Ryan is a cheap play for easy money

Rating: Null/10 (21 January 2004)

Since I spent three years of my life doing military service during the Vietnam period, I'm not going to excuse myself for criticizing Saving Private Ryan for being cheap mystification in the pursuit of easy money: (1)pulling cash from the pockets of persons from generation of the War nearing the end of their lives in a world they don't identify with very easily and a long way away from their early memories, or (2) doping the younger generations with the illusion that one can passively flip around in time and space, or onto the Normandy beaches, like a minor god by way of images and popcorn for under $10. But, where's the beef, it feels good?: don't read any further if that's what comes to mind.
The generations born after 1945 need to start thinking themselves past World War II into the world where they actually live, and stop trying to zap through virtual reality (with $ magic) to a sweet past of handsome heroes who woo virgins at soda-shop counters. The film `The Longest Day' was the war generation imagining what they had lived, for better or for worse, but there was actual experience linked to what was put up in the images. Ironically enough, the screen heroes_ people like Ronald Reagan _ did their war in Hollywood where the only real danger was perhaps falling off a bar stool. The war generation itself however was capable of a more critical look at their own times: for example Norman Mailer's, `The Naked and the Dead', or Joseph Heller's `Catch 22', or Leon Uris's `Battle Cry', or Irwin Shaw's `The Young Lions', to name some of the most widely read (and seen) material. In comparison, `Saving Private Ryan' is a big step backward because it feeds completely upon a too apparent Manichaean conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil for a mostly postwar born audience who's closest contact with the War was in an Army Surplus store, or in family stories, second or third hand. In short, Saving Private Ryan doesn't make the world around us any clearer, it feeds on our worst fears and illusions. It would be helpful to know what experience of war, say during the Vietnam War period, Steven Spielberg depended upon to empathize with a soldier facing actual battle.
I admit that, as a soldier, I didn't face real battle myself, but I did go through some very tough military training and I had a near fatal accident working as professional deep-sea diver. Thinking of people I know who did face battle, from my father's generation (including my father) and of people I knew who fought in Vietnam, I think it is only respectful to say that it's simply not possible to imagine your way into what a soldier goes through in battle, as regards the raw fear at the threat to one's survival, or the controlled madness one feels toward an enemy. Most soldiers I know who fought have told me that going into battle they experienced themselves as another personality who listens to nothing else, sees nothing else except what could matter for survival. They were surprised to find such a self inside their own skins.
Primitive brain memories we confront when our survival is in question are short lived, happily enough, and well trained soldiers are taught when and when not to allow themselves to slip into this instinctive set of gears which are the ones we normally learn to repress in order to live in society. Some men are haunted for the rest of their lives with horrible dreams or memories they never manage to put behind them. Most war tried soldiers return to civilian life and reintegrate society without apparent difficulties, but what is most striking about such men I find (including my father) is that they usually refuse to talk about themselves in actual battle situations, and I think it's because they have made a deal with themselves, for their own mental health, to keep to themselves experiences that are so subjective and buried in their nerves that they cannot be transmitted in words to anyone who has not experienced a similar `heart of darkness.' Likewise, real soldiers in battle know too that, should they die, it will very probably be alone and hours before anyone even notices, and that there will be no long camera shots zooming in over the violin music to pick up their immortal last gasping words.
To Saving Private Ryan viewers who marveled at the Omaha Beach landing scenes at the beginning of the film, they've been robbed if they really think they can get up that sandy ramp in a padded seat in a darkened movie theater. To get some realism into the experience, people would need to stay awake for three or four days in a rolling ship smelling fear and vomit, have their minds wiped clear about how the story ends, experience the awful smell of black powder mixed with perspiration, have no idea where they're really going, or what's awaiting them and, last but not least, experience what hellish noise bombs, and shells and machine guns really make as cold seawater runs into their boots. There are certainly some important films yet to make about World War II for us who were born after, films about a postwar world that's not a pure catastrophe for example, but Saving Private Ryan just isn't one of them. However, Mr. Spielberg may have some very deep personal experience with soldiering we need to hear more about. I'm all ears.