ClandesTime host Tom Secker joins Henri to discuss the 1998 World War 2 film, “Saving Private Ryan.” We spend ample time discussing that “horrific” opening scene and whether it’s as honest as Steven Spielberg would like it to be, as well as Spielberg’s tendency to sanitize and simplify so much of the combat. We cover the actual history of that section of Omaha beach, as well as the true story of the four brothers who were the inspiration for the film’s plot. Finally, we tackle the film’s religious themes and how this film serves WW2 cultural myths much more so than any factual account of WW2.
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This is Fortress On A Hill, with Henri, Kaygan, Jo
Don:vonni, Shiloh, and Monisha
Henri:Well, welcome everyone to Fortress On A Hill, a podcast about
Henri:US foreign policy, anti imperialism, skepticism and the American way of war.
Henri:I'm Henri.
Henri:Thanks for joining us today.
Henri:With us is my pal, the legendary Tom Secker from spyculture.
Henri:com and the podcast ClandesTime and he is here to discuss with me the 1998
Henri:war film, uh, Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:Tom, how are you doing?
Tom Secker:I'm good, Henri.
Tom Secker:I'm good.
Tom Secker:Thanks for having me back on.
Tom Secker:Uh, this conversation has been quite a while in the making, so I have a
Tom Secker:feeling it's going to turn into a bit of a splurge of different ideas and
Tom Secker:opinions that we have about Saving Private Ryan, but I'm looking forward to it.
Henri:Me too.
Henri:Me too.
Henri:It is, it is one of those films that, um, well, there certainly
Henri:is a lot we can say about it.
Henri:Critically, that it does have some very good moments and really
Henri:interesting cinematic moments.
Henri:They're most mostly moments because they don't fit together whatsoever.
Henri:But, um, but the, you can see why the film is, is captivating for people,
Henri:especially with what, uh, what was done with the first 25 minutes.
Henri:But of course, we're going to talk about that at, uh, at length today.
Henri:So, um, when I was a kid, my grandfather, my, my mom's dad, my pop, um, took
Henri:me to see this in the theater.
Henri:And I would say that, you know, of the films I saw in that era, between in Let's
Henri:say Forrest Gump and the Hurt Locker, that the two that were most impactful on me was
Henri:Blackhawk down and Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:I never really discussed it much with my grandfather as to specifically why
Henri:he wanted me to see it, but he was in the army between Korea and Vietnam.
Henri:So he didn't end up serving in either, but I think he wanted to give me an
Henri:education about what being in the military could be, and so, you know, I
Henri:bet it was it was you know, that first 25 minutes as a 16 17 year old kid, make you
Henri:hold your breath and um, and certainly that was what Spielberg was going for.
Henri:Um, and there is a measure of authenticity to that first bit, but.
Henri:Then you get into it and things become much more problematic.
Henri:The second little history tidbit on Henri about Saving Private Ryan is that there
Henri:was a point when I was in high school where my history teacher, um, who was a
Henri:Navy veteran showed us a little blip of the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:I wouldn't say it was longer than 10 minutes, so we couldn't have even seen
Henri:the entire first sequence, but it was, you know, it was appropriate for what
Henri:we were studying in history at the time.
Henri:And, um, there were complaints to the school board and they
Henri:pulled Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:Um, by name, of course, but they pulled just about any other R rated film that
Henri:a teacher might have shown a portion of in a, in a class, and so I felt deeply
Henri:compelled to do something about that, and I wrote a letter to the editor of
Henri:the local newspaper where I'm from, the Dallas Chronicle, and I just, I expressed
Henri:my, Dissatisfaction at the other adults, the school board and, and others who
Henri:complained their, uh, their queasiness about seeing something like that, because
Henri:again, especially for American public school, seeing those 10 minutes again,
Henri:within American, the American side of things could be very informative for
Henri:somebody, especially wanting to join the military or wanting to understand
Henri:something about going back there.
Henri:So anyways, so I wrote a letter to the editor.
