Someone posted a few days ago the theory that even anti-war stuff was pro-war in its effects. If this is so, that is a rather dismal condition. For it would be hard to argue that pro-war propaganda is anti-war in its effects. So if anti-war stuff is in fact pro-war, then perhaps true "anti-war" propaganda is an impossibility. But if that is true the Nazis, in banning REmarque's work ("All Quiet" and a film version of Brecht's Threepenny opera, among thousands of other things) were wasting their time.
It is of course true that even war does not make people anti-war. The Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan is a seasoned veteran of other assaults which ought to have driven him mad, if war itself were enough to turn (all) people against war. Spielberg is of course a reactionary, and the film's flag-waving prologue and epilogue lend themselves to a reactionary interpretation of the film's ostensible "political" content.
As for the movie, I abstain from trying to impute a "message" to the technical virtuousity of its battlefield recreations. Kubrick's Paths of Glory is also rather dreadfully "realistic." So is the Turner version of Gettysburg, which is, BTW, a first-rate film and worth the time (five or six hours). I am not aware of a first-rate filmmaker having made anything based on the Iliad, but a careful reconstruction of the battle sequences would be interesting.
Nonetheless, film is an art and its technical component is a substantial part of its ability to creaste illusion. From this POV, "Saving Private Ryan" is a brilliant achievement. If you are "into" the history of film it is a must-see. The interpretive problems it poses are neither greater nor less than war itself, whether you want to think of it as political, interpersonal, psychological, cultural, anthropological, or what have you.
Incidentally the principal combatant actors were dragged out into the Australian bush (or somehwere awful) and drilled by a drill sergeant for two weeks. A number of the actors begged to be fired. But the "hard edge" that the film has is partially reflective of that. As with murder, adultery, wife battery (anyone see "Once Were Warriors"?), and other extreme and unpleasant situations, warfare is one element of the human condition. As such it merits careful attention. Private Ryan was for me a disturbing viewing experience even though "the good guys won for the just cause" as is archetypal of any Hollywood cliche WWII film. Its "entertainment" value, compared, for example, to a mindless John Wayne movie, is substantially transformed by the vividness of the experience. I would like to see it again, but I must confess that I probably "won't find the time" in the same way that I didn't "find the time" to re-see "Once Were Warriors" which is equally disturbing (in its own way). BTW, on a totally unrelated thematic issue, one of the truly interesting (given the rabid anti-statism in American films) elements of "Once Were Warriors" was the benign view of the state, whose welfare policies stand out as an island of sanity in a very savage personal universe.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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