October 29, 2020
(I dislike this pen)
On Tuesday, I watched Saving Private Ryan. The character Uphman, initially a boy, becomes a man when he murders the German soldier that his company had previously captured and released (at Upham’s urging). The movie implies the audience should see him as a redeemed coward: the camera captures him in a transcendent light after he fires the shot; but, it seems otherwise to me: the murder makes him a coward.
“Every man I’ve killed takes me further from my self.” Captain Miller.
Uphman murders the German not to revenge the murder of the Captain and Mellish, but to assuage his guilt and cancel his debt of cowardice. Telling that he can only murder after they have won, after the act is no longer needed.
“War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.” Upham quoting Emerson.
Upham spends the movie quoting passages related to war to the other more experienced soldiers. They mean nothing and Upham’s intention to write a book, his aestheticization of war, is called into question. Certainly the movie says all this and certainly the movie glorified war and aestheticized it.
The critical mistake was not the compassion that saved Willie; but his cowardice that condemned Mellish.
Antagonisms with phantoms. Resentments hold onto me.
I’ve never (rarely) written about Victoria. Not literary enough to my juvenile mind hungover on Euro-Orientalism. The literary is anything treated so. Intrinsically human as literature comes from us; a sunset blossoms only in my mind. The literary is not just the transmutation of physical objects into pretty (word) images. The literary makes meaning and is beautiful b/c it means, is emotional, b/c it means. The power is meaning, even if nothing, no argument, is stated.
I appreciate that in 20 years I’ll have no idea what spurred me to make that note about antagonisms. Does posterity prevent me? Why not name names?
I’ve come to Vancouver to see Travis. A. and F. went to Regina with Peanut (Grammy – when F. says her name it sounds like Peanut), to see the great grandmother R.
The movie says what all American war movies eventually say; war is necessary. And they never ask themselves how they arrived at the moments where this necessity became a reality.
