[Work] Expository Writing Work
Hi everyone my name is Shih-Han, I am here to share some of my work done at
Emerson College. I inadvertently found this great place to practice and share.
Hope this makes some little contribution.
This is an 6-7 pages MLA style argument, and I hope you enjoy it
Shih-Han Wang
Bryan Godfrey
Expository Writing
11 Apr. 2008
Saving Private Ryan: A Reminder of War’s Traumatic Legacy
Ten years ago, one of the most successful films at the box office was the
blockbuster Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg. It was a great
movie, and it earned a lot of praise from the public and movie critics alike.
As the movie reviewer Paul Tatara notes, Saving Private Ryan dynamically
portrays the reality of war, and the portrayal is so appalling that it makes
the audience think these soldiers are living in a hell on earth (par. 1).
Although Saving Private Ryan vividly presents a wartime situation and tells a
story to the audience, it is more than a story about war. The opening
sequence of Saving Private Ryan lasts approximately 20 minutes, and is
extremely brutal and horrible. As the reviewer Paul put it, “the carnage is
so obscene it almost becomes hallucinatory” (par. 9). While movie reviews,
such as CNN and BBC reviews strongly stress the realism of Saving Private
Ryan, the book “Now You Know” Reactions after Seeing Saving Private Ryan
focuses on true feelings of the audience. Also, Taxonomy of Trauma and Trauma
Assessment provide a different perspective to the trauma. Some of scenes in
Saving Private Ryan implicitly inform the audience of how these solders go on
with life after the war, relating to Tom O’Brien’s argument. He claims
that morality issue in war does not exist and further tell us what reality is
during wartime. Altogether, Saving Private Ryan uses a good story as a
background to depict World War II, but it fails to tell the audience that
most of soldiers would not have a great life after war’s end. While SPR can
help family members to understand the past experience of veteran’s in World
War II, it also uncovers unpleasant memories for those who have been trying
to forget the brutality and immorality of war.
World War II brought countless deaths and was extremely expensive. In 1941,
when the United States decided to declare war on Japan, American lives were
quickly lost. According to the statistics from the book Grand Expectation:
The United States, 1945-1947, 405,399 United States military personnel died
because of war-related fighting, and 670,846 suffered non-fatal wounds in
action (Patterson 4).
The overall death toll during World War II, including China, Germany, Japan,
and all the European countries is approximately 60 million (Patterson 4).
These huge numbers may be nothing for ordinary people, or maybe some of them
would be shocked. But to the great soldiers who survived the battlefields of
World War II, their countless sacrificed brothers either became statistics,
or a hidden memory. In short, they became the only true legacy that passed
the returned soldiers like the movie Saving Private Ryan: trauma.
The trauma starts in SPR, and constructs the scenes itself. In the opening
sequence, many soldiers die on Omaha Beach. Tom Hanks, as Captain Miller,
sees his men being shot and slaughtered by gunfire. From Captain Miller’s
point of view, the fierce battle of Omaha Beach at times is in slow motion.
The brutality may help the audience experience the trauma by the realism, and
some veterans may even relieve the reality of World War II. But the film’s
version is always a constructed reality, why do I say a constructed reality
of World War II for the audience? Quite simply, there is still a tiny
difference between the realism and reality. The reality has been already
experienced by these veterans who survived World War II, and the audience
never reaches at the reality because they do not really experience it. All of
the audience’s reality is imagination in medium, not in reality. As the poet
Hilda Doolittle within, “But to my mind has its peculiar ego-centric
personal approach to the eternal realities, and differs from every other in
minute particulars.” Her words seem to be tricky but literally explain the
difference between reality and realism.
Some of the audience experience the similar trauma from the movie and express
their opinions regarding SPR in the book Now You Know: Reactions after seeing
Saving Private Ryan, an anonymous wife, also as a daughter states that her
husband never told her things about the Vietnam War and her father never told
her things about World War II. She did not really have much better
understanding before seeing SPR and did not know why her husband and father
did not want to talk about the Vietnam War and World War II (Kornbluth and
Sunshine 41). Obviously, many audiences feel their father or husband having
a hard time dealing with this situation. On the one hand, for these veterans
returning from the Vietnam War and World War II are no longer willing to face
the trauma they have experienced. They are hardly willing to talk about the
past in front of their family. To these brave men, silence may be the best
way for them to face the past. On the other hand, this wife’s statement
implicitly shows she did not really know anything about the situation during
the wartime—even her imagination cannot reach the wartime. Her words tell us
her understanding of World War II she had before seeing SPR: lesser than
husband and father and almost nothing.
