In commemoration of this 70th anniversary of D-Day, here’s a brief discussion of Steven Spielberg’s film about the invasion, Saving Private Ryan, from a scholarly essay of mine recently published in the UK film journal, Film-Philosophy. I’m talking about the way in which movies, like all stories, dramatize dialectical debates (in Robert McKee’s phrase), debates carried out principally through the choices of the characters.
“At the beginning of their search, most if not all of the men Captain Miller (played by Tom Hanks) leads in search of Private Ryan are of the opinion that eight men should not be wasted on such a random search in what was at that time the most dangerous theater of the war. If polled, most of the men who had invaded Normandy would probably have agreed. Eight men are not worth one man. In the dialectic of the movie, however, their opinion clashes with that held by Captain Miller: this is the mission, one man is worth risking the lives of eight. Miller does not quite believe this himself at first, but in his actions he ranks the opinion of his superior officers—the ‘wise’ in this context—higher than his own. There is, no doubt, some truth in the contrary opinion. There is a great risk in sending eight men out to scour the Norman countryside in search of one man. There would be an incalculable human loss if they were all to be killed without saving Private Ryan. But the contrary opinion fails to grasp a deeper aspect of reality. Those who hold it are thinking only in consequentialist terms. They are simply doing the math: eight is greater than one. What they fail to appreciate is the truth that Evelyn Waugh articulates in his trilogy about the Second World War, Sword of Honor, namely that when it comes to the lives of human beings ‘Quantitative judgments don’t apply.’ Eight soldiers plus Private Ryan does not equal nine; it equals one, one band of brothers who live all for one and one for all. Yes, eight men are worth the life of just one man, but not in the sense that they are mere cannon fodder for one lucky guy who has a chance to go home; but in the sense that their lives are bound up with one another, in the sense that they live and die for one another. The good of one just is the good of all.”
My essay is entitled, “Internal Needs, Endoxa, and the Truth: An Aristotelian Approach to the Popular Screenplay.” (This link is to a .pdf of the entire essay.) Endoxa, by the way, is Aristotle’s term for those “reputable opinions” about a topic held either by the many, by everyone, or by the wise, which must be taken into account in any inquiry.
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