Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Barta, Damon
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
My study examines expressions of American innocence in post-Cold War U.S. fiction and film and considers how these cultural artifacts reveal the role of this potent cultural myth in consent for war after 9/11. As John Shelton Lawrence writes, “the notion of national innocence seems central” to post-9/11 consensus about war. Similarly, Marita Sturken sees a “renewed investment in the notion of American innocence” after 9/11 (7), and Donald Pease casts 9/11 as an uneasy navigation of the “fantasy of radical innocence” (162) that American mythology has enabled. I argue that my exhibits trace the recuperation of this mythical innocence across what Samuel Cohen calls an “interwar decade” (4) and reveal its renewed cultural currency as the post-Cold War era was transformed by 9/11 and the U.S. began its War on Terror, an abstraction that took form in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I examine how Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) probe Cold War nostalgia in the “interwar decade” and interrogate notions of American innocence that rely on such nostalgia. I then anatomize how Saving Private Ryan (1998) and The Thin Red Line (1998) invoke a nostalgic discourse of WWII that contributed to a recuperation of American innocence instrumental to the call to war after 9/11. I go on to show how Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (2012) expose the rift between notions of American innocence and the realities of war by depicting young veterans who struggle to reconcile the two as they return from the Iraq War. I also show how Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), written shortly before the end of the Iraq War, rebukes American nostalgia for the putative innocence of the 1950s by tracing the homecoming of an African American veteran of the Korean War. Finally, I explore how Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Argo (2012) articulate distinct but complementary notions of American innocence that capture yet another recuperation of American innocence in the wake of the Iraq War.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT OF INNOCENCE: CONSENSUS, WAR, AND MYTH IN POST-COLD WAR AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM by Damon Barta B.A., North Dakota State University (2008) M.A., University of British Columbia (2011) A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2021 © Damon Barta, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Caught in the Act of Innocence: Consensus, War, and Myth in Post-Cold War American Literature and Film submitted by Damon Barta in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Examining Committee: Jeffrey Severs, English, UBC Supervisor Sandra Tomc, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Michael Zeitlin, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Bo Earle, English, UBC University Examiner Leslie Paris, History, UBC University Examiner iii Abstract My study examines expressions of American innocence in post-Cold War U.S. fiction and film and considers how these cultural artifacts reveal the role of this potent cultural myth in consent for war after 9/11. As John Shelton Lawrence writes, “the notion of national innocence seems central” to post-9/11 consensus about war. Similarly, Marita Sturken sees a “renewed investment in the notion of American innocence” after 9/11 (7), and Donald Pease casts 9/11 as an uneasy navigation of the “fantasy of radical innocence” (162) that American mythology has enabled. I argue that my exhibits trace the recuperation of this mythical innocence across what Samuel Cohen calls an “interwar decade” (4) and reveal its renewed cultural currency as the post-Cold War era was transformed by 9/11 and the U.S. began its War on Terror, an abstraction that took form in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I examine how Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) probe Cold War nostalgia in the “interwar decade” and interrogate notions of American innocence that rely on such nostalgia. I then anatomize how Saving Private Ryan (1998) and The Thin Red Line (1998) invoke a nostalgic discourse of WWII that contributed to a recuperation of American innocence instrumental to the call to war after 9/11. I go on to show how Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (2012) expose the rift between notions of American innocence and the realities of war by depicting young veterans who struggle to reconcile the two as they return from the Iraq War. I also show how Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), written shortly before the end of the Iraq War, rebukes American nostalgia for the putative innocence of the 1950s by tracing the homecoming of an African American veteran of the Korean War. Finally, I explore how Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Argo (2012) articulate distinct but complementary notions of American innocence that capture yet another recuperation of American innocence in the wake of the Iraq War. iv Lay Summary This study examines expressions of American innocence in twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. fiction and film and considers the implications of these expressions in a perennially militaristic U.S. foreign policy. “American innocence” is a potent cultural myth that disavows the historical wrongdoing of the United States and fosters a spurious belief in the righteousness of American actions, including war. This study argues that exemplary films and novels produced in the United States at critical post-Cold War junctures trace the recuperation of this mythical innocence and reveal its currency in popular, political, and literary culture as the U.S. began its War on Terror. v Preface This dissertation is an original intellectual product of the author, Damon Barta. A version of chapter 4 appears as “Strangers in a Homeland: Veterans and ‘Innocensus’ in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds” in the edited collection Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television, edited by Paul Petrovic and published by Rowan and Littlefield in 2015. A portion of chapter 2 appears as “Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and the Culture War: Innocence, Nostalgia, and American Historiography” in Philip Roth Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2018, pp. 25-35. vi Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................................................. iv Preface .......................................................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................................... vii Dedication ................................................................................................................................................................... ix The Ends of Innocence: American Narratives, War, and the Economy of Guilt .................................................. 1 Innocence and Exceptionalism ....................................................................................................................... 7 The Post-Vietnam State of Innocence .......................................................................................................... 14 American Pastoral, Underworld, and Home: American Narratives across an “Interwar” Economy of Innocence ................................................................................................................................................................... 29 American Pastoral and the “American Berserk”: Innocence, Nostalgia, and American Historiography .............................................................................................................................................. 35 Hind Sites and Historical Memory: Underworld’s White Spaces and Overworld Nostalgia ....................... 49 The House of Race in the Homeland: Morrison’s Home and Neocontainment Culture ............................... 63 WW2K: Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as Interwar “Sights” of Memory .................................... 78 Spielberg’s Americans in Saving Private Ryan: Do Decent Things, Shoot, Repeat ..................................... 88 The Wit[t] of the Moving Box: The Thin Red Line’s Tacit Tour Guide ....................................................... 97 Strangers in a Homeland: Veterans and “Innocensus” in The Yellow Birds and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk ......................................................................................................................................................................... 105 Rituals of Innocence in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk ......................................................................... 110 The Yellow Birds and the Homeland Dream ............................................................................................... 117 Epilogue: The Best Picture(s) of Innocence and the War on Terror .................................................................. 127 From “Get the Water” to “You’re Going to Kill Him for Me”: Incremental Participation, Innocence Recuperation, and War by Proxy in Zero Dark Thirty ............................................................................... 135 Argo, Pseudohistorical Depth, and Innocence by Committee .................................................................... 138 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................................. 140 vii Acknowledgements Gratitude has driven me to complete this project, especially when doing so has been the most challenging. To express this gratitude in its fullness to the people who have seen me through is not possible. To all those people: I could not have done this without each of you and the words below are not enough. Before I get to those words, I would like to mention that my research was funded by several fellowships and scholarships, including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and a University of British Columbia Four Year Doctoral Fellowship, and I am grateful to SSHRC and UBC for the indispensable financial support. Now for those hopelessly inadequate words to those unquestionably essential people: Thank you, Jeff Severs, for your attentiveness, patience, and advocacy throughout. Thank you, Sandy Tomc and Mike Zeitlin, for your encouragement and guidance. Thank you, Gary, for many years of mentorship and friendship. You helped me realize that I could do this and that I wanted to. Thank you to my graduate cohort and our softball team, The Prose, for countless hours of camaraderie and catharsis. Special thanks to my friends Emer, Geoff, Mandy, and Jeffrey. Thank you, Matt and Jude, friends and stalwart virtual playmates, for your companionship, encouragement, and emotional support in the final stages of this project. Sharing our struggles and letting them go for a few hours each week helped me hold my sanity during the pandemic. Thank you, Norm and Norma, for accepting me into your family and all the years of comfort, support, and safety you gave me. viii Thank you, Steph, for the many years of companionship, for your unwavering support of my work, and for giving me my greatest teacher. Thank you, Avery, for being my greatest teacher. Thank you, Erica, for challenging me to occupy my best self and for not letting me quit. ix Dedication To my grandmother, Jeanne Kelly. I know you would have read this whole thing if you were still here. I miss you. 1 The Ends of Innocence: American Narratives, War, and the Economy of Guilt In the week after the attacks of 9/11, Joan Didion was asked whether she thought the “nostalgia for an imagined America” she had written about a few years earlier was still happening. “I think so,” she responded. “People are talking about ‘America losing its innocence.’ How many times can America lose its innocence? In my lifetime we’ve heard that we’ve lost our innocence half a dozen times at least” (“Didion on 9/11”). Marita Sturken also notes that “virtually every traumatic event of twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. history, from Pearl Harbor to the Vietnam War to 9/11 has been characterized as the moment when American innocence was lost” (Tourists 16). Loss of innocence has been associated with the nuclear arms race, the trial of Alger Hiss, the assassination of JFK, the atrocities of Vietnam, the transgressions of Nixon, the Columbine shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the attacks of 9/11, to name more than a half-dozen occasions that have been described in these terms since Didion’s birth in 1934. This recurrent invocation of national innocence occurs in the face of flagrant contradictions, defies logic, and projects problematic categories that prompt several questions: How could a nation that sanctioned slavery, undertook a genocidal campaign against native peoples, implemented segregation, dropped atomic bombs on civilians, destroyed peasant villages, and tortured “enemy combatants” ever have been construed as “innocent”? A loss of innocence is presumably a singular event, so how did America manage to get it back? In what sense did “America” get it back? How do narratives of innocence fit into policies of recurrent and open-ended warfare undertaken by the United States? One of the fundamental challenges implicit in discussions of “American innocence” is the profound ambiguity within the semantic constituents of this expression. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following four definitions of “innocence”: 2 1. Freedom from sin, guilt, or moral wrong in general; the state of being untainted with, or unacquainted with, evil; moral purity. 2. Freedom from specific guilt; the fact of not being guilty of that with which one is charged; guiltlessness. 3. Freedom from cunning or artifice; guilelessness, artlessness, simplicity; hence, want of knowledge or sense, ignorance, silliness. 4. Of things: Harmlessness, innocuousness. Two principal senses emerge from these denotations: “guilelessness” and “guiltlessness.” These senses of the word are not easily separated, as naïvety, or being “unacquainted with evil,” makes it impossible for the naïve to be “guilty” of anything. The apparent circularity in the word “innocence” provides one key to understanding the concept of “American innocence” and its role in the regenerative nature of American military aggression. The naïve are “simple,” “ignorant,” “pure,” and “harmless” while the not guilty are “free” from “guile,” “artifice,” and “knowledge.” To disavow knowledge and cultivate ignorance are the principal means of maintaining the simplicity and purity requisite to a state of innocence, and, as Sturken points out, “[n]otions of national innocence are fragile and need constant maintenance in order to be sustained” (Tourists 18). The means by which this is accomplished implicates sundry aspects of culture and relies on the implicit instability of “innocence” as a concept. “American” is an uncertain term here also. To whom is this innocence being attributed? Certainly, not everyone living within U.S. borders would insist upon the “guiltlessness” of his or her nation with regard to foreign policy. Certainly, not everyone who is a resident of the United 3 States has had equal access to the democratic processes that ostensibly generate consensus for U.S. policy. Only those most heavily invested in the appearance of such consensus are likely to embrace such a sweeping characterization. It is here that we must separate the American imaginary from the American populace without denying the role that an imaginary plays in influencing the actions of that populace, a parsing that has always been a delicate operation undertaken with blunt instruments. Bruce Kuklick explicitly introduced this question into American Studies in his 1972 attack on the previously dominant paradigm in American Studies, “the myth-symbol school.” This “school” consisted of a small group of scholars whose readings of a small number of American texts projected Edenic symbolism onto the American landscape. Critics in the 1950s such as R.W.B. Lewis and Henry Nash Smith located the “American Adam” at the edge of a “Virgin Land,” and read the negotiation of this frontier as a quintessentially American experience. The readiness of critics at mid-century to “identify” innocence as a fundamental element of an American paradigm with a contiguous history has since been viewed, by scholars such as Donald Pease, as a response to the burgeoning Cold War tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and an investment in the dichotomous allotment of culpability attendant to this antagonism. The Edenic symbolism offered by Lewis, Smith, and others could be used to map a causal trajectory through history that found the U.S. at yet another frontier, one at which the “morally pure” United States and the “morally corrupt” Soviet Union (what Reagan would later call, respectively, the “shining city on a hill” and the “evil empire”) would vie for political power. Early Americanists provided scant explanation about how their symbolic framework aligned with the attitudes of those living within the U.S., offering vague phrases such as “anonymous popular mind” to explain the connection (Kuklick 445). While Kuklick granted that 4 such a “world of suprapersonal ideas which we all share and which we may use to order our experiences is a reasonable supposition” (438), he did not believe that this sufficiently bound the symbols used by myth-symbol critics to the behavior of Americans. Such generalizations, according to Kuklick, “must be subject to falsification by . . . ‘lower level’ historical research” to be valid (447). He also objected to generalizing a zeitgeist, across class and other differences, noting the precarious nature of attributing attitudes or beliefs to an “anonymous popular mind.” After all, argued Kuklick, “many people live in a country and . . . attribution of motives to all of them requires extensive evidence” (445). He goes on to challenge the notion that selected examples of popular and literary culture can constitute any kind of meaningful consensus among “regular” people. According to Kuklick, “without hesitation American Studies scholarship . . . jumped from the ‘literate public’ to everyone” (445). Kuklick’s critique was only the first salvo in a fusillade of attacks on the flawed methodologies of American Studies. The subsequent rise of African American, feminist, and queer criticism has brought appropriate attention to the spurious claims of a cohesive “American” identity, and the “new” Americanists have to some degree recalibrated the parameters of debate within the field by positioning the United States in a more global context, although they may have overzealously prosecuted the “old” order. John Whalen Bridge has noted that the new Americanists, in their haste to critique, ultimately reproduce this old order through “a discourse in which the critic ‘otherizes’ an Old Americanist to authorize his or her own position” (31). He notes that while such critics use “Adamic” in a pejorative sense to denote “a naïve American false consciousness” (31), they take part in the very fallacy they denounce. According to Whalen-Bridge, “By seeing him- or herself as more ready to admit ‘historical national shames’ than the previous generation of critics, the New Americanist 5 undergoes rhetorical self-purification and is reborn as the simple, genuine self [Emerson’s phrase] against the whole academy” (32). Whether the new Americanists have problematized or propagated it, the utility of “nation,” in general, and “America,” in particular, as interpretive categories can no longer be taken for granted. However, as Matthew Frye Jacobsen suggests, “the militarized ultrastatism that crystallized after the attacks of 9/11” has validated its ongoing, if qualified, use as a “building block” of emergent transnational paradigms (274). This study does not presuppose an “anonymous popular mind,” and it does not posit a unitary “America” that somehow correlates with a set of symbols presumed to be common to peoples within the United States. However, it does not seek to distance itself from the discursive boundaries of “America,” a discourse that continues to have considerable currency in political rhetoric, popular culture, and literary work. I have chosen artifacts from these media, based on their criticism of or complicity with a concept of innocence that continues to inform American political discourse. While only arguably prevalent in the minds of the “American people,” this concept has most certainly been present in film and literature produced in the United States. The examples I have chosen are not meant to insist upon a zeitgeist of any particular generation or demographic of Americans, but rather to illustrate and anatomize the uses and functions, at particular historical junctures, of a powerful myth with wide-reaching political implications. The complete term “American innocence,” much like its linguistic constituents, is fraught with ambiguity. It has been used to refer to both a trope and a condition presumed to be actual, to express both an antithesis to a corrupt Old World born of geographical separation and an innate virtue ascribed to those who occupy the New World, to both denote a sincere belief in American righteousness and to satirize this belief. Like the dual senses of its root concept, “innocence,” the valences of “American innocence” overlap and operate in complex and 6 seemingly contradictory ways. The U.S. has been at war for most of the twentieth and twenty- first century.1 A certain “naivety” or “want of knowledge” seems requisite to the single-minded conviction necessary to prosecute war, but the prosecution itself requires no small degree of “guile” and a willingness to do harm, although this harm is authorized by an unequivocal assertion of America as the “not guilty” party in any instigation of war. The malleability of the concept of innocence has been well-demonstrated by oscillating emphases in political rhetoric. After the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was heard to muse, “Why do they hate us?” a question that President Bush, eleven years earlier, attributed to the “American people.” Bush’s response relied on “guilelessness” (they hate “freedom”), while his remedy relied on a sense of “guiltlessness” that was only made possible by the extremity of his (apparent) naivety. These uses of American innocence differ in their rhetorical ends, but they share a significant trait: innocence has never been a current condition, but rather one that once was but is no longer. American innocence always belongs to the past, but it only appears at the moment it is invoked. In other words, American innocence is always “lost” innocence, and it relies on ahistorical and parochial interpretations of geopolitical realities that allow for a parabolic reading of the U.S. as an originally guileless entity that has now been violated, and now that it has been “acquainted with evil” will be a reluctant, resolute, and righteous participant in war, even if that means starting one. As President Bush put it in his televised pitch for the Iraq War in 2003, “The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat. But we will do everything to defeat it” (emphasis added). As John Shelton Lawrence writes in his analysis of public commemoration ceremonies, “the notion of national innocence seems central” to post-9/11 consensus about militaristic U.S. 1 The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on 30 Aug. 2021, ending the war that began nearly twenty years prior, on 7 Oct. 2001. 7 policy, and Sturken sees a “renewed investment in the notion of American innocence” after 9/11 playing out in the consumption of commemorative kitsch in lieu of actual political engagement (Tourists 7). These are apt and timely acknowledgements, and Sturken convincingly implicates innocence in her analysis. My contribution to American Studies is both an intervention and an addition: it offers a similar focus on the primacy of innocence to American culture, but it brings this focus to bear on American film and literary fiction and their complicity with and critiques of the ways innocence compels U.S. aggression abroad. It also examines significant artifacts of a symbolic order inaugurated by 9/11. While Americans expressed diverse and often ambiguous reactions to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration ostensibly cultivated a consensus that enabled its agenda by offering the metaphor of the “Homeland.” As Pease has observed, this is the latest example of a “semantic field by which individuals [are] persuaded to live demonstrably imaginary relations to their real conditions of existence” (643). I will demonstrate ways that American innocence has operated within this semantic field since the end of the Cold War to project consensus, dismiss historic transgressions, and discredit dissent. Innocence and Exceptionalism Questions about American innocence are closely related to those of “American exceptionalism,” a notion that has received increasing critical scrutiny in recent decades.2 Certainly, “American innocence” and “American exceptionalism” have common attributes and functions. The supposedly unique character of America and its attributed moral purity both presuppose immunity from historic forces. “Exceptionalism,” like “innocence,” has been used as both a celebratory and pejorative term, and the “end” of exceptionalism has been heralded nearly as 2 See, for example, Sylvia Soderlind and Godfrey Hodgson. 8 many times, and often on the same occasions, as the “loss” of American innocence. Neither of these notions, however, was in any immediate peril in the immediate wake of the Iraq War. During the 2012 election primaries, both major political parties explicitly endorsed the most celebratory and least critical concept of “exceptionalism” while implicitly invoking ideas of “innocence” that undergird it. According to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, It is our willingness to shape world events for the better that has kept us safe, increased our prosperity, preserved our liberty and transformed human history. At our best, America has led. We have led by our example as a shining city on a hill. We have led in the direction of patriots from both parties. We have led shoulder to shoulder with steadfast friends and allies. We have led by giving voice to the voiceless, insisting that every human life has dignity, and aiding those brave souls who risk everything to secure the inalienable rights that are endowed to all by our creator. [. . .] We have led with generous hearts, moved by an abiding love of justice, to help others eradicate disease, lift themselves from poverty, live under laws of their own making, and determine their own destinies. We have led when necessary with the armed might of freedom’s defenders, and always we have led from the front, never from behind. [. . .] This is what makes us an exceptionalist nation. It is not only who we are, it is the record of what we have done. In perhaps a more disingenuous assertion, John Kerry offered the following assessment of exceptionalism on behalf of the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama: 9 Our opponents . . . like to talk about American exceptionalism, but all they do is talk. They forget that we’re exceptional, not because we say we are, but because we do exceptional things. We break out of the Great Depression, win two World Wars, save lives fighting AIDS, pull people out of poverty, defend freedom, go to the moon and produce exceptional people who even give their lives for civil rights and for human rights. Despite . . . what you heard in Tampa, an exceptional country does care about the rise of the oceans and the future of the planet. [. . .] That . . . is a responsibility from the Scriptures. And that too is a responsibility of the leader of the free world. The only thing exceptional about today’s Republicans is that almost without exception, they oppose everything that has made America exceptional in the first place. An exceptional nation demands exceptional leadership. These assertions about the uniqueness of America rely on the vagueness and selectivity that one might expect from political rhetoric, but they are nonetheless astonishing in their blithe inversions of reality, in their embrace of “ignorance” or “want of knowledge.” One wonders, for example, who the “voiceless” were that were “given a voice.” Most Americans do not feel adequately represented by their government, some Americans have been squelched for their dissent, and still others have been struggling to have their voices heard by the rest of the United States for centuries. The “we” that broke out of the Great Depression is also a questionable entity, papering over, as it does, the fractures in the social fabric caused by disparities in wealth and power. Again, no one would expect a politician to address these issues, but they are completely effaced by a rhetoric of exceptionalism predicated on a guiltless conception of nation. Whether or not the speakers actually espouse this notion, they clearly believe that it will “play” 10 with a portion of the electorate that wants to view themselves as especially virtuous. Tellingly, both Kerry and McCain frequently substitute the word “exceptionalist” for the word “exceptional,” even though they are not synonyms. The adoption of the suffix “-ist” makes a word meaning “special” or “unique” into the adjectival form of “exceptionalism,” which denotes a belief in “specialness.” America may or may not be “exceptional” in some respects, but “exceptionalism” is only concerned with the belief that it is. The object of this study is this belief, the realities that belie it, and the ways that these beliefs and realities are represented in film and literature. Another important principle lies within the concept of exceptionalism. “Exceptional” is a necessarily relative state, and, as Sylvia Soderlind notes, exceptionalism is “an ideology premised on the existence of an identifiable antagonist external to the nation” (6). One could produce an extensive list of external U.S. antagonists in the late twentieth century but would be hard-pressed to come up with one in the years between the Gulf War and 9/11. This is not to say that the U.S. refrained from military interventions in these years (Somalia and Bosnia, for example), only that there was no longer a monolithic external enemy presence that the U.S. could consistently measure itself against. This changed after 9/11, but the renewed vigor of exceptionalism was less a return to form than an iteration of a form that remained committed to external antagonists in the post-Gulf 1990s. These antagonists, unavailable in the actual geopolitical arena, were found in nostalgic revisitations of prior wars, particularly World War II. For some scholars, American exceptionalism has been transmitted via myth in myriad forms, and many studies have attempted to uncover and/or impose cohesion on these forms. This body of scholarship does the important work of identifying significant memes in American myth, but it often does so by using an oversimplified model of transmission: a linear trajectory in 11 which the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” has become the “frontier,” a concept that in turn has become a set of symbols that can, as Amy Kaplan has noted, all too easily be “export[ed] . . . to new frontiers” (Anarchy 17). These new frontiers have been found by scholars in the imperial excursions of the United States in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. While the “errand” and “the frontier” can be useful ways to apprehend American culture at particular points in time, it is essential to remember that these are tropes and that they are not necessarily corollaries. While these concepts give (or once gave) a coherent form to cultural forces that have circulated in the United States, they also retroactively impose a plot to history. This problem of reading contingency as inevitability continues to be a central challenge to scholars in the humanities, and it is one that this study must account for. As Godfrey Hodgson notes in his 2009 study of American exceptionalism, John Winthrop was “not preaching to Americans about the future of the United States of America” when he gave his sermon about the “City on the Hill,” and the speech that Ronald Reagan gave that invoked this sermon 350 years later had “virtually nothing in common” with the original (3). I will treat the myth of American innocence not as a teleological narrative of historical events or ideas that impose continuity in hindsight, but rather as historically contingent arguments about particular past epochs that arise at moments of anxiety or crisis and only then begin to take shape. As I have suggested above, narratives of American innocence only take shape after the innocence has been “lost.” Although the chapters that follow will largely be organized chronologically, the cultural moments at which American innocence arises should not themselves be viewed within a linear trajectory of historical “progress,” but through a set of interpretive moments “in which time stands still,” moments that Walter Benjamin calls Jetztzeit, or “time filled by the presence of the now” (261). These moments reveal what Homi Bhabha 12 calls a “nation-space in the process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in media res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image” (3). Innocence has been instrumental in the composition of this image. Yet, while it promotes and sustains exceptionalism, innocence is a distinct concept that requires discrete analysis. To understand the vibrancy of exceptionalism that has persisted in the face of conspicuous contradictions, we must first understand the nature and uses of innocence in American culture. There is a ritualistic nature to invocations of American innocence that has been hinted at by Lawrence and examined in one important context by Sturken but deserves further scrutiny. These ritualized expressions of innocence bear some resemblance to what Sacvan Bercovitch has called the American jeremiad, though it seems to invert this rhetorical form. Bercovitch explains the cohesion of an American imaginary in terms of the “jeremiad,” a rhetorical genre imported by the Puritans to the New World, which was largely a “mode of denunciation,” an “ancient formulaic refrain” that “castigated the evils of the time” (6), “decried the sins of ‘the people’,” and “warned of God’s wrath to follow” (7). Bercovitch identifies, within this castigation, a “pervasive theme of affirmation and exultation” that belies the “vehemence of its complaint” (6). At first glance, this model may seem incompatible with rituals of “innocence.” If the “sins of the people” have corrupted the “errand,” then the people are certainly not “guileless” or “morally pure.” However, when we recall that innocence only appears at the moment of its loss, a significant bond between the denunciation of evil within “the people” and an affirmation of their supposed innocence begins to emerge. While the Jeremiad backhandedly validates the exceptional status of Americans by invoking the sacred errand that has been ignored but is still 13 primary--to bring “the people” back to the path of the righteous and ongoing errand--the “loss of innocence” confers an “acquaintance with evil” on the people, a condition that authorizes a reprieve from “guilelessness” and sanctions violent conflict in order to restore a state of innocence. In other words, because “America” has now been sullied by its acquaintance with evil, burdened by knowledge, it is authorized to commit sins of its own. It must restore its “moral purity” by using the methods of the foreign entity that “introduced” the evil. More recently, William Spanos has integrated frontier mythology with the Jeremiad model to explain American aggression. While my assertions here owe a debt to Bercovitch and Spanos, my study will demonstrate the reliance of these concepts on a twofold sense of innocence that remains central to American narratives. I will examine filmic expressions and literary critiques of innocence produced nearly a decade after the end of the Cold War that demonstrate the vitality of the innocence myth even in the absence of a clear “external antagonist” before turning to the attacks of 9/11, an event of “lost innocence” that generated a distinct “economy of guilt” that had to be negotiated to restore innocence to a nation undeniably “acquainted with evil.” I have chosen to juxtapose popular film with literary work not to compare them directly, but to offer different angles of view on American innocence and its attendant allotment of guilt. I have chosen particular artifacts from among many suitable ones for their acute articulations of innocence at specific temporal junctures, in which narratives of innocence cohere, punctuating as they do extended negotiations of innocence that both precede and succeed them. Each negotiation focuses on different valences of innocence, but each is invariably linked to war. Large-scale antagonisms may have subsided between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, but the importance of war to a sense of innocence remained vital. The “surgical” Gulf War and the commemoration and canonization of 14 World War II in the 1990s fuelled an economy of guilt in post-Cold War/pre-9/11 period in the U.S. that saw technology and nostalgia (somewhat paradoxically) used to tilt the balance back towards American “guiltlessness.” Just as this sense of innocence was being firmly re- established, 9/11 again disrupted the economy of guilt, and compromised that other enduring pillar of American innocence, “guilelessness.” After 9/11, narratives of innocence focused on re- establishing the “guilelessness” that was lost after an “acquaintance with evil” at a site of presumed invulnerability. Although the emphasis on one or the other facet of innocence can be seen to oscillate across time, these concepts are interdependent, and they operate with and against each other to perennially regenerate cultural paradigms in which war is the remedy for its loss. The Post-Vietnam State of Innocence While this study will subsequently focus on the post-Cold War era, it entails some discussion of the state of innocence after one of its principal twentieth-century challenges--that of the Vietnam War. Historical revisioning and mythologizing of Vietnam have been studied at length by scholars such as John Hellman, Bruce Franklin, Susan Jeffords, and Jerry Lembke. While the following analysis will draw on this body of scholarship, my point of departure is the centrality of innocence to these revisions, and any redundancies that arise will be brief but necessary. In Vietnam, the United States was clearly culpable of both facilitating an ethically fraught war and perpetrating violent transgressions in its execution (My Lai, for example), and the primary “lost” condition that needed to be recovered was that of “guiltlessness.” Few films about Vietnam were contemporaneous with the war, the jingoistic John Wayne feature, The Green Berets (1968), being the most prominent of them. A proliferation of Vietnam 15 films would ensue in the 1980s, many of which functioned to encode a mythology that could resolve the massive failure and carnage of the war with a now imperiled sense of American exceptionalism. Between the official end of the war in 1975 and Reagan’s election in 1980 lies a period in which a critical negotiation was taking place, a negotiation that would determine the tenor of subsequent Vietnam representation. A definitive moment in this negotiation can be found in the 1978 Academy Awards, an event that literally featured a high-profile competition between two versions of the American experience of the Vietnam War. Two Best-Picture nominees, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, ostensibly differed in focus and scope, but their respective allotments of responsibility, blame, and innocence illustrate a common shift in the economy of guilt. Coming Home and The Deer Hunter both depict Vietnam as a narrative of lost innocence for Americans, and they both focus on damaged veterans who return home but are no longer able to function (a trope that will have increasing currency in films to come).3 Indeed, they both present a narrow and parochial perspective on the war, one that bypasses the broader contexts of American involvement in Vietnam and ignores the damage done by Americans to the Vietnamese. Within this limited scope, in which “want of [historical] knowledge” and “ignorance” already implicate the films in a discourse of innocence, the two films diverge in their perspectives and motives. The degree of political engagement of those involved in each film, for example, was highly disparate. Coming Home was initially a project of Jane Fonda’s Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC). John Voight’s character was based on anti-war veteran Ron Kovic, and the film’s director, screenwriters, and principal actors were all committed anti-war 3 See, for example, First Blood (1982) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). 