In the other case, a veteran really suffered and was brought back to the
horrible memories of wartime. In the book Now You Know: Reactions after
Seeing Saving Private, a anonymous man mentions that his grandfather was
totally in shock because the movie SPR seemed to bring his grandfather back
to many horrible memories of World War II. His grandfather said the movie is
extremely like “the reality,” and his grandfather cried for three days
straight without stopping. He thinks that the movie was good, but he knows
the situation was in World War II (Kornbluth and Sunshine 15). It comes as no
surprises this grandfather is emotionally different from his grandson because
of the difference of the reality and the realism. In SPR, the scenes really
caught the audience’s attention including the veterans’ family members and
veterans’ and also cause the trauma to react to both of them with different
degrees.
The trauma comes from these veterans’ experiences, and these veterans can no
longer get rid of it. However, do we really know what kind of experiences
they had? Yes, we do, but not clear because we only see actors pretend to
die. To veterans, seeing the soldiers die and facing the morality maybe the
hardest thing for them. As Tim O’Brien argues in his work, a true story is
never moral because it does not need instruction, advocating virtue, or any
models of proper human behavior (O’Brien 421). The scenes in SPR may tell us
that inconvenient truth implicitly. As one of Captain Miller’s one of
soldiers Wade who is killed by a Germany soldier’s gunfire, Captain Miller
is forced to face a moral dilemma. He cried, lonely and afraid of being seen
by his team members, his face covered with sadness. In the next scene, it
seems that releasing a surrounded Germany soldier Steamboat Willie should be
a right thing to do. However, his team members in a struggle and they do not
really want to release Germany soldier who killed Wade. Additionally, Captain
Miller’s team members think that they should not lose more team members in
order to save Private Ryan. In these scenes, Captain Miller’s words directly
tells us that he wants to go home and he unwillingly fights, and he feels the
more people he kills the farer away from his home he feels. Such a statement
conveys some crucial information to us: he may never be the person that he
used to be. His words sound awkward and incredible, but it’s true.
According to a recent study Taxonomy of Trauma and Trauma Assessment, the
author Ibrahim Aref Kira explains the idea of survival trauma. She claims
that survival trauma is an event that poses a direct or indirect threat to
self or others’ lives, such as witnessing deaths in war, killing people, and
violent crimes. This type of trauma may cause victims to change their beliefs
and even undergoes a paradigm shift of their whole value system (Kira 77).
Moreover, facing morality is really a major factor that forms the trauma. As
we can see in SPR, the morality conflict appears in many forms, such as
releasing a prisoner, sacrificing team members to save Private Ryan, and
killing Germany soldiers. From psychological perspective, we can, however,
find some answers in Kira’s dissertation to morality issue because she
states two crucial factors—value, morality—will be taken into consideration
when we discuss the cause of the trauma (Kira 74). Morality and value are
important because of different cognition of what is immoral and what is
valuable to individual. Everyone possesses different value and morality, so
the trauma is. We do not know what the level is to be enough for individual
to feel the trauma. Generally speaking, morality is one of most basic
cognition for human beings. It is reasonable that these veterans would feel
trauma when they have to disobey morality codes, such as killing people. To
sum up, SPR interprets a way to see how these soldiers suffering the trauma.
The immorality of war becomes a sphere for these soldiers to receive and
perceive the trauma, and even they become veterans, they can barely get over
it.
In conclusion, more and more stories regarding World War II are being told to
our new generation. A war’s traumatic legacy is also being inherited by our
new generation. The brutality of war is to remind people of how painful the
trauma is. The real function of Saving Private Ryan is ultimately to claim
that remembering the trauma is to remember the horror of war because it is so
horrible that people would not want to face and talk. Also, we must know that
the trauma inside veterans’ can be recalled by movies such as SPR, so we
should not touch their past again. The lesson we learn in SPR is a great
thing for us, not to understand the past experience of veteran’s or trauma,
but other profound meaning: how to face the future without making a mistake
like war.
Work Cited
James, T. Patterson . Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974.
United States: Oxford University Press US, 1996.
Paul, Tatara. Review: ‘Saving Private Ryan’ Staggering, hellish, heroic. 24
July 1998. CNN.com. 11 Apr. 2008.
<http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9807/24/review.saving.private.ryan/index.html>.
Kornbluth, Jesse, and Linda Sunshine. “Now You Know” Reactions after
Seeing Saving Private Ryan. New York: Newmarket Press, 1999.
Hlida, Dolittle. enotes.com. 11 Apr. 2008 <
http://www.enotes.com/famous-quotes/but-my-mind-yours-has-its-peculiar-ego>.
Ibrahim, Aref Kira. “Taxonomy of Trauma and Trauma Assessment.” Florida
State University. 11 Apr. 2008. <http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/v7/Taxonomy.pdf>.
O’Brien, Tim. The Compact Bedoford Introduction to Literature. Sixth
Edition. “How to Tell a True War Story.” Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston,
2003.
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