Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) as a Post-Vietnam War Film in Search of Moral Legibility

Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) as a Post-Vietnam War Film in Search of Moral Legibility

Saving Private Ryan revived the WW2 combat film and used many of its tropes but is still heavily influenced by the Vietnam War films. This creates structural ambiguity in a film that strives to acknowledge the horrors of warfare while still trying to restore the sense of moral legibility and decency...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transatlantica Vol. 1; no. 1
Main Author: Achouche, Mehdi
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Association française d'Etudes Américaines (AFEA) 30-06-2022
Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
Subjects:
D-Day
melodrama
post-apocalyptic
ruins
Vietnam
WW2
D-Day
Vietnam
post-apocalyptic
WW2
post-apocalyptique
ruins
melodrama
mélodrame
ruines
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Summary:Saving Private Ryan revived the WW2 combat film and used many of its tropes but is still heavily influenced by the Vietnam War films. This creates structural ambiguity in a film that strives to acknowledge the horrors of warfare while still trying to restore the sense of moral legibility and decency that is specific to WW2 and had been lost in Vietnam War films. War ruins convey the quasi-postapocalyptic setting of the film, with a group of soldiers crossing a moral wasteland where savagery is the only way to survive. Yet the film still attempts to rescue the citizen-soldiers traditionally celebrated by the genre from that wilderness by relying on the codes of melodrama and the central figure of the good leader
ISSN:1765-2766
1765-2766
DOI:10.4000/transatlantica.18645