Destructive Sublime: World War II In American Film And Media 081359748X, 9780813597485, 0813597498, 9780813597492

Table of contents :
Cover Page
......Page 0
Title Page
......Page 3
Copyright Page
......Page 4
Dedication
......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
Introduction: A Retrospective Look at the World War II Combat Genre......Page 11
Chapter 1. “No Faking Here”:
The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries......Page 39
Chapter 2. The “Good War”? Style and Space in 1940s Combat Films
......Page 71
Chapter 3. Rationalizing War: Reconstructions of World War II during the Cold War
and Vietnam......Page 105
Chapter 4. Nostalgia for Combat World War II at the
End of Cinema......Page 137
Chapter 5. Simulating War on an
Algorithmic Playground......Page 167
Conclusion: A Bad War? The World War II Combat
Genre Now......Page 202
Acknowledgments......Page 219
Notes......Page 221
Selected Bibliography......Page 239
Index......Page 243
About the Author......Page 259

Citation preview

Destructive Sublime

War Culture Edited by Daniel Leonard Bernardi Books in this new series address the myriad ways in which warfare informs diverse cultural practices, as well as the way cultural practices—­from cinema to social media—­inform the practice of warfare. They illuminate the insights and limitations of critical theories that describe, explain and politicize the phenomena of war culture. Traversing both national and intellectual borders, authors from a wide range of fields and disciplines collectively examine the articulation of war, its everyday practices, and its impact on individuals and societies throughout modern history. Tanine Allison, Destructive Sublime: World War  II in American Film and Media Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim, eds., Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-­First-­Century Perspectives Jonna Eagle, Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema Aaron Michael Kerner, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation David Kieran and Edwin A. Martini, eds., At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett, Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War Nan Levinson, War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built Matt Sienkiewicz, The Other Air Force: U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media Since 9/11 Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites, eds., In/visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-­First-­Century America Roger Stahl, Through the Crosshairs: The Weapon’s Eye in Public War Culture

Destructive Sublime World War II in American Film and Media

TANINE ALLISON

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

978-0-8135-9749-2 978-0-8135-9748-5 978-0-8135-9750-8 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2018 by Tanine Allison 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. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-­1992. www​.rutgersuniversitypress​.org Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory of my father, who first taught me the power of the movies For Kyle, Emer, and Dash

Contents

Introduction: A Retrospective Look at the World War II Combat Genre

1

“No Faking Here”: The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries

29

2

The “Good War”? Style and Space in 1940s Combat Films

61

3

Rationalizing War: Reconstructions of World War II during the Cold War and Vietnam

95

4

Nostalgia for Combat: World War II at the End of Cinema

127

5

Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground

157



Conclusion: A Bad War? The World War II Combat Genre Now

192

1

Acknowledgments 209 Notes 211 Selected Bibliography 229 Index 233

vii

Destructive Sublime

Introduction A Retrospective Look at the World War II Combat Genre A succession of World War II–­era U.S. Army transport airplanes floats across a starry nighttime sky partially obscured by clouds. With somber music, a male voice recounts, “My paratroopers and I got our orders to jump into Normandy today.” White text on a black screen clarifies the date: “June 5, 1944, the night before D-Day.” Over a montage of images showing U.S. Airborne paratroopers preparing to jump, the voice continues, “We’ll be the first ones there, the first to fight. The Screaming Eagles won’t let our boys on the beach down.” In medium close-­up, one paratrooper looks up at the camera, his face camouflaged with black paint and aglow with a red warning light, as the voice-­over concludes, “I won’t let my men down.” Text on the screen alerts viewers that the events pictured are “based on a true story.” A different male voice begins a new narration: “In the name of liberty, they fought for their country, their families, their brothers. As soldiers, they fought as a squad. As a team, they triumphed.” This recitation unfolds over a series of images showing soldiers in combat in a generically French landscape from the mid-­twentieth century, filled with quaint farmhouses, fields of tall grass surrounded by trees, and bombed-­out villages bounded by short stone walls. Like many trailers, this one highlights action and excitement: soldiers run across an open landscape firing their rifles into smoke; a soldier is blown backward by an explosive blast; a Jeep approaches with machine guns ablaze at the camera; an airplane on fire darts across the sky and crashes into the ground, causing an enormous yellow explosion. There are also moments of pathos 1

2  •  Destructive Sublime

and danger: a soldier cries into his radio, “This is Baker company, we’re surrounded”; a group of paratroopers tries to find a way to parachute out of their burning aircraft; of the dead body of a soldier lying in blood nearby, someone states, “They were on the same basketball team, they dated the same broad.” Aesthetic qualities of the images connect this trailer to recent contributions to the World War II combat genre: desaturated colors dominated by browns and greens, tracking shots moving around soldiers in combat, slow motion to show the experience of firing at the enemy, a shot that shakes in response to an explosion. The musical soundtrack, too, reminds one of John Williams’s melancholic, brassy score for Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and the martial drumming familiar from many battle scenes. Not only does the on-­screen text provide information like the date and the historical source of the story, but it also pulls out and emphasizes particular words in the voice-­ over narration: “Country,” “Families,” “Brothers.” The trailer gives the overall impression that combat is an honorable activity, motivated by the necessity of protecting liberty and one’s fellow soldiers. Despite the dangers, waging war is a matter of duty and service to one’s country and one’s family. As the voice-­ over, on-­screen text, and selected imagery make clear, triumph can be achieved through teamwork and, occasionally, sacrifice. Reading my description above, you might assume that the trailer in question was made to promote a film or television series set in World War II, or perhaps a History Channel documentary that uses reenactments. If you were watching the trailer, one clue would suggest otherwise: all the characters and settings are computer generated. In fact, the trailer advertises a video game, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft, 2005).1 The thematic concerns and aesthetic characteristics of the trailer suggest that the digital medium of video games simply adopts genre conventions of legacy media like film and television while giving them a technological upgrade. The video implies that the game continues in the venerable tradition of the World War II combat film. It includes all the elements that, as media scholar Debra Ramsay has argued, comprise the conventional American media portrayal of World War II: the citizen-­soldier, the spectacular visual construction of the war, and the justification of the war as necessary.2 Even the game’s title is intentionally reminiscent of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), which dramatized the wartime exploits of the same airborne company that is depicted in the game. Playing the game itself, though, suggests something else. Most of the gameplay involves moving through a simulated version of World War II–­era Normandy and enacting brutal violence on German soldiers. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is a first-­person shooter, meaning the player looks at the gameworld through the eyes of a participant in the action. The gameplay is focused on killing; a gun remains visible at the bottom of the screen and a targeting

Introduction  •  3

reticule stays centered on-­screen throughout the interactive portions of the game. Missions involve achieving particular objectives: usually a combination of destroy this (bridge, tank, weapon), capture this (farmhouse, town, weapon), or defend this (town, bridge, hill). But instead of providing meaningful historical narratives, these objectives primarily serve to motivate movement through a series of game challenges with different weapons, vehicles, landscapes, and arrangements of enemies that must be killed. The majority of the gameplay is spent moving, aiming, and firing, as well as directing squad members to do the same. The narrative qualities emphasized in the trailer—­the selfless squad leader, the emotional connections among “brothers in arms,” the virtues they are fighting for—­are, ironically, minimized within the game to intermediary cut-­scenes or bits of voice-­over between the missions. In many ways, World War II becomes merely an aesthetically and historically interesting backdrop to the standard first-­person shooter mechanics of gameplay. It is tempting, therefore, to see World War  II shooter games as watered-­ down versions or bastardizations of the cinematic combat genre. This line of reasoning would allow scholars and historians of the World War  II combat genre to set video games aside as an aberration, leaving untouched the core values of the cinematic genre as they have been understood in previous scholarship. However, another possibility—­which I take up in this book—­is to suggest that video games can expose parts of the genre that have previously been ignored. While it is often taken for granted that the study of older media can inform our understanding of newer media, I propose that the reverse is also true: the analysis of emerging media can open up novel ways of understanding the aesthetic forms of the past. By looking at the World War II combat

FIGURE 1   A digital landscape in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft, 2005).

4  •  Destructive Sublime

genre retrospectively, through the lens of first-­person shooter video games like Brothers in Arms, we can see the seventy-­plus-­year-­old genre afresh. In applying this retrospective methodology, new questions arise: Do the celebration and reward of violence form part of previous representations? How might attending to combat change how we conceive of the genre, its aims, its aesthetic forms, its functions, and its meanings? This book asserts that many of the elements of video games that appear to depart from the cinematic genre can actually be found there as well. Shifting the focus from analysis of plot, dialogue, and character to consideration of the distinct aesthetics of combat sequences—­those portions of films most similar to action-­oriented video games—­exposes similarities between the two media, challenging some of our assumptions about the genre as a whole. After all, World War II combat films also contain sequences that spectacularize violence and celebrate destruction. Like video games, they engage viewers by evoking strong sensations, and they acknowledge killing as an inherent part of war. In addition, the films sometimes use the apparent moral clarity provided by World War II in order to justify or excuse the visualization of elements that are less clearly moral, that might in other circumstances be perceived as prurient, sensationalistic, or exploitative. The overwhelming focus on fighting in video games serves as a reminder that battle scenes are a crucial part of the cinematic combat genre, yet the aesthetics of combat have often been overlooked in favor of a narratological and ideological analysis of the genre. By privileging the visual construction of battle over narrative, this book traces a new aesthetic history of the World War  II combat genre, revealing elements of the films and other media texts that challenge our typical assumptions about them. By examining archival sources relating to the production and reception of particular texts and performing close readings of the combat sequences within them, I argue that the genre’s messages about war are more ambiguous and contradictory than previously imagined. Instead of an ever-­ increasing mythologization of the “good war,” the genre presents a (sometimes literal) battleground for conflicting views and feelings about World War  II as well as more recent conflicts that have occupied the American military. Through my retrospective methodology, the genre can be viewed less as a propaganda machine, or an ongoing chronicle of the “greatest generation” of Americans, and more as an internally divided body of work reflecting uncertainty and confusion about America’s involvement in fighting overseas, both during the Second World War and in more recent conflicts. In the remainder of this introduction, I examine the “good war” myth of World War II and the ways that the World War II combat genre contributed to that legend and made it into a formula. I then argue that combat sequences frequently complicate that formula by representing war as irrational, violent, and chaotic. They do so by engaging in the “destructive sublime,” a term

Introduction  •  5

inspired by Edmund Burke (by way of J. David Slocum) that describes the perverse pleasure taken in witnessing devastation. The destructive sublime often takes the form of an alternative or secondary discourse in a media text, running parallel to the conventional narrative. By connecting the destructive sublime to Jordan Crandall’s conception of “armed vision,” I show how visual media’s use of perspective can align the view of spectators with that of combatants or weapons themselves. I then introduce the primary visual perspectives (embedded and remote) and imagemaking modes (record and reenactment) that I trace throughout the World War II combat genre in the chapters ahead. Finally, in an outline of the book chapters to follow, I demonstrate how these aesthetic forms combine to mediate conflicting representations of war as rational, controllable, and knowable on the one hand, and illogical, uncontainable, and inexplicable on the other. Moreover, both of these potentially contradictory accounts of war may be present in a single film.

World War II as the “Good War” The Second World War has remained a popular setting for Hollywood over the last seventy-­five years, providing high-­stakes drama as background to stories of romance, adventure, and tragedy as varied as The Great Escape ( John Sturges, 1963), Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, 1987), The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), and even Captain America: The First Avenger ( Joe Johnston, 2011). The explicitly fighting-­focused World War II combat genre also continues to this day, attracting acclaimed filmmakers like Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both from 2006), Spike Lee (Miracle at St. Anna, 2008), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds, 2009), George Lucas (executive producer of Red Tails, 2012), and Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, 2017). American popular culture has taught us what to expect of these stories: citizen-­soldiers fighting for freedom, individuals putting aside selfish desires to work for the common good, men finding the best of themselves in the worst of circumstances. Throw in some thrilling aerial dogfights and a little John Wayne, and you have the stereotypical presentation of World War II, burned into the American cultural imagination by television reruns, pop culture parodies, and robust genre conventions. In contrast, this same cultural imaginary projects the Vietnam War as a “bad war”; films about this conflict typically question the meaning of war, expose the brutality of military life, and show Americans as corruptible (or just corrupt). But World War II had both a justification (the evil Nazis and imperialistic Japanese) and a “happy ending.” Stories of the Second World War celebrate everyday heroes fighting the “good fight.” In this mind-­set, recent revisions of the genre—­Saving Private Ryan’s brutal Omaha Beach sequence, Spike Lee’s assertion of military racism, Quentin Tarantino’s rewriting of history—­are all the more surprising

6  •  Destructive Sublime

because war films are purported to be conventional and staid. World War II films are often assumed to be conservative both politically and formally—­to be, indeed, generic. This book argues that the genre is far more complex than it is often purported to be. The popular American understanding of World War II is paradoxical when we consider Hayden White’s argument that “‘holocaustal’ events”—­and he includes the two world wars alongside genocides like the Shoah—­function like psychological trauma for the groups that experience them: “This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind, but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning.”3 These painful events, White claims, do not lend themselves to conventional histories. Yet for the last seventy-­five years, American culture has sought to establish a clear and unambiguous account of World War II, modifying a traumatic event into the nation’s greatest glory. No matter how psychologically overwhelming, how violent and destructive, how varied in terrain and technology, World War II has since been molded into a triumphalist teleology, sanded of its rough edges and imbued with a sense of moral righteousness. The war was good because we won, and we won because we were good. In The Best War Ever: America and World War II, Michael C. C. Adams claims that over time, “the war years have come to seem a golden age, an idyllic period when everything was simpler and a can-­do generation of Americans solved the world’s problems. In this mythic time of the Good War, everyone was united: there were no racial or gender tensions, no class conflicts.”4 James Bradley, coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers and son of one of the Iwo Jima flag-­raisers, characterized this “can-­do generation” as loyal and dedicated, honorable and brave. His book concludes with the lines, “They were boys of common virtue. Called to duty. Brothers and sons. Friends and neighbors. And fathers. It’s as simple as that.”5 In his series of books on World War II veterans, Tom Brokaw also locates the virtue of the war explicitly in those who fought it, claiming that they were part of the “greatest generation any society has ever produced.”6 To achieve this unique status, their task was nothing less than to “save the world,” and they succeeded by winning the war.7 As White attests, the war was not always endowed with such clarity of meaning. Even a narrative of national victory requires frequent repetition in order to overcome the trauma at its origins. It has taken a wholesale rewriting of the war to turn one of the most destructive and deadly enterprises in human history into the “good war.”8 Paul Fussell’s groundbreaking work Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War devotes itself to undermining the myths that have accumulated about the war. He writes, “For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant,

Introduction  •  7

and the bloodthirsty.”9 For Fussell, who fought as an infantryman in the war, World War II was “indescribably cruel and insane”: “It was a savage, insensate affair, barely conceivable to the well-­conducted imagination (the main reason there’s so little good writing about it) and hardly approachable without some currently unfashionable theory of human mass insanity and inbuilt, inherited corruption.”10 Similarly, Edward W. Wood Jr., another veteran of the war and author of Worshipping the Myths of World War II, writes that “World War II was about one thing and one thing only: killing.”11 Through the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first, popular American film participated in the project of transforming the Second World War from a global cataclysm into evidence of virtue, particularly American virtue. This effort began during the war with fictional films recreating battles ripped from the headlines: Wake Island ( John Farrow, 1941), Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943), Guadalcanal Diary (Lewis Seiler, 1943), Objective, Burma! (Raoul Walsh, 1945). By borrowing from previous war films and genres like the Western, these films established a clear set of genre conventions that created particular, positive associations with America’s participation in the war. Jeanine Basinger’s formative book The World War  II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre elucidates these conventions while also tracing their origins and their development over time. Some of the most important of these conventions are the ethnically mixed group of soldiers that overcomes internal conflicts to become a cohesive fighting unit, the reluctant hero who is forced to become the leader of the group, the important military objective that the group must achieve, and the combat with the enemy that determines the fates of the characters.12 These cinematic conventions highlight the cultural meanings that have attached themselves to World War II over time. The focus on the group dramatizes the necessity of unity, and the group members’ ability to overcome petty feuds among them demonstrates their ability to put aside selfish concerns for the good of the collective. The soldiers’ acceptance of duty underscores the need for sacrifice. Their discussions of home serve as reminders of the freedoms they fight to protect, while the enemy is demonized as tyrannical, deceptive, and unrelentingly evil. Over time, these genre conventions became a formula for affirming the Second World War’s status as the “good war,” particularly as other conflicts, like Vietnam or the second war in Iraq, appeared in contrast to be “bad wars.” This formula has been pervasive, even influencing films with science fiction combat like Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), Aliens ( James Cameron, 1986), and Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997), or more recent films like Battle Los Angeles ( Jonathan Liebesman, 2011) and Battleship (Peter Berg, 2012).13 This book does not question the existence of this formula or its power to inspire pathos and pride. In this way, it builds on Basinger’s work by taking the

8  •  Destructive Sublime

existence of a robust genre visualizing World War II combat as a given. World War II is not just a common setting for films dealing with war, but rather, in Thomas Schatz’s words, “Hollywood’s military Ur-­narrative.”14 We saw the elements of this paradigmatic narrative in the trailer for the video game Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. However, articulating a set formula runs the risk of making it dogmatic or monolithic. This book uncovers the cracks in this formula, where the pieces don’t seem to fit or the narrative doesn’t quite congeal. Inspired by the action focus of military video games, I argue that the combat sequence is the place where contradictions arise and new narratives emerge, upending genre conventions and potentially counteracting the honorable messages expressed by the characters, dialogue, and plot.

The Function of the Combat Sequence A fundamental argument of this book is that combat sequences in films, television series, and video games construct (and destruct) meaning in a different way than scenes without combat. Battle and fighting scenes exist in tension with narrative—­sometimes reinforcing the emotional course of the story, sometimes contradicting messages in the plot, and sometimes opening up varied sensations that can be read in multiple ways. Like the song-­and-­ dance number in the musical, the chase or fight scene in an action movie, or the special-­effects sequence in a science fiction film, the war film’s combat sequence invites a different spectatorial relationship than the rest of the film.15 Just as a musical number might motivate toe-­tapping mimicry and science fiction a feeling of contemplative wonder, scenes of combat provoke powerful, visceral sensations—­fear, disgust, joy, exhilaration—­that engage the spectator’s body on a corporeal level. As many film scholars have argued, these sequences in genre cinema, despite their spectacle and thrills, still provide narrative and character information; therefore, it would be an error to state baldly that they halt the flow of narration or oppose narrative altogether. However, these generically “permitted” scenes provide alternative pleasures, appeals, and forms of address to the more strictly construed narrative sequences. In a 1988 essay on the combat sequence, Claudia Springer reads these scenes as examples of spectacle and cinematic excess. She writes that combat sequences “depart from the requirements of narrative to indulge in visual display; the spectator is encouraged to experience the pleasure of looking when it is unconstrained by narrative logic, to experience spectacle.”16 In characterizing these sequences as “excess,” Springer draws upon Kristin Thompson’s definition of cinematic excess as “those aspects of the work which are not contained by its unifying forces,” such as narrative motivation.17 Springer also makes use of Richard Dyer’s theory that “entertainment’s non-­narrative elements give

Introduction  •  9

the spectator feelings of plenitude and exhilaration that temporarily overshadow tensions present in the narrative.”18 By drawing on these two theorists, Springer makes two arguments worth reiterating here: Combat sequences can disrupt and unsettle narrative meanings. At the same time, they provide their own gratifications in the form of heightened stimuli and intense emotion. While combat scenes may not arrest narrative development altogether, they often depart from the rest of the film by espousing noticeably different aesthetic strategies that sometimes challenge the consistency and coherence of the film as a whole. Furthermore, these opposing styles endorse divergent values. If dialogue scenes privilege transparency, communication, clarity, and unity, combat sequences employ spectacle, movement, experimentation, and disunity. One common, intentionally disorienting technique is the juxtaposition of close and distant views of battle. For instance, in December 7th (Gregg Toland/John Ford, 1943), a documentary discussed in more detail in chapter 1, the re-­creation of the Pearl Harbor attack cuts between relatively close shots of sailors moving below the decks of the USS Arizona to an extreme long shot of the battleship’s destruction in a massive explosion, envisioned using miniature models. This alternation between close-­up and removed perspectives places the viewer in the midst of the danger alongside the fighting men and then, in quick succession, at a safe distance away, able to contemplate the devastation from afar. This editing strategy gives the spectator more information and a more comprehensive view of what is happening. But the rapid cutting between these two positions also creates a sensory dislocation that works to disorient at least as much as to explain. As I will elucidate later in the introduction, the aesthetics of combat in the World War II film can be characterized by just this tension between the two different viewpoints on the action—­one up close and the other from afar; I label these perspectives “embedded” and “remote.” Some war films (and other media, like video games) highlight the former perspective and others the latter, though many combine the two, resulting in a discordant shift back and forth. In this way, the combat sequence generates movement, sensation, and bewilderment in a process akin to an action film. This production of sensation contributes to the reputation action films have for being “thrill rides” or “roller-­coasters.” But what are the ramifications of causing such corporeal disorientation in the war film? Combat sequences are like roller-­coasters without seatbelts; the perceived stakes are life and death. Springer notes, “The combat sequence is uniquely capable of positioning the spectator in the delicate balance between life and death, for it combines vicarious death with guaranteed survival. One can feel the proximity of death while knowing that, regardless of how many bodies on screen are wounded or killed, one will survive to watch the rest of the film and leave the movie theatre.”19 Although the

10  •  Destructive Sublime

viewer’s remove from the battle depicted on screen is taken for granted, combat scenes still often overwhelm the senses and trigger sensations of panic, fear, vulnerability—­and also exhilaration and invincibility. Combat sequences incite strong, corporeal feelings, but how these responses are interpreted and connected to other experiences of the film may vary widely. As Springer attests, “because combat sequences inscribe so many conflicting, even contradictory, tendencies, they open themselves up to multiple readings.”20 Scenes of battle can thus be characterized by an ambiguity of meaning, as well as an autonomy from the rest of the film. A combat sequence may be perceived as aesthetically, and even politically, radical, while the explicit narrative overtly rejects such judgment. Because of the polysemic nature of combat sequences, war media are imbued with an indeterminacy that can lead to contradictory interpretations. For instance, a film I discuss in chapter 3, Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970), received praise from both prowar and antiwar contingents at the height of the Vietnam War, one side seeing unabashed heroism in the portrait of the famous World War II general and the other seeing parody. More recently, American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), a dramatization of the life of U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, an Iraq War veteran credited with the highest number of confirmed kills in history, was greeted with many, often incompatible readings among critics in the popular press. While part of the uncertainty in these representations stems from the idiosyncratic and controversial behaviors of these two public figures, a contributing factor is the inability of scenes of combat to pin down meaning. In fact, part of the pleasure of the combat genre is the way that battle sequences affect viewers on a visceral level, tapping into wells of feeling and waves of excitation that do not conform to political platforms or strict ideologies. If combat sequences sometimes work against narrative, they also have the potential to create their own alternative stories that embrace different values. Instead of the dialogue, plot points, and narrative motivation present in other scenes, combat sequences make meaning out of aesthetic innovation, sensory play, and perspectival juxtaposition. By representing World War  II through the lens of death and disaster, scenes of combat depart from the typical “good war” narrative of moral clarity and justified force and replace it with a dangerously fascinating portrait of awesome destruction. Thus it is the ambiguity of the combat sequence’s meaning that allows it to enact a new story of World War II, highlighting the war’s sensational violence and aestheticized brutality. This view of the Second World War as typified by cruelty and killing, which aligns with the assessments of veteran authors like Paul Fussell and Edward W. Wood Jr., has rarely found unimpeded expression within mainstream American culture—­except, as I argue in chapter 5, in video games. However, I contend that some of this counternarrative of the war is embedded, if heretofore unrecognized, in even the most conventional and seemingly conservative texts

Introduction  •  11

within Hollywood cinema and mainstream media—­movies like Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943), The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962), and Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), and video games like Call of Duty (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2003). Submerged in the explosive and exhilarating aesthetics of combat sequences, this alternative story of the war speaks the language of spectacle; it revels in images of violence and obliteration; it inundates the spectator with kinetic action and sensory stimuli. I label this sensual language of violence the “destructive sublime.”

The Destructive Sublime J. David Slocum was the first to apply the term “destructive sublime” to the American war film in his introduction to the anthology Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. He describes it as an “intense and even perverse fascination with sensation and death” that he locates among some film spectators as well as some characters within a film’s story, such as bloodthirsty enemies or even those Americans who are drawn inexplicably to war like the title character of Patton.21 Slocum suggests that the “seductively enjoyable sensations” of watching the “terrible beauty” of combat from a safe distance (as in one’s theater seat) can counteract the attempt of films and other media to make sense of war and inscribe it within a rational, and moral, narrative.22 It is this tension—­between the sensual and sensible appeals of combat sequences—­that I want to explore here, first by looking more closely at Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, which Slocum references, and later, throughout the book, in relation to particular texts. Edmund Burke published his “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757, more than three decades before Immanuel Kant published his better-­known “Analytic of the Sublime” as part of the Critique of Judgment. For both Burke and Kant, the sublime refers to something of immense size, scale, or power that overwhelms human reason and produces feelings of awe, astonishment, or majesty. Burke, however, locates the root of the sublime in terror and pain, as long as one is slightly distanced from it and not experiencing it directly: “We have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.”23 Although he argues that this delight is not based in cruelty, but rather in sympathy, he also suggests that the sublime is founded simply on a yearning for forceful sensation. For Burke, pain and fear are far stronger sensations than pleasure. Burke characterizes the experience of the sublime as one of astonishment, “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” He continues that the astonished mind “is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”24 By overwhelming and engulfing the viewer, the

12  •  Destructive Sublime

sublime works by domination: “We submit to what we admire [the sublime], but we love what submits to us [the beautiful].”25 His examples of the sublime include the ocean, darkness, eternity, the night sky, and infinity—­things that cannot be fully seen or truly understood in their immensity and limitlessness. Unlike Kant, who celebrates human reason for its ability to apprehend that which lies beyond the imagination, Burke proposes that the sublime cannot be tamed by reason; the sublime exists beyond the scope of human comprehension. To make the connection between Burke’s notion of a destructive sublime (he never actually uses that phrase) and war media, it is instructive to look at one of his examples: London, destroyed by “a conflagration or an earthquake.” Burke imagines crowds thronging to look at the city after the “fatal accident.”26 Are these throngs so different from the audiences clamoring to see images of the horrors of war—­either documentary or fictional, past or present—­in movie theaters, on television screens, or via video game consoles? David Bromwich argues that Burke’s treatise retains its power today because it offers a “psychological analysis of the priority of feeling to thought.”27 According to Burke, we do not seek out sensation in art or nature because it is edifying to our reason or instructive to our moral improvement, but simply because we have an appetite for profound feeling. By adopting the idea of the destructive sublime, I propose that the appeal of the war genre stems as much from the forces that work against understanding (sensation, spectacle, violence) as those forces that work toward it (narrative, visual order, structure). Certainly, there are aspects of the World War II combat film that provide ethical instruction and that seek to explain and justify violence and war. Yet there are also other, competing elements that seek to provide intense sensations, regardless of moral outlook or political implications. Like Burke, I maintain that this indulgence in strong emotion has the potential to disorient, minimize context, and challenge the primacy of rationality or morality. Throughout this book, I use the term “destructive sublime” to describe both an experience (the overwhelming sensation of being confronted with the massive destruction on display) and a formal language designed to provoke this experience. Through visual and auditory means, war media seek to emulate the experience of the soldier, caught, like the spectator, in a limbo state between life and death, action and stasis, safety and danger. While this can be bewildering and frightening, it can also, like the roller-­coaster ride and like combat itself, reflect the libidinal thrill of living on the edge. In combat, the usual strictures governing social behavior are suspended, lifting certain taboos, such as the rule against killing. This puts the soldier in touch with the base realities of human experience: life and death, pain and exhilaration. War media attempt to re-­create this experience using the technological affordances of their particular platform, whether cinema, television, or video games.

Introduction  •  13

Burke’s treatise emphasizes the sensual aspects of the experience of the sublime, particularly visuals but also sounds and even smells. Some of his stranger examples of the sublime include wild animal cries and “intolerable stenches.”28 Unfortunately, war media must omit smell—­to the detriment of their realism, considering the unpleasant odors of gunpowder and death on the battlefield—­but visual perspective and sound design are central to how media-­makers design representations of combat to elicit the destructive sublime. Although all of Burke’s examples imply that the person experiencing the sublime is at a safe distance from the source of dread and awe in the form of the ocean, the city on fire, or the battlefield, that sense of distance does not transfer directly into film style. There are a number of films that use long shots and aerial cameras to present a distant view of amphibious beach landings, burning battleships, or destroyed cities, but the experience of disorientation and domination can be expressed just as well through close-­up shots and a handheld camera. Both perspectives tap into the same thing: a sense of the overwhelming power and deadly stakes of industrialized warfare. The distance Burke finds necessary to transform a simply painful experience to one that is sublime results from the mediated distance between the spectator and the represented event. In media that represent war, the up-­close-­and-­personal view of mechanized slaughter can be just as dreadful and awe-­inspiring as the distant one.

Armed Vision Updating an Enlightenment-­era thinker like Burke to the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries does not just entail applying his ideas of sensational address to contemporary media. It also involves accounting for the ways that vision itself has changed in the intervening centuries, particularly in relation to the ascendance of the industrialized military in that time. For cultural theorist Paul Virilio, the signifying moment of modernity was the synchronic emergence of mass media and the industrial army, resulting in a “melding of military, cinematic, and techno-­scientific logistics of perception.”29 By this, Virilio contends that the emergence of perceptual technologies in the military, filmmaking, and techno-­scientific research in the twentieth century shaped how we experience, and particularly how we see, the world around us. Once war started to be waged at a distance—­artillery shot over trenches, ordnance fired over miles of ocean, or bombs dropped from the air—­the issue of seeing took on greater importance, and technology stepped in to enable it over long distances. Virilio writes that once long-­range bloodshed predominantly supplanted hand-­to-­hand combat, an insistent need arose for “ever more accurate sighting, ever greater magnification, for filming the war and photographically reconstructing the battlefield.”30 From rifle scopes to bombsights, from radar

14  •  Destructive Sublime

to aerial reconnaissance, from the soldier-­cameraman with his Bell & Howell Eyemo camera to the U.S. Marine training with the video game Doom31—­the military has developed, adopted, and transformed cinematic and media technologies to aid in the waging of war. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, perceptual technologies have been integrated into military affairs to such a great extent that media and military technologies are difficult to distinguish. Discussing the “eye for battle” cultivated by the U.S. Marine Corps, John Pettegrew explains how “military power and killing force flowed from technologies of seeing: the capacity to shine light on an object and, with that, to destroy it.”32 From simple devices like telescopic lenses and searchlights, military technicians during World War II developed far more complex technologies that utilized the innovations of the radio, television, and film industries for the waging of war. To produce the “sniperscope” night-­vision device used during World War II, for instance, technicians modified early television technology to create image tubes that would make infrared light visible to soldiers in the field.33 A television camera also allowed for the remote control of the U.S. Navy TDR-­1 assault drone, an early unmanned combat aerial vehicle used to drop bombs on the Japanese.34 The perceptual machines of World War II led to the ultimate development of many of the technologies that we use today in both military and entertainment contexts, such as drones and digital computers. World War  II also employed the medium of film strategically, substantially extending the links between war, cinema, and the state. Thomas Schatz writes of the era, “Never before or since have the interests of the nation and the movie industry been so closely aligned, and never has Hollywood’s status as a national cinema been so vital.”35 All of the war’s major powers experimented with film as a form of propaganda. Both the Axis and the Allies recorded as much of the war as possible, using the resulting footage for enemy surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence, training, news, entertainment, indoctrination, and morale—­as well as more amorphous motivations, such as posterity, history, and visual evidence. The U.S. Army Pictorial Service (as well as similar services in the other military branches) oversaw the training and deployment of hundreds of still and motion-­picture photographers onto the front lines in all theaters of the war. Thomas Doherty explains: “No accurate measure exists of the sheer quantity of film exposed during 1941–­45, but the military photographic units and the Hollywood trade press took it for granted that the Second World War was the most thoroughly documented event in human history. It probably remains the event most thoroughly documented via the medium of celluloid motion pictures.”36 The U.S. government also sought to oversee the development of fictional films produced by Hollywood. The Office of War Information sent representatives to influence the film industry to create films that would “help win the war.”37 Furthermore, during the Second World War,

Introduction  •  15

about ninety million Americans went to the movies each week, making the war years an enormous financial boon to Hollywood.38 What were the consequences of this recruitment of cinema and media toward the objectives of war? One result was the convergence of cinematic seeing with targeting the enemy. George H. Roeder Jr. writes that the visual materials produced by the United States government and military during World War II—­including maps, posters, photographs, charts, and documentary and fictional films—­“encouraged Americans at home and abroad to see [foreign] cultures through the narrowly focused lens of a bombsight, which reduced all things to one of two categories: that to be spared and that to be destroyed.”39 In Roeder’s estimation, the camera is not just a neutral seeing device; instead, it can be used to naturalize a particular kind of vision, like looking through a bombsight, and to support specific ideologies, such as an us-­versus-­them mentality. In World War II, the camera was deployed as a kind of weapon. As wielded by combat-­cameramen, it could produce images for intelligence, training, and persuasion; when attached to gunsights and bombsights, it could provide evidence of destruction and information about the enemy; when attached to reconnaissance aircraft, it could provide surveillance and spatial data. All of these functions of the camera allowed the military to kill more and kill better. When the camera becomes an instrument of war, seeing through a camera is weaponized as well; shooting a film shares the same visual aiming and targeting functions as shooting a gun. Examining the integration of cameras into guided missiles, Jordan Crandall describes a modern form of seeing that fuses human perception with that of a weapon. This “armed vision” combines the gathering of visual data—­the placement and movement of objects in space—­with the destructive power of a weapon, merging the eye and the projectile into one. This new way of seeing establishes a visual language concerned with “positioning, tracking, identifying, predicting, targeting, and intercepting/containing,” the ultimate fulfillment of Virilio’s logistics of perception.40 Nowhere in the war genre is this kind of armed vision more apparent than in first-­person shooter video games like Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, described at the beginning of this introduction. In these games, the visual apparatus is identical to the shooting mechanism. As I describe in more detail in chapter 5, looking around in a first-­person shooter game is the same as aiming your weapon; a reticule or crosshair remains in the center of the screen, turning every visible part of the game into a possible target. Looking back through the lens of contemporary media as part of a retrospective methodology, could this form of armed vision, exemplified so perfectly in the first-­person shooter video game, also be found in cinematic and televisual war media? For Crandall, armed vision corresponds specifically to the vertical or aerial perspective of a reconnaissance aircraft, guided missile, or bombsight; it is “a viewpoint not recognizably our own.”41 Even before the

16  •  Destructive Sublime

invention of smartbombs and guided missiles, filmmakers realized the visual potential of the aerial perspective afforded by crane shots, bird’s-eye views, or cameras suspended over miniature models. As I explain in more detail in the next section, I use the term “remote” throughout this book to designate a viewpoint at a remove from the action that is “not recognizably our own,” meaning not aligned with particular characters. While only rarely used in the war genre to show the actual targets of bombing, this viewpoint is often fused with an explicit or implicit form of targeting. This targeting viewpoint is even more apparent in first-­person video games and other media that use a subjective point of view to represent the perspective of combatants within the action. Although in gaming this point of view technically does not correspond to Crandall’s definition of armed vision in that it provides a horizontal or terrestrial perspective, it also participates in the viewing of objects, people, and landscapes as potential targets. As a contrast to the remote viewpoint, the term “embedded” designates those shots that provide the point of view of a combatant within the action, or in some instances, a handheld camera carried by a combatant. Although they are perceptually opposed—­presenting far-­ off and close-­up views of combat, respectively—­these two perspectives both generate an “armed vision” by merging the visual apparatus with the military objectives of seeking out information, keeping track of objects and movement, and transforming objects into potential targets. As a result, these visual perspectives work together to structure the World War II combat genre’s aesthetics of combat and its invocation of the destructive sublime.

The Aesthetics of Combat In discussing the aesthetics of combat, I deploy three distinct meanings of the term “aesthetics.” First, “aesthetics” (singular noun) is a branch of philosophy that discerns the value of art, taste, and beauty. While this book is not a philosophical work, I draw on Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime and a broader history of aesthetic philosophy in order to explore the powerful sensations prompted by film and media as works of art. Second—­but most important for this book—­“aesthetics” (plural noun) refer to particular stylistic principles that define artistic movements (e.g., the modernist aesthetic). Going beyond the fine arts, the term “aesthetic,” used here synonymously with “aesthetic form,” denotes a specific assemblage of audio and visual conventions found within media. This is the predominant sense in which “aesthetic” appears in this book: to denote a system of signification that appears in combat sequences across World War  II media. Finally, the phrase “aesthetics of combat” reminds us that there are artistic pleasures to be gained from scenes of battle, despite (or because of ) their violence and destructiveness. This book identifies and explicates the particular aesthetics of World War II combat in

Introduction  •  17

war media since the 1940s and argues that they offer specific gratifications and ways of seeing the world. Within the aesthetics of combat of World War II media, I have observed two major aesthetic forms, each constituted by a continuum between two contrasting ideals. The first traces a continuum between two opposed visual perspectives: embedded and remote. The second outlines a continuum between two opposed imagemaking modes: recording and reenactment. This book traces the development, coordination, and alignment of these various aesthetic forms over time to analyze how audiovisual style reflects (and influences) how American culture conceives of war, nation, and representation itself. These two sets of opposed aesthetic forms comprise the grammar of the destructive sublime as found in the World War II combat genre.

Opposed Perspectives: The Embedded Point of View The close-­up, “embedded” point of view is exemplified by the shaky, handheld, error-­filled camerawork of particular combat documentaries, especially The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942) and The Battle of San Pietro ( John Huston, 1945), both discussed in chapter 1. The presence of the camera, held by a combatant or cameraman within the combat zone, is marked by irregular cinematography, shaking in response to nearby blasts, and errors like lens flares and blurry focus. As I explain in the first and second chapters, this cinematographic method, even when used with staged or fictional events, came to signify authenticity in subsequent films—­including fictional war films from the 1940s or 1950s that interspliced documentary footage into the story, such as Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949), and combat films from the 1990s and 2000s, like Saving Private Ryan or Flags of Our Fathers, that emulated combat cinematography in their re-­creations of battle. The embedded perspective is similar to what film scholars would call “subjective” point of view, in which the camera appears to take on the visual viewpoint of a particular character. While this replacement of the camera for the character is common enough in the point-­of-­view shot, “subjective” usually designates a shot that moves as the character would or that attempts to convey something of the character’s state of mind. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) includes subjective shots that convey a character’s blurred vision as a result of being drunk or poisoned. With a few exceptions—­including experiments with using subjective camera throughout the entire film such as Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) and, more recently, Hardcore Henry (Ilya Naishuller, 2015)—­subjective camera is used sparingly in cinema, but might adequately describe the first-­person point of view used in video games like Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. However, I mostly avoid using the term “subjective” in my descriptions of perspective in combat films and video games, because in many instances,

18  •  Destructive Sublime

FIGURE 2  The embedded perspective in The Battle of San Pietro ( John Huston, 1945).

the camera does not take on the visual perspective of a particular character or “subject.” Instead, in the combat photography of World War II, the point of view presented was that of the camera itself placed in the midst of activity. Although the camera was typically carried by a combat cameraman, many cameras were also mounted on equipment and operated remotely or automatically, such as the gunsight cameras featured in The Fighting Lady (Louis de  Rochemont, 1945), which I discuss further in chapter 1. The sometimes blurry, shaky, or imperfect film that resulted from the camera’s placement within a war zone does not symbolize the cameraman’s subjective state, but rather makes the audience aware of the camera itself and its proximity to violence. Later, when such cinematography is mimicked in films like Saving Private Ryan, the technique is used less (though occasionally) to present the subjective view of a particular character and more to highlight the chaotic surroundings of the recording mechanism itself. First-­person shooter games often do approximate subjective effects by having the image blur or turn red to signal being wounded, but even in this case, the visual perspective includes elements that are outside the immediate perception of the player-­character, including the icons on the screen that give the player a map, compass, ammunition count, or health status (these on-­ screen elements are commonly referred to as the “heads-­up display”). Thus, as with films, if there is a subjectivity on display in a video game, it is as likely to be that of the apparatus

Introduction  •  19

itself—­the virtual camera or the game interface—­as that of the character being represented. To embed means to place securely within; in the military parlance of the early twenty-­first century, it refers specifically to the attachment of reporters and photographers to military units. In this system, which rose to prominence during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, journalists gained greater, uncensored access to the activities of troops, while the military ensured their own control over what was covered and how. Just as the embedded journalist reports on events as a near participant, so too does the embedded perspective give a view in close proximity to the action, even if it does not correspond exactly to a specific person’s perception. My use of a contemporary term forms part of my retrospective methodology; it also illuminates how the embedded perspective synthesizes the militarization of vision and the weaponized camera. In this way, the embedded perspective activates the destructive sublime, even though it presents things on a smaller, closer scale instead of reveling in the vastness of the battlefield or grand vistas of devastation. The embedded point of view, despite the fact that it often does not represent a particular person’s eyes, is closer to the body, presenting a corporeal response to violence and chaos, even if the corpus in question is that of a camera or video game interface. The close-­up views of horror and pain elicit strong, sometimes contradictory sensations—­disgust, fascination, pity, vengefulness—­that may go beyond reason and understanding. The lack of context, spatial or otherwise, in the embedded point of view only emphasizes the visceral impact of its immediacy and nearness to combat.

Opposed Perspectives: The Remote Point of View At the opposite end of the spectrum from the embedded perspective lies what I call the “remote” point of view. This viewpoint stands far from the action, typically off to the side or up above. Unlike the embedded point of view, it does not take the position of a firsthand witness but presents a distanced, nonspecific perspective—­the equivalent of a god’s-eye view or that of a general looking down at the model of a planned invasion. Abstracted from any particular viewpoint, the remote perspective gives an overview that provides some spatial, if not ideological, context. It aligns well with the aerial or vertical vision described by Jordan Crandall in that it is a perspective “not recognizably our own.” Instead of offering the perspective of being on the battlefield, it presents combat from a remove that multiplies the initial distance of mediation, the barrier between spectator and screen. This reduplicated distance finds expression in a number of combat films that show the waging of war from afar, from the re-­creations of the destruction of Pearl Harbor in December  7th, Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer et al., 1970), or Pearl Harbor to aerial views of beach invasions in Sands of Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, or Flags of Our Fathers.

20  •  Destructive Sublime

FIGURE 3  The remote perspective in The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962).

By using the technological affordances of the day—­from miniature models to crane shots to virtual cinematography—­these texts visualize the destructive sublime in a more typical sense, showing views of seemingly endless battlefronts, fleets of ships, and lines of soldiers. Unlike the proximate horror rendered by the embedded point of view, the remote perspective prompts a feeling of awe or astonishment at the massiveness of total war and the scale of the violence. Although a wider stretch of space can be shown in the remote perspective, this increased area does not necessarily occasion rational understanding or better analysis of the situation. By evoking the destructive sublime, these sequences counteract such understanding by bombarding the senses with immense scale and the impression of infinitude. In addition to meaning something separated or placed far apart, remote may also describe something performed at a distance, such as remote control. Again, using a retrospective methodology to allow contemporary aspects of media and culture to open up new perspectives on older media, I chose the term “remote” because of the predominance of digital tools in the contemporary military that allow for remote sensing, information gathering, and even the deployment of weapons. The primary instantiation of U.S. military action since the initial invasions of the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan has been the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone). While UAVs fly directly over combat zones (or areas with suspected enemy insurgents), they are piloted and controlled remotely, typically by U.S. servicemembers located within the United States or on military bases potentially thousands of miles from their targets. UAV piloting interfaces are increasingly designed to mimic video game controls.42 Therefore, by referencing the contemporary military application of the term “remote,” I allude to the connections between contemporary video game perspectives, UAVs being used in the War on Terror, and prior instances of the aerial or far-­off view. This retrospective methodology

Introduction  •  21

exposes the ways that remote views in previous media opened up the visual imagination toward what Crandall describes as a visual language of tracking, predicting, and targeting, culminating in the current reliance on drones in contemporary warfare. Just as the embedded point of view might correspond in some instances with the subjective perspective as defined in film studies, the remote point of view could be designated as “objective.” The term “objective,” however, is tricky for two reasons. First, in this context, it might imply the visual perspective of an object, like a camera, rather than the view of a person or character. Yet, as shown above, the embedded perspective is just as likely to reveal its mechanical origins in a film camera or video game engine. Therefore, while the remote view takes a position abstracted from the human perspective as combatant (it is “not recognizably our own,” as Crandall puts it), it is not unique in showing the viewpoint of an “object.” Second, in common usage, “objective” means fair or impartial; to use this term in describing visual perspectives might imply that the embedded point of view is biased, while the remote view is disinterested and evenhanded, and therefore more accurate or trustworthy. I do analyze some films—­particularly the large-­scale re-­creations of the 1960s and ’70s that I discuss in chapter 3—­that use the remote perspective, especially aerial shots, as part of a larger strategy of objectivity as impartiality, suggesting the filmmakers’ ability to know and encapsulate all of an event like a battle into one film or one sequence. However, I avoid the term “objective” to refer to a distanced perspective in general, since that viewpoint can also be used to construct the destructive sublime, bombarding spectators with powerful sensations that cannot be accommodated to reason, as opposed to providing unbiased and truthful information. Placed on a spectrum, the embedded and remote perspectives stand at opposite ends, offering two divergent possibilities for the representation of combat. Some media texts rely predominantly on one or the other—­first-­ person shooters, for instance, apply the embedded perspective almost exclusively—­but most media make use of both viewpoints. I also do not mean to suggest that embedded and remote are the only two perspectives possible within war media; they merely represent two possible extremes. This book asserts that by analyzing the configurations of these viewpoints diachronically, we can learn something about how mainstream American media have used World War II through time to assess and appraise the contemporary connection between war and the nation.

Opposed Forms of Media-­Making: Recording and Reenactment In addition to the embedded and remote perspectives, a second aesthetic continuum within war media distinguishes between two primary modes of

22  •  Destructive Sublime

media-­making: recording and reenactment. Recording refers to firsthand documentation of an event; within cinema, it entails the visual transcription of that event using the cinematic language and technology of the time, whether celluloid or digital. Reenactment, on the other hand, indicates the re-­creation of events at a later date; within visual media, this means the performance, or reperformance, of actions in front of cameras or the replication of the objects, events, and settings within the computer-­generated worlds of video games. Robert Burgoyne defines reenactment as “the act of imaginative re-­creation that allows the spectator to imagine they are ‘witnessing again’ the events of the past.”43 Although it seems like recording and reenactment should be easily distinguishable and diametrically opposed, this book shows how often war media blur the lines between them. For instance, in chapter 1, I discuss how The Battle of San Pietro uses the embedded perspective to give a sense of the chaotic action of battle. John Huston made the film with troops in Italy during the war, but evidence suggests that the battle scenes were reenactments filmed away from the front lines days or weeks after the events they are purported to record. In chapter 5, I discuss how the video game Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 uses photographs, maps, and documents from the war to re-­create exact buildings, streets, and spatial relationships, muddling the distinction between record and re-­creation. As I demonstrate, reenactment plays a larger role in the war genre, particularly in documentaries, than we usually expect; therefore, I see recording and reenactment as two ends of a spectrum, rather than mutually exclusive opposites. These two media-­making modes correspond to two different ideals of realism. The ideal of the cinematic record, which reached its peak in the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s, relies on notions of the film camera as a dispassionate observer that inscribes the world directly into images. In particular, the ideal of the record is founded on the ability of the medium to capture contingent events as they occur spontaneously in front of the camera. I discuss this documentary ideal, particularly its relationship to the work of French film theorist André Bazin, in more detail in chapter 1. For now, I want to emphasize that the idea of film as record neglects cinema’s long history of artifice, using staging, special and visual effects, and other techniques to manipulate the image beyond mere reportage. This ideal has also come under challenge in the last twenty or more years with the ascendance of digital imagery, as well as the growing prevalence of reenactment in documentaries since The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988). Part of my project, in fact, is to historicize the trajectory of the ideal of the cinematic record of war, from when it was newly possible (in the recordings made of World War II by combat cameramen) to its replacement by physical reenactments (in the war films of the 1960s and ’70s) and then digital re-­creations (in the war films and video games of the 1990s and later).

Introduction  •  23

Reenactment carries its own ideals, as well. Since reenactment happens at a temporal remove from the events it represents, it cannot provide direct testimony of what occurred. However, those who stage reenactments prioritize the collection and interpretation of evidence from the events they re-­create. Accuracy is prized, though it is often achieved only in superficial matters: what uniforms and weapons look like, where things took place, how participants interacted. Historian Vanessa Agnew writes that reenactors are “preoccupied with the minutiae of daily life” and “vie to create the appearance of historical fidelity.”44 Although Agnew studies historical reenactors, her comments also apply to those who create reenactments for films and other media. The preoccupation with genuine objects, fidelity of appearance, and the minute details of the historical world can be found in films like The Longest Day and video games like Brothers in Arms. In the large-­scale reenactment films of the 1960s and ’70s—­films like The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge (Ken Annakin, 1965), and Tora! Tora! Tora!—­filmmakers strove for authenticity by doing extensive research, accessing visual records, consulting experts and firsthand participants, and using weapons, vehicles, or other materials from the war. Instead of capturing chance occurrences on film, these reenactments strive for a different ideal: complete knowledge and reproduction down to the last detail. Reenactment’s mode is “agglomerative,” according to Agnew, based on the accumulation of bits of information and the relics of history in order to piece together a comprehensive view.45 In my analysis of reenactments of World War II for films and video games, I propose that reenactment is wrapped up in a quest for mastery over the unknowable past. The minutiae of history cloak the vast gap of knowledge and experience between the past and the present that cannot be filled even by memory. Genuine articles and realistic replicas fill that hole with presence, even if they are not explanatory. The reenactor’s goal of comprehensiveness thus refers to both the physical collection of a vast array of historical objects and information and the psychological comprehension of this totality. The comprehensiveness of reenactment aids understanding, or at least gives the impression of understanding based on the accretion of “authentic” objects. However, Agnew notes that this “insistence on ‘authenticity’ grounds historical claims that might otherwise lack legitimacy.”46 In other words, while reenactments may be accurate in detail, the broader contextual stakes might be misconstrued. Although, as Agnew explains, reenactments are often explicitly apolitical, they may end up reinforcing common (mis)perceptions of an event, rather than allowing new questions to be answered. I argue in chapter 3, for instance, that World War II films produced during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, such as The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora!, use reenactments—­along with the remote perspective—­to suggest that war is knowable and rational, despite contemporary evidence to the contrary.

24  •  Destructive Sublime

* * * As the chapter outline below makes clear, Destructive Sublime traces these aesthetic forms—­embedded and remote perspectives, recorded and reenacted modes—­throughout media representations of World War II from the 1940s through the present. In various combinations, these aesthetics reveal how World War  II has taken on various meanings over the decades, sometimes confirming and sometimes contradicting the myth of the “good war.” In many cases, aesthetic forms coalesce into larger patterns. For instance, in the 1940s combat documentaries I discuss in chapter 1, the embedded point of view of the combat cameraman fuses with the ideal of recording. In the reenactment films of the 1960s and ’70s, however, the use of the remote point of view is more prevalent, indicating an effort toward both perceptual comprehensiveness and overarching knowledge. In part, the changes in aesthetic technique over time are technologically determined. The creation of relatively small, lightweight cameras in the 1940s allowed them to be taken places they had never had access to before, like combat. If not for these handheld cameras, the embedded point of view would never have emerged during the war. Likewise, the remote views of the 1960s were enabled by new helicopter and crane technologies, allowing for high-­angle and aerial shots that were far more difficult in previous time periods. However, it would be unwise to attribute all aesthetic change to the influence of technology. Instead, I maintain that technology is just one of many determining factors—­including social, cultural, and political circumstances—­working together to prompt the emergence, dominance, and decline of aesthetic forms. Technologies and techniques work together but are not synonymous. Aesthetic techniques not only demonstrate what is technologically possible at a given time but also are developed at particular moments because they can help express what is culturally meaningful in that period. Thus the chapters ahead combine some consideration of technology with formal analysis and critical interpretation in order to better demonstrate the rich, sometimes conflicting, meanings of war and culture present in World War II media.

Chapter Outline I began this introduction with an example from a video game in order to demonstrate the value of a retrospective methodology to the study of historical media and changing media aesthetics over time. By priming this study with the sensational affect and visceral combat of video games, I propose that contemporary media can open up new avenues to reenvision legacy media. Video games, and in particular first-­person shooters, expose how the intensity of combat and prevalence of violence can work against the typical associations

Introduction  •  25

of World War  II with duty, sacrifice, and virtue. These games prompt us to focus on the corporeal sensations of combat, which are present even in noninteractive media through battle scenes. An emphasis on sensation and aesthetics may lead to an acknowledgment of the ambiguity of media, which include potentially contradictory messages provided by spectacle and combat. Despite my retrospective methodology, though, the chapters are arranged chronologically in order to show how aesthetics of combat changed over time, from the 1940s to now. To this diachronic study, my look back involves a renewed emphasis on sensation, violence, and action that reveals aspects of the World War II combat genre that have been previously hidden. The first two chapters explore American documentary and feature film depictions of World War  II made while the war was ongoing. In chapter 1, “‘No Faking Here’: The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries,” I examine a series of combat documentaries produced by the U.S. military in conjunction with Hollywood personnel during World War II, focusing on four in particular: Gregg Toland’s (with John Ford) December  7th, John Ford’s Battle of Midway, John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro, and producer Louis de Rochemont’s The Fighting Lady. These established many of the central aesthetics of the representation of World War II combat discussed in this book. Most importantly, Battle of Midway introduced a new style of realism that based its authenticity on the errors in the cinematography that served as evidence of the camera’s proximity to combat. These errors include the shaky camerawork, blurred focus, and erratic movement that have become the hallmark of battlefield cinematography in the intervening years. In order to claim authenticity, these aesthetic forms adopt an embedded perspective that joins the spectator’s point of view with that of a combatant. These markers also serve as evidence of the unfiltered nature of the recording, tying the ideals of the record with those of the embedded camera. A comparison with an earlier documentary, December  7th, shows that this representation becomes newly dominant during the war because of the way the camera becomes mobile throughout the front lines of combat. In short order, though, this aesthetic is detached from the specific filming conditions that influenced the style in the first place, meaning that as early as The Battle of San Pietro in 1945, these markers of the proximity of the camera to the action merely became part of the style of reenactments. From an analysis of this originary documentary footage, the book then turns to a study of the “afterlife” of this footage in subsequent media, from its insertion into fictional films’ combat sequences to its imitation in contemporary films and video games. In chapter 2, “The ‘Good War’? Style and Space in 1940s Combat Films,” I focus on two American feature films made during the war—­Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer (Henry Hathaway, 1944)—­ that illustrate the narrative and aesthetic consequences of

26  •  Destructive Sublime

integrating documentary footage and new special-­effects techniques into combat sequences. The almost hallucinatory battle scenes in Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer juxtapose documentary footage, special effects, and classical staging, resulting in incoherent representations of space and time. The alternation between the embedded and remote perspectives and the recorded and reenacted modes creates an unstable space of war. The unexpected points of view and inconsistent scale and visual quality on display in combat sequences undercut the force of the narrative, investing instead in powerful sensations that open the possibility for the emergence of counternarratives. Drawing from Dana Polan’s work on the fractured narratives of Hollywood films in the 1940s, I argue that the aesthetics of combat films were similarly fragmented, illustrating the competing aesthetic and ideological motivations of filmmakers at the time. While the initial conventions of the “good war” narrative were established in this period, it was also witness to strange spatial and temporal dislocations that illustrated the perceptual and existential challenges the war posed to vision and representation. Chapter 3, “Rationalizing War: Reconstructions of World War  II during the Cold War and Vietnam,” examines the films of the 1960s and ’70s that re-­created historical battles with large-­scale reenactments, focusing especially on The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora! These films are remarkable for eschewing the embedded perspective and recording mode of the wartime documentaries discussed in chapter 1 and developing a new set of aesthetics based on the remote view and reenactment. By contextualizing the films in relation to the ideological circumstances of the Cold War and then the war in Vietnam, I argue that the shift from using documentary footage to illustrate combat to recreating battles through large-­scale reenactments was not only an aesthetic choice but a political one. The combat sequences, in this instance, mirror the narratives of the films in emphasizing communications, information processing, logistics, and planning. Ultimately, the combat sequences underline an effort—­led by Darryl F. Zanuck, producer of The Longest Day—­to re-­create events of World War  II through an agglomeration of as many “authentic” objects and realistic details as possible. This production practice mirrors the narrative of The Longest Day, which replaces the combat group of wartime films with a loose conglomeration of interconnected agents from every part of D-Day. Instead of action heroes, these agents are more likely to be bureaucratic officials, fighting the war through knowledge and educated guesses rather than valiant action. In this way, the aesthetics and the narratives of these films work together to make war out to be rational, knowable, and explainable at a time when the Vietnam War presented a whole new military, and aesthetic, challenge to American culture. The final two chapters move ahead to cinema, television, and video games from the 1990s to the present, exploring how these more recent texts

Introduction  •  27

reference, re-­create, and speak in dialogue with the films discussed in previous chapters. Chapter 4, “Nostalgia for Combat: World War II at the End of Cinema,” explores the nostalgia that World War  II combat films of the late 1990s and early 2000s demonstrate for their earlier counterparts in the 1940s. This chapter focuses primarily on three Hollywood productions that combine the aesthetic ideals of the military documentaries discussed in chapter 1 with cutting-­edge digital visual effects: Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Flags of Our Fathers. In doing so, they demonstrate a nostalgia for celluloid, and especially the embedded perspective and recording functions of combat documentaries, just as celluloid was being replaced by digital technologies of film production, editing, and distribution. These heterogeneous visual registers—­the precision of computer-­generated images with the marked (and even exaggerated) deficiency of documentary-­inspired images—­combine with graphic depictions of violence and wounded bodies to integrate powerful vicarious sensations with the structures of melodrama. I argue that while the 1940s films often presented American soldiers as active agents who sacrificed their desires or their lives for the common good, the World War II films of the 1990s and early 2000s present American soldiers as suffering victims beset by the unexplained forces of war. In this instance, the destructive sublime presents the intimate details of anguished bodies, making American soldiers out to be victims and thereby redeeming them from their brutal behavior during the Vietnam War (or, at least, in movies about Vietnam). The final chapter, “Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground,” explores the ways that video games set in World War  II follow the conventions of the cinematic combat genre while also introducing fresh ways to view both the Second World War and contemporary conflicts. The relentless focus on action and fighting in first-­person shooters like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor (DreamWorks Interactive/Electronic Arts, 1999) allows for the chaotic essence of the destructive sublime to emerge unimpeded by the concerns of narrative, particularly in the multiplayer modes in which players fight against other players and story is at a minimum. While strategy games provide a remote overview of the gamespace of war, the first-­person perspective of many contemporary shooter games takes the embedded point of view of the combat cameraman to a new extreme, combining the sense of presence and proximity with the act of targeting and shooting. In addition to Crandall’s armed vision, this perspective exemplifies Patrick Crogan’s argument that video games express the logics of preemption and logistical control that describe the wider techno-­scientific legacy of computer media. This legacy includes the development of simulations, which use computer processing power to model variable outcomes. Video games, too, are a form of simulation, leaving open novel possibilities for historical representation in which new stories and even new outcomes might emerge. In this way, these video games draw

28  •  Destructive Sublime

from the iconographic elements of World War  II—­the weapons, uniforms, and settings—­while their gameplay better reflects elements of contemporary, digitally integrated warfare. Nevertheless, the video games still misrepresent modern war by modeling combat as something precise and controlled that can be mastered through repetition. In the conclusion, I explore a shift in how American media have portrayed the Second World War since 2008. Video games like Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (Gearbox Software/Ubisoft, 2008) alongside films and series like Inglourious Basterds, Fury (David Ayer, 2014), and The Pacific (HBO mini­ series, 2010) illustrate the brutality and corruption of war, reflecting the seemingly never-­ending War on Terror instead of a nostalgic reverence for the “good war.” Inglourious Basterds rewrites the history of the war to highlight the theme of revenge, which is typically downplayed in World War II media in favor of stories of willing sacrifice and noble values. Like Tarantino’s film, Fury returns to the “dirty group” format of films like The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967) and Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970). By showing American soldiers participating in cruelty, Fury demonstrates how war—­any war, even World War II—­corrupts the soul and destroys the humanity of soldiers. In this way, it mirrors a contemporary concern with the psychological aftermath of war as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan War films like The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) and American Sniper. Far from simplistic propaganda or uninventive reiterations of the “good war” mythology, the texts under examination here show the World War  II combat genre to be capable of a great degree of ambiguity, providing multiple, and often contradictory, visions of war and American culture. Looking back at the genre through the lens of contemporary video games exposes new meanings, revealing inconsistencies in the typical narratives and conventions associated with World War II. Combat video games remind us of the importance of spatial representation and the visual perspectives used to access the geographies of the genre. While games like Call of Duty or Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 allude to elements of the genre’s narrative formula—­the “melting pot” platoon, the reluctant leader, the bond of brotherhood among soldiers—­their fierce commitment to combat exposes aspects of the genre often overlooked: the great spectacle of destruction, the powerful sensations of witnessing death, the excitement of shooting, and the alignment of vision with targeting. Rather than existing on the periphery, these facets of the genre, which I have labeled the destructive sublime, comprise its predominant pleasures and modes of appeal. Far from being “excess,” the elements of sensational address, graphic violence, and irrational spectacle are central to the genre, forming a striking counternarrative to the conventional view of the war as something virtuous or moral, as something “good.”

1

“No Faking Here” The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries “Yes, this really happened,” intones the narrator of John Ford’s 1942 combat documentary, The Battle of Midway. The camera looks up at an American flag that a group of marines has just raised in the midst of the battle for Midway Atoll. This striking shot captures the Americans’ nationalistic determination to keep the Japanese from capturing the island. The shot also stands out, though, because of its visual quality—­or, to be more precise, its lack of quality. The image, exposed on Kodachrome color film, is slightly blurry and overexposed, and a large lens flare partially obscures the image of the flag. The camera is at an odd angle, so the flagpole seems to be tilting over as it juts into the blue sky. Other parts of the film share this rough, unpolished quality. In another remarkable shot, the camera shakes so hard in response to an explosion that the strip of film is dislodged from the camera aperture and the frame line is exposed. According to the professional standards of photographers and cameramen of the day, these shots would be considered cinematographic errors best left on the cutting room floor. These so-­called errors, though, were at the heart of an unprecedented film aesthetic emerging during World War II. This new expression of the destructive sublime used the unrefined image as evidence of its authenticity and its proximity to real war. To do so, it broke the rules of conventional filmmaking 29

FIGURES 4 AND 5  A prominent lens flare and frame displacement mar the image of the

Kodachrome combat report in The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942).

“No Faking Here”  •  31

and highlighted those imperfections that may have previously caused the footage to be tossed in the trash. When the narrator says, “Yes, this really happened,” the statement is quaintly redundant. The aesthetic of the image, raw and unpretty, has already made this claim itself. The blurry exposure, cinematographic mistakes, and ungainly compositions serve as indicators of the camera’s presence in a war zone. Mistakes give the footage more authenticity because the images produce records not only of the events transpiring but also of the chaos of filming in the middle of combat. Instead of following classical Hollywood conventions of clarity, professionalism, and coherence, this new aesthetic of combat introduces conventions that demonstrate what Thomas Doherty calls “verisimilitude-­via-­deficiency.”1 This chapter charts the emergence of this new style within a segment of wartime documentaries made by Hollywood filmmakers for the U.S. military. This new aesthetic of failure ultimately became the visual calling card of the World War II combat documentary, but it existed alongside another, more pervasive grammar of the destructive sublime that visualized war through reenactments and the remote perspective. In this chapter, I examine how these two aesthetics forged competing images of the world at war—­one presented from a safe distance with totalizing comprehension and the other from an unsafe proximity to dangerous events as they unfolded. This aesthetic contest represented a battle for the meaning of the war as it was being played out on the front lines across the globe. These documentaries contain the seeds of the contrasting aesthetic devices that this book traces throughout American media representations of World War II; these forms alternatively naturalize and denaturalize war, lull and shock their viewers, and confirm and confound the assumptions of their audiences. Examining the production and reception histories of four combat documentaries—­The Battle of Midway, December 7th (Gregg Toland/John Ford, 1943), The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston, 1945), and The Fighting Lady (Louis de Rochemont, 1945)—­this chapter identifies elements of the two opposed aesthetic strategies and links them to contrasting philosophies of historical representation. While reenactments and the remote perspective held sway at the beginning of the war in films like December 7th, the rough aesthetics of The Battle of Midway opened up new possibilities for a crude, more “real” look at war that reached its apotheosis in The Battle of San Pietro and The Fighting Lady. However, the fact that much of The Battle of San Pietro was actually staged away from the front lines reveals that the new aesthetic is not a guarantor of truth or actuality but rather a visual style that connotes authenticity regardless of the circumstances of production. This, then, was the creation of not a new mode of filmmaking but rather a new style, one that could be mimicked in filming reenacted or fictionalized events to give them a sense of presence and urgency—­to make them look like they were filmed under actual combat conditions even when they were not.