16 activists. At least one critic chastened it for moments in which it felt like a “sermon.” Conversely, The Deer Hunter’s director Michael Cimino has repeatedly insisted that his film is not political, and producer Michael Deely has further argued that the film “is not ‘about’ Vietnam” but is rather “a parable” that revolves around “unpalatable choices” and “blame.” The “sermon and the “parable” both depict characters arcs from “want of knowledge” to “an acquaintance with evil,” though they suggest different sources for the evil with which these characters become acquainted. Although the principal characters in The Deer Hunter occupy a world of limited horizons and bleak economic prospects, they are portrayed at the onset of the film as unencumbered by guile. The men work their shifts in the refinery next to their childhood friends, do a lot of drinking together, and occasionally go deer hunting. The women marry these men, do a lot of drinking together, and wait for the men to come home. When three childhood friends are drafted for Vietnam, they are excited to go, despite some fear and hesitation. In their subsequent imprisonment and torture in a prison camp, they become acquainted with evil, an evil represented in this film by the invariably sinister and sadistic Vietnamese people. The principal mode of torture is forced games of Russian roulette. Peter Arnett, a war correspondent who spent thirteen years covering Vietnam, was among the first to note that the film portrays the Vietnamese people as “inhuman monsters” and to point out that, the ubiquitous violence in Vietnam notwithstanding, there were no known instances of Russian roulette (“The Deer Hunter”). He also challenged the film’s tacit claim to historical truth in its juxtaposition of actual footage from Saigon with that of a parochial fiction that offers “simplistic” and “satisfying” answers to “enduring anxieties” about the conflict. More recently, Bruce Franklin has documented some startling inversions of widely recognized media images from Vietnam in the film. Television audiences were stunned in 1968 when the head of South Vietnam’s police, 17 General Loan, summarily executed a Viet Cong prisoner on live television. The still image, which appeared in newspapers the following day and is one of the most enduring images of the war, is mirrored in The Deer Hunter. As Franklin observes, “The crucial torture scene consists of sequence after sequence of images replicating and replacing that infamous historical sequence in which General Loan placed a revolver to the right temple of his NLF [Viet Cong] prisoner and killed him with a single shot” (16). This is achieved by framing the Russian roulette scenes so that “the connection between the prisoner’s body and the arm holding the revolver” is eliminated, thus transmuting an act of brutal violence against a shackled Viet Cong prisoner into an act of brutal violence against an American soldier. The film, according to Franklin, is pervaded by such reversals. The first scene set in Vietnam evokes widely circulated images of American GIs destroying Vietnamese villages and killing civilians as a uniformed soldier kills several women and children with a grenade and a machine gun. Yet, as Franklin points out, this soldier turns out to be North Vietnamese and is subsequently killed by a “guerrilla” in the brush who turns out to be an American commando. The final scene of The Deer Hunter is one of innocence lost and, as such, a moment where innocence is born: a spontaneous rendition of “God Bless America” followed with a toast to the dead soldier by his mentally and physically damaged survivors. No one at the table can any longer be construed as “unacquainted with evil,” although they are still remarkably unburdened by knowledge. While self-blame has afflicted the combat veterans throughout the film, and the sombre rendition of “God Bless America” has been interpreted by some as a sardonic elegy, “Americans” (insofar as they are represented by the denizens of this particular blue-collar enclave in Pennsylvania) have not only been exonerated from complicity in the horrors of Vietnam but are also ultimately framed as victims of larger inscrutable forces, tragic, apolitical archetypes untethered to history. Their explicit disavowal of 18 politics notwithstanding, the makers of The Deer Hunter express, consciously or not, fantastical revisions of the Vietnam War that deflect and displace guilt, thereby preserving and propagating a sense of national “guiltlessness.” In Coming Home, that vague bureaucratic entity sometimes referred to as “the government” appears to bear some responsibility for the trauma inflicted upon American veterans, though, again, there is little context and no specific details about how this works. Jane Fonda plays Sally Hyde, the wife of a marine whose husband, Bob, is sent to Vietnam. Although this deployment occurs in the wake of the infamous Tet Offensive, he is “excited” to be going and confident that the Viet Cong have “blown their wad” with Tet. He “feels like he’s off to the Olympic Games representing the United States.” Sally starts out as an ingénue who, according to Bob, “doesn’t understand” the war “but accepts it.” The two are shown driving home on the sunny day before deployment, children playing in the street, to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel singing about “a time of confidence and innocence” (though as the music fades and the shot ends, it can be heard that this “time” was “long ago” and in a “photograph”). She volunteers at a VA hospital after visiting the facility with a friend, whose heavily medicated brother has lived there since his compulsory tour in Vietnam. She tries to lift the spirits of wounded vets by offering them small comforts and a sunny disposition, and she even petitions a committee for substantive improvements in their care, all to no avail. She befriends a bitter paraplegic veteran, Luke Martin, with whom she comes to share a profound disillusionment with the war. The two fall in love and carry on an affair until her husband returns home after having “accidentally” shot himself in the leg. He discovers the affair, and when Luke visits Sally’s house to placate him, Bob produces a rifle with bayonet and makes threats and menacing gestures. He is ultimately pacified, but it is clear that he is no longer mentally stable, and at the 19 end of the film he is seen stripping his uniform and running naked into the sea, presumably to drown. The scenes of Bob’s imminent departure from the world are juxtaposed with those of a speech given by Luke, who has been emboldened to speak out on the war by his relationship with Fonda. The speech is clearly anti-war, but troublingly vague. It is essentially a condensed iteration of his comment earlier in the film that “war is the enemy.” His reference to going to war for the “wrong reasons” is left unexplained and, as with The Deer Hunter, audiences are left with the impression that the inexorable and amorphous entity “war” rather than the specific and contingent Vietnam War is the culprit here.4 As with The Deer Hunter, innocence has been discovered in the event of its loss. Both films were commercially successful and largely well-received critically. The Deer Hunter was ultimately awarded Best Picture by none other than John Wayne (awarded a congressional medal of honor the following year for representing the quintessential American hero) and Coming Home garnered awards for Best Actress (Jane Fonda, dubbed “Hanoi” Jane by her critics on the right for her outspoken opposition to the war) and Best Actor (John Voight). The high profile of these films and their status as early bellwethers of Vietnam War representation amplify the power of their assertions about the War. These assertions are remarkably similar, and together they signal a significant redistribution in the economy of guilt that would by 1983 allow President Reagan to antithetically cast the United States as “the Shining City on the Hill “ against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union, and by 1991 allow President Bush to declare that the “Vietnam Syndrome” had been cured by the Gulf War, an astonishing claim in that “syndrome” had come to refer not to the complex political implications, 4 As historians have long noted, the war in Vietnam was not declared by Congress and was officially designated a “police action” by President Eisenhower. 20 fraught ethics, and widely-recognized brutality of this war, but the fact that the U.S. had lost its nerve. While this public contest of attributed artistic merit in film and literature reflects a significant restructuring of the post-Vietnam economy of guilt, an equally critical question arises from this jetzeit: Who was watching? Who is it, at a given historical moment, that consumes and reproduces the narratives circulated by film, by literary fiction, and in what ways if any can this group be said to constitute “America”? What characteristics do these groups share with those that consume political rhetoric, televised and print news media? With those that vote in elections? This returns us to Kucklick’s objections to the methodology of early Americanist scholarship, objections that have been reiterated in more recent critiques. Alon Confino, discussing what has been increasingly referred to as “collective memory,” has described the outcome of the optimal method (which he leaves unarticulated) as that which “outline[s] the mental horizons of a society” by linking popular and literary representations in “a single cultural world” and “establish[ing] a shared identity of some group “whose members . . . have different interests and motivations” (1390). Pease has approached this challenge by suggesting that a “state’s policies get internalized through a state’s fantasy work” and are then “experienced as internal to the citizens’ desire” (4). This is a seductive assertion, one that allows us to conflate the rhetoric of the state with the will of “the people,” and one that is not without merit. However, this “internalization” of state “fantasy” remains entirely hypothetical in the work of Pease. He deftly anatomizes the various fantasies created by the state since the end of the Cold War, but the relationship of these fantasies to the behavior of American citizens remains problematic. Pease describes the “operative component of state fantasy” as that which gains “U.S. citizens’ acquiescence to the processes whereby the state superimposes the legal identities through which21 it seeks to manage the everyday practices and the self-representations of its citizens” (4). As examples of this component, he cites four “compacts” offered to Americans by legislators and Presidents (“New World Order,” “New Covenant with America,” “Contract with America,” and the “Homeland Security State”). While he gives insightful readings of these paradigms as “fantasies,” and there is little doubt that some Americans have subscribed to these fantasies, it bears mention that “compacts” are reciprocal. The proposal of a “Contract with America,” for example, must be accepted for a valid contract to exist, and a cursory look at voting statistics for the United States suggests that all of these contracts, and this one in particular, have only been endorsed by a small fraction of U.S. citizens.5 This is not to say that citizens, perhaps even many, who are not engaged with the political process have not internalized state fantasy to some degree, but only to remind us that this is not something that an analysis of these compacts as proposed legislative programs can tell us. These questions implicate the research, past, present, and future, of a number of disciplines, and illustrate the critical importance of interdisciplinary American Studies scholarship. To convincingly establish a cohesive “collective memory” would require analysis of what Confino, echoing Aby Warburg, calls “a full spectrum of [cultural] artifacts” (1391) and to demonstrate that the versions of the past that become the “official” narratives of this group align with those of the individual people. What follows is only a part of this spectrum. It is primarily a study of representation. Furthermore, it is a study of certain kinds of representation, memory as construed by a particular cadre of filmmakers and authors. While the analyses that follow will demonstrate the centrality of innocence in artifacts of literary and film culture in the 5 During the year Newt Gingrich proposed his “Contract with America,” for example, a mere 45% of eligible voters in the United States voted in the congressional election, and a significant minority of those voters did not vote for Republican candidates who endorsed this “contract” (“Voting”). 22 United States and discuss its relationship to war, it is essential to bear in mind that innocence, like Bercovitch’s jeremiad, is primarily an Anglo-protestant phenomenon and, as such, one that relies on the willful forgetting of U.S. policies of native genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, Japanese internment, and the systematic torture of Islamic “enemy combatants.” Narratives of innocence are created and consumed at the expense of the groups affected by these policies, and an unwelcome potential by-product of the study of such narratives is the propagation of this forgetfulness. This forgetfulness is unacceptable. I hold at the centre of this study the premise that a cohesive “America” is a fallacy propagated by a political class that courts the interests of an increasingly narrow constituency. I will not only address historical occasions of “consensus” fostered by innocence, but also examine the ways that dissent and recognition of U.S. transgressions against foreign and domestic others is omitted from the “economy of guilt” that motivates U.S. military action. Kaplan’s approach is particularly instructive in this respect. She connects the contemporary discourse of the Homeland with an evolving rhetoric of empire while exploring the mutually constitutive notions of “foreign” and “domestic” in U.S. culture. Kaplan foregrounds the ways in which the United States’ colonization of foreign “others,” both at home and abroad, calls into question the very cohesiveness that the discourse of empire proffers as “American.” I will approach the U.S. as “Homeland” much as Kaplan has approached the U.S. as “empire”: as an abstraction “riddled with instability, ambiguity, and disorder, rather than as a monolithic system” (Anarchy 14), one that belies attempts by those in power to totalize the disparate experiences of those who live within U.S. borders. Kaplan’s study demonstrates the ways in which the “anarchy” of the “other” is paradoxically both a necessary element of the Anglo-American conception of empire and the means of its undoing, and I will likewise look to the other to illustrate the fallacy of cohesion in the Homeland. I will treat the Homeland as one 23 incarnation of an “America” that Bercovitch views as “a rhetorical battleground” rather than an “overarching synthesis” with the recognition that it is a symbol that “has been made to stand for diverse and sometimes mutually contradictory outlooks” (355). As Confino suggests in his critique of collective memory studies, such a rhetorical battleground spans many mediums and encompasses many motives. The media I examine here are markedly different in the ways that they contribute to an American collective memory. Novelists have more latitude and often more inclination to critique dominant cultural narratives than filmmakers, who must take greater care to balance any cultural critique they wish to offer with tropes and narratives that will not alienate the broad swath of the consumer class that is necessary to make a film profitable. While both novels and films are consumer products, their markets are significantly different, and films are more widely consumed than novels. A best- seller, though notoriously vague and varied by source in its criteria, usually indicates a readership in the thousands while a Best-Picture nominee will almost certainly be viewed by millions. Both media, however, participate in a common discourse in which a national imaginary is conceived, a discourse in which history and consumerism converge, a discourse in which a corpus of literature and entertainment encode the collective memories that other kinds of rituals and narratives once provided to preindustrial communities. The novel once belonged to the leisure class just as the cinema once belonged to the working class. The middle class, or consumer class, that emerged in twentieth-century United States read and went to movies. The emergence of digital media has widened this sphere still further, increasing the availability of news, literature, film, and television as well as introducing new discursive forms. While some may still be inclined to make distinctions between “high” culture and “popular culture,” a more useful distinction can be found in Foucault’s paradigm of “memory” and “counter-memory” 24 (Language 160). For Foucault, collective memory is constructed, but counter-memories are conscious of this construction and, as such, can offer resistance to dominant cultural narratives that have been encoded as memories. By deploying this model, I do not mean to suggest that cultural products will fit neatly into one of these two categories, only that commercial films and literary novels participate in the discourse of innocence in, respectively, more complicit and more resistant ways. The films and novels in this study exemplify the ways that American collective memory has cohered around a sense of innocence that emerges at moments of crisis and becomes a justification for war. This study will focus on two periods of anxiety in particular: that of post- Cold War and post-9/11 America. The first of these periods (1989-2001) saw the internecine “culture wars” and their attendant nostalgia come to the fore as a new geopolitical paradigm emerged in which the U.S. had no consistent or monolithic national enemy. The broad and self- reflexively national scope of Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral and Don DeLillo’s Underworld attempts to examine the complexities of American postwar history in terms of subterranean and interconnected cultural phenomena, while the more focused Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line demonstrate a fixation on the mythology of World War II. These comparisons between films of collective memory and novels of counter-memory will demonstrate an escalating tension between guilt and innocence, naivety and knowledge, at a time that was being cast by Francis Fukuyama as “the end of history.” DeLillo and Roth interrogate an iteration of American innocence that enlisted past symbolic paradigms to ameliorate the lack of a contemporary “guilty” counterpart. DeLillo’s novel bookends the Cold War era, beginning on the day the Soviets successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1951 and ending in 1992 as the vestiges of Cold War culture are being reconfigured. Nick Shay, who is “shaped and made” (416) by a youthful 25 act of violence that ironically precludes his service in the Korean War, binds the overarching historical sweep of DeLillo’s narrative to the formation of an American self. Roth’s novel also pivots on a youthful act of violence, that of Merry Levov, daughter of third-generation Jewish immigrants, who, at sixteen, blows up a country store/post office in her parents’ rural New Jersey community to “bring the [Vietnam] war home to America.” Roth approaches a premillennial cultural paradigm in which “Everything now is ‘was’” (348) by staging a confrontation between “the longed for American pastoral” of the nostalgic imagination and the realities of bloody foreign policy and rampant domestic dissent, the “desperation of the counterpastoral,” (86) that nostalgic narratives circulating in the 1990s threatened to elide. Such narratives of nostalgia were anchored by the recapitulation of the “triumphs” of this history as necessary moments in a victorious American trajectory. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) represent a version of exceptionalism that cast this particular triumph as a validation of American innocence in a changing geopolitical environment that no longer offered a “guilty” national entity against which U.S. innocence could be measured. Indeed, Oliver Stone has called Saving Private Ryan part of “the worship of world war Two [sic] as the good war” (qtd. in D’Arcy). Terrence Malick did not fare as well at the box office, partially because Twentieth Century Fox “failed to locate The Thin Red Line within public discourse surrounding World War Two, something that Ryan had achieved with notable success” (Flanagan 127). The Thin Red Line was instead marketed as an art-house alternative to Spielberg’s “historical” epic, one that came to be discussed by reviewers and critics almost exclusively in terms of the film’s aesthetic achievements. This discursive hegemony has minimized discussion on the film’s historical claims and mythological resonance, both of which offer premillennial expressions of innocence. Despite the marketing bent, The Thin Red Line 26 invokes the discourse of the combat film, a genre that is “distinctly historical,” “distinctly political,” and “distinctly mythic” with regard to national identity (Rijsdijk 27). The tension between guilt and innocence, naivety and knowledge, became even more pronounced after 9/11, which, conversely, was framed as the beginning of an entirely new era. The defining phenomenon of this “new” era was once again war, and the first wave of Iraq War novels from American authors illustrates the centrality of innocence to consent to the American military conflicts of the twenty-first century. I will examine three literary texts that emerged in the immediate wake of the Iraq War, Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (2012), and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), all of which depict young veterans who struggle to reconcile the realities of combat with national myths as they return to the societies that have nurtured these myths. Billy Lynn, who is given a brief furlough from Iraq to participate with his platoon in a Super Bowl halftime show, encounters people who are only able to view him in the context of myth, and who have circumscribed him and the war by adopting clichés that deflect their complicity. Powers’ narrator, Bartle, loses his innocence in Iraq only to return to a country that maintains its own by treating him as a necessary abjection of a morally justified war state. Powers juxtaposes the narratives of Bartle’s life-altering combat experience in Iraq with the subsequent languor of life with his mother in Virginia to fashion what Michiko Kakutani aptly refers to as “a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory.” Morrison offers Frank Money, an African American who returns from Korea with PTSD to the Jim Crow South of the 1950s. Money’s odyssey from Korea to the northern U.S. to Lotus, Georgia brings him into contact with sundry strands of the culture that underwrote the conflict, but he is unable to confront the trauma of the war in Korea and his own transgressions there until he returns to Lotus and confronts repressed memories of racial violence 27 at “home.” Again, the literary output of the period stands against a more narrowly focused and parochially oriented vision proffered by commercial film. I will argue that American innocence figures largely in two of the 2013 Academy Award nominees for Best Picture: Argo (2012) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which depict, respectively, the 1979 attack on the U.S. embassy in Iran and the events leading up to the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s refuge in Pakistan. While the events depicted are separated by 32 years, they both endorse a notion of American innocence that had again become important to recuperate after eight years of war in Iraq and more than ten years of war in Afghanistan. In Zero Dark Thirty, assertions about the use of torture by the U.S. to locate Osama bin Laden are ambiguous, although identification with Maya, a CIA analyst who tracks bin Laden, is not. American audiences are meant to identify with her suppressed shock as she witnesses and participates in torture, an expression of innocence that validates the “necessary” violence that the film depicts. Argo portrays a daring escape from Iran after an attack on the U.S. embassy there. Although the attack was precipitated, in part, by U.S. policy and previous unwelcome interventions by the U.S. embassy, the film depicts a heroic CIA agent shepherding a group of blameless American bureaucrats out of a homogenously hostile Middle- Eastern nation. As Nima Shirazi puts it, Argo is “a decontextualized, ahistorical ‘true story’ of Orientalist proportion” and a “heavily decorated paean to the CIA and American innocence.” It should be noted that the critiques I attribute to the “counter-memories” that the novels posit against the films are not purely antagonistic to the myths espoused by the films. In accordance with Foucault’s insistence that “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History 95), I contend that resistance to notions of American innocence can only occur from within the discursive framework of dominant myths. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish the sources of the resistance, which diverge along multiple axes of 28 power. Roth, DeLillo, and Morrison are celebrated American authors whose work has been eminently canonized as “national” in scope. However, there is an obvious contrast between them in Morrison’s position as a woman of color and Roth and DeLillo as white men. Powers and Fountain are both white southerners and emergent authors with disparate class and experiential vantages on the Iraq War. Steven Spielberg, Terrence Malick, and Ben Affleck are all white men, and Kathyrn Bigelow is a white woman. Implicit in the choices of artifacts for this study are omissions that must be acknowledged. In an attempt to demonstrate the predominance of the American innocence myth in national culture, I chose films and novels that are heavily invested in this myth, and these selections themselves illustrate an important corollary of this demonstration: the implicit whiteness of what has been canonized as “national” American culture. While individual non-white U.S. citizens and residents have come to espouse and appropriate, to varying degrees, the myths of the still-dominant Anglo-Protestant culture, there are a plurality of narratives that run counter to it, and only those who have been most willing to engage with these myths have attained access to the “American” canon. Because these myths owe so much to a sense of innocence that contradicts the “other” American voices that know better, and because the plurality of these other voices is so often muted by the seductive totality of a monolithic American narrative, the repressive American imaginary continues to be worth examining, even if this examination treads a fine line between critique and reification. 29 American Pastoral, Underworld, and Home: American Narratives across an ‘Interwar’ Economy of Innocence The recurring rhetoric of “innocence lost” in the United States has sustained disparate narratives that do strikingly similar cultural work. While the War on Terror supplanted the Cold War as the prevailing unitary American schema for the post-9/11 geopolitical condition, American political rhetoric made a point of distinguishing between the two emphatically. Donald Rumsfeld insisted that “the challenges of a new century are not nearly as predictable as they were during the Cold War,” and George W. Bush, in more dramatic fashion, claimed that on 9/11 “night fell on a different world,” one that featured a “threat with no precedent.” The Bush administration subsequently introduced a new government agency with an unprecedented scope, the Department of Homeland Security, to deal with this “unique” threat. This anxious insistence on a difference between Cold War and War on Terror paradigms is belied by their structural similarities. As Douglas Field has noted, 9/11 prompted “a startling return” to Cold War concerns with “fortify[ing] national boundaries,” “combat[ing] and contain[ing] an international threat,” and “a continuing struggle to identify and detain these ‘shadowy, entrenched enemies’” (2). The term “Homeland” is itself emblematic of such concerns, and “Homeland Security” seems preoccupied with bringing a diffuse, border transgressing, network of geopolitical forces into a familiar alignment, one with clear symbolic borders that echo those of the Cold War. According to Alan Nadel, the Cold War was characterized by a dichotomous social paradigm that he describes as “containment culture.” Nadel appropriates the term “containment” from official U.S. postwar policy on Communism to elucidate the various aspects of a “privileged American narrative during the Cold War” that attempted to “unify, codify, and contain . . . the personal narratives of its population” (3-4). This totalizing narrative brought various and sundry identities within the U.S. under the rigidly 30 dualistic rubric with which it apprehended the geopolitical landscape and demanded “an identification with or alienation from” a “historical order” that this narrative established (4). The “Homeland” demanded a similar response from its denizens. As Susan Faludi points out, a narrative of “neofifties nuclear family ‘togetherness’, redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold Warrior manhood” (3) pervaded media and advertising after 9/11. From the theatrical “rescue” of Jessica Lynch (whose somewhat perplexed response to her rescuers who announced themselves as U.S. soldiers--as they enacted a highly orchestrated damsel in distress scenario straight out of a fairy tale--became the title of her memoir: I’m a Soldier Too), to a largely media-manufactured “marriage boom,” and a preoccupation with male heroism, a resonance with early Cold War conceptions of gender roles was clearly identifiable in the images and rhetoric of politicians, social commentators, and mass media. The racial othering that had previously been imposed on black Americans was now also being projected onto Muslim Americans (and those who were mistaken for Muslim) even as politicians advanced a post-racial rhetoric of national unity. Although the two paradigms, Cold War and War on Terror, have functionally similar structures, one did not simply replace the other immediately after 9/11. The period between the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,6 and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, has retrospectively been called an “interwar decade” (Cohen 4) and has often been alluded to as “peacetime” despite Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia, the bombing of a Chinese Embassy in 1999, the bloody Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, and the “surgical” Persian Gulf War (1990-91) that killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis. Although there was no shortage of geopolitical violence and war in the nineties, from an 6 Historians continue to dispute this periodization. Sociopolitical conditions fostered by the Cold War continued in South America and elsewhere beyond 1989. 