camera moves back we realize that this is the backdrop to a makeshift stage, set amid the ruins of Monte Casino. Two soldiers, played by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, are putting on a holiday show for their buddies, who are clapping along while enemy fire lights up the evening sky behind them. Just as Crosby begins singing “White Christmas,” the commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Waverly, arrives on the scene and sits down to observe his troops. Due to his war injuries he is about to be replaced by a new commanding general and has merely returned

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to bid his troops farewell. The gaze with which he looks at his men, united in rapt silence as they listen to a song about the home they are fighting for, is doubly mournful. This particular performance reminds him of the home he is about to return to, even while it also anticipates what he is about to lose—the affective unity with his men. Crosby’s front line yuletide entertainment comes to a spectacular end once Waverly has himself mounted the stage to officially take leave of his boys. His voice hesitates as he declares sadly that all he can say in parting is what a fine outfit he is forced to leave (and one might recall Dietrich in Italy, speaking to the men and women of the Fifth Army). Then, with the help of the final marching number, in which all the soldiers, including those in the audience, declare in song that they would follow the old man wherever he goes because they love him, the departing general is able to leave both this stage and the theater of war in Europe. As he moves through the audience, shaking hands one last time with individual men, incoming enemy fire breaks up the entertainment. What is compelling about this mise-en-scène is the fact that Bing Crosby, another veteran soldier in greasepaint, is singing what in 1954 would be remembered as one of his signature troop entertainment songs. The poignancy also resides in the marked artificiality of the setting. The painted backdrop screens out our view of the actual battlefront, even while the ruins and rubble amid which the soldiers have come together is clearly a studio set. The postcard image of home is erected in front of another painted backdrop of war-torn Italy, which runs along the entire back wall of the set. The all-American Christmas landscape, which the enrapt audience is looking at throughout the entertainment, not only covers up the actual landscape of war (even if that, too, is a painted studio backdrop). Because it is clearly a painted image, it also heightens the out of the ordinary, which camp entertainment affords. For the duration of the performance, war is suspended by invoking an imaginary scene of a snowy holiday. Coming a decade after the event Curtiz is depicting, the film seems to be commenting on the status of the musical spectacles on the front lines. The home that unites all those present, over and against the war barrage they see and hear in the background, is a mythic image of home. The white Christmas Crosby’s lyrics bespeak is something we dream about, and as such is a cipher for the utopianism of musical entertainment; it is something we desire, which everyday life does not provide.32 The home invoked by this musical performance is not an actual site, but rather an affective space, produced by bringing together a postcard image with a makeshift stage and the war ruins in which it is embedded. The camp show’s magic illusion of a home away from home is transient because it ends once the song is over, but also because it is explicitly staged by soldiers about to take leave of a beloved commander. Where initially the ruined houses of Monte Casino are presented as stage props, the perfect surroundings for the time-out from war the entertainment affords, their mimetic quality is reintroduced with the incoming enemy fire. As the troops disperse to avoid bombshells, one of the walls is shown to be real. Its bricks actually come apart, and it begins to collapse, threatening to smother Bing Crosby.

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As in Anthony Mann’s musical reenactment of World War II in his biopic of Glenn Miller, the danger of real war is part of the fabric of this nostalgic military musical spectacle. The mise-en-scène undoes both the unifying pathos of the song “White Christmas,” as well as the artificiality of the setting where Crosby performs it, by bringing the real atrocity of war back into focus. While on the diegetic level of the narrative the mythic holiday home serves momentarily to screen out the real butchery of war, we find included the moment when the illusion of musical escape at the front breaks down, because the destruction of war has returned to once more replace it. Within the dramaturgy of the film narrative, this Christmas performance on enemy territory emerges as the unfinished business of war. The utopic drive of musical entertainment will prove to be affectively powerful both because of the transience inscribed in it and because it is driven to repeat itself. After the war, Crosby’s and Kaye’s fictional characters, who have become a successful Broadway team, will meet their former commanding officer again by accident. Like other veterans having difficulty fitting into peacetime America, Waverly (a forgotten man of World War II) is struggling to keep up the holiday inn he has been running in Pine Tree, Vermont. In order to pay tribute to their former commander, the two show stars have recourse to the pathos formula of USO camp shows. They decide to put on a musical extravaganza to lift the morale of the former general. They send out a call to their former war buddies, asking them to come up to Vermont for the holidays and celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 151st Division. Before turning to the reenactment of the Christmas entertainment at Monte Casino, which Bing Crosby will direct in Waverly’s barn theater, it is fruitful to remember the wartime musical White Christmas is modeled on. In an interesting sign of repetition, Crosby’s role in Holiday Inn (1942) anticipates that of Curtiz’s veteran general. In the earlier film he is the one who has turned a farm into an inn, open only on holidays, although the world he has left behind is Broadway, not wartorn Europe. The song, which explicitly links Mark Sandrich’s wartime musical to Curtiz’s postwar reiteration, is initially dedicated to his partner, Linda, in anticipation of the home he hopes to share with her. Important for the way White Christmas picks up on this familiar tune is not that these two show people will ultimately find romantic happiness. Given that after Holiday Inn came out Crosby came to be known for singing precisely this song at USO shows, his performance implicitly conjoins two heterotopic sites. If a holiday inn serves as a site of leisure, where for a limited amount of time one can enjoy a time-out from ordinary life, it shares this trait with camp entertainment. The film draws our attention to this analogy by having the former general open up an inn in Vermont once he has been dismissed from the theater of war. The film also uses Crosby’s performance of his signature war song in White Christmas to pick up on a point already made by Sandrich’s wartime musical. Any entertainment invoking the dream of a snowy Christmas holiday is out of the ordinary, regardless of whether Crosby sings about it at the front lines or in a rural inn. In relation to the question of genre memory, what his song invokes, given that it was initially pitted against a scene of war, is not any dream of home, but rather the symbolic fiction of an imaginary community worth fighting for.

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While the romance narrative of Holiday Inn takes place in a quasi-mythic wonderland outside real time, Sandrich at one moment does explicitly invoke the actual war taking place at the time the film came out. The escape from everyday life that Crosby’s inn affords is clearly made under the auspices of a second utopian gesture, namely the national hope that victory may, with the help of Hollywood entertainment, be realized. For the Fourth of July celebration, Crosby designs a show routine that begins with him posing as an American troubadour, bringing his “song of freedom to all people wherever they may be.” As the chorus joins in, the curtain opens up to a movie screen on which a montage sequence of newsreel images of national mobilization unfold: the American eagle juxtaposed onto fighter planes flying in formation transforms into kaleidoscope images of men and women on the production lines, pilots running to their planes, soldiers marching, and airborne troops parachuting onto enemy territory and driving through it in tanks, accompanied by navy and air support. The last montage images connect the troops on land, air, and sea by having as the central focal point an American star, onto which we first see the Statue of Liberty superimposed. As Crosby and his chorus sing their wish “that all God’s people shall be free,” President Roosevelt emerges in the center of the star, addressing the nation. His portrait is juxtaposed on an American flag, resolutely flying in front of an open sky. This equation of military spectacle and musical performance underlines precisely what Dyer isolates as the affective code

Figure 19 Holiday Inn. Military mobilization. Digital frame enlargement.

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of entertainment, working at the level of sensibility, by presenting “what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.”33 By turning a camp show into its narrative frame, White Christmas recalls both the way the military musical had come to produce an effective imaginary community during World War II as well as the idea that what affectively holds the veterans together in peacetime is the nostalgia for a moment of shared musical entertainment during the war. The surprise party Crosby and Kaye have organized for their former commanding officer is a reenactment of the Christmas spectacle the film began with. When Waverly enters his barn theater, some of his former officers stand to attention, while the soldiers’ families in the audience energetically applaud. The curtain rises to reveal Crosby, again leading his fellow performers in the song with which once already they had declared they would follow the old man wherever he went. There is, however, a significant difference. The backdrop is no longer a sheet, representing a snowy New England town. Rather, at the center of the stage, we now see one of the bombed-out buildings of Monte Casino, which, during the opening sequence of the film, had stood to the left of the stage. In the later musical extravaganza, the ruin has taken the place of the mythic representation of home. What the performers are commemorating with their song is not a white Christmas but their loyalty to their former commander. The war entertainment has now taken on the affective power of bringing a touch of home to the veterans, away from the front. Nothing—especially not a painted image of a holiday home—needs to shield the audience’s gaze from the war zone, because, temporally removed by a decade and spatially translocated to Vermont, the battlefield of Monte Casino can be included with impunity in this belated front line Christmas entertainment. Once more, Waverly gets up on stage to speak to his troops—not, however, to take leave of them as he did a decade earlier, but to express his gratitude that they have returned to him. The ruin at the center of the stage, in front of which the affective bond between Waverly and his men comes to be reinstalled, attests to the fact that the war remains unfinished business: not unfinished in the sense of a traumatic haunting, but as an affective memory, which those who shared the brief time-out on Christmas Eve, 1944, are nostalgically moved by. The force of this reenactment is augmented by the fact that it is as transient as the original scene it invokes. No incoming fire breaks apart the ritual performance of unity as the ex-GIs come together in their shared rapture for a familiar song routine. Instead, once their performance is over, they join their families in the audience, and in so doing return once again to being civilians in Eisenhower’s postwar America. The moment of bringing the site of advanced war action into one’s own backyard, radically blurring the boundary between a war zone “over there” and the “here” of the home front, cannot be sustained. Yet the film’s imaginary reinvocation of front line entertainment, much like Marlene Dietrich’s performance of her war songs long after the war was over, says something about the intensity underwriting the equation between military and musical spectacle, of its capacity for current and belated movement. If popular music could mobilize the soldiers in their fight, it is also what moves them again when it returns to haunt the world of civilians by reminding them of the war.

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Figure 20 White Christmas. Troop entertainment overseas and at home. Digital frame enlargement.

While USO camp shows were meant to distract from the actual horror of war, the film’s re-creation serves to draw our attention back to the war—not in its actual atrocity, but in its magical moments of respite. Although a reference to Monte Casino, one of the most brutal battle sites of the invasion of Italy, serves as the point of departure and closure of White Christmas, it is important to bear in mind the film’s reencoding of any actual advanced military areas. Even though war is evoked through musical memory, this recollection is clearly filtered through the lens of 1950s tastes, bespeaking the cultural style of the times. If this reenactment of a Christmas front line entertainment fulfills the utopian fantasy that all musicals, according to Dyer, do, it does so in the gesture of restitution. The hope this final musical number responds to is a need to address something left over from the war, something that endures in the memory of those involved, yet something that can only be satisfied by the very displacement into entertainment that had evoked this affective capacity to movement in the first place. The actual drive of war can only find oblique rearticulation after the veterans have come home, as the capacity to movement that persists in the ritual repetition of a popular song on a stage, where front line and holiday inn entertainment comes to be conflated. In the final sequence of White Christmas, the strange splice between home and front lines is resolved as we return to the very first image of the film. The musical reenactment has had a cathartic effect on nature itself. It has begun to snow. Seeking to include even the space outside the inn in their extravaganza, Crosby and Kaye push open the barn door so that the back of the stage now opens out onto Waverly’s backyard. At the end of the finale, in which they are joined on stage by their wives and children to sing “White Christmas,” the back of the stage is lifted to reveal this white winter landscape, now once more a painted backdrop. The inn in

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Vermont, like the front line at Monte Casino, is again enclosed by a landscape painting, containing the piece we saw at the beginning of the film, but now stretching across the entire back stage. This representation of the generic holiday home has replaced the ruin that was at the center of the stage during the first show number, recalling the actual site in which the Christmas troop entertainment had taken place in 1944. Although the relation between imaginary home and war zone is now reversed, the latter has not been occluded. Instead, recalling Dyer’s discussion of the utopic sensibility of musicals, we have moved into a theater of memory. The dream of something better to escape to, which the singing now evokes, is a Christmas landscape inscribed by historical reality and genre memory. The rhetorical repetition the mise-en-scène works with suggests that by bringing a touch of home to the front lines, the military musical affectively recalls the war it was meant to detract from when it is reenacted at home. Everyone is united not only in song but also in a nostalgia for a front line camp, which has become as much a site of fantasy as the white Christmas they were dreaming about while there.

Trouble in the Camp Show Mark Rydell’s For the Boys (1991) is one of the few films about USO camp entertainment after World War II. It focuses on how Dixie Leonard (Bette Midler), first in Korea and then in Vietnam, embodies a gradual sense of discontent with U.S. military action abroad. Once she finds herself on Christmas Day, 1969, at the army outpost where her battle-weary son is stationed, she is forced to confront his sober indictment of the madness this war is bringing out in his men. The fact that Bette Midler’s performance is interrupted by incoming Viet Cong fire, killing her son, is symptomatic of Hollywood’s shift in attitude toward this first TV war. The nationally unifying patriotic spirit that characterized Hollywood’s fascination with military spectacle in the 1940s and 1950s no longer appears adequate in an environment influenced by counterculture protest, even if, as Peter C. Rollins argues, this bias came to simplify the complexity of the actual experience of the American war in Southeast Asia.34 At issue in this closing discussion of Hollywood’s fascination with martial spectacle is the fact that precisely because the symbolic narrative of an imagined community, held together by a shared trust in the war effort, no longer reflected the cultural climate at home during the Vietnam War, the USO mandate of bringing home to the boys over there also came to be troubled. Just how vexed the cinematic depiction of camp shows had become lies at the heart of what is perhaps the most disturbing war entertainment scene in Hollywood film: the appearance of the Playboy bunnies in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux. During one of his tours in the South Pacific, Bob Hope had joked about his sidekick Patty Thomas parading in front of the troops in her bathing suit, claiming, “I just want you to see what you are fighting for.”35 The scantily dressed Playmates who arrive in a helicopter at Ham Phat in Coppola’s film take the eroticism of military action to its breaking point. As the showgirls, performing their striptease dance routine with army rifles and pistols, become ever more suggestive in their poses, responding tauntingly to the lewd shouts from the audience,

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some of the soldiers break loose and storm the stage. Astonished at the misunderstanding, the dancers interrupt their entertainment, hurrying back to their helicopter, while MPs ward off the men who have taken too literally the idea of touching the entertainers that have come out to bring a touch of home to them. Given that the Playmates put on display an aggressive femininity, not only welding together erotics and rifles but also resolutely in control of this erotic performance, the home they are bringing to the front lines emerges as vexed. They are a reminder of precisely the feminine power back home men go to war to escape from.36 With the appearance of the Playboy bunnies marking a moment of time-out from battle, their speedy disappearance also signals that the war-riddled Vietnam, to which they abandon their enrapt audience, is also a time-out from ordinary America. This brief vignette of USO entertainment gone out of control can be read as a cipher for a war that had equally spun out of control. By staging a dissolution of the boundary between stage illusion and audience participation, Coppola suggests that the front line has itself become the stage of uncontained enjoyment that will continue even, or especially, after organized USO entertainers have once again left.37 Several scenes later, Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), who is taking a small boat up river to cross clandestinely into Cambodia so as to kill Col. Kurtz (a former Special Services commander who has gone insane, played by Marlon Brando), leaves the last U.S. Army outpost at Do Lung Bridge behind him. He had been introduced in the first scene of the film, lying in a drunken stupor on his bed in Saigon, waiting for his orders. To indicate how persistent his flight from the home front is, we see him, in this first scene, singe the photograph of his wife with his cigarette while his voiceover relates that he has consented to a divorce. Now, safely distanced from wife and home, he and his men, having received their last installment of mail at the last outpost of American territory, are venturing into the forbidden territory of the Cambodian jungle. Lance, still on his own private acid trip, reads out loud to himself part of a letter his friend Jim has written him: “There could never be a place like Disneyland, or could there?” As he looks up to survey the Vietnamese shoreline, Lance confidently replies, “Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland.” In Coppola’s cinematic interpretation of American military engagement in Southeast Asia, coming almost five years after all U.S. forces had been recalled from Vietnam, the war zone emerges as a ubiquitous fantasy space, where the soldiers are actors in a selforchestrated entertainment, sustained by narcotics and rock and roll. The trip up the river unfolds as yet another spin on entertainment’s utopianism—a trip through wonderland one cannot have at home. During a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, where Apocalypse Now was shown in 1979, Coppola claimed that his film was not a film about Vietnam. Instead, he sought to capture what it was really like: “It was crazy. There were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little, we went insane.”38 The particular craziness Coppola draws our attention to, as he self-consciously departs from any claim to a mimetic rendition of the complex political realities of the Vietnam War, is one that unfolds when a battle zone transforms into a seemingly unrestricted stage for one big show. Particularly out of control is the blindness

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toward the real consequences such an aggressive desire for entertainment might have, commemorated so scathingly in the infamous scene with Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Running an outfit that had devolved from a former cavalry unit, the officer brandishes a hat reminiscent of the Civil War, in this new but also civilly divisive American conflict in Southeast Asia. Seeking to bring a touch of home to this enemy territory, he attacks a Viet Cong village and drops napalm on the jungle surrounding it, so as to clear a beach to make it safe for surfing. Kilgore is implicitly reiterating the USO entertainment formula, yet a disturbing touch is added to this obscene version of troop entertainment. So as to captivate the enemy before killing him, Kilgore orders a tape recording of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to be played during the attack. This usage of music blasting from the loudspeakers attached to the approaching helicopter unabashedly discloses the vexed side of any equation between military deployment of entertainment and Hollywood’s fascination with martial spectacle. Nothing could be more different from Mann’s juxtaposition of D-Day footage and swing music, and yet, here, too, we have a musical soundtrack to a battle interspliced with the authentic sounds of war. As the American helicopters come in low out of the rising sun, preparing to bomb the small strip of beach, Wagner’s music is infused with the sounds of their propellers, their guns being loaded, the Vietnamese preparing themselves for the attack, and finally the actual detonation of the bombs and the spray of artillery fire. Where Mann’s inclusion of swing music served to sustain his support of the U.S. war effort in World War II, Coppola is equally unequivocal in his indictment of the troubling interface between the drive of war’s violence and a lust for unbridled enjoyment. To the soundtrack of Wagner’s warrior goddesses, we continue to watch GIs flying through the air, taking aim at their enemies, while the Vietnamese below run from the incoming fire, then jump and fall once they have been hit—a macabre martial spectacle choreographed in the real. The camera dexterously moves around both sites, forcing us to both partake in the affective surge and confront the toxic underbelly of a capacity for movement that conflates battle and music. The rhetorical gesture of the mise-en-scène and editing is resolutely doublevoiced. By drawing our attention to our own capacity to be moved by what is clearly an obscene enjoyment of orchestrated violence, the sequence also foregrounds what the characters screen out. The massacre emerges as particularly horrific because it is experienced as war entertainment. The sequence reenacts this obscene enjoyment so as to critically unfold what it means to experience war-torn Vietnam as a psychedelic drug trip surpassing anything Disneyland can offer. Even while the film suspends judgment, its narrative solution to the transformation of the war front into a site of unbridled enjoyment is to move to a different spectacle of war altogether. At the end of his journey, Willard will indeed terminate with extreme prejudice the American officer whose methods have become untenably unsound to the U.S. Army, mimicking the ritual slaughter of a sacrificial animal Kurtz’s followers are performing in front of his quarters that same night. Although the killing is staged as a moment of sublime catharsis, signaled by the rain that has begun to pour down,

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Coppola, whose struggle for an ending to his Apocalypse Now was notorious by the time the film was finally released, refuses any relief from the interface of musical entertainment and military spectacle underwriting his bleak narrative. After we see Willard and Lance, the only surviving members of the crew, regain their boat and begin their return journey down the river, the scene moves to an eerie sequence of montage images. A close-up of one of the pagan sculptures from the Cambodian temple Kurtz had turned into his headquarters is superimposed on the image of the boat gliding through the rainy night. Then a close-up of Willard’s face, decked in mud, as we had seen it just before he attacked Kurtz, reemerges, taking us back into the narrative, while the boat (moving into an unknown future) completely disappears from the screen, leaving only a foggy surface behind. A further layer of images is seamlessly superimposed over these two faces, recalling Capt. Kilgore’s obscene front line entertainment. As silent helicopters begin to fly back and forth across the screen, they bring with them images of the burning Vietnamese jungle. Yet all we hear, together with the sound of rain, are Kurtz’s final words: “The horror.” First the jungle and the helicopters fade from sight, then Willard’s face, leaving for a brief moment only the pagan statue, until it, too, disappears into the darkness of the film screen. As in White Christmas, this final tableau both recalls and rewrites the introductory images of Apocalypse Now. With the Doors’ song “This Is the End” as its soundtrack, the opening scene superimposes onto a close-up of Willard, lying on his bed in Saigon while waiting for a new mission, images of his journey to the heart of darkness of the Vietnam War: a jungle landscape going up in napalm flames, helicopters flying through the gray sky, the pagan sculpture he will encounter at the end of his trip as well as an anticipation of his mud-caked warrior’s face. An equation of military and musical spectacle serves as our entrance point into a film claiming to capture what the obscene utopia of a war zone, more entertaining than Disneyland, would have felt like. Here, too, the sound of the choppers signals that the danger of real war is part of the fabric of a fantasy sequence that conflates Willard’s daydream with the film about to unfold. The fiction of a unified nation may have fallen apart, but the Doors’ music that accompanied the war in Vietnam has maintained its affective power. Much as World War II came to be remembered in relation to swing, we remember the affective intensity of the Vietnam War in relation both to the sound of U.S. helicopters and rock music recalling “a wilderness of pain in which all the children are insane” (Doors). What Apocalypse Now also self-consciously inherits from Hollywood’s World War II effort is the power of montage. Dreaming not of home but of a combat still to come, Willard’s fantasy is both solitary and self-directed, standing in stark contrast to the shared touch USO camp shows sought to celebrate. We have neither the thrilling cohesion of the World War II musicals nor the somber commemoration of Dietrich’s shows. Instead, the film’s narrative frame, like White Christmas, foregrounds the artificiality of the stage where military and musical spectacle come together in their capacity for movement, even if its point of departure is, from the start, not a mythic image of home but rather of the front (beginning, one might say,

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Figure 21 Apocalypse Now. Vietnam as music video. Digital frame enlargement.

where the film by Curtiz ends). The burning Vietnamese jungle may be a less palatable image of entertainment’s utopianism than a ruin in Monte Casino, yet Coppola also invites us to join him in dreaming about it as a stage of mad enjoyment, which our day-to-day lives do not provide. Like all the other sites of Hollywood’s war entertainment discussed, it is not an actual site but an affective space, produced by intersplicing images and music with the real sound of war. If Apocalypse Now is particularly unabashed in forcing us to confront our own spectatorial complicity with a drive that joins military capacity for movement to the logic of the musical spectacle, this film is also the most self-reflexive performance of this intensity. The affective space it sets out with and returns to with these two montage sequences— the former accompanied by the psychedelic sound of the Doors, the latter by Marlon Brando’s final words—is to be treated as a reflection of precisely the charmed space of war cinema itself. Admitting to the power of its drive is this film’s form of critique. Whether this pure spectacle makes war bearable or indicts the horror of war is our worry, not Coppola’s. As in the previous chapter, the discussion has traced a marked shift of the 1940s war effort, recollected nostalgically in the 1950s, to a sobriety in the films coming after Vietnam. This change in tone marks a progressive self-reflexivity regarding the implication of the cinematic medium in war entertainment. The unabashed patriotic furor of the 1940s and the restorative commemoration of the 1950s transforms into a celebration of grotesque excess in Apocalypse Now. This film attests no longer to a united nation on the move, but to a senseless destructive movement without unity. This chapter has addressed the transformation of the actual butchery entailed by war’s capacity for movement on the battlefield into musical spectacle, with the orchestrated drill scenes on stage distracting even while gesturing toward (and thus remembering) the real violence to which war entertainment

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moves people. Picking up on these cinematic transformations of battle choreography into military musical routines, the next chapter moves into the battlefield itself. It highlights the theatricality of battle and the aesthetic reenactment of this choreography on screen. As in films about troop entertainment, the real danger of war is also part of the fabric of any cinematic depiction of battle. A similar affective appeal is at issue as when music shares war’s capacity for movement, drawing the audience into the movement of the show troops on screen. However, while the war musical appropriates martial spectacle, battle reenacted on screen seeks to approximate a real that inevitably eludes its grasp. Picking up on the use Anthony Mann made of newsreel footage in his brief depiction of the Allied Forces’ invasion of France, the discussion focuses on the Omaha Beach landing, treating D-Day as an emblematic case history for what is at stake in cinematic battle choreography. Where musical choreography borrows from a theatricalization of war, battles come to be choreographed on screen for our belated understanding. And where troop entertainment serves as a frame for battle, as the point of departure and return, the theater of actual battle lies at the dead center of war. The point of connection between the two is the fact that even the most realistic representation of battle is invariably a belated refiguration. The sustained tension between historic evidence and aesthetic reconception continues to be at issue, even if we are now confronted more directly with the carnage musical films elide. And yet, as is the case with the military musical spectacle, battle choreography on screen is also about a movement of bodies in and through space. The death in battle comes to be contained in the double meaning of the word: the narrative and the framing of D-Day by each of the films to be discussed maintain and restrain the depiction of the struggle for a capacity to move across Omaha Beach. The containment of aesthetic reenactment thrives on an affective turn, troubling even while banking on the entertainment any depiction of battle on screen might afford.

4

Choreography of Battle

Individual battles punctuate the advance of any military campaign. As troops come into violent contact with each other, they viciously give body to the political struggle between two opposing armed forces. Sometimes this clash of fighting units marks the decisive moment in a military conflict, turning the tide against one of the opponents. Sometimes it is merely one of a chain of assaults leading toward a showdown, at the end of which one side is finally declared victorious. In all cases, the actual scene of combat stands in stark contrast to the uncertain anticipation of entering the battlefield as well as to the weariness of waiting in between individual attacks or to the drudgery of crossing enemy territory in constant expectation of danger from an invisible foe. It is on the battlefield that the possibility of dying or surviving finds its acme. In the face of an enemy onslaught, every movement entails danger, yet not to move can be just as fatal. In a situation that is both overwhelmingly chaotic and riddled with intense anxiety, each soldier must diligently recall the training he received in preparation for combat. He must also be hypersensitive to the incalculable contingencies of battle, ready to seize any opportunity that arises and even improvise to protect himself and his buddies. Unquestioned obedience to the commands of his superior officers must at times give way to resilient individual ingenuity.1 With this chapter we move directly into the field of combat and its representation on screen. Films from the battlefield have existed as early as 1914. After World War I, Hollywood reconceived the confusion, disorientation, and claustrophobia of trench warfare in films such as The Big Parade (1925) and What Price Glory (1926), in ways Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) as well as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) would refigure. Other films like Wings (1927) and Dawn Patrol (1938) brought to the screen the dangerous team clashes in aerial combat, influencing all later films about the air force. Aimed at a deep reading of the visual and dramaturgic structure of screen battle rather than a historical overview of combat in film, this chapter isolates one single battle, the landing on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944, and explores its representations ranging from the first newsreels to the HBO series Band of Brothers (2001). As in the previous chapters, at issue is how subsequent films pick up and rewrite their predecessors, tipping their helmet to previous generations of filmmakers and paying homage even while filling in gaps remembering what other films elided. At issue also is the fruitful tension between evidence and aesthetic refiguration, given that what comes to be screened is visually edited and framed with a narrative. To be transmitted on screen, the utter confusion and incoherence of battle must be translated into a visual story about the fog of war. In some manner meaning must be attributed to the military action on display, even if it consists in

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drawing attention to the meaninglessness of war. The cultural survival of D-Day representations thus revolve around the following conundrum: the traumatic atrocity of battle can never fully be grasped in cinematic language, and yet, in the name of those who died, each new reenactment responds to a cultural need to reimagine this sacrifice.

Belated Viewing It is useful to recall: while military historians have come to speak of theaters of war, individual battles are also the moment when the horrific destruction of any military campaign unfolds most clearly as a spectacle. Within the limited geographical area designated for a particular attack, the battle enacts the choreography of a carefully designed strategy. Each officer and his soldiers have been assigned a special part to play in the overall arrangement of the armed assault, with the commanding generals assuming the role of those directing this military performance. All individual combat units must be perfectly coordinated in advance so that the capacity for movement, so tantamount to any capacity for war, may be efficiently executed.2 Battles punctuate the war narrative the high command intends to play through in the real, even while, in retrospect, they reflect on the prudence or foolhardiness of the original strategy of the officers in charge on the ground. Regardless whether a particular war ultimately ends in victory or defeat, we tell it as the story of a succession of battles. It comes as no surprise that individual battle reenactments should function as the linchpin of Hollywood’s engagement with war. A combat scene may serve as the point of departure for a film’s narrative because it has raised personal issues or political conflicts that the hero and his combat unit must resolve. Or a particular battle comes as the culmination point, repeating previous combat action with a significant difference, so that the psychological and ideological points raised by the film’s narrative can find a satisfying closure. Paul Fussell, himself an infantry soldier during World War II, suggests that it is the very hazard of modern war situations, their utter unthinkableness, that makes them theatrical: “seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.” In retrospect, soldiers often describe moments of heightened anxiety during battle as having produced a sense of being “beside oneself.” While the part of the fighting man that is convinced that the battle is real acts out commands, the other, protecting himself by treating it as an illusion, observes and records.3 Fussell’s far more sinister equation of war and theatricality is particularly relevant to my own discussion of how battles come to be reenacted in mainstream cinema because it implicitly addresses the ambiguous status of any belated spectatorship. Where a soldier can only observe and record his combat action by affectively splitting himself off from the part of himself doing the fighting, all cinematic renditions imply a similar detachment from the heightened anxiety of actual battle. It is the escapism a theatrical perception of battle affords that allows the war film to

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pass as movie entertainment in the first place, regardless of how realistic it strives to be. Even if a particular cinematic reenactment is in part based on the reports of veterans who were actually present in battle, their testimony is the result of revisiting, in their minds, a past event. The film narrative reencodes their firsthand experience in compliance with Hollywood’s visual codes and genre rules, only to project these in an utterly different place, namely on the movie screen. The same holds true for the cameraman and the director. Even if they were actually present at the scene of combat, by virtue of filming rather than fighting, they, too, are split off from the visceral experience of battle. At best, they are comparable to the part of the soldier who can observe and record the actual horror of battle in a state of being beside himself. As Sam Fuller, another veteran infantryman from World War II, cynically points out, the only way to put war experience on film “and really let the audience feel what it’s like is to fire live ammo over the heads of the people in the movie theater.”4 Cinematic reenactments of battle prove to be irrevocably double-voiced. Driven by a sense of urgency to recall the horrific intensity of real battle, they are forced to factor in the irrepresentability of any actual experience of war. To underline from the start that any discussion of the choreography of battle on film must address precisely this conundrum, I have chosen to frame my discussion of D-Day reenactments with a different imagined battle, reinvoked in John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946). One of the most memorable scenes in this documentary film about psychoneurotic World War II veterans treated at Mason General Hospital in Brentwood, New York, involves a man suffering from amnesia after being wounded by a shell explosion during the siege of Okinawa. Under hypnosis, he is compelled by his psychiatrist to recall the battle scene, which had been so traumatic that, in order to forget it, he has lost all memory of who he is. The reenactment at stake in Huston’s documentary is twofold. On the one hand, as he explains with his introductory titles, “No scenes were staged. The cameras merely recorded what took place in an Army hospital.” On the other hand, the amnesiac is in fact restaging in mind—for his psychiatrist, for Huston’s camera, and implicitly for a sympathetic film audience—the battle scene at the heart of his psychoneurotic illness. Even though Huston claims that his cameras were merely detached witnesses, the soundtrack he chooses serves as a commentary to a therapy session in which a war veteran is forced to reimagine a scene of injury. Pointedly, once the patient has successfully fallen into his trance, ominous music sets in as though to underscore the psychiatrist’s hypnotic suggestion: “You’re going back now to Okinawa, you can talk, you can remember everything, tell me what you see, speak.” The description, recalled under hypnosis, of fragments of the battle scene that this amnesiac has sought so desperately to repress is, through Huston’s film language, transformed into a moment of cathartic magic. This scene of healing further troubles the question of any straightforward reenactment in that, as the process of hypnotic remembering proceeds, the psychiatrist continually repeats out loud what his patient is mumbling. So as to prompt him to continue his narrative about the explosion that wounded him, the psychiatrist

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reiterates in his own voice his patient’s descriptions of a battle the psychiatrist was not present at, therapeutically splitting off the soldier, now able to remember and record a traumatic battle scene, from that part of himself so affectively invested in the utter vulnerability of his injury that he chose to forget everything about the battle, including his own identity. The therapy consists in externalizing the traumatic experience so that, once it has become objectified, it can be recalled as a narrated scene. The psychiatrist urges his patient to describe for him what he is seeing again before his inner eye. By repeating these images back to him, he is also able to produce an affective detachment from the heightened anxiety that had overwhelmed the soldier during his actual presence in Okinawa. Just before waking his patient from his trance, the psychiatrist assures him: “This is going to stay with you. You’re going to remember it all, you’re going to remember about Okinawa . . . about the shells and the bombs, but they’re gone.” At this point the film once more inserts music, as though to underscore the reawakening as a moment of restitution. Reenactment of the soldier’s experience of the battle of Okinawa under hypnosis has produced a double-voiced psychic and cinematic representation. The scene of injury can now be remembered with impunity, because it is unequivocally perceived as being different from the original experience in two seminal ways. As an event, it belongs to a past, clearly severed from the present, even while all affects of pain and anxiety have allegedly been erased from the memory trace. The scenario draws our attention to the way in which, under hypnosis, the veteran comes to retrieve the repressed battle not only in words, but, more important, as a scenic reconstruction of fragmented internal images. However, even though the therapeutic narrative thrives on the distinction between a battle experience too traumatic to remember and a belated reenactment cleansed of all debilitating affects, the intention of the documentary is to insist on the undeletable psychic aftereffects of war. While, at the end of the hypnosis session, the actual war in all its visceral horror is no longer an affective presence in the mind of the shell-shocked veteran, he will continue to be haunted by his war experiences, even beyond his tenure at the military hospital. Though commissioned by the War Department, Let There Be Light was initially banned after its release, out of fear that its extremely explicit depiction of shell-shocked soldiers might have demoralizing effects on a postwar audience.5 Seminal for my own discussion of cinematic reenactments of battles are the two sides to the equation of war with theater that unfold in Let There Be Light. While traces of past trauma can never be fully deleted from any belated recollection of war, no reenactment can do without aesthetic reformulation. Even if Huston claims that the scenes he depicts were not staged, he nevertheless works with a minimum of cinematic effects, whose subtlety underscores the difference to any actual battle butchery. Although he uses a static camera to avoid visual movement, the editing oscillates between close-ups and middle shots once the hypnotized man begins his recital in order to foreground important transitions in his narrative, much as the music is sporadically introduced to underscore the cathartic nature of the scene. The decision not to include any scenic flashback or actual documentary

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footage from Okinawa means that we are reduced to observing a man in the process of offering verbal image fragments of what he saw and felt while in battle. The absence of all visualization of actual fighting compels us to produce our own images of the vicious bloodshed. The documentary seems to argue that while the traumatic experiences of battle can—and indeed must—be invoked on screen, because in our cultural memory we are indelibly haunted by them, something escapes any belated cinematic representation. Because we, the audience, were not present during the battle of Okinawa, we can only piece together for ourselves the memory fragments offered to us. Any reconstruction of this battle requires the psychiatrist’s verbal intervention, repeating back to the patient the verbal fragments he receives from him. It also requires our affective interaction, transforming with the help of our imagination the transcription of someone else’s singular battle experience into our own recollection. By foregrounding what is necessarily lost when the experience of battle is translated to film, this scenario of hypnotic reenactment functions as a touchstone for my own discussion of battle choreography. Hollywood’s resilient and inventive fascination with the theatricality of warfare is predicated on the fact that the actual scene of battle is safely gone from any belated film narratives recalling it. Left only with memory traces cleansed of real fear and anxiety to work with, the reconstruction is affectively effective because the real experience of slaughter, lying beyond what cinematic language can hope to capture on screen, can successfully be recoded. At stake in cinematic choreography of battle is the question of organizing a visceral experience of destruction in all its confusion and multiplicity by giving a visual logic to the chaotic experience of battle. Fuller laconically surmises, “in the movies it is almost impossible to show a real war. There is smoke everywhere.”6 If the irrepresentability of actual war carnage emerges as the grounds and vanishing point of all battle representation, we must not overlook the aesthetic gain. As my discussion of Civil War films has already argued, American culture remembers past battles because the collective act of recalling a national past of violent conflict has proved to be a particularly compelling way of addressing and negotiating anxieties and desires besetting the current cultural moment. Focusing on the specific issue of how battles are choreographed on screen, one can augment this claim. Given that war and film share a capacity for movement, the cinematic reenactment of battle scenes thrives on another ability, namely what Robert Burgoyne calls a capacity for a historical imagination. By allowing spectators to imagine they are witnessing again a battle of the past, which in most cases they were not present at, cinematic reenactment involves a form of double consciousness: “Rather than a simple reexperiencing, as if there were no gap between the actual event and its rerepresentation, the filmmaker and the spectator alike project themselves into a past world in order to re-imagine it, to perform it, and to rethink it.”7 With memory inadvertently inscribed by imagination, the point of view that is presented in a reenactment of a given battle entails both a way of seeing and a form of reconceptualizing. The authenticity of experience at stake in the cinematic reenactment is no longer about questions of historical verisimilitude and reconstructive precision.

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Instead, the reimagined battle unfolds on screen as a reality effect, plausible precisely because it is an aesthetically formalized recasting of the past, offering visual and narrative coherence within the cinematic codes of the present.

Pathos Formulas of Battle What, then, does it mean to reimagine battle on screen? What visual grammar does its choreography have recourse to? Let us recall that the Hollywood combat film inherits from the tradition of battle paintings the motivation to impose ordering patterns and structures on the chaotic events of war. As Paret argues, imitating war’s organized use of large-scale violence, painters since the early modern period have captured “imagined battles” on canvas, often produced years after the fighting was over. Their purpose was to transform a dehumanizing and catastrophic experience into a narrative about the regeneration of civilization through violence that could be enjoyed as much for its moral or political message as for its aesthetic power.8 Regardless of whether the paintings sought to treat this subject allegorically, to foreground the horrible dynamic of war abstractly, or to strive for mimetic realism, we find a recurrent repertoire of rhetorical strategies of visualization developed to capture the give and take of battle. The demand for a dramatic composition of powerful bodies clashing with their enemies often comes to counterbalance historical fact. It also opens up an array of artistic possibilities for experimenting with light and shadow, with the placement of bodies within a given frame, as well as with visual perspective. While early Renaissance battle paintings often came to blend the leaders of the opposing armies into the unformed mass of fighters, well into the nineteenth century it was common to focalize the scene from the position of the supreme commander, surveying its progress from a distance. Equally common was a visual strategy that deployed a heroic officer in the center of the battlefield surrounded by his troops, to serve as the organizing principle of the image. Battle painting came to thrive on the tension between a panoramic overview, simply capturing the confrontation of adversaries, and a focus on detail, pitting individual episodes of war against a detached rendition of the topography of a battle with its anonymous masses. The most obvious precursor to cinematic battles was, of course, the invention of panorama paintings, continuous circular representations hung on walls of rotundas specifically constructed for them. Similar to entering a movie theater, spectators were asked to walk up a dark staircase to a platform surrounded by a ramp. This prevented them from going too near the canvas yet allowed them to walk around to view the scene from all possible perspectives. While panorama paintings also depicted famous mythic scenes, voyages to unknown places, and cityscapes, some of the most prominent ones commissioned exclusively for an American distribution were dedicated to scenes from recent wars, notably the Battle of Gettysburg (exhibited in New York City in 1886) and the Battle of Chattanooga (painted by a team of artists for the Philadelphia Rotunda in 1885). One of the last panoramas exhibited exclusively in America was the Battle of Atlanta, shown around 1917–1920 in a rotunda in Grant Park, Atlanta.9 These sensationalist circular representations fed a

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cultural desire to turn historical painting into a form of mass entertainment. Moving beyond the limited frame of the conventional historical painting by unfolding a 360° rendition of a particular battle proved to be a more adequate artistic correspondence to the complexity of modern industrial warfare. To further support the illusion of accuracy, some panoramas even added actual movement, mounting the painted canvas on rollers, so that the scene would scroll as a continuously changing view in front of the spectator. Yet for all their intended realism, panorama paintings had the effect of containing war’s chaotic destruction. They organized the visual experience of battle in such a way as to include several vantage points. By positioning the spectator at the center of this all-encompassing spectacle, they sustained the illusion that the audience was in control of the spectacle, rather than being overwhelmed by the intensity of slaughter on display. With war and power as one of its privileged themes, the panorama helped circulate a reassuring notion of national history, founded on successful military confrontation. Bernard Comment argues that it gave evidence to a need for visual dominancy. The world seems organized around and by the individual spectator, “yet this was a world from which they were also separated and protected, for they were seeing it from a distance.”10 With their conflation of skillful artistic composition, historical commemoration, and sensationalist entertainment, the panorama paintings anticipate the choreography of battles on screen. Because their visual effect was premised on the illusion that the spectators were able to rewitness recent military events, the battles they reimagined on canvas were conceived as a reportage from the war zone. Hollywood’s theatricalization of war is also indebted to battle painting in general for the way it helped produce a collective imaginary. As Gerhard Paul notes, historic genre painting came to influence the perception and cultural memory of World War I. Soldiers would remember comparing their actual battle experiences with their recollection of paintings they had seen before they ever saw any real action.11 By tapping into the visual logic of historic battle painting, Hollywood’s choreography of war can be taken as evidence of a very particular survival of visual formalizations of emotional intensities and traumatic affects. What is reimagined is not only a given scene of battle but also the particular forms of visualization and narration that have allowed our cultural image repertoire to remember as well as be haunted by it. To explore this haunting, I borrow from Aby Warburg the critical term “pathos formula,” which, as discussed in the introduction, he coined to describe a productive tension between a state of being overpowered by an aesthetic experience and the ability to intellectually grasp it. My understanding of Warburg’s concept is that cinematic representations of war, whose pathos grasps the spectator even while containing this intensity, is itself an aesthetic formalization of an earlier experience of overpowering emotion. While aesthetic forms capture and in so doing give a more permanent shape to transient emotions, they also preserve the intensity of the pathos, which required an aesthetic refiguration in the first place. In the specific case of the reenactment of a battle on screen, the aesthetic refiguration renders its chaotic intensity graspable, while the images, in a gesture of recycling,

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also remember this pathos. By reappropriating these artistic formalizations, used in the past to give shape to overpowering emotional intensities, their affective power is once more unleashed. Not only do the actual historical events come to be transmitted by virtue of the survival of the pathos formulas used to give artistic shape to them. The recycling of the formalizations themselves is part of the memory that is activated in moments of crisis. War, as one of the most intensive experiences of passion, survives in our cultural memory, resiliently challenging us to revisit and reconceptualize its battle scenes in relation to our present. Cinema’s efforts to be part of such a rewitnessing of the past take place primarily on the level of affects that its visual language can revive and reimagine. It is in the aesthetic reformulation itself that traces of the past survive. My claim is that while Hollywood cinema in general functions as a conceptual space for reimagining historical moments of crisis, the battle on screen thrives on the survival of pathos formulas par excellence. These cinematic formalizations, taken from history painting, explicitly make use of the distance visual figuration affords to contain and structure the intense energy of actual battle. Each new cycle of cinematic reenactment draws attention to both the past historical event it rethinks within the context of current cultural concerns as well as prior cinematic formalizations of the intensity of battle action. To speak of a cultural survival of pathos formula of screened battle choreography foregrounds the seminal tension between historical evidence and aesthetic refiguration, which I locate at the heart of all cinematic reconceptualizations of war scenes. Given that the concept of pathos formula also impinges on issues of genre memory already raised in my chapter on Civil War films, it is useful to recall Burgoyne’s discussion of the double consciousness at work in any cinematic reimagination of historical events. The double-voicing he proposes to be at stake in reconceptualizations of battle on screen splices together memory with imagination, and as such the evidence of witnessing with the aesthetic encoding required by genre cinema. It also involves adapting the rules of the genre, with its stock of traditional pathos formulas, to each cultural context, providing ever-new perspectives both on the past and on past reenactments so as to assure first and foremost the survival of a generically codified affective memory. Finding powerful formulas for states of heightened emotion is what Hollywood is all about. As discussed in the introduction, asked by Jean-Luc Godard, in Pierrot le Fou (1965), to explain his passion as a director, Fuller responded: “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in a word emotion.” This equation between war and cinematic spectacle has prompted John Belton to add that “if film is like a battleground, then the war movie is potentially the ultimate form of the cinema.” It is both uniquely capable of maximizing spectacle, “marshaling thousands of troops in battle formation,” but also has “its own ‘production numbers’ in the form of explosive action sequences, superhuman feats of bravery, and spectacular displays of mass destruction.”12 The conventional continuity editing rule of shot/reverse shot takes on a heightened meaning in war films, offering visual coherence to the battle on display as well

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as commenting on what the two opposing camps that meet in combat do to each other. A battleground can be likened to film above all in regard to the issue of movement. While war films are indebted to history painting for the way both media give a coherent structure to the chaotic intensity of battle, an obvious difference consists in the fact that the movement reproduced on screen takes place within the image itself. Three aspects of the capacity for movement characteristic of warfare come together when film enacts a battle. As troops move toward their goal, the camera moves with them to capture their advance. These moving images of troops on the move are, in turn, edited to move the audience in front of the screen. Our affective involvement with the action that unfolds before our eyes allows us to reimagine something we were not part of. For this reason I propose to think of the cinematic screen as a conceptual space for a collective rewitnessing that allows American culture to constantly rethink national identity in relation to past battles. As anticipated in the introduction, by equating the battleground with film, a second level of reconception comes into play. Choreography of battles on screen also allows cinema to think about itself. Before looking more closely at depictions of D-Day, we must ask: How is the visual and acoustic experience of battle organized into a coherent cinematic reenactment? How does the visceral materiality of the battleground translate into miseen-scène, montage, and the genre narratives of mainstream movie entertainment? Thomas Koebner argues that battles on screen are predicated on the sudden but terrible move from a ceremoniously ordered display of military force into the catastrophic chaos of actual fighting. The depiction of battle itself straddles the panoramic perspective of the uninvolved chronicler with a proximity to the subjective perspective of the fighting troops, whose field of vision has come to be reduced to the actual onslaught. While the former maintains a safe distance from all violence, the latter focalizes the individual soldier lashing out against the enemy, dodging his fire, and running from death in a state of heightened anxiety or battle frenzy.13 The dramaturgy of the battle is predicated on a political conflict between two opposing forces, which will come to be resolved as a result of the outcome of the fight. The moral and ideological perspective offered by the film is usually as clear-cut as the line of demarcation between the two fronts, even if, in the spirit of epic storytelling, a director opts for a narration that gives a more fleshed out and thus sympathetic face to the enemy. Film tends to bookend the chaos on the battlefield with scenes depicting a ceremonious preparation for battle, on the one hand, and, on the other, scenes in which those who have survived the slaughter comment on the casualties, only to move on to the next battle site. On the battlefield itself, the sudden outburst of violence, which unfolds as a horrendous spectacle of bodies crashing through space, enveloped in smoke and accompanied by the deadening sounds of artillery fire, serves as a counterpoint to the tense anticipation experienced by the soldiers and their commanding officers as they wait for the signal to attack. The drama of battle is heightened by the contrast between an initially peaceful battleground and a battleground that is the scene where excessive noise and action are released, only to return once more to a state

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of serenity after the slaughter has ceased. The dramaturgic logic of cinematic battles involves a transformation of radical contingency into visual and narrative coherence. While, at the beginning of a battle, the spectator does not yet know its outcome, the resolution brings with it a reconstruction of order that is both ideological and aesthetic. The two sides that came into brutal contact with each other during combat are once again neatly severed, even while the outcome is endowed with meaning, regardless whether the story it prompts is one of glorious victory, valiant defeat, or pacifist outrage. Yet one can speak about a transformation of contingency into coherence in a far more concrete sense as well. As my preliminary discussion of Let There Be Light illustrates, there is no coherence to any real experience of battle, only fragmented impressions and heightened affects. In the heat of battle, at least for those immanently involved, there is nothing but disorder, confusion, and chance, which will determine whether one will survive or die. On the level of visceral experience, it is all about avoiding the gunfire of the enemy and killing as many of one’s opponents as one can. The aesthetic refiguration serves to transform the fatal fog of war into a coherent cinematic narrative that can be remembered and retold. The incalculable contingency of battle action comes to be pitted against a measurable and surveyable complexity, even if something of the actual experience is lost in this translation. Two visual and narrative strategies are necessary for the reimagination of battle on screen to succeed. On the one hand, the spectator must be able to orient herself or himself within the depiction of the battle unfolding on the screen. A narrative focus that regulates the way we orient ourselves in relation to the fighting troops is necessary. Analyzing the visual enactment of battle, one must ask: What position does the camera take in relation to the action? Is it in close proximity, imitating the movement of the troops themselves, focusing on details of the battle? Or is it at a distance, capturing the action as an anonymous mass movement within a framed image that remains static? On the other hand, for the ideologically and morally inflected narrative to work, we must also be interested in the outcome of this particular battle, and identify with the actors bodily enacting it. We must also ask what attitude the camera maintains toward the action it unfolds. What does it focus on or leave out of focus, so as to arouse our empathy? What does it relegate to a space off screen to pass judgment? To reimagine the battle as a horrific human experience, the camera must detach individual soldiers from the anonymity of mass slaughter and focus on their singular experience of the battle. We are interested in particular soldiers only when they are no longer simply part of an abstract military strategy. We come to understand the battle because we are able to sympathize with individual participants. Hollywood inherits from battle paintings the tension between distance and proximity, as well as the iconography of visually isolating a commanding officer, around whom troops rally, coming together as a defined combat unit within the overall confusion of a multitude of bodies violently clashing with each other. Regardless of how the tension between distance and proximity, stasis and movement, anonymity and individualization, indeed mimesis and diegesis plays itself out, the cinematic

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choreography of battle implies a reencoding of the incalculable contingency of battle into a complex but comprehensible visual narrative. What is gained is a collective memory narrative that endows a situation of mass killing, in itself pointless and senseless, with a plethora of belated and perhaps even contradictory meanings. The ineluctable gap between any actual experience of battle and its belated aesthetic refiguration taps into our imaginary capacity.14 We ourselves are not on the battlefield, but confronted with fighting on screen, we can imagine being there or having been there. Precisely because reenactments of battles are radically predicated on their own ability to activate our imaginary capacity, they are always also about the power of the cinematic imagination itself.