32  •  Destructive Sublime

The trajectory of this style leads toward the shaky, handheld cinematography of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), which also uses the embedded camera to provide a sense of proximity and realism to its battle scenes, as I explore further in chapter 4. The influence of this style can also be found in the first-­person perspective of video games like the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series, discussed in chapter 5, which also attempt to engage users by placing them directly into the middle of the action. Because of its emphasis on the individuated perspective and the circumstances of filming, the new documentary aesthetic ignores bigger-­picture issues, such as the reasons for the war, encapsulated so well in films like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942–­1945). But it does create a new way of engaging viewers in the destructive sublime of combat, making the war viscerally felt and perceptually proximate. As I note in a final section of the chapter, which addresses French film theorist André Bazin’s hesitations about uncritical belief in the documentary image, the new kind of vision made possible by portable battlefield cameras may impress spectators by its seeming authenticity, but the camera-­eye can also distort and obfuscate reality.

Pearl Harbor in Hollywood: Gregg Toland and John Ford’s December 7th Before filming The Battle of Midway, legendary Hollywood director John Ford was involved with another film, December 7th. The latter film exemplifies an older mode of documentary filmmaking reliant on staged and reenacted material that was not easily distinguished from fictional filmmaking. During World War II, the lines between documentary and fictional filmmaking were blurred as the imperatives of total war brought everyone into war production in one way or another. Many Hollywood directors, for instance, got involved in making films for the military during the war. John Huston, William Wyler, Frank Capra, George Cukor, and George Stevens, alongside John Ford, all took part in making government-­or military-­sponsored documentary films.2 Many other Hollywood technicians and famous actors enlisted as well, including Clark Gable, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Sterling Hayden. Because they were bringing a Hollywood sensibility to a form of filmmaking with which many had no experience—­documentary or nonfiction filmmaking—­it’s no surprise that the results were often strange amalgams of documentary and fictional conventions. What is more surprising is that these same filmmakers were responsible for the appearance of a brand-­new aesthetic that revolutionized documentary film style. The story of December 7th begins even before the United States officially entered World War  II, when John Ford organized a group of film industry personnel into an informal, quasi-­military espionage group. Although Ford

“No Faking Here”  •  33

had missed his opportunity to participate in World War  I as a young man, he had a “romantic conception of himself as a roving seaman always ready to light out” and had arranged for himself a commission as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves in 1934.3 He began doing impromptu reconnaissance missions on his personal sailboat, usually on his own orders, scouting Japanese fishermen off the coast of San Diego or Mexico.4 Without receiving any authorization to do so, Ford started recruiting other people in the film industry for a military filmmaking unit that would provide photographic intelligence to aid the war effort in Europe. The Field Photographic Branch, or “Field Photo” for short, included such top names as cinematographers Gregg Toland and Joe August, special-­effects expert Ray Kellogg, character actor and World War  I veteran Jack Pennick, editor Robert Parrish, and screenwriters Sam Engel, Garson Kanin, and Budd Schulberg. With borrowed costumes and prop weapons, Ford put his conscripts through drills on the sound stages at Twentieth Century–­Fox. Without even shooting any film, Ford had already invested in the ethos of reenactment, using his skills as a metteur-­en-­ scene to re-­create martial activities independent of any legitimate military authority. Rebuffed by Ford’s beloved U.S. Navy, the Field Photo eventually found a place in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS; later, the CIA). “John Ford’s navy,” as some referred to it, operated outside of the military chain of command, providing film reports to OSS chief “Wild” Bill Donovan, who reported directly to President Roosevelt. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Donovan asked Ford and his crew to make a film documenting the rebuilding of the Pacific Fleet in order to reassure the public about the navy’s preparedness.5 The working title for the film was The Story of Pearl Harbor: An Epic in American History, and Ford handed the reins over to Gregg Toland, an experienced cinematographer known for his groundbreaking work on Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), who had been itching to sit in the director’s chair. Ford and Toland had worked together previously on The Long Voyage Home ( John Ford, 1940) and The Grapes of Wrath ( John Ford, 1940). Influenced at some points by the Depression-­era documentary photographs of Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-­White, The Grapes of Wrath expressed a mode of social realism that worked to expose the lives of the downtrodden, but Toland had little experience with documentary filmmaking. Toland and Sam Engel, formerly a writer and producer for Twentieth Century–­Fox, flew to Hawaii to begin production in January 1942. They shot some background material, obtained copies of the minimal footage shot during the attack by two amateur cameramen, and organized some reenactments at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field. But their designs for the film were far grander than a brief newsreel about military preparedness. Toland and his crew wrote a screenplay, hired actors and extras, and set up shop back at the Twentieth Century–­Fox studios in Los Angeles.6

34  •  Destructive Sublime

Toland initially produced thirty-­eight thousand feet of black-­and-­white footage for December 7th, which was culled to eight thousand feet for his original cut of eighty-­three minutes.7 Toland’s film begins and ends with extensive scripted scenes featuring familiar actors playing American archetypes. There are no credits identifying the actors and their roles, but many of them would have been recognizable to audiences at the time, including Harry Davenport, who had appeared in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), and Walter Huston, who had played the title characters in Abraham Lincoln (D. W. Griffith, 1930) and Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936). (Walter Huston is also the father of The Battle of San Pietro director John Huston, discussed below, who directed him in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1948] after the war.) Dana Andrews, then an up-­and-­coming actor, discussed at more length in the next chapter, also appears in December 7th. The style of December 7th does not differ substantially from a typical Hollywood fictional film. In no way does it attempt to “fool” audiences into thinking that these were “real” events captured firsthand by a camera. In the first third of the film, Uncle Sam (Walter Huston) wrestles with his conscience, “Mr. C” (Harry Davenport), over the vast number of Japanese citizens living in the Hawaiian Islands, whom Mr. C depicts as having divided loyalties at best; a later section of the film depicts them as spies for the villainous Japanese consul general. Toland paints an ominous portrait of the islands through montages of Japanese cultural centers, deceitful Japanese saboteurs masquerading as chauffeurs or gardeners, and an “interview” with a Shinto priest who confirms that the Japanese worship their emperor as a god. The second part of the film reenacts the Pearl Harbor attack, using large-­ scale reenactments, miniature models, practical special effects, and a small amount of newsreel footage. After the advancing Japanese are finally “beaten back,” the film honors fallen soldiers, shows an emotional funeral service, and lauds the efforts of those repairing the ships damaged in the attacks. A final section consists of a conversation between two dead soldiers walking in a cemetery: Dana Andrews as an anonymous young sailor who died at Pearl Harbor and Paul Hurst as a cynical soldier who died at the Marne. The Great War veteran morosely discusses the futility of endless war and fears the return to isolationism. Using an extended baseball metaphor, the Pearl Harbor sailor displays his optimism, declaring that he has faith in “the Roosevelts, the Churchills, the Stalins, and the Chiang Kai-­sheks” to make the world safe, “to call a fair ball fair and a foul ball foul.” When studio executives and military officials were finally shown the film, they found much of it objectionable. The use of theatrical dramatizations and sophisticated special effects to re-­create the battle of Pearl Harbor were not the source of controversy, however. Rather, Adm. Harold Stark, head of

“No Faking Here”  •  35

FIGURE 6  Walter Huston as Uncle Sam and Harry Davenport as his conscience in December 7th (Gregg Toland and John Ford, 1943).

naval operations at Pearl Harbor, objected to how the navy was represented in the film: “The picture leaves the distinct impression that the Navy was not on the job, and this is not true.”8 Julian Johnson, head of production at Twentieth Century–­Fox, where much of the film had been made, gushed, “This is the most powerful American war film I have ever seen far and away,” yet he claimed that the ending scene, returning to the issue of America’s isolationist past and the stalemate horrors of the First World War, was “bad anti-­ climax.”9 Only one respondent objected to the film’s reliance on dramatic reenactments and the scripted allegories of Uncle Sam. Lowell Mellett, head of the Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures, complained about the government’s involvement in the production of what was to him clearly a fictional motion picture. Mellett objected that the “presentation of fictional propaganda . . . would seem to be an improper activity for the U.S. government.”10 Although he successfully blocked the film from getting a theatrical release, his concerns about government-­produced fiction and the use of reenactments went unanswered. The U.S. Navy, nervous about what Toland had filmed under the aegis of the government’s intelligence service, confiscated Toland’s film. A year after its seizure, John Ford got hold of a copy of the film and, with editor Robert Parrish, shortened it to thirty-­four minutes, excising the most politically controversial parts—­the scripted scenes with Uncle Sam and Mr. C and the

36  •  Destructive Sublime

conversation between the two dead soldiers—­while making editorial changes to emphasize the success of America’s response. The great majority of the battle scenes in both the full-­length and the condensed versions are reconstructions, created by extensive reenactments using both Pearl Harbor personnel and actors in costume. The film’s wide-­ranging special effects were overseen by Ray Kellogg, who went on to produce the special effects for dozens of Hollywood films in the 1950s and to codirect The Green Berets with John Wayne in 1968. December  7th utilized practical effects like explosions and simulated gunfire as well as a significant number of miniature models, including model aircraft moved on wires and rigged with explosives and scale models of military ships filling an immense water tank at the Twentieth Century–­Fox studios.11 Ford and Toland had been loaned the small amount of newsreel footage that had been filmed during the attack, including the explosion of the USS Arizona, but they used it primarily as a visual reference for re-­creations on the Twentieth Century–­Fox back lots.12 These reenacted scenes provide what could not have been captured in the fragmentary footage taken on the day of the attack: images of the Japanese planes as they approached the islands, scenes of destruction on all the major airfields and ships, and perhaps most importantly, close-­ups of American soldiers and sailors as they fought back and were injured and killed. The reenacted sequences “fill in” what was not recorded on film during the battle but also shape the events to emphasize certain elements, such as the valiant effort to defend the islands. Instead of the rough and unpolished look of the combat sequences in The Battle of Midway, the re-­creations present these events in a combination of aerial overviews and conventional editing strategies. December  7th constructs sequences using the continuity strategies of shot/reverse-­ shot, the 180-­degree rule, and cause-­effect linearity, forming an omniscient perspective of the battle that provides visualizations of important events occurring in various places across the islands. In this way, it mostly relies on the remote perspective looking down at (miniature models of ) battleships at the harbor while also utilizing conventional editing techniques. Reenactment and Hollywood professional style were, in fact, the norm in documentary and newsreel filmmaking in the early 1940s.

A History of Documentary Reenactment Filmmakers have re-­created combat sequences using miniature models since the very first war films. For their 1898 film The Battle of Santiago Bay, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith of Vitagraph crudely reconstructed the battle with cutout photographs of battleships floating on bits of wood in a shallow water tank. Specks of gunpowder provided miniscule explosions, and cigarette smoke added to the haze.13 Reenactments of combat were widespread in

“No Faking Here”  •  37

nonfictional films and newsreels through World War I and beyond. Technical limitations meant that footage of combat taken during actual battles was very rare. Heavy, bulky cameras required tripods and other equipment, making travel with this unwieldy apparatus difficult and expensive. Cameramen were generally disallowed from the front; even if they were able to get near the action, their large cameras were often mistaken for weapons, making them prominent targets for the enemy. Filming could only proceed if the lighting conditions and terrain were suitable, and filmmakers would have had to set up cameras ahead of time. With these constraints, re-­creations were understandably preferable—­especially when actual combat footage tended to be blurry, far away from the action, or less exhilarating than an actor’s reenactment. A break for war reportage came in the Mexican Revolution, when a deal finally allowed motion pictures to be made of real combat up close. In 1914, Pancho Villa, the charismatic general of the revolution, sold the motion-­ picture rights for his part of the war to the Mutual Film Corporation of New York. In exchange for twenty-­five thousand dollars and hefty royalties, Villa agreed to go into battle during daylight hours at times convenient for Mutual’s cameramen in the field and, whenever possible, to delay attacks until they arrived.14 Villa recognized at this early date the propaganda value—­as well as purely monetary value—­of “authentic” combat footage. Because the cameramen were able to set up ahead of time in optimum conditions with an idea of what would follow, they were able to capture the intimate views they desired. Nevertheless, many of the films claiming to show events of the revolution were still fabrications. Because of advances in camera technology and long-­focus lenses, coverage of World War I in America’s silent newsreels should have been of better quality and more complete. However, strict censorship and the reluctance of military authorities to allow filmmaking at the front meant that newsreels once again used elaborately choreographed reenactments to present the events in Europe. The fictional films that came later, such as Universal’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), presented a much more vivid portrait of World War I combat than any newsreel at the time could, since newsreel audiences rarely got a glimpse of real fighting. The practice of faking war footage was so extensive that a November 1915 issue of the Literary Digest published an expose illustrating how “bladders” of gunpowder were placed underwater and electrically exploded next to costumed extras.15 After the growth and expansion of the newsreel through the late silent and early sound period, motion-­picture footage of important world events became more common. Newsreel segments devoted to sporting events, presidential elections, coronations, natural disasters, important trials, and spectacular crime were customary. Still, coverage of events was limited to what was easily accessible to newsreel cameras. For instance, newsreel reportage of Charles

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Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight showed only his takeoff and his welcome-­ home celebration.16 More complete coverage was only possible for events like parades or formal ceremonies that were planned ahead of time so that multiple cameras could be set up to film the event from various angles. Some of the most memorable moments seen in newsreels, however, were unplanned. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated during a motorcade procession in France in front of a full Fox Movietone camera crew in 1934—­with sound. Even more famously, the explosion of the Hindenburg was captured by unsuspecting cameramen who had merely been dispatched to film what they thought was a routine zeppelin arrival.17 These chance events caught on film anticipated later famed images such as the explosion of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor and the Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination. Nevertheless, these dramatic events caught on film were very much the exception, not the rule. Raymond Fielding’s history of the newsreel suggests that if newsreel companies had had to rely on “authentic” motion-­picture records of newsworthy and spectacular events, they would have gone out of business a long time before they did. With stimulating authentic footage few and far between and fresh editions arriving in theaters twice a week, newsreels had to rely heavily on manufactured, manipulated, staged, or artificial news: “In the history of newsreel production the faking of newsreel content to augment deficient or insufficient footage for the week’s release was a frequent practice, commonly admitted and sometimes boasted of by newsreel editors and cameramen.”18 Louis de Rochemont, founder of the film newsmagazine The March of Time and producer of The Fighting Lady, which is discussed later in this chapter, claimed that reenactments were “frequently sharper and more detailed than the ‘real’ thing.”19 British and American documentary filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s saw their films as more complex and artistic than mere newsreels, which British documentary pioneer John Grierson disparaged as “just a speedy snip-­snap of some utterly unimportant ceremony.”20 But Grierson and his British cohorts as well as Robert Flaherty, Pare Lorentz, and others in the American movement were just as likely to stage actions for the camera. Grierson defined documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality,” and as Brian Winston has shown, dramatization of events was a distinguishing feature of Grierson’s documentary practice: “Drama was not only already present in Grierson, it is the ontological mark of the Griersonian documentary, the essence of what is meant by ‘treatment.’”21 These filmmakers constructed sets, scripted dialogue, and coached or directed their “actors” to perform particular deeds for the camera. Technological limitations, especially those of synchronized sound, meant that sets were built for the trawler’s cabin in Drifters ( John Grierson, 1929) and for the mail train in Night Mail (Harry Watt/Basil Wright, 1936). Lacking the lightweight tape recorders that enabled the Direct Cinema

“No Faking Here”  •  39

movement in the 1960s, filmmakers had to set up their heavy and space-­ consuming cameras and audio equipment in specific conditions, preferring large, indoor spaces with controllable light and sound conditions. Even after Grierson’s departure for Canada in the late 1930s, these practices continued during the war. In Humphrey Jennings’s celebrated documentary Fires Were Started (1943), for instance, firefighters reenacted their valiant efforts during the Battle of Britain on abandoned buildings with fires set ablaze specifically for the filming. As these examples demonstrate, “reconstruction” was a necessary component of most documentary filmmakers’ production methods through the 1930s and 1940s. The civilian and enlisted cinematographers who were engaged in filming combat during World War II had also internalized the typical strategies of newsreel camerawork, including staging and reenacting, as well as the professional visual style of Hollywood. Initially, photographic units in the army and navy drew members from those who had already received photographic or cinematic training at one of the newsreel schools, such as those The March of Time or Movietone News operated. Then, in February 1942, the War Department purchased the old Paramount studios on Long Island in Astoria, New York. Thereafter, all training of new soldier-­cameramen took place at this facility. Many Hollywood veterans served as instructors at the new facility, teaching camera basics, cinematographic technique, editing, continuity, planning, and processing. The training facility taught students how to work a camera but also techniques that would ensure Hollywood-­style continuity. For instance, they were trained to get multiple angles on an event so that the film could cut back and forth between views. They were also trained with the rules of the 180-­degree system, which ensures consistent screen direction (such as American soldiers always moving left to right) and the impression of three-­dimensional space. The combat cameraman was trained to shoot in such a way that images could be edited together coherently later, presenting the illusion of a contiguous space and time, even when the images were not related. Aesthetically, then, filmed reality looked about the same as filmed fiction. One army cameraman explained that at the front, “we could not control the action to our cameras, but the principles of continuity had become so deeply ingrained that we instinctively shot pictures that ‘made sense’ on the screen.”22 However, despite the strongly inculcated practices of re-­creation and Hollywood-­style continuity editing, the circumstances of filming World War II allowed for the emergence of the new, unrefined aesthetic during this period.

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“18 Minutes of Actuality”: The Battle of Midway and the New Combat Aesthetic The Battle of Midway presents striking views of up-­close-­and-­personal action in the midst of combat. It was filmed on color film stock primarily during an air raid on Midway Atoll during the three-­day naval battle, a turning point in America’s war against Japan. John Ford learned of the incipient attack on Midway while he was at Pearl Harbor, seeing to the production of December 7th. Soon, he and enlisted navy photographer Jack MacKenzie Jr., a former RKO cameraman, were en route to Midway, arriving just days before the first raid. During the main attack on June 4, 1942, Ford and MacKenzie were dispatched to take positions in the observation tower on top of the powerhouse on Midway’s Eastern Island. They brought two Bell & Howell Filmo cameras and two hundred feet of 16 mm Kodachrome film. Their job was to report back to the commander what they observed during the attack and to attempt to make a photographic record of the bombing. Ford and MacKenzie found that they had an excellent view of the fight; in fact, the powerhouse on which they perched was one of the Japanese bombers’ main targets. Although the battle was won by the ships far out at sea, and far away from Ford’s cameras, Ford managed to capture some of the most intense images of combat action then made. Ford’s story of filming the battle later appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Examiner, Louella Parsons’s syndicated column, and Hedda Hopper’s radio address. His account tends to exaggerate his bravado in single-­handedly shooting the film even after being wounded by shrapnel, which later earned him a Purple Heart. Ford boasted to Peter Bogdanovich in the 1970s, “I did all of it—­we only had one camera,” ignoring the contributions of MacKenzie and the naval and aerial footage included in the film that was shot by U.S. Navy lieutenant Kenneth M. Pier.23 Ford points to the visual quality and style of the film as evidence of its authenticity: “I shot film and continued to change the film magazines and to stuff them in my pockets. The image jumps a lot because the grenades were exploding right next to me. Since then, they do that on purpose, shaking the camera when filming war scenes. For me it was authentic because the shells were exploding at my feet.”24 His later comments aside, it does not appear that Ford intended a new style from the outset or that he had rejected the production strategies of December 7th. Before the shooting started, Ford reportedly told MacKenzie, “Photograph faces. We can always fake combat footage later.”25 Even after the footage was developed and a rough cut completed, Ford’s crew considered adding special-­effects re-­creations. In a letter to Ford describing the reactions of studio executives to the rough cut, naval attaché A. J. Bolton wrote that Harry

“No Faking Here”  •  41

Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, “was quite upset that you didn’t have any miniatures of . . . plane crashes. Bob [Parrish] and I thought we might cut in a few but decided not to until consultation with you.”26 According to some sources, much of the footage was initially deemed unusable.27 Most of Ford and MacKenzie’s footage had been handheld, providing a jarring perspective, unpredictable movement, and a look of unprofessionalism. Even newsreel cameramen during this time routinely used tripods; handheld camerawork was uncommon. While slightly shaky or imperfect images had been used before in documentaries, the violence with which the images in The Battle of Midway were formed and to which they attested created a strong sense of verisimilitude. This style departed from classical Hollywood tradition as well as documentary convention, both of which tended to subordinate the camera to the events they filmed. Other parts of the film followed classical Hollywood conventions of narrative and editing more closely. In fact, upon seeing Ford’s film, Gregg Toland and producer Sam Engel were outraged that Ford “stole” some scenes from December  7th, such as the images of parents back home and a burial at sea accompanied by “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”28 The Battle of Midway also employs various voice-­ overs, including omniscient narrators voiced by Hollywood actor-­directors Donald Crisp and Irving Pichel as well as character voices by actors Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda. (None of these actors is credited in the film, but their voices would have been familiar to viewers from other films.) Reminiscent of her character Ma Joad in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Darwell’s contribution accompanies an image of the wounded: “Get those boys to the hospital, please do! Quickly! Get them to clean cots and cool sheets. Give them doctors and medicine, a nurse’s soft hands.” Editor Robert Parrish has claimed that it was the most melodramatic parts of the film—­Jane Darwell’s voice-­over, for instance—­that prompted the greatest emotional response from the audience at the film’s premiere at Radio City Music Hall.29 Critics, however, tended to praise the film’s realistic style. Film critic Nelson Bell called the film “18  minutes of actuality.” For him, the film was “not a ‘production,’ it was a fact depicted in all its heroic glory.”30 The Washington Post remarked, “‘The Battle of Midway’ undoubtedly marks the beginning of a new epoch in war pictures,” and the New York Times elaborated, “For eighteen tingling and harshly realistic minutes the spectator is plunged into the frontline amid the thunder of exploding bombs, the angry whine of fighter planes locked in combat and the relentless bark of anti-­aircraft guns aboard the surface vessels.”31 The most commented-­upon moment was the image (or, actually, multiple images) in which the film strip is jarred out of its sprockets by a nearby explosion. These images were taken as evidence that the film was absolutely authentic. Bosley Crowther wrote, “No faking here; this is the real thing. When those bombs hit, the cameras shivered, the

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film went wild and debris was hurled in perilous showers right in front of the lens.”32 Other reviewers, however, seemed to lament the lack of conventions made familiar to them in other “war pictures,” their terminology already blurring the distinction between fictional and documentary accounts of the war. Although Crowther gave The Battle of Midway high praise, he described the film as “a lot of random footage” that the filmmakers were able to salvage because of “sheer mastery in film construction and an artistic use of the sound track.”33 An editorial in the Washington Post opined, “It does not, and, of course, could not, despite skillful montage, give more than a confused idea of the actual development of the battle.”34 Although the editorial praises the film’s authenticity, it does remark on how the film lacks “continuity and completeness,” which traditionally would have been provided, as in December  7th, with a voice-­ over, titles, reenactments, and miniatures. A letter to the editor printed in the New York Times railed against the film; the viewer had wanted “an illustrated account rather than a purported motion picture of the battle,” and he suggested adding just those conventional elements missing in the film, such as the “use of ‘library’ shots, of animated maps and of miniatures such as those made by Norman Bel Geddes for Life Magazine, to fill in the gaps in the film made at Midway.”35 The reference to Bel Geddes is of interest because it demonstrates the extent to which miniature re-­creations had provided Americans with visualizations of the battles that servicemen were fighting continents away. A theatrical and industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes rose to prominence with the miniature Futurama displays of American cities and highways he created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. During the war, he created dioramas of naval battles, photographs of which appeared in Life magazine with information about Bel Geddes and how he created them. The framing of the Battle of the Coral Sea diorama, for instance, mimics the view from a fighter plane. The bird’s-eye-­view photograph includes the blurry frames of the cockpit windows, as if taken by a pilot as he tipped his airplane nose down.36 Simulated waves surround more than a dozen ships of various sizes, representing both sides of the battle. Although the scene is very precisely arranged, it is hard to believe that it would eradicate doubt as to how the events transpired. With so many ships crammed into a very small space, presumably to condense many actions into one scene, it is impossible without the accompanying text to follow the course of the battle. Despite this, the diorama seems to reduce the complexity of a multistage battle into one tableau, which had the effect of convincing some, like the New York Times letter writer, of the efficacy of this technique for clarifying the course of combat. Although The Battle of Midway pioneered a new style of representing combat—­an aesthetic that linked realism to a series of unpolished camera

“No Faking Here”  •  43

techniques that connote that “this really happened”—­it did not necessarily change the public’s views on documentary, which emphasized the social message or political function of the film over its use of “the actual,” to use Grierson’s terms. Even those critics who praised The Battle of Midway’s realism usually ended their remarks with approval of the message of the film and its effectiveness in providing motivation, inspiration, and obligation to continue to support the war effort. The enhanced realism, or more “authentic” style of the film, did not always conform to critics’ ideas of what a documentary should look like. For instance, Bosley Crowther wrote, “It seems downright callous and presumptuous to apply the term ‘documentary’ to films which show victims actually dying and soldiers battling grimly for their lives.”37 For this film reviewer in 1942, the term “documentary” meant the absolute opposite of an unvarnished recording of objective reality. Rather, Crowther appears to expect a documentary to be an informational film without such shockingly real images. This makes sense considering the preponderance of staging and conventional film style in newsreels and documentaries at the time. Yet the fact that Crowther makes a distinction between what might be considered an old-­fashioned view of “documentary” and the “graphically

FIGURE 7  Norman Bel Geddes’s model of the Battle of the Coral Sea as photographed for Life magazine. Courtesy of Life magazine.

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immediate” Battle of Midway demonstrates that the film did something new that would influence how the public perceived the role of cinema in war and the possibilities of recording events as they occurred. We can see in this film the seeds of a new style of representing combat. The fact that Crowther, and others, did not have terminology to denote this shift demonstrates how the aesthetic of The Battle of Midway breaks with the received aesthetic and generic categories of the time. This new style of realism seems to guarantee authenticity because the shaking camera, off-­kilter angles, and “errors” in composition and exposure imply a connection between the camera and the action taking place around it. By breaking with the polished, professional style of classical Hollywood cinema, The Battle of Midway calls attention to its jarring visuals and to the implied presence of a camera operator, making the spectator aware of the production of the images—­an awareness heightened by the popular press extolling the heroism of Hollywood celebrity directors like Ford, who braved the dangers of battle to bring back “authentic” pictures of the action. This new aesthetic form appeared to capture chance events as they occurred in real time in front of the camera, making possible a new philosophy of objective recording taken up by postwar documentarians, like those in the cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema movements. Therefore, in relation to Bill Nichols’s typology of the documentary, we could say that the World War  II combat documentary is an example of the expository documentary, which uses narrative structuring and omniscient voice-­over to give coherence and meaning to the filmed images. However, the new, unvarnished images also pave the way for the emergence of the observational mode in the 1960s, which aimed to dispassionately record events as they transpire in front of the camera.38 The authenticity conferred by this style ultimately stems from its failure—­to create a professional, “invisible” style and to provide the omniscient view of the battle given by December 7th or a Bel Geddes miniature. This impression of contingent events occurring before the camera was amplified by the stylistic markers of documentaries like The Battle of Midway, such as the shaky camerawork, jumping film, filmmaking “mistakes,” out-­of-­focus shots, and other qualities that previously would have been edited out of a professional Hollywood or documentary film. Although Ford’s preliminary comment to MacKenzie about faking the combat footage later showed an initial desire to treat this like a Hollywood film or a fictional reenactment like December 7th, the result was the discovery of the power of the mistake—­the damaged or imperfect image, the shaky camera—­not only to dramatize the stakes but to signify the reality of the image, to provide a document of presence. Almost immediately, however, those elements that appeared to provide evidence of the authenticity of the documentary image were copied to give credibility to manufactured images. The best example of this is The Battle of San Pietro.

“No Faking Here”  •  45

Grim Fairytales: John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro One of the most prominent films to use these new codes of combat realism is John Huston’s acclaimed documentary The Battle of San Pietro. Upon its 1945 release, the film was hailed as a “grim and gripping document” and praised for its accurate representation of the experience of the fighting men.39 Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “The picture brings the audience closer to the grim realities of infantry action than almost any other.”40 The Battle of San Pietro’s renown has only grown over the ensuing decades. Much of the praise has come from its perceived authenticity as a thorough record of one battle, its portrayal of the experience of combat rather than just strategic maneuvers and abstractions, and what has been considered an “antiwar” stance in the guise of a wartime propaganda film. Gary Edgerton, for example, calls San Pietro “the most graphic and honest account of combat during World War II ever documented on celluloid.” He continues, “What remains is a camera-­eye that begins to step back at times from the usual authoritarian posture of most World War II documentaries in order to record in fascinating detail men under the pressure of live fire.”41 His use of words like “honest,” “document,” and “record” suggests a sort of faith in the truth value of the image. In a New York Times article in 2000, filmmaker Midge Mackenzie wrote, “The Battle of San Pietro stands alone in the history of documentary filmmaking. Presenting the battle in the Liri Valley as a costly continuing campaign rather than in retrospect as a strategic victory, it is the only complete record of an infantry battle.”42 The Battle of San Pietro’s reputation was shaped in part by the comments Huston made about its production history and its reception by the U.S. Army. Huston claims to have shot the film personally with a group of army photographers during the actual battle, defying bullets, artillery fire, and shells to get up close coverage of the experience of combat. Huston followed John Ford’s lead in emphasizing his individual experience and thus bringing Hollywood and war into close quarters. He also relates that the military brass objected to his film, threatening to ban it. His autobiography provides a famous anecdote: “The War Department wanted no part of the film. I was told by one of its spokesmen that it was ‘anti-­war.’ I pompously replied that if I ever made a picture that was pro-­war, I hope someone would take me out and shoot me.”43 The Battle of San Pietro has seemed to support Huston’s version of events because of its style, which appears to show evidence of battle conditions surrounding the shooting. For instance, many of the shots of combat employ rapid swish pans paired with images of explosions. The swish pans vacillate erratically across the open sky and ground, showing jarring perspectives on the sky or blurry landscapes in motion. Significantly, soldiers often appear

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in the frame with an explosion, adding continuity and a sense of imminent danger. One American soldier appears to have been shot and perhaps killed in front of the camera. In a long shot, a soldier moves up a hill with his back to the camera; suddenly, he crumples to the ground, without any of the Hollywood theatrics of, for instance, December 7th’s simulated deaths. Other shots demonstrate a roughness that connotes an amateurish quality, lacking the polish of professional studio cinematography. Most of the shots of combat appear to be handheld, with extremely jerky camera movement and a relatively low angle, as if a soldier-­cameraman were filming while moving, falling to the ground, or peering out of a foxhole. Many shots are slightly out of focus, and the scenes of combat in an olive grove are obscured by branches directly in front of the camera, approximating the view of a soldier hiding from live fire. By using the embedded perspective, the film places the spectator into the combat boots of one of the American soldiers—­specifically that of the camera operator, who seemingly dodges the fire of the enemy. The last image of the film presents a disclaimer: “All scenes in this picture were photographed within range of enemy small arms or artillery fire. For purposes of continuity a few of these scenes were shot before and after the actual battle of San Pietro.” However, a look at the production history proves that most, if not all, of the scenes were staged. During the nine-­day battle itself, Huston only made two brief visits to San Pietro, did not witness any direct combat, and returned with little footage.44 The National Archives’ records of outtakes taken by Huston’s team demonstrate that the majority of their footage was taken in the weeks or months following the battle, in various locations in Italy.45 As historian Mark Harris puts it, “The Battle of San Pietro was a scripted, acted, and directed movie that contained barely two minutes of actual, unreconstructed documentation.”46 Gordon Frye and Sam Tischler, two army cameramen who were assigned to Huston’s film crew in Italy, confirm that Huston staged a great part of the combat scenes far from the front lines, including all the sequences of men throwing grenades, the battles in the olive groves and on Mount Sammucro, and the dramatic explosions of white phosphorus shells, which show up much better on celluloid than the typical blast that one would see in actual combat.47 The erratic swish pans were the result of Huston hitting their cameras with his hand, not the effect of the (planted) explosions themselves. One shot purporting to show a dead German soldier in a foxhole while American troops moved in the background actually depicted a live American soldier playing dead in a German uniform.48 Some scenes, though shot on location, were used completely out of the original context of their creation. Combat photography historian Peter Maslowski has shown, for instance, that the “scene of a dead woman being dug out of the rubble after a German booby trap supposedly exploded [in San Pietro] was actually taken at Caiazzo after American

FIGURES 8 AND 9  John Huston used intentionally blurry and erratic combat cinematogra-

phy in The Battle of San Pietro (1945).

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planes accidentally bombed it, wounding Frye and killing many civilians.”49 As Maslowski explains, based on his interviews with the cameramen who took part in the battle, the terrain, weather, and other conditions during the actual battle were not conducive to filming. In order to obtain the dramatic and exciting scenes of combat that the Signal Corps desired, they had to be staged away from the front lines.50 The commanding officer of one of the regiments that provided the “actors” for Huston’s film wrote, “You just can’t photograph some of those scenes in actual combat and live to get the film back to the lab. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t live to even photograph them.”51 In interviews and his autobiography, An Open Book, John Huston has been candid about the production histories of some of the other documentary films he worked on during the war. He admits that while working on the British coproduction Tunisian Victory (1944) for Frank Capra’s unit, almost all the American footage had to be fabricated in the Mojave Desert and Orlando, Florida, after the genuine footage was lost on a sunken ship. Huston rejects the re-­creations as “trash” in his autobiography, but he was most likely aware that most of Desert Victory (1943), the successful British documentary they were trying to emulate, was also staged.52 Huston also comes clean about his first military documentary, Report from the Aleutians (1943), which purports to record a particular bombing raid in which everyone comes back unscathed. Huston calls the film “tainted” because it splices together footage from multiple raids, the vast majority of which had heavy casualties.53 However, in all interviews and accounts of the filming of San Pietro, Huston maintains that he personally shot much of the footage alongside the troops under fire as they fought for control of the village. Why did Huston insist on The Battle of San Pietro’s absolute authenticity? This certainly has to do in part with its reputation, even at the time, as a record of the soldier’s experience. Despite their knowledge of Huston’s extensive reenactments, the Public Relations Bureau of the War Department wrote a press release upon its first arrival in theaters that attested to the authenticity of the filmmaking conditions, even concocting stories that Huston led his crew into no man’s land hours before the attack in order to set up their cameras for the impending action.54 The style of the film—­the shaking camerawork, erratic movements, blurry focus, extreme low and canted angles—­emulates The Battle of Midway, but takes the aesthetic even further because a larger portion of the film consists of combat footage. The camera movements are even more exaggerated, the sense of embedded perspective even more emphasized. Huston’s comments seem to suggest that because the earlier films were filmed like Hollywood fictions, their propaganda value was written on their surface; thus their status as reenacted fictions could be acknowledged. But the style of The Battle of San Pietro breaks with the Hollywood norm, using a self-­consciously visible style that calls attention to the actions of the cameraman as he appears

“No Faking Here”  •  49

to react to the events around him. To admit that this style is a conscious choice and not necessitated by the filming situation is to reveal the impact of style on the perception of realism, questioning what realism means at all. Yet, to what extent were audiences “duped” by the style of The Battle of San Pietro? Certainly, the critical and journalistic discourse responding to this film appears to acknowledge a difference in how this film was presented; critics wrote that the film revealed the “grim realities” of combat, “the cold, relentless violence of war,” and the “taut, nervous ‘feel’ of the actual battle.”55 It is unclear, however, to what extent these comments referenced the film’s visual style and cinematography, or alternatively, its narrative, voice-­over (performed by John Huston himself ), or, perhaps most importantly, the story spread by Huston and the press about how the images were obtained in the line of fire. The stylistic effects of The Battle of San Pietro seem to be markers of the authenticity of the image, evidence on the surface and within the style of the film that it was taken during combat. But we now know that those events were staged and those effects manufactured. Eventually, these unpolished stylistic effects came to be read as codes for realism, for a screen experience that mimicked the actual experience of soldiers in the battlefield, even if it did not capture it directly. As future chapters will demonstrate, this conception of the new aesthetic—­as a way of manufacturing vicarious experience rather than as evidence of actual events—­was very influential on the continuing development of the aesthetics of combat in film and media.

Two Paradigms of Historical Re-­creation The American military documentaries discussed above employ two different styles of realism to represent history as it was being made. The first style, represented by December 7th, emulates Hollywood in its production values, heightened acting, remote perspective, use of special effects, and classical editing. The second style, illustrated most effectively by The Battle of Midway and The Battle of San Pietro, rejects Hollywood polish and instead represents the chaotic, unpredictable nature of combat photography. Only fragmentary images of the event are present; thus the cause-­effect chain of continuity editing is minimized, if not completely rejected. Instead of adhering to the “professionalism” espoused by both Hollywood and newsreel practice, this style replaces stable, tripod-­centered camerawork with mobile, shaky handheld cinematography. Other forms of damaged or imperfect footage—­such as images with blurred focus, oblique angles, over-­or underexposure, lens flares, or unbalanced composition—­are not rejected, but instead foregrounded, as apparent evidence of the camera’s presence in a combat zone. These imperfect images are thus thought to be more authentic than the previous model; they have the look of evidence that “this really happened.”

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The first style—­that of December  7th—­presents history as a triumphant and omniscient narrative, a story can be told completely and from all perspectives. This style places combat within a causal trajectory, contextualized within a larger story that contains a coherent beginning, middle, and end. In this way, it is reminiscent of another grand documentary project, the Why We Fight films produced by Frank Capra for the Office of War Information. These films, spanning from Prelude to War in 1942 to America Enters the War in 1945, chronicle the military, cultural, and ideological history leading to the current global conflict. To do so, they use an amalgam of materials, from Disney-­produced animated maps to newsreel footage to clips from fictional films. Like December 7th, the Why We Fight films argue for the inevitability of victory for the Allied forces and the righteousness of American values over that of its enemies. The second style—­that of The Battle of San Pietro—­fragments the totalizing narrative into bits and pieces, suggesting the inability of coherent storytelling to encapsulate the experience of war. The voice-­over of The Battle of San Pietro makes this clear: “Many among these you see alive here have since joined the ranks of their brothers in arms who fell at San Pietro. For ahead lay San Vittori and the Rapido River and Cassino. And beyond Cassino, more rivers and more mountains, and more towns, more San Pietros, greater or lesser, a thousand more.” Huston’s narration represents the war as an endless stream of struggle and sacrifice, without a strong narrative arc to give this battle climactic meaning. Instead of an omniscient, remote perspective, The Battle of San Pietro and other films of the same style adopt the embedded point of view. The erratic camerawork appears to mirror the perspective and movement of the camera operator; thus it gives a specific, ground-­level view on the events. Films that espouse this fragmented style give the spectator a different kind of historical access to the images on screen, as well as a close-­up experience of the destructive sublime. Unlike the style of December  7th and Hollywood fictional films—­which aimed to give the viewer a cohesive, complete, and overarching view of the event and keep him informed through a balanced and continuous flow of story information—­the embedded style seen in The Battle of San Pietro and The Battle of Midway presents restricted information, usually only through one perspective, or shifts among multiple, individual perspectives that do not add up to a whole, complete view. Furthermore, as Stella Bruzzi argues, the use of “voice of God” narration in these films could be understood as an attempt to make up for the fractured and necessarily multivalent montage of images rather than evidence of the filmmaker’s control over the film’s reception and meaning: “Narration could . . . be viewed as a mechanism deployed to mask the realisation that this mode of representation, and indeed its inherent belief in a consistent and unproblematic truth, are perpetually on the verge

“No Faking Here”  •  51

of collapse, that commentary, far from being a sign of omniscience and control, is the hysterical barrier erected against the spectre of ambivalence and uncertainty.”56 However, both of the styles that I have described above—­the cohesive and the fragmentary—­have been used with staged footage, based on real events but not recorded during their historical unfolding. Both sets of techniques are available for either documentary or fictional filmmaking. Yet the rough techniques of the fragmentary style are often taken as confirmation of the evidentiary quality of film. That is, markers of unprofessionalism, like shaky camerawork and blurry focus, seem to prove that the camera acts as a witness to events, transcribing the actions and objects before it into a visual record. The production history of San Pietro in particular demonstrates the error of this assumption. At stake, then, is not whether the footage is “real” but what kind of history these films narrate. The important transition that occurred between 1941’s production of December 7th and 1944’s production of The Battle of San Pietro was not the rejection of staging, reenactment, or special effects for a more gritty and “authentic” realism but the espousal of a model of history that emphasizes a limited and embedded, rather than omniscient, perspective. This model downplays the overarching, assured narrative of an event that can be understood in context and accessed rationally. Instead, in approximating the optical point of view of the soldier, it emphasizes the experience of an individual in confronting a bewilderingly violent situation without knowledge of the larger plan in which he is engaged. To some extent, this transition might be judged a positive move away from the grand narratives and false assurances of totalizing history. Yet in glorifying the personal and particular experience of the common serviceman, these texts ignore the broader scope of the war, the fate of the enemy or the plight of the innocent victims, and the significance of these events to a larger history of the twentieth century. By minimizing the larger issues of strategy and cause-­effect in favor of the personal and individual, the films maximize the sense of immediacy and sensory address of the spectator, allowing for the emergence of a visceral, close-­up experience of destruction at the expense of an analytical framework for understanding.

“A Wholly New Kind of Sight Instrument”: The Fighting Lady and the Cinematic Record Writing shortly after the war, film theorist André Bazin—­now a fundamental figure in the history of film theory for his extended meditations on the relationship between film and reality—­acknowledged the new aesthetics of documentary and their reliance on something like the destructive sublime, warning against an uncritical acceptance of the purported reality of documentary

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images. Although writing in France, Bazin was attuned to the changes the Second World War wrought in American (as well as European) documentary and narrative filmmaking. In the postwar years, he made note of the emerging style of authenticity and its impact on the reenactment practices of old. He declared that “the documentary-­film-­by-­reconstruction is dead” due to “the prevalence of objective reporting following World War II.”57 Bazin places reenactments securely in the past, as part of a set of déclassé practices: “The fact that reconstructions of actual events were acceptable in the earliest days of the cinema is a clear indication that there has been an evolution in the attitude of the general public.”58 In these statements, Bazin confirms his reputation as a realist who believes the function of cinema is to record and reveal something of the world. In his foundational essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he writes, “The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities.”59 In his work at large, Bazin discusses the objective nature of photographic media, which benefit from their automatic nature without the intermediary subjectivity of an author. It is thus hardly surprising that he would later celebrate the end of reenactment in documentary in favor of a detached reportage of cinematic “facts.”60 In his essay on “Cinema and Exploration,” published after the war, he even describes something like the World War II combat documentaries’ new style of rough and deficient reportage in his analysis of the film Kon-­Tiki (Thor Heyerdahl, 1950), an amateurish but completely authentic attempt to record explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage to Polynesia in a raft.61 Like The Battle of Midway and The Battle of San Pietro, Kon-­Tiki is marred by blurred focus, errors in cinematography, and few images of the important events of the journey, such as storms or animal attacks, yet Bazin considers it more genuine than perfectly staged and expertly recorded images. He writes that “the faultless and complete report” moves us less than the film whose “faults are equally witness to its authenticity.”62 However, in another early essay published in Esprit in 1946, “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,”63 Bazin suggests that there might be something morally, or aesthetically, dishonest even in what he calls “the unique event, shot on the spot, at the very moment of its creation.”64 At first, he mentions the “moral dishonesty” of editing together newsreel footage to create an ideological purpose, using Frank Capra’s Why We Fight propaganda films as examples. But then the potential for dishonesty also invades the image itself. Bazin sees the war as something already staged and artificial, even if also improvised on the fly. From the very beginning of the essay, Bazin describes the vast landscape of war in theatrical terms: “Such a theater of operations [that of the war itself ], when compared to the other one [a theatrical stage], has the invaluable dramatic superiority of inventing the play as it spontaneously unfolds. It is a kind of commedia dell’arte in which the scenario itself

“No Faking Here”  •  53

is always being reworked.” For Bazin, the “colossal mise en scène” of war far overshadows the efforts of an early epic film like Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916), which “looks as though it were the set for a small show touring the provinces.”65 In our desire to watch the war unfold cinematically, Bazin points to the “Nero complex,” a perverse pleasure taken in witnessing our own destruction, broadcast to us on screens everywhere, akin to the destructive sublime. For Bazin, this psychological condition also values the objective record of war over the lives of those who capture such images: “The cameraman runs as many risks as the soldiers, whose death he is supposed to film even at the cost of his own life (but who cares, as long as the footage is saved!).”66 Why We Fight and related films are, for Bazin, an abomination not only because of their frequently deceptive editing and overwhelming didactic voice-­overs but because in the guise of “History” they purport to offer unadorned fact. Instead, he argues that they provide obscene spectacle and Hollywoodized drama. He makes this clear when he considers Roger Leenhardt’s suggestion that “next time, Commander Humphrey Bogart or Sergeant Spencer Tracy, playing the parts we have come to expect of them, would be the protagonists of some grand semi-­fictionalized report. A crew of cameramen would be responsible for filming the course of the actual military operations that Bogart or Tracy would really command at the patriotic peril of his life.”67 John Ford’s and John Huston’s accounts of their experiences filming combat are exemplary of this semifictionalized bravado. This kind of manufacturing of experience prompted Bazin to a skeptical take on documentary realism. He warns us of the moral dangers in an uncritical belief in, and enthusiasm for, the supposedly objective records of war reports. He ends the essay on a negative note: “I think that, far from moving the historical sciences toward more objectivity, the cinema paradoxically gives them the additional power of illusion by its very realism.”68 Thus the realism of cinema—­the impression of reality being recorded “on the spot” by the camera—­can serve illusion as much as the task of the discovery or revelation of the real. Bazin warns his contemporaries about the ideological manipulations of propaganda films like Why We Fight, but his comments also have something to tell us about films “shot on the spot” like The Battle of Midway. He cautions that the realism of the new aesthetic I have described here, reliant on amateurish mistakes to convince audiences of the lack of deception, offers incredibly powerful tools that can be used for illusion instead of truth. Moreover, he notes the possibility of dishonesty even in “authentic” footage, since the war itself seems staged for the cameras. The 1945 film The Fighting Lady serves as an example of a film made up of combat footage “shot on the spot” that nevertheless might obscure meaning and lead to multiple or contradictory interpretations. Although the film seems perfectly authentic, it presents a series of ambiguous, even abstract

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images of combat that are hard to classify. The Fighting Lady was the first of a series of “journalistic news features” that Louis de Rochemont,69 producer of the newsreel The March of Time, planned to make in order to capitalize on and extend the growing interest in nonfiction films during the war.70 This marked the first time that a commercial studio (Twentieth Century–­Fox) produced and released a war documentary on its own, instead of following its traditional function as a distributor for the films produced by the war and navy departments. The Fighting Lady, a sixty-­two-­minute documentary feature made with color film, presents the trials and tribulations of an aircraft carrier and its crew from its commission through its first year of service. The film follows a familiar story: the maturation of the crew from inexperienced “greenhorns” to practiced, confident soldiers. They are tested in a number of Pacific naval battles, including Marcus Island, Truk, and the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” De Rochemont and his team—­including noted photographer and naval commander Edward J. Steichen, who oversaw the shooting—­had unprecedented access to the ship and its crew.71 Navy photographers shot more than sixty thousand feet of 16 mm Kodachrome color film (magnified into 35 mm Technicolor for release prints) over fourteen months to provide the raw material for the film, and cameras were placed on and synchronized with machine-­g un sights and bombsights on eighteen of the fighter, bomber, and torpedo planes stationed on the ship.72 As a “journalistic news feature,” The Fighting Lady combines elements of both fictional films and documentaries. It includes both a voice-­over and nonsynchronized dialogue from some of the “characters” in the film, who are alluded to by their nicknames: Jocko, Smoky, Dixie. But the real innovation of the film is its remarkable emphasis on gun-­and bombsight footage along with other spectacular images, especially images of the crash landings of American aircraft returning to the carrier after battles. Reviews from the period called the film “thrilling” and “incredibly exciting”; one recognized in it “the most spectacular aerial combat pictures yet made in this war.”73 Critics tended to recount their favorite sequences. One reviewer enthused: “The camera takes you right down to the frantically zig-­zagging Jap [sic] fleet as it tries desperately to evade the destruction pouring from the bomber, dive bomber, torpedo and rocket planes of the famous Task Force 58. You see the flak belching from Jap [sic] guns as our fighter bore in to strafe battleships, cruisers, carriers, destroyers, etc.”74 Not only did The Fighting Lady and other war documentaries show exciting images of “real” combat, but they also provided a new kind of kinetic and affective experience. Part of this involved witnessing great and unfamiliar new machines in action—­tanks, ships, aircraft. For instance, The Fighting Lady introduces audiences to a brand-­new Essex-­class aircraft carrier, the largest then built. The narration expresses awe at the size of the ship: it is

“No Faking Here”  •  55

“enormous, wonderful, and strange to us.” It is described as a vast body, with a brain, eyes, and ears.75 Yet the greatest machines featured in The Fighting Lady are not ships but airplanes; the film wonders at their spectacular takeoffs and landings, the method of tracking the aircraft miraculously through radar, and the way the planes feature folded wings to fit dozens of them on deck. Not only are the aircraft visually striking in and of themselves, but they also provide a different kind of perceptual experience for the spectator. Aerial views had been available before World War II, but a new visual experience was on offer as audiences got a chance to witness dogfights and bombing runs from the plane’s point of view. Almost a full quarter of The Fighting Lady consists solely of footage obtained from cameras attached to gun and bomb sights, automatically triggered by the mechanism that controls the gun’s firing or the bomb’s drop. To be clear, the body of the airplane to which the camera is attached is not visible in any of these shots; thus the view is of exactly what the plane would “see” if it had eyes, witnessing the Zeroes flying by, the ships being strafed, and the results of bombing on islands below. Taking the plane’s point of view is different from taking the pilot’s point of view—­his perspective is far more mobile, being able to turn around, follow an object through the sky, and split attention among multiple objects and events. His point of view also necessarily implies a view of the cockpit, controls, and parts of his own body, more similar to Bel Geddes’s photograph of his re-­ creation of the Battle of Coral Sea for Life magazine. The automatic gun-­and bombsight footage, on the other hand, is disembodied—­from both a personal point of view and from a human operator. The narrator of The Fighting Lady, actor and naval lieutenant Robert Taylor, announces, “Our eye is now the very eye of our fighting airplane.” In this form of embedded perspective, human vision is displaced by machine vision. The narration of The Fighting Lady addresses the issue outright: “In an almost vertical dive, the pilot may black out or go blind for a moment when he pulls up and out of the bottom, but the camera won’t black out.” The camera is made to be an infallible eye—­like a pilot’s eye but more consistent, more precise, and lacking in human flaws of inattention or fatigue. The gun-­and bombsight footage provides spectacular battle sequences in The Fighting Lady. Six different sequences—­anywhere from one to five minutes in duration—­consist solely of a montage of these images, showing bombing runs, attacks by Japanese fliers, dogfight sequences, and invasions of Japanese-­held islands. Since the footage is automatically generated with no intervention by an operator or artist (other than the pilot or bomber who inadvertently activates the camera with the weapon’s trigger), it would seem to function as a privileged demonstration of the film image’s recording function. Moreover, to adapt the argument of film historian Paul Arthur, this footage

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anticipates the Direct Cinema movement’s “stipulation of transparency and noncontrol as a paradigm of authenticity.”76 Like The Battle of Midway or The Battle of San Pietro, this footage contains certain markers of authenticity, such as blurriness, shaky cinematography, and off-­center composition; however, unlike San Pietro, this footage cannot be accused of being staged away from the front lines. The automatic nature of the images precludes any kind of manipulation or tampering in their production. If we then take these images as examples of the cinematic record par excellence, it is worthwhile to look at exactly what kind of recording this is and what kind of information is imprinted on the image. The images within these sequences are often hard to make out; they tend to be blurry, over-­or underexposed, or rendered indistinct by the vibrations of the aircraft shaking the camera. Often the intended focus of interest is merely a dark smudge moving within the frame, which the voice-­over narration identifies as an enemy plane. With aerial footage, particularly of dogfights, it is often impossible to tell which way is up. Unlike the experience of a pilot who senses gravity physically, for the spectator looking “through” the camera, the movement of the airplane through the sky is only legible in relation to other objects. When those other objects, such as the ground, are out of sight, the manner in which the plane is careening through the sky is not necessarily apparent, and when those other objects, especially enemy aircraft, are also moving, the sense of direction and orientation is lost (but it is not necessarily vertigo-­inducing, and thus visceral, as it would be for the pilot). Furthermore, the angle of the camera is static, but the movement of the plane produces unclear, unbalanced, or barely legible compositions. Enemy aircraft rarely stay in frame, since it is difficult to train one’s guns/cameras at them for long considering defensive maneuvers. Thus montages of aerial footage break all rules of continuity editing. In one shot the enemy plane might be in the upper left corner of the frame moving right; in the next, it might be lower right moving left. If after several other shots, an extreme long shot shows an explosion over the water, it must merely be assumed that this is the same plane, or even a plane at all. This attempt to create continuity out of fragmented and abstract images speaks to the potential distortions that Bazin warned against in his 1946 essay. Some of the most disorienting aspects of the aerial footage in The Fighting Lady are the tracer lines. Wavy scribbles decorate much of footage, often in different colors and shapes, further marring the decipherability of the image. The narrator of the film explains this strange and spectacular phenomenon to the audience: “These red balls floating up at us so lazily are anti-­aircraft fire. There is three times as much of it as we can see, because only one shell in three is a tracer. What look like firing pollywogs are traces from our own wing guns. The ack-­ack [slang for antiaircraft fire] is much heavier than expected,

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but through it we go to knock out enemy bombers on the ground.” The antiaircraft “red balls” appear in the image as pink dots with little, tadpole-­like tails, seeming through an optical illusion to be traveling slowly toward the airplane and thus toward the screen. The wing gun tracer fire takes the form of two white, mostly straight, intermittent lines, entering from the upper right and left sides of the frame and shooting down toward the center of the frame. The tracers, along with the camera, provide a visualization of something invisible—­the bullets that move too quickly for the human eye or the camera to perceive. This film instead presents an explosive ballet of lines and colors, shapes and squiggles. For those in the “line” of fire, tracer lines are legible in terms of the placement of the enemy and the accuracy of one’s shots, but for the spectator, they become part of the spectacle, a component of the mysterious workings of war. If one were to disregard the historical context of how these images were made, these sequences could be considered experimental or abstract in form. Their play with line and color are reminiscent of Norman McLaren’s experimental animations like Dots (1940) or Begone Dull Care (1949). With only the scantest voice-­over to motivate, explain, and contextualize these images, the pleasure in watching the tracer fire is only partly inspired by the sense that one is watching a life-­and-­death battle in the air. The other component to their appeal is the perceptual experience of feeling as if

FIGURE 10  Tracer lines from antiaircraft fire are barely legible in this gunsight footage from

The Fighting Lady (Louis de Rochemont, 1945).

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one is high above the earth, careening up and down, surrounded by unfamiliar, abstract shapes and colors. If we focus on this aspect of the image, should these images still be thought to be primarily records of actual events? If they are so fragmentary, indistinct, and abstract, of what exactly do they provide a record? If we cannot read the images, are they still worthy documents? The new and varied perceptual experiences of soldiers and spectators alike during World War II brought the special “vision” of the camera to light. A two-­page spread in the New York Times Sunday magazine—­written by Iris Barry, curator of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, in January 1946—­discusses how the camera allows for “seeing better and seeing more.” She describes how documentary cameras have “revealed the unseeable, the invisible”: “Eclipses and volcanic eruptions, a star in its path, a rare medical operation were grist to this machine. They photographed the unfolding of a rose, synthesized the flow of movement in bird’s wing or horse’s canter: the inmost secret of life was brought forth for all to marvel at when a living cell was first recorded by photomicrography.”77 Echoing Dziga Vertov’s earlier description of the “Kino-­Eye,”78 Irving Pichel, writer and narrator for The Battle of Midway, published an article in the second issue of Hollywood Quarterly in January 1946 about “Seeing with the Camera” in which he discusses the camera as analogous to the human eye—­yet, “like the microscope or the telescope or field glasses, it extends the capacity of the human eye.” The camera “is a wholly new kind of sight instrument, as fabulous as radar and free from most of the limitations that hedge about human sight. . . . It goes where no human eye could possibly go. It moves according to laws, if any, which apply not to the human eye or the human consciousness, but to itself.”79 Because of the special vision of the camera, the film image must be considered to be something more than just a transparent record of an event. It in some ways exceeds the capabilities of the record—­producing not just the objective or the actual but also the illegible, the abstract, and the spectacular. The gunsight images in The Fighting Lady produced, paradoxically, records of optical illusions: bullets as floating pink balls and streaks of white light. Thus even when images are not staged, the recording function of the camera creates not just an objective imprint of an event but a very particular kind of sight—­the vision of the camera itself—­that transforms the event as much as it reveals it.

Conclusion The Fighting Lady takes the new aesthetic of combat documentaries to an extreme by embedding the camera perspective with that of a vehicle, instead of an individual combat cameraman. By eliminating the authorial presence, the gun-­and bombsight footage also serves as an exemplar of the ideal of

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recording without the bias of a human operator. However, by taking these aesthetic forms to their limit, it also suggests a breaking point, where the camera reveals something beyond the scope of human experience—­the maneuvers of an airplane, the abstract impressions of tracer bullets, and the blurry documents of bombings. The military documentaries I have examined here demonstrate that the documentary image does not just function to bring things to light, to provide a visual record or a kind of visible evidence. It also conceals reality in blurry, dark images, in the danger that lurks off the screen, in the guns and body of the aircraft that are invisible but appear to be “seeing.” Like the tracer fire that stands in for the bullets, the documentary image, too, stands in for reality, but it also distorts the impression, replacing the reality that exceeds any attempt to represent it in its totality with a strangely colored, possibly illegible substitution. Like any other visual image, the documentary image makes visible and invisible; it conceals and reveals. In their sensory address of the spectator, whether through December 7th’s impressive aerial views of miniature models or the up-­close-­and-­personal point of view portrayed in The Battle of San Pietro, all these films engage in the destructive sublime. Their scenes of combat open up new meanings that may not correspond exactly to the voice-­over narrations or narrative patterns of the rest of the film. While the remote views of December 7th and the bombsight footage in The Fighting Lady provoke the destructive sublime in their visions of the totality of destruction, the new, embedded perspective of The Battle of Midway and San Pietro also activates the destructive sublime on a corporeal level, making the viewer feel like a part of the action. These latter films represent a new way of portraying the combat experience—­using the camera as a proxy for the audience in the midst of the action. The body of the camera and the filmstrip stand in for the body of the spectator, and the blows delivered to the camera seem like blows to the perceptual apparatus of the viewer. Ultimately, the bodily mimicry between viewer’s body and camera’s body is what grounds the realism on display here, not merely the use of unpolished aesthetic strategies to give the impression of evidence. While those strategies can be used in staged or reenacted films, as in the case of The Battle of San Pietro, and thus cannot be used as evidence of authenticity in terms of filming conditions, they do serve as a basis for a corporeally grounded realism that impresses spectators with a sense of presence and participation. This sensation is at the core of the new style’s influence on combat aesthetics over the long term, not just the realism of the mechanisms of recording. The documentaries I have discussed here all return the spectator to awareness of the moment of filming, acknowledging the camera’s presence in the space of war, whether through the voice-­over or through shaky or blemished images that respond to the circumstances of shooting. As The Fighting Lady and my other examples here make clear, photographic and film images made

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during the war are not transparent documents of combat. Even while taking reality as its object, the camera brings its own way of seeing to the representation, altering how the spectator sees the object. When combined with the mechanisms of war, new images of reality are available, but they are also abstracted through the lens of the camera and through the lens of war. This produces images that fall into the category of the destructive sublime—­labeled by Bazin as the “Nero complex”—­images that are supremely exciting, thrilling, and spectacular but also complicit in the destructiveness of war. Thus when we look back at the military documentaries produced during World War II, they cannot be understood simply as propaganda or as objective records. Rather, they mark the emergence of a new aesthetics of realism that provides a different view—­the view of the camera mechanism itself—­of the pleasures and tragedies of modern war. The next chapter examines the aesthetic and narrative ramifications of inserting some of this footage, alongside the kinds of miniatures and reenactments found in December 7th, into the combat sequences of fictional films made by Hollywood during the war.

2

The “Good War”? Style and Space in 1940s Combat Films In order to keep track of the various kinds of footage that would make their way into the 1943 Warner Brothers film Destination Tokyo, art director Leo “K” Kuter compiled a thick book titled “Continuity Sketches—­‘Destination Tokyo’—­Process-­Miniature-­Straight.”1 Almost like a flip book, the pages overlay one another to demonstrate how various scenes would be composed of multiple kinds of filmed material, including special cinematography of miniature models, “stock footage” (fictional or documentary footage taken from another film), and newsreel/combat footage. These filmed materials were either juxtaposed by editing or combined in a single shot via rear projection, a relatively inexpensive form of compositing that was called “process” photography in the 1940s.2 Each shot is described on three different, overlapping pages: a first page contains a hand-­drawn storyboard on the left-­hand side, a second page includes a frame enlargement of whatever filmed material would be projected into the shot as a background, and a third page displays text on the right-­hand side describing the finalized shot, including Kuter’s handwritten notes about which takes to use. To take an example, the pages labeled shots 17–­20 first include four drawings of a crew on the deck of a submarine: one submariner sets up a gun, and the captain looks through binoculars. Underneath this page, a set of frame enlargements shows the water scene that will be projected into the background 61

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of these shots: miniature ice-­covered mountains and a matte painting of a cloudy sky surrounding a water tank. One shot even includes the front of a miniature model of a submarine. A third page describes the shots, indicating camera distance and movement, the scene number for reference, and the major events of the shot in order to keep everything consistent as these different pieces of footage are put together. The continuity drawings for shots 17–­20 demonstrate how conventionally staged footage with actors would appear on top of background images made with miniature models. In other scenes delineated in Kuter’s continuity sketchbook, the drawings illustrate how the actors would be processed into shots with documentary or stock footage in the background. Kuter’s continuity sketches provide a rare look into the technical construction of the space of war in American combat films of the 1940s. Hollywood had to find a way to visualize combat within its own set of expressive techniques, yet the nature of World War  II—­with its new landscapes, weapons, and tactics—­necessitated new aesthetics of representation. Two cost-­effective techniques came to the fore during this period: the integration of documentary footage from newsreels and military reports and the use of miniature models to re-­create ships, aircraft, submarines, weapons, and other matériel to

FIGURE 11  The art director’s continuity sketches and notes for Destination Tokyo (Delmer

Daves, 1943) show how miniature models are to be combined with live-­action footage. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Leo “K” Kuter Collection.

The “Good War”?  •  63

which the filmmakers would not have immediate access. However, these two techniques, while both prevalent in wartime films, were nearly anathema to each other in terms of their relationship to the reality of war. As I explored in the previous chapter, documentary footage captured by combat cameramen in the field purported to reveal the real face of war. Moreover, some documentary films, like The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942), experimented with jarring aesthetic techniques such as blurred focus, shaky cinematography, and the embedded perspective to enforce a perceptual identification between the spectator and the soldier (or at the very least, the camera on the battlefield). On the other hand, miniature models and other special effects draw from an alternative tradition of artifice within Hollywood film. While well crafted, models and other effects shots serve illusion. And because of technical limitations, models were often shot without showy and expressive film style; framings were typically static, editing worked to preserve the illusion of coherent three-­ dimensional space, and continuity strategies aimed to seamlessly integrate the images into the fictional world of the film as a whole. Using two remarkable case studies, Destination Tokyo and Henry Hathaway’s Wing and a Prayer (1944), this chapter examines the aesthetic and narrative ramifications of the synthesis of various kinds of footage within the American combat films made during World War II. What is most striking to me about Kuter’s continuity sketches for Destination Tokyo is the interchangeability of special-­effects footage and documentary footage in the backgrounds of these scenes of combat. Both are used equally well to provide background settings for the actors and sets placed in the foreground. However, this amalgamation of various kinds of cinematic material results in widely varying senses of scale, realism, size, and quality. Because of this variation—­either within a scene or, just as often, within a shot—­combat sequences present inconsistent or incoherent representations of space. Special effects, documentary footage, conventional scenes shot on sets, and footage shot on location all combine to create combat sequences so perceptually varied they could be described as kaleidoscopic. The collected papers of Kuter and Destination Tokyo writer-­ director Delmer Daves, both used to research this chapter, do not suggest that such jarring visuals were intentional; yet, the films participated both in the establishment of the wartime “good war” narrative and the aesthetics of the destructive sublime.3 Dana Polan has shown how the narratives of films in the 1940s exhibit fractures in logic and consistency, due to the cultural and aesthetic stresses of the war.4 Drawing on his work, I contend that the aesthetics of wartime films reveal disjuncture too, reflecting both industrial and cultural pressures. In these scenes, the irrationality of combat comes to the fore, confronting spectators with strong sensations and potentially contradictory messages about the meaning of war. Combat sequences carry the potential for a counternarrative

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of World War II, working against the “good war” mythology and reminding us of its violence, destruction, and senselessness. The invigorating inconsistency of the aesthetics of combat in wartime films opens the possibility for this dissident narrative of the war to emerge. In what follows, I discuss how wartime combat films established genre conventions that laid the groundwork for later evaluations of World War II as the “good war.” At the same time, though, they also created new aesthetic forms that combined multiple kinds of cinematic material, resulting in perceptually varied explorations of destruction. In relation to each case study, Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer, I discuss narrative structure, construction of space, and then combat aesthetics. In representing militarized spaces—­the submarine in its underwater surround in the former film and the aircraft carrier and airplanes in their aerial surround in the latter—­the films depict the difficulties characters have comprehending and navigating these atypical cinematic milieus. The films define various spaces as being gendered, demonstrating an anxiety about the ways war had affected the experiences of masculinity and femininity. Finally, with each film, I explore the ways the multiple and contrasting aesthetics of combat work against a coherent diegesis, opening up the films to various reactions and interpretations, including the pleasurable tensions of the destructive sublime.

