“Silver Linings Playbook,” one of nine pictures nominated for the 2012 Oscars, featured a bipolar hero. (The last nominee with an Axis I protagonist was “A Beautiful Mind,” a lamentably inaccurate portrayal of paranoid schizophrenia, which nevertheless became a beautiful gold mine for Universal Studios.)

My research shows that “Playbook” is one of a half handful of films about bipolar disorder. This set me wondering about the prevalence of various psychiatric disorders in a small group of so-called “mental health” movies focused on the specific syndrome of the hero/heroine, as well many more movies from other genres that provide sufficient material to infer a character’s diagnosis.

Why has cinema favored some disorders while others go neglected? Obviously, there are no statistics on this score. The following remarks about what I’ll call “cine-diagnostics” are based my own impressions rather than established fact.

Whether a feature film (I’m excluding documentaries) focuses on a specific psychiatric disorder or contains characters so well drawn that a diagnosis can be sussed out, filmmakers have always been especially attracted to syndromes that they perceive as hallmarked by especially melodramatic symptoms and behavior. (Of course, the disorder’s presentation might not be as electrifying in real-world psychiatry.)

I suspect that producers and filmmakers conceive that characters with “spectacular” symptomatology offer more entertaining narrative possibilities than less sensational maladies, thereby generating bigger box office revenues. When it comes down to the wire, a disorder’s prevalence or clinical accuracy usually will not count as much to the industry as the picture’s profit potential.

That’s not always a bad thing. See my article on “In Treatment,” the HBO series, on internationalpsychoanalysis.net for more on this point.

The largest group of “mental health” movies was produced from about 1957 to 1963, a period in which increasing public knowledge about psychiatric illness coincided with greater acceptance of its treatment. Krin and Glen O. Gabbard have explored this golden age of “pro-therapy” pictures in their estimable “Psychiatry and the Cinema” (Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 1999).

The Gabbards note that former World War II military physicians, who became conversant with promising new therapies during service, were instrumental in demystifying psychiatry upon returning to America. (These methods were often taught by émigré psychoanalysts who had fled Nazi persecution.) Not unsurprisingly, some of the most popular pro-therapy movies were about wartime and post-war post-traumatic stress disorder. Films like “Home of the Brave” (1949) often portrayed PTSD’s more melodramatic features.

Courtesy Showtime Showtime’s “Homeland” has provided a reasonably accurate portrayal about character Carrie’s (pictured) bipolarity, says Dr. Harvey Roy Greenberg.

After the Golden Age, other “spectacular” syndromes depicted in mental health pictures and popular genres included: conversion disorder (“Freud,” 1962); multiple personality disorder (“The Three Faces of Eve,” 1957); dissociative disorder (“The Swimmer, 1968″); erotomania/de Clerambaults syndrome (“Fatal Attraction,” 1987; “The Story of Adele H,” 1975); alcoholic hallucinosis and delirium tremens (“The Lost Weekend,” 1945); acute schizophrenia (“The Snake Pit,” 1948); and compulsive gambling (“The Lady Gambles,” 1949; “California Split,” 1974).

Antisocial personality disorder was, and still remains, the most prevalent – often immensely popular – Axis II category, particularly in mainstream fare featuring sociopathic characters who relish mayhem and murder (“The Talented Mr. Ripley,” 1999). Movies about antisocial serial killers have done so well in recent years that they’ve become an industry staple (“Silence of the Lambs,” 1991; “Manhunter,”1986).

Major depression doesn’t usually present the florid symptomatology of multiple personality disorder or acute paranoid schizophrenia. Arguably, that’s why major depressive disorder (MDD) seems to appear far more often in thoughtful indie or foreign cinema than in action-oriented mainstream movies.

MDD has evoked some of the greatest acting by accomplished actors in cinema – for example, Victor Sjöström’s despairing aged physician in “Wild Strawberries,” (1957); Jeremy Irons’s despondent Antonio in “The Merchant of Venice,” (2004); and Steve Cochran’s inarticulate, ultimately suicidal despair in “Il Grido,” 1957). (“Il Grido” – “The Cry” in English – is a neglected small masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni.)

Other psychiatric disorders/conditions less often addressed at the multiplex include Alzheimer’s disease (“Away From Her,” 2006); autism/savant syndrome, (“Rain Man,” 1988); and mental deficiency (“I Am Sam,” 2001); “Light in the Piazza,” 1962). One wonders if filmmakers imagine that a film about Alzheimer’s disease would be too close to the bone for older viewers and might not interest young viewers, who don’t imagine they’ll ever grow old. (The Dustin Hoffman character in “Rain Man” was a misdiagnosed savant, possibly for narrative purposes, but I would rate him in an autistic category.)