D-Day On Screen While other campaigns from World War II could have been chosen, this chapter focuses on the cinematic history of D-Day, one of the most important military movements ever made by the U.S. armed forces, because it offers a particularly salient case study both of Hollywood’s capacity for historical imagination as well as the limits imposed on all cinematic representations of battle. As John Ford, whose documentary footage of the landing on Omaha Beach was incorporated into newsreels at the time (and documentaries ever since), explains in his interview with Pete Martin: “Not that I or any other man who was there can give a panoramic wideangle view of the first wave of Americans who hit the beach that morning . . . my staff and I had the job of ‘seeing’ the whole invasion for the world, but all any one of us saw was his own little area.”15 He adds that he probably never saw more than a dozen men at one time on the beach, because his eye could not take in more. In a similar vein, one of his cameramen, George Hjorth, who was parachuted in to film the invasion not from the water but from the beach itself, describes his own sense of incapacitation: “Here are these guys shooting and being shot at and I’m just hiding there behind bushes taking pictures, big deal, I’m doing nothing.”16 Each cinematic recycling of the original D-Day footage, beginning with the newsreel, supplementing the constraints imposed on those actually documenting the event at the time, seeks to fill a second seminal lacuna. Although an enormous effort was made on the part of the U.S. Army to cover the invasion, including twenty-one men for motion-picture photography and more than fifty 35mm cameras mounted on landing barges, tanks, as well as in the gun sights of the attacking planes, little of the material survived. Forty-seven of the mounted cameras were subsequently smashed, while the Nazis sunk the ship carrying most of the footage back to Britain.17 The invasion footage that did survive, initially heavily censored because the government was reticent about showing the actual American casualties, was edited for newsreels such as the one issued by Universal News on June 13, entitled “First Invasion Pictures.”18 The manner in which the material has been spliced together into a coherent news story is compelling not least of all because, indebted to the visual logic of war painting, it installs a series of pathos formulas all subsequent fictional reenactments will tap into. While the male voice-over begins to explain the

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minutely coordinated military strategy behind the landing, we see fighter planes in medium shots as they commence the bombardment of Normandy, followed by panoramic aerial shots of the result of this barrage. The newsreel cannily deploys the bird’s-eye perspective, a classic establishing shot of Hollywood narratives, to draw the audience into the rendition of battle about to follow.19 The cameras, following the movement of the planes, proceed in mimicking the trajectory of the bombs, even while at times the screen is filled with the flames and smoke from the explosions. Though safely distanced from the actual air battle, we are called upon to imagine what flying through an airspace riddled with detonating bombs was like. Having recourse to the oscillation between distance and proximity developed by battle painting, the newsreel shifts its attention to include more detailed images of the air invasion, focusing on the faces of paratroopers boarding transports, and gliders about to take off into the dawn. Then the perspective once more returns to its initial panoramic overview, now capturing the 4,000 ships approaching Normandy, at this point oscillating between shots that close in on individual soldiers as they board the attack boats and those moving back to capture in long shots the vast navy barrage backing them up. In line with the government’s reticence about showing the actual casualties of D-Day on screen, the narrator explains, “While landings were successful, we were not without our losses.”20 To lead into this decisive transition in the news story, the camera briefly focuses on troops inside an assault boat, speeding toward the beach, only to cut away as the front of the boat opens out to enemy fire. The editing draws our gaze back into a safely distanced panoramic view of what the voice-over declares to be “the most gigantic invading armada in history.” Only then does the newsreel return to the men on the ground, so as to focus on their frontal assault on the entrenched enemy. This acme of the invasion is rendered as a brief sequence of laconic images: anonymous soldiers jumping out of the landing boats, wading through the water and moving across the beach not in any frenzied rush but in a steady dogtrot. A camera, poised on the landing craft close to the shoreline, catches the steady stream of wet troops pouring onto Omaha Beach from behind, while another, already positioned closer to the cliffs, captures them as they approach. Despite the incessant sound of fire, the overall tone invokes an almost eerie reality outside any ordinary sense of space-time. Grainy smoke fills the entire screen, tracking the men doggedly moving forward, while others, hit by enemy fire, stagger, try to get up again only to fall to the ground permanently, with still others floating in the water behind them. Farther up the beach, a few officers stand together, their backs turned to us, scrutinizing the scene in front of them. We are given no close-ups of the men moving across the beach, no details of their dying or of the corpses being washed ashore, simply an uncommented upon view of a few moments of the battle action on a limited segment of Omaha Beach. The absence of any dramatic embellishment makes for the eerie spectrality of what are also the most authentic images of the landing. This is filmed battle at its purest, unequivocally asserting that what we see took place, even while relegating us to the position of the distanced onlooker. The adherence of a real referent to

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these images is also the mark of our absence from them. Only with the return of the voice-over, commenting on the corpsmen removing the wounded, on the first Nazi prisoners taken, on the cooperation of the French civilians, and on the continued air bombardment, does the newsreel once more foreground its upbeat propaganda message. It now calls upon us to partake in the pathos of the event—the establishment of the beachhead and, with it, a national confidence in the Allied advancement. Although all details of the enormous number of casualties seem to have been elided, the final close-ups of wounded men being carried back to a hospital ship serves as an explicit reminder that “there’s still a long road ahead to Berlin.” The physical cost of battle turns into an issue of economic cost, as the newsreel ends with an appeal to the movie audience to buy war bonds, and in so doing participate from afar in the invasion whose first pictures they have just witnessed. Significant for my discussion of the cultural survival of the pathos formulas of these first invasion images is the role they came to play above and beyond their initial news value. Recycled in propaganda films such as It’s Your America (1945, a film short produced by the U.S. War Office), they were spliced together with documentary footage from other battles of the European theater to lend authority to the patriotism Arthur Kennedy, playing a wounded soldier on board a homeward bound ship, intones. As he recalls the Normandy landing, the film screens images familiar to wartime Americans from newsreels so that the affective power that they contain might help him persuade his audience to continue their support of the war effort. In a similar vein, a propaganda short of Lena Horne singing “The Man I Love” in a radio studio for the USO juxtaposes images from Juno and Omaha Beach with those of civilians hearing of the invasion at home, transforming Ira Gershwin’s melancholic love lyrics into a song about the anticipation of the homecoming of D-Day veterans.21 Once they had become familiar visual fragments, the newsreel images from the actual landing were also recycled in documentaries such as The French Campaign (1945) for the March of Time series, or D-Day (1950) for ABC’s television series The Big Picture, produced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Benefiting from a knowledge of the outcome of the invasion, these postwar educational films are concerned with a more impersonal depiction of military strategy. So as to offer a cohesive chronicle, they include more footage than the original newsreels, even while continuing to withhold direct depictions of the tremendous casualties. They, too, explicitly bank on the fact that the recycling of familiar film footage would seamlessly bring back memories to a large part of the audience, and with it an appropriate pathos regarding war’s destruction even if its visual depiction was curtailed. Owing to its distinct shift toward a personal perspective, most pertinent for my own purposes is the way Ford’s footage came to be edited into a meaningful story. Speaking for the first time about his experiences on Omaha Beach in his interview with Pete Martin, Ford admits, “My memories of D-Day come in disconnected takes like unassembled shots to be spliced together afterward in a film.” In so doing, he is in fact referencing the opening titles of the film D-Day: The Normandy Invasion (1944), which he actually did assemble for the OSS (though not officially credited as

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director): “The motion picture camera can see just as much as the human eye and therefore only fragments of the magnitude and scope of an operation like the Normandy Invasion can be shown on the screen.”22 In stark contrast to the buoyancy of the newsreel and war effort propaganda, as well as the clinical presentation of evidence in postwar educational films, the opening sequence sets an elegiac tone. As the title “D Day ⫹ 3” appears on screen, superimposed over a panoramic view of the beachhead after the Allied troops have moved inland, a somber voice-over explains that their work, though accomplished, has not been “without a price in men and matériel.” The camera captures a few stray figures, sauntering along the now empty beaches, as though they were the eyes through which we are to gaze upon the scene of devastation: the ruins of bombed houses; the infamous iron cross obstacles bunched together next to stone rubble and driftwood; and abandoned tanks, jeeps, and landing craft, as well as assault boats riddled with gunshots, eerily stranded in the sand. Under the auspices of an overwhelming sense of loss, this documentary recalls the events that led up to and followed upon H-Hour. The following sequences recapitulate the grand-scale rehearsal of landing operations, getting the troops from their ships to the shore both in the United States and in England, albeit under friendly conditions. While the opening sequence visually foregrounds the material relics left behind on the coast of Normandy, the rest of the narrative brings into play the human factor, intersplicing renditions of combat training and navy maneuvers with close-range portraits of soldiers relaxing or training under the expert eyes of their commanding officers. Similarly, the sequences leading up to June 6, 1944, disperse all anonymity by giving a face to the nameless men as they perform pedestrian tasks such as loading a jeep or hauling K rations on board. Implicitly invoking the visual logic of battle painting, the film welds together the distance necessary for a panorama of the military logistics and matériel behind the four days leading up to D-Day with an empathetic proximity to the individuals who would literally carry it out over their vulnerable bodies. Idiosyncratic about the assemblage of D-Day: The Normandy Invasion is the film’s insistence on tarrying with the affective human details of battle preparation, showing men playfully waving to those they are leaving behind, eating, playing cards, or praying together on deck. Seeking to re-create a broad palette of emotions, the film includes a more somber scene of anticipation as well, capturing the grim but determined expression on the faces of the navy and coast guard fighters as they receive final instructions from the officer in charge. The camera never loses sight of the quotidian work of war, including close-up shots of men loading machine guns, studying maps, or simply trying to catch a bit more sleep before the actual invasion begins. While it is through both the personal perspective of the fighting troops and the circumspect eyes of the commanding officers that the editing transitions to a bird’seye shot of the vast Allied fleet approaching the beachheads, the actual fighting on Omaha Beach is radically curtailed. The focus instead is on re-creating the emotion involved in getting the troops on shore. Along with the aerial bombardment familiar from the newsreels, the editing includes close-up shots of paratroopers jumping

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Figure 22 D-Day: The Normandy Invasion. Omaha Beach landing. Digital frame enlargement.

from their aircrafts and floating in the sky among planes and gliders. Similarly, the detail shots of infantry soldiers disembarking make the difficulty of climbing down rope ladders into a Higgins boat as tangible as the drive toward the coast under the umbrella of ceaseless navy bombardment. The mise-en-scène has rendered these nameless soldiers so familiar to us that as they wade through the water, we can imagine walking on shore with them. While the actual frenzy of fighting is not shown, the film’s visual narrative enacts a different drive. Seamlessly eliding the first hours of the battle, when American troops were relentlessly pinned down on Omaha Beach, our attention is drawn to the landing craft bringing ever more reinforcements on shore, followed by motorized equipment, and then shots of the first defeated Nazi soldiers. To counterbalance this forward drive, D-Day: The Normandy Invasion includes a lengthy sequence dedicated to the transportation of the wounded back to the hospital ship off shore, their prostrate bodies on stretchers serving as the mirror image to the vehicles and men that continue to move over the beach inland. Also as proxy for the corpses that could not be shown, the camera again draws our attention to the material debris of battle—the shattered Higgins boats lumped in a pile, close-ups of the holes ripped into the battleships—while the voice-over proclaims, “The silent evidence of fierce battle was apparent everywhere.” We return to the elegiac tone of the introductory sequence of D-Day: The Normandy Invasion, even while the final sequence offers a more optimistic narrative resolution. The same ship that had brought the troops to Normandy now carries back the first prisoners of war, and, again, the camera moves into close proximity of these captured men so as to give a human face to the enemy as well. Significant for the issue of historical imagination inscribed in cinematic representations of battle is the way this documentary constructs a personal story out of footage Ford directed on Omaha Beach. Though the film assembles material actually shot during the Normandy landing rather than reenacting D-Day after the event, emotionally and aesthetically compelling about this rendition is that, in the process of editing this footage, the documentary film is already rethinking this decisive battle. Its rhetorical aim is to persuade the audience to imagine the preparation, the landing, and the

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aftermath from the subjective perspective of those enacting the military movement on the ground. The poignant ellipses of the blood and gore of actual fighting informs even more directly personal documentaries such as Garson Kanin and Carol Reed’s The True Glory (1945), a joint Anglo-American film project using the sound bites of enlisted troops who actually fought on D-Day to accompany its compilation of documentary footage.23 As the history of D-Day’s cultural survival on screen shows, it will take fiction film to historically reimage the actual grand-scale death of that day.24 Embedded in fiction films, cinematically imagined reenactments, predicated on a fundamental lacuna, transform the limitations imposed by the paucity of available archival material (or its censorship) into their aesthetic gain. While the documentaries, assembled from the footage shot by combat photographers on the ground, work on the assumption of an irretrievable loss, the double-voicing at stake in the fiction films involves various aspects of reinscription. Each subsequent recycling seeks to fill in a part of the big picture that has been left uncharted, splicing together historical hindsight with current cultural concerns. Historical imagination informs all belated commemoration, because, beginning with the first newsreels, we remember D-Day as a cinematically mediated experience. At issue, on the one hand, is how reenactments offer a new perspective on the past. On the other hand, each reconceptualization of this decisive battle says something about the historical narratives necessary at a particular moment; it also speaks to the visual taste of a given time. Above and beyond questions of censorship (or disclosure) informing each reconceptualization of D-Day, it seems fruitful to interrogate the visual and dramaturgic pathos formulas of earlier battle representations that, as part of their cultural survival, come to be refigured. Given that the choreography of battle clearly changes depending on the technical capacities available to the director and his or her production team, one must also ask how technical innovations both allow for and insist on different strategies of visualization. As, in the spirit of genre memory, each reenactment adds a new layer to the already existing image repertoire, the double-voicing inscribed in battle representations in general interweaves documentary evidence with aesthetic formulizations. Rather than merely adapt the older pathos formulas to a new context, battle choreography can be seen as an ultimate form of cinema because, along with historical rethinking, each reenactment of the past mirrors the current state of cinematic art itself. Battles imaged on screen attest to our resilient capacity to keep reimagining and renegotiating the past, even while giving evidence of our technical ability to do so. Hollywood’s effort to tackle the challenge of bringing D-Day to the screen as an epic narrative came at the end of the classic studio system, and, although the war film as a genre in its own right remains contested, it is clear that The Longest Day (1962) self-consciously inscribes itself into a long tradition of battle on film.25 Concerned with reconstructing an authentic documentary look as well as giving an objective, multiperspectival chronicle by engaging three different directors for the American, British, and German episodes under his general command as producer,

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Darryl Zanuck introduces the Normandy landing from the perspective of those about to lose. In shock and awe, a German officer inside a Nazi bunker gazes upon the vast Allied fleet emerging at dawn from beyond the horizon, with the widescreen cinemascope frame duplicating the bunker’s slit window. Just before the fleet begins to unleash its fire, the film cuts to Gen. Omar Bradley (Nicholas Stuart). He gazes grimly in the reverse direction, with a rear projection of archival D-Day footage prominent as a backdrop, as though to underline the theatricality of the moment. Zanuck’s commanding general is clearly positioned as the director of the overall choreography of battle about to unfold and as such cites the standard pathos formula of battle painting that deploys a sovereign leader as its visual point of orientation. Yet in line with Zanuck’s desire for multiperspectivity, Bradley’s gaze is not the dominant one, even though, to mark the end of the first failed phase of the assault on Omaha Beach, the narrative will return to him as he is given a report of the heavy casualties. Leading up to the landing, as overall commander of the cinematic reenactment, this epic reenactment includes scenes from the beach that splice together French civilians, gleefully waving to the incoming fire, and German soldiers, desperately warning the Nazi high command (stationed in Paris) and preparing their defense. Unique in Zanuck’s cinematic history lesson is that his panoramic perspective individualizes the enemy along with the various sections of the Allied forces (though glaringly excluding the African American company).26 In relation to the Nazis, it does so primarily to articulate their canny foreboding of defeat, and as such anticipates the spirit of resilience that will prove to be the seminal pathos driving this fictional reenactment forward. Deeply committed to historical accuracy, The Longest Day self-consciously recycles the visual logic of previous documentary films. The actual fighting is introduced with a long shot of the coastline, onto which the title “Omaha Beach 06:32 Hours” is superimposed. The film then transitions to a minute reconstruction of the aerial shots of the assault boats heading toward the shoreline, which, by the early 1960s, were long familiar from newsreels and education films. The subsequent montage brings us into closer proximity with anonymous soldiers disembarking down rope ladders, then returns to the perfect formation of the battleships and various landing craft deployed in this amphibious invasion, including the Higgins boats long familiar from the newsreels, carrying the men ashore. Part of the visual logic deployed to both help us orient our gaze and empathize with the battle action recycles another pathos formula of battle painting. Before moving back into the aerial long shot ceremoniously celebrating the visual grandeur of the approaching Allied fleet, the sequence includes a brief scene in which Robert Mitchum stands poised above his men at the back of his Higgins boat. He calmly surveys both the coastline and his outfit before beginning his descent into their midst. Like Bradley, he, too, is placed in front of a rear projection of a landing craft ejecting a stream of further assault boats. The splitting of the screen in this case draws attention to the theatricality of this historical reimagination, even while it anticipates the dual role Mitchum will play. Though he will partake in the bloody

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Figure 23 The Longest Day. Male star as visual rallying point. Digital frame enlargement.

spectacle on the beach, his part will be that of directing its victorious outcome on the ground. The affective resonance of the choice of Mitchum, famous for his parts in previous combat and war veteran films such as The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and Till the End of Time (1946), consists in endowing the historical Gen. Norman Cota with a face familiar to the American movie audience. Owing to his star quality, Mitchum can effectively be deployed as the affective rallying point to which the film’s narrative will repeatedly return, so as to lend coherence to the confused chaos of battle. Mitchum’s familiarity as a star (in contrast to the forgotten actor Nicholas Stuart, who actually resembles the real Bradley) is used as the framing device for the Omaha Beach sequence in particular as well as the story as a whole. Just before the actual fighting begins, we see him pulling out a cigar and using it to point toward the coast. As he laconically states, “There it is, men, Omaha Beach, dead ahead,” the screen gives a view of the infamous shoreline, now with its steel cross obstacles clearly visible. Mitchum/Cota will keep this cigar with him throughout the rest of the film narrative until the fighting and, with it, The Longest Day itself are over. The confrontation of the two embattled camps, interpolated into this narrative frame, is visually enacted as a sustained shot/reverse shot sequence, offering details of the entrenched Nazis firing on the invading American troops, whom we see from behind and then from the front as they charge onto the beach. The editing continually oscillates between middle range shots capturing scenic fragments of the individual men fighting on both sides, with more distanced panoramic shots to help us calibrate our understanding of the way the battle is progressing. As a mark of its particular splice between historical accuracy and theatrical reconstruction, the scene, showing American troops desperately wading through the water under heavy fire, known from the newsreels, uses a repeated close-up of the film’s star, Robert Mitchum, assembling a small unit of men around one of the steel crosses. His steady trek across the beach, leading some of his men successfully to the bottom of a concrete road block while relentlessly passing those falling down by the

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wayside, is captured by a continual tracking shot, equally determined in its movement through the dark smoke clouds of enemy mortar fire. This dual movement forward, welding together the camera with one of the commanding officers on the ground, does more than simply track the process of battle. It gives visual form to the pathos this battle representation seeks to call forth in its audience. The camera movement corresponds to our desire that by getting off the beach the actors in this martial spectacle will finally be able to engage their adversaries. The steady oscillation between the two sides of the battle, as well as the constant recalibration of our view of the initial phase of this battle, shifting between close shots of men struggling forward (many being wounded or killed in the process) and a more distant point of view, taking in the spectacle as a whole, explicitly fills in the lacuna of the preceding documentaries. As part of the survival of cinematic pathos formulas of battle I seek to trace, one could read this editing as a recycling of the visual rhetorics of The Birth of a Nation (1915). In his reenactment of the final siege at Petersburg, D. W. Griffith had introduced the juxtaposition of the two embattled camps as a template for battle choreography, oscillating between bird’s-eye long shots, some static and some panning the scene as though in imitation of panorama paintings, and medium shots of entrenched men on both sides of the battle, shooting, waving flags, or cautiously entering the smoke-riddled field. Even though the technical know-how at the time dictated a relatively static camera, Griffith was also the one to introduce the use of a star body for regulating the response of his spectators. As a way of transitioning to the final desperate assault by the Confederates, the scene cuts to a close-up of its hero, the “little Colonel,” beckoning his men to follow him out of the trenches. After returning once more to medium shots helping us to reorient ourselves regarding the overall geographic parameters of the battlefield, the film records this final frenzied charge as a backward tracking shot. The camera keeps a close-up of Griffith’s star, Henry B. Walthall, in focus for several moments, before it moves back into the distance to show the visceral clashing of the two adversaries, now resorting to bayonets and fists in the culminating phase of the battle. While by foregrounding Mitchum as the battle’s visual rallying point Zanuck takes from Griffith the inclusion of a familiar star’s face to add human resonance as well as visual order to the grand-scale mass death on the battlefield, he owes a different debt to another early master of battle choreography. With All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Lewis Milestone perfected the use of tracking shots interspliced with continual shot/reverse shot sequences to visually encapsulate both the bodily and the emotional movement of a given battle choreography. Rather than having recourse to the gaze of a commanding officer as the visual point of departure, his rendition of trench warfare typical of World War I (and itself refiguring films like The Big Parade) sets in with a camera pan, moving up and down the trenches to capture the soldiers, intently gazing at the horizon, waiting for the enemy to emerge, and intercutting this visual flow with reverse shots of incoming fire being detonated in no-man’s-land. Then, once the actual fight has begun, the scene uses tracking shots panning over a trench to show the besieged troops

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Figure 24 The Birth of a Nation. Male star leading troops into battle. Digital frame enlargement.

throwing grenades at their attackers, and, once the French have actually broken through, the film resorts once more to a pan shot, now tracking above the man-toman fighting that has broken out in the narrow space of one trench. In what are perhaps the most chilling moments of the entire battle depiction, the camera pans along the barbed-wire fence in imitation of the machine-gun fire mowing down the soldiers trying to jump over it. The camera’s and the guns’ shots are perfectly aligned, disclosing the equation between pure battle and pure cinema. Milestone also improved on Griffith’s oscillation between distanced panorama shots of the battleground and close-range shots, capturing the ongoing fight in more personal, albeit fragmentary, detail. Distinctly in contrast to his predecessor, he does not limit his close-up shots to his star, but dispenses them democratically among several actors, foregrounding not their rank but the fact that on the battlefield they share a heightened anxiety and, once they have returned to the safety of their own trenches, an equally intense exhaustion. Also in pointed contrast to Griffith, the top shots of the troops charging into no-man’s-land are not geographically demarcated. Instead, so as to underscore the disorientation experienced on the battleground, these panorama views give the impression of an unbounded field of vision, lacking all framing that might help us orient our gaze. As anonymous troops charge forward, the masses of bodies we see from a bird’s-eye perspective seem to blend in completely with the muddy landscape, even before those who are hit by enemy fire fall and literally become part of the battleground. Given Milestone’s

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Figure 25 All Quiet on the Western Front. Camera as machine gun. Digital frame enlargement.

passionate critique of the madness of World War I warfare, the force of his choreography of battle resides in the way his montage, while bringing individual soldiers into focus, reduces battle action to a pure death machine, driving bodies forward until they are either hit by enemy fire or reach their home base again. Most important, in sharp distinction to almost all the battle choreography that Hollywood will bring to the screen after him, Milestone staunchly refuses all sentimentality. The awe his bare images of death and survival invoke is so chilling because they will not allow themselves to be subsumed into a coherent narrative about the tragic but necessary cost of patriotic bravery. They insist on the quotidian quality of modern technological warfare.27 While The Longest Day pays homage to Milestone’s disturbing alignment between camera movement and battle movement, the seminal difference resides in the reenactment of D-Day as a chronicle, whose distinct political message is predicated on turning history into legend. Though the film includes images of the grandscale casualties on Omaha Beach elided by the original documentaries, Zanuck’s concern with historical accuracy, backed by the Pentagon’s enormous loan of men and equipment, dovetails with a curious occlusion of real death. The theatricality of the film’s lavish reenactment, underlined by the use of rear projections at the beginning of the Omaha Beach sequence, attests instead to the capabilities Cinemascope had at the time to make D-Day come alive again on the silver screen. Reimagining this historic battle as a mythic story about successful teamwork among various

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nations in their fight against a mutual enemy clearly reflects the political concerns of the Cold War. One might surmise that the real butchery caused by the Nazis was in part elided, along with endowing dignity to some of their commanding officers, because by the early 1960s the Germans were themselves key players on the Allied team. The most significant difference to Milestone’s unflinching presentation of mass killing on the battlefield resides in the way The Longest Day interpolates a minidrama into its panoramic chronicle, so as to reimagine the turning point of the invasion. Since the early 1940s, it has become a template of combat films to add human resonance to historical representation by showcasing the actions of individual characters involved in a plot sequence revolving around the successful removal of an obstacle, be it a bunker pin box, a machine-gun nest, or an occupied house.28 Explicitly working with this genre memory, this production stages what by the early 1960s had become a standard in history textbooks. The Americans were ultimately able to orchestrate their breakthrough at Omaha Beach because of individual improvisation on the part of officers and enlisted men. Mitchum, still chewing on his cigar, comes up with the ingenious plan to collect together a small combat unit and equipment so that, with the help of Bangalore torpedoes, they can blow a hole in the concrete roadblock where he had initially assembled his men, and in so doing open up an exit from the beach. In contrast to the battle choreography of All Quiet on the Western Front, so distressing in part because it forecloses all dialogue, Mitchum has recourse to a spirited rallying call to move his men into action. “Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach,” he explains. “Those that are already dead and those that are gonna die. Now get off your butts. You guys are the Fighting 29th.”29 Having recruited the enthusiastic engineer Lt. Fuller to lead the explosion team, Mitchum continues to direct the enterprise from behind a nearby reef, giving appropriate signals to his lead actor. The narrative coherence this insertion of a minidrama within the grand-scale choreography of the battle affords is twofold. Focusing on the concerted effort of a small band of brothers, it transforms the chaos of the ongoing onslaught of enemy fire into a cogent plot with a focused, surveyable objective. To underscore the theatricality, the scene repeatedly returns our gaze to Mitchum, intently watching Lt. Fuller as he and his men assemble the Bangalore torpedoes, then expertly blow a hole in the barbed wire, only to return once more under heavy enemy fire to detonate the roadblock from beneath. The fact that Lt. Fuller dies just before giving off the final charge, so that the camera can return for a brief moment to show Mitchum’s distressed face, augments the suspense of the minidrama. It also supports the mythic status of anecdotes about D-Day, revolving as much around the resolve of the commanding officers as the relentless bravery of enlisted men in the heat of battle. Another man from the squad immediately takes the dead man’s place, and within seconds Mitchum is able to charge forward, with an anonymous mass of cheering troops following him through the burning breach in the wall. Narrative coherence is perfected when, in its final sequence, The Longest Day finishes up once again at Omaha Beach. In a panorama shot we get a view of victory,

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Figure 26 The Longest Day. A general’s cigar. Digital frame enlargement.

recalling the classic finale of the newsreels and documentaries. Accompanied by the film’s chirpy theme song, a long stream of men, supplies, and equipment has already begun its steady move inland, the beaches miraculously cleansed of all wounded and dead. Then the film returns one last time to the commanding officer, who had been the affective and visual rallying point throughout the rendition of this particular stage of the Normandy invasion. Hailing one of the jeeps passing behind him, he turns once more to face the beach. As though he had been holding his breath all day long, Mitchum exhales deeply, then almost disdainfully tosses away the remaining stub of the cigar with which he had pointed to Omaha Beach at the beginning of his assault. Only after retrieving a fresh one from inside his jacket does he finally break into a mischievous smile, and, lighting up again, he gives to the anonymous driver of the jeep what is also the final command of the film: “Okay. Run me up the hill, son.” The Longest Day aims at an epic overview, filling in uncharted areas on the map of cinematic D-Day reenactments. Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980) selfconsciously taps into his own experience with the First Infantry Division. As he explains in his introductory motto, his aim is to bring “fictional life based on factual death” to the screen. In the Omaha Beach landing scene, personal proximity to the battle finds a correspondence in the visually limited subjective focalization with which most of the ten-minute sequence is shot. Dispensing with all distanced panoramic perspective to help us orient ourselves, the film’s title “D-Day Omaha Beach June 1944” leads straight into close-up shots of the members of a rifle squad from the First Infantry Division as they struggle through the water and, under continual enemy fire, begin to reassemble around their nameless sergeant. To move even closer into the viscerality of the fight, the camera zeros in on an extreme closeup of Lee Marvin’s eyes as he cautiously raises his head from behind a shallow reef to gauge the situation, recognizing immediately that, in contrast to what he had been led to expect, the beach has not been touched by any preliminary Allied bombardment. Throughout the sequence, the camera stays close to the ground, enveloping its images in dark smoke, wavy water, and fire, as though it were one of the troops, wet and confused, desperately struggling to gain firm ground. In The Big Red One, the narrative frame for the minidrama, which also revolves around blowing up a barbed-wire tank trap to produce an exit from the beach, is decidedly more

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sinister. Four times the camera will move into a detail of a dead soldier’s arm, washed over by the splashing and foaming of the surf, ever more tainted with blood. His wristwatch registers how long it takes to conquer these few yards of sand.30 Interpolated into this frame we find Fuller’s macabre reimagination of the anecdotal Bangalore relay. Like Mitchum’s Cota, Lee Marvin’s sergeant (who remains nameless) directs the assemblage of the pipeline from behind the safety of the reef, surrounded by his boys, while all around them pinned-down troops are unable to move either forward or backward. Yet the tone of this minidrama, reflecting the theatricality of the battlefield in general, has turned into a celebration of carnivalesque violence. One by one the sergeant counts out the numbers of the members of his squad, and one by one they enter the unprotected space in front of them, assembling by hand another piece of the pipeline and drawing it further to the obstacle at the foot of the hill until enemy fire knocks them out. As in The Longest Day, the camera keeps returning to the faces of those watching the spectacle from behind the reef. As it captures the mounting anxiety on the part of those who know they, too, are about to be called up, the camera aligns their emotions with ours. Implicitly the suspense is also mounting for us, as we pray that the one who is currently on the lethal piece of sandy stage will be successful so that those still waiting might be spared. The sergeant’s directing is far less jovial than Mitchum’s. When Pvt. Griff, called up as number eight, hesitates because, having stumbled in the sand, he finds himself looking straight into the dead eyes of one of his buddies, Lee Marvin does not hesitate to raise his rifle and shoot around him so as to prod him along. Reiterating Milestone’s equation between camera shot and gunshot, a grim sequence of shot/reverse shot follows, linking the young soldier’s terrified gaze to the determined one of his sergeant, who is looking just past the viewfinder of his rifle and defying him to disobey his directions. The camera continues to stay close to the ground as it tracks Griff while he finishes the assemblage, successfully pushes the pipeline underneath the barbed wire, and finally detonates the TNT. The camera either crawls with him or cuts back to the eyes of Lee Marvin and the remaining members of his squad to register their mounting glee. Nevertheless, marking its debt to Zanuck’s epic reimagination of this historic anecdote, the narrative also resurrects Mitchum’s cigar—not, however, placing it in the mouth of his nameless sergeant, but rather in that of Samuel Fuller’s alter ego, Zab, who throughout the sequence is seen chewing on it. Once the breach has been blown open, Zab is sent by the sergeant to relay this information

Figure 27 The Longest Day. Bangalore relay. Digital frame enlargement.

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to the colonel. As he makes his way across the beach, he trips over a dead soldier. The last stub of his chewed-up cigar falls onto the open viscera of the corpse, yet, without hesitating, Zab pulls out a fresh cigar from inside the dead man’s jacket, taking both it and the man’s helmet before moving on to deliver the message. He throws himself down next to the colonel, shouts to him that Exit E-1 is now open, and remains lying in the sand, utterly exhausted. The commanding officer, as though magically reanimated by the message but also by the genre memory it evokes, suddenly rises to repeat with exaggerated pathos the rallying call delivered by Mitchum some twenty years earlier: “There are two kinds of men on this beach. Those that are dead and those that are about to die. So let’s get off this goddamn beach and die inland.” Rather less boisterously than in Zanuck’s reenactment, though equally resilient, the men slowly begin to get up and move. No panorama shot lifts us away from the stage of carnage. Instead, the camera draws our attention one last time to the wristwatch on the dead soldier’s arm, the surf splashing over it now completely red with blood. The closure may not be uplifting, but it, too, offers cohesion to the viscerality of battle Fuller’s hard-boiled aesthetic formalization seeks to relay.

Recycling the Pathos Formulas of D-Day Much has been written about Steven Spielberg’s twenty-three-minute reenactment of the landing at Omaha Beach, lauding the veracity as well as the visceral impact of this screen battle, even while highlighting how Saving Private Ryan (1998) draws on both the tradition of the Hollywood combat film as well as innovations in cinema technology to reinscribe the genre into a late-twentieth-century culture of war commemoration.31 As Burgoyne notes, Spielberg blends “computer-generated imagery, live action photography, reenactments of documentary photographs and sequences, accelerated editing, slow-motion cinematography, and electronically enhanced sound design.” While his reliance on genre memory brings forth a layered record of the past to bear witness to the traumatic experience of the war, his project is self-consciously double-voiced. Paying homage to the veterans who fought on Omaha Beach, he ideologically re-forms his narrative to serve, as Burgoyne puts it, a “re-illusioning of American national identity after Vietnam.”32 D-Day veterans claimed that viewing the film reawakened powerful memories.

Figure 28 Left: The Big Red One; right: Saving Private Ryan. Bangalore relay redux. Digital frame enlargement.

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Film critics countered that at issue is less a question of accurate realism than of spectacle. What was perceived as authenticity, they suggest, is in fact the result of a sensory simulation of battle experience. Spielberg’s expert handling of special effects produced above all a reality effect, rendering the carnage on the beach “more real,” as James Chapman suggests, than any cameraman on the ground that June morning could have. Rather than denouncing this as manipulative artifice, however, Chapman astutely shifts his discussion to the irresolvable tension at stake in all battle representations between a desire for authenticity and the aesthetic formalization these must fall back on to present their evidence.33 Crucial for my own discussion of the cultural survival of cinematic pathos formulas is the way Spielberg, by using special effects to bring out a realism effect, addresses what all D-Day reenactments must negotiate, namely the shortage of actual footage taken on Omaha Beach as well as the limited perspective with which a director like John Ford had to contend. As Toby Haggith has amply documented, Saving Private Ryan fills this lacuna by recycling historical Technicolor combat footage from battles in the Pacific. Spielberg’s decision to have his camera remain close to the ground with the troops pinned down on the beach, focusing on their subjective perspective of the wounded and dead so blatantly absent from the Normandy newsreels, is a recurrent visual strategy deployed by documentaries such as With the Marines at Tarawa (1944) and To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945).34 The narrative suspense drama revolving around the use of Bangalore torpedoes to breach Nazi defenses, which Spielberg (like his predecessors Zanuck and Fuller) interpolates into his historic reimagination of D-Day, in turn, explicitly cites a fictional rendition from the same theater of war. In Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) John Wayne successfully leads an assault on a Japanese bunker on Tarawa. He will die at the end of the film, after the marines, having moved on to Iwo Jima, have successfully taken Mt. Suribachi. Equally seminal is Spielberg’s idiosyncratic way of dealing with the double consciousness inscribed in all historic reimagination. As he comes to reconceptualize D-Day on the eve of the twenty-first century, at stake is as much the authenticity of visual style as historical accuracy. Whether or not the documentary footage his film refers to involves the same battle he is reconstructing is less at issue than that, by resurrecting the pathos formulas deployed by combat photography at the time, he is also reactivating the war experience they gave shape to. A creative play with the actual referent of the image was already at work in classic 1940s war films, which often spliced documentary battle scenes into fictional episodes or used them as rear projections. As Jeanine Basinger reminds us, during World War II the American audience was not just seeing fictionalized combat but also real images in magazines, newsreels, and propaganda shorts produced by the Office of War Information (OWI). These visualizations of war “put pressure on Hollywood because from seeing them, home audiences gained an idea of what real combat looked like and expected war movies to look the same.”35 When Allan Dwan includes footage from With the Marines at Tarawa in Sands of Iwo Jima, splicing John Wayne into a scene shot on a real battlefield some five years earlier, he does so in part to lend authority

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Figure 29 Top: Saving Private Ryan; left: Sands of Iwo Jima; right: To the Shores of Iwo Jima. Pinned down on the beach. Digital frame enlargement.

to his postwar revisiting of the war in the Pacific. He also banks on the fact that by the late 1940s this combat photography had gained a familiar patina of its own, so that recalling representations of the battles at Tarawa and Iwo Jima had the same affective power as recalling the events themselves.36 By tapping into our cultural image repertoire of screen battles, both fictional and documentary, Spielberg inherits this creative exchange between authentic evidence and aesthetic formalization. He shares with pop art the conviction that our access to the world is through the consumer representations we have of it. His celebration of a wide range of Hollywood film references, assembled to produce what Chapman calls the “realism of surface accuracy,” is everything but frivolous postmodern pastiche.37 As in Andy Warhol’s disaster paintings, the real of death lurks directly beneath the artificiality of the image’s surface, invoked as that which cannot be directly exposed. Precisely because, from the start, our understanding of what D-Day was like was indelibly shaped by the way photography came to transmit the event, Spielberg’s reenactment, reanimating this ever-growing set of

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representational conventions, is immanently accurate. The conundrum of cinematic battles at the heart of his Omaha Beach sequence is that it affects us most viscerally because it self-consciously puts on display a brilliant artifice, exploiting all registers of genre memory available to it. How, then, does Spielberg refigure the visual strategy and pathos formulas of battle choreography discussed so far? The sequence begins with a shot of the steel crosses erected as obstacles on the beach, waves splashing against them. Once again, a superimposed title tells us it is “June 6, 1944. Dog Green Sector Omaha Beach.” Dispensing, as The Big Red One did, with all panoramic establishing shots, Spielberg moves into close range of several Higgins boats, speeding toward the coast. Moving even closer inside one of them, he offers as his framing device a detail of the shaking hands of Capt. John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) as he lifts his water canister to his mouth and drinks. Like Robert Mitchum, the star, Tom Hanks, is immediately established as the visual as well as empathetic rallying point, to which the camera will repeatedly return throughout. Equally like his predecessor, he is looking toward the coast, anticipating the carnage about to unfold because we, coming to the event in hindsight, are already expecting it. As one of many implicit nods to the documentary D-Day: The Normandy Invasion, the camera moves back to include close-up portraits of some of the other soldiers in the boat, sharing the heightened anxiety of their squad leader. This visual formula is also used to isolate stars like Tom Sizemore (as Sgt. Horvath) and Barry Pepper (as the sniper Pvt. Jackson), who will be supporting Hanks in his mission. The former puts a piece of food into his mouth, the latter has begun to pray, while some of the men around them are vomiting. Once the steering man calls out that they will land in thirty seconds, Hanks is suddenly animated into intense action. His hands are no longer shaking as he resiliently takes charge of his squad, rehearsing directions that culminate in the final command: “I’ll see you on the beach.” Also referencing Milestone’s laconic depiction of soldiers in trenches, somberly waiting for battle to begin again, Spielberg transitions to the grand-scale dying about to set in by offering another sequence of portrait shots—now, however, of soldiers for whom we will never have a story because within minutes of the landing, they will be dead. Another line of correspondence can be drawn to All Quiet on the Western Front, given that the sequence uses a similar panning shot from inside a German bunker, equating camera and machine-gun shots, as the latter mow down the men coming within their range. Framed by the slit bunker window, this distanced top shot, the first of the slaughter on the beach we are given, functions as a self-reflexive comment on battle choreography as ultimate film movement. The dark silhouettes of the men we see only from behind, relentlessly firing their guns at the approaching Higgins boats, uncannily resemble a film audience, shooting at what they are seeing on a screen, as though this were a rear projection. In sharp contrast to the safely distanced view of the soldiers inside the bunker, the scene’s use of a handheld camera in relation to the invading troops brings us into an almost hyperreal proximity to the men jumping out of these assault boats. Struggling under water with their gear, some manage to resurface, dragging each other out of the water, while others drown.

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Figure 30 Saving Private Ryan. Inside the enemy bunker. Digital frame enlargement.

As Tom Hanks finds shelter behind one of the steel crosses, the film’s relentless handheld camera stays close to the ground with him, recalling the documentaries of similar beach landings in the Pacific, even while the depiction of the trajectory and impact of gunshots, oozing viscera, and splashing blood is far more graphic than any battle choreography preceding Saving Private Ryan. This radical proximity to the battle action supports the confusion of the assault, even while, closer to The Longest Day than Milestone’s rendition of trench warfare, the parameters of the battleground remain coherently delineated. In the classic Hollywood film code of shot/reverse shot, Spielberg oscillates between details of the confused troops, desperately dodging enemy fire, and the faceless Nazis shooting at them from a safe distance. So as to install further visual coherence, the sequence inserts a close-up of Tom Hanks’s face, even while on the soundtrack a hollow echo replaces the mimetic sounds of battle. What follows from the subjective perspective of his hero is a string of horrible vignettes, as though Hanks’s gaze were panning the details of a panorama battle painting: a terrified soldier cries helplessly as he huddles beneath one of the steel obstacles, a lone soldier picks up the arm shot from his left side, other soldiers drag themselves back into the bloody water to extinguish the flames caught in their clothes. As mimetic sound returns to the screen, Hanks’s character signals to Sgt. Horvath to get the surviving men off the beach, even if their objective is as yet unfocused. The rallying point, he explains, is “anywhere but here.” As he begins to make his way across the sand, the overwhelming contingency of battle steadily transforms into an increasingly coherent visual narrative. Once a tracking shot begins to capture the slow movement forward, the scene reduces the emphatic rallying call taken from prior films to its bare essence. One of Capt. Miller’s men warns a soldier, refusing to leave the shelter of his steel cross, “You stay here, you’re a dead man.” Hanks’s own painful progress is rendered as a mixture of middle-range

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shots, helping us constantly reorient ourselves on the battlefield, and a close-up of his back as he pants toward the cliff, the camera imitating him and those following his lead. The distance across the beach is measured in the casualties he leaves behind, as though this were the ballast he needs to cast off in order to assemble a functioning combat unit farther up along the beach. Spielberg’s aggressive focus on the details of the blood and gore spilling over the sand self-consciously embellishes what had been left out of most previous renditions. His relentlessly graphic embodiment of the horror of battle also sustains the pathos of retaliation inscribed in many classic war narratives. Those who manage to assemble around Hanks and Sizemore at the bottom of the cliff, directly below one of the Nazi bunkers, are fighting with particular ferocity to avenge their buddies. In his recycling of the interpolated dramatic suspense sequence inherited from The Longest Day, Spielberg also foregrounds how the assembling of a Bangalore torpedo, used to blow a hole in the enemy defenses, comes to be measured by the body count of those killed in the act. Into depictions of Hanks’s small combat unit, gathering weapons and ammunition to finally engage the enemy, the sequence repeatedly intersplices gruesome details of the wounded being tended by medics working under desperate conditions. Yet in this interpretation, exploding a hole in the cliff is not presented as theatrical suspense, with the commanding officer anxiously watching the progress of the men he is directing. Instead, the detonating of the Bangalore torpedoes is performed as a perfunctory act, in which Hanks is simply one of several men setting off the explosion, with the camera positioned next to them as they lie close to each other in the sand. To encapsulate how the slow advancement of Hanks and his band of brothers is predicated on those no longer able to fight, the sequence splices together images of the small group of men, now able to follow their commander up the cliff, with graphic depictions of those lying immobile in the sand. Soberly, a medic categorizes their wounds, determining who will be given priority in treatment and who will be left to die. Dramatic suspense is interpolated into the narrative once the men have made it to a mountain ledge higher up, from where they have direct access to a machine gun protecting the bunker. Having emphatically proclaimed “Let’s get in the war,” Hanks starts calling out the names of his men, giving covering fire to them as they move by fours into the grassy field below, so as to move in on the Nazis manning the machine guns. As in Fuller’s version, this attack is staged as a game, in which a team of soldiers takes turn at batting, even while the peripeteia depends on the resourcefulness of one individual. Once the other key players have moved around the ledge to the other side of the cliff, Hanks calls to his sniper, who finally puts an end to the merciless machine-gun fire and in so doing forges an exit. The prayer, with which Pvt. Jackson introduces each successful shot, is spliced together with the prayers of those dying on the beach.38 Once again, part of the pathos of this rereconceptualization of D-Day is its insistence that the killing is done in retribution for those who were not able to survive.

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Spielberg ups the ante set by previous battle choreography, reworking the equation of pure death and pure cinema on which all battle choreography is predicated. Part of Hanks’s role as director of this decisive dramatic scene (mirroring the overall theatricality of the battle) involves using a pocket mirror, attached to the tip of his combat knife with a piece of chewing gum, to calibrate the exact location of the Nazi guns. Just before the men begin their rifle relay, Spielberg juxtaposes two images: Hanks’s troops, their guns poised, waiting to move around the edge of the ledge into a space we cannot see, and the Nazi gunmen behind their sandbags, shooting at them. What we get at the core of this theatrical inset is a mise en abyme of the cinematic image itself: a space of pure visual virtuality in which the two sides fighting each other are brought together on screen, with Hanks’s eye the focal point holding them together. Rather than montage, Spielberg has opted for juxtaposition, with a miniature image of the enemy, unnaturally framed by the darkened sides of the mirror, appearing like a freeze-frame on top of a second image in the background, depicting those about to destroy them. For a few brief moments, his cinematic encapsulation of the turning point in this battle mirrors itself, and thus reflects on its own visual power. Once Jackson has successfully taken out the machine-gun nest, Capt. Miller can finally charge forward with his men in tow to exterminate the bunker, while through the barbed wire they have left behind them the camera captures a long shot of the beach, for the first time giving us a panorama perspective from the point

Figure 31 Saving Private Ryan. A captain’s pocket mirror. Digital frame enlargement.

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of view of the invaders. Slowly, a mass of anonymous troops starts moving in the direction of Dog Exit One. To afford narrative closure, the camera returns to the subjective gaze of its star. Tom Hanks watches silently as his own men mercilessly kill their enemies, while others break into tears, overwhelmed by the intense strain of what they have just experienced. Offering a quiet counterpoint, Sgt. Horvath collects dirt into a tin can already labeled “France,” and calmly places it in his pouch next to those labeled “Africa” and “Sicily.” In perfect symmetry to the inaugurating narrative frame, we return to a close-up of Tom Hanks’s hands, shaking as he once again reaches for his water canister, taking what is his first drink since landing (even while recalling Mitchum’s cigar). Then, as the camera moves into a close-up of this star, we hear Sgt. Horvath exclaim: “That’s quite a view.” As Hanks responds, “Yes it is, quite a view,” the camera zooms forward into an extreme close-up of the eyes of the man who has been our point of orientation throughout. Although Hollywood’s code of cinematic language suggests that the following image sequence is also Capt. Miller’s subjective point of view, Spielberg captures what his hero, positioned on top of the hill, cannot possibly see. Unfolding first on the screen are close-up images of men lying dead in the blood-tainted surf, then, having moved up into a medium-range top shot, the camera begins tracking forward, revealing the extent of the casualties. Only at this point does the soundtrack switch to the film’s melancholic theme song, so as to musically underscore the cost of victory. Finally, Spielberg’s camera isolates one lone soldier within this anonymous mass. He is lying face down in the sand, surrounded by dead fish. As the camera zooms into a close-up of the dead man’s back, we decipher the name “Ryan, S.” on his knapsack. By taking as its point of departure for the rescue narrative to follow the image of an individual soldier, killed in battle, Saving Private Ryan selfconsciously cites Sands of Iwo Jima, yet does so with a significant difference. Like Spielberg’s captain, who dies on a bridge in Normandy after having successfully located the one surviving brother of the Ryan family, John Wayne is shot in the back at the end of Allan Dwan’s film after having successfully led his squad of marines up Mt. Suribachi. Important for the layer of pathos formulas Spielberg inscribes into his historical reimagination is the fact that this hero, too, is shown

Figure 32 Left: Sands of Iwo Jima; right: Saving Private Ryan. Dead soldier’s backpack. Digital frame enlargement.

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with his face in the sand, as the camera zeros in on a close-up of his back, bearing the name Sgt. John M. Stryker. By virtue of this citation, the visual formula into which Spielberg condenses the mass death on Omaha Beach also collapses the point of departure of his rescue narrative with its narrative closure, endowing a faceless soldier with the pathos of a courageous commander’s death. Yet the recycling is even more complicated given that in Sands of Iwo Jima, the image of John Wayne, lying with his face in the sand, itself cites a classic formula of battle painting: the assembling of soldiers at the corpse of their smitten commander. It is over the dead body of Sgt. Stryker that this squad of marines fully comes together, watching in awe as the American flag is raised on Mt. Suribachi, until their new commander calls to them, “Let’s get back in the war.”39 The fact that Miller utters almost the same war cry on the ledge of the cliff at the dramatic turning point of Spielberg’s Omaha Beach sequence is yet another indication of the central position this film assumes in his own cinematic reenactment. Sands of Iwo Jima was one of the poignant examples of combat films to use the topos of a team of soldiers taking on an enemy obstacle in an interpolated minidrama mirroring the overall theatricality of war, even if, in Dwan’s combat film, John Wayne himself takes over from his men to finish the job. Sands of Iwo Jima was also one of the first post–World War II films to recycle documentary footage, anticipating the survival of visual and narrative pathos formulas Spielberg would perfect in Saving Private Ryan. To reanimate a cultural memory of the war in the Pacific, Dwan seamlessly spliced footage from With the Marines at Tarawa into his fictional reenactment. During the landing on Iwo Jima, he has a marine, pinned down on the beach, confess to his buddy, “If this were a blanket, I’d pull it over my head.” His film explicitly echoes the narrator of the documentary To the Shores of Iwo Jima. This voice, still familiar to his audience in 1949, had recalled: “We were pinned down. We wanted to pull the beach over our heads like a blanket.” My own conjecture is that Spielberg’s doubled reiteration of John Wayne’s death—the knapsack at the conclusion of the Omaha Beach sequence and the commander’s corpse at the end of the film’s story—draws our attention to the way Sands of Iwo Jima itself already installs a cinematic Bangalore relay. In this version of the war game, each subsequent director, picking up where his predecessor left off, reimagines the war by commemorating the men who fought it, but also by paying homage to those who came before him in bringing battle to the Hollywood screen. There is a final innovation Spielberg has added to the repertoire of D-Day reenactments. Saving Private Ryan does not begin with the Omaha Beach sequence, but with the old James Ryan, visiting the military cemetery where the man who helped him survive the war is buried. The extreme close-up of Tom Hanks’s eyes at the end of the battle on Omaha Beach is anticipated by the one of the old veteran kneeling at the gravestone of Capt. Miller, who, shortly before dying, bestowed upon him a terrible endowment. “James, earn this!” were his dying words. At the end of Saving Private Ryan we return to the cemetery in Normandy, with the veteran tearfully confessing to the gravestone that he has tried to live a good life. At stake in

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Figure 33 Saving Private Ryan. Reimagining D-Day. Digital frame enlargement.

Spielberg’s own apostrophe is a twofold rhetorical gesture, given that his film is implicitly an address to all those who died in the course of the story as well as the historical troops they stand in for. James Ryan’s life came to be saved by the War Department to assuage for his mother the death of his two brothers on Omaha Beach, much as the individual heroism of Miller’s death on the bridge in Normandy undoes the anonymity of the previous slaughter. Owing to the dying words of his commanding officer, James Ryan’s subsequent life has come to be haunted by an ambivalent command to remember the horror of war. In line with the doublevoicing suggested by the psychiatrist in Huston’s Let There Be Light, he has been called upon to live his civilian life under the auspices of a memory of this carnage. He can do so with impunity because the real threat of battle is safely gone. Spielberg is even more ambivalent in his use of double-voicing. The reason why Ryan can remember the landing on Omaha Beach in what, as I have traced, is a complex refiguring of previous cinematic mediations of this historical battle is that it was from the start a memory by proxy. It was never his own experience. The camera cuts from an extreme close-up of the eyes of Ryan kneeling at the gravestone, to the steel crosses on the beach, then to the shaking hands of Capt. Miller, ending up with a close-up of the eyes of Tom Hanks, giving us his subjective view of the men in his Higgins boat. Only after the man has died, whose gaze is installed as that of the privileged witness both at the beginning and end of the battle representation, does the film return to the eyes of the survivor. Capt. Miller’s death, we are to understand, lends authority to a representation of the Omaha landing, which someone else is remembering in his place. By this cunning sleight of hand, the film attributes the memory of a battle to a survivor, who, in fact, did not take part in it.

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Spielberg signals that his reenactment of D-Day is to be taken not so much as a witness report than as a capacity for historical reimagination: a survivor’s ability to reinvoke in his mind an experience that is his own because he is able to empathize with the vision of a man who was actually there. Like the inclusion of the inserted image on the surface of a pocket mirror at the turning point of the battle, this match cut between two extreme close-ups attests above all to the spectacular capacity of cinematic reimagination. Within the parameters of a screen, confessing that its images are nothing other than approximations, we are affectively drawn into an experience of battle whose singularity, as I have been arguing, is radically untransmittable. Equally unabashedly Spielberg insists that the mass death, in the name of which he is undertaking his reconceptualization, is the sanction of everything he has to tell. With their miniseries Band of Brothers, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg returned once more to a D-Day reenactment, now as executive producers of Steven Ambrose’s reportage of the trials and travails of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne, starting with its precarious drop behind enemy lines a few hours before the beach landings and ending up at Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden, Germany. While the special effects of postproduction cinema once more allow the producers to visually enhance the blood and gore of dying, which earlier documentaries could only gesture toward, noteworthy for my discussion is their inclusion of selected veterans, now adding a layer of authentic witness testimony to the genre memory of combat film. As in Huston’s documentary, these men are sharing with us, albeit in a far more coherent manner than his amnesiac, scenes that in the course of the interviews reemerged before their inner eyes. The veterans call upon us to imagine for ourselves what they are describing. Although the graphic depictions that follow implicitly give visual shape to the stories they have been telling, Band of Brothers underlines the double-voicing that holds together the recollection of an actual experience and any belated aesthetic reconceptualization by splicing a title card in between the two. The red letters “Part 2—Day of Days,” projected on a black background, serve to bridge the lacuna. What we reimagine is as indelibly different from what the veterans are seeing again with their inner eyes as the cinematic reenactment that brings their accounts to the screen. Addressing the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century our cultural memory of what D-Day was like is shaped largely by the ways films, novels, and historical reportages have reconceptualized it for us, the miniseries reintroduces the voices of survivors to offer a poignant counterpoint of authenticity to all dramatic visualization. Yet the urgency of recording what they have to say, given the advanced age of those who could bear witness, also attests to the fragility of any attempt to retrieve the past other than as a reinscription in an ever thicker layering of genre memory. The last of the veterans to speak before the title card transitions to this cinematic enactment of D-Day recalls what is was like to jump out of an airplane knowing that enemy fire would fill the sky. One had to focus on what one had been trained to do, he stolidly explains, “what your job is going to be and what you’re supposed to do. That’s what you gotta think about. And we lost a lot of

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people that night.” Hesitating slightly, tears mounting, he adds, looking pointedly at his interlocutors: “But you try to put it all out of your mind.” It remains ambiguous whether at this moment he is referring to his jump that June morning in 1944 or his belated recollection, or whether his own injunction to “put it all out of your mind” in fact gives voice to the pathos that connects the present with the past. My claim is that all cinematic battle choreography walks a thin line between a personal and collective need to forget and an ethical imperative to reenvision. Reanimating the heightened intensity of any battle experience by reworking the formulas that gave shape to it at the time, cinema unfolds a resilient and endlessly reworkable space of virtuality. In it we remember with impunity because we know that the kernel of pure horror, upon which our reimagination is based, is safely placed out of our minds. It is the resonance of what cannot be captured on screen because there is simply too much smoke on the battlefield, which makes for the emotional force of what, in turn, we do see. Taking Huston’s documentation of hypnosis as a viable means for retrieving traumatic battle memories as its point of departure, this chapter has focused on the restitution a reimagination of battle on screen affords. Like Huston’s military psychiatrist, cinematic reenactment thrives on a cathartic magic so as to commemorate the loss all war entails. The affective turn on which cinematic reenactment thrives addresses a seminal conundrum: the trauma of battle can never be deleted from personal or collective memory, nor can it be directly represented. It can only be reenacted in the sense of a historical reconception with the help of aesthetic formalization. The memory presented on screen calls upon the audience to affectively interact with generically codified images and narrative management aimed at producing meaning and closure. By delineating the cultural survival of cinema’s reconceptualization of D-Day over more than half a century, this chapter has also shown that each new depiction entails a twofold recycling of the past—of the battle itself and of previous representations of it. In the midst of a development toward ever more graphic violence, what remains constant is a fruitful tension between documentary evidence and aesthetic formalization. Recycling engenders a complex patina of affectively charged film sequences. Their affective turn draws us into a proxy experience. The imaginary capacity invoked is self-consciously that of cinema itself. Films about D-Day are also about the history of that battle, its cultural survival on screen, refigured over and again in response to previous refigurations and tailored to address the present. I take as my point of transition the unbridgeable lacuna inscribed in the testimony given by World War II veterans in Band of Brothers. Staying with my premise that battle can neither directly nor fully be represented, with films about war speaking about and to the psychic aftereffects of this unfinished business, all three chapters to follow explore more directly the issue of haunting—by war and by previous movies about war. While the question of how Hollywood films transform the horror of real battle into coherent narratives remains an issue, the focus now shifts to issues of reporting, passing judgment, and reevaluation after the fact. The next chapter looks at the deployment of war correspondents in Hollywood films, as

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characters in fiction films but also as directors using documentary footage to bank on the murky interface between giving evidence of and reimagining the past. It traces how battle comes to be explained for those at home, even while bearing testimony or paying tribute to those who fought overseas. Double-voicing is engendered by a narratorial stance that looks back and reflects on the war scenes it also reinvokes on screen. Especially when these films splice together documentary and studio footage, the boundary is troubled between present and past, here (at home) and over there (at the front). And while the next chapter picks up on the tension between witnessing and aesthetic encoding at the heart of my discussion of battle choreography, the reconceptualization is now explicitly aimed at those not involved in the action.

5

Reporting the War

In the voice-over to the personal color film diary that his father, George Stevens, began at dawn on June 6, 1944, while aboard the flagship Belfast, George Stevens Jr. recalls that the captain read to the men assembled on deck a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V, which has since become a signature commentary on the D-Day invasion.1 Let us recall the theatrical scene. Just before the battle at Agincourt is about to begin, Shakespeare’s king assures his men that their paucity of troops may still prove to be a sign of luck. Coveting honor beyond all earthly possessions, he explains, he would want to share the glory of vanquishing the French forces with only the very few men who were willing to die with him that Friday, October 25, 1415. To rouse the war fury of his small number of troops, he goes on to describe the way their actions will, in retrospect, come to serve as a missive of their valor. The war veteran who will have returned home safely will celebrate each Crispian Day to come, show his scars, recall the feats he performed, and remember the names of all those who fought with him. By virtue of this repeated commemoration, these former soldiers will ritually reenact the battle for those who were not present, while the scars on their bodies will also lend authority to the story of combat they have to tell. The narration of the battle of Agincourt, passed down from one generation to the next, will ensure the survival of those who were actually there in our cultural memory. “This story shall the good man teach his son,” King Henry proclaims, “And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be remembered, / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” (4.3.56–60). The violence about to be unleashed is introduced as an act of speech. It will reverberate in the future, because it will have prompted stories of commemoration, the first of which introduces the event itself. The anticipation of pain and dying within the ranks of the English not only justifies the slaughter of the enemy. Real suffering also comes to function as the ground on which the narrative of an astonishing victory over the French, who greatly outnumbered King Henry’s forces that day, will have been founded. Continuing with the theme of a double-voicing inherent to all battle representation, the figure of the war correspondent addresses the personal and cultural need for reports from the war zone. Returning to the HBO series Band of Brothers (2001), this chapter raises theoretical issues involved in straddling the evidence a witness has to give and the formalization visual narratives have recourse to so as to transmit this report. In the interest of generic diversity, it will bring together a panoply of examples of Hollywood’s enmeshment of documentary evidence and fictionalization, beginning with the inclusion of actual combat footage and real soldiers in

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World War II combat films such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Air Force (1943), and Back to Bataan (1945). The troubling dialogue William Wellman sets up between his story of a real war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and Huston’s own report from a war zone, The Battle of San Pietro (1945), will follow. The decisive transformation of the role of combat correspondent in the wake of Vietnam becomes stridently evident in Anzio (1968) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), both films in which the role of the soldier and the reporter, neatly severed in my previous examples, are conflated. Errol Morris’s film about the photographs documenting prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure (2008), in turn self-consciously straddles documentation with fictionalization, interrogating what soldiers themselves felt committed to pass on to those not present in a war zone. Morris places the soldier qua reporter back into the frame of what is a highly aestheticized reenactment.

