Heroism and Gender in War Films This Page Intentionally Left Blank Heroism and Gender in War Films

Heroism and Gender in War Films This page intentionally left blank Heroism and Gender in War Films

Edited by KAREN A. RITZENHOFF AND JAKUB KAZECKI HEROISM AND GENDER IN WAR FILMS Copyright © Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-47334-2 ISBN 978-1-137-36072-4 DOI 10.1057/9781137360724 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heroism and gender in war ﬁlms / edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–137–36453–1 (alk. paper) 1. War ﬁlms—History and criticism. 2. Heroes in motion pictures. 3. Sex role in motion pictures. I. Ritzenhoff, Karen A. II. Kazecki, Jakub. PN1995.9.W3H48 2014 791.4396581—dc23 2014005575 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Michael, Jan, Dom, and Lea who have taught me about war and peace (Karen A. Ritzenhoff)

For Iana (Jakub Kazecki) This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Anna Froula

Introduction 1 Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki

Part I Historical Leaders and Celebrities: Their Role in Mythmaking in the Cinema 1 Mary Pickford’s WWI Patriotism: A Feminine Approach to Wartime Mythical Americanness 9 Clémentine Tholas-Disset 2 The Reluctant Hero: Negotiating War Memory with Modern-Day Myths in Passchendaele (2008) 23 Janis L. Goldie 3 A Hero or a Villain, a Terrorist or a Liberator? The Filmic Representations of Gavrilo Princip since the Late 1960s 35 Tara Karajica

Part II Hollywood’s War Myths in the 1940s and 1950s 4 No Women! Only Brothers: Propaganda, Studio Politics, Warner Bros., and The Fighting 69th (1940) 51 Rochelle Sara Miller 5 The Postwar Anxiety of the American Pin-Up: William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 67 Lesley C. Pleasant

Part III Ideologies, Nationality, and War Memory 6 Germany’s Heroic Victims: The Cinematic Redemption of the Wehrmacht Soldier on the Eastern Front 87 Brian E. Crim viii Contents

7 Balls and Bullets: A People’s Humor as an Aesthetic Stratagem in Golpe de Estadio (1998) 99 Claudia Aburto Guzmán 8 From Saviors to Rapists: G.I.s, Women, and Children in Korean War Films 115 Hye Seung Chung

Part IV Men, Women, and Trauma: Heroes and Anti-Heroes 9 “I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen the Way It Is”: Military Heroism, Gender, and Race in Brothers (2004 and 2009) 133 Debra White-Stanley 10 The Gendered Geometry of War in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) 153 Janet S. Robinson 11 Rebel Tributes and Tyrannical Regimes: Myth and Spectacle in The Hunger Games (2012) 173 Jessica R. Wells 12 Mulan (1998) and Hua Mulan (2009): National Myth and Trans-Cultural Intertextuality 187 Jinhua Li

Part V Historical Reality, Authenticity of Experience, and Cinematic Representation 13 “What Shall the History Books Read?” Quentin Tarantino’s Basterdized Histories and Corporeal Inscriptions 209 Tiel Lundy 14 There’s Something about Maya: On Being/Becoming a Heroine and the “War on Terror” 225 Charles-Antoine Courcoux

Notes on Contributors 245 Index 249 Illustrations

1.1 The personification of America: Angela More (Mary Pickford) in The Little American (1917) 16 4.1 “A donkey is sensitive!” A scene from The Fighting 69th (1940) 53 4.2 “Sign the book.” A scene from The Fighting 69th (1940) 56 4.3 “American money!” A scene from The Fighting 69th (1940) 59 6.1 Corporal Steiner (James Coburn) debriefs Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell) in Cross of Iron (1977) 90 8.1 Colonel Dean Hess (Rock Hudson) watches Korean orphans’ folk dance performance with Miss Yang (Anna Kashfi) in Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymn (1957) 119 8.2 Peeping children, Sung-min (left) and Chang-hee (right), are shocked to spot the latter’s mother with an American G.I. in a rare close-up shot of Lee Kwang-mo’s Spring in My Hometown (1998) 123 9.1 Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and his sister-in-law Sarah (Connie Nielsen) in the renovated kitchen. A scene from Brødre (2004) 139 9.2 Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), traumatized vet acting out against the family kitchen. A scene from Brothers (2009) 147 10.1 Marching head-first into the “jaws of death” in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) 158 10.2 Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) literally caught in the web of the sexually charged “daisy chain” of IEDs that not only threaten his life but also his masculinity. A scene from The Hurt Locker (2008) 164 12.1 Hua Mulan tricks her father into taking his medication using military strategies. A scene from Hua Mulan (2009) 193 12.2 Hua Mulan reveals her emotional vulnerability in the battle. A scene from Hua Mulan (2009) 197 This page intentionally left blank Preface Anna Froula