Establishing the “Good War” Narrative World War II has been conceived as the “good war” in American culture only in retrospect. However, elements of wartime films and other media paved the way for this interpretation. Frank Capra’s Prelude to War (1942), the first of his Why We Fight series, construes the war as a fight between a free world and a slave world. In this worldview, American military force is justified as a defense of freedom in the face of tyranny. Fictional films of the period adopted this abstracted and simplified discourse as their own. The narratives of wartime combat films presented the war both as necessary and as unambiguously righteous. According to John Bodnar, a traditional perspective on World War II has seen the war “not as a human tragedy but as an opportunity for Americans to assume a position of dominance in the world and reaffirm their innate (and traditional) moral courage and bravery.”5 Conventions emerged in the war years that established and confirmed this traditionalist view. According to Jeanine Basinger, “World War II gave birth to the isolation of a story pattern which came to be known and recognized as the combat genre.”6 This story pattern involves narrative trajectories, such as the journey to achieve a military objective, as well as semiotic units, such as the group (usually of soldiers) that learns to work together. Typical characters include the dead father figure, the hero, the hero’s adversary, the noble sacrifice, the old man and the

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youth, the immigrant representative, the comedy relief, the peace lover, and the minority representative.7 As Basinger explains, the average wartime combat film portrays the group as an ethnic mix that represents the ideal of the melting pot of America. Although internal conflicts typically erupt within the group, the fact the characters are able to overcome such differences to achieve a military objective shows the power of the American democratic spirit to minimize differences in the attainment of the common good. In most wartime films, at least one character must learn to put aside individualistic desires—­whether for glory, revenge, or personal gain—­in order to subordinate to the needs of the group. According to Lary May, this “conversion narrative,” in which the character is taught the group’s values and ultimately adopts them as his own, “reinforced the view that formerly alienated groups had united behind the patriotic cause.”8 These elements combined to establish narratives of World War  II as a “good war,” fought for justified rationales against a set of evil adversaries. In his study of film narrative in the 1940s, Dana Polan describes the power of narrative to “write an image of life as coherent, teleological, univocal . . . to convert contingency into human meaning.”9 Polan argues that during the war years, films established a discourse of war affirmation through the repetition of symbols and bits of narrative content that were used and reused over and over again. For instance, the ever-­present attack on Pearl Harbor “becomes a bit in a symbolic code that unites Americans” in a shared goal and ideological commitment.10 In addition, small-­town America stands in for common values of decency, politeness, respect for authority, and equality, presented as natural characteristics of the American agrarian lifestyle.11 However, Polan is also attuned to how these narratives, despite their projection of an “aggressive surety,” begin to break down under the burden of excessive cultural signification.12 Polan notes that while the home front in retrospect has been imagined as a culture of consensus, struggles relating to the definition of American identity were evidenced, in fact, by events like labor strikes, the African American “Double V” campaign for victory abroad alongside racial equality at home, and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 in which American servicemen attacked Mexican youth. In terms of the industry, Hollywood had to balance the imperatives of the government and military, while also attracting moviegoers to films about the war that had already pervaded nearly every aspect of their lives. Hollywood, always burdened with contradictory obligations, felt these burdens particularly acutely during wartime; filmmakers and studios felt pressure to support the troops, to entertain, to show something of reality, to inform, to provide escapism. Considering these competing responsibilities, combined with the efforts to depict the new facts of total war, it’s no wonder that coherent storytelling began to collapse, and that it did so in the most spectacular way in scenes of combat.

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In his attention to the cracks in the logical structure of war-­affirmative discourse, Dana Polan demonstrates that war films in this decade were fraught with contradiction, disunity, and fantasy. As Polan argues, the sense of justification, consensus, and inevitable victory that can be found in the narratives of these films results from a desire for these qualities rather than their presence in social reality: “Even at its most emphatic, or perhaps because of that very emphaticness, the representation of war unity can be read as contradictory, a fictive attempt to not so much describe a state of affairs as to empower a state of affairs that it wants to have seen as already empowered.”13 While the films of this period usually succeed in presenting war within a coherent framework of ideological justification and emotional confirmation, Polan argues that they are only able to do so “at the cost of repressions and distortions that come bursting out under moments of narrative stress.”14 These conflicted narratives can be read in the ways that wartime combat films depart from typical conventions associated with Hollywood film­ making during the studio era. John Belton has argued that the war film suspends the laws of classical narrative construction by eschewing Hollywood’s typical emphasis on the individual and focusing instead on the formation and achievements of a group.15 Moreover, the usual lack of women in combat films means that narratives that would be anchored by the formation of the heterosexual couple are now reconceived in relation to men’s relationships with each other. The difficulty of the conclusion of war films also presents a challenge to the suturing function of the typical Hollywood ending, in which the hero wins out, the couple reunites, and all loose ends are resolved. Since the war was ongoing and the armed forces were concurrently enacting the broader war narrative on the battlefield, films dealing with the war attempted to avoid definitive endings. Many wartime films explicitly renounced an ending: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943) joined other war-­related films in inserting the word “NOT” before the final title of “The End.” The final credits of 1942’s Wake Island were just as explicit: “This is not the end. There are other leathernecks who will enact a just and terrible violence.” David Bordwell, a major theorist of classical Hollywood cinema, has noted that Hollywood in the 1940s was “an era of narrative innovation.”16 He points to the increasingly common use of flashbacks, subjective narration, framing devices, and dream or fantasy sequences. Bordwell has not written at length about the combat genre, probably because it does not usually indulge in these showy narrative techniques. However, wartime combat films did deviate from the norm in their use of multiple protagonists and their episodic narratives that loosened causality. These alternative narrative structures reflected both a cultural pressure to represent America’s fighting forces as unified as well as an acknowledgment of the contingencies of war: people die, soldiers have little

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control over their own destinies, wartime experience does not follow a clear pattern, and of course, during the war itself, the ultimate outcome is unknown. In his analysis of wartime combat films, Dana Polan focuses mainly on the difficulties of constructing unified narratives in wartime. However, he maintains there was a strong degree of stylistic uniformity during this era. This chapter, on the contrary, will demonstrate the stylistic irregularity and formal hybridity of combat films in the 1940s. I contend that the stylistic norms often taken for granted in classical Hollywood cinema are routinely ignored in wartime combat films, particularly in their scenes of combat. The insertion of footage from multiple sources, including documentary and miniature models, stretches the narrative and visual coherence of these films to the breaking point. The awkward, disjointed, and sometimes even phantasmatic inclusion of combat scenes in the war films discussed below demonstrates how these films produced incoherent, incomplete, and contradictory spaces and times rather than one unified diegesis. By focusing on the construction of space in my two case studies below, I show how space did not subordinate itself to the narrative but took on a life of its own, eventually challenging the perception of both the characters within the film and the spectators in the audience. Moreover, as space was explicitly as well as implicitly gendered in these films, the films put forth a particular form of masculinity as desirable and natural.

Inside the Blue Grotto: Space and Perception in Destination Tokyo Narrative Structure Upon first glance, Warner Bros.’ late 1943 release Destination Tokyo appears to follow classical Hollywood narrative conventions by the book: its major protagonist, Capt. Cassidy (Cary Grant), must overcome obstacles ( Japanese enemies, as well as disputes among his men) in order to achieve a goal (a successful attack on the Japanese). He and his men succeed and return home. However, the film’s narrative also strays from classical conventions in its episodic structure and emphasis on spectacular combat sequences. Along with Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943), Sahara (Zoltan Korda, 1943), Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943), and Guadalcanal Diary (Lewis Seiler, 1943), Destination Tokyo is one of five films that Jeanine Basinger considers foundational to the construction of the World War II combat genre. Delmer Daves’s casting of John Garfield and John Ridgely, both of whom had starred in Air Force, led critics to note that Destination Tokyo meant to model itself after the earlier Warner Brothers success, which Basinger has called “perhaps the purest combat film ever made about the air service.”17 Like Air Force, Destination Tokyo follows the exploits of a group of diverse servicemen as they

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undertake a specific mission.18 The USS Copperfin submarine’s mission is to journey to Tokyo, where the submariners will aid in the Doolittle Raid’s bombing of the city. Along with the iconography of military equipment and uniforms, the film contains such generic elements as a burial at sea, a “last stand,” deceitful enemies, and discussions of women and home. Although conventional in terms of the genre, Destination Tokyo, like many combat films, modifies the strictures of classical Hollywood cinema by dispersing the focus among a fairly large group of main characters. Capt. Cassidy is ostensibly the protagonist, as the fatherly leader of the group, but other characters attract as much screen time, especially “Wolf ” ( John Garfield), the boastful ladies’ man. The group also includes “Cookie” (Alan Hale), the cook who mothers the men; “Tin Can” (Dane Clark), the Greek American who wants to revenge his uncle’s death at the hands of the Nazis; “Pills” (William Prince), the pharmacist’s mate who believes in science, not religion; Tommy (Robert Hutton), “the kid”; and Mike Conners (Tom Tully), an Irishman who mentors young Tommy. Each of these characters faces his own obstacle and must overcome it: Wolf gives up his playboy fantasies and commits to the group by undertaking a risky mission onshore in Japan; Cookie learns that the men appreciate his mothering; Tin Can gives up his disproportionate hate of the enemy and learns to rely on others during a depth charging; Pills learns the power of faith when his patient Tommy wakes up from a successful appendectomy operation reciting the Lord’s Prayer; and Tommy, in addition to having an appendectomy, overcomes his excessive grief for his friend Mike (who was literally stabbed in the back and killed by a downed Japanese pilot Mike was trying to save). As this list makes clear, subplots abound; the story proceeds from one episode to the next without a strong overarching narrative to structure it. The closest thing the film has to a linear narrative trajectory is its physical journey to Tokyo and back, but this is cyclical instead of a clear progression from obstacle met to objective achieved. Throughout all this, the backstories of each of the major characters are explained through dialogue, flashbacks, and sequences enacting Wolf ’s fanciful stories about women. The characters also work through issues as weighty as atheism, marriage and family, the evils of Nazism, the nature of Japanese imperialism, grief over the death of a comrade, and the necessity of sacrifice. Even critics at the time recognized that the film was “too much,” complaining about its excessive length (135 minutes), clichéd gags, and jam-­packed plot containing an implausible amount of action and circumstance for one patrol of one crew. Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times, “The chief fault, in our estimation, with the Warners’ ‘Destination Tokyo’ is that there is just too doggone much of it and is all too conventionally crammed in.”19 The Washington Post reviewer concurred with Crowther’s sense of an overabundance of

The “Good War”?  •  69

plot: “Delmar [sic] Daves and Albert Maltz, the scenarists, have packed into this one plot nearly all the exciting incidents involving submarines that have hit the front page during this war.”20 As an accomplished screenwriter before getting a chance to direct Destination Tokyo, which he also wrote, Delmer Daves knew how to provide plausible motivations for spectacular set pieces or propagandistic speeches. For instance, the need to pick up Lt. Raymond ( John Ridgely), an aerology and Japanese language specialist, motivates a detour to the Aleutian Islands. Later, Mike’s death prompts a diatribe by Capt. Cassidy about the differences between American and Japanese societies (one gives children roller skates; the other, daggers). But what motivates the submarine’s implausible single-­handed sinking of an aircraft carrier, other than the desire to visualize such an astonishing scene and to dramatize such a triumphant success? The motivations that lead the Copperfin to Tokyo Bay in the first place are tenuous at best. The ostensible goal is to place agents on the ground in Tokyo to perform weather-­related tests and provide essential data to the bomber pilots. Both military advisors and film critics found this plot outrageous. One navy advisor complained that the submarine’s penetration of Tokyo Bay was “only possible in the movies—­too far fetched even for [the] public to swallow—­already used in Crash Dive [Archie Mayo, 1943] and was ridiculous. Could never get out. The assignment of a modern fleet submarine to penetrate Tokyo Bay for weather data is wholly unsound.”21 But did this invalidate the film for audiences or even the navy? No. The drive to illustrate such a daring feat of infiltration of the enemy’s territory and such a thrilling triumph outweighed practical concerns about a credible story line. Instead of the cause-­effect chain of story actions motivating the ending, as one would expect in classical Hollywood cinema, the filmmakers for Destination Tokyo worked backward from the desired ending, thrilling set pieces, and bits of visual and character detail toward figuring out enough narrative glue to put them all together. Early story notes and research materials gathered by the filmmakers suggest that the elements they considered key ingredients of the film were the submarine, a trip to Tokyo, sinking ships with torpedoes, and an allusion to a large and important real-­life battle. The first three elements were all present in early reference materials collected by Daves in early 1943, including a typewritten copy of the Life magazine article “West to Japan,” dated March 15, 1943, and the manuscript “Via U.S. Sub to Japan—­and Back,” by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Stanton Delaplane based on the reports of an anonymous navy submarine skipper, dated January 3, 1943.22 This latter contains a number of plot elements from the finished film, including a trip to Japanese waters, the torpedoing of several ships (though not hitting or sinking all of them), the mistaking of a sea bird for an enemy aircraft, a celebratory roast turkey dinner (after sinking a ship, not for Christmas), and a depth charging. Although the plot of the finished film leads up to the Doolittle Raid

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on Tokyo, earlier drafts indicate that the filmmakers’ original plan involved the Copperfin in the Battle of Midway, which was planned to occur halfway through the film instead of at the end. A treatment dated May 13, 1943, describes the Copperfin’s discovery of a Japanese naval task force: “The Captain has picked up something—­something big—­maybe as big as Midway!” Although the battle changed, the plan to use documentary footage for their biggest combat sequence did not; a parenthetical statement in the treatment notes, “We have the film on this action.”23 If it fulfilled the desire for an exciting battle, which battle it was did not seem to be so important. Instead of spectacle subordinating itself to narrative, the narrative in this case was built around finding plausible ways to include as much spectacle as possible. Even Bosley Crowther expressed an inkling of this: “The Warners wanted to show us as much as they possibly could of the ever-­present perils and excitements of life in a fighting submarine.”24 This emphasis on showing is reflected in the pacing of the plot and the episodic and sometimes disjointed structure of the narrative. Early story notes for the film praise the earlier Warner Brothers hit Air Force: “Very skillfully done the ‘Air Force’ picture had repetitive periods of quiet story telling, then WHAM, ACTION! Back to routine again, then like a hypodermic needle jabbed without warning, a new emergency appears.”25 Destination Tokyo duplicated this pattern of alternating between relative calm and perilous danger.

(En)Gendering Space Destination Tokyo art director Leo “K” Kuter and writer-­director Delmer Daves attempted verisimilitude in their designs of the submarine and its surroundings, but unsurprisingly, they also took some liberties in order to make things flashier and draw attention to the experience of vision and sound on the submarine. In order to obtain realism in story and design, Daves claims to have spent a week aboard a submarine at Mare Island Navy Yard as he worked on the script, and his team worked closely with the navy to model their sets and re-­creations as closely to actual submarines as possible.26 Engaging almost in a technological fetishism, critics praised the film’s accuracy in terms of its depiction of submarine equipment. Crowther remarked, “The interior scenes are fascinating—­the gadgets and all that sort of thing.”27 Destination Tokyo encouraged this attention by showcasing their re-­creations of submarine technology in their control room set, which was budgeted at an impressive $18,500 with an additional $7,500 for a steel frame and rocking platform to simulate a submarine’s movement (together about one-­sixth of the total budgets for sets).28 The importance of technologically enhanced perception aboard the submarine is highlighted by Capt.  Cassidy’s repeated use of the periscope and the crew’s reliance on a radar system, the appearance and operation of which

The “Good War”?  •  71

was still a classified military secret of the time.29 Unlike real radar systems, the system in Destination Tokyo is modeled after an oscilloscope and therefore provides a far more abstract visual representation of what the radar “sees.” Although the crew appears to gain information from this device, it would be hard for audiences to “read” the radar, as its operation is never explained. Indeed, it seemed far more important for the production crew that the radar provide visual interest than actual information. Producer Jerry Wald wrote to art director Leo Kuter: “I think we can certainly take a dramatic license with the Radar equipment, since up to date nobody has seen a Radar machine, and I doubt whether they will see it until after the war. . . . It should have some trick lights on it and look very busy.”30 The control room set, while perhaps more “busy” than other places within the vessel, exemplifies the cool, rational, and organized sense of space inside the submarine. The inclusion of newfangled gadgets like the periscope and fathometer gives the impression that the submarine is technologically modern—­and thereby safe, working against the association of the submarine service with its extremely high casualty rate (almost 22 percent) during the war.31 Although the submarine’s clean, rational spaces and advanced technology, along with its all-­male crew, make it into a masculine space, it also includes touches that associate it with home and therefore are gendered feminine. The submarine’s tiny mess hall is the most home-­like space. The night after the submarine disembarks, the crew celebrates Christmas with a traditional American dinner. The mess hall and kitchen are presided over by “Cookie,” the cook played by then-­fifty-­one-­year-­old Alan Hale, who is understood as the “mother” of the crew, as Capt. Cassidy is the “father.” When the men make fun of his cooking at Christmas dinner, he theatrically protests, “Who practically mothers all the guys on this ship? I do. Who bends over a hot stove all day long for you guys? I do. Who’s gonna get all the glory when you sink a Jap ship? You, that’s who. . . . And what am I gonna get? Nothing but varicose veins and dishwater hands!” They then show respect to their “mother” by presenting him with a Christmas gift—­the kitchen knives that will later be honed down into surgical instruments for Tommy’s appendectomy. The feminine is also mapped upon the submarine itself, which like other military vessels is always referred to as “she.” The personification of the submarine as a woman is made concrete in the inclusion of a female “character” in this all-­male adventure: Nita, a doll clothed in a skimpy dress. Wolf, who entertains the crew with his outlandish stories about female conquest, brings the doll aboard specifically to make up for the lack of women on the submarine: “She’s a Liberty gimmick. Makes the gals jealous.” As a prop only briefly shown and unimportant for the development of the plot, the doll received a remarkable amount of press. Hedda Hopper reported overhearing discussion of “a doll so lifelike and sexy it will probably be censored by the Hays office.

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It’s the only female in the submarine in ‘Destination Tokyo.’ . . . Wait till you see it. It does everything but say ‘Sugar Daddy!’”32 (Despite Hopper’s exhortations, in the film, the doll is only about two feet tall and more cartoonish than lifelike.) John Garfield claimed in the press that the only picture he would send in answer to servicewomen’s requests would be one of him clutching the doll with the inscription “Till the girls come home.”33 The doll substitutes for the girls back home (and serving in the military elsewhere), but it also serves as a double for the submarine itself. In a fantasy sequence visualizing one of Wolf ’s fabricated stories of prowess with women, Wolf uses marine metaphors to describe the woman he desires: “She was built for speed but kinda compact too, like a submarine.” Later, when he returns to the submarine after a dangerous onshore mission and then when the sub survives depth charge explosions, Wolf twice kisses the submarine’s wall and exclaims, “Sweetheart, I love ya!” As a substitute for women, the submarine is both sexualized, as in Wolf ’s story, and sublimated, as the womb-­like space that protects them from the outside world. The representation of the interior of the submarine as home-­like, safe, secure, and maternal contrasts with the representation of the exterior—­the open ocean, the Aleutian Islands, and finally Tokyo Bay—­as foreign, threatening, and full of danger. Interior and exterior spaces are closed to one another;

FIGURE 12  Wolf ( John Garfield) shows off his doll Nita in Destination Tokyo.

The “Good War”?  •  73

when the men are inside the submarine, they cannot directly perceive the outside and must use mechanical instruments like radar and the periscope to sense what is happening. The schism between outside and inside, home and foreign land, friend and enemy becomes a gulf in perception between what can be directly experienced and what must be mediated through technology. Devices like the periscope and binoculars allow the crew some view of the outside, but it is a particular kind of remote, and weaponized, seeing. Unlike other examples of remote seeing discussed here, such as the aerial views or long shots used in scenes of terrestrial combat, subjective shots showing the view through a periscope or binoculars only give a small piece of the exterior world. In this way, they draw comparison to the gunsight footage in The Fighting Lady (Louis de Rochemont, 1945), which provides a technologically mediated view somewhere between the embedded perspective and the remote viewpoint. This division between interior and exterior leads to a crisis in perception that becomes a major motif running throughout the film. Destination Tokyo constantly broaches the possibility of mistaken perception. The first indication of the unreliability of one’s senses is when the young rookie, Tommy, mistakes an albatross for an enemy aircraft through his binoculars. Only after the submarine dives and Capt. Cassidy is able to use the periscope do they realize his mistake. Early in the film it appears that hearing is more reliable. After Mike’s death at the hand of the Japanese pilot, his friends realize that he had been sneaking off on his own to listen to a record of his wife’s voice expressing her love and devotion. As Mike’s friends listen to the record, their grieving faces reveal that her voice is a sincere testament to her feelings; there can be no misperception here. Shortly after this, Capt. Cassidy recounts how he met his wife on a—­literally—­blind date. Remarkably, Cassidy claims that he never saw her face, but he fell in love with her voice. The very next scene, however, demonstrates the potential of the aural to mislead. Cookie hears a voice speaking Japanese in a nearby part of the submarine. Arming himself with a pot of hot coffee, he sneaks into the room, only to find Lt. Raymond demonstrating his prowess with the Japanese language. In the previous examples, it would appear that the female voice is always trustworthy, while the male voice can be deceptive. However, later in the film, the crew listens to a radio broadcast of “Tokyo Rose,” an English-­speaking female broadcaster of Japanese propaganda, spewing lies about the strength of the Japanese navy and trying to seduce the Americans into giving up. The real difference among these examples seems to be whether the audio or visual data comes from home/America or from outside the safety of home. In the war genre, women often serve as representatives of home; they are reminders of “why we fight.” The Japanese appropriation of the female voice in Tokyo Rose, speaking in English with no apparent accent, demonstrates, in the logic of the film, the enemy’s deceit and perversity in manipulating something so

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seemingly sacred. As one of the crewmen remarks in an early version of the script: “There oughta be a law against a female like that using our language!”34 Tokyo Rose stands as the negative counterpart of the doll Nita and the submarine “herself.” While Nita and the Copperfin combine to represent both the sensual and the maternal aspects of femininity, Tokyo Rose represents a deficient and duplicitous form of femininity. As the “spokeswoman” for the Japanese, she feminizes the enemy, associating that gender with danger, seduction, deception, and ultimately death. While the American submarine combines feminine contours and a womb-­like sense of security with masculine technologies—­the control room machines and phallic torpedoes—­the exterior landscapes present a shift away from the sense of security, intimacy, and order experienced inside the vessel. As the Copperfin moves farther and farther away from home, the danger increases, represented by the growing opportunities for perceptual confusion, beginning with Tommy’s albatross mistake and ending with a depth charge attack in which the crew’s visual and aural perceptions cannot be trusted as accurate locators for the enemy craft that pursue them. The outside of the submarine represents a radical exteriority that cannot be controlled and manipulated by the desires and actions of the protagonists. Unlike stretches of beach that can be invaded, secured, and taken over by advancing marines, the ocean discourages such determinism through its fluidity. As opposed to surface vessels, the submarine is most frequently found fully immersed in water, completely surrounded by a life-­affirming but potentially deadly substance. The most horrifying moment in any submarine film is likely when the pipes burst and water starts flowing in, threatening to drown the crew. Destination Tokyo includes such a scene, acknowledging this danger, but under calm and assured Capt. Cassidy, it never threatens to get out of control. The one member of the crew who cracks under the pressure, Tin Can, is tackled and punched by the others to get him to calm down. They care for him but will not tolerate panic. “We can’t win if we can’t take it,” they explain. The liquid flow of the ocean becomes associated with the enemy, which can appear from any direction, from above or below. Combining with Tokyo Rose, the fluid danger of the ocean demonstrates the feminization of the enemy and the association, in this instance, of the feminine with the fraudulent and fatal.

Aesthetics of Combat The divorce between the home-­like, as well as rational and controlled, interior of the submarine and the enemy-­laden and undefined space outside the sub­marine also appears through the differing visual materials used to envision these two spaces. The Copperfin’s interior is represented by sets built on soundstages; the editing follows conventional patterns of continuity editing.

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Outside the submarine, however, the events of the film are more likely to be presented with miniature models, stock footage (from both fictional and documentary sources), and newsreel/documentary footage. The Copperfin’s encounter with Japanese aircraft in the Aleutian Islands, illustrated in the continuity sketches that opened this chapter, stands out as a very odd combination of visual material. About half of the scene was crafted from miniature models—­a small, scaled-­down submarine; a miniature landscape of water, fog, and ice-­covered mountains or rocks made out of papier-­ mâché; and Japanese planes in miniature, run on fishing line and rigged with explosives to blow up on cue. A second part of the scene was constructed with conventional shots of actors on a set, mostly on a full-­scale mock-­up of the top of a submarine built in a back-­lot water tank surrounded by matte paintings of rocks and fog. A third part of the scene consisted of stock or second-­unit footage shot in a separate place and time, including an image of a man bailing out of a plane with a parachute. Early in the scene, as the submarine emerges from underwater, these three kinds of images are combined through montage. We first see an undersea shot of the (miniature) submarine rising to the surface and another shot of the model sub breaking the surface from above.35 Then we see the actors coming on deck on their full-­scale set, and we switch back to the miniature sub moving in the snowy model landscape. After these first few establishing shots, however, the miniature models and the full-­scale sets are combined within the same shot through rear projection. The next shot returns to the actors on set, but projected into the background is the miniature landscape of rocks and fog. A few shots later, the submariners spot an aircraft in the distance. A point-­of-­ view shot through the binoculars shows a scale model aircraft approaching, combining miniatures and full-­scale dramatizations within the logic of point-­of-­view editing. In shots that follow in the scene, the actors fire at a miniature Japanese plane approaching them that exists only in the footage that is projected into the background of the shot. This combat scene is cut together with rapid montage and an alternation between long shots of the submarine (provided by the scale model), close-­ups of the faces of the firing submariners (on set) and reaction shots of the Japanese pilots (either stock footage taken from another fictional film or actors being filmed in yet another location), and medium shots of the actors on the submarine deck. By adopting conventional strategies of action sequences like quick cutting, this scene attempts to override the vast differences among these three (or more) spaces. But the lines between them remain visible, creating a disjointed sense of space and causality. Although the action is made clear, the sense of space, especially in rear-­projected shots, is flattened. By placing full-­size actors “within” a miniature landscape through rear projection,

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FIGURE 13  As imagined in shot 20 of the art director’s storyboards (see figure 11), actors

stand in front of prefilmed footage of miniature models in Destination Tokyo.

the film cannot help but create an almost dreamlike sense of dimension and scale. Later in the film, as the Copperfin travels farther and farther from home and closes in on enemy territories, the spaces inside and outside the submarine are more often linked by editing, rather than composited together into the same shot. The cut separating these two spaces represents the further distance between the sense of security within the submarine and the fluid and indeterminate danger outside. As the submarine approaches Tokyo Bay, we see more shots of the submarine from the outside, visualized by a miniature model moved in a shallow tank with a sandy or rock-­strewn bottom. Despite skillful craftsmanship, the model cannot help but seem artificial; it looks more like a stop-­motion puppet than an actual submarine. Moreover, the scene condenses the space of Tokyo Bay considerably, showing a tiny, constricted sink-­like space that the miniature submarine must travel through, dodging rock formations, floating mines, and the underbellies of Japanese ships. The claustrophobia that one would expect to feel inside a submarine has been projected outside onto the bay. Here, the submarine faces the continual danger of being trapped, being detected, or bumping into a mine or enemy vessel and thus being destroyed. The underwater miniatures may be less convincing today than they were in the 1940s because of advances in cinematic technology, but audiences and

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FIGURE 14  A miniature submarine inside a re-­creation of Tokyo Bay in Destination Tokyo.

critics at the time were not fooled by the miniatures; they were well aware of how these scenes were created. A number of contemporary reviews mentioned, and typically praised, the special effects. Bosley Crowther opined, “The undersea model work is graphic, for all its inside-­the-­Blue-­Grott [sic] look.”36 His sardonic reference to the Italian sea cave suggests that he thought the miniatures looked inauthentic, but his choice of the word “graphic” highlights the function of the models to provide additional visualizations of the activity of the submarine beyond what could be shown on sets of the submarine’s interiors. Despite their artificiality, the models work to secure and corroborate the experience of the crew inside, demonstrating that their guesses about where they are and where they are going are correct. They do so, however, through their illustrative function, not through a realistic sense of commonality between the inside and the outside of the submarine. These two spaces are separated by more than editing; they appear to be two different kinds of worlds altogether. The most jarring scene in the film, though, could also be considered the film’s climax—­the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. Writer-­director Delmer Daves must have faced difficulties in deciding how to visualize the raid. Because of the plot of the film, he needed to show the submarine’s contribution to this spectacular and important battle, but in actuality, submarines were not involved in the bombing. The Copperfin completes its (fictional) mission of

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gathering data for the bomber crew on a nearby aircraft carrier and thereafter has nothing to do but get away safely and return home. But omitting the raid itself would deny the audience the spectacular payoff of all the plot events leading up to it, as well as a dramatization of the triumphant success of the American military, which had very much been in doubt during the first two years of U.S. involvement in the war. This difficulty in the plot resulted in the inclusion of material from another film altogether, further undermining the attempt to create a cohesive diegetic space out of miniatures, full-­scale sets, and stock footage. The raid scene starts with two stock shots from documentary footage: an extreme long shot of an aircraft carrier moving over open water and a view from the deck showing a line of bomber planes. Then the scene switches to a ready room within the ship, where the bomber pilots and crew gather to prepare for their mission. The production quality and acting style of these shots—­lasting for about one minute—­match the rest of Destination Tokyo; archival documents corroborate that a set was constructed for this sequence and pages of dialogue written.37 However, the shots that follow of young aviators running to their planes and preparing to take off do not match the previous interior images. The next two minutes consist of edited footage that appears to have been taken en masse from another film. Considering the excessive scratches on the celluloid—­often a dead giveaway that shots within fictional films come from archival footage—­and the fact that a series of shots shows real bombers taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier, one might assume that this sequence was taken from documentary footage, perhaps shot during the Doolittle Raid itself. John Ford claimed to have filmed the Doolittle Raid; could this be his footage?38 Yet much of this material appears to be scripted and staged. Although they are not characters introduced in Destination Tokyo, the young men act like individuated characters from another film. Their glances to each other, comments to one another, distinctive differences in dress, and framing in a series of close-­ups—­these all suggest that in another film, the film from which they were excerpted, these men would be recognizable characters referencing backstories and relationships that we do not have access to here. In one striking sequence of shots, one man yells, “Go get ’em, Butch!” The man we assume to be Butch then turns around with a goofy look on his face and makes a strange, exaggerated gesture with one hand up and down, as if mimicking the undulations of ocean waves. This is clearly an inside joke that only makes sense within the world from which these characters were taken. The end of this sequence, though, contains images of actual airplanes taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Could the documentary and scripted images have been put together for a previous fictional film or for a documentary film produced by the U.S. military?

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Unfortunately, the archival sources I consulted did not shed light on the origin of this sequence. One letter written by producer Jerry Wald references his trip to the Air Force Motion Picture Unit to find additional stock footage for the Doolittle Raid sequence, but it’s not clear whether this piece of footage was found there or elsewhere.39 While its source is unknown, the sequence seems to spring from a different cinematic space and time, a different diegesis, than the rest of Destination Tokyo. The combat climax of the film thus appears to be the climax to another film, inserted whole into this one with little connection to the main narrative. Although this momentous battle represents triumph, in mismatching the rest of the film visually, spatially, and temporally, this scene only represents a fantastical triumph, not one grounded in the film’s diegetic reality.40 This sequence demonstrates the extent to which the amalgamation of miniature models, full-­scale dramatizations, and stock or documentary footage disrupts the continuity of cinematic space. Instead of following the standard Hollywood aesthetic norms of unity and balance, these scenes are fragmented among various kinds of spaces. Moreover, they work against the maintenance of a coherent, singular diegesis. The Doolittle Raid sequence provides the most clear-­cut example of another diegesis—­the cinematic world of these other characters—­interrupting the original one. Other parts of the film, though, like the Aleutian Islands section, question the possibility of constructing a consistent or harmonious diegetic world out of disparate materials like models and stock footage. Rather than promoting harmony and consistency in their visual style, these scenes present wildly varying and often jarring views of the waging of war. In doing so, they invite spectators to react to them in different ways—­from fear and tension to jubilation and exhilaration to awe and astonishment. The jumbled scenes of fighting contrast with the rational, orderly, and masculine construction of space inside the submarine. By presenting inconsistent and discordant perspectives, battle sequences reveal the irrationality and incoherence of combat itself, evoking the destructive sublime.

Fusing Fiction and the “Real Thing”: Wing and a Prayer and the Space of the Screen Twentieth Century–­Fox’s 1944 combat film Wing and a Prayer is not a particularly well-­known film today. Its biggest star was Don Ameche, a Twentieth Century–­Fox contract player acclaimed at the time for having starred in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (Irving Cummings, 1939) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943). Wing and a Prayer also features a young Dana Andrews; it was released a few months before his breakthrough starring role in Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944). (Andrews had also appeared in Gregg Toland and John Ford’s December 7th [1943], though his scenes as the ghost of a Pearl

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Harbor veteran were omitted from the final cut of the documentary.) What makes Wing and a Prayer so intriguing now is its comparatively bold construction of combat sequences fusing fictional characters with documentary footage. These sequences are similar to those described above in Destination Tokyo, but their heavy usage of documentary footage for rear-­projected backgrounds highlights the visual, and diegetic, disparities produced by combinations of fiction and nonfiction. Furthermore, the narrative of Wing and a Prayer explicitly calls attention to Hollywood filmmaking by including a screen actor as one of the major characters. Implicitly, the film contrasts Hollywood filmmaking with the documentary mode of production on display in the backgrounds of the shots, illustrating a self-­reflexivity and critical engagement with prior visual depictions of the war. As with Destination Tokyo, this also involves the representation of precarious and dangerous spaces that are explicitly gendered by the narrative.

Narrative Structure The plot of Wing and a Prayer strains the boundaries of narrative realism associated with classical Hollywood cinema. Like Destination Tokyo, Wing and a Prayer attempts to be both one specific story and all stories about the contribution of one particular military service—­in this case, the air and sea crews of an aircraft carrier. The subtitle of the film, The Story of Carrier X, marks both a claim to historical reality and a distancing from it. The use of the generic letter as stand-­in for the carrier suggests that the film tells the true story of a particular aircraft carrier, whose identity cannot be revealed for reasons of national security.41 Yet since the film does not name a specific ship, it can combine as many stories from various carriers in wartime as its plot would allow. Thomas Pryor of the New York Times noted that Wing and a Prayer is “a composite reflection of the adventures of such gallant ships as the Enterprise, the Lexington, the Hornet and Torpedo Squadron 8.”42 As such, it, like Destination Tokyo, follows an episodic structure that is based as much on the cyclical nature of training and combat as it is on a progression from the beginning to the end of a mission. The mission of Carrier X is one of deception and secrecy, devised to fool the Japanese navy about the strength, size, and geographic deployment of the American fleet, which had been so badly damaged at Pearl Harbor. In the first scene of the film, an admiral explains that the carrier will travel around the islands of the Pacific, running away from any engagement with the enemy but making sure to be spotted by him at specific points. This movement will create the illusion that Carrier X is not one American ship going back and forth among islands, but several aircraft carriers disconnected from one another and staffed by demoralized sailors who lack the will to fight. The officers hope that this will lure the Japanese navy into a false sense of complacency, which the

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American fleet will take advantage of when they finally go on the offensive at the Battle of Midway. This mission motivates the plot but does not comprise it. Rather, the main antagonism of the film consists of the conflict between the hard-­nosed flight commander, Bingo Harper (Don Ameche), and the pilots and other crew of Torpedo Squadron Five, who chafe at military discipline and their inscrutable orders, as yet unexplained as to their rationale, to turn away from the enemy instead of fight. Yet even this conflict remains in the background as we watch the men form relationships, adapt to the structure of the military, engage in hijinks, train, and eventually, fight. For the men, their mission is no mission. They are told to perform reconnaissance and training tasks but to avoid engagement in the war at all costs—­in effect, to do nothing. Therefore, their actions and psychological goals do not drive the plot in the same way that one would expect of conventional Hollywood films of this time period. Instead, their actions are determined by commands from unseen authorities, and their desires—­mostly, to fight or to return home—­are constantly thwarted by their orders. When at last their mission “succeeds” and the trap is sprung on the Japanese fleet at Midway Atoll, the men finally fulfill their desire to openly fight the enemy. Yet the climax was brought about only surreptitiously by their own actions. This key moment of combat appears to be less motivated by the skillful construction of the plot than by the perceived necessity to include a spectacular and triumphant combat sequence near the end of the film. In fact, Twentieth Century–­Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck urged the producers of Wing and a Prayer to “avoid plot, otherwise we will destroy the value of the honesty that we must maintain.” Instead, he suggested they focus on engaging characters and thrilling combat scenes to create “the feeling that our characters are actually in battle.”43 Wing and a Prayer includes no discussions of the necessity of fighting the war, does not mention Pearl Harbor, and imparts no information that disparages the enemy. Rather, the war is taken as a given, its reasons already understood by the film’s 1944 release date. The lack of focus on the enemy means that the obstacle facing the film’s protagonists shifts from external to internal forces, foreign to domestic disputes. The issue confronted in the film most directly is military discipline. Wing and a Prayer seeks to reconcile the hierarchical and autocratic structure of the military, and the discipline and self-­ control that it requires, with America’s cultural emphasis on the individual and his (and to a lesser extent, her) personal freedom. The latter is personified most forcefully in the character of Hallam Scott (William Eythe), an Academy Award–­winning actor turned torpedo bomber pilot. A charming but self-­centered playboy, Scott routinely clashes with Cdr. Harper. However, the problem of freedom versus discipline is solved by the experience of combat, which appears to have an instantaneous effect on

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once-­skeptical characters, prompting them to finally recognize the necessity of sacrifice. At the end of the Battle of Midway, after Scott and his crew are nearly killed by flying too low over a torpedo blast, they are stranded without the coordinates of the carrier’s new position. But Scott, after an unshown and unremarked change of heart, refuses to endanger the carrier by breaking radio silence, and therefore he runs out of gas and crashes into the ocean. The stern commander also experiences a change of heart, hardly motivated by the plot, as he finally breaks down and explains how his stringent exterior masks the emotional difficulties he faces sending men to their possible deaths. These plot points demonstrate the conventionality of the “conversion narrative,” which reinforced the impression that all Americans could and would put aside individual desires for the common good—­a standard narrative trope undergirding the “good war” mythology.

(En)Gendering Space Like Destination Tokyo’s submarine, Wing and a Prayer imagines its vast aircraft carrier as a home away from home for the sailors and airmen on board. Although the size of the ship gives it the appearance of strength and authority that the submarine in Destination Tokyo lacks, “Carrier X” is continuously labeled as feminine. The carrier and the airplanes on or within it are referred to as “she” and are coaxed and caressed with care and admiration, even love. When the pilots are first shown in the air, the squadron leader (Dana Andrews) looks down at the carrier and remarks over the radio: “Pilot to crew: there’s Mama.” Later, landing on the carrier is compared to “putting a baby to bed.” Other aspects of home are simulated on the ship, including gardening. One pilot starts a hydroponic vegetable garden on the flight deck using leftover materials and chemicals. When he dies in aerial combat, the camera sweeps over the pots of now-­ripe tomatoes and herbs. Like the Copperfin, the carrier is a place of safety and security that can be personalized and inhabited like a home. Opposed to the maternal and feminine space of the ship, the sky represents an unbounded canvas, full of danger but also power and freedom. Beautiful long shots of American airplanes flying in formation in front of clouds are common in Wing and a Prayer and almost every other war film dealing with the air service. These shots are designed to evoke a sense of awe at the command these pilots have of their technology and of the sky. Their movement seems limited only by their discipline in flying in formation. In Wing and a Prayer, only men—­and only those with a secure sense of masculinity—­are allowed in the air. One pilot, “Cookie” Cunningham (Kevin O’Shea), reveals his fragile mental state by failing to properly launch his plane off the carrier deck and crashing into the ocean before a routine patrol; in the not-­so-­hidden symbolism of the film, he cannot “get it up.” Sharing the same nickname as

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the maternal cook in Destination Tokyo, Cookie was a hero at Pearl Harbor who now suffers from an unnamed nervous condition. His failure illustrates the film’s association of the sky with masculinity. His inability to get into the air reflects his symbolic impotence more than his lack of flying prowess. When Scott, whose narcissism and association with Hollywood also puts his masculinity in doubt, nervously approaches the aircraft carrier to land, he does not look at a picture of a girl back home to soothe his nerves but instead pulls out his Oscar statuette—­a little golden man—­for good luck. In this film, even (or especially) at moments of weakness, women are forbidden in the cockpit, in the pilot’s thoughts or otherwise. The sky represents freedom of action and motion, but in its openness, it can also be deceiving to the eye and threatening in its access to the enemy. Like the ocean in Destination Tokyo, the sky here represents an unbounded, indefinite space. Unlike the ocean, a full and heavy space, the sky is distinguished by its lightness and seeming emptiness. It is a frontier of sorts, mastered by men with their death-­defying daring and complex machinery. It is a space for movement but also a space where one’s perception of direction and orientation can become easily confused—­hence the orderly airplane formation as a focus in many wartime films, which would seek to downplay the possibility of disorientation. But as much as this aerial bewilderment is suppressed by the films, it emerges again in scenes of combat. For Scott, the Japanese planes that shot down his roommate Gus Chisholm (Richard Crane) just “came out of the sun.” This statement attests to the possibility of perceptual confusion in a space with so few visible barriers or landmarks, while also referencing the visual symbols of the Japanese flag. Like Westerns, war films present dangers arising abruptly out of nature. While in an infantry film the soldiers often find themselves, disconcertingly, to be sharing the same space as the enemy—­as when an unseen sniper shoots down one of the team—­the spatial connections between opposed combatants in naval and air force films are more fluid and dispersed. In these spaces, the danger of contact with the enemy often takes the form of mistaken perception: albatrosses for airplanes, enemy craft emerging from the sun. One way that Wing and a Prayer meditates on the problem of perception is by including a consideration of cinematic space within the diegesis. In other words, the film self-­reflexively explores the nature of cinema and its relationship to the war. The most direct way the film does this is by focusing much of the narrative on Hallam Scott, the Hollywood actor. Before his unexplained (but completely conventional) conversion toward group loyalty at the end of the film, Scott constantly breaks the rules, puts himself before others, and endangers the rest of the crew with reckless comportment. Scott’s behavior prompts a speech from the squadron leader that insists that there are no “stars” in wartime, just people willing to work together as a team. The film thus implicitly

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suggests that Hollywood cinema must get rid of the trappings of glamour and self-­involvement in order to make a contribution to the war effort. The film’s investigation into cinematic space comes to the fore in a scene in which the crewmen gather to watch a film, the Twentieth Century–­Fox Betty Grable vehicle Tin Pan Alley (Walter Lang, 1940). Excited to see the film, the men assemble around the film projector as a frazzled projectionist tries to make it work. Finally, the projector starts, showing the opening titles of Tin Pan Alley and the “Sheik of Araby” number in which Grable and Alice Faye sing and dance wearing veils (thus misrepresenting the order of the actual film). Along with snippets of the projected film, Wing and a Prayer shows us the men’s faces, grinning, shouting, clapping, or leering at the women onscreen. Then the diegetic filmstrip breaks, and the men stand up shouting in protest. Finally, the projectionist gets the film going again, but this time, the image is upside-­down, resulting in another near riot. When he finally gets it running properly, the men are once again interrupted from their captivation by the screen—­this time by a call to battle stations. The necessities of the real world draw the men away from the fantasies of the screen world, represented by Grable and Faye in this dream-­like, Arabian Nights–­type number. Thus the scene illustrates the very process of sublimation as the men quickly turn from leering at scantily clad women to waging a battle.

FIGURE 15  The men erupt with frustration when the filmstrip breaks in Wing and a Prayer

(Henry Hathaway, 1944).

The “Good War”?  •  85

Cinema, here represented as an illusionistic fantasy projected onto a screen, is opposed within Wing and a Prayer with authentic, masculine experience, which can only be attained by being at war and, especially, fighting the enemy. The Tin Pan Alley scene celebrates Hollywood’s (and particularly Twentieth Century–­Fox’s) role in providing much-­needed entertainment to the troops, but ultimately Wing and a Prayer is implicitly critical of this frivolous distraction from the war. Escapist entertainment is represented as flat, like the makeshift movie screen, while the “real” adventure that the men experience in the war takes place in a space as vast and unlimited as the sky. The film’s depiction of entertainment is explicitly gendered. Through the device of fan letters, the film shows that women naively believe the fantasy they see on screen. Early in the film, Scott receives a huge stack of fan letters that had been sent on from Twentieth Century–­Fox Studios, and throughout the film, his fellow crewmembers open them, look at the photos sent, and mockingly read the letters out loud. One fan writes: “Dearest Hallam, I couldn’t sleep a wink thinking of how lucky the girl was in your picture I saw last night, and thinking of how wonderful it’d be if I could have been her and feel your strong arms around me and your lips pressed close to mine.” Although the men are titillated by the women’s attraction and gullibility, they also renounce this kind of romanticism as indulgence in fantasy. Unlike these girls, they, as men and particularly as military men, have serious and grave work to do. Furthermore, Wing and a Prayer shows naive belief in a cinematographic or photographic image to be a sign of weakness. Chisholm, the first pilot to be killed, talks to a photograph of his girlfriend, saying “Good morning” and “Good night” to her each day. This sentimentalism and preoccupation with a picture are shown to be shortcomings when the work of war is involved. Similarly, the men are drawn away from the screening of Tin Pan Alley to do the “real” work of fighting. They are entranced by the image only at their own peril. These scenes self-­reflexively construct the space of Hollywood as shallow, narcissistic, illusory, and feminine—­a dream image projected on a screen. Wing and a Prayer contrasts this space of fantasy to the rational, “real,” and masculine space of combat and the military, disavowing its own status as an artificially constructed, cinematic product. The contrast between real war and cinematic fantasy forms part of the film’s gendered rhetoric of authenticity. Danger appears in the film not just when the masculine space is confronted with the feminine but when these two worlds collide, narratively and stylistically. Scott and Cookie do not manage to fit comfortably within the masculine space of combat because of their narcissism and/or impotence—­at least until they make the ultimate sacrifice, choosing to accept death rather than endanger their comrades.

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Aesthetics of Combat Like Destination Tokyo, Wing and a Prayer also attempts to visualize an important battle, but instead of primarily using miniature model special effects, this film relies heavily on preexisting documentary footage. Films made later in the war (1944–­1945) and postwar films—­such as The Story of G.I. Joe (William A. Wellman, 1945) or Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949)—­tended to move away from a prominent use of miniatures, anticipating the general postwar cinematic trend of using more outdoor or location shooting. These shifts in film style—­along with the inclusion of omniscient voice-­over narration, unknown or nonprofessional actors, and handheld cinematography—­ demonstrate the impact wartime documentaries, like those discussed in chapter 1, had on Hollywood. Their influence is nowhere greater, though, than in the wholesale incorporation of scenes from documentaries into Hollywood fictional films. The growing availability of combat footage taken by military cameramen overseas did not alleviate the problem of representing combat, however. In their extensive use of documentary footage, films like Wing and a Prayer challenge conventional Hollywood editing techniques that privilege transparency and uniformity, creating combat scenes that stand out both visually and narratively from the rest of the film. The sometimes jarring aesthetic effects of the inclusion of documentary footage have been overlooked by previous theorists and historians of the war genre and the World War II film. That Hollywood would utilize combat footage taken by U.S. military cameramen has retrospectively been taken as a given. Certainly, quality military footage—­available for free or for cheap and depicting just those weapons, military vehicles, or events that Hollywood found it difficult to convincingly or cost-­effectively re-­create—­would have been attractive to producers trying to keep their bottom line in check. But the stylistic and structural effects of the inclusion of this footage into Hollywood narrative features have yet to be analyzed. Genre critics have generally interpreted the use of documentary footage in fictional combat films as an attempt to authenticate the film’s grounding in historical reality and add to its verisimilitude. Kathryn Kane discusses newsreel footage as one of several devices, along with maps, specific dates and places, and the portrayal of historic persons, which seek to establish authenticity and foreground the film’s “basis in historical fact.”44 For Jeanine Basinger, the inclusion of documentary footage into combat films marks a strategy of “put[ting] reality into the genre.”45 However, the insertion of documentary footage into Hollywood features often had unanticipated consequences, particularly the tendency of documentary images, with their striking new aesthetics of combat, to make the rest of the film look phony. As the foregoing analysis of Destination Tokyo demonstrates, combat films of the 1940s intercut documentary

The “Good War”?  •  87

footage not only with scripted re-­creations on Hollywood sets but also with miniature model re-­creations, second-­unit material shot on location or outdoors, and stock footage from both nonfictional and fictional films. Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (Mervyn LeRoy, 1944), for example, includes documentary shots alongside sequences featuring extensive special effects with miniature models, especially those created for the Doolittle bombing of Tokyo; the film won the 1945 Academy Award for Special Effects. In many combat films of this period, various types of footage are frequently combined in the same shot, resulting in the preternatural flatness of matte shots or rear-­projected images. These juxtapositions, whether created through editing or montage within the shot, tend to produce particularly unstable constructions of cinematic space and time. For Wing and a Prayer, director Henry Hathaway merged footage shot on a shakedown cruise of the brand-­new aircraft carrier USS Yorktown with documentary footage taken during actual combat, a few miniature models, and full-­scale re-­creations with actors on sets. As the New York Times reported, the film spent sixty thousand dollars building a “‘flattop’ set” on Twentieth Century–­Fox property to correspond with the footage taken on the York­ town.46 The documentary footage and the fictional scenes are integrated through both montage and rear projection. The result is a complex amalgamation of footage pieced together from various spaces and times to represent a historical moment. While it could be argued that almost all films use editing to create the illusion of a continuous space and time, the difference here is the degree to which these spatial fusions are visible on the surface of the film and how they may prompt viewers to contemplate the relation each of these kinds of footage has to historical reality. Other contemporary films use compositing to combine multiple shots into one, such as those shots in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) that use optical effects to create the illusion of deep focus. In contrast, Wing and a Prayer, along with other combat films that rely heavily on documentary footage, like RKO Radio Pictures’ Bombardier (Richard Wallace, 1943), reveal—­and even appear to highlight—­the seams between different types of images. If, as Kane and Basinger claim, the inclusion of documentary footage works to add authenticity, it is not merely by boosting the quotient of realistic-­ looking images. Rather, it is only by being recognizable as documentary footage ostensibly shot under combat conditions that these images posit their claim to realism. Thus although filmmakers worked to integrate documentary footage into the fictional mise-­en-­scène, they also benefited from choosing images that were visibly marked as combat footage. Hybridity in space and time was thus stylistically built into films like Wing and a Prayer. Contemporary reviews acknowledged the heightened presence of documentary footage in this film as something new but differed in their assessments

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of its impact. Some reviewers likened Wing and a Prayer to government-­ produced documentary films, such as John Ford’s Battle of Midway, but the comparison was unfavorable. Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Though the film’s battles are spectacular they suffer, as do most of those in Hollywood productions, by comparison with the real action of the government features.”47 Thomas Pryor of the New York Times acknowledged and praised the use of documentary footage: “Director Henry Hathaway has so skillfully woven documentary film footage into the story that it is difficult at times to spot the ending of an incident out of history and the beginning of an episode fashioned on the typewriter of Scenarist Jerome Cady.” Critics appear to have been influenced by the quite obvious use of documentary footage to either take the rest of the film’s story as fact or disparage it as not as real or effective as government-­or military-­produced documentary films. Pryor concludes that Wing and a Prayer “misses out on the epic sweep of the actual Midway campaign. The Navy’s own documentary, ‘Battle of Midway,’ remains the classic screen account of that historic engagement.”48 Ironically, Pryor identifies Ford’s The Battle of Midway as better depicting “the epic sweep” of the battle despite its introduction of unpolished aesthetics that emphasize deficiency and preclude “epicness.” Paradoxically, then, Wing and a Prayer’s inclusion of documentary footage from films that, like The Battle of Midway, follow new codes of realism may have played a role in Pryor’s judgment that it lacked that grandiose or overarching vision of the battle. Wing and a Prayer’s combat sequences reveal the schisms between masculine and feminine, real and artificial, superficiality and depth on the visual and aural tracks of the film. The most bombastic, and also phantasmatic, instance of spatial and temporal fragmentation in the film is the major combat sequence encapsulating the Battle of Midway. The scene begins simply enough, adding to conventional stylistics only the unusual touch of omitting any musical score during combat. After a montage showing pilots and crew preparing their aircraft and themselves for the mission, we see the planes take off, fly in formation until they spot the enemy convoy of ships below the clouds, and then dive down to begin the torpedo bombing. The first part of the battle follows basic spatial and temporal continuity—­the American planes generally travel from right to left; the dropping of torpedoes and eruption of explosions closely follow images of pilots scoping their targets and pushing the appropriate buttons. After only two minutes of this fairly orderly depiction of combat, however, the spatial and temporal clarity breaks down. First, the film neglects the visual spectacle of battle to focus attention on the act of imagining the battle from a distance. Then the film creates a bizarre and complex amalgam of various kinds of footage to represent the final stage of the battle. After the relatively brief illustration of the torpedo bombers doing their job, the focus shifts back to the aircraft carrier, the crew of which must wait

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to hear back from the pilots and air crew that they launched before the battle. The captain of the ship, listening to the pilots speak to each other over the radio, decides to broadcast this flow of sound to the rest of the ship over the loudspeakers. Three minutes follow without any combat images. A sound montage dominates this scene as voices and sound effects implicitly narrate the battle: “How many are there?,” “Smack ’em down, kid!,” “Let ’em come around, let ’em come around!,” “Alright, alright!,” “Swing us around, skipper, swing us around!,” “Got ’em, got ’em, got ’em!,” “Seven o’clock!” The film explicitly represents the process of imagining a battle. Listening intently while staring at the audio speaker or into empty space, the crewmembers back on the carrier react with visible joy when the pilots report hitting their targets, tension when the outcome is unclear, and sadness when one of the Americans is hit or faces death. For instance, in one exchange between a bomber pilot and his radio operator, the latter says that the plane is on fire and that he cannot move, urging the pilot to bail out. The pilot responds, “I haven’t got the altitude, Mike. We’ll take this ride together.”49 (This sequence motivates the aforementioned shot overlooking the pilot’s vegetable garden.) A number of shots show a secondary character whose hobby is boxing repeatedly punching the air, imagining the aerial battles he hears as bouts with invisible foes. With the sound montage on the aural track, the image track focuses on the faces of the men listening and reacting. The Battle of Midway is denied to the audience visually. This artistic decision may well have been a cost-­saving measure, but the effect is a focus on the imagination of combat, drawing a parallel between those crewmembers listening on the ship and the spectators listening (and watching others listen) in their theater seats. But if this earlier part of the scene asks the audience to visualize the battle in their heads, the next part of the scene brings the process of cinematically visualizing combat to the fore. For the climax of the combat scene—­when Japanese bombers attack the aircraft carrier itself—­Wing and a Prayer combines conventional scripted scenes with documentary footage, special-­effects shots of miniature models, and stock or second-­unit footage of generic activities like the firing of antiaircraft guns. Although many wartime combat films, Destination Tokyo included, utilize these kinds of footage, what is remarkable here is the continuous use of rear projection to insert actors from the fictional diegesis into (or, more accurately, on top of ) documentary footage of actual events. These composited images display some of the flatness associated with Hollywood screen images, such as Tin Pan Alley, instead of the three-­ dimensional space associated with the war in earlier parts of the film. This last segment of the battle scene begins with documentary footage of airplanes in the sky, large guns firing on deck, and a remarkable panning shot of an airplane on fire crashing into the ocean. The next shot breaks with this pattern, however, and establishes a new one: it shows a similar documentary

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shot of an explosion in the ocean, but into the left part of the frame leans one of the secondary characters, as if he, too, is watching the explosion, and then he turns back toward the camera and smiles (figure 16). The rest of the scene includes a series of images that also insert fictional characters into the foreground of documentary shots, as if the characters were reacting to the events in the background footage. Cdr.  Harper’s medium close-­up, for instance, appears over a grainy documentary shot of an aircraft carrier deck that has been bombed and is covered in smoke and fire (figure 17). Later, the air-­boxing crewman appears again pulling a fire hose in front of a documentary naval combat scene in the background. In these process shots, the background image often contains camera movement or editing that does not match the foreground material. In one example, an officer stands in front of a doorway that frames a documentary image of an airplane falling into the ocean. The background shot has a slight downward movement to follow the plane as it falls, while the foreground image remains completely still. In another example, there is a subtle jump cut in the background documentary material between a shot of the deck on fire and a slightly different shot of the deck being splashed with water from a nearby explosion. The character in the foreground reacts to the explosion but does not react to (or participate in) the jump cut. The visual differences between foreground and background are not limited to discrepancies in camera movement or angle. The documentary footage used in this sequence—­unlike in the earlier parts of the film, which heavily utilized footage of actual maneuvers and equipment shot by the Wing and a Prayer crew on a shakedown cruise—­diverges severely in quality, clarity, visual tone, exposure, and lighting from the fictional material acted out on a set. The scene utilizes extraordinary shots of airplanes on fire, falling from the sky, and exploding, as well as a series of shots documenting the results of bombing and fire on an aircraft carrier deck. Visually and stylistically, however, they are estranged from the rest of the visual material of the scene; they are shot on gritty film stock, and because of lighting and filming conditions, they tend to be washed out and lack sharp focus. Finally, because this footage is provided by the U.S. military, which kept combat film in badly organized archives without necessarily providing the best care for reels of celluloid, it contains scratches and visual blemishes that are lacking in the foreground images. The disparity between foreground and background in this series of shots works against a sense of stable space and time. Not only do the backgrounds tend to shift in disconcerting ways, but their differing clarity and quality prove that they represent a different space and time than the foregrounds. Although the sequence appears to make an attempt to integrate fictional scenes with documentary images—­in shots of actors on a set meant to mimic the damaged carrier deck from the documentary footage, for

FIGURES 16 AND 17  Characters in the fictional world stand in front of rear-­projected documentary footage in Wing and a Prayer.

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instance—­other spectacular images appear even if they do not make logical or spatial sense. An aerial shot captured by a machine-­g un camera on an airplane in the midst of a dogfight is inserted into the sequence, even though such a shot is completely unmotivated by the rest of the scene. The shot is so brief, it would not be likely to jar the spectator; rather, it provides a thrilling illustration of combat, regardless of whether it corresponds to the rest of the sequence visually or narratively. The clear distinction between documentary and fictional footage throughout the scene, in both composited and other shots, cannot be overlooked. Although it would be a stretch to assume that the filmmakers aimed to disrupt diegetic space and time, this scene works to expand the spatiotemporal landscape of the film to include the past temporal durations of the events captured by the documentary footage. This leads the spectator to contemplate, however briefly, the spatial and temporal representations in the film, whether to integrate them in his or her mind or to enjoy the destructive sublime on display in this most fantastic of combat sequences. Because of its own disruptive makeup, the destructive sublime offers visceral pleasures untied to spatial coherence or narrative plausibility. Earlier scenes in Wing and a Prayer drew lines between the reality of warfare and the dream world usually offered by Hollywood, as represented by the actor-­turned-­pilot, his fan letters, and the onboard screening of Tin Pan Alley. The heavy and perceptible use of documentary footage in this last sequence corresponds to the film’s attempt to distinguish itself from typical Hollywood productions. In this way, despite its visual disparity, the documentary footage stands out as “real,” proving its authenticity by its difference in style and quality. On the other hand, however, the use of documentary footage framed by characters reacting to it in the foreground parallels, rather than opposes, the visualization of Hollywood cinema earlier in the film. When Tin Pan Alley is screened for the men, the whimsical image is framed by the heads of the crewmembers watching and reacting. In the final combat sequence, the documentary footage is similarly framed by observing characters, demonstrating an interrelationship much like that at work in cinematic spectatorship—­one of reaction rather than intervention. This visual parallel suggests that the line between frivolous entertainment and authentic document can become blurred as types of footage, with their unique circumstances of filming and distinctive durations of time and space, are merged within Wing and a Prayer and other combat films. The result of this merging is not a continuous space and time but rather a disjunctive amalgam of views. Instead of creating a singular and stable diegesis, using the documentary footage to place fictional events into a time line of history, the film produces a layering of spaces and times, some that match and others that create jarring or spectacular juxtapositions. While at first glance it may

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seem that Wing and a Prayer works to enforce a distinction between the artificial and feminized fantasy worlds of Hollywood cinema and the authentic and masculine depiction of a wartime world, the last combat scene introduces an uncertainty about any cinematic product’s ability to create a “real” image of war. The film’s self-­reflexivity in considering issues of perception and cinematic spectatorship—­the deceptive mission aiming to confuse the enemy’s perception, the meditation on imagining and visualizing war, the parallelism between fantasy and “actual” cinematic images—­demonstrates a complex engagement with issues of truth and fiction, appearance and reality.

Conclusion The ability of Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer to represent combat was hampered by technical and aesthetic difficulties as well as limits imposed by the military and the industry on the amount and type of violence on display. Not only did filmmakers face the complications of obtaining the materials, manpower, and funds necessary to restage particular battles, but they also ran into the historical problem of imagining and visualizing the experience of war cinematically. The presence of combat in the World War II “combat film” cannot be taken for granted as an inevitable generic ingredient. These films struggled to represent battle and often thematized their inability to adequately portray the combat experience by presenting challenges to the characters’ sensory perception. To represent combat, these films turned to other cinematic material, most prominently miniature models, stock footage from both documentary and fictional films, and full sequences from documentary films. Although the disparities among various types of footage are particularly striking in Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer, many other combat films of the period also grappled with the difficulty—­and exhilarating opportunity—­offered by these multiple visualization methods. Air Force, Bataan, and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo all experimented with using miniature models to visualize combat. Films like Corvette K-225 (Richard Rosson, 1943) explored the consequences of integrating large amounts of documentary footage into the fictional diegesis, while films like Bombardier matched Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer in combining documentary footage with special effects. To a greater or lesser extent in these films, the heterogeneous visual materials used to create scenes of combat in turn fracture the coherence of the film’s diegetic world. When miniature models are used to re-­create events, the juxtaposition of models with full-­scale objects and actors creates dissonance in the spatial relationships formed by objects in the world of the film. Visual cues related to proximity, relative size, perspective, and shadow differ in shots with miniature models and those with full-­scale sets and locations. Documentary

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footage intercut into a fictional film also introduces temporal incongruity. The diegetic world of the film fractures between the space and time of the staged re-­creations of actors and the space and time of the historical event. A past moment recorded in documentary footage interrupts the imagined “present” of the fictional film. When films combine miniature or documentary footage with narrative scenes within the same shot, as with rear projection, the spatial, temporal, and visual qualities of the disparate materials often conflict, resulting in a hallucinatory, insistently cinematic, and incoherent construction of space, as well as a sense of flattening as the various kinds of images appear to be layered over one another. The effort to control that which, in the war itself, cannot be controlled—­ death—­reveals a potential source of incongruity and rupture. Indeed, combat scenes can often be seen as fissures in the fabric of the narrative in which the heretofore repressed contradictions of war spill out onto the screen in a wave, perhaps paradoxically, of thrills and sensations, speaking the language of the destructive sublime. The breaks in narrative seen so prominently in combat sequences appear on the surface of the film most readily in the juxtaposition of documentary footage, miniature models, full-­scale re-­creations, and practical special effects like explosions. The visual register of each of these modes is distinct from the others, introducing perceptible breaks in visual quality, cinematography, editing, and constructions of space and time. Although an attempt to seamlessly integrate various forms of footage is apparent, the radically different senses of scale, movement, quality, and perspective rarely succeed in cohering into a unified spatial and temporal impression. In effect, these stylistic ruptures depart from not only the narrative trajectories of the films but also the homogeneity of techniques associated with classical Hollywood cinema. Combat, when it does appear, stems as much from a desire to show the spectacle of war as from narrative causality. In producing these spectacles, wartime combat films routinely break rules of continuity and disrupt the unity of the diegesis usually maintained by Hollywood aesthetic conventions regarding time and space. They often present episodic plots, flimsy narrative causality, narrative gaps, and cinematic space and time that break open and fragment the diegesis of the film. In doing so, they offer a varied repertoire of techniques to thrill, delight, engage, and move viewers, establishing influential aesthetic forms for future constructions of the destructive sublime and challenging simplistic notions about World War II as the “good war.”