Witnessing as Evidence Death serves as the uncircumventable real clinging to any report that those who survive a battle and return home safely have to give. The tragic irony is that while knowledge of the actual experience of battle is something only those who partook in it can share with each other, there is a need to pass on this knowledge to the uninitiated as well. A telling lacuna is inscribed into all dispatches from the war front. What is related turns the slaughter of war into a coherent and meaningful narrative, yet endows the testimony of an eyewitness with a duplicitous authority. While the claim to having actually been present at a particular scene of war authenticates the report the eyewitness gives, it also opens up an insurmountable impasse in communication. The people he or she is addressing were not themselves present on the battlefield. They can only process the other’s description of war by tapping into their own imaginary capacity, into their intellectual compassion. While the eyewitness and his or her audience may share stories about past battles, the actual event, in all its real pain, horror, and confusion, which is to say the material referent to all war narratives, is precisely what they do not have in common. The wars Shakespeare’s history plays recall were fought before war correspondents came into fashion. It was primarily the soldiers and commanding officers who themselves reported from the front lines. This may, in part, explain why Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks chose the title Band of Brothers for their miniseries, committed as they are to transmitting what those who experienced battle firsthand still remember of their combat experiences more than half a century after the war they fought was over. Fully cognizant of the gap in transmission all combat correspondence contains, each of the episodes splices together the verbal testimony of a group of veterans from the 101st Airborne Division with a cinematic reenactment of their World War II travails, beginning with the experience of boot camp and ending with the Japanese declaration of unconditional surrender. Comments from members of Easy Company introduce each episode (as discussed for the D-Day episode in the previous chapter). Their belated appraisals of past events function as

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mottos to the fictional reenactment, even while lending urgency to the overall claim that their testimony must be preserved. The move into a fictionalized narrative is justified by virtue of the fact that, repeatedly, these eyewitnesses fall silent because the onslaught of memories chokes off their words. While any explanation they have to offer sheds light on their experiences of war, some things can only be circumscribed. Having recourse to a literary analogy where one’s own language fails is a rhetorical move on the part of Band of Brothers, which further explains the choice of the title. In contrast to all previous episodes, the last one moves directly to a scene at Zell Am See in Austria, in the summer of 1945. The veterans of Easy Company, whose comments up to this point have anchored the cinematic reenactment in historical reality, do not appear until the very end of this final episode. For the first time, we are given their names and are able to match them up with the actors who have been playing them throughout. So as to underscore the very unusual bond they had come to have for each other, Carwood Lipton quotes Shakespeare’s Henry V, claiming that the “lucky few” who fought with him shall not only be remembered until the end of the world, but that the blood they shed together has made them brothers. The very last words of the episode, however, go to another eyewitness from the 101st Airborne. To enact what has rhetorically been at stake all along (namely the ventriloquism by which those present on screen speak with the voice of those absent), Maj. Dick Winters, who had been in charge of Easy Company throughout the war, reminds his interviewer of a letter a fellow soldier wrote him. In it, Mike Ranney had described how, when asked by his grandson whether he had been a hero in the war, he had replied, “No, but I served in a company of heroes.” The facial expression with which Winters accompanies his recital of this correspondence is hard to read, oscillating between a sober smile and silent sorrow. If one veteran has recourse to Shakespeare in his search for a metaphor that best describes the admiration he continues to have for the men he fought with over two and a half years, the other veteran foregrounds the need to pass on their story. At stake is the unseverable bond between men who shared the horror of war. An account of this band of brothers originates with someone who is justified in claiming that he was there to witness the events, but whose experience must also be recounted to someone who was not there—to a grandchild, to an interviewer, and to us, the audience. We can never share the particular emotions this letter raises in Winters, but we are compelled to engage with the pregnant silence that follows upon his recital of it. The double-voiced closure of Band of Brothers raises precisely the vexed issue of transmission inscribed not only in reporting the war but also— for the purpose of the following discussion even more relevant—what is at stake when Hollywood films take the act of corresponding about war as their theme. In 1943 reporter Richard Tregaskis published his Guadalcanal Diary, an account of the first successful land victory by marines in the South Pacific. Lewis Seiler, turning this account into a film the same year, uses the actor Reed Hadley to stand in for Tregaskis both on screen and for the voice-over narration. The war correspondent is introduced to us early on in the film when a soldier, on board the ship

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taking them to Guadalcanal, asks him to put his name in the papers. Repeatedly we see Tregaskis interacting with the marines, or, with his notebook in hand, taking down what he sees and hears. Yet his is a shadow presence, the mark of an empathetic observer, not a participant. The voice-over functions to support this doubling. At seminal moments, Hadley/Tregaskis gives a commentary on the action we see on screen, offering his interpretation of what the soldiers are feeling, as though he were the stream of consciousness of the battalion. He comments in real time on the uncertainty of their first night on the island and on the changes in their attitude toward fighting the Japanese, and even introduces the first assault on the enemy with the explanation: “Now at last, the day we have been training for.” Both in the war zone and outside, experiencing and witnessing the military events, he is a perfect embodiment of the double-voicing inscribed in any depiction of war on screen. Three different temporal moments need to be distinguished for my discussion about giving testimony from the battlefield. War correspondents are eyewitnesses to events of which they give an account at the time that they occur, reporting explicitly for those who are not there. If their concern is to inform about and to a degree make sense of individual events and actions, cinematic narratives about reporting the war arrive at the scene at a historical distance (even if, as in Guadalcanal Diary, in the same year). As the film narratives record how a given war correspondent came to transmit his or her news from the battlefront, they not only recall this particular aspect of the war effort but already take into account the effect it has had. The reference of authenticity, adhering to the actual report of the correspondent, is no longer located only in the story the film chooses to relate, but also in the images or citations from past reports it embeds in its own narrative. Where, on the part of the war correspondent, bearing witness is a form of recalling the actions of soldiers (regardless of whether this serves to honor or to criticize), a cinematic reenactment of war reporting amounts to a second-degree recollection. The film narrative recalls a report that has already been made, much as images of war come after the event. Reed Hadley’s voice-over implicitly recalls Richard Tregaskis’s original book. Any film about a war correspondent must inevitably take into account the effect his or her writings from the war may have already had, as well as whether to correct or to appraise the prior report. If all dispatches from the battlefront are belated missives, any cinematic engagement with the theme of war reporting involves secondhand knowledge, handed down to others so as to become part of our cultural image repertoire. Our engagement with these reports becomes the burden of our own historical heritage, calling upon us to use both the cinematic reenactment as well as the initial reportage it is based on to form our own recollection and our own accounting of the war. What, then, is at stake in Hollywood’s engagement with the art of witnessing and giving testimony of war? Even when the story they tell involves a newspaper reporter and not a photographer or director, as is the case in Seiler’s Guadalcanal Diary, movies nevertheless use photographic images to visualize the scenes of war being transmitted. We must thus first ask: how are combat and photography

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Figure 34 Guadalcanal Diary. Star as war correspondent. Digital frame enlargement.

mutually implicated, be it still photography or the moving images of film? Roland Barthes was one of the first to insist on the special relation that photography has with death, given that we must contend with the way reference stubbornly adheres to the camera’s image. Both the cinematic image and the photograph bring back to life people and scenes no longer present, but capture them as specters of themselves. Both confirm that what appeared before the camera’s lens at the particular moment the photographer triggered the shutter or the director’s camera began to roll was unequivocally there. Yet to assert that a particular scene took place also implies that what it references no longer exists, at least not quite the way we see it recaptured on film.2 Both the cinematic and the photographic image recall the intractable fatedness of what they also commemorate. What is special about photographing and filming the war is that its scenes occur in a theater of transience par excellence. Because the context of combat photography as well as documentary films of battle is the possibility of dying at any moment, real danger hovers at the edges of all the images it produces. The urgent claim on our attention these images make, regardless whether they are still or in motion, is based on a two-sided affect. They render visible our own mortality even while the camera’s mechanical gaze contains this disturbing insight.3 War photography opens up the question of complicity. The war correspondent, normally unarmed, chooses to compose an image or take notes rather than intervene in battle. His or her reportage, once circulated, mobilizes

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public attitudes toward the hostilities it depicts and implicates us, the intended spectators. A nonretractable referent adheres to the photographic image in general and documentary images of war in particular, and yet the reality these representations contain are always also obscured. We are presented with a scene purporting to be an eyewitness report, yet any photographs, film sequences, or narratives inevitably frame what they record. They codify the real and translate it into the realm of the imaginary. On a personal level, dispatches from the war front make knowledge available to us by proxy, even while shielding us from all real effects. This protection works on a public level as well. Our culture must engage in a constant struggle to contain the disruptiveness of military violence, reconciling its bloodshed with our sense of political justice. War reportage—whether praising, commemorating, or critiquing—has emerged as a particularly resilient way of crafting and containing this violence, precisely because it offers representations and interpretations of what would otherwise be seen purely as a threat to individual and collective survival. Although war reportage privileges the eyewitness account, the authenticity it promises is from the start caught up in a cultural matrix that blurs the distinction between documentary evidence and aesthetic representation. Even the most literal depiction of scenes of war deploys rhetorical devices (if only owing to its framing), while real death adheres to even the most stylized visualization, and any formalization amounts to an interpretation. As Ulrich Keller insists, “armed conflicts are shot through with signs, and the processes of signification are shot through with conflict; warfare is among other things an aesthetic enterprise and art, among other things, a site of battle. And the two essentially depend on each other, in a sometimes perverse nexus.”4 As is the case with any narrative reportage from the battle zone, photographic and cinematic images of war inevitably formalize the violence, which is its unretractable referent. They confront us with our own complicity as the intended viewers of the spectacle. Yet even as culture uses war reportage to contain military violence, it is forced to recognize that once brought into circulation, images and stories develop a life of their own, producing shifting meanings that cannot be controlled. While the war correspondent’s reportage compels us to agree that horrific destruction has happened, we may well come to disagree on how to respond to this evidence. We may read the images against the grain of the correspondent’s intention, see condemnation where he or she intended to praise, discover sympathy where he or she sought to accuse. Over the long run, memories of war, preserved and circulated through pictures and narratives, prove to be necessary cultural fictions. As Susan Sontag argues, while, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory, there is collective instruction: “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”5 While war photography allows culture to contain military violence, Hollywood has brought forth two types of films that report from the war zone. I discuss John Huston’s work for the War Department during World War II as an example of the

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way a director may himself or herself assume the role of war correspondent, given that his or her documentary film pits his or her personal commentary against the official newsreels. Moving to fiction films explicitly about war correspondents, I treat the combat journalist as a particularly resilient example for what it means to witness war and give report of this experience for those waiting at home. In both cases, the missives they dispatch from the front lines commemorate the events of past wars by recalling eyewitnesses and calling upon us to remember. They also shape the way we take note, and instruct us on how to think about the evidence those reporting from the war confront us with. Because they do so within the genre of fictional narratives, they implicitly reflect on the contradiction inscribed in all war reportage as it welds together an irretraceable real event with an aesthetic formalization. We can only partake of war by adapting the real event to the pathos formulas and codes of genre cinema. There is a particular historical context for the convergence of documentary evidence and fictional reenactment, which Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg chose to showcase in their miniseries by splicing together the reports their veterans have to give with a lavish cinematic reconceptualization. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the War Department and the Hollywood studios formed a historically unprecedented band of brothers of their own. Fully committed to the war effort, directors such as William Wyler, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford, and John Huston joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps (supervising transmission of all military information) to produce combat documentary films. Even while Ford’s Battle of Midway (1942) or Wyler’s Memphis Belle (1944) used actual war footage to emphasize the authenticity of the battles they were recording, these films were riddled with traces of the melodrama and the western genre their directors had earlier become famous for. John Ford had Henry Fonda, known for his representation of Abraham Lincoln, inhabit a persona in Battle of Midway to make the connection to his earlier work in a mythic retelling of American history explicit. The collective instruction at stake in the convergence of the War Department’s Signal Corps and Hollywood during World War II left its traces in combat dramas as well. As Thomas Schatz notes, by 1943 these had entered a stage of remarkable symbiosis with nonfiction war films. As documentary filmmakers came to dramatize and humanize their wartime subjects, he explains, “fictionalized accounts of combat developed a more pronounced ‘documentary realism.’”6 They did so by dedicating the war dramas, meant to boost the morale of those fighting on the front and at home, to those who had already died in battle. They also thanked the military institution that made the continuation of the war in Europe and the Pacific, but also its cinematic recollection, possible. Air Force is emblematic of this twofold gesture of commemoration, moving beyond straightforward war correspondence by inserting actual battle footage into a fictional story, which at that same time authenticates its message. As a foreword to his narrative, Howard Hawks inserts a quotation from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address after the title credits, explaining the purpose of his film: “It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be

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dedicated to the great task remaining before us that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The decisive air battle includes newsreel footage, which either functions as a rear projection for the cinematic reenactment of the fighting, or, in the case of the bombing and sinking of the enemy ships, is spliced into individual scenes so as to weld together fictional dialogues among actors with combat photography of a battle that actually took place. The final dedication draws yet another connection between documentation and fictionalization, reminding the audience that “this story has a conclusion but not an end—for its real end will be the victory for which Americans—on land, on sea, and in the air—have fought, are fighting now, and will continue to fight until peace has been won.” Hawks justifies his fictional representation of a particular phase in American air combat by implicitly embedding his reel battle into the still ongoing real battle in the Pacific theater. With the final shots of his film, he blurs the boundary between the site of cinema and that of military operations even further. Superimposed on a freeze frame of fighter airplanes flying in formation above the clouds, the final words of Air Force read: “Grateful acknowledgment is given to the United States Army Air Force, without whose assistance this record could not have been filmed.” Even more hauntingly, Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan begins and ends its story of the liberation of the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan, with released prisoners parading through the streets of Manila. The voice-over gives a roll call of some of the men who were actually imprisoned there, ascribing a name, a rank, and a place of origin to anonymous faces. In the closing shots, Dmytryk goes one step further and superimposes the faces of these soldiers onto those of the actors who played in the cinematic reenactment of the story behind this rescue. As real prisoners of war and reel heroes blend together visually, so do documentary evidence and cinematic representation. While the aesthetic formalization serves to contain the actual violence of the struggle behind this rescue, rendering this story of resistance palatable to the war effort, the dedications ask us to remember the valor of actual American troops. The narrative sandwiched in between these close-ups of soldiers and actors indeed shapes the way we take notice of the liberation of Bataan; it instructs us on how to think about the documentary evidence that introduces and concludes the fictional enactment we have been watching. In Back to Bataan, typical for Hollywood’s engagement with combat documentation during World War II, interpretation takes precedence over fact. And yet these framing documentary shots also foreground the fact that real battle is unretractably written into Dmytryk’s cinematic representation. That a referent adheres to these images comes to be articulated in what I call an authenticity effect. The real of war is located precisely in the murky interface that emerges as John Wayne and Anthony Quinn share the frame with liberated prisoners. The allure of the Hollywood star is ineluctably held at bay by these haggard, haunted faces in which we read traces of the suffering of actual imprisonment, even as they smile into the news cameras that are there to record their triumphant rescue.

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Figure 35 Back to Bataan. Prisoners of war meet stars on screen. Digital frame enlargement.

The Director as Correspondent In his film review “Best of 1945,” written for the Nation, James Agee singles out John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro and William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe as the two best films of the year in which the Allied forces won their victory, praising both for the sober compassion with which they depict the Fifth Army’s campaign in Italy. Both films share a visual eloquence, attentive to the heavy casualties in human lives, even while accepting these losses as the facts of war. Agee argues that they touch upon the essence of the power of moving pictures: “they give you things to look at, clear of urging or comment, and so ordered that they are radiant with illimitable suggestions of meaning and mystery.”7 Focusing on the long and difficult struggle to liberate Rome from the perspective of the ordinary GI (albeit as a belated aesthetic formalization of these soldiers’ perspective), both films refrain from glamorizing soldiering or ennobling the war effort. Even if the suffering of these infantrymen is shown to be unspectacular, because neither recklessness nor bravura is underscored, the point of both films is to make their story known, to draw our attention precisely to an unassuming valor that might otherwise be overlooked. Their affective power consists in deploying fictional codes so as to render war as ordinary, and thus real. In a very concrete sense, they also share a conversation about the war correspondent’s impulse to blur the border between documentary evidence and aesthetic

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formalization. Not only was Huston forced to restage some of the combat around the Italian village, but Wellman, directing his film months after this part of the campaign was over, decided to include footage shot by Huston’s Signal Corps cameramen in San Pietro. While in his documentary film Huston himself takes on the role of a war correspondent, whose personal impressions of the war are being reported, Wellman is the director of an explicitly fictional re-creation of the life of Ernie Pyle, based on but also embellishing the columns the actual combat journalist sent back home from the war front. Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro begins with a panorama shot of Liri valley. As the camera moves into the landscape, focusing on barren grapevines, forlorn olive groves, and cornfields lying fallow, the voice-over narration, spoken by John Huston himself, explains that the last year had been bad for the harvest. After locating San Pietro on a military map, the camera moves into the ruins of this ancient village at the threshold of the valley. As Huston goes on to explain how, over the centuries, these dwellings were built by Italian peasants not for themselves alone but for future generations, he shows us villagers cleaning away the rubble of their bombed homes, until the camera comes to rest at the body of a dead girl, lying on her back, her eyes staring blankly into space. At the end of its record of the battle that liberated this village from Nazi occupation, Huston’s narrative returns to images of children who survived the onslaught, as though to support his hope that they might be able to forget quickly. Yet it is the corpse of a child, collateral damage of the battle of San Pietro, that introduces all the other dead that will be buried in the ground around the village, instructing us on how to interpret what we are about to see. If we are to believe in the future, the film bleakly suggests, then we do so only by remembering the toll in human suffering. The documentation of the bitter fighting that took place in this valley between the end of October and the middle of December 1943 reiterates the visual elements introduced in the frame. Maps of the area, explaining military strategy, are juxtaposed with shots of the Italian landscape as well as scenes depicting the quotidian existence of ordinary foot soldiers, standing behind artillery, fixing bayonets, strapping on hand grenades, pushing forward cautiously over the rocky paths of the mountains, and, at best, returning to camp. Again and again Huston’s camera moves into close-ups of his infantrymen. Balancing the anonymity of modern warfare with the resonance of the individual face, Huston insists on embedding both in the geography they use as their stage, by repeatedly drawing our gaze back to the scenery and then its cartographic representation on a military map.8 As his voiceover continues to narrate the broad shape of this particular battle, dryly describing the military strategies that had been deployed during the tantalizingly slow movement toward the village of San Pietro, Huston inserts images of the wounded carried back on stretchers, the dead in body bags heaved onto carts or lying sprawled on the ground. In the same way that the individual battalions are rotated from position to position overlooking the valley, so that the troops can study the terrain ahead from various viewpoints, Huston, too, offers a multiple perspective. Into his laconic

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visualization of battle activity—transmitting information, patrolling the terrain, taking prisoners, receiving instructions, waiting in anticipation of battle, moving toward the enemy targets, firing bombs, and, finally, engaging the chaos of handson combat—the film repeatedly intersperses close-ups of the real soldiers (playing themselves) with this scene of war. The contrast between the narrator’s laconic recollection of what had happened militarily on those hills and the humanely resonant images of these soldiers’ faces is not ironic. It suggests instead that, in order to grasp what happens in battle, one must oscillate between the pathos of individual actions and the cold abstraction of the overall scheme of the campaign, even while acknowledging the routine of both. The mise-en-scène seeks to affectively draw us into experiences of the common foot soldier by foregrounding the real death hovering at the edge of the images. As the camera tracks one of the battalions approaching an impenetrable line of mines and fire from pillboxes, one soldier suddenly falls down a few feet ahead. We see death in action, but, rather than moving into a close-up shot as the melodrama convention would suggest, the scene underscores the impact by moving on. The horrific significance of death in war consists precisely in its narrative insignificance; here, dying, after all, is the norm. To underscore the intensity of the fight, Huston resorts to a handheld camera, unfocussed images of explosions, and low shots, as though to simulate both the movement of the soldiers and the earth trembling around them during the bombings. Visual emphasis is given to the effects of war. The camera repeatedly returns to the wounded and dead, whose bodies mark each yard of the slow process in pushing back the enemy. After a final montage sequence that juxtaposes extreme close-ups of the charging troops with the last barrage of shell fire, the noise of battle ceases. Yet even as the troops move forward unimpeded, the camera draws our attention to the casualties that are strewn along their path. Out of one foxhole rises the head of a dead man, who could be either enemy or friend. While the classic combat film would depict the taking of the village as a climactic moment of triumph, Huston foregrounds the ordinariness of conquest. Some weary soldiers move on to the next village, others bury the dead, nailing their dog tags onto makeshift wooden gravestones. What is harrowing about Huston’s mise-en-scène is that even as he calls upon us to recognize the high cost in lives this battle demanded, he also draws our attention to the larger military scheme that it was a part of. The only respite allowed to the survivors is a brief period of repose, and, as the camera once again captures the faces of the men sitting by the roadside, cheerfully chatting with their buddies, the narrator reminds us: “Many of these you see alive here have since joined the ranks of their brothers in arms who fell in San Pietro.” As in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the promise of commemoration and the anticipation of death are mutually implicated. When the film was released in 1945, the audience knew of the other battles, still lying ahead, “more San Pietros, greater or lesser, a thousand more.” The juxtaposition of the soldiers’ faces with the anticipation of an inevitable death to come is haunting precisely because this enactment brings the dead back to life. Yet it does so explicitly as an interlude between two battles, which also bridges the young

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men’s hope for survival with the sober knowledge the audience has of the tragic outcome the future was to hold for many of them. The elegiac note Huston’s voiceover narrative intones is the more bitter because he superimposes it onto faces of men marked by the cheer of having, if only for a short while, outrun death. Equally disturbing is the fact that, in its final sequence, the film narrative introduces yet another perspective on the Allied victory. Old people, women, and children reappear from their hiding places in caves to begin rebuilding their village. The pathos of restitution resides entirely with them. Even while mourning the dead, whom they find buried beneath the rubble, they resume their everyday lives, breast-feeding their babies, bringing back their belongings, trading at the marketplace. Huston shows women washing their clothes in the river as American trucks move on across the bridge. For the military strategist, he explains, the primary aim was to engage and defeat the enemy, while the liberation of the town of San Pietro was of an incidental nature. So as to contain this inhuman logic, Huston shifts our attention to the people, for whom this battle was everything but incidental. “In their military innocence,” he adds, “it was to free them and their farmland that we came.” The last close-ups of the film are granted to the children who have begun to smile into the camera, growing ever more confident as it holds their gaze. While the GIs move out of the villagers’ frame of vision, the camera tarries with the farmers who have once again begun to till their soil. Visually anticipating a good harvest, this documentation of the battle of San Pietro flows seamlessly into a mythic narrative of regeneration out of death. That this no longer concerns the foot soldiers of the Fifth Army does not make their sacrifice unimportant. It marks instead the final turn in the symbiosis between fiction and documentation Huston’s idiosyncratic report of this war undertakes. The rich harvest his final images evoke is ineluctably grounded on the dead bodies buried on the outskirts of the village. When one of the officers heading the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) complained that the film was “against war, against the war,” John Huston replied, “Well, sir, whenever I make a picture that’s for war—why, I hope you take me out and shoot me.”9 Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro presents real soldiers as dramatic personae in a documentary film about sacrifice and regeneration, claiming to report in their name. Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe offers a fictional rendition of the real war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who accompanied troops throughout various campaigns of the war so as to send home his impressions of their mutual experience. In this case, also, belated knowledge overshadows our reading of the film. Not only does Pyle’s voice resonate in the narratorial voice-over, which in part directly quotes from his newspaper columns, renowned for their folksy human-interest touch.10 The death of Pyle by sniper fire in Okinawa on April 18, 1945, draws our attention to the real death hovering on the edges of Burgess Meredith’s performance of the ScrippsHoward war correspondent. Yet reference to the reality of war already adheres to the opening credits. After naming both the lead actor and the supporting cast, including Robert Mitchum as Lt. Walker (who was to be nominated for an Oscar

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Figure 36 The Story of G.I. Joe. Veterans spliced together with fallen buddies on screen. Digital frame enlargement.

for this role), a larger typeface proclaims: “And as themselves, combat veterans of the campaigns in Africa, Sicily, and Italy.” This symbiosis of fiction and documentation finds its acme when, to induce the decisive charge, a mud-covered Robert Mitchum beckons his soldiers to follow him in an assault on a hill, only to be spliced into the archival material from Huston’s documentation of the same battle. The Hollywood star comes to share the scene with anonymous soldiers, who may well not have survived this battle, even while men playing themselves in a fiction film two years after the events are also reunited visually with their former buddies. In Wellman’s editing, close-ups of surviving war veterans are montaged with dead soldiers, who have come back to life on film. The authenticity effect is such that the grain of the image foregrounds the difference, implying a compelling connection with an actual event of battle Wellman chose not to reenact. By opting to embed secondhand film material of the fighting instead, the film offers a poignant comment on what it means to report from the battlefront. While the star, Robert Mitchum, is the one whose call to arms raises the specters of the dead, this gesture is also meant to instruct us that the battle we are seeing actually took place. Regarding the war correspondent commenting on this murky interface between fact and fiction, from the moment Meredith’s Ernie Pyle joins the Eighteenth Infantry in Africa, the film deploys him as the figure whose taciturn gaze mediates the events at the war front, instructing us in his compassion for the simple GIs and his passion for their cause. The men call him Pop, or the Little One, and ask him why he, who did not have be there, has joined them in battle rather than go home, as they all dearly wish they could. The fact that he has chosen the battlefront as his scene of action is what distinguishes him as the privileged observer of war. Accompanying the foot soldiers as an eyewitness rather than fighting with them, he can assume the distance necessary to turn the contingent violence of war into fables about young men “with guns in their hands, facing a deadly enemy in a strange and far away land.” His emotional proximity to the ordinary GI gives him the right, as he sits amid burning ruins, to offer a subjective yet more sober evaluation of the first defeat in Africa and the bloody victories that followed than the official

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propaganda of the War Department’s newsreels could: “We realized—only battle experience makes combat soldiers. Killing is a rough business. Men live rough and talk rough.” In moving from one outfit to the next, Pyle’s distinctive take on what he witnesses holds the different war sites together, representing them as part of one big scheme. Yet his focus remains on the everyday routine of war, on soldiering as daily work, often tedious but always dangerous. Often nothing is said and only gestures exchanged as war-weary men go out to patrol the hills along the road to Rome, only to return to their muddy caves with little to show for their efforts. As a cinematic rendition, The Story of G.I. Joe is able to add a dimension missing from Pyle’s columns, namely the distinction between actual events at the front and their translation into stories that explain the war to the folks back home. When one of the soldiers, Murphy, who recently celebrated his wedding to a nurse, does not return from a patrol, Wellman’s camera focuses on the war correspondent’s gaze, taking note of the way the others respond to their friend’s death. As the other exhausted men glumly drop onto their bunks, the dog, A-Rab, which has been with them since Africa, begins to whine plaintively. One of the GIs strikes Murphy’s name off his list of beneficiaries of his life insurance policy. Finally, Pyle takes the photograph of the bride tacked on the wall above the dead soldier’s bunk and pockets it as he leaves their quarters to walk through the rain to his own bunk, with the commanding officer, Lt. Walker, gazing after him in helpless silence. The film’s mise-en-scène can visualize what the men have no language for. Then, when Pyle goes to the barracks where the other war correspondents have set up their headquarters, he discovers that he has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Without taking off his cap and coat, he sits down at his typewriter to resume his work. His own jubilation at having been promoted to a distinguished journalist is brief. Commemorating his dead friend takes precedence over all personal vainglory. In the same laconic mode chosen for depicting the ordinary work of soldiering, the scene depicts this war correspondent typing away at a story that begins with the sentences: “I had long ago come to think of Private ‘Wingless’ Murphy as an old, old friend. He was just a plain Hoosier boy.” In his column dated January 10, 1944, Pyle himself describes a further eerie incident of leave-taking: “The uncertain mules moved off to their olive groves. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I could sense them moving, one by one, close to Captain Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.”11 This scene of quiet recognition serves as the melodramatic resolution of The Story of G.I. Joe. Sitting under the shade of a tree on the road to Rome, surrounded by his old buddies from the Eighteenth Infantry, Pyle watches one of the men leading the mule that is carrying the corpse of Bill Walker. As Pvt. Dondaro gently unloads him, Wellman moves from a close-up of Mitchum’s motionless face to the faces of the men who suddenly realize that their captain is dead. Sitting as though in formation, the group watches Dondaro kneel beside the dead man while the soldiers of other companies, unaffected by this one particular death, take no notice. Then slowly, one by one, Capt. Walker’s troops

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Figure 37 The Story of G.I. Joe. Ernie Pyle reporting from the front. Digital frame enlargement.

get up and go over to him. As they pass by, Pyle remains standing, positioned as the privileged witness to the final tribute these men pay to the man who had been their leader since they began fighting in Africa. The war correspondent’s face mediates between the close-up shots that connect the faces of the survivors and the shots of the dead man, until, weeping shamelessly in a way they would not, he turns away. As the soldiers fall in and begin marching on the road to Rome again, a few look curiously at the GI stroking the hand of a dead officer. Dondaro, realizing that he must take leave, gets up, straightens the collar of Mitchum’s jacket, touches his right cheek gently, and runs to join the others. Standing in front of a field of white crosses, Pyle has been waiting for him. The cinematic rendition requires his gaze as a final comment on the pathos we have been witnessing. As he, too, runs to join the other marching men, his voice-over not only stipulates that this one singular casualty is worth taking note of, but also why it is decisive: “We will win. I hope we can rejoice with victory. But humbly. That altogether we will try out of a memory of our anguish to reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so fair that another great war can never again be possible.” As the men march into a bright, white sky, they turn into silhouettes and disappear behind the horizon. Then the light fades and the screen is about to turn completely dark, but until the end we see the back of Pyle’s upper body, growing smaller and smaller as his voice-over proceeds with an instruction aimed at an America no longer at war, confronted instead with the difficult task of integrating its massive dead into a newly gained peace: “And for

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those beneath the wooden crosses there is nothing we can do except perhaps to pause and murmur, thanks pal, thanks.” The final image is also Wellman’s own taciturn tribute to the war correspondent who was willing to get into harm’s way to report the travails of the common GI. The pathos lies in the insistence on our debt, a testimony above and beyond indictment or remedy, which simply attests that because this actually happened, the issue is not how to respond to those who have not survived, but that we must not fail to take them into account.

G.I. Joe as Correspondent Though in the next two decades Robert Mitchum was to play in several more World War II films, including, The Longest Day (1962) and Crossfire (1947), his most dissonant performance of a war hero is to be found in Anzio. Using one of the biggest mistakes in military strategy of World War II to comment on the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, Dmytryk presents a far more cynical reportage of war than Wellman, marking a shift in the complicity between journalism and military violence as well. Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum), war correspondent for the International Press, is introduced as a seasoned reporter taking on army brass. His savagely critical column on the debacle at the Rapido River just got a one-star general rotated home. Like Ernie Pyle, his sympathies lie with the foot soldiers who need not have died if military strategy had been less faulty. In contrast to Wellman’s correspondent, Dick Ennis is concerned with indicting those at fault. In the first of two conversations he has with Gen. Jack Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), whose hesitation to push forward to Rome immediately after landing in Anzio will result in more unnecessary casualties, he explains why he has felt compelled to continue working as a war correspondent. Ever since he saw his first dead face he has been asking himself: “Why do we do it, why do people kill each other?” Smiling ironically, Ennis rejects the general’s rebuttal that we do so to survive, because in war one either kills or is killed. To an American audience, watching the carnage of the Vietnam War on their television sets each evening, such a standard formula for the unleashing of military violence is clearly not adequate. But the answer Dmytryk has to offer cannot simply be stated. To critique the power that killing in war affords requires an enactment of its seduction, and the war correspondent is a particularly viable candidate for this instruction, because he or she is in the position to comment on his or her own complicity. Ennis will soon find himself walking into a fatal setup, as he accompanies a battalion patrolling the Alban Hills around Cisterna. Once again witness to unnecessary slaughter, he will ultimately pick up the machine gun from a dead soldier and fire the shots that will kill the German sniper, who has been targeting the last three survivors of the ambush. Back at camp, the report he gives is no longer that of a war correspondent, offering a critical perspective on the development of the campaign, but of a man implicated in the war machinery, delivering intelligence that will give the Allied forces the decisive edge over their enemies. Having experienced his first kill in a situation where the survival of himself and his buddies was at stake, he has finally found an answer to the question subtending his dispatches from the front.

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Speaking once more to Gen. Lesley, who has been relieved of duty, he offers the text of his next column in person to the man responsible for the current debacle. Not for survival is war perpetrated, not to secure shelter, nor to appease hunger. The instruction Dmytryk’s war correspondent has is daunting in its plain simplicity: “Men kill each other because they like to.” History, Ennis insists, has taught us that war has never solved anything. The moment he found himself picking up a machine gun to defend himself, he discovered that facing a man with a gun in your hand you live more intensely at that moment than in any other moment in your life: “Because you’re scared to death and you’ve got to kill.” Acknowledging the authenticity of this emotion is also what lends authority to the remedy he has to offer. To recognize the soldier’s enjoyment of killing may be a condemnation of mankind, he admits, “but maybe, if we recognize it and admit it to ourselves, we might learn to live with each other.”12 The hope Dmytryk’s war correspondent has is far more bleak than the one Wellman can conceive at the end of World War II, even while his instruction is also more clearly based on an indictment of strategic decision making typical for Vietnam correspondents such as David Halberstam or Seymour Hersh.13 In that it is won out of the experience of the blurring of the line between reporting and fighting, it responds as much to the way historians came to judge the debacles of the Italian Campaign as to a fascination for combat’s dangerous edge predominant in 1968, the year Anzio came out. As though in conversation with Dmytryk, a veteran of antifascist propaganda films, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket offers the same conclusion. Culminating in the taking of Hue City at the beginning of the Tet Offensive, the reportage is given by a young marine, nicknamed Joker by his vicious drill instructor at boot camp, who straddles writing and killing from the position of a soldier explicitly assigned to report the war. Black humor, foregrounding an irresolvable conflict between complicity in military violence and ironic commentary, is the response Kubrick’s war correspondent assumes so as to depict the chaotic madness that was Vietnam. Working for Stars and Stripes out of Saigon, Joker (Matthew Modine), who in contrast to the correspondents discussed so far does not accompany troops but is himself a member of the company, is compelled to abide by military censorship. As his editor explains during one of their briefings, because this is not a particularly popular war he needs stories with a happy ending: reports about combat action resulting in “a kill” that can be sold under the heading “Winning the War.” “It is our job,” he argues “to report the news that these ‘why-are-we-here’ civilian newsmen ignore.”14 The film’s daunting irony consists in the fact that what Joker’s film narrative reports is something Stars and Stripes would have unequivocally censored. The voice-over we hear, commenting on the scenes we see, references Gustav Hasford’s autobiographical account Short-Timers, written after he left the army. The doublevoicing is such that his voice-over instruction dramatically contradicts any piece he might have written as an enlisted man, and together with the dramatic enactment the film envisions profusely embellishes on the energizing thrill of killing, which Robert Mitchum, who began his career with an earlier generation of

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war veterans, only laconically invokes. During their last meeting at boot camp, when Sgt. Hartman discovered that Joker had been assigned to Basic Military Journalism, he had shouted in outrage: “You’re not a writer, you’re a killer.” The young marine had affirmed the interpellation of his drillmaster. For him, also, proving he is the killer he has been trained to become requires an enactment. As a war correspondent, Joker wears a peace sign on his jacket, even while “born to kill” is written on his helmet to signal the irresolvable duality he finds himself in. In contrast to Ennis, who for only a brief period moves from reporting to killing, Joker has been trained to oscillate between these two roles depending on the situation in which he finds himself. In the final shooting of the North Vietnamese army sniper, with which Full Metal Jacket comes to its narrative climax, at issue is the question of acknowledging the erotic enjoyment of shooting someone who threatened to kill you. Significantly, it is the photographer Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) who fatally wounds the young Vietnamese woman, because Joker’s rifle jams. The former had explained to his friend in an earlier scene that he was desperate for some “trigger time,” and the scene indeed explicitly identifies Rafterman’s camera with the gun’s trigger. Lying on her back, encircled by the GIs, who are panting in a curious mixture of exhilaration and confusion as they tower above her, the female sniper moans, “Shoot me.” Joker is the one to fire the coup de grâce, choosing deliberately to kill out of a sense of justice that is as bizarre as the war zone they find themselves in. Kubrick’s camera tarries with his face as his buddies comment on this “hard core” act, because this killing is not about the victim. Like Dmytryk’s war correspondent, Joker is in a position in which he finds himself compelled to kill, though he does so not to survive a sniper but instead to put the woman out of her misery. Acknowledging his empowerment at the expense of his enemy is the moment when he moves beyond the interpellation of the military logic drilled into him at boot camp. Like Ennis, he is not blindly following a command but commits a deliberate act for which he is solely accountable. This “one kill” is significant not for a story he might write for Stars and Stripes, but for the counternarrative the film has to tell. Within the rulelessness of Kubrick’s Vietnam, assuming full responsibility for the death of another is the one meaningful gesture his correspondent can perform, and he, too, has an instruction for us as a result of it. Walking through the burning city of Hue at dusk, Joker joins the other GIs, only to fuse completely with the band of silhouettes that have begun to walk out of the picture frame. Superimposed over their Mickey Mouse march, we hear his voice-over declare: “I’m in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive. And I am not afraid.” As at the end of The Story of G.I. Joe, darkness begins to encroach upon the screen. In contrast to the quietly hopeful ending Wellman can imagine for his report from the Italian Campaign, Kubrick’s nightfall swallows up all the marching men. With the distinction between shooting the war and shooting in the war having completely collapsed, Kubrick cannot salvage a final image of the war correspondent as our privileged point of perspective. He can only leave us with an impenetrable black screen.

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Figure 38 Top: The Story of G.I. Joe; bottom: Full Metal Jacket. War correspondents moving on. Digital frame enlargement.

If photojournalism came into its own at the outset of World War II, working in tandem with the OSS, what was unique about the news coverage of Vietnam was its lack of censorship on the part of the media and lack of restraint on the part of the journalists. For the first and only time in American history, an open media policy had been instituted. Correspondents could go anywhere they wanted, film and report anything they chose and get it published. As Sontag notes, “only starting with the Vietnam War is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were set-ups. And this is essential to the moral authority of these images.”15 Yet it is also the war that first raised doubts about whether the presence of war correspondents helps end a war or prolong it, given that media interest often goes hand in hand with escalations of violence. If Vietnam inaugurated the myth of the bold correspondent, courageously in pursuit of truth despite political attempts to stop him or her, it was also the watershed for the myth of the self-absorbed reporter, obsessed with covering situations that put him or her in dangerous situations. As Susan Moeller, herself a former war photographer, notes, there are conflicting reasons why reporters go into combat. They may want to be witnesses at decisive moments in history; they may seek to indict the horrors of battle; they may want to become famous or indulge their fascination with destruction. In all cases, however, “war photographers are obsessed with war, with observing and recording the events of battle.” Her own conclusion is astonishingly similar to the one

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Dmytryk’s war correspondent offers: “photographers go to war and keep going back into combat because they are addicted to the frisson of danger.”16

Storytelling as Evidence The uncomfortable complicity between reporting the war and sustaining the very military violence combat correspondents seek to disclose has become even more complicated with the introduction of embedded journalists during the initial campaign of the Iraq War (March–April 2003). In contrast to the reporters and directors working through the Pentagon in World War II, but also in contrast to the combat correspondents of the military’s own news agencies, the policy of embedding placed the journalist inside a specified military unit. Because they are stuck with one unit, this new type of war correspondent soon finds it impossible to maintain a critical objectivity. The distinction between themselves and the troops they were accompanying is all but obliterated, even while they find themselves fully dependent on the media briefings from Central Command for all information outside their limited experience of the war. As Phillip Knightley notes, what further made the coverage of the first phase of the Iraq War unreliable was the fact that there was so much of it. Manically splicing together feeds from every front with experts in television studios, only to give way to an incessant barrage of more incoming “breaking news,” the fog of media coverage did more to obfuscate than clarify the events. Yet in hindsight, Knightley’s most telling anecdote picks up on the protest by Daniel Demoustier, a cameraman for ITN, in relation to the way many of his colleagues seemed ready to accept the embedding of correspondents as the future of war journalism: “Let the army do it. Put a colonel there, give a soldier a camera and he [the colonel] can say what’s happening.”17 The infamous prison at Abu Ghraib would emerge as the scene where this war correspondent’s nightmare would become a reality, though not quite in the way he—nor, for that matter, the Pentagon—had anticipated. No embedded journalists were necessary, because the soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company involved did the reporting themselves. Although initially not taken for publication, once the images were leaked to the press neither the soldiers themselves nor the military could control their meaning. Prompting an army investigation that would result in the court-martial of eleven low-ranking soldiers, the images have since come to be seen as an indictment of the U.S. government’s policy on torture. Military historians such as Mark Danner see them as evidence of the systemic violation of the Geneva Convention in American military prisons, rather than merely proving the guilt of a band of brothers in crime, behaving badly on the night shift.18 With a press corps limited not only in their access to war locations but also called unpatriotic if they write critically of the behavior of U.S. troops in Iraq, only the soldiers themselves are in a position to offer uncensored reports from the war zone. It was the lack of censorship on their part regarding both the abuse they inflicted and its photographing that produced the scandal. In his initial response, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld faulted today’s soldiers, claiming they were behaving like tourists, “running around with digital cameras and taking

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these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.” Turning the screw on the secretary of defense’s implausible shock, Sontag notes how these pictures reflect a significant shift in visual culture. Digital photographs have come to be messages, meant for dissemination and circulation, a ubiquitous record of the war, in which no distinction is made between tourist attractions, raucous partying, and the committing of abusive atrocities.19 The fact that the disk of photographs Sgt. Joe Darby handed over to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID), which investigated the incident, contained unofficial representations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib is also, ironically, what endowed them with an unequivocal claim to authenticity. As some of the alleged bad apples to be brought before a court-martial in 2004 have pointed out in their defense, the decisive issue is not what they did, but that they chose to record it. If there had been no photographs, there would have been no investigation. As I have been arguing throughout, regarding public effect and cultural memory, the images come before the event. In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris puts his finger on the temporal loop inscribed in cinematic representations of war, drawing attention to the way we judge this event through its mediated transmission. Yet we might also want to ask what kind of evidence this report in fact amounts to, given that by photographing their illegal acts and disseminating these images clandestinely, this band of brothers came to expose what had been happening at Abu Ghraib. What Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure adds to the evidence so far is that it engages with the ambivalent, perhaps even contradictory, evidence these photographs offer. Given that the scenes of humiliation are clearly staged for the camera, with the soldiers self-consciously playing themselves, the investigation could argue that being in the photograph was ocular proof of criminal conduct. Morris counters this simple reading of photographic evidence by reconsidering what conflicting truths these photographs might reveal, even while he also draws our attention to what may again come to be hidden from our sight when we interrogate the events at Abu Ghraib only in relation to visual evidence produced there. The point for Morris is less the postmodern dictum that events of war need to be turned into a spectacle to become real.20 He shares Sontag’s conviction that the ethical imperative inscribed in photographs from the war zone is that they invite us to pay attention, to reflect upon the suffering we see depicted there, precisely because this information comes to us at a distance, formalized and framed as a photographic image. While unambiguous in his assessment that what happened on the infamous night shift was not only in violation of the Geneva Convention but also of human decency, Morris is sympathetic to the claim made by the indicted MPs that they were using these photographs to document the strange place they felt Abu Ghraib to be. Convinced that they have a story to tell that points to a systemic violence that goes beyond their individual crimes, Morris chooses to diverge from the investigation report. Rather than reducing the photographs to evidence in a criminal case, he treats them as records of a world we would know nothing about if the clandestine recording of this war zone had not uncovered what was meant to

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remain hidden. So as to dramatically re-create this act of disclosure, he adds the dimension of narrative to his investigation. Using the stories his eyewitnesses relate, he restages the events in an effort to reanimate the infamous images on screen. The voice-overs of his witnesses serve as the narrative link between the interview situation and the cinematic reenactment, drawing our attention not only to what is being revealed but also affectively drawing us into the twofold act of disclosure he undertakes: one handed down to him and one re-created by him. As in the other films discussed, documentary evidence is spliced together with aesthetic representation so as to bridge the gap between the actual experience of the soldiers and the audience’s engagement with its horror by proxy. The distance inevitably inscribed into the formalization cinematic language affords emerges as an advantage. While a referent ineluctably adheres to the photographic evidence Morris embeds in his narrative, his highly aestheticized restaging reminds us that we were not there. Our imaginary capacity is required for us to take account ethically of what happened at Abu Ghraib. Where Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe reuses footage handed down to him from Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro to produce an authenticity effect, Morris defamiliarizes the infamous images by artistically reenacting the context from which they emerged. He makes us stand back and rethink photographs that, by virtue of their excessive and diverse media deployment, have been all but depleted of their meaning. Given that the reconsideration he aims for requires a story that moves beyond these images, he also has recourse to the melodramatic sensibility perfected by his predecessors in their reports from the war. As his heroine, he chooses Sabrina Harman, the key photographer. In a letter home to her partner, Kelly, she describes how, from the day of her arrival at Abu Ghraib on October 1, 2003, she had a bad feeling about the place and started taking pictures of prisoner abuse to “record” what was going on. While we see photographs of a naked man, handcuffed to a bunk with white panties over his head (a situation deemed “standard operating procedure” by the subsequent military investigator), we hear Harman reciting the text of her first letter home from the prison: “Not many people know that shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures to prove that the U.S. is not what they think”—another instance of double-voicing. Morris is intrigued by Sabrina Harman not least of all because, as the daughter and sister of police officers, she had always wanted to become a forensic photographer and had joined the military police to earn her tuition. Taking pictures was something that came as naturally to her as smiling and giving a thumbs-up when someone else photographed her. As she insists after the event, it was also an act of establishing proof that could not be denied. While not condoning their conduct, Morris insists that the eyewitnesses he interviewed had a moral compass, even if they did not act on it. They knew that they were doing something wrong by humiliating prisoners even if they were also right in claiming that they thought they had no choice but to follow orders. Morris is equally convinced that Harman’s epistolary and visual record of the abuse at Abu Ghraib is not simply an indication of an addiction to digital photographing. In the sequence that emerges as the melodramatic

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epicenter of his documentation, he uncovers the murky ethics behind Harman’s photographic urge. Morris sets the tone by presenting Other Government Agencies (OGA) interrogators as phantom figures, superimposed and thus translucent, looking into rooms through two-way mirrors, while one of his witnesses explains, “We called them ghosts, because they come in and you don’t know who they are. Whoever their prisoners were, you never logged them. They don’t exist.” The death of one of these “ghost detainees,” al-Jamadi, emerges as the dark kernel of the film because it was the only death at Abu Ghraib that was actually ruled a homicide. It was also the only death known to have been photographed, namely by Sabrina Harman. This core sequence sets in with a highly stylized enactment of how prisoners in general were tortured by placing them under a shower with a burlap sack over their head. It then moves to the particular case of al-Jamadi, cutting between the cryptic log report about the shower OGA used and the testimony Sgt. Diaz and Specialist Frost give of how they discovered that, after an hour of interrogation, the man had to be declared dead. Morris presents the actual murder as blurred contours of ominous silhouettes against bright lights. Only when his eyewitnesses begin to describe the corpse do the images in his cinematic reenactment come into focus again, showing blood dripping in slow motion from the face of a murdered man. To draw us into the moral ambiguity more effectively, Morris moves on in his narrative and once more spectralizes the agents involved, presenting the transparent figures of ghost interrogators (visually superimposed on the setting) placing their dead ghost detainee on ice in a body bag, so as to keep him in the interrogation room over night before transporting him from the prison. Morris stages the locking of the door in ominous close-ups, basking in white luminous light the detail that would obscenely unravel what was to remain a covert operation, the spare key. As though driven by the same curiosity as the MPs involved, he invokes, without actually showing them, their forbidden entrance into the torture chamber and the opening up of the body bag, while, in her voice-over, Harman recalls in detail the condition of the corpse, as though she were reciting a forensic report. Her photographs of al-Jamadi’s face, which the film embeds into her testimony, not only prove that what military intelligence had claimed to be a heart attack was in fact murder.21 They also restore a name as well as a fatal ending to an anonymous “ghost detainee.” Recalling Wellman’s use of close-ups resurrecting soldiers on the screen who had died before the film was released, Morris also stages death at work in the cinematic image. Where in The Story of G.I. Joe the reference adhering to the images is elegiac in tone, the irrefutable evidence of murder that Standard Operating Procedure uncovers is far more sinister. Harman was indicted because in one of the pictures we see her with her characteristic smile and thumbs up, kneeling next to the dead man in his body bag. While the criminal investigators read this as evidence of her perverse enjoyment of death, it can, in the way the film stages it, take on a additional level of meaning. The obscenely raised thumb could be read as a gesture, indicating that this event actually took place: “This happened. I was there to witness what we did.” For Morris, the more than twenty photographs Harman took at

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this crime scene cannot be reduced to the simple distinction between criminal act and standard operating procedure, which Brent Pack from the CID felt compelled to resort to when processing the material for the prosecution. Coming at these pictures from outside military protocol, Morris instead warns us that it would be too easy to imagine a world without morality in which a band of perverse soldiers acted alone in a nocturnal interzone. Instead, he foregrounds a complicity pertaining to the indicted soldiers but also to us as viewers of these images as well. Embedded into his artistic fictionalization, Harman’s report from this war zone, obscene as it may be, calls upon us to engage—or gauge our response. In contrast to the containment of violence that war photography has often come to serve, these images uncover and recover violence. That the event happened is uncontested. How to respond to it is, in turn, something neither the actual photographs nor the documentary reconstruction can control. Taking into account the stories that go with the photos, the film records a version of the Iraq War’s GI Joes whose authenticity effect consists in using the stylized restaging of an event to move beyond images whose subsequent media scandal has overwritten all factual accounts of the event. In the tradition of a war correspondent like Richard Tregaskis and Ernie Pyle, Morris, too, has a collective instruction, though his is one about the limits of photographic evidence. As Philip Gourevitch, coauthor (with Morris) of the book Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story, claims: “Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation.”22 If the authenticity effect consists in revisiting images by embedding them into a complex narrative, then the burden of making sense of this cinematic report lies with us. We must take it into account, because—and this is the point of all the films about reporting the war I have discussed—as spectators of the spectrality that plays itself out on the screen in cinematic stories of death at work in war, we, too, are accountable. This chapter has explored the blurred distinction between documentary evidence and aesthetic representation in films revolving around the figure of the war correspondent. Focusing on the indelible gap in transmission, we have seen a double-voicing at play. Those who report from a war zone speak for those absent from it. Those to whom the war dispatches are addressed are, in turn, compelled to engage with knowledge not their own. The voice of the war correspondent calls upon us to form our own recollection and our own account of war we have access to only by proxy—thus the importance of voice-over commentary. War correspondents put a frame on scenes of battle to contain their force, in an effort to reconcile bloodshed with a sense of political justice. A similar drive to narrative management takes place in the court of law, to be explored in the next chapter. Like war correspondents, offering their interpretation of the action witnessed on a battlefield, judges also seek to contain the testimonies of traumatic violence by offering their legal interpretation of the case. At issue in a court of law is the type of instruction the judges have for those who remained at home, insisting that war must be accounted for by all.

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The illegality documented by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib, as well as the way these photographs came to function as evidence in the case against the accused, serves as the thematic connection between these two sites. A further point of transition is the complex issue of what it means to give evidence. The court of law, like the media reportage, is an instance where those involved in the trial speak for those who died in war. The difference is that what comes before the court of law are cases where the fine line between legitimate killing and illegal murder needs to be drawn to sustain the political sense of a just war. Those reporting about war seek a cohesive narrative, regardless whether the aim is commemoration (The Story of G.I. Joe), parodic criticism (Full Metal Jacket), or an ethic urge to interrogate the status of photographic evidence (Standard Operating Procedure). In films about war crimes, the weight falls primarily on giving testimony so as to come up with a coherent narrative that will either indict or declare innocent those accused of war crimes. In films about war correspondents, the diegetic report and the film’s narratorial stance support each other, such that the double-voicing is complementary. In films about court-martial, these two articulations challenge each other. These latter films sustain the antagonism between a legal system that must unequivocally determine truth before the law, and an ethic-aesthetic judgment, giving voice to what is elided in the act of sentencing. Where legal judgment puts closure, the fiction films insist on keeping the case open. At the same time, films about war reporting, like those restaging a court-martial, make clear our own complicity when war as spectacle comes to be replayed, be it as a media report or as a court case reenacted on the screen.

6

Court-Martial Drama

One of the traits Alexis de Tocqueville believed to be most noteworthy about American culture was the fundamental role a legal spirit played in its imaginary: “There is virtually no political question in the United States that does not sooner or later resolve itself into a judicial question.” Because jury duty makes people of all classes familiar with legal ways, the legal spirit infiltrates all of society. As a result, he surmised, “all the parties in their daily polemics find themselves obliged to borrow the ideas and language of the courts.”1 With legal process structuring all forms of public life in America, filtering down through all ranks, actual trials have emerged as one of the most resilient modes of mass entertainment. Not only are daily controversies discussed as though they were court cases. With the support of mass media, the courtroom has also come to stand in as an arena for public discussion that often touches on larger cultural issues well beyond the actual case at hand. This chapter looks at the reenactment of war crimes in a courtroom so as to decipher war’s permanent presence within society. The films chosen for discussion deliberate alleged war crimes in order to pass judgment, less on the individual court case itself than on the legitimacy of war the trial reflects. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), about the framing of three foot soldiers during one of the many military disasters of World War I, sets the tone regarding the double-voicing at issue in courtmartial dramas. The judgment the film passes reflects as much on the enmeshment of military and politics at the time the film was made as on the fubar of World War I. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), in turn, explores the fragility of closure any court sentence affords. In his reenactment of the trial against Nazi judges, director Stanley Kramer places center stage the way crimes committed in the name of war haunt subsequent times of peace. To reopen the case is less about finding a different version of truth. Instead, Kramer draws attention to the way we continue to be implicated even after proper justice has been found. The specters of war’s unfinished business cannot be laid to rest, and the Hollywood screen is where such haunting most forcibly draws our attention. Finally, the figure of the rogue soldier serves as an embodiment of the implication of military justice in political ideology. In A Few Good Men (1992), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Rules of Engagement (2000), guilt is displaced onto one individual so that the court can sustain the legitimation and justification of war in general. The counterjudgment passed by the films over and beyond the legal sentencing offers insights into the systemic violence inherent to military code of law.

War in Court: The Trials of Violence How does the specific case of court-martial refigure the dramaturgic rules of the courtroom drama? In her discussion of the courtroom as movie theater, Carol

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Clover points out that the equation between film diegesis and evidence stems from the original Greek referent: the recital of facts in a court of law. She foregrounds the fact that in court-case drama, the process of giving testimony, examining and cross-examining witnesses, and discussing evidence so that in the end a case can be argued for or against a defendant, involves an act of narration. This is not only addressed to the jury appointed to judge the particular case but also, given the way film narratives play on the difference between diegetic and extradiegetic juries, asks the audience to pass judgment, sometimes in contradiction to the actual jury or the judge. “We are a nation of jurors,” Clover concludes, “and we have created an entertainment system that has us see just about everything that matters . . . from precisely that vantage and in those structural terms.”2 Because the juridical process infiltrates society at large but is itself also influenced by political interests surrounding the cases it examines, it can never rid itself of the suspicion of fallibility and indeed corruptibility. The evidence explored in courtroom dramas often touches on the question of whether truth can actually be found or whether the political interests involved cause justice to fail. At stake is the law itself. Can the court distinguish between an abstract technical justice, based on the letter of the law, and real human justice, based on questions of morality? How objective and how discerning can a set of twelve allegedly impartial jurors be? What does it mean to find truth, and when is this impossible because the interests of those involved are too conflicted? Courtroom dramas often work with an ironic distance toward the sentence passed by jurors or a judge personally implicated in the case. While these films put the legal system itself on trial, their claim is that, above all, it is the audience whose judgment can be relied upon. What also makes for Hollywood’s fascination with the courtroom drama is the distinctive adversarial structure of the American legal process. The long period of examination it puts on display presents itself as a contest, with each side vying to convince the judge and jurors. While the opening statements set the tone for the competing narratives the prosecution and the defense will relate, the closing arguments assemble all the individual pieces of evidence that have been examined into a coherent explanation, supporting a particular interpretation of the crime under discussion.3 In the process of bringing forth and scrutinizing testimonies relating to a breach in law, the courtroom emerges both as a stage and as the site where the criminal act on trial comes to be reenacted. Because both the crime itself as well as the witness reports used to reconstruct it involve partial, fragmented, subjective, and indeed biased evidence, the adversarial structure of the legal process at play in the courtroom emerges as a battle over a truth that, far from being whole, real, or philosophical, proves instead to be a truth of exhausted possibilities. The final judgment that is passed reflects the narrative that wins out in the end against all others, valorizing a given interpretation against all other explanations.4 In its adversarial tone, the judicial system thus shares traits with the institution of sacrifice, symbolically protecting the community from internal violence by seeming to cure it of a particular instance of transgression. The closure the judge’s final sentence affords is

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one that pits the legal and legitimate violence of the court against the illegal and illegitimate violence of a criminal act, so as to redraw a clear and unequivocal boundary between a just and an unjust act of violence.5 The judgment pronounced at the end of a courtroom battle ultimately sustains the symbolic fiction of justice the culture at large requires to contain (but never dissolve) internal antagonisms and differences. On the diegetic level, the adversarial trial pulls the judge and jurors back and forth between the prosecution and the defense until a sentence that can only be appealed in a higher court is pronounced. The courtroom drama mimics this legal battle scene on the extradiegetic level by pulling its audience between the truth presented by the court and the countertruth its narrative pits against it. We, the movie audience, function as the agency to whom an appeal in the name of justice is being addressed, regardless of whether any such justice is in fact possible on the level of the film narrative. Given that we emerge as the real moral jury in courtroom dramas, those films revolving around crimes committed in the context of war ask us to judge the cinematic reenactment of battle in a very specific sense. In the particular case of court-martial dramas, the adversarial structure of the American trial not only recalls but quite literally repeats a scene of battle between two enemies where a breach of military law took place, with the defense supporting the accused in his or her fight against the prosecution. In contrast to other courtroom dramas, films revolving around court-martial cases bring forth evidence not only to determine whether the accused is guilty of a crime but indeed whether a breach in military law in fact took place. Like the reports brought home by eyewitnesses from the war zone, the testimony brought forth in the courtroom works by virtue of filling a gap in transmission. Those judging the case were not present when the alleged transgression happened. To determine whether any illegal action occurred, the tribunal requires evidence from eyewitnesses, themselves implicated in the battle, even while the testimony they offer is the result of a twofold mediation. The examination of witnesses serves to settle the differences between the prosecution and the defense. It also straddles two battle scenes: the one that occurred in an actual war zone and the one being re-created by two legal camps in the courtroom. Yet while the spectacle of the court-martial shares with the reports brought back from the war zone by journalists and photographers the importance of eyewitness testimony, the final sentence the tribunal pronounces is more than a moral judgment on a particular soldier and his or her actions. It determines the legitimacy of a particular military action as such. As Michael Walzer notes, “war is distinguishable from murder and massacre only when restrictions are established on the reach of battle.”6 Given that in battle, killing is justified because war is defined as a struggle between combatants, the prohibitions defining the soldiers’ right to kill specify both when and how they can kill, as well as whom they can kill, declaring civilians to be located outside the zone of combat. The judgment produced in the course of a court-martial constitutes the vital force of war convention regarding legitimate killing by critically reflecting on what it means to violate rules of war—either because in the heat and

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frenzy of battle the accused has lost his or her moral compass or because the accused resists being turned into a blind instrument of killing. While the disciplinary system of the military requires obedience, Walzer insists that even though soldiers may be coerced moral agents, they “are not mere instruments; they do not stand to the army as their weapons do to them. . . . It is precisely because they do (sometimes) choose to kill or not . . . that we require them to choose in a certain way.”7 Films about boot camps are predicated on the conviction that soldiers are trained to obey. To challenge a command breaches the elemental contract of combat unity and can be fatally dangerous for fellow soldiers. Courtmartial narratives are concerned precisely with the margin of freedom and responsibility that comes with a claim for resisting war convention on moral grounds. Where, in courtroom drama law itself is on trial, in dramas revolving around a court-martial, military strategy and rules of engagement are on trial. The scene of battle is reenacted to distinguish legally between war convention and crime where in reality, in the fog of war, no moral clarity is to be found. A tribunal appointed by the military itself is compelled to put those accused of a breach in conduct on trial so as to legitimate the very codes of behavior it is scrutinizing: above all, the code of obedience to those in command as well as the margin of freedom open to individual choice. Far more than in civil courtroom dramas, those judging the accused are themselves part of the very military codes being judged. They are not an impartial jury. Court-martial films pronounce their own judgment on the case, foregrounding how, at times, military law fails owing either to its own implication in politics or to the emotional appeal the defense can make that the accused is a decorated member of the institution judging him or her. These narratives draw attention to the fact that, in order to preserve the sovereignty of military law as a whole, a sacrificial exteriorization is necessary. Individuals declared to be rogue soldiers must be found responsible so that, by declaring their breach in conduct to be an anomaly, the legality of all other conduct is implicitly proven.8 The closure a legal sentence brings to the eruption of illegality in the midst of war supports the symbolic fiction that nothing is wrong with military command as such, given that this specific instance of transgression has been examined and judged. By determining before the law that a clear distinction can be made between legal and illegal acts in war, the final sentence the court passes relegitimates the war effort in general. It rehabilitates the violence of war as a necessary force. Where the testimony of eyewitnesses in war correspondences produces an affective proximity to actions in a war zone aimed at remembering what occurred, law produces a distance whose goal it is to put a discussion of an alleged transgression to rest. When films about court-martials pass their own judgment, often in contradiction to the sentence passed in the courtroom, they do so to reopen the case: either to explicitly indict the political system that has brought about a false sentence or to question, on more general moral grounds, any attempt on the part of military law to dissociate itself from the murky interface between justified, indeed heroic, killing and murder ineluctably inhabiting all war convention.

