Screen Combat: Recreating World War Ii in American Film and Media

SCREEN COMBAT: RECREATING WORLD WAR II IN AMERICAN FILM AND MEDIA by Tanine Allison B.A. in Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2010 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Tanine Allison It was defended on September 8, 2010 and approved by Dr. Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor, Department of English Dr. Randall Halle, Klaus W. Jonas Professor, Department of German Dr. Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, Department of English Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Adam Lowenstein, Associate Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by Tanine Allison 2010 iii SCREEN COMBAT: RECREATING WORLD WAR II IN AMERICAN FILM AND MEDIA Tanine Allison, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2010 “Screen Combat” interrogates how the cultural mythology of the Second World War as the “Good War” surfaces in the American war film by examining the change in the aesthetics of combat sequences over time. By juxtaposing 1940s documentary and fiction films with contemporary cinema and video games, this dissertation argues that the World War II combat genre is not the conservative, coherent, “classical” genre that previous studies have assumed it to be. Rather, combat films and video games are complex, polysemic texts that challenge our assumptions about Hollywood filmmaking and mainstream American media. This dissertation contends that the combat sequences of World War II films give voice to a counter-narrative of the war, breaking away from the typical plots of noble sacrifice and dedicated heroism to show literally explosive images of devastation and annihilation. Even seemingly conventional cinematic histories of the war—movies like Destination Tokyo (1943) and Pearl Harbor (2001) and video games like Call of Duty (2003)—contain jarring and exhilarating combat sequences that undercut our usual notion of the Second World War as a morally righteous undertaking and replace it with a dangerously fascinating portrait of awesome destruction. It is in these moments of action that the contradictions of war come bubbling to the surface, convulsing and even rupturing the body of the text as it seeks to simultaneously contain and unleash the violence of battle. In combat-centered films and video games, heterogeneous messages about the experience of war converge in the body of the spectator/player, who is iv caught up in both the spectacle of fantasy and the visceral sensation of “being there” on the front lines. Beyond the realism of historical fidelity or visual mimesis, these texts activate a “corporeal realism” that exists at the very base of specular experience—that of bodily sensation. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION: SCREENING THE “GOOD WAR” ........................................ 1 2.0 STAGING WAR: WARTIME MILITARY DOCUMENTARIES AND THE DISCOURSE OF REALISM ..................................................................................................... 21 2.1 REENACTMENT AND THE DOCUMENTARY IDEAL ............................ 26 2.2 “THE DRAMA TAKES PLACE ‘FOR REAL’”: BAZIN AND DOCUMENTARY REALISM .......................................................................................... 29 2.3 PEARL HARBOR IN HOLLYWOOD: GREGG TOLAND AND JOHN FORD’S DECEMBER 7TH ................................................................................................. 35 2.4 RECONSTRUCTING COMBAT: DEFINING DOCUMENTARY IN THE 1940S ............................................................................................................................. 41 2.5 “NO FAKING HERE”: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY AND DOCUMENTARY AESTHETICS ................................................................................... 45 2.6 GRIM FAIRYTALES: JOHN HUSTON’S SAN PIETRO ............................ 52 2.7 TWO PARADIGMS OF HISTORICAL RECREATION ............................. 59 2.8 “A WHOLLY NEW KIND OF SIGHT INSTRUMENT”: THE FIGHTING LADY AND THE CINEMATIC RECORD ..................................................................... 63 3.0 CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA GOES AWOL: SPACE, TIME, AND PERCEPTION IN WARTIME COMBAT FILMS ................................................................. 76 vi 3.1 THE COMBAT FILM AND CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA ....... 81 3.2 INSIDE THE BLUE GROTTO: SPACE AND PERCEPTION IN DESTINATION TOKYO ..................................................................................................... 88 3.3 FUSING FICTION AND THE “REAL THING”: WING AND A PRAYER AND THE SPACE OF THE SCREEN ........................................................................... 107 3.4 DIEGETIC INCOHERENCE ........................................................................ 129 4.0 NOSTALGIA FOR COMBAT: WORLD WAR II AT THE END OF CINEMA ... .................................................................................................................................... 133 4.1 NOSTALGIA FOR WAR ............................................................................... 138 4.2 “MOMMA! I WANT TO GO HOME!” ........................................................ 146 4.3 NOSTALGIA FOR FILM .............................................................................. 155 4.4 DIGITIZING THE PAST ............................................................................... 163 4.5 “EARN THIS”: AMERICAN SOLDIERS AS VICTIM-HEROES ........... 170 4.6 MORPHING HISTORY ................................................................................. 178 5.0 SHOOT TO KILL: WORLD WAR II AND THE FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER VIDEO GAME .......................................................................................................................... 182 5.1 VIDEO GAMES, HISTORY, AND WAR ..................................................... 185 5.2 THE WORLD WAR II SHOOTER GAME AND THE COMBAT GENRE .. ........................................................................................................................... 191 5.3 A LUDOLOGY OF FIRST-PERSON SHOOTERS .................................... 203 5.4 SIMULATING VIOLENCE ........................................................................... 210 5.5 IMMERSIVE HISTORY AND THE SOLDIER AS MACHINE ............... 221 6.0 CONCLUSION: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES OF WORLD WAR II ............ 231 vii BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 246 viii PREFACE I would like to thank the English Department and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh for providing the financial and intellectual resources necessary for me to complete this dissertation. A Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship gave me a precious opportunity to concentrate on this project, and the travel grant I received for archival research offered me access to materials that deepened and enriched my work. Librarians and archivists at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Stanford University Special Collections helped guide my foray into the archives. I would like especially to thank Barbara Hall at the Herrick Library for suggesting related material that I did not even know existed. My professors at the University of Pittsburgh have given me motivation, instruction, and encouragement over many years. I am particularly grateful to my dissertation committee for nurturing this project from its beginnings in seminar papers and project exams to its final form. Lucy Fischer, Randall Halle, and Marcia Landy provided invaluable guidance and support via written comments, one-on-one conferences, and even international correspondence. My dissertation chair, Adam Lowenstein, has been an exacting reader, a patient advisor, and an unwavering advocate throughout this project. He pushed me to be precise, rigorous, and original in my thinking, while never doubting my ability to succeed. These scholars have given me ix additional inspiration through their own scholarly work, some of which is cited in the pages ahead, and I have been honored by their investment of time and energy into my own project. Friends and family have been extremely helpful and accommodating during this process. My friend and fellow dissertator, Kyle Stevens, generously read each chapter, sometimes more than once, offering insight, perspective, and a lot of laughs along the way. The Allisons and Temples have been proofreaders, cheerleaders, captive listeners, and much more over the years. I would like to especially thank my mother, Pixie Allison, for reading drafts, cooking meals, giving encouragement, and providing childcare. I would never have been able to write this dissertation without my husband, Kyle Temple, who moved with me to Pittsburgh from the sunny South so that I could pursue this degree. He has supported me with endless patience and love through many moments of anxiety and doubt, and he contributed many important insights into the war movies and video games that we watched and played together over the years. I must also acknowledge Kyle’s vital assistance as my “research assistant” for my chapter on video games. He slogged through countless hours of World War II video games, killing hundreds upon thousands of Nazis (and Nazi zombies)—all solely for my benefit, I’m sure. Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my father, David Allison, whose love of American genre cinema instigated

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