As the corpus of war writing affirms, the sexual ecstasy of battle is as long-standing and constant as war itself. In his characterization of war in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Thersites infamously describes the action around him primarily in terms of sexualized disgust, as “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery!” But while the Trojan War was fought for a woman’s body, war has historically been perpetuated on women’s bodies in the form of rape and the killing of civilians. On the other hand, during war, women’s bodies perpetuate war by producing soldiers—both enemies and friendlies—and nursing wounded male bodies back to health and, preferably, back to fighting shape. The interplay between male and female bodies at war, male and female bodies as war, war as sexual perversion, and sexuality as war is complex, interweaving cultural practices of sexuality and mores, often treating and outrightly conflating bodies as sexual subjects, bodies as sexual objects, sexual violence as war, and war as destructive to sexuality. Warfare’s terrain as the site of mythical man-making also often doubles as the site of women’s actual un-making, as the long, sordid history of rape attests. According to Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,”1 US national mythology recasts the idea of the frontier as the site of man-making that served as a training ground for war-making. Indeed, the notion of Manifest Destiny is itself sexualized: brave, white men wresting the fertile, virgin land from the savage, dark Other in order to popu- late it with white offspring to form a civilization to which white women contribute their domestic gifts. Yet, white women also pose a threat to the civilizing white hero in the classic Western. Will she compel him to end his violent ways and subject him to a domesticated life or will she watch him ride off into the sunset, self-exiled from domesticity as a liminal being who can only preserve civilization through violence but find no home there? From Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba to recasting the Vietnamese jungle as “Indian Country” to President George W. Bush’s 2001 pledge to take down Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,”2 frontier mythology permeates American martial discourse. In the 100 years since World War One (WWI), the “war to end all wars,” began, war’s technologies have become more horrifyingly effective at killing—and horri- bly dehumanized, as in the case of drone warfare—just as war’s geographies have become more vague. The horror in the WWI trenches contorted the portrait of military masculinity in the male combatant, maimed or shell-shocked by warfare on xii Preface an industrial scale. Modernist writers such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Erich Maria Remarque exemplified how this war destroyed the capabilities of language to convey that war has also destroyed notions of nationalist heroism and glory. King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) complemented Passos and Hemingway but also suggested that the love of a French woman who has survived the war in her backyard can remasculate a veteran who lost his leg.3 In a response to Remarque, Helen Zinna Smith’s Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War painted a portrait of upper-class women serving as volunteer ambulance drivers who transported the screaming bodies of men ripped open and unmanned by war. The women, cleaning bodily filth from their ambulances, embody Julia Kristeva’s abject,4 the charwomen of the wounded and dead, who tread the line between masculinity and femininity as both agents of warfare and of those who tend the muck of military wounds. In the United States, the military units in which women served in Europe as nurses were disbanded after the war, meaning that the nation’s entry into WWII would neces- sitate the formation of new military units for women. American women served in every military branch in the United States, but popular culture—working closely with the US Office of War Information (OWI) and its Magazine War Guide as well as with President Roosevelt’s short-lived Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP)—argued just as strenuously for all women to join the military, take a war manufacturing job, and turn their homes into efficient sites of rationing and material sacrifice as it would argue for women to return home, lest children suffer from a neglectful mother who still wants to work outside the home or men suffer from returning to a newly financially independent woman. Hollywood films, popular magazines, and newsreels strove to create just the right tone: in their new, formerly male-only positions, women were capable (but not in a way that would threaten or degrade men’s capabilities), feminine and attractive (but not in ways that interfered with their work), desperately needed (but only until men returned to reclaim their occupations), and still representative of what men were fighting for overseas (heterosexual but monogamous, sexy but not too sexual). The only film to have BMP support and interference, Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail! (1943) portrays nurses in the early days of the Pacific theater as resilient, brave, cooperative, and dedicated to the mission—so much so that Veronica Lake’s Lt. Olivia D’Arcy would become a literal blond bombshell on a suicide mission against the encroach- ing Japanese. Yet romance was integral to