I can’t easily account for the dearth of movies about autism and the mentally challenged. Perhaps there’s a mistaken assumption that audiences would be turned off by such pictures because of the uncomfortable, if unacknowledged sense of “otherness” these syndromes evoke in some people, filmmakers included. (The “praecox feeling” of schizophrenia comes to mind.)

I return to the peculiar shortfall of bipolar disorder at the Bijou. “Lust for Life” (1956) isn’t on my short list, because I don’t think Van Gogh was bipolar.

“The Madness of King George” (1994) is another vexed case: It remains unclear whether George III’s mania was attributable to porphyria or some other organic disorder. (The porphyria theory has been much disputed.) The monarch’s medical records offer no evidence of a major depressive swing – but then, I wasn’t there. In “Bigger Than Life” (1956), James Mason’s flagrant mania obviously stemmed from heavy doses of steroids given for a collagen vascular disease.

Pressured speech and giddy behavior pervade screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s (“The Awful Truth,” 1937; and “Bringing Up Baby, 1938″). However, their rat-a-tat zaniness is a function of the genre, evidenced by virtually everyone in a screwball movie.

“Mr. Jones” (1993) presents an incontestably bipolar patient: Richard Gere’s eponymous hero seems embued with a romantic aura from the start. The picture intimates that his illness endows him with a “specialness” placing him far above the mortal crowd (R.D. Laing was of the same opinion about schizophrenia, and that notion caused much woe.)

Jones and his psychiatrist (Lena Olin) fall in love. Typical of Lalaland’s female practitioner, life outside the job is lackluster until she’s smitten with her patient. I don’t recall if she quits her work to marry Jones/Gere, another standard outcome for female cinetherapists.

She would do well to stop practicing, and not only because of her flagrant boundary violations. A real-life psychiatrist would fend off Gere’s advances and instead seek to determine whether his mania is influenced by a comorbid narcissistic personality disorder or is solely a symptom of his mood disorder – a vital therapeutic issue.

The paucity of bipolarity in past movies, when the disorder was still known as manic depression, might be a function of its unfamiliarity to the average screenwriter back in the day.

It’s not unlikely that the manic side of bipolarity could be confused with acute paranoid schizophrenia with grandiose delusions – a common clinical error that still crops up. Bipolarity also was once deemed relatively rare and didn’t enter as much into public, let alone psychiatric discourse, compared with schizophrenia and “neurotic” diagnoses.

Bipolar disorder had finally come into its own before “Silver Linings Playbook.” One reason is the revelation of their bipolarity by celebrities. I also wonder whether the name change might have played a role in making bipolarity better known and more accepted.

The very word “bipolar” has a kinder, friendlier nimbus than “manic depressive.” Arguably, “manic depression” also held obscure connotations of aggression and irresponsibility for some folks. In my practice, I’ve found that “bipolar disorder” is frequently thought to be somehow more treatable than “manic depression.” I free associate to a patient’s belief that “Wellbutrin” would do him more good than “bupropion.”

Today, bipolar disorder has become the flavor of the month, notably among the glitterati, where it’s as fashionable as Botox. Bipolarity is jabbered about at Hollywood watering holes, on TMZ and reality TV shows.

The word is so detoxified that it’s comfortably entered the vernacular. When an adolescent patient told me that her best girlfriend had become bipolar, she meant the kid was scatterbrained, moody, and, worst of all, messing around with her (the patient’s) boyfriend.

With the ups and downs of bipolarity getting so much play, I expect that screenwriters will create more bipolar characters, because the inherent dramatic value of those affective swings has been recognized in Hollywood. The success of “Silver Linings Playbook” is sure to generate clones.

So far, Showtime’s “Homeland” series has been reasonably accurate about Carrie’s bipolarity; it’s also proved a useful plot device. One can only hope that filmmakers can come up with more fare like “Homeland,” rather than grinding out flyweights like “Silver Linings Playbook.”

A closing thought: Dorothy Gale in “The Wizard of Oz” could by a stretch be construed in her dream of Oz as afflicted with Charles Bonnet syndrome, except the tiny and very busy little people of Munchkin Land are extremely interested in her, indeed honor her for slaying the Wicked Witch of the East. In the real deal, the Bonnet’s munchkins go about their business utterly uninterested in the hallucinator. That’s show business.

 

Glen and Krin Gabbard’s “Psychiatry and the Cinema” describes our discipline’s considerable value for screenwriters. The Gabbards cite the term “ficelle,” first used by Henry James in discussing narrative devices. A ficelle is the system of strings used to control a marionette.