Henri:I have hunted, I hunted high and low trying to find it so I could read a
Henri:portion of it for today and maybe I will at some point in the future if I come
Henri:across the one copy I have somewhere, um, but I will say is that it's important
Henri:for me to emphasize my own being taken in by the film, and that it kind of
Henri:went up on the mental shelf of examples of being in the military, examples
Henri:of being in war, and that, you know, the, the many, many things many, many
Henri:aspects of a film like Saving Private Ryan that are taken out and looked at.
Henri:On their own, and then of course how they're arranged together, like, you know,
Henri:the church scene where the soldiers, the younger soldiers are talking about missing
Henri:their mothers and trying to remember them and the firm understanding that they fully
Henri:know that tomorrow may be their last day.
Henri:And I thought that part, that part of it, I thought was a beautiful scene.
Henri:It is, it is, it's certainly, it certainly really drips
Henri:sentimentality in certain ways.
Henri:And so, um, but, uh, anyways, um, enough about my experience with the film.
Henri:Tom, you, uh, you've actually been to the Normandy coast.
Henri:Tell us about that.
Tom Secker:Uh, this was On a school trip when I was, I don't know, 11, 12 maybe,
Tom Secker:um, where we went to Normandy, one of the places we visited was one of the beaches,
Tom Secker:uh, where the invasion took place.
Tom Secker:I'm not going to say which one, but this was a smaller beach.
Tom Secker:It certainly isn't the one depicted in the film.
Tom Secker:And to be honest, the whole experience was rather quaint because it's
Tom Secker:not like in Saving Private Ryan.
Tom Secker:Obviously, coastline is different in different places.
Tom Secker:This was quite flat and There weren't any great big bunkers or anything like that.
Tom Secker:There were a few trenches and ditches and things.
Tom Secker:And there was the occasional bit of rusted old tank trap left in the sand.
Tom Secker:So you've got a sense.
Tom Secker:of something happening here and obviously there's a few plaques and memorials
Tom Secker:and a little like visitor's information center that we looked around so you've
Tom Secker:got a sense of you know this is a historically important location but
Tom Secker:ultimately it was just a quite nice beach, which was a slightly odd thing
Tom Secker:that because like you studying our history Or certainly through the school system.
Tom Secker:World War II is really important.
Tom Secker:And so the Normandy invasion is really important.
Tom Secker:And this is something I must have been told about and seen
Tom Secker:referenced on television hundreds of times before I ever went there.
Tom Secker:And the real life experience of just standing there was like, so this is
Tom Secker:where a major part of a war took place?
Tom Secker:And actually, of course, it didn't.
Tom Secker:Not all the beaches were the same.
Tom Secker:That's one of the things that you pointed out in your emails to me.
Tom Secker:And you're absolutely right, there wasn't a huge amount of action on this
Tom Secker:particular beach, but nonetheless, it was, it was a great part of one
Tom Secker:of my favorite trips in my life.
Tom Secker:It wasn't the best part of that trip to France and to Normandy, but I'd
Tom Secker:say it was probably the second best.
Henri:Were you able to, uh, did you get to visit any of
Henri:the cemeteries that are there?
Tom Secker:Uh, we did.
Tom Secker:I don't know if we visited them so much as passed them.
Tom Secker:Um, there's certainly things we saw.
Tom Secker:I don't remember actually going round them, if you see
Tom Secker:the distinction I'm making.
Henri:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Henri:Cause it, the, the One thing we haven't touched on yet is
Henri:the, the, um, the opening.
Henri:It's not, it's not really a montage, it isn't called a montage, but the opening
Henri:scene with, uh, who we eventually find out is Private Ryan himself as
Henri:an older man, visiting, um, graves in Normandy with his family, and it
Henri:looks like he brought his partners with him, children, grandchildren.
Henri:This is a very big occasion that this is happening.
Henri:Um, yeah.
Henri:That the, in terms of looking at the way we looking at things, that kind of
Henri:thousand yard stare that came from the, uh, from, from Ryan and, you know, the
Henri:rows and rows and rows of graves and, and, and just, they're trying to plug
Henri:in this veneer of, I, I know they're going for respect, but it, it seems just
Henri:to me more of a, of a sentimentality.
Henri:That doesn't have a lot of backbone behind it.
Henri:We want you to get weepy when you see the graves, not when you
Henri:understand how the graves got there.
