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| WINDS OF WAR | |
 February 2, 1999  | |
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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: As we slide towards the Oscar race, two hard-core, World War II epics are being highly touted as potential winners. Forget escapist fare with its pseudo violence, volcano eruptions, asteroid crashes, et cetera. It is these two movies, "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line," that are being talked about, and their violence seems anything but fake. They are both gripping and graphic, reawakening our violence-benumbed hearts to outrage and grief, reminding us of the cost of war, any war, even the so-called "last good one." Limbs are severed, innards tumble onto the ground in surreal counterpoint to the beauty of the countryside. World War II is breaking out anew in other places as well. Anchorman Tom Brokaw's book about the World War II vets, "The Greatest Generation," has been at the top of the best-seller lists, while Stephen Ambrose's two recent books about the war have together sold a million copies. Clearly, there are fashions in nostalgia as in anything else. But why this fashion now? The obvious answer is the easy one: Because we want and need heroes, and we have to go back over 50 years to find them, certainly that many of them, millions of near-kids who fought on faraway battlefields defending democracy. Today, the last of them, many of them our own fathers, are rapidly aging, and a younger generation wishes to pay its final respects. Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," like Tom Brokaw's book, is full of such sentiment, almost a wistful, apologetic adulation tendered by men who themselves never went to war, a guilt-laced generational gut ache left over from Vietnam. It's no accident that all this World War II stuff comes now, amid the mid-life reckoning of the baby boomers; when the first of them to reach the White House, the first president to be impeached in over 100 years, was a man who like so many of his peers back when -- friends and foes alike -- sidestepped the draft when it was his turn. It comes, too, at a time when the world seems an overly complicated, intractable, and muddy place. Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq-- you name it, it's muddy. What to do? How to help? Whose problem is it, anyway? Yes, today feels more like 1936, when we wanted to think that Hitler was Europe's problem, and December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor made our moral virtue easy to find. SPOKESMAN: Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy - ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: This isn't even the Cold War, with its clear polarity to comfort our World War II heroes. There was clarity in that, however threatening, however much it caused us to sometimes compromise our own standards by propping up this or that dictator, or even helping to overthrow democratically-elected governments, not to mention the excesses of McCarthyism at home and the quagmire that became Vietnam, all in the name of anti-communism. All of these things can get overlooked or pushed aside in our desire to have things simple, clean, like in the movies, like on TV -- good guys, bad guys, black and white, men with guns, men bonded in a noble cause. TOM HANKS: ("Saving Private Ryan") Some private in the 101st lost three brothers, and he's got a ticket home. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: In fairness to the two movies, they are not full-tilt, gung-ho war movies. They are World War II refracted through the memory of Vietnam. "The Thin Red Line" certainly is, and more powerful and more complex for it. You do leave the theater after these movies grateful for the sacrifices these men made, but also mindful of the stupefying loss of life, the boredom and terror of war. ACTOR: Have you ever had anyone die in your arms? ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: And that's a gift whenever and wherever it comes. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. |