3

Rationalizing War Reconstructions of World War II during the Cold War and Vietnam In the early 1960s, Darryl F. Zanuck—­independent producer and former head of Twentieth Century–­Fox—­attempted what he called a “daring, impossible undertaking.”1 For his new film The Longest Day, he would re-­create the entire D-Day invasion of Normandy, from both the Allied and Axis perspectives, without using one piece of documentary or stock footage. To accomplish this, he consulted more than a dozen military advisors, reenacted eight major battles, employed as many as twenty thousand soldiers from at least three different national militaries, and spent more money than had ever been spent on a black-­and-­white film. A grandiose epic of nearly three hours, The Longest Day propagated a new aesthetic for the depiction of World War II combat characterized by large-­scale reenactments and overhead and distant views. In this way, the film—­and the new crop of war films that followed it— ­showcased the massive spectacle of war, activating those aspects of the destructive sublime that provoke awe and astonishment at immensity, size, and power. The Longest Day inaugurated a particular cycle of the World War II combat film that stretched from the early 1960s to the mid-­1970s. Films like Battle of the Bulge (Ken Annakin, 1965), Battle of Britain (Guy Hamilton, 1969), Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer et al., 1970), and A Bridge Too Far (Richard Attenborough, 1977) modeled themselves on the narrative and aesthetic 95

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structure of The Longest Day. This model involves a re-­creation of a single battle or campaign in the war, interconnected episodes featuring various groups rather than a single protagonist or platoon, the casting of many recognizable stars to fill out the multitude of characters, colossal reenactments with hundreds or thousands of extras and masses of military equipment such as tanks or ships, combat aesthetics that include remote viewpoints displaying overviews of the action, and narratives that explore the information gathering, decision-­making, and hierarchies of power within the institution of the military. An offshoot of this cycle consists of military biographies of the “great men” of the war, including Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970) and MacArthur ( Joseph Sargent, 1977). These films center on individuals but maintain the representation of important historical battles, the use of reenactments and distant views in combat sequences, and the thematic interest in military institutions. This chapter demonstrates that although the films of the 1960s and ’70s continued the wartime combat film’s portrayal of World War II as a fight for freedom against tyranny, the destructive sublime takes on an entirely new shape. Rejecting the embedded perspective and mode of recording established in wartime documentaries and then inserted, with jarring effect, into many fictional films during the war, The Longest Day embraces the two opposite forms of the destructive sublime: the remote perspective and the mode of reenactment. Unlike wartime films, in which the disruptive combat sequences often present a counternarrative, the two aesthetic forms on display in 1960s reenactment films correspond thematically to their narratives, which also highlight authoritative viewpoints and the orderly transmission of information. Ultimately, the narrative, aesthetic form, and production histories of these films all work together to make war seem controllable and knowable when, in the midst of the Cold War and the increasing involvement of the United States in Vietnam, it was anything but. Focusing specifically on The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora!, this chapter shows how World War II took on various meanings in this period as it both became reified into the “good war” and became a cypher for concerns about current geopolitical conflicts. In what follows, I first look back at the World War II combat films released between the end of the war and the early 1960s, showing that they mostly follow the aesthetic conventions established by wartime films while also displaying some emergent characteristics of the reenactment films to come. Then in an extended analysis of the style, narrative, and production history of The Longest Day, I argue that its cinematic style and its narration align to construct a worldview of rationality, authority, and order. The film’s investment in the depiction of hierarchy and objectivity takes shape in the cinematography’s remote perspectives as well as the narrative that identifies the moral virtue of the war with its logistical organization and its direction by a well-­meaning managerial class.

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This worldview is also apparent in the films’ dominant construction of masculinity, which celebrated pencil pushers over action heroes in a clear departure from the wartime films discussed in the previous chapter. The rise of the bureaucratic hero is most evident in 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, yet this film also betrays growing skepticism about the righteousness of military institutions. Tora! Tora! Tora!’s narrative illustrates the shortcomings of attempting to contain the excesses of warfare with the yoke of rationality, and its major combat sequence highlights the ability of the destructive sublime to undermine the narrative meanings that came before. At the end of the chapter, I explore the full ramifications of this epistemic questioning in the late 1960s shift toward black comedies and “dirty group” films like The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967), Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970), Catch-­22 (Mike Nichols, 1970), and MASH (set in the Korean War, Robert Altman, 1970). These films opened up a new grammar of the destructive sublime that influenced later films like Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) and Fury (David Ayer, 2014) and revealed how cultural assurances about the “good war” and its reflection of American virtue had begun to break down.

World War II Combat Films, 1945–­1962 In the years following the end of World War II, Hollywood films furthered many of the narrative conventions of the wartime combat film while also retaining much of the same visual language of the destructive sublime. For the most part, postwar combat films followed the lead of Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943) and, especially, Wing and a Prayer (Henry Hathaway, 1944) in representing combat and other aspects of the war with documentary footage. Warner Bros.’ Fighter Squadron (Raoul Walsh, 1948), for instance, employs a wealth of combat footage, including aerial gunsight footage of the sort featured in The Fighting Lady (Louis de Rochemont, 1945). Twelve O’Clock High (Henry King, 1950) also visualizes aerial combat with documentary footage. William A. Wellman’s Battleground (1949) mostly avoids the use of documentary footage in its dramatization of the winter fighting at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, yet the end of the film includes a long montage of newsreel material that suggests that the final fictionalized combat scenes of the film are the culmination of a broader history of the war. As with the films discussed in the previous chapter, these postwar films’ inclusion of documentary footage fragments the represented time and space, opening the films up to a variety of perceptual sensations and intellectual evaluations even when the films’ narratives tend to be narrowed to a single campaign or event. Television series in the 1960s also adopted the strategy of integrating footage from documentary sources as well as reusing combat sequences created for fictionalized films. For instance, Rat Patrol, a thirty-­minute adventure

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series set in North Africa and broadcast on ABC between 1966 and 1968, included scenes from Battle of the Bulge and The Great Escape ( John Sturges, 1963).2 Combat!, an hour-­long ABC series that ran from 1962 to 1967, was a more direct adaptation of the World War II combat film for television, and as such, it utilized a substantial amount of documentary footage to provide broader visualization of battles in which the main characters are not individually involved. The pilot episode, for instance, shows the series’ two major characters, Lt. Hanley (Rick Jason) and Sgt. Saunders (Vic Morrow), landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. A twenty-­minute combat sequence situates their experience on the beach within the larger context of the invasion by using documentary footage. These well-­worn documentary shots show massive numbers of ships sailing across the English Channel, paratroopers dropping out of airplanes, the naval bombardment of the beaches prior to landing, and army rangers scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. Documentary footage also provides images of nonspecific but viscerally affective actions, such as explosions on a beach and the use of a flamethrower to attack a bunker. However, the show’s reliance on nonfictional footage became a problem in its fifth season, which was shot in color, because the producers lacked sufficient color documentary film to supplement their own dramatizations and reenactments. Warner Bros.’ Task Force (1949), helmed by Destination Tokyo writer-­ director Delmer Daves, stands out as an extreme example of a fictional film compiled out of documentary and fictional stock footage. Not a combat film per se, it uses these masses of stock footage to illustrate the history of the development of the aircraft carrier over three decades. Daves again worked with art director Leo “K” Kuter, who oversaw the use of rear projection to combine various types of footage in a process similar to techniques he developed for Destination Tokyo. In this instance, instead of footage of miniature models, they predominantly used documentary or fictional stock footage, often combined with actors in the foreground, as seen in Wing and a Prayer. Producer Jerry Wald started work on the film in 1945, hiring at least three officers in the U.S. Navy Reserve to track down footage in the navy archives before the Pacific War was even over. In addition to all the original Kodachrome footage and outtakes made for The Fighting Lady, Lt. George K. Boggs, USNR, “also found an old G.I. garbage container in the vault full of captured and seized Jap [sic] film—­the film had just been dumped in the can in loose rolls and is all pasted with scotch tape where someone marked certain frames for still blowups.”3 Boggs sent Wald fifteen films from Navy Photographic Services, including The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942) and December  7th (Gregg Toland/John Ford, 1943); the latter was marked “4 reel version, fine grain transfer—­do not screen.”4 Other archived documents reveal that they selected stock footage from Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943), MGM’s Hell

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Divers (George W. Hill, 1931), Michael Curtiz’s color spectacular Dive Bomber (1941), and dozens of other fictional and documentary films as well as other reels languishing in military archives.5 The finished film jumps from black and white to color halfway through and contains an incredibly wide variety of film types and qualities, resulting in the same inconsistency of storyworld and visual style on display in wartime films like Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer. Although this extensive use of documentary footage to create the visual background of an entire fictional film has been rare, war films continued to integrate this material into combat scenes through the 1970s. In 1976, Midway (directed by Jack Smight) included a large amount of combat footage taken from documentary films, fictional films, and Japanese films. As a widescreen, Technicolor film (which also used the new surround-­sound technique called “Sensurround”), Midway relied heavily on material from the Kodachrome documentaries made during the war, including The Battle of Midway and The Fighting Lady. Midway producer Walter Mirisch had previously employed large chunks of archival color film to dramatize naval battles in Flat Top (Lesley Selander, 1952).6 For Midway, Mirisch obtained the support of the Department of the Navy and accessed their archives. He also acquired the rights to use portions of the Pearl Harbor attack from Tora! Tora! Tora!, the Doolittle Raid sequence created for MGM’s Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (Mervyn LeRoy, 1944), and scenes from the Toho production Hawai Middowei daikaikûsen: Taiheiyô no arashi (Shûe Matsubayashi and Hugo Grimaldi, 1960; released in the United States under the titles Storm over the Pacific and I Bombed Pearl Harbor). To attempt to even out the differences among film stocks, the filmmakers duped the entire film to make the film grain match that of the archival footage. The use of stock footage made financial sense, even if it neglected aesthetic consistency. The free or inexpensive stock footage allowed Mirisch to limit the film’s budget to a mere $5 million; since it made more than $40 million at the box office, he claims it was his most profitable film.7 Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) represents an aesthetic transition between the wartime/early postwar tradition of extensive use of documentary footage and the emergence of the new aesthetics of large-­scale reenactments in the 1960s. Like Fighter Squadron and Twelve O’Clock High, Sands of Iwo Jima visualizes combat sequences with nonfictional stock footage, in this case portions of the government-­produced documentaries With the Marines at Tarawa, produced in 1944 by the U.S. Marine Corps Photographic Unit, and To the Shores of Iwo Jima, released in 1945 by the U.S. Office of War Information. In one scene depicting fighting on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa, the Sands of Iwo Jima production crew designed outdoor sets to re-­create landscapes seen in With the Marines at Tarawa so that the film could more seamlessly

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cut between the staged scenes and footage from the documentary. In other instances, sections of To the Shores of Iwo Jima were inserted whole into the body of the film. These practices correspond to the earlier aesthetic of using documentary footage to visualize combat, despite its disruptions in style and diegetic continuity. However, Sands of Iwo Jima also demonstrates elements of the period of reenactment to come. The creation of sets to mimic documentary footage anticipates the way later films would use documentary photographs and film footage as research material for more exact re-­creations. Like The Longest Day and other future films, Sands also reenacts particular battles (Tarawa and Iwo Jima) and uses participants and objects from those actual events in an almost totemic fashion to impress spectators with authenticity. Sands of Iwo Jima precedes Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006), discussed in the next chapter, by several decades in recreating the circumstances of Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture of marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Producer Edmund Grainger elicited the participation of the three surviving flag-­raisers—­Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and John Bradley—­who agreed to reenact their previous actions, and the production also secured the actual flag from the historic day and used it for this re-­creation. Thus postwar films like Sands of Iwo Jima previewed the later investment in the ethos of reenactment.

The Supreme Commander and His Vision of War The 1960s–­70s cycle of reenactment-­heavy films was established primarily by one man, Darryl F. Zanuck. Zanuck saw himself as the force behind The Longest Day in every respect: he conceived the idea, obtained the source material for the film, and produced it through his own independent production company. Although the financing for the film was provided by Twentieth Century–­Fox, the studio that he cofounded and led for more than twenty years, Zanuck was allowed full control over the screenplay, direction, casting, and location of the shooting.8 In this extensive endeavor, Zanuck drew both from his managerial experience as a studio boss and from his insider experience within the shrouded hierarchies of the military. During World War II, Zanuck had served as a colonel in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. While his military service resulted in a book about his wartime experience and the documentary film At the Front in North Africa (1943), his commission was based more on his political connections and industry status than on his military training. He ultimately resigned his commission in 1943 after being humiliated by the so-­called Truman Committee, which investigated whether he was continuing to draw a salary from Fox while he was also being paid by the army.9

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Despite this tarnished history, by the early 1960s Zanuck had refashioned himself as a military-­like “commander” of films. During the production of The Longest Day, Zanuck repeatedly compared himself to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who prior to being elected president in 1952 was supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and the architect of D-Day. Zanuck wrote to his personal friend Lord Louis Mountbatten (whom Zanuck met during the war and who also had served as a supreme commander): “I believe I have a tougher job than Ike had on D-Day—­at least he had the equipment. I have to find it, rebuild it, and transport it to Normandy.”10 Picking up on this megalomania, the press began referring to Zanuck as “General Zanuck,” “Supreme Commander,” or “Darryl the Great.”11 As the visionary producer behind the film, Zanuck did not select a director who might compete with his claims of authorship; instead, Zanuck hired a number of directors, including Andrew Marton for the American sequences, Ken Annakin for the British, and Bernhard Wicki for the German. Another director, Gerd Oswald, was fired from the picture after a disagreement with battle coordinator Elmo Williams. Oswald later claimed that Zanuck hired a number of “lightweight” directors whom “he felt he could control and who would not question his decisions.”12 In a publicity piece for the New York Times penned by Zanuck himself, he diminished their role to “second unit directors” and claimed that he directed 65 percent of the film himself.13 Reflecting Zanuck’s own worldview in life and in war, The Longest Day is concerned primarily with commanding officers and military administration rather than the undistinguished GIs and their plebeian perspective on the fighting. For the narrative structure of The Longest Day, Zanuck relied on a recently published work of popular history, Irish journalist Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same title. The book emerged out of some seven hundred interviews with D-Day survivors who fought for both the Allied and the Axis armed forces.14 Ryan also wrote the screenplay for the film but eventually had a falling out with Zanuck, claiming that Zanuck was trying to coopt D-Day for his own glorification.15 Zanuck also gathered a large group of advisors, most of whom had participated in D-Day and some of whom contribute characters to the film. British advisors included Lord Mountbatten, Lord Lovat (portrayed in the film by Peter Lawford), and Maj. John Howard (Richard Todd). German advisors included Vice Adm. Friedrich Ruge, Gen. Gunther Blumentritt (portrayed by Curd Jürgens), Lt.  Gen.  Max Pemsel (Wolfgang Preiss), and Maj. Werner Pluskat (Hans Christian Blech).16 French and American advisors abounded as well. Instead of emphasizing the differences in these personal histories, Zanuck sought to synthesize them into one all-­encompassing story that would explain the entire event. The film’s orderly and rationalized portrayal of war reflects the necessarily bureaucratic mode of film production, with Zanuck as a CEO or supreme

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commander conveying his orders down the ranks to the three directors and various other crew. The production history, visual style, and narrative content all display an attempt to organize and control war, pin down its meaning, and rationally apprehend its logic. Instead of exploring the subjective experience of war, The Longest Day focuses specifically on the management of the war: how resources were allotted, how decisions were made, how information was communicated, how strategies and plans were developed, and how officers commanded troops in changing circumstances. By reenacting the administration of warfare, Zanuck tried to insulate his representation of war from the ambiguities of history and personal experience, which can be subjectively colored, impressionistic, and unreliable. In contrast, the film concentrates on facts, time lines, causes, and effects. Accordingly, Zanuck, like the producers of Sands of Iwo Jima, put faith in the explanatory power of actual objects that had been used in the war and real locations where it took place. These elements of authenticity allowed Zanuck, in the words of historian Vanessa Agnew, “to create the appearance of historical fidelity.”17 The production obtained original Spitfire aircraft from the Belgian Air Force that were fitted with new Rolls-­Royce engines and two Messerschmitt aircraft from Gen. Franco’s air force in Spain. They also commissioned the building of two Horsa gliders from the same British piano company that had converted to glider construction during the war. World War II–­era cannons, antiaircraft guns, rifles, machine guns, and other weapons were found for the production in museums and national armories. More than six hundred thousand rounds of blank ammunition were specially manufactured for the film.18 A crew of engineers cleared out mines from Normandy locations and even unearthed and made serviceable a British tank that had been buried in sand for seventeen years.19 This agglomeration of authentic articles from the war combined reality and reenactment in a bid for complete comprehensiveness and totality, reinforcing the film’s attempt to present war as something rational and knowable in its entirety. The film’s re-­creation of D-Day pursues mastery over the unknowability of the past and of war more generally. It replaces doubt with concrete evidence and plausible reconstruction, providing an experiential plentitude that covers over gaps in knowledge or comprehension. Whereas wartime documentaries like The Battle of Midway or The Fighting Lady prized the capturing of contingent events, reenactment films like The Longest Day banish the contingent altogether in favor of intensely planned and controlled re-­creations. Despite the fact that The Longest Day includes eight major combat sequences, battle scenes do not comprise the bulk of its nearly three-­hour running time. Instead, much of the film details the collection and circulation of information. The most prevalent and crucial technology of the war, according

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to this film, is not the Panzer tank, the B-29 Superfortress, the atomic bomb, or even the M1 rifle; instead, it’s the telephone. Nearly every noncombat scene shows someone getting an order, conveying intelligence, or making a request via telephone. Such an emphasis on communications is understandable considering the vast scale of operations depicted, from both the Axis and Allied perspectives and from various branches of military service. Like the wartime films discussed in the previous chapter, The Longest Day centers on a group that must learn to work together, but instead of a small unit or squad of soldiers, The Longest Day examines a much larger assemblage of interests, representing all the major fighting forces on D-Day. This expanded scope has important ramifications for the form of the film. Most significantly, it means that the narrative does not follow a single protagonist or small group of main characters; instead, the film is composed of a series of interrelated vignettes among a large group of characters who often do not meet one another but are nevertheless affected by one another’s decisions and choices. Therefore, the predominant structure of this film is the network of interconnected agents rather than the integrated platoon. To make sense of the profusion of characters and locations, on-­screen titles provide place names and the official titles of dozens of major characters. The film’s posters advertised forty-­three international stars, including Arletty, Paul Anka, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Curd Jürgens, Peter Lawford, Rod Steiger, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and many more. Beyond the cameo spotting encouraged by this kind of casting, the film gives the impression of portraying a representative slice of a vast collective endeavor. The aesthetics of the film also produce an effect of relationality and comprehensibility. As David Denby notes, the reluctance of the filmmakers to use close-­ups and

FIGURE 18  Telephones enable the flow of information in The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et

al., 1962).

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analytical editing to break scenes (and bodies) into pieces presents a domain governed by unison: “The world must be seen whole as an intelligible unity of interconnected parts.”20 Decision-­making is given precedence in The Longest Day in a way that is quite unusual for combat films, which usually present decisions as beyond the pay grade of the “grunt” protagonist. This very difficulty is dramatized in 1940s films like Sands of Iwo Jima and Wing and a Prayer: the servicemen experience frustration because their commanding officers never explain the reasons behind their strict standards and inscrutable orders. In Zanuck’s film, the Allied forces are depicted as having access to accurate information and being able to interpret it judiciously. Scenes detail the plans made for all aspects of the invasion, with maps prominent in the backgrounds of many sets. From weather reports to the location of swamps, seemingly every aspect of the future invasion is discussed in detail before the protagonists come to a decision. The Allies’ heightened knowledge also takes the form of an awareness of the historical import of the events in which they take part. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort ( John Wayne), the superlatively competent airborne commander, states with assuredness, “We’re on the threshold of the most crucial day of our times.” The Germans (never, in this film, “the Nazis”) also have access to information, but their skills of interpretation and prediction are inferior to the Allies. Upon learning of the poor weather forecast, for instance, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Werner Hinz) smugly assumes that the Allies would never invade in such bad weather and travels from the front back to Germany for his wife’s birthday. When other Germans interpret information correctly, they are usually ignored by their commanding officers. Gen. Gunther Blumentritt (Curd Jürgens) is one of the few Germans to recognize that the “skirmishes” in Normandy are in fact the long-­awaited invasion of the Allies, and he requests tank support. Another general, however, claims that the activity is just a commando raid and refuses to wake Hitler to give the order to release the tanks, since he has taken a sleeping pill and gone to bed. Blumentritt laments, “We are going to lose the war because our glorious Fuhrer has taken a sleeping pill and is not to be awakened. . . . We are witnessing something which historians will always say is completely improbable and yet it is true.” Despite these errors of judgment, the Germans are presented as rational individuals who follow orders and engage in the accepted terms of warfare. Although they are woefully lacking the pluck and improvisation displayed by the relatively more casual American commanders, portrayed by the likes of John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, the Germans are not presented as ideologically deranged Nazis. This film, made at the height of the Cold War, shows Germans and Americans to be far more alike than different.

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A film fundamentally about the transmission of information, The Longest Day portrays the Allies as ultimately victorious because they are able to create clear networks of communication and make wise decisions. However, the film also presents an anxiety about the breakdown of communications and the possibility of unplanned contingencies disrupting their carefully considered plans. Vandervoort’s paratroopers miss their drop zones by five miles—­just as he predicted they might—­with some ending up in swamp land and others in the middle of a German-­controlled town. Likewise, Gen. Theodore Roosevelt’s troops land a mile and a half away from Utah Beach, forcing Roosevelt (Henry Fonda) to improvise, declaring, “We’re starting the war from right here!” The rangers who scale the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in order to destroy a large German concrete installation find out when they get there that the bunker is empty, its massive guns never installed. This acknowledgment of errors and contingent problems demonstrates uncertainty about whether war can be completely controlled and known. But the film calms these fears by showing the grit and resolution of Allied officers who are willing to be flexible and able to revise their plans. In contrast, the Germans appear inflexible and too tied to the chain of command. The Longest Day presents a controlled, planned, coordinated effort for victory. The foresight of the Allied officers proves to be one of their greatest strengths. Their ability to accurately predict the future—­to the extent that they often seem prescient—­represents something more than the perspective of the filmmakers in the 1960s, who naturally knew the outcome of the war and designed the narrative to make it seem inevitable. It also goes beyond a triumphant teleology designed to make the Allied countries feel good about their victory; it is in addition a representation of a particular rational orientation to information. The episodic nature of the film presents an intricate web of knowledge and reveals how that intelligence is transmitted, weighed, accepted or discarded, and then acted upon.

Authority and Objectivity in The Longest Day In its benevolent stance toward the German opponent, The Longest Day reflects the culture of the Cold War and the way that World War II had already become an ideologically loaded cultural touchstone for American society. By the 1960s, West Germans had become allied with the United States, Great Britain, and France, while the Soviet Union and China, former allies, had become enemies. Despite its constitutive, and some would argue decisive, contribution to the Allied powers during World War  II, the Soviet Union is never mentioned in The Longest Day. The real enemy in the film, though never seen or spoken of, is Communism. During the filming of The Longest

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Day, two Cold War confrontations took place. First, in April 1961, the United States invaded the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow the Communist government of Fidel Castro. Then, in the Berlin Crisis of the summer and early fall of 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union seemed on the brink of war over the fate of partitioned Berlin, leading to the construction of the Berlin Wall. This latter event had an immediate impact on the film production, as the Department of Defense cut the number of American soldiers participating in the filming from 750 to 250 so that more could be made available to defend West Berlin.21 The Longest Day’s overall admiration of traditional institutions and the chain of command implicitly rejects the feared anarchism and radicalism of Communism and buttresses American military ideologies of force, order, and discipline. In the film, rational decision-­making, logistical planning, and benevolent authority figures become tokens of democracy and the superiority of the West. Both the narrative and the aesthetics of the film espouse these virtues. The film presents the events of D-Day, including the fighting, as orderly and inevitable. But rather than a disinterested reflection of the past, the narrative and visual style of The Longest Day actually privilege particular values that stand in for the American way of life. As the New Yorker’s David Denby wrote of The Longest Day on the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, “The immense production was itself an example of American strength, a confirmation of American planning and execution on D Day. Who else could pay for such a movie?”22 The aesthetic style of The Longest Day also reflects the Cold War–­era military virtues of authority, reason, and order. The distinguishing characteristics of the film’s visual style are long takes, long shots, and abstract, deindividuated camera angles. Long takes provide fluidity and continuity, and the lack of close-­ups presents events in their wholeness instead of fragmenting them into smaller parts. Long shots shift the emphasis from individuals to masses or groups, depersonalizing the fighting and calling attention to the war machine itself. The use of the god-­like vantage point represents an authoritative view that seems omniscient and omnipotent. In some instances, this remote perspective is explicitly compared to that of a general. The remote viewpoint corresponds to an attempt to create an objective overview of events—­both in the sense of removing the view from an individual subject and of presenting something unbiased and neutral. However, these shots also engage the destructive sublime in their presentation of immensity, quantity, and vastness; in doing so, they open up these carefully planned and logically designed sequences to the strong, and sometimes contradictory, sensations prompted by the sublime. Instead of delving into the sometimes chaotic and subjective experience captured by combat cameramen, Zanuck looks back at the war from the secure vantage point of the 1960s to explain the causes, effects, and contingencies of

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the Normandy invasion. Rejecting the ambiguity of the subjective, the style of the film attempts an objective overview of both sides and all the successes and failures. Zanuck embraced technological developments of the time in order to create this objective aesthetic. Instead of the squarish Academy ratio, Zanuck opted for the very elongated 2.35:1 CinemaScope format, which Twentieth Century–­Fox had introduced in 1953 while Zanuck was studio head. He also used helicopters and newly invented cranes to get the long shots he wanted. Although The Longest Day’s aesthetic mode disrupted the traditions of combat films in its rejection of documentary footage and adoption of new technologies, it did maintain other visual conventions; for instance, Zanuck decided black-­and-­white was the appropriate color for this story, since it was how audiences were used to looking at World War II in newsreels and fictional films. Ironically, this stylistic choice would have made it much easier for Zanuck to integrate documentary footage into the film. According to his son, Richard, Zanuck chose black-­and-­white for its authenticity but worried that in the age of Technicolor, audiences might mistake his reenactments for stock footage.23 While there are some documentary shots included in The Longest Day, such as images of marching German soldiers, the vast majority of the combat sequences are complete re-­creations. Instead of relying on the gritty realism and amateur quality of documentary combat footage, The Longest Day instead highlights grand vistas, masses of people and vehicles, and smooth camera movement. Particular aesthetic choices in the cinematography express the massive size and scale of the D-Day events. The film includes many striking long shots, or extreme long shots, that give a sense of distance from the unfolding events. The distant view shows the size of individual objects, such as ships or tanks, but is more commonly used here to show massive numbers of objects and people. For the Sword Beach sequence, for instance, the French army lent the production three thousand troops for four hours.24 Zanuck claimed that Britain, France, and the United States supplied an estimated twenty-­three thousand troops over ten months of shooting.25 The remote viewpoint also stresses the relational movement in a continuous space of all the people and equipment. Unlike the fragmentation and disjuncture common in wartime combat films, the combat sequences of The Longest Day assert an omniscient point of view and a distanced stance. Another common aesthetic choice throughout the combat sequences is the placement of the camera at a 90-­degree angle to the axis of movement in the shot, so that the camera is directly to the side of the action, rather than at a more common diagonal angle. An early shot in the Omaha Beach sequence, for instance, is a slightly high-­angle tracking shot set at an exact 90-­degree angle to the soldiers running up the beach, moving directly left to right as the camera moves at the same pace, conveying smooth and continuous movement.

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Scholars Daniel Binns and Paul Ryder describe this camera setup as the “quintessential ‘D-Day shot,’” arguing that the shot “denotes a grand victory against insurmountable odds.”26 The other beach invasion sequences also include these 90-­degree angle shots. In the Utah Beach sequence, directly following the one at Omaha, another tracking shot at the 90-­degree angle follows Gen. Roosevelt as he moves from landing craft to beach, holding his cane the whole time. The Sword Beach sequence features many similar shots, although most of them are static. The 90-­degree shots almost always show the Allied soldiers advancing from left to right, and the Germans on the right, facing left. The repeated use of the 90-­degree angle provides continuity among the various beach invasions and helps distinguish among the different fighting forces. This clarity is particularly needed considering that the shots are often far enough away that a spectator is unable to recognize any characters or identify the sometimes subtle distinctions in uniforms. Moreover, the 90-­degree angle shot emphasizes movement in a clearly focused direction, even if the spatial objective or target is off screen and unseen. This stylistic choice gives the invading soldiers a sense of momentum toward a goal; their movement forward despite the uncertainty of what they will face there (because it is outside the frame in the shot) lends the impression of determination. The smooth motion of the tracking shots is very different from the shaky camerawork found in the wartime documentaries that “prove” the cameraman’s proximity to action. Instead of registering the visceral sensation of the jolts and confusion of combat, the camera instead floats above or alongside the battle, taking a perspective that would be impossible for any participant to have. Only one of The Longest Day’s eight major battle scenes emphasizes the subjective point of view, and yet it still manages to give many high-­angle long shots, since the central figure of the scene hangs from his tangled parachute above the fray. In this scene, Pvt. John Steele (Red Buttons) parachutes with

FIGURE 19  A remote, 90-­degree angle in The Longest Day.

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the rest of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division over the German-­controlled town Sainte-­Mère-­Église, miles from their intended drop zone. Steele’s parachute gets caught on the top of a church steeple. Unable to get down or shoot his weapon, he is forced to watch helplessly as his fellow paratroopers drop into a group of German soldiers, fall right into a raging fire, or are gunned down in midair. The editing cuts back and forth between shots of the trapped paratrooper—­the shots getting closer to his face over time, from long and medium shots to close-­ups and even extreme close-­ups—­and ones showing his point of view through high-­angle long shots of the chaos below him. While many shots do not replicate his exact point of view, showing instead events from ground level, the scene is striking for the extent to which Steele’s embedded point of view is privileged. Moreover, with its heavy reliance on shot/reverse-­shot patterns, this is a rare sequence in which the editing is prominent and used to create sympathy for a particular individual rather than an understanding of the group as a whole. The Sainte-­Mère-­Église scene departs from the objective point of view privileged by the rest of the combat sequences. A prominent example of a god’s-eye view of a battle is the Free French attack on the town of Ouistreham. The first shot of this scene consists of an extensive long take provided by a new technological development of the postwar era—­the helicopter. The mounted camera moves slowly from left to right, tracking a large group of French commandos as they invade a town currently controlled by the Germans from atop a casino. The long take follows the commandos as they run down the street past a hotel and a church, across a bridge, and toward the casino that is their ultimate goal. This long take fundamentally differs from the rapid editing and subjective focus of the Sainte-­Mère-­Église paratrooper battle. The shot’s fluid movement through space and removed distance from combat, making

FIGURE 20  A caught parachute occasions a rare use of close-­ups and point-­of-­view editing in

The Longest Day.

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FIGURE 21  A helicopter shot in the Ouistreham sequence in The Longest Day.

the human figures in the scene look like swarming insects, connect it to the smooth tracking shots following soldiers as they land on the beach in previous combat sequences. The differences between the Ouistreham and Sainte-­Mère-­Église sequences also extend to their depiction of movement. In Sainte-­Mère-­Église, Steele is rendered impotent by his lack of ability to move. The movement that he witnesses, such as fellow paratroopers dropping into the fire or into groups of German soldiers, is curtailed by death or fighting. In Ouistreham, the high angle and long take emphasize the sweeping nature of the attack and the sense of inevitable completion of the movement as the town is saturated with the invading force. David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, released just months after The Longest Day in 1962, features a similar shot when Lawrence’s group of Bedouins takes the town of Aqaba. Both films use this cinematographic choice to create a continuity of space and time and to portray velocity as well as to take advantage of the wider 2.35:1 frame of CinemaScope or Super Panavision. In each sequence, movement—­both within the frame and of the camera—­signifies the wresting of control over physical territory. The long shot accentuates a continuity of space, opening it up to a rational appraisal. The long take asserts a continuity of time, giving not only the impression of “real time” happening as you are watching but also a sense of speed—­and dominance through speed. The overhead shot gives distance from the action and thus allows the viewer to appraise it as one movement, one unified force moving through space. With a few exceptions, the aesthetics of The Longest Day present combat as something orderly and predictable, moving inexorably toward Allied victory. In showing a battle all at once (with the god’s-eye view), from above, or from the side with smooth camera movements, the cinematography reinforces the sense of stability in combat. Because the film depicts history with a favorable outcome, spectators can feel secure in knowing what will happen. The

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aesthetics also seem to reveal the whole of the battle. Combat is not mired in subjective partiality but instead can be seen dispassionately from a distance, creating a sense of objectivity.

Masculinity and the Bureaucratic Hero The eight major combat sequences in The Longest Day are important to the film but are ultimately overshadowed by other forms of negotiation and communication. The film’s network of information necessitates new kinds of action to be taken, such as logistical planning and decision-­making, that obviate or downplay the taking of physical action, such as heroics on the battlefield. What emerges in The Longest Day and other war films of the 1960s and ’70s is a new kind of hero, one that succeeds in navigating the bureaucracy of institutions. Instead of weapons, the accoutrements of this individual are the telephone, the briefcase, and the typewriter. The new bureaucratic hero solves problems through logical deduction, code breaking, and effective communication rather than through violence. The Longest Day, Patton, and Tora! Tora! Tora! present three phases in the emergence of the information warrior. In The Longest Day, conventional heroes battle alongside the new bureaucratic hero. Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum) exemplifies the traditional hero who imposes his will upon the world through physical action. He is seen on the field of battle, alongside his troops, facing fire and risking his life. The film often shows him physically moving in space. One long shot on Omaha Beach shows him running toward the camera away from a massive explosion. (He is, of course, unscathed.) When faced with being bogged down on the beach, Cota refuses to “turn tail” when another officer suggests a retreat. Instead, he strategizes a way forward with the help of the army engineers and some Bangalore torpedoes. He motivates the men into action with the famous line (historically attributed to another officer on Omaha Beach, Col.  George A. Taylor): “Only two kinds of people are going to stay on this beach, those that are already dead and those that are gonna die.” Cota exemplifies a particular form of masculinity that praises fighting with disregard for death, never staying still and always moving forward. This articulation of masculinity derives directly from the wartime films of the 1940s in which, according to J. David Slocum, “individual commitment could be measured by active, physical participation in the war effort.”27 As seen in chapter 2, individuals in wartime films who were unable to take action, such as shell-­shocked “Cookie” Cunningham in Wing and a Prayer, were seen as less than masculine. Although the man of action lauds movement, this masculine type never expends more effort than is necessary. For instance, when everyone else is flinching or ducking for cover, the man of action remains standing and does not react to explosions or bullets nearby. In The Longest Day, Robert

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FIGURE 22  Robert Mitchum as a man of action in The Longest Day.

Mitchum’s and John Wayne’s characters display this unflappability in the face of war, as if heavy combat is just another typical day. Mitchum trades on the unaffected persona and world-­weary stoicism he had established in his films noir of the 1940s. In an affectation that has become a cliché of the war film, Cota casually and determinedly chomps on a cigar throughout the film. This motif first emerged in postwar films like Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949) and Samuel Fuller’s Korean War film The Steel Helmet (1951). In the latter film, the cigar appears constantly in between the lips of antihero Sgt.  Zack (Gene Evans), connoting cynicism and grimness. (In The Longest Day, it also may have reflected Zanuck’s own penchant for cigar smoking.28) The cigar motif continues in Tora! Tora! Tora!, where it appears between the lips of Adm.  Halsey ( James Whitmore), and is later taken to the absurd by Col.  Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). The war film’s man of action has much in common with the hero of countless Westerns. Like the soldier, the Westerner is typically a fighter and must take action against Indians, bandits, or corruption, yet he is also a “figure of repose,” as described by Robert Warshow.29 Like the Western hero, a soldier like Cota remains composed in the midst of battle and can “keep his countenance in the face of death,” giving him “an apparent moral clarity.”30 This moral clarity is also in accordance with Mitchum and John Wayne’s characters’ reluctance to “be a hero.” According to Warshow, for the archetypal Westerner, “it is a crucial point of honor not to ‘do it first’; his gun remains in its holster until the moment of combat.”31 Although men of action, they cannot be too eager to attack, to kill, or to act with anger. Slocum notes that in wartime films, both the Germans and especially the Japanese were often dehumanized “by virtue of their seemingly unconstrained aggression.”32 The connection between the Western and war film is embodied in John Wayne, a frequent star in both genres. Wayne’s role as Sgt. Stryker in Sands of

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Iwo Jima cemented his association with the World War II combat film and his persona as the quintessential tough-­g uy soldier who is disciplined, stoic, and extraordinarily capable. Stryker is a battle-­hardened drill instructor who, they say, has “the regulations tattooed on his back.” He demonstrates heroism by taking action. In one scene, Stryker watches as his men are killed one by one in Japanese machine-­g un fire as they attempt to throw explosives into a bunker. He then takes matters into his own hands, destroying the bunker and somersaulting jauntily down the sandy ridge to safety. This persona of John Wayne as the ideal soldier contributes to later films, including The Longest Day, in which Wayne is also preternaturally capable. John Wayne continued as the embodiment of masculine heroism through the 1960s. A particularly striking example is his starring role as a colonel in the Vietnam War film he codirected with Ray Kellogg, The Green Berets (1968). However, his ability to personify the ideal hero declined as he aged, accompanying a shift in interest toward the bureaucratic and logistical underpinnings of war. While Wayne’s Col. Vandervoort in The Longest Day is still an exemplar of Wayne’s particular brand of stoic masculinity, he is less active, since his ankle is broken in his parachute drop and he has to be pulled around on a cart for the rest of the film. Cota and Vandervoort are The Longest Day’s premier examples of men of action, but the film does not fully espouse the gospel of action-­focused masculinity. As just two of many important officers featured in the film, Mitchum and Wayne appear alongside many other A-listers in the cast. The shift in emphasis from the squad or platoon to the massive, networked collective has implications for the representation of masculinity, since the actions of any one man are minimized in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, in The Longest Day, the man of action is matched by the cerebral hero whose strengths include organization, management, and planning. This masculine type excels at navigating bureaucracy, making shrewd decisions, and managing personalities rather than traversing a battlefield and personally taking action. The bureaucratic hero is typified by cinematic portrayals of generals Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, depicted less as physically imposing and active men than as levelheaded brainiacs who can be trusted to manage decision-­making for large undertakings. Mitchum in The Longest Day thus represents a last vestige of the man of action in an age of bureaucratic heroes. This shift accompanies the movement in the postwar era to explore the lives of officers rather than enlisted men. This is apparent in films such as Twelve O’Clock High and the Korean War drama The Bridges at Toko-­Ri (Mark Robson, 1954). Philip J. Landon has noted the arrival of the bureaucratic hero even earlier, in wartime films, demonstrating how cowboy-­like figures dominate many films made early in the war, but by the end of the war, the “organization man” wins out. Landon explores the wartime films of John Wayne as exemplary of this transition. In The Flying Tigers (David Miller, 1942), Wayne trades on

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his Westerner persona, playing a lone hero who defends a small Chinese town against the savage Japanese in a near remake of the Western-­influenced Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939).33 Wayne substitutes his horse for an airplane but represents many of the same values as the Western hero. By the end of the war, however, Wayne played roles in The Fighting Seabees (Edward Ludwig, 1944) and They Were Expendable ( John Ford, 1945) that illustrate the transformation of Wayne’s cinematic persona from rash individualist to an effective leader and administrator. Landon notes, “The western myth must be replaced by a less glamorous myth of the hero, one which reconciles a tradition of individualism with the strictures of the military hierarchy.”34 I would add that Wayne’s portrayal of Sgt. Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima further exemplifies this transition. While Stryker is certainly an active hero, he also deals with the stresses of command (through excessive drinking) and is ultimately killed off by the film in order to allow for the emergence of a new brand of heroism, represented by the more cerebral and sensitive Peter Conway ( John Agar). Landon sees the evolution from cowboy to professional as a reflection of the emerging postindustrial American landscape. He explains, “In the new, affluent [postwar] society, managerial skills and technological innovation would replace political conflict as a way of solving the problems facing society, and the organization man would provide the necessary expertise.”35 Whereas in the films of the immediate postwar era we mostly see officers who are also on the front lines—­fighting sergeants, lieutenants, or captains—­by the 1960s, we see the emergence of war heroes who never set foot on the battlefield. Arthur Hiller’s The Americanization of Emily (1964) trades on this difference, since its climactic moment places a noncombat officer ( James Garner, whose role as an admiral’s executive assistant is to find his commanding officer fine food and female companionship far from the battlefield) onto the front lines, where he is completely unsuited and disoriented. More and more often throughout the 1960s, we see protagonists and other major characters using the managerial and technological skills Landon describes as their primary modus operandi. Patton, released by Twentieth Century–­Fox in 1970, serves as a fascinating case study in the opposing models of masculinity at this time. As represented in the film by George C. Scott, Patton is an archetypal man of action. As such, he runs afoul of generals Eisenhower (not shown) and Bradley (Karl Malden), both quintessential bureaucratic heroes. Like Cota in The Longest Day, Patton is associated with spatial movement and speed. Patton states in the infamous first scene, as he stands in front of an enormous American flag and speaks to the audience as if they are soldiers under his command: “I don’t want to get any messages saying that ‘we are holding our position.’ We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy.”

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In addition to his crude language and lack of tact, the film’s Patton explicitly rejects the values of the bureaucratic hero: he dislikes following orders, he argues with his military superiors, and he has little patience for the logistical planning that bureaucrats impose on his desire for unfettered movement and the conquest of territory. With the nickname “Old Blood and Guts,” Patton expresses a love of physical fighting and even a love of war itself. Surveying a scene of destruction after a major battle, Patton whispers to himself, “I love it, God help me, I do love it so, I love it more than my life,” demonstrating a particularly strong indulgence in the destructive sublime. Although his overt enthusiasm for combat departs from the figure of the Westerner as described by Warshow, other aspects of his persona explicitly reference the cowboy hero. He wears two pearl-­handled revolvers and the riding boots and pants of a horseman. Ultimately, though, Patton is placed in opposition to Gen.  Bradley, an organization man par excellence. In contrast to Patton’s romantic idealization of war and general aggressiveness, Bradley is represented as being better suited for a future in which, as Bradley explains to Patton, “just being a good soldier won’t mean a thing”; warriors will need to transform into “diplomats, administrators, you name it.” Patton is presented as being wholly unfit for this task. As a romantic warrior in an age of bureaucrats, Patton is completely at odds with the philosophy of total war. In this, he represents an alternative, no matter how impractical, to the logic of the postindustrial age and its emphasis on the dispassionate crunching of numbers. In this sense, he could have been perceived as an appealing tragic hero both to counterculture youth and their more conservative parents. But in showing Patton to be a myth or an anachronism, like Don Quixote, Patton shows the process by which the man of action is killed off by the organization man.

FIGURE 23  George C. Scott as a mythic hero in Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970).

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Misinformation in Tora! Tora! Tora! Tora! Tora! Tora!, another Twentieth Century–­Fox production released in 1970, perhaps best exemplifies the ascendance of the bureaucratic hero in this era since the bulk of the film consists of administrative and diplomatic episodes leading to the Pearl Harbor attack at the end of the film. Two of the unlikely heroes of the film are the intelligence officers Lt.  Cmdr. Kramer (Wesley Addy) and Col. Bratton (E. G. Marshall), who use intercepted and deciphered messages from the Japanese to predict the attack on Pearl Harbor. Many shots follow the two officers shuffling important, classified papers—­putting them in and taking them out of locked briefcases. Papers are passed around, looked at, and discussed with various military leaders and government officials. A film critic at the Boston Globe sardonically described the clerical feeling of the first half of the film, which “takes place in and out of the offices and official chambers in Honolulu, Tokyo and Washington, with a steady obligado [sic] of attaché cases being clicked open, clucked shut.”36 If the emblem of The Longest Day is the telephone, the briefcase is the emblem of Tora! Tora! Tora! To the extent that it has one, the climax of the first half of the film (preceding the intermission) could be said to be a lengthy scene in which intelligence officer Kramer goes from house to house and office to office with the first thirteen parts of an intercepted Japanese diplomatic message that seems to threaten imminent war. Kramer, though, is no action hero. He is driven in a car by his wife, to whom he dispassionately refuses to betray any state secrets; he waits patiently when told that Gen. Marshall will not be awoken for any message that is not yet complete; and he even eats a hot dog procured by his wife during the exhausting rounds. He is never shown in strenuous activity—­running, shouting, shaking someone awake with the news—­but rather displays the patience, levelheadedness, and rational decision-­making to be expected of the bureaucratic hero.

FIGURE 24  Bureaucratic heroes in Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer et al., 1970).

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However, while Tora! Tora! Tora! celebrates these rational administrators, it ultimately dramatizes their failure to prevent the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on December  7, 1941. In The Longest Day, the aesthetics and narrative work together to present a world of intelligibility and rational thinking. Hierarchies are present in the depicted military organizations, as well as in the film’s creation of an authoritative overview in the form of long shots and long takes. But what worked in 1962 as a reflection of Cold War thinking—­contrasting the rationalism and orderly structure of the West with the threatening destabilization of Communism—­had begun to break down by the time Tora! Tora! Tora! was released in 1970. As I explain further below, a number of elements suggest that Tora! better reflects the Vietnam era than the earlier Cold War world of the early 1960s. First, the Japanese-­American coproduction managed by Elmo Williams, the battle coordinator for The Longest Day, experienced many difficulties in communication between the two parts of the production, West and East. Second, the narrative was even more heavily weighted toward aspects of planning and diplomacy, leading critics to criticize the film for lack of excitement. The attempt to make war rational may not have been as compelling for audiences eight years later. Finally, the final combat scene showing the bombing of the harbor departs so drastically from the rest of the film that it undercuts any attempt to impose order on war. Work on Tora! Tora! Tora! began as early as 1962 when Ladislas Farago’s code-­breaking history The Broken Seal was optioned and an initial script was drafted. Tora! Tora! Tora! was imagined as a kind of follow-­up to The Longest Day, giving to the Pacific War what one reviewer called the “Walter Lord approach to history in its step-­by-­step at 1:01 a.m. so-­and-­so-­said sort of documentation.”37 It, too, had the participation of Darryl Zanuck, who had been brought back to Twentieth Century–­Fox as president in 1962 after the filming of The Longest Day. Like that film, Tora! was imagined from the beginning as an international production with a narrative that would show both sides of the conflict, with two directors and both American and Japanese casts. Initially, renowned filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was contracted to direct and write the script for the Japanese sequences. He had a grand vision to use the film to restore the reputation of the Japanese military. In accordance with his epic ambitions, Kurosawa oversaw the construction of full-­scale replicas of the entire battleship Nagano and the front half of the aircraft carrier Akagi on the seashore in southwestern Japan at a cost of about five hundred thousand dollars.38 At a press conference, Kurosawa stated that he intended the film to disabuse the American idea that Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack: “This movie will be a record of neither victory nor defeat but of misunderstandings and miscalculations and the waste of excellent capability and energy.”39 Unfortunately, misunderstandings and miscalculations also invaded the production process. Kurosawa’s increasingly erratic behavior and inability

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to stay within the budget or follow the orders of the Hollywood production team led to his termination as director; he was replaced by Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda, two younger and lesser-­known directors. The production went significantly over its original budget, running up more than twenty-­five million dollars in expenses, nearly three times the cost of The Longest Day. Director of the American sequences Richard Fleischer later joked that the film spent more money on its re-­creation than the Japanese Navy spent on the actual attack.40 The Tora! crew spent about one million dollars creating a full-­size set of the Arizona battleship inside modern-­day Pearl Harbor. The hull of the re-­creation was six hundred feet long, and the tower rose 220 feet into the air.41 It was built of plywood atop barges so that it could be towed into place in the harbor. Despite this effort, Tora! only made back slightly more than half of its production costs in domestic rentals, making it a box office disappointment. Historian Hiroshi Tasogawa describes the debacle as “a clash between Japanese and American personalities, a clash of differences in the ways of making movies, and in the broadest sense, a clash between cultures.”42 The inability of Hollywood to successfully negotiate the relationship between America and Japan, a new ally in the Cold War, parallels the contemporaneous “misunderstandings and miscalculations” between East and West that also contributed to the Vietnam War. Production files reveal that the Tora! Tora! Tora! filmmakers made decisions with the Vietnam War in mind and that the ongoing conflict created problems for them.43 An urgent letter from Tetsu Aoyagi, then managing director for Akira Kurosawa in Japan, dated February 1, 1968, reacts to the news of North Korea’s capture of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance ship, the USS Pueblo, just days before. Aoyagi implores producer Elmo Williams to reassure him of the future of the project. He notes, “Although Fox including you had been convinced with an optimistic future, which came from Washington, with Vietnam War, as you can very well see, it has been getting worse and worse day by day.”44 Aoyagi appears concerned that Twentieth Century–­Fox would decide to produce the film entirely in the United States, without the cooperation of the Japanese or perhaps even without the cooperation of the U.S. military. Nevertheless, by March 1968, the production team anticipated beginning shooting in Japan by November “unless the Vietnam war grows worse.”45 Other mentions of the contemporary conflict are peppered throughout the production files. One document dated September 1968 notes that they had tried to get permission from the U.S. Navy to modify some airplanes and to test them landing and taking off, but they were unable to obtain permission because “the work load from Vietnam is too heavy at present.”46 Another document explains that Kurosawa had decided against building a front projection screen at Itazuke Air Base unless “a peaceful solution to the Vietnam War should take place.”47

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In a striking reflection of the film’s production process, the narrative of Tora! Tora! Tora! also chronicles one failure of communication after another. Warnings and alerts are ignored. A brand-­new radar machine detects a surprisingly large group of airplanes shortly before the attack, but it is misrecognized as an American squadron returning to base. A Japanese submarine is spotted just outside the harbor, but a captain, thinking it is a false alarm, refuses to relay word about it to his commanding officers until he receives independent confirmation. The misinformation takes place at even the highest levels of government. Shortly before December 7, President Roosevelt (never shown in the film) sends a message to the Japanese emperor intended to spark new diplomatic negotiations, but the American ambassador gets it too late to deliver it to the emperor in time, and it is dismissed by war-­hungry Gen.  Tojo (Asao Uchida). Other late communications abound, with disastrous consequences. The Japanese ambassadors to the United States receive the last part of a message meant to declare war prior to the attack just two hours before it is to be delivered to the secretary of state. Because they must translate and type it themselves, they miss the deadline and deliver it only after the secretary has already been informed of the attack. Because of their decryption device, the U.S. intelligence officers have a warning about an impending attack (though the location of it is not known), but due to spotty radio and telephone communications, they cannot get word directly to Pearl Harbor. Gen. Marshall (Keith Andes) therefore sends a telegram, but because it is not marked urgent, it languishes in a stack until the middle of the attack when it is finally delivered, decrypted, and read—­far too late to do any good. Constantly in the film, messages are delivered long after they would be useful, adding to the feeling of pathos that even overshadows the bombast and excitement of the attack itself, which is rife with explosions and action. Moreover, during the attack, the communications of the control center in Pearl Harbor are not operational. The phone lines are all jammed, and the radio is not reliable. Adm. Kimmel (Martin Balsam) and Gen. Short ( Jason Robards) cannot get word out to warn anyone else, and they also cannot call for help. Instead, they languish inside the communications center looking powerlessly out the big picture window at the scene of destruction in the harbor below them. While this gives them an aerial overview, which should provide an idealized, objective view, it only serves to highlight their inability to act and communicate. This use of the wide shot to represent the general’s point of view inverts its use in The Longest Day; in that film, the remote perspective emblematizes knowability and omniscience, whereas in Tora! it only represents impotence. Despite its attempt to highlight the valiant efforts of bureaucratic heroes, the film in the end demonstrates their failure to accurately predict and prevent such devastation.

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Instead of the distanced surety produced by the remote perspective in The Longest Day, Tora!’s major combat sequence, arriving at the tail end of the film, is more reminiscent of the phantasmatic combat sequences discussed in chapter 2 that resulted from the combination of miniature models, documentary footage, and reenactments. Producer Elmo Williams’s undated memo, labeled “Production Ideas” and likely from 1968, specifically mentions both The Battle of San Pietro ( John Huston, 1945) and The Fighting Lady as inspiration for the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the memo, Williams directs himself, “Use the realistic on the spot camera technique. The camera jiggles with every explosion, especially those near the camera. . . . By using these camera tecniques [sic] our Travelling Mattes will be less critical. And we can utilize more mineatures [sic] effectively.”48 Tora!’s combat sequence relies heavily on footage of miniature models. (These scale models were actually quite large; one production memo lists preexisting model ships that were between twenty-­three and fifty-­three feet in overall length and could be remodeled for the film.49) The production used a brand-­new front projection system that combined live foreground elements and projected background elements in real time in front of the camera. This allowed the crew to see the combined footage the next day, unlike bluescreen compositing, which took weeks. However, like the back-­projection techniques used in wartime films like Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer, the front-­projection process of Tora! also imbues the two planes of action with differing visual qualities and flattens the background action. Like in The Longest Day, the scene’s many long shots emphasize the remote perspective, particularly in shots looking down on miniature models from above. While these shots invite the sense of wonder associated with the sublime, they also assault the spectator with an amalgam of different kinds of footage, varying perspectives shifting from the American to the Japanese point of view, and

FIGURE 25  Miniature battleships set aflame in the Pearl Harbor attack sequence of Tora!

Tora! Tora!

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spectacular imaginings of explosions and destruction. The sequence does not have a single consistent look and thereby prompts a variety of responses, from horror and disgust to pride, awe, or anger. Therefore, while The Longest Day establishes a network of information that, despite some errors, is effective in creating momentum for victory, Tora! shows the complete breakdown of a military intelligence communications network. The producers of Tora! attempted to create certitude about a past event, showing it to be a known entity, but the film’s narrative undermines this effort, showing how uncertainty, misinformation, and instability infect information networks. Rather than casting out the doubts associated with the Vietnam War, this film demonstrates how much the World War II narrative had been shaken by 1970. Tora! Tora! Tora! reflects the ambiguity and confusions of its historically contemporary war, instead of exemplifying the presumed virtue and rationality of World War II.

Allegories of Vietnam in the World War II Combat Film Tora! Tora! Tora! attempted to bring the Cold War–­inspired, postindustrial worldview of The Longest Day to a depiction of an institutional failure at the hands of an Asian enemy, making it potentially very resonant with contemporaneous experiences in Vietnam. Yet by almost every measure, it failed. It was a financial disappointment as well as a critical one. Reviewer Kevin Kelly, for instance, opined that “sitting through its three-­hour display is the slow way to commit hara-­kiri.”50 Aesthetically, too, it was inconsistent. Richard Fleischer has claimed that the production intentionally allowed the American and Japanese sequences to have different cinematic styles, but some critics found this jarring.51 Variety suspected that the American and Japanese scenes were “filmed without a sense of the ultimate slotting in the finished form.”52 Some characters appear for important moments and then disappear, never to be seen again. Other films in this period were judged more successful in reflecting the cultural context of the late 1960s and the Vietnam War in particular within the broad strokes of the World War II combat genre. Instead of the bureaucratic hero, these films depict antisocial and antiauthoritarian protagonists. In what Jeanine Basinger describes as the cycle of “dirty group” films, the honorable platoon or interconnected network of allied agents is replaced by a group of outsiders. The progenitor of this brief cycle of films, The Dirty Dozen, makes a specialized commando unit out of twelve convicted criminals who are given the opportunity to undertake a risky mission to gain their freedom. Similar groups of misfits, criminals, and antiheroes populate The Devil’s Brigade (Andrew V. McLagen, 1968), Play Dirty (Andre De Toth, 1969), and Kelly’s Heroes.

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While these films maintain the genre conventions of emphasizing a group of soldiers and utilizing the typical iconography of the war, they stray from representing combat in an orthodox way. Unlike the massive reenactments of The Longest Day or Tora! Tora! Tora!, these films present combat in alternative modes, bringing in conventions from other genres. The Dirty Dozen, for instance, self-­reflexively highlights the artificiality of cinematic combat sequences by staging its climactic commando raid like a piece of theater. Each of the antiheroes plays a role, dresses the part, and memorizes a rhyme to help remember the next part of the deadly play as it unfolds. Staged more like action sequences than the battle scenes described thus far, the depictions of combat in these films neglect the grammar of remote and embedded viewpoints that comprise the destructive sublime in the combat genre; yet, these films often inspire similar visceral reactions to their exciting action, suspenseful plotting, and, in some films, explicit violence. Although the “dirty group” films reject standard combat sequences, they sustain the contemporaneous concern with logistical planning and the nature of the military as an institution. Because they tend to represent the military as fundamentally corrupt, the films depict individuals using skills in organization, logistics, and strategy to their own ends instead of serving the institutional or national interest. In Kelly’s Heroes, a group of soldiers, ironically deemed heroes by the film’s title, plan and execute a daring raid beyond enemy lines, but their motivation is to gain fourteen thousand gold bars being held in a bank—­for themselves, not for the glory (or coffers) of the U.S. military. The film relocates the syntax of the heist movie into the World War II combat genre. A crucial part of the scheme is supply officer Crapgame (Don Rickles), who uses his knowledge of the bureaucratic side of war to obtain black market supplies that allow them to pull off their caper. Ultimately, the group—­led by antihero Kelly (Clint Eastwood) and pacifist tank driver Oddball (Donald Sutherland), an anachronistic hippie—­collaborates with a German tank commander, who blasts open the bank for them in exchange for a piece of the take. This “combat sequence” moves beyond the official ideologies of the “good war” and shows both sides as motivated by material rewards. Moreover, the film shows Kelly to be mirroring what he sees top U.S. Army officials doing. His commanding officer, at the front lines as little as possible, uses his troops and resources to steal a yacht for himself, which he tows away with an army Jeep. The film delivers an antimilitary message by celebrating these rogue soldiers who deprive their government of the financial rewards that could help them win the war. This antiwar missive arises from the collaboration not only between Americans and Germans but also among the man of action (in the form of Eastwood, known for his Western roles), the bureaucratic hero (Crapgame), as well as the pacifist (Oddball). These three figures, also representing

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different generations, work together not for the good of the country but for personal gain, implicitly derogating the objectives of the military as a whole. Catch-­22 (Mike Nichols, 1970) depicts a bureaucratic hero taken to a frightening extreme in the figure of Lt. Milo Minderbinder ( Jon Voight). In the film, Milo uses his superior bureaucratic skills (negotiation, organization, planning) to engage in black market trade of surplus U.S. Army items, such as blankets, for goods like eggs and olive oil. Over the course of the film, he takes all the first-­aid kits and the airmen’s silk parachutes to exchange for other goods to be traded for a profit. Since he has set this up as a syndicate, with supposedly every serviceman participating, everyone serves to profit, and he appears to operate with the approval of the military brass. “We’re going to come out of this war rich,” Milo exclaims, but of course he is jeopardizing the safety of the supposed syndicate members, the soldiers, by taking their parachutes and other necessities. Ultimately, when Milo ends up making a bad business decision, he makes a deal with the German army that if they buy his worthless goods, the Americans will bomb their own base, which they do, killing one of their own soldiers. While the bombing sequence perpetuates some of the aesthetics of combat in this period—­combining close-­up action with remote perspectives—­another battle sequence works against such conventions; this scene takes the form of a dream-­like memory that returns over and over to the protagonist Capt. John Yossarian (Alan Arkin). The recurring scene consists of a series of disconnected close-­ups and the faint sound of a voice saying, “Help the bombardier.” Yossarian replies, “I’m the bombardier,” but when the voice replies, “Help him,” he notices the young gunner lying on the floor of their aircraft while they are flying. He has a gut wound that Yossarian is unable to fix. In one of this scene’s iterations, Yossarian’s hands tear away the skin, allowing bloody intestines to spill out onto the floor. The close-­up, gruesome horror is a significant departure from the remote views of war in films like The Longest Day and stands as a predecessor to the intense bodily horror of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and other films of the 1990s and 2000s (to be discussed in the next chapter). Moreover, by presenting this element of combat as dream-­like, it further distances the genre from the quest for authenticity and fidelity to history. While it is ostensibly set in the Korean War, the unexpected smash hit of 1970, MASH (Robert Altman, 1970), also fits this pattern of a rogue group of outsiders who work against the military establishment. Although skilled surgeons and nurses, the characters are rarely seen treating patients; when they are, the spurting blood and wretched groans of the injured soldiers follow the same trend of showing corporeal violence as Catch-­22. Mostly, though, the characters are interested in the management of the hospital community, and the characters learn to manipulate the system to fulfill their own

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individual desires. For instance, Trapper (Elliott Gould) and Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) agree to operate on the son of a U.S. congressman in Japan in order to take the opportunity to play golf there. Furthermore, the last scene of the film, a football game, metaphorically disparages war and the military for being as meaningless as a game whose rules must be subverted to win (they bring in a “ringer” in order to achieve ultimate victory). The comparison of war to football in MASH reflects some of the absurdity of the Vietnam War and the corruption seen in its waging, along with the lack of clear moral values. The alternative depictions of World War  II in the late 1960s and early ’70s also reflect a growing understanding that the bureaucracy of war is not benevolent, as depictions of Eisenhower in The Longest Day, the intelligence officers in Tora! Tora! Tora!, or Bradley in Patton would have it. Instead, the films illustrate how this bureaucracy is corrupted by a desire for personal gain at the expense of the values the war was supposedly fought to protect. While the characters still find value in logistics, it is to their own ends, not for the good of the institution or the nation. The cultural narratives of the “good war” seem to have been exhausted within this cycle of films, which was more explicit in negotiating a disguised representation of Vietnam than the epic reenactment films of the same time period.

Conclusion Darryl F. Zanuck’s “daring, impossible undertaking” to re-­create a piece of World War  II without documentary footage led to a cycle of films following its aesthetic pattern. Films like The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and A Bridge Too Far replaced documentary images with large-­ scale reenactments and rejected the amateurish, fragmented style of combat cinematography in exchange for the polished, abstracted views of the remote perspective. This style allowed the films to explore aspects of the destructive sublime associated with size and quantity as well as massive force and violent power. The new style of combat sequences mirrors the films’ narratives, which dramatize the administrative machinery of the military. Reflecting the conditions of the Cold War, these films depict the German and Japanese commands as intellectual, rational, and respectful of authority and tradition, inexplicitly rejecting the presumed disorder and classlessness of Communism. The films present military campaigns as a series of interconnected episodes determined by the logical deductions and strategic planning of a hierarchy of officials. The combat aesthetics of The Longest Day and its followers are also the product of intensive planning, international diplomacy, and rational decision-­making, if on a smaller scale. The visual style of remote viewpoints, abstracted camera positions, smooth tracking shots, and balanced, holistic framing grounds its

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authenticity in an approximation of objectivity rather than relying on the subjective, individual experience of combat. This style matches the films’ portrayals of the military as an institution governed by rules, rationality, and leadership. The World War  II reenactment films in this period sought to clarify the moral virtues of the war, but they did not do so by giving speeches about “why we fight,” the villainy of the enemy, or the larger meanings of the war. Rather, they illustrated a particular conception of righteousness in their very form, by demonstrating the rationality, the predictability, and the clarity of war—­what happened when, what the causes were, and why things unfolded as they did. This philosophy of reconstructing the war reflects a popular mythology of the Second World War, whose apparent moral clarity produces clarity in knowledge, cutting out the fog of war and making causes, effects, characters, and places all clear. But this approach to war did not reflect the contemporaneous conflict in Vietnam; instead, it deflected it. The narrative of Tora! Tora! Tora! tries to hold on to the mythic story of the Second World War, presenting the U.S. military as a rational force that relies on information and the chain of command, even when it fails. However, difficulties in its production and the sometimes inconsistent narrative and combat aesthetics show that the conventional narrative of the “good war” had begun to break down by 1970 as a result of the Vietnam War. In order to represent Vietnam, even allegorically, at this point in time, the genre had to break with convention, integrating elements of other genres. Kelly’s Heroes uses elements of the Western and the heist film, and black comedy allows The Dirty Dozen, Catch-­22, and MASH to comment on Vietnam and the corruption of the military establishment. The combat sequences take on new meanings by being structured as a traumatic memory (Catch-­22), a piece of playacting (The Dirty Dozen), and a heist (Kelly’s Heroes), or being replaced by symbols (the football game in MASH). The heroes of these films are not traditional men of action but rather antiheroes who use bureaucratic logic against the very system that established it as the norm. During the Vietnam War, very few films explicitly showed the conflict in Southeast Asia. John Wayne’s The Green Berets was the most prominent of these films,53 and it follows some traditions of the World War II combat film in its re-­creations of combat and depiction of the brotherhood of war. The explicit World War II films in this period did not ignore Vietnam but rather shaped their stories of the midcentury war in ways that would either reassure audiences of the competence of the military hierarchy or confirm their suspicions about its base and corrupt nature. The meaning of World War  II became malleable in order to reflect contemporary conflicts and geopolitical relationships. Although films like The Longest Day crystalized the conversion

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of World War II into the “good war,” others like The Dirty Dozen or Kelly’s Heroes emptied out the conventional meanings of World War II and used the war as cover for deeper, comically critical explorations of the institution of the American military. As seen in the next chapter, by the 1990s, films like Saving Private Ryan had adopted some of the gruesome depictions of bodily violence from this cycle of films but rejected its cynical outlook on the military and the motivations for waging war.

4

Nostalgia for Combat World War II at the End of Cinema One of the most commented upon sequences in all of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) begins with Capt.  Miller (Tom Hanks), not yet introduced by name, crawling out of the bloodstained water on Omaha Beach toward the cover of an anti-­tank obstacle. The camera tracks in jerkily to a close-­up as the shot goes into slight slow motion; on the soundtrack, the roar of battle and whine of bullets fade out and are replaced by abstract white noise. The sequence cuts to a medium shot of what Miller appears to be looking at—­a soldier cowering in fear behind another anti-­tank obstacle—­and returns to a medium close-­up of Miller’s face, seemingly staring uncomprehendingly. The slow motion and ambient noise continue. Next, the sequence cuts to a medium-­long shot of three soldiers engulfed in orange fire as one of their flamethrower tanks is hit by a bullet. The next shot returns to Miller’s face; he flinches in response to an unseen nearby explosion that sprays his head with blood, or perhaps bloody sea water, and he continues staring into the distance. A medium-­long shot shows a stunned soldier wandering around looking for something; he uses his good arm to pick up the bloody limb that had been blown off the other side of his torso. After a couple of shots showing Miller witnessing the burning of a landing boat, a close-­up of a young soldier mouthing “What now, sir?” appears to snap Miller out of his shock. After a

127

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sound like a teapot whistle, the noises of the raging battle return and Miller continues up the beach. This sequence forms part of the harrowing, twenty-­minute-­long sequence visualizing the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. The portion of the scene described above is striking for its representation of the subjective experience of combat, using cinematography, editing, and sound to approximate Miller’s sense of being overwhelmed in the midst of carnage. It also stands out from the other films discussed so far in this book for its extreme violence, particularly in its detailing of the specific effects of bullets and explosions on the body of the soldier. The sequence only lasts about a minute and a half, but it shows two limb amputations, dozens of men on fire, several explosions, and enough blood to turn the ocean water red. With its hellish depictions of combat and innovative film style, Saving Private Ryan struck a cultural nerve upon its release in 1998. Along with Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), it spurred a new cycle of World War II combat films, a genre that had flagged since the mid-­1970s and had been mostly replaced by Vietnam War films like Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), and Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987). The decade following Saving Private Ryan witnessed the release of more than a dozen combat films and a major HBO miniseries set during the Second World War. These include U-571 ( Jonathan Mostow, 2000), Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), Band of Brothers (HBO miniseries, 2001), Windtalkers ( John Woo, 2002), Saints and Soldiers (Ryan Little, 2003), The Great Raid ( John Dahl, 2005), Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006), Letters

FIGURE 26  Subjective visuals and sound present the horrors of combat in Saving Private

Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998).