Henri:They really put this whole scene on the beach on that plateau in that way.
Henri:And that's not to say that what happened on that beach wasn't horrific.
Henri:It was.
Henri:And the movie does distill a lot of that very clearly.
Henri:It focuses way too much, of course, on the individual.
Henri:People in it, and that brings us as individual moviegoers into it more than
Henri:we see in bigger collective actions.
Tom Secker:That opening scene bothers me a bit, because like you say, what
Tom Secker:are we supposed to feel in that moment?
Tom Secker:Because we haven't really been introduced to this person.
Tom Secker:And it, Turns out to not be the person we think it is anyway, which
Tom Secker:is kind of just pointlessly confusing.
Tom Secker:And as you say, the emotional tone of that is just a broad sentimentality.
Tom Secker:There's no real definition to it.
Tom Secker:Somewhat sad?
Tom Secker:Sure.
Tom Secker:That's about it.
Tom Secker:And why hang the opening of your movie on a scene with so
Tom Secker:vaguely defined emotional stakes?
Tom Secker:And then cut straight to flashback, what appears to be a
Tom Secker:flashback, but turns out it isn't.
Tom Secker:Why?
Tom Secker:Um, which then launches you into the action.
Tom Secker:It would have made more sense to me to start that with Tom Hanks in
Tom Secker:the boat, in the landing craft, or at least a big broad sweeping shot.
Tom Secker:Yeah.
Tom Secker:Lots of landing craft approaching the beach and then whatever.
Tom Secker:Why do we need that scene in, in the graveyard, in the cemetery?
Tom Secker:Why is it there?
Tom Secker:Beyond.
Tom Secker:Kind of giving a hook to come back to at the end of the film.
Henri:Right, right.
Henri:And if it was, if it did go as you suggested and immediately begin on
Henri:the beach, if they were to have left in that final scene, it would be much
Henri:more meaningful that we weren't, one, like you mentioned, we weren't tricked
Henri:into thinking it was somebody that it wasn't, and two, we are seeing Ryan's
Henri:story coming full circle for the first time, not some person we don't know
Henri:who the fuck is at the beginning.
Henri:It would actually have had a greater meaning in that way.
Henri:I don't, I would have cut out both of them.
Henri:Uh, in, in, in either case, but at least, at least I could see that,
Henri:I could, I could see that argument being made about the final one
Henri:if the first one wasn't there.
Tom Secker:It certainly would have had more of an impact in terms of you
Tom Secker:actually caring about this person.
Tom Secker:Rather than it becoming, oh, he's the guy in the cemetery.
Tom Secker:It's more a moment of realization rather than a moment of sympathy
Tom Secker:with this character, which is presumably what they were going for.
Tom Secker:It is very emotionally confused that those two scenes bookending the film.
Tom Secker:As to quite why they included them or what they were going for.
Tom Secker:Whole film's confusing in that respect to be honest.
Henri:It really is.
Henri:It really is.
Henri:And the um, the original script was uh, was much more, just was a greater script.
Henri:It was just much more honest and open and authentic.
Henri:It didn't have those open and closing scenes.
Henri:Tom Hanks's character is much more in line with what you would
Henri:expect from a wartime army officer.
Tom Secker:I never know when I'm watching this film what it is that I'm supposed
Tom Secker:to be feeling, because aside from lots of little problems, which we'll get
Tom Secker:to as we go through different parts of the movie, um, I, I, it doesn't feel
Tom Secker:like I'm actually with any of these characters at any moment, it feels
Tom Secker:very much like I'm watching a film.
Tom Secker:I always feel a distance to what's happening on screen, even, to be
Tom Secker:honest, in that opening section.
Tom Secker:And I get the idea that, from a filmmaking point of view,
Tom Secker:that's supposed to draw you in.
Tom Secker:And then you're sucked into the movie, and then it slows down,
Tom Secker:and we get the actual story.
Tom Secker:And we're supposed to be carried through.
Tom Secker:By the effect of that opening sequence, but it never had that
Tom Secker:effect on me for some reason.
Tom Secker:And so as a result, the remainder of the film is quite boring.
