Morality, Justice, and Freedom in World War II Cinema

Journal of Military Ethics ISSN: 1502-7570 (Print) 1502-7589 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/smil20 US-American Intervention in Europe: Morality, Justice, and Freedom in World War II Cinema Tatiana Prorokova To cite this article: Tatiana Prorokova (2019) US-American Intervention in Europe: Morality, Justice, and Freedom in World War II Cinema, Journal of Military Ethics, 18:2, 96-109, DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2019.1651978 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2019.1651978 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 11 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 336 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=smil20 JOURNAL OF MILITARY ETHICS 2019, VOL. 18, NO. 2, 96–109 https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2019.1651978 US-American Intervention in Europe: Morality, Justice, and Freedom in World War II Cinema Tatiana Prorokova Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article analyzes the American intervention in Nazi-oppressed World War II; US intervention; Europe during World War II and the way in which this film portrayals of war; ethics intervention is represented in film. Examining the visual and of war; freedom cinematic aesthetics of Saving Private Ryan and the mini-series Band of Brothers, the article seeks to demonstrate how film has responded to US intervention overseas. It is argued that the need to liberate Europe from the evil Other stands forth as the main, heavily moralized purpose of US military intrusion in the film and the mini-series being analyzed. To shore up this speculation, the author considers other films on the topic, namely, The Longest Day (1962) and Shutter Island (2009). The author claims that the scenes in the concentration camps that are crucial in Band of Brothers and Shutter Island have an ethical function, i.e. they justify US intervention in the foreign territory. Additionally, the article provides a brief overview of Playing for Time (1980), Schindler’s List (1993), The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999), The Grey Zone (2001), as well as the mini-series Holocaust (1978). Introduction: ethics, film, and World War II The Second World War changed, as the famous cultural and literary historian Paul Fussell (1989, ix) puts it, the “psychological and emotional culture” of all the nations that partook in that brutal contest, including the US. The war itself was not just about coping with the intense physical load but, probably most importantly, it was about “deal[ing] with … the rationalizations and euphemisms … , [with] the abnormally intense frustration of desire in wartime and some of the means by which desire was satisfied” (1989, ix). Fussell speaks about the enormous material damage caused by the air bombing and shooting; however, he emphasizes also the damage the war did to “intellect, discrimination, honesty, indivi- duality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit” (1989, ix). What Fussell finds problematic is that when the war was over, people tried to “sanitize” and “romanticize” the bloody battle that lasted for six years (1989, ix). For Americans, the main reason for doing so was arguably a desire to sanctify the war so that US citizens would feel the significance of their grandfathers’ participation in World War II. This is, CONTACT Tatiana Prorokova [email protected] Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. JOURNAL OF MILITARY ETHICS 97 however, possible only when the nation sees the “pure” side of the war, namely, that their grandfathers were fighting on the right side with good intentions. Fighting against the Nazis was a justification strong enough to allow certain facts that could tarnish the repu- tation of American soldiers to be omitted or just remain unspoken. The war was partially stylized into an “adventure” where good fought against evil. I argue that this tendency was, to some extent, transferred to film. Nonetheless, many directors have also tried to question the war in their works and show the reality of combat as authentically as possible. This includes Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg, and the mini-series Band of Brothers directed by, among others, David Frankel. Before proceeding to the analysis of the chosen cinematic examples, however, it seems reasonable to consider the following two issues: first, how film portrayals of war cultivate, formulate, and eventually promote specific understandings of particular wars, as well as how film creates an image of those who partook in those conflicts; and second, referring specifically to World War II, how the war that took place more than 70 years ago has been generally reflected on screen over that vast period of time. The complexity and importance of war explain the emergence of a large number of dis- ciplines that analyze the problem from various angles. Nonetheless, perhaps the most obvious perspective from which one can examine war is a historical one, since every war inevitably becomes part of history, including cultural history. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that war-related themes can frequently be found in various forms of media, such as literature, music, art, and film. All those contributions are significant as they shape cultural perspectives on the issue of war. In this article, I focus only on film for two reasons. First, film has a very specific ability to visualize events, both facilitating and intensifying one’s perception. Second, the chosen cinematic examples can be con- sidered a visual re-visiting of World War II, i.e. they obviously differ from the films on World War II that were released shortly after the war was over. War is one of film’s most popular topics. Considering only wars the US has taken part in, one can find cinematic examples that deal with the American Civil War (Shenandoah [1965], Glory [1989]), World War I (Shoulder Arms [1918], Paths of Glory [1957]), World War II (Saving Private Ryan [1998], The Thin Red Line [1998]), the Korean War (Sayonara [1957], Inchon [1981]), the Vietnam War (Apocalypse Now [1979], Full Metal Jacket [1987]), the First Gulf War (Three Kings [2003], Jarhead [2005]), the Balkan War (Behind Enemy Lines [2002]), the Afghanistan War (Brothers [2009], Lone Survivor [2013]), and, finally, the Iraq War (Stop-Loss [2008], American Sniper [2014]). This panoply shows that film has been a solid platform not only to portray the complexity of war but also to deal with various wars, taking into consideration different historical periods and events. In depictions of war, the issue of ethics1 becomes a key one. Among the ethically rel- evant questions to ask are the following: How does cinema portray war? Does it tend to take sides? Can one consider these cinematic representations to be historically correct re-tellings of the events in question? Does film depict war events in order to make them persist in collective memory? These are truly complex questions, and each of them would need a detailed examination. What I will do in the following is to consider them as they relate to ethical challenges and problems. Specifically, I argue that every representation of war to a certain degree employs ethics. It is important, however, to understand that different wars provoke different reactions and, eventually, different representations. For example, whereas American participation in 98 T. PROROKOVA World War II is frequently referred to as participation in a “good” war, US intervention in the Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq) in the twenty-first century hardly resembles the “good” war against the Nazis. The cinematic portrayal will arguably depend on two factors: first, against whom war is waged, i.e. who the enemy is; and second, what means are applied in order to win the war. In short, historical facts and factors ultimately play a significant role in the formation of a cinematic portrayal. Moral justification of war on-screen takes place most explicitly when the war itself, or rather the participation of a specific side and its committed actions in a given war, can be historically and ethically justified. Perhaps the only example of war that can be treated in this way without raising additional questions and provoking a negative response is the allied cause, including American participation, in World War II. Since the intervention of the US has generally been deemed legitimate, its portrayal in film reflects a similar tendency. The fight against the Nazis in Europe, the freeing of innocent people from the occu- pied force, and the destruction of concentration camps – these are the actions that created the image of a “good” war. When analyzing the representation of World War II on screen, it is important to bear in mind that Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers – two relatively modern and quite famous examples of World War II cinema – are far from the only films on the “good” war. The film medium responded to the war during the war and also almost immediately after it was over, and indeed, a great number of works were created shortly after 1945.2 Guy Westwell comments that those films were “largely committed to a process of reckon- ing and reconciliation as well as celebration of American victory and hope for the future” (2006, 46).

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