Saving Private Ryan has won the Academy Award for Best Director. On the strength of this it is back in theaters, where it will do respectable business for a while, then fade away. Had it been awarded Best Picture, of course, these theaters would be fairly brimming with moviegoers -- some repeat viewers and a lot of first-timers for whom the rendering of judgment of a group of anonymous Hollywood insiders is of great moment.
Humbug. If you are a university student, there are sounder reasons for you to get yourself to a theater and see this film -- or see it again -- while you can.
These reasons have nothing to do with Ryan being one of the greatest films ever made, or anything of the sort. Ryan is probably not one of the greatest films ever made, but it may be one of the most important, if the social importance of a film is to be gauged by the degree to which it conveys information that is in particular need of conveyance at a particular time.
And that's what Ryan has in spades -- information about the real world for a generation that lives under the illusion that the real world is the thing it sees around it every day.
And illusion it is. No group of young persons in any nation has lived more thoroughly free from the kinds of hardships that most of the people who have ever lived have simply called "life" than has the American university student. Nor has any generation been more frustratingly ignorant of how great its privilege has been, or more unmindful of how uncertain its future still is.
Which is the first reason to see this film: It happened.
Yes, yes, you know all this -- that World War II was the good fight and D-Day was an important day and we should honor those who fought and blah, blah.
That's not the point. The information Ryan's got is not factual but purely visceral. That is, you don't see the film to know that D-Day happened but to feel it.
Now, it is a truism that no film can hope to do even partial justice to the cruelties of modern warfare. But it is also consensus among veterans of all stripes, including those who lived the day itself, that in turning technical mastery to the cause of historical honesty Steven Spielberg has gone leagues beyond any other director toward this end.
Hence the phenomenon of so many members of this reticent, stoical generation coming forward, with urgency and uncharacteristic emotion, to bear witness: I was there; this is truth. (Which is what the aged D-Day veteran said to a friend of this writer as he seized him by the arm outside the movie theater.)
And hence the opportunity we have in this film. For it is one thing to "know" that something happened because you have been told it again and again. It is something else entirely to experience, all at once (probably for the first time), the visceral rush of understanding that for a lot of young people once, this was just life. It was their real world. And it may yet be ours.
It has been quipped that any period of peace will eventually be called "the interwar period" by historians. Facetious, perhaps, but not very much so. Things change. War happens.
Things certainly changed for the students of the Oxford Union -- that university's renowned debating society -- who in 1933 passed their famous resolution "that this House refuses to fight for King and country."
They were young, and they lived in a time when it was believed by many that universal shock at the horrors of World War I, and widespread disgust with the statesmen who were responsible, could prevent any such thing from happening again. (The hard reality of bombs falling upon their homes and families would shortly disabuse them of this notion.)
So situated are we, the current, cozy generation. Like most Americans before the outbreak of the Second World War, many of us would likely be roundly offended at the suggestion that we might one day find ourselves (or our friends, or our children) fighting in defense of foreign shores, or of our own. But reality cares not a whit for anyone's delicate sensibilities. And the relevant reality for us is that the post-Cold War period shows every sign of being fully as dangerous to Americans -- abroad and at home -- as the perilous period which has just ended. Said Leon Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
These famous, ominous words were spoken long before the record of this violent century made "expect the unexpected" the most trenchant banality around, but their essence is the same: The world is still a hard place, and one way or another, bad things will happen.
Which is why we, the young, should care about a film like Saving Private Ryan. It gives us cause to value just a bit more highly the extraordinary wealth of opportunity that is, for us -- for now -- simply "life." And perhaps to consider, if only for a moment, the daily conduct of our own lives.
For if we are not to be seized with the vigor, or some shade of it, of the returning World War II veterans (who, finding themselves unexpectedly alive, went to college in hordes and became the most achieved group of students America had seen), then perhaps we who are so forgetful might at least remember that there are a great many people in the world who would give their right arm to be in our position -- a university student in the most prosperous nation that has ever existed.
Or perhaps, the next time we're in the grocery store thinking our lives are rough because the woman at the head of the line didn't even take her checkbook out of her purse until she got to the register, it will simply occur to us that if this is what gets us agitated, then maybe we haven't got it all that bad.
Yet.
Carpe Diem.
