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Dear Sirs,
After some consideration, I want to make some comments on both Krin Gabbard's Film Review Essay ‘Saving Private Ryan's Surplus Repression’ (2000) and, subsequently, the 1993 decision to ‘merge’ and ‘incorporate’ the International Review into the Journal.
The ‘review’ of Spielberg's film disturbed me—not because of Gabbard's extreme dislike for the movie but because the grounds for the attack were so idiosyncratic and ‘un-analytic’.
We are not guided through thoughtful impressions of the emotional and poetic impact of Spielberg's imagery, narrative, scene juxtaposition and character sculpting—elements which might comprise a director's imaginative-emotional receptivity and transformative capability, or ‘alpha-function’ (Bion). Instead, we are flatly told in the opening sentence that the film is ‘conventional and predictable’ and that Spielberg has ‘once again’ tricked gullible millions into ‘so warm a reception’ by touching their ‘especially vulnerable’ oedipal spots, unconsciously.
Gabbard's belligerence towards war as ‘senseless slaughter’ is admirable. But to suggest that Spielberg has sentimentalised and idealised it, and its emotional impact on all humans, seems ludicrously unsupported, and possibly evasive of the full emotional impact of the film.
In stressing Spielberg's (and his generation's) oedipal rivalry with the father as the ‘real’ meaning of war, and of the film, Gabbard neglects the crucial narrative element that saves Private Ryan. It is his link with his mother. It is the thought of a mother's intolerable loss of all of her sons that moves—for better or for worse—that drives the ‘oedipal’ generals to some compassion.
But Spielberg's compassion seems deeper. He lets us feel enough fear to understand even the paralysis of the ‘coward’ who cannot bear any more—and who thus betrays the hero and causes his death. This is a more complex morality than the oedipal rivalry of Gabbard's ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Spielberg.
To reduce the film to the argument that ‘…