Tom Secker:I admire the opening section, certainly, as a piece of, as a piece of cinema,
Tom Secker:as a piece of Making film, but it doesn't have the emotional impact
Tom Secker:on me that I think is intended.
Tom Secker:And I'm not sure quite what is intended beyond that technique of
Tom Secker:using the action to suck you in.
Tom Secker:But there again, if that's the whole point of the opening of the film, why
Tom Secker:start with the scene in the cemetery?
Tom Secker:And why pull the whole switcheroo with the characters?
Tom Secker:It just seems like Almost an exercise in keeping the audience guessing at
Tom Secker:the exact moment that you want them to start absorbing this world that you're
Tom Secker:creating, to start feeling part of it.
Tom Secker:And maybe that's why the movie has just never really worked for me, whereas
Tom Secker:it has for so many other people.
Tom Secker:I mean, lots of people think that this is a great movie.
Tom Secker:And fine, lots of people get drawn into it, and I understand why you did.
Tom Secker:I just never had that reaction from the first time I saw the movie all the
Tom Secker:way through to the time and re-watched it recently in order to prep for this.
Henri:I, I know I de I definitely had a, a much more romantic notion
Henri:of being in the military of combat, of the, uh, consequences in the
Henri:casualties and things like that.
Henri:You know, and I, I know that, that it made, made a lot
Henri:of that, those kind of, uh.
Henri:Propaganda films really fit in well for me and I think that well for
Henri:the American public because most of our learning is through media.
Henri:We're not learning, we're not learning extensive non American, uh, history that
Henri:is actually connecting the dots for us on a bigger, bigger scheme than what the
Henri:American government wants us to know.
Henri:They want us to, to, to vote and to, to support things by sentiment, not by.
Henri:Um, critical analysis, not by being willing to understand what the
Henri:actual foreign policy looks like.
Henri:They want us to go in full in on the, and especially with Saving Private Ryan,
Henri:on each of the individual soldiers.
Henri:And that's, and that's one of the ways Spielberg keeps us going through
Henri:it, is that there's this drip, drip, drip of dead guys from the squad, and
Henri:people are just drawn along with it.
Henri:But again, the, the sense of collectivism about the fight.
Henri:is, totally gives way to all the individuality, and that's what,
Henri:you know, that's what Spielberg was definitely going for.
Tom Secker:But you see what I mean?
Tom Secker:It's, to my mind, the best propaganda is emotionally specific.
Tom Secker:It doesn't have to be honest, of course, but it has to be aimed at something
Tom Secker:quite specific that it's trying to trigger in you, or maybe lay down so
Tom Secker:it can then be picked up on later.
Henri:No, I totally, I totally get the, the, the point you're making that it does
Henri:it, it, you know, and I look at it now that way, um, you're much, much years
Henri:later after having taken in a lot more war films and really looked at the, at the
Henri:context, um, but you're absolutely right, is that that opening scene, it's so Uh,
Henri:one dimensional and kind of blase, you see that thousand yards there and Ryan,
Henri:and maybe the audience has an idea of what that's about and maybe they don't.
Henri:There's nothing specific, right?
Henri:It's not driving towards anything specifically.
Henri:And then of course there's his family there and they're all kind
Henri:of, you know, just following grandpa.
Henri:You know, I don't, you don't see any of them.
Henri:They don't seem upset or sad to kind of lend us in that direction, or maybe
Henri:some of them are frustrated or angry over different dynamics of it, but at
Henri:the very least, it would give us clues to go forward, and there are none.
Henri:That opening thing, it gives us, it gives us nothing other than saying, you know,
Henri:going to the American notion of, well, not just American, but you know, the, the,
Henri:the notion of this, this guy is unsettled.
Henri:This guy is, you know, this guy is a, here's our war veteran.
Henri:Here's our, you know, guy, and you can see in his face, there's something wrong.
Henri:Do you know what it really is?
Henri:No.
Henri:Could it be nothing?
Henri:Could he be having bad gas or something?
Tom Secker:Um, did he forget to take his pills this morning?
Henri:Exactly, exactly.
Henri:No, there is, there's no, there's nothing to grab on in that moment.