According to the Gabbards, the celluloid practitioner often serves as an admirable ficelle – enabling exposition via flashbacks to recent or remote events (“Tell me more about your bar mitzvah …”); eliciting sensational revelations about emotional trauma; illuminating motivation, and so on. In return, Hollywood’s contribution to the understanding of mental illness and its treatment has been meager. More often than not, movies serve up distortions and trivializations about our work.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Side Effects” is the 26^th picture in an artistically accomplished and lucrative career. His works range across nearly every genre from science fiction (“Solaris,” 2002) to the caper film (“Ocean’s Eleven,” 2001). He’s directed exemplary “indie” movies like “sex, lies, and videotape,” (1989) as well as box office hits like “Erin Brockovich”(2000). Bafflingly, “Side Effects” is a toss-away turkey. It owns the dubious distinction of cramming the greatest number of misrepresentations about our work and ourselves into a single movie. Some of these are merely risible, others potentially hurtful – of which more presently.

A thin screenplay is cribbed from thrillers with gonzo therapists – for example, “Dressed to Kill” (1980), “Basic Instinct” (1992), and “Final Analysis” (1992) – as well as the “black widow” crime subgenre. [Spoiler Alert!] Dedicated, compassionate Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) undertakes outpatient treatment of Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), after a suicide attempt that brought her to the hospital ER, where he’s a consultation/liaison psychiatrist. Several years ago, her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), was convicted of Wall Street insider trading. Martin’s recent return from prison apparently has exacerbated the devastating depression brought on by the loss of her husband, unborn child, and affluent suburban lifestyle. Crippling side effects from a first round of the usual suspect drugs leads Banks to prescribe a new antidepressant, Ablixa. It’s been recommended by Emily’s former Connecticut psychiatrist, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The drug provokes a mild episode of somnambulism, but Banks continues it because Emily is improving.

A few days later, she slashes her husband to death during another bout of sleepwalking, awakening with no memory for the murder. Dr. Banks, a perennial multitasker, turns out to be a respected forensic psychiatrist. His testimony in that capacity gets Emily declared incapable of participating in her defense “by reason of insanity,” and committed to an inpatient facility until deemed competent to stand trial.

As a result of the hailstorm of publicity surrounding the case, Dr. Banks’s life begins to unravel. He’s blamed for prescribing Ablixa, fired by his patients, shunned by his colleagues, threatened with losing his license. His marriage lies in ruins. Broke but not broken, Banks begins to smell more than one rat. He winkles out a conspiracy between Emily and Dr. Siebert – it’s as full of holes as John Dillinger’s corpse. Emily seduced Dr. Siebert. It’s unclear whether she came to Dr. Siebert for help, and intuited the latter’s latent lesbian yearnings and criminality, or planned to corrupt her from the start (my read). The smitten Dr. Siebert taught her to how to mime depression, while giving a short course in psychopathic psychopharmacology. Thus, Emily never took Ablixa, or anything else; faked her suicide; chivvied Dr. Banks into treating her; and slew her husband.

Figuring the value of the Big Pharma company manufacturing Ablixa would plunge in the wake of Martin’s death, Emily and Dr. Siebert scored immense profit by shorting Ablixa. (Emily arguably took a tip from her husband’s criminal market tampering to engineer her own insider fraud). Dr. Banks was cold-bloodedly selected because of his impeccable credentials and forensic clout, under the assumption he would find her incompetent, then push for her acquittal once she was “cured” of her phony major depressive disorder. Emily is now Dr. Banks’s only patient. At first, one cannot ascertain whether he’s only a visitor to the hospital where she’s confined or is consulting with ward therapists. By the end, he’s totally in charge of her care and fate.

One wonders if his job description mutated according to script changes dictated by the director and/or whichever writer was on board the project at whatever time. (Using multiple script writers is common in the industry, particularly in mainstream filmmaking: One of my patients was hired and fired from a production six times.) Dr. Banks compels Emily to confess to the murder by a devious combination of guile and threats. He cons her into thinking Dr. Siebert has secretly paid off his cooperation, because he’s ferreted out the deadly duo’s con. While she’s reasonably certain that that Dr. Banks has been bribed into enabling her release, admitting her guilt to him wouldn’t be a problem in any case: Once acquitted, she cannot be tried again. A murderer invoking double jeopardy is a bromide of crime film and fiction. Dr. Banks entices Emily into entrapping Dr. Siebert into making whoopie at her office. The latter is promptly arrested for professional misconduct, financial fraud, and as an accessory to Martin’s death. In a move typical of film noir, Dr. Banks abruptly turns the tables on Emily (think Sam Spade “sending over” spider lady Brigid O’Shaughnessy to prison and possible execution in “The Maltese Falcon”). Dr. Banks declares Emily is far sicker than he first imagined, summarily orders her communication with the outside world severed, and prescribes a massive cocktail of psychotropics that will keep her indefinitely hospitalized and zombified. His professional and personal happiness is restored in an eye blink.

