The propaganda power of “Saving Private Ryan” w/ Tom Secker – Ep 153

This is Fortress On A Hill, with Henri, Kaygan, Jo

vonni, Shiloh, and Monisha

Well, welcome everyone to Fortress On A Hill, a podcast about

US foreign policy, anti imperialism, skepticism and the American way of war.

I'm Henri.

Thanks for joining us today.

With us is my pal, the legendary Tom Secker from spyculture.

com and the podcast ClandesTime and he is here to discuss with me the 1998

war film, uh, Saving Private Ryan.

Tom, how are you doing?

I'm good, Henri.

I'm good.

Thanks for having me back on.

Uh, this conversation has been quite a while in the making, so I have a

feeling it's going to turn into a bit of a splurge of different ideas and

opinions that we have about Saving Private Ryan, but I'm looking forward to it.

Me too.

Me too.

It is, it is one of those films that, um, well, there certainly

is a lot we can say about it.

Critically, that it does have some very good moments and really

interesting cinematic moments.

They're most mostly moments because they don't fit together whatsoever.

But, um, but the, you can see why the film is, is captivating for people,

especially with what, uh, what was done with the first 25 minutes.

But of course, we're going to talk about that at, uh, at length today.

So, um, when I was a kid, my grandfather, my, my mom's dad, my pop, um, took

me to see this in the theater.

And I would say that, you know, of the films I saw in that era, between in Let's

say Forrest Gump and the Hurt Locker, that the two that were most impactful on me was

Blackhawk down and Saving Private Ryan.

I never really discussed it much with my grandfather as to specifically why

he wanted me to see it, but he was in the army between Korea and Vietnam.

So he didn't end up serving in either, but I think he wanted to give me an

education about what being in the military could be, and so, you know, I

bet it was it was you know, that first 25 minutes as a 16 17 year old kid, make you

hold your breath and um, and certainly that was what Spielberg was going for.

Um, and there is a measure of authenticity to that first bit, but.

Then you get into it and things become much more problematic.

The second little history tidbit on Henri about Saving Private Ryan is that there

was a point when I was in high school where my history teacher, um, who was a

Navy veteran showed us a little blip of the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.

I wouldn't say it was longer than 10 minutes, so we couldn't have even seen

the entire first sequence, but it was, you know, it was appropriate for what

we were studying in history at the time.

And, um, there were complaints to the school board and they

pulled Saving Private Ryan.

Um, by name, of course, but they pulled just about any other R rated film that

a teacher might have shown a portion of in a, in a class, and so I felt deeply

compelled to do something about that, and I wrote a letter to the editor of

the local newspaper where I'm from, the Dallas Chronicle, and I just, I expressed

my, Dissatisfaction at the other adults, the school board and, and others who

complained their, uh, their queasiness about seeing something like that, because

again, especially for American public school, seeing those 10 minutes again,

within American, the American side of things could be very informative for

somebody, especially wanting to join the military or wanting to understand

something about going back there.

So anyways, so I wrote a letter to the editor.

I have hunted, I hunted high and low trying to find it so I could read a

portion of it for today and maybe I will at some point in the future if I come

across the one copy I have somewhere, um, but I will say is that it's important

for me to emphasize my own being taken in by the film, and that it kind of

went up on the mental shelf of examples of being in the military, examples

of being in war, and that, you know, the, the many, many things many, many

aspects of a film like Saving Private Ryan that are taken out and looked at.

On their own, and then of course how they're arranged together, like, you know,

the church scene where the soldiers, the younger soldiers are talking about missing

their mothers and trying to remember them and the firm understanding that they fully

know that tomorrow may be their last day.

And I thought that part, that part of it, I thought was a beautiful scene.

It is, it is, it's certainly, it certainly really drips

sentimentality in certain ways.

And so, um, but, uh, anyways, um, enough about my experience with the film.

Tom, you, uh, you've actually been to the Normandy coast.

Tell us about that.

Uh, this was On a school trip when I was, I don't know, 11, 12 maybe,

um, where we went to Normandy, one of the places we visited was one of the beaches,

uh, where the invasion took place.

I'm not going to say which one, but this was a smaller beach.

It certainly isn't the one depicted in the film.

And to be honest, the whole experience was rather quaint because it's

not like in Saving Private Ryan.

Obviously, coastline is different in different places.

This was quite flat and There weren't any great big bunkers or anything like that.

There were a few trenches and ditches and things.

And there was the occasional bit of rusted old tank trap left in the sand.

So you've got a sense.

of something happening here and obviously there's a few plaques and memorials

and a little like visitor's information center that we looked around so you've

got a sense of you know this is a historically important location but

ultimately it was just a quite nice beach, which was a slightly odd thing

that because like you studying our history Or certainly through the school system.

World War II is really important.

And so the Normandy invasion is really important.

And this is something I must have been told about and seen

referenced on television hundreds of times before I ever went there.

And the real life experience of just standing there was like, so this is

where a major part of a war took place?

And actually, of course, it didn't.

Not all the beaches were the same.

That's one of the things that you pointed out in your emails to me.

And you're absolutely right, there wasn't a huge amount of action on this

particular beach, but nonetheless, it was, it was a great part of one

of my favorite trips in my life.

It wasn't the best part of that trip to France and to Normandy, but I'd

say it was probably the second best.

Were you able to, uh, did you get to visit any of

the cemeteries that are there?

Uh, we did.

I don't know if we visited them so much as passed them.

Um, there's certainly things we saw.

I don't remember actually going round them, if you see

the distinction I'm making.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cause it, the, the One thing we haven't touched on yet is

the, the, um, the opening.

It's not, it's not really a montage, it isn't called a montage, but the opening

scene with, uh, who we eventually find out is Private Ryan himself as

an older man, visiting, um, graves in Normandy with his family, and it

looks like he brought his partners with him, children, grandchildren.

This is a very big occasion that this is happening.

Um, yeah.

That the, in terms of looking at the way we looking at things, that kind of

thousand yard stare that came from the, uh, from, from Ryan and, you know, the

rows and rows and rows of graves and, and, and just, they're trying to plug

in this veneer of, I, I know they're going for respect, but it, it seems just

to me more of a, of a sentimentality.

That doesn't have a lot of backbone behind it.

We want you to get weepy when you see the graves, not when you

understand how the graves got there.

They really put this whole scene on the beach on that plateau in that way.

And that's not to say that what happened on that beach wasn't horrific.

It was.

And the movie does distill a lot of that very clearly.

It focuses way too much, of course, on the individual.

People in it, and that brings us as individual moviegoers into it more than

we see in bigger collective actions.

That opening scene bothers me a bit, because like you say, what

are we supposed to feel in that moment?

Because we haven't really been introduced to this person.

And it, Turns out to not be the person we think it is anyway, which

is kind of just pointlessly confusing.

And as you say, the emotional tone of that is just a broad sentimentality.

There's no real definition to it.

Somewhat sad?

Sure.

That's about it.

And why hang the opening of your movie on a scene with so

vaguely defined emotional stakes?

And then cut straight to flashback, what appears to be a

flashback, but turns out it isn't.

Why?

Um, which then launches you into the action.

It would have made more sense to me to start that with Tom Hanks in

the boat, in the landing craft, or at least a big broad sweeping shot.

Yeah.

Lots of landing craft approaching the beach and then whatever.

Why do we need that scene in, in the graveyard, in the cemetery?

Why is it there?

Beyond.

Kind of giving a hook to come back to at the end of the film.

Right, right.

And if it was, if it did go as you suggested and immediately begin on

the beach, if they were to have left in that final scene, it would be much

more meaningful that we weren't, one, like you mentioned, we weren't tricked

into thinking it was somebody that it wasn't, and two, we are seeing Ryan's

story coming full circle for the first time, not some person we don't know

who the fuck is at the beginning.

It would actually have had a greater meaning in that way.

I don't, I would have cut out both of them.

Uh, in, in, in either case, but at least, at least I could see that,

I could, I could see that argument being made about the final one

if the first one wasn't there.

It certainly would have had more of an impact in terms of you

actually caring about this person.

Rather than it becoming, oh, he's the guy in the cemetery.

It's more a moment of realization rather than a moment of sympathy

with this character, which is presumably what they were going for.

It is very emotionally confused that those two scenes bookending the film.

As to quite why they included them or what they were going for.

Whole film's confusing in that respect to be honest.

It really is.

It really is.

And the um, the original script was uh, was much more, just was a greater script.

It was just much more honest and open and authentic.

It didn't have those open and closing scenes.

Tom Hanks's character is much more in line with what you would

expect from a wartime army officer.

I never know when I'm watching this film what it is that I'm supposed

to be feeling, because aside from lots of little problems, which we'll get

to as we go through different parts of the movie, um, I, I, it doesn't feel

like I'm actually with any of these characters at any moment, it feels

very much like I'm watching a film.

I always feel a distance to what's happening on screen, even, to be

honest, in that opening section.

And I get the idea that, from a filmmaking point of view,

that's supposed to draw you in.