31 American perspective, the absence of a single, clearly defined state-sponsored enemy made a narrative of post-Cold War peacetime believable enough to foster a sense of nostalgia for such unity and clarity. This nostalgia invoked apocryphal remembrances of both domestic tranquility and global war, specifically, the cohesion and prosperity of postwar America and the attributed moral clarity and unqualified valor of the American campaign in World War II. In a symbolic sense, the nineties were, in fact, not an interwar decade at all, but a decade in which “war” figured largely in discursive constructions of “America.” Pat Buchanan invoked “war” in his 1992 speech to the Republican National Committee (now often referred to as the “culture war speech”) when he described political disagreements within the U.S. as “a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself.” This rhetorical “war” pits defenders of an idealized American nostos against left-wing extremists, born of the counterculture, who distort the precepts of American democracy and revise history in accordance with their agenda. This conception of American culture invokes the perennial narrative of lost innocence, a paradisiacal America undermined from within, and imagines highly polarized factions engaged in a struggle over what James Davison Hunter, another early interlocutor of the culture wars, calls the “meaning of America” (Culture Wars 50). According to Hunter, these “progressive” and “orthodox” factions vie for interpretive supremacy in these “wars.” Superficially, American news media and political rhetoric would appear to validate Hunter’s affirmation in 2005 that this war “endures” (“Enduring” 10). Yet, there is no reliable evidence that this polarization has actually ever existed on the national level outside of its rhetorical propagation. As Irene Thomson has argued, survey data shows that “American public opinion is considerably more ambivalent and internally inconsistent than the image of a culture war implies” (1), and even “the 32 arguments of culture war partisans are nuanced and riddled with internal disagreements” (2). The culture war persists as a narrative that creates an “image of a culture war,” an image that relies, in turn, on images generated by a narrative of postwar lost innocence in which a harmonious liberal consensus was destroyed by the tumult of the “sixties.” Buchanan went on to cast this “war” in the binary terms which had governed Cold-War rhetoric and would likewise come to govern the War on Terror, although the enemies in this case were within U.S. borders. In Buchanan’s reductive formula, “Clinton [and] Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” World War II was extensively commemorated, celebrated, and depicted in film and television as an instrumental part of a teleological narrative that encompassed the American defeat of both fascism and communism, a putative defeat of “ideology” that Francis Fukuyama controversially heralded as “the end of history.” If, as Thomson argues, “there is no culture war” then the question becomes “[w]hy is a culture war perceived to have broken out in the late 1980s and early 1990s?” (175). The beginnings of an answer are implicit in Marita Sturken’s assertion that “innocence is fragile and needs constant maintenance” (4). Innocence is a state that implies opposition, and when the long-standing binary antagonisms of the Cold War were perceived to have ended, a void in the economy of innocence critical to national narratives of identity was created, causing a crisis in what Benjamin calls “the historical continuum of messianic time,” a fixed, teleological progression of events (263). The “end of history” became the next historical crisis, an exigent “state of emergency” that required an oppositional force. Lost innocence narratives provided this force. With the mythic possibilities of the future seemingly exhausted, a culture of nostalgia and war commemoration emerged to revive notions of the American ideological, industrial, and martial superiority that had won the war(s), and “ended” history. I will discuss these representations of WWII at greater length in the next chapter. 33 This chapter will examine two fin de millennium literary representations of the early Cold War as a mythic avenue to the familiar comfort of Cold War binarism, and one War on Terror artifact that resituates this era within an ostensibly new, but highly derivative, cultural paradigm. My exhibits include the work of three novelists, Phillip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison, whose canonical status, historical scope, and longstanding concern with exploring the discursive limits and possibilities of a national American culture place them in a relatively small group of writers who can be considered major literary contributors to the contemporary discourse of “America.” The particular novels, American Pastoral (1997), Underworld (1997), and Home (2012), differ in their focus and reach, but they intersect at a critical juncture for discussions of innocence, war, and nostalgia across the “interwar” period. These novels situate characters with regard to their “identification with or alienation from” the prevailing American narratives of the Cold War, a conflict of once-indefinite tenure that President Truman, in 1950, explicitly declared a “state of emergency,” to illuminate two subsequent “states of emergency” on either side of the millennium, that draw on elements of this narrative. While Field, Cohen, and Faludi (among others) have convincingly established parallels between the Cold War and the War on Terror, I contend that these commonalities do not represent a post-9/11 “return” to Cold War narratives but rather a heightened emphasis on particular aspects of oppositional, binary narratives predicated on notions of American innocence that remained influential in the 1990s. As Benjamin puts it, “moments of danger” foster turns to a mythical historical continuum. In an exceptionally lucid metaphor, Benjamin cautions against apprehending history in this way, as a sequence of events like the beads in a rosary, advocating instead a “grasp” of “the constellation which his own era forms with a definite earlier one” (263). Roth, DeLillo, and Morrison seem to have exceptionally firm grasps on such constellations, each holding their own moment in 34 conspicuous proximity to earlier ones, thus disrupting the illusion of a single, fixed historical continuum. In Underworld and American Pastoral, the reflections of central characters cast functionally different kinds of nostalgia against one another to explore the ways that the Cold War, beyond its nominal end, continued to construct the American subject. These novels invoke Svetlana Boym’s twofold typology of nostalgia. Boym distinguishes between what she calls “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia, the former being a means of establishing a fixed vision of a “lost” home (nostos) and the latter a more fluid conception that interrogates the longing (algia) for this home. As Boym puts it, “Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt” (xviii). Boym associates restorative nostalgia with “national memory,” which attempts to fix a reductive and unitary identity on a polity, and reflective nostalgia with “social memory,” which presents “ethical and creative challenge[s]” to this unitary conception. Morrison revisits the early Cold War fifteen years after Roth and DeLillo, in the midst of the War on Terror, to offer an ethical and creative challenge to the “restorative” nostalgia that has once again endorsed the state of emergency du jour. Her novel pointedly defies notions of the fifties as constitutive of any kind of lost national “nostos” and implicates the reader in the construction of a national narrative that accounts for some of the most glaring omissions of long-established Anglo-American narratives. It also resists the innocence that these narratives demand. All three novels cast the early Cold War as that which Benjamin calls jetzeit, or “time filled by the presence of the now,” an image of the past that is “blasted out of the continuum of history” (261). Once untethered to the teleological narrative continuum of what Benjamin refers to as “messianic time,” such images can be recognized for what they are--elements of contemporary narratives of power. The precise mechanics of this 35 power implicates both conscious and unconscious manipulations of such narratives on the part of politicians, media, and other sources, but the instrumental role of innocence in such narratives is central to it. American Pastoral and the “American Berserk”: Innocence, Nostalgia, and American Historiography In a 2002 interview, Phillip Roth scoffed at the notion that America had “lost its innocence” on 9/11. “What innocence?” he complained. “That’s so naïve. From 1668 to 1865 we had slavery in this country. Then, from 1865 to 1955, a society marked by brutal segregation” (Roth, Interview). Roth’s implication of naivety as a prerequisite for guiltless apprehension of American history is more than mere tautology--it is a reflection of a circular, self-perpetuating twofold sense of innocence that relies on “want of knowledge” to remain “not guilty.” Roth anatomizes this current in American Pastoral, which probed the validity of the innocence question only four years before 9/11 fostered yet another improbable assertion of innocence lost. Roth’s novel predicates its insight on an ambiguous dynamic between the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and the figure of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a blue-eyed, fair-haired Jew who had been an iconic athlete at Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey during World War II. This dynamic is represented by the subjectivity of Zuckerman, who tells the story of the Swede, and the Swede himself, whose perspective eventually seems to eclipse that of Zuckerman. This ambiguity has always been at the center of the novel’s critical reception and continues to motivate interpretations that rely on a common premise. Aliki Varvogli describes this premise as “a consensus . . . that Zuckerman is allowed to disappear from the narrative so that his alignment with the Swede can be thrown into relief” (103). While this alignment has been frequently misread as a conflation of the attitudes of Zuckerman and the Swede, Varvogli 36 insists that Zuckerman’s “act of ventriloquism should not be taken to mean that Zuckerman’s ideology is close to the Swede’s” (104). I concur that Zuckerman and the Swede are not ideologically aligned, and I further contend that Roth’s “act of ventriloquism” allows him to manipulate two distinct registers that illustrate functionally different modes of nostalgia, one that earnestly espouses American innocence and one that bears witness to its contradictions. While Varvogli suggests that Roth’s sympathies reside with the Swede’s terrorist daughter, I propose that Roth’s identification with one character or another (including Zuckerman) has been overemphasized. As David Brauner has suggested, American Pastoral is more properly thought of as a novel “preoccupied with history as an abstraction, and with the problems of historiography” (20) than as a validation or repudiation of any of the political positions his characters espouse. Roth does not identify fully with any of his characters, but rather employs them to target a master narrative of postwar American historiography that emerged in the nineties to advance a notion of “cultural warfare.” Aimee Pozorski has hinted at the possibilities of framing Roth’s work as a “critique of the culture warriors who insist that there was ever a ‘pure’ or virtuous America” (1) and exposing a “fantasy” that is “ritualistically invoked in the culture wars” (12). While “culture war” is not a valid analog to the kinds of international and grimly lethal conflicts that took place before, after, and during the “interwar” decade, this rhetorical conflict illuminates an ongoing reliance on the trope of fallen innocence to project consensus for the decidedly non-rhetorical wars to come. Roth prefigures the increasing recognition by contemporary theorists of “nostalgia as both a method of cultural retreat and critique” (Turner 183) by nesting the Swede’s narrative of bewildered guilelessness within that of Zuckerman’s more reflexive, and more cynical, one. According to Zuckerman, the Swede “lived in America the way he lived in his own skin” (213), and Zuckerman enacts his own metaphor by “inhabiting” the Swede for much of the novel. 37 Indeed, American Pastoral comes to foreground the imagined perspective of the Swede and his sense of “restorative” nostalgia, though it is always implicitly qualified by the “reflective” nostalgia of Zuckerman, who remains the Swede’s intermediary, however faint his own voice becomes. This critically important frame is established at the onset of the novel, with Zuckerman’s recollection of the Swede as a figure through whom their middle-class Jewish neighborhood “entered into a fantasy about the world” (3) in which the Swede’s athletic achievements allowed the community to “forget about the war” (4). Zuckerman’s childhood friendship with the Swede’s younger brother, Jerry, had once kept him in close proximity to the Levovs, who were at “the vanguard of the vanguard” of a “mainstream American life” that was then beginning to supplant the more parochial identities of the “first postimmigrant generation of Newark Jews” (10). Zuckerman’s reflection on “Swedian innocence” is prompted by a letter he receives from the Swede in 1995, itself prompted by a chance encounter with the Swede at a baseball game in 1985. Having idolized the heroic but inscrutable Swede, Zuckerman meets with him assuming that they will discuss the “shocks that befell his loved ones” that the Swede has cryptically referred to in the letter (18). These “shocks” are never discussed during this meeting, and Zuckerman is left searching for a “substratum” (20) to this seemingly depthless “human platitude” (23). He later learns about the source of these shocks from Jerry Levov when they meet at a forty-fifth-year high school reunion, where Jerry tells Zuckerman about Merry Levov, the “monster daughter” of the Swede’s original marriage (to Dawn Dwyer, an Irish-catholic and Miss New Jersey 1949). At age sixteen, Merry blows up a rural postal station to “bring the [Vietnam] war home to America” (76). This revelation, along with the reunion’s evocation of postwar American progress, reignites Zuckerman’s quest to imagine a character for the Swede, 38 one that situates the Swede’s “fall from innocence” within a mythical American postwar historical continuum. Zuckerman’s conversation with Jerry Levov provides some fundamental details that Zuckerman will subsequently use to construct his version of “the Swede,” and it also establishes a key dynamic that Roth employs throughout the book to signal his incredulity towards a postwar embrace of innocence that some early critics of the novel mistakenly construed as his own. Jerry decries all nostalgia as “bullshit” and praises Zuckerman for his seeming absence of “superfluous sentiments” and “asinine longings to be home again” (61). Yet, despite Jerry’s insistence that they share an unqualified contempt for nostalgia, Zuckerman’s remembrances are predicated on the same premises of postwar American myth as the Swede’s, as articulated in Zuckerman’s reunion speech (which he admits was not written until after the reunion and is more of a speech to himself). He confesses that “something powerful united us. And united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going and how we would get there. We had new means and new ends” (44). Zuckerman recalls with apparent, if qualified, affection the “greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history” in which “Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together” (40). Still, Roth is not, as some critics have contended, lamenting the passing of this moment. As Samuel Cohen has noted, American Pastoral “is not a simple historical reflection on the way things went wrong in the latter half of the twentieth century” but rather a commentary on “the persistence of the myth of innocence in national and personal narratives and the costs of that persistence” (64). Rather, Roth establishes a common collective memory that intersects with the individual narratives of his characters (including Zuckerman) to produce an “American” subject, 39 each of [whom] remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint--it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand at the very same kitchen table, to be a wilful excursion into mythomania. (55) The ensuing pages are just such a “wilful excursion,” as Zuckerman’s subjectivity dissolves into that of the Swede to address the seemingly disparate positions within the myth that the Swede and his daughter represent. While Zuckerman’s imaginative act of impersonation invents a subjectivity for the Swede that revolves around the Swede’s question of why his daughter would execute the “total vandalization” of his world, it is more properly thought of as Zuckerman’s question of why Merry’s act is so incomprehensible to the Swede. The ambiguity of perspective allows Roth to address both questions, to both assert and challenge the narratives of lost innocence that have provoked his own incredulity and to challenge the validity of reductively oppositional tropes that have undergirded this narrative. As Jerry Levov puts it, “Seymour was into quaint Americana. But the kid wasn’t. He took the kid out of real time and she put him right back in” (68). What Jerry Levov calls “real time” refers to the violent realities of Merry’s terrorism and its reflection of American dissent circa 1968, but in the time period represented by the frame, 1995, “real” events of 1968 have become part of the mythical trajectory to a post-Cold War narrative vacuum, a time in which “the old system that made order doesn’t work anymore” (422). I regard this statement, ostensibly spoken by the Swede in 1973, as one of the few, but critical, oblique references by Zuckerman to his own struggle, in 1995, to come to terms with his conception of history. He 40 confesses early on that “there is no easy mastery of . . . events at age sixty-two, and only a year beyond cancer surgery. Instead of recapturing time past, I’d been captured by it in the present, so that passing seemingly out of the world of time I was, in fact, rocketing through to its secret core” (45). This kind of “capture” recalls Benjamin’s assertion that “[t]he past can only be seized as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” According to Benjamin, such images “must be recognized by the present as one of its own concerns” (255) before they can be usefully apprehended as “history.” Roth, if not Zuckerman, bears this recognition, and he uses Zuckerman’s “capture” as a way to critique contemporary uses of historical narratives. Despite the orientation of the frame, critics continue to read American Pastoral as a book “about” the sixties. If this were true, there would be considerable merit in assertions, such as those of Robert Boyer, who remarks that the novel “is not a good study of social disorder” because it does not “consider seriously the actual sources of discontent in American society” that would require more attention to marginalized groups. While the Swede ponders the radicalism of Angela Davis and lauds the loyalty of Newark Maid’s stalwart black employee, Vicky, and there are passing mentions of “blacks,” mostly in the context of rioting, there is no attempt to anatomize the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, or any other specific constituent or demographic of the “counterculture.” Even the section that revisits Newark in 1967 during riots eschews political contexts for its impact on the Swede’s fantasy of America. This dearth of attention to the politically marginalised is not an oversight, but rather an unavoidable casualty of faithfully reproducing an American master narrative that Roth means to attack on its own terms. Rather than a flawed “study” of the sixties, Roth provides a critique of the uses to which the 41 sixties have been put: as an index of fallen innocence in an American historical narrative that has shunted aside many “grievances” that would challenge this putative innocence. Zuckerman’s tale of the Swede seeks to understand a shared frame of reference, “the common landmarks of everyday life” that Boym attributes to “collective memory” (53). In order to do so, he must faithfully recreate the Swede’s restorative vision, which relies on a national memory that “make[s] a single teleological plot out of shared everyday recollections” (53). In this way, Roth’s novel is both the story of a “blast” that tears the Swede’s pastoral fantasy asunder and a Benjaminian blast that disrupts a dominant American narrative that has profoundly influenced both the Swede and Zuckerman. These emergent post-cold war narratives rely on oppositions and situate them in the “eternal past” projected by a teleological historical continuum. Zuckerman’s method of negotiating these oppositions reflects a pattern aptly identified by Debra Shostak, who writes that “[Roth] talks to himself, through a diverse population of fictive avatars” that she calls “counterlives” (3). The two principal counterlives in the novel, Merry Levov and her father, the Swede, represent seemingly antithetical positions that illustrate a paradox created by the historiographical figurations of the “liberal consensus” and the “counterculture.” Merry Levov and the Swede enact contrapuntal roles that are fundamental to the same teleological historical narrative, a narrative that begins with postwar optimism and “ends” with the Cold War. This is the narrative that mediates individual and collective memory for both the Swede and Zuckerman. “Consensus historians” have long asserted the primacy of certain shared ideals in American culture after the World War II, and such historians often mark the end of this consensus in 1968, at the height of unrest over Vietnam and shortly before the term “counterculture” began to appear to describe myriad social forces that had reached a critical mass by that year. By the 42 1990s, this “counterculture” had been thoroughly caricatured and integrated into a narrative of lost innocence. Roth’s countervoices put the liberal consensus and counterculture in dialogue to illuminate their mutually constitutive nature and illustrate their role as a key monad in a post- cold war lost innocence narrative. While the sundry political responses to Jim Crow, Vietnam, patriarchy, and pervasive institutional problems at every level of society that have been homogenized by the term “counterculture” varied in their aim, scope, and intensity, American Pastoral renders them as a single trope, held in opposition to a similarly generalized trope of consensus. Zuckerman articulates these tropes through the Swede’s apprehension of them, and the Swede’s impression of the counterculture that he imagines has hijacked his daughter is almost hyperbolically grotesque: He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of the violent Uncorrupted who called him a criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have [….] They were delirious with joy, delighted having destroyed his once-pampered daughter and ruined his privileged life, shepherding him at long last to their truth, the truth as they knew it to be for every Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their insatiable greed. The something that’s demented, honky, is American history! It’s the American empire! It’s Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard Oil and Newark Maid Leatherware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the fucked-over-by-America human race! (256-57) 43 This reaction to his daughter’s act, and its implicit disavowal of responsibility in the political forces it satirizes, inversely parallels his pastoral dream, which presents a likewise grandiose image of the privileged life before it was “blown up” by the cackling demons of the counterculture: “As a family they flew the flight the immigrant rocket” that flies an “upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to the highest flier of them all, the fourth generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself” (122). At the zenith of this “rocket” is Old Rimrock, the Levovs’ country estate where the Swede has settled with Ms. New Jersey to raise their daughter, a place he recalls now with an absurd sheen, as he conflates himself with Johnny Appleseed: From the front counter he’d pick up the paper with “Levov” scrawled at the top in Mary Hamlin’s hand, charge a quart of milk if they needed it, a loaf of bread, a dozen fresh-laid eggs from Paul Hamlin’s farm up the road, say “See ya, Russell” to the owner, and then he’d turn and stride all the way back, past the white pasture fences he loved, the rolling hayfields he loved, the corn fields, the turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows, the acres and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country dweller’s puppy love for nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he loved and the substantial old stone house he loved- -pretending, as he went along, to throw apple seed everywhere. (317-18) 44 Like his hyperbolic condemnation of counterpastoral monsters, his celebration of pastoral bliss is cartoonish and reductive, a fantasy that subsumes particular ethnic and religious differences (Jew, Irish, Catholic, Protestant) and renders the “American” in its “naturally” agrarian habitat.7 The Swede’s credulous delusions and incredulous reactions to Merry and Merry ‘s blanket condemnations of her bourgeois upbringing, her amorphous ideologies (e.g., Catholic, Communist, Jain) and her oscillation from unrepentant acts of murderous violence to absolute non-violence suggest the incoherence of a reductive American narrative that by 1995 had begun to pose a monolithic “counterculture” against the similarly homogenized “liberal consensus” as the roots of a contemporary “culture war.” These grossly generalized poles, referred to shorthand in the novel as “pastoral” and “counterpastoral,” are modulated by Zuckerman, a reflective nostalgic who seeks a more nuanced model of the forces that have governed his and the Swede’s “shared social framework” (Boym 53), and he uncovers the reliance of both positions on fantasies of innocence. American Pastoral is replete with dramatized arguments about innocence that illustrate its importance to the consensus-counterculture narrative. After the Swede concludes a tour of his glove factory with what he believes is a college student, the “student,” Rita Cohen, reveals herself (perhaps falsely) as an emissary of his exiled daughter. When they meet again the next morning, she lambastes the Swede “as a shitty little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the nigger- proof security gates of his mansion” (133), and the ensuing exchange between the two becomes Roth’s polemic on which of them is the most ignorant. “You know nothing about anything!” fumes the Swede, while Rita Cohen insists that he is “too stupid” to see the truth about his 7 Significantly, these ethnicities can all be categorized as “white.” 45 lifestyle. He rages at her “childish clichés” of social justice while she denounces his “fairy tales” of bourgeois prosperity (135, 137). The Swede’s conversations with Merry also conform to this pattern. While the Swede derides Merry for capitulating to simplified representations of complex sociopolitical forces, “[l]ike some innocent in a fairy story who has been tricked into drinking the noxious poison” (99), Merry chides the Swede’s credulous fidelity to the narrative of postwar American progress that she thinks has made him blind to the suffering it has produced. The Swede decries her “flagrant childishness” (250) while Merry “addressed him as though he were the child” (244). The two characters project guilt onto each other, wielding the other’s want of knowledge to protect their own naïve positions and each, perhaps, aptly characterizes the effect of the other. The Swede fumes at the “egregious innocence” that Merry uses “to distance herself from the four who are dead” (264). Yet, Zuckerman makes it clear that the Swede’s protestations are also a means of denial. His insistence that his daughter has been manipulated is also meant to distance himself from her murderous acts, until “it was he for whom the guilt made no sense” (264). Even as the truth threatens to breach the Swede at his dinner party, he reiterates that “Merry had been used for somebody else’s evil purposes--that was the story to which it was crucial for them all to remain anchored . . . Merry’s absolute innocence” (365). The father and daughter whom Jerry Levov jeeringly refers to as the “monster” and the “gentle giant” (281) spar over the particulars of a historical narrative, each offering challenges to the innocence that undergirds the other’s understanding of identity within a shared American historical order. These arguments have moments of validity, as when Merry points out the dead children in Vietnam, and when Swede points out the loyalty of his employees, but the arguments always lapse into familiar generalizations that pose the pastoral against the counterpastoral. 46 These moments of fierce opposition are subtly mediated by Zuckerman, who obliquely hints at the symbiotic nature of each character’s accusations as Zuckerman describes the Swede as speaking “as though he were not joined to her maniacally uncompromising mission in the most unimaginable way” (134). Zuckerman’s voice again becomes audible here, suggesting that Merry and Swede are counterparts of the same reductive narrative. Despite his “fall,” the Swede remains an improbably incredulous figure, and, as Mark Schechner has argued, Roth seems to depict Merry and Rita as “[c]artoon insurrectionists” (159). Zuckerman’s negotiation of the American narrative in which his own identity is embedded pits the pastoral vision of the Swede against the counterpastoral assertions of Rita and Merry to test their validity and he discovers instead their interrelatedness, their mutual reliance on innocence. The binary logic of the pastoral and counterpastoral that pervades the novel has a “monster-child” all its own. Most readings of American Pastoral have conflated the “indigenous American Berserk” with the “counterpastoral” based on the following passage: . . . the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede’s castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral--into the indigenous American Berserk. (86) While this passage clearly poses the “pastoral” in opposition to the “counterpastoral,” it is much less clear where, or even if, the “indigenous American Berserk” fits within this dichotomy. Is “-- 47 into the indigenous American Berserk” an iteration of the previous phrase, or at a further remove from it? The syntactical ambiguity here suggests that the “American Berserk” can be interpreted as the disorder that belies a consensus-counterculture narrative, its own entity, an impulse fostered by the failure of such teleological and binary American narratives, a grotesque legacy of the antagonisms depicted by Roth, those fostered by a “pastoral” narrative and its attendant antithesis, the “counterpastoral.” Ross Posnock has aptly characterized Roth’s central impetus as invoking a “force that disrupts assurance and control” (xiv), but this force is not necessarily the counterculture of the Swede’s imagination. While the counterpastoral disrupts the pastoral, the American Berserk can be read as the force that disrupts narratives of lost innocence that rely on these oppositions. Merry and the Swede are absurd to each other, but there is a logic to their antagonism in the context of such narratives. Conversely, “berserk,” implies madness, an absence of logic, and Zuckerman’s probe of “Swedian innocence” leads him to the “berserk” nature of American subjectivities guided by a national narrative of lost innocence. The novel increasingly comes to focus on the incoherence of this narrative and its effect on its subjects. “[I]t doesn’t hang together” (245) is a kind of Swedian refrain in American Pastoral, and iterations of this expression appear intermittently (245, 253, 264, 281) until “Nothing hangs together” (368) finally becomes “he doesn’t hang together” (371). The American subject ultimately “dissolves” without a fantasy of innocence. Zuckerman depicts the Swede as ultimately so beguiled by the “madness” of the “American Berserk” that he briefly fantasizes Rita Cohen into nonexistence in order to reclaim a stake in the innocence of the failed narrative, for he cannot be judged “[g]uilty!” by “someone who did not exist” (370). This echoes an earlier attempt to imagine that “none of this could possibly be” with regard to his Newark encounter with Merry (241). However, his attempts to disavow the very existences of Rita and 48 Merry only highlight the ephemerality of his own subjectivity, as it relies on “an enemy that evinces little more substance than a mythical monster” (371). Although the Swede repeatedly and insistently sees the “counterpastoral” as disjointed and chaotic, it is his notion of self that lacks coherence, relying, as it does, on fantasies that tether his identity to a rigidly restorative version of the nation’s and opposing it to caricatured “monsters.” This vision had been predicated on “[h]is ability not to see” the incoherence of the narrative that held his life together, a “failure to confront the realities of political violence” that Dale Pattison has argued, “is the consequence of his investment in politically repressive, state-endorsed narratives” (238). As the Swede’s subjectivity threatens to dissolve in the face of “everything he cannot stand to know” (274), he retreats into a familiar narrative of domesticity by reconstituting a nuclear American family. For, as Shostak has pointed out, “Only the innocent survive” the American Berserk. The pivotal moment for Zuckerman’s Swede occurs at the realization that He had thought most of it was order and only a little of it was disorder. He’d had it backwards. He had made his fantasy and Merry had unmade it for him. It was not the specific war that she’d had in mind, but it was a war, nonetheless, that she brought home to America--home into her very own house. (418) His original “pastoral” nostos destroyed, the Swede starts over with a new family, and this, of course, is how Zuckerman finds him in 1985, at a quintessentially American venue, a baseball stadium, with his young son, one of three, all gifted athletes and “hardworking students” (23). Ironically, the Swede’s retreat has reproduced the very conditions that fostered “the shocks” in the first place, a life of surfaces that revolves around a normative domesticity predicated on 49 political innocence. Although he later summons Zuckerman, he never discusses “the shocks.” Dawn Levov, the former Miss America candidate, is also poised at the end of the novel to “resume the uncontaminated life” (385) with “Mr. America,” William Orcutt, a WASP whose ancestors had founded Old Rimrock, the Swede’s American “paradise.” Necessarily, Merry, and all the counterculture demons she represents, remains in exile, out of this frame. This reconstruction of the American nostos, and Zuckerman’s apprehension of it, is instructive in an interwar context. Indeed, Pattison argues that American Pastoral both “engages the post-Cold War, pre-9/11 politics of the 1990s” and “helps illuminate post-9/11 America” by “probing the connections between domestic space, the homeland, and narrative production” (238). These connections hint at a cycle of innocence and war that has characterized the “American century” and would arrive again at war after 9/11. Hind Sites and Historical Memory: Underworld’s White Spaces and Overworld Nostalgia Like American Pastoral, Underworld orbits a youthful act of violence and explores narrative failure in the wake of the Cold War and the intersection of collective and individual memory that constitute a post-Cold War American subject. While postwar American narratives do not “hold together” any better for DeLillo than they do for Roth, DeLillo posits an intricate interconnectivity between manifold cultural