In these pages and elsewhere, I’ve stated that mainstream moviemakers will always sacrifice clinical accuracy for narrative sizzle when push comes to shove. But I’ll always forgive a film that is only mildly inaccurate and owns redeeming artistic or sheer entertainment value. In recent years, “Homeland” and much of the “In Treatment” series fit that bill. I can’t forgive Soderbergh, whose hits like “Ocean’s Eleven” draw large audiences, for encouraging a multitude of misperceptions in order to make a dismal dud that could easily discourage an emotionally distressed viewer from seeking psychiatric care. I’ve always avoided the periodic wrangling over this issue. However, “Side Effects” is the only film that I believe does pose a substantive risk of putting off prospective clients. What follows is an anatomy of its mistakes and downright falsifications:

• In a case like Emily’s, it would be conceivable but uncommon for a psychiatrist treating a noncriminal patient to also be a qualified forensic expert, tasked to render the pivotal opinion about the client’s competence to stand trial. It would be decidedly rare for that psychiatrist to undertake inpatient treatment of the patient he’s been instrumental in committing. (Let me know if I’m wrong on this score.)

• No lawsuit is ever brought against the manufacturer of a drug with such lethal potential, nor against Dr. Banks for prescribing Ablixa, as would most certainly happen in the litigation-loving real world. (The validity of such legal action is beside the point.) Dr. Banks would seem to have a fourth-rate insurance carrier without a risk-management service. He’s not represented by a skilled malpractice attorney who might advise him not to testify at all if possible or would sharply limit his testimony. In either case, he would be cautioned to cease all contact with Emily.

• These and other omissions could proceed from the creative team’s blind ignorance or willful disregard of the facts in order to facilitate a tighter, more-compelling narrative, as noted above. While annoying to the practitioner, the elisions would not have significant impact on our notional prospective patient. The film’s negative presentation of various psychiatric therapies, and particularly its toxic characterization of practitioners themselves, is vastly more off-putting.

• Soderbergh seems bent on having it both ways vis-a-vis psychopharmacology. He discharges psychotropics from blame by revealing that Emily’s somnambulism and other side effects were malingered, then subliminally criticizes their use. The plentiful mention of unpleasant reactions to well-known psychotropics outweighs citing their very real benefits, particularly to seriously ill patients. (Be it noted in all fairness that Soderbergh also intimates, if distantly, that Big Pharma’s rampant hucksterism may be turning us into pill pushers and folks with ordinary woes into enthusiastic pill poppers.)

• The inpatient service where Emily is confined is at best a drab, cheerless place, where no one seems to care or do very much for the clientele beyond drugs and restraints. But via plot developments, the mise-en-scene’s design, and declarations of camera, the milieu is eventually transformed into a snake-pit cum penitentiary. Patients are totally at the mercy of their minders. Tyrannical psychiatrists can, on a whim, reduce them to vegetative compliance by overmedication and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

• To wangle Emily’s confession, Dr. Banks shows her an ECT treatment like an inquisitor exhibiting the instruments of torture to a recalcitrant heretic. He also infers that ECT memory loss is permanent. Soderbergh resurrects the standard “shake-rattle-and-roll” depiction of earlier mental health movies in which ECT – which in many cases rivals drugs in effectiveness for major affective disorders with fewer side effects – is painted as a barbaric assault upon brain and body.

• Most disheartening is the unsympathetic, even repellant portrayal of virtually every psychiatrist in the film. Underneath her empathic facade, Dr. Siebert is a debauched ice queen, a sleek pantheress capable of loving someone only as perverse and corrupt as she is. Dr. Banks’s colleagues quickly desert him when he most needs collegial support. They’re a timorous, distasteful lot – one recommends Effexor passim but offers not a jot of compassion. “Side Effects” quickly establishes that Dr. Banks is a smart, compassionate humanitarian when, at his ER consultation/liaison job, he identifies a Haitian patient’s supposed hallucinations as a cultural manifestation of grief. But he escapes Emily’s web of deceit by easily identifying with the aggressor, first introjecting, then outdoing her wickedness. Emily happily slaughtered Martin. Now Dr. Banks takes equal pleasure in murdering her spirit. In the closing sequence, he’s seen dropping off his son at a ritzy private school, with his contented wife at his side. All would seem as before, but the taint of Dr. Banks’s spectacular wrongdoing hover around him, rendering his reversion to benevolent healer profoundly suspect. One is reminded of the conclusion of “Suspicion,” which suddenly revealed that Cary Grant/Johnnie never plotted his wife’s murder for her money; he’s always loved her and saw her as his redeemer. The studio allegedly suppressed Hitchcock’s original ending, which unmasked Johnnie’s remorseless psychopathy and had him strangle the wife. The taint of Johnnie’s evil hangs ominously over the bogus happy ending, utterly undoing it. Even auteurs like Hitchcock, Truffaut, and Welles had their flops. Several of Soderbergh’s previous pictures were unsuccessful but always honorable failures.