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Court-Martial as Cover-Up Kubrick’s Paths of Glory begins with a voice-over, explaining: “War began between Germany and France on August 3, 1914. Five weeks later, the German army had smashed its way to within 18 miles of Paris. There the battered French miraculously rallied at the Marne River and in a series of unexpected counterattacks, drove the Germans back. The front was stabilized and shortly afterwards developed into a continuous line of heavily fortified trenches zigzagging their way 500 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. By 1916, after two grisly years of trench warfare the battle lines had changed very little. Successful attacks were measured in hundreds of yards and paid for in lives by hundreds of thousands.”9 During these prefatory remarks, we watch as Gen. George Broulard (Adolph Menjou) enters a grandly furnished castle, serving as headquarters for Gen. Paul Mireau (George Macready), who is in command of the division stationed at this section of the front line. In the ensuing discussion we discover that Ant Hill, the key to the German position in his sector, is to be taken. Both officers know the mission to be beyond the ability of the 701st Regiment assigned to stage the attack, because it has lost too many men in recent battles. Once Broulard indicates to his friend that were he to succeed in this mission he would be promoted and asked to command the Twelfth Corps, Mireau decides after all to risk the lives of 8,000 men. When Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas), informed that he is to lead the attack on Ant Hill, cautiously asks about the expected casualties, he discovers that the general, who regards soldiers only in terms of the price one must pay for successful military strategy, anticipates the loss of 60 percent of his troops. Kubrick uses the figure of Dax, who before the war had been a leading criminal lawyer in France, so that even before the actual battle takes place he can pass judgment on a military decision sold under the banner of patriotism, while it in fact feeds the personal ambition of one general and the political needs of another. In his first of several verbal duels with Mireau, Dax finds that his appeal to the human cost of war has no influence on his superior officer, who responds to his reasonable doubts by accusing him of lack in confidence in himself and his men. In order not be relieved of his duty, Dax will ultimately accept what he knows to be an impossible mission, subjugating his rational appraisal of the situation to the dictates of the military chain of command. The film’s mise-en-scène of the calamitous attack on Ant Hill, which takes place the next morning, splices together three separate but enmeshed scenes of battle. The first entails the battle devised by Broulard for political reasons to give both headquarters and the French press evidence that progress is being made on the front line. The second battle scene takes place at a safe distance from any actual fighting, at the command post from which Mireau observes the front line through a telescope. Lured by his friend with the promise of promotion, the general will lose all rational assessment of the situation, and, once he realizes that the troops are failing to advance according to his plan, he will call upon Battery Commander Rousseau to fire on his own men. The latter will refuse, insisting on a written and signed order, in part to protect himself from the possibility of a subsequent court-martial, in part because he represents the morally tuned officer

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who, in the heat of battle, takes responsibility upon himself to disobey what he judges to be a bad command. The third scene of battle, the actual front line, is introduced with a tracking shot as anonymous soldiers, waiting to enter the fight, make way for Dax while he strides along the trenches, about to take command. By cutting between the subjective gaze of Kirk Douglas walking past his men and the camera following him from behind as he moves through the narrow passage, Kubrick is able to underscore that this third scene of confrontation is a visceral experience of war, influenced by the noise and barrage of incoming fire, the fog of the cannon shots, as well as the confusion and deadly danger of the actual battle. With his whistle in his mouth and his revolver in his right hand, Dax tries to lead his men across no-man’s-land under heavy fire, even while the camera’s continuous forward pan soberly registers the men that fall dead all around him as he continues to beckon his troops forward. This unrelenting depiction of a battle’s immediacy contrasts sharply with the distanced view Mireau has through his calibrated telescope of the men still waiting in the trenches. While the general merely notes an act of insubordination, Dax, who returns to the trenches to fetch replacements, quickly recognizes that they cannot in fact advance into the field because of all the other soldiers who are already falling back into the trenches, some fatally shot. The court-martial called together to put three randomly chosen members of the 701st Regiment—Pvt. Pierre Arnaud, Pvt. Maurice Ferol, and Cpl. Philippe Paris—on trial under penalty of death for cowardice in the face of the enemy performs a sacrifice on several levels. Mireau seeks to cover up both his failed military strategy regarding the attack on Ant Hill as well as his morally dubious order to have the battery commander shoot down his own men. The prosecution needs to legitimate the failed attack after the event and, more important, to set an example to the rest of the regiment, so as to contain the possibility of an internal revolt in the face of bad command. The politically savvy albeit deeply cynical Broulard calls the execution that is meant to put closure both on the flawed mission as well as on the court-martial a “perfect tonic for the entire division,” claiming that “there are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.” The actual court proceeding emerges as a further site of battle, a repetition of the luckless attack on Ant Hill, with Dax now defending the men in a different fight for their lives. To the prosecution, the case is a simple one of soldiers failing to obey orders, regardless of whether the mission was impossible to carry out. With both the presiding judge and the tribunal partial to the general’s need for scapegoats, the defense is shown to have no chance at justice. Dax finds himself radically curtailed in his presentation of the case, forbidden to enter evidence that would attest to the character of the accused or document past citations for bravery. Similarly, the witnesses themselves are forbidden to give any detailed description of the heavy casualties of the attack that might justify, even before military law, why they were unable to reach the enemy lines. Instead, they are restricted to giving simple answers about their movements during a battle that was everything but straightforward. The law in this particular case is only concerned with the

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abstract issue of alleged insubordination to military command and not, as Walzer puts it, individual soldiers as coerced moral agents who are responsible for their actions, especially in the heat and frenzy of battle. The three accused are shown to have no voice precisely because the prosecution, backed by the judge and the tribunal, treats them as instruments that must not be granted the right to a personal choice. The brief court-martial closes with two pleas offering competing evaluations of what in the absence of any other witnesses the accused have related. While the prosecutor calls the failed attack on Ant Hill a stain on the character of the fighting men of France, Dax turns his accusation against the court itself. Protesting the authenticity of a legal process that prevents him from presenting evidence vital to his case, even while refusing to have a stenographic record made of the trial, he calls the court-martial a stain on the nation: “To find these men guilty would be a crime to haunt each of you till the day you die.”10 Dax will ultimately fail in his appeal to the compassion of the tribunal, even as he failed on the battlefield the day before. After a brief deliberation of the case, the judge decides to show no mercy and proclaims the death sentence. While, on the diegetic level of the film, the three soldiers are to be made an example of, Kubrick uses the court-martial to pass his own judgment both on the fallibility of a prejudiced court proceeding and on the enmeshment of military law and politics as this relates to the American culture of the late 1950s. Broulard, the mastermind behind the ill-advised attack on Ant Hill, chooses to be absent from the court-martial, so that he can come out as the winner in the final sequence of a political battle, which is far more invidious than both the actual battle and the battle in court because it occurs behind closed doors. Although Rousseau was not allowed to appear as a witness in court, the film uses his testimony to unequivocally sway its audience both against an individual general, blinded by his own ambitions, as well as against an entire military institution, which is relentless in sacrificing individual members so as to maintain its power. While the tribunal is still deliberating, Dax goes to Broulard, hoping to get him to appeal the death sentence with the help of the sworn statements of witnesses attesting to Mireau’s tantrum that culminated in the strategically dubious order to have the artillery fire on its own positions. The film’s narrative argument is as follows: If such evidence were presented in an American courtroom, it would taint the man who had called for the death penalty to such a degree that the judge would dismiss a case that, under the changed circumstances, would look more like murder than legitimate military code. Given that this incriminating material can only be presented unofficially, Broulard is able to turn the question of who must pay for the failure of the attack into a twofold sacrifice, which leaves the military institution itself more intact than ever. Although he does not intervene in the execution of the three soldiers, he informs Mireau that a public inquiry into his behavior will be necessary. Although Broulard is justified in indicting a general who has proven to be a liability to military command, his ruthlessness in sustaining the political battle subtending all actual battle is in moral terms perhaps even more unaquittable. He has not only shown himself willing to sacrifice three soldiers, even though he

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knows they are innocent of the charge made against them. He is also willing to turn a fellow officer into a scapegoat to cover up the fallibility of the general staff. Kubrick’s indictment is even more harshly complex. During his final discussion with Dax, which puts closure on all public and clandestine battle scenes, Broulard confesses he had assumed the colonel had only brought forward the battery commander’s testimony indicting Mireau in order to further his own promotion. The quiet outrage with which Dax responds to the general’s cynical, albeit realistic, claim that in war one cannot afford to be a sentimental idealist is meant to ignite our own moral indignation. To follow military code strictly to the letter, he suggests, implies a disregard for human compassion that can only be pitied. Yet the general’s assessment that if men do not fight they are shot and if charges are brought against an officer he must answer them is one the film can also not refute, even if we are asked to share Dax’s aversion to military strategy that thinks only in terms of the letter of the law, not the cost in human lives. As the clandestine director of this particular theater of war, Broulard remains emotionally untouched by any single battle, even this final one. He is also the one who gains power within a political culture sustained by military conflict. Implicitly gesturing to the perpetual Cold War subtending America at the time Paths of Glory was released, the film suggests that when judging military codes, our critical attention should above all address an attitude of impartiality to anything other than preserving the military system, especially when it legitimizes itself by invoking the threat of an ongoing state of war. Such recourse to pure legality leaves no room for moral choice, and thus no room for personal accountability. Although Dax ultimately rebukes the general, who sees everything in terms of political ambition, the final sequence of the film tells us that the political power struggle at military headquarters will continue to be fought out on the front line. After their brief furlough, the troops are being called back to the trenches. While the outcome of the court-martial has proven that the implication of military law in a politics of warfare taints its justice, the return to battle, as well as the pending inquiry into Mireau’s command, also signals the fragility of any closure the law seeks for a particular breach of military code. The irresolvable conflicts that will continue to be played out on the battlefield and in the court cannot be closed, not least of all because they pertain to Carl von Clausewitz’s claim that war is a continuation of politics by other means. In his series of lectures, “Society Must Be Defended,” Michel Foucault takes this definition a step further to suggest that if war merely continues political power struggles, this is so because power is anchored in the particular relationship of force established in and through war. To claim that politics is the continuation of war by other means implies that the political system merely reinscribes an adversarial relationship of force by sanctioning and reproducing the disequilibrium of forces manifested in scenes of war, where a combat decides that one party triumphs over another party. Not only does confrontation and lethal struggle sustain political power even after a concrete war has come to an end. Foucault goes a step further to suggest that law itself is “born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests . . . the

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law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at break of day.”11 If cinematic court-martial dramas lay bare the adversarial relations subtending American culture in general, and politics in particular, the law judging war is not to be thought of merely as an agent for pacifying conflict. War, as the motor behind institutions of order, quietly continues to rage even after a military victory has been won. “Peace itself is a coded war,” Foucault suggests. A battlefront runs continuously and permanently through civil society in part because “there is no such thing as a neutral subject.” In our social relations with others, we are inevitably someone else’s adversary.12 Picking up on Tocqueville’s point that the legal spirit infiltrates American society at large, anyone speaking for herself or himself in public is involved in precisely the adversarial struggle around which courtroom dramas revolve. The person who claims to be telling the truth, who recounts the story of a past event, who rediscovers a memory or tries to forget, is never doing so from a universal, totalizing, or impartial position. She or he does so instead in order to take one side or the other, so that a particular evaluation of past events will come out as being victorious. Because any demand to speak out for a particular position asserts a singular right against an opponent who, if only implicitly, seems to challenge this right, juridical universality comes to be decentered. The truth claimed by a subject who is demanding her or his rights before the law is no longer the universal truth of the philosopher, but rather one deployed from a position of combat, seeking victory. In a manner fruitful for a discussion of the rhetoric of court-martial dramas, Foucault goes on to suggest that precisely the fact of “being on one side and not the other means that you are in a better position to speak the truth.” Accepting the adversarial spirit of the legal process by taking one side against another is what makes it possible “to interpret the truth, to denounce the illusions and errors that are being used” by one’s adversaries: “The subject who is speaking is . . . a subject who is fighting a war.” The courtroom, site par excellence for the adversarial aspect of asserting one’s right to be heard, thus in its own specific manner reduplicates the battlefront, because truth here functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, where one side overwhelms the other.13 The point to bear in mind in a discussion of Hollywood’s treatment of courtmartials is that those speaking in the name of truth do so as combatants on several levels of the film’s narrative. Not only the witnesses, along with the prosecution and the defense, but above all the director is fighting a war over a particular version of the truth. Neither the court nor the film seeks to impose a judgment based on the impartial universal truth of legal philosophy. The truth that wins at the end of the depicted court proceeding is clearly a truth bound up with, and thus partial to, precisely the political relationships of force that have transported the rhetoric of war (fighting to win in an adversarial struggle inscribed by a dissymmetry of power) into the legal institution. At stake in my reading of a set of cinematic court-martial dramas in light of Foucault’s claim is that the films share his critical concern with deciphering war’s permanent presence within society. Defining his project, Foucault explains that his

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interest lies in “discovering, beneath the forms of justice that have been instituted . . . the forgotten past of real struggles, actual victories, and defeats which may have been disguised but which remain profoundly inscribed . . . the battle cries that can be heard beneath the formulas of right, in the dissymmetry of forces that lies beneath the equilibrium of justice.”14 What connects Kubrick’s Paths of Glory to the other court-martial dramas to be discussed as well as to Foucault’s reformulation of Clausewitz is the way in which a permanent war is seen to subtend political power relations. By rediscovering war beneath peace, these films recall the wars that engendered peace; they conceive of themselves as the work of cultural memory. Their narratives are deployed as weapons to win a partisan victory regarding our desire to avert our gaze from the adversarial structure of peacetime institutions of order. They also seek to disclose that, in the context of political battles fought out in court, universal truth and general rights are illusions. Along with deciphering war’s permanent presence within society, these films seek to disclose that the antagonisms of past wars will continue to haunt us, regardless how staunchly we seek to avert our gaze from this disturbing knowledge. Any court case can give only impartial closure to a history of struggle and conflict precisely because we continue to be implicated in its perpetual force.

Sentencing as Ethical Indictment Released four years after Paths of Glory, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg addresses a very specific example of the continuation of war in the midst of institutions of peacetime. The overture recalls the sounds of Nazi military marches, introducing a credit sequence where close-up images of a white swastika, projected on a black background, transform into a photograph of this political symbol crowning the stadium in Nuremberg, the infamous site of Nazi party rallies. At the end of the credit sequence the marching music suddenly stops as explosives destroy this monumental structure of Nazi power, leading seamlessly to images of postwar Germany, lying in ruins. Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy), appointed to preside over a tribunal investigating the implication of German judges in Nazi war crimes, is being driven through the devastated landscape of Nuremberg in 1948. The opening scene uses a rear projection of documentary footage to authenticate the historical moment of the trial about to take place. The visual difference between Spencer Tracy, grimly taking note of the city’s destruction, and these documentary representations implies two emotional sites as well, with the American judge evaluating the world of rubble he has entered at a distance, colored by his knowledge that this city once served as the epicenter of Nazi power. As the prosecutor, Col. Lawson (Richard Widmark), explains during his opening statement, the case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. They are on trial as the embodiment of how justice had been distorted, perverted, and destroyed by the political interests of the Third Reich. As the prosecution goes on to explain that only judges know that a court is more than a courtroom, that it is “a process and a spirit, it is the house of law,” the camera fully circles Richard Widmark, introducing itself as the agency of

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Kramer’s own moral judgment of the trial his film is about to reenact. Throughout Judgment at Nuremberg the camera will intervene visually to underscore the reactions of those present in the courtroom, to foreground certain evidence, and to punctuate the affective turning points of the legal proceedings. By calling judges to account for the brutalities and atrocities committed by the Nazis based on the sentences they passed in this and similar courtrooms, they are to be made a very specific example of. They stand before the tribunal as German citizens who embraced the ideologies of the Third Reich as educated adults, but also as representatives of the very system of justice that came to be tainted. By returning to the site of the show trials of the Nazi regime, the trial the film depicts reiterates what the prosecution will repeatedly denounce as a previous mockery of justice. It does this not, however, to make scapegoats of these judges, as a few years earlier they themselves did of those illegally accused on the grounds of political affiliation or race. Instead, seeking to make a decision on whether a judge makes the law or merely carries out the law, the prosecution will foreground the issue of personal responsibility, or rather the margin of freedom to refuse as the linchpin of just law findings. From the start, Kramer’s film troubles the very notion of reenactment as collective restoration the trial is meant to serve. While it unequivocally supports the spirit of the prosecution in its furor to find guilty and sentence those responsible for the enmeshment of justice with Nazi ideology, Judgment at Nuremberg also suggests that the affective effects of a totalitarian regime cannot readily be dispersed, even (or especially) when peace has set in. Political passion, Kramer implies, can neither be calibrated nor contained by formal legalities. To illustrate this point, he has Judge Haywood, after the first day of trial, visit both the old town square and the stadium invoked in the film’s opening scene. As Haywood surveys the monumental architecture, we once more hear the spectral sounds of the Nazi regime, haunting him as they haunt the film’s narrative opening. Upon reaching the balcony Hitler used for delivering his speeches, the marching song transforms into the führer’s voice, promising German victory to an enthusiastically cheering audience. The close-up of Spencer Tracy’s face registers his emotional trepidation as he recalls this sound of war, as though in anticipation of the fact that the specter of the Nazi regime will not only return to haunt the trial he is presiding over, but that even the most just sentence may well be insufficient to lay this specter of unfinished business to rest. While the affective traces of German aggression in World War II are thus shown from the start to frame a restoration of justice in Germany, the fictional trial the film reenacts is also framed by the very real American political climate of the late 1940s. Jonathan Friedman has drawn attention to the way the shift in the Truman administration’s overall program for Germany came to influence the direction of the actual Nuremberg trials, moving “from a policy of occupation and denazification to one of integration and reconstruction, designed to meet the new challenges of the cold war.”15 Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg draws attention to precisely this shift by bringing into play the crisis in Czechoslovakia and how it came to impinge on American political interests in Western Europe by raising the

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specter of a Communist takeover. Soon after the trial has begun, both the prosecutor and the judged discover that the military, though committed to the trial, seeks to accelerate the outcome. Senator Burkette goes even further to suggest that, since in this new political order the United States needs Germany as a key ally in all future fights for survival against Communism, it would be politically imprudent to declare these judges to be criminals in the eyes of the German people, whose hearts and minds they must win.16 The widow Mrs. Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), whose husband has already been tried and executed by the American military government, embodies a third interest group, one seeking to impede the prosecution’s commitment to disclosing the enmeshment of judicial and military regimes during the Third Reich in a way that makes both denial and forgetting of Nazi crimes against humanity impossible. Her conversations with Judge Haywood are meant to convince him that not all Germans were monsters, insisting (in what by the early 1960s had become a cultural cliché) that most civilians were ignorant of the atrocities committed by their leaders. She gives voice to precisely the attitude of collective denial politically sanctioned by postwar American policy, which insists that the German people not be discredited so as to forge a shared political future. Kramer’s choice of actress is deeply ironic, owing to Marlene Dietrich’s passionate involvement in American troop entertainment during World War II as well as her insistence on referencing her opposition to Nazi Germany in the interviews she gave after the war.17 Sitting with Judge Haywood in a restaurant one evening, Mrs. Bertholt tries to diffuse the horrific evidence brought forth by the prosecution by suggesting that a clear line of demarcation can be drawn between the common German people and all former political ideology. Calling upon him to think of her first and foremost as a woman, drinking a glass of wine with him, she tries to make him see other Germans primarily as fellow human beings. Yet even as she tells her personal story of deprivations, culminating in the insistence that one must forget if one is to go on living, Kramer inserts as a backdrop the ever-mounting noise coming from the other guests. They have begun a communal drinking song, banging their beer mugs on the tables to punctuate their singing. The grotesqueness of this collective desire to forget, pitting the cheerfully raucous song of an anonymous German crowd against the individual witness testimonies that have been brought forth in the courtroom, is interspliced with a close-up of Marlene Dietrich’s face. The appeal for compassion she is making on the diegetic level of the film is contrasted with the contradictory political engagement this celebrity had become famous for by the time Judgment at Nuremberg was released. Self-consciously casting herself as the eyewitness who could testify that Germans very definitely had a choice in supporting (or opposing) Hitler, Marlene Dietrich unequivocally shares Kramer’s conviction that to avert one’s gaze from the past does not put an end to its haunting. In stark contrast to her character’s role, the close-up of this star’s face attests to the fact that not wanting to know makes one guilty after the event, even if the status of one’s knowledge at the time is uncertain.

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In its effort to rehabilitate the German justice system, the trial against the judges of the Third Reich recalls the show trials of the Nazi regime, so as to scrutinize the influence these sentences may have had in perpetrating war crimes. The adversarial trial proceedings emerge as a battle over truth, in which each side fights so that its interpretation of the evidence will be victorious. While Haywood is called upon to uphold an objective law, both the prosecutor and the defense viciously combat each other, even while politicians and military alike put pressure on the tribunal to attune its final sentence to appease the current political climate. A third force intervenes in this legal combat, where truth functions not as an objective entity, but as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, namely the affects of the witnesses. By being forced to reenact the show trials that convicted them, they unwittingly find emotional injury reinflicted upon them. Because it proves to be the linchpin of the entire trial proceedings, I limit myself to a discussion of the Feldstein case, the only tangible evidence the prosecution has against the argument of the defense that the accused men stayed in power to prevent worse things from happening. Initially, Irene Hoffman (Judy Garland) resists giving testimony, afraid of what it will mean for her to face her former judges. To counter the collective spirit of denial in postwar Germany, she soon recognizes that it is her duty to speak for those who can no longer do so, above all to find retribution for the Jewish merchant Feldstein, who, under the Nuremberg race laws, was sentenced to death because of his friendship with this young Aryan woman. He had been friends with her parents and continued to take care of her after their death. Called as a witness, Hoffman’s former lawyer reinvokes the atmosphere of prejudice and hostility in the courtroom during this show trial, as well as the brutality of the public prosecutor. He notes that the one hope he had had for the outcome was that Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), known to have dedicated his life to the concept of justice, was to be the judge in the case. Once she has taken the witness stand, Irene Hoffman first testifies that the prosecutor had threatened her with imprisonment for perjury were she to protect the man they sought to execute for race defilement. She then continues to give an account of how the prosecution made a mockery of everything Feldstein tried to say in his own defense, while the audience laughed at the ridicule he was being held up to. Most decisive is her naming of Janning as the presiding judge, and at this point the camera tracks backward to frame the accused and the witness together in one shot. As Irene Hoffman confirms that both the death sentence against the accused and her imprisonment were carried out, the one judge in the dock who up to this point had refused to speak, unwilling to accept the jurisdiction of the American military court, suddenly shakes off his inner resignation and turns toward the witness. While the witness cautiously passes her former judge on her way out of the courtroom, the camera focuses on Burt Lancaster, who follows her with his gaze. By isolating him from the other men in the dock, Kramer underscores the point that by rendering judgments that sent people to camps and death chambers, Janning is guilty of these atrocities, even if he did not personally commit them. The shot also anticipates that his intervention on the part of a just law will decide both of their cases.

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From the beginning of its cross-examination, the defense tries to curtail Irene Hoffman’s statements, limiting her testimony to her awareness of the Nuremberg race laws. Hans Rolfe (Maximillian Schell) also begins screaming at the witness, seeking to intimidate her into confessing an illicit sexual relationship. To defend his witness, Col. Lawson astutely names what is at stake in the battle over how to interpret the Feldstein case: the defense is reenacting what was a travesty of justice in the first place. Because Maximillian Schell is allowed to continue badgering the witness, Judy Garland, literally choking on the words he will not allow her to speak, throws his question back at him, asking accusingly: “What are you trying to do? Why do you not let me speak the truth?” At this precise moment the camera breaks with the 180° rule of continuity editing, moving into a position that includes in one frame the back of the defense lawyer and the face of the accused, Ernst Janning, who has suddenly risen from his chair in the dock. By doing so, the camera signals that its narrative of this trial has literally arrived at the decisive turning point. As Irene Hoffman begins beating on the stand with her fist, calling out to the defense to “stop it,” the former judge rises from his seat, and for the first time we hear his voice in court: “Are we going to do this again?” he quietly but sternly admonishes his counselor. Kramer uses montage to connect the decisive players in this chilling battle over truth: the witness (breaking down in tears), the prosecution (vehemently pleading that the accused has the right to make his statement now), the defense (equally forcefully seeking to prohibit any self-incriminating testimony), and the judge (called upon to decide how to proceed after this breach in court proceedings). By splicing together these conflicted evaluations of what it means to speak the truth about a friendship between a young German woman and an older Jewish man within a courtroom torn between conflicting interests, the film signals that the proceedings have come to an impasse. Judge Haywood adjourns the trial, aware that the testimony by the traumatized witness has introduced an affective disturbance into the juridical process, rendering it impossible to find any objective, philosophical truth. In her reading of the Nuremberg trial reports, Shoshana Felman argues that if these proceedings conceived of justice not simply as punishment and retribution, but as “a marked symbolic exit from injuries of a traumatic history,” the testimony of afflicted witnesses brought back into the courtroom what the final sentence sought to cover up and find closure for.18 The aporia when discussing trials pertaining to traumatic histories is that the collective injuries that must be heard in court are precisely those that cannot be articulated in legal language. Applied to my discussion of Hollywood’s court-martial reenactments, the traumatic legacy that the law seeks to contain proves to take over the theatrical space of the court and in so doing affectively reclaims the trial. A particular trial represents a legal effort to give voice to the victims of traumatic history, but also to transform their testimony into a collective story, which restores consciousness and dignity to those previously denied public acknowledgment. If the witness embodies both an individual and a collective memory, the translation of her or his testimony into a public legal record

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of mass injury assures the transmissibility of this information—its cultural memory. However, two aspects of the law trouble this process. For one, the trial attempts to legally define a traumatic injury that is not reducible to legal concepts. For another, as the case of Irene Hoffman movingly demonstrates, while the legal process attempts to compensate her for past injuries by addressing her claim, the actual trial, rather than redressing the legal and psychic damage done to her, inadvertently becomes the site of acting out again the painful continuing force of the initial traumatic injury. Felman concludes that trials and trial reports bring conscious closure to the trauma of war; they help us “to separate ourselves from the atrocities and to restrict, to demarcate and draw a boundary” around the suffering of others. As a discipline of limits and of consciousness, law serves to close a particular case of traumatic history—to enclose it in the past. Significant for Hollywood’s courtmartial dramas is that by having recourse to an aesthetic refiguration of the past, they offer a counterforce to legal containment. We need the distance law affords because it alone allows us to apprehend the contours and the magnitude of a particular case of traumatic history—to judge history in hindsight. Yet we also need art, Hollywood’s fictionalization of historical events, to bring us closer again to what, according to Felman, is not closed and cannot be closed in traumatic memory. Only the aesthetic reenactment allows us to face up to and thus begin to understand the affective force of traumatic injury, which evades legal conceptualization.19 While the final verdict passed by Haywood will allow closure on this reiterated trauma, Judgment at Nuremberg insists that complete pacification is impossible. The collective forgetting fostered by the Truman administration’s policy toward Germany is undermined by the affectively charged moral testimony the film presents. The reenactment in the courtroom—and implicitly by the film— brings forward evidence to convict the accused of guilt beyond reasonable doubt. It also performs an excess of traumatic recollection, which the law cannot and the film does not want to contain. Rather than the cathartic repetition of a traumatic scene serving to work through psychic injury, as Freud deployed it in his analytic cure, we have, in this nontherapeutic case, a traumatic reenactment degenerating into inquisitorial violence. While Kramer comes down on the side of an affective spectacle rather than a sober legal explanation of the facts, he does not question the cultural necessity of trials regarding traumatic histories. Even if legal language fails to fully encapsulate traumatic injuries, the legal process functions as a compelling medium of communication. It transmits truth as a shocking encounter with traumatic historic events of war and those implicated in them. The statement Janning gives, prompted by Irene Hoffman’s breakdown, further plays on the distinction between an impersonal law that distances and a partial testimony that uses truth as a partisan weapon. Speaking directly to Haywood, Janning explains why he broke his silence. Reopening the Feldstein case has turned into an unholy reenactment, raising again the mockery of justice Janning must acknowledge having been part of. Accusing his counsel of reiterating Nazi interrogation techniques, he, too, addresses the haunting of a traumatic collective history

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that the law cannot ensure closure on. “It is not easy to tell the truth,” he confesses, “but if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it.” To support his self-accusation, he testifies that he reached his verdict on the Feldstein case before he entered the courtroom: “I would have found him guilty whatever the evidence.” Faced with the fallibility of any particular law finding itself implicated in political ideology, Janning feels compelled not to defend the law as law. The testimony he presents against the specter of Nazi truth being reinvoked by the defense is one that is partial to the injury he himself inflicted. Accusing the other judges—but, above all, himself—for having been fully aware of their complicity with a criminal regime, the truth he tells is unabashedly partisan against any collective denial or oblivion. The closure his voice puts on the battling between the prosecution and the defense is irrefutable because his accusation exceeds any sentence of guilt or innocence the tribunal might pass. Judge Haywood will ultimately rule that the accused are guilty, appealing to a notion of justice that is beyond the intervention of politics and that, by factoring in the human truth of collective traumatic injury, declares individuals to be responsible for the crimes brought forward during the trial.20 The camera tracks forward to capture Spencer Tracy in a close-up, who offers his final statement: “The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime, is guilty.” As in Paths of Glory, an example is being made—not one, however, that implicitly passes judgment on the fallibility of the law, but one that commemorates a moment when justice has been served because it is partial to the accountability of those who speak and act in its name. That Kramer, like Kubrick before him, is also interested in indicting a political culture that will distort justice for its own purpose is also contained in the final sentence Judgment at Nuremberg passes on a specific moment in American history, when in 1961 the Cold War was about to become very real in Southeast Asia. Judge Haywood’s final words declare: “Let it now be noted that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.” The final title card of the film corrects this trust. As we discover, “The Nuremberg trials held in the American zone ended July 14, 1949. There were ninety-nine defendants sentenced to prison terms. Not one is still serving his sentence.”21 There is a further truth deployed as a partisan weapon at work in this courtmartial drama. In contrast to the reality of postwar American politics, but also in distinction to a law that seeks to distance itself from the eruption of traumatic testimony so as to master the nightmare of history, Kramer’s trial against the judges of the Third Reich goes further than enacting the reinjury of his key witnesses. Lawson, who was in command of troops liberating concentration camps in Dachau and Belsen, takes the witness stand, prompting the other affective peripeteia of the narrative. His eyewitness report is meant to authenticate the documentary material he has chosen to introduce as evidence. Treating the courtroom as a theater of recollection and as a cinema, he presents footage of the atrocities of the concentration

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Figure 39 Judgment at Nuremberg. Watching documentary evidence in court. Digital frame enlargement.

camp as a means of transmission of this traumatic history to those not present at the crime scene itself. Kramer punctuates the prosecutor’s detailed comments of the representations of violence he is inflicting on his audience with close-up reaction shots of the defense counsel, the accused men sitting in the dock, the men of the tribunal (focusing particularly on the presiding judge), but also the quiet gaze of an anonymous African American MP. To him, implicitly, these images of human destruction open up the recollection of a different chapter in the annals of collective traumatic history. These faces mirror us, who are asked to sit in judgment of the men who were the legal machine authorizing the persistence of these camps and of the history of violence these images are traces of. In contrast to the fallibility of the testimony of the witnesses, this documentary material is presented as infallible evidence. Its affective appeal to our sense of moral outrage serves to validate cinema as the true site for collective memory. The legal function of the court emerges in its ethical essence as both a dramatic and a cinematic function. Justice must not only be done, it must also be rendered visible. Law, as Felman argues, is a language of abbreviation, of limitation and totalization. The insertion of this documentary footage into a courtroom drama produces an aesthetic enactment in which the testimony given—the horrific images and the explanatory comments irrefutably meant to indict—brings forth a truth of human suffering, which cannot be encased in an explanatory narrative but only repeatedly recollected. This footage supports Kramer’s insistence that the case against the implication of justice in political ideology remains an open one, whether this be an American or a German dilemma. The shock this footage is meant to invoke puts the burden of judgment on us.

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If, in his sentence, Haywood insists on the personal accountability of the judges, Kramer insists that we, too, are responsible for what we choose to remember or not.

The Politics of Trial What the courtroom dramas discussed so far have shown is that, given the coexistence of collective guilt and individual responsibility, the politics of these trials follow the cathartic sense of justice being done at the sight of a former oppressor defending himself in court, or at least—as is the case in Paths of Glory—the expectation that Mireau will be indicted. Yet as Gerry Simpson argues, the juridification of war through a criminalization of aggression is controversial. It is not surprising, he explains, that the “juridification of war has been fixated on questions of individual agency,” since “criminal law is an exercise in abstracting motivation from situation, in decontextualizing events, and in substituting individual culpability for social or political responsibility.” A standard defense ploy in war crime trials involves “displacing personal guilt with systemic violence or malfunction.”22 While Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg insists on the personal accountability of the accused, the last set of films to be discussed once more address a systemic malfunction of the legal process. I focus on the rotten kernel of military law that emerges in the conflict between individual choice and obedience to military code, as this comes to the fore when a commanding officer is called rogue. The catharsis at work is one where by displacing systemic violence onto an individual, these films seek to indict both, moving away from the abstract decontextualizing of criminal law to an affective judgment that only the plural space of the fictional courtroom of cinema can afford. At the dramatic peripeteia of the trial in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) takes the stand to testify in the case of two of his marines, stationed at the Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Charged with having brought about the death of a fellow soldier, Pfc. William Santiago, the two men insist that they only followed the orders of their commanding officer, who had given a code red, a euphemism for extrajudicial punishment inflicted upon soldiers in boot camp by their comrades for disciplinary purposes.23 When asked whether he had, indeed, reverted to this illegal disciplinary measure, the colonel, convinced of his right to choose for himself what measures it takes to preserve the unity of his command, in fury admits to the defense lawyer: “We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns . . . Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall! We use words like ‘honor,’ ‘code,’ ‘loyalty.’ We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. . . . I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.” By publicly testifying that he abused his power, Jessup damages himself, even while unwittingly naming a rogue kernel in the very military code he has violated. If following orders is what sustains combat unity, then any commanding officer is in a position to

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make choices to preserve this unity at all costs. Precisely because abuse of power is what makes him or her a sovereign commander, which is to say because he or she at times must choose to kill or not, military law requires the commanding officer to choose in a certain way. Jessup’s point is that abstract, decontextualized law cannot accurately gauge the actual conditions at the front line. He sees his power to give code red as what makes saving lives in hostile situations possible, and thus the very condition of his success. A Few Good Men ultimately insists on the letter of the law and uses the colonel’s outburst on the witness stand to indict him. By calling him a rogue commanding officer a different internal unity is preserved, that of the American system of justice. Yet like Judge Haywood, who is willing to cede that while he cannot condone the behavior of the judges of the Third Reich, there is some truth in the argument that they were simply acting as part of a political system, the film’s narrative is ambivalent about a legal closure that shifts all responsibility back to an individual officer. There is truth in Jessup’s claim that people want him on the wall, even if they are not willing to admit this in public, as there is truth in the accusation that they will clandestinely condone breaches in military code if it sustains political power. To denounce him as a rogue officer implies shifting guilt away from the military institution as such. By indicting an individual rather than the overall positioning of a naval base at Guantanamo, the trial serves as a political stabilization.24 For post–Vietnam War American culture, the film argues, such a clear line of demarcation between collective guilt over systemic violence and individual responsibility, resulting from a personal choice, cannot readily be drawn. What then, is the relation between law and violence, especially in situations of war, where the choice between following orders or death emerges as a false choice? Writing his “Critique of Violence” explicitly in response to military violence during World War I, which, as Paths of Glory has shown, did not shy away from using the death penalty to legitimize the laws of war, Walter Benjamin argues that if “conclusions can be drawn from military violence, as being primordial and paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends, there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character.”25 Benjamin’s perturbing insight into the way peacetime militarism (or, as Foucault would put it, politics as the continuation of war by other means) introduces the use of violence as a means of politics is that legal violence punishes the infringement of law but also establishes new law. All violence as means is either law-making or law-preserving, while law, in turn, forfeits all validity if it lays claim to neither of these predicates. There is a latent presence of violence in all legal institutions, because law-making is power-making, and as such an immediate manifestation of violence. Choosing the death sentence as the linchpin of his critique, Benjamin suggests, given that violence lies at the origin of law, our attention is most fearsomely drawn to this enmeshment when the most extreme violence occurs in the legal system, namely when a decision is made between life and death. The duplicity at stake is that, if in the “exercise of violence over life and death more than in any other legal act, law reaffirms itself . . . something rotten in the law” comes to be revealed as well.26

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This rotten kernel of the law, drawing attention to the originary implication of law and violence, needs to be covered up as much by final sentencing as the eruption of utterances of traumatic history into legal language enacted in Judgment at Nuremberg. Reestablishing law after an infringement has taken place is played out as a public battle between two forces: the prosecution and the defense. Fought over, particularly in court-martial dramas revolving around an abuse of power on the part of a commanding officer, is not simply the question of to whom guilt is to be ascribed. Instead, it is in instances of an infringement of the law of war qua primary scene of the implication of violence in legal process that the rotten kernel of military law juts into our field of vision with particular force. By declaring an officer rogue, and in so doing turning him or her into a scapegoat, the violence inhabiting law at its core can be ritually embodied and as such exteriorized. Law is reinstated because the sentencing clearly ascribes guilt to someone, now designated as being outside the norm. The pacification and closure this sentencing affords imply an act of covering up by violent means precisely the violence necessary to preserve the law or make a new law. Within Hollywood cinema, the rogue kernel of military law has been negotiated in relation to very different commanding officers, who choose to take decisions pertaining to the life or death of their men into their own hands. The Caine Mutiny (directed by Edward Dmytryk) explicitly frames its scrutiny of a rogue officer by explaining with an introductory title card: “There has never been a mutiny in a ship of the United States Navy. The truths of this film lie not in its incidents but in the way a few men meet the crisis of their lives.” It judges the court proceedings taking place sometime during World War II from the subsequent valorization of the peace those fighting this “good war” engendered. Lt. Com. Francis Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), taking command of the Caine, discovers that the discipline on board this minesweeper is extremely lax. For this reason, he immediately informs his officers that, under his command, things are to be done strictly according to the book of navy law and that he will tolerate no disobedience to his orders. His officers notice very quickly that Queeg’s obsession with discipline harks back to his years on duty in the Atlantic. The permanent fear of having had to dodge Nazi submarines has psychically injured him and tainted his judgment to such a degree that he reads every digression from protocol as a dangerous interference with his command. Rather than giving him the constructive loyalty he appeals to, the officers turn against him, accusing him of acute paranoia, so that during a heavy storm his failing command threatens to sink the ship. Seeking to save the lives of the men on board, Lt. Maryk (Van Johnson) relieves the captain under Article 184, which allows insubordination against an officer clearly unfit to command. Upon returning to San Francisco, Maryk finds himself charged with conspiracy to mutiny and risks receiving the death penalty. As in A Few Good Men, Queeg, breaking down on the witness stand, will unwittingly give enough evidence of his paranoid personality to justify Lt. Maryk’s decision to violently relieve him of his command. The pregnant silence with which everyone in the courtroom responds to Capt. Queeg’s narrative of persecution

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signals that in this particular court-martial, a rotten kernel cannot be located in the law. Instead, the law must fall silent when faced with a commanding officer clearly no longer in command of his mental faculties, since this makes any further discussion of his ability to command a ship in wartime (the case is tried in August 1944) obsolete. Where the court finds itself compelled to exonerate an officer who legitimately questions the sovereignty of his commander, thus indicating that a fallibility in navy command is possible, the film judges those who brought forward the case of Queeg’s mental illness. Not least of all by choosing Humphrey Bogart, known for his sangfroid in antifascist political thrillers such as Casablanca (1942), the film implicitly defends its rogue commander on the grounds that breaking under the strain of long, arduous combat duty gives voice and body to the psychic collateral damage of war. Dmytryk uses the defense lawyer Harding to pit his moral sentence against the legal acquittal the jury pronounced. Interrupting the victory celebration of the other officers, the lawyer unexpectedly questions the moral grounds of his legal argumentation. Accusing himself of having torpedoed Queeg during his crossexamination until the captain broke down, he names the military spirit of the courtmartial process, but also recalls Queeg’s sinister quip about taking the incessant barrage of torpedoes in the Atlantic personally. Harding holds the other officers to account for what was perhaps not just an issue of military code of conduct but, more important, one of respect. As though anticipating Jessup’s speech about our ambivalent wish to have armed men stand watch on the wall demarcating a perpetual war inscribed in peacetime, the lawyer uses his rhetorical skill to remind the other officers (and implicitly the audience watching the film in 1954) that it was Queeg who was “standing guard over this fat, dumb, happy country of ours,” while they were still training to enter the war. Indignant at his own complicity in dishonoring one of their own, he claims that it was not the captain who endangered lives during the storm, but the officers who refused to give him the loyalty he needed for his command to hold. A Few Good Men pits against Jessup’s disturbing rule that the orders of a commanding officer must be followed, or else the command is threatened from within, the conviction that soldiers should refuse an illegal code red when at stake is the life of one of their comrades. Dmytryk, working in the wake of the fragile victory of World War II, has far more sympathy for his psychically damaged veteran commander. By declaring officers guilty for not respecting their commander, he turns the accusation into a question of personal responsibility, so as not to indict either military command or the law sustaining it. With his opening title card drawing our attention to the fact there was never a case of mutiny in the U.S. Navy, he shifts accountability back to individuals, who break under strain. Pointing to the fictionality of the court-martial serves another purpose as well. The final title card declares: “The dedication of this film is simple: The United States Navy.” While the film’s final title card acknowledges the psychic collateral damage of war, it straddles the legitimacy of mutiny and the guilt of having failed as an officer, so as to produce legal as well as political closure. By shifting its critique of a rotten kernel in military

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law to the collective guilt of a group of navy officers, The Caine Mutiny validates in hindsight the U.S. armed forces in World War II. A different judgment emerges when clear political positions regarding responsible command are lacking, precisely because, after the Vietnam War, U.S. military strategy as such can no longer be perceived as coherent. Rules of Engagement (directed by William Friedkin) brings us back to the murky enmeshment of politics and war strategy disclosed by Paths of Glory, only, in contrast, the narrative of the later film (set in the context of post–Desert Storm American military missions) finds itself hovering between exonerating and indicting its rogue commander. Col. Terry L. Childers (Samuel L. Jackson), a decorated war hero on a mission to protect the U.S. embassy in Yemen, finds himself under heavy attack from demonstrators in front of the building. After evacuating Ambassador Mourain and his family, he returns to the roof of the embassy and gives the order to engage hostile targets as they appear. The camera, which up to this point has only shown us images of angry demonstrators throwing stones, remains focused on Samuel L. Jackson’s face as he peers at the hostile crowd below, withholding the reverse shot of what prompts Childers to authorize deadly force. The trial will revolve around this visual ellipsis, since we initially have only Childers’s subjective claim: “I lost marines, the crowd was hostile, they fired first.” In the court-martial, which is convened in response to the press release of photographs of the wounded and dead, at issue is whether they were infiltrated by terrorists or simply civilians. Against public opinion, which has already condemned Childers, the prosecution insists that in light of the military decorations of the accused the case will be tried on good evidence alone. The lawyer for the defendant, Col. Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), who was wounded during a joint mission with Childers in Ca Lu, Vietnam, in 1968, will use his passionate plea for the officer who saved his life to affectively sway the fellow marines judging the case. Childers will be found not guilty and honorably discharged. The court-marital serves to exonerate both a man explicitly called a warrior’s warrior by the prosecution and the rules by which he engages an enemy to protect the lives of his men, regardless of the casualties. As in Paths of Glory, we find several battle sites reenacting or reflecting upon the violence in front of the embassy. In the courtroom, a battle unfolds over the truth of the images that were made at the scene of the massacre. Set explicitly in the context of the negative effect this incident will have on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the prosecution uses photographs of the wounded children, women, and old men to support its case that the commanding officer had an intent to kill. The defense focuses its argument on the existence of a tape from the security cameras recording the actions of the demonstrators before Childers gave the command to fire. This visual material cannot be shown in court because the National Security Advisor, in desperate need of a scapegoat, aims to sacrifice a man he finds guilty of hot-headed miscalculation. Behind closed doors, in what Rules of Engagement presents as a clandestine cinema only we are privy to, Bill Sokal (Bruce Greenwood) watches the footage showing men with machine guns firing in the

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midst of the civilians demonstrating in front of the U.S. embassy, and then throws the tape into the fire. While this evidence still raises the moral dilemma entailed in fighting a guerrilla force that makes strategic use of civilians, its existence makes the case against the accused less straightforward. For the judgment the film asks us to pass, it is important that, in contrast to the jury, we should see the content of this tape, justifying Childers’s version of the events that took place, without condoning his action. To make the case morally more ambivalent, Friedkin includes a flashback of Childers’s subjective recollection of what he saw from the roof of the embassy, which isolates women and children shooting in a way the footage recorded by the security camera does not. What the film foregrounds is the fact that the line between violence that is justified under military law and violence that is morally as well as politically untenable is hard to draw. Rules of Engagement opens up yet another rotten kernel at the heart of military law by supporting Childers’s claim with irrefutable evidence and also showing his visual recollection of the massacre as a situation of extreme moral uncertainty, because he could no longer distinguish between terrorists and armed women and children. As the prosecutor notes while preparing his case, “Whether a man is charged with murder or hailed as a hero is sometimes a very thin line.” The fact that we are shown this footage only behind locked doors recalls the dramaturgic indictment of Paths of Glory. The real rogue of the story is not the commanding officer, making a morally ambiguous choice, but the politician, obstructing justice in support of his own ambitions. Mirroring, but also contesting, the reenactment of the massacre in the courtroom by the witnesses, Sokal opens up a different battle zone. At issue in this battle is the question of who will be taken to account: the politicians who misjudged the situation, the military who ordered the mission, or the man who carried it out? There is truth in Sokal’s claim that whichever way one interprets the massacre, “we”—meaning the Americans—are responsible for the dead. “If Childers isn’t held totally responsible,” he explains to Ambassador Mourain, pressuring him into tailoring his testimony, then the finger will undoubtedly be pointed at the man who should have known the situation in Yemen was at a point of erupting. The film troubles any clear-cut distinction between institutional and individual responsibility, drawing our attention to the fact that the National Security Advisor needs to turn the incident into the story of one man’s failure in judgment so as to cover up systemic miscalculations on the part of the Department of Defense in relation to its policy in the Middle East. Rules of Engagement discloses this war zone by informing us with the final title card that, after an investigation, Bill Sokal was found guilty of destroying evidence and resigned as National Security Advisor, while Ambassador Mourain was removed from the diplomatic corps and charged with perjury. While all systemic responsibility on the part of the military institution is once again safely transformed into a story of two politicians’ individual responsibility, the narrative frame of the film introduces a third scene of battle, haunting the accused and his lawyer but also the entire narrative in a manner less easily pacified. Rules of Engagement begins with a flashback Hodges has on the evening of his

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retirement party, recalling the battle of Ca Lu twenty-eight years earlier, in which he found himself pinned down by enemy fire, unable to withdraw, and thus forced helplessly to watch all his men die. Only after he was saved did he discover that Childers had executed a North Vietnamese radio operator so as to persuade the commanding Col. Binh Le Cao to pull back his men. To heighten the moral complexity, Childers is introduced as a man who has no moral qualms about resorting to a violent transgression of military law if this illegal act saves the life of a fellow marine, even while he is shown to be true to his word. Hodges recalls seeing the imprisoned Vietcong commander being allowed to withdraw once his men have indeed begun to retreat from the scene of the ambush. As though it were the film’s primal scene of war, which the massacre in Yemen somehow reflects and contests, this scene in Vietnam is compulsively reinvoked. Hodges accepts the case after (standing at the Vietnam memorial in Washington) he has once more recalled the dead at Ca Lu. He will make reference to this scene in his final defense argument for the man who saved his life there. He also has a flashback of his dead comrades in Vietnam when, during his investigation of the scene of the massacre in Yemen, he finds a young Arab boy pointing his finger at him as though to shoot him. The memories of the battle of Ca Lu mark a moment of traumatic military history the two men share, even while it distinguishes the Vietnam War from current U.S. military engagement. Early on in the film, Childers explains to Hodges, who since his injury in Vietnam has only been fighting battles in military courtrooms: “You ain’t missing much. . . . It’s a whole new ball game. No friends, no enemies, no front nor rear, no victories, no defeats.” Serving as the affective moral measure of Rules of Engagement, the battle of Ca Lu allows Hodges to reflect both on the gratitude he feels toward the man who saved his life as well as the moral qualms riddling him as the only survivor. Just before the trial begins, he confesses to Childers that the first thing he felt upon realizing that he alone of all his men was still alive was a disturbing sense of elation: “I was glad it wasn’t me and I fucking hate myself for that.” He is haunted by the guilt so endemic for those who have survived the death of their comrades in war. Childers is equally haunted by the incident in Ca Lu, only he uses this past breach of military conduct to morally gauge the choice he made in Yemen. Were he to be found guilty, he explains, “I’m guilty of everything I’ve done in combat for the last 30 years.” This self-defense represents not a legal but rather an affective psychic truth. Making the decision to save his fellow marines at all cost—regardless of the moral dilemma this puts him in—unwittingly compensates for the deaths he could not prevent in Vietnam. It is the mark of the clandestine repetition compulsion underlying his military career. The incident at Ca Lu is also used by the prosecution when it calls Binh Le Cao to testify to the former misconduct of the accused. The tragic irony is that if the Vietnam War is reconceived in hindsight to have allegedly been the last American military engagement with clearly distinguishable parameters, where one could readily determine friends and enemies, it is also the piece of military history both the prosecution and the defense share as a point of reference for evaluating moral choice. Hodges is successfully able to turn the presence of his former enemy into

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an asset in his cross-examination. When asked whether he would have shot a captive American radio operator in the head if he had thought it would persuade Childers to spare the lives of his own men, Bin Le Cao admits, after a brief moment of hesitation, that he would have done the same thing. The coherence Friedkin’s film belatedly ascribes to the war in Vietnam is based on enemies united by a rotten kernel in a military law they both adhere to, namely the uncontested rule to defend the lives of their men. Waiting for Childers outside the courthouse after the jury has acquitted him is a crowd of reporters but also his former enemy, who, like Hodges, is alive because the colonel’s word proved to be his bond. For a brief moment the two men look at each other, then Binh Le Cao salutes, and Childers proudly returns the salute. A tacit bond, reflecting the traumatic history they share, has been reconfirmed, over and beyond any decision made in court about current and past military rules of engagement. What they share is beyond the law but also beyond our understanding. All we can do is acknowledge, without condoning, this limit to our own judgment. The final sentence both the trial and the film’s narrative passes is fraught with ambivalence, in part on account of the recalling of past traumatic histories of war, in part because the defense uses to its advantage the undisputed legal distinction that a civilian pointing a weapon is no longer a civilian, so that deadly force is authorized to save lives. Decriminalizing his client’s act, Hodges succinctly states: “It’s not murder. It’s combat.” He deftly finds a loophole in the law. Because he has evidence that the tape from the security camera was delivered to the State Department, even while he has also proven that the National Security Advisor did not pass this evidence on to the prosecution, Hodges can deliver a legal blow his opponents cannot counter. While in the absence of the tape the defense cannot prove that the crowd fired first and Childers is innocent, without that tape the prosecution “can not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty.” The verdict this tribunal comes to pass upholds our trust in justice as well as in military rules of engagement, yet it can do so only by finding someone to call rogue. As in Paths of Glory, the political battle fought behind closed doors will come out into the open. Rules of Engagement, while not discrediting the court proceeding, cautions us against being all too quickly pacified by the assurance that political corruption has been disclosed. Friedkin has admitted that the final title card was a concession to the audience’s wish to vindicate a commanding officer, especially one played by the African American Samuel L. Jackson.27 We are called upon to straddle three diverse positions of closure, leaving both the military institution and the law of war unchallenged. The military tribunal acquitting a commanding officer for violent aggression against civilians has not been tainted by the political interests brought to bear on its decision making. As in Judgment at Nuremberg, our trust in the legal system’s ability to determine legitimate rules of engagement remains intact. Two former enemies acknowledge each other as fellow officers, putting to rest a shared experience of traumatic history that has, implicitly, haunted them but also their respective cultures at large. The nostalgia at work in the revisionary recollection of Vietnam suggests in hindsight that when

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lines of demarcation between enemy and friend can be clearly drawn, transgressions in the heat of battle can forge unexpected bonds that save lives on both sides. Those found guilty not of misconduct in battle but of withholding evidence counter the proclivity toward conspiracy in what Richard Hofstadter has called a paranoid style in American politics. By disclosing that the National Security Advisor did not get away with his cover-up, a trust is reinstalled that the legal process is successful in scrutinizing clandestine operations inherent to national defense. We must, however, ask: Does this triple closure pacify us by leaving intact precisely the rules of engagement that brought about a situation of false choice— murder or watch a fellow marine die? Or does the overdetermination of the legal and narrative closure draw our attention to the point made by Paths of Glory? Is it more comfortable to believe in the corruption political interests exert on the legal process than to address the murky line between murder and heroism in battle, given that the laws of warfare contain by definition the possibility, perhaps even the necessity, for an abuse of power on the part of those in command? After all, there is truth in the claim made by the National Security Advisor, reiterating Kubrick’s cynical but savvy general: politicians must be more interested in international power relations than in individual soldiers and their commanding officers. Focusing our moral indignation on individuals occludes the attention Childers, while on the witness stand, himself drew to a rotten kernel of military law. Provoked during cross-examination into justifying himself (like Queeg and Jessup before him), his unguarded self-defense allowed a piece of traumatic history to erupt in the courtroom: “You think there is a script for fighting a war . . . follow the rules and nobody gets hurt?” Insisting that he did not exceed his orders, he is, nevertheless, as utterly honest in his self-accusation as Janning is in the indictment of himself along with the other judges of the Third Reich. “Yes, innocent people probably died,” Childers admits. “Innocent people always die.” This terrible truth is what the triple closure of Rules of Engagement seeks to contain, even while its public utterance cannot be erased. That the case is ultimately decided based on a lack of evidence that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant did not abide by official international rules of engagement does not cover up the fact that he obliquely admits intent to kill: “I wasn’t going to see another marine die just to live by rules.” It simply turns aggressive violence into understandable heroism. As Simpson suggests, the legal regulation and criminalization of war have shifted in the second half of the twentieth century, to suggest a link between doing evil in war and the evil of war itself. Hollywood’s court-martial dramas unfold a complex interplay between political cover-up, uncovering the truth, and the need for closure.28 In all cases the tension between individual responsibility and systemic critique is resolved by declaring someone rogue, even though this may serve an ironic critique of the force of war subtending peacetime politics, as in Paths of Glory, or validate in hindsight from the position of peacetime politics a particular war effort. Queeg’s faulty command becomes understandable, as does Jessup’s abuse of power, in light of the psychic damage sustained warfare has proven to have.

