Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private RyanSaving Private Ryan
War cannot be faced. It is too dreadful. It is the great emptiness that stands before life, transforms itself into a million shapes of unutterable horror, then returns to mocking silence. It is the nightmare from which we can never awake, because the nightmare is the truth: We die. We die like animals because we are animals. We are all creatures who blindly run until something big and hard hits us and our torn insides spill out and we die. "It was easy to read the message in his entrails," Yossarian thinks in "Catch-22" as he stoops over the whimpering, dying Snowden ("I'm so cold"), his liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs and stomach blasted apart by a three-inch piece of flak. "Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret ... Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage."
For those of us who never went to war, and learned of its horrors only through the reports of those who did or the representations of artists, it is easy to keep the nightmare hidden away. Maybe not so easy with the war closest to many of us, Vietnam. Thanks to our disillusionment with it, and the work of journalists like Michael Herr and filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola, Vietnam flickers in and out of our imaginations as a minor piece of hell, a torn-out fragment from a Bosch painting. But World War II, the Good War, the Heroic War, the war that saved the world, is different. Yes, we know it was dreadful, but we don't really want to know: We'd rather cling to the image of jutting-jawed John Wayne firing his machine gun at a collapsing line of Axis dummies.
After "Saving Private Ryan," the myth of World War II will never be the same. Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a phenomenology of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema. "Saving Private Ryan" is a very good film, not a great one, but it will forever change the way people imagine the most important event in 20th century history. That is no small achievement.
The film's most extraordinary sequence is its depiction of the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. It begins with a shot of troops huddled on a landing craft. The swells rock the boat up and down, the air is gray and heavy. No one says anything. A man leans forward and vomits, then another. There is no gunfire. The camera...
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