February 25, 1999

Announcements:  None.

Lecture Notes:

I.  General Review of War Film and Casablanca

• Thievery and murder are justified in order to win the war
• Rick shoots Strassa so Ilsa and Laslo can get away
• If Rick left with Ilsa it would undermine the concept of self-sacrifice for the larger cause
• Through this sacrifice, love earns a higher significance
• Rick must be detached from selfishness to accomplish the group goal

II.  The Reintegration Film

• War is considered a male undertaking;  women are presented as prostitutes, or homemakers
• Men are portrayed as having to shed their masculinity in order to fit into society after the war

• Story of three men who each have to reintegrate themselves back into society after the war
• Two of them have to adjust to class differences and one has to adjust to gender differences
• In combat, all men are made equal
• One man comes back from the war with mechanical hands
• He has to go back to his fiancee
• They get married and resolve their gender differences
• After the war, people thought they could go back to domestic privacy
• The second man had a very high rank in the army but has to go back to a poor home
• The third man had a lower status in the military, but is a wealthy banker in the real world
• He provides the working class man with a GI loan
• This shows how America is a classless society
• The movie portrays the difficulties induced by war and individuals dealing with reintegration to society

III.  Vietnam

• In these movies, the returning solder usually has to channel his rage in order to fit into society

IV.  Sexual Combat

    A.  Oedipal Battles

• Oedipal conflict between father and son as they compete for the attention of the mother
• The son usually ends up emulating the father
• Same sort of relationship in war where the younger soldier emulates the sergeant
• In Casablanca, Rick emulates Laslo
• Laslo, an idealist, reflames Rick's sense of passion and need to commit himself

• Theme of homoeroticism
• Women are objects of mutual affection which creates bonding between men
• Ilsa is a bonding mechanism for Rick and Laslo
• Rick maintains his friendship with Renault, which shows a homoerotic bond of loyalty in the last scene
• Women sometimes pose a threat of weakening or distracting men
• War film marginalizes women--stereotypes them as threats to masculinity or supporters of masculinity

V.  The Vietnam Reversal

• The typical war film narrative is inverted:  America is at war with itself
• Soldiers are divided in their sense of purpose
• Therapeutic mechanism for audiences
• All films made about Vietnam War, except Green Berets, followed the reversal format
• Theme of undermining group solidarity
• Casualties of War:  renegade leader faced off by morally conscious character

• A group of childhood friends from a Pennsylvania steel town are sent off to war
• They go off to war with a sense of purpose, but become divided
• Clip:  One friend is left behind in Vietnam, and he goes crazy.  He plays Russian roulette to make money which he sends back to his family.  Another friend goes back to get him to rescue him from insanity.  When he gets there, the friend doesn't listen to him and ends up killing himself playing roulette.
• At the end of the movie, the principal characters come back together;  they sing "God Bless America"
• This anticipates the reemergence of national patriotism of Reagan era

• War films of this time had a sense of national purpose
• Theme of personal achievement:  In An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere goes from a '60's hippie to a military officer
• Theme of anti communism:  Rambo fights Soviets to regain possession of American prisoners

• This movie heals over the rift between father and son
• A young man grows up in a military family
• He always battles with his father, rejecting his father's philosophy on war
• His father's jet crashes.  He had veered the jet so it would crash in a remote area and not kill anyone.