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Regardless of whether military law itself is under scrutiny or a belief in belated just sentencing is rehabilitated, as in Judgment at Nuremberg, the complex interplay between obedience and justified insubordination, command and abuse of power, individual responsibility and collective guilt, hinges on our own willingness to be held accountable for the judgment we pass on what we have seen. Truth, we discover in all the court-martial dramas I have discussed, depends on which explanation wins out in the end against all other opposing ones, where no absolute, objective philosophical truth can be found. It may appeal to our need for pacification and our wish to vindicate one player and indict another. The ambivalence all these films nevertheless sustain is that, by finding closure—legal and narrative—we avert our attention from a different truth that we, at the same time, can also not afford not to know, a truth about the violence of the law of war that is as irresolvable as it is irrefutable. The films discussed in this chapter repeat on screen a battle fought out in the courtroom regarding the truth about alleged cases of war crimes. As in the previous chapter on war correspondents, at issue is the gap in transmission, with those judging—whether the actual tribunal or the audience positioned as the jurors—not present at the scenes that come to be reenacted in the court. What distinguishes the interpretation of war that emerges from the court-martial drama from other war reporting is the way the sentence passed determines the legitimacy of military action as a whole. Military strategy and rules of engagement are as much on trial as any individual accused of a concrete war crime. Equally seminal is the doublevoicing, allowing the director to pronounce his own judgment of the case, drawing attention to the rotten kernel inscribed in military law itself. By reopening the case on screen, each court-martial drama troubles our desire for closure. In war, where the line distinguishing justified killing and murder is fraught at best, the need to police the boundary between legal and illegal actions comes to be heightened. The traumatic injury even a justified war entails, however, cannot be unequivocally judged. The case on past wars can never be closed. The court-martial dramas discussed in this chapter thrive on this aporia. While courts seek a mark of symbolic exit from the injuries of traumatic history, the cinematic reenactment allows for a reentry into an inquiry of this injury. Where the court sentence seeks to separate us from the traumatic past, films bring us back into proximity with it. Foregrounding war on screen as unfinished business calls upon us not to avert our gaze and instead to readdress our own complicity in this traumatic history. The next chapter, tracing one last time the way war continues to write itself into the fabric of peacetime, focuses on the resuscitation of the past that cinema affords by looking at films that address collective cultural guilt but also collective cultural legacy. The crime at issue in this concluding chapter is that of forgetting or overlooking the psychic residues of war, which may not be accessible directly, but nevertheless insist on being taken into account, in being taken note of.

7

War’s Sustained Haunting

What does it mean to look back at a war, often decades after those who fought have returned home? What is revealed when military action is not simply recalled and commemorated, but rather reconceptualized specifically in relation to the subsequent peace predicated on it? How do these belated narratives not only reimagine battle but also scrutinize the emotional and political aftereffects of war that come to figure into this reconception? By thinking about past wars in relation to and from the position of home in times of peace, Hollywood investigates how difficult it is to return from war, even while also disclosing that such a return can never be complete. The peace regained is fragile not only because war can erupt again at any time. Like scars that remain after physical wounds have long since healed, psychic traces of the experience of battle retain their possession of the war veteran on and off screen, making up nothing more than a silent companion to his or her restored civil self. The classic melodrama of homecoming, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) serves as point of departure for a discussion of Hollywood films that engage with the way recollections of war remain inscribed in the fabric of peacetime, even if only obliquely acknowledged. It is followed by three film noirs: Key Largo (1948), Somewhere in the Night (1946), and Act of Violence (1948). While Wyler’s melodrama directly addresses the post-traumatic stress of his veteran as a prolonged state of psychic embattlement, film noir presents the world of crime as a continuation of war with other means in peace. This return to the genre of melodrama (already discussed in chapter 2) is less concerned with issues of gender trouble. Instead, the psychic battle the veteran fights with himself is foregrounded. Replaying at home conflicts left open while he was on the front comes to serve as a second homecoming, even though the restitution won may be fragile at best. The dustup between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee regarding the alleged absence of African Americans in Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers (2006) prompts reading this film alongside Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008) in the second half of the chapter. Both historical reimaginations of military campaigns during World War II thrive on an exploration of sustained haunting. Flags revolves around a veteran who will not share with those at home the war memories possessing him (though not suffering from any post-traumatic stress syndrome), while Miracle tells the story of a veteran whose story finds little attention upon his return home. Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008) plays through a third position closer to that of film noir—finding restitution by tapping into the cathartic magic of reenacting a war memory that has overshadowed the veteran’s entire civil life. The experience of war all three films address is one that has come to be split off from our cultural memory, more overlooked than repressed. In contrast to films relating directly to war trauma, at issue

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is not that this past cannot be represented but that a choice has been made not to. Never completely forgotten, the memories these films retrieve take on the shape of phantoms, who persistently revisit the survivors to render visible the knowledge that the door on the past can never be completely shut.

The Melodrama of Homecoming Because a mutual implication of war and peace is at stake in my discussion of the cinematic haunting of war, it is worth recalling Michel Foucault’s provocative claim that peacetime politics is itself a coded war. As discussed in the previous chapter, he proposes that “power is war, the continuation of war by other means,” because it is anchored in “a certain relationship of force that was established in and through war at a given historical moment.” Politics “sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war.”1 Even though civil peace is designed to put an end to war, far from suspending the effects of martial power relations, the confrontational struggle at the heart of political life reinscribes these in institutions, in economic inequalities, and in a cultural imaginary of which Hollywood is one of America’s seminal producers. If war, Foucault argues, can be regarded as the moment when force-relations are laid bare, peace, too, contains clashes over and with power. Once we look beneath the civil order and prosperity of peace, he contends, we will discover a “primitive and permanent war” shaping all power relations.2 In film noir, the world of crime serves as a particularly resilient trope for the claim that civil politics is predicated on the continuation of war by other means. However, not all films about the way war haunts times of peace as an incessant but often overlooked presence use as explicit a form of antagonism as crime to draw the unseverable connection between the two. More often, the continuation of war in peacetime is as much a psychic as a political power issue. For veterans, the experience of war affectively remains unfinished business, even many decades after actual combat ends. Those who have survived war can never fully abandon memories of what they did in battle or of those they left behind, finding themselves compelled either consciously or unconsciously to revisit the past. Even if readjusting to the world of peace means abandoning the most aggressive aspects of what it meant to be a successful soldier, knowledge of this cast-off self continues to have its hold. Whether the wartime double is acknowledged by virtue of a personal investment in keeping the past alive, or disavowed by virtue of repression, recollections of the fighting self can never be fully relinquished. In the stories Hollywood has to tell, a veteran may feel compelled to take revenge (even decades later) for something that happened in the war, or live with silent guilt over actions committed while “over there.” He may even harbor a nostalgic fondness for the companionship he had with his buddies, indeed confess to a faint regret over the loss of the thrill of military action. In all cases, even while he has come to repossess his life as a civilian, memory traces of the self, left in battlefields along with the other casualties of war, continue to possess him.

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At issue in the Hollywood narratives of sustained haunting I now turn to is less the question of choosing to remember or to forget. Instead, applying Foucault’s proposition that war subtends all power relations in civil polity to the psychic dimension of postwar culture, the choice is between screening out the residues of war inscribed in the very fabric of peacetime or choosing to decipher these traces. Personal memories and their collective reenactment as film narratives are attempts to contain this haunting, even while articulating what cannot not be acknowledged. The genre that has repeatedly addressed the difficulty of coming home from war (along with the activity on the home front) is the melodrama, revolving as it does in general around the emotional sacrifices necessary to preserve the integrity of the American family against internal conflicts as well as external pressures. For its depiction of three veterans, painfully forging a new existence for themselves in post– World War II America, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives has become iconic. Early on in the film we see our three heroes returning to Boone City. Because there is no space available on any commercial flights, they board a B-17, which, assigned to an unspecified military mission, is on its way there as well. Familiar with the interior of these planes because he fought in one of them as a bombardier, Capt. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) suggests to the other two men that after takeoff they move into the nose, so as to get “a nice view of the good old USA.” More than picturesque shots of American geography from the air are at issue. By having his veterans get their first view of peacetime America from where the bombsights used to be, Wyler indicates the double vision at stake in their return. They are implicitly looking at the world they left behind, when they joined the armed forces, through the psychic lens of their recent war experiences. Standing behind the two other men, who in contrast to himself are in the front window of a bomber plane for the first time in their lives, Fred confesses he never used to think it was beautiful to look down through the nose of a B-17 while he was flying over enemy territory. As they come closer to Boone City, he also admits that the uncertain feeling he had when he first went oversees is taking possession of him again, only more so. Al Stephenson, returning to his life as a banker, says of his own trepidation about walking over the threshold of his former home: “Feels as if I were going in to hit a beach.” Wyler’s returning soldiers continue to use military lingo to indicate the psychic continuation of war in peace, even if they do so ironically. Their aim is to try to reintegrate themselves into the civil world, not to continue a clandestine war by transgressing its laws. At issue is not whether they will ultimately manage to readjust. Instead The Best Years of Our Lives shows what it takes for veterans to realign their psychic vision, treating the unfamiliar world of peace not as enemy territory, with objectives to attain and dangers to circumvent, but as a home, whose familiarity must be regained. Played through in melodrama narratives of homecoming is a doubling between wartime and peacetime self. To better conceptualize this psychic battle, it is fruitful to recall that Freud, diagnosing the flight into illness some soldiers undertook in order to escape the horror of trench warfare, speculates that shell shock may well be promoted “by a conflict in the ego between the soldier’s old peaceful ego and his

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new warlike one.” This struggle, he adds, “becomes acute as soon as the peace-ego realizes what danger it runs by losing its life owing to the rashness of its newly formed, parasitic double.” While outbreak of traumatic neurosis renders pathological this split between civilian and soldier all fighting is predicated on, this split continues in the case of the homecoming veteran, even when he is not (or no longer) suffering from shell shock. Picking up on Freud’s diagnosis, Paul Fussell (as discussed in chapter 4) rewrites the formula, claiming that banking on his self-doubling and treating warfare as spectacle provide a psychic escape for the soldier participating in battle. By splitting off his real (civilian) self from the wartime one performing perverse, cruel, and absurd acts required of men in war, he argues, the soldier can retain his conviction that the world is still a rational place.3 If the ability to preserve an ironic distance to battle furor proved a possible strategy for psychic survival in a war zone, Wyler’s narrative explores how, upon returning home, this translates into an emotional distance to the civil world. For his three veterans, holding on to the wartime self, and, in so doing, treating postwar America as a spectacle in which they function as estranged observers rather than integrated participants, is also a form of psychic protection. Caught in a state of mourning, they need a period of transition to decathect their war experience and readjust to the indelible changes that occurred at home while they were away. Where in combat narratives a mental duplication of the self can serve as the impetus behind extraordinary deeds of valor, this melodrama recasts home as a continued war zone. Psychic doubling is shown to be the source of his veterans’ anguish at finding themselves estranged from a world that was once familiar, but it is also the means for curing this malaise. Fred is the most pointed example of the way restitution in The Best Years of Our Lives is predicated on the veteran fighting a psychic battle with his wartime self, so that the civil self must overwhelm its wartime double before homecoming can be fulfilled. While the former bombardier does not directly suffer from the incapacitation of war trauma, in his nightmares he relives a particularly gruesome moment of air battle, encapsulating the guilt of survival. During an enemy attack, he was forced to watch some of his men, unable to bail out in time, burn to death as their plane exploded. The fact that, at night, he finds himself compelled to revisit this scene of utter vulnerability is used by Wyler to signal that his hero is invested in straddling two incompatible psychic sites, albeit unconsciously. He cannot yet let himself give up this terrible memory because the traumatic battle vignette also contains for him a key to how he can transition into peace. Neither a knowledge of the casualties of war nor the fact that he has been irrevocably tarnished by his war experience is something from which he can avert his gaze. Instead, the melodramatic resolution Wyler imagines for the homecoming veteran consists in a productive continuation of the knowledge of war in peacetime. In the scene of anagnorisis, Fred returns to the airport, where a multitude of bomber planes are lined up for demolition. As though his site of work during war were the only place left for him to go when all else seems to have failed, he crawls back into the nose of one of these planes. In contrast to the flight at the beginning of the film, he is now completely alone as he takes his seat once more at the bombsights.

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Figure 40 The Best Years of Our Lives. Veteran in his bombardier seat at home. Digital frame enlargement.

The dirt on the glass is so thick that it blocks the view of what lies beyond it—a visual trope for his psychic impasse. Dana Andrews is shown from behind, sitting immobile in front of the window through which he cannot see, forced instead to look inward. The reverse shot cuts to a close-up of his face, which, owing to the dirt and cracks on the window, is only barely perceptible from the other side. Having fallen into a trance, he is in two places at once, physically on an abandoned field in peacetime but mentally in the air over enemy territory. The scene has no images for its hero’s revisitation of his battles, only his silent, frozen face. The spell of this ominous haunting is broken by the voice of the supervisor of the demolition team, asking him what he is doing. Fred explains that, by returning to the place where he used to work during the war, he had hoped to begin getting old memories “out of his system.” The way the film stages his reawakening indicates how narrow the path leading back into the world of peace actually is, gesturing toward all those who were not as resilient as his ex-bombardier. Had the foreman not fortuitously detected Fred, he might literally have ended up on the scrap heap along with the plane. Or, in a more figural sense, he might have left the field locked in an attitude of mourning, unable to face the challenge of starting over his postwar life from scratch. Instead, as Fred launches into self-pity, calling his interlocutor the “junkman, who gets everything sooner or later,” the other man sets him straight. “This is no junk,” he sharply

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retorts, “we’re using the material for building prefabricated houses.” The fact that Fred is able to spontaneously surrender his emotional investment in his war past, and instead ask for a job, even though the foreman taunts him as a “fallen angel of the Air Force,” is the narrative’s concession to the demands of the genre. Fred’s homecoming, while not yet fully achieved, is achievable. In melodrama, the possibility of future happiness must be retained, even if this has been disclosed as a tarnished hope. Fred assures the foreman that the self-reliance that had distinguished him as a decorated war hero can be reoriented to help him at any new trade. Like the recycled bomber planes, broken up so that in a changed form they can be reshaped to fit a world of postwar prosperity, so, too, the former air force captain’s identity can be dismantled so as to fit him into a new team, engaged in building rather than bombing houses. While recycling changes shapes, it never fully destroys the material it works with. The knowledge of the fragility of life, which Fred’s nightmare vision forces upon him, is everything but averted. By working in the junk business, Wyler’s rehabilitated bombardier has his eyes fixed on how precarious the civil world of peace he has chosen to reinhabit continues to be. The melodrama’s happy end is predicated on nothing more, but also nothing less, than what Jonathan Lear calls radical hope.4 We never see what actually becomes of these three veterans after they have learned, to a degree at least, to contain the shadow of their war doubles. Nor could Wyler imagine, one year after World War II had come to an end, a time when homes might again be scrapped to sustain a new war effort. The films by Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee, by contrast, rediscover precisely the somber inverse of Wyler’s contained optimism, picking up some five decades later where The Best Years of Our Lives left off. Flags of Our Fathers and Miracle at St. Anna, both predicated on the premise that past wars continue to obliquely inhabit the fabric of civil peace for decades to come, seek to decipher these traces. While they engage with the veteran’s split between wartime and peacetime identity, the spin they give to this double vision foregrounds not the resolution melodrama has to offer but the sustained haunting.5 While this chapter continues to focus on how Hollywood films interpret and, in so doing, judge war from the position of postwar civil culture, in contrast to the previous discussion of war correspondents and court-martials, at stake now is the way the mutual doubling of war and peace can never fully be undone. Neither system of power relations can ever completely be subsumed into the other. The knowledge of war that narratives of sustained haunting present is neither the report of the war correspondent nor the testimony of the eyewitness in court. It is retrieved knowledge, which incessantly insists on being brought back into the public eye. Like Wyler’s veterans, the heroes around whom these film narratives revolve also straddle the past and the present, only their self-doubling is rendered more poignant because it has been clandestinely preserved over many decades: either, as in Flags, horrific memories have successfully been relegated to the shadow world of nightmares by a veteran who refuses to speak about the war or, as in Miracle, the public does not want to openly discuss what in this case is literally a

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dark side of World War II, namely the devastating discrimination of the Buffalo Soldiers of the segregated Ninety-Second Infantry Division. Specific to narratives of sustained haunting is that they reopen a case after it seems to have been closed, and reproduce a proximity to past events of war many decades later, insisting on passing on this overlooked or silenced version of the past. By virtue of this retrieval, they shed a different light on familiar historical events, deciphering stories of personalized haunting as national narratives of an equally fraught and equally two-sided return to peacetime. At issue is less what home looks like to the veteran who has returned from war. Instead, predicated on the conviction that on an intimate (though often latent) emotional level veterans never fully abandon their reminiscences of war regardless of how successful their readjustment to the civil world may be, these films offer a reconceptualization of war in light of this double life. They locate the hope of restitution not in trusting in an open future but in facing disturbing experiences that come back to them out of the past. Before turning to these most recent war films, coming at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is fruitful to recall that film noir, contemporary with Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Life, was the other genre famous for its stories about the fragility of the veterans’ homecoming.6 Indeed, one might surmise: both Eastwood’s and Lee’s revisitation of wars that took place half a century earlier splice together the restitution melodrama offers with a noir inflection that insists on foregrounding traces of war over and against all promise of transformation. They return to the narrative formula film noir came to be known for, namely reopening an investigation into the past that has caught up with the present, calling for revenge, sacrifice, and atonement.

Restaging War at Home in Film Noir It has become a commonplace, as Vivian Sobchak notes, “to regard film noir during the peak years of its production as a pessimistic cinematic response to volatile social and economic conditions of the decade immediately following World War II.”7 Tracking the dark side of modernity’s trust in prosperity, progress, and selfimprovement, this genre zeroes in on crime as the privileged site where Hollywood could best explore the continuation of war by other means in peacetime by conceptualizing the confrontations informing postwar culture. Even when not clinically traumatized, as they became veterans, soldiers found that the war came home with them. Film noir draws attention to the violent fallout of this haunting. Anton Kaes argues, “unable to reintegrate into a civil society that has little interest in them, and plagued by traumatic repetition compulsions, many veterans reenacted the war in the streets and living rooms of film noir.”8 In many cases, the war is only peripherally mentioned, as when in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) Vicki, the femme fatale, asks her lover, Carl, a Korean War vet, whether it is difficult for a soldier to kill. He laconically replies, “That’s what they give you medals for,” adding, “it’s the easiest thing in the world.” He will not give in to her demand to murder her husband, explaining: “In the war you fire into the darkness, something moving on the ridge, a position, uniform, enemy, but a man coming home helpless, drunk,

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that takes a different kind of killing.” What Lang nevertheless negotiates is the nervousness prominent in postwar America about the fine line between justified killing in combat and murder at home.9 Other film noirs draw attention more explicitly to the way the killing sanctioned by war, and indeed perfected on the battlefield, spills over into peacetime. Some noir heroes, like Bill Saunders in Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948), find themselves unable to restrain the violent impulses that had helped them survive battle. Indelibly marked by his experience in a Nazi prison camp, Saunders continues to treat postwar London as though it were enemy territory, using unbridled aggression against anyone who seems to oppose him, even if the murder he commits is unintentional. In Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), the veteran’s inability to reassimilate into civil life translates into a far more sinister restaging of the situation of combat. Faced with the absence of a clearly demarcated enemy, he unleashes the hatred that has nowhere else to go in a private killing rampage, spurned on by antiSemitism. For men like him, war will continue in peacetime, simply shifting its focus from a hostile nation to internal race difference. Irving Rapper’s Strange Intruder (1956) attributes the murderous rage of the veteran to psychic trauma. The war Paul brings home with him entails resuscitating in spirit and action the comrade who had died in his arms while in a Korean prison camp. On leave from the military hospital, he visits the home of the deceased, and, once there, begins to hallucinate his dead buddy’s spectral voice, commanding him to kill his widow and children. While in Paul’s case reenacting the war entails transforming this peaceful American home into a personal war zone, his restitution depends on overcoming the former war self, which has taken possession of him in the shape of a vengeful phantom veteran. In all cases, exploring the difficult transition from war into the civil world, these films restage front-line combat, drawing attention to the way postwar peace must be conceived in the light of the fighting it is predicated on. Writing in the same year that The Best Years of Our Lives came out, Siegfried Kracauer detects a continuation of the energies that Hollywood’s anti-Nazi propaganda tapped into in the sinister films that suddenly came to dominate the cinemas once the war was over. The hope of winning “freedom from fear,” propagated by the American war effort, has now, he suggests, come to be acclimated to the American scene itself, saturating it with a far more indeterminate panic. Rather than restoring mental stability, these dark thrillers foster increased feelings of fear and dreadful possibilities. “A civil war is being fought inside every soul,” Kracauer surmises, “and the movies reflect the uncertainties of that war in the form of general inner disintegration and mental disturbance.” As he concludes, redemption is predicated not on averting the gaze from this all-pervasive sense of foreboding, but on exorcising it “by an incessant effort to penetrate it.”10 The three film noirs I discuss in more detail grasp this diffuse cultural malaise by drawing attention to a continuation of war in peace that is everything but oblique. In each, the world of crime emerges as the site where the fear harnessed for anti-Nazi propaganda finds its most resilient afterlife in postwar Hollywood. This haunting reflects back on the war itself. For the noir veterans, the

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protracted period of readjustment entails revisiting the war by transforming the battle they fight internally with themselves into a justifiable external battle with an acknowledged public enemy, even while this sustained violence serves also to reconceptualize retroactively the battle they actually fought oversees. Key Largo opens with a long shot of the concrete causeway connecting the small islands located at the southernmost point of the United States, so as to signal that at issue in Huston’s noir continuation of war in peace is the protection of the American border against enemy penetration. Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart), a melancholy war veteran, has come to pay his respects to the owner of Hotel Largo because he was in the same outfit as the owner’s son, who died during the Italian Campaign. He is greeted by George’s widow, Nora (Lauren Bacall), who, together with Mr. Temple (Lionel Barrymore), convinces him to stay the night and invites him into the study, hoping that he can give them a more detailed picture of what the war had been like. Gathered around a table decorated with a photograph of the deceased, the medal he won, and the letters he wrote home, the two mourners listen with mounting patriotic fervor while the former major speaks about George as a “born hero” everyone in his regiment was proud of, who “couldn’t imagine his own death, only dishonor.” To give more human depth to his report, Frank recalls a scene outside San Pietro. As the only one to survive a direct hit on a forward observation post, George had stayed awake for three days and three nights to direct his unit’s fire, tirelessly speaking on the phone about his family. Frank solemnly ends his recollection with a description of the burial grounds on a slope overlooking a valley, prompting Mr. Temple’s wish to travel to Italy and visit his dead son’s grave.11 While Nora gets up to close the shutters because of the storm warning, the father, deeply moved by what he has heard, remains seated. For a few moments, the camera tarries with the old man even after the others have left him alone in the darkened room, as though in a private cinema, running before his inner eye the war stories that the returning veteran’s recital has introduced into his home. Given the way Bogart has played the scene, self-consciously aware of the effect of his delivery, we are led to suspect that his rendition is above all a reconception of war from the position of peace, refigured in the light of a father’s need to hear a story of his son’s valor so as to make sense of his untimely death. As we discover later, it was Frank himself who had given directions from the isolated observation post on the hill. Two things are noteworthy about this mise-en-scène. First, it draws attention to the fact that for a veteran’s report to have a therapeutic effect on those who remained on the home front, it must recast the actual battle (so soberly documented in Battle of San Pietro) into a protective fiction of individual courage. Mistrusting the denial of knowledge any simple readjustment of war experience to postwar sensibilities implies, the film further restages the war in the Temples’ living room before this veteran can achieve his homecoming. The process of haunting, set in motion by Frank’s narrative, comes to be played through as a twofold siege. As Nora continues to close all the other shutters in anticipation of the hurricane, Key Largo implicitly recalls the nocturnal blackout of

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the American coast during World War II. Then a new front line suddenly opens up on this southernmost tip of the country. The gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) is also trying to return. Having been thrown out of the country as an undesirable alien, he had stayed in Cuba for the duration of the war and has now chosen Hotel Largo to bring counterfeit money into the country to finance his illegal homecoming.12 His hope is that postwar America will see a new era of prohibition, and with it a resurrection of the glorious days of crime after World War I. Finding themselves hostage to both the impending storm and the gangsters, the Temples and their guest soon engage in a second discussion of the war, only now the tenor is more sinister. Frank, whom Rocco pointedly keeps calling “soldier,” recalls that he had enlisted in the U.S. Army to “cleanse the world of ancient evils.” As enemies of the American nation, he suggests, organized crime and the Axis powers are mutually interchangeable. The possibility of Rocco’s return casts a shadow on his earlier account of the Italian Campaign. Implicitly, if war continues in the guise of postwar crime, George’s death, while justified, may have been in vain. The presence of this new public enemy also draws out the veteran’s own ambivalence about his prior war engagement. Initially, Frank refuses to be a hero in this domestic war of crime, maintaining that “one Rocco more or less makes no difference in this world.” In contrast to other film noirs, readjustment to postwar peace in Key Largo does not call for a relinquishing of the war self. On the contrary, Frank’s battle furor must once more be awakened. He may not want to be a hero, but, as Nora points out to him, his whole previous life as a soldier is against him. Fighting emerges as an impulse he not only cannot, but in a real situation of threat also must not, control. While the hurricane is raging outside, we find the Temples and their visitor once more sitting in the darkened study. With the spirit of his dead comrade serving as inspiration, Frank recognizes that he cannot help but protect America against a man who, like the totalitarian governments he fought against in Europe, will bring violence and fear to America to serve his corrupt aims. Framed by George’s photograph and fingering his medal, Frank finally accepts that the world of postwar crime is his war after all, even if it is one that can only be contained, never fully won. He will be victorious because, possessed by recollections of his recent battle experiences (for which he, too, was decorated), he is also in possession of the better military strategy. The boat with which Frank is supposed to take Rocco back to Cuba once the storm has subsided becomes the stage where the civil war inside this veteran’s soul can be fought against a reemerged public enemy. In what is perhaps film noir’s most benign version of how the killing of war spills over into peace, the final showdown of Key Largo has Frank methodically take out one gangster after another. By striking a decisive blow to Rocco’s homecoming, he is restaging his military experience one last time so as to vanquish the ghosts of war that have kept him from making a new home for himself in postwar America. Yet the film’s optimism is restrained. Rocco must be eliminated not because his death will mark the end of crime but because, in the face of a public enemy, American citizens can do nothing other than resist. Only because Frank’s act of violence is seen as a continuation of

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Figure 41 Key Largo. Second homecoming light. Digital frame enlargement.

war in peace can the script unequivocally justify what in most other film noirs is shown as the murderous rage of a civilian. The noir inflection of the melodrama of homecoming consists in drawing attention to the way killing transforms into legitimate violence once it can be conceived as a restaging of war in the interest of national security. The film’s argument for what is a justifiable battle is even more cunning. The threat of a perpetual world of crime inhabiting the achievement of peace is as much a reference to the totalitarian governments fought in World War II as to the surfacing of a cold war in its wake. Violence against an enemy is morally authorized when it restages war on home ground. Such a reenactment helps draw a clear line of demarcation between the laudable courage of the prior war effort in Europe and current Cold War paranoia, with its far less graspable phantoms and indeterminate fears. Bogart has our unmitigated sympathy because with him we return to the imaginary geography of the Italian Campaign and its lack of moral ambiguity. In his last battle, fought on a boat just off the country’s southernmost tip, his performance brings back onto the screen the invigorated war hero he had been talking about in the inaugural scene in Mr. Temple’s study. After Frank has successfully slain his enemies, he turns the boat around and, heading toward the Florida coast, calls Nora to tell her that he is coming back to them for good. While, in response to his war stories about her husband, she had closed the shutters of the window in the study, she now goes and opens them. The light she lets in to signal the end of danger (from the hurricane and from the gangsters) is superimposed on a medium shot of Bogart, steering the boat into safety. Having engaged one last time in the denial of death in the face of a justified enemy that he had attributed to George, he is able to move from mourning the dead left on the slopes of an Italian valley into the dawn of a new day. The marriage we can expect between him and Nora is more than a private affair. It represents the hope Huston places in a restored bond between the individual subject and the American nation. The veteran’s return from his last battle marks the end of the Temples’ mourning. As in all film noirs, a shadow tarries on the fringes of the screen. Huston’s noir veteran is about to step

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into the shoes of his dead comrade, filling an absence in the Temple family he also recalls. The marriage bond about to be achieved is promising because it comes after an all-pervasive sense of danger has been acknowledged, not dispersed. We never see the veteran’s return home; we are only led to anticipate it. Instead, in the last shot of the film we see a revived soldier, on the alert, smiling to himself.13 While in Key Largo the return of a war-weary veteran is coupled with that of a former crime boss, Somewhere in the Night uses an unresolved murder to straddle the war and the home front. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s noir veteran wakes up in a naval hospital suffering from amnesia after having been wounded by an exploding grenade on Okinawa. Although everyone addresses him as George Taylor, he does not recognize this to be his real name. Upon being released, he returns to Los Angeles, where he lived before he enlisted. He has found a letter from a man named Larry Cravat among his belongings and hopes that by finding him he will discover his own prewar identity. As with so many Hollywood veterans, the war, as he soon comes to discover, is not yet over for him. In his case, an investigation into his past does not entail mentally revisiting the battlefield where he received the wound that has resulted in his memory loss. Searching for the one man who might know who he is, he finds himself in a different kind of enemy territory, pushed around and beaten up by hoodlums, while the people he interrogates mysteriously get killed. In this sinister world of beguilement and betrayal, where an obscure threat hovers over everything, he finds himself reliving the state of constant fear he thought he had left behind when he got out of the army. From a homicide detective working on a murder case that goes back to 1942, he soon discovers that Cravat had been a shady private detective who one day mysteriously disappeared with $2 million. As Police Lt. Kendall puts it, the money was sent over to America when “one of the Nazi hotshots saw the handwriting on the wall.” The Nazi is killed by a fellow party member before he could retrieve the money, and it had since been moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, leaving a string of corpses behind, until Cravat vanished without a trace. The clandestine battle over the unclaimed Nazi millions, fought out in a dark underworld of petty crime on American soil, not only runs parallel to the battle overtly fought on the European continent, but, in contrast to it, continues after peace has been made. For the duration of the war, the money and the man who committed murder on the docks of Los Angeles to get it have successfully remained under cover. This also means that the war has put a crime on hold, which, having festered in the dark, comes to erupt with a new vengeance when the return of the veteran involved in the case reopens it. Anzelmo, the small-time chiseler who has been harassing Taylor, proudly admits to him that he was “once a great thief and a magnificent scoundrel” in prewar Europe. The veteran’s search for Cravat has rekindled his hope that, were he to finally get his hands on the millions that slipped through his fingers just as the United States was getting into the war, he might regain his former greatness. Taylor’s investigation hinges less on him retrieving his former self than discovering his motivation for going to war. The noir inflection Mankiewicz gives to the country’s entrance into the war is not that patriotism

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impelled his amnesiac but rather a need to hide from the law. After the only witness to the killing that occurred “when the war was still young” tells him that the suitcase with the unclaimed Nazi money is hidden between the pilings of Terminal Dock, Taylor is finally able to piece together his former identity. He himself is Larry Cravat, who enlisted under an assumed name to escape from a criminal investigation that would have found him to have been in possession of stolen money as well as indirectly responsible for murder. During the fateful nocturnal exchange on the dock, he had pretended to Mr. Steele, delivering the Nazi millions, that he was the rightful recipient. When, minutes later, this messenger was shot by the real owner, who believed he had been double crossed, Cravat had dropped the suitcase and, changing his clothes and his name, came up with the perfect hideout. Horrified at his own former cynicism, he explains to his lover, Christy, who has accompanied him on his journey into self-discovery: “With a brand-new war on, what better place than the service?” The disappearance of the unclaimed Nazi money, we realize, is, in fact, collateral of the American war effort and its resurfacing an emblem of the way residues of the war continue to haunt peace. Mankiewicz’s noir veteran restages the war at home, with key witnesses dying in his arms and him repeatedly fighting his way out of lethal situations. Also at issue is the uncovering of a crime obliquely reflecting on war. The justified killing in the Pacific theater of war, which got Taylor/Cravat wounded in Okinawa, has literally allowed him to escape from the consequences of an unjustified murder on the civil home front. One year after V-Day, the police detective can laconically claim he is very busy these days owing to “a post-war boom in homicide.” Somewhere in the Night unravels the following retrospective evaluation of war: by drawing all the attention to the national engagement of the enemy on two foreign fronts, war covers up (and serves as a cover for) violence at home, namely the penetration of Nazi money into the country and the killings committed to get at this loot. For the noir veteran to discover that he himself is the man he has been chasing is more than a narrative ploy. The civil war of the soul the narrative puts on display by giving two distinct names to the doubling of civilian and soldier involves as much acknowledging the proclivity toward illegal violence on the part of the prewar Cravat as it entails relinquishing the killing for which the army trained Pvt. Taylor. As in Key Largo, revisiting the war from a position of peace has a therapeutic effect. Throughout the story, Christy is the one to remind the amnesiac that he has brought the war with him, prompting new killings whenever he interrogates a witness. She is also the one to insist that he must not run away from the truth of who he has become in the course of his military action. As she laconically puts it, “Three years of work can change a man.” War may serve as a perfect hideout from one’s civil responsibility, even if the crime is theft and not murder, but it also promises to have been the site of transformation.14 While, on the home front, the suitcase with the unclaimed Nazi money (emblem for enemy penetration) lies hidden from sight between the pilings of a Los Angeles dock, on the battlefront, the man responsible for putting both the theft and the murder it brought in its wake on hold finds himself rechanneling his criminal energy into a justified violence.

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Mankiewicz’s veteran will ultimately be able to fully return home by preserving in peacetime the self he became during the war, splicing together the soldier with his former civilian name. To clear himself, he will turn in the stolen money to the police and once more tap into his prewar skills as a private detective. In what Kendall calls a “pretty sharp piece of thinking” he will uncover the actual murderer, who has been able to hide his crime for the duration of the war, living as dual a life on the home front as Cravat/Taylor had on the battlefield. Yet when asked by the policeman whether he will go back to being a private eye, now that he has rehabilitated himself before the law, this noir veteran offers his own reconceptualization of war from the position of peace. Looking knowingly at Christy, who has not left his side since he first went into the night in search of the hidden suitcase (and with it the painful truth about his prewar double it contained), he takes up her remark about self-improvement. Poignantly exchanging one word, he explains, “Three years of war can change a man.” Where Huston’s melancholic veteran finds himself reenergized by tapping into his inner battle spirit, the work of the soldier has indelibly cured Mankiewicz’s amnesiac of his transgressive desires to steal and betray. The wounding at Okinawa deleted primarily the memories of his criminal activity before he enlisted. His memories of the war, by contrast, were never so traumatic that he needed to repress (or for that matter remember) them. They merely prompt both the sense of fear as well as the anger at those threatening him, which propels his investigation forward. The marriage we are to anticipate as a sign of this noir veteran’s reintegration into postwar America is predicated on his retaining the identity of his war self over and against any further memories of his prewar self he might retrieve. As in Key Largo, at the end of Somewhere in the Night war haunts as a positive force, a valuable possession to be retained at all costs, if only in one’s imagination. Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence is by far more sinister than these other two film noirs, involving, as it does, not a crime suspended by war, but one committed during the war and spilling over into peace. The opening credits are superimposed over a forlorn street at night in New York City. A man, one leg crippled, limps hastily toward a brownstone building, clasping a newspaper in his left hand. After entering his apartment, he goes immediately to his bedroom to retrieve a gun hidden in a chest of drawers. Only as he loads it do we recognize Robert Ryan’s face, miming an unambiguous determination to kill. He will take a Greyhound bus clear across the country and get off in Santa Lisa, California, landing in the middle of a Memorial Day parade. Concerned only with the continuation of his personal war, not a collective commemoration of past wars, Zinnemann’s veteran walks straight through the marching men, turning his back on their peaceful celebration. He is neither a melancholic weary of the war nor an amnesiac seeking to discover his prewar identity, but rather someone possessed by a war memory he will not allow himself to forget, because it alone is what keeps him alive. The sole survivor of a thwarted attempt to break out of a Nazi prison camp, he has found out where the senior officer who informed on them now lives, and has come to avenge the horrible death of his comrades. From his wife, the ex-pilot Frank Enley (Van Heflin)

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will soon discover that while he was away fishing his former bombardier, Joe Parkson, had paid them a visit. Forced to accept that the past he has been running away from has finally caught up with him, he himself introduces the spirit of war into his tidy suburban home. As though preparing for an enemy attack, Frank locks the doors and pulls down all the shades, only to hear his nemesis dragging his crippled leg as he circles around the darkened house, trying to open the locked doors. While in Somewhere in the Night the veteran coming home must fight against his own prewar self, Act of Violence presents a civil war of the soul in which the guilt of one veteran is mirrored by the desire for retribution of the other. Denial and obsession emerge as two sides of the same pathos of war haunting postwar America. Because he cannot, on his own, confess the terrible secret he has been carrying with him, Frank implicitly wants his former friend to force him to clear himself. Joe, in turn, needs to satisfy his desire for revenge by taking the life he feels he owes his dead comrades, so as to make sense of his own survival. While the rest of America has moved on, turning its attention to the upward mobility that postwar prosperity promises, what happened at the prison camp remains unfinished business for both of these men who continue to be “sick with the war.” Frank, refusing to speak about the war, has become a successful building contractor. Joe, given his physical disability but also that he vigorously clings to his war reminiscences, has not been able to readjust to a new life. The film’s unabashed penetration of the war’s sustained haunting consists in drawing attention to the fact that both veterans are indelibly marked by the nightmare of war they share. The difference lies merely in the way they treat this possession. Frank’s postwar success is predicated on keeping his past precariously hidden, while Joe can only live with his physical disability by keeping these same memories constantly in mind. The film uses Frank’s wife to represent a postwar America reluctant to confront the ugly realities of war both veterans confide in her. Having invaded her tastefully furnished living room, Joe justifies his desire for vengeance by describing for her the bullet-riddled bodies and tormented moans of the men who were shot by the prison guards outside the wire after her husband had betrayed their plan. Several hours later, Frank launches into his rendition of this fateful event, claiming initially that he had informed the Nazi commander in the hope of saving lives. He then goes on to describe how, upon discovering that his confidence had been misused, he had been forced to listen to his comrades being bayoneted, set upon by dogs, and left to die of their wounds. Only after his rendition of what the massacre looked like from a safe position inside the camp does he finally confess the true horror of his deed. He had thought from the start that the Nazi officer would not keep his word: “They were dead and I was eating. And maybe that’s all I did it for. To save one man. Me. There were ten men dead and I couldn’t even stop eating.” Zinnemann’s noir inflection of the psychic residues of war involves penetrating the moral ambiguity at the heart of survival, revealing this instinct itself to be at the root of the crime. What the appearance of the crippled bombardier brings into the open is not simply the terrible death of those who tried to escape from a war camp. Far more disturbing is the murky interface between courage and complicity embodied by this decorated

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war pilot. Were Enley’s action in the Nazi camp to become public, his would be a case for court-martial, even if he were ultimately found to be not guilty of a war crime. That Mrs. Enley flees from her husband’s confession, much as she calls Joe’s story the ravings of a sick man, is evidence of the film’s fearless indictment of cultural amnesia. In this noir world, only a murderous obsession to remember can bring about retribution. Built on a denial of war’s violence, the wife’s domestic haven cannot withstand the shadow that is cast on it when a returning veteran insists on bringing the war back home. Equally somber is the fact that there is no public arena where this doubled figuration of the survivor—one tormented by a revenge that might turn him into a murderer, the other tormented by guilt over having unwillingly brought on the death of his comrades—can officially be heard out. Instead, the civil war inside the veteran’s soul can only be fought out in the dark, under the auspices of a group of small-time criminals (and, of course, on the movie screen). In Act of Violence, the world of crime emerges as the one site where war’s unfinished business of vengeance, retribution, and absolution can be played through because moral ambiguity is its ruling motto. Trying to convince Frank to pay an assassin to get rid of his nemesis, a gangster boss cruelly suggests, “You’re the same man you were in Germany. You did it once. You can do it again. What do you care about one more man? You sent ten along already.” By making this noir plea for the seamless continuation of war camp mentality in postwar Los Angeles, the gangster finally triggers a hallucination of the past that puts Frank on a par with his hunter. Fleeing into the night, he ends up walking into a tunnel, where, as though in mind revisiting the one his comrades had built, he replays all the spectral voices haunting him. The voice-over splices together the gangster’s sinister proposal, the final conversation he had with Joe warning him against the escape, and the voices of the Nazi soldiers about to attack, until, having dissolved all boundaries between the past and the present, Frank calls out in despair: “No, don’t do it Joe! No don’t!” Various points are at issue in this restaging of a Nazi prison camp in postwar Los Angeles. The mise-en-scène renders the guilty informer’s internal ghosts audible, not those of the sole surviving victim of the massacre. The fact that we are given no flashback of the camp scene underscores the impression that the haunting at issue is first and foremost a phantom battle. The desperate call Frank utters as he begins running out of the tunnel, with the word “no” reverberating all around him, pertains as much to Joe’s doomed escape during the war as to the murder he intends to commit. At this darkest point of his psychic night, caught between spectral Nazis and real gangsters, Frank will also give in to his own murderous rage and set up a meeting with Joe at the train station in Santa Lisa, commissioning the assassin to go in his stead. The showdown the next evening restages the war on home ground, using the presence of a third party to redraw a line of demarcation that places the former friends once more on the same side. If the somber point of this noir narrative consists in disclosing how readily both veterans, sick with war, can be criminalized, the professional killer emerges as the new common enemy. Having woken up from his delirium, Frank recognizes that he must prevent this one death at all cost and therefore

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Figure 42 Act of Violence. Second homecoming dark. Digital frame enlargement.

goes to the train station himself. He is ready to take death onto himself rather than have Joe be the victim of a death he, in this case, explicitly ordered. At first we see Joe, limping several feet behind Frank, with the gangster looking on from inside his car. Then Frank turns around and walks directly toward the gun that is pointed at him, telling Joe he has come to warn him about something. What follows is a gesture of self-sacrifice that allows him to atone not only for the murder he commissioned but also for the killings he did not prevent when he failed to warn his friends that the enemy was waiting for them at the other end of the tunnel. Seeing that the gangster has begun to take aim, he runs to the car to stop him. He takes the bullet meant for Joe, and, though wounded, jumps onto the car as the gangster tries to flee, causing a crash that will leave both dead. By drawing the act of violence onto himself, he has changed the course of the haunting, preventing the death of his former bombardier and saving him from becoming a murderer. As Joe comes running to the scene of the car crash he is met by his lover, Ann, who throughout the film has been arguing against revenge. In clear conscience he can claim that he did not go through with the killing he had intended, calling out to her, “I didn’t do it.” The future that the final scene of Act of Violence anticipates for this noir couple continues to be inscribed by the residues of war’s haunting. Not Ann’s voice of reason but Frank’s willingness to die for his comrade has saved the day. Rehabilitation has engendered another battle in which all those involved are guilty parties in one way or another, even though restaging the war on the platform of a small-town Californian train station serves to morally clear both veterans by redirecting evil to the criminal who kills only for money. Throughout the film, Zinnemann calls upon us to have as much sympathy for the terrible choice a prisoner of war made to survive as for the equally terrible desire for retribution on the part of his opponent. His film offers a noir twist on the Civil War narratives such as Major Dundee and Ride with the Devil. Only the emergence of a new enemy, external to their fraternal war, can reunite the two veterans, giving Frank a chance to prove his moral fiber. Yet this fragile grace is based on pure chance. Joe would have made the shot if the gangster had not fired first. Frank did give the command to kill, even if in a drunken stupor.

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Both are morally tarnished by a war whose haunting can be rechanelled but not fully dispersed. For the police, finding the killer and his victim lying next to each other on the pavement, the case is closed. Joe, prevented from actually committing a crime he had intended, will now be possessed by memories of the man who died for him. There is no sunlight at the end of Act of Violence as Frank and Ann walk side by side back into the night, on their way to Mrs. Enley to tell her of her loss. Instead, this couple—yet another emblem for the newly forged bond between the veteran and the nation he has come home to—is arrested in a freeze-frame while the closing credits role across the screen.

Returning to the Scene of War At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Hollywood is compelled by a different urgency to address the sustained haunting of war celebrated by film noir. As Fussell admits, “to forget the war would be not just impossible, it would be immoral. It’s something that never goes away, it’s something you have to endure the way you endured the war itself.” He adds, “There’s no alternative. You can’t wipe out these memories. You can’t wipe out what you’ve felt at that time or what you knew other people felt, this is part of your whole possession of life.”15 To be haunted by war means to live a double life, with the past obliquely overshadowing the present, persistently keeping the specter of one’s former self alive. Both Flags of Our Fathers and Miracle at St. Anna draw attention to the way, five decades later, reminiscences of World War II continue to have their hold even on veterans who were successful in forging a new life in postwar America. Revisiting the imaginary geography of two significant battle zones—Iwo Jima and Tuscany—serves to give visibility again to experiences that have either come to be distorted or gone unnoticed by standard commemorations of this war. By foregrounding veterans who have remained alone with their memories, unwilling or unable to share the spectral war that has quietly pervaded their lives, both films conceive of themselves as the conveyors of what has haunted them. They raise ghosts from the past so as to make sure that these obscured recollections of war do not die out as this generation of veterans passes away. Although neither of the films explicitly uses the world of crime as a metaphor for the continuation of war in peace, they take from film noir the narrative formula of an investigation, aimed at revenge and retribution. They uncover something that has been kept in the dark. These films can be read in relation to film noir’s insistence that the psychic residues of war inscribed in the fabric of peace can never fully be obliterated because they, too, put a civil war fought inside the soul on display. Only here, the double life of the veteran is carried out as a silent conflict, invisible to the public eye until, for one reason or another, the past catches up with him. I want, therefore, to shift the focus slightly of what Anton Kaes calls shell shock cinema, regarding the way film noir restages the lasting psychological wounds inherited from the Weimar period in postwar America. Conceived primarily to benefit generations of Americans who have no firsthand knowledge of the war, both Flags and Miracle address the perturbing knowledge of experiences that have come to be silenced rather than any actual psychological trauma. Working under the auspices

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of transgenerational haunting, they uncover particular events that occurred in the war as though these were a shared secret that had to be passed on.16 In both films, the restaging of phantoms of war that continue to have their hold on the present deals less with penetrating an indeterminate postwar panic than with passing on a collective possession by a past that is knowable but has come to be overlooked. The impulse behind the films is above all a sense of moral obligation to retrieve knowledge about World War II that has been culturally suppressed not, as in film noir, for the war’s duration, but over decades. Flags and Miracle indulge in exactly those renditions of the war that Frank Enley’s wife, representing the cultural amnesia of Truman’s America in Act of Violence, is reluctant to listen to. They draw our attention to the ugly viscerality of all combat as well as the moral ambiguity involved in surviving where others die. Recalling but also refiguring film noir, their restaging is situated not on the diegetic level of the story, with a veteran replaying by proxy a former battle that is itself never explicitly shown. Instead, the reenactment of past battles takes the shape of sustained flashbacks, interwoven with the present to straddle the war and the home front. Self-consciously redressing what was screened out by previous narrative framings of war and the memorials based on these, their belated reappraisal locates retribution primarily in the act of cinematic retrieval itself. Like the veterans quietly haunted by their past, the films themselves refuse to allow memories to be wiped out. Presented to us as a shared secret, they take on the function of collective cultural phantoms, resuscitating a past that has implicitly never gone away so as to make the war’s dead explicitly present again on screen. As Robert Burgoyne suggests of Flags of Our Fathers, “the theme of haunting provides a new way of looking at the war film, illuminating the presence of the past in film in ways that suggest the war film’s power to evoke not just the tangible world but its uncanny double, a subject that shifts the discourse of the war film from ideals of authenticity to that which is invisible but still present.”17 As the brief opening credit sequence sets in, giving only the producers’ names and the title of the film, we hear Clint Eastwood’s voice, softly whispering the lyrics of a World War II hit song: “I’ll walk alone. / They’ll ask me why and I’ll say that I’d rather. / There are dreams I must gather, dreams we fashion the night.”18 The nocturnal dream scenario that follows tracks a young corpsman, running aimlessly in an eerily deserted rocky landscape, with the voices of men he cannot see calling out for him. For a moment he stops to catch his breath as he scans the battlefield enveloped in fog, while the camera tracks around him 360° as though in imitation of the disembodied voices surrounding him. He begins running again, only to stop abruptly as he recognizes the futility of any attempt to help his buddies. As the camera moves into an extreme close-up of his terrified eyes, we see a tear running down his right cheek. An eye-line match brings us to the present, with John Bradley, waking up in terror, still hearing the spectral voices calling for his former self. His wife lying next to him, clearly accustomed to her husband’s nightmares, wakes as well and calms him. This morning, the ghosts of the past will not let him fall asleep again.19

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We see Bradley wandering alone through the rooms of his funeral parlor, when, climbing the stairs leading to the first floor, he collapses. No longer able to keep the past neatly severed from the present, he finds himself as disoriented and frightened as in the war dreams he has been carrying with him at night, calling out repeatedly, “Where is he?” He has condensed all the men he could not reach in his nightmare into the memory of losing his buddy Iggy during a nocturnal skirmish on Iwo Jima, and continues calling out to him long after he has been brought to the hospital by an ambulance. To his son James, who, in the penultimate scene of the film, is with him when he wakes one last time from this distressing vision, he will claim he had not thought of Iggy for years. In the case of Eastwood’s veteran, the sustained civil war fought inside the soul over decades has produced a split between memories that can be shared and those that cannot. To replace the scene of abandonment he had before his inner eye when his heart began to fail, Bradley recalls instead how, after they had planted the flag on Mt. Suribachi, they were allowed to go swimming. “It was the funniest thing,” he explains, “all this fighting and we were jumping around in the water like kids. That’s the way I remember Iggy now.” An oblique excuse for all the things he never told his son about the war, John Bradley’s dying words are also an indication of how he himself wants to be remembered. Eastwood honors this deathbed wish by visualizing the screen memory the dying man had invoked. We see “Doc,” as he used to be called by his buddies, first watching the other boys take off their uniforms before jumping into the ocean and then joining them himself in their celebration of this brief time-out from war. Coming as the closing sequence in Flags of Our Fathers, this memory is conceived as the counterpart to the opening nightmare, with both belonging to an imaginary geography of war Bradley has persistently lived with since his return home from the Pacific. At issue are two types of ghosts raised from the past. The scene with which, on his own deathbed, he chooses to remember his buddy Iggy (who, as we discover in the course of the film, did not survive the war) serves as a protective fiction against the nightmare of the opening sequence, pertaining to experiences he would like to forget but cannot afford not to remember. While he is awake, he is able to recall the bond of friendship that held their platoon together, whereas the encrypted language of dreams forces him to acknowledge his guilt at knowing that as a corpsman he was not always able to preserve the lives of his buddies. These two scenes, both revealing how the dead continue to possess the living, serve as the narrative frame for the investigation into the past that James Bradley embarks on after the death of his father.20 In contrast to Somewhere in the Night, at issue is not curing a war veteran of his amnesia but uncovering the war experiences he persistently refused to talk about to his family, even while this past never ceased to trouble him. By interviewing people who were also in the Pacific, the son James is himself engaged in raising ghosts, only in his case the phantoms embody a gap in knowledge he has inherited along with his father’s parting story about swimming off the shore of Iwo Jima. What Flags of Our Fathers uncovers is the story the veteran withholds even on his deathbed, not because he cannot remember it, but because, as one of the men

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Figure 43 Flags of Our Fathers. Two memories from Iwo Jima. Digital frame enlargement.

interviewed suggests, he was still trying to forget what happened “over there.” The film restages the flag-raising on Iwo Jima and the seventh war bond drive this prompted, so as to give cinematic shape to the fragmentary pieces of testimony James gathers together. It foregrounds the lacuna on which the son’s retrieved story (and implicitly his film as well) is grounded. Because the father would not speak about his experiences during the war to protect his peacetime existence from a past he could never fully shed, the son must uncover the past his father has passed onto him as a cryptic story. He has no choice but to take on his father’s secret. Consequently, both the story James ultimately comes to reconstruct about his father and the flashbacks embedded into his investigation to visualize his findings are haunted first and foremost by the veteran’s resilient silence. The son’s need to speak emerges as the mirror inversion of his father’s refusal to speak, with both giving voice to the fact that the war has always clandestinely inhabited their shared life. While the son needs to remember what the father cannot forget, he can take possession of what had possessed his father only as an imaginary reconstruction of a past. The narrative the film presents us with clearly does not draw on John Bradley’s memories, but contains the story attributed to him by his son, over and against his father’s silence. In contrast to war films that undertake a straightforward fictionalization of historical reality, this film self-consciously pitches its cinematic restaging of the war as the replacement for a knowledge of the past the veteran has staunchly taken with him to his grave. In the chapter on battle choreography, I argued that any belated recollection of war on screen is possible only as an aesthetic reformulation. Flags of Our Fathers takes the issue of approximation one step further, with firsthand memory itself shown to recede from any direct articulation. With his truncated war story, the veteran passes on to his son the haunting itself. Regardless of how appropriate it may be, any understanding of his father’s wartime experience James finally arrives at is irrevocably nothing more than speculation. It is as if Flags of Our Fathers takes from Saving Private Ryan the conviction that restaging the war on screen involves our capacity to imagine that which we did not experience.21 While Spielberg’s aesthetic strategy of recycling serves to retrieve the affective power contained in and by cinematic images of war, Eastwood works with the ambivalent logic of screen memories. Standing in for something too terrible to articulate directly, these

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protective fictions openly admit that they are nothing other than a substitution. Their affective power resides in the fact that they function as a double of the past, covering something up in the very act of revealing something else. The explanation of what happened on Iwo Jima and during the war bond drive that James comes to piece together with the help of the witness testimonies he gathers, preserves his father’s secret, much as the film’s own restagings, as accurate and effective as they may be, cover for a memory the veteran’s staunch silence has rendered irretrievable. The film is far from lamenting the lack of authenticity that goes in tandem with a cultural circulation of visual replacements. Its multilayered narrative, weaving together scenes from the veteran’s last days with the son’s posthumous investigation and the flashback images this evokes, celebrates doubling as a highly effective way of translating the experience of sustained haunting to the screen. Early on in the film, one of the men interviewed by James explains, “What we see and do in war, the cruelty, is unbelievable. But somehow we’ve got to make some sense of it.” To do that, he adds, “We need an easy-to-understand truth.” The sense Flags of Our Fathers makes of the battle on Iwo Jima from the position of home, many decades later, is to query whether there can be any easy-to-understand truth. The bathing scene at the end of the film offers closure to the son’s resurrection of the dead, allowing James to conclude: “If we wish to truly honor these men, we should remember them the way they really were, the way my Dad remembered them.” Yet this one shared screen memory is staged over and against the sustained nightmare world of dying on Iwo Jima and its reenactment in the course of the war bond drive on the home front. Anticipated by the director’s whispering of a wartime hit song in the opening bars of the soundtrack, playing these phantom memories off against each other hollows out any desire for a simple story—not because what emerges is a contradictory revelation but because it leaves us caught up in a complex network of visual doublings whose ground of reference has irrevocably receded from our grasp. So as to draw attention to the way haunting was written into the transmission of the battle for Iwo Jima from the start, the film stages Joe Rosenthal’s shooting of the photograph that almost single-handedly turned around the waning enthusiasm for the war in 1944 as a spectacular double vision. Although a photographer is present when a group of marines puts up the first flag, this is not the image that serves as the template for the reenactment of the flag-raising during the seventh war bond drive. Because Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, recognizing its publicity value, wants the flag that was raised on Mt. Suribachi as a personal memento, a second group of marines is sent to replace it. Although this second flag-raising goes almost unnoticed by the men on the island, the photograph recording it will receive international notice. The mise-en-scène foregrounds the issue of duplicity. We see both groups of men together in the frame, one about to remove the flag, the other poised to raise the second pole. Rosenthal is accompanied by a cameraman, so that this act of replacing one flag with another will be recorded as a printed photo and in a newsreel.