I would not be so disparaging about “Side Effects” were it not for the possibility that its deep stupidity or flagrant indifference vis-a-vis the psychiatrist’s methods and person might prejudice viewers needing help. Granted their numbers might be few, given greater public awareness of mental disorders. But even one would be too many. TV commercials routinely caution that such-and-such nostrum might not be “right for everyone,” then unreel a list of black box warnings and other disagreeable reactions (the sinister roll call frequently concludes with the very ailment for which the drug is prescribed in the first place, but farewell that). I believe “Side Effects” isn’t right for anyone. Take this review as a warning against Soderbergh’s deplorable black box.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annual award ceremony debuted at a modest dinner in the Blossom Room of Los Angeles’s Hollywood Roosevelt hotel in 1929. Two hundred and seventy people attended at $5 a head. Who could have predicted that by 2013, the Oscars would have evolved – or devolved, depending upon one’s viewpoint – into a Tinseltown behemoth, staged before a glittering celebrity horde, broadcast to millions of viewers across America and around the world?

(Worshipping at Oscar’s Golden Calf also yields millions of shekels to the host TV network from commercials, as well as to winners – especially big name stars –- their retinues and sundry studio machers.)

Today’s Oscar ceremony (it’s officially no longer called the Academy Awards) is a gross spectacle of self-congratulation, wherein Lalaland egos are stroked to an even higher gloss. Standing ovations, once rare, are now obligatory, regardless of the talent on display, or lack of same.

The dilemma posed year after year to the producers of this anthem to the culture of narcissism is how to articulate the actual presentations with a semblance of entertainment. One doubts this can ever be satisfyingly brought off, due to the nature of the beast.

Each year brings an ever-glitzier high-tech mise-en-scene, but the Oscars inevitably – and endlessly – pivot around the unwrapping of the Holy Envelope, the strut to glory, then an acceptance speech cataloguing the recipient’s benefactors, which frequently stretches from parents, to high school drama teacher, to King Abimelech.

This year, the Oscar sachems chose Seth MacFarlane, creator of Fox’s “Family Guy” and the hit movie “Ted” (2012) to host the show. One supposes they thought that the series’ irreverent humor, which has notably drawn young adult viewers, would likewise seduce them to watch the awards: MacFarlane could surely be trusted to send up Hollywood’s foibles in the spirit of “Family Guy’s” satirical edginess.

Instead, his wise-ass dishing was so witless as to make one yearn for Bob Hope’s harmless, but quite funny ba-da-BUMP-BUMP one-liners back in the day. In the introductory monologue, “Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk (William Shatner) addressed MacFarlane from the future. Kirk/Shatner prophesized that MacFarlane would receive a negative critical and industry response the next day – which is precisely what happened in many quarters.

The debacle following MacFarlane’s began with “We Saw Your Boobs,” a blatantly misogynistic number about famous actresses who had appeared topless. One of the spoofed was Jodie Foster, whose nakedness sharpened the horror of her rape in “The Accused.”

Then followed a reasonably repellant bashing of – inter alia – gays and Jews. (A sketch about how you couldn’t make it in Tinseltown without a yarmulke was particularly reprehensible.) His humor even descended into the territories of domestic violence and slavery with a joke about Rihanna and Chris Brown.

How to account for this orgy of bad taste? My guess is that the writing team assumed their odious gags would be received as so “in” to veterans of the industry that no offense would be taken. Many of the “in” crowd thought otherwise, women notably.

As for the “outs,” it didn’t seem to occur to MacFarlane and company that a worldwide TV audience would include parents who might deem their kids unready for X-rated trash talk. Or that the merely ignorant, or truly down-and-dirty nazified would find the argument that Jews really do run Hollywood quite persuasive.

Andrew O’Hehir, who writes for salon.com, did a good job of explaining why what MacFarlane tried to do just didn’t work: ” … If anything, I think MacFarlane’s Oscar night performance was too clever by half and resulted in a profound failure of messaging and symbolism. As one female friend of mine succinctly put it, ‘Somebody else might’ve been able to pull that off, but that guy just looked like a frat boy in a tux.’ ” He went on to say that many people experienced MacFarlane’s humor as “the humor of mockery and abuse.”

It was entirely fitting to the mediocre tenor of the 2013 Oscars that “Argo,” an entertaining but hardly memorable escape caper, would win best picture over Steven Spielberg’s magisterial “Lincoln.”

But let’s give MacFarlane credit for analyzing the 16th president’s enigmatic character with a subtlety that eluded Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis. The only person who ever really was able to get into Lincoln’s head, our host asserted, was John Wilkes Booth. That’s entertainment!

