Reviewed by Michael A. Hoffman II
"Saving Private
Ryan," Steven Spielberg's latest cinematic entry in the canon of
Mr. Spielberg would have us
believe that after 54 years, the Allied myths about World War Two continue to
hold true--Studs Terkel's pivotal reference point--"The Good War"--is
confirmed. There are good wars, by golly, and WWII was it. Hip, hip,
hooray!
Don't look for shades of
moral gray or the existential self-doubt that attends retrospective accounts of
So how does Spielberg go about
celebrating the "values" of the "good war" in a time of
slackers, grunge and Generation X?
He plays on the
heart-strings of the same type of naive draftees who marched to
Spielberg imagines he has
the antidote to our ennui.
Patriotism, bravado and
faith in army generals are conditionally legitimate here (whereas in
After a brief preface at an
Allied cemetery, "Saving Private Ryan" opens with the
The nearly-psychedelic
scenes of gore and carnage--perhaps the most thrilling and beguiling ever
staged--will surely hook a mass audience. The premise of the film is a huge
slice from the dusty dish of "Capra-corn" (after pro-Soviet
sentimentalist Frank Capra). It seems that Uncle Sam cares about his troops. No
less a figure of "sterling manhood" than FDR's General George C.
Marshall takes a personal interest in Private Ryan, the sole survivor among
four brothers who marched off to make the world safe for Communism.
A special team of Army
rangers is dispatched. The team is deliberately comprised of one of those
multi-ethnic American units that were staples of B-movies and Marvel comic
books. There's a timid egghead, a dumb Italian, a pushy Jew, a surly Yank from
The Jewish trooper waves
his "Star of David" necklace at German POWs and taunts them with
shouts of "Juden, Juden." This is the only hint of the underlying
conflict in the film. But there are no depictions of any husky German grunt
spitting on the necklace. There is no sense that a "holocaust" is
transpiring a few thousand miles eastward in
Why Spielberg didn't hit
this angle harder is anyone's guess. It's my hunch he intuits how weary American
audiences are of "holocaust" themes. He chose to advance his agenda by less
transparent means.
One of these is the
suggestion that the Wehrmacht--mostly conscripts, if we recall our
history--are practically war criminals just for fighting the Americans.
Spielberg telegraphs an
unambiguous message about the necessity of shooting unarmed German POWs and how
foolish it is to spare them (the Jewish soldier eventually dies as a result of
his captain having failed to authorize the murder of a German POW).
One of the most compelling
figures in the film is
"Pig Latin"? Is Spielberg mocking the presumed ignorance
of the servants of the New World Order? German being the language of
philosophy and rocketry, among other stellar Teutonic achievements, Spielberg
would seem to be both applauding and mocking the anti-German bigotry of this
"hick," who mutters a psalm every time he blasts any German who gets
in his sniper rifle's sights.
How the Germans ever
conquered Europe and North Africa and fought the Red Army to the gates of
They fight with basic
soldierly resolve only as long as they have the advantage--a fortified pill
box, a machine gun nest or a Tiger tank. But as soon as the tide turns, the
German soldiers toss their arms up in surrender and jabber in hysterical fear
and pleading.
They fight with the same
wooden stupidity as did the extras on the set of the old 1960s TV series
"Combat"--whenever they're in American sights they get hit and drop,
whereas, once off the beach, Americans can run in front of a legion of German
rifles and dodge bullets with miraculous invulnerability.
There is just one swastika
visible in the film (a graffito painted on the Atlantic Wall). Even an SS tank
commander appears sans monocle and armband. Spielberg obviously sought
to avoid hyperbole and schlock.
He makes his anti-German
point with a much lighter touch, but he makes it all the better by this
near-subliminal technique. It's simple, really, an old trick from the
propaganda manual: he endears us to the American troops by showing them griping
and complaining, joking, sobbing and gambling.
We share their life stories
and their jests. We "bond" with them. They are not robots. They gripe
about "Fubar"--an acronym for an expletive for
The Germans are mere
ciphers, however. Never does Spielberg take us to their campfire to hear their
songs and stories. We almost never glimpse their humanity. No German words are
ever translated into sub-titles. German becomes an unintelligible clamor--a
"pig Latin." We are glad
whenever the German boys die and
The closest Spielberg comes
to humanizing the German troops is in a brief standoff between an American and
a German, when they both run out of ammo and hurl their helmets at each other;
and in a quick flash of a German soldier making a hurried gesture resembling
the Catholic sign of the cross (blink and you miss it).
In a nearly three hour
film, those 15 seconds do not counter-balance the straw men Spielberg has
fashioned. He has shown even these skimpy scenes only to make his point more
convincingly--yes, he grudgingly seems to be saying in these snipetts--the
Germans are sort of human, maybe--but not anywhere on par with the noble and
lovable Americans.
This would not wash in a
1990s war film about
Spielberg's defenders will
claim he humanized them in a scene with a German POW who babbles about
"Betty Boop" and "Steamboat Willie." But his mutterings are
grotesque, not poignant. This is not a means for humanizing Germans, it's a
demonstration of how supposedly weak and disgusting the German soldier--the
"Hitlerian superman"--really is once he's disarmed; his behavior
being perilously close to that of a coward.
There is not a single good
German in "Saving Private Ryan," just as every single one of the
hundreds of German soldiers depicted in Spielberg's "Schindler's List" were, to a man, nothing but
homicidal robots.
"Saving Private Ryan"
is a whitewash of the ignominious record of George C. Marshall and a
celebration of senseless fratricide and jingoism. This war-mongering emanates
from that compassionate paragon of humanitarianism--that bearded and
bespectacled teddy-bear--Steven Spielberg, "repository of warmth and
wisdom."
Sweet dreams, kiddies.
Sooner or later it will be your turn to die for the New World Order in another
Glorious Crusade against "tyranny." The killing fields await another
generation of American manhood, prepped and primed by the latest
Prepare the prosthetics and
wheel chairs, puff up the pillows at the Veteran's hospitals, speed up
production at the body-bag factories, the U.S. World Police Force Inc. is on a
"patriotic" roll--across the technicolor screen and around the world.
[Michael A. Hoffman II is a
former reporter for the N.Y. bureau of the Associated Press and the editor of Revisionist History journal]
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