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 t is
encouraging to believe a notion that is very popular just now: that
baby boomers — that's my generation — rose up as one to
demand that the entertainment community pay tribute to the "Greatest
Generation," who fought and died in WWII.
It's a sentiment
offered as fact in many corners — and recently on NRO —
but it's just not true.
The notion
that boomers launched all this cheerleading for the Allies is made
possible partly by forgetfulness, and partly by very wishful thinking.
What really happened to get those "tribute" movies made
— and there have in fact only been a couple of them —
was what always happens in the movie business: Filmmakers set out
in search of a great story to tell that would look good on the screen,
and that would make money.
Saving Private
Ryan is usually cited as the first expression of a supposed
generational epiphany. However, the movie was conceived not as homage
but "simply as a badass Second World War movie," according
to its director, Steven Spielberg, who said so in an interview with
Stephen Dubner of the UK's Guardian Unlimited. The notion
of Private Ryan as tribute came after its release —
a welcome outcome, but a far cry from the now-popular idea that
it was Hollywood's portion of the virtuous expression of a suddenly
grateful nation.
Perhaps Spielberg
decided to make it a tribute during production? "[T]alking
to veterans during research 'sobered me up'," the director
told Dubner, but the effect was not to inspire tribute, but to "push
the film towards the grimmest realities: fear, boredom, killing."
Ryan
wasn't conceived as a "thank you" at all, and neither
were the WWII films that came after. For instance, Terrence Malick's
The Thin Red Line, released within weeks of Private Ryan,
had just about nothing to do with honoring our soldiers. An overblown
exercise in thinking out loud, CNN movie critic Paul Tatara got
it right when he said the movie should have been called Patrolling
the Area for Godot. 2001's Enemy at the Gates is a character
study of WWII snipers, one German and one Russian. Both men (and
by its silence on the matter, their causes) are presented as moral
equals.
There has been
no Hollywood response because there has been no public demand. Most
people don't even know the simplest facts of American history, let
alone those of the Second World War.
In a 2000 survey
of seniors at the top 55 universities in America, the American Council
of Trustees and Alumni found that four-fifths of these "elite"
students didn't know who led the USSR during the war. Almost two-thirds
didn't know that the Battle of the Bulge occurred during the war.
One third couldn't identify Germany's Axis partners from a list.
(However, 98 percent identified Snoop Dogg as a rapper. Really.)
Overall, the
report found that four out of five seniors scored either a "D"
or an "F" on a widely used high-school exam on American
history — and these are our best students, who have been exposed
to the material relatively recently. It is hardly likely that the
typical Boomer knows much more, and certainly not enough to create
a demand heard all the way in Hollywood to start praising their
"wartime heroes."
None of this
takes away the achievement of Saving Private Ryan in (somewhat
accidentally) raising public awareness of the terrible necessity
of war, and in its (perhaps inadvertent) honoring of the men who
fight it on our behalf — men who, since Vietnam, have had their
sacrifice swept under the rug by the arbiters of popular culture.
But it should put the lie to the self-flattery that there was a
generational outcry for such a thing.
If anyone deserves
extra credit for focusing attention on the 1940s, it is Steven Spielberg
and Ryan star Tom Hanks in their work after the film. The
two men who have channeled American appreciation into support for
a World War II Memorial on the National Mall, and for the National
D-Day Museum. In addition, recent, powerful films on war after WWII
deserve notice for clearly explaining war: Black Hawk Down
told the American story in Somalia, and We Were Soldiers
restored some honor to our fight in Vietnam.
Let's stop congratulating ourselves for remembering what should
never have been forgotten. The lion's share of the tribute our veterans
now enjoy came from a serendipitous connection between Hollywood's
love of a good story, and our own blessed sense of collective obligation
— which was awakened in us, and not by us, just in time, before
the last of these heroes are gone.
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