phenomena of the late-twentieth century that reveals an underworld of abjected guilt beneath a nostalgic surface of innocence. The most salient analyses of Underworld have aptly homed in on the centrality of nostalgia to the novel and its role in inscribing postwar history. Damjana Mraovic-O’Hare sees “an abiding conflict between nostalgia and apocalypse” (214) as the dominant impulse behind DeLillo’s apprehension of history. Jennifer Ladino sees Underworld as a “simultaneously nostalgic and ironic text” in which DeLillo “wields” nostalgia to “read and describe the past” (2). While Ladino and 50 Mraovic-O’Hare tether nostalgia to apocalypse and nature, respectively, I propose that an anatomy of the novel’s nostalgia dovetails with earlier criticism of the novel that identifies its concern with what Peter Knight calls “the yet unconfigured world beyond the end of the Cold War” (283). This world has now retrospectively been configured by the War on Terror, which relegates it to the “innocent” side of the nation’s most recent “lost innocence” divide. Yet, DeLillo, widely celebrated for both his ability to articulate pivotal historical moments and for his prescience, has left a literary index of the vital role of lost innocence to conceptions of American identity in what Thomas Schaub agrees “seems to have been an interim moment between Cold War narrative and the Narrative of Terror” (70). Underworld challenges the notion that “night fell on a different world” (Bush) after 9/11 by standing as a chronicle of Cold War nostalgia that emerged in the nineties, a longing that, to some degree, was mollified by post-9/11 antagonisms. Such antagonisms, although nominally different, conform to a familiar binary conception of enmity that relies on an economy of innocence that DeLillo depicts as a circulation of cultural phenomena between “overworld” and “underworld.” Patrick O’Donnell frames Underworld as a set of “collapsible antinomies” that “might be termed the novel’s dialectic” (113), and Mark Osteen sees a hermeneutic rubric in “dyads” that develop the novel’s themes (236). While the “underworlds” of Nick and Matt Shay ultimately intersect at an undeniable complicity in the business of mass death, the world above ground frantically tries to “press time flat” with a “pornography of nostalgia” (320). An equally important and instructive dyad exists in this “overworld,” that of Klara Sax and Marvin Lundy, who, in a significant exception to the novel’s schema of pervasive interconnectivity, remain unconnected (other than their mutual acquaintance with Nick Shay). Although Klara Sax admits to a feeling that the balance of power between “the Soviets and us” may have “held the world together” (76), she cautions against consigning the 51 Cold War to a “bottom pit of nostalgia,” and seeks an “element of felt life” (77) among objects from the era. Her spectacular exhibit of redecorated B-52 bomber planes conspicuously arranged in the Arizona desert is meant to provoke reflection on what Boym calls “the interrelationship between individual and collective remembrance” (41) and invite meditation on the narratives that mediate the individual and the nation. Klara’s project is a pointed contrast to that of Marvin Lundy, who remains largely unconscious to the possibilities of insightful nostalgia, fixating instead on the restorative narrative evoked by the ball, even as he vaguely dreads the “underground of memory and collection” (321) that has fostered a “pornography of nostalgia” (320). I will examine key dyads in the novel as representatives of an “alternative mirror universe of shadow identities, sites, and latent, loosely coupled systems” that constitute the novel’s underworld “unconscious” and the anxieties and fantasies of what O’Donnell calls the “official” or “quotidian” overworld (114) as DeLillo’s means of navigating a post-Cold-War economy of political innocence. Nick and Matt Shay, brothers who have careers in weapons and waste respectively, are each made to confront his own complicity in nationally-sponsored mass violence in two subterranean “white spaces,” a weapons facility in the American desert known as “the Pocket,” and the Kazakh Test Site, a nuclear test range-turned waste disposal facility in the former Soviet Union. While the activities of the Shay brothers in these spaces bring together the two strands of culture that feed a military-industrial complex enabled by a narrative of innocence, two “overworld” enterprises illustrate a tension between reflective and restorative responses to this narrative. Sax’s work stylizing decommissioned aircraft attempts to “unrepeat” the mass production of commodity and ideology that attended the Cold War, to provoke reflection on “the ordinary thing” and “the ordinary life behind the thing” (77), while Lundy’s 52 pursuit of the Thomson homerun ball attempts to recapitulate “a forgotten human murmur, maybe, a sense of families, in little heartland houses with a spaniel flop-eared on the rug, a sense of snug innocence and the undiscovered world outside, the vast geographic” (320). The planes and the ball can both be seen as Cold War artifacts, objects that extrapolate the novel’s initial juxtaposition (drawn from an actual front-page newspaper juxtaposition) of the 1951 Giants- Dodgers pennant game and the Soviet atomic bomb test that triggered the arms race. While Sax and Lundy never cross paths in the novel, DeLillo embeds cross references, or recursive echoes, that draw attention to the common function and disparate effects of their projects. Klara Sax’s aspiration to “unrepeat” echoes the “things that apply unrepeatably” to the baseball game, constituting “the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play” (27). Her exhibit, as viewed from above by Nick and Marian Shay in a hot air balloon, invites reflection on the illusion of cohesion and continuity in official Cold War narratives and that which “lives in the spaces” of these narratives. When the installation first begins “to emerge out of distance and haze” the “ranks of aircraft appea[r] as one unit of fitted parts, a shaped weave of painted steel in the monochrome surround” (124). As the balloon descends closer, Nick sees that “the work grew rougher and frontal,” and he could see “unpainted intervals, dead metal strips across the wings of several planes, peroxide white, scabby and gashed . . . it lost its flow and became more deeply grained,” and he “saw the struggle to make it, scores of people in this chalk heat, muscles and lungs” (125). This image of the physical movement of human masses also invokes the spaces in the “official play-by-play,” for “the crowd is also in this lost space” (27). In total, Nick thinks the planes are “great things, painted to remark the end of an age and the beginning of something so different only a vision such as this might suffice to augur it” (126). 53 Conversely, Marvin Lundy is attempting to bridge narrative spaces in order to impose a restorative, teleological narrative, “to reassemble a crucial moment in time out of patches . . . borrowing a powerful theme and using it to locate a small white innocent object bouncing around a ballpark” (181). As many critics have noted, Underworld proceeds backwards in time after its exposition in 1951, creating what Schaub calls its “inside narrative” (71). The backward movement of this narrative brings the reader to the definitive moment in the life of Nick Shay, the killing of George Manza, but it also reconstructs the trajectory of the baseball. Klara Sax’s project is meant to explore the end of a Cold War narrative “anchored to the balance of power” and invite reflection on a contemporary one in which “a number of postwar conditions” apply “without a war having been fought” (69-70). Lundy works to replant this anchor in a talismanic object, part of what Underworld’s “garbage archeologist” Jesse Detwiler calls “a remote landscape of nostalgia” that addresses “complex longings . . . for the brute force of old industries and old conflicts” (286). Lundy’s obsessive quest to validate the Thomson homerun ball is a means of projecting continuity and order on the past and using objectified longing as a means of situating the uncertain present in this order. Paradoxically, the baseball’s authenticity, which relies on this imposed narrative continuity, constitutes “proof” that such order exists. This paradox is beyond the horizon of Lundy’s consciousness, however, as he does not initially “know why he was chasing down exhausted objects” (191), although he eventually comes to understand that “[a]ll that frantic passion for a baseball” represents “some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss” (191-92). The relationship between amassing possessions and terror remains murky to Lundy until his wife Eleanor explains to him that, 54 “Yes, you’re mad but there’s a certain reasoning behind it. There’s a childlike spot of logic. A little bedtime thing. You need to finish the story. Dear Marvin. Without the final link to the baseball there’s no way to be sure how the story ends. What good’s a story without an ending? Although I suppose in this case it’s not the ending we need but the beginning.” (314) Here, Eleanor Lundy reveals what may be the central impetus for the novel’s inverted trajectory. Like American Pastoral, Underworld is often read as a novel “about” the Cold War era when its true concern is the post-Cold War era and how nostalgic narratives of the past constitute contemporary identities. If, as Schaub contends, the early Cold War era is “the privileged location of the novel” (75), constituting, as it does, the bulk of the novel, it is primarily because this era is so integral to narratives of innocence in the temporality of the frame, 1995. The beginning of a teleological postwar narrative became that much more important to American identity after the end of the Cold War and the void it created in an economy of innocence that held American and Soviet ideologies in antagonistic opposition. While Lundy constructs a narrative for the baseball, the “thing” that lurks in the spaces of this narrative threatens to surface. The “forgotten human murmur” that Lundy seeks to recover by imposing a historical trajectory on the baseball exists in tension with this “thing” that Klara Sax seeks to reveal with her project, a primordial impulse, something anterior to language manifest in the husks of the B-52 bomber planes. Klara Sax is explicitly interested in this, “the ordinary thing” and “the ordinary life behind the thing,” that “thing” being an unnameable, primal impulse that took a modern shape in the bomb. Lundy’s project, to establish the “what- do-you-call . . . lineage” of the baseball, is likewise preoccupied with language and primordial 55 impulses. “What do you call?” or “What is the word?” are expressions frequently used by Lundy. Not merely a characteristic verbal tic, these expressions cross-reference Klara Sax’s remarks about the atomic bomb and Oppenheimer’s references to it as merde. “You can’t name it,” she insists. “It’s too big or evil or outside your experience” and must be “relegated . . . to the status of shit” (77). Sax’s remarks on shit as abjection are echoed when Lundy visits San Francisco with Eleanor to validate the baseball’s connection to Chuckie Wainwright, Jr., a “key to the chain of possession” (306). As he stands on a pier waiting for Chuckie, he detects a “faint sort of stinkhole odor” (306) that “traces back through memory, musty and earthy in this particular case” causing “an unaccountable urge to follow it to its source” (307). When Eleanor also notices the smell, Lundy realizes that “the odor was so compelling” because “[i]t came, in a way, from him” (308). He recalls their honeymoon in Europe in 1951, during which his “bowel movements seemed to change, in grim stages, as he and Eleanor moved east through Europe” (309). He notes that “[t]he deeper into communist country, the more foul his BMs” (311), and he tries desperately to conceal the stench from his new wife. This escalating and humiliating foulness reaches its zenith in Russia, where Lundy exchanges friendly barbs with the “dedicated communist” Avram, with whom he “traded many family stories but always with an undercurrent of contention and with intervals of open insult, Us and Them” (312). His BMs then become increasingly normal as he returns to Western Europe. This is where he hears the Thomson homerun on the radio. Lundy’s shame and secrecy about his worsening BMs and the corresponding trajectory through postwar Europe suggest that Lundy’s pursuit of the baseball is an inversion of Klara Sax’s Cold War project, which is predicated on high visibility and acknowledgement of human affairs that went unarticulated by official “containment” narratives. Sax’s project seeks to expose what Lundy’s seeks to elide: the illusory nature of totalizing 56 historical narratives and the permeability of the borders that structure these narratives. Sax means to foreground that “thing” that Julia Kristeva would call the “abject,” or that which is “radically excluded” (2), “disturbs identity, system, order,” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4). Marvin Lundy avoids confronting this “thing” by focusing on the innocuous homerun that punctuated his anxious honeymoon in postwar Europe. The empty husks of Sax’s planes, which were “used to carry nuclear bombs ta-da-da out across the world” (70), and the juxtaposition of Marvin’s BMs as he literally traverses borders between western Europe and the communist bloc both suggest the pre-eminence of merde in the Cold War order, the “thing” reified by the bomb. While Sax and Lundy undertake disparate responses to the abject, each engages a means of “purifying” it: Lundy by sublimating it to a nostalgic object and Sax by consigning it to an aesthetic experience.8 As the “overworld” negotiates responses to the abject, two literally subsurface settings of the novel confront it, exposing the post-Cold War economy of political innocence by staging encounters between the means of success in the military-industrial complex and the complicity in mass-death that this entails. Nick and Matt Shay, brothers whose youths have diverged along a tenuous axis between soldier and criminal, and culminated in careers in weapons and waste respectively, are each made to confront his own complicity in mass violence in the two “white spaces” of DeLillo’s subterranean labyrinth, a weapons facility in the American desert known as “the Pocket,” and the Kazakh Test Site, a nuclear test range-turned waste disposal facility in the former Soviet Union. Osteen aptly observes that, “The contrast between Nick and Matt embodies some of the most important dyads” in the novel, the most significant adult realization of which is “waste versus weapons” (236), the two strands of culture that feed the military- 8 Kristeva also implicates religion, another important thread in DeLillo's “overworld,” in the purification of the abject. 57 industrial complex and constitute that which Osteen sees as the “primary theme” of Underworld. As the novel demonstrates, these strands are intimately connected, as are the other seemingly disparate dyads represented by the Shay brothers. The youthful lives of Matty and Nick proceed along seemingly disparate trajectories, but these differences are ultimately seen to be a fictitious duality imposed upon them by the spurious ideology of containment. As a youth, Matt submits enthusiastically to Sister Edgar’s bomb drills, as “[h]e felt an odd belonging in the duck-and-cover. It was a community of look-alikes and do-alikes, heads down, elbows tucked, fannies in the air” (728). Likewise, he takes comfort in the unity proffered by the Baltimore Catechism, to which Matty and his classmates respond “in unison” with the prescribed “right” answers (717). As mentioned above, Matt’s indoctrination explicitly implicates him in the contingencies of a historical order that subsumed individuals under a collective fear of nuclear devastation. Nick’s early experiences, on the other hand, lead to his claim that he has “always been a country of one” (275). He drops out of school to work, and to move among the underworld of the yards, the lots, and the pool halls, using his body for labor, fistfights, and lovemaking. Although he complains of a thousand “sameshit” nights, his days are highly idiosyncratic in comparison to Matt’s regimented existence of bomb drills and chess matches. Yet, as Osteen points out, the two brothers ultimately find themselves in each of two vocations, waste and weapons, that feed the greater narrative of “containment.” What binds these seemingly “alienated” and “identifying” elements of the Cold War historical order in Underworld are cultural narratives that propagate a fear of transgressive performances: those that threaten the borders between us-them, self-other, borders that support what Nadel calls “the myth of a dual nature” that attends containment, the construction of which “can be figured by a vast array of narratives, but never eradicated” (34). 58 The Pocket, “an underground operation” in which “weapons were conceived and designed” (404), is “an area that is white on your map” (404), “self-enclosed and self-referring” (412). Not only is the larger society unaware of the machinations of the Pocket, many of its inhabitants “didn’t know exactly what happened to their findings” (401) and “didn’t know how their arrays of numbers and symbols might enter nature” (408). This is not true for Matt Shay, who struggles with the knowledge that his work kills. Although he is beguiled by an insistent sense of “unreality” (a condition that also afflicts Sax and Lundy) he understands that “[t]his is real. The work, the weapons, the missiles rising out of alfalfa fields” (458) and “how a brief equation that you tentatively enter on your screen might alter the course of many lives, might cause the blood to rush through the body of a woman on a tram many thousands of miles away” (408-09). Matt’s ambivalence about “reality” began in Vietnam, “where everything he’d ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true” (418) and after which “he had trouble with the input” (462). As Yoshihiro Nagano observes, “Matt’s disturbing sense of unreal reality is rooted in the overarching, ominous war scenarios that could ultimately lead to Mutually Assured Destruction” (243), and they are rooted in his experiences in Vietnam. Matt Shay goes to Vietnam because he “could not evade the sense of responsibility” that the absence of his father evokes, and he “did not want to slip away, sneak through, get off cheap, dodge, desert, resist, chicken out, turn tail, flee to Canada, Sweden or San Francisco, as his old man had done” (463). There is enough doubt or lack of conviction that Matt is able to work in a facility that designs and tests long range weapons meant to kill. However, as Matt’s half-beliefs steadily yield to the unpleasant realization that he is an agent of death, he realizes that he had been one in Vietnam as well. Indeed, “he was in the Pocket even then” (466), and though he did not think “down the systems line” (408) at the time, he comes to realize that his work has always involved consent to 59 kill. It is only the nature of consent that differs between Pockets. This calculus of destruction and authorization unfolds in the lives of the Shay brothers, whose seemingly divergent lives converge on a common locus of complicity and consent that the “overworld” expresses as nostalgia. The nagging knowledge of complicity in the prospective nuclear conflicts engendered by the Cold War creates a moral conundrum for Matt, one that he tries to resolve by what Nagano calls “a transfer of blame” (248). As he continues the work of building better weapons systems, he tries to outsource the responsibility that such work implies. He turns first to his girlfriend, Janet, confessing the “thrill of devastation” he feels when he contemplates the ill fortune of “the enemy” and revealing “his subsequent shame” (458). He likens his participation in nuclear scenarios as “a dream someone’s dreaming that has me in it” (458). As Nagano points out, “It is fair to say that the ‘someone’ Matt refers to is the state with its military and war industry” and that the dream which “the state acts out is that of the development of the most powerful means of destruction with the aim of defeating the enemy” (246). His ambivalence about reality, however, is receding, and his “half-beliefs” are quickening into convictions. Maintaining a psychic distance between means and ends becomes increasingly difficult, and he attempts to project his assent to the ultimate purpose of the weapons he develops, first on Janet, from whom he seeks “a clear position he could set against his doubts” (416), then on Nick, from whom he seeks a “judgement in his brother’s voice” (416). Nick’s attributed qualifications to offer such a judgment emanate from a decidedly different “underworld” than that of the Pocket, a history of violence that begins with street-yard scraps and culminates in the fatal shooting of George Manza. After his ensuing internment at the Jesuit school, Nick avowedly “lives responsibly in the real” (82) and Matt describes him as 60 “shaped and made. First unmade and then reimagined and strongly shaped and made again” (416). Nick represents a stalwart presence against which Matt seeks to delimit the uncertain reality of the Pocket, and he imagines that Nick can tell him how to define himself as a “serious man” (416). While Matt wonders when “history turned to fiction” (459), Nick “didn’t accept this business of life as a fiction” or “that things had become unreal” (82). Perhaps most significantly, Matt believes that “Nick had the enduring stuff of narrative, the thing that doesn’t have to be filled in with speculation and hearsay” (454). Nick’s belief in the “real,” his hard- edged experience, and his adherence to a cohesive narrative of self makes him a reference point for Matt, whose credulity towards such narratives has been supplanted by a paranoid vision of “some horrific system of connections in which you can’t tell the difference between one thing and another” (446). Nick’s relative clarity of vision has nearly as much to do with events that precluded his military service as Matt’s disorientation does with his experiences in Vietnam. Although he assumes as a teenager that “[h]e would get drafted soon and that was probably not a bad thing to happen” (742), Nick’s presumably imminent trip to Korea, and his attendant participation in the mass violence there, is forestalled by his impromptu act of lethal violence against George Manza. This act spares Nick an otherwise compulsory participation in war and brings about instead a compulsory sojourn to a remote Jesuit outpost in northern Minnesota, where he “remakes” himself under the tutelage of Father Paulus (536) and within the confines of a system that offers him “method and regularity” (503) and the “stern logic of correction” (502). These conditions allow Nick to “build an individual” (503) through routine labor and solitary study. This sense of self-definition eludes Matt who also values method and regularity but began, at an early age, to “think in systems” (707) and to value “acting in unison” (728), modes of thought that are 61 ostensibly antithetical to Nick’s individualism. Their subsequently divergent trajectories lead them to differing but complementary positions in the postwar cultural milieu, positions that (like Sax and Lundy) illustrate abjection and its complicity in the construction of post-Cold War innocence narratives. Despite their divergent trajectories, Matt and Nick Shay both become instruments of the same institution of Cold War containment, the military-industrial complex that integrates their adult vocations of weapons and waste. Osteen identifies this locus of convergence as one in which “a totalizing ideology of containment” reveals itself (215) as the force that connects manifold individual consciousnesses which have been molded “invisibly” by this totalizing ideology. The event that escalates the apparent divergence of Matt and Nick’s lives, the killing of George Manza, also prefigures the unitary nature of these seemingly disparate enterprises. Just as “[w]eapons and waste converge as Nick pulls the trigger” (Osteen 224), so too do the other false binaries subsumed by the metanarrative of containment converge or collapse as the Cold War ends and the “yet unconfigured world” emerges. The collapse of Cold War binaries exposes the “containment” culture that mediated the Shay brothers’ lives as a “narrative of a narrative, a narrative that neither generates events nor results from their sum; rather it is a narrative completely divorced from its constituent events, a free-floating signifier designating an infinity of possible referents” (Nadel 18). As Elaine Scarry points out, such signifiers tend to find their referents in the bodies of those who agree to participate in, or are injured by, activities undertaken in the name of “unanchored” ideology: The radical unanchoredness of the language of war is in nothing so visible as in its separation from that phenomenon…that is, in the midst of so much fictiveness, 62 not only the most indisputably and unalterably real phenomenon but also the phenomenon that is with massive, obsessive, dogged repetitiveness being brought into being often hundreds of times each day, day after day. The eventual transfer of the attributes of injuries to a victorious national fiction requires as prelude the severing of those attributes from their original source, an act of severing and disowning that has a wide, perhaps collective authorship. (136) The “collective authorship” of such acts is brought under scrutiny by Underworld’s closing Section, “Das Kapital,” in which another recursive echo binds the experience of the Shay brothers. The Kazakh Test Site, a former nuclear test-site-turned waste-disposal facility, is another “white space on [the] map” (789) that corresponds in key symbolic ways to the Pocket. Nick’s visit to the clinic “downwind” of the site invokes the rumoured “downwinders” of the Pocket. Unlike the rumoured “downwinders” of the Pocket, whose existence is never substantiated, and whose bodies are never witnessed, those of Kazakhstan present Nick with disfigured and otherwise damaged bodies that he cannot dismiss in a fog of “half-belief.” After viewing a “two- headed specimen,” a “cyclops,” and several other hideously deformed bodies in the “Museum of Misshapens,” he moves on to a clinic where he sees the effects of atomic radiation on the living: a boy “with skin where his eyes ought to be,” “bald-headed children,” and a woman with “half a face” (800). Nick confesses that, “These faces and bodies have enormous power” and he begins “to feel something drain out of me. Some old opposition, a capacity to resist” (801). The “old opposition” undoubtedly refers to the binary antagonisms of the Cold War, an era in which technology accomplished the “building out of consent” (Scarry 155) to nationally sponsored acts 63 of mass violence by proliferating a weapon that, once deployed, could not and would not distinguish between willing participants and dissidents, soldiers and citizens in either the bomb’s target or its country of origin. As Scarry puts it, “The missile is the building-in of an unprecedented capacity to injure and the building-out of consent, the shattering of the ratio of willed authorization to willed risk by a factor of millions” (155). This era is now ostensibly over, and the primary political ideologies that presided over mass-death potential have been supplanted by a seemingly monolithic consumerism that subsumes the myriad “cultural and personal needs” (78) of a globalized society. Yet, the Bomb has not gone away, it has merely gone underground. While denizens of the overworld are comforted by nostalgic narratives and aesthetic catharsis, the bomb’s confluence in “white space” with the operations of waste management offers a powerful illustration of the implausibility of innocence in a society that owes its waste-proliferating affluence to an arsenal that has not been deployed but has dictated the terms of its existence.9 This is a site where the injured bodies of radiation test and accident victims signify not any victorious national fiction but rather the fallacy of any innocence assumed by this society and a profound repudiation of restorative nostalgia for the Cold War. The House of Race in the Homeland: Morrison’s Home and Neocontainment Culture As demonstrated above, Roth and DeLillo critique narratives of American innocence on its own terms. Because these terms have been primarily Anglo-centric, one of the greatest casualties of innocence narratives and Cold War nostalgia remains unaddressed: the enduring legacy of African slavery. With Jim Crow at full force in the South, hostility and discrimination in the North, and violence against African Americans nationwide, the early Cold War era offers no 9 More accurately, not since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the advent of the Cold War. 64 comforting nostalgic return for African Americans, and any nostos it provides to white Americans is predicated on its omission of a racialized Other. The inclusion of Cotter Martin, the young African American boy who first comes away with the Bobby Thomson homerun ball, his father Manx, and Nick Shay’s colleague, Big Sims, does not overcome the whiteness of that American voice that DeLillo calls “your[s]” (1) at the onset of the novel. Nor do allusions to sixties radical Angela Davis and the Swede’s recollection of Newark Maid’s black employee, Vicky, attenuate the whiteness of American Pastoral. Despite Roth’s explicit incredulity about post-9/11 American innocence and slavery and DeLillo’s recognition of a black subjectivity in the figure of Big Sims, a co-worker with whom Nick Shay discusses the underrepresentation of blacks in the census, and a figure who Nick (here, perhaps a veiled DeLillo) admits “challenged [him] with his own experience” (95), their critiques remain centered on sites of “white” national identity. As noted above, these books critique narratives of innocence that have necessarily excluded the Other. This reflects, to an extent, Toni Morrison’s assertion, from Playing in the Dark, that an “ego-reinforcing Africanist presence” is what “Americans are so insistently innocent of” (45). I will turn to Morrison here to trouble the problematically homogenized “American” voice that emanates from American Pastoral and Underworld and to implicate a similarly homogenized voice of consensus in the perennial deployment of soldiers for wars predicated on a dualistic ideology. Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) both addresses critical shortcomings of Roth and DeLillo’s critiques of the uses of the early Cold War era and presents a doubly abjected veteran who obliquely directs attention to race and Iraq. The spatial liminality of this analysis is a reflection of the ambidexterity of Morrison’s text in my study of American innocence. In one sense, Morrison belongs with Roth and DeLillo as a literary titan who, according to Wendy 65 Steiner of the New York Times, is “the closest thing the country has to a national writer” and whose novel Home also invokes the early Cold War. Yet Home, like the novels of Ben Fountain and Kevin Powers published the same year, depicts a troubled veteran homecoming and its contemporaneity with the War on Terror and the attendant conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be overlooked. The overlapping concern here is the use to which the early Cold War era as a trope, the “fifties” in particular, has been put in a post-9/11, War on Terror paradigm. Morrison provides a potent anti-nostalgic counternarrative to that which is invoked, however reflectively, by Roth and DeLillo, one that rebukes the ongoing influence of American innocence in post-9/11 American culture. In post-9/11 America, the “fifties” has once again become a Benjaminian jetzeit, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Morrison, who, in an interview with Emma Brockes of The Guardian, has described Home as an attempt to “take the scab off” the period. While this kind of cultural work is well within the national-historical scope of her ouevre, it is difficult to believe that she believes that this “scab” needs to be removed for her African American readers, who would be unlikely to apply this metaphor of convalescence to the period. Her disingenuousness hints at the contemporary influences on her narrative: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a notion of innocence that is far more likely to be assumed by her many white readers. This iteration of innocence is enabled by a mythic appraisal of the fifties that has persisted through and sustained the containment narratives of Cold War culture, the binary “culture wars” narratives of the nineties, and endures in the “neocontainment” culture of the Homeland. Morrison faults a “fluff,” “veil,” and “flowers” conception of the fifties for a “narrative of the country” that she bluntly describes as “fake” (“Toni Morrison’s Haunting Resonance”). Her critique of the “fifties” as a trope in this narrative consigns the Anglo-American subjectivity that 66 is at the centre of American Pastoral and Underworld to the frame, as an anonymous, indistinct entity that may be attempting to appropriate, contain, or subsume the narrative of Frank Money, an African American veteran of the Korean War. Morrison’s choice of protagonist considered alongside her unabashedly critical stance on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, implicitly suggest parallels between Cold War containment and War on Terror “neocontainment” meant to challenge the continuing use of narratives that minimize the role of race-thought in the U.S. and the troubling persistence of American innocence and its role in projecting consensus for these wars. Morrison’s oblique critique of contemporary American war culture via the “forgotten war” has been unduly castigated by reviewers as “simplistic” (Churchwell) and “lacking new insight” (Alexis). However, a telling index of the novel’s contemporary cultural import can be found in the comments of Colonel Scott Krawczyk, who invited Morrison in 2013 to speak to cadets at West Point about Home. According to Krawczyk, Morrison provides “just enough psychological complication of Frank Money to open up an understanding of how desperately malignant the realm of war can be” and offers an important study in the “moral ambiguity” that will undoubtedly be faced by his cadets (qtd. in Meisel). In addition to the instructive complexity and immediate cultural relevance Krawcyzk aptly attributes to the novel, I propose that Home offers a hermeneutically rich, if aesthetically stark, text that provides penetrating insight into the role of racial othering in “neocontainment” constructions of the nation as “home,” a metaphor that has a heightened resonance in the “Homeland.” As Morrison navigates the fraught meanings of “home” to her wayfaring protagonist, she illustrates the compound effect of race on the estrangement of the combat veteran and gestures towards a contemporary revival 67 of Cold War narratives of containment that preserve and perpetuate notions of innocence in post- 9/11 America. Invocations of the fifties as a “golden era” have recurred since the end of the period. In fact, the “period” has been construed less in strictly temporal terms and more in terms of how it serves historiographic narratives. As Andrea Carosso points out, “scholars have tended to see the 1950s in terms of a ‘long decade’ spanning from the end of World War II to sometime in the early 1960s,” with some even extending it to the end of the Kennedy presidency (11) and, as discussed above with regard to American Pastoral, it has often been seen as an antithetical antecedent to the disorder and disunity of the “sixties.” This appraisal imagines “the fifties” as a time of prosperity, peace, and cohesion. To the extent that the Korean War has been a “forgotten war,” the forgetting of it owes much to this myth. Frank’s unceremonious return “from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland” (Leah Hagar-Cohen) that is, like the war, perilous and without peace for African Americans, demonstrates one of the central fallacies implicit in this myth--that the postwar social structure of the United States was relatively stable and cohesive, if not entirely equitable, a condition right on the cusp of being “disrupted” by the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, consensus historian Godfrey Hodgson describes September 1955 as “precisely the moment when consensus was settling like snow over U.S. politics” (America in Our Time 74), a “moment” that occurred only days after Emmet Till was killed, and only weeks before the arrest of Rosa Parks, which triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Indeed, retrospective notions of “consensus” seem absurd when African American experience is accounted for. As Gary Gerstle points out, the racial clashes of the 1960s were not “sudden and inexplicable explosions of rage” but rather “the continuation of a twenty-year-old pattern of racial violence” (583), a pattern in the midst of which Morrison places her protagonist. 