The Image of Shell Shock: Psychological Trauma, Masculinity, and the Great War in British and American Cinema
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The Image of Shell Shock: Psychological Trauma, Masculinity, and the Great War in British and American Cinema by Jobe Close A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Master of Arts by Research Department of Film and Creative Writing College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham January 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The profound brutality and absurdity of the First World War has been meticulously detailed in the cinematic representations of the conflict. At their epicentre, we frequently find the symbolic figure of the shell-shocked man, who, overcome by the fear and exhaustion that loomed over the trenches and battlefields of the Western Front, was often condemned as failing to meet expected standards of masculine behaviour. This filmic fixation reflects the dominant cultural perception of a war of which shell shock came to be emblematic, giving rise to a considerable scholarship on the social, medical, martial, and political discourses by which the disorder was surrounded. What is lacking is any substantial examination of how shell shock has been interpreted by filmmakers. Focussing on British and American cinema from 1916 to 2014, this thesis explores shell shock’s cinematic identity chiefly in terms of masculinity, its most central historical theme. It argues that filmmakers have tended to return to the Great War and its most famous malady during historical periods of marked social consciousness, turbulence, or discovery in areas of thematic importance to the disorder – gender, mental health, or military conflict – and examines the relationship between these films and their historical contexts. Acknowledgements There are a handful of very important people without whom the conception and completion of this project would have been impossible. My first thanks must go to Rob Smith, who introduced me to its fascinating subject. For his history class I wrote two thousand words that inspired the forty thousand contained in these pages. My supervisor, Michele Aaron, has been an invaluable source of insightful comments and thoughtful criticism, without which this idea could never have come to fruition. To the Heaven family, your warmth and generosity has truly gone above and beyond, especially during the year in which I was working on this project. Emily – thank you for all the advice, encouragement, and of course, badminton. I wouldn’t be writing this now if it wasn’t for your friendship over the last five years. And finally to my family: Mom, Tim, Luke, Billie, Jule, and Nan, I would have to write another thesis to cover all of the reasons I have to love and be grateful to you, so I’ll leave it at this: thank you all, for everything. Contents Introduction 1 Literature Review 2 General Introduction: Hysterical Women to Shell-shocked Men 5 Mind over Muscle: Masculinity and Mental Health in the United Kingdom 11 Muscle over Mind: Masculinity and Mental Health in the United States 17 1. Propaganda Wars: The Politics of Shell Shock, 1914-1918 24 2. Pacifism and the New Woman in the Interwar Years 44 Pacifism: Journey’s End & All Quiet on the Western Front 46 The New Woman: Woman to Woman & The Sun Also Rises 56 3. Reassurance in an Age of Anxiety: Rewriting Trauma in Random Harvest 69 4. Shell Shock in Cold War America 73 5. Remembrance, Rediscovery, Regeneration: British cinema, 1945-1997 83 6. One Hundred Years On: Cinema and Shell Shock in the Twenty-First Century 111 Conclusion 126 Works Cited 130 Filmography 140 List of Illustrations Fig. 1. Advertisement for The Battle of the Somme in The Observer (27 August 29 1916), featuring the comments from The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Fig. 2. British Tommies dominate their German captors in The Battle of the 30 Somme. Fig. 3. Hate the Hun: the malicious German officer and downtrodden Girl in a 33 promotional poster for Hearts of the World. Fig. 4. Lillian Gish’s Girl as the ghostly bride searching the decimated landscape 36 for her fiancé (Hearts of the World). Fig. 5. Theatre of Hysteria: Hurst’s unnamed muscular paralysis patient in War 39 Neuroses. Netley Hospital, 1917. Fig. 6. The visual purgatory of the trenches in All Quiet on the Western Front. 54 Fig. 7. David and Lola pastiche Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene in Woman to 60 Woman. Fig. 8. Jake Barnes’ sense of alienation from the vibrant city and society of 67 interwar Paris is given visual life in The Sun Also Rises. Fig. 9. Left: The villain’s lair – Mireau’s opulent headquarters. Right: Interior and 79 the archetypally villainous General himself (Paths of Glory). Fig. 10. Dr. Yealland’s “laboratory” (Regeneration). 107 Fig. 11. Testament of Youth evokes Gone With the Wind’s famous crane shot in 123 illustrating the sheer scale and unmanageability of wounded with which Brittain and the other nurses must cope. Introduction Future Lieutenant Colonel, British spy, Military Cross recipient, veteran of two world wars, and noted London eccentric Alfred D. Wintle was just a teenager when, in 1916, he saw action in the Great War. During his first night on the Western Front the sergeant to whom he had just been introduced was hit by a shell and killed, showering the young soldier in his remains. Rather than succumb to the horror of the event, so the story goes, Wintle stood immediately to attention, as shells continued to fall around him, and saluted. This ‘miraculously did the trick,’ he would later write. ‘Within thirty seconds I was able to become again an Englishman of action and to carry out calmly the duties I had been trained to perform.’1 Wintle’s experience was far from rare among the soldiers who fought in the trenches of the First World War; his reaction to it, however, certainly was. Confronted with conditions and experiences of untold horror and unimaginable stress and fear, many reacted with psychological breakdown, in order to, as the American physician Thomas W. Salmon later put it, ‘escape from an intolerable situation in real life to one made tolerable by the neurosis.’2 The British army alone reported 80,000 cases of shell shock – later, and more accurately, known as war neuroses – by the end of the war; the actual figure, according to recent research, could be significantly higher.3 The stoicism of Wintle, who demonstrated (insofar as we have faith in the veracity of his story) a masculine ideal towards which men were trained not only in military service but throughout their lives, was a near-impossibility; the war itself, as Virginia Woolf would aptly label it, a ‘preposterous masculine fiction.’4 Shell shock became, and remains, 1 A. D. Wintle, The Last Englishman: an autobiography of Lieut.-Col. Alfred Daniel Wintle, M.C. (1st the Royal Dragoons) (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), 36. See also James Wilson, ‘The last Englishman’, New Law Journal (26 July 2013) <www.newlawjournal.co.uk/content/last-englishman>. 2 Thomas W. Salmon, ‘The Care and Treatment of Mental Diseases and War Neurosis (“Shell Shock”) in the British Army’, in The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War, Vol. X: Neuropsychiatry (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), 506. 3 See Jay Winter, ‘Shell shock’, in Winter, J. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. 3: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 328-30. 4 This description appears in a letter from Woolf to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies, dated 23 January 1916. See Virginia Woolf & Joanne Trautmann Banks (ed.), Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf (San Diego, CA; New York; London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 89. Introduction | 2 emblematic of the First World War, and the stigma of emasculation suffered by these men is one aspect that has dominated the war’s cultural legacy: particularly in intellectual thought and literature, television and the cinema. It is in this latter arena, the visual and narrative conception of shell shock and its sufferers on the big screen, with which this thesis is concerned. This is a study, then, of the moving image. More specifically, it is a study of a group of often very different film texts that all concern themselves, in multiple and various ways, with a common historical phenomenon. It is in the essential nature of the historical film to reflect, represent and interpret the historical reality that they take as all or part of their subject – as the critic Fredric Jameson has argued, history is not in itself a text, but is ‘inaccessible to us except in textual form,’ necessarily passing through a process of textualisation and narrativisation.5 Effective textual analysis of filmic narrativisations of history necessitates a certain level of understanding of the historical discourses that these films seek to reproduce and represent. This thesis is thus an interdisciplinary one, firmly rooted in textual cinematic analysis, but drawing heavily upon historical research as a vital supplement. Literature Review As a multidisciplinary study bridging a group of disciplines as diverse as film studies, history, psychology, and gender and cultural studies, this thesis is indebted to the work of scholars in each of these fields.