And then you're sucked into the movie, and then it slows down,

and we get the actual story.

And we're supposed to be carried through.

By the effect of that opening sequence, but it never had that

effect on me for some reason.

And so as a result, the remainder of the film is quite boring.

I admire the opening section, certainly, as a piece of, as a piece of cinema,

as a piece of Making film, but it doesn't have the emotional impact

on me that I think is intended.

And I'm not sure quite what is intended beyond that technique of

using the action to suck you in.

But there again, if that's the whole point of the opening of the film, why

start with the scene in the cemetery?

And why pull the whole switcheroo with the characters?

It just seems like Almost an exercise in keeping the audience guessing at

the exact moment that you want them to start absorbing this world that you're

creating, to start feeling part of it.

And maybe that's why the movie has just never really worked for me, whereas

it has for so many other people.

I mean, lots of people think that this is a great movie.

And fine, lots of people get drawn into it, and I understand why you did.

I just never had that reaction from the first time I saw the movie all the

way through to the time and re-watched it recently in order to prep for this.

I, I know I de I definitely had a, a much more romantic notion

of being in the military of combat, of the, uh, consequences in the

casualties and things like that.

You know, and I, I know that, that it made, made a lot

of that, those kind of, uh.

Propaganda films really fit in well for me and I think that well for

the American public because most of our learning is through media.

We're not learning, we're not learning extensive non American, uh, history that

is actually connecting the dots for us on a bigger, bigger scheme than what the

American government wants us to know.

They want us to, to, to vote and to, to support things by sentiment, not by.

Um, critical analysis, not by being willing to understand what the

actual foreign policy looks like.

They want us to go in full in on the, and especially with Saving Private Ryan,

on each of the individual soldiers.

And that's, and that's one of the ways Spielberg keeps us going through

it, is that there's this drip, drip, drip of dead guys from the squad, and

people are just drawn along with it.

But again, the, the sense of collectivism about the fight.

is, totally gives way to all the individuality, and that's what,

you know, that's what Spielberg was definitely going for.

But you see what I mean?

It's, to my mind, the best propaganda is emotionally specific.

It doesn't have to be honest, of course, but it has to be aimed at something

quite specific that it's trying to trigger in you, or maybe lay down so

it can then be picked up on later.

No, I totally, I totally get the, the, the point you're making that it does

it, it, you know, and I look at it now that way, um, you're much, much years

later after having taken in a lot more war films and really looked at the, at the

context, um, but you're absolutely right, is that that opening scene, it's so Uh,

one dimensional and kind of blase, you see that thousand yards there and Ryan,

and maybe the audience has an idea of what that's about and maybe they don't.

There's nothing specific, right?

It's not driving towards anything specifically.

And then of course there's his family there and they're all kind

of, you know, just following grandpa.

You know, I don't, you don't see any of them.

They don't seem upset or sad to kind of lend us in that direction, or maybe

some of them are frustrated or angry over different dynamics of it, but at

the very least, it would give us clues to go forward, and there are none.

That opening thing, it gives us, it gives us nothing other than saying, you know,

going to the American notion of, well, not just American, but you know, the, the,

the notion of this, this guy is unsettled.

This guy is, you know, this guy is a, here's our war veteran.

Here's our, you know, guy, and you can see in his face, there's something wrong.

Do you know what it really is?

No.

Could it be nothing?

Could he be having bad gas or something?

Um, did he forget to take his pills this morning?

Exactly, exactly.

No, there is, there's no, there's nothing to grab on in that moment.

And so, I do totally get, you're looking at that in kind of confusion,

why are they, what the fuck is this supposed to be sending me towards?

And then you get to the end, and you're like, okay, I guess I know what

they were going for, but still, it feels It feels a bit like cinematic

gaslighting when you really look at it.

Yeah, because it's a warm open that then drops into a cold open.

Right, right.

The film starts twice, essentially.

And lots of critics, lots of critics in the stuff that I've

read online had that same complaint.

It was like, you know, that if you were taken between the beach and, um, The

Ryan's, uh, Ryan's Rescue at the very end and cut out the beginning and end.

It would have been like a perfect film to them, but they did notice that,

you know, what is, why is there this schmaltzy thing attached to this film?

Do we not have enough to see what the characters are doing?

Without having this weird intro and outro.

It also reminds me, and I know I bring up this film quite a lot

in our conversations, but I'm going to do it again anyway, of Fields of

Fire, the Vietnam film that was never made, the one written by Jim Webb.

Because the opening of that film is the father, the Vietnam veteran,

who is clearly somewhat disabled and certainly still suffering.

His experience is taking his son to Vietnam to visit the location of

a battle, which we then come back to see later in the film for real.

So it establishes, as I say, the emotional stakes, who these people

are, what their relationship is, where they're going and why we should care.

Um, does not take a long time to do that.

It then does go a bit supernatural and he starts to see ghosts and things

and that precipitates the flashback.

And then as in this film, we then get the story kind of moving forward

from there chronologically, but it's essentially the same open, right?

The same way of structuring the opening to a movie.

And it's so much more effective.

And of course that film done in by the DOD, I mean, it's largely

their fault that it was never made.

Whereas this one ultimately got army support of varying kinds.

I mean, they didn't provide a lot of hardware because they didn't

actually have any World War II hardware left to loan them.

So I'm not quite sure where they got all this from, but

fair play to them for doing it.

Um, and yeah, yes, like I say, when I was reflecting on why that opening

of the movie bothers me so much this time, I was thinking it's because

it's the same opening as Fields of Fire, just really badly written.

You know, they were going for the same kind of thing, but they

just either didn't know how to execute it or didn't care, maybe?

There's not a lot of care in that opening either.

It doesn't feel like, uh, you know, Spielberg is capable of

generating great cinematic moments.

Always has been.

And yet that scene feels so vague and lazy.

And then, yeah, like I say, I think of just a cold open

where we jump straight either.

We see a big.

We get the big picture of the invasion, we'll just start with

a few guys in a boat, yeah?

Maybe pull out from there.

I don't know, there's so many different ways you could do this that would be more

effective than that, um, but we should move on and actually talk about this

great big, is it 24, 25 minute battle sequence that is the thing everyone talks

about with Saving Private Ryan, I guess.

Yes,

yes, so it's important for people to know that we have to, we definitely

have to take a trip through some important history to understand this, uh, some of

this stuff, and also that it is kind of a curious thing that a filmmaker would

choose such a specific place Among such a huge battle, um, and concentrate on it.

And again, you know, got a great many of the details right, especially as to,

you know, veterans that, that saw it when it first came out and talked about,

you know, that the, the authenticity was definitely up there, but it's

a curious thing to, to Thank you.

Try to recreate such a specific place because the history can stand there,

you know, opposed to you the whole time.

Um, whereas if we're watching a movie like Platoon, that we understand that, that

script, that, that, um, that Oliver Stone amalgamized different parts of it and put

different things together to make it more compelling, not to make it inauthentic.

Today we're not gonna talk about training or deployment of hundreds of thousands

of Americans, British, French, and so on.

Participated.

Participated in the evasion, uh, both in the English channel like

Tom Hanks and his pals in the movie.

Um, huge airborne drops from into Normandy behind enemy lines.

Massive bombardment of the coastline.

Um, we're not talking about the full picture of coastal

defenses by the Germans.

We're not discussing PSYOP's campaigns by the Allies to try to shift

German assets in different places.

Um, you know, we're not talking about the fact that You know, truly that four of

five deaths in Europe at that time in, in World War II were cumulative, cumulatively

on the Eastern front as the U.

S.

only lost about 600, 000 troops, Russia lost 27 million folks

between military and civilian.

What we are discussing today and what you need to center your mind on as

you're listening to us is that this is one very small section of Omaha Beach.

And they took it and they made this 25 minutes, so everything that I

just mentioned, we have to understand that we're not getting the full

picture of any of those things.

Of course, we're not getting the full picture in the 25 minutes, but it is

much more honest than a demonstration of the rest, but it goes back to us

focusing on the individuals, on the individual wounds, on the individual

arms lost and people blown up.

Drowned in the, in the surf.

And, and of course all those things happen.

A horrific, horrific place to be any kind of a human being, much less a troop

of some kind on one of those beaches.

Um, one other aspect though, just so I don't forget to mention it later, is that

much like a film like Black Hawk Down, that this film focused on American forces.

I don't remember seeing any number of Brits, French, Canadians, um, All of the

varying types of people that actually took part in this, and you know, different

countries ended up taking full on different beaches, um, but then we move

on to the actual scene, and history says that at this particular sliver of sand,

that this was the worst casualty wise.

It's important to emphasize here that Omaha beach was the most casualty heavy

area of the initial beach landings.

What you see in the film, while inaccurate in many ways, does give the

viewer a better grasp on how awful that morning was for the invading troops.

Why did Spielberg choose this beach?

Was he attempting to give viewers a sense of how hopeless or

difficult the place really was?

Or was it chosen to make a huge action sequence that allowed for only binary

assessments of what was happening?

Of course, both points aren’t mutually exclusive.

It can be both extreme hopelessness and a huge action piece that focused on

individuals reacting to heavy violence without equally showing the other side.

During the Normandy beach landings, that more people died in this small sliver of

ground that included Charlie Company, 2nd Rangers, that was actually captained by a

guy named Captain Ralph Goranson, um, and then immediately to their left, I believe,

is Alpha Company, 116th Regimental Combat Team, 29th Infantry Division.

And I say that because when the scene opens, when they're opening

the boats for the first time and Tom Hanks and Tom Sizemore run out

there, there are already men from that alpha company dead on the beach.

Their company was almost completely wiped out.

In that section, the Rangers did better, only a little better, and I

don't know to put it on Rangers or just they had good leaders and were able to

make the most of the horrifying place.

Also possibly just dumb luck.

.Absolutely.

No, there's, there's so many different factors that can come into it.

Um, one thing that Saving Private Ryan didn't include in the front

thing was that there were a couple of incidences of friendly fire.

That was mainly when, uh, Naval bombardments, they were able to signal

back to British naval ships and get them to provide them artillery support

and sometimes there were misfirings, they hit places where there were actual

Allied troops instead of German troops.

And they also, the troops on the beaches, used white phosphorus grenades.

To clear out the bunkers and pillboxes that the Germans were in.

I hope I don't need to emphasize to anybody listening to this podcast, but

I'm going to anyway, how horrifying white phosphorus burns are, and how

even after you've been able to get the fire out, which is a chemical fire, one

that can't be put out by water, um, but it's just a horrifying thing, but of

course that one, I could see Spielberg easily saying we're not going to show

that, and certainly we're not going to show that happening to any Americans

if somebody missed threw a grenade, and even though they do show stuff like that,

um, throughout the film, that it was, they didn't include any of those kind

of things, so we're American centric, doesn't include Friendly Fire, doesn't

allow us to know about that other company that is being entirely shredded to bits.

All you've just said makes me think This sequence is

known for being, or at least in our generation anyway, for being like

the definitive depiction of combat in all its horrible, brutal glory, etc.

And yet, everything you're saying says it's actually quite sanitized

and quite carefully sanitized to give the impression of exactly what they're

going for, which is what Spielberg said.

And he said this ludicrous thing, it's a quote I came across when I was Reading, I

think it was actually Larry Seward's entry on Saving Private Brian, which is alright.

One of the better entries in his not especially impressive book.

Um, yeah, anyway, Spielberg said, you know, there have been, I think he said

84 American films that depict combat in war, and this will be the 85th, and

it'll be the first one to tell the truth.

I'm thinking, firstly, you've ripped off this opening from

The Longest Day, so that's just bullshit straight out of the can.

And secondly, how arrogant to say that, and then to avoid Some of the real chaotic

nastiness of what really happened, some of the real, the real horror show, and

instead it's basically just machine guns, lots and lots and lots of machine

guns, um, and obviously being hit with an industrial machine gun, having

your gut shredded by it, is not a good thing, but we don't actually see people

dying in the way a lot of people died.

It's often quite quick, for one thing.

Yeah?

You don't see, apart from the guy who actually has his guts hanging

out and he's screaming and there's, you know, there's a bit of that,

but it's kept to a relative minimum.

We do just see a lot of people getting hit by bullets and now they're dead.

Like the idiot who comes along and takes his helmet off and then is immediately

shot and it's like, that's such a war movie cliché, that's so, I mean,

what were they going for with that?

Were they trying to make it funny?

It's almost slapstick, given what's going on around them, given all these

other people who've died, and are dying, and are, you know, lying on

the beach, missing a leg, and so on.

So yeah, what you're saying is actually, rather than being the truth about combat,

as Spielberg was promoting it, possibly self promoting, It's actually quite

clean given what truly happened there.

There was a lot of deaths on the day of the invasion that happened simply

because the troops were dropped off from their Higgins boat or whatever kind

of craft was taking them to the beach.

Um, that so many of them drowned.

You know, they never made it to the beach.

And we see that a little bit.

We see a few guys struggling in the water.

There's, you know, a couple floating in the water, although it's close

enough, you don't know whether it could have been gunfire or just

the water or a combination thereof.

And the stories, the little snippets that I've read through, uh, doing

research for this has almost every guy.

Who gets mentioned saying that they were helping somebody else who was wounded,

you know, guy broke his leg trying to come out of the water guy gets trapped under

a rock and so, so much of the soldiers time on the beach when they're supposed

to be moving forward is just dealing with the casualties and not even specifically

being dealt with by the medics.

Um, no, sure.

Just being grabbed and dragged around and someone's

trying to patch you up.

All of that.

So the beach action, it did include a little bit of that and it did

include some of that hopelessness that there was that one dude that Captain

Miller drugged for a little bit and then I think is immediately after he

stopped dragging him, he got shot.

On the ground.

And, and that's, you know, like the thing with the, with the helmet, you

know, those things do happen in, in combat, but they are also cliches.

They, they are, they fit into their, they think that they're instilling

something with wisdom and they're just encouraging lazy writing, you know.

Well, that's the thing.

It's like everything that actually happens in that opening sequence,

give or take, did actually happen.

It's all the stuff that also happened that is missing from that

opening sequence that undermines it.

And I'm reminded of the sequence in Wonder Woman where she goes over the

top, where she's marching through no man's land and, you know, deflecting

all the bullets with a shield and again it's a machine gun because it's Germans.

And that is perhaps the most iconic action sequence in that film about World War One.

And it is a complete lie about the true nature of trench warfare and

what going over the top was like.

Going over the top, i.

e.

everyone just piles over the top of the trenches and charges towards the

opposition's trench, and most of those people just get cut down, most of

those people die, exactly like here.

And, okay, this is a far more realistic film than Wonder Woman,

and this is still a far more realistic sequence than that one was.

But it has the same troubling dimension to it, that it's taking the mass, I

don't want to say suicidal, because it's not suicidal, but it's near as damn it

being sent on a suicide mission, for a lot of those people, taking that and

turning it into something simple and heroic that can be overcome quickly.

Because that's the other problem with it, is that after 25 minutes,

they're basically one, it seems, and it just sort of stops.

And you don't get a sense of, oh, this is just this little part of the beach,

there's still a hundred fights going on up and down the coastline, and there's

still lots of people dying and lots of stuff going on, it just sort of almost

goes quiet, and then they get the mission to go off and save Jack Ryan, and

That I also find deeply troubling, because as you say, this was a very

varied invasion in terms of the scale of what was happening on different

beaches and which forces were involved and so on, and of course how many people

died and how many people survived.

And it made it seem like the invasion of Normandy was just Tom Hanks

having to blow up a bunker or two.

Pretty much, yeah.

So again, this is something that is really morally problematic

about it, because people take it as being a gruesome, gritty depiction

of combat that's actually been kind of squashed into a tiny little.

ball of what they want you to see, that doesn't actually tell

you what this thing was like.

It doesn't, it's, it's very impressionistic.

I think that's ultimately the problem with it.

But, okay, the sound design is fantastic, the camera work is fantastic,

it's beautifully edited together.

But ultimately, does it really give you an impression of suffering and

death and the futility of this?

Or does it just make you move on so fast that none of that really resonates?

When, surely, that should be the point?

And that seems to be the point that a lot of people have taken from it, even though

that's not what the film has given them.

So, I'm left wondering how they ended up with that reaction.

I'm very confused by people's reactions to this movie being so

very different to mine, obviously.

Um, and normally I can understand that, but with this one, the more I break

down that sequence in my mind, the less I understand why people think it's so

Iconic for one thing, but also profound.

It's actually saying anything about either the Normandy

invasions or combat in general.

Is it, I mean, are you coming from a different place here?

Can you see some kind of moral or statement or something that

they're actually trying to say there that I'm just missing?

No.

No.

No.

There just isn't.

There just isn't.

Do you remember what the Pentagon said about forrest Gump?

They said it had a nihilistic view of the Vietnam War.

I'm starting to wonder, does Saving Private Ryan have kind of

a nihilistic view of World War II?

That's a good, that's a really good point, man.

Even though it's interpreted in such a different way to that,

that's not how most people see the film and most people remember it.

That's how I'm reacting to it right now.

Well, one thing I This film would fit into Before my army time it would

fit into a category of films that most people only ever saw once And that was

as far as they thought that they could stomach it and so in you know, in their

remembered reflections of what they got from the movie, I think that it People

are, are filling in more blanks than Spielberg gave them blanks to fill in.

The biggest FU to me, and I don't know why screenwriters allowed this to happen

to their work, but that the original script for Saving Private Ryan was a

much better, much more honest An open depiction of what war was, um, during

that time, um, a couple of good examples that, um, even after the Rangers get off

the beach, um, before they are sent to go after Ryan, that in order for them to

brief Captain Miller on the mission, they have to literally remove him from combat.

He and his soldiers are fighting right there, and his soldiers keep fighting

while he's briefed, he then goes back, takes the ones that he determines are

going to come, and then they end up leaving, and then for them, there are

no shortage of horrifying events that On their way to try to find Ryan and try

to, try to bring him back to wherever they were supposed to bring him back to.

Um, and so it's, it's, uh, and then, and then the final thing, and I think

this, this definitely goes to what you're talking about in terms of the,

the minimization of really, Horrifying wartime kind of violence, um, is

the final battle that I think is, is sterilized in very much the same way.

Um, but when you compare it to the original script, that sequence of

the movie is much, much longer.

You see them take Hours and hours and hours preparing the battle space, moving

rubble around, setting up machine guns, deciding what angles of fire are the best.

In the portion we saw in the movie, mmm, 10 minutes?

Maybe?

Something, you know, a very, very short thing.

Um, and then of course there's the ending and the, the, earn this and

all that other bullshit and such.

Um, but it, it It just looking at how much it was downgraded

from the original script.

And of course, that's the, you know, this Spielberg, this Spielberg

special, um, to go ahead and do what he wants and make and make changes.

And however he feels, because he's, he's the God with the Oscars.

Um, But it's really important that the, the, that we point out the, um, the

sterility of the movie, of the entire movie, there's sterility in the, in

the violence, and certainly in the more sentimental moments, there's also this

sterile sentimentalism, you know, like when Ryan's mom gets the telegrams and

we haven't really talked much about the original story But we'll we'll get to

that in a little bit But when in the film you see Ryan's mom get the telegrams

She gets of course gets all three of them at once and you never see her face.

She's at this at the sink washing dishes She looks out her window She sees in the

distance the chaplain's car coming to her home And of course once she realizes that

of who it is, she sits down on the porch So I'm sure she's beside herself if we

could see her face Does she have a face?

We don't know.

We didn't get to see it.

Um, and, and the other thing, and this one, this one hit me much, much harder.

Maybe it was because I was a soldier or that it just goes

back to older, older parts of me that I'm not noticing right now.

But, um, when Ryan, when Private Ryan is initially told that his three

brothers are dead, he falls on the fucking ground and loses his mind.

I mean, he is beside himself at the thought that all three of them.

We don't see any of that in Matt Damon's performance of Private Ryan.

We see a much more manly, hold it in, you know, kind of thing.

Um, and it's clear, you know, he loves his brothers, that little story about

the bra and the barn and all that shit.

And to be fair, I could understand that at a moment like that, that, you know,

you're so confused trying and he's trying to remember his brother's faces and he's

not sure at that moment how to do that.

But again, it's, it's, that's not.

The reaction, Matt Damon's performance is not the reaction of someone who

just lost their three siblings.

And that whole thing just flattens out over the whole film.

Like they're giving us a secondary lesson in American male masculinity in

addition to all the bullshit in the film.

That this is how it's how we're supposed to be, instead of understanding

that people lose it, people who lose their children in war lose it, and

that should be acceptable, fair, in a film, in a war film, it should be,

yeah, it's uncomfortable as fuck to watch somebody cry and mourn and lose

their mind, and it's supposed to be.

That's one of the aspects of war that we do leave out so much, you

know, you have your mom with a single tear as opposed to a mom that can't

get out of bed for a month because their son is dead, or something.

Well, like you say, we don't actually see the face,

we just see them face in hands, silhouette from behind, weeping.

Yeah, and then it will quickly fade into something else to not linger on that.

Um, so just as they don't linger on the physical suffering.

In that first sequence, in the combat, they don't linger on the emotional

suffering, which is supposed to be the thing that drives the entire plot.

That's the whole reason why we should care about this, right?

We want this kid to survive because he's the only son left.

We want this woman to get her only surviving son back.

And yet, again, they never introduce her, really, we don't get to know her,

we don't get to know why her son matters to her so much, I mean, we're just

sort of left to presume all of that.

And like you say, when they eventually actually get to Jack Ryan, I keep

calling him Jack Ryan but I'm going to keep doing that anyway, um, I know

that's not his name in the film but when we eventually get to him, his

emotional reaction is Neither one of shock and shutting down, nor one of

exploding and falling to the ground, like you say in the original script.

So, quite what are we supposed to make of the emotional through

line to the entire movie?

And how is that supposed to link up with the bookends that we've already discussed?

Given that Spielberg was evidently trying to make that kind of film,

I think he screwed up, basically.

Um, I think he missed what the emotional beats in this movie were

supposed to be for that story to work, and cheated the audience.

Out of both, a realistic, truly realistic depiction of the combat at Normandy,

particularly that bit of the beach.

And, kind of cheated them out of the rest of the film too, because it's,

as I said, he ripped off the start from The Longest Day, the rest of the

film, and he's quite open about this.

He ripped off from a film called A Walk in the Sun, which is about a small group

of American GIs in Italy, I think, who are looking for a bridge they have to blow up.

So it's just them.

Like in most of, uh, Saving Jack Ryan, um, just traipsing across

the countryside, talking about stuff, and then things happen.

Um, why try and make both of those films at once?

Make one or the other.

Or, as you say with the original script, if you are going to

do it, have it like that.

Have it that they're kind of pulled out of combat.

So you get the sense that the fight is still going on on the beach, and then

as they move away, they engage in more of a fight, they discover, you know,

there's just sort of random chaos, bits of war going on all around them, and

they're trying to move through this.

That's presumably what they were going for, even with the toned

down and sanitized version, but it's not what we ended up with.

What you end up with is something that's sensorily overwhelming,

but then goes quiet, and then gets a bit dull for quite a while.

Because, as I say, how are we supposed to care about all of these people when we

haven't been introduced to them, and we don't really know who they are, or Why all

of this matters the person that we really are supposed to care about is the mother

back home Who we hope will one day get to see her son again but we spend no time

with her because the only women in this film are either typists or a mother who

we'd never see her Face because this is a very very sexist movie in that respect.

Yeah, it's like a Michael Bay movie The women are there to

cry And it'd be an emotional anchor point and that's about it.

It really, it really, uh, it really lends itself to, uh, American and British

military notions about women in combat.

About, you know, because we could tell, we could, you know, they

could include those kind of things.

They could include, you know, nurses that happen to come ashore.

With, uh, the medical teams sometime later on, and for some reason

there's fresh fighting going on nearby and they could go over it.

I read about this.

I read about all kinds of things like that.

No, there weren't, uh, there weren't women specifically on the beach, but

there were women everywhere else in that.

There were women loading bombs.

There were women, you know, as part of the, um, like I said, a big part

of the medical, medical crew there.

And they could have included those things, and they chose not to.

It's just, you know, that there, there are, there are so many great stories like

that in, in American and British history about women going, you know, and I don't

want to, I don't want to go over to the, to the combat worship side of it, but just

in terms of the survival of a human being against amazing odds and being helpful at

a time when society said Women shouldn't be in combat, around combat, near combat.

They might get scared.

They might get this, whatever bullshit they happen to throw out at that point.

They can be every bit as good as men in being warmongers.

There is no reason to not do that.

And it's, it's their own lack of imagination of including that.

And especially like you mentioned about Spielberg and his many, the many cliches

and things that he borrowed from places.

Um, it begins to make you wonder if he ever writes anything truly original.

But, uh, that would be a long subject for a different day.

It would also involve watching all of his films again and concluding the

answer to that question is probably not.

Especially after Ready Player One, which is just a mashup of all his pre existing

films and some other stuff that he likes.

Um,

have a

strange

guy, Spielberg.

He really is.

He's a, yeah.

He did.

Um, I, I think the best thing that he's ever made in my mind, and of course he

was only executive producer of it, but my favorite Spielberg thing is Animaniacs.

That, uh, that, that, that is where I put it because that's some

good stuff and he didn't write it.

He just was the, he was just the dude on the executive producer

thing, you know, so, but good show.

Good show.

Animaniacs was great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I can see that.

No, I can see that.

I just wasn't expecting you to mention it.

So, I want to, I want to key up on one thing that happened, and this

goes right to, I think, to the heart of what you're discussing here, Tom, about,

about what characters find importance and how do we make our attachment to that.

Ryan's comment, right after meeting Captain Miller and hearing the

whole spiel and wanting to take him home, and Ryan retorts to the

Captain, he says, You can tell.

Her, my mom, when you found me, I was with the only brothers I have left.

Now, from a real simplistic soldier kind of standpoint, I could understand

him saying like that, but his brothers were literally just killed.

He's a member of the 101st Airborne, which means at that point where he was.

If we're to take all of that at face value, he had already seen a

whole host of death and destruction.

Why is it that he would place such stock in his comrades lives, knowing

that his own brothers were just killed?

This same way, why would he say anything lofty about the value of life when life

at that point that he was living, so, so fucking cheap, um, is it a, is it a,

uh, you know, kind of a, a front, you know, we're putting one foot in front of

the other and that is our retort to say.

Again, it's the theme here totally lost in the sauce in terms of

where that's supposed to go.

You know, him falling on his knees and crying, hearing about his brothers, people

can relate to, people can grab onto.

But if you're going to, if it's always going to fit into that male

centric, masculine presentation, John Wayne with the helmet and the cigar.

Um, then we're not going to get any closer to the real reality of

the emotions in times like these.

Um, and, and that's the other thing about the conclusion of the film that I think

was a sincere fuck up on Spielberg's part is that When Ryan ultimately

gets rescued, when the Mustangs fly overhead and bomb the bridge and push

back the Germans and everything, there is nothing to say that Ryan couldn't

have died 10 minutes after that, or 10 hours after that, or 10 days after that.

Um, remembering that all of those guys that came to rescue him

died, and he was left by himself.

Now, of course, if there's If there's allied air power overhead, that may mean

that ground forces are not far away, but that doesn't guarantee it in any instance.

So, I feel like that by moving immediately from that point back to

our sterile, uh, cemetery, and Grandpa Ryan trying to deal with his thousand

yard stare and everything, um, that there's something missing there.

There's something that, you know, and it, how, how did he fucking get home?

Even a short, very short little montage sequence of riding in the back of the

truck back to the beaches, getting on a boat, going back across the channel,

and then eventually Making it all the way back home, um, at least that could have

given us a connection and understanding that his war, his portion of the war, was

truly done right there, but it didn't, it didn't give us anything close to a

period on what was actually happening there, and that whole area, everything

about the Normandy beaches, about the Allies movement inland towards, um, bigger

German forces was all very tentative.

There was, there was nothing to say that the Germans wouldn't be

come back in a much greater force.

But, the film firmly tells us, we're stopping right here.

Here's where the fucking story ends.

What other story there is?

Well, you know, whatever people are thinking some people would be like,

okay Well, I'm glad the movie's over.

I don't have to go through that shit anymore.

And some other people who would have been, you know, more World War II Knowledgeable,

you know would have in their mind.

Okay, I guess he's going home now They don't have to explain that but that's

not the nature of war And so it's I think that that's a really big another missed

beat Along with a lot of the other stuff that we've been, we've been talking about.

Yeah, because like you say, the reason why we're supposed to

care about the people we're following through this journey, rather than seeing

a wider scale movie that, as you say, could keep moving back to the beach,

and show that this is still going on, as these guys are gradually making

their way across the countryside and trying to find Ryan, that there is

still a war going on all around them, and there is people dying constantly.

But they didn't make that film.

They made, uh, A Walk in the Sun, a small group of guys.

But if you want to have a small group of guys, your opening half hour to the

movie probably shouldn't be everyone but your small group of guys getting shot.

It should probably be a conversation, maybe, between your small group

of guys, establishing who the hell they are, so we can care about them.

And then they try and do that.

That all seems to sort of happen in the second act.

Instead of the first.

So again, the movie is sort of restarted once more.

Um, third beginning now, just keeping score.

Um, and that's when we start to get to know these guys.

For one thing, it seemed like they just slapped everyone who was hot in

the late 90s into a World War II army uniform and stuck them on the screen.

And I don't think the characterization was done that well.

They don't really stand out to me.

I don't remember anyone in this film apart from Matt Damon

and Tom Hanks, particularly.

Maybe that's just me.

Maybe other people feel differently.

But even if that is what they were going for, and even if they accomplished that

part of it, and some people may feel that they did, it gets very confused by

all of these different things saying, oh no, but the individual doesn't matter.

Your relationship to individual soldiers fighting in this war is irrelevant.

And yet the ending of the film is all just one individual survives.

And as you say, he says this line about my family brothers, my blood

brothers are gone, but these are my new family, my new brothers.

And then they all die.

So, how is that line supposed to have much emotional resonance,

when, okay, his first family's dead and now his second family's dead?

Why does it even matter whether he survives at that point?

Let alone the question of how does he survive, as you say.

He's still in the middle of a war, and the notion that, oh, that's the end of

Didn't he just, like, parachute in the day before, or that morning, or You

know, it didn't seem like that was his whole mission, was to parachute in, get

blown off course, and then get rescued.

Um, I assume he had some other business that he would have to attend to before

they just let him go out of France.

Yeah, the whole, I mean, the whole premise of the film is screwed, because the notion

that they would send off people in the midst of all of this to go and find one

guy, and I know you've got some notes just to go through on, like, real life

stories that may have inspired this, or certainly I think did inspire this.

This, just to say, this is one of the things that the U.

S.

Army had a problem with themselves.

As they said, the premise of the movie is kind of screwed.

Not just because you open with Ryan, but then we're following Tom Hanks.

So we assume Tom Hanks is the old guy at the end of the film, but then he dies.

But Ryan was never on the beach, so the whole flashback thing

doesn't actually follow through.

They were criticizing this.

That's the U.

S.

Army who said they had a problem with this.

Now they also said the premise of sending off a bunch of guys to track down one

soldier in the midst of a war, which is encompassing many hundreds of thousands

of people, many many tens of thousands of whom are basically just dying every

moment, doesn't make any sense either, and we wouldn't have actually done this.

And there is also the whole problem of, how does the news

get to the mother so quickly?

I think there's actually one of the script notes that says, well, they

didn't have email or faxes in the 1940s.

So that was just physically impossible.

Let alone the notion that they're all arriving at once,

which is extremely unlikely.

Um, you know, even they were picking holes in this very stupid script.

Um, but yeah, it's particularly that through line of Does

the individual matter?

Because the film's sort of saying it does, but undermines that at almost every turn.

And do the bonds of battle matter?

It's saying yes, but undermines it at every turn.

So, what actually matters?

What are we left with except Guardian Cemetery?

That's pretty much it, and I think that kind of circular logic

and the schmaltz of the beach and everything, it really fits well in

other, among other American films about, you know, American centric thinking

about our military and what it does.

Um.

But it, you know, it's, it's very much, you know, as, as you're saying, you know,

this individual matters, they die, that individual matters, they die, um, and,

and, and nothing else better is, comes from that, and, and I'm really glad that

the army and that soldiers pointed that kind of thing out, and it, about, you

know, sending, sending a bunch of guys to kill and die for one, one person,

and Spielberg, He said the same thing.

He said he wanted to demonstrate the, um, the futility of what

it was they were trying to do.

Not just the actual mission, but the idea of sending that many, you know,

sending that many people ostensibly to die for this one dude to come home.

Um, but the thing is, is our mythology, American mythology, in that way, does

Attach itself really well to that, you know, to one of the, I don't remember

if it was the code of conduct or which, which army thing you're supposed to

resuscitate about this, but where it mentions leave no man behind.

And, you know, the, the whole, you know, if, if, if we were to take Blackhawk

down as being a second chapter of, of Saving Private Ryan, you would see,

you know, this repeated choice for military leaders to say, I'm going to

send a whole bunch of people to stop a very few people, or I'm going to spend

a whole bunch of people to rescue a very few people instead of cutting, you

know, cutting their losses and saying, I'm sorry, we can't, it makes no sense.

There is no sense to it.

Um, but again, like you're pointing out here is that Spielberg did

it so much throughout the film that there is never anything

concrete to grab onto in that way.

Um.

But, um, let's, um, let's move on a little

bit.

If anything, actually the most, the most powerful emotional beat

that I felt in the film is in the, um, the wrong Private Ryan scene.

Mm hmm.

That was, that was

a good one.

That was a

powerful one, yeah.

Yeah, that's, that's how it should actually be when they

find the real Ryan, yeah?

And it's the wrong one.

It's a scene that doesn't need to be in the film, and is in fact a

bit of a waste of everyone's time.

They probably could have left that out and just moved the fuck on with the story.

But then they're actually missing the only emotional beat that

landed in the entire film for me.

So, I get that no matter what they did, I would have criticized it.

But you see what I mean?

He managed to create, in that moment, greater emotional depth, with a character

that has no bearing on the plot.

He's just got the same name and someone makes an administrative mistake.

BF WATCH TV 2021 Then he did in the entire rest of the movie with the

characters that we're supposed to care about, such as the mother, such

as Tom Hanks, such as Matt Damon.

How did he manage to create a greater emotional anchor with an entirely

tertiary irrelevant character that, as I say, could just be written out and

no one would miss him, than he did with the actual story he was trying to tell?

I think maybe he got lost in the notion of futility.

If he was trying to say that this was futile, I mean, firstly, that begs the

question, why make the film, Stephen?

Um, if your story is ultimately futile, maybe don't make it, but also, if

you're trying to depict futility, you need to see the struggle of the

people who are trying to do something futile, which means ultimately you

do need to relate to their struggle.

Great.

Otherwise, you just end up with a kind of cold, emotionally flat film that

doesn't really go anywhere and starts by saying the Normandy landings were

over in about 20 minutes and finishes by saying we won World War II by

saving or and or blowing up one bridge.

And it's quite a small bridge as well.

It's not like we're talking about the bridge over the river Kwai here.

It's that was another thing that puzzles me about that ending.

It's so small scale.

They're trying to make this the big climax of the film, but it's just like

one little bridge that, you know, you could probably rebuild that in about

two days if you really wanted to.

Probably faster if you get some Army Corps of Engineers in there or something.

Um, and yet Tom Hanks makes this his last stand?

Why?

Why does he care?

Why should we care?

Sorry, you wanted to move on to something else.

Please, please do, because I'm just ranting about how little

I care about this meeting.

Um, so we need to talk a little bit about the real, um, basis.

For the story of, of Saving Private Ryan, and of course it is, it is only one

aspect that is among many other aspects from many other films and ideas that,

um, get input in here, but the real story is quite different, but I think it's a,

it's an important one to put alongside.

Um, so a partial basis for this story is the tale of the Nyland brothers,

but the, before we come to them, we need to first talk about the Sullivan

brothers, the Sullivan brothers were five biological siblings who enlisted.

In the Navy after Pearl Harbor and were assigned together on the USS

Juneau, which was part of the U.

S.

Pacific Fleet.

George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert Sullivan.

The Navy agreed to the request that all five would serve on the same ship.

It wasn't a common practice by the U.

S.

military to place siblings together, but it wasn't discouraged either.

Some officials saw it as a way to keep family morale high.

In fact, at least 30 sets of brothers were serving on the Juneau when it sank.

Um, it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes in 1942 with no known survivors.

And so the fallout from the deaths of the so brothers led to significant

changes in policies at the, uh, the war department about siblings or close

relatives being stationed together.

Um, now this was prior, prior, you know, this was the war department before it was

changed to the DEF Department of Defense.

Mind you, at this point in World War II, the Sullivans were, of course, only one

very small portion of sibling groups who had died together, so the War Department

created its own sole survivor policy.

It was this policy that affected the Nyland brothers, um, Edward,

Fritz, Preston, and Robert Nyland.

And then their postings among American forces were a direct

result of this new policy.

One was assigned to the U.

S.

Army Air Corps in the Pacific, while the other three were assigned to various

infantry units in the European theater.

In fact, three of them were stationed in England at the same time in

preparation for the Normandy landings.

Um, although because they were in different units and preparing for

different missions, they didn't actually have much contact with each other while

they were in England still getting ready for the invasion in May of 1944

Edward Nyland was shot down over Burma and was declared missing believed to

be dead next on June 6th 1944 the first day of the Normandy landings the three

brothers Each participated in the landings albeit in very different places Robert

was killed in action on the 6th On, I want to say, on one of the beaches, and

then on the 7th, the same fate befell Preston, and the last brother, uh,

Frederick, or Fritz, as he was called, was missing, having jumped in with the

101st the night prior to the invasion.

Now, I'm gonna, next part, I'm gonna quote a little bit here from Band of

Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, and he is What was for the long time, one of the

main historians around some of this stuff, a very prominent one, but also a very U.

S.

centric one.

Quote, the previous day, Nylund had gone to the 82nd to see his brother, Bob,

the one who had told, told Malarkey in London that if you wanted to be a hero,

a hero, the Germans would see to it fast, which had led Malarkey to conclude

that Bob Nylund had lost his nerve.

Fritz Nylund had just learned that his brother had been killed on D Day.

Bob's platoon had been surrounded and he manned a machine gun, hitting the

Germans with harassing fire until the platoon broke through the encirclement.

He had used up several boxes of ammo before getting killed.

Fritz next hitched a ride to the 4th Infantry Division, and this

is all, of course, post landing.

Um, And, uh, 4th Infantry Division positioned to see another

brother who was a platoon leader.

He, too, had been killed on D Day on Utah.

By the time Fritz returned to Easy Company, uh, which he was part

of Easy Company, uh, what is it?

2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment.

Um, by the time he returned to the company, Father Francis Sampson

was looking for him to tell him that a third brother, a pilot in

the China, Burma, India theater, had been killed the same week.

Fritz was the sole surviving son and the army wanted to remove him from

the combat zone on the same day.

Father Sampson escorted Fritz to Utah Beach where a plane flew him

home, flew him to London on his first leg of return to the states

and he actually served stateside as an MP until the end of the war.

And so obviously Saving Private Ryan diverges from this super fucking strongly,

um, keeping only the deaths of the three brothers in close succession and the

quote unquote rescue of by the army.

Although the rescue If we're to call it one and all, it

was very different in reality.

Um, the survival of Edward after his release from the POW camp wasn't included

in any way in the final film or the journey Fritz took to find his brothers

after the initial D Day landings.

Um, and of course, no soldiers were sent individually or as

a unit to bring back Fritz.

Inspiration for Saving Private Ryan.

I don't know about you, Tom, but I would have found a movie that told the story of

this brother Fritz going to find out about his brothers by himself, mind you, would

have made a much better film and a much more authentic film than anything that

Saving Private Ryan can spit back at us.

Um, you know, and it, it, and this is how it happened.

The hero of the matter, if there's to be a hero, was a chaplain.

Someone who, you know, he wasn't part of the fighting or anything,

but recognized what was happening and took it upon himself.

I think he actually turned the packet of paperwork into his command

on behalf of Fritz in order to get him to be able to go home.

I mean, would, I can't imagine that anybody on the Normandy side of

things would consider wasting Time on something like that when they're

having to deal with actual battleship.

I

totally agree.

That sounds like a much better film.

Not just because it's a real story, but because it's a better story.

It's, I

mean, okay, that's quite, that would actually be quite difficult to write.

Nonetheless, it's evident that they picked up on stories like this one,

possibly that family in particular, as the basis for Saving Private Brian.

And yet, they missed the opportunity.

To make Ryan the central character, I guess, is partly

where they went wrong with that.

Just from a storytelling point of view, again, they needed

to establish Ryan earlier on.

And if they were telling that story about that family, presumably, Fritz

would be in the opening reel of the film.

He'd be established quite early on.

They'd even establish the relationships between the brothers.

They could maybe establish the chaplain quite early on in the film.

Yeah, you could tell a so much better story, while still having the war

going on around them, while still having it depict action and combat

and, if you want, the futility of it, certainly the chaos and the noise

and the cinematic side, but still tell that particular kind of a story.

where it's more tightly focused.

I mean that's another problem with Saving Private Ryan is there's kind of too many

men in this troupe that they send off.

If they just sent off a couple of guys and it's about their relationship

or at least that part of the film is about those two guys and some

kind of back and forth but it isn't.

It's about Tom Hanks and some people.

So you see what I mean if you pack too many people into that group you don't

give any of them enough time to breathe so you don't ever get to really know them.

Whereas in the story that you're describing with Fritz,

You could establish all of those people well enough, the ones that die,

their deaths matter, and the ones that survive, their mission, their sense

of purpose, their journey matters.

Instead of this kind of meandering, not quite sure what this film is about, not

quite sure who is this guy that they're looking for, maybe he's dead, anyway.

Maybe that would have made for a better film as they eventually

get there and Jack Ryan's dead.

I mean, you want to talk about a story of futility, tell that story.

Right.

Yeah, we've talked about that one before, yeah, definitely.

So,

no, you're right, you're right.

Real life is always better.

And that is actually quite an amazing story from Normandy from World War II.

There's, yeah, that's kind of an amazing thing to do,

particularly in the midst of a war.

Right.

Particularly when there's a million other things pressing on you at every moment.

Um, for people to find that sense of, I guess, caring, to find it within

themselves to actually give a shit enough, to just help someone out like that.

When you don't have to, you know, yeah, that chaplain, I don't know who they

could get to play him, but yeah, yeah, that would have made a really nice

movie.

Yeah, I think so too.

I think it would be a very interesting perspective, especially among American

war films, which if a chaplain's there, it's because somebody's dying or dead.

That's that's the only reason that the chaplains fight alongside and they

have a much greater role in that in that way Um, they're there to make

death sacred.

Basically.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely Um,

it's more about in the story you're telling it's more

about making life sacred, right?

Which is not a point that ever gets made in Jack Ryan Even though the whole film is

supposed to be about the survival of one man and why that should matter Spielberg

got very confused when writing this.

He really did.

The

writing of this movie Maybe his co creator was off that week, who knows?

Um, so there's a second historical part of this that I want to mention real quick.

And it has to do with the use of what's called the Bixby

letter in Saving Private Ryan.

And this letter was written by either by President Lincoln or Lincoln's

personal secretary to a mother who was believed to have lost five sons.

In the Civil War and the local, local politicians and the governor

in Massachusetts, they put in the request for Lincoln to, to write this

letter and it's beautiful, but it's also honest, um, you know, he talks

about how we, how we can fruitless any words of mine might be to comfort you

in a moment like this, um, but it's.

I feel like that it doesn't feel right for, um, the movie because, because

again, we're getting into, we, we've, we finally found a limit to our futility,

Tom, and it's called Saving Private Ryan, you know, um, and I think that that, in

addition to the whole earn this thing, they almost feel like fourth wall breaks.

It almost feels like Deadpool should be showing up and cussing at us in

these moments because that's kind of.

How the moment seems to feel.

And I have a lot of questions about that whole scene with the Chief of Staff,

you know, General George Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of the Army during

World War II, and of course is a very famous and beloved general here in the U.

S., um, that, uh, would George Marshall have time at, what is it, two days

after D Day, after the landings, to I Have enough information to actually

know that this has happened and then actually be able to order an individual

group, a single squad of soldiers to go and do something about it.

Um, and, and there's a, there's a bit of back and forth.

There's the other officers there.

Dale Dye is in that scene and he mentions about all the airborne

misdrops and how you may be sending your guys to on a, on a wild goose chase.

Some of the only, um, outside pushback in the movie, of course, the soldiers going.

Talk about it a little bit, but very seldom are we hearing

anybody higher up, even Captain Miller, saying anything about it.

Um, but the, the, the idea of losing five sons, or in the case of Mrs.

Ryan, having lost three sons and one son come home.

For the military and the kind of combat operations and, and conflicts that

American personnel end up these days, that It, it, we just can't fathom, and

they don't even try anymore, filmmakers don't even try to help us fathom the scale

of what some of these things are, and I think that they say to themselves, okay,

we're going to focus on an individual, and he'll have the values that we're

trying to get across, whatever stupid army bullshit is going on, you know.

Um, but it, I don't know about you, but the idea of using it, granted

it, I can't, it feels like they're trying to give us so much fake

grief that it becomes just farcical.

It's doesn't feel real anymore.

It doesn't feel like something that we can attach on to, you know, we hear five guys.

This mom lost five sons and it's like the emotion of it.

You almost want to take a deep breath.

That's what they're counting on.

It's not about understanding that the, you know, the real futility of it.

Why didn't, you know, they could have talked about it in the movie.

Uh, George Marshall could have talked about how many different

pairs or brothers died in this movie.

They could lay that on really thick.

Hey, I've got a stack of files over here that says all these

families no longer have sons.

Yeah, let's try to get this one back.

And like you said, anything like that is absent from this shit.

It doesn't, it doesn't give it to us.

So they say, okay, well, we'll just wrap it all around one asshole.

We'll just say he's gonna be the one asshole and we'll

see if people care about him.

And obviously the film really doesn't teach us to, it teaches us to, to

tokenize him, to see his service as something to place on a pedestal.

And of course, as we all know, when we place things on pedestals,

we begin to forget parts of them.

They often become more mythological than factual or historical.

And that's what America wants people to do with soldiers.

They want us to look that way.

You know, soldiers are and especially wounded and dead

soldiers, are forms of currency.

That politicians can use to bring them to the State of the Union, all kinds

of different things that they can be performatively, um, appealing to

those people that really care about.

Or at least say that they really care about veterans of the military or etc.

Sure, sure.

Well, the thing about that letter, I mean, that's just, why bother with that?

Unless the whole attempt is to create a kind of sense of this is, I guess, an

inevitable part of the American mythology?

Something like that?

What exactly are they even trying to evoke?

That this happened during the Civil War?

Yeah, the Civil War was a fucking horror show.

Yes, it was.

Yeah, a lot of people died.

And you could say that was fairly futile.

Um, or a lot of it was anyway.

But why does that matter in this moment?

Again, it's like the sort of dragging in all of these little things from

outside, from the bigger picture, without actually ever giving us that bigger

picture or saying Why we care about this.

It's just like, Oh, we want to revoke something.

Want to give an impression of something.

Oh, this is, this is Americana.

This is the American experience.

Well, for some people it is.

Yeah.

So what?

I mean, what, what, what next?

What's the end of that sentence?

Um, and as you say, why not have the general, if he's apparently

this well informed, this quickly, about all the people who are

dying and who they're related to, surely he would be on top of this.

Surely he'd be aware that this is actually happening left, right and centre.

And as you say, they could use that as, you know, that's just the moment he says,

no, we're going to, we can't do anything about this massive stack of files that are

all about, you know, three dead brothers, four dead brothers, five dead brothers,

but we're going to make this one matter.

And you could even have a great 1980s style moment where someone says, why?

And he goes, because we can.

Even that, cheesy, but would have been better than what they did, having

a guy who just sort of decides it.

I'm in a position to decide this, so I'm going to, because I believe

it's quite the thing, to become such.

There's never any sense of this being a moral mission.

No.

Because it's so confused and implausible.

As you say, you used the phrase earlier about it being cinematic

gaslighting, and it is like that.

It's sort of, oh, this guy's life really matters.

But does it?

No.

So we're going to send these guys off to find him, because, you know, the

bonds between People who've served together and fought together means that

they'll get it, but they don't get it.

And actually the captain of that, or leader of that troop, thinks the

whole thing's kind of stupid, and doesn't understand why he's being sent

off on this mission at this moment.

Every time they offer you something that you could latch on to,

they then take it away again.

To the extent that it almost feels deliberate, it almost does feel like

someone is deliberately manipulating and just teasing you with this

so that they can then go, nope, and slap you in the face again.

And again, from a filmmaker who's usually so good at identifying what

are the emotional anchors, what are the emotional beats, what is this story

actually about on a basic human level.

And with this film, he seems to have got distracted trying to do something else,

or he's done it in this really weird way deliberately, thinking, as long as I.

Give enough impressions of emotional beats, people will fill

in the blanks for themselves.

Because people are so prepped going into this by all of the documentaries

on the History Channel about World War II, by all the stuff in the

classrooms, by all of the, I don't know, parades and razzmatazz and everything.

They're already conditioned, pre conditioned, to see in this film what I

want them to see and have the reaction I want them to have, almost regardless of

what I actually put up on screen for them.

Um, even if I base this whole thing around a central character who you

think is going to survive but actually dies, And another guy who does survive,

but we never get to meet him until about two hours into the movie anyway,

so why the hell should anyone care?

You see what I mean?

It's this constant rug pull of anything that could be considered deep, or

profound, or even a clear statement.

What the hell does this film even say about itself, about its own story?

The main character in it tells us the whole story is stupid

and the premise is fucked.

Is that not stupid?

Is that not Spielberg kind of confessing that this isn't a very good

film?

He's

got Tom Hanks of all people up there telling us

this film is fucking stupid.

I'm starring in it and it makes no sense.

There's uh, there's also, there's something about the title that I think

lends itself to pointing to a lot, a lot of what we're talking about here

that the talking about saving anything, because, in addition to the, the rescue

kind of saving as in what they're trying to do here, that, um, Saving, I

think, could apply to two other areas.

One, a Christian, uh, invocation, you know, in terms of that, that we're

doing, we could be doing God's work if we're trying to save Private Ryan, you

know, that that's the best thing to do.

That's what God would want us to do.

I think that there's, there's, there's some of that in there.

Um, but there's also about mom.

There's also about Mrs.

Ryan, does the title and the notion of quote unquote saving Ryan to save his

mother further harm, um, cause even, cause we do talk about that a very

little bit, but not very much, I feel like all of that, it really rings false.

It's attempting to kind of mythically lift up a gold star mother and I, I,

I don't agree with that saying, but everybody knows what I'm talking about

when I, I mentioned it, um, in a way that ordinary people, non military affiliated

people, maybe people who aren't World War II history buffs, that they can't

appreciate that we, like, you Right now, the United States is contemplating

big moves towards Iran because of the two, um, or excuse me, three Army

Reserve soldiers that were killed.

In, uh, in Jordan recently, um, three dead people and they're ready

to go kill a few thousand more.

That is that, you know, that when we were, if we're to really look back

at world war two, and this of course comes across to in Vietnam and other

big, bigger things that most people never really attached themselves

to how horrifying it really was.

I remember reading a story about a guy working on an airfield, I think, I don't

know if it was in France, but in World War II, where a plane comes in and crashes,

and that because of the design of the plane, the guys that are underneath,

like the bombardier, the navigator, or whatever, they get crushed to death and

set on fire, and the guys standing on the side Of the airfield listening to it,

listening to these people burned alive.

And again, these are their pals.

The aircraft crash did not come as a result of enemy, enemy, anything.

It's just there and there's no sense to be made of it.

There isn't.

It's just a horrific thing, but we only, you know, like we're talking about the

sterilized, you know, opening scene and, and, you know, not including some

of this stuff is that it had to be.

So terrifying.

But there was a, there was a firm, firm ceiling in that, like we were mentioning

earlier that, um, it won't go past that.

And that makes it easier for people to mythologize it.

It's like when them cutting out cursing out of military movies is somehow people,

you know, uh, Conservative Christian folks will watch those kinds of things

and because there's no cussing, it doesn't bother them as much because

they've been primed to care far more about cursing than they have about mass

violence or the real reality of anything.

So I felt like it's holding up this, this mom and we do feel for her and I think

that we should, um, but are we sending her to a place where no one understands

what the fuck is going on with her?

That we have to treat her like an angel floating in the atmosphere and

not a real literal person who lost her sons and still has to try to go on

living.

And this is a point you've made in our emails when we were back and forth

being trying to figure this one out, is that an awful lot of the emotions

in this film give way to spirituality.

Yes.

So rather than keep them grounded, as you say, in human beings, which help people

empathize, because, you know, human beings can empathize with one another, especially

when they see something of themselves in the other person that they're,

yeah, um, this stuff isn't complicated.

But

also in the

way that the overall narrative Which is not so much as a

saving of Private Ryan or a rescuing of Private Ryan, but seemingly

an attempt to save World War II from its own futility, perhaps?

Um, it's underpinned by this Christian or Judeo Christian

religiosity or spirituality.

I've got in my notes here, 21 minutes in, so After we've had about 20

minutes of the big battle sequence, everyone starts finding God.

The sniper starts muttering his Jesus stuff to himself.

And there's some other, if not necessarily religious, certainly

religious feeling moments.

They're like religious experiences going on.

And then they all start committing war crimes.

They start executing prisoners of war.

They start executing people who are unarmed and surrendered.

There's the bit where Uh, they're all burning in the bunker, and he says,

don't shoot, just let them burn.

When the main thing would be to just shoot them and kill them.

Put them out of their suffering at that point.

So, it seems that, if anything, the throughline of this film is

a kind of religious vengeance?

Maybe?

Uh, or certainly, that's how that opening sequence plays out.

And it comes back at the end, you know, you have a sniper up in the

tower who gets shot by the tank, um, and he's doing the same thing again.

He's sort of muttering, not necessarily biblical verses to himself, but something

of that nature as he's shooting people.

Um, that's odd in a film like this, particularly when the enemy

are mostly white Christians.

But of course we never really get to meet any of the Nazis or talk to them very

much so none of the Germans are really even considered human beings in this

film.

There's, there's also the huge inclusion of peoples that they

had captured and were forced into being part of the German forces.

But, you know, we're Polish, Romania, all kinds of different places and that was a

good portion of their replacements that were working in Normandy at the time.

And of course, like you said, all we see are white, German, uh, bad guys.

We don't see anybody that could show us some, some other aspect of that.

It's just exactly what we would expect to see.

And

so ultimately, is this movie Not an emotional tale of human

beings at all, but fundamentally a spiritual myth about a futile war,

but because it was spiritual, that somehow elevates it above being.

I mean, it's like futile in a human sense, it's futile in an

everyday, grounded, this is the real world and people are dying sense.

And that doesn't actually come across that strongly to me, but I get.

You know, some of the things that they included in the film, what they

were going for with that, I guess.

But what elevates it, or what they're trying to elevate it with,

is that spirituality or religiosity.

And bear in mind, this is Spielberg, who did make Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is

essentially a Jewish revenge fantasy about killing Nazis using the power of God.

So, we're not reaching here.

This is something that is in Spielberg's filmmaking repertoire

somewhere along the lines.

Um, I know he produced that one and George Lucas directed, but whatever.

Um, it's still his work.

Was it

the other way around?

Yeah, yeah.

Regardless, I think it was Lucas that directed that

one, yeah.

The two of them made that film together.

Um, and that is what that film is ultimately about.

And this is the only other film that he made about Nazis.

Uh, aside from the three, I mean the three, but two Indiana

Jones films that cover Nazis.

Um, so, the notion that this would be some kind of religious

quest, is that what they were on?

Because it doesn't make any sense from a strategic or logistical

or straight up military resources point of view or any of that.

So why are they doing it?

Why do they even go along with it?

It's not like anyone's gonna There's no one there to tell them off if

they start just ignoring this stupid order that they've been given.

You know what I mean?

There's too much going on for anyone to really care whether

or not they end up finding Ryan.

No one's in the scheme of this is even going to notice probably, um, if they

just decide to like fuck off to Belgium.

And let it be someone else's problem.

No one's going to stop them.

So, but they keep going, and they keep going to an end where our quasi

Christ like leader, the man who's shifting the week through the valley

of darkness, ends up being sacrificed.

Mm hmm.

Yeah?

Yep.

You see where I'm going with this interpretation?

I do, totally, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that might be ultimately what this film is.

Because this was the other question that we kept batting back and forth

is what even is Saving Private Ryan, even setting aside what Spielberg

was trying to do, sort of what film did we actually end up with?

Yeah, you take over, because I'm rambling about Jesus again.

I don't want to piss off Christians.

If I keep talking, I will.

Well, like, we know it can't possibly be considered a historical movie.

If it's a war movie, it's a war movie in a very specific sense,

and not in anything traditional about the nature of Uh, war films.

Um, I do, I think it's, I, it, I think the, you know, the, the spiritual aspect

that you're mentioning, that I think that those, those may have been the real beats

that they were trying to go after that.

And, and of course you had, it was twofold in that way.

One, there are lots of people that would wanting to see something that had been

said to have additional authenticity.

Like they had taken a syringe of authenticity steroid and.

Suck it right into Tom Hanks ass or something, but we have a lot of those.

America is filled with history buffs, especially World War II history

buffs, and so you could definitely see it in that way that in terms

of a, it could maybe be a war porn.

Or, you know, just a pornographic depiction of very specific sliced

events that Spielberg put together.

Um, and then the other half is what exactly I think exactly what you're

pointing out here is that the, the religious aspect of it, the, um, you

know, we're wanting to save Ryan, save his mother to, you know, to.

Meet our understanding of God being supportive of this endeavor that God was,

God was on the side of the allies that, you know, God understands that things

make mistakes and you drop bombs on wrong people, and God forgives those things.

And, um, yeah, I think, I think that you have to hit the nail on

the head with, with that part of it.

And it, and it does, it leaves ordinary film goers, especially discerning film

goers to, to sit and ask you, is it?

Did it fulfill anything in that way other than just a propagandistic notion

of how the higher ups, how the folks at entertainment liaison offices ever

want things to be seen in that way?

It has to fit into a certain thing or it's going to upset a certain

type of veteran or certain type of film buff or history buff.

Um, Because don't, you know, the people will say that I've read all the books

on a single subject and I'm like, well You've read all the books that everyone's

written, or you've only, have you only written, read books that came from

the same point of view that you were already emphasizing, um, and You just

read the other books that those books were based

on Exactly, exactly, and that's the, like, the easiest way of mentioning

Stephen Ambrose is that, yes, there's a lot of good stuff in his work, but

there's also a lot of other stuff He was one that, uh, I think he actually lied

about being a pen pal with Eisenhower before Eisenhower passed away And wrote

a whole thing on that, but it's, it's a very American centric, even for everything

that it's honest about, for its own authenticity, it's a very American centric

view, so, and, and that's the thing is, I can see churches having Saving

Private Ryan nights here in the US, I can see that very easily, that would be

a, you know, we wouldn't, we certainly wouldn't let the young kids come watch

it, but, um, but yeah, it would fit, uh, perfectly Uh, in that kind of, in that

kind of scenario and fall into the same kind of, you know, typical Protestant

evangelical line of thinking about God and war and who we send to war and who's

special and who's is, who isn't and then ultimately what we end up not saying.

Okay, so four quick things.

One, this whole Lincoln letter thing is making me think of the hateful

eight and Eisenhower fake pen pal and

I can only assume that's what Tarantino was playing on.

Two, Jack Ryan is the chosen one.

Three, the only other big emotional beat that lands in the movie is the scene in

the church that you mentioned earlier.

And four, the opening of the film isn't the invasion of Normandy, it's the Jews

crossing the sea to get out of Egypt.

Sounds right to me.

Um, bearing in mind that Spielberg is Jewish and there is

quite a lot of biblical symbolism knocking around in his films in

one place, in one form or another.

So yeah, the more I think about this, the more this is a film about some kind

of Judeo Christian spirituality that just happens to be set in World War II.

I didn't think of that thing about, you know, the parting of the seas

and the walking up onto the sand.

I didn't think about that until just now.

While you were talking, and now I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

It just so easily fits into that niche of where

people would accept it again.

Like the, you know, the, there's only limited cursing in it, which is something

I know I mentioned this earlier, but.

People, Christians are, it's a huge, huge thing in the United States about

using cursing, so if you keep all of the violence, whatever kind of violence that

happens to be in your film, but you remove or minimize the cursing, you're going to

have created something that a lot more people would be openly willing to do.

Watch, especially if it's like a, you know, a TBS or TNT version

that's, you know, made to be 17 hours long with commercials.

Um, yeah, it's

much more acceptable to the concerned housewives of America,

or whatever they call themselves.

Yeah, yeah.

But they do, it ends up being, but it ends up being just, just you're

complaining about window dressing.

You know, you're complaining about it is, it's like the, you know, the

broken windows policing that they they've done in New York city, that

we care about these tiny little things that the big things matter.

And, and again, going back to Spielberg again, like you said,

is that maybe that was the idea he got in his mind is it's like, I got

all these other things together.

I just got to hit these specific beats with these specific places,

fill in the rest, and we got ourselves a really great war movie.

And of course, for ordinary people, because it is.

A very different war film, if we want to call it that, that they

don't know what they're looking at.

And of course, I know for me, like the first time I saw it is the first

25 minutes leave you raw mentally, just, just trying to take that in.