68 Morrison’s novel chronicles the odyssey of Money’s return to the United States from combat duty in Korea as he makes his way to his childhood home in Lotus, Georgia, where repressed memories of racial violence there merge with those of his own violent acts in Korea. Dictated to an unidentified figure set on “telling [his] story” (4), Money’s tale begins in “Central City,” somewhere in the northern United States (possibly Seattle), where Money has been arrested and institutionalized for some unspecified transgression that he does not remember. As he considers the necessity of shoes for his imminent escape, he recalls the childhood flight from his original home in Texas to Lotus, Georgia after threats from the Ku Klux Klan. While he fears being arrested for vagrancy once he leaves the facility, these memories remind him “that being outside wasn’t necessary for legal or illegal disruption,” that even “inside . . . men with or without badges could force you . . . to move” (9). This early establishment of an inside/outside dichotomy cues one of Morrison’s enduring concerns and hints at her ensuing critique of the Homeland, via her distinctions between the metaphors of house and home. This critique implicates Kaplan’s paradigm of U.S. culture, which views notions of “foreign” and “domestic” as mutually constitutive of the nation as “home” and is mindful of the ways in which “slavery and emancipation and relations between blacks and whites [have been] intertwined” with the overseas campaigns of the United States (18). Frank is “foreign in a domestic sense” (3), a phrase Kaplan has appropriated from Justice Edward Douglas White, who used it to describe the status of Puerto Rico as a U.S. possession in 1898. While Money is, of course, a de facto citizen of the U.S., he is excluded from full citizenship in the national community as imagined by a society that has deployed him to fight a war motivated by narratives meant to “contain” foreign influences. 69 Valerie Smith calls Morrison’s novel “a meditation on the idea of home” (204), but Home is more properly positioned as the latest moment in a longstanding fixation. Morrison had already devoted considerable creative and analytical energies to this idea by 1997. In her 1997 essay, also entitled “Home,” Morrison posits a “radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home” (3) and describes the central problem of her already extensive oeuvre as that of “convert[ing] a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home” (5). She describes the pitfalls of “rebuilding” the “house of race” in which “the anxiety of belonging is entombed” (10) and cites nationhood as a figuration that contains such anxiety, either by being “raced” or fallaciously imagining itself as “not-raced,” both untenable positions for Morrison. She describes her fiction as attempts to “transform” the house completely, thereby creating a “sovereign” psychic space that can be called home. Her most recent attempt at such a transformation, undertaken amidst the U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and set during Jim Crow and Korea, provokes not only a dialogue about the meaning and possibilities of this kind of “home” in the recently established discursive construction of the “Homeland” but also how it may represent an iteration of raced Cold War culture that is often represented as “not- raced.” Writing at a time in which the term “post-race” has gained at least tentative currency among some cultural commentators and scholars, Morrison invokes a period in which race has often been expunged to serve (white) American myth. As Grestle points out, a long-dominant consensus model of apprehending U.S. history is an idea that has masked” ‘massive resistance’ to integration in the North among working-class and lower-middle-class whites” (580). Morrison foregrounds this resistance. Frank traverses the United States on what can be seen as an inverted “underground railroad,” a network of sympathizers who guide him from north to south. This 70 ironic trajectory offers a survey of the “house of race” that must be overcome before reaching “home,” which is less a return to a specific geographical locus than it is an affirmation of a community within the larger national community that does not conform to its discursive boundaries. The path Frank takes to get to this home explores the features of the house of race and brings to the surface the brutal realities running beneath nostalgic veneers of fifties America that have supported enduring notions of innocence. Indeed, one of the most prominent incidents of violence in the era is encoded in the name of her protagonist. Frank “Money” recalls the case of Emmet Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in 1955 when he was abducted, beaten, mutilated, and killed by white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. While this incident drew national attention and incurred opprobrium from across the U.S., violence and discrimination against African Americans had been, and continued to be, a regular and frequently undocumented occurrence. Morrison offers a survey of the obstacles faced by African Americans in a frequently hostile environment. Not only is Frank perpetually concerned about being arrested for vagrancy, he receives “glacial contempt” from a supposedly sympathetic reverend in Portland who keeps him on the back porch because “[his] daughters are inside the house” (22). On a bus bound for Chicago, a sign on the restroom warns him away, and he must disembark to relieve himself in the shrubbery. Frank later witnesses the distress of a couple who are forcibly removed from a restaurant and beaten. He encounters the mother of a young boy who has been shot by a “redneck rookie” cop (31). Frank’s lover, Lily, is denied a house because of a clause in the rental contract that precludes occupation of the property by persons of “Hebrew . . . Ethiopian, Malay or Asiatic race excepting only employees in domestic 71 service” (73). Home is replete with examples of the affronts and assaults faced by African Americans in a decade of imagined innocence. Home, however, is not a simple catalogue of closeted skeletons. If the two dominant truths of the fifties for Morrison are the Korean War and racial violence, it is the significance of their intersection that is the most insightful contribution Home makes to contemporary discourses of war and innocence in the Homeland. Several early reviews of Home refer to the novel as “allegorical,” but Morrison’s novel demands more intensive interpretation. Although it is tempting to read Frank’s heinous murder of a young girl in Korea as merely a sublimation of the violence visited on African Americans in the U.S. during the Korean War, and the opening and closing images of the novel (the “horses that stood like men,” and the “sweet bay tree” under which Frank and Cee re-bury the dead combatant who had had such a profound psychic impact on them) as an anti-racist parable, such readings diminish Morrison’s command of metaphor and downplay the historical occasion of the novel. A more attentive reading of the novel reveals a nuanced critique of contemporary Homeland culture refracted through that of the Cold War. The centrality of masculinity to Frank’s self-perception, and its diminished relevance upon his return to Lotus with Cee, is one of the devices by which Morrison exposes the reductive work of the Cold War containment narrative, its reliance on historical race-thought, and its complicity in contemporary innocence culture. She engages the double-bind of black masculinity, which is at once both a means of complicity and resistance to the containment narrative. Subjugation of blacks in slavery to some extent relied on a degradation of their masculinity, a masculinity that was defined by the southern masters themselves and was characterized by chivalric behavior that valorized the protection of the family through combat and the rescue of women from peril. Money’s sister, Cee, is cast in terms of a victim who 72 requires the intervention of a man, and this characterization of her is a projection of Frank’s, who invests much of his own identity in her dependence on the masculine persona he has cultivated: She was the first person I ever took responsibility for. Down deep inside her lived my secret picture of myself—a strong good me tied to the memory of those horses and burial of a stranger. Guarding her, finding a way through tall grass and out of that place, not being afraid of anything—snakes or wild old men. I wonder if succeeding at that was the buried seed of all the rest. In my little-boy heart I felt heroic and I knew that if they found us or touched her I would kill. (104) This “picture” of himself and its associations with the horses “that stood like men” and the man who is buried unceremoniously like a dead animal may suggest some of the allegorical correspondences to which critics have referred. The “beautiful” and “brutal” horses with “raised hooves crashing and striking” gain their “manhood” through battle and subsequent control of the mares. But they are only “like” men; they are subhuman servants whose power and brutality is employed by actual men for their own ends. The juxtaposition of this battle with the death match of a black father and son in a Jim Crow south only a half-century removed from slavery also seems to suggest a ready parallel. So too does the winner of battles earning the right to keep watch over the mares, as it resonates with a conception of masculinity predicated on a capacity for violence as a guarantor of female safety, a strength held in balance with feminine weakness, and a role that Frank takes on in his quest to save Cee. However, Morrison creates these correspondences only to blur and challenge them. Money’s hypermasculine persona is an asset in the “house of race” that has deployed him to Korea, but when he reaches Lotus, it becomes obsolete in the (re)discovery of a community in which boundaries between gender roles are less 73 circumscribed (although women are central to the operations of this community) and where “foreignness” is not construed through race. Instead, the pathologies that foster race-thought in the larger American society are seen as “invading” Lotus. Frank’s rage is focused on “the arrogant evil doctor” who “sliced her up” and this provokes within him fantasies of violent revenge (120), but “the women [of Lotus] handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping” (121). They approach Cee’s afflictions as a pathology imposed upon them from outside in the greater national community, not as the result of individual malfeasance by one racist. Their response is also collective and collapses the boundaries that this larger society has so rigidly established. Home also demonstrates attention to the fragility of other boundaries, those that expose the tenuously suppressed knowledge that contradicts (white) society’s veneer of innocence. Throughout her oeuvre, Morrison has employed peculiar houses to illustrate the trappings of the house of race, particularly for the African diaspora, and most notably the haunted 124 of Beloved, which contained (and did not contain) the ghosts of the Middle Passage. While her attention to the houses in Home is not as focused or extensive, it is duly pointed. For example, the house of Dr. Beauregard Scott, a “heavyweight Confederate” (62), illustrates the troubling “foundations” of white prosperity that are unacknowledged by mythic remembrances of the fifties and acknowledges “structural” problems with the house of race. “Dr. Beau” conducts dangerous experiments on Cee in order to improve the quality of discreet abortions for more genteel women like his wife, who spends her days on the upper level of the house watching television sitcoms (an emergent genre in 1953) and taking laudanum while Cee, as well as other “poor people--women and girls especially” (64), endures serious physical trauma as a test subject at the hands of Dr. Beau downstairs. While Mrs. Scott listlessly watches Milton Berle, The 74 Honeymooners, and I Love Lucy upstairs, Cee peruses the bookshelves downstairs, finding titles such as Out of the Night, The Passing of the Great Race, and Heredity, Race and Society. These books, a “mystery” (65) to Cee, are a shorthand catalogue of the “eugenics” movement, which had emerged at the turn-of-the-century and still flourished among those who sought justification for a segregated society. Mrs. Scott’s purposeful ignorance of what occurs downstairs directs readers to an intersection of race-thought, pseudoscience, and a notion of femininity that, at mid- century, dovetailed with containment narratives and bolstered dualistic apprehensions of race, gender, and geopolitics. Morrison depicts profound alienation from this historical order even as she sketches the boundaries of the dualistic narrative that has established it, a narrative that, despite its aim to simplify distinctions between “foreign” and “domestic” incorporates “foreign” entities within its “domestic” purview. Cee sleeps downstairs in what is “more of a shallow extension of the house rather than a proper basement” (62), a terse spatial metaphor that reveals just how integral and tenuous false dichotomies of difference are to unitary conceptions of nation that were being projected during the Cold War and post-9/11. Morrison cues that this false duality is tethered to broader Cold War narratives by noting that “Cee’s room is down the hall from a bomb shelter” (62). As Nadel has aptly asserted, “a 1950s revival mentality” bears the “tacit suggestion that American culture during the cold war . . . was, for all significant purposes, white” and points to an implied fallacy that “black Americans shared in the burdens and assumptions about power of those who controlled the nation’s financial, military, and political discourse” (7). This fallacy, although contradicted by even the most cursory research on the period, illustrates the power and tenacity of narratives that spare white Americans from the burden of history. Such narratives again gained purchase after 9/11 and bore the traces of earlier narratives of “containment” that 75 sought not only to “contain” the spread of Communism but also the proliferation of deviant gender roles and racial miscegenation. In the Homeland that was born at Ground Zero, the particularities of race and gender were also subordinated to a master narrative of national unity and a binary view of enmity: echoes of the containment culture that Nadel ascribes to the early Cold War era. This phenomenon was not simple recidivism, but rather a “neocontainment” narrative that incorporated the Cold War as a nostalgic trope. Myriad subject positions within the United States were subsumed by a discourse of unity (e.g., “United We Stand,” “Let’s Roll,” etc.) that relied on the kinds of white, heteronormative models of domesticity that attended containment narratives. The 2008 election of Barack Obama further propagated the notion of the U.S. as a unitary society that some were beginning to refer to as post-racial, notwithstanding the unwavering obstinacy and thinly veiled racism of many of Obama’s opponents in Congress. Morrison is writing against notions of spuriously presumed unity, of a hyper-masculinist, post-racial America, and of contemporary appropriation of Cold War containment culture, and the narrative structure of Home is her primary vehicle of resistance. The enigmatic narrator to whom Money dictates his account suggests the problems of a national narrative that has appropriated the containment-culture “fifties” as an exemplar of a unitary America. This narrator, unnamed and addressed ambiguously as “you,” not only invokes the reader, but can be seen to represent the hegemonic voice of a white neocontainment culture, a voice that seeks to contain Frank’s narrative by assimilating it into its preferred discursive constructions. Frank frequently instructs this narrator, and his instructions are usually in the negative (don’t do this, you don’t know, you weren’t there, etc.). This suggests that, without persistent reminders, the narrator may (intentionally or not) gloss Frank’s narrative with clichés of individual heroism, or perhaps a dismissive pathos, that diminish the collective sins of a society--that this narrator will 76 end up telling a simplistic tale of a black man overcoming his struggle in a once-unjust but now equitable society. Money initially treats this narrator with resentment, skepticism, and perhaps even fatalism: “Since you’re set on telling my story . . .” (5); “Write about that, why don’t you?” (40); “You don’t know . . . You can’t come up with words that catch it . . . Describe that if you know how” (40). As the narrator does go on to relate Frank’s experience, Money continues to suspect, qualify, and instruct: “You are dead wrong if you think…” (69); “Earlier you wrote . . . not true” (69); “I don’t think you know much” (69); “You never lived there so you don’t know what it was like” (84); “Don’t paint me as some enthusiastic hero. I had to go but I dreaded it.” (84); “Korea. You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there” (93); “When you write this down, know this:” (103). Only after Frank has repeatedly admonished this narrator about his/her/their inability to sufficiently articulate his story is he compelled to reveal the source of his “free-floating rage” and “self-loathing” (15), a despicable act that further complicates the story the narrator is “set on telling.” Money prefaces his confession with an abrupt interjection: “I have to say something to you right now. I have to tell the whole truth. I lied to you and I lied to me.” (133). “You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what’s true” (134). At this point, Frank surrenders his regulation of the story and a still more complex narrative emerges. Money’s initial policing of the narration and his belated confession allow Morrison to address discrete but interdependent facets of neocontainment culture: She can first challenge the white fifties-revival narrative by presenting a counter-voice, that of an African American man and a Korean War vet, against master narratives of an idyllic and innocent America in the fifties. By deferring Money’s admission of guilt, Morrison can also critique the gendered aspects of neocontainment culture without diminishing the role of race in a narrative that relies on overlapping dichotomies. This narrative structure also further complicates problematic dualities through yet another inversion77 of the slave narrative. Not only does Frank move from north to south, his admonitions echo the invariable inclusion of white apologias that attest to the authenticity of the otherwise “unreliable” narrative of a liberated slave. Money consistently challenges the reliability of the narrator only to confess his own unreliability late in the novel, challenging both white consensus and any monolithic counter-narratives that might project a similarly dualistic reality. This technique resonates with Morrison’s imperative in her essay “Home” that “counter-racism was never an option” (4) in her transformation of the “house of race” into a “race-specific but non-racist” home (5). While American Pastoral and Underworld anatomize the work of “containment culture” nostalgia in recuperating national narratives of American innocence, Home exposes the fallacies of such nostalgia while probing the “neocontainment” paradigm inaugurated by 9/11. Taken together, as touchstones across an “interwar” decade, these novels demonstrate the particular “fragility” of innocence narratives in the absence of a national enemy and the “constant maintenance” it takes to sustain them (Sturken, Tourists 18). DeLillo and Roth reveal the uses of the 1950s and 1960s in this maintenance, and Morrison depicts a 1950s that belies such innocence and provokes a confrontation with the fallacious nostalgia that enabled the notion that America “lost its innocence” on 9/11, a notion that fuelled consensus for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The next chapter will examine how two Best-Picture nominated WWII films released in the late 1990s contributed to the American innocence that DeLillo and Roth critique and that Morrison shows is as potent as ever more than a decade after 9/11 provided a new national enemy (the terrorists) and two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) to sustain it. 78 WW2K: Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as Interwar “Sights” of Memory In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law the WWII Memorial Act. A national WWII memorial in Washington, D.C. had been proposed as early as 1987, and the completed memorial was dedicated by George W. Bush much later, in 2004 (a continuity across paradigms of Cold War and the War on Terror that I will explore more fully in the next chapter). The legislation that realized this project was enacted during what Erika Doss calls a “cultural turn toward public feeling, toward affective modes of knowledge and comprehension” (229) that emerged in the mid-1990s and intensified after 9/11. Doss points out that “[m]emorials are the physical, visual embodiment of public affect and as such, help to fabricate public subjectivity” (227). At the core of this subjectivity is a lost innocence narrative in which WWII had come to serve as a validation of the exercise of U.S. military power during the Cold War that was called into question by the Vietnam War. As Andrew Crampton and Marcus Power observe, a “WWII nostalgia industry” of the 1990s was part of “a process of recovering something lost” (245). This industry produced a range of artifacts, including public monuments, film, memoirs, and television documentaries dedicated to the recapitulation of American innocence. As architect Herbert Muschamp argued in the immediate wake of its construction, the WWII memorial essentializes WWII as “an age of moral certainty, a time innocent of complexity, irony, or ambiguity” and resembles “a Spielberg production featuring Tom Hanks in a cast of all-star unknown soldiers” (Muschamp, 2001: A- 30). Muschamp’s pointed reference to Saving Private Ryan in his polemic on the WWII memorial reveals much about the kind of public subjectivity that was being fashioned by the turn to affective knowledge. While public monuments can be said to embody such public affect, film has a particular power to elicit it. Saving Private Ryan is a prime example of ways that affect 79 and ideology coincided in post-Cold War America to bolster what Oliver Stone has called “the worship of world war Two [sic] as the good war” (qtd. in D’Arcy). As John Bodnar has shown, the “good war” discourse is an imposition on actual historical attitudes about the war, which were far more diverse than they have come to be represented. According to Bodnar, “[b]ecause comprehension was never a settled matter in the 1940s and beyond, the war was not only a topic of dispute but a subject of public performances in rituals, commemorations, and various political and cultural expressions” (The Good War 3). The public performance of WWII and its confluence with “affective modes of knowledge” (Doss 229) arguably reached a zenith in 1998, with the release of two major WWII films, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. One could reasonably expect that these stylistically disparate directors would produce much different films and, in significant ways, they did. Spielberg has spent his career producing sensational blockbusters with mass appeal and Malick has made a few meditative films that have enjoyed nearly universal critical praise but a narrower popular audience. While Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan have both been admitted to the canon of “great” American war films, Spielberg’s film enjoys a number of distinctions that Malick’s does not. Indeed, Saving Private Ryan has an attributed moral, historical, and pedagogical authority that few films of any genre have ever enjoyed. Popular film critics raced to print the most grandiose praise about Spielberg’s film. The New York Times called it “soberly magnificent” and the New York Post “savagely true.” Just as film critics widely lauded it, the scholarly discourse that emerged around the film has been dominated by indictments of its ideological project. John Bodnar claims that Saving Private Ryan “preserves the World War II image of American soldiers as inherently averse to bloodshed and cruelty” (“Postwar Memory” 805). Albert Auster describes it as 80 “stamp[ed] . . . from the start with the seal of heroism and of America’s ultimate triumph” (101), and historian and WWII veteran Howard Zinn complains that, “Our culture is in deep trouble when a film like Saving Private Ryan can pass by, like a military parade, with nothing but a shower of confetti and hurrahs for its color and grandeur” (140). Ironically, the “color and grandeur” of Terrence Malick’s contemporaneous WWII film, The Thin Red Line, is a major reason that it is not discussed in the same terms as Saving Private Ryan. While Saving Private Ryan was a commercial blockbuster, The Thin Red Line fared modestly at the box office, partially because Twentieth Century Fox “failed to locate The Thin Red Line within public discourse surrounding World War Two” (Flanagan 127). The Thin Red Line was instead marketed as an art-house alternative to Spielberg’s “historical” epic, one that came to be discussed by reviewers and critics almost exclusively in terms of the film’s aesthetic achievements. Unable to situate the film within the “good war” paradigm, a Fox representative, Tom Sherak, offered the following comparison: “Line is about what people are feeling [and Saving Private Ryan is] about arms and legs being blown off” (qtd. in Brennan and Essex). This statement unwittingly expresses a device of both films that is critical to what Marita Sturken, in 1997, called “the insistent and ongoing memorialization of World War II” (Tangled 122): the role of affect in depictions of the war. Not only did Fox promote The Thin Red Line as an impressionistic rather than verisimilar piece, but early reviewers were also often quick to exclude it from any “serious” historical consideration. Roger Ebert, for example, proposed that “any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army.” Most scholars have also adhered to this distinction, preferring to discuss formal elements of the film and/or its broad philosophical claims. Carl Plantinga focuses on the way that The Thin 81 Red Line “elicits incongruent emotions for the purposes of generating an experience of rumination and wonder” (86) while Robert Sinnerbrink parses the question of whether or not The Thin Red Line is “Heiddegerian cinema” (26). Simon Critchley claims that The Thin Red Line is a “war film in the same way that the Iliad is a war poem” a story about “heroic fact” rather than history (12). This discursive hegemony has minimized discussion on the film’s historical claims, its mythological resonance, and its implications in a nostalgic WWII discourse. While the two films are undeniably distinct formally and philosophically, and the intent and disposition of their directors are widely disparate, both films engage with the “turn to affect” and both are preoccupied with notions of innocence and loss that continue to inform American cultural memory. Despite a reception that tempered lavish praise for its aesthetic achievements with opprobrium for its disregard of historical detail, The Thin Red Line implicitly makes claims about American warfare and cultural memory. As Martin Flanagan points out, The Thin Red Line deals with “already culturally loaded subject matter” (124) and invokes the “myth” that Malcom Rijsdijk finds central to combat films: that of “compatibility” between individual and community values. He views this concern as “the critical standard operating outside them, largely because of their perceived influence over public opinion and their ambiguous, almost folkloric position as educational (often indoctrinating) narratives” (33). Rijsdijk aptly observes that The Thin Red Line, as a combat film, tacitly participates in the concerns of a genre that is always “distinctly historical,” “distinctly political,” and “distinctly mythic” (27). While Malick’s film avoids didacticism as much as Spielberg’s embraces it,10 both films participate in a discourse of innocence that serves a post-Cold War narrative of righteous victory over the “evils” 10 To be sure, Spielberg's promotional pontificating and Malick's insistent silence only amplified this distinction. 82 of communism and disavows American violence that “ended” WWII and that of subsequent military excursions that attended the Cold War era. Their angles of approach to innocence are related but distinct. Spielberg unabashedly identifies with a particular “period of innocence” in American history. He explicitly ties his fascination with innocence to American culture in the 1940s, describing it as “the end of an era” and “end of innocence,” and he admits to celebrating a “kind of naivety” that he feels may no longer be available in contemporary American society (qtd. in Friedman 190). Malick has explicitly cited the ‘innocent abroad’ as an important thematic principle in his work, and this American trope is clearly apparent in his two films prior to The Thin Red Line, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). As Robert Silberman notes, they both “feature landscapes that provide appropriate backdrops for a movement from innocence to experience haunted by a dream of Paradise” (161). Indeed, it seems clear that Malick shares what Gary Arms and Thomas Riley have identified as Spielberg’s primary theme: “innocence in great jeopardy” (8). These two American directors, each preoccupied with innocence, and each producing a WWII film at the height of a “turn to affect” in American culture, constitutes a powerful underlying connection that invites closer examination of the films’ superficial disparities and complicates the public reception and critical discourse of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as categorically different films. Both films, via WWII, make claims about innocence: its loss, its recovery, and its place in contemporary American militarism. The means by which they do so bear comparison and demand a more integral approach than the dominant mode of criticism for each film has allowed. My comparison will account for both the ideological content of these films and their aesthetic properties with particular attention to the affective nature of the film medium. As Paul 83 Gormley points out, “cinema is both a mass of signs and a source of autonomous affect” (11), and critical attempts to disentangle the visceral from the semantic cannot provide an adequate account of its influence on a viewer. I will argue that each film enacts what Gormley calls “meaning-affect loops” in which cognitive interpretation and visceral reaction are interdependent. Gormley aptly argues that cinema in the 1990s “attempt[s] to reanimate cinematic affect and the particular disturbances this affect causes in cultural signification” (13). I will not attempt to disentangle meaning and affect but rather to analyze their entanglement by examining pivotal scenes and transitions from both films that illustrate the reciprocal influence of individual affective response and cultural meaning and posit the possible impacts of these loops on an American subject who is being constituted, in part, by a discourse of innocence. This American subject is aptly described by Marita Sturken as a “tourist of history.” Embedded in a cultural matrix of sentimentality, comfort, and consumption, this tourist experiences history at a remove, as a “mediated and re-enacted experience” (9). This mode of experience, says Sturken, “with its innocent pose and distanced position, evokes the American citizen who participates uncritically in a culture in which notions of good and evil are used to define complex conflicts and tensions” (10). The filmgoer as “tourist” visits sites of memory and consumes the images of history therein. Despite the superficiality of this process, or perhaps because of it, the American subject as tourist is deeply concerned with authenticity. By visiting the national WWII memorial, for example, the tourist gains “a trace of authenticity by extension” (11). When Muschamp decries this memorial as “a Spielberg production,” he suggests a reciprocal relationship between physical sites of memory and cinematic “sights” of memory, an avenue of inquiry that yields insight into the “deep investment in innocence” that Sturken sees in American culture and can be found in both films. I view the films of Spielberg and Malick as 84 “si[ght]s of memory” that present “authentic” works of history and art, respectively, that are palatable to the American tourist of history for a similar reason. These “sights” share some significant features of memorial sites, which present carefully ordered exhibits that either impel or demand a particular trajectory and are always framed or contained by the tourist’s temporal position outside the trauma represented within. Robert Phillip Kolker inverts and iterates the relationship articulated by Muschamp when he notes that Saving Private Ryan proceeds in a “theme-park style” (340). The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan can be seen as sequences of thematic exhibits that correspond, in significant ways, to the structure of war memorials.11 The meanings in these films, much like those of war memorials, is more or less accessible depending on the presentation and arrangement of the content, its sequence and trajectory, and relies to an even greater degree on affect to bolster its ideological suppositions. If the American subject is a “tourist” that consumes history at sites and “sights” of memory, it is important to consider both the trajectory this tourist is impelled by these films to take, how affect and ideology coincide in them, and the ideological products the tourists consume. My analysis will focus on Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as “tourist sights” where the American tourist of history consumes the spectacle of war, and I will trace the trajectory of what I consider the major meaning-affect loops of both films to provide insight on the products that they offer this tourist. While I will focus on what I view as the most significant of these, it is important to note that the “looping” is continuous and irregular--continuous in the sense that film always has an affective dimension that influences the spectator’s disposition to some degree but irregular in the sense that the effect is heightened or diminished at the director’s discretion. Their stylistic divergence notwithstanding, both films are, by turns, idyllic and 11 Indeed, Sturken has referred to “film as memorial” (Tangled 122). 