narratives about military women: Lt. Joan O’Doul (Paulette Goddard) halts the evacuation of the squad of nurses in order to retrieve a black lace nightgown—necessitating D’Arcy’s sacrifice—and Lt. Davy Davidson (Claudette Colbert) ends the film nearly comatose with worry over the unknown whereabouts of her illegally married military husband. Sandrich’s next film about military women, 1944’s Here Come the WAVES!, strikes a different note, casting Betty Hutton as twins who enlist in the WAVES and squabble over romancing Bing Crosby. Meanwhile, USSR’s “Supersniper” Lyudmila Pavlichenko toured the United States as part of the promotion for women serving with the Allies. After being wounded in combat, Pavlichenko and her tales of sniping of 309 Nazis toured the United States and Canada, making her the first Soviet citizen to be received by a US president. She inspired Woody Guthrie to pen a song about her remarkable gunwomanship, Preface xiii yet she was perplexed by American reporters critiquing the fashion of her uniform and their unseemly interest in whether US servicewomen wore silk underwear.5 Meanwhile, Joan Blondell, whose lip-synching of Etta Moten singing “Remember My Forgotten Man” in Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) decried the treatment of the homeless and hungry WWI male veteran, warned women in WWII in song that “You Can’t Say No to a Soldier”: “You can’t say no to a soldier / a sailor or a handsome marine / Oh, you can’t say no if he asks you to dance / If he’s going to fight he’s got the right for romance.” Meanwhile, as lucidly analyzed in Christina S. Jarvis’s The Male Body at War,6 American military men, shouldered with the burden of remasculinizing manhood in the devastating wake of the Great Depression, found their bodies policed for homosexual tendencies, responsible for reimagining a physically disabled president as masculine and virile, and themselves often reluctant to be replaced by a woman trained “to free a man to fight.” Even as many experts viewed veterans with ambivalence—“on the one hand as heroic, and on the other, as childlike and dependent”—American women would bear the postwar burden of suppressing their newfound wartime independence and self- confidence, as well as their own intellectual, economic, and sexual desires, in order to demonstrate that the veterans would be their wives’ highest priority.7 Women veterans of the war would fight to receive military benefits into the 1970s and face rejection from veterans’ groups due to lingering discomfort about the ways in which military women challenge notions of military masculinity and manliness. Postwar popular culture framed women’s responsibilities with rhetoric that often blamed women for any difficulties in executing their rehabilitative tasks. Articles entitled “Has Your Husband Come Home to the Right Woman?” and “Are American Moms a Menace?” appeared in popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, which flipped the recruitment rhetoric to encouraging, if not demanding, that women return to their prewar domestic roles. In the American psyche, WWII—the “Good War”—remains the template with which to shape official discourse about subsequent military incursions, even when the analogy fails. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War’s shared inability to live up to the righteous martial narrative cast doubt on the United States’ military prowess globally and gave rise to the “John Wayne Syndrome”—the disillusion- ment suffered by servicemembers who thought war would be like his movies—and the “Vietnam Syndrome”—the reluctance in early 1980s American society to use military action as a solution to global unrest—among veterans and civilians. Most memoirs written by male veterans remark that John Wayne’s heroic and broken performance as Sgt. Stryker in Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and other films fed their military fantasies and desires to enlist in the military and kill clearly delineated and identifiable enemies. “Pulling a John Wayne” became a derogatory category for military actions performed by Wayne’s fans in the name of heroism that endangered the servicemember and his squad. Yet many right-leaning US commentators called for the resurrection of John Wayne and his manliness in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001—that is, events that were cast in the mold of Pearl Harbor.8 Popular culture and public discourse lauded the blue-collar masculinity perceived in the first responders to Ground Zero. State officials, many who lack combat experience, thrilled to the xiv Preface idea of restoring American masculinity once again on the battlefield. In 2003 Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who became the face of the Iraq War, injured when her convoy made a wrong turn and encountered resistance, retroactively justified the controversial decision by Coalition forces to invade Iraq by reinvigorating the logic of the captiv- ity narrative within US frontier mythology: white men must recover white women from the dark savage Other, lest they be raped or, worse, acquire savage attributes. Rick Bragg, her Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, stated in the memoir he coau- thored with her that she had been raped, despite her claims to the contrary because, as he put it, “people need to know that this is what can happen to women soldiers.”9 The stock market soared the day she was rescued from the Iraqis who had treated her injuries and tried once