A photograph lies before me as I write, taken at a British airbase sometime in l944. It shows the crew of a B-l7 Flying Fortress, their plane in the background. My uncle Bernard, its radio operator, kneels in the first row, his presence rendered uncannily real via computerized restoration. Bernie had lied about his age to enlist at l7. By the time of the photo, three years into his war, he’d become a skilled technical sergeant. The oldest man — and only career officer — was the pilot, a 26-year-old captain.

Shortly afterwards all of them were killed, saving a gunner who had been grounded with a sinus infection over his angry protests. (Bernie’s best friend and the other Jewish crew member, he continued corresponding with my family for thirty years thereafter.) The Army said they had died bravely, but details were hard to come by. After the war, my uncle Hirsch — he’d served in the Navy — travelled to England and found Bernie’s grave, a Star of David amidst a sea of crosses. Hirsch also discovered that Bernie’s squadron had been tasked to shoot down the buzz-bombs — subsonic V2 rocket precursors — which the Germans were hurling across the Atlantic into English cities.

The mission called for long hours of aerial surveillance, carrying an extra fuel load which altered the B-l7’s flight performance. On its first training run Bernie’s plane reached the end of the runway, swerved, then suddenly blew up. There was no possibility of escape. Hirsch was assured Bernie had not suffered, but he knew there could be no certainty on this score. Bad weather conditions, pilot error, even sabotage, were cited as possible reasons for the explosion. At home we blamed the war itself, and never thought otherwise than that Bernie had died in an honorable cause.

My ten-year-old imagination intuitively sanitized Bernie’s demise through the mediation of Hollywood war movies. When his coffin was eventually brought back home to Philadelphia, I considered neither the incinerated dreadfulness of its contents nor the torment my uncle might have endured in that terrible vortex of flame. In my mind’s eye he reposed whole — as in a dignified sleep. Like the dead pilot on his hospital bed in Howard Hawks’Air Force (l943).

Our rabbi proclaimed that the tragic loss of Bernie’s promise would be redeemed by the free world that was his legacy; avowed his sacrifice would never be forgotten. But within a few years Bernie’s death and his purloined future already were insidiously slipping away. Remembrance and grief had ebbed as my uncle dwindled into history

The therapeutic, yet problematic attrition wrought by time upon traumatic recollection constitutes a central motif ofSaving Private Ryan, Stephen Spielberg’s epic reconstruction of the D-Day invasion and its aftermath. The theme is struck in the film’s first shot — of a bleached-out, gently stirring American flag. This strange, estranging image summons up the bold stars-and-stripes of Patton’s (l970) opening bellicose speech, here spurring intimations of subtle melancholy.

Like the Sabbath candle drained of color at the beginning of Schindler’s List (l993), the faded flag evokes another World War II site of irremediable loss which Spielberg seeks to recuperate before the D-Day combatants, like the victims of the Holocaust, are gone forever. The “good war” has often been a priveleged subject of Spielberg’s “oeuvre” as early as the surprisingly fluid home movie which he wrote and directed as a young adolescent, starring his backyard chums. Interviews indicate that throughout his childhood Spielberg was enraptured by his father’s tales of service as a B-25 radio operator in Burma.(l)

Crucial to the memory work of Saving Private Ryan is its creator’s intention that a public whose sensibilities has so often been dulled by a surfeit of artificial violence should behold the very thing itself: the grisly toll of war upon the flesh of young American troops on that distant Sixth of June. Mutatis mutandis, the film uncompromisingly depicts analogous horrors executed by our GI’s upon their opponents under the aegis of honorable duty (and sometimes questionably executed).

The establishing sequence’s palid banner dissolves to a cemetery above the Normandy beaches where an aged veteran walks haltingly through an expanse of crosses, past a Star of David like the one that stood over Bernie’s resting place. Had he lived, my uncle would have been the same age as this now grizzled warrior — a recognition whose pathos has doubtless been registered by other surviving viewers regarding their fallen comrades, as well as by relatives whose loved ones perished more than a half century ago in the hell below this place.

The old vet falls to his knees before a grave, his family hovering anxiously behind him. In closeup his eyes brim with tears. The camera pulls back to reveal the taut face of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), who one will later learn is the leader of an elite Ranger company. One’s awareness of Hanks’ star status is played adroitly against the introduction of his character as an anonymous cog in a mighty military machine, sitting quietly in a landing boat at the spearhead of the invasion. Other troops smoke, puke, and pray around him — as in a host of earlier cinematic recreations like The Longest Day (l962).

