In 1946, Samuel Goldwyn produced and William Wyler directed
The Best Years of Our Lives, which went on to win seven
Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay
(by Robert E. Sherwood). It was widely regarded as having given a
voice to the interests and concerns of the returning American
veterans of the Second World War — including those who, like one
of its stars (Harold Russell), had returned home maimed and
disabled. If you watch it today you may be struck, as I was, by how
desperately its veterans — including poor Mr. Russell, who lost
both his hands in an accident — want to be re-integrated into
society, to pick up the lives they had left before the war with as
few changes as possible. The word “normal” resounds throughout the
film as if it described some beautiful dream.
In this respect if in no other, it is the polar opposite of
Irwin Winkler’s new movie, Home of the Brave, which is
bound to be compared to and seems to have been modeled on it. Both
pictures take a group of veterans from the same home town — the
fictional Boone City, USA, in Best Years and the real
Spokane, Washington, in Home — and show the difficulties
they face on returning home. But Winkler’s Iraq vets are (mostly)
the enemies of normality. “You want us to come back like nothing
ever happened,” growls Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson), a
traumatized combat surgeon, to his long-suffering wife (Victoria
Rowell). “You don’t want to get your hands dirty with the
details.”
Well, yes, as a matter of fact that’s exactly what we do want.
Some of us anyway. And it was once what the veterans themselves
wanted too. But things have changed since 1946. There are, I think,
two reasons for this. One is that, about halfway through the
intervening 60 years, the imaginations of both the general culture
and of Hollywood were captured by a new idea, an illness first
diagnosed in the aftermath of Vietnam called post-traumatic stress
disorder or PTSD. Ever since then you would be hard put to it to
find a war movie in which one or more of the characters didn’t
suffer from the psychological after-effects of combat. To judge by
the movies, war is now less a political or military matter than an
excuse for loss of impulse control.
The second reason is that both Hollywood and the larger media
culture of which it is a part are probably at least as anti-war
today as they were pro-war in 1946. In one scene of the earlier
film, a Nazi sympathizer suggests that America had fought the wrong
enemy and that the sacrifices of her soldiers had been in vain. One
of the sympathetic vets (Dana Andrews) decks him with a single
punch to the jaw. Such straightforward patriotic fervor (as it
would have been seen at the time) is long gone from American movies
— in case you hadn’t noticed — and the returning heroes today are
meant to be admired (like the heroes of the anachronistic Flags
of Our Fathers) not for their heroic deeds or their patriotism
but for their sufferings — and the more so when they can be
portrayed as sufferings in a bad cause.
In one scene of Home of the Brave, Billy (Sam Jones
III), the troubled son of the troubled surgeon, is sent home from
school for wearing a T-shirt with an obscene and insulting message
about President Bush. Mr. Jackson’s character, suffering from
insomnia, alcoholism, and “anger issues” — long recognized as
being among the symptoms of PTSD — responds by cursing out the
principal. Then, when his son tells him that “We went over there
for oil and the rest is bull****,” dad doesn’t deny it, though he
puts the opinion down to typical teenage rebellion. “All
15-year-olds hate their parents,” he says. “If I were a pacifist,
he’d be in Fallujah by now.” Apparently the permissions for anger
conferred by post-traumatic stress, unlike guilt, pass down from
father to son.
Another of the veterans, played by someone calling himself “50
cent,” goes on a rampage with a gun and is shot by police. A third
(Brian Presley) assaults his father when he is urged not to show
weakness by getting all weepy about a friend who died. This guy,
unable to fit back into civilian life, ends up re-enlisting in the
army for a second tour in Iraq. Only Jessica Biel’s character, a
single mother whose loss of a hand to an IED makes her possibly
more attractive than if she had two — and certainly more
attractive than if, like Harold Russell, she had none — looks
anything like the heroes of Best Years in trying to pick
up the threads of her life and returning to “normal.” And even she
pops pills and has to explain to her adorable moppet that “mommy
just gets a little bit sad sometimes.”
As a result, Home of the Brave bears an uncomfortable
resemblance to one of those disease-of-the-week daytime soap
operas. So much dysfunction, so little time! It’s one thing to
recognize that warriors often come home scarred by the war and
quite another to milk their sufferings out of a combination of
voyeurism and pity. Pity is, of course, just what the heroes of
The Best Years of Our Lives didn’t want, which is why they
strove so mightily to return to normal — by which they meant
acting, in Samuel L. Jackson’s scornful phrase, “like nothing ever
happened” in spite of their sufferings. Thus when, in the earlier
film, Dana Andrews’s minxish wife, played by Virginia Mayo, for
once shows a bit of what, for her, amounts to tenderness and asks
him: “Are you all right in your mind?” he replies: “In my mind?
What do you think? That I’ve gone goofy or something?”
The old-fashioned idea that mental disturbance was something to
be ashamed of may not have much to be said for it, but on the movie
screen it does, paradoxically, elicit more genuine feeling than the
more recent idea of making a parade out of such afflictions.
Best Years is also like Home of the Brave in
presenting us with a character, played by Fredric March, who is
like Samuel L. Jackson’s in being an obvious alcoholic. But those
were the days of the comic drunk, and March’s character fits
comfortably into the stereotype. Never is it suggested that his job
or his loving relationships are impaired by his drinking, or that
it is in any other way a reason for compassion. On the contrary, as
he gets at the booze early, even before the ceremony, at a wedding,
the others only admire his capacity. “He can take it,” one of his
comrades says.
This could sum up the whole movie as well as the ethos that got
us through World War II. Home of the Brave, by contrast,
tells us that its heroes can’t take it. They have to “act
out” — and it’s all somebody else’s fault when they do. Could this
have anything to do with the fact that it is now beginning to look
as if we don’t have what it takes to get us through the current
war? Though Mr. Winkler’s movie’s politics are mostly un- or
under-stated, apart from Billy’s outburst, there is an unmistakable
subtext of reproach to our country’s leaders in the loving display
of neurotic, psychotic and anti-social behavior, all supposedly
caused by the war “for oil.” I make no judgment on the politics of
Home of the Brave, but I think that, even if I were a
pacifist, I would find its message far less affecting in the way
that movie drama always strives to be than the simple patriotism
and the heroic repressions of The Best Years of Our
Lives.