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As both eagerly begin shooting the event, the camera cuts to the men raising the second pole, and for a brief moment includes a freeze-frame. This image is not the celebrated photograph but a belated approximation that includes, on the right side of the frame, four members of the original group, just about to take off the first flag. The scene then cuts back to the cameraman, asking Rosenthal whether he got his image. With the next shot, the scene self-consciously moves from the frozen photo back to the movement of film, reanimating the actors as they proceed in their task. Returning our gaze to the man whose lens caught them in the act, we see that the news camera is still running, while Rosenthal, looking up from his camera, notes mournfully: “I wish I could’ve seen their faces.” Along with two flags we also have the double vision of a photographer and a cameraman, one freezing movement where the other sustains it, even while never ceasing to look through his lens. The seventh war bond drive is conceived as a continuation of war by other means on the home front, culminating in the spectacular restaging of the flagraising in Soldier Field in Chicago. By doubling the act of replacement, having soldiers act themselves in an elaborate reanimation of the Rosenthal photograph, which was itself a duplicate of the scene it invokes, namely the original flag-raising, what comes to be installed is the haunting. Visual replacements invoke phantoms, the film suggests, because they are no longer attached to a clear referent. They call forth a panoply of personal memories by association, which, in contrast to the projected effect of the media event, cannot be controlled. In their argument with Bud Gerber from the Treasury Department, the three soldiers who have been recalled home to help raise money for the war initially insist on verisimilitude. While, to the American public, planting the flag meant victory, the battle in fact went on for thirty-five more days, costing the lives of half the men in the picture. Furthermore, one of the dead boys has been misidentified, so that the press is claiming he is in the picture, when in fact he was only present at the first flag-raising. The canny publicity man, countering with his own recitation that if he is not able to raise $14 billion the war cannot be sustained, insists: “That’s the story we’re selling.” The picture, regardless of whether the event it records is a duplication or is authentic and the principal actors properly named or not, articulates what in 1944 was also nothing more than a speculation, namely that the war was in the process of being won. What counts for the entertainment this military self-publicity seeks is the effect a reimagined scene has, not historical accuracy. Like the dying veteran, Gerber also holds on to a screen memory to honor the dead. He knows this is not a true representation of war, but the one that will raise the money the war effort desperately needs. His publicity extravaganza is a continuation of war in two senses. If the imaginary restaging of the war at home succeeds, the war oversees can continue. That in Flags of Our Fathers this double continuation of war involves a media stunt is Eastwood’s way of thinking about the sleight of hand at work in his own cinematic replaying of World War II for a home audience more than half a century later. Proudly pointing to the papier-mâché replica of the rocks on Iwo Jima, Gerber gives his stage directions for how, that evening, once the spotlight has come up, the three soldiers are to charge up with the flag and plant it at the top, smiling and

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waving to the thousands of cheering people who have gathered together to witness this military extravaganza. “Try and stand how you stood the first time you planted it,” he adds, “just pretend the other three guys are with you.” He remains unfazed when Ira Hayes, the Native American marine, points out that he is asking them to imagine the presence of “three dead guys.” Positioned as Clint Eastwood’s own double in the film narrative, Gerber draws attention to the way the film itself puts on a phantom show, splicing together financial gain with moral urgency in its own effort at honoring the dead. While the war bond drive spectacle thrives on reanimating a still photograph, replacing as a theatrical scene that itself was from the start a replacement, the film actors replace the actual soldiers in Rosenthal’s photograph to reembody the battle for Iwo Jima not by imagining the dead standing beside them but by serving as their body doubles. The way the hoisting of the flag in Soldier Field is staged in Flags of Our Fathers renders Gerber’s stage directions literal. As “Doc” enters the stadium with his two buddies, the absent dead return as hallucinations. Eastwood’s editing underscores this double vision by moving back and forth between Chicago, where they are the actors in a military tableau vivant about themselves entitled “The Heroes of Iwo Jima,” and the Japanese-held island, where they are caught up in real military action. The scenes from the war that “Doc” and Ira bring with them as they climb up the papier-mâché rock reimagine their dead buddies, not, however, where they were when the photograph was taken, but how they died. By bringing to the screen restagings of the actual casualties in battle, the film wants us to see what the protective fiction of victorious heroism covers over. For the men involved, this imaginary resuscitation of the dead also inaugurates the way these ghosts will remain with them as an intangible presence in their private psychic continuation of war in peacetime long after all battles have been fought. Initially the spectral voices “Doc” hears calling for a corpsman recall only the men who were with him in the photograph, bringing once more before his eyes their moment of death. Once the flag has been raised again in Soldier Field, the narrative returns to the beginning of the film, offering a flashback that discloses the terrible event encrypted in his hero’s nightmare vision, even if this representation stands in as a double for the story the veteran never spoke about to his son. Having left his buddy Iggy alone in their foxhole during a nocturnal skirmish to tend to a wounded man who had called out for him, “Doc” returns to find him gone. Digging around in the hole he soon discovers a trap door leading to an underground tunnel, but calling out to the friend he had been forced to abandon proves to be in vain. The next morning another soldier leads him to a dead marine inside a cave. For a brief moment “Doc”’s face is illuminated by a flashlight, and although the corpse has been mutilated beyond all recognition, he takes it to be an emblem for what has happened to Iggy. Eastwood spares us this image, not out of squeamishness but because the horror it contains for his hero, so distressing that it will remain with him for the rest of his life, can only be transmitted by a string of replacements: a nightmare vision in which the corpsman responsible for this death is himself abandoned, a happy memory of shared recreation days before he was killed, and

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the publicity effective recycling of a photograph, standing in for all who lost their lives on Iwo Jima. The secret at the heart of Flags of Our Fathers reinscribes unrepresentability into its own production of personal and collective screen images. The power to haunt is predicated on knowing there is something we do not know. The six men raising the flag, whose faces we cannot see in the photograph, serve as the protective cover for this one faceless corpse. In a similar vein, reimagining the dead standing next to men playing themselves in a restaging of war at home follows the two-sided power of the pharmakon. For the audience in the stadium, the event is uplifting, celebrating survival in the face of a viciously persistent enemy. For the actors themselves, it recalls the deaths on which this victory is predicated. Throughout the film Iwo Jima itself is depicted as an eerie landscape, where the enemy soldiers are primarily invisible, hidden in caves. Yet the home front also serves as the stage for hallucinations. The faceless corpse “Doc” sees while standing in the middle of Soldier Field explains and anticipates the nightmare with which the film begins. In his own extravagant restaging of the war, Eastwood is at pains to preserve this double vision, straddling the horrific and the heroic. As one of the veterans interviewed by Bradley claims, the cruelty one sees and does in war is unbelievable. The film uncovers both our need for screen memories to protect ourselves from this visceral ugliness and the way these protective fictions also serve and preserve the very phantoms they seek to contain. Flags of Our Fathers ends with a long credit sequence that brings the historical photography from Iwo Jima back into focus. To recontextualize both the Rosenthal image and the war bond drive extravaganza based on it, we are finally shown the actual faces of John “Doc” Bradley, Ira Hayes, and the other men in the photo, along with the many anonymous soldiers who fought with them, and the civilians who came to see them during their celebrated return to the home front. The photograph the film has repeatedly invoked is replaced by many, while the movement of the cinematic images returns once more to still photography. Positioned as spectral doubles, these photos recall the film scenes we have just witnessed, even though in fact they are the original record of a past that the film came to reanimate. To these original photographs, as Roland Barthes claims for all photography, a referent adheres. We know for certain that what we see in these images once existed, which also means we know that the world they depict is irrevocably gone. The fact that the film ends rather than begins with this original visual archive of Iwo Jima foregrounds the temporal logic of haunting. We see the past, including the visual record we have of it, through the lens of the present and the way we remember it now, especially on screen. While with this final credit sequence Eastwood retrieves as the source for his cinematic enactment photo images from World War II, he also taps into the spectral raising of the dead they already brought into play when they were first circulated. As we move from photos of the war bond drive back to actual photographs taken during the battle of Iwo Jima, the nostalgically lyrical theme song is replaced by ominous musical chords. Accompanying shots of the actual fighting that framed

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the raising of the flag on both ends, they underscore the reality of dying that is an invisible presence in all war photography even when not its explicit subject. As images of the wounded and the dead unfold on screen, the two musical moods come together again, leading to a final series of images of the American flag on Mt. Suribachi. These reclaim as part of our cultural possession all those shots that have come to be overshadowed by Rosenthal’s photo. The film’s point is not to play the force of documentary images against any posthumous reimagination, in the spirit of historicist correction. Instead, to restage war cinematically under the auspices of haunting entails a combination of both. The fictional reconception of the past is based on but also refigures the initial visual recordings so as to assure a continual reanimation of the war on screen. While Flags of Our Fathers takes as its point of departure the civil war fought inside the soul of a veteran who does not want to speak about war experiences he cannot forget, Miracle at St. Anna revolves around a veteran who decries the fact that his war experiences belong to a chapter in American history the public in general has not wanted to speak about. At issue is not the transmission of secret knowledge but the bringing out into the open of the engagement of the Buffalo Soldiers during World War II, which had until recently been relegated to the shadows of our cultural memory.22 Picking up on film noir’s narratives of retribution, the sustained haunting Spike Lee presents pertains to two crimes. As in Act of Violence, his veteran, possessed by the memory of an act of betrayal that took place during the war, seeks personal revenge for his dead friends. Equally at stake is a desire to remedy the public betrayal regarding the fact that, after the war, his division’s deeds of valor had come to be left out of official war commemorations. The film begins in Harlem, New York, in 1983, with the camera tracking along a narrow corridor toward the door at the far end. We hear voices from inside the apartment before we move to a scene from The Longest Day, with John Wayne commanding a group of paratroopers that has just entered a village in Normandy. Then the camera moves back to show us an elderly African American man, sitting in front of his television set, glumly watching this canonical recollection of the European Campaign. Bitterly he addresses the action on the screen, “Pilgrim, we fought for this country, too.” Watching the film raises the ghosts of this veteran’s war buddies. In contrast to the beginning of Flags, their spectral reappearance does not take the form of disembodied voices, calling out to him in a nightmare. Instead, the Buffalo Soldiers who are not depicted in Zanuck’s epic inhabit the frame as an invisible presence, spectral doubles of the white actors who stand in for all the men who fought and died in Europe. Refusing to forget the war on the part of this one veteran, Hector Negron, undoes both their actual death on the battlefield and the symbolic death that being overlooked brought with it. Even before the story begins, we are to understand that the film’s interest lies in rewriting first and foremost reel history, in a gesture of recompensation for the near absence of the African American troops in World War II films. In the next scene we see Negron behind a window in the post office where he has been working for many decades. An elderly Italian immigrant is asking for stamps, and as Negron raises his eyes to look at him, he discovers that the

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past he has solemnly been recalling in front of his television set night after night has finally caught up with him. For a brief moment the two men look each other in the eye, then, pulling the gun he has been carrying with him since he returned home, the veteran shoots the man he recognizes as Rodolfo, a treacherous partisan fighter he knew during the war. Although Negron could make a confession to the police, justifying morally (if not legally) his killing of a war criminal, he chooses not to speak, even when a young journalist from the Daily News arrives at Bellevue Hospital, where he is detained in a ward for the criminally insane. The newspaperman was present when two detectives from the New York Police Department found the head of a Renaissance statue in Negron’s living-room closet. It belongs to the Primavera of the Santa Trinita bridge in Florence that was blown up by the Nazis in 1944. Pointedly, the young man addresses the secret that the embedded flashback will resolve: why would a man, who won a Purple Heart, who was happily married for twenty-five years until his wife’s heart gave out, who has no enemies and no debts, kill a man with a German Luger three months short of his retirement? As in Somewhere in the Night, the film narrative uncovers an investigation into the identity of a war veteran, not, however, because he is suffering from amnesia, but because postwar culture has chosen to overlook him. Spliced into the criminal interrogation of the world-weary veteran, we see an elegant middle-aged Italian, sitting in an outdoor café in Florence, reading the headline “Art, Murder, and Mystery in New York.” Back in New York, Negron is willing to say only one sentence: “I know who the sleeping man is.” The scene uses parallel editing to show how, in Florence, the Italian has abruptly risen from his chair, the past having finally caught up with him as well. His feet, splashing in a puddle as he runs along the cobblestones, serve as the transition to the Serchio River in Tuscany, in the fall of 1944. As in Somewhere in the Night, the stolen statue head, hidden in the darkness of a closet in Harlem, serves as visual emblem for the invisible continuation of war in peace. Yet if its resurfacing resuscitates the dead, the war story about Negron and his three buddies remains a secret narrative, shared only with us. On the diegetic level of the film, the detained veteran remains staunchly silent, speaking neither to the media nor the law. As in Flags, the embedded flashback we see on screen is implicitly the other life that has overshadowed Negron’s life since he came home. In contrast to Eastwood’s veteran, who refuses to speak about the war because he is still trying to forget it, Negron does not want to relinquish his war memories. Convinced that those who could understand him are all dead, retaining their memory keeps these friends alive as his precious secret possession. By bringing them to the screen, the film forges a public space for a private haunting, as it reflects on the cultural climate of the early 1980s, yet unwilling to claim possession of this dark side of the official World War II narrative.23 When we first see the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninety-Second Infantry Division, Pvt. Train is carrying the statue head wrapped in a net sack on his right hip. His platoon has begun wading through the Serchio River, drawing heavy enemy fire as they try to cross to the other side. Capt. Nokes, distrustful of the African American

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troops he is commanding, has set himself up with fire control at a safe distance, with the result that he is unable to see the actual battle. When Stamps, who is crouching on the opposite bank next to the young Negron, calls in the position of the Nazi artillery, the white officer chooses to discount his report, claiming that his second staff sergeant is lying about having managed to cross. Refusing to direct artillery fire based on the information given him, the officer fails to destroy the German stronghold. His mistrust unleashes an unnecessary slaughter of his own men as they, forced to withdraw, walk straight into the enemy’s line of fire. Conceived as the horrific inversion of Zanuck’s whitened military actions in The Longest Day, this historical reimagination of the battle at Serchio River foregrounds first and foremost the needlessness of the high casualties. Although the Buffalo Soldiers are shown to fight valiantly, their deaths are not glorious but the monstrous index of the incompetence of racist military command, willing to abandon troops they do not properly value. While Train and his buddy Sgt. Bishop Cummings, who have also successfully crossed, are shown running along the slope of the riverbank, the camera tarries with the dead, lying prostrate in the bloody water. Their anonymous faces are the collective spectral backdrop for the story of his veteran’s personal haunting. Fortuitously, the four Buffalo Soldiers, now alone on enemy territory, meet up again. Train, who blindly trusts his luck because he believes that the statue head makes him invisible, has picked up a wounded peasant boy, Angelo. Seeking medical help in the village of Colognora, the four Buffalo Soldiers soon find themselves embroiled in a different fight. Embedded into the military conflict between the Nazis and the Allied forces, the dispute between the villagers siding with the partisans and those who support Mussolini pits family members against each other in deep mutual distrust, while even the partisans are shown to be divided among themselves. Rodolfo’s war crime, we discover, is to have betrayed their leader, Peppi “The Great Butterfly,” to the Nazi commanders anxious to arrest him. When, by accident, the partisan did not show up as arranged in St. Anna di Stazzema, the officer in charge had ordered a brutal act of retaliation, rounding up and killing all the civilians, in front of the church. The boy Angelo, witness to a conversation between the traitor Rodolfo and an SS officer just after the massacre took place, is the only one to escape alive. Traumatized by this experience, he staunchly remains attached to the only friends he now has in the world, the four Buffalo Soldiers. Just before the Nazis launch the surprise attack that will begin in this village, Peppi, having finally realized who the traitor in their midst is, confronts Rodolfo, who retaliates by slashing the throat of his former brother-in-arms. Although Negron has arrived just in time to witness this murder, he cannot prevent Rodolfo from escaping into the Tuscan forest. But he now shares the secret of the dead man and will patiently wait for over four decades to take his revenge on the sleeper. The treacherous strife among the Tuscan villagers does more than mirror the larger military conflict surrounding it. In this imaginary reconception of the Italian Campaign, each side is shown to be divided against itself. Even within the Nazi camp we find soldiers hungry and weary of war, wishing only to go home. From

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the embedded flashback visualizing the massacre at St. Anna di Stazzema, we learn that the boy Angelo was able to escape because a German private, disgusted with the criminal actions of his superiors, protected him. Equally compelling in this personalized narrative representing a national experience of sustained haunting is the mutual mistrust among the American forces, causing a precarious division along racial lines among the Buffalo Soldiers and their officers, even while pitting those in command against each other. After the debacle at the Serchio River, Lee inserts a meeting at the regimental headquarters in Gallicano, in which Gen. Almond openly addresses the internal enmity the Buffalo Soldiers had to contend with along with their official external enemy. The “colored Division is an experiment,” he explains to Col. Driscoll, angrily pointing to the red and blue flag of the Ninety-Second Division, “these are the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s niggers, not ours.” Although his fellow officer replies without hesitation, “Sir, I respectfully disagree,” he falls silent as Almond mockingly retorts, “That’s why they sent you here, Jack. To lead me into the New World.” The general’s unshakable prejudice is the mark of more than simply the fault line between politicians eager to acknowledge the value of African American troops and the military brass unwilling to comply. In his disparaging estimate of the African American soldier, this American general’s racist appraisal of his troops and the Nazi propaganda he was nominally fighting prove to be of like kind.24 Along with the flashback recollection of the massacre of Italian refugees by the Nazis, Miracle at St. Anna contains a second embedded flashback scene, straddling the war zone and the home front. In contrast to Flags, the image of the war from the position of home Spike Lee offers does not take the shape of a war bond extravaganza of heroism but is reflected in the war bond posters predicated on racial exclusion. Arguing one night with his staff sergeant, Bishop, the most cynical of the four, claims that the only reason the army is beginning to be fair to its African American troops is because it is “running out of white boys to die.” Stamps, who is willing to overlook Nokes’s mistrust of his report at the Serchio River, responds, “It don’t matter.” In his defense of the army, the war in Europe emerges as a continuation of the other war they have to fight at home, the war against racism that the film, in hindsight, knows will not be over for several decades after V-Day. “They said we couldn’t fight,” Stamps proudly reminds his buddy, “had us float balloons, work as quartermasters, cook and clean. But the Ninety-Second proved we can fight.” Reiterating what Negron had said to John Wayne while watching The Longest Day, he insists: “This is our country, too.” Stamps wants to believe that any fighting they do, even if it reflects on the racism of their commanders, is about progress, predicated on the promise that when they return home, the symbolic terrain gained oversees will have its effect. Bishop asks him to recall what the home front actually looked like. The flashback that follows brings Merryville, Louisiana, where the Ninety-Second Division had one of its boot camps, back to war-ridden Tuscany. Entering a local café where they want to eat ice slops, Stamps and his squad find that German POWs are sitting under a war bond poster that depicts the dark shadow of a giant swastika falling on

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Figure 44 Miracle at St. Anna. Enemy propaganda posters. Digital frame enlargement.

three white children playing in their front yard. The slogan reads “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them.” When the owner, Herb, explains that black customers will only be served at the back, Stamps points out to him the moral incongruence in allowing the enemy, but not men of color wearing the American uniform, to sit in his café. The scene presents civil war on the home front as the mirror inversion of the Italian partisan slitting his comrade’s throat. In the presence of two white MPs leaning on the counter, Herb pulls his gun and points it at the Buffalo Soldiers. While the men guarding the Nazi prisoners try to restore peace by claiming “We are all Americans here,” no one can overlook the front line that has just opened up at home. Aware of the fragility of the cease-fire they have declared, the MPs quickly leave with their prisoners, telling the Buffalo Soldiers to do the same. Because they hesitate, the owner once more points his gun at them, proudly reasserting, in the absence of the law, that his café is open only to whites. The history lesson Miracle at St. Anna teaches takes the analogy between home and war front one step further, disclosing the common ground between American racism and Nazi war propaganda. En route to the base, Stamps and his squad decide to turn their jeep around at the railroad crossing, cocking their guns as they do so. Home has seamlessly transformed into enemy territory when they reenter the café, now with their guns raised, demanding their ice slops. Once more, the camera pans in on the poster with the three white children, encased in a black swastika. Serving as the visual transition back to Tuscany, one year later we see the same Buffalo Soldiers again looking at visual war propaganda. The Nazi posters on a billboard in Colognora include deprecatory images of African American soldiers lustily stealing away with war loot, their faces distorted to make them look like savage animals. Where African Americans are an invisible presence in the war bond poster at home, in the stereotypes the Nazis produce of their enemies, they make up a grotesque presence next to Roosevelt and Churchill. At the front it is clear to friend and foe alike which side they are on. The memory Bishop has prompted anticipates a

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continuation of the race struggle at home, merely put on hold for the duration of fighting in Europe. As Foucault notes, “the war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war. At a very early stage, we find the basic elements that make the war possible, and then ensure its continuation, pursuit, and development: ethnic differences, differences between languages, different degrees of force, vigor, energy, and violence.”25 On a structural level, the racial difference subtending the Allied presence in Tuscany is emblematic of the way war is inscribed in the very fabric of peace, defining and regulating its power relations. Miracle at St. Anna also pays attention to the specific implications this has for a proper commemoration of the Buffalo Soldiers. By showing racism to be a common ground shared by the U.S. Army and the Nazis, Spike Lee justifies his own continuation of war on the screen. Retrieving the story of four Buffalo Soldiers contributes to a battle against forgetting the discrimination and prejudice that spilled over from the war into peacetime. The continuation of war as crime takes on a very specific spin in Miracle at St. Anna. With film noir’s narratives of investigation in mind, one might say that, as in Somewhere in the Night, the crime of racial prejudice Stamps joined the armed forces to escape from will continue in the race crimes erupting during the postwar battle for civil rights, which the film only obliquely references. While it remains unclear whether any of the evidence the film brings forward to explain the reason for Negron’s crime was ever presented in court, on screen it does more than merely justify the murder by disclosing the victim to have been a war criminal. It clears the name of all the anonymous Buffalo Soldiers whose exploits have remained unnoticed and unrecognized. The amnesia at issue is collective, not personal, and what it screens out is no prewar crime but the guilt pertaining to military segregation during World War II. In the battle fought out on the narrow streets of the ancient village of Colognora, the diverse front lines come to converge. While the sustained strife between Nokes and his second staff sergeant, whom he so fatally mistrusted at the Serchio River, erupts one last time, the Nazis mount their surprise attack, killing black and white American soldiers, partisans, and civilians alike. The final moments of this military onslaught are marked by an exchange of gifts, entrusting survival to the concerted belief each of the three people involved places in miracles. The boy Angelo, himself wounded in the right shoulder, finds Negron, who is leaning with his back against the wall where he fell after being shot down. Angelo brings him the statue head of the Primavera, given to him by Train before he died on the threshold of the village church. Negron reciprocates by taking off his cross, which the boy had lovingly been fondling throughout. Putting it around the boy’s neck, he forces it to his young friend’s lips to bring him into God’s grace. For a brief moment he clutches the boy’s hand in his own, as though giving him the vitality he will need to remain alive, before sending him off to hide from their mutual enemy. Seconds after Angelo has disappeared into an alley, a German soldier appears, thrusting his rifle into Negron’s face. Before he can pull the trigger, his commanding officer intervenes. Declaring the battle to be over, he orders his men to collect their wounded

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and bury their dead. Tapping into the grand pathos of melodrama, the scene resolves all strife in a second and utterly unexpected gesture of grace. Having pulled his Luger, the Nazi officer, rather than shooting, presses it into the hand of his wounded enemy, commanding him to “defend yourself.” As an agent of mercy, granting temporary reprieve to a man he could kill, he is also shown to treat this Buffalo Soldier with more propriety than Negron’s own captain ever had. These two gifts will effect Negron’s miraculous survival. When the medics carry him away on a stretcher, he is holding the Luger tightly in his right hand and clasping the statue head, still inside its net bag, with his left arm. While medics place him on the jeep that will drive him to the aid station, two other soldiers collect the dog tags of his dead buddies lying next to each other on the cobblestones, calling out their names in the film’s final honorary roll call. Capt. Rudden, the white officer now in command, assures Negron that for having held the village, he will be decorated with a Purple Heart. As he is driven away, his eye catches the inscription from the bottom of one of the Nazi posters still hanging on the billboard where he and Bishop had torn them off. It says “Fratricidi” and once more serves to straddle the war zone and home, leading back to the crime scene at the beginning of the film and Negron’s appearance in court. Fratricide is the concept that best describes the haunting the film has uncovered, culminating in one man’s belated revenge. Fraternization is, in turn, the resolution Miracle at St. Anna has to offer to put ghosts of the past to rest. At the end of the film we are on Rose Island in the Bahamas. Overwhelmed at again seeing the statue head of the Primavera, which he thought had been returned to the Italian government, Negron slowly walks toward it along the beach. It is resting on a table next to the sun chair in which the mysterious man, whose wealth and influence have procured his reprieve before the Manhattan Superior Court, is sitting, yet Negron does not initially take notice of him. Cradling the ancient artifact again in his arms, Negron breaks down in tears, speaking to it as though the stone face were his confessor: “I am the only one left who knows. I’m the last.” Only then does the other man intervene, assuring him, “You’re not the last.” He takes off the cross he has been carrying with him ever since their miraculous survival in Colognora, to prove there is someone else who shares his knowledge. In an inversion of their parting, he places it back around the neck of the former Buffalo Soldier. Now he is the one to press the cross to the old man’s lips, before he reveals himself to be Angelo, while the old man, clasping the hands of his retrieved friend in his own and crying for joy, keeps repeating his name. The affective bond that is reforged is the final movement in a miraculous exchange of gifts. While the Nazi officer’s Luger served as a weapon of retribution against a former traitor, the statue head is the instrument by which an old trust comes to be restored. The act of violence Negron committed three months short of his retirement has brought with it a final act of recuperation. The reprieve Angelo’s intervention on his behalf affords involves more than the criminal case that brought the old Buffalo Soldier to his attention again. Although it remains unspecified what hidden knowledge Negron is referring to in his tearful confession to the

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statue head, he can now be sure that someone else has survived with whom he shares his recollection of the past. Over and against the experience of discrimination that has been haunting him, as well as the terrible slaughter of soldiers and civilians he witnessed, the reappearance of Angelo brings with it the recognition that someone else has not forgotten the friendship they had shared in the face of war’s destruction. The last image of Miracle at St. Anna is a close-up of the statue head of the Primavera, serenely sitting on the beach: not a screen image covering up the ugly cruelty of war, but an emblem of grace. While the timeless charm of her features attests to the generosity these two men have shown for each other by trying to preserve the other’s life, the temporary immunity she promises is above all from oblivion. Alone on the beach, kneeling before her, the two survivors happily share their haunting, and we are in on their secret.

Passing on War Stories In the same year that Miracle at St. Anna came out, Clint Eastwood once more returned to the story of a veteran whose war memories make up an invisible presence in the life he has been leading since returning home. Recapitulating the film in the terms of the pathos formulas of haunting discussed in this chapter is meant to draw attention to the debt to film noir’s replaying of war on the home front that Eastwood puts on display. Gran Torino (2008) begins with the funeral of Walt Kowalski’s wife. During the reception after the church service, his grandchildren open a trunk in the basement of his home and discover photographs of him with the Third Platoon E Company in Korea, in the spring of 1952. They know nothing about his time there, not because he has repressed scenes too painful to remember or is still trying to forget what happened to him, but because he has chosen to keep his past locked away in the dark recesses of his mind. To underscore that this veteran is fighting a phantom battle inside his soul, the film offers no flashback restagings of this hero’s military actions in Korea. Instead, Walt (played by the director himself) candidly admits to his late wife’s priest, Father Janovich, that he will remember the horrible things he found himself compelled to do during the war until the day he dies. He refuses to go to confession because this is a guilt he has learned to live with. Like so many noir veterans, Walt has brought the war home with him and continues to rely on his war experience as a template for the decisions he makes in moments of crisis. When, soon after the funeral, members of a Hmong gang show up on his front lawn, Walt opts for self-defense. They have come to harass his neighbors, to whom one of them is related, hoping to intimidate the son, Thao (Bee Vang), into joining their gang. Pointing his rifle at the five belligerent Asian Americans, Walt reminds them that, in Korea, they used to stack the bodies of enemy casualties five-feet high and use them as sandbags. The next day, Father Janovich accuses him of having acted rashly, to which he blithely replies, “When we were in Korea and a thousand screaming gooks came across our line, we didn’t call the police, we reacted.” Retorting angrily, “We’re not in Korea, Mr. Kowalski,” the young priest, for whom the American military intervention along the thirty-eighth parallel is first

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and foremost the “Forgotten War,” believes in a clear line of demarcation between past wars and current acts of criminal violence. To Eastwood’s veteran, Korea is an inextricable part of his whole possession of life. As in Key Largo, the war the veteran has preserved as his personal secret will come to be played through again at home, now as a civil war among the Hmong community, pitting gang aggression against peaceful civilians. Gran Torino takes from film noir quite explicitly the theme of war continuing by other means in the world of crime. Against his own wishes, Walt becomes a hero to the neighborhood at large for having saved Thao from the assault by his cousin’s gang. He soon personally befriends Thao’s family, above all taking the son under his tutelage. The film explicitly conceives of the new enemy that has suddenly appeared on this veteran’s front lawn as a double continuation of war. Walt’s intervention on behalf of his neighbors transforms their street into the front line in a domestic gang war, turning this midwestern suburb into the stage for a reenactment of his Korea experience. The eruption of violence in the midst of this particular community also reflects on the other American military engagement in Southeast Asia. The Hmong had fought with the United States against the Vietcong, so that their presence in this midwestern city is the direct result of the Vietnam War, now spilling over into a gang war. Hoping to put an end to their harassment of Thao, Walt goes to the house where Thao’s cousin lives and beats up one of the gangbangers. He unwittingly prompts the very violence he has sought to prevent. The young men retaliate, returning one night to fire their machine guns at the home of his neighbors. Sitting at the table with Thao and his mother after this second assault, Walt once more revisits his imaginary geography of the Korean War. “In the war we just lost a lot of friends, but you’re kind of set for it,” he recalls, “you’re geared to it.” To be haunted by memories of a past war, the film insists, does not mean conflating home and the front. Even if this veteran has consistently lived his postwar life in reference to his experiences in Korea, he is fully cognizant of the distinction. As in Zinnemann’s film noir, the act of revenge he will ultimately opt for consists in putting an end to a tragic repetition in which violence begets ever more violence. When Thao’s sister appears, brutally raped by her cousin and his friends, Walt realizes that he must do something unexpected to bring this crime out in the open. He knows that Hmong custom forbids betraying family members to the police. He is convinced that as long as the gang is around, neither of the children has any chance at breaking out of the vicious cycle of blood revenge. So as to prevent Thao from blindly indulging in his murderous rage, he leads him into the basement of his home, ready to confide in him the war scene that has been troubling him all his life. Walking down the stairs, he explains, “1952 we were sent up to take out a chink machine-gun nest. Been shredding us up pretty good. I was the only one that came back that day.” As in Miracle, passing on the possession of his war experience is conceived as a gift that assures an affective bond between two generations. Before continuing with his story, Walt opens the trunk and, pushing away the photographs, takes out his Silver Star, insisting that he wants Thao to

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have it. Asked by the young man what it was like to kill, Walt initially refuses to answer, claiming, “You don’t want to know.” Only after he has managed to stall Thao long enough to lock the door to the basement, making sure that he cannot embark on the blind retaliation he is thirsting for, is Walt willing to share his secret. The only thing more awful than killing in war “is getting a medal of valor for killing some poor kid that wanted to just give up, that’s all,” he explains. “I shot him right in the face with that rifle you were holding,” he adds, now explicitly drawing on the parallel between his past world of war and the current world of Hmong gang crime: “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, and you don’t want that on your soul.” Aware that he is irrevocably tarnished by what he did in the war, his gift to the young man whom, in contrast to his own children, he is proud to call his friend, is to protect him from living with the same guilt. That he chooses to do so by passing on his story, even while preventing its repetition, is part of the logic of sustained haunting Gran Torino exposes. As Stanley Cavell argues, one of the oldest themes of tragedy involves revealing that if “our actions have consequences which outrun our best, and worst, intentions,” then the reason these consequences “hunt us down is not merely that we are half blind, and unfortunate, but that we go on doing the thing which produced these consequences in the first place.” Asking what it would take to put an end to the tragic side of haunting, he continues, “what we need is not rebirth, or salvation, but the courage, or plain prudence, to see and to stop.”26 Walt, opting for precisely such a clear-sighted abdication from the logic of retaliation, will “go it alone” that night, because, as in Act of Violence, taking back onto himself the death he feels he unjustly dispensed in Korea is his way of preventing the young man he has adopted as his spiritual son from committing a killing that, in peacetime, could only be considered murder by civil law. He goes once more to the house where the gang members live in an effort to take out this Hmong machine-gun nest. While Gran Torino treats gang violence as an embodiment of a continuation of war, the resolution its haunted veteran achieves is less Bogart’s regeneration through violence than Heflin’s atonement through self-sacrifice. Walt’s courage, or plain prudence to see and to stop, consists in introducing one small but decisive difference into this final restaging of war on the front yard of his enemy. He goes armed with nothing but the lighter, bearing the emblem of the First Cavalry, that he got in 1951 when he enlisted. At first he merely taunts the gangbangers with the racist lingo he has been using to describe the enemy in Korea, waiting to make sure that there will be enough witnesses to the act of violence he anticipates. As he pulls a cigarette from the right pocket of his jacket, all five gangbangers point their guns at him, and he retaliates by aiming and firing at each one with a phantom gun he pretends to be holding in his right hand. Now fully in command of the showdown he has devised, he asks whether anyone has a light, and, pointedly placing the cigarette between his lips, he adds, “Me, I’ve got a light.” With the grace of an avenging angel, he begins to whisper his final prayer, absolving himself of the guilt he will not confess in church, while the drum tap that has set in on the soundtrack invokes a military execution.

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Figure 45 Gran Torino. Passing on a war story. Digital frame enlargement.

Calmly poised for the death he this time redirects toward himself, he slowly slips his right hand into the inside of his jacket and, quickly retrieving it, draws lethal fire from all five assailants. The bitter symmetry makes for a keen dramatic irony. In belated reparation for his wartime killing of a young soldier wanting merely to surrender, he now saves a boy by making these gangbangers kill him, an innocent man. One is, however, prompted to ask, whether it is enough to fight violence with violence by pitting suicide against manslaughter in war. His murder is an open-and-shut case. When the police arrive, they find his corpse lying on the sidewalk, with his lighter in his opened right hand, a stream of blood trickling beneath it. On the strength of the testimony of the neighbors, the gang members will be locked up for a long time. As in Act of Violence, Thao now stands indebted to the man who gave his blood to change the course of retribution. In contrast to Zinnemann’s somber final image, fixing the restored couple in a freeze-frame, Eastwood trusts in the radical hope of melodrama. Along with Walt’s Silver Star, Thao has inherited his 1972 Gran Torino, the car he put together on the production line and has kept in mint condition ever since in his garage. In the last shot of the film, we see Thao, not unlike Bogart at the end of Key Largo, smiling to himself as he drives out of the picture into an unconditionally open future. He is not himself a reinvigorated war hero, but the designated heir to a clandestine war story Eastwood’s veteran has passed on to him, and to us, his designated audience. Cinematic narratives of sustained haunting, resuscitating a palimpsest of past wars that remain with us, appeal to our moral obligation not to forget. They insist that while peace may put an end to military conflicts, it never fully disperses our affective investment in imaginary reconceptions of national struggles over power. Fusing personal memories with public testimony, they attest to the persistence of our claim on war as a measure for our cultural self-definition. In the stories we tell of the past, we discover who we are now, even while any current conception of peace invariably reflects back on the wars it is predicated on. The magic transmission cinema affords is such that the experiences of those who have returned from war become our possession of life as well. Reimagining war on screen is always a retrospective activity. We are dealing with knowledge passed on to us, with experiences we share by proxy. Hollywood emerges as a privileged site for a commemoration that consists first and foremost in an imaginary geography of war we

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choose to revisit again and again because there we can continue to be at war with impunity, enjoying protective fictions of individual courage, prowess, and grace along with the incredible cruelty and enormous sacrifice that are also indelibly part of all war efforts. The containment any cinematic reenactment of haunting affords cuts both ways. Even while the screen holds a past we are compelled to keep revisiting in place, restricting its strategic power, the retrieved past takes possession of us. Passed on to us, whether as a clandestine confession or an extravagant commemoration, this intangible endowment will not relinquish its power over our imagination. Haunted by the war stories of others, we are held by what is also our legacy.

Conclusion Where does this leave us? Wars continue, and so does Hollywood’s engagement with military conflicts. Recent films about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, like Jim Sheridan’s Brothers (2009), continue to attest to the way soldiers never fully return home, even when they bring nothing more than quiet despair back with them from the war zone. In a similar vein, we, revisiting their experience on screen, also never fully work through the experience that the stars of these films embody for us. We can take possession of the past by turning it into stories that can be passed on to the next generation, but the effort at working through on screen the mutual implication of violence and politics in American national self-conception remains an open process. Looking at the most current films about military conflict, we find a wide array of attempts to tap into the rich repertoire of visual and narrative pathos formulas of war discussed in this book. Each reflects on the ongoing military conflicts in the actual world, touching on many of the same themes. The opening credit sequence of Lord of War (2005), for example, offers a disturbing visualization of the consequences of international weapons trade, with the United States among the top five arms suppliers in the world. A close-up shot targets the production of a single bullet, traveling with it as it comes to be assembled in a factory in Odessa. We share its subjective point of view when an inspector picks it up and places it back on the conveyor belt, when a lid is hammered shut over the box containing it, and then when it is briefly handled by a Russian soldier inspecting the content. Seamlessly we move to Africa where, as the box is opened, our bullet falls to the ground, is again picked up and replaced in its container, until its journey ends with an anonymous soldier loading it into his rifle. The camera remains positioned inside the muzzle of this weapon, following the trajectory of the bullet to its final destination, the forehead of a young African boy. Andrew Niccol’s introduction to his story about two reckless American gunrunners, reducing the reality of war to a purely mechanical movement of its weaponry, is paradigmatic for a current trend in war cinema. Equating battle action with subjective and, indeed, limited visualization, this perfectly composed opening clip draws us so closely into the war action that no distanced, objective evaluation is possible. Instead, the technical brilliance of this opening travel shot, forcing us into the position of traveling with the instrument of death, underscores our complicity. In films like Green Zone (2010), the difficulty of visualizing war, deployed as a dramatic tool to illustrate its unimaginability, serves a far less satirical political critique.1 By foregrounding the faulty intelligence that came to frame the United States’ invasion of Iraq, the issue of not grasping the real of war is both the theme

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and the visual wager of the film. Paul Greengrass moves his narrative among several politicians, who, to serve their own power interests, manufacture narratives about the war that stand in stark contrast to the actual experience of the military campaign on the ground. There, the troops find themselves lethally confronted with the discrepancy between the reality of war and what high command cannot, or will not, see because it eludes its political grid. Green Zone splices together handheld camera sequences imitating the confusion of the men and women actually engaging the enemy with distanced views of the same scene, simulating the visual recordings produced by drones, digital computer simulations, and surveillance cameras. The action played through on the ground is calibrated through mediatized images that are far away from this reality in more sense than one. The inability to gain insight into the actual war playing itself out on the ground comes to be reflected in the way the camera is either too close to the events for a coherent view to emerge, or its images disclosed as a manipulated mediatization. By reiterating this disjunction, Greengrass draws attention to the impossibility of representing the complexity of the battle over Iraq’s future, even while making us, who are enjoying this visual play, complicit in the tension between the two visual registers. That reports from the war can only ever be approximations is also the theme of films about the troubled homecoming of its veterans. Oren Moverman’s The Messenger (2009) brings home from the front lines a decorated war hero, who, although his battle wounds have healed, is still tormented by the traumatic experience of the death of one of his men during a sniper attack. To help him deal with his own mourning, the army assigns him to the Casualty Notification Team in his area, pairing him up with a career soldier who has perfected the art of conveying the news of death. When, after a hunting trip, the young man is finally able to confide in his older partner, he replays in words the terrible scene in which, trying to save his wounded buddy, he unwittingly placed him on top of an improvised explosive device (IED), loading him, as he puts it, into the bomb. Moverman offers no flashback of the scene, focusing instead on the resurgence of pain in his veteran’s voice, who struggles not to break into tears. Initially, the man listening to him, accustomed to the emotional outbreaks of others, remains calmly seated next to him on the living-room sofa, gently urging him to continue his story. Only after the young soldier, having finished his confession, leaves the room to fetch another bottle of beer, does his own pent-up emotion break through. Helplessly overwhelmed by his own memories of war, he begins to weep convulsively. His friend, sensing that this is a pain he cannot share, remains in the kitchen, a distance the film itself retains. We are given no explanation, neither images nor words, for the traumatic scene that still haunts the older soldier. Instead, we, too, hover over this pathos gesture of belated mourning, in sympathy with a pain we cannot imagine. Even when, as in In the Valley of Elah (2007), we have actual images from the war zone, they do not explain what happened “over there.” Although the bereaved father of a soldier who was killed on an army base after just having returned from an eighteen-month tour in Iraq finds a recording on his son’s cell phone attesting to the bond of ribald violence that held him and his buddies together, this evidence

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remains inconclusive. The images neither help him solve the crime nor allow a coherent story about his son’s combat experience to emerge. Many of the current Iraq war films staunchly defy the possibility of any narrative management of death in war, foregrounding instead its affective collateral damage, which, far from resolving any loss, leaves those on the home front, along with us, in the dark. In Redacted (2007), the way in which the unimaginability of war both tempts and exasperates cinema’s narrative ambitions revolves around the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl in Samara by two soldiers during a nocturnal raid. Brian De Palma, known for his love of postmodern pastiche, uses this ugly war story, officially barred from the news by the government and then exposed on the Internet, to explore how, in the age of new digital visualization, the open access to nonauthorized, found footage may serve as an intervention in official state censorship. Self-consciously pitted against the embedded journalism staged by the Pentagon, De Palma’s iconoclastic claim is that anyone can make his or her own war movie with the material others have made available, replacing the live combat correspondent with what might best be described as post-individual reporting. Yet even as De Palma refuses to give us a personalized narrative of this national experience, offering instead his citation of fragments, which comment on but hardly explain the event, he draws attention to our own moral responsibility. We may not be able to come to terms with the moral confusion war induces, but we must acknowledge it. When Redacted brings its decorated hero home, his friends have a celebration. Asked to tell them a war story, the hero suddenly brings the conflict home. “Everywhere you look is just death, and its suffering,” he explains, “and the killing that I did do, it made me sick to my stomach.” This is clearly not the representation of war his friends want, and yet he adds, “I have these snapshots in my brain that are burned in there forever, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about them.” To shield themselves from his heart-wrenching confession of the war crime he witnessed, his friends again begin to clap and cheer. De Palma ends by screening photographs of civilian Iraqi causalities, burning them into our memory. As though offering the inversion of the denial of war’s senseless destruction on the home front, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) draws attention to the psychic protection military engagement affords the impassioned soldier. Dressed in his armored suit and helmet, her hero blithely returns to Iraq to rejoin his bomb disposal team. As in so many films about the difficulty of homecoming, the world of war is far more coherent to him than the gender conflict waiting for him at home. The costume he wears while disarming bombs, completely insulating him from all direct contact with his hostile environment, is also a metaphor for the visceral thrill of war. Like in other recent combat films, Bigelow draws on the analogy between the limited frame of vision each soldier has during combat and the fragmentary narrative this affords. To underscore the paranoid sense of dislocation experienced by the troops, forced to anticipate danger lurking in every corner of the sites they are called to, The Hurt Locker has no narrative objective. Bigelow’s attempt to grapple with the unimaginability of war consists in reenacting repetitive sequences of the work of war, with her hero ever more reckless in his effort to defuse bombs while around him others are hit by enemy fire. What she does take from the classic war

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film whose narrative desire she undermines is an unmitigated fascination for the machinery of war, tapping into the inherited pathos formula that equates seeing with shooting. Cell phones function as handheld cameras until they trigger a bomb. Telescopes target suspects, offering, along with her self-contained hero, the only stability in what is otherwise a celebration of visual cacophony. Equating cinema with explosives is also the premise of Quentin Tarantino’s dark war comedy Inglourious Basterds (2009), blurring the boundary between the scene of combat on screen and the space in front of and behind it. In his fulminant narrative apotheosis, staged in a movie theater in occupied Paris, he offers his idiosyncratic take on Samuel Fuller’s claim that the only real cinematic representation of war would be one where live munitions were fired over the heads of the audience. While Hitler and all the other key Nazi officials watch a fiction film about a sniper taking out an entire enemy battalion, two members of a guerrilla troop of Jewish American soldiers emerge on the balcony and begin firing their machine guns into the audience. Suddenly, the action the spectators have been enjoying at a safe distance on the screen encroaches upon them, the bullets no longer celluloid proof of Nazi omnipotence but evidence of real enemy fire. The spectators cannot escape from this barrage because the young Jewish woman who owns the movie theater, having blocked all the doors, has unleashed a battle of her own. Shosanna has had her lover build a bonfire behind the screen with the inflammable stock of the film reels in her archive, which he ignites once her own face appears on screen in an eerily lit close-up, interpolated into the Nazi propaganda film. We see her mouthing the words, “I have a message for Germany, that you are all going to die.” She insists that they look deep into the face of the Jew who is going to do it. Tarantino’s wager is that cinema not only represents war by igniting the battle fury necessary to sustain it. Cinema can also perform the unimaginable real of war in the space of a pure virtuality produced when real violence emerges on the very surface of the screen. As the flames pierce through Shosanna’s laughing face, consuming it with their fire, the omen of destruction her image had proclaimed transforms the space in front of the screen into an actual battleground, until explosives strategically placed by the Basterds go off, destroying the entire setting. The heroine’s revenge attacks the images of war cinema themselves. The screen no longer mediates between a past event and its current reception. The equation is no longer between camera and gun shot, but between screened violence and a performance of its real effects. Even after the screen has burned down, Shosanna’s ghostly face hovers in the movie theater, now a projection on the smoke released by the machine-gun fire, while her laughter fills the room. Tarantino’s excessive orgy of destruction is also meant as an homage to the promise of historical reimagination only cinema’s virtuality can offer. Under the auspices of our knowledge of the horrific number of casualties World War II would ultimately cost, Tarantino plays through a protective fantasy of his own. What if one of the many assassination attempts on Hitler’s life had succeeded? What if, in one all-consuming explosion, the war might have ended? On the level of cinematic reimagination, even if nowhere else, history can be rewritten and lives can be spared.

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For my own purposes in exploring the spectral haunting of war on screen, the most compelling current example is to be found in the oblique references to military campaigns that intermittently erupt into the narrative of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men television drama, and its hero, Don Draper. In more senses than one, the advertising agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce consistently emerges as the site for a continuation of war by other means. Going to work is a form of going into battle. The employees of the firm are in vicious competition with each other, even while their acquisition of yet more new accounts is waged as a war on other firms, using military lingo to describe their campaign strategies. Don Draper’s American dream is, furthermore, predicated on his having first enlisted in the Korean War so as to flee unbearable conditions at home (as discussed in chapter 2), only to turn the fog of war to his personal advantage. Switching dog tags with his commanding officer, who died during an enemy assault, he was able to return to America a decorated war hero, free to reinvent himself with all ties to his family severed. The battle of the sexes he wages with his wife, Betty, in their suburban home refigures the predisposition of the soldier, willing to treat everyone as a potential enemy. Weiner’s portrait of his haunted veteran leaves open the question whether Don Draper is too traumatized to relate his war experiences, or whether he purposely preserves the attitude he acquired in Korea as a psychic shield against the domestic conflicts raging in the workplace and at home. Draper is not alone in being haunted by war. Shortly before dying, his father-inlaw, who has come to live with them in the suburban home riddled with their marital skirmishes, eerily relives his World War I trench warfare experience in their sanitized postwar kitchen. Then war obliquely resurfaces again in the episode “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” in season four, when the Honda Motorcycle Company opens up a competitive bid for their American account. Roger Sterling, himself a war veteran from the Pacific, insists on resuscitating the war dead when he assures his partners that their firm will not do business with former national enemies. “I used to be a man with a lot of friends,” he explains, “then World War II came, and they were all killed by your new yellow buddies.” Although the oldest of the partners counters, “The war is over, Roger,” and is even willing to go behind Roger’s back to bring in this account, Mad Men itself will not let go of war. It looks back on the transition from the postwar optimism of Eisenhower’s America to the cultural confusion of Nixon’s civil rights era with the casualties of the war in Vietnam as its implicit point of reference in the near future. While the competition over the Honda account is still raging, Weiner inserts a pertinent dialogue between Joan, chief secretary of the firm, and Roger, who continues to have recourse to military terms in his treatment of the Honda delegation. As he embarks on yet another melancholic memory of his dead war buddies, she interrupts him, explaining, “I don’t want to hear it.” After she has reminded him that her husband will be in uniform any day now, he asks her how she will feel when, some day in the future, one of her bosses goes to a Vietnamese doctor. In answer, she assures him that he fought to make the world a safer place, “and you won, and now it is.” This, she adds, is something she must believe, yet the script is

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clearly double-voiced. Where Sterling pits loyalty against forgiveness, the TV series argues for sustaining the tension. Watching Mad Men’s characters, possessed by different wars that will not be kept at bay, our attention is drawn to America’s continuing military efforts we cannot overlook.

Autobiographic Prelude as Epilogue All along, a personal interest has driven my foregrounding of the issue of spectral haunting. Given my stress on the way the personalized narratives Hollywood provides us with render palpable a national experience of historical violence, I must finally admit my own investment in this project. My parents met soon after World War II was over in Europe. My father, the son of Jewish immigrants who had fled eastern Europe before World War I, had so passionately felt the need to fight for his country that when, after graduating from Brooklyn College, he was turned down by the army’s Officers Training Program owing to his impaired eyesight, he enlisted with army intelligence instead. He soon found himself working as an agent with the Seventh Criminal Investigation Detachment (CID), assigned to the First Division of Patton’s Eighth Air Force, stationed in England. His war job consisted in investigating felonies committed by members of the U.S. Armed Forces, solving crimes, and preparing these cases for the judge advocate. When, in March 1945, with the end of battle in Europe in sight, his outfit was to be transferred to Japan, he quit the CID. Insisting that his war was with Hitler, he instead joined the Military Government of Germany, newly organized to run the country after the war. Under Major Audey, chief of the special branch, he got his commission as an officer after all. Starting at the rank of second lieutenant, he was stationed in Berchtesgaden as head of the Special Investigation Section, assembled to investigate crimes by Germans against the Military Government but above all to denazify the German population. It is in this small Bavarian town that he met my mother, and, subverting the nonfraternization act between American soldiers and German civilians, courted her, as I like to imagine, by dancing with her in the officers club to the sound of swing music. They belonged to the first couples to get married once the ban on German-American marriages had been lifted, and my father liked to boast that his commanding officer gave them Hitler’s Mercedes to use for the wedding ceremony. He would go back to the United States to study law, taking his foreign wife with him, only to return once again to Bavaria in the early 1950s, working as a civilian attorney for the American military still stationed there. In more ways than one, their war experience was the implicit frame for this unlikely marriage between a young Jewish American officer in the Military Government and the daughter of a German officer, whom his investigation found to be untainted enough by Nazi ideology to be released into postwar civil society. Most of this knowledge was handed down to me in the form of personal myths, leaving endless room for conjecture. I know of my mother’s deep admiration for Marlene Dietrich, who had left Germany in protest of Hitler and vigorously supported the American war effort—a decision many other Germans never forgave her for. My father, in turn, would wax

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lyrical over skiing in the Bavarian mountains so close to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. He also told stories about flying over Germany on reconnaissance, sitting next to the bombardier in the nose of bomber planes or parachuting behind enemy lines, with him the sole survivor. I am uncertain about the accuracy of these reminiscences given that his faulty eyesight should have kept him away from any aircraft during active combat. And yet these stories carry an affective truth. They are the way he remembered his war. My knowledge of my mother’s war experiences, so much more painful to acknowledge, is also far more limited. She was to lose her home during the Allied bombing of Munich and finally gave up on finishing her dissertation in economics after the university library was hit during a raid. Yet her favorite narrative about the war was that Hitler had cheated her out of the best years of her life, when she had simply wanted to finish her studies and enjoy her youth. She, in turn, would never tire of describing how, bicycling from Munich to the village her family had moved to, an American bomber relentlessly tracked her with his barrage because the red sweater she was wearing made her such a conspicuous target. Similarly, she would rewrite the fact that her brother was lost in action on the Russian front into a story of personal affront, claiming that he had deserted her. Long after V-Day, she would hold on to her personal recasting of the national German catastrophe into a story about her private battle with her mother, which she was left to fight on her own when her brother went off to a war from which he never returned. I have boxes of photographs recording what my parents and their friends looked like during the era of the American Military Government of Germany, but I can only speculate about the experience they attest to. What was it like for a twenty-two-year-old college graduate from Brooklyn, who would end up studying law in Georgetown on the GI Bill of Rights, to read the dossiers of former Nazis, some of whom had actively participated in the Holocaust, so as to decide who should be persecuted and who reabsorbed into the new Germany the Allies were forging? Similarly, I can only speculate what it was like for my mother, who had been critical enough of Nazi furor to refuse to join the party’s Women’s Association, to find her entire world collapse. Little was ever directly addressed, as though the incredible optimism with which my parents, coming out of two distinct experiences of war, were willing to embark on a shared future was predicated on fervent denial. The secret they have passed on to me, I decided, is one calling for an investigation that best seeks its evidence in the imaginary retrieval Hollywood films can afford. I have looked for my father in the newsreels of the men and women of Patton’s army, listening to Marlene Dietrich in Northern Italy, or marching along the dirt roads of Normandy, even though I have to assume he never left England while the war was raging in Europe. What I found were men who uncannily resemble him, as I have found traces of my mother in Hollywood’s stars at the time, knowing that she modeled her sense of personal elegance beyond all political and national lines of demarcation. But my favorite conjecture is based on a story I heard from a nanny who was already with our family several years before I was born. Well into the 1950s, she

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Figure 46 All Quiet on the Western Front. Dead soldiers gaze back. Digital frame enlargement.

told me, my parents would listen to big band music while having their dinner, only to rise from the table when a favorite tune came up and begin dancing. The sound of war never quite let go of them, if only as shared entertainment. The curious contradiction between a nostalgia for war experiences they staunchly refused to address in any other terms than those of personal myths is one that will not be resolved. Instead, I have come to understand this legacy as a pawn ticket that can, if nothing else, redeem the movies they shared and I share with them. As public as the reimagination of war on screen continues to be, retrieving a past from which there is no redemption is, also, very much a personal affair. Which brings me back to where I began, with the dead, looking back over their shoulders in the final sequence of Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I look back at my parents’ experience of war through films we implicitly shared. The resuscitated soldier, embodied by an actor long dead, looks back at me from the surface of the projected film image. At the point where these two gazes intersect, I locate the real of a traumatic history of war: a painful history that we have access to only through the affective traces it has left in our memory—the testimonies of the survivors, the letters sent back from the front, photographs and scraps of film for which there are no subtitles. In my own critical reimagination of the cultural effects of war, I am left with the problem of knowing only the before and after of war, never the fury and horror of battle itself. I can only acknowledge these two gazes coming to me from the dead, can only ask myself what it means to look back

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at them. So as to perform the conceptual vanishing point any critical engagement with representations of wars must ineluctably address, home, as a geographical and emotional point of departure for those going to war, was chosen as the frame of reference for the first three chapters of my book. In the last three chapters, I chose to look at the way knowledge about war is again returned home, for those who were not part of it to try to understand and judge. I have strategically placed the chapter on battle choreography at the dead center of my book. Implicitly, my discussion of how those at the heart of battle see only the fog of war is also the point of intersection between my own gaze at my personal dead and the collective gaze of the war dead resurrected on the Hollywood screen. Only those on the periphery, anticipating battle or retrospectively commenting on it, have a view. The gaze of those in the center of war’s fury is a blind look. We are always looking back, over and against—but also empathetically with—that other, impossible gaze.