The men shuffle forward, the ramp slams down. Instantly the camera’s viewpoint cuts to that of a German machine gunner in a bunker above the beach. With a single burst, every soldier is mowed down before setting a foot ashore. It’s deliberately unclear whether one has witnessed the annhilation of the craft in the preceding sequence — and Miller/Hanks with it. This astonishing, transgressive “coup de cinema” instantly thrusts the viewer into a state of frightening disequilibrium, reminiscent of one’s incredulous reaction to Janet Leigh’s murder midway through Psycho (l960). Mainstream cinema isn’t supposed to expose one to such trauma from the safe perspective of the tenth row.

The boat’s destruction launches a half-hour sequence in which the human body is mutilated, macerated, punctured, disembowelled with scarifying authenticity. One cringes before an intolerable cacophany — the roar of explosions, the whang of richochets, the screams of the dying, the fragmented babble of the terrified living.

A frequent borrower from other films, Spielberg has just as frequently marred his skills by overwhelming his sources with wretchedly excessive special effects, as inAlways’ (l989) hyperbolic rehash of A Guy Named Joe(l944).(2) Saving Private Ryan refuses any competitive homage. In one bravura stroke, Spielberg “takes back” the standard World War II film’s stylized gore, unmutilating mortal wounds, last-gasp foxhole rhetoric — every device which disguised the gruesome reality of combat from homefront viewers — amongst them, my child self before and after my uncle’s death.

A multitude of untested boys lie slaughtered or horrendously wounded around Miller; crying out for mother, medic, or priest (by chance or the generals’ choice, such raw troops were flung wholesale on D-Day onto the brutal beaches beside the Ranger outfits, like so much raw meat). Amidst the chaos, Miller begins hyperfocussing upon the bloody scene. His decelerated flashes of traumatized and gradually organizing perception are exemplary of veteran cameraman Janusz Kaminski’s virtuoso riffs on the combat photography of the time.(3) The captain succeeds in rallying his company, supported by his equally seasoned top sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore).

The Rangers penetrate the German defenses and establish a beachhead for their comrades. Their professionalism is rendered more remarkable through Spielberg’s repeated, if understated emphasis that most of these men are not professionals — Miller taught high school — but have learned their perilous trade on the line. However, admiration for their gritty valor is tempered by one’s increasing awareness of its darker side: protective numbing of the sensibilities; cruel animal ferocity, compelled both by vengeance and the sheer need to discharge pent-up fear. Enemies flushed out of the bunkers by flamethrowers invite the laconic observation: “Let ’em burn.” Surrendering prisoners are shot down with a diffident joke about the GI’s defective hearing.

Hardly has the assault subsided when Miller is given another impossible assignment, stoically accepted. He and the cream of his valuable cadre are dispatched to search out a single paratrooper, James Ryan, whose unit has been scattered across the French countryside during the pre-invasion drop, possibly stumbling into enemy held territory. Ryan’s three brothers have been slain — two lie on the Normandy beaches — and General George C. Marshall himself wants Private Ryan plucked out of the war, sent back to his mother and his prairie home.(4) Ryan’s rescue is no cheap PR gimmick. A moving Washington sequence, in which Marshall reads Lincoln’s famous letter to the mother who had lost five sons in the civil war, attests to the utter sincerity of the general’s purpose.

After a series of alternately picaresque and terrifying encounters in which two of their number are killed, the Rangers stumble upon Ryan (an insouciant Matt Damon). To their dismayed anger he refuses to abandon his outfit, which has been decimated in defending a crucial bridge. His buddies are now his family, Ryan declares; his mother would surely approve his decision to remain with them.

The ordinarily unreflective Horvath surprises Miller with the speculation that getting Ryan home may be the finest act any of them will take away from the war. Miller opts to join the paratroopers in a last ditch stand against the German panzers. The length and spectacular savagery of the action serves to bracket the initial invasion scene.

Ryan survives; Miller, Horvath, and most of the Rangers do not. In a return to the framing sequence, the aged Ryan — it’s he, not Miller who has made the painful second journey to Normandy — addresses the Captain’s grave; swears he has lived every day of his life according to Miller’s last words: “Earn this . . .” Ryan salutes; the film concludes upon a final shot of the faded flag.

Miller and his cadre encompass a broad sampling of American class and ethnicity: Jew and Italian, city and farm dweller, lowbrow and highbrow. (African Americans are notably excluded, for few were afforded opportunity to die for democracy by that segregated Army.) The group resembles those assembled in a hundred other Hollywood war movies, encompassing World War I to the Vietnamese debacle, including the choice handful Spielberg respectfully alludes to (e.g. A Walk In The Sun[l946], Battleground [l949], Attack! [l956], The Victors[l964], Platoon [l985]). Other genre commonplaces include the GI’s perennial griping; offcolor gibes; their angry debate about their mission’s validity, redeemed by ultimate respect for their leaders.

Saving Private Ryan’s strong casting lends an astringent depth to its characters, major and minor, which transcends the regional/ethnic cliches Spielberg consciously invokes. Hanks’ quiet integrity and Sizemore’s profane toughness inform the best work of their careers. Amongst the GIs, Barry Pepper’s devout Southern sharpshooter is especially — and eerily — striking. The single glaring disappointment is Jeremy Davies’ Corporal Upham, an egghead writer seconded to the Rangers as a translator. The liberal Upham comes wreathed in ponderously predictable tropes, his disastrous terminal cowardice included.

Robert Rodat’s workmanlike script largely manages to avoid “why we fight” bromides, no small task given Spielberg’s well known penchant for sententious sentimentality. Rodat/Spielberg’s grasp of myriad telling details of the invasion is unerring (e.g., the dead fishes littering the beaches; a GI efficiently knocking an ammo clip into his gun against his helmet). Equally impressive is the film’s feel for screwups, hilarious or tragic (e.g., in a compulsive post-traumatic babble, a haggard glider pilot recounts how the heavy armor specially installed to protect a general was responsible for the crash that killed nearly everyone aboard, the general included).

Saving Private Ryan has proven a surprising hit. However, like Schindler’s List, it has occasionally been labeled as yet another Hollywood co-optation of weighty and tragic events. The film’s accuracy (5) and ideological agenda have also been questioned. It owns the dubious distinction of being castigated from both right and left. Conservative critics have complained that neither the vileness of Nazi evil, nor the glory of its vanquishment are sufficiently addressed in Spielberg’s project.

One rebuts that, having already dealt plentifully with Nazi monstrousness in the enormously successful Schindler’s List, Spielberg has made a not unwarranted assumption that his audience is aware, however faintly, of the dire and just reasons dictating the necessity for D-Day. Although the force of the concluding graveside sequence is greatly diminished by Ryan’s saccharine plea for his wife’s validation, it still amply testifies to Spielberg’s belief that Miller’s sacrifice has shaped Ryan’s maturity by obliging him to live out the moral American future for which Miller gave his life.

Mutatis mutandis, various critics on the left have claimed the film is as jingoistic as any John Wayne flag-waver; object to the portrayal of German troops as anonymous stick figures to be competently massacred. One counters that, for once, Spielberg’s patriotism is blessedly implicit rather than banally explicit. With the exception of a single prisoner, German troops appear as they were customarily beheld: fierce, feared, innominate adversaries, glimpsed through a halestorm of destruction, to be killed before they could kill — and fuck them.

Indeed, if one sets ideology, viability of cause aside,Saving Private Ryan emerges as a harrowing pop-culture essay on the ruthless art and brutal vicissitudes of soldiering in any war.(6) One could well have done without both cemetary scenes, but these, too, are testamentary of another given of military experience — the veteran’s prevailing belief that he fought the good fight, even if the cause was objectively detestable.

I look again at the picture of the now antique B-l7 and its crew. More than a half century after the fact I can only remember Bernie’s broad smile as he gave my mother an absurdly huge bunch of bananas at the time of his last leave. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” wrote the Roman poet Horace of death in battle: “Sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country…” Saving Private Ryanaffirms that, were it not for young men like John Miller and my uncle, I would probably not be alive today. But Spielberg’s enterprise leaves no doubt that such deaths, such losses, are never sweet; no, never.

References

1. For a fuller discussion of World War II’s significance relative to Spielberg’s personal background and career, see Harvey R. Greenberg: “Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always“, in Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch. New York: Columbia University Press, l993, pp. 2ll-24.
2. Greenberg, Harvey R., ibid.
3. Besides referencing the footage of regular Army photographers, Spielberg and Kaminsky have obviously been influenced by John Huston’s documentary, The Battle of San Pietro (l945). Arguably the most accurate depiction of combat to that date, Huston’s stunning work was largely held back from homefront audiences by the authorities, who deemed the horrors he recorded antithetical to the patriotic sentiments the film was supposed to arouse.
4. Both are limned with powerful economy in a scene which shows the mother peering anxiously through the window of her homestead at a war department car which threads its way down a winding road into her yard. An officer and clergyman emerge. They climb the stairs of the front porch, the minister’s hand tentatively outstretched as Mrs. Ryan slumps slowly to the floor. The sequence works daringly against the attainder of kitch. It achieves the hieratic status of a pieta sans Son through homely yet uncannily hyperreal figurations evocative of Thomas Hart Benton and Norman Rockwell.
5. The Rangers’ mission may be an unlikely fantasy, but it unfolds in a mise-en-scene infinitely — and painfully — more factual than The Longest Day (for corroboration, see Stephen Ambrose, D-Day: June 6, l944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, l995; also, Paul Fussell,Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, l989).
6. A similar discourse from the Wehrmacht soldier’s pointedly unideological perspective is Sam Peckinpah’s unjustfiably neglected Cross of Iron(l976).