to return her to US forces. One year later, Spc. Lynndie England became the photo negative of Lynch and the poster girl and scapegoat of the torture at Abu Ghraib, inspiring the Rolling Stones to write and record “Dangerous Beauty,” a song about her. During the inva- sion of Iraq, the first military member to be injured was Eric Alva, a gay man, serving his country despite the restrictions that DADT imposed on him and many, many others until September 20, 2011, when the rule was finally lifted. And in January 2013, the US military lifted its official ban on women in combat, an act that recognizes—finally—that women are fighting and dying in the United States’ unending wars. While the changing of these rules confers honor and recognition on men and women who have chosen to serve their country via military service, it also presents us with a military that can remain all-volunteer to serve the interests of the for-profit military-industrial complex. The “war on terror” also ushered in an era of women in postfeminist ensemble films about the conflicts, no longer starring as gendered anomalies in films such as Courage under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996) and G. I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997). Documentaries such as Lioness (Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, 2008) and The Invisible War (Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick, 2012) are being deployed as educational tools about women’s experiences and capabilities in combat and to fight for an end to military sexual assault, which suggests that the prevalence of women in the military does not automatically translate into the military becoming less hypermasculine. The “war on terror” enunciates the absurdity of declaring war on an abstract emotion, a war in which the theater of combat is civilization itself, crumbling under air strikes and bombing raids and penetrated by house-to-house searches in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as the frontless theater of war blurs boundaries between civilian homes and war zones, the figure of the soldier blurs as well. Some of the captives tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison were the children of alleged insurgents, kidnapped by Coalition forces to be used as bargaining chips.10 As of February 2014, 1,100 of the dead reported in Syria’s ongoing civil war are children, and some 6,000 women have been raped, mostly “during governmental raids at checkpoints and within detention facilities.”11 This grim picture, largely only wit- nessed by those suffering it, hangs conspicuously in the background of progress made by military servicemembers in arenas of gender and sexuality. These snapshots paint with broad strokes some historical ways in which gender, sexuality, and military culture intersect. The recent changes in US military rules will give rise to new popular stories as well as new insights about the impacts that Preface xv gender and sexuality make on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and success in re-assimilating servicemembers into a society prone to occasional jingoistic dis- plays of thanking military men and women for their service but not ensuring that these same servicemembers receive benefits, including food stamps, prompt and adequate health care, and access to employment. It is my hope that this collection and books like it will encourage us not only to tell better stories about the full costs of war but also to treat all those who must suffer its costs with greater human dignity and empathy.

Notes

1. Frederick Jackson Turner introduced his “Frontier Thesis” on July 12, 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. See “The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,” https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/development-west /timeline-terms/frederick-jackon-turners-frontier-thesis-0, accessed February 10, 2014. 2. George W. Bush explained in 2001 press conference why Osama Bin Laden needed to be captured to achieve “justice.” He referred to “an old poster Out West” that suppos- edly said “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFgn4EaCGQA, accessed February 10, 2014. 3. John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 1921 (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2004); Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929 (New York: Scribner, 1957); Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel, 1929 (New York: Random House, 2013); Helen Zinna Smith, Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War, 1930 (New York: Feminist Press, 1993). 4. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 5. “Army Girl Sniper,” Time, September 28, 1942, 60. 6. Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during WWII (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 7. Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 235. 8. Peggy Noonan, “Welcome Back, Duke,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2001, http:// online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122451174798650085; Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 9. Faludi, The Terror Dream, 191. 10. Standard Operating Procedure. Directed by Errol Morris. USA, 2008. 11. “Syrian Women Raped, Used as Shields and Kidnapped by Both Sides in War,” The National, November 26, 2013, http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/syrian -women-raped-used-as-shields-and-kidnapped-by-both-sides-in-war.