Notes introduction 1. See J. David Slocum, “General Introduction,” in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, ed. J. David Slocum (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. 2. Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 3. As I discuss in chapter 4, John Belton makes a similar point regarding the battle film’s unique capability of maximizing movement on screen. John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (Boston: McGraw Hill 2005). 4. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999), 6, 7. 5. See the introduction to Elisabeth Bronfen, Crossmappings: Essays zur visuellen Kultur (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess 2009), 7–41. 6. See in particular Stanley Cavell’s discussion of The Philadelphia Story in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1981). 7. Cited in Dorothee Bauerle, Gespenstergeschichten für ganz Erwachsene (Münster: Lit Verlag 1988), 13. This title for a panel dated 9.5.1928 can be found in Warburg’s unpublished notebooks. See also Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2000). For other texts by him regarding his memory project, see Aby Warburg, Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2010), especially the section entitled “Mnemosyne: Zwischen Evolutionstheorie und Bilderatlas,” 603–662. Interested in tracing the afterlife of antiquity in the gestural expressions of Renaissance art, Warburg used black panels to reenact this cultural survival by producing an anachronistic montage of images pertaining to one particular pathos gesture, with postage stamps and advertisements found next to classic painting. 8. See Georges Didi-Huberman’s “Foreword,” in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books 2007), 10. 9. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? (Karlsruhe: ZKM 2011), 20. 10. Ibid., 151. Though Warburg did not actually begin working on his Mnemosyne Atlas in 1924 (and never finished by the time of his death in 1929), he had initially conceived it some twenty years earlier. Given that he interpreted the resurgence of pagan gestural movements in Renaissance art as the tension between lofty ideas and monstrous emotions, he understood his research into the aesthetic formalizations of embodied passion as refiguring this battle between astra and monstra in the arena of cultural analysis. By 1918 he had come to include a card index of war (Kriegskartothek) in his archive.

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11. See especially their essay “From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda” in Iain Calman and Paul A. Pickering, Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 12. I am grateful to Gesine Krüger for this conceptual point. 13. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in The Standard Edition, 14:291 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957). Indeed, it would be worthwhile to crossmap Freud’s rethinking of his cartography of the psyche under the auspices of World War I with Warburg’s reconception of his memory library. 14. Ibid., 14:291. In chapter 4, I make use of Paul Fussell’s reformulation of Freud’s insight that our own death is unimaginable except in terms of fiction. Seeing warfare as theater, he argues, provides a psychic escape for the participant. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975), 192. 15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen 1981), 102. 16. Fredric Jameson, “War and Representation,” PMLA (2009): 1547. 17. The Revolutionary War is left out of my discussion not least of all because it has had a limited afterlife on the Hollywood screen, reimagined in Griffith’s America and Ford’s Drums along the Mohawk. 18. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador 2003), 51.

chapter 1. unfinished business of the civil war 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 204ff. 2. Ibid., 206. Following this rhetorical logic, the Civil War begets the Revolution. With America (1924), Griffith casts his cinematic reconception of this military strife in terms of a struggle between two English families, one in staunch allegiance to the mother country, the other in opposition to it. Although I have chosen not to includes films on the Revolution, it would be fruitful to read America along the lines of the inversion of conventional genealogy Anderson proposes, with the earlier The Birth of a Nation about the later Civil War begetting a cinematic reconceptualization of the earlier War of Independence, which in turn speaks not to the time of World War I but to the postwar period of the 1920s. 3. Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, together with Rich Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 264. 4. Quoted in Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War (1990). 5. Burgoyne, Film Nation, 6. 6. For a discussion of Civil War films from a historical point of view, see Alicia R. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr., “The Civil War and Reconstruction,” in The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past, ed. Peter C. Rollins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 58–68. See also Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Jenny Barrett,

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Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 7. See Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 96–135. 8. During these fascist-ridden times, David O. Selznick was explicitly reacting out of sympathy with another persecuted people, the Jews. See David O. Selznick, Memo from: David O. Selznick (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 188. 9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 106. 10. Burgoyne, Film Nation, 8. See also Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). 11. Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 224. 12. Ibid., 38. 13. Thomas Cripps, “Winds of Change: Gone with the Wind and Racism as a National Issue,” in Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture, ed. Darden Asbury Pyron (Miami: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 137. See also the discussion of the racial politics of the film in Williams, Playing the Race Card, 187–219. 14. In an interview on the four-disc collector’s edition of Gone with the Wind (Turner Entertainment, 2004), Olivia di Haviland recalls how Leslie Howard brought his worry about the coming war to bear on his performance of Ashley Wilkes, a role he was never comfortable in, to boot. 15. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 107. 16. Quoted in Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Random House, 2003), 445. 17. Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” in Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 197. 18. Ibid., 224. 19. Ibid. 20. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 120. 21. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, 230. He also notes that Hearts of the World (1918), the most popular war movie of its time, uses the same family structure, replacing the North and South with Germany and France, respectively. In this film, the actor who played Silas Lynch assaults Lillian Gish, as a German officer ravishing a French girl. 22. See Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987) 115ff; from him I take the notion of separateness as a form of acknowledgment. 23. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 281.

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24. One might also read Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) as an example for rethinking the Civil War in terms of the conflict in Vietnam. In the final scene of the film, the wounded Martin Sheen, flying away from the battlefield in a helicopter, recalls in his voice-over: “Looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves, and the enemy was in us.” Addressing how, even after having returned home, the war has remained with him, he speaks of himself as the child born of the two fathers, who, as his commanding officers, had fought as brothers divided against each other not as in a Civil War film on home ground, but in the Southeast Asian jungle. 25. Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 144. 26. See Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 300. 27. A similar gesture can be found in Michael Camino’s Deer Hunter, discussed in the next chapter, when Nick, having returned from Vietnam, chooses not to shoot the deer, thereby signaling that he has moved beyond the “one shot” hunter’s mantra, which has been the insignia of his bond with his hometown and later wartime buddies. 28. Burgoyne, Film Nation, 37.

chapter 2. home and its discontent 1. As Penny Colman notes in Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II (New York: Random House, 1995), women in navy yards were told to be “feminine and ladylike, even though you are filling a man’s shoes,” while at Boeing Aircraft, women were given courses in “proper dress, makeup, poise, and personality to help women workers maintain their ‘FQ’ (Femininity Quotient)” (67). 2. Michael Renov, Hollywood’s Wartime Women: Representation and Ideology (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), 39. 3. Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front during World War II (New York: Free Press, 2004), 39. She notes that women taking war jobs raised many feminist issues that would persist through the twentieth century. As Penny Colman further documents, black women especially saw themselves as part of a “Double V” campaign. One “V” stood for victory overseas against political dictatorship, the other for victory at home against racial and gender discrimination. Coleman, Rosie the Riveter, 27. 4. Initially sung by the male quartet the Four Vagabonds, it was also performed by the Cappy Barry Boys and the Smoothies Trio in the short soundie Rosie the Riveter, directed by John C. Graham, as well as in the musical Follow the Band (1943), directed by Jean Yarbrough. 5. In marked contrast, Star Spangled Rhythm, which came out the same year, uses the musical number “On the Swing Shift,” as Michael Renov astutely notes, to glamorize, modernize, and legitimate women’s war work. Here the night shift emerges as a site where high-spirited, glamorous female factory workers could readily find romance, screening out the fact that, in reality, all war work was marked by precisely the absence of young, draftable manpower; see Renov, Hollywood’s Wartime Women, 209–212.

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6. For a discussion of this concept (taken from Michael Bakhtin) in the spirit I am using it, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). 7. The statement was published in the New York Times, “Weighs Job Hopes of Women in Peace,” August 16, 1943; quoted in Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 69. 8. I want to particularly thank Isabel Capeloa Gil for her own work on World War II melodramas of the home front and the discussions we had surrounding this issue, especially regarding the framing internal differences as well as the ideological deployment of an idealization of domesticity to screen out actual war activities. 9. As Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron note, Since You Went Away offers a fictional reenactment of many of the suggestions brought forward by the OWI Manual regarding proper behavior for civilians on the home front. See Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945–1946 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 19–41. 10. The choice of Hattie McDaniel as the actress to help Anne (Colbert) defend her home in times of war is the most obvious analogy to Selznick’s other mythic home-front extravaganza, Gone with the Wind, plus the fact that, like Scarlett, Anne also finds herself straddling her love for two men, of whom one spends a significant portion of the narrative not on the front lines but with the women. 11. See Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), who documents that home in films of the 1940s and 1950s was a site of potential narrative reversals, at the extreme a self-enclosed environment, “not simply a haven against the outside world but a separate world of its own, a vast act of imagination” (253). 12. Renov, Hollywood’s Wartime Women, 223. 13. See also Katharine Hepburn’s speech at the end of Stage Door Canteen, serving on the diegetic level of the film to convince the romantic heroine to continue her work as an entertainer. Playing herself, Hepburn first invokes the standard slogan from OWI manuals that the Allied Forces are fighting for a world in which one can live together with others in happiness, peace, and love. Her appeal, “Don’t ever stop for a minute working, fighting, praying until we’ve got that kind of world,” is thus pitched unequivocally to the audience, self-consciously disclosing the diegesis of this fiction film to be nothing other than a cover for war propaganda. 14. See Colman, Rosie the Riveter, 55. 15. Ibid., 103. See Connie Field’s documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), which uses interviews with former war workers to underline the discrepancy between the OWI’s cinematic depiction of women on the home front and the far less glamorous but also more tension-riddled reality. In “Rehearsing Feminism: Women/History in The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter and Swing Shift,” in The War Film, ed. Robert Eberwein (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 193–204, Mimi White shows how Demme’s fiction film, in fact, stages many of the points Field’s interviewees raise regarding this discrepancy.

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16. See chapter 7 for a discussion of the way both the melodrama and film noir came to refigure the changes war brought about from the perspective of the homecoming soldiers. 17. Michael Wood, America in the Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 40. 18. See my discussion of Hegel’s theory on the necessity of war in Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 99. Hegel argues that womankind, indifferent to the cares of the universal, transforms the general activity of the government into private, individual concerns for the family. The community, he proposes, maintains itself by absorbing the very separation into independent families that women make a claim to. Since the community at large, in turn, only gets its existence by interfering in this personal claim for happiness represented by women, it creates for itself— in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it—an internal enemy, which Hegel designates as womankind in general. 19. Wood, America in the Movies, 43. 20. Seen in the context of postwar America’s twofold discontent, with homecoming veterans uncertain how to adjust to the social changes that occurred in their absence and women needing to adjust to their often involuntary reconfinement in the home, the gender anxiety Zinnemann puts on display says more about the aftermath of the American victory in the Pacific than the cultural moment out of which the attack on Pearl Harbor was born. 21. J. E. Smyth isolates Alma’s reconstruction of her relationship with Prewitt in light of the attack on Pearl Harbor as endemic for the way novels and films help transform historical events into reconstructions of the past. J. E. Smyth, “James Jones, Columbia Pictures, and the Historical Confrontations of From Here to Eternity,” in Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 298. 22. For a different reading of the gender war at home, which The Deer Hunter pits against the war in Vietnam, as well as a discussion of the homoeroticism at play, see Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 94–102. 23. I take this point from Leslie Fiedler, “Mythicizing the Unspeakable,” Journal of American Folklore 103, no. 410 (October–December 1990): 390–399. 24. Ibid., 395. 25. Recalling the montage of actual newsreel footage from war zones and studio reconstruction in From Here to Eternity, Cimino inserts shots of American helicopters hovering over the American embassy, well known from the TV coverage of the Vietnam War, into his reenactment of the desperate last days of Saigon. See chapter 4 for a longer discussion of war films’ montaging of actual and fictional evidence. 26. Jeffords, Remasculinization, takes this battle more literally as a sign of Nick’s disappointment that Mike, choosing to save Steve rather than stay with him, abandoned him in Saigon. Regarding Nick’s suicide, one might also add, had he returned home, he would have had to contend with the fact that his illegitimate child with Angela is the official son of one of his war buddies, while Linda has become the lover of the other.

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27. Fiedler, “Mythicizing the Unspeakable,” 395, argues against the prevailing critics who, at the time, either thought this closure to be a sentimental cop-out or a piece of covert irony. 28. For a discussion of how the sharing of popular music, like cinema itself, is a performative assertion of home, see my reading of Dorothy’s claim in The Wizard of Oz that “there’s no place like home” in Home in Hollywood, 65–93.

chapter 3. war entertainment 1. Quoted in Lewis A. Erenberg, “Swing Goes to War: Glenn Miller and the Popular Music of World War II,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 144. See also Louis De Rochement’s short film Show Business at War (1943), documenting the war effort of Hollywood studios and their stars during World War II. 2. Erenberg, “Swing Goes to War,” 145. 3. Ibid. 4. For a more detailed discussion of the usage of documentary and newsreel footage in fiction films made to support the war effort in World War II, see also chapter 5. 5. With this mise-en-scène, Anthony Mann implicitly recalls the cinematic dramaturgy of the educational films typical for the World War II war effort, which often used popular songs as the soundtrack accompanying news images documenting the success of a particular military offensive abroad or the successful deployment of the tanks, guns, and airplanes produced at factories on the home front. The veterans and civilians interviewed in films such as Entertaining the Troops (1994), directed by Robert Mugge, as well as Julian Schlossberg’s Going Hollywood: The War Years (1988), keep emphasizing how popular music came to forge a tangible lifeline between the American public at home and the U.S. troops fighting oversees, driving one group to support the military industry and the other to do its fighting, while uniting both by virtue of the popular entertainment they shared. 6. As David Welky documents in The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), the studio bosses, after having been forced to toe the line of pacifism throughout the 1930s, only too willingly took on the role of morale boosters as well as supporting the ideology of the War Department after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank produced recruitment and educational films, and used familiar cartoon figures to sell war bonds or to offer a nightmare vision of Nazi Germany, such as My Fuehrer’s Face. See the DVD Walt Disney Treasures: On the Front Lines: The War Years. This collection of production shorts is introduced by Leonard Maltin. 7. Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001), 4. 8. See Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness. 9. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), 10. 10. Ibid., 13. 11. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Only Entertainment, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 20.

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12. Quoted in Tony Thomas and Jim Terry, The Busby Berkeley Book (Greenwich, N.Y.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 18. 13. Quoted in Stéfani de Loppinot, “Hot Parades,” Exploding: Revue d’analyse de l’expérimentation cinématographique 10 (July 2003): 31. 14. See the interview with Busby Berkeley in Bob Pike and David Martin, The Genius of Busby Berkeley (Reseda, Calif.: Creative Film Society, 1973), 117. 15. As Thomas Cripps notes, “even when black acts were segregated, their energy and style rattled convention and made the cats swing,” commemorating the black loyalty to the war effort. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95. See also WWII: The Music Video, vol. 2, produced by the Universal Archives 1991, which includes an informational newsreel about American field artillery in which footage from the front is spliced together with Robert Weede singing the “Caissons” song on the soundtrack. 16. As Thomas Doherty notes in Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press 1993), the original title of the number had been “Dressed Up to Kill,” but upon reflection, studio bosses thought that the performance was “not symbolic of the humane manner in which the United States has waged war,” and changed it to the more benign refrain “dressed up to win” (123). 17. Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here begins in a Broadway canteen, using real footage of Benny Goodman playing there; Charles Vidor’s Cover Girl has Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers doing camp shows; while Betty Grable in Pin-Up Girl begins as a hostess in a local USO canteen before becoming a Broadway star. See Thomas Schatz, “World War II and the ‘War Film,’” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 111. 18. See Yellin, Our Mother’s War, 86. 19. See Frank Coffey’s official photographic history, Always Home: 50 Years of the USO (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1991). See also the entry on “United Services Organizations” in War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. M. Paul Holsinger (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 320–321. 20. Steven Cohan, “Almost Like Being at Home: Showbiz Culture and Hollywood Road Trips in the 1940s and 1950s,” in The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1997), 116. 21. CBS went on the air with a regular Thursday evening variety show entitled Stage Door Canteen on July 30, 1942, often broadcasting from the New York Canteen. In his film version, Stage Door Canteen (1943), Frank Borzage splices documentary film footage from broadcasts with musicians such as Count Basie, Ethel Waters, Benny Goodman, and Rosemary Clooney into his wartime romance narrative. 22. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Penguin, 1998), 178. 23. See Thomas Doherty, who faults the militarist musical with an ungainly self-aggrandizement, in Projections of War. He recalls the anecdote of GIs stationed in India walking out

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on Hollywood Canteen because they could not stomach the portrayal of good, levelheaded, mature American soldiers as simple gullible fools, awestruck by the presence of screen queens (190). 24. See the interviews with Maxene Andrews and Dorothy Lamour, as well as the footage of Lena Horne on Jubilee, an all–African American radio program, in Robert Mugge’s documentary film Entertaining the Troops (1994). 25. Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” in Standard Edition, 14:305. 26. Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 238. See also Tom Moon, This Grim and Savage Game: The OSS and U.S. Covert Operations in World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1991), 304–306. 27. It is worth noting that in contrast to another famous USO veteran, Bob Hope, Dietrich would leave behind the film crew and reporters, so that little film footage of her camp shows exists. The documents we have are primarily photographs, often taken by the GIs themselves. For the masterful way she came to manipulate her celebrity image in relation to the war, see Marlene Dietrich’s autobiography Marlene, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Grove Press, 1987). For a transcription of the interviews conducted by her grandson, see David Riva, A Woman at War: Marlene Dietrich Remembered (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006). 28. I want to thank David Slocum for pointing out the shades of different troop entertainment in World War II. For a rich collection of photographs, see Jean-Jacques Naudet, comp., Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). See also Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); and Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (London: Harper Collins, 1992). 29. Riva, Woman at War, 128. 30. Ibid., 145. 31. See Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 151. 32. “White Christmas,” like Dietrich’s signature song “Lili Marlene,” was not written as a war tune, yet because of its yearning, nostalgic tone, it, too, captured the wartime mood. See Allen L. Woll, The Hollywood Musical Goes to War (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 67. 33. Dyer, Entertainment and Utopia, 20. Even though the film project was already far advanced when Curtiz was brought on board, the fact that it serves as a vehicle for Irving Berlin tunes implicitly pays homage to This Is the Army, even if there is no intentional influence. The reenactment in the backyard plays with the same repetition compulsion as the earlier film, albeit to a different effect. Where Curtiz’s wartime musical seeks to mobilize war furor, his 1950s reenactment of troop entertainment seeks restorative closure. 34. See Peter C. Rollins’s entry for “The Vietnam War” in Rollins, Columbia Companion to American History on Film, 93–102. 35. See Mugge, Entertaining the Troops. 36. One might read the Playboy bunnies, carrying mock rifles on stage, as Coppola’s ironic refiguration of Santley’s Rosies, carrying their rivet guns on the home-front stage; see my discussion in the previous chapter.

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37. The fact that Coppola initially cut the scene, in which two of Willard’s men, spending time with the Playboy bunnies in their abandoned helicopter, discover how psychically frail they are, indicates the severity of his initial indictment of Vietnam as a zone of unleashed enjoyment. Women from back home even make it into the jungle, yet no real solace is in sight. This additional information, however, also softens the depiction not only of selfempowered women, flaunting their sexuality, but also of the soldiers’ furor of violent enjoyment. Their sexual impotence underscores their implenitude. 38. Quoted in Eleonor Coppola’s documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991).

chapter 4. choreography of battle 1. As Ken Burns notes in the episode on D-Day in his television documentary The War, it was when commanders among the American fleet off the shore of Omaha Beach began to defy orders, risking their ships to knock out German defenses, while on the beach itself “officers and enlisted men alike began taking their survival into their own hands,” that the tide of the bloodiest battle in American history since Antietam turned in their favor. 2. As discussed in the earlier chapter on camp entertainment, Paul Virilio, in War and Cinema, attributes this definition to Napoleon. At the same time, to illustrate the proximity between war and cinema, he recalls how, in preparation for the Normandy landing, the high command transformed the East Anglian countryside into an enormous film lot. Shepperton film studios produced phony armored vehicles and landing ships to deceive Nazi spies about the actual mobilization under way, while false information was disseminated on the airwaves to mislead German radio-operators intercepting these broadcasts. 3. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 192. He is explicitly picking up on Freud’s insight in his timely thoughts on death and war discussed in the introduction, namely that our own death is unimaginable. In any attempt to imagine our death, we really survive as spectators of our own demise. 4. Quoted in his conversation with Lee Server, Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994), 52. 5. Huston’s film was first screened publicly at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981 and has since become a standard World War II documentary. While the explicit intertext is to Andrei Konchalovsky’s film Maria’s Lovers about the difficulty World War II veterans had in returning home to postwar America, one can also readily treat the film as an implicit point of reference for film noir’s engagement with war trauma. 6. Quoted in Server, Sam Fuller, 20. 7. Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 8. See also Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), for a discussion of the murky interface between the imaginary and memory. Cinematic reenactments come closest to what he calls a writing of history in which the resurrection of the past assumes quasi-hallucinatory forms, undertaken “under the aegis of the ostensive function imagination” (54).

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8. See Peter Paret, Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 9. As both Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997), and Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), point out, in their efforts to accurately reconstruct the battle—in this they anticipate Hollywood’s reenactments—the team of painters would visit actual battle sites, making topographical studies and sketches. They would also gather witness reports from soldiers and officers alike, procuring official documentation and photographs, but also asking soldiers to partake in the painting sessions, either as experts or as models playing their former selves. As is the case with war veterans commenting on their experience of seeing a battle they fought on screen, so, too, old soldiers might visit a panorama with their friends to show them where they had fought in a particular battle. 10. Comment, Panorama, 19. 11. See Gerhard Paul, Bilder des Krieges: Krieg der Bilder: Die Visualisierung des Modernen Krieges (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh Verlag, 2004), 43ff. Making this same point for early World War I films, Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, recalls how those who fought in the Second World War “couldn’t help noticing the extra dimension of drama added to their experiences by their memories of the films about the Great War.” Pinned down on the Anzio beachhead in 1944 seemed like a return to the film set of All Quiet on the Western Front (221ff). 12. John Belton, “War Cinema,” in Belton, American Cinema/American Culture, 200ff. In its discussion of the choreography of battle, this chapter picks up on my earlier discussion of war musicals, in which war’s capacity for movement was discussed in relation to the musicals’ capacity for dance movement. In its foregrounding of the tension between authentic evidence and artistic refiguration, it also anticipates my discussion of war correspondents in chapter 5. 13. Thomas Koebner, “Schlachtinszenierungen,” in All Quiet on the Genre Front? Zur Praxis und Theorie des Kriegsfilms, ed. Heinz-B. Heller, Burkhard Röwekamp, and Matthias Steinle (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2007), 113. 14. I take the term “imaginary capacity” from Cornelius Castoriadis, who speaks about our ability to use our imagination to render present to ourselves an event or a relation that is not present, and indeed was never present to us in our personal repertoire of perceptions. See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 319–337. 15. See Pete Martin, “We Shot D-Day on Omaha Beach (An Interview with John Ford),” www.thefilmjournal.com/issue12/ford.html. Twenty years after the event, Ford, speaking about D-Day for the first time to a journalist, tells how we was head of the Photographic Department of the Office of Strategic Services under General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, and used cameramen attached to and trained by the Coast Guard. They were aboard the destroyer Plunket, which dropped anchor off Omaha Beach about 6 a.m., and they went ashore with the second wave. 16. See John Ford Goes to War, directed by Tom Thurman (2005). Cameramen under the command of John Ford shot footage on Omaha Beach, though it is unclear how much and

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what in the Universal newsreel is his. According to the film written and directed by Richard Schickel, Shooting War: World War II Combat Cameramen (produced by Steven Spielberg and hosted by Tom Hanks), virtually all the footage of the initial landing was lost when cans of film were dropped into the sea. The material that survived did so because a wounded cameraman, Dick Taylor, personally carried back the film he had shot. 17. For a discussion of newsreel coverage of D-Day, see Dohery, Projections of War, 242ff. See also Toby Haggith, “D-Day Filming—For Real: A Comparison of ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ in Saving Private Ryan and Combat Film by the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit,” Film History 14, nos. 3/4 (2002): 332–353, who notes that in consequence, although there is plenty of footage of Omaha Beach some days after D-Day, there is actually little material of the actual landings on June 6. 18. See the Newsreels of Universal International News, 1944, part 1, compiled by Steven Schoenherr, Department of History, University of San Diego. 19. The aerial shots, initially made for bomb spotting, exist because far fewer planes were lost than ships. Albeit implicitly, these shots recall the aerial combat celebrated in World War I films, even if what is lacking is the duel in the sky for which Wings and Dawn Patrol are famous. Newsreel images like these, capturing the dropping of bombs, were to have a cultural survival of their own in films such as Air Force, in which similar documentary material was spliced into the scenes shot in the studios, to give authenticity to the fictional story. 20. In his interview with Pete Martin, John Ford admits that very little of the footage shot by his men was released to the public in the news weeklies following the invasion because the government was afraid to show so many American casualties on screen at the time. Although the Allied casualties were much lighter than the high command had expected, approximately 6,600 American troops, along with roughly the same number of British and Canadian troops, died on D-Day. As discussed below, this is a further lacuna subsequent film versions, especially Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, seek to redress. 21. See Back the Attack: American and British Wartime Propaganda Motion Pictures 1940–1945 (1974), compiled by Chris Buchman and Rex Schneider, as well as Robert Mugge’s Entertaining the Troops (1999), discussed in the chapter 3. 22. As with the Universal newsreel, it remains unclear how much of the footage in D-Day: The Normandy Invasion can be attributed to Ford; see also Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin 2001), 297. This mix of images offers a poignant cinematic example of what Roland Barthes meant when speaking of the death of the author in modern texts. We have only the footage as a trace, evidence of what occurred at a particular moment and place on Omaha Beach, given additional authority by the knowledge we have that Ford and his Signal Corps cameramen were actually there to record the events. One can also fruitfully speak of images coming before the event. The audience watching this documentary would have already been familiar with images of men leaving a ship to establish a beachhead, with the D-Day documentary replicating previous newsreel images of other landings. Finally, Ford’s film, which was shot in color, was later transferred into black and white, to be used in newsreels. See Douglas Brinkley, “The Color of War,” New Yorker, July 20, 1998, 36. This recalls the change from black and white to color of the Pearl Harbor material used in

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This Is the Army. The theoretical point this detail draws attention to is how authentic footage comes to be detached and refigured, the color changed, the attribution lost. Far from diminishing its effect, this transformation actually augments the authenticity ascribed to these images. 23. Although Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (1975) interweaves official war footage with a personalized story of two draftees in the British army, he also elides the death of his hero. Instead, in the final sequence he juxtaposes shots of a steady stream of infantrymen leaving their assault boat with wounded men on stretchers being ferried back to the hospital ship— like Ford, foregrounding the scenes that bookend the actual battle. 24. In the PBS documentary The War, the veterans Ken Burns interviews tap into this lacuna, candidly speaking about the mass death they encountered on Omaha Beach. Responding as well to Steven Spielberg’s graphic foregrounding of the horrific destruction of this battle in Saving Private Ryan, Burns also includes both photographs and film footage of the dead so pointedly eclipsed in prior documentaries. The fact that this visual material has entered our cultural image repertoire after Hollywood’s fictional reenactments underscores my own concern with the murky interface between aesthetic formalization and historical evidence. 25. Individual episodes recall classic World War II combat films such as Bataan (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1945), or They Were Expendable (1945). In contrast to Ford’s part in the Normandy invasion, which I have likened to Barthes’s notion of the death of the author, Zanuck’s role in The Longest Day involves a different difficulty regarding authorship. Peter Lev, “Filming The Longest Day: Conflicting Interests,” Literature/Film Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2005), claims “the evidence for Zanuck as a filmmaker is pretty clear: he co-wrote the script (uncredited), hired the three directors, directed some scenes himself, and closely supervised the editing” (263), while publicity referred to him as General Zanuck, supreme commander. According to Mel Gussow in his biography, Zanuck: Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking (London: W. H. Allen, 1971), Zanuck spoke about the reenactment as Z-Day. His overidentification with the project is also attested by the anecdote that he is to have told: “I believe I had a tougher job than Ike had on D-Day. At least he had the equipment.” Cited in George Custen, Twentieth Centuries Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books 1997), 362. 26. It is this lacuna that Spike Lee self-consciously redressed with his World War II reenactment Miracle of St. Anna, discussed in chapter 7, though he shifts the scene from Normandy to Northern Italy. Multiperspectival battle choreography can be found in other poststudio docudramas, such as The Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Tora, Tora, Tora (1970). 27. Released at the historic moment when the United States was poised to reenter a world war, Sergeant York (1941) picks up on the visual battle iconography Milestone created, giving it the patriotic spin, however, that All Quiet on the Western Front and Dawn Patrol debunk. It, too, has a cultural survival of its own. In Guadalcanal Diary (1943) a sniper explicitly imitates Gary Cooper’s idiosyncratic gesture of touching the finder of his rifle with his thumb, applying a bit of spit to cut the glare, and, when asked about this mimicry, admits his admiration of the film.

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28. See Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), who notes that this docudrama represents the final evolutionary stage in the development of the genre, translating history into a legendary story, fully distanced and mythic, but as such, one might add, close to the rhetorical gesture of Gone with the Wind. 29. In his discussion with Lee Server in Sam Fuller, Sam Fuller remembers these words, attributing them to the regimental commander George Taylor: “[He] led us out of there. He stood up, said something fantastic. He said, ‘Two kinds of people are going to stay on this beach, the ones that are dead and the ones that are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here!’ And we went” (22). Like Zanuck, Fuller came to use this anecdote in his own cinematic reimagination of D-Day. 30. See Ulrich von Berg, “Fullers Kriegsfilme,” in Fuller, ed. Ulrich von Berg and Norbert Grob (Berlin: Edition Filme 1984), 84. 31. While Jeanine Basinger, in The World War II Combat Film, praises the film for putting the old elements of the genre together for a new purpose, Michael Hammond describes Spielberg’s project as “celluloid memorial,” confronting traditional war memorial with a cinema of immersion, foregrounding the carnage and confusion of battle. Michael Hammond, “Some Smothering Dreams: The Combat Film in Contemporary Hollywood,” in Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: BFI, 2002), 69. 32. Burgoyne, Hollywood Historical Film, 50ff., 60. See also Michael Hammond’s discussion of the special effects Spielberg used to produce an overwhelming visceral impact and thus an affective realism. Michael Hammond, “Saving Private Ryan’s ‘Special Affect,’” in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2004), 153–166. 33. See James Chapman, War and Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 26. 34. See Haggith, “D-Day Filming,” for a detailed reconstruction of the documentary material Spielberg reworks, as well as Stephen Pizzello’s interview with Steven Spielberg, “FiveStar General,” American Cinematographer (August 1998): 44–51. 35. Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 256. I return to the question of a murky interface between documentary and fiction film in chapter 5. 36. For the use and interaction of actual soldiers in 1940s combat films, note that Alan Dwan uses the three survivors of the Iwo Jima flag-raising in cameo roles as bearers of the flag in the concluding scene of his fictionalized Sands of Iwo Jima. 37. See Chapman, War and Film, 30, who discusses a wide range of fictional intertexts for Saving Private Ryan, including Patton (1970), Cross of Iron (1977), Sergeant York (1941), A Walk in the Sun (1945), and The Sullivans (1944). 38. While Spielberg’s sniper does not imitate Gary Cooper’s thumb gesture, his religious appeal recalls that Sergeant York is a film of a Quaker, who only uses his rifle power on the front lines when he realizes that he must kill to save the lives of his comrades. 39. John Wayne initially falls backward so that we see his face as his men rally around his corpse. Then, after they have gazed at the men raising the flag, the camera returns to the dead commander, who is now lying on his face, exposing his back instead. Regardless of whether or not this is a mistake in continuity editing, foregrounded is a lack of realism,

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heightening rather than lessening the cinematic effect (as is the case with Tom Hanks’s pocket mirror).

chapter 5. reporting the war 1. See D-Day to Berlin, written, produced, and narrated by George Stevens Jr., a documentary film enmeshing official newsreel footage with visual material that his father had shot during the European Campaign with his own handheld camera. 2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 3. See Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997). 4. Keller, Ultimate Spectacle, xiv. See also the discussion on cinematic representations of battle in chapter 2. 5. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 86. 6. Schatz, “World War II and the Hollywood ‘War Film,’” 121. 7. See James Agee, Film Writing and Selected Journalism (New York: Library of America, 2005), 192. See also the reviews written for the Nation on May 26, 1945 (191–195); “A Great Film,” on September 15, 1945 (200–204); and “Best of 1945,” on January 19, 1946 (217–219). See also Michael Henry Wilson, “For Those Who Lie Under the Wooden Crosses,” in Print the Legend: Cinema and Journalism, ed. Giorgio Gosetti and Jean-Michel Frodon (Locarno: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004), 113–121. 8. See Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation,” New German Critique 59 (Spring–Summer 1993): 41–76. 9. Quoted by Scott Simmon, curator of “More Treasures from American Film Archives,” in his notes on the film in the accompanying booklet (26). For praise of the way this film presents war from the perspective of the ordinary GI, see Chapman, War and Film; and Basinger, World War II Combat Film. Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) poses an interesting intertext, notably when the farmers return to the rice field after the battle for their village has been won, turning their backs on the samurai who have survived as well as on the dead they have just buried. 10. As Phillip Knightley notes, “one of the curious facets of the reporting of the Second World War was that the more the importance of the individual soldier was reduced by technology, the more correspondents concentrated on writing about him. Pyle was the master in this field.” Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 357. In contrast to Guadalcanal Diary, Wellman’s Ernie Pyle becomes a real character in the film, dramaturgically as important as the troops he is reporting about. As in the earlier film, we also have the double-voicing, with Meredith’s voice-over comment shadowing his bodily presence on screen. 11. Ernie Pyle, “This One Is Captain Waskow,” in Reporting World War II, Part One, American Journalism 1938–1944 (New York: Library of America, 1995), 736.

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12. One might also draw an analogy to Platoon by Oliver Stone, himself, like Fuller, a war veteran turned director. His protagonist, Chris, initially takes on the quasi-distanced attitude of an observer, and, as in Guadalcanal Diary, the letters he writes to his grandmother serve as a narrative voice-over, commenting in real time on the events unfolding on screen, simultaneous to the action. He, too, functions as a shadow double of what we see, namely the batten between his two commanding officers. This double-voicing continues all the way to the massacre on the Vietnamese village, an assault that engenders a civil war within the platoon. From this point on his voice-over comment breaks off until after the battle in which he manages to execute Barnes. The final voice-over sets in again when, wounded, he is going home, only now he no longer offers in real time a simultaneous comment on the events in this war zone. He now speaks in hindsight, offering a distanced recollection. Looking back, he is able to reencode his war experience as a mythic narrative, aimed at acknowledging his obligation to his two fathers, although in contrast to Wellman’s Ernie Pyle, his is a far more self-centered gesture of commemoration. 13. See Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 14. See John Irvin’s Hamburger Hill (1987) to understand why they might want an inside man. Here the reporters have no insight into and no empathy for the men fighting in Vietnam. In a particularly chilling scene, a war correspondent confronts a weary platoon returning from yet another failed attempt to take a particular hill. Angered by the claim that their fighting is in vain, the squad leader, with the TV camera running, quietly but sternly compares the newsmen to vultures, simply there to do their jobs, impartial observers, not taking sides. The reporter falls glumly silent, as he accuses him, “You haven’t earned a right to be here.” This is a far cry from Guadalcanal Diary and The Story of G.I. Joe, in which the correspondents travel with the troops as sympathetic onlookers, partaking in their experience of war. 15. Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 57. 16. Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 12. See also the documentary film Restrepo (2010) by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. This narrative about two embedded journalists is overshadowed by the death of one of the directors, Tim Hetherington, who was subsequently killed in action as a war photographer in Libya in 2011. 17. Knightley, First Casualty, 548; see chapter 21, entitled “No More Heroes March–April, 2003,” for a discussion of embedded journalism. 18. See Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); and Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 19. Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 128–142. See also Jeffrey Chown, “Documentary and the Iraq War: A New Genre for New Realities,” in Rollins and O’Conner, Why We Fought, 458–487. 20. Picking up on Carl von Clausewitz’s paradox in his book On War, namely that the war can only be represented, Paul Virilio has argued that in industrialized warfare, where the

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representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image gains sway over the object, and war is ever more an issue of how to interpret the images produced in a particular war zone. See Virilio, War and Cinema, 3, who equates the weapon with the camera’s eye. 21. In his explanatory comments on the DVD, Errol Morris wryly notes that under other circumstances, Sabrina Harman would have been given a Pulitzer Prize. She herself notes that during her court-martial, they dropped all the charges pertaining to the ghost detainee, because bringing in these photos would have also been evidence of the murder they had sought to cover up. Philip Gourevitch also suggests, “had a journalist taken the photos, there would have been prizes. Instead, the photographs were used by the administration and the military to frame the soldiers who took and appeared in them as rogues acting out of their own individual perversity. In that way the exposé became the cover-up.” Philip Gourevitch, “The Abu Ghraib We Cannot See,” New York Times, May 24, 2009. 22. Ibid.

chapter 6. court-martial drama 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, part II, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 310. 2. Carol Clover, “God Bless Juries!” in Browne, Refiguring American Film Genres, 272. 3. For the narrative structure of American courtroom proceedings, see Robert P. Burns, The Death of the American Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 4. Carol Clover, “Law and the Order of Popular Culture,” in Law in the Domains of Culture, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 105. 5. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Athlone Press, 1988). 6. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 42. 7. Ibid., 306. 8. For a discussion of how the figure of the rogue negotiates the mutual implication of law and transgression, see Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 9. Peter Capall, who narrates the opening sequence, appears in the film itself as the judge of the court-martial, so that his is both the voice of justice in the film diegesis and the voice implicitly critiquing the military strategy of the French army in the voice-over. 10. As did Standard Operating Procedure, discussed in the previous chapter, Paths of Glory raises a similar question about the relation between evidence and narrative. Errol Morris’s documentary, of course, sets in after the accused soldiers have been court-martialed and sentenced, and argues that photographs from a crime scene require narratives to make them meaningful, because they have more than one story to tell. While the different, conflicting testimonies given in court also require a narrative to turn them into usable evidence, a plurality of readings is precisely what the court proceeding must, with its final sentence, exclude as a possibility.

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11. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 50. See also Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Richard Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). 12. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 51. 13. Ibid., 53ff. 14. Ibid., 56. 15. Jonathan Friedman, “Law and Politics in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 1946–1949,” in Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes, ed. Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 95. 16. Implicitly, Stanley Kramer is referring as much to the crisis in Czechoslovakia as to the developments in Indochina in the early 1960s, which would prompt the Vietnam War as a continuation of politics by other means in that zone of power. 17. A longer discussion of Marlene Dietrich’s work for the war effort is found in chapter 3. 18. See Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1. Her discussion of law, seeking to avert its gaze from narratives of traumatic history, not only recalls the shift in the Truman administration’s policy for Germany at the time of the Nuremberg trials but also recalls Foucault’s distinction between a philosophic-juridical discourse, organized around the notion of an abstract law, and a historico-political discourse, which both deciphers and reiterates war’s permanent presence within society. 19. Ibid., 107. 20. In this, Kramer supports the concept advanced by the Dachau trials and the Nuremberg proceedings, namely that “civilians could be held individually accountable for war crimes, irrespective of the overall responsibility of their governments.” See “U.S. Army War Crimes Trials in Germany, 1945–1947,” in Heberer and Matthäus, Atrocities on Trial, 67. 21. The exception the film glosses over is Rudolf Hess, sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau, where he committed suicide in 1987. 22. Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime (London: Polity, 2007). 23. The concept “code red” was never used in the U.S. Marines, where punishment through fellow soldiers was instead termed a “blanket party,” given that it consisted of beatings with blankets wrapped around hard objects. 24. Susan Sontag makes a similar point about the MPs indicted over the photographs that emerged from the prison at Abu Ghraib, claiming that the issue is not whether the torture was carried out by certain individuals, but whether it was systemic. In other words, at issue is whether the nature of the policies of the Bush administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out make such acts likely. See Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” 128–144. 25. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 283. 26. Ibid., 286.

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27. As William Friedkin states in his commentary on the DVD, he personally did not believe that what Childers did was right. See Hammond, “Some Smothering Dreams,” 62–64. 28. Simpson, Law, War and Crime, 133.

chapter 7. war’s sustained haunting 1. See Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 15ff., already discussed in the previous chapter. For a critical discussion of Foucault, see also Nick Mansfield, Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 2. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 47. 3. See Sigmund Freud, “Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses” (1919), in The Standard Edition, 17:207–215 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). 4. In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), Jonathan Lear uses the concept of radical hope to describe a “daunting form of commitment: to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is” (100). Arising at the limits of one’s existence, such as the emotional zero point Wyler’s veteran finds himself in, having no clear view into the future yet recognizing that he must relinquish his war past, this leap of faith consists of the ability to open one’s imagination to a radically different set of future possibilities, which one can only trust in because one as yet has no concept of and for them. 5. A different interrelation could be drawn between Wyler’s melodrama, Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and recent films about veterans returning from the war in Iraq, such as Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss (2008). They privilege the question of resolution, be it the closure of a criminal case or the return to war, rather than the sustained doubling I am concerned with regarding narratives of haunting. 6. One could readily read George Marshall’s The Blue Dahlia (1946) as a noir version of Wyler’s melodrama. It, too, revolves around the homecoming of three veterans, with Johnny, similar to Fred Derry, finding himself estranged from his faithless wife. A caricature of a pleasure-seeking home front, cruelly oblivious to the horror of the front overseas, she will be murdered, where Wyler’s frivolous wife simply chooses to divorce the ex-bombardier when his back pay from the army runs out. Suspected of having murdered his wife, Johnny, as part of his process of rehabilitation, seeks to find the real murderer. Given that, in this noir inflection of postwar America, anxiety about former servicemen unable to control their killer instinct is more openly addressed, his integration into the civil world depends not on finding a new joy, but on proving that he has successfully relinquished his wartime self. Where in The Best Years of Our Lives Fred’s buddy Homer is coming home with two hooks for hands, unsure how his family will cope with this disability, in a further noir twist, Buzz, in The Blue Dahlia, is returning with a plate in his head, causing him to have unbridled fits of violence. However, although Raymond Chandler’s screenplay had foreseen him as the murderer, the studio thought it politically improper to vilify a member of the navy, designating instead a corrupt security guard for this role.

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7. Vivian Sobchak, “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotype of Film Noir,” in Browne, Refiguring American Film Genres, 130. Concerned with the domestic anxiety of postwar culture, Sobchak discusses the way a loss of home becomes a structuring element in film noirs. For a further discussion of how war trauma obliquely riddles the homecoming of the veteran, see Bronfen, Home in Hollywood. In a similar vein, Sheri Chinen Biesen, in Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), argues that film noir explores the “darker side” of the American wartime psyche, though her book explores not the way this genre represents the war but the actual production conditions of wartime Hollywood. 8. Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 215. 9. As Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron note in Best Years: Going to the Movies, 226, by December 1946, when Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives came out, the “Chicago press was full of real-life stories of the many returning GIs whose readjustment was delayed, often permanently compromised, by the experience of war.” For a detailed discussion of the postwar discourse on the dangers posed by the returning veteran, see Polan, Power and Paranoia. For a discussion of the way protagonists in film noirs of the 1940s are obliquely marked as maladjusted veterans, even when World War II as such is not thematized, see Richard Maltby, “The Politics of the Maladjusted Text,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992). For an overview of the critical discussion on film noir in relation to a postwar period characterized by a crisis within both masculinity and patriarchal cultural order, see Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991). 10. Siegfried Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” New German Critique 89 (Spring–Summer 2003): 111. The article originally appeared in Commentary 2 (1946): 132–136. 11. With this report Huston cites his own documentary, Battle of San Pietro, released three years earlier; see my discussion in chapter 5. The sense one gets is that he, too, needs to restage in Hollywood, in a different genre, the experience of war he continues to be haunted by. His choice of star, in turn, is a further indication of the way the energy harnessed by films made during the war is reinscribed, invoking anti-Nazi thrillers like Casablanca, Passage to Marseille, and Action in the North Atlantic—that is, precisely those films whose deployment of fear Kracauer saw as having spilled over into postwar Hollywood. Bogart would also have been known for his vigorous engagement in war bond drives during the war years. 12. It is a curious coincidence of history that the end of Prohibition falls in the same year as the Nazi takeover in Germany in 1933, so that implicitly the expulsion of a public enemy, waging a domestic war of crime, is coterminous with the emergence of a national enemy. His attempted return equally serves as an underhand reference to the Cold War, given that Rocco vents his anger at having been deported after having lived in the United States for thirty years, by adding, “Like I was a dirty Red or something.” Huston seems to suggest that if crime and fascism are interchangeable as figurations of the enemy, so, too, are crime and Communism.

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13. I take my discussion of the covenant of marriage as a trope for the covenant between the individual and the nation, and as such its achievement as emblem for human perfectibility, from Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness. Huston is implicitly recycling the marriage at the end of The Best Years of Our Lives, which also serves as a trope for the promise of a shared tomorrow. See also Deborah Thomas, “How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male,” in Cameron, Movie Book of Film Noir. The noir hero, she argues, projects the war aggression he must relinquish in peacetime onto the femme fatale and her partners in crime, even while reencoding his transition from wartime into peace as the move from bachelorhood to marriage. 14. Dead Reckoning also revolves around a man who enlists under a false name to escape from being framed for a murder he did not commit, while Crooked Way shows another amnesiac veteran uncovering his prewar crime past in the course of reclaiming a postwar identity. 15. See episode 7, “A World without War” in Ken Burns, The War (2007). 16. I take the concept “transgenerational haunting” from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok; see the section entitled “Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 165–206. 17. Burgoyne, Film Nation, 166. 18. Performed by Dinah Shore in Follow the Boys, the song “I’ll Walk Alone” peaked as the number four hit in 1944. The song is sung a second time in the film by Tokyo Rose, broadcasted over the ship radio the night before the marines land on Iwo Jima, this time with full orchestration. 19. As a sober comment on Wyler’s melodrama, Eastwood’s opening sequence suggests what might have happened to Fred Derry after the marriage The Best Years of Our Lives anticipates. Though successful in his business, happily married for many years, and father to a caring son, he is still haunted by dreams at night; he has simply learned to live with them by keeping them to himself. 20. The screenplay, written by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, is based on the book Flags of Our Fathers, which James Bradley coauthored with Ron Powers. 21. Clint Eastwood bases his fictional restagings of the landing on Iwo Jima on newsreel and documentary representations, even while gesturing toward Spielberg’s recycling of this material in Saving Private Ryan, by bringing the visual style of postproduction back to the Pacific theater of war. 22. The War Department commissioned the documentary The Negro Soldier (1944), written by Carlton Moss and directed by Stuart Heisler, to reflect the position of the eventual one million black soldiers who would take part in World War II. For a discussion of the African American angle on Hollywood’s war effort, see Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 23. See Inside Buffalo (2010), a documentary made by Fred Kudjo Kuwornu and Patrick Jeffrey about the Ninety-Second Infantry Division, the African American combat unit in World War II. The film includes material from the ceremony on January 13, 1997, in which President Clinton granted medals deserved but not awarded at the end of World War II.

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24. Gen. Almond later blamed the poor combat performance of the Ninety-Second Division on the black soldiers, completely whitewashing the lethal mistakes in strategy and judgment committed by those commanding them. 25. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 59ff. 26. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1969), 81.

conclusion 1. For a discussion of the cinematic strategies regarding fraught visuality in current Iraq War films, see Garrett Stewart, “Digital Fatique: Imaging War in Recent American Film,” Film Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 45–55.

Selected Bibliography Adams, Michael C. C. The Best War Ever: America and World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Affron, Charles, and Mirella Jona Affron. Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945–1946. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Alpers, Benjamin L. “This Is the Army: Imagining a Democratic Military in World War II.” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (June 1998): 129–163. Ambrose, Stephen E. D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Auster, Albert, and Leonard Quart. How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1988. Barrett, Jenny. Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Belton, John. American Cinema, American Culture. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Bethke, Jean Elshtain. Women and War. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Bourke, Joanna. An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare. London: Granta Books, 1999. Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Random House, 2003. Brinkley, Douglas. “The Color of War.” New Yorker, July 20, 1998, 34–36. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. ———. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

266

Selected Bibliography

Browne, Nick, ed. Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Burgoyne, Robert. The Hollywood Historical Film. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. ———. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010. Butler, Ivan. The War Film. London: Tantivy Press, 1974. Cameron, Ian, ed. The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista, 1992. Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. ———. “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” In Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Chadwick, Bruce. The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Chambers, John Whiteclay, II, and David Cuthbert, eds. World War II, Film and History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Chapman, James. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Clarke, James. War Films. London: Virgin Books, 2006. Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Translated by Richard Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Dick, Bernard F. The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Dower, John W. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Early, Emmett. The War Veteran in Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Sons, 2003. Eberwein, Robert, ed. The War Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ———. Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. ———. The Hollywood War Film. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Erenberg, Lewis A., and Susan E. Hirsch, eds. The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 1998.

Selected Bibliography

267

———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador, 2003. Freedman, Lawrence, ed. War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. (1915). “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” In The Standard Edition, 14:275–302. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. ———. (1915). “On Transience.” In The Standard Edition, 14:305–307. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. ———. (1919). “Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses.” In The Standard Edition, 17:207–215. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. ———. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. In The Standard Edition, 21:64–145. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. ———. (1933). “Why War.” In The Standard Edition, 21:197–215. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Fuller, Samuel. A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking. New York: Applause Theater and Film Books, 2002. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. ———. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———, ed. The Norton Book of Modern War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Fyne, Robert. The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II. Metuchen, N.Y.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. London: Atholone Press, 1988. Goldstein, Joshua. War and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Haggith, Toby. “D-Day Filming—For Real: A Comparison of ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ in Saving Private Ryan and Combat Film by the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit.” Film History 14, nos. 3/4 (2002): 332–353. Hammond, Michael. “Some Smothering Dreams: The Combat Film in Contemporary Hollywood.” In Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale. London: BFI, 2002. ———. “Saving Private Ryan’s ‘Special Affect.’” In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker, 153–166. London: Routledge, 2004. Haskell, Molly. Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Random House, 2002. Heller, Heinz-B., Burkhard Röwekamp, and Matthias Steinle, eds. All Quiet on the Genre Front? Zur Praxis und Theorie des Kriegsfilms. Marburg: Schüren, 2007. Holsinger, Paul. War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Hoopes, Roy. When the Stars Went to War: Hollywood and World War II. New York: Random House, 1994.

268

Selected Bibliography

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Kagan, Norman. The War Film. New York: Pyramid, 1974. Keller, Ulrich. The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001. Klein, Thomas, et al. Filmgenres: Kriegsfilm. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. Koebner, Thomas. “Schlachtinszenierung.” In All Quiet on the Genre Front? Zur Praxis und Theorie des Kriegsfilms. Edited by Heinz-B. Heller, Burkhard Röwekamp, and Matthias Steinle, 113–131. Marburg: Schüren, 2007. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” New German Critique no. 89 (Spring–Summer 2003): 105–111. Mansfield, Nick. Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. McAdams, Frank. The American War Film: History and Hollywood. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. McLaughlin, Robert L., and Sally E. Parry. We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. Midkiff DeBauche, Leslie. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000. Paret, Peter. Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Paul, Gerhard. Bilder des Krieges: Krieg der Bilder: Die Visualisierung des Modernen Krieges. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2004. Polan, Dana. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Rogin, Michael. Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Rollins, Peter C., ed. The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Rollins, Peter C., and John E. O’Connor, eds. Hollywood’s World War I: Motion Picture Images. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1997. ———, eds. Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.

Selected Bibliography

269

Schatz, Thomas: “World War II and the Hollywood ‘War Film.’” In Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne, 89–127. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Server, Lee. Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994. Shindler, Colin. Hollywood Goes to War: Films and American Society 1939–52. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Simpson, Gerry. Law, War and Crime. London: Polity, 2007. Sklar, Robert. “Hollywood at War for America and at War with Itself.” In Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, 240–268. New York: Random House, 1975. Slocum, J. David. “Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking Violence in the World War II Combat Film.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 35–63. ———, ed. Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ———. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Scribner, 1975. Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotype of Film Noir.” In Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne, 129–170. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. ———. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Edited by Paolo Dilnardo and Anne Jump. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Stewart, Garrett. “Digital Fatigue: Imaging War in Recent American Film.” Film Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 45–55. Torgovnik, Marianna. The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Vettel-Becker, Patricia. “Combat Photography: Adventurers, Heroes, and Martyrs.” In Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America, 31–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989. Virilio, Paul, and Sylvère Lotringer. Pure War. Rev. ed. Semiotexte(e). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Weber, Samuel. Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Welky, David. The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

270

Selected Bibliography

Wells, Donald A. War Crimes and Laws of War. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984. Westwell, Guy. War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Woll, Allen L. The Hollywood Musical Goes to War. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983. Wood, Michael. America in the Movies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Filmography chapter 1 — unfinished business of the civil war The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dir. D. W. Griffith. The Civil War (1990). Dir. Ken Burns. Gangs of New York (2002). Dir. Martin Scorsese. Glory (1989). Dir. Edward Zwick. Gone with the Wind (1939). Dir. Victor Fleming. Major Dundee (1965). Dir. Sam Peckinpah. Ride with the Devil (1999). Dir. Ang Lee.

chapter 2 — home and its discontent The Deer Hunter (1978). Dir. Michael Cimino. From Here to Eternity (1953). Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Glamour Girls of 1943 (1943). Documentary short film produced by the Office of War Information (OWI). The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980). Dir. Connie Field. Rosie the Riveter (1944). Dir. Joseph Santley. Since You Went Away (1944). Dir. John Cromwell. Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). Dir. George Marshall. Swing Shift (1984). Dir. Jonathan Demme. Tender Comrade (1943). Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Women in Defense (1941). Documentary short film produced by the Office of Emergency Management.

chapter 3 — war entertainment Apocalypse Now Redux (2001). Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Entertaining the Troops: American Entertainers in World War II (1994). Dir. Robert Mugge. Footlight Parade (1933). Dir. Lloyd Bacon. For Me and My Gal (1942). Dir. Busby Berkeley. For the Boys (1991). Dir. Mark Rydell. The Glenn Miller Story (1954). Dir. Anthony Mann. Going Hollywood: The War Years (1988). Dir. Julian Schlossberg. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Holiday Inn (1942). Dir. Mark Sandrich. Hollywood Canteen (1944). Dir. Delmer Daves. Marlene (1984). Dir. Maximilian Schell. Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song (2001). Dir. J. David Riva. This Is the Army (1943). Dir. Michael Curtiz.

272

Filmography

White Christmas (1954). Dir. Michael Curtiz. You’ll Never Get Rich (1941). Dir. Sidney Lanfield.

chapter 4 — choreography of battle All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Dir. Lewis Milestone. Back the Attack: How We Were Mobilized to Battle the Enemy during World War Two: American and British Wartime Propaganda Motion Pictures 1940–1945 (1974). Dir. Chris Buchman and Rex Schneider. Band of Brothers (2001). Dir. David Frankel and Richard Salomon; produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The Big Red One (1980). Dir. Samuel Fuller. The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dir. D. W. Griffith. D-Day: The Normandy Invasion (1944). A U.S. Coast Guard Picture. Dir. John Ford (unattributed). John Ford Goes to War (2002). Dir. Tom Thurman. Let There Be Light (1946). Dir. John Huston. The Longest Day (1962). Dir. Daryl Zanuck (also producer), Andrew Marton, Dan Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki. Overlord (1975). Dir. Stuart Cooper. Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). Dir. Allan Dwan. Saving Private Ryan (1998). Dir. Steven Spielberg. Shooting War: World War II Combat Cameramen (2000). Dir. Richard Schickel. To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945). Edited by Warner Bros. for OWI. The True Glory (1945). Dir. Garson Kanin and Carol Reed. Universal International Newsreels 1944, Part 1. Compiled by Steven Schoenherr. The War (2007). Dir. Ken Burns (television miniseries). With the Marines at Tarawa (1944). Edited by Warner Bros. for OWI.

chapter 5 — reporting the war Air Force (1943). Dir. Howard Hawks. Anzio (1968). Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Back to Bataan (1945). Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Band of Brothers (2001). Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The Battle of San Pietro (1945). Dir. John Huston. D-Day to Berlin (1998). Dir. George Stevens Jr. Full Metal Jacket (1987). Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Guadalcanal Diary (1943). Dir. Lewis Seiler. Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Dir. Errol Morris. The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). Dir. William Wellman.

chapter 6 — court-martial drama The Caine Mutiny (1954). Dir. Edward Dmytryk. A Few Good Men (1992). Dir. Rob Reiner. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Dir. Stanley Kramer.

