Specters of War

SPECTERS OF WAR SPECTERS OF WAR Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict elisabeth bronfen rutgers university press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bronfen, Elisabeth. Specters of war : Hollywood’s engagement with military conflict / Elisabeth Bronfen. p. cm. Includes filmography. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-5398-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5397-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5399-3 (e-book) 1. War films—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.W3B76 2012 791.43Ј6581—dc23 2011048992 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2012 by Elisabeth Bronfen All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America To Isabel Capeloa Gil and Daniela Janser Contents Acknowledgments — ix Introduction — 1 1 Unfinished Business of the Civil War — 16 Gangs of New York Gone with the Wind The Birth of a Nation Major Dundee Glory Ride with the Devil 2 Home and Its Discontent — 43 Glamour Girls of 1943 Since You Went Away Tender Comrade Swing Shift From Here to Eternity The Deer Hunter 3 War Entertainment — 74 The Glenn Miller Story Golddiggers of 1933 Footlight Parade This Is the Army Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song White Christmas Apocalypse Now Redux 4 Choreography of Battle — 107 Let There Be Light Normandy Invasion The Longest Day The Birth of a Nation All Quiet on the Western Front The Big Red One Saving Private Ryan Sands of Iwo Jima Band of Brothers viii Contents 5 Reporting the War — 144 Guadalcanal Diary Back to Bataan Battle of San Pietro The Story of G.I. Joe Full Metal Jacket Standard Operating Procedure 6 Court-Martial Drama — 169 Paths of Glory Judgment at Nuremberg A Few Good Men The Caine Mutiny Rules of Engagement 7 War’s Sustained Haunting — 196 The Best Years of Our Lives Key Largo Somewhere in the Night Act of Violence Flags of Our Fathers Miracle at St. Anna Gran Torino Conclusion — 233 Notes — 243 Selected Bibliography — 265 Filmography — 271 Index — 275 Acknowledgments Conversations with others equally fascinated by the troubling interface between Hollywood films and war were very much part of writing this book, and I want to thank Isabel Capeloa Gil for the spirited intellectual exchange that took place while this project was in its inaugural stages. Equal gratitude is due Daniela Janser for her keen critical eye and her sustained support throughout the writing process. For her seminal suggestions regarding the overall theoretical argument of the book, I want to further thank Gesine Krüger. For individual pointers that ended up changing the direction this project took, allowing me to fine tune my argument as well as insist- ing on the inclusion of material I might otherwise have left out, I am grateful to Garrett Stewart, Anton Kaes, David Slocum, Andreas Huyssen, Norbert Grob, Griselda Pollock, Martin Jaeggy, Sermin Meskill, David Punter, Siegfried Weichlein, Barbara Straumann, Emily Sun, Alexander Markin, and the astute Rutgers reader who remains anonymous. On a more personal level, I want to express my debt to my sister Susan, who helped me formulate the autobiographic impulse that has, from the start, inscribed this undertaking. For his encouragement throughout and his meticulous help with the illustrations, I want to thank Johannes Binotto. For her help with copyediting, my thanks also go to Danielle Hickey. I am, as always, grateful to the students who participated in diverse seminars on the subject of war and cinema given at New York University, at the Catholic University of Lisbon, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Zurich. They allowed me to test many of my ideas before committing them to paper. A research leave granted by my home institution made it possible for me to finish the manuscript in good time, and for this I want to thank those colleagues who supported my appli- cation, in particular Andreas Fischer, president of the University of Zurich, who expressed his impatience at seeing the finished product, and to Daniel Wyler, dean of research, for a generous grant. Finally, deep appreciation goes to Leslie Mitch- ner, my editor at Rutgers University Press, for commentary that was always perti- nent but above all for her persistence in seeing this project through. SPECTERS OF WAR Introduction The final sequence of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) compellingly images the haunting specter of war. Seamlessly, we move from a close-up of the hand of his hero, Paul Baumer, who has just been shot by an enemy sniper, to a gripping superimposition. On screen, death can be reversed, the young men who have died in the trenches of World War I resurrected. Once more we see Paul and his companions marching into combat. The montage is such that their bodies are juxtaposed over and thus visually bleed into the crosses of a massive cemetery, marking their own burial site. The future they are moving toward is overshadowed by our knowledge of the demise they will find, the historical mass death in the trenches of World War I from which the film draws its authority. The young men on the screen are revenants, actors playing undead soldiers who will not stay in their graves. The charm of this resuscitation is bleak. This final image sequence fades into darkness while the platoon is still marching forward, steadily traversing their own graves. They have returned to life again to walk forever into battle. Yet they also have a message for the survivors. As Paul moves past the cam- era, he turns and looks over his right shoulder, fixing us with his gaze. Seven of his comrades do the same. The visual doubling the montage affords, giving a spectral presence to soldiers whose bodies we know to be buried beneath the crosses they are marching over, is, however, even more complicated. This final image sequence reduplicates an earlier scene. The platoon’s first nocturnal encounter with enemy fire was introduced with the exact same shot of Paul and his friends, marching forward while looking back over their shoulders. The first time, however, their backward gaze had been interspliced with a shot of the truck, which, having brought them to this part of no-man’s-land, was now returning back to the camp. Already, then, the soldiers’ gaze was deeply ambiguous, suggesting an uncertain anticipation of battle awaiting them, a longing to return with the truck rather than move forward, even a sense of abandonment to danger as they were left alone on the darkened front with only the security of their war-seasoned squad leader’s commands. When the shot is repeated at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, the meaning of their gaze has changed. We see only the resurrected dead looking back. Because we are offered no reverse shot to indicate what the soldiers are looking at, it becomes clear that they are explicitly targeting us with their gaze. The introductory title card to the film had announced: “This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.” While the resuscitated Paul and his comrades may not be accusing us, their survival as spectral bodies on screen is an 2 specters of war appeal to us to look back at them. We are faced with a curious collapse of time and space, a blurring of reference and image surface. With these young men forever going to battle, anticipation of death and resurrection from death come to be con- flated. Arrested within the same frame we have the before and after of battle, while all actual horror is elided, merely evoked as the vanishing point of any cinematic representation of war. The montage suspends the soldiers between life and death. They are neither fully gone nor fully returned, present only by virtue of their marked absence from the ordinary. Yet with their gaze, they take possession of us, calling upon us to acknowledge an experience of war we share only by proxy, in the darkness of the movie theater. Milestone’s closure holds no redemption from their history. It tarries instead with their demand to be taken notice of, their claim to our attention and our compassion. I begin my introduction with this moment from a classic war film because it encapsulates what is at stake in my own project. My entire book revolves around this haunting gaze. My claim is that cinema functions as a privileged site of recol- lection, where American culture continually renegotiates the traumatic traces of its historical past, reconceiving current social and political concerns in the light of previous military conflicts. As a shared conceptual space, cinema sustains a reflec- tion of and on the past. Indeed, in the course of the twentieth century, Hollywood emerged as the site where American culture thinks about its implication in the traumatic history of war by offering personalized narratives of rites of passage that reflect (and reflect on) the ever-shifting stakes in this collective conversation about national identity.

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