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from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006), and Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008). This chapter examines why the genre resurged at the end of the 1990s and how the filmmaking techniques and technologies of the time afforded a new representation of the Second World War while also returning to earlier expressions of the destructive sublime. The revival of World War II on the big screen in 1998 culminated a decade of America looking back at the war. In concert with the broader cultural reverence for the Second World War in this period (as made manifest by best-­selling history texts and national memorials), Saving Private Ryan also evidences a nostalgia for the photochemical techniques and stylistic markers of World War  II–­era filmmaking, particularly that of the combat documentaries discussed in chapter 1. As seen in the Omaha Beach sequence described above, the World War II films of the late 1990s and early 2000s reject the overarching remote views so prevalent in the epic reenactment films of the 1960s and early ’70s, and they instead reinvest in the embedded point of view and the aesthetics of celluloid recording established by the combat cameramen of the 1940s. However, as much as Saving Private Ryan looked to the past, its release also demonstrated how Hollywood was looking ahead to a digital future. Foreseeing the death of celluloid, film studios and individual filmmakers in this period finally embraced technologies like digital cameras, computer-­ generated imagery, nonlinear editing, and the digital intermediate. This “end of cinema” marked the emergence of new conventions and possibilities for the cinematic medium based on the affordances of the digital.1 While their films are in some ways elegies for obsolete photochemical filmmaking practices, Steven Spielberg and his compatriots, including Clint Eastwood and Michael Bay, also began to embrace the spatial and temporal liberties availed by digital imagemaking. This chapter explores the seeming paradox of films that look nostalgically back at World War II filmmaking techniques but also pioneer new uses of digital imaging. Indeed, these films rely on both forms of visualization for the intense, corporeal violence that distinguishes this cycle of World War II combat films. By drawing on Linda Williams’s theory of melodrama, I argue that the graphic violence of this cycle of films also represents a new orientation to the American soldier after his reputation was tarnished by the atrocities of the Vietnam War and, post-­9/11, similar brutalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The combat scenes’ explicit bodily violence both punishes and redeems the American soldier, operating under a melodramatic logic that aims to prove his virtue. In the process, the films attempt to rein in the excesses of the destructive sublime apparent in the combat sequences and make these scenes reinforce more conventional meanings associated with the war genre. Despite this effort, though, scenes of combat prove their ability to surpass these significations in their corporeal appeal to the viewer’s body.

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The sections that follow illustrate how war films and television series from the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s negotiated the tensions between digital and celluloid, as well as between reverence for the past and reflections of current conflicts and modes of warfare. In their probing of these contradictions, the texts explore the impact of violence on two bodies: the body of the American soldier within the text and the body of the cinematic text itself, existing now on a continuum between celluloid inscription and digital file. These bodies intersect in explosive and gut-­wrenching combat scenes where the corporeality of the soldier’s body in abject victimhood forms the basis for the increasing decorporealization of the film text as it shifts from celluloid to digital. In this way, these texts ironically display an increasing investment in showing the corporeality—­the bodily effects—­of war while, at the same time, the physical corpus of film dematerializes and soldiers fighting modern wars increasingly use digital technologies to wage war from afar.

Nostalgia for War The basic contradiction that fuels much of the combat genre, particularly after the Vietnam War, is, How can war be morally justified if it results in so much death and suffering? And more specifically, how can a soldier be virtuous if his job is to kill? The World War II films of the late 1990s and early 2000s prove the virtue of the American soldier by showing his pain and distress rather than focusing on the destruction of the enemy. The films step back from the equanimity shown toward the opposition in the films discussed in the previous chapter, such as The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer et al., 1970). Instead, American soldiers play the melodramatic victims, expressing the paradoxical power that comes from suffering rather than that associated with force or strength. Linda Williams has argued that melodrama—­understood as an emotionally heightened narrative form that works to establish moral virtues in a secular world—­is the fundamental mode not just of American cinema but of American popular narrative broadly conceived.2 She writes, “If emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately concerned with a retrieval and staging of virtue through adversity and suffering, then the operative mode is melodrama.”3 While this description does not always fit the war genre writ large (Vietnam War films invert many of these tendencies), it nevertheless stands as a veritable template for the nostalgic World War II films that emerged in the late 1990s. Melodrama has been understood as an attempt to “reconcile the irreconcilable,” resolving primary contradictions that underlie the fabric of society.4 American popular culture has often construed war in terms of Manichean

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conflicts between good and evil, victim and perpetrator, righteousness and deviousness. The World War II combat films released between 1998 and 2008 perpetuate these oppositions by making particular use of melodramatic frameworks and moral structures. They nostalgically return to a moment of American history that has since been constructed as an era of ethical certainty, national consensus, justified belligerence, and complete military and ideological victory. Nostalgia and melodrama are both built around a retrospective temporality, looking toward the past as an idealized place to which to return. Both also involve a longed-­for, but irretrievably lost, object—­whether that be a time, a place, a feeling, or a physical marker of these things—­leading to the pathos experienced by both nostalgics and melodramatic characters (and audiences). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words “nostalgia” and “melodrama” both emerged in the late seventeenth century, gaining wider use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arising out of the same historical and cultural circumstances, the two concepts can be seen as responses to modernity. “Nostalgia” was originally coined to describe a medical condition commonly afflicting soldiers fighting in foreign lands. This “homesickness” (from the Greek, nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, “pain”) plagued groups of soldiers like an epidemic, causing melancholy and confusion and reducing the fighting spirit.5 Nostalgia became an integral part of the development of nationalism in the nineteenth century as the heritage of nations became institutionalized in museums, memorials, and songs. War is particularly important in determining the shape of these national stories. As Svetlana Boym has explained in her exploration of the subject, “The nostos of a nation is not merely a lost Eden but a place of sacrifice and glory, of past suffering.”6 The longed-­for past is not just an idyll but often a time of collective sacrifice and pain that challenged but strengthened the bonds of community. Yet as Susan Stewart points out, nostalgia is “a sadness without an object”: “the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.”7 So, too, do the myths of World War II rest upon a fabricated history: an amalgam of true stories, exaggerated exploits, and fictional media portrayals. Like the seventeenth-­century soldiers pining for their homelands, the cycle of World War  II films following Saving Private Ryan evinces an impulse to return to an earlier time (the 1940s) and place (an idealized America of close-­ knit rural communities and family values). By the time these nostalgic films began to appear in the 1990s, factory farming had put many family farmers out of business, and the culture wars surrounding issues such as feminism, gay rights, and affirmative action had challenged white male privilege. Furthermore, technological developments such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles had led to what was deemed “postheroic” warfare, fought mostly

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from a distance with a lower level of risk to soldiers.8 As if to counter these developments, the fiftieth-­anniversary commemorations of World War  II in the early to mid-­1990s offered a return to a period that had become associated with moral clarity, national consensus, and the heroism of (predominantly white) men. The best-­selling books of journalist Tom Brokaw (The Greatest Generation) and historian Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers, D-Day, Citizen Soldiers) and the National WWII Memorial (in Washington, D.C.) and the National WWII Museum (in New Orleans) sought to preserve the memories of the generation that experienced the war, who by the 1990s were aging or passing away.9 In these memorials, World War II represents the height of the modern age, combining the industrial might of midcentury America with the last gasps of national imperialism, before a post-­Fordist economy became dominant and a new form of globalization took root. The late 1990s also witnessed the Kosovo War, in which NATO intervention took the form of aerial bombardment with zero NATO fatalities. The return to World War II in popular culture restored the presentation of male bodies at risk, allowing for depictions of physical heroism and meaningful sacrifice at the level of the individual soldier. In the face of a new, casualty-­free form of “virtuous war,”10 popular culture reinvested in “the codes of legitimation that underpin traditional war—­concepts such as heroic sacrifice, valor, and fraternal bonding.”11 The Second World War provided the most logical setting for these themes. It may appear odd, at first, that American culture would manifest a nostalgic longing for a period of wartime, but after the extended and unresolved (or unhappily resolved, for the United States) wars in Vietnam and, later, Iraq and Afghanistan, a war conceived of as justifiable and virtuous could be worthy of nostalgia. According to Jean Baudrillard, the cinematic recovery of turbulent historical periods reflects a desire “simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.”12 Furthermore, Baudrillard finds in historical films an obsession with recreating cinema’s own past, in remaking, reenacting, and referencing its aesthetic history: “Cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original, etc.: all of this is logical, the cinema is fascinated by itself as lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent.”13 A look at the production history of Saving Private Ryan demonstrates how the nostalgia for the World War II era often corresponds with a nostalgia for past cinematic forms, which, like the war itself, are imbricated with romanticized notions of what cinema is and was.

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Nostalgia for Celluloid As seen in the opening to this chapter, the combat sequences of Saving Private Ryan, particularly the one at Omaha Beach, mimic some of the aesthetics of World War II combat cameramen in their use of shaky cinematography, low-­to-­the-­ground camera angles, and the exploitation of cinematic “mistakes” like allowing water (or blood) to appear on the lens. Although inspired by films like The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942) and The Battle of San Pietro ( John Huston, 1945), Spielberg takes these aesthetics to extremes that are not present in the original documentaries and were anathema to conventional newsreel cameramen or trained combat photographers.14 While only a few swish pans appear in The Battle of San Pietro to represent the discombobulation of the camera operator, this mobile and erratic cinematography governs nearly all the shots in the Omaha Beach sequence. Spielberg adopts this grammar of the destructive sublime—­and its underlying suggestion that cinematic errors result from authentically difficult filming conditions—­and takes it even further. More than just a simple question of technique, a film’s aesthetic and technological choices correspond to issues of representation, truth, and history, especially in films depicting historical wars. Celluloid has long served an evidentiary function, and nowhere are the stakes of this function higher than in war. As I demonstrated in chapter 1, during World War II itself, combat cameramen and photojournalists captured film evidence of violence on a worldwide, industrialized scale: the Blitz in London, Omaha Beach on D-Day, the Nazi concentration camps, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iconic photographs of D-Day, Iwo Jima, Auschwitz, and the mushroom clouds brought the realities of war back to the home front. In comparison with celluloid, digital imagemaking was greeted in the 1990s with suspicion; it seemed too easy to manipulate a photograph into something else or to realistically visualize something that had never happened or could never happen. For example, William J. Mitchell wrote in 1992 that for the last half of the nineteenth century and the majority of the twentieth century, photographs “were comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world.” However, he argued that “the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted these certainties,” leading to a sense of the “fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real.”15 Digital imagemaking appeared to render obsolete all the alleged truth value of photochemical photography. For those in the 1990s and early 2000s making films about World War II—­the war most associated with celluloid filmmaking—­realism became imperative, but how it was achieved was an open question. Hollywood filmmakers from Steven Spielberg to Michael Bay and Clint Eastwood were

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forced to negotiate ideologically loaded film techniques, both photochemical and digital, in order to re-­create World War II. Steven Spielberg, for one, explicitly attempted to distinguish Saving Private Ryan from Hollywood war films of the past, and he called upon realism as a way to do that. He admits to having been a “war-­movie fanatic” growing up watching World War II combat films like Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943), Objective Burma! (Raoul Walsh, 1945), The Story of G.I. Joe (William A. Wellman, 1945), and Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949) as they played over and over again on television.16 The Second World War was also the subject of the first amateur films Spielberg made as a youth, Escape to Nowhere and Firesquad, which were shot on 8 mm using firecrackers for bullet impacts.17 But as he explains in an essay he penned for Newsweek in 1998, Spielberg came to feel that the Hollywood war movies he grew up on were one-­sided, only showing triumph. They contributed to naiveté about the war and did not tell “the hard truth about what real combat was.”18 Saving Private Ryan was Spielberg’s attempt to tell this truth, to “once and finally acquit with honor the reality of the actual combat soldier.”19 Ultimately, violence became Spielberg’s route to this reality. Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach sequence contains many grisly images, including those described at the beginning of this chapter. The combat begins with the door opening on a Higgins boat and the exiting soldiers being immediately mowed down by machine-­g un fire, their bodies falling over one another as all are slaughtered. One memorable shot shows a fallen soldier crying out “Momma!” as he clutches the intestines that have fallen outside his body. A few shots detail gory battlefield medical procedures, with medics reaching their hands or fingers inside the body to try to staunch the spurting blood. The deep red of blood forms a distinctive visual contrast to the washed-­out blues, grays, and browns of the rest of the mise-­en-­scène. In 1962, The Longest Day included some of the same actions, such as the Higgins boats arriving on Omaha Beach and the soldiers getting pinned down on the beaches. However, the overhead views and distanced framings remove the visceral intensity of the sequence and present the violence more abstractly. In The Longest Day, the destructive sublime takes the form of an awe at the size and scope of the war; in Saving Private Ryan, in contrast, the destructive sublime creates visceral intensity, practically reveling in images of fragmented bodies. Veterans of World War II who spoke out about Saving Private Ryan generally concurred that the film’s presentation of combat was realistic, particularly in its depiction of graphic mutilation, blood, and death. Paul Fussell, a scholar and World War  II veteran, noted, “Blood, in run-­of-­the-­mill war movies, tends to look too thin; in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ it is thick and when it is arterial blood it comes out in correct rhythmic spurts.” He cautions, though, that “‘Saving Private Ryan’ does not mark a new moment in Hollywood history. Hollywood’s purpose is profit, and it has learned that violence sells.”20

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What makes the violence in Saving Private Ryan so distinctive is not just the quantity and intensity of it but also the unique mixture of old and new techniques used to create the overwhelming impression of destruction. As noted above, the cinematography explicitly mimics the look of combat documentaries of the 1940s. In press materials, Spielberg referenced John Huston’s Report from the Aleutians (1943) and The Battle of San Pietro, John Ford’s The Battle of Midway, and William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle (1944).21 But Saving Private Ryan also inherits a particular permissiveness toward graphic violence that was not possible until the late 1960s due to the easing of industry censorship and the shocking images of real-­world violence brought into the home as part of television news coverage of the Vietnam War. In addition, Spielberg also utilized the new digital techniques of the 1990s, including the computer-­generated imagery that he mastered in Jurassic Park in 1993. Thus his film’s depiction of violence represents a confluence of forces, including a nostalgic return to older documentarian techniques of the 1940s, the graphic violence of the Vietnam War era, and the utilization of digital techniques to realistically depict violent actions or effects that would be difficult to re-­create practically. Spielberg openly discussed the Vietnam War’s influence on him in some press. Although, as Stephen Prince argues in Classical Film Violence, the World War II combat film in the 1940s opened the doors in the first place to more graphic portrayals of violence, it was the Vietnam War that inspired filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah to push the envelope even further.22 In 1962, before massive amounts of American troops began to be stationed in Vietnam, The Longest Day presented combat deaths from afar, showing soldiers falling in clichéd poses with hardly a drop of blood. When fighting in Vietnam began entering the living room on the daily news broadcast, such artificiality suddenly looked old-­fashioned. In his Newsweek essay, Spielberg specifically mentions how he got an education on what war really looks like by watching the news every night in the late 1960s and early 1970s.23 Spielberg’s representation of the trauma of war violence reflects a post-­Vietnam fascination with the destructive force of violence and its bodily effects. Vietnam not only made audiences more accepting of cinematic gore but also directly influenced the aesthetic vocabulary of corporeal violence. But while Spielberg acknowledged the impact of the Vietnam War on the aesthetics of Saving Private Ryan, he downplayed his use of digital effects. Instead, he emphasized the many old-­fashioned techniques he used to create the distinct look of the film. One of the most prominent of these techniques is his characteristic use of low-­angle, handheld—­even erratic—­cinematography during combat sequences. In this, he and his longtime director of photography Janusz Kaminski aimed to emulate the look of wartime combat documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro and With the Marines at Tarawa (1944). Spielberg

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explains, “Was I going to stand up 40 feet above a war to get the best shot? No, I would have been the first person shot off the precipice. Instead, I stayed five inches off the sand. . . . I wanted the shaky point of view of a young, terrified combat soldier, not a Hollywood director.”24 Here, Spielberg explicitly rejects the aerial and remote perspectives of films like Tora! Tora! Tora!, opting instead to return to the aesthetics pioneered by the likes of John Ford and John Huston for the U.S. military. In addition to taking the embedded perspective, Spielberg and Kaminski tried to re-­create the outmoded form of wartime documentary filmmaking with their every step. They considered making the film in black and white, like most newsreels and combat documentaries or like Spielberg’s own Schindler’s List (1993) but decided against it.25 Instead, they used a series of in-­camera and photochemical techniques to create an extremely desaturated, nearly monochromatic look: Kaminski pushed his film stock one stop to burn out highlights, he used a device called the Panaflasher to add additional light to the exposure during filming, and the film was treated with a high level (70 percent) of Technicolor’s proprietary silver retention processing called ENR. Used together, these techniques desaturated and flattened the color, giving the film a very limited palette.26 Kaminski also modified cameras and lenses to imitate the look of 1940s documentaries. He asked Panavision to strip the protective coating off some older Ultra Speed lenses, creating a slightly foggy and diffuse look and increasing the probability of getting lens flares.27 For some shots in the combat scenes, Kaminski used a 45-­or 90-­degree shutter, which decreases the amount of time light is exposed on each frame of film, thereby reducing motion blur and resulting in a choppy or staccato sense of movement. Kaminski and Spielberg even introduced intentional filmmaking “errors” in order to give the impression of filming in the midst of real warfare. In some shots, Kaminski deliberately threw the camera’s shutter out of sync to create a streaking effect running from the top to the bottom of the frame. He also allowed blood, water, and dirt to cloud the lens in certain shots, again making the audience aware of the camera and the camera operator’s supposed presence in a war zone.28 Channeling the logic of John Ford or John Huston in their wartime documentaries, Spielberg explained, “If the lens got splattered with sand and blood, I didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, the shot’s ruined, we have to do it over again’—­we just used it in the picture. Our camera was affected in the same way that a combat cameraman’s would be when an explosion or bullet hit happened nearby.”29 Although the real combat cameramen of World War  II went out of their way to avoid such errors, the “controlled spontaneity” of these shots gives the impression of realism, even when the effects were planned.30 Kaminski also introduced artificial camera shake to simulate explosive concussions or the exaggerated wobble of handheld camerawork. Initially, they attached

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an electric drill to the camera but then found that Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker worked even better, with more precise variations of vibration.31 Spielberg’s re-­creation of the filmmaking conditions of wartime combat documentaries departs significantly from how an actual soldier would have experienced the war and instead creates a highly stylized vision of combat. In fact, Spielberg’s yearning to exactly re-­create the look of old combat reports trumps his often-­expressed desire to “honor the reality of the actual combat soldier.” Echoing the thinking of Darryl F. Zanuck in the production of The Longest Day, Spielberg acknowledged, “Even though my dad fought in a technicolour war, I just believe that all of us can relate to that period much better through black-­and-­white or faded 16 mm Ektachrome film.”32 Spielberg’s determination to make Saving Private Ryan look like it was made in the 1940s prioritizes the visual appearance of the film over its content, introducing a potential barrier between the audience and the soldiers’ experience. Spielberg’s commitment to outmoded celluloid filmmaking demonstrates a nostalgia not simply for a representational technology but for the connotations associated with that technology. Old-­fashioned cameras and film­making techniques literally stripped the polish off the image, seeming to get to the unadorned truth. Those technologies necessitated physical proximity to the events they captured and made the recording of contingent events newly possible. Photochemical photography and filmmaking are laden with ideological meanings relating to truth, honesty, and transparency. In comparison, modern filmmaking techniques—­especially digital ones—­are associated with the creation of fantasy, making everything look better, cleaner, and more beautiful than it really is.

FIGURE 27  Blood splatters on the lens in Saving Private Ryan.

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Despite his involvement in the advancement of digital visual effects as director of Jurassic Park and executive producer for Young Sherlock Holmes (Barry Levinson, 1985), which created the first fully computer-­generated character in a feature film, Spielberg has long considered himself a “traditional filmmaker” who makes films the old-­fashioned way. Saving Private Ryan was the last film to win an Academy Award for Editing that was cut by hand on a flatbed instead of with the use of a nonlinear digital editing system like Avid. (Spielberg only finally embraced the Avid in 2012 when he directed the animated film The Adventures of Tintin, which was a completely digital workflow from start to finish.33) For longer than many other directors, Spielberg resisted digital technologies and preferred the tactility and physicality of filmmaking on celluloid. He explained in 2003, “I just like the purity of actually being able to touch film and see it on a screen after threading it through a projector. I like cutting my finger occasionally on a strip of film. I like the craft of it.”34 Looking back in 2008 at his role in innovating visual effects in films like Jurassic Park, Spielberg had mixed feelings, expressing pride at being part of many advances but also sadness at the passing of old ways. He noted that he is “kind of a sentimental kind of guy” and “a bit in mourning for the past” way of doing things.35 In 2015, he told the New York Times that he would have liked to have worked under contract in the classical studio era.36 Spielberg’s nostalgia for previous modes of filmmaking is evident in his devotion to recreating past cinematic forms, at least as much as—­if not more than—­the actual experience of World War  II combat. In his attempt to re-­ create the look of documentary footage taken by combat cameramen, Spielberg demonstrates a nostalgia for celluloid at the same time that celluloid was losing its status as the predominant medium for motion pictures. Not only does Saving Private Ryan act as a tribute to the soldiers who fought in World War II, including Spielberg’s own father, but it also serves as an homage to the photochemical method of making motion pictures, which was in its heyday during World War II but nearly obsolete by the beginning of the 2000s.

Interrogating Record and Reenactment In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg’s old-­fashioned filming techniques combine to form an aesthetic template that connotes realism for the war films that follow it. As described above, this template consists of nearly black-­and-­ white color desaturation, lack of motion blur (a result of the low-­angle shutter), handheld cinematography, and an embrace of filmmaking “mistakes” like lens flares, streaking, and blood on the lens. Although the war films and television series inspired by this template are typically not as extreme in their visual style as Saving Private Ryan, these techniques appear again and again; in each instance, filmmakers claim that their motivations for using them are

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based on a desire to present, in Spielberg’s words, “the hard truth about what real combat was.” Because of its production team, the Spielberg and Tom Hanks–­produced miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) adopts the aesthetic template directly, leading critics to recognize “the powerful stylistic influence of ‘Private Ryan,’ [which] gives coherence” to a miniseries that employed many directors and two cinematographers.37 Codirector of photography Remi Adefarasin said that the aesthetic approach, handed down by Spielberg and Hanks, was to approximate the look of “dropping a documentary unit into the past.”38 This phrase aptly summarizes the philosophy of using modern filmmaking methods to mimic the aesthetic techniques of the 1940s. Even the romantic drama Pearl Harbor adopted aspects of the Private Ryan template for its major reenactments of the Japanese attack. Departing from the vibrant colors used in noncombat scenes, the battle sequences of Pearl Harbor present a washed-­out color palette, matching the desaturated colors of the Spielberg film. Cinematographer John Schwartzman explained, “My goal was to create a rich, colorful movie, then have everything turn almost black-­and-­ white during the bombing.”39 Director Michael Bay filmed some of the combat re-­creations in 16 mm, black-­and-­white 35 mm, and 8 mm formats and inserted a handful of these shots into the major battle scene.40 Pearl Harbor departs from the template, though, by inserting montages of actual archival footage in order to convey historical information or denote the passing of time. The first of these montages bridges the gap between the childhood of the main characters in the 1920s and the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. This montage contains many well-­known pieces of nonfictional film, including images of Hitler and shots taken from Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935). A voice-­over is laid over the images mimicking that of a newsreel announcer from the 1940s, explaining the buildup to and outbreak of war in Europe. The last shot—­also in black and white and with faux grain, scratches, and projection lines to artificially age the image of an airfield—­transitions to color, as if an archival filmstrip were “coming to life.” In partitioning off the archival footage in intermittent montage sequences, Pearl Harbor treats such black-­and-­white footage as both a stand-­in for history and an old-­fashioned and now-­antiquated way of conveying information. The film’s fascination with archival footage also invades the diegesis. A romance between Danny ( Josh Hartnett) and Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) begins after they reunite walking out of a movie theater showing a newsreel about the Battle of Britain (in which their friend, Rafe [Ben Affleck], fought and, they think, died). In another scene, an intelligence analyst (Dan Aykroyd) projects aerial surveillance footage to demonstrate that the Japanese naval fleet has disappeared, leading him to later propose that they intend to attack Pearl Harbor. Finally, a newsreel cameraman briefly becomes a minor character in the film. He records some of the action during the Pearl Harbor attack, including

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Danny and Rafe’s efforts to defend the island from the attackers. Images from the newsreel camera are intercut into the regular action, showing the events as if through the camera’s lens. The images are shaky, low to the ground, and handheld, as well as being monochromatic. This diegetic camera even captures the cameraman’s death after he is shot and drops the camera so it is (conveniently) facing him in his death throes. The film thus takes literally André Bazin’s 1946 exhortations about the wartime fervor for filmed facts: “The cameraman runs as many risks as the soldiers, whose death he is supposed to film even at the cost of his own life (but who cares, as long as the footage is saved!)”41 Although this filmmaking style in no way resembles any of the footage that actually was taken during or directly after the Pearl Harbor attack, these faux newsreel images mirror the documentary-­inspired cinematography of Saving Private Ryan. Although made eight years after Saving Private Ryan, Clint Eastwood’s World War II films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima borrowed many of Spielberg’s aesthetic strategies, including nearly monochromatic desaturation of color, handheld camerawork, blood on the lens, and graphic violence. Michael Owens, visual effects supervisor for both films, explained that “Saving Private Ryan was really the benchmark” that he and Eastwood aspired toward in terms of the films’ overall look. Owens attested, “We very carefully studied every bit of documentary footage and all the stills that we could find [from the Iwo Jima conflict] in books and other sources.”42 Moreover, because Flags of Our Fathers narrates the story behind Joe Rosenthal’s famous flag-­raising photograph taken on Iwo Jima, it also thematically addresses the meaning of (celluloid) photography at a moment (2006) when photochemical filmmaking was rapidly being replaced by digital cameras, processing, color correction, visual effects, and even projection.

FIGURE 28  The diegetic cameraman’s own camera records his death in Pearl Harbor

(Michael Bay, 2001).

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FIGURE 29  Extreme desaturation of color in Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006).

Flags of Our Fathers addresses issues of memory, reenactment, and subjectivity, complicating a straightforward reverence for photographic truth. The majority of the film takes place in 1945, during the Battle of Iwo Jima and the “Mighty Seventh” bond drive that commenced shortly after. Based on the eponymous book written by the son of one of the men in the well-­ known photograph, the film follows the fates of the flag-­raisers, particularly the three who survived the fighting on Iwo Jima: John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon ( Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). The film plays with the spectator’s perception by initially blurring the lines between memory, dream, reenactment, and actual event. The first images of the film show a young man in combat gear (who, we later learn, is Doc) running through a deserted landscape of black sand, trying to locate the source of the voice yelling “Corpsman!”43 The next shot reveals this to be the dream of Doc as an old man. Soon after this dream sequence, we see Doc, Rene, and Ira climbing a rocky hill in their combat gear, surrounded by smoke, sounds of explosions, and lights in the distant night sky. As they get to the top and put up the flag, the booming noises shift to sounds of applause. As the camera tilts down, we realize they are not in battle but rather climbing a papier mâché–­covered set in a football stadium full of cheering fans under a sky full of fireworks. When the film returns to this scene later, the walk up the faux mountain, the bright lights, and the pops and bangs of the fireworks trigger memories for the three surviving flag-­raisers, and subsequently, the film transitions to flashbacks of the traumatic deaths of the other marines who helped raise the flag. Because the combat scenes are often placed within the film as memory-­ triggered flashbacks, the quaking camera and flat colors give the impression of being altered by subjectivity. This same cinematography and color palette are used in the dream sequence that opens the film as well. The scenes set during the bond drive, however, look quite different, with bright colors and more

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conventional cinematography. The documentary-­like style is associated, then, with traumatic memory more than merely “reality.” Flags of Our Fathers thematically opposes reenactments with photographic evidence. When the main characters reenact the flag-­raising during the bond drive, it is presented as an adulterated version of the real thing. Ira, the moral conscience of the film, accuses the tour of being a farce. Everything in the reenactments has a bright and shiny look, in stark contrast with the washed-­out, dirty look of the combat sequences. The perceptual trick played on the film audience in the scene described above—­making their stadium reenactment appear like the actual battle—­only reinforces the difference between them. One is a nightmare, while the other is a safe and cheery celebration without any of the danger, violence, or fear present at the original. Perhaps the most disturbing, and most damning, “reenactment” takes the form of miniature cakes made in the shape of the flag-­raising pose. At a gala celebration as part of the bond drive, the three flag-­raisers are given the option of strawberry or chocolate sauce for the cakes. Doc watches the blood-­red strawberry syrup being poured over their likenesses, triggering a gruesome flashback showing the wounded on Iwo Jima. More than the other films, Flags of Our Fathers acknowledges how photographs act not only as records but also as symbols. The whole conceit of the film is an investigation into the circumstances behind the famous flag-­raising photograph taken at the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. The film shows that photographs make myths of history as much as they document it. The celebrated photograph—­itself something of a reenactment, since it depicts a replacement flag, the second flag to be put up that day—­does more than capture a moment in time; it captures the hopes of Americans, the desire for victory, and the necessity of working together to achieve it. It symbolizes the unity and consensus assumed to be the public zeitgeist of the World War II era in the United States. On one level, Flags of Our Fathers challenges the meaning of the famous Iwo Jima photograph, seeking to explain and perhaps undermine its power to gloss over the actual history in favor of a more “heroic” narrative. However, it does not discredit the photograph and its power. A voice-­over early in the film concludes with the statement, “The right picture can win—­or lose—­a war.” This narrator mentions Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning photograph of a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner during the Vietnam War: “That was it. The war was lost.” In this one explicit reference to Vietnam, the film evokes the horror and bloodshed of that conflict only to contrast it with the received narrative of World War II, the “good war.” The film shows that the Iwo Jima photograph maintains its power to inspire, despite its less-­than-­heroic origin as a mere replacement flag hoisted by everyday servicemen. Even as the film tries to demystify the photograph, it still

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celebrates it and its sentimental intensity. As the actors reenact the pose in the film, the image briefly pauses, letting the audience contemplate the immortalized moment. Flags of Our Fathers also displays original photographs of the flag-­raisers and combat on Iwo Jima during the credit sequence at the end of the film. While this sequence shows pictures of the first flag-­raising and other lesser known photographs taken before, during, and after the famous raising of the replacement, the last image that the film dwells on is the famous Iwo Jima photograph itself. Instead of being discredited, the photograph stands, after viewing the film, as an even more powerful testament to the honor and virtue of the servicemen who defended their country. Like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor, Flags of Our Fathers is nostalgic for celluloid in the form of photographs or film. In each of the films, celluloid is associated with honest representation and the unvarnished truth. The photographic gives a glimpse of the real—­the real nature of the enemy (as in Flags’ photographs of Japanese beheadings that the marines pass around) and the reality of death, fighting for survival, and war. It is thus linked melodramatically and symbolically with the film’s attempt to honor soldiers and to recognize their virtue. These films seem to suggest that only celluloid can produce a visual truth about these honorable soldiers.

Digitizing the Past Despite their nostalgia for celluloid as a recording technology, all the productions discussed here use digital imaging to enhance the film with images that would be difficult to get with photochemical or optical effects, or to create images that stand out and grab the viewers’ attention. Band of Brothers is a good example of a project that emulated the Saving Private Ryan process in most aesthetic parameters but replaced some photochemical processes with digital ones. The series was shot on 35 mm film with many of the same techniques as Private Ryan, such as using a 45-­or 90-­degree shutter and a handheld camera, but the film was handled differently in postproduction, using a digital intermediate instead of ENR processing and other photochemical adjustments. In the digital intermediate process, the film is scanned at high resolution, digitally color corrected and combined with visual effects, and, in theatrically released films, printed back onto film. Therefore, the intense color desaturation of Band of Brothers was achieved on a computer instead of optically or photochemically.44 The series was also edited digitally on an Avid and included a number of elaborate digital visual effects, such as creating a sky full of hundreds of computer-­generated parachutes and paratroopers, as well as digital set extensions and matte paintings of wartime Paris, Holland, and other European locations. In many cases, the digital visual effects mimicked the look of celluloid recording. One complex scene was based on a real

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photograph of German POWs marching down a highway. A shot of two hundred troops at Hatfield Studios was composited with crowd replication techniques (split screening the troops to make them look like there were more than a thousand), computer-­generated tanks and cars, a digital matte of sky and mountains, and CG enhancements like haze and telegraph poles. To this, the visual effects team matched an extensive camera movement to reveal two children walking across a bridge (filmed in front of a bluescreen) in the foreground watching the scene.45 Although this scene replicates an old-­fashioned photograph, it goes beyond what would be possible with purely celluloid-­based methods in its addition of CG elements and digitally enhanced camera movement. Band of Brothers, along with the other contemporary war films, is thus torn between a nostalgic homage to 1940s films and the look of celluloid on the one hand and a playful indulgence in cinematic images only available through the use of digital technology on the other. Part of the goal of these films is to reproduce what audiences have come to associate with “truthful” images of World War II, and thus they re-­create documentary or documentary-­like images: the desaturated colors of the combat sequences, the faux newsreels of Pearl Harbor, the erratic, handheld, and low-­angle cinematography used to represent combat. Yet their other goal is to wow viewers with a never-­before-­seen experience, to reinvent and update the war for contemporary audiences. To that end, they utilize wide-­angle shots of computer-­generated ships; swooping, bird’s-eye-­view camera movements that could only be created with virtual cinematography over a digital landscape; and images of limbs or heads violently torn from bodies, created or altered through computer-­generated imagery. One of the most memorable sequences of Pearl Harbor follows a bomb as it drops from an airplane. Everything in this shot had to be computer generated, including the ships and people on the ground, the water, the sky, and the bomb itself. Visual effects supervisor Ed Hirsch explained how his team devised the shot, “That was a very difficult shot because the design of it was so stylized, so unrealistic. It was something you could never do in real life—­shoot that bomb coming out of the plane and then follow it all the way down—­ so that meant we had to work that much harder to make it look real. . . . We worked on it a long time to make it look as if a camera operator was really shooting this—­getting it not too perfect, with just the right kind of camera wobble.”46 Digital technology allowed the filmmakers to create a completely impossible shot but one that is visually engaging and viscerally thrilling, as the viewer seems to fall along with the bomb, all the while knowing that it will end in a vast explosion. At the same time, though, care was taken to ensure that the shot would “look real,” and this entailed mimicking the “camera wobble” that would result from a traditional handheld camera following the bomb as it fell, as if such a thing were possible. Despite its artificiality, audiences likely

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perceive the shot as “perceptually realistic” because it appears to follow basic laws of physics and imagines a consistent three-­dimensional world.47 Pearl Harbor’s bomb-­following shot culminates in a massive explosion that further combines the opposing impulses to nostalgically mimic documentary footage and to digitally create something that, in words attributed to director Michael Bay, “looks cool.”48 The bomb falls on the USS Arizona, whose historical sinking famously emblematized the destruction caused during the Pearl Harbor attack. The bombing of the Arizona killed more than a thousand sailors (nearly half of all the American deaths during the attack), but the Arizona is also well known because the enormous explosion that sank it was captured on film by a Fox Movietone cameraman.49 The blast was particularly visually impressive since the bomb ignited thousands of pounds of munitions being stored on the ship. When designing their re-­creation of this event for Pearl Harbor, Bay and his visual effects team consulted the extant footage of the Arizona’s explosion. Despite the authenticity of the footage, they found that it was not dramatic enough. Visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig explained, “It was a big explosion, but it wasn’t interesting visually. Battleships are so big that they actually stress when they blow up, so we [decided we] wanted to see this 600-­foot metal ship ‘flex’ briefly before the explosion ripped through its skin. That’s something we could only do with CG.”50 The visual effects team therefore improved upon the historical footage in order to visually represent the flexing of the ship’s hull, something that in actuality happened too quickly for the human eye to perceive. With digital technology, however, these temporal limitations do not restrict what can and cannot be represented. In this instance, the desire to create something that looked “cool” overruled the desire to mimic the documentary footage of the actual event. Like Band of Brothers and Pearl Harbor, Flags of Our Fathers employed computer-­generated imagery extensively to create nonorganic elements, such

FIGURE 30  Computer-­generated imagery created this shot of a bomb falling on the USS

Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

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as the eight-­hundred-­ship armada that transported the troops to Iwo Jima as well as organic elements in the form of additional troops and computer-­ generated marines. Flags took the technological sophistication of Band of Brothers one step further by using Massive, a piece of software originally designed to generate the vast digital armies of the Lord of the Rings films (Peter Jackson, 2001–­2003). Massive produced crowds of computer-­generated people for Flags of Our Father’s combat scenes, as well as those at the bond drive. Instead of animating individual characters one by one, Massive creates multitudes of autonomous agents programmed to select among a series of likely actions based on their immediate surroundings. In Flags, these actions were selected from a library of motion-­captured movements created specifically for the film.51 Some of these actions involved violence, either inflicted upon others or inflicted upon the CG serviceman himself. Therefore, the capacity for violence was automated into the system, innovating a new semiotics of the destructive sublime. Shots that involved Massive-­controlled troops typically utilized the remote perspective, serving as a technological update to the reenactment aesthetics of films like The Longest Day. In addition to this digital violence seen from afar, much of the computer-­ generated imagery in Flags of Our Fathers involved embellishments of wounded bodies in close-­up shots. Even more so than Saving Private Ryan, the combat sequences in Flags feature battlefield medical procedures, since one of the main characters, Doc, is a medic. Bodies disintegrate in explosions, sometimes leaving parts—­a hand, a foot, a torso—­in the sand. In one scene, the main characters explore a cave where American prisoners of war were killed with grenades. Their bodies are ruptured open, spilling out undifferentiated flesh in mounds. Many of the diegetic injuries in Flags of Our Fathers were accomplished through practical makeup effects but were also often enhanced and supplemented by digital means. One scene witnesses the decapitation of a marine portrayed by the director’s son, Kyle Eastwood. While on set the production filmed a dummy severed head, doing their best with the limitations of prosthetics and makeup. The digital effects supervisor for Digital Domain explained how they tweaked the shot on the computer: “We put smoke coming out of the neck area as if it had just been sliced by a hot piece of shrapnel. We also added dripping blood and morphed the jaw to open when a knee hits the head. It looks very real. When Clint saw it, he joked, ‘There have been times I’ve wanted to do that to him!’” For other scenes of Flags, the Digital Domain team inserted digital blood, crafted computer-­generated marines who are hit by explosions, and created “some 3D body pieces that you wouldn’t necessarily recognize as specific body parts, but look like human flesh.”52 Even Saving Private Ryan, made eight years earlier with Spielberg’s preference for “traditional” filmmaking, includes digital effects to heighten the realism of graphic violence, allowing for both a photorealistic vision of bodily

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injury and the “wow factor” of showing something that had not been seen before. Industrial Light & Magic completed forty digitally augmented shots for Private Ryan. As in Flags, the visual effects artists typically added CG elements to filmed practical effects rather than relying solely on digital imagery. For example, the production employed amputee stuntmen who were fitted with fake limbs rigged with breakaway joints to show soldiers whose arms or legs were blown off by explosives or other munitions.53 Later, many of these shots were digitally touched up to create bloodier stumps of the severed limbs, among other CG wounds. One affecting shot shows a soldier who deflects a bullet with his helmet, takes it off to marvel at it, and then receives another shot to the head, which kills him. The bullet effects and wounds in this shot were created digitally, and the artists were challenged to create an organic-­looking blood spray.54 Because Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach sequence stays primarily with the embedded perspective of the invading soldiers (or implied combat cameramen), it has few wide shots showing the entire scene. In those few, it used digital visual effects to visualize hundreds of invading ships, dozens of landing craft, barrage balloons, trucks and jeeps, barbed-­wire barricades, and other elements of the scene. But much of its use of digital effects is up close and personal, exploring the parts of the body—­wounds, blood, internal organs—­that usually are not seen. It creates a visceral impact on the spectator who feels his or her own body responding to the horrific images of violence on screen. The destructive sublime works here on a corporeal level, combining the embedded views of wartime documentaries with graphic, CG-­enhanced violence.

“Earn This”: American Soldiers as Victim-­Heroes In addition to increasing the sense of perceptual and sensual realism, digital special effects aid in the creation of graphic depictions of wounded and dying bodies. This explicit violence reinforces the melodramatic redemption of the American soldier through suffering. Previous chapters of this book describe the dominant models of masculinity in earlier World War II films. The combat films discussed in chapter 2, made during and immediately after World War II—­such as Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943), Wing and a Prayer (Henry Hathaway, 1944), and Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949)—­display heroism and commitment to the cause in terms of physical activity (such as attacking the enemy). As I show in chapter 3, this exemplary form of masculinity was challenged in the 1960s and ’70s by the emergence of the bureaucratic hero, who ably navigates administrative red tape and participates in the complex strategic preparations for war. In contrast to these two prior ideals, the World War II films released around the turn of the twenty-­first century illustrate a significant shift toward representing heroism by means of the endurance

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of pain and suffering. In these films, virtue is linked to what the soldiers withstand—­physical and psychological pain, the gruesome deaths of friends, unexpected ambushes, a brutal and practically unseen enemy—­not what they accomplish. Saving Private Ryan, for instance, has less to do with actually saving Ryan or defending the bridge in the last battle sequence than it does with witnessing the soldiers’ many sacrifices. Indeed, Pearl Harbor narrates a defeat for the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and while it implies the inevitable American victory, it is not shown. Flags of Our Fathers, for its part, does not show American success at Iwo Jima. As soon as they raise the flag, on day 4 of a five-­week battle, the soldiers receive enemy fire. The film details the physical and psychological toll taken on the men of the battle more than their accomplishments or actions. This shift in the depiction of heroism took place over time. After the celebration of the men of action in early wartime films and the bureaucratic heroes of the 1960s and early ’70s, the Vietnam War films of the 1970s and 1980s reflected the way the image of the American soldier had been tainted by the events of that war. Many Vietnam War films portray U.S. soldiers as antiheroes at best and outright criminals at worst, showing them engaging in murder, drug abuse, rape, prostitution, and wanton destruction. These films paint the U.S. military as dehumanizing, soul crushing, authoritarian, racist, and imperialistic. In films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Casualties of War (Brian de  Palma, 1989), American soldiers are presented as villains themselves for participating in the rape and murder of civilians. At the same time, however, a number of films—­including The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989)—­portray Vietnam veterans as victims, either physically or psychologically wounded by the war, preparing the way for the victim-­heroes of 1990s war films. While on the surface films like Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers seem simply to ignore Vietnam, skipping it over entirely to get to the supposed moral righteousness of World War II, they acknowledge it in their narratives of soldiers who question their mission and express cynicism about whether their actions have moral worth. In Saving Private Ryan, for instance, the soldiers are convinced that their mission to save one man is just for public relations purposes and not worth the sacrifice of the soldiers who might die trying to save him. In Flags of Our Fathers, the flag-­raising soldiers question whether they deserve to have been taken away from the front lines in order to sell war bonds. Moreover, as I noted above, war films at the turn of the millennium are indebted to Vietnam War–­era films in their representation of explicit and graphic corporeal violence. The excessive violence of contemporary war films can be seen as a kind of punishment, what Linda Williams describes as the “trial by ordeal” covertly embedded into melodramatic spectacles.55 Violence

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serves as a way to purge the sense of guilt over Vietnam and other, more recent, conflicts in which the American military could be considered the “bad guy.” American soldiers must be shown to “pay for” their mistakes, and the extreme violence of combat scenes accomplishes this. But because their suffering is emphasized, through screen time and explicit representation, the “bad guys” become victims in the process and secure the sympathy of the viewers. In this melodramatic mode, “bodily suffering [serves] as the means to the recognition of virtue.”56 As Williams explains, melodrama has long been the “alchemy” by which American culture transforms “its deepest guilt into a testament of virtue.”57 Violence—­illustrated in the films through a combination of digital and photochemical effects—­serves as the mechanism for this redemption. This trial by fire transforms the soldier from deadly weapon to vulnerable target. Instead of tough guys, World War II films since 1998 are filled with sensitive citizen-­soldiers. Accordingly, the focus has shifted away from the investigation of military hierarchy and authority in films like Tora! Tora! Tora! and Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970) in the 1960s and ’70s and returned to an emphasis on the smaller-­scale squad or unit of soldiers. Capt. Miller in Saving Private Ryan is not the typical cigar-­chomping, cynical officer familiar from postwar films like Battleground, The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951), and The Longest Day; rather, he is a former teacher whose calling card is his uncontrollably shaking hand.58 In the Omaha Beach scene described at the beginning of this chapter, Miller stumbles to the ground and momentarily loses his hearing and seemingly his sanity as he looks around in revulsion and terror. In Flags of Our Fathers, the tone is set by Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), who psychologically relives the horrors of war and is reduced to pathos-­filled tears every time he drinks. Traumatized by his combat experience, he becomes an alcoholic and ends up poor and alone, dying young. As in any melodrama, these characters do not just stand for themselves but act as personifications of larger forces. By condensing all of the American military and the experience of war into a handful of characters, these World War II films metamorphose abstract entities associated (after Vietnam) with guilt and suspicion into virtuous innocents, victim-­heroes worthy of our empathy and respect. Instead of heroic triumphalism, the primary tone of these films is one of loss, as if acknowledging that the war adventure stories of the past are no longer available to us. The intense violence of Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers, and Pearl Harbor also participates in a religiously tinged iconography of redemptive suffering. This is made most explicit at the end of Pearl Harbor when Danny is captured and tied up by his Japanese captors with his arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, and he then sacrifices his own life to save Rafe. Saving Private Ryan’s Capt.  Miller has also been read as a Christ-­like figure. Charged with leading a group to find and relieve from duty a Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon) whose three brothers were all killed in action, he “arrive[s] from the outside

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with a group of disciples on an errand of mercy and eventually lays down his life so that another might live.”59 The theme of self-­sacrifice has appeared in American war films throughout their history, but here it takes on a new valence. Instead of dying for a cause or one’s country, here the soldier dies, or suffers, for the bonds of brotherhood with his fellow soldiers. It is significant, for instance, that Pvt. Ryan refuses to leave with Miller, choosing instead to stay and fight to defend a bridge with “the only brothers I have left,” his comrades in arms. This emphasis on brotherhood, while accurate to veterans’ testimony about the military experience, serves to evacuate the broader causes and ultimate goals of waging war, focusing instead on the microlevel of the individual soldier and his comrades. By painting the American soldier as a victim and dwelling on his physical anguish, World War II films at the turn of the millennium make their moral landscape legible. This process of moral legitimization becomes narrativized in the films. Even though issues of meaning and virtue are brought up as questions, the films go out of their way to reassure viewers with comforting answers. Highlighting the importance of finding meaning in destruction, Rafe, in Pearl Harbor, makes clear that he is “not anxious to die, just anxious to matter.” On their way to bomb Tokyo, Danny and Rafe question what their sacrifice would mean if they never made it back. The answer, arriving in a speech by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), is belief in America’s force of will: “Victory belongs to those who believe in it the most and believe in it the longest. We’re gonna believe. We’re gonna make America believe too.” Similarly, when Capt. Miller expresses doubt about the moral calculus of sending a group of soldiers to risk their lives for one person, Sgt. Horvath (Tom Sizemore) reassures him: “We might look back on this day and think that saving Pvt. Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole god-­awful, shitty mess. We do that, we all deserve the right to go home.” In Flags of Our Fathers, the question of larger purpose is posed most dramatically in the hyperbolic staging of the bond tour, in which the three surviving flag-­raisers must playact their parts. Bud Gerber ( John Slattery), their treasury department representative, cynically describes one drive event as being “so moving” it will make people “shit money.” To Ira’s suggestion that the tour is a disgusting joke, the usually contemptuous Gerber replies: “You think this is a farce? You want to go back to your buddies? Well, stuff some rocks in your pockets before you get on the plane, because that’s all we got left to throw at the Japanese.” He finally declares that despite what the flag-­raisers say about the insignificance of their action, their photograph has meaning because it gives America hope: “People on the street corners, they looked at this picture and they took hope . . . It said, ‘We can win this war, are winning this war. We just need you to dig a little deeper.’” Accordingly, although Ira, Doc, and

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Rene may not be heroes just for raising a flag, the film shows them undoubtedly to be heroes in their concern for their fellow marines, their willingness to sacrifice themselves, and their endurance of suffering. As the closing voice-­ over intones, “The risks they took, the wounds they suffered, they did that for their buddies. They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends, for the man in front and the man beside him.” Saving Private Ryan has its group of soldiers question whether their mission—­and in extension, the war itself—­is “worth it.” In the end, this question hinges on the virtue of Pvt.  Ryan himself, the human objective of the mission. A blond, blue-­eyed, farm-­raised Midwesterner, Ryan appears as the embodiment of the heartland of America. When Miller’s group finally finds Ryan and he refuses to be relieved, Miller agrees to commit his men to the defense of a bridge that Ryan’s unit has been tasked with. During this battle, Miller is shot, and his dying words to Ryan are “Earn this,” referring to his and all the other sacrifices. Following this, a digital dissolve transforms the young Ryan’s face into an aged man in the film’s present. The elderly Ryan collapses in front of, and later stands and salutes, Miller’s grave at the U.S. military cemetery in Normandy. Ryan recognizes Miller’s virtuous sacrifice here and, in doing so, demonstrates his own virtue. This demonstration has its own diegetic audience, surrogates for the film’s audience: Ryan’s wife, children, and grandchildren. In emotional anguish in front of the grave, Ryan recalls Miller’s last words and, doubting himself, asks of his wife, “Tell me I have led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man.” His wife reassures him, but she and the family behind him, witness to his recognition of another man’s virtue, are the proof of Ryan’s own virtue. By creating a family—­a “good” family that recognizes the sacrifices of veterans—­Ryan has reproduced the symbols of what America is and what soldiers fight for. He has created his own idyllic picture of a traditional American family who in their recognition of Ryan’s and Miller’s virtue also prove their own. The framing device of the film explicitly links self-­sacrificial suffering to the redemption of America through the iconography of the family. It is thus on a personalized level that a larger redemption is enacted. Saving Private Ryan evokes the Vietnam War in its cynical, mission-­questioning soldiers and its extremely graphic depictions of war’s brutality, but it also seeks to redeem American soldiers from their association with Vietnam’s atrocities by showing them suffering and ultimately being redeemed. The corporeal realism of the combat sequences works to make this recognition of virtue felt by the spectator. The sensations experienced by the spectator’s body are used to orchestrate the moral universe into the recognition of a “felt good.”60 By suffering (vicariously) ourselves, we recognize the suffering of the victim-­heroes emotionally and viscerally. While the depiction of suffering in elaborate combat sequences

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participates in the destructive sublime on a corporeal level, the narrative of melodramatic redemption blunts the unsettling force of the sublime and ties it into broader discourses of sacrifice and virtue. This staging of virtue takes place within a very reductive arena. In the World War  II films of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the larger stakes or military significance of individual actions are rarely discussed, the agents of violence against the American soldiers (German or Japanese troops) seldom appear on screen with any specificity, and the violence enacted by the Americans on the enemy is also rarely represented. The large-­scale combat sequences focus on massive explosions often captured at a distance (Pearl Harbor) or a wall of gunfire punctuated by larger explosions (Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers). The choice to focus solely on the experiences of American troops stands in sharp relief to the major World War  II films of the 1960s and 1970s, which went to considerable lengths to show the experiences of German or Japanese troops as well as those of other Allied forces. Clint Eastwood represented the Japanese side of the fight on Iwo Jima in his companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima, in which a predominantly Japanese cast spoke in Japanese with subtitles. This film also uses the melodramatic structure to humanize the Japanese soldiers, but its narrow focus on the common experience of the Japanese means that American soldiers are not shown as perpetrators of violence. Many of the Japanese soldiers in Letters are victimized by their own military officers and protocols, allowing for U.S. soldiers to still be thought of as victims. In most cases, the World War II films of the 1990s and 2000s depict war as a depersonalized and apolitical force that accosts soldiers unrelentingly and randomly. Thus the issue of guilt is made almost irrelevant, as the films show American soldiers facing an overwhelming and seemingly unchangeable power.

Conclusion I would like to return to the digitally enhanced dissolve at the end of Saving Private Ryan because it emblematizes the state of the war genre in Hollywood at the turn of the millennium. The digital dissolve between the young and old faces of Pvt.  Ryan transitions gradually over seven seconds, a lengthy period that allows the audience to contemplate the morph as it transpires. The dissolve merges into a masterful camera movement that circles around Ryan and moves from a low angle looking up at Ryan’s face to a high angle behind the older Ryan’s head, revealing that he is looking at the crosses marking the graves of American servicemen. This is an audacious shot for a film so indebted to trying to revive earlier, celluloid-­based filming techniques. The transformation of one face to another is reminiscent of the digital morphing technique brought to prominence in Michael Jackson’s 1991 music video

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“Black or White.” The transmutation of Matt Damon’s young face into that of the actor who plays the older Ryan traverses the same contradiction explored in this chapter. The shot shows a nostalgic and melodramatic transformation of Pvt.  Ryan—­literally that for which they fought, symbol of the values of brotherhood and common decency that are thought to have characterized the “Greatest Generation”—­into a present-­day elder, antiquated but not forgotten, recognized for his virtue by his family. In the conspicuous morphing image, the body of the soldier and the body of the film converge, reminding us of how the represented body and film’s body are imbricated in one another. This peculiar use of computer-­generated imagery holds in tension competing messages regarding the impact of Hollywood’s digital revolution on the war genre. On the one hand, Saving Private Ryan venerates the celluloid-­ based documentary images of combat made during World War II, from Robert Capa’s still photographs to John Huston’s harrowing combat scenes in The Battle of San Pietro. In emulating these, Spielberg ignores the history of staging in the creation of many early documentaries, including the ones that had such an impact and influence on his filmmaking. He uses the “shaky-­ cam” techniques developed in World War  II combat documentaries to the same effect—­to give the appearance that a camera is recording these events as they occurred, whether or not that was actually the case. This impression is dependent upon an association of celluloid-­based film with the creation of an objective record of events transpiring in front of the camera. Instead of following this logic exactly, Saving Private Ryan fetishizes this association, drawing attention to markers of celluloid and the presence of the camera: blurred

FIGURE 31  A digital morph transforms the face of young Pvt. Ryan into an elderly man

decades later in Saving Private Ryan.

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focus, lens flare, shaky cinematography, and blood and dirt on the lens. In this instance, celluloid film is not used in a “classical” way to “invisibly” tell a story. Spielberg paradoxically relies on the notion of celluloid’s transparent recording of history while also aestheticizing the images with falsified approximations of celluloid’s flaws. On the other hand, the morph reveals in a spectacular way that Saving Private Ryan does indeed use digital technology, thus implying that celluloid was not sufficient for the telling of this story. Spielberg could have opted to use age makeup or other nondigital cinematic devices, such as editing, to reveal that Ryan survives and ages to become the old man at the cemetery. (Editing at the beginning of the film could be interpreted to imply that Miller is the one to live and honor Ryan’s grave as an old man, which means that the morph demonstrating Ryan’s survival might come as a surprise to audiences.) The morph, though, brings us into the present, both within the story of the film and within the production history. Despite its fascination with celluloid throughout the film, this scene shows that digital technology had an important place in the war genre at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. In Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers, Band of Brothers, and other media texts of this period, digital imaging both aids in the nostalgia for celluloid and provides new kinds of images and sounds that offer different perspectives on the war. In many examples, filmmakers used digital techniques to enhance the reenactment of old-­fashioned celluloid filmmaking, as in Band of Brothers’ use of digital imagery to re-­create the wartime photograph of German POWs. At the same time, though, the productions’ deployment of digital technologies also opened up new vantage points and iterations of the destructive sublime, as with the impossible shot of the bomb dropping on the Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Ultimately, the conflict—­and collaboration—­between celluloid and digital imagery emerges in scenes of violence, particularly in the remarkable combat sequences in these films, which upend all previous conventions regarding acceptable representations of gore and corporeal violence. The soldier’s body mediates this relationship between old and new media in the practical, optical, and digital effects used to represent his wounded and, in some cases, fragmented body. This implies that the shift from old media to new involves some violence—­it is perceived as a rupture or a break rather than a smooth continuum. We certainly see filmmakers like Steven Spielberg resisting the complete transition to digital by celebrating the look of outmoded documentary film forms and delaying adoption of digital techniques as long as possible. Spielberg is invested in a particular understanding of the body of film based on a tactile relationship to a physical object. As noted above, he likes to “get [his] hands dirty,” to feel the touch of the film on the flatbed, even to cut his finger on it.61 His relationship to film involves a physicality—­even a

Nostalgia for Combat  •  155

violence—­rooted in their material copresence in space. This informs his nostalgia for celluloid and sense of loss at the passing of old technologies and old techniques. Paradoxically, though, he and the other filmmakers invest in the materiality of film at the same time that the body of film is dematerializing with the rise of digital imaging and as warfare is also becoming more virtual. Digital imaging, ironically, aids in the re-­creation of the celluloid look, transforming celluloid from a physical medium—­on which Spielberg can cut his finger—­to a set of aesthetic standards, a style that can be created in any medium. In Flags of Our Fathers, for example, the digital intermediate allowed Eastwood to go even further into desaturated, high-­contrast imagery with deeper blacks than would have been possible with a photochemical process like ENR. Eastwood’s director of photography, Tom Stern, explained that he “tried to create a monochromatic world, a kind of uber hell on earth,” and the manipulations of digital color timing allowed them to achieve exactly the look Eastwood wanted. Ironically, Eastwood and Stern described that look as “Kodalithic,” after a very high-­contrast black-­and-­white film stock.62 Digital technology allowed them to get closer to a celluloid look than celluloid itself. The films’ unique combination of celluloid and digital effects also allowed for an affective reinvestment in the bodies of soldiers when the military was facing the “Revolution in Military Affairs” that would remove those bodies from the battlefield in favor of cyberwarfare, drones, and aerial bombardment.63 By returning to World War II, Saving Private Ryan and the war films that followed it placed the body of the soldier as the central locus of meaning. The films’ claims to reality are grounded in the authenticity of the painful bodily experiences depicted on screen. The theme of the “band of brothers,” pervasive throughout this period, emphasizes the training and bonding of male bodies put at risk. This representation neglects contemporaneous developments in military affairs aiming to conduct war from a distance and risk as few soldier lives as possible, as was the case in the Kosovo War of 1998. Films like Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers nostalgically represent a world in which men still risk their lives for their country (or at least their comrades in arms) and their sacrifice still seems to mean something. When both digital visual effects and changing military technologies were taking real bodies out of combat, these films insisted even more intently that the meaning of war could be found in the soldier’s corporeal experience. By using computer-­enhanced techniques to fixate on the body in pain, these World War II films contributed to a melodramatic logic that proves virtue through suffering and paints the American soldier as a victim-­hero. The use of practical, optical, and digital means to illustrate the graphic injury done to soldiers’ bodies resolves the predominant moral contradiction of the war film: war can be morally justified because of the virtue of those who fight.

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In Spielberg’s words, describing the World War  II generation, “These dogfaces who freed the world were a bunch of decent guys.”64 Their decency is demonstrated by their willingness to endure grievous injury for their fellow “dogfaces” (enlisted soldiers), their commitment to the wounded and dead, and their reluctance to kill. In this melodramatic logic, the films’ use of digital means to achieve the appearance of photochemical photography does not contradict their attempt, in Spielberg’s words, “to acquit with honor the reality of the actual combat soldier.” Instead, digital techniques aid in the graphically detailed visualization of the horrific violence that at once punishes and redeems the American soldier. Ultimately, though, this use of melodrama tames the force of the destructive sublime, so strong in the films’ raucous combat sequences. The next chapter explores the unfettered explosion of this violent imagery and the consequent reinvestment in the destructive sublime in the first-­person shooter video games of the same time period.

5

Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground

In addition to being a cineaste, Steven Spielberg has long been involved in video games, both as a player and a producer. When his production studio DreamWorks launched its new Interactive division in 1995, he pitched the idea of a World War II game titled Normandy Beach. Beyond an initial demo, though, the game never came to fruition; there was skepticism about the viability of an action-­based video game set during World War II, and attention needed to be paid to the latest Jurassic Park game. But when Spielberg was finishing postproduction work on Saving Private Ryan in 1997, the idea resurfaced. Spielberg had watched his son, Max, then fourteen, playing the James Bond–­themed first-­person shooter GoldenEye 007 (Rare/Nintendo, 1997). He wondered if a similar game could teach the history of World War  II to young people who were not old enough to watch the R-rated Saving Private Ryan. Although there were still lingering doubts about whether World War II would translate well to this type of video game, DreamWorks Interactive committed to the project. The game, titled Medal of Honor, was published by Electronic Arts and released for the Sony PlayStation in 1999 to critical acclaim and robust sales.1 Therefore not only did Saving Private Ryan reinvigorate the combat film genre, but by inspiring Medal of Honor, it also engendered a whole new video game genre: the military shooter. This genre now includes multiple franchises, like Battlefield and Call of Duty, and is responsible for billions of dollars of revenue for the video game industry.2 Military shooters have been among the most popular video games of the twenty-­first century. 157

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In designing Medal of Honor, Spielberg’s DreamWorks Interactive team approached the assignment with the same reverence for the war and pursuit of authenticity as the producers of Saving Private Ryan. Medal of Honor producer Peter Hirschmann conducted research at the Imperial War Museum in London. Art director Matt Hall sought authentic examples of World War II–­era weaponry at the Hollywood armorers Stembridge Gun Rentals. Military advisor and retired U.S. Marine Corps captain Dale Dye, who had worked with the cast and crew of Saving Private Ryan and played a small role in the film, put the design staff through an impromptu boot camp and monitored the production for historical inaccuracies; he also lent his distinctive gruff voice to the opening narration of the game.3 As a result, Medal of Honor—­and the many sequels that followed in the next eight years—­shares many qualities with Saving Private Ryan: similar settings and characters, authentic details in uniforms and weaponry, stories of sacrifice and triumph over adversity, and veneration for the World War II soldier. However, the shift to a new, interactive medium also meant limitations in the way the narrative of World War II could be told, as well as opportunities for novel articulations of the destructive sublime. This chapter explores what World War II video games can tell us about the war that combat films can’t and how their status as computational media affords them that expressivity. The rise of Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and other World War II–­set military shooters in the early 2000s coincided with the United States–­led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These games gained popularity in an era of renewed patriotism after 9/11, growing awareness of the American military and its impact on the world, as well as debate and dissent about the justifications for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, more generally, the appropriate response to terrorism. Moreover, the games coincide with the theorization of “postheroic” warfare, which is waged increasingly by networked means and from a distance. By representing World War II, these games return to an era of moral clarity and conventional warfare, ignoring or implicitly rebuking the ethical challenges increasingly leveled against the Iraq War, particularly after Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, which justified the war in the first place, were revealed to be nothing more than a fantasy. I argue below that World War II shooter games’ unique combination of “good war” narrative elements and violent gameplay geared toward mastery and control engages the destructive sublime in two ways. On the one hand, the celebrated violence and brutality of the games explicitly reveals the destructive sublime at the heart of the combat experience. On the other hand, though, the way that material is contextualized within the ethical connotations of World War II downplays the radical potential of such spectacular displays of violence. Moreover, the underlying gameplay mechanics, which reward the player’s precision and control, seek to rein in the possibly unsettling results of the destructive sublime.

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I begin the chapter by laying out the historical trajectory of the representation of World War  II in video games, beginning with the strategy games of the 1980s and ending with contemporary first-­person shooters, the focus of this chapter. I then account for the similarities between combat films and games. Using Rick Altman’s theory of genre, I demonstrate how military first-­ person shooters adapt the World War II combat film by employing the film genre’s semantic elements, such as stock characters, iconography, and markers of authenticity. These aspects of commonality suggest that World War II shooter games perpetuate the reverent and nostalgic vision of the “good war” present in films like Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006). However, while these semantic elements generally carry over from film to game, the syntactic relations connecting these elements are changed by the interactive and computational underpinnings of the video game. As action-­ oriented games, first-­person shooters like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty focus on combat in a way that films and television shows do not. They feature nearly nonstop action and violence while shunting off the contextualizing narrative of the war to noninteractive (and sometimes skippable) cut-­scenes4 in between the game’s major missions or levels. Therefore, it is here, in this digital media form, that we can most clearly see the full flowering of the destructive sublime in the World War II combat genre. These games celebrate killing, demonstrating both the spectacular thrill of combat as well as the unrelenting violence and cruelty of the war. In this way, they come the closest to exemplifying what veteran-­authors like Paul Fussell and Edward W. Wood Jr. have attested about undergoing combat. Yet they also falsify major aspects of the World War II experience (by ignoring, for instance, that the majority of U.S. soldiers never fired their weapons5). The algorithmic makeup of these games better reflects the more digitally inflected warfare of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, though they still mistakenly portray war as something that is clean and precise. In World War II shooters, the nostalgic re-­creation of the “good war,” combined with gameplay mechanics that reflect contemporary fantasies of mastery and precision, appears to provide an ethical justification for the violence and brutality at the center of these games. In the multiplayer modes, the narrative of the good and just war is marginalized, the landscape becomes a display of clichés and symbols, and the focus is on action. Accordingly, the soldier is presented no longer as a pathos-­inducing victim, as in the combat films of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but rather as a pathos-­deflecting machine for movement and action. Drawing on Patrick Crogan’s work revealing the origins of video games in military technoscientific research, I argue that playing a first-­person shooter becomes a form of information processing. While the multiplayer levels attenuate the historical and moral links to the war, they

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expose the mechanisms of contemporary warfare, by which simulation, calculation, and virtual training attempt to work against the chaos of the War on Terror and the uncertainties of asymmetrical warfare.

World War II in Games Games have always had an intimate relationship with war. War games have been used for entertainment, strategy, and prediction for centuries; traditional examples range from chess to Kriegsspiel, a nineteenth-­century Prussian war strategy game. Video games, too, have demonstrated a propensity toward simulating armed conflict over the course of their history. One of the earliest video games, Spacewar!, designed in 1962 at MIT, engages two players controlling spaceships in battle against one another. The growing popularity of board games in the 1970s and ’80s also influenced the development of video games. Strategy board games like Risk and the World War II–­themed Axis & Allies translated well to computerized media, which could quickly calculate variables and would not immediately need complex graphics—­a map with simple icons or menus was enough. Within video games, the strategy genre is defined by its overhead and distanced view of a map or large area, as if taking the remote perspective of a general or god-­like figure; gameplay involves resource management (whether troops, equipment, or economic commodities) and strategic decision-­making. In the 1980s, game developer and distributor Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI) dominated the strategy game market for the home computer, producing games like Gettysburg: Turning Point (1986) and Battles of Napoleon (1989). A number of their games simulated World War  II specifically, beginning with Computer Bismarck (1980) and Bomb Alley (1983), both of which focused on particular missions of the war. The 1989 SSI game Storm across Europe became the first “grand strategy” video game to attempt to encompass almost all of World War II, allowing the user to play as Germany, the Allies, or the Soviet Union in Europe and North Africa from 1939 to 1945. Strategy games have since copied and expanded this scenario, including Clash of Steel (SSI, 1993), Axis & Allies (an adaptation of the board game by MicroProse/Hasbro, 1998), Hearts of Iron (Paradox/Strategy First, 2002), and World War II: Frontline Command (Bitmap Brothers/Deep Silver, Strategy First, 2003). In the 1980s, action games set in World War II also emerged. Action games distinguish themselves as a genre by their quick pace of play and the need for hand-­eye coordination and timely reactions to stimuli. Early World War  II action games include Into the Eagle’s Nest (Pandora Software/Mindscape, 1986), 1943: The Battle of Midway (Capcom, 1987), and Castle Wolfenstein (Muse Software, 1981) and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (Muse Software, 1984). Because of graphics limitations of the time, these action games

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FIGURE 32  The distant, overhead map view of the strategy genre in Hearts of Iron (Paradox/

Strategy First, 2002).

share the top-­down perspective of strategy games, meaning that the point of view of the game looks directly down at various landscapes (a “bird’s-eye” or overhead view). In contrast to the strategy genre, in which the player manages multiple variables, the player of these action games typically controls a single unit within this landscape, such as an individual soldier or airplane. And instead of large-­scale strategic thinking, these games require timely shooting of enemies and, in some cases, stealthy navigation of particular spaces. Castle Wolfenstein, for instance, involves moving a character through a series of two-­ dimensional rooms presented in the top-­down perspective and either shooting or evading Nazi guards or SS Stormtroopers while also searching for valuable items like grenades or bulletproof vests. Both of these genres—­strategy and action—­have persisted since video gaming’s early days, but in the early 1990s, a new subgenre emerged that would redefine World War II’s representation in video games: the first-­person shooter. This action-­based game formula uses 3D graphics to simulate the point of view of the primary character moving through space, usually with only the character’s hand and/or weapon visible at the bottom center of the screen.6 The first-­person shooter thus emulates the individual combat experience rather than the overarching view of generals simulated in strategy games. While a

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FIGURE 33  The top-­down perspective used in an action game in Beyond Castle Wolfenstein

(Muse Software, 1984).

number of predecessors experimented with the first-­person point of view, the first game to cement the core characteristics of the first-­person shooter was Wolfenstein 3D (id Software/Apogee Software, 1992), an adaptation of 1981’s Castle Wolfenstein with contemporary graphics and programming capacities.7 And since it, too, was set in World War II, albeit a fantasy-­inflected one with unrealistic weapons and supernatural elements, Wolfenstein 3D established the relationship between the first-­person shooter and World War II from the very start of the subgenre. In this game, the player takes on the role of an American soldier and spy, William “B. J.” Blazkowicz, who, like his predecessor in Castle Wolfenstein, must navigate through the rooms of the castle, shooting Nazi guards and attack dogs to try to escape. In later missions, Blazkowicz fights clones, mad scientists, an army of undead mutants, and Adolf Hitler himself, who is equipped with a robotic suit and four chain guns. The screen displays an approximation of Blazkowicz’s first-­person point of view, and the player uses the game controls to aim and fire a gun at enemies, move through space, and collect objects. Wolfenstein 3D thus established the principal qualities of the first-­person shooter: movement into and through a (more or less) open, three-­dimensional virtual space; the ability to pick up and collect items; and the primary gameplay function of shooting enemies with guns. Seven years later, Spielberg’s Medal of Honor furthered the association of the first-­person shooter with the story of World War II. Between 1999 and 2010, World War II was the most prevalent real-­world conflict to appear in military first-­person shooters.8 Among these games stand the originary games for a number of best-­selling franchises, including Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Brothers in Arms as well as

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FIGURE 34  Fighting Adolf Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D (id Software/Apogee Software, 1992).

Medal of Honor and Wolfenstein. Of these game series, Call of Duty is the most successful by far, with fourteen major releases (as of this writing, not counting side games and handheld versions), more than 250  million games sold,9 and more than $15 billion in global sales.10 Activision has released a new game in the franchise every year since 2003. In 2015, they declared that their most recent game, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (Treyarch/Activision, 2015), was the biggest entertainment launch in any medium (including movies, television, or music) that year; its $550  million in worldwide sales in the first seventy-­ two hours was more than any film had ever grossed in its opening weekend.11 Activision’s chief executive has claimed, “If you consider the number of hours our audiences are engaged in playing Call of Duty games, it is likely to be one of the most viewed of all entertainment experiences in modern history.”12 These sales numbers demonstrate the cultural ascendency of video games, and in particular the military shooter, in the last two decades. While other genres of video games set their stories in World War II in the first decade of the twenty-­first century—­including strategy games like Company of Heroes (Relic Entertainment/THQ, 2006)—­no genre captured the collective imagination of war quite like the military shooter. Not only did this video game genre speak to the shared concerns of the American populace contemplating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from a distance, but it also gained a robust following among the armed forces and

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veterans of those wars. By the mid-­2000s, journalists began recognizing the current crop of American troops as part of the “video game generation.”13 In a military-­administered survey in 2006, about 46 percent of enlisted soldiers reported playing video games at least once a week.14 Video game consoles can be found on military bases, on submarines,15 and even on the front lines. Soon after the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, one journalist reported that video games “are as ubiquitous at Camp Fallouja and around it as tattoos, buzz cuts and shouts of ‘Hooah’ from one Marine to another. When the power goes out, a Humvee battery and a pair of alligator clips are all the resourceful gamer needs to resume the digitized fight.”16 While many soldiers played whatever they could get their hands on, among the most popular games were military shooters, including Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and other games set during World War II.17 Although the remainder of this chapter primarily addresses the appeal of military shooters for civilian gamers, I want to pause here for a moment to address the meaning of these games for deployed soldiers. As the retired U.S. Army captain who sent video game care packages to soldiers in the field put it, “Everyone’s like, ‘Wait a minute, the guys over there who are kicking doors and pulling triggers, they want games about kicking doors and pulling triggers?’”18 Various accounts laud the ability of video games to relieve boredom, provide stress relief, and create a sense of normalcy for soldiers while deployed. Despite, or perhaps because of, the perceived similarity between actions in actual combat and actions in the gameworld, these pieces of media also create a distancing effect. Military shooters simplify combat by making enemies obvious, removing the possibility of shooting civilians, and omitting all aspects of war that aren’t fun: homesickness, critically bad decisions, paperwork, or mechanical problems, to take a few. In the words of the video game reviewer for the Army Times, games like Call of Duty make you feel like “you’re in your very own war movie.”19 This additional mediation between soldiers and combat turns video games, in the words of game scholar Nina B. Huntemann, into “emotional management tools.”20 Huntemann quotes a former U.S. Navy officer who played games while in the service: “Nothing is that straightforward [in the navy]. We had assignments, yeah, but it was random. Half the time you had no idea what one mission had to do with the other. Honestly, I think the appeal of [the video game SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals] for me and my buddies was the logic, the big picture . . . it is all laid out for you.”21 The reduced complexity of the combat scenarios donated reason and lucidity to what might have been inscrutable in the field. The World War  II setting further contributes to a sense of meaning and justification. According to Luke Caldwell and Tim Lenoir, the Second World War gives players “a believable context that explains why the player should kill wave upon wave of enemies without feeling like a psychopath. Without a clear

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reason to kill, the violence of shooters becomes banal and reveals war as an unentertaining and traumatic enterprise. The moral clarity that accompanies a mission to defeat the Axis powers provides that justification and opens the experience to positive affects of virtue and heroism.”22 In the midst of a war perceived to have obscure, discredited, or morally suspect motivations, the appeal of World War  II–­set action games for active-­duty soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan may have been the clear rationale and ethical justifications of the war. In order to supply this moral clarity, World War II–­set shooter games draw explicitly and implicitly from Hollywood’s World War II combat film genre.

First-­Person Shooter Adaptations of the World War II Combat Genre Throughout its history, the video game industry has sought to elevate the cultural cachet of its products by aligning itself with the older and more reputable medium of film. The review above that compared Call of Duty to a war film likely drew its language from the game’s publicity materials. The text on the back of the box of the first Call of Duty (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2003), for example, promises to “deliver the gritty realism and cinematic intensity of World War II’s epic battlefield moments.”23 This section explores how the World War II first-­person shooter has tried to make meaning by drawing on its predecessors in cinema. To begin very generally, video games borrow narrative devices as well as formal and aesthetic qualities from film. Some basic aspects of the visual and auditory experience of cinema and modern video games are the same—­the rectangular screen, the illusion of three dimensions, the interaction of sound and image, and the modulation of perspective and point of view. Many game developers have sought explicitly to replicate live-­action cinema in their pursuit of photorealistic graphics and other cinematic effects (such as slow motion, mobile cinematography, etc.). The influence of cinema can be seen most directly in cut-­scenes, which are scripted and noninteractive portions of video games that introduce characters, fill in story line, and prepare the player for upcoming missions or events. Historically, cut-­scenes have been able to have higher quality visuals because they do not have to render graphics on the fly in response to player input, allowing them to mimic the polished look of cinema. Furthermore, cut-­scenes are often edited like films, cutting among various angles and camera distances and using such cinematic techniques as close-­ups, slow motion, and shot/reverse-­shot. In some games, such as Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (Treyarch/Activision, 2005), cut-­scenes are also marked by the use of letterboxing—­black stripes appear at the top and bottom of the screen to give these scenes the widescreen effect of watching a movie on your

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television set. With the influx of digital animation and processing into Hollywood filmmaking today, the distinction between live action (in cinema) and 3D digital animation (in video games) is hardly meaningful.24 Since they are audiovisual media with shared narrative concerns, can we say that first-­person shooters and combat films set in World War  II share the same genre? At first glance, the answer appears to be yes. World War II shooter games utilize the same settings and character types, look similar stylistically, and share other elements that film genre theorist Rick Altman would label “semantic” elements.25 One of the major semantic elements employed by both games and films is World War II iconography. Along with the basic setting of the war, these video games aim to reproduce the historically authentic uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and insignia that also appear in films. Furthermore, the games visualize the same iconic spaces and events that appear over and over again in combat films: the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, combat among the hedgerows and bombed-­out villages in France, tank warfare in North Africa, winter combat at the Battle of the Bulge, and so on. While some games feature combat in the Pacific and on the eastern front of the European theater, the bulk of them focus on battles fought by the Americans and British on the western front, which is more conducive to narratives of triumph and heroism. D-Day, and Omaha Beach in particular, provides these elements and is thus simulated in a number of the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games, referencing not only this event as a turning point in the war but also the aesthetic impact of Saving Private Ryan. A cut-­scene at the beginning of a D-Day mission in Call of Duty 2 (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2005), for instance, even borrows specific details from Private Ryan, including a soldier vomiting on the boat on the way to the beach and a re-­creation of the concussive effect of a nearby explosion, rendering the player-­character deaf and disoriented as he watches a boatful of burning soldiers run off of a landing craft on fire. The sound and visual quality of this sequence directly copies the subjective scene with Capt.  Miller described at the beginning of the previous chapter. In addition to iconography, World War II shooters also draw from the cinematic genre’s set of stock characters. Most importantly, this involves the privileging of the group of soldiers over the individual. Unlike earlier entries in the genre, such as the first Medal of Honor games, which engaged the single player in lone wolf–­type missions (espionage, sabotage, rescue, etc.), the Call of Duty games place the player’s character within a group of computer-­controlled characters who aid the player and must in part be supported by him as well. To this end, in most of the World War II–­set Call of Duty games, friendly fire is not possible, even if you aim and shoot at a teammate point-­blank. The Brothers in Arms games also emphasize the group of soldiers by requiring that the player issue commands to, and partially control, a team of one to three soldiers

Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground  •  167

FIGURE 35  Call of Duty 2 (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2005) directly references Saving Private

Ryan’s D-Day beach landing.

in addition to the main player-­character. This broadens the player experience to more advanced fire and maneuver tactics (the “four F’s” presented in the game tutorial, “Find, Fix, Flank, Finish”) as well as making the case that the individual soldier achieves little without the support of his team. As in the combat film genre, this group of soldiers often includes representative types from various parts of the United States. Richard Slotkin argues that the war film’s “‘melting pot’ roll call has become a basic trope of the war movie, a cinematic cliché” that represents “the idealized self-­image” of America as multiethnic but unified.26 According to Jeanine Basinger, the types found most often in World War II films include the immigrant representative, typically Polish and often from Pittsburgh; the Italian from New York, usually Brooklyn; and a Southerner, often called “Tex” whether or not he is from Texas.27 Of the whole franchise, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, a spin-­off game that was created specifically for home consoles, follows these conventions of American combat cinema most directly since it is the only one of the series that uses a single, American playable protagonist for the entire game. Although it does not overtly reference the Samuel Fuller film The Big Red One (1980) in anything but the title, the game also follows a group of soldiers (part of the U.S. Army 1st Division, whose insignia includes a red number one, hence the name) from North Africa through D-Day to Germany as they mature from rookie recruits to an integrated fighting force—­a standard narrative of the World War II combat film (including Fuller’s film). In Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, one plays as Pvt. (and later Sgt.) Roland Roger, who is relatively indistinct as a character and never seen since the game purports to present the world from his point of view. Following the combat

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film convention, his squad includes a modicum of ethnic and geographic diversity. Visually, however, the squad is homogenous because of unsophisticated graphics capabilities. Thus names and voices are the only way to gauge ethnic, class, or racial identity. The accent and dialogue of one character, named Pvt. Denley, identifies him as a Texan former high school football star (this game’s version of “Tex”). Pvt. Castillo’s name and voice are vaguely Latino (relatively rare in 1940s war films, but nonetheless this game’s “immigrant representative”). Pvt. Alvin Bloomfield, the son of a Jewish deli owner from the Bronx, is quickly nicknamed “Brooklyn” (this game’s update to the typical Italian with that moniker). The game’s overwhelmingly white cast of characters reflects the historical situation of segregation in the U.S. military during World War II, but not necessarily the cinematic genre. In the 1940s, films like Sahara (Zoltan Korda, 1943) and Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943) invented situations in which it could plausibly include black soldiers or sympathetic Filipino or Chinese characters among the group. Unlike Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, however, the rest of the World War  II games of the Call of Duty franchise alternate the player among American, British, and Soviet characters, departing from typical Hollywood convention. The various playable characters may disperse the player’s primary identification among two or three different characters, but this design strategy does reinforce one of the genre’s major thematic messages: the coalition of free nations against the forces of tyranny. A third semantic element that is shared between the cinematic and video game versions of World War II is the use of evidence and historical references

FIGURE 36  The group of soldiers in Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (Treyarch/Activision,

2005) includes some ethnic diversity, though the unsophisticated graphics render them homogenous.

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as strategies of authentication. Like many World War II combat films, these video games include animated maps, epigraphs, inspirational quotations, and other markers—­like date, time, and place specifications—­to position the narrative in a distinct space and time and with a specific set of meanings and associations. Moreover, like the wartime combat films discussed in chapter 2, almost all the World War II shooter games include documentary or newsreel footage taken during the war. By employing archival film in a similar way—­to visualize aspects of the war that might be difficult to re-­create and to substantiate the production’s historical claims—­World War II video games mirror the combat film genre’s modes of visual authentication and its reverence for celluloid reportage. But because this film footage is two-­dimensional and noninteractive, it fits uneasily within the 3D, actionable storyworld of video games. Therefore, these games isolate the documentary footage in montage sequences that occur in between levels of gameplay or in unlockable28 bonus features. Most of the games from the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises scenes to edit archival footage into minidocumentaries that play as cut-­ introduce the missions to follow. In some cases, these cut-­scenes mimic 1940s-­style newsreels with a montage of documentary footage and an old-­ fashioned, voice-­of-­God-­like narrator. In most cases, the historical cut-­scenes emphasize—­even exaggerate—­the outmoded technologies used to create the images. Prominent scratches mar the film images, and the sequences often begin with artificial blips of celluloid with frames that say Picture or Start to make the simulated newsreels look like real filmstrips. In some examples, the whir of the film projector or snap of the slide projector can be heard. In this way, the video games ground the historical authenticity of the game in the technological underpinnings of documentary media, displaying veneration for celluloid photography in the same way that Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood do in their World War  II films of the same period. But because the digital imagery of the bulk of the video game contrasts so sharply with the documentary images, the video games carefully deposit archival footage outside of the playable gameworld. The archival images can provide context but are placed securely in the past; the gameplay in virtual landscapes, in contrast, gives the impression of unfolding for the player in real time, in the now. Moreover, the playable missions give the impression of agency and choice to the player, which is foreclosed by the static documentaries of the past. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft, 2005), discussed in the introduction to this book, takes the schism between documentary and digital images of the war one step further by completely removing archival records from the gameworld and making them unlockable bonus materials. These extras also demonstrate the lengths to which the production went to create a historically authentic virtual world. The game’s playable characters are fictional, but all nonplayable characters at the rank of lieutenant and

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higher are based on actual soldiers, specifically Lt. Col. Robert G. Cole and Lt. Gen. Robert F. “Bob” Sink. (Spielberg’s military advisor Dale Dye played Sink in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, demonstrating the interrelated nature of World War II–­set media during the early 2000s.) More than any other World War II shooter, Road to Hill 30 draws on historical research to re-­create actual events and characters in the game, much like Darryl F. Zanuck did for The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962). As the unlockable game extras reveal, personnel from the design team visited historical locations in Normandy as well as museums like the National WWII Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum. The game’s codirector Brian Martel attests in a making-­of bonus sequence that the National Archives and Records Administration provided the game studio with “thousands of pieces of historical evidence used in the making of the game,” including “photos, U.S. Army reports, eyewitness accounts, maps, and spy plane images.” Martel displays an aerial reconnaissance photograph showing locations in Normandy that were re-­ created in the game, such as Hill 30, “The Farmhouse,” “The Causeway,” and the town of Carentan. Media scholar Brian Rejack notes that because the production team re-­created nearly exact, functional replicas of some of these locations based on period photography and maps, “the world of the game and its plot gets literally mapped onto an image of the terrain in France as it was in 1944.”29 Despite this mapping, though, the game cannot easily insert pieces of legacy media—­noninteractive, linear, or unchangeable images, documents, film sequences, or other records—­within its three-­dimensional, interactive gameworld. The historical basis for these simulations must be kept outside the game’s virtual world as contextualizing cut-­scenes or educational bonus materials. Like the documentary footage integrated into fictional films like Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943) and Wing and a Prayer (Henry Hathaway, 1944), the archival materials inserted into video games hold the potential to both authenticate the historical reality of the game and to prevent the player’s full immersion into the gameworld by splitting it into two parts: present, changeable action and past, immutable history. Furthermore, as I discussed in chapter 2, documentary footage sometimes works to disrupt aesthetic unity and diegetic coherence when integrated into fictional media. The relegation of archival footage to the cut-­scenes means that the alternative meanings that might be evoked by the documentary images are contained and controlled by the dominant narrative of the fictionalized missions and the overall story arc of the game.30 One way for the games to control the connotations of archival images is through voice-­over narration. Morally loaded language attempts to pin down

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FIGURE 37  Bonus features included in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft,

2005) demonstrate how parts of the game re-­create photographs and other primary material.

the reading of polysemic and potentially anarchic archival footage. Written and spoken text in cut-­scenes, loading and menu screens, and introductory sequences evokes the heroism and honor of soldiers and the necessity of World War II as a justified and worthy endeavor, evoking the myths of the “good war.” Like the use of melodramatic conventions in Saving Private Ryan and other films of this period, this exhortatory text functions to impede the full expression of the destructive sublime, which works to open up meaning rather than restricting it. The opening sequence of the first Call of Duty game gives the following text in small chunks in between representative images from World War II: “In the war that changed the world, victory was not achieved by one man but by the lives of many. Across the battlefields of Europe, many nations united to reach one goal: Berlin.” In these sentences, sentiments of victory, unity, and individual and collective sacrifice prime the player with an honorable context for the violent gameplay to come. A similar sequence opens the original Medal of Honor game. Over a rapid montage of some of the most famous documentary images of World War  II—­Nazi soldiers marching in goose step, bombs falling from the sky, tanks in North Africa, an air raid shelter, soldiers moving up Omaha Beach on D-Day—­Dale Dye’s voice narrates a brief history of the war. The narration represents the Allied efforts as a pact between Winston Churchill, the protector of “the fires of freedom,” and the United States, “the military and industrial muscle”—­a combination that will “save the world.” (The contributions of the Soviet Union, as in many Hollywood films about the war, are ignored entirely.) The narrator explicitly invites the player to join this “great crusade” by going “above and beyond the call of duty.” By using terms that refer

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to moral obligation, greatness, and freedom, the connective tissue of World War  II video games reins in the potential meanings of archival footage and attempts to shape the interpretation of the destructive gameplay that follows. By adopting the ethical themes and language of the combat genre—­as well as its iconography, stock characters, and modes of authentication—­World War  II first-­person shooters appear to conform to the conventions of the genre, at least in terms of its semantic building blocks. And on a broad level, the video games also seem to share the same narrative “syntax,” which Rick Altman defines as the constitutive relationships that describe how the semantic elements create meaning. Like the films, these video games engage their groups of soldiers in specific missions to achieve particular military objectives, and this always results in combat, the defining feature of the genre. Moreover, these missions are contextualized within narratives of sacrifice, duty, and the inevitable victory of the freedom-­loving Allies. However, in the following sections, I outline the various ways that the syntax of the World War II first-­person shooter departs from the cinematic genre. First, I discuss how the video games emphasize combat and accentuate graphic violence far more than combat films. Second, I explain how the use of the first-­ person perspective in video games centralizes the activity of targeting, which reflects contemporary warfare’s efforts to eliminate contingencies. Finally, I explore how the algorithmic gamespace of World War II shooters diminishes the moral associations of the genre’s iconography and narrative, reducing them to neutral battlefields for contests of skill, particularly in multiplayer matches.

Different Syntax: Combat and Violence For all of the broad thematic similarities and lip service paid to heroism and freedom in World War II shooters, these games neglect many of the integral situations and relationships explored in their cinematic counterparts. The World War II combat films to which the video games refer frequently revolve around an internal conflict among the soldiers, whether between rivals or between the enlisted men and the officers, as in Wing and a Prayer; they feature narratives of conversion in which selfish individualists are persuaded to sacrifice their own desires to join the group effort, as in Destination Tokyo; some of the duration of the film is devoted to discussion of home and what they are fighting for, as in Saving Private Ryan; and the temporality of the film plays out along a dialectic between the frustrations of waiting and training and the exhilaration and terror of fighting, as in The Longest Day. Nearly all of these meaning-­making structures are absent from World War II shooters. Instead, there is a relentless focus on action and combat. Unlike a film, which might work its way up to a big fighting sequence, every battle in a video game is a combat climax. Nearly every mission is a “last stand.” In many of these games,

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basic contextual and character information is dispatched with quickly through the documentary montages and brief cut-­scenes. The overwhelming bulk of the games is devoted to combat—­in various situations, over multiple terrains, and using assorted weapons. This compulsive action differs from the narrative movement of the film genre. While meaning is arguably created in a film in the relationship between action sequences and dialogue or other sequences, the meaning in a video game is created in the action itself. To take it one step further, the meaning is the action. Scott A. Lukas argues that “the virtual gun [is] the most meaningful sign in the semiotic system of video gaming.”31 World War II shooters are fundamentally about fighting, and specifically shooting, with an intensity and singular focus that war films could never sustain. Producing a sixteen-­hour film of pure combat would be a piece of avant-­garde cinema, not a popular narrative film, but this overwhelming dominance of combat is seemingly the goal of most action-­oriented war games. In most World War II shooters, the player gets the chance to use a wide range of historically accurate weapons. In a single mission, a player might have access to five or six different weapons, but across the whole game, dozens of different weapons are available, including stationary guns and weapons attached to various vehicles, such as antiaircraft or tank guns. The Internet Movie Firearms Database wiki lists fifty-­four playable weapons in Call of Duty: World at War (Treyarch/Activision, 2008), ranging from pistols and rifles to shotguns, machine guns, explosives, and grenades.32 Although, for a modicum of situational realism, the player can only carry two weapons at a time in Call of Duty games, the vast availability of weapons differs from that of actual World War II infantrymen, or even their cinematic counterparts, who were assigned either a rifle or another weapon, such as a Browning automatic rifle (BAR). As I explain further in the next section, most first-­person shooters include crosshairs (or some other graphic, such as a circle or a dot) over the center of the screen to aid in precise aiming. Furthermore, as in Call of Duty: World at War, most first-­person shooters provide a range of scoped weapons and a button that switches the visual perspective of the game to a magnified view as if seen through the telescopic sight (as in sniper rifles). This perceptual experience, allowing for precise aiming and the picking off of targets, is an integral part of first-­person shooters. Scoped weapons appear in various challenges amid multiple levels of the game, meaning that the gameplay switches back and forth between precision targeting and firing rapidly, and less discriminately, at multiple enemies. Although the cut-­scenes and intermediary documentary sequences try to give World War  II shooters honorable justification, their gameplay revolves around depopulation of the enemy through shooting and killing. This violence is explicitly rewarded through game objectives (which typically require

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FIGURE 38  The sniper rifle allows for precision aiming in Call of Duty: World at War

(Treyarch/Activision, 2008).

shooting in order to achieve them) and scoring. Killing is computed and rewarded algorithmically; many games present their players with performance statistics upon completion of the level or mission. An early version of this appeared in Wolfenstein 3D: a screen at the end of each episode details percentages for the number of enemies killed, secrets found (such as hidden passageways), and treasures collected, along with the total time it took to complete the level. By 1999’s Medal of Honor, the information gathered had expanded to seventeen discrete metrics presented as if on an old-­fashioned paper form labeled “Office of Strategic Services Performance Evaluation.” The scores include “Objectives Completed,” “Number of Shots Fired,” “Number of Hits,” “Accuracy,” “Preferred Weapon,” “Number of Hits Taken,” “Number of Objects Destroyed,” “Number of Enemies Killed,” and “Shot Locations” (broken down by “Head,” “Torso,” “Groin,” “Left Leg,” “Right Leg,” “Left Arm,” and “Right Arm”). This element of the game received praise in reviews. One critic wrote, “After every mission, players will receive a full readout of their work. The stats are awesome.”33 The narrative-­focused campaign modes of Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms games do not provide performance statistics after the completion of missions, but as I will explore later, this element returns, in heightened form, in multiplayer modes like Team Deathmatch, where scoring is tied solely to the number of people killed. As the games and their photorealistic visuals progressed over time, so did the graphic detail in the representation of violence. The brutality and gore in Call of Duty: World at War are particularly up close and personal. One way this viciousness is justified is by returning to a standard tactic of World War II films—­demonizing the enemy. This is especially apparent in the opening

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mission in a Japanese prison camp on Makin Island. A preliminary cut-­scene shows a Japanese guard standing over an American prisoner. The first-­person point of view suggests that the player-­character is present in the scene but lying on the ground, perhaps wounded and left for dead. The guard, yelling in (subtitled) Japanese, puts out a burning cigarette on the other prisoner’s face and then executes him by decapitating him with a samurai sword. As the guard then moves past the lifeless and bleeding body of the American lying on the ground and toward the screen (and thus, the player), he is attacked from behind by another American marine who kills the Japanese guard by stabbing him through his neck. This marine addresses the player and helps the player-­character escape the prison camp. Then the cut-­scene seamlessly transitions into the gameplay, as the player then controls the character’s exit from the camp into a battle. This grisly scene in the prison camp relies on cultural stereotypes of the Japanese from the 1940s and later, particularly in the form of the cruel prison camp guard and the barbarity of samurai sword beheadings, which were publicized in the press and much feared by American servicemen while also being objects of fascination. The first-­person perspective of the scene heightens the player’s identification with the scenario and the dangers of the gameworld. This embedded perspective also makes the interactive violence in the continuing mission appear warranted because of the egregious actions of the Japanese guard, whose murder of the prisoner is given no backstory or motivation. The cut-­scene models the appropriate and expected behavior for the player; the gruesome murder of the prison guard by the fellow American character acts as instructions for the player in the rest of the mission. This mixture of nonplaying and interactive parts of the scene sets the stage both morally and physically for the subsequent gameplay. The player is motivated to avenge this killing he has witnessed and is expected to act out that revenge. Stereotypes of the enemy allow for an easier entrance into the game and the gameworld since nuance of character does not need to be demonstrated. Rather, the reliance on demonized enemies and clichéd allies works with the first-­person point of view to allow a seamless and immersive experience of the game’s action, with little delay for explanation. Furthermore, because of the use of cultural and historical stereotypes, players can feel justified, perhaps even morally superior, in killing human characters. This heightened violence and reinforced negativity toward the enemy may serve to explain and legitimize other innovations of World at War, particularly the introduction of two new weapons: the bayonet and the flamethrower. On the one hand, these weapons are historically accurate to the close-­quarter combat on the islands of the Pacific. But they also add a level of personal interaction between the player character and the enemy, along with enhanced visual gore. Both weapons must be used at extremely close range and the effect on the

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(virtual) body is more pronounced than just a bullet wound. In closer ranges or with the use of the magnified sight of the sniper rifle, elaborate and graphic streams and splatters of blood can be plainly seen throughout the game. When I played the game—­and without even trying to achieve these effects—­I blew off the heads of enemy soldiers, amputated limbs, caused sprays and clouds of blood, and even “gibbed” two or three combatants. (In gamer terminology, to “gib” a character is to hit him with a projectile with such force that his body is reduced to indiscriminate chunks of flesh, as “to turn into giblets.”) These military shooters match Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers in their interest in visualizing the bodily trauma of combat, but they exceed the films in the frequency and total amount of depicted wounds. Since the games provide multiple hours of potential combat, the number of injured bodies multiplies accordingly. Gore is not just a consequence of gameplay but an integral part of it; in fact, graphic violence is often a motivating factor in the choice to play the game in the first place. It has been reported that gamer fans of Call of Duty requested the ability to dismember the bodies of their victims—­a request that was denied.34 One of Medal of Honor’s innovations in 1999 was the increased artificial intelligence system of the game that led to varied death animations for nonplayer characters depending on how they are hit by the player’s projectiles. As Medal of Honor producer Peter Hirschmann explained, “To be crass about it, whenever you shot a bad guy, something cool happened.”35 Therefore, despite the justifications given in patriotic documentary sequences or grisly cut-­scenes, the games trade in the visceral brutality and thrilling violence of

FIGURE 39  Ostentatious bloodshed in Call of Duty: World at War.

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the destructive sublime. As the next section demonstrates, the emphasis on combat—­and particularly shooting—­is built into the fabric of the games.

Different Syntax: Perspective and Targeting In previous chapters, I discussed how the representation of violence and death in combat sequences stresses and strains the capacities of conventional film style. Combat sequences serve as a limit case to see how far mainstream films can go to adopt new cinematic techniques without utterly disrupting the constitution of the film. In first-­person shooters, however, the combat is centralized, not only in the fact that most of the time spent with a game is in the activity of fighting but also in that combat is the basis of the very makeup of the games. First-­person shooters are constructed with aiming and firing as the primary way to visually experience the game, to interact with the virtual world, to achieve game objectives, and to advance through the game’s narrative. This is because targeting is the operative mode built into the architecture of the first-­person shooter. In these games, shooting is not just a genre, or a form of gameplay, but a way of seeing the world. Because a targeting reticule remains at the center of the screen, looking and moving are inseparable from targeting. Aiming is therefore (literally) central to the experience of the game, and mastery over the game comes with ever more precise aiming and firing. As evident in the descriptions above, the first-­person perspective in video games takes to an extreme the embedded point of view seen in the World War II combat documentaries discussed in chapter 1. Because of their proximity to action and their responsiveness to the camera operators’ movements and reactions, embedded cameras often produce disorienting footage; directors like John Ford and John Huston took advantage of this effect to produce a sense of immersion as well as to ground the authenticity of their combat documentaries. Similarly, in mainstream, fictional cinema, point-­ of-­ view shots and subjective camerawork typically are kept to a minimum because they, too, can disorient. Combat sequences in films capitalize on this disorientation, though, to try to reproduce the overwhelming experience of being on a battlefield. The replication of the embedded perspective and handheld camerawork of wartime combat documentaries in Saving Private Ryan, for instance, attempted to make viewers feel like they are there on the battlefield next to Tom Hanks. In first-­person shooter video games, however, the subjective point of view is used continually, not just for disorientation or emotional effects. In a video game, the first-­person perspective provides a way to navigate through space. As James Newman argues, the player character is often more a form of “vehicular embodiment” through which the player moves through virtual space and less a full-­fledged character with which one can identify.36

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The characters in first-­person shooters are intentionally rather undefined anyway to remove barriers from the player’s adoption of the character’s perceptual apparatus. Media theorist Alexander Galloway has traced the origins of the first-­person subjective perspective through the history of cinema.37 Such cinematography—­ which not only takes the approximate view of a character but attempts to render visually his or her actual perception, sometimes blurred by tears, blood, dizziness, or the like—­has been exceedingly rare in film. Along with Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947), an early and perhaps failed attempt to use the subjective point of view throughout an entire film, Galloway describes the first hour of Dark Passage (directed in 1947 by Delmer Daves, director of Destination Tokyo, discussed in chapter 2) in which the first-­person perspective acts as a conceit to hide the bandaged face of the main character from view until he emerges as Humphrey Bogart. These experiments with extended subjective perspective are uncommon. But brief use of the subjective can be found in other films, as in the Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan described at the beginning of the previous chapter. Galloway argues, however, that the predominant use of subjective perspective in cinema reproduces the deviant vision belonging to a damaged, monstrous, detached, or cyborg personality. For example, The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964) contains the optical perspective of a drunk, and Vertigo’s (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) famous “trombone shot” (tracking out while zooming in) represents the fearful and disorienting experience of vertigo. In slasher films like Halloween ( John Carpenter, 1978) or Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), the film often adopts the subjective perspective of the killer stalking a victim. Carol Clover has labeled this kind of sadistic vision “predatory” or “assaultive.”38 The use of first-­person camera to mimic the point of view of cyborgs and other alien beings in films such as The Terminator ( James Cameron, 1984), Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987), and Predator ( John McTiernan, 1987), only reinforces the sense of detachment and monstrousness attached to this camera perspective.39 Thus, Galloway argues, instead of connecting the audience more organically and fully with the character whose perspective it takes, the subjective camera in cinema ironically distances the audience and “effect[s] a sense of alienated, disoriented, or predatory vision.”40 In contrast, Galloway claims that in video games, and specifically first-­ person shooters, “the subjective perspective is quite common and used to achieve an intuitive sense of motion and action in gameplay.”41 He asserts that the first-­person perspective—­even when attached to the “shooter” point of view that includes the weapon at the bottom of the screen—­aids identification but is not necessarily associated with violence. As he points out, video games that adopt a different perspective on the action (such as third person or the god-­like overview) are just as likely to contain violence. But can we

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say with such certainty that the alienation and aberration associated with the first-­person perspective in cinema does not also affect the World War II shooter game? According to Galloway, first-­person shooters differ in their use of perspective and representation of space from films because the video games involve action and require “fully rendered, actionable space.”42 In other words, unlike a film, which only shows portions of a three-­dimensional space artificially constructed via montage, a video game provides access to a virtual three-­ dimensional space that can be explored and is always available to be acted upon by the player. The first-­person shooter gives us, in effect, a continuous long take on the action. This is, indeed, an important variation in the representation of space between the two media. However, despite Galloway’s dismissals of the first-­person shooter’s link with violence, the way the video game space is “actionable” is predominantly through shooting. The player visually experiences the game setting as a scrolling landscape atop a weapon, or quite often, through the scope of a gun. The visual and spatial experience of the game is intrinsically linked to the violence perpetrated through the weapons, which are usually a permanent fixture at the bottom of the screen. The game experience of the first-­person shooter—­its construction of time, space, narrative, and objective—­revolves around the aiming and firing of weapons. While it may be true that the first-­person point of view that Galloway locates first in cinema is not necessarily aberrant or deviant in video games, it cannot be disconnected from shooting since the gamespace is experienced through a targeting reticule. Thus the violence that Galloway linked to the subjective view in cinema is also a central part of video games, in fact more so than film, since the use of first-­person perspective extends throughout the game. The difference is that this violence, not just this point of view, is normalized and standardized. It is no longer detached or alienated, attached to monstrous or cyborg characters, as it was in film. Rather, it becomes routine. The emphasis on targeting is meaningful not only because of its link to what Jordan Crandall would call “armed vision”43 but also because it becomes a form of anticipation and preemption that mirrors other uses of digitally enhanced weapons in contemporary warfare. The use of the subjective view in video games therefore moves away from the embedded point of view as it was employed in 1940s combat documentaries. In chapter 1, I discussed the use of an embedded perspective similar to first person to give a sense of capturing contingent acts of chance, violence, and chaos in combat cinematography. Along with particular editing strategies and camera movements, this embedded view emblematizes the unknown, the uncontrolled, the contingent, and the fog of war. Although there was a shift from documentary films like The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942), in which particular subjective effects were authentic to the filming conditions, to films in which this connection to actual

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battle was staged (from The Battle of San Pietro [ John Huston, 1945] to Saving Private Ryan), these sorts of aesthetic strategies—­representing the embedded point of view in the midst of battle—­have raised the viewer’s expectation that the camera will capture contingent events from within the action itself. Because video games are such tightly controlled simulations, however, nothing is left up to chance, preventing the representation of true contingency. Even randomness (so that each gameplay session is slightly different from the last) has to be programmed in. The first-­person perspective in video games works against chance; it works instead toward mastery, the ability to take any input and apply it to a predictable and controlled end. This automated first-­person perspective takes the subjective camera and weaponizes it, turning it into an extension of a gun scope, more like the gunsight cameras of The Fighting Lady (Louis de  Rochemont, 1945) than the shaky, flawed camera movements of The Battle of Midway or The Battle of San Pietro. But unlike the passive recording of the gunsight cameras, this perspective is active and controllable by the player, who works toward dominance over the gamespace. Media scholar Patrick Crogan has explored the historical roots of video games within the military-­industrial-­entertainment complex to argue that they form a part of a broader “war on contingency” that reflects contemporary warfare’s emphasis on logistical planning and the anticipation of potential threats before they become realized.44 Thus he sees in video games “a technics of anticipating what has not yet happened” that leads toward a philosophy of preemption.45 Video games, as interactive computer media, are organized around the quest to master a particular pattern or formula for success, an algorithm. This algorithm does not allow for the possibility of profound contingency because most options in a video game are predetermined. Thus although the first-­person shooter adopts a similar point-­of-­view structure to some 1940s combat documentaries, the ability of the camera to capture an unplanned event is not part of this visual system. Instead, this viewpoint is used for additional control, often deadly control (at least within the diegesis of the game), over the environment. Although Crogan discusses this technological effort against contingency in relation to general trends within the military over the last seventy years, this line of development has also materialized in specific video games that have been used by the military for training and recruitment purposes. In the early days of video gaming, the U.S. military adopted and altered commercial video games for use in training. In 1980, Atari’s Battlezone, which uses simple vector graphics to represent the view from a tank, was modified to train soldiers for the then-­new Bradley armored fighting vehicle. In 1995, officers at the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office modified Doom II: Hell on Earth (id Software/GT Interactive Software, 1994) into a military fire-­ team simulation. While Marine Doom, as it came to be called, could not teach

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players to accurately fire their weapons, it sought to teach them how to work as a team and make quick decisions within the chaos of (simulated) battle.46 In the late 1990s, the Naval Postgraduate School’s Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute began work on America’s Army, a free, online first-­person shooter released in 2002.47 In the process of teaching players the algorithms they need to advance in the game, America’s Army educates potential recruits on how the military operates while also engaging them in exciting action-­packed gameplay. Another collaboration between the U.S. military and the video game industry produced Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic Studios/THQ, 2004). This squad-­based tactical-­action game was intended both for training enlisted soldiers and for attracting prospective ones.48 Years later, it also serves as the basis for another simulation, Virtual Iraq, a set of virtual reality environments used in clinical therapy for veterans with post-­traumatic stress disorder.49 The collaboration between the military and the entertainment industries reached its apex in the establishment of the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California. Spurred by a forty-­five million dollar grant from the Department of Defense, the institute, according to its website, “brings film and game industry artists together with computer and social scientists to study and develop immersive media for military training” and other uses.50 At ICT, digital tools fuel virtual simulations of war that in turn help inform the construction of digital technologies that will be used on the battlefield.51 For Crogan, the essential mechanism of most video games is a “problem-­ solving dynamic of modeling solutions via experimental repetition of [a] challenging scenario.”52 Thus they perpetuate the preemptive regulation of contingency that is a part of contemporary digital war, even when the scenarios being displayed are set during a war that occurred more than fifty years in the past. As I have shown, first-­person shooters allow for mastery and control over the environment, through navigation as well as through the default perspective of targeting. However, Crogan also overstates the lack of contingency in video games. In any video game, and particularly in many first-­person shooters, there is the possibility of emergence: choices made by video game players that were not anticipated by the game’s designers. Multiplayer matches, which I address in the next section, are an interesting mix of controlled environment and emergent gameplay, since the outcomes of these matches are not determined in advance. But even in the single-­player campaign mode, part of the fun of a video game is unpredictability as well as the inability to completely master the mechanics of the game. Thus the desire to eschew contingency and chance is never fully possible. That this desire drives an attempt toward mastery, control, anticipation, and preemption, though, demonstrates that the games attempt to make war knowable and controllable. As the epic World War II films of the Vietnam era sought to tame that chaotic war into something known and easily

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understood, so, too, do World War II shooter games attempt to make sense of the post–Cold War and post-9/11 eras, connecting the well-worn stories of the “good war” to the less familiar dangers of the War on Terror.

Different Syntax: Space and Simulation Along with targeting, the navigation of space is an essential part of the first-­ person shooter. The first-­person perspective allows the player to move through virtual three-­dimensional space with intuitive ease. This immersive movement also allows for speed, which underlies the gameplay dynamics in many military shooters—­in contrast to the slow and deliberate pace of early strategy games. Because of its computational basis, the gamespace of war in first-­person shooters is transformed from an organic space laden with innumerable possibilities for movement to a tightly controlled space governed by algorithmic rules. By tracing the origins of those rules in technoscientific research in the postwar period, Patrick Crogan comes to describe the gamespace of video games as a “logistical space.” He defines this as “an informational space where logistical problems are anticipated, mapped, and resolved.”53 By navigating and taking action upon and within this space, players participate in the activities of mapping and anticipating possible actions and outcomes. Despite their setting in the past, the World War II video games explored here contribute to this kind of thinking by teaching players an algorithm, or pattern, for success and organizing their experience toward the prediction and resolution of future events. Media scholars Robin Andersen and Marin Kurti agree with Crogan that “succeeding in combat, virtual or real, depends on anticipating contingencies, advanced skill levels and increased proficiencies, all with the goal of surviving the battle by dominating the space.”54 Crogan, like some other video game theorists, fruitfully explores video games as simulations, and he discerns the nucleus of video games in early flight simulator technology.55 He characterizes gamespace as “a system of vectors,” “a flowchart,” or “a diagrammatic representation of an incredibly complex and dynamic reality.”56 This ever-­changing flowchart or diagram attempts to represent forces of reality that may be beneath the surface of conventional, superficial representations. A simulation is a form of reenactment, but where the typical reenactment (as in a film like The Longest Day) is static, the simulation is variable. What the two forms share is the attempt to know and re-­create all parts of something to the tiniest detail. But not only does the simulation copy the external appearance of things; it also must replicate behaviors and the laws that those actions follow. These laws are programmed into the simulation as part of the algorithmic structure of the simulation itself. Instead of following a series of facts, then, the simulation modifies a series of variables, if-­then statements that are manipulated through a user interface. Therefore, a true

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simulation allows for multiple outcomes based on the decisions of a human programmer or interactor. Instead of being oriented toward the past, the simulation is oriented toward the future. It corresponds to the same impulse toward preemption and logistical planning as other aspects of computational society and contemporary warfare. First-­person shooters instrumentalize space and embed it with information. Learning, collecting objects, and progressing through narrative are all linked to the navigation of space in these games. As Henry Jenkins has shown, video games are a form of “environmental storytelling.”57 As such, he questions how theorists have typically conceived of stories in terms of narrative causality (beginning, middle, and end) and development (exposition, rising action, climax). Video games, in contrast, tell stories by creating rich and multifaceted worlds in which narratives arise rather than by following standard aesthetic principles of plot development. In this way, they follow a broader historical trajectory of spatial stories, including the travel narratives, hero’s journeys, and quests featured in mythic tales and modern genres like fantasy and science fiction. Jenkins notes, “Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information across the game space.”58 Whereas narrative meaning in a linear medium like cinema or the novel emerges out of the ordering of sequences of events, in video games, narrative meaning is replaced by information processing. In a virtual world of information, as described by Jenkins or Crogan, the advancement of story takes a back seat to the completion of logistical duties. Crogan argues, “This transformed narrative is no longer a mechanism for plotting events into ordered and significant relations—­an interpretation machine—­but another kind of operation. Narrative becomes the plotting of a trajectory of tasks to accomplish.”59 Narrative space becomes a place for the discovery of potential resources (such as weapons and health boosts) and the achievement of particular objectives. While advancing technologies have allowed video games to construct ever more immense virtual gamespaces, many games are still fairly linear (in that one cannot deviate much from the assigned tasks in the order in which they are given). Regardless of size or linearity, though, they all design algorithms meant to train players in control and precision. For this reason, they focus less on ethical positioning through storytelling. In World War II shooters, the moral framework comes from the cut-­scenes and documentary inserts discussed earlier, but these may be ignored or skipped in favor of the immersive gameplay. The multiplayer modes of World War II shooter games illustrate another way in which the conventions of first-­person shooter gameplay can be removed

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from narrative and moral context. All of the Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Brothers in Arms games discussed here contain two modes of play: single-­ player campaign mode (in which players participate within a predetermined narrative with set missions presented in a particular order) and multiplayer mode (in which networked players compete against one another, individually or in teams). The Battlefield games mostly dispense with the single-­player campaign altogether60; they consist of a series of multiplayer games that can be played on various maps, or virtual landscapes. In Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions/Electronic Arts, 2002), the World War II–­set game that is the first of the series, these maps are re-­creations of the settings for various historical battles like El Alamein, Wake Island, and Caen. In multiplayer games, the goal is usually to kill as many of the opposition as possible. The outcome of the Deathmatch mode, for instance, is measured solely by the individual or team’s total number of kills within a limited time frame. The multiplayer Conquest mode in Battlefield 1942 combines the incentivizing of as many kills as possible with the necessity of teamwork to hold and defend particular areas on the map. In these multiplayer modes, the narrative context is more or less removed; World War II becomes a mere stage for the fight between two sides. While these matches retain the campaign mode’s realistic landscapes, weapons,

FIGURE 40  Landscapes in the multiplayer modes of shooters like Battlefield 1942 (Digital

Illusions/Electronic Arts, 2002) become morally neutral environments for tests of skill.

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and vehicles, the meaning of World War is diminished. Unlike the story­based campaigns (which present combat from the Allied point of view only), World War  II–­set multiplayer games typically allow players to choose to fight for either the Axis or the Allied powers. Both sides are relatively evenly matched, with similar resources in terms of weapons and vehicles. The player’s decision to play for the German, Japanese, American, or British army relies as much on personal preference or a favorite weapon as on moral conviction. The results of gameplay rely exclusively on the skill of the players; all other aspects of war, like the logistics of supply, the ideologies of combat, and the pressures of politics, are made out to be equivalent. Therefore, the results of the battle need not follow history. Germany can win the Battle of Britain, and the Japanese can win at Midway. In many instances, the contests do not correspond with specific historical battles; they merely place World War II–­era weapons and equipment within a vaguely midcentury European, Asian, or North African landscape without any further contextualization of the fight. Beyond moral authority, or even historical accuracy, player experience is shaped by the weapons and vehicles available in the gamespace and the tactical possibilities of the map (such as barriers, hiding places, good vantage points to shoot, and easy spaces to navigate). Johan Hoeglund asserts that, because the multiplayer modes of first-­person shooters are not contextualized extensively within fictional stories or the greater significance of the conflict, “the focus here is not on resolving a narrative but on dominating space through the dispensation of repetitive military violence,” which is the only form of exchange and interactivity possible.61 The World War II setting becomes a veneer, and the ethically charged settings, characters, and objects become mere functionalities. Instead of reinforcing the “good war” mythology, the moral meaning of World War II drains out of the landscape and is replaced by a series of denotative signs: tanks, hills, rifles, buildings. Because of this redefinition of space, World War  II shooter games depart drastically from the combat films of the same period in their representation of masculinity and heroism. Whereas the films I discussed in the previous chapter—­such as Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), and Flags of Our Fathers—­demonstrate heroic masculinity through suffering and victimhood, the video games under examination here emphasize action, speed, and the infliction of violence onto the enemy. In video games, “heroism” becomes a matter of calculation—­a readout of statistics at the end of the mission—­and neglects the robust cultural context that would make sense of these symbolic actions. The games provide a new model for the American soldier as both a man of action and a man of knowledge (knowledge of the algorithm). In contrast to the Hollywood films released around the same time, these games appear to be motivated by the desire to perpetrate violence, wreak destruction, and kill with precision, making them excellent examples of the destructive sublime.

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Instead of making the American soldier out to be a victim, the structure of the first-­person shooter makes the player’s soldier character nearly invincible. Player-­characters can never truly die in the game—­or rather, they die all the time but come back to life at the latest save point. According to Bernd Hüppauf, the industrialization of warfare in the twentieth century led to a “reconstitution of the soldiers’ identity,” turning the soldier into a “fighting machine”: the “hardened man with his steel helmet, emotionless, experienced, with no morality apart from the value of comradeship and no obligation or attachment other than to his immediate group of warriors.”62 This description of the modern soldier also typically applies to the character one plays in World War II shooter games. These characters are literally fighting machines, impervious to the mortality and moral failings that afflict real-­world combatants. In one way, this makes them the ultimate heroes, capable of death-­defying feats. But their machinic basis also evacuates the larger cultural associations and deeper meanings of their actions despite the recurrent reminders of the historical and moral context of World War II via the iconography, cut-­scenes, and montages of documentary footage. These soldiers may exist in what Galloway called a fully “actionable” space, seemingly open to unlimited possibilities, but the virtual environment of the game is also akin to the “geometrical and abstract,” “non-­emotional and basically empty space” that Hüppauf finds in the aerial photography of the First World War.63 Instead of moving through a landscape filled with moral and emotional associations like a cinematic character, the video game player fights through an abstract, virtual landscape in order to rack up points and kill counts, to progress through space in the most precise, skilled, and swiftest way. This representation of soldier as machine also reflects the transition that Lynda Boose has identified in war cinema between Vietnam War films like The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) or Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) and later films like Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986). While the former films—­and I would add more contemporary World War II films like Flags of Our Fathers—­represent the soldier as victim, the latter film contains “a radically different ethos, that of the elite technicians of war, the studied sprezzatura and gamesmanship of the high-­flying macho men of the air who . . . experience war from the detachment of button-­pushing technology.”64 For these machine-­soldiers of the digital age, war is made computable and thus knowable, predictable, quantifiable, controllable, and rational. In video games, visibility is at the crux of the action. The act of aiming and firing, essential to the first-­person shooter, involves the player in a process of mentally computing visual information, making quick decisions, and acting upon the information to achieve determinable, quantifiable results. The player herself thus becomes part of the machine. Video games “represent the most complete symbiosis

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generally available between human and computer—­a fusion of spaces, goals, options and perspectives.”65 While the semantic elements of World War II shooters return them nostalgically to the past, the syntactic elements of the games reflect a contemporary fantasy of modern warfare, particularly as it is increasingly waged with weapons designed to work like video games. The digital interfaces of video games mirror the interfaces of computerized instruments and weapons currently being used by the American military, such as the unmanned aerial vehicles flown in the Middle East but controlled remotely from Nevada or elsewhere. In a particularly apt convergence of military and entertainment technology, Raytheon hired video game developers to redesign their drone aircraft guidance systems to look and respond more like the video games with which military recruits are increasingly familiar.66 Moreover, video games and virtual worlds are used by the military to train, educate, and even heal soldiers.67 As a result, video game simulations are at the very center of the current military experience, not a distraction or mere reflection. Neither World War II nor the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fit the model that is propounded by contemporary military video games—­a war of precision aiming and firing in which enemies are clearly located and there is no collateral damage. Instead, these games reflect the fantasy of what technologically advanced war is: clean, precise, fast-­paced, and with quantifiable success. Video games present war as something computable, controllable, and orderly, fought without post-­traumatic stress disorder or real death by machine-­like soldiers. In this, they reflect how Jean Baudrillard described the first Gulf War, “an asexual surgical war, a matter of war-­processing in which the enemy only appears as a computerised target.” The fact that this description neglects the massive destruction on the ground contributes to his assertion that the war “did not take place.”68 We know that this fantasy of clean, digital, precise war does not correspond to the realities of combat—­whether in the first Gulf War, in World War II, or in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-­first century—­despite all the new computer-­controlled technologies at work in the military. As Matthew Thomas Payne argues, “The first-­person shooter creates an attractive textual means of interacting with the unpleasant aspects of postmodern conflict.”69 These unpleasant aspects include the unpredictability of terrorism, the lack of clear distinction between combatants and civilians, and the ambiguities of asymmetrical warfare (in which each side is not evenly matched in terms of technology and arsenal, resulting in high-­tech weapons being felled by low-­tech weapons like improvised explosive devices [IEDs]). In the context of these combat conditions, the World War  II shooters discussed here appear doubly out of touch—­first, by returning to a war from sixty years prior

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and, second, by representing combat as something that can be controlled and conducted with exactitude. The turn to digital models in logistical planning, combat simulation, and militainment does not reflect reality but rather represents an attempt to stave off the randomness, irregularity, and confusion of war through its micromanagement. Thus first-­person shooters have a dual relationship to the destructive sublime. They reflect, and indeed amplify, the destructive sublime by embracing the violence and cruelty of combat as well as the possible pleasures to be gained it. But at the same time, by transforming combat into something computable, quantifiable, and controllable, these games ignore the messy and chaotic essence of war.

Conclusion As simulations, World War II shooters open the possibility of multiple narrative trajectories, determined, in part, by the actions of the player. In their story-­ based campaign modes, however, these games do not allow such agency to the player. The player is allotted some leeway in where to go, which weapon to use, and which tactics to employ, but the overarching narrative of the war is not up for debate. If major nonplayable characters die, this is dealt with in the noninteractive cut-­scenes between missions. Rarely does player action determine even the fates of minor nonplayable characters. Looking more broadly, player decisions count for nothing in relation to the trajectory of the war as a whole, which progresses from mission to mission toward an inevitable conclusion as long as the player has the requisite skill to continue playing. Jaimie Baron has argued that the historical campaign of Call of Duty: World at War, like its peers, “reasserts the traditional linear, singular, and teleological conception of history within a digital interface even as it introduces interactivity into the spaces ‘around’ this history.”70 Only by suppressing a key potentiality of the interactive medium can this narrative mode continue to tell a straightforward story about World War II. The iconography, characters, settings, story lines, and documentary vignettes of World War II shooters all reinforce a traditional view of the war as a place where heroism and meaningful sacrifice are possible and bloodshed is not only morally justified but demanded of a good citizen-­soldier. In doing so, though, they have to work against aspects of the computational medium in which they are grounded. The honorable connotations of World War  II that remain in the games derive from the genre conventions of linear forms like cinema. The digital bedrock of video games, however, counteracts these conventions, speeding the representation of the midcentury conflict into the twenty-­first century. In addition to offering the possibility of new narratives of the war, which are allowed (within reduced circumstances) in multiplayer matches, video games rewrite our notions of narrative itself, emphasizing

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movement through space over temporal progression. In doing so, they evacuate those spaces of narratively driven ethical meanings and open them up to computation. Heroic achievement becomes quantifiable as a kill count working toward a goal of complete depopulation. Because of the particular perspective offered by the first-­person shooter, vision and movement are linked to violence. While this perspective is normalized by the game to create intuitive movement and an immersive experience, it still contains some of the “predatory” perspective that Galloway located in the subjective point of view in cinema. The digital apparatus of the first-­person shooter foregrounds targeting: looking around is seeking a target, moving through space involves finding targets and moving inexorably toward them. Targeting allows for firing with precision, which is valorized by the gameplay rules and the computation of points and achievements. The gameplay mechanic of targeting, linked inextricably with the immersive first-­person view, is at the heart of moral panics regarding video games and real-­world violence. That sense of proximity, and of agency, makes these games much more like personal combat simulations than the distanced, overhead view of strategy games. First-­person shooters glorify guns and war by making shooting weapons fun. But the fun is due at least as much to the sensation of control and mastery as to the sense of unstructured violence and destruction. Shooting haphazardly will not get you very far in the game; it takes measured thinking, quick decision-­making, practiced proficiencies, and ingrained dexterities to advance to the highest levels. Violent shooting games reflect a contemporary American society that not only wears its gun obsessions on its sleeves but also has been transformed by computational media into an instrumentalized, rationalized culture that is incessantly quantified, measured, and forecast. As Patrick Crogan has argued, first-­person shooters train players—­soldiers and civilians alike—­toward the anticipation and preemption of future conflicts. This future-­directed instrumentalization makes everything a quantifiable potentiality, making video games part of a larger embrace of digital tools for war. These tools, too, participate in the fallacy of clean war. The ideology of targeting drives both video game shooting and computerized weapons on the battlefield. Video games enact a “premediation,” or imaginative construction of future conflicts, by reflecting the ideologies and digital substrate of the military itself.71 This premediation may be more obvious in the successors to the World War  II shooters: the games of the same franchises (Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield) that shifted in the mid-­2000s toward representing more modern conflicts. In terms of their settings, iconography, characters, and the like—­the semiotic aspects—­these more recent games better reflect contemporary, technologically advanced warfare. But the syntax of World War II games already shared this connection to twenty-­first-­century warfare in their game

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mechanics. And although the more recent games of the Call of Duty series (the Modern Warfare and Black Ops games, for instance) represent modern and near-­future war, they have retained some of the determinant features of the World War II–­set games. For instance, World War  II provided game designers with two fairly evenly matched opponents and warfare that was both conventional (meaning weapons-­and military-­based) and symmetrical. Despite their ostensible portrayal of modern-­day wars that are waged unconventionally and asymmetrically, the current Call of Duty installments mostly retain these design parameters from World War II games. The designers of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2007), the first of the series to be set in a contemporary war, acknowledged that “one aspect of the gameplay that we didn’t want to change from previous titles [those set in World War II] was the idea of two large opposing forces with similar numbers and technology.”72 This led them to invent a new war with multiple fronts, including Russia and the Middle East. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Call of Duty would return to the Second World War, as it did in 2017. The Cold War, a rivalry between two nearly evenly matched superpowers, also echoes through many of these games. The perpetuation of symmetrical warfare into the modern period relates to issues of game balance (not allowing one opponent to have too much of an edge over another for fairness), but it also further propagates myths about contemporary war—­that war is waged fairly and that conflicts can be easily broken down into two sides: black or white, right or wrong, good or evil. One could speculate that this kind of ethical reassurance makes military shooters appealing to active-­duty soldiers—­as well as civilians—­who confront an ethically trickier set of circumstances in contemporary wars. Despite the initial skepticism expressed about the appropriateness of World War  II as a setting for first-­person shooters during the creation of the first Medal of Honor, World War II proved itself to be well suited for this video game structure. The games’ adoptions of certain elements of the cinematic combat genre—­such as settings, narrative themes, and use of documentary footage—­preserved common cultural messages about the honor and duty of soldiers and the just nature of World War II. As I discuss in this book’s conclusion, however, major military shooter franchises—­such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield—­shifted away from World War  II around 2009 in favor of more contemporary wars or speculative future conflicts. Ultimately, nostalgia for the “good war” and a desire to educate the public about the war were not the only motivations driving the creation of the military shooter genre. Video games have gone further than World War  II films in demonstrating the messy cruelty, as well as the exhilaration, of combat. As digital media, though, first-­person shooters also perpetuate a philosophy of preemptive war

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that aims to prevent contingencies, dominate space, control communications, and deter attacks before they can occur. The destructive sublime subverts this precision-­driven ideology, revealing it to be a fantasy of control in a time of great uncertainty due to the end of the Cold War and the beginning and continuation of the War on Terror. Thus video games exemplify the World War II combat genre’s celebration of killing and destruction but also demonstrate an effort to control that chaos and make it meaningful—­if not in terms of honor and duty, then at least in terms of quantifiable measurement.

Conclusion

A Bad War? The World War II Combat Genre Now I began this book with the description of a trailer for the 2005 video game Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft). In addition to showing exciting action sequences, the trailer reiterates the soldier’s duty to liberty, country, and his “brothers” in combat. The violence showcased in the trailer is motivated by noble values and the desire to serve; this discourse of virtue attempts to rein in the explosive force of destruction on exhibit in the excerpts of gameplay that follow. The official launch trailer for the 2008 continuation of the game series, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (Gearbox/Ubisoft), is organized in a similar fashion, but the mitigating context of honor and sacrifice is less pronounced. This trailer highlights brutality and relishes the details of violent deaths with slow motion and a zooming (virtual) camera that reveals a closer view of the destruction. About twenty seconds into the trailer, an American soldier wades through a river and is shot in the head. A cloud of blood bursts forth, splashing onto the (virtual) camera. The next shot shows an underwater view as the blood collects and floats outside the body, mixing with the water. Soon after, another American soldier is blasted into the air by an explosion, his body limp and his helmet blown off his head. In addition to a wailing air raid siren, the soundtrack of this segment of the video consists of panicked breathing. This scene’s graphic violence, enunciation of the corporeal suffering of American 192

Conclusion  •  193

soldiers, and use of subjective point of view and sound are reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and the World War II films of the early 2000s discussed in chapter 4. However, the rest of the trailer, separated from the opening scene by a brief title screen with the full-­screen logos of the game developer and publisher, shows only the carnage that the player or the player’s squad-­mates inflict on the enemy. Some images just show American soldiers (in third-­person perspective) or the player-­character (in first person) firing various weapons—­rifles, machine guns, a tank gun, a bazooka—­but a selection of accentuated shots feature the gruesome effects of these weapons. In one slow-­motion shot, a grenade thrown at two German soldiers blasts them into the air, severing one of their legs at the calf. A bazooka shoots a rocket into the top of a house, blowing its inhabitant into the air. Another shot in slow motion shows the result of a bullet to the head, creating an elaborate eruption of blood. Later, a tank explodes, disintegrating into chunks of metal that go flying in all directions. Weapons are fired, and bodies crumple to the ground under the barrage of bullets. Unlike the on-­screen text in the 2005 trailer that amplifies the words “Country,” “Families,” and “Brothers,” the written text of the Hell’s Highway trailer echoes the idea of war as hell: “There’s only one way out of hell, and that’s through it.” While the trailer for the earlier game includes a voice-­over narration that articulates the values of liberty and teamwork and reasserts the eventual triumph of the Allied forces, the 2008 trailer includes no voice-­ over. Instead, pieces of dialogue and sound effects from the game combine with bracing music to create a sense of turmoil and commotion. In addition to generic phrases like “get moving” and “take cover,” a brief scene includes a character intoning, “You follow orders, or you die.” It’s not clear whether the character means this as an entreaty or a threat. The last image of the trailer is a close-­up view following an American soldier as he rushes toward a German soldier and stabs him in the neck. The image goes to black right as the blade enters flesh, but the wet sound of the impact continues. The screaming heard is that of the American: a war cry, not a scream of pain. In relation to this description, a couple of disclaimers are necessary. First, a trailer is not necessarily an accurate depiction of the game, as I demonstrated in my introductory discussion of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. Second, there are many trailers made for a game; what I’ve described above is just one of them. Nevertheless, the differences between the trailers for the 2005 and 2008 instantiations of the Brothers in Arms franchise are striking. By 2008, the vestments of the “good war” narrative have been mostly removed. Explicit violence, offered in ever more graphic and elaborate displays, provides its own attraction; it is underlined with slow motion and zooming cameras. Instead of duty, the discussion revolves around orders. Rather than fighting for something (their country, their families, their brothers), the soldiers fight because

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they have to in order to survive, to get out of hell. Or, looking at the imagery of the trailer, perhaps they fight simply to create the game’s luxurious spectacles of ruptured bodies, sprays of blood, and ravaged landscapes. As a collection of some of the most exciting and gruesome parts of the game, the trailer confirms the argument I made in the previous chapter that first-­person shooters indulge in the destructive sublime, speaking a language of violence that provokes strong sensations and perverse pleasures in representations of pain. By beginning and ending my book with these video games, though, I suggest not only that they are the quintessence of the destructive sublime within the World War II combat genre but that they have something to tell us about the combat films and television series that came before these games and exist alongside them. My retrospective methodology has revealed the power of combat sequences to disrupt or complicate the meanings of war constructed by dialogue or plot—­in films as much as in video games. Video games take the celebration of destruction and killing to an extreme since combat takes up the majority of game, but combat sequences in film or television also encourage the same fixation. Scenes of combat often offer counternarratives that work against, or alongside, the dominant story of World War II as the “good war.” Although they may occasion opportunities for citizen-­ soldiers to actively convey their commitment to freedom and the American Way, they also typically go beyond these narrative demands. Combat sequences furnish fascinating and affective audiovisual stimuli that engage viewers’ bodies. These scenes are, in turn, frightening, exhilarating, awe inspiring, disgusting, and pathetic. They provoke joy, fear, pride, horror, or excitement—­and sometimes all of these at once. As the previous chapters have shown, combat sequences vary stylistically both within an individual sequence and among sequences within a single film, as well as across the genre. Chapter 2 demonstrated, for instance, how battle scenes in wartime fictional films were constructed out of disparate cinematic materials: documentary footage, dramatizations or reenactments, and special-­ effects footage with miniature models. The aesthetics of combat sequences have also fluctuated over time: from the embedded perspectives and (sometimes intentional) cinematographic errors of the combat documentaries made during the war (that also inspired similar aesthetics in Saving Private Ryan and other films of the late 1990s and early 2000s) to the remote perspectives and large-­scale reenactments of 1960s and ’70s films like The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962). What they have in common is their modulation of point of view and modes of imagemaking to create intense sensations, emotional impacts, and visceral gratifications (and discomforts). Combat sequences are polysemic; they can be interpreted—­and felt—­in any number of ways, potentially simultaneously.

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This book has charted the forms the destructive sublime has taken in the World War  II combat genre over the course of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-­first. The genre has had to negotiate with the power of the combat sequence, working both to unleash its force and to restrain it, to allow it to disrupt signification at one point and to make it signify at another. The aesthetics of combat I have enunciated in this book enact this negotiation differently. The embedded perspective that emerged out of wartime combat documentaries like John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942), aligned with the mode of celluloid recording, represents the destructive sublime on an up-­close-­and-­personal level, demonstrating violence that can attack the body and disorient the senses. The remote perspective that took center stage in the massive reenactments of the war in 1960s and ’70s films like Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer et al., 1970) initiates the destructive sublime on an impersonal and immense scale, abstracted from the individual experience. The World War  II combat genre presents war alternately as rational and irrational, knowable and beyond comprehension. Combat aesthetics help construct these meanings but also offer the means by which to undermine them. Battle sequences are inherently destabilizing and therefore ambiguous or multivalent. First-­person shooters like Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway remind us of the power of the destructive sublime to unsettle conventional notions of World War II in American culture. Looking back at the genre through the lens of these video games reveals the logical and aesthetic cracks, unresolved contradictions, and indeterminate sensations that have always been part of the genre but have been overlooked in favor of the positive and honorable connotations of the war and the genre.

The World War II Combat Genre after 2008 Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway also exemplifies a shift in how American media have represented World War  II since 2008. In films like Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), Fury (David Ayer, 2014), and the HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), the genre has swung back to a portrayal of the irrationality of war and the corruption of combat, like the genre-­bending World War II films of the 1960s and ’70s, including The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967), Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970), and Catch-­22 (Mike Nichols, 1970). These recent World War  II representations also include a narrative and aesthetic recognition of the seductive power of war that stems from Vietnam War films like Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), and Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986). Like those films, recent war media show combat to be psychologically transformative, creating intense impressions of pleasure and pain and, sometimes,

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madness. Aesthetically, these contemporary media limit their use of wide-­scale combat sequences, focusing instead on the experience of the individual or small group. They sometimes use, but are not limited to, the specific aesthetics of 1940s-­era combat documentaries, such as shaky cinematography, lens flares and other cinematic “mistakes,” and the embedded perspective that acknowledges the camera operator’s presence. These aesthetic forms have since become a routine part of many action films (note, for instance, Paul Greengrass’s use of the handheld camera in his Bourne films [2004, 2007, 2016] or the lens flares in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek films [2009, 2013]); their meaning is no longer specific to their history in the World War II combat genre. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, American media reinvested in the World War II narrative as a reminder of the virtue of the American soldier, the ideals of American society, and the might and superiority of the American military. Even with the disorienting power of the destructive sublime, these representations served a broader cultural nostalgia for a seemingly lost past; after 9/11, they could invoke other times the nation was made to play the victim and reassure audiences of America’s good intentions and eventual triumph. These films, television series, and video games also emphasized bodies at risk and the corporeal effects of war in an era witnessing the dematerialization of conventional combat due to remote and digital weapons. But by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, American media began to represent World War II as just another example of the barbarity and injustice of war, the corruption of good intentions, and the unintended consequences and psychological impact of asking men to kill. In this, the World War II combat genre can be seen to reflect the contemporary circumstances of the seemingly endless War on Terror and the increasing awareness of the physical, mental, and emotional damage done to soldiers in war as they return home and overwhelm the resources of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The year 2008 represents the tipping point in the genre when the reverent nostalgia for World War II transformed into the cynical echoing of contemporary wars. At this time, the troop surge in Iraq had yielded some success, and Americans were more anxious than ever to get out of the Middle East. After the economic recession, there was increased pressure to focus on nation-­ building at home rather than in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 There have only been a trickle of World War II combat films or series since 2008, including Inglourious Basterds, The Pacific, Red Tails (Anthony Hemingway, 2012), Fury, Hacksaw Ridge (Mel Gibson, 2016), and Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017). In the same time period, the War on Terror film found its footing on American screens. Before 2008, a number of Iraq and Afghanistan films were released; they tended to be critical of the American military and performed badly at the box office. These include In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007), Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007), Redacted (Brian de  Palma, 2007), and

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Stop-­Loss (Kimberly Pierce, 2008). However, after The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010, a series of films followed that not only provide exciting combat scenes but also explore the psychological impact of war on soldiers. Lone Survivor (Peter Berg, 2013) and American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) feature protagonists that combine two archetypes of masculinity discussed in previous chapters: the man of action from wartime films and the victim-­hero of late 1990s and early 2000s films. Both main characters—­Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) and Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), respectively—­act heroically and bravely but also struggle with the psychological consequences of their actions and the loss of their fellow brothers in arms. This cycle of films depicts American soldiers and government agents as victims of the trauma of war but also as perpetrators or transgressors. Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-­up to The Hurt Locker, charts the career of a CIA intelligence officer, Maya ( Jessica Chastain), as she hunts for and finds Osama bin Laden. In the process, she is complicit in the torture of men suspected of knowing something about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Unlike Saving Private Ryan and other earlier films, these post-­2008 combat films depict the violence inflicted by the American soldier or agent, not just on him or her. A similar transition occurred in first-­person shooter video games around 2008. These games have always depicted the agency of the soldier and presented him (or, less often, her) as an assailant or shooter rather than just a victim. Since 2008, though, the military shooter has typically placed the soldier in contemporary or near-­future settings. In 2007, Call of Duty released its first Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward/Activision) game, featuring near-­future warfare in a speculative Russian civil war and Middle Eastern coup d’état. After 2008’s return to World War  II in Call of Duty: World at War (Treyarch/ Activision), the franchise released a long series of games set in near-­future conflicts, with the exception of a few missions set during the Cold War in the Black Ops series. Other prominent military shooter series have also relocated to more contemporary wars or have lost momentum. The last Medal of Honor game to be set in World War II was 2007’s Medal of Honor: Airborne (EA Los Angeles/ Electronic Arts). In 2010, the game franchise “rebooted” with a new release set in the War in Afghanistan. After only one poorly selling sequel, though, the series was discontinued in 2013. Since Hell’s Highway in 2008, the Brothers in Arms series has released three additional games set in World War  II, but these are only for the relatively minor platform of mobile phone/tablet. The Battlefield series only featured the World War  II setting in one major game, Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions/Electronic Arts, 2002), the first in the franchise, as well as one downloadable spin-­off game called Battlefield 1943 (EA DICE/Electronic Arts, 2009). All the other games in the series have

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been set in other wars or imagined future conflicts. The most recent game in the franchise, Battlefield 1 (EA DICE/Electronic Arts, 2016), is set in World War  I, representing an exception to the current emphasis on future warfare and a possible new direction. The shift within the military shooter genre away from World War II reflected the failure of the traditional connotations of the “good war” to adequately control the meaning of the games. The contemporary and near-­future settings have better served the cultural necessity of coming to terms with modern warfare, which differs in terrain, opponent, and mode of fighting from the twentieth century’s world wars. However, the Call of Duty franchise returned to World War II in 2017, as I discuss further below, suggesting that World War II may be more malleable to various meanings and portrayals of war even in this more cynical time. The war films and video games of the post-­2008 era show soldiers with more agency to take action, but this power offers both positives and negatives. With additional control comes the potential for brutality. In this period, the films, series, and video games set in World War II explore the inhumanity and cruelty of war no less than the media set in contemporary wars. As described at the beginning of this conclusion, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway includes a new visual device called the “action cam” (dubbed by some fans as the “killcam”) that shows a particularly skillful headshot, grenade, or bazooka impact in slow motion with a zoom-­in to show the gory details of the death. The game also features ragdoll physics, meaning that blasted bodies flail or crumple in response to particular wounds (rather than conforming to standard death animations). The World War II films and television series of this period also feature gruesome violence, along with the heightened representation of the American soldier as a perpetrator of violence rather than a victim of it. In The Pacific, one U.S. Marine is shown pulling out the teeth of dead Japanese soldiers to collect gold fillings. In Fury, German prisoners of war are killed by American soldiers. In Inglourious Basterds, a group of Jewish soldiers kills German soldiers in vicious ways, such as beating them with a baseball bat. As a caveat, the cruel behavior of American soldiers takes a different valence in the two films of this period with predominantly African American casts. Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008) follows the melodramatic logic of Saving Private Ryan in visualizing the victimization of African American soldiers, both by the Germans they are fighting and by the racist American authority figures who underestimate them and discriminate against them. Red Tails, on the other hand, shows the active heroism of the Tuskegee airmen, who are more akin to the 1940s-­style men of action. In each of these films, the callous inhumanity of the American military takes the form of white officers who underestimate or intentionally endanger black soldiers. Interestingly, the narrative of a pitiless and cruel military hierarchy actively oppressing well-­ meaning soldiers who are perceived as different is repeated in Mel Gibson’s

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Hacksaw Ridge, though in that case the individual in question, historical Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), is persecuted for his religious beliefs, rather than for his race. The other recent World War II films mentioned here mostly ignore African American contributions to the war (Spike Lee called out Clint Eastwood for completely neglecting the black soldiers who fought on Iwo Jima in Flags of Our Fathers [2006]2); thus this cycle of post-­2008 World War II films and video games mostly explores the culpability of white American soldiers in participating in the cruel realities of war.

Exploring Revenge in Inglourious Basterds Inglourious Basterds explicitly concerns itself with Jewish identity in relation to World War  II and the desire for revenge. Some of Quentin Tarantino’s other films have revolved around the theme of vengeance, such as the two Kill Bill films (2003, 2004), and he has drawn on the centrality of that theme in genres like the Western (particularly the Italian, or “spaghetti,” Western), film noir, martial arts, and horror. The revenge theme in Inglourious Basterds is marked explicitly as Jewish vengeance against the Nazis. The Basterds are a ragtag group of Jewish American soldiers thrown together in order to partake a dangerous mission, much like the commando unit composed of criminals in The Dirty Dozen. The Basterds’ objective is to infiltrate German-­occupied land ahead of the U.S. armed forces, terrorize the Nazis by killing as many as possible with vicious means, and collect one-­hundred Nazi scalps each. The film also tells the concurrent story of Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), whose family is killed in the first scene by the Nazi Col.  Landa (Christoph Waltz), nicknamed the “Jew Hunter.” Shoshanna escapes, moves to Paris, and takes over the management of a movie theater, where she hatches a plan to kill the Nazi high command—­including Hitler himself—­when they gather there for a film premiere. Shoshanna makes a short film that plays while she sets the theater on fire; in it, she intones, “This is the face of Jewish vengeance,” and laughs menacingly. Revenge has always been a part of the American cultural imaginary of World War II, particularly in the hateful vehemence with which the Japanese war was conducted after Pearl Harbor. European immigrants to America also had reason to seek revenge on the Nazis for the abuse of their home countries. In Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943), Tin Can (Dane Clark), whose real name is unpronounceable to his shipmates, feels hatred toward the Nazis for killing his uncle in Greece. However, the film sees this as a problem that must be remedied, since it distracts him from his work on the submarine and keeps him from uniting as a team with the other sailors. In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino makes extensive reference to other genres—­ and, significantly,

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foreign genre films—­allowing him to foreground and reinvigorate the theme of revenge, highlighting a crucial but underrepresented American cultural understanding of World War II. Tarantino marks his inspiration by Italian and Asian film genres with his extreme use of graphic violence. Two scenes in particular stand out in this respect. In the first, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the (non-­Jewish) leader of the Basterds, threatens to kill a Nazi officer if he does not give them information about a possible ambush. More specifically, he says that Sgt. Donny Donowitz (played by horror film director Eli Roth), also known as the “Bear Jew,” will beat him to death with a baseball bat. When the officer refuses, Raine laughs and replies with awful glee, “Watching Donny beat Nazis to death is the closest we get to going to the movies.” After Donny emerges wearing a dirty tank top and carrying a baseball bat, the film shows him bashing the skull of the Nazi officer in a medium shot and then provides a high-­angle long shot of Donny swinging the bat again and again at the Nazi’s head. In a second scene, at the end of the film, Donny and another Basterd infiltrate the Nazi film premiere with weapons and explosives. As the theater catches fire, they break into Hitler’s box seats, firing incessantly with machine guns. Hitler is shown in medium close-­up lying on the ground as the bullets transform his face into an unrecognizable lump of flesh. A slow-­motion close-­up of Donny shows the hatred, but also illicit pleasure, he experiences in killing Hitler, knowing that he himself will soon blow up as well. The sadistic violence of these two scenes, inflicted by American Jews on the enemy, seeks justification in the “Jewish vengeance” of which Shoshanna speaks, yet it also exceeds the bounds of conventional taste by being so extreme. While the violence of a film like Saving Private Ryan is also exceptionally graphic—­showing amputations, guts spilling out, pools of blood, and so on—­it was also fairly impersonal; violence was shown to be the inevitable

FIGURE 41  The Basterds take revenge against the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin

Tarantino, 2009).

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outcome of the machinery of war put into motion. But in Inglourious Basterds, the violence is inflicted against individual persons intentionally and with malice. Although violence is not new to the World War II combat genre, this kind of personalized, sadistic violence previously had not been a typical part of the American story of the war, particularly before the “dirty group” cycle of films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If that kind of violence exists in the popular rendition of the war, it is usually on the part of the pathologized enemy soldiers (especially the Nazis, often depicted as vicious, ruthless, and sometimes mentally unhinged in their excessive loyalty to Hitler and their cruelty against the enemy). A wartime film like Destination Tokyo depicts massive destruction caused by torpedoes shot by the American submarine, causing far more deaths numerically. But its violence is shown in an extreme long shot, and it is illustrated with the explosion of a miniature model of a Japanese ship. Pre-­ 2008, World War II films mostly showed the more gruesome violence being inflicted on American soldiers. Inglourious Basterds departs from this tradition by showing American soldiers inflicting violence rather than being victimized by it. The two violent scenes described above also make the institution of cinema complicit in the violence being enacted, demonstrating a self-­consciousness of genre conventions that is typical of the World War II films and media of this time period. In the first scene, the onlooking Basterds form an audience for the killing of the Nazi officer, hooting and laughing in anticipation of a spectacle that is explicitly compared to “going to the movies.” The actual audience watching Inglourious Basterds adds to this diegetic viewership, invited to take perverse pleasure in this audacious act of brutality. While in this scene, Tarantino appears to be celebrating a destructive fantasy of murderous revenge, the other scene in the diegetic movie theater is somewhat more ambiguous regarding the functions of cinema. The fictional Nazi propaganda film being premiered, Nation’s Pride, tells the story of a German sniper who manages to kill almost three hundred Allied soldiers over three days. (It thus stands as an ironic predecessor to Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, released five years later.) The part of the film that we see is only rapid-­fire shooting and killing, edited together in a disjunctive way, closer to avant-­garde filmmaking than to classical Hollywood or Nazi propaganda. More Sergei Eisenstein than Leni Riefenstahl, it even copies a shot from Battleship Potemkin’s (Eisenstein, 1925) famed Odessa Steps sequence, a close-­up of a figure being shot in the eye. Instead of being critical of the Nazi film, therefore, Tarantino uses the film sequence as an opportunity for additional stylistic experimentation and further intertextual references. He celebrates the diverse history of film style, rather than being critical of propaganda.3 Tarantino clearly finds violence, whether it is perpetrated by the Nazis or by those fighting the Nazis, to be “fascinating,” demonstrating the dangerous power of fascistic imagery that Susan

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Sontag describes in her essay “Fascinating Fascism.”4 Tarantino’s film was characterized as “kosher porn” by his costar Eli Roth,5 but some critics also questioned its excessive violence and the possibility of evoking sympathy for the Nazi victims of gruesome brutality.6 For Tarantino, cinema is complicit in violence, but it also holds out the possibility of resistance to power. Shoshanna’s movie theater offers the one magical opportunity to kill Hitler and end the war. The short film she plays during the massacre identifies who did this and why, giving her vengeance a voice. But only in cinema is such a plan possible—­blowing up a movie theater (with highly flammable nitrate film stock, no less) and thus winning the war. Only in the movies could such a colorful set of characters converge and change the course of history. In its constant intertextual references to other films, Inglourious Basterds venerates cinema’s ability to reenvision entrenched historical narratives, such as the conventional story of World War II. But the film’s critical potential is lost when it appears that only in the movies is such a narrative possible. Because Tarantino’s film is constructed out of bits and pieces of other movie universes, it is a powerful demonstration of the ways cinema constructs national narratives of history. Like the video games discussed above and in the previous chapter, Inglourious Basterds alters the narrative of World War II that has been most commonly received in American cinema. Tarantino visualizes an alternative ending to the war as well as imagining the power of a handful of Jewish individuals (the Basterds and Shoshanna) to strike fear in the heart of the Nazi leadership and, ultimately, to destroy them. Although it presents an almost cartoonish fantasy of power for those who were powerless to stop something as vast as the Holocaust, it also reiterates the horror of the war’s violence and makes that horror felt in the body of the spectator. Like the cynical World War II films of the late 1960s and ’70s such as The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, and Catch-­22, Tarantino’s film does not feature typical combat scenes like the ones found in Destination Tokyo, The Longest Day, or Saving Private Ryan. Inglourious Basterds, like those other atypical combat films, explores the culpability of the American soldier in acts of violence and therefore avoids the mass slaughter of combat scenes portrayed from the remote perspective. Rather, the camera stays close and reveals the ferocious intensity of hand-­to-­hand fighting. Emerging out of a cycle of films that portrayed American soldiers as victims, Tarantino’s film imagines what would happen if that victimhood were taken to another level (in reference to the victims of the Holocaust) and then used as righteous justification for murderous actions.

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Corruption and Sacrifice in Fury David Ayer’s Fury does not play with the narrative of World War  II to the same extent as Inglourious Basterds. In many ways, it returns to the roots of the genre: it follows a small group of soldiers—­in this case, a single tank crew—­as they work toward an important military objective, defending a supply train that will ensure an American victory in Germany. The unit includes a father-­figure leader, appropriately nicknamed “Wardaddy” (Brad Pitt); an untested recruit, Norman (Logan Lerman), who has been in the army for eight weeks and was trained as a clerk-­typist, not a tank driver; and a group of ethnically diverse crewmembers, including a Mexican immigrant, “Gordo” (Michael Peña), a Cajun, “Coon-­Ass” ( Jon Bernthal), and a religious Southerner, “Bible” (Shia LeBeouf ). Like Inglourious Basterds, Fury’s group of soldiers, though conventionally composed, resembles a “dirty group” like that found in The Dirty Dozen or Kelly’s Heroes. The group members behave more like a group of misfits than a set of professionals; they seem to have been driven at least half-­crazy by the war. Moreover, the group is literally dirty throughout the film, caked with dirt, mud, and, occasionally, blood. In part, Wardaddy and his crew are men of action, like the heroes of some 1940s films. When their tank is disabled by a mine on the side of the road, the crew decides to fight against the approaching SS battalion of about three hundred soldiers instead of ditching the tank and hiding. In doing so, they all make the ultimate sacrifice, except for Norman, modeled as the moral conscience of the group, who is later spared by a German soldier and found by the American army. Wardaddy, as the leader, also has some of the exceptional capacity for strategy and execution, outstanding ability to command, and sheer will of a John Wayne figure like Sgt. Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949). But the film also explores the savagery of the American soldiers and the guilt they feel in participating in the pain and horror of war. After Norman proves reluctant to kill German combatants, resulting in the death of some Americans, Wardaddy tries to force him to shoot a German POW in the back. Norman refuses, and Wardaddy ultimately commits the war crime himself. None of the other soldiers looking on appear to be fazed by Wardaddy’s behavior; indeed, other killings of prisoners occur later in the film. Norman serves as a transitional figure between the worlds of war and peace—­he maintains some of the standards and morals of civilization while also adapting to the necessities of war. He learns to kill German soldiers and even comes to “like it.” He is eventually accepted by the rest of the crewmen and earns the moniker “Machine,” yet he seems to retain more of his humanity than the other members of the crew. The other men in the tank are presented as psychologically damaged by their traumatic experience participating in the massive death and destruction

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of the war. It is revealed that the group started fighting together in North Africa years prior and fought through Normandy together to get to Germany, one of the only teams able to survive long enough to do so. They have been changed not only by the violence that has been done to them but by that which they have inflicted on others. One combat scene shows the successful capture of a town from the German army. In the process, many buildings are destroyed or damaged. Nevertheless, as soon as the active fighting is over, the American soldiers begin celebrating in the street. Wardaddy takes Norman and forces his way into an apartment inhabited by a German woman. He finds another woman hiding under the bed and drags her, crying, out of the bedroom. With the implied threat of violence, Wardaddy asks the women to cook some eggs that he has carefully transported in a metal box. Wardaddy also arranges for Norman and the youngest woman, who had been hiding, to go to the bedroom together. Wardaddy says to Norman, “She’s a good, clean girl. If you don’t take her into that bedroom, I will.” Wardaddy had given the older woman two packs of cigarettes when he arrived; it’s unclear whether this was meant as payment for sexual services, compensation for the meal they would cook for him, or a gift meant to show their good intentions. In an earlier scene, Coon-­Ass had claimed that a German woman would let an American soldier have sex with her in exchange for only four cigarettes. Although Fury takes pains to show that the sex between the girl and Norman is consensual, Wardaddy’s implicitly threatening demeanor colors this scene with the dynamics of wartime sexual violence. After Norman and the girl return from the bedroom, giggly and aglow, despite the fact that the two soldiers barged their way in with guns drawn only moments before, the rest of the tank crew arrives, drunk and insulted that they hadn’t been invited to the festivities Wardaddy and Norman have arranged with the two women. Gordo wears a top hat and carries a cane in a parody of high-­society celebration. Bible says grace. Wardaddy insists that the girl be given her plate even though Coon-­Ass has intentionally befouled her egg by elaborately licking it. Bible, with tears in his eyes, tells a story about how they spent days killing wounded horses after a protracted battle in Normandy. This scene serves as a compact demonstration of how war debases or perverts normal life, imbuing everyday actions with violence while confusing or inverting moral values. The tank crew appears as a grotesque caricature of civilization with its perverse dinner party, warped religious observance, tears spilled over dead animals instead of people, and sexual violence presented as wartime romance. Despite their best efforts, the crewmen seem unable to live with any sense of normalcy. This scene also illustrates a lack of distinction between combat and noncombat. The celebration of the success of the battle is also punctuated with destruction. The sexual encounter between the two youths is stained with the

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implication of rape. An outdoor piano that had been providing jaunty music after the end of the battle is blown up by a grenade. Finally, the scene ends when some latecoming bombers blow up the women’s apartment just after the tank crew has left, killing the two women. In Fury, the destructive sublime is no longer contained by distinct combat sequences, though this film has some exciting tank battle scenes. Rather, the contradictory pleasures of the destructive sublime bleed out of the combat scenes into the rest of the diegesis. The hazy line between combat and noncombat, between civilian area and battlefield, makes manifest the ambiguity of contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Although Fury ends with the survival of the ethical compass of the film, Norman, while the other characters are killed, the film questions the morality of the American soldiers. They have certainly lost their empathy for the enemy. Like the “dirty group” films of the 1960s and ’70s, Fury illustrates how war corrupts the soldiers, but the culprit is less the institution of the military, which is shown in films like Kelly’s Heroes or Catch-­22 to be inherently corrupt, and more the experience of war itself. Soldiers like Wardaddy are necessary for these wars—­particularly against enemies like the SS, who are shown forcing children to fight and hanging them if they refuse—­but their humanity is destroyed in the process. The only way for one’s compassion to survive war is to minimize one’s exposure to it, as Norman is able to do only because he is new to the army. American soldiers thus sacrifice their humanity, and their ability to live normally in the world (or at all), so that others, like Norman, can retain theirs. While a sense of sacrifice is still active in these most recent films, it is a very different form of sacrifice than that shown in previous World War II media; this martyrdom is not made to preserve freedom or the virtue of a nation but to mitigate the damage of the horrendously violent and tragic events of world war. Even the more conventionally patriotic Hacksaw Ridge focuses less on Desmond Doss’s duty to his country and instead visualizes his religiously inspired duty to his fellow man—­to save as many of their lives as possible in the midst of a protracted and vicious battle. To do so, he is willing to sacrifice his own life. His religion shields him somewhat from the corruption of war and the military, against whom he must fight in order to have the chance to serve as a conscientious-­objector medic and save lives in the first place. The extreme violence of the film’s combat sequences, its depiction of the callous military leadership, and its portrayal of the debilitating psychological effects of war on Doss’s father, a Great War veteran, connect Hacksaw Ridge to the other post-­2008 films discussed here, despite its more extensive representation of morally righteous actions. Hacksaw Ridge presents World War II not as an extension of Christian morality but as a series of challenges that the moral Christian must overcome.

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The “Good War” Now and into the Future Like the multiplayer modes of World War II shooter games, these recent contributions to the World War II combat genre, Hacksaw Ridge included, mostly vacate the moral universe of the World War II narrative. The “good war” associations have been replaced by conflicting views and internal divisions both within combat sequences and, as in Inglourious Basterds and Fury, in dramatic and dialogue sequences as well. As first-­person shooters make violence part of the banal destruction of the landscape of war, so do these texts make cruelty central as well as ordinary. Looking back through the lens of violent military shooter games, one begins to notice the celebration of destruction and the normalization of violence in earlier texts as well, from the wartime documentaries with their proximate views of the chaos of battle raging around them to the epic reenactments twenty-­five years later that show the distant spectacle of action and death. The year 2017 saw the release of two pieces of World War II media, the film Dunkirk and the video game Call of Duty: WWII (Sledgehammer Games/ Activision), that suggest the beginning of another shift in how American culture understands the war and uses it to reflect on contemporary concerns. Dunkirk shows some of the cruelty inherent in war—­the stranded British and French soldiers face bombs, bullets, torpedoes, and the threat of drowning at every turn—­but it returns to a depiction of war as a place for redemption and moral action. In an era of “postheroic” warfare—­when war is fought more or less invisibly, from the public’s point of view, by Special Forces or drones—­Dunkirk joins other recent films in emphasizing the body at risk, returning to a time when dying in war meant something and soldiers truly risked their lives. However, the film is almost experimental in its reduction of plot and dialogue to a minimum, so while the traditional myths of the “good war” are on display, they are marginalized by the film’s focus on the soldier’s corporeal and perceptual experience. Likewise, Call of Duty: WWII returns to traditional representations of the war, including missions that could be considered the “greatest hits” of World War II combat: Omaha Beach on D-Day, tanks in the Ardennes Forest, fighting among the hedgerows and quaint villages of Normandy. The campaign-­ mode narrative again follows the U.S. Army 1st Infantry Division, the “Big Red One” previously featured in Samuel Fuller’s 1980 film of the same name and the console-­only expansion of Call of Duty 2 (Treyarch/Activision, 2005). For some diversity of perspective, it also features missions with a playable female character (a French Resistance fighter) and a playable African American officer from another regiment. Despite these contemporary updates, early reviews suggest that the game does not do enough to reimagine the World

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War II shooter in the way that Battlefield 1 innovated the form with its return to the First World War. It is yet to be seen whether Dunkirk and Call of Duty: WWII herald the emergence of a new wave of World War II media or whether new contributions to the genre will merely repeat tropes from the late 1990s and post-­2008 cycles. This book has demonstrated that despite the diversity of film style and ideological perspective on the war present within the genre over time, the World War II combat genre as a whole has invested, literally and figuratively, in the destructive sublime—­audiovisual representations that delight in obliteration and violence, not just the reassuring narrative of triumphant military success. This investment disputes familiar characterizations of the genre: that it is composed merely of simplistic propaganda or triumphalist fantasies, that it reflects a culture of consensus, and that it is both formally and politically conservative. The previous chapters have uncovered the ideological contradictions, narrative ruptures, and fractured visual styles that undercut these characterizations. The lack of narrative and aesthetic coherence found in wartime fictional films like Destination Tokyo and Wing and a Prayer (Henry Hathaway, 1944) persisted in the failed continuity of Tora! Tora! Tora!, the tensions between violence and melodrama in Saving Private Ryan, and the grotesque parody of civilization in Inglourious Basterds and Fury. Furthermore, the fascination with devastation in evidence in these texts works against any one-­dimensional reading of narrative. Rather, attention to visual style and kinetic action reveals counternarratives of World War II at the heart of combat sequences. These viscerally thrilling scenes immerse the spectator in another kind of history written on the body and felt in the jolts and shocks experienced by the viewer. These histories tell stories of force and power, action and movement, cruelty and killing, destruction and violence. In their use of both spectacle and various aesthetics of realism, combat sequences give expression to an alternative narrative of World War  II, one emphasizing the destruction caused by the war on a massive scale. In individual texts, this brutality has different effects—­from callously rejoicing in the destruction of the enemy to melodramatically valuing the suffering of Americans. But in all the examples I have examined here, the “good war” narrative of American triumph is only part of the story. Although the war itself has receded into the past, the World War II combat genre has proven itself culturally productive into the future. The genre has evolved not just in its perspective on the war but in what it is capable of thinking through, including political, cultural, and technological developments that came well after the war was over. Combat sequences, for all their carnage and aggression, offer multiple pleasures of their own, often working against the explicit narrative of the film offered by dialogue and plot. They open up an array of meanings, some of

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which may contradict each other. These exciting and horrifying scenes of violence show that there was more to the American World War II experience than the heroism, triumph, honorable sacrifice, and camaraderie usually celebrated and acknowledged in the combat genre. As we have seen time and again, some combat sequences finally give voice to what many experienced in the war, showing it to be a merciless exercise in cruelty, bloodshed, and slaughter.

Acknowledgments

This book emerged out of my doctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh under the guidance of four academic heroes of mine: Adam Lowenstein, Marcia Landy, Lucy Fischer, and Randall Halle. Adam Lowenstein’s teaching first inspired me to draw connections between film style, technology, and culture, and he nurtured the project from its origins as a seminar paper on Black Hawk Down to its expansion as a dissertation. I am grateful to these professors as well as Colin MacCabe, Mark Lynn Anderson, Neepa Majumdar, Jane Feuer, Daniel Morgan, and others for their ongoing support and for modeling scholarly curiosity and academic rigor. Many thanks also go to my fellow doctoral students at Pitt, especially Kyle Stevens, whose camaraderie and intellectual vision were indispensable to this project’s first years. Pitt’s English department provided fellowships and research/travel funds that enabled me to complete initial research at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Stanford University Special Collections. I have been extremely lucky to land in Emory University’s department of film and media studies, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an assistant professor. Matthew Bernstein has been an invaluable mentor, department chair, and friend. His perpetual generosity allowed this project to flourish. I am also grateful to the faculty, staff, and students of the department, who have encouraged and supported me in all aspects of academic life. Michele Schreiber has been a valued source of writing and career advice, and Beretta Smith-­Shomade generously introduced me to the editors at Rutgers. Matthew Bernstein and Karla Oeler read the manuscript multiple times, offering helpful suggestions, big and small. Members of various writing groups at Emory—­including Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Arun Jones, Zach Ludington, 209

210  • Acknowledgments

and Daniel Reynolds—­read smaller portions, and their collegiality, wisdom, and exactness improved this book in countless ways. Students in my two War in Film and Media seminars helped me think through many aspects of the project and inspired novel ideas and renewed motivation. I would also like to thank my graduate research assistants, Drew Devine and Pedro Doreste. Pedro’s assistance in particular was essential; he will see his fingerprints all over this book. I am also grateful to Barbara Hall, who was kind enough to find me additional research materials at the Herrick Library and USC Special Collections as I was finishing up this project. A postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellows program allowed me to complete an initial draft of the book, and a grant from the Emory University Research Committee gave me teaching leave to complete final revisions. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with Rutgers University Press throughout the publication process. I am especially grateful to War and Culture series editor, Daniel Bernardi, who initially saw promise in the manuscript and has been both an editor and a mentor, and to editor-­in-­chief Leslie Mitchner, who guided me expertly through every step. The book was made stronger by feedback from Stacy Takacs, Doug Cunningham, anonymous readers, and many others along the way. My family and close friends enabled the completion of this book with their enduring enthusiasm, patience, and affection. Pixie Allison provided much-­ needed sustenance, both literal and figural, throughout this long journey, and Olga Martins supplied laughter and compassion to keep me going. This book is lovingly dedicated to Kyle Temple; our daughter, Emer; and our son, Dash, who remind me what life is really about. Kyle inspired many parts of this project and sat through countless hours of war movies and Call of Duty games in support of it. Along with Emer and Dash, he makes what I do possible—­and worthwhile.

Notes Introduction 1 It is common practice within video games scholarship to provide the name of

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

the developer, publisher, and year of release in parentheses after the title. In this instance, Gearbox is the game developer (akin to the film production company that actually makes the film) and Ubisoft the publisher and distributor. Debra Ramsay, “Brutal Games: Call of Duty and the Cultural Narrative of World War II,” Cinema Journal 54, no. 2 (2015), 94. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 20. Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), xiii. James Bradley and Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), 353. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998), xxx. Ibid., xix. Studs Terkel applied the phrase “the good war” to World War II in his book The Good War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985). Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ix. Ibid., 132. Edward W. Wood Jr., Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America’s Dedication to War (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006), 19. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 67–­69. For more on how science fiction films remediate the World War II combat genre, see Tanine Allison, “How to Recognize a War Movie: The Contemporary Science Fiction Blockbuster as Military Recruitment Film,” in A Companion to the War Film, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham and John Nelson (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 253–­270.

211

212  •  Notes to Pages 8–14

14 Thomas Schatz, “Old War/New War: Band of Brothers and the Revival of the

WWII War Film,” Film & History 13, no. 2 (2002), 75.

15 John Belton makes the comparison between the musical sequence and the combat

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37

sequence in American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1994), 164. Claudia Springer, “Antiwar Film as Spectacle: Contradictions of the Combat Sequence,” Genre 21 (Winter 1988), 480. Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia, 1986), 130. Springer, 481. Springer is paraphrasing the argument of Richard Dyer’s essay “Entertainment and Utopia,” Movie 24 (1977), reprinted in Dyer, Only Entertainment, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 19–­35. Springer, 483. Ibid., 484. J. David Slocum, “General Introduction: Seeing Through American War Cinema,” in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, ed. J. David Slocum (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9. Ibid., 17. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 42. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 44. David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014), 89. Burke, 77–­78. Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (New York: Continuum, 2002), viii. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 70, italics in the original. In the 1990s, the video game Doom II: Hell on Earth (id Software/GT Interactive Software, 1994) was modified for use in training marines to work as a team. For more on this process, see Corey Mead, War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 18–­22. John Pettegrew, Light It Up: The Marine Eye for Battle in the War for Iraq (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 7. William P. Vogel Jr., “Television Reaches Out,” Popular Science Monthly, June 1946, 73. Charles Jarnot, “History,” in Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ed. Richard K. Barnhart, et al. (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2012), 7. Thomas Schatz, “World War II and the Hollywood ‘War Film,’” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 89. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6. For more on how the Office of War Information influenced Hollywood filmmaking during the war, see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Notes to Pages 15–36  •  213 38 Doherty, 9–­11. 39 George H. Roeder Jr., “War as a Way of Seeing,” in Hollywood and War, 70. 40 Jordan Crandall, “Anything That Moves: Armed Vision,” CTheory, June 15, 1999,

http://​www​.ctheory​.net/​articles​.aspx​?id​=​115 (accessed July 20, 2016).

41 Ibid. 42 Roger Stahl notes that the developers of the Predator drone based their control

43 44 45 46

system on an Xbox processor and brought in a team of video game designers to create an interface that young recruits raised on video games would find intuitive. See Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 91. Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 7. Vanessa Agnew, “What Is Reenactment?,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (2004), 330, 331. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 331.

Chapter 1  “No Faking Here” 1 Doherty, 254. 2 The experiences of Ford, Huston, Wyler, Capra, and Stevens making films for the

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

U.S. government or military during World War II are relayed in Mark Harris’s Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (New York: Penguin Press, 2014). Harris, 55. Ibid., 56, 72. Ibid., 107. The history of John Ford’s Field Photographic Branch and the production of December 7th can be found in Harris, 56–­57, 106–­109, 206–­210; Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 251–­257, 265–­268; Dan Ford, Pappy: The Life of John Ford (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1979), 151–­168, 180; Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 201–­202, 215–­216; and Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 336–­356, 383–­386. James M. Skinner, “December 7: Filmic Myth Masquerading as Historical Fact,” Journal of Military History 55, no. 4 (Oct. 1991), 510. Quoted in William T. Murphy, “John Ford and the Wartime Documentary,” Film & History 4 (Feb. 1976), 7. Ibid., 6. Cited in Harris, 207. Outtakes of the original special-­effects footage and photographs of the water tank filled with mock-­up battleships for December 7th appear in Richard Schickel’s documentary about World War II combat cameramen, Shooting War (DreamWorks, 2000), which originally aired on ABC on December 7, 2000 (the forty-­ ninth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack). Steven Spielberg served as the film’s executive producer and Tom Hanks as its host. Harris, 207. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911–­1967, 2nd ed. ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), 20. A reenacted visualization of J. Stuart

214  •  Notes to Pages 37–45

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

Blackton and Albert E. Smith producing their water tank re-­creations can be seen in the PBS documentary Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-­American War (Daniel A. Miller, 1999). Fielding, 64–­66. Cited in ibid., 68–­69. Ibid., 102–­103. Ibid., 137–­145. Ibid., 166. Cited in ibid., 95. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 99. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: BFI, 1995), 54. Cited in Doherty, 251. Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 82. As quoted in McBride, 360. Ford, 170. Quoted in Eyman, 261. Doherty, 254. Robert Parrish, Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 18–­19. Ford, 174. Nelson B. Bell, “Screen Goes Realistic; This Is the Army Means It,” Washington Post, Oct. 4, 1942, L3. Editors, “The Midway Movie,” Washington Post, Sept. 20, 1942, B6; “Film of Midway Released by Navy,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1942, 19. Bosley Crowther, “Citation for Excellence,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 1942, X3. Ibid. “The Midway Movie,” B6. Sam Harold, “Disappointed in ‘Midway’ Film,” Letter to the Editor, New York Times, Oct. 18, 1942, X5. “Coral Sea: Norman Bel Geddes’ Models Re-­enact Naval Battle,” Life 12, no. 21 (May 25, 1942), 21. Crowther, “Citation for Excellence,” X3. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Bosley Crowther, “San Pietro Is Given ‘A Bell,’” New York Times, July 15, 1945, I9. Edwin Schallert, “San Pietro Brilliant Film of Bitter Battle,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 1945, A2. Gary Edgerton, “Revisiting the Recordings of Wars Past: Remembering the Documentary Trilogy of John Huston,” in Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience, ed. Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 40. Midge Mackenzie, “An Antiwar Message from the Army’s Messenger,” New York Times, April 16, 2000, AR23. John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Knopf, 1980), 119. For more on how Huston’s wartime experiences affected his following films, see Edgerton; and David Desser, “The Wartime Films of John Huston: Film Noir and the Emergence of the Therapeutic,” in Reflections in a Male Eye, 19–­32.

Notes to Pages 46–53  •  215 44 Harris, 267–­269. 45 These cards are reprinted in David Culbert, ed., Film and Propaganda in America: A

Documentary History, vol. 3 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

46 Harris, 280. 47 The documentary Shooting War contains an interview with former World War II

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

cameraman and later Hollywood producer-­director Ed Montagne of the 163rd Signal Photo Company, U.S. Army, in which he confirms that Huston staged the majority of combat footage in San Pietro away from the front lines. Peter Maslowski, Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993), 89. Ibid., 90, italics in the original. Conditions in the Pacific were more amenable to filming—­sunny days, open space, closer contact with the enemy—­and thus many of the more “authentic” documentaries were filmed there, including To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945) and With the Marines at Tarawa (1944). Quoted in Maslowski, 90. Huston, 103; Maslowski, 66. Cited in Mackenzie, AR23. Harris, 383. Schallert, A2; Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: A Thousand and One Nights, Costume Show, with Cornel Wilde, Opens at the Criterion—­Army Film at 55th Street,” New York Times, July 12, 1945, 8. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2000), 52. André Bazin, “Cinema and Exploration,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 156, 158. Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, 51. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, 15. Bazin uses the term “fact” several times to denote concrete rather than symbolic use of cinematic images, especially in neorealist films. In his analysis of Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946), for instance, Bazin contrasts the shot, “an abstract view of a reality which is being analyzed,” with the “image fact,” described as a “fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity” (37). See Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), especially 34–­38. The essay “Cinema and Exploration” combines two separate articles Bazin published in France-­Observateur in April 1953 and January 1956. See Bazin, “Cinema and Exploration,” 162. “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel” was first published in Esprit in June 1946 and then was reprinted in the first volume of Qu’est ce le cinema (Paris: Édition du Cerf, 1958–­1962), 31–­36. Citations here refer to the English translation printed in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 187–­192. Bazin, “On Why We Fight,” 187. Ibid. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 188–­189. Ibid., 191.

216  •  Notes to Pages 54–61

69 The Fighting Lady was produced by Louis de Rochemont and lists credits for tech-

70

71

72

73

74 75

76 77 78 79

nical direction (Lt. Cmdr. Robert L. Middleton, USN; Lt. Dwight Long, USNR; and Philippe de Lacy) but not for direction. Many accounts of the film, including most DVD and video covers and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), claim that the director was an uncredited William Wyler, who directed two other wartime documentaries, The Memphis Belle (1944) and Thunderbolt (with John Sturges, 1945). However, none of the press materials or reviews from the time period mention Wyler’s involvement. The next film in the series was The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, 1945), a “semi-­documentary” (mostly fictionalized, with a substantial amount of expository documentary information and footage) about a double agent working for the FBI to keep the atomic bomb from the Nazis. It appears that Rochemont’s attempt to create a series of “journalistic news features” fizzled out after this, though he did then produce a number of “torn from the headlines” dramas, such as 13 Rue Madeleine (Henry Hathaway, 1947), Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, 1947), and Lost Boundaries (Alfred L. Werker, 1949). The carrier was the USS Yorktown (CV-­10), but for security reasons the name was withheld for the film. This also allows the film to be taken as the general experience of all aircraft carriers. Production details can be found in Thomas M. Pryor, “By Way of Report: Fox to Experiment with The Fighting Lady—­Aurora Miranda Kisses the Air,” New York Times, Sept. 24, 1944, X3; Fred Stanley, “Hollywood Faces Facts: Fox Plans to Make ‘Journalistic’ Film Series—­Man-­Made Desert—­Other Items,” New York Times, June 18, 1944, X3; and “Filming Fighting Lady,” New York Times, Jan. 14, 1945, X3. Nelson B. Bell, “Mother of an Angry Brood: The Fighting Lady Is Vivid Action Story of U.S. Carrier,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 1945, S6; “Thrilling Action in Fighting Lady,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 1945, 15. “Thrilling Action,” 15. Significantly, it is coded as a female body; the ship is described as a “cave” and is both strange to the sailors who make their home in it and a protective womb-­like space that must be defended. Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 124. Iris Barry, “Challenge of the Documentary Film,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, Jan. 6, 1946, 9, 46. See Dziga Vertov, Kino-­Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Irving Pichel, “Seeing with the Camera,” Hollywood Quarterly 1, no. 2 ( Jan. 1946), 140, 142.

Chapter 2  The “Good War”? 1 This document is archived within the Margaret Herrick Library Special Collec-

tions, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif., Leo “K” Kuter Collection, Box 8, Folder 87 [hereafter, Kuter Collection]. 2 Rear projection is a process in which actors perform, sometimes on sets, in front of a large screen onto which prefilmed sequences are projected in order to composite together a foreground and separate filmed background. According to Julie Turnock, rear projection was the standard technology for “process” photography throughout

Notes to Pages 63–70  •  217

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

the 1940s because it allowed composite shots to be completed on set during principle photography, thereby avoiding the need for expensive postproduction. See Julie Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 33–­38. Delmer Daves’s papers are housed at Stanford University: Delmer Daves Papers, M0192, Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. [hereafter, Daves Papers]. Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–­1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 4. Basinger, 13. Ibid., 48–­51. Lary May, “Hollywood and the World War II Conversion Narrative,” in Hollywood and War, 192. Polan, 12. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 48–­49. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 18. Belton, 165–­166. David Bordwell, “Innovation by Accident,” Observations on Film Art, Sept. 10, 2013, http://​www​.davidbordwell​.net/​blog/​2013/​09/​10/​innovation​-by​-accident/. Basinger, 39. Ibid., especially 67–­75. For an example of the claim that Destination Tokyo emulated Air Force, see Edwin Schallert, “Drama and Film: New ‘Monte Cristo’ Feature Announced; John Garfield, John Ridgely Will Join Cary Grant in Destination Tokyo,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1943, 15. Bosley Crowther, “Catching Up: Some Late Afterthoughts on Madame Curie and Two Other Current Films,” New York Times, Jan. 9, 1944, X3. Marjorie Kelly, “An Action-­Packed Submarine Melodrama on Screen at Earle,” Washington Post, Jan. 1, 1944, B4. Producer Jerry Wald was known for taking story ideas directly from newspaper and magazine articles. See, for instance, Thomas M. Pryor, “Jerry Wald, the Big Idea Man; Being a Resume of the Phenomenal Success of a Producer Who Finds His Movie Plots in Newspapers and Magazines,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1947, X5. J. W. Coe, “Suggested Constructive Criticisms of Temporary Script—­Destination Tokyo (From a Submariner’s Standpoint),” cited in Lawrence Suid, Sailing on the Silver Screen: Hollywood and the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 65. A submarine was used to provide weather information to the USS Hornet prior to the Doolittle Raid, but it did not enter Tokyo Bay or put anyone on land (63). Daves Papers, Box 14, Folders 16 and 17. “Destination Tokyo Revised Treatment,” no author listed, Daves Papers, Box 15, Folder 5, citation from pages 17–­18. Crowther, “Catching Up,” X3. “Story Notes,” author and date unknown, Daves Papers, Box 15, Folder 8. For Daves’s claim to have traveled to Mare Island to “live with the submariners,” see his letter to Steve Trilling, dated May 20, 1943, Daves Papers, Box 15, Folder 9. The

218  •  Notes to Pages 70–80

27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

41

document “Destination, Tokyo Summary of Scenes to Be Shot Which Require Navy Cooperation” details the parts of the film that were shot using navy equipment and locations, Daves Papers, Box 16, Folder 5. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Destination Tokyo, a Highly Eventful Submarine Drama, with Cary Grant and John Garfield, Opens at the Strand,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 1944, 9. This set cost about 16 percent of the entire $161,325 budget for set construction. See art director Leo Kuter’s budget dated May 28, 1943, Kuter Collection, Box 8, Folder 90. Lawrence H. Suid explains that the navy demanded an explanation of how Daves came to construct a realistic radar set but were mollified when he explained the designs were based on his own research and he had invented an oscilloscope display instead of the electronic sweeping display of actual radar systems. See Suid, Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film, revised and expanded ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 81–­82. Letter from Jerry Wald to Leo Kuter, dated June 7, 1943, Kuter Collection, Box 8, Folder 90. Suid, Sailing, 69. Hedda Hopper, “Looking at Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1943, 13. Marjorie Kelly, “D.C. Theaters Get Their Bond Drives Under Way,” Washington Post, Jan. 6, 1944, B7. Script dated July, 31, 1943, Daves Papers, Box 14, Folder 18. Kuter collaborated in the construction of two model submarines for Destination Tokyo, one at the scale of 1 inch per foot and one at the scale of ¼ inch per foot. Much of the correspondence between Kuter and director Daves and other production crew members entailed matching the model submarines to the exterior submarine set and footage taken of actual submarines at Mare Island Naval Yard outside San Francisco. For instance, Kuter discusses the miniature model submarines in a letter to producer Jerry Wald dated July 1, 1943, Kuter Collection, Box 8, Folder 90. Crowther, “Destination Tokyo,” 9. Letter from Jerry Wald to Tenny Wright, dated August, 25, 1943, Kuter Collection, Box 8, Folder 90. Biographer Joseph McBride reports that John Ford was on deck on the USS Hornet filming the Doolittle raiders take off: “Cutting in the camera, Ford alternated views of planes taking off with shots of cheering, waving, and saluting sailors and marines.” The rest of McBride’s description does not match the footage that appears in Destination Tokyo. See McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York: Faber & Faber, 2003), 356–­357. Letter from Jerry Wald to Tenny Wright, dated August 25, 1945, Kuter Collection, Box 8, Folder 90. Destination Tokyo follows the typical American portrayal of the Doolittle Raid in representing it as a triumph despite the fact that all the bombers were destroyed, a good percentage of the American fliers died, and the raid did little damage to the Japanese war industry. Lawrence Suid has shown that the story of Carrier X in Wing and a Prayer has no basis in reality; no aircraft carrier was used as a decoy in the Pacific to deceive the Japanese into thinking the American fleet was scattered and afraid to fight. See Suid, Guts & Glory, 89.

Notes to Pages 80–101  •  219 42 Thomas M. Pryor, “The Screen; at the Globe and Gotham,” New York Times, Aug.

31, 1944, 14.

43 Quoted in Suid, Guts & Glory, 87–­88, from the minutes of a November 19, 1943,

story conference.

44 Kathryn Kane, Visions of War: Hollywood Combat Films of World War II (Ann

Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 117.

45 Basinger, 110. 46 Fred Stanley, “Hollywood Turns to ‘Hate’ Films,” New York Times, Feb. 6 1944, X3. 47 Edwin Schallert, “Wing, Prayer Exploits Ship Adventures,” Los Angeles Times, Aug.

4, 1944, 11.

48 Pryor, “At the Globe and Gotham,” 14. He refers here to John Ford’s documentary,

The Battle of Midway (1942), discussed in the previous chapter.

49 Lawrence Suid reports how Ronald Reagan throughout his political career often

recounted a story of a B-17 pilot who refused to bail out after finding that his wounded gunner was unable to move. Said the pilot, “Never mind, son. We’ll ride it down together.” According to Suid, there is no historical record of any such thing occurring, leading Suid to conclude that Reagan had taken the anecdote from Wing and a Prayer. See Suid, Guts & Glory, 89–­90.

Chapter 3  Rationalizing War 1 Quoted in Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes until I Finish Talking (Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday, 1971), 217.

2 Basinger, 182. 3 Letters from Lt. George K. Boggs, USNR, to Jerry Wald, dated May 13 and May 15,

1945, Delmer Daves Papers, Box 19, Folder 13.

4 Letter from George Boggs to Jerry Wald, dated June 15, 1945, Daves Papers, Box 19,

Folder 14.

5 “Air Force Selected Stock,” undated, Daves Papers, Box 19, Folder 15; untitled,

6 7 8 9 10

11

12

undated descriptions of feature and documentary stock footage available, Daves Papers, Box 20, Folder 1. Walter Mirisch, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 327–­328. Ibid., 337–­339. Leonard Mosley, Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 324. Harris, 215–­216. Quoted in Gussow, 216. This quotation was also likely included in some publicity material for the film since the line is mentioned in contemporary press coverage. See, for instance, “Operation Overblown,” Time, Oct. 19, 1962, 91–­92. Peter Lev also mentions that the line appeared in French newspapers. See Peter Lev, “Filming The Longest Day: Conflicting Interests,” Literature/Film Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2005), footnote 2. See, for instance, Richard Oulahan Jr., “The Longest Headache,” Life, Oct. 12, 1962, 113–­120; and “Operation Overblown,” 91–­92. For a longer discussion of the making of the film, see Lev. Quoted in Steven Jay Rubin, Combat Films: American Realism, 1945–­2010, 2nd ed. ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 93. Despite its title, Rubin’s book is not a genre study; instead, it provides production histories for a series of important films from

220  •  Notes to Pages 101–118

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

the American combat genre writ large (including all combat-­centered war films, not just those depicting World War II). Darryl F. Zanuck, “One Man’s Army, Ready for Action,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1962, X7. Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 332. Lev, 264. Rubin, 100–­101. Agnew, 331. Rubin, 94. Ibid., 95. David Denby, “D Day on Film,” New Yorker, June 6, 2014, http://​www​.newyorker​ .com/​culture/​culture​-desk/​d​-day​-on​-film (accessed August 17, 2016). Rubin, 108. Denby. George Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 361. Mosley, 337. Zanuck, X7. Daniel Binns and Paul Ryder, “Re-­viewing D-Day: The Cinematography of the Normandy Landings from the Signal Corps to Saving Private Ryan,” Media, War & Conflict 8, no. 1 (2015), 93–­94. J. David Slocum, “Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking Violence in the World War II Combat Film,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 3 (Spring 2005), 44. For mention of Zanuck’s cigar smoking, see Rubin, 93, or Oulahan, 113. Robert Warshow, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular Culture, enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001 [originally 1946]), 107. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 110. Slocum, “Cinema and the Civilizing Process,” 46. Philip J. Landon, “From Cowboy to Organization Man: The Hollywood War Hero, 1940–­1955,” Studies in Popular Culture 12, no. 1 (1989), 30. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37. Kevin Kelly, “$25 Million Tora! Tora! Lacks Reality,” Boston Globe, Oct. 7, 1970, 24. Walter Lord was a popular historian known for combining detailed historical research with journalistic methods of storytelling. His best-­known work is A Night to Remember (R&W Holt, 1955) about the sinking of the Titanic. The review comparing Tora! Tora! Tora! to Walter Lord is “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (film review), Independent Film Journal, Buying and Booking Guide, Section 2, Sept. 30 1970, 1345. Hiroshi Tasogawa, All the Emperor’s Men: Kurosawa’s Pearl Harbor (Milwaukee, Wis.: Applause, 2012), 184. Quoted in ibid., 16. Richard Fleischer commentary track, Tora! Tora! Tora! (20th Century Fox Cinema Classics Collection, 2006), DVD. Tasogawa, 183.

Notes to Pages 118–132  •  221 42 Ibid., 18. 43 The production files for Tora! Tora! Tora! are housed within the Margaret Herrick

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Library Special Collections, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif., Elmo Williams Papers [hereafter, Williams Papers]. Letter from Tetsu Aoyagi to Elmo Williams, dated February 1, 1968, Williams Papers, Box 16, Folder 153, pg. 1. Letter from Elmo Williams to publicist Irving Hoffman, dated March 20, 1968, Williams Papers, Box 9, Folder 86. Letter from Stanley H. Goldsmith to Stan Hough, dated September 28, 1968, Williams Papers, Box 9, Folder 85. Memo from Stanley H. Goldsmith to Tetsu Aoyagi, dated November 1, 1968, Williams Papers, Box 9, Folder 85. Uncredited author (presumably Elmo Williams himself ), “TORA TORA TORA, Production Ideas,” undated, Williams Papers, Box 10, Folder 104. Memo from Herb Cheek to Elmo Williams, “Miniatures for Tora, Tora, Tora,” April 14, 1967, Williams Papers, Box 10, Folder 97, pg. 1. Kelly, “Tora! Tora! Lacks Reality,” 24. Fleischer DVD commentary. “Film Reviews: Tora, Tora, Tora,” Variety, Sept. 23, 1970, 13. Early American war films set in the Vietnam War include Samuel Fuller’s China Gate (1957), A Yank in Viet-­Nam (Marshall Thompson, 1964), and To the Shores of Hell (Will Zens, 1966).

Chapter 4  Nostalgia for Combat 1 Among others who use the phrase “end of cinema,” Jon Lewis’s edited collection

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The End of Cinema as We Know It (New York: New York University Press, 2001) explores the ways filmmakers in the 1990s mourned the loss of old techniques of moviemaking and experimented with new film technologies. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 37. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 3–­4. Ibid., 15. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. Edward N. Luttwak, “Toward Post-­Heroic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May/ June 1995), 109–­122. Tom Brokaw published The Greatest Generation in 1998. Stephen Ambrose’s best-­ selling histories of World War II include Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), and D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). Planning for the National World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., began in the 1990s, but the memorial was not finished until 2004. The National World War II Museum, originally named the D-Day Museum, opened in 2000.

222  •  Notes to Pages 132–138

10 “Virtuous war” is James der Derian’s label for a technologically enhanced virtual

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

war that is “bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic.” See James der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-­Industrial-­Media-­Entertainment Network (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), xv. Robert Burgoyne, “Eye in the Sky: Aerial Vision and Somatic Witnessing” (paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Chicago, Ill., March 2017). Jean Baudrillard, “History: A Retro Scenario,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 44. Ibid., 47, italics in the original. Toby Haggith and Stuart Bender have demonstrated that the shaky, handheld cinematography was not typical of most newsreel footage taken by the combat cameramen of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and other photographic units of World War II. Instead, they were trained to hold their cameras steady, even while shooting handheld, to ensure standards of professional quality despite the unforgiving circumstances of filming. See Toby Haggith, “D-Day Filming—­for Real: A Comparison of ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ in Saving Private Ryan and Combat Film by the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit,” Film History 14 (2002), 335–­341; and Stuart Bender, Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 103–­107. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-­photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001 [1992]), 224. Steven Spielberg, “Of Guts and Glory,” Newsweek, Summer 1998, 66. David Giammarco, “The Private War of Steven Spielberg,” Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ont.), July 23, 1998, C1. Spielberg, 66. Quoted in Lewis Beale, “The ‘Private’ Mogul,” Daily News (New York), July 19, 1998, 2. Paul Fussell, “The Guts, Not the Glory, of Fighting the ‘Good War,’” Washington Post, July 26, 1998, C1. All these are mentioned in Spielberg, 66. Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–­1968 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), especially 155–­164. Spielberg, 66. Quoted in Giammarco, C1. Christopher Probst, “The Last Great War,” American Cinematographer 79, no. 8 (Aug. 1998), 32. Ibid., 33, 36. Ibid., 33. Spielberg and Kaminski were also influenced by the still photographs taken by Robert Capa at Omaha Beach, which (because of developer error) were blurry and distorted, giving them a dramatic effect. See Haggith, 335–­336. Probst, “Last Great War,” 34–­36. Quoted in Stephen Pizzello, “Five-­Star General,” American Cinematographer 79, no. 8 (Aug. 1998), 45. Bender, 109. Probst, “Last Great War,” 34. Quoted in Giammarco, C1. Bill Desowitz, “Cinematic Siblings Still Thinking Analogue in a Digital World,” Editors Guild Magazine 1, no. 1 ( Jan./Feb. 2012).

Notes to Pages 138–154  •  223 34 Quoted in Michael Goldman, “Spielberg Goes Retro,” Millimeter 31, no. 1 ( Jan.

2003), 18–­24.

35 Quoted in Michael Goldman, “Spielberg’s Take on Visual Effects” (interview), Mil-

limeter 36, no. 3 (May–­June 2008), 13.

36 Cara Buckley, “The Cold War and Other Front Lines,” New York Times, Oct. 18,

2015, AR1.

37 James Caryn, “An Intricate Tapestry of a Heroic Age,” New York Times, Sept. 7,

2001, E1.

38 Jean Oppenheimer, “Close Combat,” American Cinematographer 82, no. 9 (Sept. 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

2001), 33. Quoted in Probst, “One Nation, Under Siege,” 42. Ibid., 43–­44. Bazin, “On Why We Fight,” 188. Quoted in Jody Duncan, “One for All Time,” Cinefex 107 (Oct. 2006), 45. In World War II, corpsmen were U.S. Navy medics who provided battlefield medical services for the U.S. Marine Corps, who did not have their own trained medical staff. John Bradley was a pharmacist’s mate second class in the U.S. Navy, but served with the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, of the 5th Marine Division during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Jean Oppenheimer, “Virtual Coloring,” American Cinematographer 82, no. 9 (Sept. 2001), 39. Bill Desowitz, “Cinesite Contributes Complicated CGI to Ambitious HBO Miniseries,” Animation Magazine 15, no. 9 (Sept. 2001), 23–­24. Quoted in Jody Duncan, “More War,” Cinefex 86 ( July 2001), 88. Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 1996), 27–­37. “Make something that looks cool” were the instructions given to visual effects art director Alex Jaeger by Michael Bay and visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig. See Duncan, “More War,” 88. For more about this famous shot, see chapter 1 and Doherty, 231–­232. Quoted in Ron Magid, “Allied Powers,” American Cinematographer 82, no. 8 (Aug. 2001), 73. Duncan, “One for All Time,” 51. Ibid., 58. Ron Magid, “Blood on the Beach,” American Cinematographer 79, no. 12 (Dec. 1998), 58. Ibid., 60. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres, 81. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 29. Ibid., 44. Interestingly, an early draft of Robert Rodat’s screenplay published online describes Capt. Miller in this earlier fashion: “Relaxed, battle-­hardened, powerful, ignoring the hell around them. He smiles, puts a cigar in his mouth, strikes a match on the front of DeLancey’s helmet and lights the cigar.” See Robert Rodat, Saving Private Ryan (screenplay), Internet Movie Script Database, http://​www​.imsdb​.com/​ scripts/​Saving​-Private​-Ryan​.html (accessed July 21, 2017). Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2000), 61. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 21. Quoted in Goldman, “Spielberg Goes Retro,” 18–­24.

224  •  Notes to Pages 155–163

62 David E. Williams, “Symbolic Victory,” American Cinematographer 87, no. 11 (Nov.

2006), 79.

63 The “Revolution in Military Affairs” is a military doctrine imagining a future in which

advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles, robotics, and information technology create radically altered warfare conditions, including reduced casualties and the waging of war from a distance. For more, see der Derian, xv. 64 Spielberg, 66.

Chapter 5  Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground 1 The making of Medal of Honor is detailed in Jamie Russell’s Generation Xbox: How

Videogames Invaded Hollywood (East Sussex, U.K.: Yellow Ant, 2012), 192–­202.

2 Colin Campbell, “How Steven Spielberg Inspired Today’s Top Shooters,” IGN,

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10

May 29, 2012, http://​www​.ign​.com/​articles/​2012/​05/​30/​how​-steven​-spielberg​ -inspired​-todays​-top​-shooters (accessed June 19, 2016). Russell, 194–­196. Video game designer Ron Gilbert is typically credited with coining the term “cut-­ scene” when he was working on the LucasArts adventure game Maniac Mansion (1987). By “cut-­scene,” he meant a film-­like scene that cuts away from the action of the game to show the player another part of the story, or what is happening elsewhere. Today, it means any noninteractive portion of the game that plays more like a video. Cut-­scenes have also been called “cinematics.” According to Michael C. C. Adams, only 27 percent of the military saw combat during World War II. See his Best War Ever, 11. An immediate postwar study conducted by Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall concluded that 75 to 85 percent of U.S. soldiers most likely did not ever fire their weapons while at the front lines in both the European and Pacific theaters. See S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Toronto: George J. McLeod, 1947), 56–­57. 3D computer graphics are mathematical representations of three-­dimensional objects and spaces. Although ultimately 3D models are usually displayed in two dimensions on a computer or television screen, they differ from 2D graphics by containing spatial data. In the design process, they can be rotated, animated, and modified within virtual space along three axes, whereas 2D graphics may have the appearance of three dimensions (through shading, for instance) but exist only on a “flat” plane. Earlier video games experimented with first-­person perspective, such as Maze War (Steve Colley, Greg Thompson et al., 1973), Spasim ( Jim Bowery, 1974), Battlezone (Atari, 1980), MIDI Maze (Xanth Software F/X/Hybrid Arts, 1987), and Hovertank 3D (id Software/Softdisk, 1991). Johannes Breuer, Ruth Festl, and Thorsten Quandt, “In the Army Now: Narrative Elements and Realism in Military First-­Person Shooters,” Proceedings of DiGRA 2011 Conference, http://​www​.digra​.org/​dl/​db/​11307​.54018​.pdf (accessed June 30, 2016). Chris Pereira, “Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Was 2015’s Best-­Selling Game as Franchise Passes 250 Million Units,” Gamespot, Jan. 14, 2016, http://​www​.gamespot​.com/​ articles/​call​-of​-duty​-black​-ops​-3​-was​-2015s​-best​-selling​-ga/​1100​-6433848/ (accessed June 19, 2016). “Activision Blizzard Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Financial Results,” Business Wire, Feb. 11, 2016, http://​www​.businesswire​.com/​news/​home/​ 20160211006451/​en (accessed March 6, 2017).

Notes to Pages 163–173  •  225 11 John Gaudiosi, “Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Generates $550 Million in 72 Hours,”

12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30

31

Fortune, Nov. 11, 2015, http://​fortune​.com/​2015/​11/​11/​call​-of​-duty​-black​-ops​-3​ -sales/ (accessed June 19, 2016). Gabriel Madway, “Activision Says Call of Duty Series Tops $3 Billion,” Reuters, Nov. 27, 2009, http://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​idUSTRE5AQ37V20091127 (accessed June 12, 2010). See, for instance, Nick Wadhams, “Battling in Fallouja 1 Minute, in Halo the Next,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2, 2005, A3; and Jose Antonio Vargas, “Virtual Reality Prepares Soldiers for Real War,” Washington Post, Feb. 14, 2006, A1. Karin A. Orvis, Jennifer C. Moore, et al., “Are Soldiers Gamers? Videogame Usage among Soldiers and Implications for the Effective Use of Serious Videogames for Military Training,” Military Psychology 22 (2010), 147. “United States Submarines Receive Video Game Consoles and Software,” Business Wire, Aug. 27, 2002. Wadhams, A3. Vargas, A1. Noelene Clark, “Help the Troops? This Retired Soldier Is Game,” Dayton Daily News, July 14, 2012, D10. Phillip Thompson, “Heed the ‘Call’, World War II Game Looks, Feels Like the Real Thing,” Army Times, Mar. 14, 2005, 37. Nina B. Huntemann, “Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in Military-­Themed Video Games,” in Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, ed. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne (New York: Routledge, 2010), 233. Ibid. Luke Caldwell and Tim Lenoir, “Wargaming Futures: Naturalizing the New American Way,” in Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 265. Call of Duty PC game (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2003), text on the back of the box. For more on the use of digital effects in contemporary films, see Tanine Allison, “Visual Effects: The Modern Entertainment Marketplace (2000–­Present),” in Editing and Special/Visual Effects, ed. Charles Keil and Kristen Whissel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 172–­185. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999), 219. Altman’s essay “A Semantic/ Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” reprinted as an appendix to Film/Genre, was originally published in Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (Spring 1984), 6–­18. Richard Slotkin, “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality,” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (2001), 469. Basinger, 51. Unlockable features in a video game typically refer to bonus elements or extra levels that only become available after completing particular objectives, such as finishing a mission. Brian Rejack, “Toward a Virtual Reenactment of History: Video Games and the Recreation of the Past,” Rethinking History 11, no. 3 (2007), 418. For more on the ways that documentary footage can disrupt meaning in World War II video games, and how the games work against this, see Jaimie Baron, “Digital Historicism: Archival Footage, Digital Interface, and the Historiographic Effects in Call of Duty: World at War,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4, no. 2 (2010), 303–­314. Scott A. Lukas, “Behind the Barrel: Reading the Video Game Gun,” in Joystick Soldiers, 78.

226  •  Notes to Pages 173–183

32 “Call of Duty: World at War,” Internet Movie Firearms Database, http://​www​

.imfdb​.org/​wiki/​Call​_of​_Duty:​_World​_at​_War (accessed June 24, 2016).

33 Doug Perry, “Medal of Honor” (review), IGN, Nov. 18, 1999, http://​www​.ign​.com/​

articles/​1999/​11/​19/​medal​-of​-honor (accessed June 24, 2016).

34 David Kushner, “Lord of the Fans: How to Keep Trigger-­Happy Gamers in Line,”

35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55

56 57

58

Wired 17, no. 11 (Nov. 2009), http://​www​.wired​.com/​magazine/​2009/​10/​pg​ _games​_modernwarfare2/ (accessed July 21, 2017). Russell, 196. James Newman, “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some Thoughts on Player-­ Character Relationships in Videogames,” Game Studies 2, no. 1 ( July 2002), http://​ www​.gamestudies​.org/​0102/​newman/ (accessed June 30, 2016). Alexander Galloway, “Origins of the First-­Person Shooter,” in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 39–­69. Carol Clover, “The Eye of Horror,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 193. In a more recent example, released after Galloway published his chapter, Hardcore Henry (Ilya Naishuller, 2015) presents the point of view of a cyborg assassin throughout the entire film; unlike the examples Galloway discusses, it is clearly influenced by the conventions of the first-­person shooter video game. Galloway, 68. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 63. Crandall. Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxii. Ibid., xix. Mead, 18–­22. Randy Nichols, “Target Acquired: America’s Army and the Video Game Industry,” in Joystick Soldiers, 40. Joanna Bourke, Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-­Play Invade Our Lives (London: Virago, 2014), 203–­204. Mead, 133–­135. USC Institute for Creative Technologies (website), http://​ict​.usc​.edu/ (accessed August 4, 2017). For more on the Institute for Creative Technologies, see der Derian, “Virtuous War Goes to Hollywood,” chap. 7 in Virtuous War, 153–­178. Crogan, 98. Ibid., 48. Robin Andersen and Marin Kurti, “From America’s Army to Call of Duty: Doing Battle with the Military Entertainment Complex,” Democratic Communiqué 23, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 51. For more on video games and simulation, see Gonzalo Frasca, “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 221–­236. Crogan, 48. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 121. Ibid., 126.

Notes to Pages 183–202  •  227 59 Crogan, 74. 60 In Battlefield 1942 and most of the rest of the franchise, a single-­player campaign

61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

is possible, but the gameplay does not include a specific narrative or characters; it just entails playing against AI-­controlled opponents. The Battlefield: Bad Company series within the franchise (EA DICE/Electronic Arts, 2008–­2010) departs from the others by featuring a full-­scale campaign mode with an overarching narrative and set characters. Johan Höglund, “Magic Nodes and Proleptic Warfare in the Multiplayer Component of Battlefield 3,” Game Studies 14, no. 1 (2014), http://​gamestudies​.org/​1401/​ articles/​jhoeglund (accessed June 27, 2016). Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation,” in Hollywood and War, 61, 63. Ibid., 64. Lynda Boose, “Techno-­Muscularity and the ‘Boy-­Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf,” in Hollywood and War, 282. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-­Modern Science Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 196–­197. William Saletan, “War Is Halo: Killing Real People Becomes a Video Game,” Slate, July 22, 2008, http://​www​.slate​.com/​id/​2195751/ (accessed June 29, 2016). Mead, 115–­153. Jean Baudrillard, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” in Hollywood and War, 303. Matthew Thomas Payne, Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 39. Baron, 304. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Zied Rieke and Michael Boon, “Postmortem—­Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” Game Developer 15, no. 3 (2008), 25. Quoted in Payne, 77.

Conclusion 1 Brian Glyn Williams, Counter Jihad: America’s Military Experience in Afghanistan,

Iraq, and Syria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 216.

2 See, for instance, Paul Lewis, “Spike Lee Gets in Clint Eastwood’s Line of Fire,”

Guardian, June 6, 2008, 17.

3 Although uncredited, Eli Roth, the horror film director and actor playing Donny,

directed Nation’s Pride. A more extended version Nation’s Pride is available in the Special Features of the DVD release. 4 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 6, 1975, reprinted online at http://​www​.nybooks​.com/​articles/​1975/​02/​06/​fascinating​ -fascism/ (accessed Sept. 8, 2016). 5 Mark Brown, “Cannes Film Festival: Only One Winner When Tarantino Takes on Hitler,” Guardian, May 20, 2009, https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​film/​2009/​may/​ 20/​inglourious​-basterds​-tarantino​-cannes​-film​-festival (accessed March 15, 2017). 6 See, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg, “Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger,” Atlantic, Sept. 2009, https://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​magazine/​archive/​2009/​09/​hollywoods​ -jewish​-avenger/​307619/ (accessed March 15, 2017).

Selected Bibliography Adams, Michael C. C. The Best War Ever: America and World War II. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Agnew, Vanessa. “What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46, no. 3 (2004): 327–­339. Allison, Tanine. “How to Recognize a War Movie: The Contemporary Science Fiction Blockbuster as Military Recruitment Film.” In A Companion to the War Film, edited by Douglas A. Cunningham and John Nelson, 253–­270. Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. ———. “Visual Effects: The Modern Entertainment Marketplace (2000–­Present).” In Editing and Special/Visual Effects, edited by Charles Keil and Kristen Whissel, 172–­185. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Arthur, Paul. “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments).” In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov, 108–­134. New York: Routledge, 1993. Baron, Jaimie. “Digital Historicism: Archival Footage, Digital Interface, and the Historiographic Effects in Call of Duty: World at War.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4, no. 2 (2010): 303–­314. Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Revised edition. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Bazin, André. “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel.” In Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, edited by Bert Cardullo, translated by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, 187–­192. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. What Is Cinema? Volumes 1 and 2. Edited and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 1972. Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1994. Bender, Stuart. Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013. Binns, Daniel, and Paul Ryder. “Re-­viewing D-day: The Cinematography of the Normandy Landings from the Signal Corps to Saving Private Ryan.” Media, War & Conflict 8, no. 1 (2015): 86–­99. Bodnar, John. The “Good War” in American Memory. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

229

230  •  Selected Bibliography

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Burgoyne, Robert. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Crandall, Jordan. “Anything That Moves: Armed Vision.” CTheory, June 15, 1999, http://​ www​.ctheory​.net/​articles​.aspx​?id​=​115. Crogan, Patrick. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. der Derian, James. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-­Industrial-­Media-­Entertainment Network. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001. Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. Revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911–­1967. 2nd edition. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Grusin, Richard. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Haggith, Toby. “D-Day Filming—­for Real: A Comparison of ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ in Saving Private Ryan and Combat Film by the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit.” Film History 14 (2002): 335–­341. Harris, Mark. Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. Höglund, Johan. “Magic Nodes and Proleptic Warfare in the Multiplayer Component of Battlefield 3.” Game Studies 14, no. 1 (2014), http://​gamestudies​.org/​1401/​articles/​ jhoeglund. Huntemann, Nina B., and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds. Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–­130. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Kane, Kathryn. Visions of War: Hollywood Combat Films of World War II. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Landon, Philip J. “From Cowboy to Organization Man: The Hollywood War Hero, 1940–­1955.” Studies in Popular Culture 12, no. 1 (1989): 28–­41. Luttwak, Edward N. “Toward Post-­Heroic Warfare.” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May/June 1995): 109–­122. Maslowski, Peter. Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II. New York: Free Press, 1993. Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Newman, James. “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some Thoughts on Player-­ Character Relationships in Videogames.” Game Studies 2, no. 1 ( July 2002), http://​www​ .gamestudies​.org/​0102/​newman/.

Selected Bibliography  •  231

Payne, Matthew Thomas. Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Pettegrew, John. Light It Up: The Marine Eye for Battle in the War for Iraq. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Polan, Dana. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–­1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–­1968. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. ———. “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory.” Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 27–­37. Ramsay, Debra. “Brutal Games: Call of Duty and the Cultural Narrative of World War II.” Cinema Journal 54, no. 2 (2015): 94–­113. Rejack, Brian. “Toward a Virtual Reenactment of History: Video Games and the Recreation of the Past.” Rethinking History 11, no. 3 (2007): 411–­425. Rubin, Steven Jay. Combat Films: American Realism, 1945–­2010. 2nd edition. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011. Schatz, Thomas. “Old War/New War: Band of Brothers and the Revival of the WWII War Film.” Film & History 13, no. 2 (2002): 74–­78. ———. “World War II and the Hollywood ‘War Film.’” In Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, edited by Nick Browne, 89–­128. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Slocum, J. David. “Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking Violence in the World War II Combat Film.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 35–­63. ———, ed. Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Slotkin, Richard. “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality.” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (2001): 469–­498. Springer, Claudia. “Antiwar Film as Spectacle: Contradictions of the Combat Sequence.” Genre 21 (Winter 1988): 479–­486. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Suid, Lawrence. Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Revised and expanded edition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. ———. Sailing on the Silver Screen: Hollywood and the U.S. Navy. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996. Terkel, Studs. The Good War. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985. Virilio, Paul. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. New York: Continuum, 2002. ———. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular Culture. Revised and enlarged edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wood, Jr., Edward W. Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America’s Dedication to War. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006.

Index Bold denotes photo Abrams, J. J., 196 action cam, 198 action games, 160–­161, 162, 165, 181 Activision, 163 Adams, Eddie, 142 Adams, Michael C. C., 6, 224n5 Addy, Wesley, 116 Adefarasin, Remi, 139 Adventures of Tintin, The, (film), 138 aesthetics: of failure, 31; new aesthetic history of World War II combat genre, 3–­4; technology as one of many determining factors of, 24; use of term, 16; World War II as necessitating new aesthetics of representation, 62. See also combat aesthetics Affleck, Ben, 139 Afghanistan, war in, 129, 132, 158, 163, 165, 187, 196, 197 African Americans, 198, 199 Agar, John, 114 Agnew, Vanessa, 23, 102 Air Force (film), 67, 70, 93, 98, 147 Aldo Raine (character in Inglourious Basterds), 200 algorithms, of combat genre video games, 159 Aliens (film), 7 All Quiet on the Western Front (film), 37 Altman, Rick, 159, 166, 172 Alvin Bloomfield (character in Call of Duty 2), 168

Ambrose, Stephen, 132 Ameche, Don, 79, 81 America Enters the War (film), 50 Americanization of Emily, The (film), 114 American Sniper (film), 10, 197, 201 America’s Army (video game), 181 “Analytic of the Sublime” (Kant), 11 Andersen, Robin, 182 Andes, Keith, 119 Andrews, Dana, 34, 79, 82 animation, use of, 57, 166, 176, 198 Anka, Paul, 103 Annakin, Ken, 101 antiheroes, 112, 121, 122, 125, 148 Aoyagi, Tetsu, 118 Apocalypse Now (film), 112, 128, 148, 195 archival footage, use of, 78, 99, 139, 169, 170, 171, 172 Arkin, Alan, 123 Arletty, 103 armed vision, 5, 13–­16, 27, 179 Army Times, 164 Arthur, Paul, 55–­56 Atari, 180 At the Front in North Africa (film), 100 August, Joe, 33 authenticity: elements of used in The Longest Day, 102; as emerging style, 52; of wartime combat documentaries, 29–­60 authority, in The Longest Day, 96, 105–­111 233

234  •  Index

Avid (editing software), 138, 143 Axis & Allies (board game), 160 Axis & Allies (video game), 160 Ayer, David, 203 Aykroyd, Dan, 139 back-­projection techniques, 120 “bad war,” 5, 7, 192–­208 Baldwin, Alec, 150 Balsam, Martin, 119 Band of Brothers (Ambrose), 132 Band of Brothers (HBO miniseries), 2, 128, 139, 143, 144, 145–­146, 154, 170 “band of brothers” theme, 155 Baron, Jaimie, 188 Barry, Iris, 58 Basinger, Jeanine, 7, 64, 65, 67, 87, 121, 167 Bataan (film), 7, 67, 93, 134, 168 Battlefield (video game series), 157, 162, 184, 189, 197–­198 Battlefield 1 (video game), 198, 207 Battlefield 1942 (video game), 184, 184, 197, 227n60 Battlefield 1943 (video game), 197 Battlefield: Bad Company (video game), 227n60 Battleground (film), 97, 112, 134, 149 Battle Los Angeles (film), 7 Battle of Britain (film), 95 Battle of Midway, The (film), 17, 29, 30, 31, 36, 40–­44, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 63, 88, 98, 99, 102, 133, 135, 179, 180, 195 Battle of Napoleon (video game), 160 Battle of San Pietro, The (film), 17, 18, 22, 31, 44, 45–­49, 47, 50, 51, 52, 56, 59, 120, 133, 135, 153, 180 Battle of Santiago Bay, The (film), 36 Battle of the Bulge (film), 23, 95, 98 Battle of the Coral Sea, model of, 43, 55 Battleship (film), 7 Battleship Potemkin (film), 201 Battlezone (video game), 180, 224n7 Baudrillard, Jean, 132, 187 Bay, Michael, 129, 133, 139, 145, 223n48 Bazin, André, 22, 32, 51–­53, 56, 60, 140, 215n60 Beach, Adam, 141, 149 Beckinsale, Kate, 139 Begone Dull Care (film), 57

Bel Geddes, Norman, 42, 43, 44, 55 Bell, Nelson, 41 Belton, John, 66 Bender, Stuart, 222n14 Bernthal, Jon, 203 Best War Ever: America and World War II, The (Adams), 6 Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (video game), 160, 162 Bible (character in Fury), 203, 204 Bigelow, Kathryn, 197 Big Red One, The (film), 167 Bingo Harper (character in Wing and a Prayer), 81, 90 Binns, Daniel, 108 bird’s-­eye view, 16, 42, 144, 161 black-­and-­white cinematography: consideration of for Saving Private Ryan, 136; in December 7th, 34; and Kodalithic look, 155; in The Longest Day, 95, 107; in Pearl Harbor, 139; Spielberg on use of, 137; in Task Force, 99. See also monochromatic cinematography black comedies, 97, 125 Blackton, J. Stuart, 36 Blech, Hans Christian, 101 blood on the lens, 138, 140, 154, 176 Blumentritt, Gunther, 101, 104 blurry cinematography: in The Battle of Midway, 25, 29, 63; in The Battle of San Pietro, 45, 47, 48, 51; in The Fighting Lady, 56, 59; as form of damaged or imperfect footage, 49; in framing of Battle of Coral Sea diorama, 42; in Kon-­Tiki, 52; as making audience aware of camera and its proximity to violence, 18, 31; in Saving Private Ryan, 153–­154; as signifying authenticity, 17 board games, influence of on development of video games, 160 bodily trauma of combat, visualization of, 176 Bodnar, John, 64 Bogart, Humphrey, 178 Bogdanovich, Peter, 40 Boggs, George K., 98 Bolton, A. J., 40 Bomb Alley (video game), 160 Bombardier (film), 87, 93

Index  •  235

Boose, Lynda, 186 Bordwell, David, 66 Born on the Fourth of July (film), 148, 186 Bourke-­White, Margaret, 33 Bourne (film series), 196 Bradley, James, 6 Bradley, John (“Doc”), 100, 141, 146, 150, 223n43 Bradley, Omar, 113, 114, 115, 124 Bratton, Rufus S., 116 Brevig, Eric, 145, 223n48 Bridges at Toko-­Ri, The (film), 113 Bridge Too Far, A (film), 95 Brokaw, Tom, 6, 132 Broken Seal, The (film), 117 Bromwich, David, 12 Brothers in Arms (video game series), 197 Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (video game), 192–­193, 195, 197 Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (video game), 2–­4, 3, 8, 15, 17, 22, 23, 28, 162, 166–­167, 169–­170, 171, 174, 184, 192, 193, 198 Bruzzi, Stella, 50 bureaucratic hero, 97, 111–­115, 116, 116, 119, 122, 123, 147, 148 Bureau of Motion Pictures (Office of War Information), 35 Burgoyne, Robert, 22 Burke, Edmund, 5, 11–­13, 16 Butch (character in Destination Tokyo), 78 Buttons, Red, 108 Cady, Jerome, 88 Caldwell, Luke, 164 Call of Duty (video game series), 11, 28, 32, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 171, 174, 176, 184, 189, 197, 198 Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (video game), 165, 166, 167, 167, 168, 168, 206 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (video game), 190, 197 Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (video game), 163, 190, 197 Call of Duty: World at War (video game), 173, 174, 175, 176, 188, 197 Call of Duty: World War II (video game), 206, 207 cameo spots, 103

cameras: action cam, 198; digital cameras/ digital imaging (see digital cameras/ digital imaging); first-­person camera, 178; high-­angle shots (see high-­angle shots); impact of changes in technology of, 24, 37; as infallible eye, 55; as instrument of war, 15; integration of into guided missiles, 15–­16; kill-­cam, 198; long shots (see long shots); modification of, 136; shaking/shaky camerawork (see shaking/shaky camerawork); special “vision” of, 58, 60; use of 90-­degree angle shot, 107–­108, 108; use of as proxy for audience, 59; use of in The Battle of Midway, 40. See also cinematography Capa, Robert, 153 Capra, Frank, 32, 48, 50, 52, 64 Captain America: The First Avenger (film), 5 Cassidy, Capt. (character in Destination Tokyo), 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74 Castillo, Pvt. (character in Call of Duty 2), 168 Castle Wolfenstein (video game), 160, 161, 162 Casualties of War (film), 148 Catch-­22 (film), 97, 123, 125, 195, 202, 205 celluloid recording/photography, 129, 130, 133–­138, 140, 143, 154, 155, 169 censorship, 37, 135 CG (computer-­generated) imagery. See computer-­generated (CG) imagery Chastain, Jessica, 197 chess, as example of war game, 160 Christ-­like figures, 149–­150 cigar motif, 112 cinema, end of, 129, 221n1 “Cinema and Exploration” (Bazin), 52, 215n61 CinemaScope format, 107, 110 cinematic excess, 8 cinematography: back-­projection techniques, 120, 144; black-­and-­white cinematography (see black-­and-­white cinematography); blurry cinematography (see blurry cinematography); erratic movements in (see erratic movements in cinematography); handheld cinematography (see handheld cinematography); low-­angle cinematography, 46, 135, 138, 144, 152;

236  •  Index

cinematography (continued) monochromatic cinematography, 136, 140, 155 (see also black-­and-­white cinematography); rear projection, 61, 75, 87, 89, 94, 98, 216–­17n2; wide-­angle cinematography, 144 cinéma vérité movement, 44 Citizen Kane (film), 87 Citizen Soldiers (Ambrose), 132 Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker, 137 Clark, Dane, 68, 199 Clash of Steel (video game), 160 Classical Film Violence (Prince), 135 classical Hollywood styles/conventions: The Battle of Midway as breaking with, 44; described, 31, 39, 41, 49, 79, 80, 81, 92, 94; as norm in early 1940s documentary/ newsreel filmmaking, 36; as routinely ignored in wartime combat films, 67 close-­ups: in The Battle of Midway, 17; in The Battle of San Pietro, 17; in Catch-­22, 123; in December 7th, 9, 36; in Destination Tokyo, 75, 78, 90; experience of disorientation and domination as expressed through, 13; in Flags of Our Fathers, 146; impact of, 19; in Inglourious Basterds, 200; in The Longest Day, 109, 109; in Nation’s Pride, 201; reluctance of filmmakers to use, 103; in Saving Private Ryan, 127; in trailers, 1, 193; use of in cut-­scenes, 165 Clover, Carol, 178 Cohn, Harry, 40–­41 Cold War, 105, 106, 117, 118, 121, 124, 190, 191, 197 Cole, Robert G., 170 color desaturation, 138, 143. See also desaturation of color Combat! (TV series), 98 combat, nostalgia for, 127–­156 combat aesthetics: The Battle of Midway as pioneering new style of, 42–­44; in Destination Tokyo, 74–­79; fluctuation in over time, 194; overview, 16–­24; role of, 195; in Wing and a Prayer, 86–­93 combat genre: construction of space in, 67–­94; World War II as giving birth to, 64–­65. See also World War II combat genre

combat sequences: as expressing alternative narrative of World War II, 207–­208; function of, 8–­11; as polysemic, 194; power of to disrupt/complicate meanings of war constructed by dialogue or plot, 194; variation in, 194 Company of Heroes (video game), 163 Computer Bismarck (video game), 160 computer-­generated (CG) imagery: in Band of Brothers, 143, 144; in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, 2; in Flags of Our Fathers, 145–­146, 145, 155; precision of, 27; in Saving Private Ryan, 129, 147, 153; Spielberg’s use of, 135, 138; in video games, 22 Connery, Sean, 103 “Continuity Sketches—­‘Destination Tokyo’—­Process-­Miniature-­Straight” (Kuter), 61–­62, 63 conversion narrative, 65, 82, 83, 172 Cookie (character in Destination Tokyo), 68, 71, 73 Cookie Cunningham (character in Wing and a Prayer), 82–­83, 85, 111 Coon-­Ass (character in Fury), 203, 204 Cooper, Bradley, 197 corruption, in Fury, 203–­205 Corvette K-­225 (film), 93 Cota, Norman, 111, 112, 113, 114 Crandall, Jordan, 5, 15, 16, 19, 21, 179 Crane, Richard, 83 Crapgame (character in The Dirty Dozen), 122 Crash Dive (film), 69 Crisp, Donald, 41 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 11 Crogan, Patrick, 159, 180, 181, 182, 183, 189 Crowther, Bosley, 41–­42, 43, 44, 68, 70, 77 Cukor, George, 32 Curtiz, Michael, 99 cut-­scenes: in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, 3, 170, 171; in Call of Duty, 159, 166, 169, 175; coining of term, 224n4; defined, 165–­166; in Medal of Honor, 159, 169, 176; in video games, 173; in World War II shooters, 183, 186, 188 Damon, Matt, 149–­150, 153, 153 Danny (character in Pearl Harbor), 139, 140, 149, 150 Dark Passage (film), 178

Index  •  237

Darwell, Jane, 41 Davenport, Harry, 34, 35 Daves, Delmer, 63, 67, 69, 70, 77, 98, 217–­18n26 D-­Day (Ambrose), 132 December 7th (film), 9, 19, 31, 32–­36, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49, 50, 51, 59, 97, 98 decision-­making, as theme, 104 Deer Hunter, The (film), 148, 186, 195 Denby, David, 103–­104, 106 Denley, Pvt. (character in Call of Duty 2), 168 Department of Veterans Affairs, 196 der Derian, James, 222n10 de Rochemont, Louis, 38, 54, 216n69, 216n70 desaturation of color, 2, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 155 Desert Victory (film), 48 Destination Tokyo (film), 11, 61, 62, 63, 67–­79, 72, 76, 77, 89, 99, 120, 170, 172, 199, 201, 202, 207 destructive sublime: in The Battle of Midway, 59; in The Battle of San Pietro, 59; in December 7th, 59; embedded perspective as activating, 19; examples of, 185; examples of films engaging in, 59; in The Fighting Lady, 59; first-­person shooters as indulging in, 194; in Flags of Our Fathers, 146; full flowering of in World War II combat genre, 159; in Fury, 205; impeding of full expression of, 171; as labeled by Bazin as “Nero complex,” 60; in The Longest Day, 134; new shaping of in 1960s and ’70s films, 96; power of to unsettle conventional notions of World War II, 195; in Saving Private Ryan, 133, 134, 147, 156; use of term, 4–­5, 11–­13, 28; in video games, 158, 188; in Wing and a Prayer, 92; World War II combat genre as investing in, 207; World War II combat genre’s invocation of, 16, 17, 20, 79 Devil’s Brigade, The (film), 121 digital cameras/digital imaging, 129, 130, 137, 143–­147, 152, 154, 155, 156, 225n24 Digital Domain, 146 Direct Cinema movement, 22, 38–­39, 44, 56 dirt on the lens, 136, 154

Dirty Dozen, The (film), 97, 121–­122, 125, 126, 195, 199, 202, 203 “dirty group” films, 97, 121–­122, 201, 203, 205 disorientation, 9, 13, 83, 177 Dive Bomber (film), 99 documentary: examples of (see The Fighting Lady [film]; Report from the Aleutians [documentary]; Shooting War [documentary]; To the Shores of Iwo Jima [government-­produced documentary]; With the Marines at Tarawa [government-­ produced documentary]); expository documentary, 44; image of as making visible and invisible, 59; reconstruction as component of, 39; use of term, 43 documentary footage: attempt to recreate look of, 138; mimicking of in films, 145; in Sands of Iwo Jima, 17, 99–­100; in Task Force, 98; in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 87; in Tora! Tora! Tora!, 120; use of in television series, 97–­98; use of in video games, 169, 186, 190, 225n30; in Wing and a Prayer, 26, 80, 86, 87–­88, 89–­90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 170 documentary reenactment, history of, 36–­39 Doherty, Thomas, 14, 31 Donny Donowitz (character in Inglourious Basterds), 200 Donovan, “Wild” Bill, 33 Doolittle, Jimmy, 150 Doolittle Raid, 69, 77, 78, 79, 87, 99, 218n40 Doom (video game), 14 Doom II: Hell on Earth (video game), 180 Doss, Desmond, 199, 205 Dots (film), 57 “Double V” campaign, 65 DreamWorks Interactive, 157, 158 Drifters (film), 38 drones, 14, 20–­21, 155, 187, 206, 213n42 Dunkirk (film), 5, 196, 206, 207 Duvall, Robert, 112 Dwan, Allan, 99 Dye, Dale, 158, 170, 171 Dyer, Richard, 8–­9 Eastwood, Clint, 5, 122, 129, 133, 140, 146, 152, 155, 169, 199, 201 Eastwood, Kyle, 146 Edgerton, Gary, 45

238  •  Index

editing: analytical editing, 104; in Band of Brothers, 143; in The Battle of Midway, 36, 41, 63; continuity editing, 49, 56, 74; of cut-­scenes, 165; in Destination Tokyo, 76; in The Longest Day, 109, 109; in Nation’s Pride, 201; nonlinear editing, 129; point-­ of-­view editing, 75; in Saving Private Ryan, 128, 138, 154; strategies of, 9; use of to create illusion of continuous space and time, 87; in Why We Fight, 53; in Wing and a Prayer, 86 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 101, 113, 124 Eisenstein, Sergei, 201 Electronic Arts, 157 embedded perspective/point of view: in The Battle of Midway, 50, 59, 63, 195; in The Battle of San Pietro, 22, 48, 50, 51, 59; in Call of Duty: World at War, 175; as corresponding to subjective perspective, 21; in December 7th, 46; described, 179–­180, 196; in documentaries, 63; in The Fighting Lady, 55; in first-­person shooter video games, 177; in Nation’s Pride, 109; as opposed to remote perspective, 17–­19, 18; in Saving Private Ryan, 32, 136, 147, 177; use of term, 16; in World War II films of late 1990s/early 2000s, 129 Empire of the Sun (film), 5 Engel, Sam, 33, 41 engendering space: in Destination Tokyo, 70–­74; in Wing and a Prayer, 82–­85 English Patient, The (film), 5 ENR (silver retention processing), 136, 155 erratic movements in cinematography, 25, 46, 48, 48, 50, 133, 135, 144 errors in filmmaking. See filmmaking: “errors”/“mistakes” in Escape to Nowhere (film), 134 Esprit (magazine), 52 Evans, Gene, 112 Evans, Walker, 33 Evelyn (character in Pearl Harbor), 139 expository documentary, World War II combat documentary as example of, 44 “eye for battle,” 14 Eythe, William, 81 failure, aesthetic of, 31 faking, of war footage, 37

Farago, Ladislas, 117 “Fascinating Fascism” (Sontag), 202 Faye, Alice, 84 feminine/femininity: associations of in Destination Tokyo, 71, 74; associations of in Wing and a Prayer, 82, 85, 88; war as affecting experiences of, 64 fictional films: blurring of lines between documentary and fictional filmmaking during World War II, 32, 42; examples of, 7, 17, 37, 44, 170, 207; insertion of archival/documentary footage into, 25, 78, 86, 91, 94–­95, 96, 99, 170; style of, 50; use of footage from, 50, 61, 75, 87, 93, 98; U.S. government as seeking to oversee development of, 14 Fielding, Raymond, 38 Field Photograph Branch (Field Photo), 33, 213n6 Fighter Squadron (film), 97, 99 Fighting Lady, The (film), 18, 31, 38, 51, 53–­58, 57, 59, 73, 97, 98, 99, 102, 120, 180, 216n69 “fighting machines,” soldiers as, 186 Fighting Seabees, The (film), 114 film, as form of propaganda, 14. See also propaganda films filmmaking, “errors”/“mistakes”: in The Battle of Midway, 17, 25, 29, 31, 44, 52; in The Battle of San Pietro, 17, 52; Bazin on, 53; causes of, 133; in combat documentaries, 194; examples of, 196; Kaminski’s and Spielberg’s introduction of, 136; in Kon-­ Tiki, 52; in Saving Private Ryan, 138 Firesquad (film), 134 Fires Were Started (film), 39 first-­person camera, 178 first-­person shooter games: as adaptations of World War II combat genre, 165–­172; Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway as example of, 195; Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 as example of, 2, 4, 15, 17; Call of Duty as example of, 27, 32, 159; described, 18, 24–­25, 173, 177–­188, 189, 194, 197, 206; emergence of, 161–­162; GoldenEye 007 as example of, 157; Medal of Honor as example of, 27, 32, 159; targeting viewpoint in, 16; World War II as backdrop to, 3, 190 Flags of Our Fathers (Bradley), 6

Index  •  239

Flags of Our Fathers (film), 5, 17, 19, 100, 128, 140–­143, 145–­146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159, 176, 185, 186, 199 Flaherty, Robert, 38 flatness, of screen images, 75, 87, 89, 94, 120 Flat Top (film), 99 Fleischer, Richard, 118, 121 Flying Tigers, The (film), 113 Fonda, Henry, 32, 41, 103, 105 Ford, John: accounts by on filming combat, 53; aesthetics as pioneered by, 136; The Battle of Midway (film), 29, 40, 41, 44, 45, 88, 135, 195; December 7th (film), 32–­33, 35, 36; filming Doolittle Raid, 78; use of embedded cameras by, 177 Fox Movietone, 38 fragmentary style, 51 Friday the 13th (film), 178 Frye, Gordon, 46, 48 Fukasaku, Kinji, 118 Fuller, Samuel, 112, 167, 206 Full Metal Jacket (film), 128 Full Spectrum Warrior (video game), 181 Fury (film), 97, 195, 196, 203–­205, 206, 207 Fussell, Paul, 6–­7, 10, 134, 159 Gable, Clark, 32 Gagnon, Rene, 100, 141, 151 Galloway, Alexander, 178–­179, 189 Garfield, Andrew, 199 Garfield, John, 67, 68, 72 Garner, James, 114 Gerber, Bud, 150 Gettysburg: Turning Point (video game), 160 Gibson, Mel, 198 Gilbert, Ron, 224n4 god’s-­eye view, 19, 109, 110 GoldenEye 007 (video game), 157 “good war” myth/narrative/associations: breaking down of, 97, 125; combat sequence as moving beyond ideologies of, 122; connection of with War on Terror, 182; conversion narrative as standard trope of, 82; current and future status of, 206–­208; establishment of, 64–­67; exhaustion of in films, 124; films about, 159; films as participating in establishment of, 63; nostalgia, 190; World War II as “good war,” 6–­8, 24, 126, 142, 194; in

World War II shooter games, 158, 159, 171, 193, 198 Gordo (character in Fury), 203, 204 Gould, Elliott, 124 Grable, Betty, 84 Grainger, Edmund, 100 Grant, Cary, 67 Grapes of Wrath, The (film), 33 graphic violence, 28, 129, 135, 140, 146, 172, 176–­177, 192, 200 Great Escape, The (film), 5, 98 Greatest Generation, The (Brokaw), 132 Great Raid, The (film), 128 Green Berets, The (film), 113, 125 Greengrass, Paul, 196 Grierson, John, 38, 39, 43 group loyalty, as theme, 83, 103 Guadalcanal Diary (film), 7, 67 Gulf War, 187 Gus Chisholm (character in Wing and a Prayer), 83, 85 Hacksaw Ridge (film), 196, 199, 205, 206 Haggith, Toby, 222n14 Hale, Alan, 68, 71 Hall, Matt, 158 Hallam Scott (character in Wing and a Prayer), 81, 83, 85 Halloween (film), 178 Halsey, William, Jr., 112 handheld cinematography: in The Battle of Midway, 49; in The Battle of San Pietro, 49; in Bourne films, 196; in December 7th, 46; and embedded perspective, 16, 17, 24; experience of disorientation and domination as expressed through, 13; of Ford and MacKenzie, 41; Kaminski’s use of, 136; in Pearl Harbor, 140, 144; in Saving Private Ryan, 32, 135, 138, 143, 177; as shift in film style, 86 Hangmen Also Die (film), 66 Hanks, Tom, 127, 128, 139, 177 Hardcore Henry (film), 17, 226n39 Harris, Mark, 46 Hartnett, Josh, 139 Hathaway, Henry, 63, 87 Hawai Middowei daikaikûsen: Taiheiyô no arashi (film) (Storm over the Pacific and I Bombed Pearl Harbor), 99

240  •  Index

Hawkeye (character in MASH), 124 Hayden, Sterling, 32 Hayes, Ira, 100, 141, 149, 150 Hearts of Iron (video game), 160, 161 Hell Divers (film), 98–­99 heroism: American soldiers as victim-­heroes, 147–­152, 155, 197; bureaucratic hero; representation/depiction of, 147–­148; in video games, 185; Western hero, 112, 114. See also antiheroes high-­angle shots, 24, 107, 108, 109, 110, 152, 200 Hiller, Arthur, 114 Hindenburg (airship), 38 Hinz, Werner, 104 Hirsch, Ed, 144 Hirschmann, Peter, 158, 176 historical re-­creation, paradigms of, 49–­51 Hitchcock, Alfred, 17 Hoeglund, Johan, 185 Hollywood: burdens felt by during wartime, 65; as era of narrative innovation in 1940s, 66; involvement of directors in making films for military during World War II, 32; as looking to digital future, 129; role of in providing entertainment to troops, 85; typical ending of films made by, 66; U.S. government as seeking to oversee development of films produced by, 14; war years as financial boon to, 15; World War II as popular setting for, 5. See also classical Hollywood styles/conventions Hollywood and War: The Film Reader (Slocum), 11 Hollywood Quarterly, 58 “holocaustal” events, 6 home front, as culture of consensus, 65 Hopper, Hedda, 40, 71, 72 Horvath, Sgt. (character in Saving Private Ryan), 150 House on 92nd Street, The (film), 216n70 Hovertank 3D (video game), 224n7 Howard, John, 101 Huntemann, Nina B., 164 Hüppauf, Bernd, 186 Hurst, Paul, 34 Hurt Locker, The (film), 197 Hussein, Saddam, 158

Huston, John: accounts by on filming combat, 53; aesthetics as pioneered by, 136; The Battle of San Pietro (film), 22, 25, 45–­49, 50, 135, 153; making government-­ or military-­sponsored documentary films, 32; Report from the Aleutians (documentary), 135; as son of Walter Huston, 34; use of embedded cameras by, 177 Huston, Walter, 34, 35 Hutton, Robert, 68 I Bombed Pearl Harbor (film), 99 imagemaking modes, 5, 17, 21–­24 Industrial Light & Magic, 147 information warrior, 111 Inglourious Basterds (film), 5, 97, 195, 196, 199–­202, 200, 206, 207, 227n3 Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), 181 Internet Movie Database (IMDb), 216n69 Internet Movie Firearms Database, 173 In the Valley of Elah (film), 196 Intolerance (film), 53 Into the Eagle’s Nest (video game), 160 Iraq, war in, 7, 129, 132, 158, 163, 165, 187, 196 Jaeger, Alex, 223n48 Jenkins, Henry, 183 Jennings, Humphrey, 39 Jewish identity, 199, 200, 202 Johnson, Julian, 35 Jurassic Park (film), 135, 138, 157 Jürgens, Curd, 101, 103, 104 Kaminski, Janusz, 135, 136 Kane, Kathryn, 86, 87 Kanin, Garson, 33 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 12 Kellogg, Ray, 33, 36, 113 Kelly (character in Kelly’s Heroes), 122 Kelly, Kevin, 121 Kelly’s Heroes (film), 97, 121, 122, 125, 126, 195, 202, 203, 205 Kennedy, John F., filming of assassination of, 38 Kilgore, Col. (character in Apocalypse Now), 112 Kill Bill (film series), 199 kill-­cam, 198 Kimmel, Husband E., 119 “Kino-­Eye” (Vertov), 58

Index  •  241

Kon-­Tiki (film), 52 Kosovo War, 132, 155 Kramer, Alwin, 116 Kriegsspiel, as example of war game, 160 Kurosawa, Akira, 117–­118 Kurti, Marin, 182 Kuter, Leo (“K”), 61–­62, 63, 70, 71, 98 Kyle, Chris, 10, 197 Lady in the Lake (film), 17, 178 Landa, Col. (character in Inglourious Basterds), 199 Landon, Philip J., 113, 114 Lang, Fritz, 66 Laurent, Mélanie, 199 Lawford, Peter, 101, 103 Lawrence of Arabia (film), 110 Lean, David, 110 LeBeouf, Shia, 203 Lee, Spike, 5, 199 Leenhardt, Roger, 53 Lenoir, Tim, 164 lens flares, 17, 29, 30, 49, 136, 154, 196 Lerman, Logan, 203 Letters from Iwo Jima (film), 5, 128–­129, 140, 152 Life magazine, 42 Lions for Lambs (film), 196 Literary Digest, 37 location shooting, 86, 87 Lone Survivor (film), 197 Longest Day, The (film), 11, 19, 20, 23, 95, 100–­115, 103, 108, 109, 110, 112, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 134, 135, 137, 146, 149, 170, 172, 182, 194, 202 Longest Day, The (Ryan), 101 long shots: in The Battle of San Pietro, 46; in December 7th, 9; in Destination Tokyo, 75, 78, 201; as example of remote perspective, 73; in The Fighting Lady, 56; in Inglourious Basterds, 200; in Lawrence of Arabia, 110; in The Longest Day, 106, 107, 108, 111, 117, 120; in Nation’s Pride, 109; in Saving Private Ryan, 127; in Wing and a Prayer, 82 Lord, Walter, 117, 220n37 Lord of the Rings (film series), 146 Lorentz, Pare, 38 Los Angeles Times, 45

Lovat, Lord, 101 low-­angle cinematography, 46, 135, 138, 144, 152 Lucas, George, 5 Lukas, Scott A., 173 Luttrell, Marcus, 197 MacArthur (film), 96 MacKenzie, Jack, Jr., 40, 41, 44 Mackenzie, Midge, 45 Malden, Karl, 114 Malick, Terrence, 128 Maltz, Albert, 69 Maniac Mansion (video game), 224n4 March of Time, The (newsmagazine), 38, 39 Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office, 180 Marine Doom (video game), 180–­181 Marshall, E. G., 116, 116 Marshall, George, 119 Marshall, S. L. A., 224n5 Martel, Brian, 170 Marton, Andrew, 101 masculinity: association of sky with in Destination Tokyo, 83; and the bureaucratic hero in The Longest Day, 111–­115; models/ forms of, 67, 97, 147, 185, 197; war as affecting experiences of, 64 MASH (film), 97, 123, 125 Maslowski, Peter, 46–­47, 48 Massive (software), 146 Masuda, Toshio, 118 May, Lary, 65 Maya (character in Zero Dark Thirty), 197 Maze War (video game), 224n7 McBride, Joseph, 218n38 McLaren, Norman, 57 meaning-­making structures, 172 Medal of Honor (video game), 32, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 169, 171, 174, 176, 184, 189, 190, 197 Medal of Honor: Airborne (video game), 197 media-­making, opposed forms of, 21–­24 Mellett, Lowell, 35 melodrama: defined, 130, 131; nostalgia and, 131; theory of, 129, 130, 148; use of, 156, 171, 198, 207 Memphis Belle, The (film), 135

242  •  Index

Mexican Revolution, motion pictures made of real combat during, 37 MGM, 98, 99 MIDI Maze (video game), 224n7 Midway (film), 99 Mike Conners (character in Destination Tokyo), 68, 69, 73 military biographies, 96 military reports, integration of documentary footage from, 62 military shooter video games: appeal of, 190; described, 176, 182, 197, 206; rise of, 158, 163, 164; Saving Private Ryan as engendering genre of, 157; shift away from World War II in, 198 Miller, Capt. (character in Saving Private Ryan), 127–­128, 149, 150, 151, 154, 166, 223n58 Milo Minderbinder (character in Catch-­22), 123 miniature re-­creations/models: of Battle of Coral Sea, 43, 44, 55; in The Battle of Santiago Bay, 36; in December 7th, 9, 34, 36, 42, 59, 60; in Destination Tokyo, 61, 62–­63, 62, 75–­76, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86–­87, 93, 201, 218n35; impact of, 67, 94; moving away from use of, 86; potential of, 16; and remote perspective, 20; in Tora! Tora! Tora!, 120, 120; in Wing and a Prayer, 87, 89, 93 Miracle at St. Anna (film), 5, 129, 198 Mirisch, Walter, 99 misinformation, in Tora! Tora! Tora!, 116–­121 mistaken perception, in Destination Tokyo, 73, 83 mistakes in filmmaking. See filmmaking: “errors”/“mistakes” in Mitchell, William J., 133 Mitchum, Robert, 103, 104, 111–­112, 112, 113 Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute (Naval Postgraduate School), 181 models. See miniature re-­creations/models monochromatic cinematography, 136, 140, 155. See also black-­and-­white cinematography Montagne, Ed, 215n47 moral legitimization, 150

motion blur, 136, 138 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 101 Movietone News, 39 Mr. C (character in December 7th), 34 multiplayer matches, in video games, 27, 159, 172, 174, 181, 183–­185, 184, 188, 206 Mutual Film Corporation, 37 Naked Kiss, The (film), 178 narration, use of, 50–­51, 59, 169, 170–­171. See also voice-­overs narrative structure: in Destination Tokyo, 67–­70; of The Longest Day, 101; of Wing and a Prayer, 80–­82 National Archives and Records Administration, 170 National Museum of American History, 170 National World War II Memorial, 132, 221n9 National WWII Museum, 132, 170 Naval Postgraduate School, 181 “Nero complex,” 53, 60 Newman, James, 177 newsreels: in Battleground, 97; described, 37–­38, 43; faux newsreels in Pearl Harbor, 139–­140, 144; footage from in December 7th, 34, 36; footage from in World War II shooter games, 169; internalization of strategies of, 39; Kane on, 86; The March of Time as example of, 54; use of footage from, 50, 52, 61, 62, 75 Newsweek, 134, 135 New York Times, 41, 42, 45, 58, 68, 87, 101, 138 Nichols, Bill, 44 Night Mail (film), 38 Night to Remember, A (Lord), 220n37 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 129, 158, 182, 196 1943: The Battle of Midway (video game), 160 90-­degree angle shot, 107–­108, 108 Nita (doll in Destination Tokyo), 71, 72, 74 Nolan, Christopher, 5 Norman (character in Fury), 203, 204, 205 Normandy Beach (idea for video game), 157 nostalgia: for celluloid recording, 133–­138, 143, 153, 154, 155; for combat, 127–­156; defined, 131; for “good war,” 190; for war, 130–­156 Notorious (film), 17

Index  •  243

Objective, Burma! (film), 7, 134 objective point of view, 21, 109, 125 objectivity, in The Longest Day, 105–­111 observational mode, 44 Oddball (character in The Dirty Dozen), 122 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 33 Office of War Information. See U.S. Office of War Information Only Angels Have Wings (film), 114 on-­screen titles, use of, 103 “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (Bazin), 52 “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation and the Newsreel” (Bazin), 52, 215n63 Open Book, An (Huston), 48 O’Shea, Kevin, 82 Oswald, Gerd, 101 outdoor shooting, 86, 87, 99 Owens, Michael, 140 Pacific, The (TV series), 195, 196 Paisà (film), 215n60 Panaflasher, 136 Panavision, 136 Parrish, Robert, 33, 35, 41 Parsons, Louella, 40 patriotism, 158 Patton (film), 10, 11, 96, 114–­115, 115, 124, 149 Payne, Matthew Thomas, 187 Pearl Harbor (film), 11, 19, 128, 139–­140, 140, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150, 152, 185 Pearl Harbor, attack on as symbol, 65 Peckinpah, Sam, 135 Pemsel, Max, 101 Peña, Michael, 203 Pennick, Jack, 33 perception: mistaken perception, 73, 83; problem of, 83 perceptual technologies, integration of into military affairs, 14 perspective, in video games, 177–­182 Peter Conway (character in Sands of Iwo Jima), 114 Pettegrew, John, 14 Phillippe, Ryan, 141 “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (Burke), 11

photochemical filmmaking: digital imagemaking as rendering obsolete alleged truth value of, 133; ENR as process of, 155; as laden with ideological meanings, 137; nostalgia for, 129; replacement of, 140, 143; Saving Private Ryan as homage to, 138; Spielberg’s and Kaminski’s use of, 136; use of digital means to achieve appearance of, 156 Pichel, Irving, 41, 58 Pier, Kenneth M., 40 Pills (character in Destination Tokyo), 68 Pitt, Brad, 200, 200, 203 Platoon (film), 128, 148, 195 Play Dirty (film), 121 Pluskat, Werner, 101 Polan, Dana, 63, 65, 66, 67 “postheroic” warfare, 158 Predator (film), 178 Predator drone, 213n42 Preiss, Wolfgang, 101 Prelude to War (film), 50, 64 Prince, Stephen, 135 Prince, William, 68 “Production Ideas” (Williams), 120 propaganda films, 14, 37, 45, 48, 52, 53, 201 Pryor, Thomas, 80, 88 Public Relations Bureau (War Department), 48 Pvt. (and later Sgt.) Roland Roger (character in Call of Duty 2), 167–­168 Rafe (characterf in Pearl Harbor), 139, 140, 149, 150 Ramsay, Debra, 2 Rat Patrol (TV series), 97–­98 Raymond, Lt. (character in Destination Tokyo), 69, 73 Raytheon, 187 Reagan, Ronald, 219n49 rear projection, 61, 75, 87, 89, 94, 98, 216–­17n2 reconstruction, as documentary component, 39 record, as imagemaking mode, 5, 17, 21–­24 re-­creations: in Battlefield 1942, 184; of Bel Geddes, 42; in Call of Duty 2, 166; in December 7th, 9, 19, 36, 40; in Destination Tokyo, 70, 77, 86–­87; in The Green Berets,

244  •  Index

re-­creations (continued) 125; in The Longest Day, 96, 100, 102, 107; in Pearl Harbor, 19, 139, 145; preference for, 37; in Sands of Iwo Jima, 100; in Saving Private Ryan, 137, 166; strongly inculcated practices of, 39; in Tora! Tora! Tora!, 19, 118; two paradigms of historical re-­creation, 49–­51; in war films and video games of 1990s and later, 22. See also miniature re-­creations/models Redacted (film), 196 Red Tails (film), 5, 196, 198 reenactment: according to Bazin, 52; Ford’s investment in ethos of, 33; history of documentary reenactment, 36–­39; as imagemaking mode, 5, 17, 21–­24, 31, 36, 96, 99, 100, 124, 125, 139, 141, 142, 146, 182 Rejack, Brian, 170 remote perspective/point of view: in Catch­22, 123; as corresponding to objective perspective, 21; in December 7th, 36, 49, 59; defined, 16; described, 124; examples of, 73; in Flags of Our Fathers, 146; in The Longest Day, 20, 96, 106, 107, 108, 119, 120, 123, 194; as opposed to embedded perspective, 19–­21; prevalence of use of, 24, 31, 129, 195; in Tora! Tora! Tora!, 195; use of term, 9, 16 Report from the Aleutians (documentary), 48, 135 representation, nature of World War II as necessitating new aesthetics of, 62 revenge, exploration of in Inglourious Basterds, 199–­202 “Revolution in Military Affairs,” 155, 224n62 Rickles, Don, 122 Ridgely, John, 67, 69 Riefenstahl, Leni, 201 Risk (board game), 160 RKO Radio Pictures, 87 Robards, Jason, 119 Robocop (film), 178 Rodat, Robert, 223n58 Roeder, George H., Jr., 15 Roland Roger (character in Call of Duty 2), 167–­168 Rommel, Erwin, 104 Roosevelt, Theodore, 105 Rosenthal, Joe, 100, 140

Roth, Eli, 200, 202, 227n3 Ruge, Friedrich, 101 Ryan, Cornelius, 101 Ryan, Pvt. (character in Saving Private Ryan), 149–­150, 151, 152–­153, 153, 154 Ryder, Paul, 108 sacrifice, in Fury, 203–­205 Sahara (film), 67, 168 Saints and Soldiers (film), 128 Sands of Iwo Jima (film), 17, 19, 86, 99, 100, 102, 104, 112–­113, 114, 147, 203 satellites, as technological development, 131 Saving Private Ryan (film), 2, 5, 17, 18, 32, 123, 126, 127–­129, 128, 131, 137, 140, 143, 147, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 166, 171, 172, 176, 177, 178, 185, 193, 194, 198, 200, 202, 207 Schallert, Edwin, 45, 88 Schatz, Thomas, 8, 14 Schindler’s List (film), 136 Schulberg, Budd, 33 Schwartzman, John, 139 science fiction films, 7, 183, 211n13 Scott, George C., 114, 115 “Seeing with the Camera” (Pichel), 58 Sensurround, 99 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 129, 158, 182, 196 shaking/shaky camerawork: in The Battle of Midway, 17, 25, 29, 44, 56, 63, 180; in The Battle of San Pietro, 17, 48, 51, 56, 180; in documentaries, 41, 108, 196; in embedded point of view, 17; in The Fighting Lady, 18; Ford on, 40; Haggith and Bender on, 222n14; mimicking of in Saving Private Ryan, 133, 136, 153, 154; replacement of, 49; in Saving Private Ryan, 32 Shoah, 6 Shooting War (documentary), 215n47 Short, Walter, 119 Shoshanna (character in Inglourious Basterds), 199, 200, 202 simulation, video games and, 182–­188, 226n55 single-­player mode, 181, 184 Sink, Robert F. (Bob), 170 Sizemore, Tom, 150 Slattery, John, 150 Slocum, J. David, 5, 11, 111, 112

Index  •  245

Slotkin, Richard, 167 small-­town America, as symbol, 65 Smith, Albert E., 36 SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals (video game), 164 soldiers: as “fighting machines,” 186; meaning of video games for, 164–­165; representation of as perpetrators of violence rather than victims of, 197, 198, 201, 202; as victim-­heroes, 147–­152; as victims, 186 Sontag, Susan, 201–­202 Sony PlayStation, 157 soundtracks, 2 space: construction of in combat genre, 67–­94; engendering of in Destination Tokyo, 70–­74; engendering of in Wing and a Prayer, 82–­85; hybridity in, 87; navigation of in video games, 182–­188 Spacewar! (video game), 160 Spasim (video game), 224n7 special effects: in Bombardier, 93; in December 7th, 34, 36, 40, 49; in Destination Tokyo, 26, 63, 77, 93; in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 87; in Wing and a Prayer, 26, 89, 93 Spielberg, Max, 157 Spielberg, Steven: as adopting grammar of destructive sublime, taking it further, 133; borrowing of aesthetic strategies of, 140; and digital imagemaking, 129; involvement of in video games, 157, 158, 162; on making Saving Private Ryan, 135–­139; as negotiating ideologically loaded film techniques, 134; preference of for “traditional” filmmaking, 146; as resisting complete transition to digital, 154–­155; use of “shaky camera” techniques by, 153; veneration of celluloid photography by, 169; on World War II generation, 156 Springer, Claudia, 8, 9, 10 SSI (Strategic Simulations Inc.), 160 Stahl, Roger, 213n42 Stark, Harold, 34–­35 Starship Troopers (film), 7 Star Trek (film series), 196 Star Wars: A New Hope (film), 7 Steele, John, 108–­109 Steel Helmet, The (film), 112, 149 Steichen, Edward J., 54 Steiger, Rod, 103 Stern, Tom, 155

Stevens, George, 32 Stewart, James, 32 stock footage, 61, 62, 75, 78, 79, 93, 95, 98, 99, 107 Stop-­Loss (film), 197 Storm across Europe (video game), 160 Storm over the Pacific (film), 99 Story of G.I. Joe, The (film), 86, 134 Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI), 160 strategy games, 27, 159, 160, 161, 163, 182, 189 Stryker, Sgt. (character in Sands of Iwo Jima), 112–­113, 114, 203 subjective point of view, 16, 17, 108, 141, 177, 178, 179, 189, 193 sublime, theory of, 11–­13, 16 Suid, Lawrence H., 218n29, 218n41, 219n49 Super Panavision, 110 Sutherland, Donald, 122, 124 swish pans, 45, 46, 133 Tarantino, Quentin, 5, 199, 200, 201, 202 targeting, in video games, 177–­182, 189 Task Force (film), 98 Tasogawa, Hiroshi, 118 Taylor, George A., 111 Taylor, Robert, 55 Team Deathmatch (video game mode), 174 Technicolor, 136 technologies: adoption of new technologies in The Longest Day, 107; integration of perceptual technologies into military affairs, 14; as one of many determining factors of aesthetic forms, 24 television series: as integrating documentary footage, 97–­98; as reusing combat sequences created for fictionalized films, 97–­98 Terminator, The (film), 178 theory of melodrama, 129, 130, 148 theory of the sublime, 11–­13, 16 They Were Expendable (film), 114 Thin Blue Line, The (film), 22 Thin Red Line, The (film), 128 Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (film), 87, 93, 99 Thompson, Kristin, 8 3D computer graphics, 146, 161, 166, 169, 224n6 time, hybridity in, 87

246  •  Index

Tin Can (character in Destination Tokyo), 68, 74, 199 Tin Pan Alley (film), 84, 85, 89, 92 Tischler, Sam, 46 Todd, Richard, 101 Toho, 99 Tojo, Hideki, 119 Tokyo Rose, 73–­74 Toland, Gregg, 32, 33–­34, 35, 41 Tommy (character in Destination Tokyo), 68, 74 Top Gun (film), 186 Tora! Tora! Tora! (film), 19, 23, 95, 96, 97, 99, 111, 112, 116–­121, 116, 120, 124, 125, 149, 195, 207 To the Shores of Iwo Jima (government-­ produced documentary), 99, 100 tracer fire/tracer lines, 56, 57, 57, 59 trailers, 1–­2, 192–­194 Trapper (character in MASH), 124 Triumph of the Will (film), 139 Tully, Tom, 68 Tunisian Victory (film), 48 Turnock, Julie, 216–­17n2 Twelve O’Clock High (film), 97, 99, 113 Twentieth Century–­Fox: December 7th (film), 33, 35, 36; The Fighting Lady (film), 54; introduction of CinemaScope format by, 107; The Longest Day (film), 100; Patton (film), 114; Tin Pan Alley (film), 84, 85; Tora! Tora! Tora! (film), 116, 117, 118; Wing and a Prayer (film), 79, 85, 87 2D computer graphics, 224n6 U-­571 (film), 128 Uchida, Asao, 119 Uncle Sam (character in December 7th), 34, 35 Universal, 37 University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), 181 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), 20–­21, 131 U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, 170 U.S. Army Pictorial Service, 14 U.S. Army Signal Corps, 48, 100, 222n14 U.S. Marine Corps, 14 U.S. Marine Corps Photographic Unit, 99

U.S. military: films made for during World War II, 213n2; use of video games by in training, 180–­181 U.S. Navy, 33, 35, 118 U.S. Office of War Information, 14, 35, 50, 99, 212n37 U.S. War Department, 39, 45, 48 Vandervoort, Benjamin, 104, 113 Variety, 121 “verisimilitude-­via-­deficiency,” 31 Vertigo (film), 178 Vertov, Dziga, 58 victim-­heroes, American soldiers as, 147–­152, 155, 197 video game generation, 164 video games: action games, 160–­161, 162, 165, 181; as borrowing from film, 165; as enacting premeditation/imaginative construction of future conflicts, 189; first-­ person shooter games (see first-­person shooter games); as form of “environmental storytelling,” 183; “grand strategy” video games, 160; heroism in, 185; influence of board games on development of, 160; military shooter video games (see military shooter video games); multiplayer matches (see multiplayer matches); as offering possibility of new narratives of war, 188; organization of, 180; performance statistics, 174; perspective and targeting in, 177–­182; representation of soldier in, 159; representation of World War II in, 159, 160–­165; as rewriting notions of narrative, 188–­189; role of combat video games, 28; role of in World War II combat genre, 3–­4; shift away from World War II in, 190; and simulation, 182–­188, 226n55; single-­player mode, 181, 184; and space, 182–­188; Spielberg’s involvement in, 157; strategy games (see strategy games); syntax of World War II combat genre in vs. syntax in film, 172–­177; targeting in, 189; unlockable features in, 169–­170, 225n28; use of by U.S. military in training, 180–­181, 187; weapons in, 175–­176. See also specific games Vietnam War: allegories of in World War II combat film, 121–­122; films about,

Index  •  247

128, 130, 148–­149, 186, 195; influence of on making of Tora! Tora! Tora!, 118; influence of on Spielberg, 135; as new military/ aesthetic challenge to American culture, 26; projected as “bad war,” 5, 7, 124, 125, 129; Saving Private Ryan as evoking, 151 Villa, Pancho, 37 Virilio, Paul, 13, 15 “virtuous war,” 132, 222n10 visual effects, 22, 27, 138, 140, 143–­144, 145, 147, 155 Vitagraph, 36 “voice of God” narration, 50 voice-­overs: in The Battle of Midway, 41, 44; in The Battle of San Pietro, 49, 50; in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, 3; in The Fighting Lady, 54, 56, 57, 59; in Flags of Our Fathers, 142; inclusion of omniscient voice-­over narration, 86; in Pearl Harbor, 139; in video games, 170–­171; in Why We Fight, 53 Voight, Jon, 123 Wahlberg, Mark, 197 Wake Island (film), 7, 66 Wald, Jerry, 71, 79, 98 Waltz, Christoph, 199 war: corporeality (bodily effects) of, 130; embrace of digital tools for, 189; modern-­ day wars as unconventional and asymmetrical, 190; nostalgia for, 130–­156; “postheroic” warfare, 158; preemptive war, 191; rationalizing of, 95–­126; simulating of on algorithmic playground, 157–­191; video games as reflecting contemporary fantasy of modern warfare, 187; “virtuous war,” 132, 222n10. See also specific wars war-­affirmative discourse, 66 Wardaddy (character in Fury), 203, 204, 205 war games, history of, 160 Warner Bros., 61, 67, 70, 97, 98 War on Terror, 20, 28, 160, 182, 191, 196 Warshow, Robert, 112 Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Fussell), 6 Washington Post, 41, 42, 68–­69 Wayne, John, 5, 103, 104, 112–­114, 125, 203

weapons: as designed to work like video games, 187; embrace of digital tools for war, 189; in video games, 175–­176 Wellman, William A., 97 Western hero, 112, 114 White, Hayden, 6 Whitmore, James, 112 Why We Fight (film series), 32, 50, 52, 53, 64 Wicki, Bernhard, 101 wide-­angle cinematography, 144 William “B. J.” Blazkowicz (character in Wolfenstein 3D), 162 Williams, Elmo, 101, 117, 118, 120 Williams, John, 2 Williams, Linda, 129, 130, 148–­149 Windtalkers (film), 128 Wing and a Prayer (film), 63, 79–­93, 84, 91, 97, 98, 99, 104, 111, 120, 147, 170, 172, 207 Winston, Brian, 38 With the Marines at Tarawa (government-­ produced documentary), 99–­100, 135 Wolf (character in Destination Tokyo), 68, 71, 72, 72 Wolfenstein 3D (video game), 162, 163, 163, 174 women, lack of in combat films, 66 Wood, Edward W., Jr., 7, 10, 159 World War II: blurring of lines between documentary and fictional filmmaking during, 32, 42; conventional American media portrayal of, 2; as “good war” (see “good war” myth/narrative/associations); involvement of Hollywood directors in making films during, 32; media representations of, 24; nature of as necessitating new aesthetics of representation, 62; as popular setting for Hollywood films, 5; as providing game designers with conventional and symmetrical warfare, 190; representation of in video games, 159, 160–­165; revenge as part of American cultural imagery of, 199; transformation of, 7; view of as typified by cruelty and killing, 10. See also World War II combat genre World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, The (Basinger), 7

248  •  Index

World War II combat genre: complexity of, 6; conventions of, 7, 8; as culturally productive into future, 207; disorienting techniques in, 9; as explicitly fighting-­focused, 5; first-­person shooter adaptations of, 165–­172; as investing in destructive sublime, 207; through lens of contemporary video games, 28; new aesthetic history of, 3–­4; as presenting war as alternately rational and irrational, knowable and beyond comprehension, 195; as reflecting contemporary circumstances, 196; science fiction films as remediating, 211n13; syntax in video games vs. syntax in film, 172–­177; 2008 as tipping point in, 196; after 2008, 195–­199 World War II: Frontline Command (video game), 160

Worshipping the Myths of World War II (Wood), 7 Wyler, William, 32, 135, 216n69 Xbox, 213n42 Yossarian, Capt. John (character in Catch-­22), 123 Young Sherlock Holmes (film), 138 Zack, Sgt. (character in The Steel Helmet), 112 Zanuck, Darryl F., 81, 95, 100–­105, 106–­107, 112, 117, 124, 137, 170 Zanuck, Richard, 107 Zapruder, 38 Zero Dark Thirty (film), 197 Zoot Suit Riots, 65

About the Author TANINE ALLISON is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Emory University, where she teaches courses on film, digital media, and video games. She holds a PhD in film studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Her previous publications have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Literature/ Film Quarterly, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and a number of edited collections.