85 contemplative, violent and anxious. Both lead the viewer through a sequence of spectacular “exhibits” designed to provoke sympathetic reactions in the viewer while encouraging a reductive understanding of World War II that encourages the distanced and innocent stance that Sturken attributes to the tourist. As Kolker says of Saving Private Ryan, the “viewer buys the commodity-as-spectacle and is repaid by exciting images that offer the dangers of subversion rendered harmless by the affirmation of secure convention” (342). While they do so distinctly, both Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line contain their war-as-spectacle within frames that offer solace to the spectator who at various points in each movie will be made to share the physical and emotional trauma of the characters in the films. The tourist’s induction into these “sights” bears some examination before proceeding to the properties of the films’ other exhibits. Many reviewers and even some scholars cite the now-famous 25-minute battle scene as the “opening” scene of Saving Private Ryan, completely omitting the heavy-handed symbolism of the frame. The film actually opens with the image of a waving American flag against the sky. This is followed by an elderly and enfeebled man walking somberly through a cemetery, trailed by a hand-wringing group of younger people--many of whom are presumably his progeny. The man kneels at a grave and weeps, and the family collapses in around him. The film’s signature battle sequence is then engaged through a close-up of the man’s eye. This diegetic focalizing is a form of what film theorist Noel Carrol calls “criterial prefocusing” (69), a way of framing the subsequent material to evoke particular emotional responses from the viewer. In this case, nation, family, loss, and sacrifice are invoked along with the individual’s struggle to produce meaning from a life that will eventually end, whether in battle or old age. Only after these powerful themes have been introduced and their meanings encoded, the spectator (or tourist) is transported to Omaha Beach at the onset of the D-Day landing. We become privy to what appears to be a 86 memory,12 which serves as a way of making the first-person individual memory a collective one. The D-Day landing begins with the family and flag still seared into the eyelids of the viewer, and though the chaotic brutality that follows privileges visceral reaction over cognition, this juxtaposition has already suggested a hermeneutic lens. The scene is designed as much to physically unsettle its audience with violence as it is to offer a grunt’s-eye-view of D-Day, and its jump cuts and pans are jarring, disorienting, and nauseating. The point-of-view switches erratically from individual American soldiers to a third- person panorama, to that of a German machine gun nest. Yet, certain individuals resolve themselves from this bedlam to become the narrative focus of the film. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his men quickly become the protagonists of the battle and will go on to be at the center of the film’s eponymous mission. The visceral impact of the D-Day battle scene has been well-documented. Indeed, accounts of tearful veterans leaving theaters prompted Veterans Affairs to establish a hotline for vets who were traumatized by their viewing experience. For viewers not driven away by PTSD, realism eventually gives way to a melodrama, inducted by that most melodramatic of features, the pathetic fallacy. In a shot that mirrors the one that introduced the battle, the camera moves in on Miller’s eye as he beholds the tide, red with blood, batting around the remains of dead soldiers. The camera then zooms in on a single corpse in the sand. In a decidedly non-Malickian shot, a dead soldier with the name Ryan stenciled on his uniform is surrounded by dead fish in a formation that suggests a chalk outline--even nature centralizes the sacrifice of Spielberg’s Americans. “That’s quite a view,” remarks Miller, and again the camera moves in on the eyes. This enacts the second transition between the film’s oscillating modes of visceral assault and melodramatic parable and recalls the mind’s eye that 12 It should be noted that this is a disingenuous device--the beholder of this scene, who turns out to be Private Ryan, was not present at Omaha Beach. 87 contains the narrative action of the film. This shot can be seen to parallel that of the spectator- tourist, who is only visiting, taking in the view while remaining in the memorializing temporality of the frame. At first glance, the opening sequence of The Thin Red Line could hardly appear more disparate from the waving flag of Saving Private Ryan: a dark chord rises to a crescendo as a crocodile enters dark water and submerges, followed by the first of the many cryptic and unattributed voiceovers that characterize the film: “What is this war in the heart of nature? Why must nature vie with itself?” The crocodile disappears beneath the surface of the muck and the scene goes dark. The following scene counters this darkness and descent with an ascent towards the sky. The camera takes spectators up and away from the dark and sets them back down again on a brightly lit beach where indigenous children are placidly cracking nuts with stones. The camera angle widens, and we see the children among a community of people collecting, cracking, and gathering nuts. Some children play a game in which they collect and pass a stone to one person while receiving one from the other side, all synchronized, circular. The camera then cuts to children swimming beneath the surface of bright blue water, from which the vantage rises to a white man paddling a canoe. He, too, seems content, and he smiles at two indigenous men who glide by in another canoe, inviting from the audience what Amy Coplan has identified as “contagion responses” in Malick’s film that prompt audiences to share the emotions of his characters even without any narrative context (73).13 The man is out of his canoe now, standing watch as people bathe in a lagoon, a happy mother and child near the centre of the frame. The camera then cuts back to man, who bears a wistful look on his face. The mother and child leave 13 Coplan derives this concept from psychologist Elaine Hatfield et al’s notion of “emotional contagion,” which they define as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person, and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (153-54). 88 the lagoon and walk towards the sea. The man is in the background now, not watching them. The sea is seen through the trees and a warship’s prow penetrates the scene. People run, and the sky darkens. The man’s face conveys distress when the ship comes to collect him and his AWOL companion, and they run, to no avail. Ideological conflict and technowar have “infected” an originary life of sustenance and play, and the viewer is transported abruptly and unceremoniously, along with the man, to a cloistered and dark place. The scene shifts abruptly from the bright blues and greens of the paradisiacal Melanesian island to the dark hold of the transport ship, where the man we will come to know as Private Witt is confronted by Sergeant Welsh. This transition enacts a recurrent theme in the film, which is irreconcilable rift between people and the dream of a harmonious collectivity. In this dark scene of containment, an ‘argument’ about existence ensues, in which Witt claims to have “seen another world,” while Welsh insists that there “ain’t no world but this one.” The merits of each metaphysical argument notwithstanding, the viewer has already seen Witt’s other world and wants to return. Spielberg’s Americans in Saving Private Ryan: Do Decent Things, Shoot, Repeat When not engaged in what is portrayed as justified violence, Spielberg’s Americans are usually doing the “decent thing” that implicates them in such violence. As the scene shifts from Omaha Beach to a government letter office, news passes up the chain of command that three Ryans are dead. Debate ensues at highest level about the perils of a potential rescue mission. These are summarily put to rest when General George Marshall invokes a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a mother who had allegedly lost five sons in the civil war. Marshall somberly recites Lincoln’s acknowledgement of Bixby’s “overwhelming grief” and offers her thanks for “so costly a sacrifice at the altar of freedom” before directing his subalterns to “Get him the hell out 89 of there.” This is a key scene, in which the bottom-up ascent of American moral righteousness culminates in the unimpeachable moral authority of Lincoln. This razor slice through red-tape, validated at the top and anchored to Lincoln, constitutes one of Spielberg’s “structures that demand complete assent and emotional compliance” (Kolker 305), though it is also based on historic fallacy.14 This oscillation is emblematic of a pattern that pervades Saving Private Ryan: scenes that are at once a visceral reprieve for the audience and an ideological justification for the next iteration of violence. Reprieve mode continues as we return to Captain Miller’s company in France, where Miller receives his orders for this “PR” mission. He subsequently recruits the conspicuously effete translator, Corporal Upham, who naively believes, in Emersonian fashion, that “war educates the senses” and who we learn intends to write about the “bond of brotherhood” between soldiers. In a move that some have generously construed as a critically self-reflexive gesture by Spielberg, Upham is an object of derision in the platoon, and for all his romanticization of war, he ultimately proves to be an inadequate soldier who allows one of his own to be killed, presumably because of his distance from the “real” war and his indecisive and cowardly nature. Indeed, Spielberg has suggested that Upham is the character he identifies most with, a rather disingenuous deflection of responsibility for this particular director, who has willfully and eagerly accepted the role of an authoritative mediator of warfare and public memory. When this “fancy little fuck” with “rat claws” naively asks Miller if he can bring his typewriter, Miller wryly holds up a pencil, a gesture that Upham and audiences both understand, yet this kind of critical attention is certainly not expected to be directed at Spielberg and his camera. Audiences 14 As Auster notes, “Mrs. Bixby had only two sons, not five, and historians have long debated over the question of whether or not Lincoln actually wrote the letter” (101). 90 expect Upham’s attitude to change as he experiences war, even as they accept Spielberg’s immutable aesthetic distance from it. Once Miller has established his contingent, the men traverse the countryside, in an idyllic and expository scene, characterized by lush pastoral imagery and easy banter between the men. Here the spectator finds not only visceral comfort in the sounds and textures of the scene but also the comfort of familiar generic conventions of the combat film: the men are coarse but amicable, of varied ethnic backgrounds, and constitute a homosocial community from which the viewer is invited to extrapolate “America.” The audience is also introduced to the ongoing debate among the men as to what Miller did for a living before the war, knowledge that will serve a critical narrative function later in the film. Audiences are introduced to the company through bits of expository dialogue meant to characterize each man and to convey the problematics of the mission. The men banter about the “FUBAR” mission, challenging the notion of imperiling many to save one and discussing the mystery of what Miller did before the war. These concerns will later merge, in a pivotal scene that appears to conflate the rescue of Ryan with the innately good character of the American citizen-soldier. Just as the sympathetic fish accompanied the transition from violence to peaceful narrative space, the natural environment sympathizes with the transition back, as the sound of raindrops merges with that of sporadic gunfire and the urgent rhythm of boots tromping through puddles. The vibrant greens of the countryside give way to the drained gray of a war-ravaged town and the camera angles become increasingly oblique and unstable as the next firefight looms. Spielberg has just introduced the members of the company and the moral debate at the center of their mission, and now he must couple the emergent narrative with affective immediacy. When Miller’s company comes across a French family in the bombed-out husk of a 91 building, the father beseeches the soldiers to take their daughter. While Miller ardently protests, Private Caparzo does what he calls “the decent thing” by taking her. In Saving Private Ryan, no decent thing goes unpunished. No sooner has he handed her off than he is gunned down by a sniper, and we are immersed once again in Spielberg’s affective matrix: the camera shifts like a nervous gaze as the soldiers search for the source of the shot, then heaves back and forth very slowly like a ship tossing at sea. Doing the decent thing has inaugurated this mode of visceral discomfort, and, in Spielberg’s cinematic paradigm, American violence is required to correct it. Private Jackson, the platoon’s own sniper, kills the German sniper with an impossibly precise shot through the German’s scope and sighting eye. This acutely efficient and proportionate strike offers visual stability to the spectators as it enacts a central dynamic of Spielberg’s film: when Americans act “decently,” they are immediately attacked, and they are compelled to dispatch their attackers brutally and proficiently. Once order and its attendant optic stability has been provisionally restored by the Americans, Spielberg returns to reprieve/propaganda mode. The company takes refuge for the night inside an abandoned church. A sequence of stable shots assures viewers that they are safe, which prompts them to relax along with the soldiers, allows the development of the film’s characters, and promotes Americans as both ordinary citizens and righteous avengers. At this confluence of visceral reprieve and narrative diegesis, Miller reveals his moral logic to Sergeant Horvath: “When you lose a man, you tell yourself it happened, so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others” Horvath, in turn, expresses the paradox at the heart of their enterprise (also the tag-line for the movie): “This time the mission is a man.” No sooner is this conundrum explicitly posited then it is tested under fire. 92 On the move again, the company is outdoors among green fields, sunshine, birds tweeting, and cows mooing when they come across a German bunker at a defunct radar station. Although Mellish voices the consensus of the men that they “can still skip it and accomplish our mission,” Miller refuses to “just leave the machine gun for the next company” and reminds his men that their “objective is to win the war.” Again, decency incurs the wrath of the Germans, and the medic, Corporal Wade, is fatally shot as the men approach and eventually take the machine-gun nest. The Americans capture one German, with whom only Upham can communicate verbally. In a conspicuously distant shot that renders all the men as silhouettes on the horizon, the POW is beaten. Not strictly “decent,” this act is depicted in a highly stylized fashion that stands starkly apart from the realism attributed to the rest of the film’s violence. The internal fracture of the platoon, a longstanding trope of post-Vietnam war film, briefly threatens to disrupt the Good War narrative of Saving Private Ryan when Miller sets the POW free. The men are incredulous and on the verge of insurrection, frustrated with the mounting costs of doing the “decent thing.” Miller’s announcement that he is a schoolteacher abruptly pacifies his men and ends this standoff. While this revelation diffuses the mutiny and fulfills an earlier narrative promise, it also prefaces a confusing explanation of his behavior. Miller goes on to explain that he does not care about Ryan, but that if completing the rescue mission gets him home to his wife, then he will attempt to accomplish the mission. This placates the men who then come together to bury their fallen comrade, although it seems to retrospectively validate the objections they had to taking the machine-gun nest in the first place. Does Miller want to complete the mission to save Ryan or fulfill his objective to win the war? The men soon stumble across Ryan, who is determined to stay with his comrades-in-arms, prompting Horvath to remark that “The world has taken a turn for the surreal.” Although 93 Miller’s company has already sacrificed two men for Ryan, Ryan will not abandon the many for the few. The men are initially irritated by Ryan’s intransigence, but their grudging compliance finally resolves the conundrum. The bridge that Ryan’s company was sent to defend is critical to the Germans’ overall campaign, and the man that was “the mission” has now become “the war.” The company does the decent thing one last time in the besieged village of Ramelle, staying to help secure a critical position despite the fact that they have only to return Ryan to safety to accomplish the mission. The film’s accretion of American “decency” achieves critical mass in the last battle scene, in which some of the most viscerally unpleasant affect is punctuated by steady and soothing shots of American righteousness. The proximity of German tanks is realized with a camera view that rattles violently in concert with machine guns. As the camera follows the movement of soldiers, it moves too quickly and erratically--the viewer’s eyes cannot keep pace, yet they cannot help but try, making the scene literally hard to watch. As usual, erratic gunfire, explosions and shouting amplify this stress. Spectators get relief as the camera cuts to a shot of Private Jackson in a bell tower, where the composure of the American response is mirrored by the composure of both the camera and that which it frames. Jackson’s steady hands, the cadence of his prayers, and the precision of his shots enact the righteousness of his violence, and the thick and steady gush of blood from a victim’s neck, unlike so many other shots of mortal injury in the film, is unnervingly satisfying: the terse and definitive act of Jackson results in a terse and definitive consequence. Jackson forgoes further sniping to forewarn his companion of a tank that has taken aim at the bell tower. Again, American decency has a price, as the tank fires and obliterates Jackson. Spielberg emphatically dismisses responses that do not include the kind of swift and violent retribution that Jackson undertakes. For example, Upham freezes and stands by as 94 Germans infiltrate his companions’ position, one of whom brutally kills Mellish with a knife. This distanced mediator, translator, the diplomat, the decency advocate, the coward is fully armed, and could have intervened at any point and not only saved his comrade but spared the spectator an agonizingly long and unflinching shot of Mellish getting stabbed. However, the viewer is meant to associate Upham’s cowardice with this killing. Upham’s hand-wringing inaction is recast as an active participation in the stabbing that contrasts starkly with the swift and decisive action of Jackson and demonstrates the necessity of an unequivocal and violent response—the potential ugliness of such a response thoroughly justified by the actual ugliness of a close-quarters stabbing. The decent thing comes back to haunt Miller’s company in this final sequence. Upham spots the German they let go, who shoots Miller. After doing the decent thing one too many times, even Spielberg’s most unabiding American simply must turn to brutality. In the calm after the air support moves in, Upham shoots the POW, on whose behalf he had once pleaded for mercy, in cold blood. This is understood to be an appropriate corrective for Upham’s prior transgressions, a restoration of order that is once again reinforced by the stability of the shot relative to the chaotic vantages that precede it. To punctuate the effect, Miller appears to destroy an approaching tank with a pistol (this is actually accomplished by an airstrike the spectator is not yet privy to)--an illusion with a point: American virtue can turn a pistol into a mortar. “Earn this” croaks a dying Miller to Ryan, heralding a return to the frame and hailing the spectators as they return to what they now understand is Miller’s grave. Safely returned to what Kolker calls the “stasis” of the frame, this spectator has simply and circularly to agree with the propositions of the film to become the kind of American who has earned “this.” 95 If the trajectory of Saving Private Ryan carefully guides the tourist of history through its exhibits with its structures of assent, The Thin Red Line can be seen as a more free-ranging tourist “sight.” Like the WWII memorial, the aesthetics and semiotics of its exhibits are less organized and often cryptic, both promoting confusion and permitting a broader range of responses than Spielberg’s film. Aptly described as “episodic,” “elliptical,” and “circuitous” in structure, Malick’s images are nonetheless received sequentially, as they must be in a film, and while this sequence does not proceed with the focus, cohesion, and pace of Saving Private Ryan, it does offer an intelligible narrative that upholds the uncritical participation in historical narratives that Sturken attributes to the tourist of history by reducing a historically contingent occasion to a mythic “sight” of universal human drama. Sympathetic depictions of the enemy, scenes of pointless suffering over an unremarkable hill, along with some selective quotes from characters and voiceovers have led some critics and scholars to see The Thin Red Line as stringently anti-war. For example, Risjdik suggests that the film specifically questions the untroubled return to the values of the Greatest Generation by reminding the viewer of the intervening trauma of Vietnam and, more important, by reminding the viewer of the trauma of conflict for everyone involved. The questions posed by the film in voiceover are muttered doubts about the spiritual cleansing of the national character through most World War II revival films. (42) 96 I view the film as doing the opposite: rather than posing a cohesive and sustained challenge to the “cleansing of the national character,” The Thin Red Line avoids delineating a national character and sublimates the specific transgressions of American empire into the realm of “good and evil,” both aspects of a universal nature that invariably produces such antinomy. As Roger Ebert observed, the Japanese “aren’t seen as enemies so much as necessary antagonists--an expression of nature’s compulsion to ‘contend with itself.’” This attributed equivalence of enemies and its suggestion of timeless human conflict redirects attention from the film’s conspicuously specific historical situation to a more general “war is hell” theme, and any suggestion of Vietnam in the jungle island landscape only serves to generalize that conflict as well. In a shot that is emblematic of the film’s deference to universalizing myth over attention to specific history is the scene of a burning village, the most convincing allusion to Vietnam, further reinforced by a shot of a silhouetted figure (perhaps a statue) sitting placidly among the flames. This seems to recall both the savagery of My Lai and the Buddhist immolations in Vietnam. However, the camera does not dwell on this reference, instead rising to the sky before cutting away to jeepfuls of American soldiers on leave from duty who fight amongst themselves as another voiceover provides an observation that transmogrifies a potentially significant allusion into a universalized claim: “Each time you start from scratch--war don’t ennoble men, it turns them into dogs.” While the second clause in this assertion has been cited ad naseam in accounts of the film, particularly those that hold it up as anti-war, the first part is almost never mentioned. The Thin Red Line may very well be, as John Streamas, echoing Tom Whalen, has suggested, “a reinvented myth of the Fall filtered through a Vietnam-era political consciousness” (143), but this reinvention should not be mistaken for a critique. “Starting from scratch” is what the film is actually about, the tragic inevitability of war and its recurrent narrative of innocence lost. 97 The Wit[t] of the Moving Box: The Thin Red Line’s Tacit Tour Guide Free-ranging as this “sight” may be, the spectator is nonetheless coaxed along a particular path. Although scholars have been understandably hesitant to overdetermine the modes of expression within Malick’s unorthodox war film, this hesitancy has precluded attention to what appears to be a clear postulate about human nature, supported by a disjointed but discernable narrative arc that traces a well-worn trajectory from innocence to experience. As other critics have pointed out, whether or not the film can be said to make any coherent historical, mythical, or metaphysical claims depends upon the role one ascribes to Witt and/or his point-of-view. Carl Plantinga describes Witt as “the locus of this film, the individual whose subjectivity and vision is elevated above all others, even Welsh” (95), and Stacy Peebles-Power calls him the “clear protagonist” of the film (153). If we accept this view, then Witt’s “serene Emersonian idealis[m]” (Smith) can be explained as a character trait that may or may not align with the inclinations of the filmmaker—perhaps a misapprehension of the world, a delusional fantasy that sustains an empathetic and naive man, but not the overarching concern of the film. Or, as his name suggests, he could be the conscience and consciousness of the film:15 a way of knowing what lies outside the individual consciousness, that which his worldly antithesis Welsh calls “the moving box.” Witt certainly enjoys a “privileged” perspective, and there are several indications that the film’s apparent procession from naivety to knowledge also operates independently from Witt--that The Thin Red Line “throws its weight behind his search” (Plantinga 97) for transcendence from postlapsarian isolation and loneliness, an otherworldly release from the box. The film enacts the confinement of the “box” and deploys Witt as a cathartic counterpoint and an explicatory guide to its spectacular exhibits of innocence lost. 15 See “Wit” in the Oxford English Dictionary as “The seat of consciousness or thought, the mind.” 98 Long before Welsh describes “your” confinement in a “moving box,” viewers are made to share the confinement and isolation that this box engenders. After the spectator’s initial immersion in paradise, and the attendant prelapsarian contentment that Malick transmits via Witt, this spectator is thrust, along with Witt, into the dark hold of a transport ship, where Welsh’s assertion that “there ain’t no world but this one” seems to hold sway. The perimeters of the moving box are starkly drawn by this cloistered, dark shot, where any kind of world outside of these characters is visually indiscernible. Still, Witt tells Welsh “I seen another world. Sometimes I think it was my imagination.” The film proceeds as a negotiation of these worlds— an irregular vacillation between images of confinement and intimations of release that cultivates the sympathy of the spectator to Witt’s vision of another world. Where Spielberg relies on battle sequences to generate the discomfort that he subsequently ameliorates with optic stability and moral validation, Malick’s primary vehicles of discomfort are images that impose the confinement of his characters on the spectator and elicit sympathetic responses to their suffering. This discomfort is intermittently relieved by capacious shots of the landscape and images of Witt’s other world, along with his compassion and composure. In other words, Malick adjusts the scope of the spectator’s moving box to offer or withhold access to a world beyond the box. This dynamic is suggested in early shots of men staring out portholes followed by a fleeting and seemingly inscrutable shot of a raging soldier, confined with his compatriots in the living quarters of the Guadalcanal-bound ship, screaming “Open this door!” repeatedly as he slams his hands against it. This shot is especially unnerving in its brevity, intensity, and inscrutability. The spectator does not know what precipitated this tirade or why the door is locked, only that this character wants to get out. This tension between confinement and release continues as the soldiers disembark and make their way towards the 99 Japanese position on Hill 210. The soldiers, with few exceptions, are shown hemmed in by grass, trees, rock, soil, bunkers, transmitting a continuing sense of confinement to the spectator. As Michel Chion notes, Malick’s camera frequently adopts vantages that “emphasize that every person is alone in their own skin, their hopes, their fear and their position” (33). Soldiers display agitation, anxiety, and fear as they wait for the enemy to appear, and Malick transmits these emotions via contagion response, in much the same way that he has inducted the spectator into Witt’s paradise. Particularly salient examples of such contagion are the shots of McCron, who has apparently succumbed to acute PTSD and is now completely enclosed in a world that no longer corresponds with the people and objects outside his moving box. In accord with this closed world and its horrors, the camera intermittently closes in and dwells on McCron’s face as he wordlessly displays expressions that seem to indicate determination, anxiety, confusion and rage with no specific context or sequential coherency. When these isolated and anxious Americans finally do battle (explosions and gunfire do not start until nearly 45 minutes into the film) the more generic discomforts of the war film compound the sense of confinement. When the shooting starts, we see more low camera angles of explosions and blood spatters that occur right at the lens of the camera. The unpleasant proximity and violence of these shots create a visceral yearning for a more comfortable point-of- view, of which viewers get mere hints: a shot of the sky as seen from a prostrate soldier, a beam of light piercing the vegetation--until Witt returns, shot from below, his sympathetic face set within a capacious sky. Scenes of visceral discomfort are subsequently punctuated by the appearance of Witt, who is often seen against the sky, or in clear blue water, bearing sympathetic witness to the travails of the other “moving boxes.” His intermittent appearances throughout the 100 film have a twofold function: he introduces visceral relief and offers an interpretive guide for Malick’s otherwise cryptic exhibits. These exhibits are often clustered together, like inverted Whitmanian catalogues of human pathos. As the Americans take the bunker near the top of the hill and overrun the Japanese camp beyond, Malick presents the Japanese prisoners and combatants in various emotional states and physical dispositions, at times simultaneously framing disparate acts like meditation and assault, laughter and crying, lethargy and panic. Again, audiences are drawn to identify with these reactions, and the disjunction between simultaneous and incongruous depictions provokes an unpleasant dissonance in the spectator, who wishes for respite. As shots cycle arbitrarily through acts of kindness, cruelty, compassion, madness, sadism and heroism, thus according them equal status as essential human propensities, a voiceover poses the question “Who’s Killing Us?” Malick tacitly posits an answer to this question in his juxtapositions of American and Japanese death and suffering. For example, a naked and wary Japanese man clutches himself, followed immediately by a shot of a uniformed and armed American (Fife) whose eyes dart fearfully and erratically, as figuratively “exposed” as the Japanese man. Everyone is alone, bound only by suffering and contention. As Chion puts it, these are “examples of humanity, each one a mirror for the solitude of the American soldiers” (28). This conspicuous juxtaposition of Japanese and American suffering tacitly answers the question of culpability. The “Us” in this context implies “people” and the “who” does the same, thus “people are killing people” or “we are killing us.” This resonates with the film’s initial suggestion that nature “must contend with itself.” By redirecting specific, ideologically motivated conflict to the realm of brutish natural propensities, or some transcendent human nature, Malick’s film sublimates the particularities of American warfare to “us,” the greater 101 human “family.” Malick diminishes the factionalism of battle in favor of the universality of a flawed human family, doomed to contend with itself. These “examples of humanity” are again framed by Witt, who appears against the sky, looking down at what appears to be a Japanese face in the ground. A voiceover associated with this face seems to address Witt, who listens raptly as it bemoans the inevitable suffering of even those who are “righteous” and “loved by all.” Malick then ameliorates the aggregate suffering of the previous scenes by cutting abruptly to a shot of Witt, countenance as serene as ever, at the edge of a river. As he pours water from his canteen onto a leaf, he recalls bathing in a waterfall among singing natives. This is one of the most inviting scenes of the film, bathed in cool blues and lush greens, featuring cascading water, beaming faces and the choral song of the natives, a striking tableau of a state that could be a memory or a dream, and it provides the spectator with a welcome window into that other world, still viable, that has been and continues to be associated with Witt. Malick provides another survey of confinement and loneliness as he returns to post-battle scenes with an omniscient, shifting gaze that presents a sequence of “exhibits” that heighten the pathos evoked by the scenes in the Japanese bunker and encampment. The spectator shares the anguish of Private Dale shaking, weeping, and clutching himself, as he regards the collection of teeth he has pulled from the mouths of Japanese prisoners. Spectators are sickened along with Private Bell as the intermittent scenes of his beloved wife at home in the sunshine, the two of them tangled together, give way to a guilt-ridden epistolary confession that she has met another man, coupled with scenes of her troubled face beneath a gray sky. Private Storm complains to Welsh that he is “numb, can’t feel nothin’ no more,” a condition Welsh attributes to his prior inexperience with war. Colonel Tall, whose motives thus far have been narrowly and coldly focused on the taking of Hill 210 without regard for casualties, regards a toe-tagged corpse with 102 tears in his eyes. The Japanese are absent now and the focus has become American loneliness and pain. In particular, Dale’s outburst of emotion cultivates a sympathy that threatens to supersede the fact of his heinous treatment of Japanese prisoners. After this sequence of lost innocence exhibits, the crocodile returns, evoking the initial shot of the film. Abstracted from the water and fully exposed, the croc parallels the full exposure of the island society that was initially depicted as harmonious and idyllic. The revelation of the croc heralds Witt’s realization that there is more to the native island society than work, play, and rest. He watches the villagers argue and notices a hut full of foreboding skulls. His profound sadness contrasts with the emotionless, fully exposed croc, subdued, potentially deadly, but inert: a dumbly innocent but potentially savage thing that has always lurked beneath the water’s surface. Only after the return of the crocodile do we see the villagers run at Witt’s approach, inverting an early scene in which they welcome him, and we are privy to Witt’s gaze as it reveals social discord and disease (conflated as natural phenomena) and his wistful prognosis that “We were a family once” as he recalls images of a unity that he thought the village represented. Shortly after he has lost his men, and his mind, a stationary McCron is shown squatting with his rifle, repeatedly declaring “I’m movin! I’m movin!” A nearby soldier gently disarms him, but his hands remain as if he were holding the rifle. This disposition is emblematic of that of the spectator, who remains stationary and passive as the camera gives the illusion of movement. As in Saving Private Ryan, a sacrifice precipitates the viewer’s retreat into what Kolker calls the “stasis” of the frame (118). After leading a Japanese squad away from other Americans, Witt is surrounded by the Japanese. His face bears the same expression it did when he bemoaned the fracture of “the family.” He raises his rifle and, with a conspicuous cut to a low-angle view of Witt from the side beneath sunbeams, is shot. In the apotheosis of all the hints 103 of release that appear intermittently throughout the film, the scene cuts to Witt swimming with native children. The low angle suggests his ascent from the moving box—a return to the paradise from which he emerged. Witt frees himself and the spectator from the confines of the box with a reprise of paradise: Witt, smiling and swimming amid children in cool blue water. Witt ends the cycle of agony and reprieve by sacrificing his life for the company, providing the “redemptive event” that Kolker ascribes to “American cinema in general” (324). It functions in much the same way that Captain Miller’s death does in Saving Private Ryan: it hails the American spectator as a sentimental consumer of proxy sacrifice that deters further intellectual or emotional investment. As Welsh kneels at Witt’s grave, it appears that Welsh’s worldview has prevailed, that the “spark” has died with Witt. Yet, Witt continues to guide the spectator via his image and voice to the conclusion of the film in which his voice is heard affirming “all things shining,” thereby enacting the “flame in us” that Bell, in one of his voiceovers, says “no war can put out.” The prospect of this regenerated “spark” counters the tragic experience of the film by offering an iteration of American myth that creates imaginative space for the recapitulation of innocence. This imaginative trajectory from innocence lost to innocence restored corresponds with the movement of the spectator who has entered a dark and delimited space, gazed only through the aperture of Malick’s moving box for the better part of three hours, and, as the theater’s lights come up, exits into unbounded space with the affirmation that WWII, much like any other conflict, was simply a crucible in which inevitable contentions were negotiated and immutable human propensities affirmed. The American tourist of history comes away from both Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line with the illusion that they have “experienced” something, but they have merely participated in what Guy Debord calls the “omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in 104 the sphere of production” (sec. 6). Despite their apparent differences, both films perpetuate a “prevailing model of social life” (Debord, sec. 6) that revolves around consumption of images as lived experience. The competition of both films for Best Picture echoes in significant ways the 1979 Academy Awards, a “competition” for discursive supremacy between versions of American innocence in the wake of Vietnam. The Deerhunter and Coming Home, described respectively as a “sermon” and a “parable,” demonstrated two facets of the innocent stance of the American subject that appear contradictory but function together in the perpetuation of acquiescence: a narrow fixation on specific historical details and graphic images that establish the reluctant but necessary violence of the American military and the privileging of universalizing myth over historical context. As in The Deerhunter and Coming Home, the choice here is between a narrowly parochial conception of history or a problematically global condemnation of war in general. Each film hails the American subject in Sturken’s terms: as a tourist who consumes the spectacle and the ideologies made invisible by it. The tokens that the tourist leaves the exhibit with are maudlin resignation at man’s inhumanity to man and the tragic inevitability of war, or, in the case of Saving Private Ryan, an imperative to “earn” the sacrifice that has been depicted, an imperative that has already been at least partially fulfilled by attending the film. In either case, the American subject construed by these films remains safely distant from the greater implications of American warfare. 105 Strangers in a Homeland: Veterans and “Innocensus” in The Yellow Birds and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk A now-familiar post-9/11 discourse of “America” has revived and reinvented the concept of “homeland.” This term, once used to describe the British Empire and its colonies, and apartheid- era South Africa, has now come to refer to space within U.S. borders. The “Homeland” as an American discursive paradigm came into being on 20 September 2001, when President George W. Bush announced the establishment of an Office of Homeland Security in a televised speech before a joint session of Congress. “Homeland Security” became the central policy concern of the Bush administration. As it did in its previous uses, “homeland” connotes images and suggests affinities that subordinate geographic space to mythical construct. The Homeland (a definite article is almost invariably used in the American context) evokes both a sober reverence for a domestic space and an anxious desire to garrison this space against a multilateral and borderless enemy (the “terrorists”). It also expresses a troubling paradox central to consensus for ongoing American military aggression abroad. This paradox has much to do with a recurring affirmation of innocence in American culture, a myth predicated on ahistorical and parochial interpretations of geopolitical realities that cast the U.S. as a reluctant but resolute participant in wars that it initiates. This myth is manifest in yet another valence of the term “homeland.” Although it had been used by numerous and varied immigrant constituents of the U.S. to refer to sundry origins abroad, the term came to refer to a monolithic national entity, described by Bush in his address to the nation on 20 September 2001 as “less innocent” than it had been and “awakened to danger and called to defend freedom” from “evil” foreign enemies. A tidy narrative emerged in which “our” soldiers were compelled to defend the Homeland from “their” aggression and Americans could take comfort that those who had violated the innocence of the U.S. would not go unpunished. 106 In a significant symbolic sense, “Ground Zero,” the rhetorical expression of the World Trade Center attacks, can be seen as the birth site of the “Homeland.” As Kaplan writes, Ground Zero “entails the return of the repressed as something at once threatening, external, and unrecognizable, yet strangely familiar and inseparable from our own pasts” (“Homeland Insecurities” 84). This strange familiarity lies in its visual and symbolic evocation of the burnt cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the original referent of “Ground Zero,” as well as the villages destroyed by Americans in Vietnam, the genocidal carnage of the “Indian Wars” in the nineteenth-century American west, and the decimated South of the American Civil War. All of this historic violence was necessarily repressed in the assertion of the American Ground Zero as a site of “lost innocence.” Ground Zero offers a pointed and fraught forgetfulness, as its contemporary usage both draws from and denies the original. Ground Zero both “express[es] the unprecedented nature of recent terrorist attacks” while containing “the echoes of earlier forms of terror perpetuated by the United States, which locates Americans within world history, rather than as an exception to it” (Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities” 84). Just as what Jonathan Gray calls “an ideological fantasy of postbellum reconciliation” (5) recast the Civil War as a disagreement about the role of government rather than a conflict born of slavery, Ground Zero was refashioned to foster consensus for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by connoting a fantasy in which the use of the atomic bomb against innocent civilians in Japan was transmogrified into the hallowed gravesite of innocent civilians in the United States. The Homeland narrative, as a progeny of Ground Zero, attempts to circumscribe the uncanny resonances that its progenitor expresses. Despite the reductive work of the Homeland narrative, the paradox implicit in assertions of American innocence has occasionally surfaced in political rhetoric. The U.S. war in Iraq 107 bears some similarities to that of Vietnam, but the Homeland narrative, with its implication of starting anew in a world that will never be the same, does not easily accommodate such comparisons. It became important early on in the war for the Bush administration to deny comparisons to Vietnam, to estrange the U.S from its own history. Senator Edward Kennedy’s 2004 characterization of Iraq as “Bush’s Vietnam” drew a strong rebuke from the White House, which called the comparison “bizarre” (qtd. in Wright). Yet, as the material and human costs of the Iraq war mounted, Bush began to invoke Vietnam, in particular citing the “price paid by millions of innocent citizens” for the withdrawal of U.S. troops (qtd. in Fletcher). This vacillation between denial and appropriation of historical violence in the service of “Homeland defense” in Iraq reveals the ambivalence Kaplan associates with the violence that is “inseparable from our own past.” The rote adulation of combat veterans (in everything from bumper stickers and yellow ribbons to civic ceremonies and personal expressions of gratitude) by many American civilians, to whom the war is often a remote (but presumably necessary) enterprise, can be seen as a means of symbolically resolving the tension between estrangement and familiarity endemic to the Homeland. As Americans make prescriptive gestures towards their military, they validate their membership in the Homeland without acknowledging their complicity in past and present brutal and racially inflected violence that this identification entails. Veterans, in turn, are compelled by these gestures to bear the full burden of this violence by stifling any moral ambiguity and guilt they may feel about combat. As Iraq veteran Rory Fanning has remarked, “Most veterans who have seen combat . . . feel anything but heroic.” Yet, the term “hero” is widely applied to veterans, interpellating them in a way that encourages at least a tacit acceptance of the platitudes that so often accompany it. 108 This repression reflects a profound estrangement between veterans and the society for which they have ostensibly fought, and it perpetuates the projection of this domestic estrangement onto foreign sources. The violation of domestic space, of “home,” that occurred on 9/11, resulted in the construction of the Homeland in its stead, which suggests a metaphoric exile of the American that requires an ongoing attrition of other “homelands,” such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The guarantor of success in these open-ended campaigns of attrition is the history of demonstrably brutal campaigns the U.S. has undertaken in the past, both on its own soil and in other nations. The unspoken realities of violence that combat veterans represent, even as their compatriots shower them with unqualified praise, can be seen as a reflection of this unspoken history of U.S. violence that mutely assures its citizens that this attrition is possible--as an assurance of a mighty American response to the amorphous “terrorists.” As Pease has suggested, “Operation Infinite Justice and Operation Iraqi Freedom invited their audiences to take scopic pleasure in the return of memories of the unprovoked aggression that the colonial settlers had previously exerted against native populations” (75). In other words, Americans take comfort, subconsciously, in past success at “frontier conquest” as a bellwether for future success at “homeland defense.” Indeed, “homeland defense” is the rhetorical realization of this logic, casting the elective and offensive military campaign of the U.S. in Iraq as necessary and defensive. While the “pleasure” Pease attributes to American audiences may be an overstatement, there is certainly a public fascination with a perennial American capacity for aggression. This fascination exists in tension with the more complex vantage of those who, as participants in U.S.-sponsored violence, have no “scopic” remove from it. The disparity between collective will and individual experience, collective denial and individual responsibility, is a complicated rift that is unduly simplified by the narrative of the 109 Homeland. Invocations of “The Homeland” and its “defense” reduce complex geopolitics and history to a situation in which the U.S. is under constant and unprovoked attack. While those that died on 9/11 were not themselves culpable of any particular offenses, the innocence that the Homeland narrative ascribes to the nation is a patently incredible claim. The U.S. had been influencing and manipulating affairs in the Middle East for years, and, as intelligence documents have subsequently demonstrated, the government had extensive knowledge of major terrorist threats that such involvement has fostered, including that of Osama bin Laden. The narrative of the Homeland privileges the sensationalism and pathos of the 9/11 attacks over the historical complexity that predicated them, taking on the functions that Roland Barthes has ascribed to myth, in that “it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact” (143). A wave of American literature on Iraq War homecomings shortly after the Iraq War had officially ended reflects a significant complication to the narrative of the Homeland by staging confrontations between an American public conditioned by a myth of innocence and what Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn calls “the war made flesh” (39)--the physical presence of the combat veteran amidst a populace that maintains its innocence by ritualistically deflecting its complicity in the violence it has authorized. Among these, Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (2012) offer particularly insightful depictions of these confrontations and the ways in which they reveal innocence as an instrument of consensus. Lynn, on furlough from Iraq for a “Victory Tour,” encounters the prescriptive gestures of an ostensibly welcoming but ultimately aloof public. The scripted interactions between Lynn and this public reveal the acute disjunctions between mythic consensus and those who are made to 110 act on it. Powers’ John Bartle loses his innocence in combat only to return to a populace that maintains its own by treating him as a necessary abjection of the war state. Unable to reintegrate into society because of trauma suffered in Iraq, Bartle is ultimately, and ironically, removed from society, arrested for a lack of decorum in disposing of a friend’s corpse in Iraq. These novels offer compelling anatomies of what I call “innocensus,” the symbiotic relationship between the recurrent myth of American innocence and perennial consensus for military aggression. Their depictions of the combat veteran’s internal and external responses to their societies offer potent counter-narratives to the innocence culture of the Homeland. Rituals of Innocence in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Fountain dramatizes the enactment of rituals that validate innocence in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by focalising public reactions to combat veterans through the titular character, who has returned from Iraq with his platoon to be honoured in various locales and venues by a grateful but naïve public. The novel opens with the final stop of Bravo Company’s so-called “Victory Tour”: a Thanksgiving Day football game at Texas Stadium, which serves as Fountain’s microcosm of The Homeland. Home of the Dallas Cowboys, aka “America’s Team,” the stadium has been “imbued” with “mystery and romance” (10) by television and contains “dollops of state and national pride” (10). This “sheltering womb of all things American” (21) encloses “all shapes, ages, sizes, colors, and income indicators” (22), and Billy uneasily notes “a backdoor link between the stadium and his family” (11). Once inside, Billy becomes acutely aware of his relation to the “three hundred million well-wishing fellow citizens” (21). Billy comes to imagine them as “his” people, and “Oh, my people” becomes a doleful refrain in the novel, usually coupled with Lynn’s wistful observations about them. Despite the praise and 111 adulation offered to the members of Bravo Company at every turn by “his” people, Billy’s affinity is only superficially reciprocated. Instead of being included by them as a participant in dialogues about the war, Billy serves as a sort of talisman in a ritual that validates “their” innocence. John Shelton Lawrence has noted the heightened importance of “rituals of national innocence” after 9/11, and he asserts that such rituals have been instrumental in generating consensus for the open-ended anti-terror excursions and pre-emptive wars carried out in the name of “Homeland defense” (35). His analysis of such rituals focuses on commemorative ceremonies and other large-scale public events, but his notion of “public ritual” also aptly describes the kinds of prosaic and repetitive exchanges between civilian and soldier depicted in Fountain’s novel. As Rachel Tsang points out, ritual, defined as “expressive behavior” that is “stylized and patterned” (3), takes place on a number of social levels and varies in form from the “highly stylized and tightly regulated” behaviours of public ceremony to the “more spontaneous” nature of “everyday mundane activities” (3-4). While rituals always express a system of meaning, these meanings may be expressed “more, or less, consciously,” with those on the mundane end of the spectrum being less conscious expressions (4). The “[e]xpressions of sentiment” that Lawrence argues drive commemoration by a public eager to be included, but reluctant to accept responsibility (35), are enacted on a smaller scale in the unqualified praise, effusive thanks, and ingratiating commentary about the war that occurs at every turn in Texas Stadium. Such expressions fulfill a symbolic need for the purveyors of sentiment even as they further estrange Lynn from “his” people. Indeed, Lynn comes to recognize that the “abyss [that] separates the war over here from the war over there” (197) is present in every interaction he has with them. Lynn is consistently amazed by the “frenzied speech patterns” and “gibberish” that 112 “[spill] from the mouths of seemingly well-adjusted citizens” (37), and he reflects the privilege of “the act of speaking” over the substance of the speech in his privileging of verbs over objects in his recollections of these exchanges: “We appreciate . . . We cherish and bless. We pray, hope, honor-respect-love-and-revere” (37). Lynn is also aware that his role in the ritual necessitates certain conventions, although he adopts them “more or less by instinct” as “way[s] of being” that are enacted “without having to think about it too much” (37). His reflexive reception and reflection of the sentiments offered implicate him in a ritual of commiseration that demands particular responses. As people approach to enact the ritual, he “rises and assumes the stance . . . back straight, weight balanced center-mass” and dons a “reserved yet courteous expression.” He lets his eyes “seem a little tired” as he “say[s] a few words” and “smile[s] occasionally” (37). These rote words and gestures validate the sentiments offered, although Lynn can hardly be said to have “participated.” Instead, he serves as a totemic object in a ritual that confers or confirms nominal membership in a national group while insulating the initiate from the responsibilities of membership. Fountain often uses spatial prosody and phonetic emphasis to illustrate the ritualistic nature of these exchanges. Words such as “terrRr,” “Eye-rack,” “nina leven,” “freedoms,” “double y’im dees,” and “dih-mock-cruh-see” (words that, among other functions, succinctly denote the various rationales for war offered by the Bush administration for the Iraq War) are stretched out across entire pages in spatial arrangements that create rhythms and aesthetic patterns while removing these words from any context that could explain them or betray their complexity. Fountain further isolates these signifiers from their referents by breaking the words down into sound components that seem to comfort the speakers as they are rhythmically repeated. The aurality and repetition of phonemes like “nina leven” and “terrRr” seem to act as 113 an incantation meant to elicit the “instinctive” responses that Lynn admits to himself are “a furnished way of being” (37). The more conscious Lynn is of these responses the more difficult they are to produce, but his occasionally lackluster and sometimes ambivalent responses to these incantations do not seem to dampen the fervor of those who offer them, and he ultimately finds these encounters “weird and frightening” (38). Lynn hypothesizes that he serves as the “contact point” for a “mystical transference” in which “[h]is ordeal becomes theirs” (39), and, as they imagine it, “vice versa” (39). Yet, Lynn’s participation in the ritual is rigidly circumscribed, and he dutifully “cough[s] up nonsequential mumblings” of affirmation as a “stranger” in his head “whisper[s] the truer words that [he] couldn’t speak” (40). Just as such rituals mute the response of this “stranger” who bespeaks the gruesome realities and existential immediacy of combat, they mute the responsibility of the citizen who has authorized it. While Lynn’s exchanges with “his” people constitute rituals that are much smaller in scale than a public vigil at Ground Zero, or a national moment of silence, these exchanges occur at a far higher frequency, and function in essentially the same way: to include participants in a national community and to exonerate them from acts of violence committed on behalf of this community. Lawrence frames this twofold function as a “transfusion of innocence” in which “[t]hose who die or suffer on behalf of the nation” are used as “proxies for the innocence of the nation” (37). This innocence-by-proxy relies on the disavowal of knowledge that does not conform to Homeland narratives of justified retribution. Although Lynn suspects that “Americans secretly know better,” he recognizes that “something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity” (11). This theatrical notion of national innocence finds a collective expression in the spectacle of the halftime show, in which the dearth 114 of dialogue that characterizes the smaller-scale innocence rituals is writ large. The sentimental utterances and the stoic acceptances of personal encounters between soldier and citizen are subsumed by a spectacular multimedia event that renders both parties passive consumers of a self-affirming spectacle. As Lynn puts it, the show is “Toy soldiers and sexytime all mashed together into one big inspirational stew” (234), and “[s]hort of blood sacrifice” could not be a more effective rouser of uncritical passion. Fountain’s halftime entertainment extravaganza resonates with Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” a cultural paradigm in which representation takes on the appearance of reality and creates conditions that invite passivity by presenting consumption of the spectacle as the only option. The halftime show, like Debord’s spectacle, appears to unite disparate elements: sex, pop music, religion, sports, patriotism, and offers a unitary image of lived existence in this melange that supplants actual experience with the consumption of its simulacrum. As Debord writes, the spectacle is “not a collection of images, but a social relationship” (5) that “unite[s] what is separate, but…unites it only in its separateness” (10). Although it masquerades as collective activity, this commodification of experience ultimately produces profound alienation. Lynn, literally at the centre of the spectacle, “is cold where the warmest parts of him should be” as he regards the spectators, and wonders if the cheering masses even “know what they know” (235). The architect of this spuriously unifying spectacle is the owner of “America’s Team,” Norm Ogleby, who represents the convergence of commercial interests and government in this Homeland. If Texas Stadium is Fountain’s homeland in miniature, Ogleby can be seen as its head of state, a figure of ambiguously republican and monarchical power. Lynn reflects that “a real king is rare these days,” but Texas Stadium is Ogleby’s “turf, his castle . . . his actual kingdom” and a place where he “reigns supreme” (188). Nevertheless, he must rely on the consensual properties 115 of a republic to fill his stadium with “subjects.” Norm wields official executive powers, but he also uses the unofficial power of the “bully pulpit” to cultivate public pliability to his will. He uses such power to synthesize various facets of culture in a bid to persuade the masses. He invokes the army (“he calls Bravo to him” [184]), evangelical Christianity (he “calls on Pastor Dan” [185]), and “calls on” the people of Texas Stadium to give due reverence to both as they consume the spectacular entertainment of the halftime show. Norm Ogleby illustrates an important dimension to the relationship between innocence and consensus in the novel that further complicates the notion of a well-intentioned public engaging in ritual adulation of veterans and the passivity fostered by self-affirming spectacle. Ogleby embodies the manipulation of this intent and these rituals at the nexus of political power and commercial interests. Lynn observes that Ogleby is “as polished a public speaker as any of the politicians Bravo has encountered,” having “mastered the wounded, vaguely petulant tone that is the style of political speech these days” (131), a tone he effects to draw in a demographic that Lynn describes as “children blessed with too much self-esteem” (45). Ogleby employs such speech to market his “product-intensive sport” as a “civic necessity” (183) to “infants” who “must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die” (46). Ogleby’s recursive marketing of products constitutes a self-referential and self- perpetuating economy in which platitudes, image, and material become functionally equivalent and reciprocally influential products to the consumer, each one promoting the other. Indeed, Billy jokingly remarks that they “only exist in Norm Ogleby’s mind” (128), a mind that conceives of combat veterans as marketable commodities and a vehicle by which Fountain can implicate the manipulation of various cultural forces that shape American opinion. Bravo Company provides a particularly useful way for Ogleby to do so. While he parades the unit 116 about the stadium with the measure of praise and deference for “war heroes” that the public has come to expect, he unabashedly imposes his will on individual members of Bravo in the “bowels” of the Stadium, where he aggressively negotiates for control of a proposed film about the battle of Al-Anskar Canal. Ogleby’s reluctance to assume the financial risk of the prospective movie about Bravo Company mirrors the public’s reluctance to assume personal risk for collective ideals, but it also reflects the distinct and privileged position of a Homeland oligarchy as shaper of public opinion. Ogleby, a “genius for turning serious bucks” (108), offers an entertainment extravaganza along with rhetoric of support for the military, effectively combining both into a single product for public consumption (131). Even as Ogleby peddles this aggregate of ideology and commodity to the masses, he must also sell it to the reluctant soldiers in Bravo Company, who are themselves commodities that he can market repeatedly and spectacularly, commodities that drive consumption of his “hard” products: football and its attendant paraphernalia. While the rituals as enacted by the public function to include and exonerate it, they contribute to a different and distinct benefit for Ogleby--profit generated by the commodification of patriotism and its integration with other products. This commodification, like the commiserative and exonerative functions of the ritual, relies on a simultaneous identification with and separation from the commodity. The operations of such rituals evoke one of the primary rhetorical devices by which the Homeland security state has procured consensus for its wars--ensuring the imagined innocence of its civilian populace by separating its citizens from its enforcers. “Americans are praying with you,” President Bush assured the military in 2003, tacitly assuring those within the borders of the Homeland that they would remain unsullied by the aggression carried out in their name. Christina Knopf has aptly anatomized the conspicuous contrast between the use of collective 117 pronouns by Roosevelt and Johnson to foster consensus during World War II and Vietnam and President Bush’s separation of the military from the larger body of citizens: The prayers of Bush’s Americans are “for the safety of your loved ones and for the protection of the innocent” (ctd. in Knopf 183). This statement, emblematic of a consistent pattern, both captures the rhetorical othering of the American soldier and implies inclusion of the stateside American populace in its conspicuously vague allusion to “protection of the innocent.” While this kind of rhetorical maneuver reflects the public’s willful distance from the business of war, the “mystical transference” of the combat veteran ritual confers inclusion without violating this distance. This enables one of Fountain’s Americans to proclaim in all earnestness that “we don’t attack unless we’re attacked first” (202; emphasis added), thus actuating what Billy Lynn recognizes as “a superseding reality that trumps even the experiential truths of a grunt on the ground” (243). The gap between these realities is provisionally reconciled for the citizen in the ritual, but only because the soldier has already been rhetorically separated from him. Ultimately, this estrangement of soldier and civilian is reciprocal, as Lynn’s “people” become other for him as well--”they are the ones in charge,” he concludes, “these saps, these innocents” (306; emphasis added). By the time he returns to Iraq, Lynn has been convinced that “[t]heir homeland dream is the dominant force” (306). The Yellow Birds and the Homeland Dream Private Bartle, of Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, demonstrates a similar resistance to the “homeland dream” in the interactions he has (and more frequently, avoids) with “his people” in The Yellow Birds. While Lynn must ultimately return to Iraq, the homecoming of Bartle is ostensibly permanent, and his reckoning with “the homeland dream” ongoing. Bartle’s 118 “experiential truths” and the “homeland dream” are put at odds immediately after his return to the U.S., as illustrated by an exchange between Bartle and an airport bartender, whose apparent empathy quickly degenerates into bigotry and jingoism. “‘I just hate that y’all have to be over there,’” he laments before advocating a nuclear attack on “sand niggers,” flaunting the yellow ribbon above his bar, and offering free drinks (104). Bartle resists this attempted enactment of ritual and the validation of the spurious but “superseding reality” that it represents. He does not return the man’s solicitous smile, and he insists on paying for his drinks. As Bartle explains, “I didn’t want to smile and say thanks. Didn’t want to pretend I’d done anything but survive” (106). Once on the plane bound for Virginia, he is heralded by the pilot as “an American hero,” but in this instance Bartle has no way to respond directly, as a spatial distance and a locked cockpit door literally separate him from the speaker. An already weary Bartle is compelled by this distance to submit to the ritual. “Fuck it,” he thinks, and accepts the free drinks subsequently brought to him (106). While Billy Lynn reluctantly defers to the rituals of “his” people, Bartle avoids people at home entirely, realizing that his ability to resist such rituals is limited and fearing the further estrangement they engender. A more enduring resistance is embedded in the structure of the novel, which demands a degree of hermeneutic participation from readers that denies them a comfortable remove from narrated events. The temporality of this structure, in which Powers juxtaposes Bartle’s chaotic tour in Iraq with his disaffected homecoming in a momentous trajectory towards the defining events of his tour in Iraq (the death of his friend, Murph, and Bartle’s murder of an innocent Iraqi man), creates a preoccupation with guilt and innocence at the level of reception that resonates with that of the narrator. Bartle’s recollections of his enlistment, his tour in Iraq, and his homecoming occur, first, in a self-imposed exile on the outskirts of Richmond, and then in a 119 military prison (218), where he spends his time trying to make meaning out of the events that have precipitated his imprisonment. Powers implicates readers in this meaning-making by having Bartle reveal at the onset of his account that his brother-in-arms, Daniel Murphy, has been killed, and that Bartle feels somehow complicit in his death. As a result, readers become invested in Bartle’s struggle to reconcile his “misguided archeology” (138) of events with his “obligation to remember him [Murph] correctly” (61). This obligation is of paramount importance to Bartle because “all remembrances are assignations of significance” (61). Indeed, readers are called upon to assign significances to Bartle’s memories due to Bartle’s admittedly unreliable sense of reconstructing the past. The fragmented account that readers must navigate mirrors the workings of Bartle’s memory, which imposes his knowledge of outcomes on his impressions from the past. These impressions bear the imprints of his experience. Bartle’s initial description of Murph is a recollection of him months before his death, but it contains suggestions of Murph’s corpse later in the text. As they ready themselves for action, Bartle notes that Murph’s eyes “had fallen farther into his sockets” and looked like “two small shadows, two empty holes” (7). Later, as he recalls wandering through Kaiserlauden, Germany on his way back to the States, Bartle remembers Murph’s eyes as “just cups now for the water he floated in” (61), and, in his ultimate description of Murph’s corpse, his eyes are “hollow sockets” (206). Bartle combs his memory for “a hint of what was coming,” for a “shadow,” a way he “could have known” Murph would be killed (25), while his language casts just such a “shadow” over Murph for readers. As a result, readers experience Murph as “half a ghost” (26) before they ever “see” his corpse. This eerie effect comes to fruition in a stark image that complicates the reader’s endowment of meaning. Readers of The Yellow Birds are “haunted” by the guarantee of 120 Murph’s bloody demise, which remains only vaguely outlined and occasionally referred to until Bartle’s revelations late in the novel. The consequences of this death are always at the fore and the awful details of what precipitated these consequences are ahead. Yet, the force that compels readers forward is less to discover what happens and more to “see” the result and ascertain its significance in light of Bartle’s overwhelming sense of guilt. What they eventually see is a gruesome image of Murph’s mutilated body: He was broken and bruised and cut and…his eyes were gouged out, the two hollow sockets looking like red angry passages to his mind. His throat had been cut nearly through, his head hung limply and lolled from side to side, attached only by the barely intact vertebrae . . . His ears were cut off . . . His nose was cut off, too. He had been imprecisely castrated. (206) The “ghost” has now been “embodied” for readers, in what Kristeva has called the “most sickening of wastes, the corpse, what must be thrust aside in order to live” (3). Kristeva’s conception of the abject positions it as something outside the symbolic order that unsettles the delineations this order has produced. The Homeland, as the officially sanctioned symbolic order of post-9/11 America, thrusts aside that which does not sustain its delineations between foreign and domestic, innocent and guilty. Powers demonstrates this abjection on two levels: formally, the novel enacts a sustained sense of the uncanny punctuated by an unflinching image of that which is denied by the symbolic order, indeed, a symbol of that which government policy has literally denied the American public. On the diegetic level, Bartle’s account can be read as the 121 abjection of a combat veteran whose sense of culpability is a threat to the Homeland narrative’s insistence on innocence. Bartle’s retrospective search for signs that Murph was going to die contradicts and supersedes another aim of his retrospection, to find “one thing he would not be guilty of” (155). Instead of finding such a reprieve, he homes in on moments that validate his guilt and identifies the precise moment in which he would never be innocent again. Although Bartle could not have anticipated the degree of estrangement he would feel upon his return to the States, he pinpoints his alienation, tracing it to his first definitive kill in a firefight near Al Tafar. “In that moment,” explains Bartle, “I disowned the waters of my youth . . . [they] all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my own home” (125). Notably, Bartle endows Murph with “an opacity [he] couldn’t penetrate” after this critical moment. In Bartle’s mind, they have become estranged by their mutually exclusive dispositions, one unredeemably guilty and the other perpetually innocent. This moment heralds the work that Bartle’s narrative has already been doing. He has created a psychic double in his memory of Murph. By the time he relates the firefight near Al Tafar, Bartle has already depicted an unusually close affinity between himself and Murph, describing him in many instances as an extension of himself. He recalls how “Murph’s breath was a steady comfort”; how they often “leaned against each other until the weight of [their] bodies found their balance (16); and how they “looked at each other as if into a dim mirror” (79). Through the reconstructive lens of memory, Murph has come to represent a condition no longer available to Bartle. Bartle has been describing Murph in cherubic terms since the beginning of the novel, making much of their three-year age difference, describing him in some cases as prepubescent, and frequently remarking on his “naivete and boyishness” (79). Murph endures in Bartle’s 122 consciousness as a ghost whose innocence is perpetually enshrined by his death, one that Bartle can measure against his shame and guilt. This doubling inverts the customary alterity of the doppelganger in fiction: although he is the ghost, Murph is not the repressed “Other” that signifies the return of an estranged threat to a cohesive identity. The doppelganger is Bartle himself, and his return to the Homeland not only creates a self-othering psychic fracture, but it conveys a threat to the cohesion of the Homeland narrative. While “to say what happened” is always a fraught enterprise for Bartle, a temporal-spatial trajectory becomes clear as the novel unfolds, and this trajectory illustrates the problematic nature of narratives of “home” that rely on the Homeland’s borders between the foreign and domestic, the innocent and the guilty. Murph remains a figure of innocence for Bartle because, as Sterling points out, he is mentally “home” before he should be (156). Conversely, Bartle’s guilt and shame preclude him from ever truly being “home” as he once knew it. This negotiation of guilt and innocence mirrors a negotiation of foreign and domestic that can be seen in Powers’ physical and psychic geography of the Homeland. Bodies of water occupy a central place in this geography. The Tigris River in Iraq, where Bartle sets the corpse of Murph adrift, and the James River in Virginia, where Bartle tries to drown himself, are ostensibly foreign and domestic sites. Yet, while Murph was “home” psychically, he will never return physically, and Bartle, conversely, returns home physically only to find that “the emptiness [he] still called home” (110) is psychically uninhabitable. This inversion of foreign and domestic space and its attendant attributions of guilt and innocence are further demonstrated by the liminal spaces of Germany and the Atlantic Ocean. Bartle feels “acutely and overwhelmingly foreign” (59) in Germany, the point of transfer between the war theatre and the U.S. This transitory space gives way to another. The Atlantic Ocean, too, is a liminal space that Bartle describes as “the last obstacle to 123 home, the land of the free, of reality television, outlet malls and deep vein thrombosis” (101), and it mirrors a psychic liminality in Bartle, who looks down at the water to see “crests becoming troughs . . . like the breaking of some ancient treaty between all those things that stand in opposition to one another” (102). In this space of negotiation, the separation between him and Murph, the guilty and the innocent, the foreign and domestic, the “home” and “not home,” briefly collapses. These concepts converge and reveal their interdependence as Bartle “echoes” a previous plea of Murph’s, a plea as yet unknown to the reader, who will later be propelled back in time and hear this “echo” from the “future,” when the fates of Bartle and Murph have already been decided: I began the same thought over and over as we breached the sand and rock and thistle of the coast, but could not complete it. I want to go…I want to…I want…I…and then the coast greened as we flew farther inland…As I thought of my descent…before I scattered over the earth……I remembered the last word-- home. I want to go home. (102) When Bartle finally arrives, his mother welcomes him with the assurance, “‘Oh, John, you’re home,’” but Bartle “[does] not believe her” (109). He has become “overwhelmingly foreign” in his own country, and his estrangement belies the unity of purpose and sense of shared sacrifice that once attended wars undertaken by the U.S. but are no longer relevant in the Homeland. Back in Virginia, the estrangement only deepens for Bartle. The disparities of “an unshared year” (103) become even more pronounced as he attempts to resettle himself in his hometown, where he contemplates the frivolity and comfort of those around him, an innocence 124 maintained at the expense of his own. As he clandestinely watches old friends frolic in the water of the James River, Bartle must “resist the urge to hate them” (143) for their blithe enjoyment of a home unspoiled by the ghosts that make home an uncanny nightmare for Bartle. He cannot reconcile the brutality of his acts in Iraq, and the senseless loss of Murph, with the incessant praise he receives from his fellow citizens. “[E]verybody is so fucking happy to see you,” Bartle bitterly observes, “the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight” (145). Bartle’s assessment of the innocence ritual is clearly less forgiving than that of Billy Lynn, and he more ardently resists the demands of its incantation. His resistance, however, bears a high cost, as his refusal to participate (or, in terms of his Melvillian namesake, Bartleby, his “prefer[ence] not to”) leads to total estrangement from his society, increasing physical torpor, and profound psychic decay. Bartle feels himself an intruder, a visitor, and, like Billy Lynn, a “stranger” in the Homeland. He resists praise, refuses honours, ignores old friends, and lives in relative isolation. He takes upon himself an oppressive burden of guilt that would more appropriately be disseminated among the well-wishers and glad handers that have tacitly authorized his participation in the violence in Iraq. The effect of his proxy assumption of an entire society’s unclaimed guilt (an inversion of the innocence ritual) is, tellingly, pathological and Bartle describes it as such. “I had become a cripple” he explains, “[T]hey should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy” (143). While Bartle’s behavior could be attributed to PTSD, this is never mentioned in the novel, and Bartle articulates a coherent logic that underscores the contradiction between the actions of the soldier and ethics of 125 the citizen and belies its dismissal as the projection of a traumatized vet. Bartle is reasonably vexed by the fact that “[t]here is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever” (144). Bartle had joined the military to avoid accountability--to be freed of the responsibilities of making decisions about how, when, and where to act. Yet, his encounters with people upon his return from Iraq confer the realization that many of these decisions have been deferred to those who will simply transfer accountability back to him to insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions. Bartle’s inability to reintegrate into his society, whether an effect of trauma or the result of a rational assessment of the moral incongruities of that society, represents a challenge to “innocensus,” and, in Powers’ novel, such challenges do not go unanswered. “Someone had to be punished,” Bartle understands, “which articles we’d be charged under, didn’t seem to matter” (179). Indeed, although the C.I.D. Captain who comes to arrest Bartle refers vaguely to a letter that Bartle wrote to Murph’s mother, it remains unclear what Bartle is ultimately charged with and why he goes to prison. It appears as though the charges have something to do with improper disposal of Murph’s corpse which, according to protocol, should have been flown home, but was instead set adrift by Bartle and Sargent Sterling in the Tigris River. The irony of being charged and imprisoned for a violation of decorum while the attendant murder of an innocent Iraqi man who bore witness to the corpse’s disposal goes unaccounted for is particularly significant. It adds to the ambiguity about guilt and punishment that surrounds Bartle’s arrest and imprisonment. This ambiguity prevents readers from assigning individual culpability and dismissing the more complex web of sociopolitical behavior within which it exists. Rather, it invites readers to think more broadly about the guilt, innocence, and complicity of an entire 126 polity, of the price of acquiescence to American myth, and of those who are estranged in a tacit embrace of innocensus. The frailty of home for the protagonists of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds is put most succinctly by Billy Lynn in his response to a stock question from a reporter. “What does it mean to be home for Thanksgiving this year?” she asks, to which Billy replies, “I’m not at home. I’m here” (143). Like Bartle, Lynn simultaneously exists in “domestic” and “foreign” space, while “his” people continue to espouse a binary between the two. Fountain and Powers deftly anatomize the most surprising of the many troubling exclusions enabled by the domestic/foreign paradigm of the Homeland: that of American combat veterans. Although they are defenders of the Homeland in the most immediate sense, the nature of their experience is incompatible with the notions of innocence that have allowed Americans to authorize armed aggression and their leaders to enact it. Fountain and Powers have each staged potent interventions in American rituals of innocence that strip away the doublespeak in the discourse of the “homeland” and compel readers to face its exclusions, deny its affirmations of innocence, and resist facile inclusion in the narrow concept of nation implicit in such rituals. 127 Epilogue: The Best Picture(s) of Post-9/11 Innocence As this study has posited, a perennial and powerful cultural narrative of American innocence resurfaces in response to traumatic events in U.S. history across the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This narrative pivots on a notion of American innocence that connotes both a want of knowledge (guilelessness) and disavowal of complicity (guiltlessness) in the conditions that have precipitated violence against the U.S. This view of American history has inspired political rhetoric that casts the U.S. as a blameless and righteous entity (the “Homeland”) that requires redemptive violence against malevolent forces and thereby fosters consent for wars that purport to remedy the injustice of attacks on this self-styled national “innocent.” In other words, in a perennial recursive cycle, such military aggression by the U.S. fosters ill-will towards the U.S, and when that ill-will later manifests in violence, American political rhetoric asks only “why do they hate us?” even as the U.S. begins its next military campaign to remedy its loss of innocence. The cultural artifacts I have presented thus far serve as popular and literary indexes of this perennial cycle, and I have held literary critiques of this narrative of innocence from the post-Cold War to the War on Terror eras against films that largely reproduce it, singling out what I have identified as highly significant juxtapositions that reveal cultural moments in which the myth of American innocence is being reconstructed. I will close by examining yet another Best-Picture contest that reveals a continued investment in the presumption of American innocence that has repeatedly led the U.S. to war and threatens to do it again. Argo (2012) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) provide us with an index of American innocence at a critical post-9/11 moment, a moment eleven years removed from 9/11 and two years after the official end of combat operations in Iraq. If the cultural receptions of The Deer Hunter and Coming Home (1978) gave us the pulse of innocence in the wake of the 128 Vietnam War, and Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line (1998) did so with the post-Cold War innocence, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) do the same with a U.S. that by 2012 had been firmly established as The Homeland in a perpetual War on Terror. By 2012, the Homeland as a rhetorical concept and symbolic order had taken shape, exposing it to both critique and reinforcement. The various and shifting justifications for the Iraq War had all been cast into doubt if not debunked entirely, and a new president, Barrack Obama, was campaigning partially on his completion of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. A wave of literary fiction had begun its post-mortem, as novels such as Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds emerged to probe the gaps between myth and reality with regard to the Iraq War (see ch. 4), and the 2013 Academy Awards centered on historical films with strong claims of authenticity. The discourse that emerged around these films once again hinged on representations of American innocence, which, like the two nominees for Best Picture of 1998 that I discuss in chapter 3, is depicted in both films through historical distortions bolstered by affect and guided by figures meant to evoke strong identification from American audiences. American innocence figures largely in Argo (2012) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), both 2013 Academy Award nominees for Best Picture. These films depict, respectively, the attack on the U.S. embassy in Iran (1979) and the events culminating in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s refuge in Pakistan (2011), and they reflect two major tenets of the American innocence myth: In Argo, blameless Americans are unjustly attacked while in Zero Dark Thirty, the righteous U.S. enacts justice through redemptive violence. Ben Affleck’s Argo portrays the CIA-orchestrated rescue of American diplomats in Iran after the attack on the U.S. embassy there in 1979. Although the attack was precipitated, in part, by previous unwelcome interventions by the U.S. in Iran’s political affairs, the film depicts a heroic CIA agent shepherding a group of blameless 129 American bureaucrats out of an inexplicably hostile Middle-Eastern nation. As Nima Shirazi puts it, Argo is “a decontextualized, ahistorical ‘true story’ of Orientalist proportion” and a “heavily decorated paean to the CIA and American innocence.” Also a “paean to the CIA and American innocence” is Kathyrn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, in which assertions about the use of torture by the U.S. to locate Osama bin Laden are ambiguous, although identification with Maya, a CIA analyst who tracks bin Laden, is not. American audiences are meant to identify with her suppressed shock, as she witnesses and participates in torture, and her anxious and possibly penitent tears at the end of the film, expressions of innocence that validate the “necessary” violence that the film depicts. While Argo would go on to win the award,16 both films and the discourse across these films may present the “best picture” of a historical juncture, much like 1978 and 1998, in which the innocence trope is caught in the act of its construction, this time in its post-9/11 iteration. As Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first President of the Islamic Republic of Iran points out, Argo misrepresents the Iranian government’s stand in regard to hostage-taking and misrepresents Iranians by portraying us as irrational people consumed by aggressive emotion, in contrast to the “Western” Americans, who were, as Edward Said once wrote, constructed as “rational, peaceful, liberal, logical” . . . We must ask why the film is based on this false dichotomy, and what political need is served by such putting Iranians in such a bad light. (28) 16 The announcement of Argo’s Best Picture Oscar was made by Michelle Obama from the White House. 130 While Bani-Sadr is undoubtedly serving his own nation’s “political needs” by leveling such a critique, his assessment of the film’s mode of representation and potential political implications is largely accurate. In 2012, Argo entered a contemporary cultural conversation about Iran and the U.S., via 1979, not by providing a robust context that acknowledges the impact of U.S. policy toward Iran prior to the embassy invasion but by reinforcing notions of the Middle-Eastern Other as angry, irrational, and bearing a misdirected hostility toward America and Americans. This hostility is construed as misdirected because, as the innocence myth assumes, Americans, in all their putative guiltlessness and guilelessness, could not possibly deserve it. In another incisive comment on the film, Bani-Sadr ponders “whether the film could ultimately, as some critics have suggested, ‘tilt the balance of US public opinion toward war’ should the ongoing nuclear negotiations fail” (29). In this sense, Argo speaks to the reaffirmation after 9/11 that Americans are unjustly hated because they have done nothing wrong, or have simply made well-intentioned mistakes, and are willing to engage in war to defend themselves against seemingly unprovoked hostility. As James Gilmore observes, Zero Dark Thirty also “operates as an argument about post- 9/11 history” (277). Unlike Argo, however, Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow seems to question the innocence that Argo appears to presume, and some critics identify an ambivalence in the film about the U.S.’s means of pursuing justice for the attack on the WTC. Most of this ambivalence pivots on whether the film endorses torture, critiques torture, or simply represents it. While, as Gilmore notes, Zero Dark Thirty’s “processes of narrative ordering create [an] ambiguity that open[s] it to a number of different ideological positions” (280), it does not seem to me as if Bigelow is trying to make the point that torture was effective. Indeed, the inability to get reliable information from the tortured detainees at the onset of the film is punctuated by 131 scenes that suggest the ineffectiveness of such means. After all, as the film depicts, the London bombing and Islamabad hotel bombing occur despite the depicted use of torture beforehand. I contend that the film offers a more deeply embedded and likely less conscious defense of the underlying mechanisms of what I have called “innocensus,” in which American consensus for war (as well as state-sanctioned torture) is generated by an incremental consent to it predicated on a notion of innocence. In chapter 3, I examined Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as “tourist sights” that are consumed by the American “tourist of history,” and I discussed both the framing, or “criterial prefocusing,” of these films and the figures that guide the viewer through the spectacular “exhibits” therein and the ways that they reveal and promote an investment in American innocence. This model will also help us understand the operations of innocence in Zero Dark Thirty and Argo. These films both open with scenes that are independent of the diegetic action of the films, sequences that assure viewers of the authenticity of what is to come, provoke affective responses, and influence the reception of the “true” histories that follow. Argo opens with a brief, rapid-fire history lesson on “the Persian Empire, known today as Iran.” As an overdubbed narrator gives her succinct version of events, the shots oscillate primarily between stylized cartoon images, still photographs, and occasional black and white footage of various moments in history. The narrator acknowledges that “in 1953, the U.S. and Britain engineered a coup d’etat and installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah” and remarks on his “opulence and excess” as “the people starved.” The narrator calls him “ruthless,” and declares that “an era of torture and fear began.” She further acknowledges that the Shah “began a campaign to westernize Iran, enraging the mostly traditional Shi’ite population” before the “Ayatollah returned from exile to rule Iran,” which “descended into score-settling, death squads, 132 and chaos.” She points out that the Shah was granted asylum in the U.S., and that “the people took to the streets demanding that the Shah be returned, tried, and hanged.” Although this history is condensed, oversimplified, and sensationalized (it occupies less than 2 minutes of the film’s 130 minute run-time; it homogenizes Iranian opinions, ignores the liberal and secular elements that were parts of the Iranian revolutionary coalition against the Shah regime, and includes sensational details that are only rumored to be true, such as the Shah’s wife bathing in milk), it seems to take pains to acknowledge the role of the U.S. government in generating the discontent of many Iranians. Thus, it may appear at first glance to work against the notion of Americans as innocent victims. However, the transition from this very brief and highly stylized scene to the more viscerally immersive full-color footage of an Iranian man burning the American flag in the diegetic present and an angry mob shouting and chanting inscrutably quickly pushes this context to the margins of the American viewer’s attention and initiates a pattern of representation that holds throughout the film: the young, ingenuous American diplomats are terrorized by Iranians who are invariably menacing and hostile. Notably, Argo only makes its explicit textual claim to authenticity (“based on a true story”) as the scene transitions from the history of Iran to the footage of a man burning the U.S. flag and the hostile mob swarming the embassy. Subsequently, the focus shifts to a group of young American bureaucrats peeking nervously out a window that they hope is bulletproof, and the Iranians we see for the remainder of the film, with the notable exception of Sahar, the Canadian Ambassador’s housekeeper, are enraged and hostile, chanting or screaming inscrutably, or staring ominously. Indeed, the first image we see as soon as the “live” color indicates the transition to the film’s diegetic present, 1979, is the American flag being burned by a fanatic, followed by a wider shot of an angry mob chanting inscrutably (to most American 133 viewers, because subtitles are virtually never provided when Iranians in the film speak their native language, Farsi). Thus, viewers are made to feel sufficiently “informed” by the narrator’s account, but the affective power of the burning American flag and a hostile Orientalized mob bolsters a narrative that subsequently diminishes the U.S. complicity alluded to in the narration. After leading with its own authenticating statement, “The following motion picture is based on firsthand accounts of actual events,” Zero Dark Thirty merges affect and authenticity by opening with a black screen overdubbed with actual audio from victims of the 9/11 attack. In contrast to Argo’s attempt (however lacking and subsequently undermined) to contextualize the sensationalized events depicted in the film, Zero Dark Thirty’s opening sensationalizes before it contextualizes—it pointedly invokes the horror and anxiety of Americans during the attack on the World Trade Center: A sequence of anxious, confused, and terrified voices are heard without any well-worn visuals that could undermine their affective power. In one particularly chilling soundbite, a woman repeatedly insists to a 9-1-1 dispatcher that she is going to die, and despite the assurances of that dispatcher, everyone watching knows that she is correct. This powerfully affective opening creates a sense of disorientation, fear, anxiety, and anger that the viewer then carries into the following scene that plies them to accept the redemptive U.S. violence that is about to be depicted. As Geoff King puts it, “The initial evocation of 9/11 . . . functions . . . to imply a justification for the torture of detainees . . . and for the general mission that increasingly comes to narrow down to the hunt for Bin Laden” (56). Thus, the criterial prefocusing of Argo and Zero Dark Thirty both validates the American tourist of history’s need for authenticity and grooms them to receive the subsequent narratives in particular ways. In Argo, this “tourist” may feel as though they have received a balanced account of the history of U.S. intervention in Iran and are thereby less apt to be critical of the Americans 134 in the story and even more pliable to the affective thrust of the film’s negatively stereotyped images of angry Iranians. In other words, although their government might have made mistakes in the past, these guileless young diplomats could not possibly deserve the violence that awaits them at the hands of a people uniformly depicted as savage and bloodthirsty fanatics. As Yasser Fouad Selim points out, Iranians in Argo “are reduced and simplified to look homogeneously mindless, vile, and fanatical” (260) and hints of the diplomats’ possible fate at the hands of these “vile fanatics” are sprinkled throughout the film on television screens, radio broadcasts, and the musings of CIA officers: American television repeatedly broadcasts shocking scenes of American hostages sleeping in dungeon-like rooms in Iran, while armoured revolutionary guards pose their guns at their heads. Radio channels speak the news that Iranian rioters at the embassy “will kill them [the hostages] all and blow up the embassy” (Argo). American CIA officers express their fear that the six American employees who escape the embassy could be subject to 74 leashes by the revolutionary guards if they are caught. One officer mentions that the American diplomats are “standing room only for beheading in the square.” (Selim 260) This pronounced disparity between the depictions of the “innocent” diplomats and the “religious fanatics, vicious militants, and ruthless politicians” (Selim 259) that are hunting them bolsters the popular notion that Americans are not accountable for the historical injustices perpetrated by their government and that the real injustice is their potential treatment at the hands of the Iranians. 135 From “Get the Water” to “You’re Going to Kill Him for Me”: Incremental Participation, Innocence Recuperation, and War by Proxy in Zero Dark Thirty While Zero Dark Thirty’s opening scene fosters a sense of horror in its American audience, the scene that follows tests the limits of what they will accept as a remedy. The darkness gives way to a dimly lit interior where an already badly beaten prisoner, Ammar, is being threatened by his CIA interrogator, Dan. “If you don’t look at me when I talk to you, I’m gonna hurt you!” he bellows, as two of three masked figures in the room shove the prisoner from either side. A third masked figure watches pensively as the others tie Ammar up, spread eagle, before Dan beckons this person to come outside with him. When she takes off her mask, “a strawberry braid tumbles forth like a lotus in the desert” (Michelle Orange), and her milky-white skin contrasts sharply with the weathered and dirty face of the seasoned interrogator, Dan. This is our first look at young, beautiful CIA analyst referred to only as Maya, who henceforth will be “our surrogate” or “guide into this dark world” (Kennedy 972). Much like Witt, in The Thin Red Line (see ch. 3), the audience is meant to identify with Maya, and they read her for cues about how to feel. Her initial hesitancy and gradual acceptance of increasing participation in torture shepherd the “tourist of history” through discomfort with torture to at least grudging acceptance of it. Indeed, Maya’s “experience of torture tracks an arc of emotion and performance that progresses from witnessing to complicity, to coercive agency” (Burgoyne 249) that arguably mirrors the perennial American recuperation of lost innocence. Indeed, there is a consensus that Maya is meant as “a stand-in for America” (Anderson) and her reactions to violence and participation in it, along with her subsequent remove from it in the next two sections of the film, tell us much about the American relationship to redemptive violence and its reliance on a sense of innocence. Bigelow immediately creates a striking contrast between Maya and the others on site. She is young, inexperienced in fieldwork, and clearly uncomfortable with what she has 136 witnessed. “There’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor,” Dan counsels her. She declines and insists on being present during the interrogations. However, she repeatedly cringes and wrings her hands as she witnesses subsequent acts of cruelty and violence. Yet, even as her body language conveys discomfort, her participation escalates from passive witness, in which her gaze is used by Dan to humiliate Ammar (“You don’t mind if my female colleague checks out your junk”), to indirect participation in a more insidious and infamous torture technique. As the interrogations escalate, we eventually witness a depiction of “waterboarding,” a controversial topic in the American discourse of post-9/11 torture that was still being debated when Zero Dark Thirty was released. This is a critical juncture for audience identification with Maya, who thus far has only tacitly consented to Dan’s techniques and has non-verbally but clearly displayed her uneasiness to the audience. Before the waterboarding begins, Dan tells Maya to “Get the water” that he will then force down the throat of his prisoner, and she does. While this moment may seem unremarkable on its face, it articulates a key moment in Maya’s incremental acceptance of torture that was not originally in the script. According to Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins, Maya was originally scripted to participate directly in the waterboarding, but the CIA (who actively participated in the making of both Argo and Zero Dark Thirty) requested a change, insisting that an analyst such as Maya would never be administering such a technique (98). As Shaw and Jenkins point out, this was “hardly a revision that sugarcoated the use of torture in the field” (98), but this revision unwittingly reveals a significant dynamic between American innocence and redemptive U.S. violence, especially when considered in the context of the subsequent two sections of the film. Maya’s incremental acceptance of torture suggests an initial “guilelessness” in her reluctance to engage in violence that only grudgingly, and out of necessity, becomes full- 137 on participation. With Dan’s departure, Maya becomes the lead interrogator, and now orders punishment rather than simply witnessing or aiding in it. Subsequently, Maya becomes “our escort through the 10 years of failures and lurches forward that lead to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound” (Orange). These “lurches” consist mostly of data driven research in what has been described as the “procedural” portion of the film, in which the remove between Maya and violence widens. Rather than occupying torture sites, she is behind a desk and in front of monitors, organizing and analyzing data. She approaches her tasks with an obsessive mania, punctuated by conspicuous moments of girlishness, always reminding the viewer that her fundamental guilelessness is intact despite her experiences with torture. While her pursuit of bin Laden remains dogged, it is now executed at a remove from the violated bodies of the torture section of the film, and the audience can enjoy the comfort of this remove, even as they anticipate the righteous violence that they know is imminent in the forthcoming raid on bin Laden’s compound. She maintains this remove in the final section of the film, where she once again stands in for “America” by telling a SEALs assault team, “You’re going to kill him for me.” This relationship mirrors that of the American citizen to the combat soldier who is made to act on the consent, however tacit, of the masses who are always at a remove from the dirty work of war. In response, the SEALs display a lightheartedness that counterbalances the weight of the mission, both in terms of personal and risk and symbolic importance, and Maya’s combat proxies, “framed as extensions of the movie’s true heroine” (Orange), head out to do her bidding. 138 Argo, Pseudohistorical Depth, and Innocence by Committee As Brian T. Edwards notes, Argo “allowed an American audience to forget briefly the contemporary controversies over the use of torture by U.S. intelligence communities” (6) that Zero Dark Thirty foregrounds. Indeed, the film’s American scenes, in which Mendez organizes his Hollywood backstory, has a frivolous tone: from the banter between Hollywood producers Lester Siegel and John Chambers, music by the Rolling Stones and Van Halen, and its conspicuously dated attire and décor, the film seems nearly as concerned with seventies nostalgia as it is with geopolitics. This recalls Fredric Jameson’s critique of contemporary historical fiction, namely, that it traffics in “stylistic connotation . . . and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (20). The juxtaposition of these American scenes offers the viewer some reprieve from the tension in Tehran, providing familiar if superficial cultural touchstones that validate America as a place of freedom and comfort while offering viewers a spurious sense of authenticity. In comparison to Zero Dark Thirty, Argo features a much less charismatic, although no less effective, hero. Unlike the expressive Maya, Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), the CIA agent sent to “exfiltrate” the Americans who escaped the embassy is affectively flat. Indeed, one reviewer notes that he is “overly restrained” and “almost bland” (Dargis). However, Argo’s argument for American innocence is not as bound as Zero Dark Thirty is to a single interpretive “guide,” at least partially because Argo does not engage with morally objectionable American behavior, as Zero Dark Thirty does. Rather, the film’s explicit and implicit assertions rely on the guilelessness and guiltlessness of the six fugitive American diplomats in Iran and their sharp contrast with the sinister Iranians. 139 Like The Deerhunter and Coming Home, and Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo present complementary narratives of history at a critical juncture, and the potency of these narratives pivots on their versions of innocence. As with the other Best-Picture contests, both films uphold the righteous and benevolent intent of U.S. policy in their cultural moments, in this case, a decade into the War on Terror. Both films privilege the guilelessness and guiltlessness of Americans while ignoring the grievances of those who have acted against the U.S. As Shaw and Jenkins muse, “We might have expected a film about the hunt for the world’s most notorious terrorist to have explored his motives, if only a little, but Zero Dark Thirty chooses not to” (99). Likewise, Argo declines to explore in any real depth the motives, reservations, and voices of Iranians, privileging instead a pseudohistorical adventure story with well-meaning Americans at the fore. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Severs, Jeffrey, 1974-
Caught in the act of innocence : consensus, war, and myth in post-cold war American literature and film
Text