Filmography Paths of Glory (1957). Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Rules of Engagement (2000). Dir. William Friedkin.

chapter 7 — war’s sustained haunting Act of Violence (1948). Dir. Fred Zinnemann. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Dir. William Wyler. The Blue Dahlia (1946). Dir. George Marshall. Crossfire (1947). Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Flags of Our Fathers (2006). Dir. Clint Eastwood. Gran Torino (2008). Dir. Clint Eastwood. Human Desire (1954). Dir. Fritz Lang. Key Largo (1948). Dir. John Huston. Kiss the Blood off My Hands (1948). Dir. Norman Foster. Miracle at St. Anna (2008). Dir. Spike Lee. Somewhere in the Night (1946). Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Strange Intruder (1956). Dir. Irving Rapper.

273

Index Abu Ghraib prison, 163–167, 168, 259n21, 260n24 accountability, personal, 185–186, 260n20 Act of Violence (1948, Zinnemann), 196, 209–213, 212f adversarial structure: of American society, 177; of courtroom dramas, 170, 171 aesthetic experience of war, 2–3, 77 aesthetic formalization: and authenticity, 132, 133; and choreography of war, 113–114; containment of war in, 4, 7, 8, 131, 151; and documentary evidence, 142, 167–168; in Flags of Our Fathers, 216–217; and historical evidence, 255n24; imaginary capacity of, 117, 141–142; recycling of, 114, 216–217; and reenactment, 110–111, 185; strategies of, 116–117; of traumatic history, 183; and war correspondents, 150, 152–153 aesthetic power of battle paintings, 112 affective code of entertainment, 98–99 affective memory of war, 99, 111 Affron, Charles, 262n9 Affron, Mirella Jona, 262n9 Afghanistan War, 233 African Americans: emancipation of, 20, 26, 31; exclusion from war bond posters, 224–225; expurgation from Birth of a Nation, 28, 34; loyalty to war effort by, 250n15 African American soldiers: absence of in war films, 196, 221; in the Civil War, 33–36; exclusion of, 123; in Major Dundee, 30, 31; in This Is the Army, 85, 87; in WWII, 263n22. See also Buffalo Soldiers; Miracle at St. Anna Agee, James, 152 Agincourt, battle of, 144 Air Force (1943, Hawks), 145, 150–151, 254n19 air force in films, 107 al-Jamadi, Manadel, 166–167 Allegheny mountains, 67, 69, 70 allegiance, fantasy of, 37 alliances, personal ambitions and, 31 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Milestone), 1, 10, 107, 125–127, 127f, 134, 240, 240f ambitions, 31, 34 Ambrose, Steven, 141 America (1924, Griffith), 19, 244n2

American dream in Gone with the Wind, 40 “American Patrol” (song, Miller), 74–75, 76 American Theater Wing War Service, 88 amnesia, 207, 263n14; cultural, 211, 214, 226 Anderson, Benedict, 18, 19, 244n2 Andrews, Dana, 198, 200f anticipation on battlefields, 115–116 anti-Semitism, 28, 203, 245n8 anxiety, 25, 248n20, 262n7 Anzio (1968, Dmytryk), 145, 159–160 Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, Coppola), 77, 101–105, 105f Armed Forces Radio, 74 Army Air Force (AAF) Orchestra, 74, 76 army bases as replacement of domestic home, 60, 65 Army Emergency Relief Fund, 85 Astaire, Fred, 77, 78 astra, 9, 243n10 audience as moral jury, 171 authenticity effects: of aestheticized restaging, 165; and documentary footage, 84; of documentary reconstruction, 167; and eyewitnesses, 145–146; of fictionalized story, 254n19; in Hollywood Canteen, 90; of Omaha Beach landing footage, 132, 254n22; of photographic evidence, 164 Bacall, Lauren, 204 Bacharach, Burt, 94 Back to Bataan (1945, Dmytryk), 145, 151, 152f Bakhtin, Mikhail, 21 Bal, Mieke, 6–7 Band of Brothers (2001, HBO series), 107, 141–142, 145–146, 150, 155 Bangalore relay, 128, 130–131, 130f, 131f, 132, 136, 139 Barrymore, Lionel, 204 Barthes, Roland, 148, 220, 254n22 Basinger, Jeanine, 6, 132, 256n28 battle: cinematic reenactments of, 5, 109; limited visualization of, 233; as mythic story, 127–128; pathos formula of, 125; and psychoneurotic illnesses, 109–111; reimagination of, 142; sensory simulation of, 132; translated to visual story, 107–108. See also choreography of battle; Omaha Beach landing

276

Index

battlefields, tense anticipation on, 115–116 Battle of Atlanta (painting), 112 Battle of Chattanooga (painting), 112 Battle of Gettysburg (painting), 112 Battle of Midway (1942, Ford), 150 Battle of San Pietro, The (1945, Huston), 145, 152, 153–155 battle of the sexes, 18, 45–46, 53–54, 57, 68, 237 battle paintings, 112–113, 115, 116, 123–124, 139, 253n9 Baumer, Paul, 1 Belton, John, 114 Benjamin, Walter, 187 Berkeley, Busby, 76, 79, 80–84, 86 Berlin, Irving, 84, 85, 86 “Best of 1945” (Agee), 152 Best Years of Our Lives, The (1946, Wyler), 14, 196, 198–201, 200f Bhabha, Homi, 37 Biesen, Sheri Chinen, 262n7 Bigelow, Kathryn, 235 Big Parade, The (1925, Vidor), 107 Big Picture, The (series), 119 Big Red One, The (1980, Fuller), 129–131, 131f bird’s-eye perspectives, 118, 120 Birth of a Nation, The (1915, Griffith), 18, 20, 21, 26–29, 27f, 41f, 125, 126f; narrative resolution in, 27 blackface, 28, 34, 87 black humor, 160 blackness, vilified, 28–29 “blanket party,” 260n23 Blondell, Joan, 79, 81 Blue Dahlia, The (1946, Marshall), 261n6 Bogart, Humphrey, 188, 189, 204, 206, 262n11 boot camps, films about, 172 Brando, Marlon, 102, 105 Braugher, Andre, 34 Broderick, Matthew, 34 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 238–241 Brothers (2009, Sheridan), 233 Brown, Karl, 29 Buffalo Soldiers (Ninety-Second Infantry Division): commemoration of, 226, 263n23; and military racism, 224, 264n24; as overlooked, 22, 221; sustained haunting of, 202. See also Miracle at St. Anna Burgoyne, Robert: capacity for historical imagination, 15, 111; double-voicing of war films, 3, 114, 214; genre memory, 21–22, 131; national narratives, 20, 40–41 Burns, Ken, 19, 252n1, 255n24 Cagney, James, 82 Caine Mutiny, The (1954, Dmytryk), 169, 188–190 Calman, Iain, 10

camp shows, 74, 81, 88, 90–91, 97, 100, 101–102, 250n17, 251n27 canteens, 88–89. See also Hollywood Canteen; Stage Door Canteen Capall, Peter, 259n9 Capra, Frank, 150 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 253n14 casualties, 254n20, 255n24. See also death Casualty Notification Team, 234 Cavell, Stanley, 7–8, 30, 77, 230 censorship, 122, 160, 162, 163–164, 235 Chandler, Raymond, 261n6 Chapman, James, 6, 132, 133 choreography of battle: and battle paintings, 113, 123; camera movement and battle movement, 125–126, 127, 134; and death, 137; organization of, 13, 111; pathos formula of, 113–114; and popular music, 74–76, 103, 104, 249n5; sentimentality of, 127; and technical capacities of filmmaking, 122 Cimino, Michael, 46, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 248n25. See also Deer Hunter cinema: battle choreography as ultimate form of, 122; capacity of movement of, 3; and explosives, 236; and interference between military spectacle, 3–4, 6–7; and military conflict, 5; philosophical impact of, 7–8; reconception of the past for cultural needs of present, 2–3; recycling of Civil War in, 21; as site of recollection, 2; war movie as ultimate form of, 114. See also documentary films; film noir; melodramas; musical comedies; war films civil rights movement, 21, 30, 33–34 Civil War: fictionality of in Gone with the Wind, 25–26; and national narratives, 19–20, 41–42; and nostalgia, 17; and racial empowerment, 20, 41; reconceived through Vietnam War, 30, 246n24; recycling of in film, 21; as unfinished business, 12–13, 18, 21; and unity, 30. See also Birth of a Nation; Gangs of New York; Glory; Gone with the Wind; Major Dundee; Ride with the Devil clandestine cinema, 190–191 class issues, 27, 35 Clausewitz, Carl von, 176 Clift, Montgomery, 61 close-up shots: Berkeley’s use of, 79, 81–82; in Deer Hunter, 70, 72; in Gangs of New York, 22; in Gone with the Wind, 22, 39–40; in Hollywood Canteen, 90; in Sands of Iwo Jima, 138–139; in Saving Private Ryan, 138–139; in Swing Shift, 56; in Tender Comrade, 55, 72 closure, 11, 70–72, 182–184, 193–194, 251n33 Clover, Carol, 169–170 code, military, 186–187

Index “code red,” 186, 260n23 codes of living, 50, 51 Cohan, Steven, 88 Colbert, Claudette, 48, 49, 50, 52, 247n10 Cold War, 128, 176, 184, 206, 262n12 collective denial, 180, 181, 214 collective forgetting, 183–184 collective instruction, 149, 150, 167 collective reality, war as, 12 collective rewitnessing, 115 collective traumatic history, 183, 185 Colman, Penny, 246n1, 246n3 combat films. See war films commemoration: of Buffalo Soldiers, 226; and cultural memory, 5, 144; and historical imagination, 122; Hollywood as site of, 231–232; and nostalgia, 76–77; restorative, 105; Saving Private Ryan as, 256n31; and war correspondents, 150 Comment, Bernard, 113 communal restoration, 70 Communism, 179–180, 262n12 community, symbolic fiction of, 97 concentration camps, 184–185 conscription acts, 16 Cooper, Gary, 255n27 Cooper, Stuart, 255n23 Coppola, Francis Ford, 101, 102, 103–104, 105, 252n37. See also Apocalypse Now Redux corporate masculine adventure: deer hunting as, 68; war as, 63 court-martial dramas, 14; adversarial structure of, 171; and cultural memory, 178; double-voicing in, 169, 195; and military strategy, 172; passing of judgment in, 172; and truth, 195. See also Caine Mutiny; Few Good Men; Judgment at Nuremberg; Paths of Glory; Rules of Engagement court martials, 163, 164, 171–172, 175 courtroom dramas, 170, 171, 185 courtrooms: and gaps in transmission, 195; movie theaters as, 169–170; reenactment of criminal acts in, 170–171; as sites of battle, 174; as theater of recollection, 184–185 crime: as continuation of war, 14, 196, 197, 202–203, 205, 229; and war as unfinished business, 211 Criminal Investigation Division (CID), 164, 238 Cripps, Thomas, 25, 250n15 “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin), 187 Crooked Way, The (1949, Florey), 263n14 Crosby, Bing, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 cross-dressers, female war workers as, 43–44, 46–47 Crossfire (1947, Dmytryk), 159, 203 Cukor, George, 21

277

Cullen, Jim, 33 cultural amnesia, 19, 211, 214, 226 cultural awareness, national narratives and, 20–21 cultural fictions, 18, 149 cultural guilt, 21, 34, 36, 187 cultural haunting, 5, 8–9, 11 cultural hyphenation, 28, 30, 37 cultural imaginary, 10, 19, 21 cultural memory: Buffalo Soldiers in, 221; and commemoration, 144; and courtmartial dramas, 178; and imaginary capacity, 117; influence of historic genre painting on, 113; and overlooked war experiences, 196–197; and reenactment, 10 cultural survival of war, 15, 119, 122, 132, 255n27, 256n38 cultural transmission, Hollywood as site of, 6 culture, American, 2, 20 Curtiz, Michael, 76, 84, 85, 86, 95, 96. See also This Is the Army; White Christmas Czechoslovakia, 179, 260n16 Danner, Mark, 163 Darby, Joe, 164 Daves, Delmer, 89, 90. See also Hollywood Canteen Davis, Bette, 89, 90 Dawn Patrol (1938, Goulding), 107 Dawson, “Buck,” 92 D-Day. See Omaha Beach landing D-Day (1950 film), 119 D-Day: The Normandy Invasion (1944, Ford), 119–122, 121f, 134, 254n22 Dead Reckoning (1947, Cromwell), 263n14 death: anticipation of, 2; and battle choreography, 137–138; denial of, 11–12; glory of in battle, 33; narrative management of, 155, 235; as pure cinema, 137–138; significance of in war, 154; as unimaginable, 145, 252n3; and war photography, 148, 220–221. See also casualties dedications of war films, 150–151 Deer Hunter, The (1978, Cimino), 46, 66–72, 69f, 72f, 73, 248nn25–26 defense work. See industrial mobilization Demme, Jonathan, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60. See also Swing Shift Demoustier, Daniel, 163 denial, collective, 180, 181 De Niro, Robert, 66, 72 De Palma, Brian, 235 Desert Storm war, 190 Diaz, Tony, 166 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 16

278

Index

Didi-Huberman, Georges, 8–9 Dietrich, Marlene, 76, 91–95, 180, 238, 251n27 distance in war films, 116–117, 118 Dmytryk, Edward, 53, 72, 151, 159, 189. See also Back to Bataan; Caine Mutiny; Tender Comrade documentary evidence: and aesthetic representation in film, 167–168; and fictionalization, 144–145; as infallible, 185; and war correspondents, 152–153 documentary films, 45, 151; and aesthetic formalization, 142; footage of Omaha Beach landing, 117–122; influence of western genre on, 150; of Omaha Beach landing, 132–133; and war, 5–6. See also D-Day: The Normandy Invasion; Let There Be Light; Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song; Standard Operating Procedure documentary reconstruction, authenticity effect of, 167 documentary vs. fictionalization, 151, 155, 156–157 Doherty, Thomas, 250n23 domestic violence, 66–67 domestic waiting, 49, 58 domestic work, industrial mobilization and, 43, 48 Doors, The, 104, 105 double consciousness: of cinematic reenactment, 111; of historic reimagination, 132 double life, 213 double-voicing, 3, 114, 143; in Abu Ghraib scandal, 165; in Band of Brothers, 141, 146, 155; of civilian and soldier, 208; in courtmartial dramas, 169, 195; of fiction films, 122; and film editing, 219–220; in Full Metal Jacket, 160–161; in Guadalcanal Diary, 147, 257n10; of historic reimagination, 132; of home, 52–53, 65; in Mad Men, 237–238; in Platoon, 258n12; psychic and cinematic representation, 110; reconception of the home front, 55–56; reconception of war, 202; in reenactment, 109, 111; in Saving Private Ryan, 139–141; and sustained haunting, 217–218; of veterans, 198, 200; of war and peace, 201; of war correspondents, 144–145, 167, 168 Douglas, Kirk, 173, 174 draft riots, 16, 17, 18 dramaturgy of battle, 115–117 Duvall, Robert, 103 Dwan, Allan, 132–133, 138, 256n36. See also Sands of Iwo Jima Dyer, Richard, 81, 98, 100, 101

Eastwood, Clint: absence of African Americans in Flags of Our Fathers, 196; basing of Iwo Jima landing, 263n21; and double continuation of war, 218, 219, 220; and radical hope, 231; and sustained haunting, 215, 216, 228; use of narrative of investigation, 202. See also Flags of Our Fathers; Gran Torino Easy Company (101st Airborne Division), 141, 145–146 Eberwein, Robert, 6 economic competition, 58 editing: and double-voicing, 219–220; parallel, 16–17, 22, 28, 62, 222 educational films, 59, 119, 249n5 education sentimental, 34 Eighth Air Force, 238 emancipation: of African Americans, 20, 26, 31; of women, 50 embedded journalism, 163, 235, 258n16 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 24 emotion, 114, 120 emotional compass, 54 empowerment of women, 18, 46, 52, 53, 56, 59, 70 enmity: external, 32–33, 60, 64–65; internal, 30–32, 50, 60–61, 64, 65, 248n18 entertainment: affective code of, 98–99; aggressive desire for, 102–103; military deployment of, 103; with national purpose, 74–76; trials as, 169; as utopian, 81, 105 equality: gender, 43, 48; racial, 36 Erenberg, Lewis A., 74, 76 escapism, 25–26 ethnicity: in Birth of a Nation, 27; hyphenated Americans, 28, 30, 37; mixed, 16; and national narrative, 20; in Ride with the Devil, 41 ethnic purity, 28–29 Evans, Redd, 46 evidence, narrative and, 259n10 exceptionalism, American, 20 eyewitnesses, 13–14, 145–146, 171–172 fantasies, 11 Felman, Shoshana, 182, 183, 185, 260n18 Femininity Quotient (FQ), 246n1 fetish, rhetoric of, 11 Few Good Men, A (1992, Reiner), 169, 186–187, 189 fiction, death and, 11–12 fictionalization: authenticity claims to, 254n19; vs. documentary evidence, 144–145, 151, 155, 156–157; narratives, 145–146; reconception of past, 221; of traumatic history, 183

Index fiction films: double voicing of, 122; and war correspondents, 150 Fiedler, Leslie, 69, 70 Fields, Barbara, 20 Fields, Connie, 247n15 film noir: crime as continuation of war in, 14, 196, 197, 202–203, 229; and homecomings, 202, 205–206, 261n6; inflection of psychic aftereffects of war in, 210–211; loss of home in, 262n7; maladjusted veterans in, 262n9; marriage in, 263n13; narratives of investigation in, 213–214, 226; narratives of retribution in, 221; replaying war on home front in, 228; and war, 5–6. See also Act of Violence; Key Largo; Somewhere in the Night films. See cinema “First Invasion Pictures” (Universal News newsreel), 117–119 Flags of Our Fathers (2006, Eastwood), 14, 196, 201, 213, 214–221, 216f flashbacks: in Flags of Our Fathers, 214, 216, 217, 219; in Miracle at St. Anna, 214, 222, 223–225; in Rules of Engagement, 191–192; in Tender Comrade, 53–54, 55 Fonda, Henry, 150 Foote, Shelby, 19 Footlight Parade (1933, Bacon), 82–83, 83f Ford, John, 30, 117, 119, 121, 132, 150, 253n15, 254n20, 254n22. See also D-Day: The Normandy Invasion For Me and My Gal (1942, Berkeley), 83–84 Forrestal, James, 217 Fort Apache (1948, Ford), 30 For the Boys (1991, Rydell), 101 Foucault, Michel: canteens as utopias, 89; continuation of war in peace, 13, 176–178, 187, 197, 198, 226 found footage, 235 fraternization, 227–228 fratricide, 227 freedom, masculine, 66, 67 Freeman, Morgan, 34 freeze frames, 60 French Campaign, The (1945 film), 119 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 183, 198–199 Friedkin, William, 191, 193, 261n27. See also Rules of Engagement Friedman, Jonathan, 179 friendship, female, 58 From Here to Eternity (1953, Zinnemann), 45–46, 60–66, 64f, 73 front line, mythic image of, 104–105 front line entertainment, reinvocation of, 99 Frost, Jeffery, 166 Fuller, Samuel: experience in Omaha Beach landing, 129, 130, 131; military action as

279

spectacle, 3, 114; unimaginability of war, 109, 111, 236. See also Big Red One Full Metal Jacket (1987, Kubrick), 145, 160–161, 162f Fussell, Paul, 108, 199, 213, 244n14, 252n3, 253n11 gangs, 16, 205, 228, 231 Gangs of New York (2002, Scorsese), 12, 16–18, 17f, 19, 22 gang violence, 16–18, 229, 230, 231 Garfield, John, 89 Garland, Judy, 84, 181, 182 gender, 20, 27, 60; anxiety on home front, 248n20; difference, 41, 63; equality, 43, 45, 48 gender battles, 13, 22–23, 235; war as liberation from, 45–46, 68, 237 Geneva Convention, 163, 164 genre memory: and double-voicing, 114, 131; human resonance in, 128; of Omaha Beach landing, 133–134; recycling of civil war in, 21–22; to reimagine the past in the present, 3; symbolic fictions in, 97, 101; and witness testimony, 141–142 Germany, 179, 181, 183, 260n18 Gershwin, Ira, 119 Gettysburg Address (1863, Lincoln), 19–20, 150–151 Gish, Lillian, 27 Glamour Girls of 1943 (1943, OWI), 43, 44 Glenn Miller Story, The (1954, Mann), 74–76 Glory (1989, Zwick), 19, 21, 33–36, 40–41, 41f Godard, Jean-Luc, 114 “God Bless America” (song, Berlin), 71–72 Goebbels, Joseph, 91 Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, LeRoy), 79–81, 80f, 83 Gone with the Wind (1939, Fleming), 18, 20–21, 22–26, 23f, 39–40, 40f, 44, 45, 247n10 Gone with the Wind (novel, Mitchell), 21 Gourevitch, Philip, 167, 259n21 Gran Torino (2008, Eastwood), 196, 228–231, 231f Greengrass, Paul, 234 Greenstreet, Sidney, 90 Greenwood, Bruce, 190 Green Zone (2010, Greengrass), 233–234 Griffith, D. W., 22, 28, 125, 126, 244n2. See also Birth of a Nation Guadalcanal Diary (1943, Seiler), 145, 146–147, 148f, 255n27, 257n10 Guadalcanal Diary (book, Tregaskis), 146 guilt, slavery and, 34, 36 Hadley, Reed, 146, 147 Haggith, Toby, 132, 254n17

280

Index

Halberstam, David, 160 Hamburger Hill (1987), 258n14 Hammond, Michael, 256n31 Hanks, Tom, 134–138, 140, 141, 145, 150. See also Band of Brothers Harman, Sabrina, 165–167, 259n21 Hasford, Gustav, 160 Haskell, Molly, 22, 24 haunting, sustained: and crime as continuation of war, 204–205; and doubling, 217; in Flags of Our Fathers, 263n19; and homecomings, 198; narratives of, 201–202, 231; and passing on war stories, 230; pathos formula of, 228; of photographs, 220–221 Hawks, Howard, 150, 151 Hawn, Goldie, 56, 59, 60 Hayworth, Rita, 78 hazing, 61, 64 Hearts of the World (1918, Griffith), 245n21 Hecht, Ben, 25 Heflin, Van, 209 Hegel, G.W.F., 248n18 Heisler, Stuart, 263n22 Henaberry, Joseph, 28 Henry V (Shakespeare), 144, 146 Hepburn, Katharine, 43–44, 247n13 Hersh, Seymour, 160 Hess, Rudolph, 260n21 Heston, Charlton, 30 Hetherington, Tim, 258n16 hindsight, historical, 122 Hispanics, 30 historical accuracy, 123, 127, 132–134 historical events as reconstructions of past, 248n21 historical evidence, aesthetic formalization and, 255n24 historical imagination: capacity for, 141; and commemoration, 122; double consciousness of, 132; and humanization, 121; and reenactment, 111–112; in Saving Private Ryan, 138; and sustained haunting, 196; theatricality of, 123 history as unfinished business, 11 history paintings. See battle paintings Hjorth, George, 117 Hmong community, 228, 229, 230 Hofstadter, Richard, 194 Holiday Inn (1942, Sandrich), 97–99, 98f Hollywood: and battle paintings, 116; as privileged site of cultural transmission, 6; reconception of past in light of cultural present, 8; shift in attitude toward Vietnam War, 101; as site of commemoration, 231–232; studio system, 122; and the war effort, 87–88, 150, 249n6

Hollywood Canteen, 89, 91 Hollywood Canteen (1944, Daves), 76, 89–91, 250n23 Hollywood Victory Committee, 87–88 Hollywood War Film, The (Eberwein), 6 Holsinger, M. Paul, 88 home: army bases as replacement of, 60, 65; camp shows as a touch of, 88, 90–91, 102; double articulation of, 52–53; as emotional base, 54–55; as idea, 13; as imaginary geography, 61, 73; imaginary vs. ordinary, 71–72; loss of, 73, 262n7; as mythic site, 48–49, 73, 96, 99; as site of gender conflict, 45; as trope for reunion of nation, 24; VA hospital as, 71; during Vietnam War, 67; and war, 101; as world of its own, 247n11 homecoming: and belated mourning, 234; as continuation of war at home, 196, 198; difficulty of, 203–204, 209, 235, 252n5, 262n9; in film noir, 202, 261n6; and paranoid sense of dislocation, 235–236; psychic doubling of, 199, 200; and reconceptualizations of war, 202; from Vietnam War, 66, 70. See also Act of Violence; Best Years of Our Lives; Deer Hunter; Key Largo; Somewhere in the Night home front: absence of men on, 246n5; as domestic front line, 57–58; dual voicing in reconception of, 55–56; as feminine, 52, 62–64; gender anxiety on, 248n20; and mores, 50, 58; reconception of, 60; as theater of war, 72–73; women on, 24–25. See also battle of the sexes; industrial mobilization; women Hope, Bob, 101 Horne, Lena, 119 housewives, leisured domestic, 56 Howard, Kevyn Major, 161 Howard, Leslie, 25, 245n14 Human Desire (1954, Lang), 202–203 humor, black, 160 hunting, 67, 68 Hurt Locker, The (2008, Bigelow), 235–236 Huston, John: aesthetic reformalization in Let There Be Light, 109, 110; camera work in Battle of San Pietro, 154; and Communism as enemy, 262n12; haunted by war experiences, 262n11; use of marriage trope, 206; use of voice-over, 155; as war correspondent, 149–150, 153; and war effort in Hollywood, 150. See also Battle of San Pietro; Key Largo; Let There Be Light hybrid figures, 24 hyphenated Americans, 28, 30, 37 hypnosis, 109, 110, 111, 142

Index image formulas, 8–9 images, mediatized, 234 imaginary capacity, 117, 141, 142, 165, 236, 253n14 imaginary geography: home as, 61, 73; United States as, 46; of war, 206, 213, 215, 229, 231–232 imaginary memory, 114 “imagined battles,” 112 improvised explosive device (IED), 234 industrial mobilization, 13, 43–48, 246n1, 246n3, 246n5 Inglourious Basterds (2009, Tarantino), 236 inquisitorial violence, 183 internal enmity, 30–32, 50, 60–61, 64, 65, 248n18 In the Valley of Elah (2007, Haggis), 234–235 investigation, narratives of, 213–214, 226 Iraq War, 163, 167, 233, 234–235. See also Standard Operating Procedure Irish-Catholic immigrants, 28 isolationist policies, 20 Iwo Jima, battle for, 217, 220, 256n36, 263n21. See also Flags of Our Fathers; Sands of Iwo Jima Jackson, Samuel L., 190, 193 Jameson, Frederic, 12 Jeffords, Susan, 248n26 Johnson, Van, 188 Jones, Tommy Lee, 190 journalism: and war violence, 159–160. See also embedded journalism; war correspondents judges, 178, 179, 185–186 Judgment at Nuremberg (1961, Kramer), 169, 178–186, 185f juridification of war, 186 jury, audience as, 171 justice, distortion by politics, 179, 184 Kaes, Anton, 202, 213 Kanin, Garson, 122 Kaye, Danny, 95, 97, 99 Keeler, Ruby, 82 Keller, Ulrich, 4, 77, 149 Kelly, Gene, 84 Kennedy, Arthur, 119, 159 Kennedy, Jihmi, 34 Kerr, Deborah, 61 Key Largo (1948, Huston), 196, 204–207, 206f killing: enjoyment of, 160, 161; as legitimate, 171–172, 193, 202–203 Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948, Foster), 203 Knightley, Phillip, 163, 257n10 Koebner, Thomas, 115

281

Korean War, 101, 228–229, 237. See also Gran Torino Kracauer, Siegfried, 203, 262n11 Kramer, Stanley: moral judgment of Nuremberg trial, 178–179, 180, 184, 186, 260n20; necessity of trials, 183, 185; war as unfinished business, 169, 260n16. See also Judgment at Nuremberg Kubrick, Stanley, 161, 173, 176. See also Full Metal Jacket; Paths of Glory Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 26, 27, 28 Labarthe, André S., 82 Lahti, Christine, 57, 60 Lancaster, Burt, 61, 181 Lanfield, Sidney, 77, 78. See also You’ll Never Get Rich Lang, Fritz, 203 law, military, 172, 175, 191 law-making as violence, 187–188, 260n18 Lear, Jonathan, 201, 261n4 Lee, Ang, 36, 37, 38. See also Ride with the Devil Lee, Jennie, 28 Lee, Spike: on absence of African American soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers, 196; commemoration of Buffalo Soldiers, 226; and military racism, 224; and sustained haunting, 221; use of narrative of investigation, 202. See also Miracle at St. Anna legal spirit in America, 169, 177 Leigh, Vivien, 22 Leslie, Joan, 89 Let There Be Light (1946, Huston), 109–111, 140, 252n5 Lev, Peter, 255n25 “Lili Marlene” (song, Leip and Schultze), 91, 92, 95 Lincoln, Abraham, 19–20, 36, 150–151 Lipton, Carwood, 146 loaded images, reconceptualizations of war as, 10 Loeb, John Jacob, 46 Longest Day, The (1962, Annakin), 122–125, 124f, 127–129, 129f, 130f, 135, 136, 159, 221, 255n25 Lord of War (2005, Niccol), 233 Lorre, Peter, 90 lost cause: personal, 22; the South as, 20 loyalty, 35, 189, 250n15 Macready, George, 173 Mad Men (TV series), 237–238 Maguire, Tobey, 37 Major Dundee (1965, Peckinpah), 18–19, 21, 30–33, 31f, 33f, 35, 39

282

Index

male bonding, 67, 68–69 “Man I Love, The” (Gershwin), 119 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 207. See also Somewhere in the Night Mann, Anthony, 74, 75, 76, 103, 106, 249n5. See also Glenn Miller Story marching drills. See military drills March of Times series, 119 Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song (2001, Riva), 92, 94f Marlene Dietrich’s ABC (Dietrich), 95 marriage: and dreams of freedom, 66; as personal reunion, 22–23; as political bond between Americans and America, 77–78, 263n13; POW camp as distortion of, 69; in Rosie the Riveter, 47; as trope for reunion of nation, 24, 32, 39, 206–207, 209 Martin, Pete, 117, 119 Marvin, Lee, 129, 130 Mason General Hospital, 109 McDaniel, Hattie, 21, 247n10 mediatized images, 234 melodramas: absence of men at home front in, 52–53; antagonism between sexes in, 22–23; Civil War films, 18–19; future happiness in, 201; homecoming narratives in, 198, 205–206; influence on combat documentary films, 150; mobilization of women in, 45; psychic battles in, 196; selfsacrificing homekeeper in, 48; and war, 5–6. See also Apocalypse Now Redux; Band of Brothers; Best Years of Our Lives; Birth of a Nation; Caine Mutiny; Deer Hunter; Few Good Men; Flags of Our Fathers; From Here to Eternity; Gangs of New York; Glory; Gone with the Wind; Gran Torino; Judgment at Nuremberg; Major Dundee; Miracle at St. Anna; Paths of Glory; Ride with the Devil; Rules of Engagement; Saving Private Ryan; Since You Went Away; Story of G.I. Joe; Tender Comrade memories of war as necessary cultural fiction, 149 memory: by proxy, 140–141; traces, 111; work, 86 Memphis Belle (1944, Wyler), 150 Menjou, Adolph, 173 Meredith, Burgess, 155, 257n10 Messenger, The (2009, Moverman), 234 Midler, Bette, 101 Milestone, Lewis, 1, 2, 125, 126, 127. See also All Quiet on the Western Front military: political power and, 176; musicals, 76; spectacle, 3–4, 6–7, 76, 77, 78–79, 80–84; strategy, 172, 190, 195 military code, obedience to, 186–187

military drills as musical spectacles, 76, 80–84, 105 Military Government of Germany, 238 Miller, Glenn, 74–76 minidramas, 128–130, 139 Miracle at St. Anna (2008, S. Lee), 14, 196, 201, 213, 214, 221–228, 225f Mitchell, Margaret, 21 Mitchum, Robert: in Anzio, 159, 160; in Longest Day, 123–124, 128, 129, 131; in Story of G.I. Joe, 155–156, 157 Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg), 8–9, 243n7, 243n10 modern technological warfare, 17, 19 Modine, Matthew, 160 Moeller, Susan, 162 Mohegan Lake Military Academy, 81 monstra, 9, 243n10 montage: in All Quiet on the Western Front, 1–2, 3; in Apocalypse Now Redux, 104–105; in Battle of San Pietro, 154; and choreography of battle, 123, 127; and cognitive mapping, 8–9, 243n7; in From Here to Eternity, 62, 248n25; in Glamour Girls of 1933, 44; in Glenn Miller Story, 74–76; in Holiday Inn, 98; in Judgment at Nuremberg, 182; in Longest Day, 123; in Story of G.I. Joe, 156; in This Is the Army, 84–85 Monte Casino, battle of, 95, 96, 99, 100 moral agents, soldiers as, 175 moral codes, 58, 61 moral perspective in war films, 115, 116 mores and the home front, 50, 58 Morris, Errol, 145, 164, 165, 166, 167, 259n21. See also Standard Operating Procedure Moss, Carlton, 263n22 motion pictures. See cinema mourning, belated, 234 movement, war’s capacity of, 3, 82–83, 108, 115 Moverman, Oren, 234 movie industry. See Hollywood movie stars, patriotic duty and, 84 movie theaters as courtrooms, 169–170 multiperspectivity, 123 Murphy, George, 84, 86 music: popular, 74–76, 103, 104, 240, 249n5; rock, and Vietnam War, 104; swing, 74–76, 103, 240. See also soundtracks musical comedies, 5–6, 76, 86, 96, 97, 100, 101. See also Footlight Parade; Glenn Miller Story; Gold Diggers of 1933; Rosie the Riveter; This Is the Army; White Christmas; You’ll Never Get Rich musical memory, evocation of war through, 100 mutiny, 188, 189

Index narrative focus of battle scenes, 111, 116–117, 128–129. See also orientation, points of narrative suspense drama, 132 National Catholic Community Service, 88 national identity, 2, 4, 88, 115, 131–132 National Jewish Welfare Board, 88 national narratives, 12, 18, 19–21, 37, 41–42 Native Americans, 30–33 Nazi regime, 25–26, 178, 179, 180, 181 Negro Soldier, The (1944, Heisler), 263n22 news coverage of Vietnam War, 162 New Woman, 27–28 Niccol, Andrew, 233 Nicholson, Jack, 186 Ninety-Second Infantry Division. See Buffalo Soldiers nostalgia, 17, 76–77 obedience, 172, 186–187 Office of Strategic Services. See OSS Office of War Information. See OWI Okinawa, Japan, 109, 110, 111 Oldfield, Barney, 93 Old South, 24, 32 Omaha Beach landing, 252n1; censorship of reconception of, 122; challenge as epic film, 122; and choreography of battle, 106, 107; cinematic history of, 117–142; cultural survival of, 119, 122; documentary footage of, 117–122, 119, 132–133, 253n15, 254n22; and Henry V, 144; lack of footage, 132, 253n16, 254n17, 254n19; pathos formula of, 136; recycling of, 131–143, 139; in Saving Private Ryan, 131; and Shepperton film studios, 252n2; and swing music, 74–75. See also Big Red One; D-Day: The Normandy Invasion; Longest Day; Saving Private Ryan 101st Airborne Division (Easy Company), 141, 145–146 orientation, points of, 123–124, 138. See also narrative focus OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 91, 119, 155, 162 Other Governmental Agencies (OGA), 166 Overlord (1975, Cooper), 255n23 OWI (Office of War Information), 43, 56, 59, 88, 132. See also Glamour Girls of 1943 Pack, Brent, 167 paintings. See battle paintings panorama paintings, 112–113, 253n9 parallel editing, 16–17, 22, 28, 62, 222 Paret, Peter, 112 past, reconception of, 2–3, 5–6, 15, 248n21 pathos formulas, 15; of battle, 125; of battle paintings, 123; of choreography of war, 113–114; of combat photography, 132–134;

283

and cultural survival of battles, 122, 132; of haunting, 8–9, 228; and historical reimagination, 138–139; of Omaha Beach landing, 117, 119, 131–143, 136 Paths of Glory (1957, Kubrick), 107, 169, 173–176, 178, 186, 259nn9–10 patriotism, 79, 84, 105 Paul, Gerhard, 113 peace as continuation of war, 13, 198, 201, 203–204, 208–209, 222 peacetime militarism, 187 Pearl Harbor, 84, 86 Peckinpah, Sam, 30, 32, 33. See also Major Dundee Pepper, Barry, 134 personal ambition, 31, 34 personal restoration, 70 pharmakon, 220 photographic evidence, 164, 166–167, 168, 220–221, 259n10, 259n21 photography: combat, 132–134, 147–149, 162–163, 220–221; digital, 164 photojournalism, 162 Pickering, Paul A., 10 Pierrot le Fou (1965, Godard), 114 Platoon (1986, Stone), 246n24, 258n12 Polan, Dana, 247n11 political disunion, 27 political justice, war reportage and, 149 political unconscious, 12 politics: and distortion of justice, 184; and military law, 175; paranoid style of, 194; violence as means of, 187; war as continuation of, 176–177, 197; and war strategy, 190 Porter, Cole, 77 posters, war bond, 224–225 “preposterous” atlas, 12 “preposterous” history, 6–7, 18 prison camps, 68–70, 151, 209, 210, 211 prisoner abuse, 164, 166 production, battle of, 57 promotion, personal, 61 propaganda: anti-Nazi, 203–204; industrial mobilization of women in, 45; Omaha Beach footage as, 119; and racism, 225; Stage Door Canteen as, 247n13 proximity in war films, 116–117, 118 psychic aftereffects of war, 110, 210–211 psychic doubling of veterans, 198–199, 210–211, 215 psychic escape, warfare as theater and, 108–109 psychoanalytical framework, 11 psychoneurotic illnesses, battle scenes and, 109–111 Pyle, Ernie, 153, 155, 257n10

284

Index

Quinn, Anthony, 151 race, 20, 21, 25, 34, 41; difference, 203; wars, 224–226 racial contamination, 27 racial difference, 226 racial empowerment, 18–19, 35, 41 racial equality, 36 racial exclusion from war bond posters, 224–225 racism, 21, 28–29, 31, 225; in the military, 87, 223, 224 radical hope, 201, 231, 261n4 Ranney, Mike, 146 readjustment of returning veterans, 203–204, 209, 212, 252n5, 261n6, 262n9 Reagan, Ronald, 84 recollection of war: as aesthetic reformulation, 216–217; cinema as site of, 2; courtrooms as theater of, 184–185; and the fighting self, 197 reconception of war: and closure, 11; as loaded images, 10; during peacetime, 5–6, 8, 204; repetition of, 12–13 reconciliation, narrative of, 30 recycling: of aesthetic formalizations, 12–13, 14–15, 114, 216–217; of documentary footage, 139; of Omaha Beach footage, 117–121, 123, 142 Redacted (2007, De Palma), 235 Reed, Carol, 122 Reed, Donna, 62 reenactment, 111–112, 252n7; and aesthetic reformulation, 110–111; concept of, 10; of criminal acts in courtrooms, 170–171; and cultural haunting, 11; double voicing of, 109; of trauma, 183; and war reporting, 147 regeneration through violence, 32 “Remember My Forgotten Man” (song, Dubin and Warren), 79–81 Renov, Michael, 45, 52, 246n5 respect, 189 responsibility, personal, 189, 191–192, 194 restitution, pathos of, 155 restoration, narrative of, 26, 70–72 restorative closure, 251n33 restorative commemoration, 105 Restrepo (2010, Junger and Hetherington), 258n16 retaliation and retribution: in Act of Violence, 210, 211–212; in Birth of a Nation, 26, 28, 31; in Flags of Our Fathers, 213–214; in Gangs of New York, 17; in Gran Torino, 229, 230, 231; in Judgment at Nuremberg, 181, 182; in Miracle at St. Anna, 213–214, 221, 223, 227; in Ride with the Devil, 37, 39; in Saving Private Ryan, 136 retrieved knowledge, 9, 201–202, 214

retrieved memory, theater of, 9 reunification of the Union: and home, 24; marriage as trope for, 24, 32, 39, 206–207, 209; in western genre, 30 revenge, 213–214, 223, 227, 229 revisiting, 109 Revolutionary War films, 19, 244n2, 244n17 rhetorical devices, depictions of war as, 149 Ricoeur, Paul, 252n7 “Ride of the Valkyries” (Wagner), 103 Ride with the Devil (1999, A. Lee), 19, 21, 36–39, 41, 42f Rio Grande (1950, Ford), 30 Riva, David, 92, 93. See also Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song Riva, Maria, 94 Robinson, Edward G., 205 Rockwell, Norman, 46–47 Rogers, Ginger, 53, 55, 58, 72 Rogin, Michael, 28 rogue commanders, 189, 190, 193, 194 rogue soldiers, 169, 172, 186–187, 188, 259n21 Rollins, Peter C., 101 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 43 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 44, 82, 88, 98 Rose, Billy, 88 Rosenthal, Joe, 217, 218, 220, 221 Rosie the Riveter, 46–47, 56 Rosie the Riveter (1944, Santley), 45, 47–48 “Rosie the Riveter” (song, Evans and Loeb), 47 rules of engagement, 172, 195 Rules of Engagement (2000, Friedkin), 169, 190–194 Rumsfield, Donald, 163–164 Russell, Kurt, 58 Russian roulette, 69, 71 Ryan, Robert, 53, 54 Rydell, Mark, 101 St. Anna di Stazzema massacre, 223, 224. See also Miracle at St. Anna Salvation Army, 88 Sandrich, Mark, 97, 98. See also Holiday Inn Sands of Iwo Jima (1949, Dwan), 132–133, 133f, 138–139, 138f, 256n39 San Pietro, battle of, 153, 154, 155. See also Battle of San Pietro Saturday Evening Post, 46 Savage, John, 66, 72 Saving Private Ryan (1998, Spielberg), 131–141, 131f, 133f, 135f, 137f, 138f, 140f, 216, 255n24, 256n38, 263n21, 263n31 Schatz, Thomas, 87, 150 Schell, Maximillian, 182 Scorsese, Martin, 12, 16, 22. See also Gangs of New York

Index Seiler, Lewis, 146, 255n27. See also Guadalcanal Diary self-destruction of soldiers, 71 self-reliance, 25–26, 44 Selznick, David O., 21, 29, 48, 52, 73, 245n8 sensory simulation of battle experience, 132 separateness, acknowledgment of, 37–38 Sergeant York (1941, Hawks), 255n27, 256n38 Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa), 257n9 sexual desire of the racial other, 26, 27–28 sexual mores, liberation of, 58 Shakespeare, William, 144, 146 “Shanghai Lil” (song, Dubin and Warren), 82–83 Sheen, Martin, 102, 246n24 shell shock, 198–199, 213 Sheridan, Jim, 233 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949, Ford), 30 Short-Timers (Hasford), 160 shot/reverse shot, 114–115, 124–125, 130, 135, 190 “Show-Business at War” (The March of Times newsreel), 84 Simpson, Gerry, 186 Sinatra, Frank, 61 Since You Went Away (1944, Cromwell), 45, 48–52, 51f Sizemore, Tom, 134, 136 slavery, 31, 34, 36 Slocum, David, 2 Slotkin, Richard, 30 Smyth, J. E., 248n21 Sobchak, Vivian, 262n7 “Society Must Be Defended” (Foucault), 176–177 Soldatensender West, 91 soldiers: as coerced moral agents, 175; in combat films, 256n36; emotional proximity of war correspondents to, 156–157; and enjoyment of killing, 160, 161; human experience of, 116, 121; lack of censorship, 163–164; legitimate killing by, 171–172; self-destruction of, 71; as war correspondents, 145–146. See also African American soldiers; rogue soldiers “Soldiers in Greasepaint,” 88 solidarity, internal enmity and, 64 Somewhere in the Night (1946, Mankiewicz), 196, 207–209 Sontag, Susan, 149, 162, 164, 260n24 soundtracks: in Apocalypse Now Redux, 103, 104; in educational films, 249n5; in Flags of Our Fathers, 217; in Glenn Miller Story, 74–76; in Gran Torino, 230; in Let There Be Light, 109, 110; in Saving Private Ryan, 135, 138 special effects, 131, 132, 141

285

Special Investigation Section, 238 Spielberg, Steven: aesthetic recycling, 216; and Band of Brothers, 145, 150; capacity of imagination, 141; pathos of retaliation, 136; use of genre memory, 133–134; use of special effects, 131, 132. See also Band of Brothers; Saving Private Ryan Stage Door Canteen, 88–89 Stage Door Canteen (1943, Borzage), 247n13, 250n21 Standard Operating Procedure (2008, Morris), 145, 164–167, 259n10 Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story (book, Gourevitch and Morris), 167 Star Spangled Rhythm (1942, Marshall), 246n5 Statue of Liberty, 98 Steiner, Max, 21 Stevens, George, 144, 150 Stevens, George, Jr., 144, 257n1 Stewart, James, 74 Story of G.I. Joe, The (1945, Wellman), 124, 145, 152, 155–159, 156f, 158f, 162f, 257n10 Strange Intruder (1956, Rapper), 203 Streep, Meryl, 66, 70, 71, 72 Stuart, Nicholas, 123, 124 studio system, 122 survive, will to, 39–40, 55, 155, 159, 210, 212, 252n1 sustained haunting: and crime as continuation of war, 204–205; and doubling, 217; in Flags of Our Fathers, 263n19; and homecomings, 198; narratives of, 201–202, 231; and passing on war stories, 230; pathos formula of, 228; of photographs, 220–221 Swing Shift (1984, Demme), 45, 56–60, 57f, 247n15 systemic critique of the military, 194 systemic responsibility, 191–192 systemic violence, 187, 260n24 Tarantino, Quentin, 236 Taylor, Dick, 253n16 Taylor, George, 256n29 technical innovations in filmmaking, 122, 131 temporal moments, war correspondents and, 147 Tender Comrade (1943, Dmytryk), 45, 53–55, 57f, 58, 72 Tet Offensive, 160 This Is the Army (1943, Curtiz), 76, 84–87, 87f, 251n33 “This Is the End” (Doors’ song), 104 Thomas, Deborah, 263n13 Thomas, Patty, 101 372nd Military Police Company, 163. See also Abu Ghraib prison

286

Index

Till the End of Time (1946, Dmytryk), 124 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 169, 177 torture, 163, 164, 166, 260n24 To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945, OWI), 132, 133f, 139 tracking shots, 125–126, 135–136, 154, 174, 214, 221 Tracy, Spencer, 178, 179, 184 transmission, gaps in, 145, 195 traumatic history, collective, 183, 185 Traveler’s Aid Association, 88 Tregaskis, Richard, 146, 147 trench warfare in films, 107, 125, 173 trials: as closure to war trauma, 182–184; as mass entertainment, 169. See also court martials; courtrooms tribunals, 172 troop entertainment, 13, 73, 76, 84. See also camp shows; canteens; Dietrich, Marlene; Hollywood Canteen; Stage Door Canteen True Glory, The (1945, Kanin and Reed), 122 Truman, Harry S., 48, 179, 183, 260n18 truth, 170, 195

and war violence, 159–160; entertainment’s utopianism in, 102, 105; Hollywood’s shift in attitude toward, 101; homecoming from, 66; home during, 67; hyphenated Americans in, 30; as liberation of troubles on home front, 237; and Major Dundee, 32; military strategy in, 190; news coverage of, 162; reconception of Civil War through, 30; revision of in Glory, 33; and rock music, 104; and war correspondents, 160, 161; as zone of unleashed enjoyment, 252n37. See also Apocalypse Now Redux; Deer Hunter; Full Metal Jacket; Rules of Engagement violence: and collective guilt, 187; domestic, 66–67; formalization of in combat films, 149; inquisitorial, 183; law-making as, 187–188, 260n18; and military law, 191; regeneration through, 32; resistance of, 38; as systemic, 187, 260n24; and war journalism, 159–160 Virilio, Paul, 78–79, 252n2, 258n20 visual narratives, 116–117, 223–234 visual rallying points, 129, 134

unfinished business, notion of, 18 United Service Organizations. See USO United States, as shared imaginary geography, 46 United States Army Signal Corps, 119, 150 United States War Department, 110, 119, 149, 150 unity: and external enmity, 32–33; in Glory, 40–41 Universal News, 117 USO (United Service Organizations), 13, 88, 92. See also camp shows; canteens; Dietrich, Marlene; Hollywood Canteen; Stage Door Canteen utopianism: of canteens, 88–89, 91; of entertainment, 81, 99, 102, 105; of musical entertainment, 96, 100, 101

Wagner, Richard, 103 Walken, Christopher, 66 Walt Disney Studios, 249n6 Walthall, Henry B., 125 Walzer, Michael, 171, 172, 175 war: accuracy of visualizations of, 132–134; aesthetic dimension of, 77; capacity of movement, 3, 82–83, 108, 115; and cinematic language, 108; collateral damage of, 235; as collective reality, 12; as continuation of politics, 176–177; as corporate masculine adventure, 63; crime as continuation of, 14, 196, 197, 202–203, 205, 229; cultural survival of, 14, 15; difficulty of visualizing, 233–234; everyday routine of, 157; evocation of through musical memory, 100; experience of as overlooked, 196–197; feminine point of view on, 22–25; and film genres, 5–6; glory of death in, 33; haunting peace, 208; hold on gender trouble during, 53–54; imaginary geography of, 215, 231–232; and imaginary home, 101; impossibility to show, 111; juridification of, 186; law-making as, 260n18; legal vs. illegal acts in, 172; as liberation from gender trouble at home, 45–46, 68, 237; as liberation from internal strife, 60–61; masculine need for, 32; memories of, 149; as only able to be represented, 4; ordinariness of, 154; peace as continuation of, 13, 201, 203, 204, 222; photography of, 147–149; politics as, 197; as positive force, 209; preference over

vagrants, war veterans as, 79–80 Vang, Bee, 228 vengeance, 17 veterans: difficulty returning home, 203–204, 209, 212, 252n5, 261n6, 262n9; doublevoicing of, 198, 200; as forgotten men, 94; possessed by war memory, 209; psychic doubling of, 196, 208, 215; recollections of the fighting self, 197; remembrance of, 86; in Sands of Iwo Jima, 256n36; in This Is the Army, 84; as vagrants, 79–80 Veterans Administration hospital, as home, 71 Vietnam War: Civil War films in terms of, 246n24; complicity between journalism

Index romantic alliances, 62; psychic aftereffects of, 110; psychic continuation of in peace, 198; reconception of as loaded images, 10; reconception of from position of peace, 204, 209; refiguration of, 106; repetition in cinematic representations of, 12–13; as rhetorical device, 149; significance of death in, 154; as spectacle, 77, 258n20; as theater, 108–109, 244n14; and transgressive violence of military, 62; understanding of, 2; as unfinished business, 5, 95, 99, 169, 195, 197; unimaginability of, 235–236; visual reconceptualization of, 3 war, cinematic representations of: and cultural imaginary, 10 War, The (2007, Burns), 255n24 War and Film (Chapman), 6 “War and Representation” (Jameson), 12 war bond drives, 74, 78, 119, 217–219, 220 war bond posters, 224–225 Warburg, Aby, 8–9, 113, 243n7, 243n10 War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line (Westwell), 6 war correspondents: complicity between reporting and violence, 163; directors as, 149–150; documentary vs. aesthetic formalization, 152–153; double-voicing of, 142–143, 144–145, 258n12; emotional proximity to soldiers, 14, 156–157, 258n14; gaps in transmission of, 145; interface between fact and fiction, 156–157; and political justice, 149; and soldiers, 145–146; and temporal moments, 147; and Vietnam War, 160, 161. See also Back to Bataan; Battle of San Pietro; Full Metal Jacket; Guadalcanal Diary; photography, combat; Standard Operating Procedure; Story of G.I. Joe war crimes, reenactment of in courtroom, 169 war effort, Hollywood and, 87–88, 150, 249n6 war entertainment: change in tone of, 105; and military spectacle, 76; profitability of, 78–79; as tool for call to arms, 86–87. See also camp shows; canteens; Dietrich, Marlene; Hollywood Canteen; Stage Door Canteen war experiences, passing on possession of, 229–230 war films, 5–6, 122, 256n28; absence of African American troops in, 221; actual soldiers in, 256n36; air force in, 107; becoming memories of war experiences, 253n11; camera movement and battle movement, 134; cultural image repertoire of, 133; dedication of, 150–151; distance and proximity in, 116–117; formalization of

287

violence in, 149; human resonance in, 128; impossibility to show real war in, 111; indebtedness to history painting, 115; liberation of gender trouble in, 45–46; moral perspective in, 115, 116; proximity in, 116–117, 118; racial refiguration of, 34; repetition of cinematic representations in, 14–15; revisiting of the past in, 15; as ultimate form of cinema, 114; and understanding of war, 2; use of visual rallying points in, 124, 125; and witness testimony, 141–142 Warhol, Andy, 133 war memories, 76, 209, 228 war photography. See photography, combat war reporting. See war correspondents war trauma, trials as closure to, 182–184 Washington, Denzel, 34 Wayne, John, 132, 138, 139, 151, 221, 256n39 weapons trading, 233 Weiner, Matthew, 237 Welky, David, 249n6 Wellman, William, 153, 156, 157, 159. See also Story of G.I. Joe western genre, 30, 150 Westwell, Guy, 6 What Price Glory (1926, Walsh), 107 “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (song, Seeger), 94 whipping, public, 35–36 White, Mimi, 247n15 White Christmas (1954, Curtiz), 76, 95–97, 99–101, 100f, 251n33 “White Christmas” (song, Berlin), 95, 97, 100, 251n32 whiteness, 28–29 Widmark, Richard, 178 Williams, Linda, 27 Wilson, Woodrow, 20, 28, 37 Wings (1927, Wellman), 107 Winters, Dick, 146 With the Marines at Tarawa (1944, Hayward), 132–133, 139 witness testimony, genre memory and, 141–142 women: desire to remain in industrial jobs after war, 44, 59; economic competition with men, 58; empowerment of, 46, 59, 70; as equal to men, 43; and feminist issues, 246n3; on the home front, 24–25, 247n15; and industrial mobilization, 13, 43–48, 246n1, 246n3, 246n5; as internal enemy, 248n18; modern American, 24; point of view on war, 22–25; rebirth of domestic housewife, 56; as temporarily in work force, 47–48; war workers as crossdressers, 43–44. See also battle of the sexes

288

Index

Women in Defense (1941, OEM), 43–44, 56 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), 43 Wood, Michael, 60, 61 workplace, battle of the sexes in, 57 World War I: as backdrop to Birth of a Nation, 20; choreography of battle in films, 127; death in war films, 1; industrial mobilization of women during, 44; influence of historic genre painting on cultural memory of, 113; overlooked veterans of, 80; trench warfare in, 125. See also All Quiet on the Western Front; Footlight Parade; Gold Diggers of 1933; Paths of Glory; This Is the Army World War II: fondness for, 95; as a “good war,” 34, 75–76; as liberation of troubles on home front, 237; logic of haunting of photographs, 220–221; as moment of nostalgia for national unity, 76; and popular music, 74–76, 249n5; reminiscences of, 213; retrieved knowledge about, 214; sustained haunting of, 198; in This Is the Army, 86; as unfinished business, 95. See also Act of Violence; Back to Bataan; Band of Brothers; Battle of San Pietro; Best Years of Our Lives; Big Red One; Buffalo Soldiers; Caine Mutiny; D-Day: The Normandy Invasion; Flags of Our Fathers; From Here to Eternity; Glamour Girls of 1943; Glenn Miller Story; Guadalcanal Diary; industrial mobilization; Judgment at

Nuremberg; Key Largo; Let There Be Light; Longest Day; Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song; Miracle at St. Anna; Omaha Beach landing; Sands of Iwo Jima; Saving Private Ryan; Since You Went Away; Somewhere in the Night; Story of G.I. Joe; Swing Shift; Tender Comrade; This Is the Army; White Christmas World War II Combat Film, The (Basinger), 6 wounded soldiers, 121, 254n20 Wright, Jeffrey, 37 Wyler, William, 14, 150, 198, 199, 201. See also Best Years of Our Lives Yellin, Emily, 46 Yip Yap Yaphank all-soldiers show, 84–86, 250n16 You’ll Never Get Rich (1941, Lanfield), 76, 77–79, 78f Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 88 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 88 Zanuck, Darryl, 123, 127, 131, 255n25 Zinnemann, Fred, 45, 60, 73, 209, 212. See also Act of Violence; From Here to Eternity Zwick, Edward, 33, 34, 35–36, 41. See also Glory

About the Author Elisabeth Bronfen is professor of English and American studies at the University of Zürich. Her books include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents, and Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema.