Save Private Ryan segun Johnson.

¿Es Salvar al Soldado Ryan, como dice Spielberg un homenaje a los combatientes? Es necesario reafirmar un mito bien asentado de la Segunda Guerra Mundial? Necesitaba la 2GM consolidarse y autoconfirmarse como segundo mito fundacional tras el 1766? Spielberg centra el film en el día del juicio final no solo de la Historia norteamericana sino del siglo XX, el 6 de Junio de 1944, el desembarco de Normandia. La película sirve como recuerdo al mundo del enorme sacrificio que cometieron los EE.UU, así como a sus futuras generaciones, de la deuda contraída para con sus veteranos.

En mi opinión, en el libro de Johnon se encuentra el mejor y más lúcido análisis cinematográfico de la película de Spielberg.

Johnston, Steven The Truth about Patriotism Duke University Press, Durham, 2007

"Saving Private Ryan opens at a French military cementery. Normandy. Spielberg's camera locks on the eyes of an anonymous American, a veteran, on his knees, overcome by emotion. He stares. No blinking. Reliving the past, eyes wide open suggest that you will see the truth of war, at last. Assited by the validation of flashback, this man will be our guide (nota 26).

Spielberg studied Defense Department footage to stage his rendering of Normandy. The beach sqeuence states the film's claim to authenticity, even though Spielberg insists that his is a pale facsimile of invasion. Appalled by the euphemistic treatments that tend to characterize war in general and Normandy in particular, Speilberg reinvents both on film. Even if you share Spielberg0s judgement of the antiseptic character of American films abouth the Second World War, it does not explain the making of Saving Private Ryan. Thanks to Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, for example, the ontological superficiality of American war movies has long been known. Spielberg's representational ambition nonetheless presumes to bring the full truth of war to an innocent world in need of civic education. Hence the graphic, even sadistic, performance of Saving Private Ryan cannot be reduced to tribute alone. It is shock therapy designed for immediate results. Spielberg seizes an opportunuty to implicate the American citizenry and induce a sense of indebtedness, and thus of attachment. With America a debtor nation to the so-calles Greatest Generation, payment must be made. Given historical ignorance, the visceral dimension underlies his cinematographic intervention. You must see what American men at war experience; you must see what men at war do. Though no smulation of war can duplicate the lived experience of it, Spielberg has executed a cinematic coup in the name of patriotism (nota 27).

How, specifically, does Spielberg work his film's patriotic will? The invasion sequience forms a veritable film within the film. From an angle, you first see waves washing ashore past massive cement barricades. Yet what is most noticeable is the sound (nota 28). The ocean roars at you. Sound makes war into a closed universe. Hermetically sealed with primitive motions and movements, it is a world ouside of which nothing exists. War constitutes a pre-moral, pre-linguistic space. The sound also displays vicious precision. At times it feels as if the fate of every bullet fired has been individualy recorded. Their speed, intensity, and energy deconsctruct no just bodies but psyches. (nota 29).

Cut to a landing craft bouncing toward the beach. The strain of its overworked engines coupled with the sound of metal slamming on water assaults you. The pilot shouts instructions. Men look somber, grim. There is no banter here, none of the macho glibness of Hollywood war legend. It is physically impossible. You cannot even hear yourself think. The sound beats you. Spielberg's invasion sequience de-romanticizes war. Here men puke as they get closer to shore. One eruption triggers another. And another. Everyone wears it. You can smell it. More instruction -from Miller, an Army captain. In this context, however, instructions prove useless; nothing can be heard; no one listens.

As the landing craft opens, machine gun fire sprays its inhabitants. The sound escalates. Beach landing equal survival exercise. No heroics. No contingency is god. This is slaughter. Before every body aboard is massacred, the captain orders everyone over the sides. (Just do what everyone else does.) Water provides no safety. Bullets follow you underneath, piercing fluid with surgical precision. If bullets don't kill you, your pack drowns you. There is no escape. Sheer numbers: some survive- not everyone can be killed. When your contry asks you to die for it, sometimes it means precisely and only that. Some bodies are killed so other won't be. Thousands are nothing more than dead bodies waiting to happen (cita 30).

On the beach, death mounts. You are treated to grisly scenes. With explosions omnipresent, bodies hurl through the air. A soldier loses the lower half of his right arm; then retrieves it. Miller pulls a wounded man out of the water -to discover the lower half blown off. He drops it. You do not see Rorty's would-be John Waynes. You see bodies dictated by necessity. To carry on names a feat itself. In the safety of the theater, you want the invasion sequence to end – now. You hope you survive the awful experience of watching it.

The invasion sequence of Saving Private Ryan makes you watch as long as possible, as if to account for each cross in the Normandy cementery. With the landning concluded, you marvel at its success. An irresistible force (America) supplanted an immovable object (Germany). The sentimental cementery scene followed by the brutal beach action form the flip sides to the same patriotic apparatus. You identify with the first; the second makes it possible. America's exceptionalism presupposes America's vast military prowess. To love one is to love the other. Anything that potentially threatens the poer that makes possible America's goodness invites a reactive, even reactionary, respone. Spielberg's cinematizes what patriots already experience, the affirmation of whatever violence may be needed to guarantee the American way.

Extracto del Capitulo nº4: The Socratic Way of Death (páginas 104-106)