Henri:And so, I do totally get, you're looking at that in kind of confusion,
Henri:why are they, what the fuck is this supposed to be sending me towards?
Henri:And then you get to the end, and you're like, okay, I guess I know what
Henri:they were going for, but still, it feels It feels a bit like cinematic
Henri:gaslighting when you really look at it.
Tom Secker:Yeah, because it's a warm open that then drops into a cold open.
Tom Secker:Right, right.
Tom Secker:The film starts twice, essentially.
Henri:And lots of critics, lots of critics in the stuff that I've
Henri:read online had that same complaint.
Henri:It was like, you know, that if you were taken between the beach and, um, The
Henri:Ryan's, uh, Ryan's Rescue at the very end and cut out the beginning and end.
Henri:It would have been like a perfect film to them, but they did notice that,
Henri:you know, what is, why is there this schmaltzy thing attached to this film?
Henri:Do we not have enough to see what the characters are doing?
Henri:Without having this weird intro and outro.
Tom Secker:It also reminds me, and I know I bring up this film quite a lot
Tom Secker:in our conversations, but I'm going to do it again anyway, of Fields of
Tom Secker:Fire, the Vietnam film that was never made, the one written by Jim Webb.
Tom Secker:Because the opening of that film is the father, the Vietnam veteran,
Tom Secker:who is clearly somewhat disabled and certainly still suffering.
Tom Secker:His experience is taking his son to Vietnam to visit the location of
Tom Secker:a battle, which we then come back to see later in the film for real.
Tom Secker:So it establishes, as I say, the emotional stakes, who these people
Tom Secker:are, what their relationship is, where they're going and why we should care.
Tom Secker:Um, does not take a long time to do that.
Tom Secker:It then does go a bit supernatural and he starts to see ghosts and things
Tom Secker:and that precipitates the flashback.
Tom Secker:And then as in this film, we then get the story kind of moving forward
Tom Secker:from there chronologically, but it's essentially the same open, right?
Tom Secker:The same way of structuring the opening to a movie.
Tom Secker:And it's so much more effective.
Tom Secker:And of course that film done in by the DOD, I mean, it's largely
Tom Secker:their fault that it was never made.
Tom Secker:Whereas this one ultimately got army support of varying kinds.
Tom Secker:I mean, they didn't provide a lot of hardware because they didn't
Tom Secker:actually have any World War II hardware left to loan them.
Tom Secker:So I'm not quite sure where they got all this from, but
Tom Secker:fair play to them for doing it.
Tom Secker:Um, and yeah, yes, like I say, when I was reflecting on why that opening
Tom Secker:of the movie bothers me so much this time, I was thinking it's because
Tom Secker:it's the same opening as Fields of Fire, just really badly written.
Tom Secker:You know, they were going for the same kind of thing, but they
Tom Secker:just either didn't know how to execute it or didn't care, maybe?
Tom Secker:There's not a lot of care in that opening either.
Tom Secker:It doesn't feel like, uh, you know, Spielberg is capable of
Tom Secker:generating great cinematic moments.
Tom Secker:Always has been.
Tom Secker:And yet that scene feels so vague and lazy.
Tom Secker:And then, yeah, like I say, I think of just a cold open
Tom Secker:where we jump straight either.
Tom Secker:We see a big.
Tom Secker:We get the big picture of the invasion, we'll just start with
Tom Secker:a few guys in a boat, yeah?
Tom Secker:Maybe pull out from there.
Tom Secker:I don't know, there's so many different ways you could do this that would be more
Tom Secker:effective than that, um, but we should move on and actually talk about this
Tom Secker:great big, is it 24, 25 minute battle sequence that is the thing everyone talks
Tom Secker:about with Saving Private Ryan, I guess.
Tom Secker:Yes,
Henri:yes, so it's important for people to know that we have to, we definitely
Henri:have to take a trip through some important history to understand this, uh, some of
Henri:this stuff, and also that it is kind of a curious thing that a filmmaker would
Henri:choose such a specific place Among such a huge battle, um, and concentrate on it.
Henri:And again, you know, got a great many of the details right, especially as to,
Henri:you know, veterans that, that saw it when it first came out and talked about,
Henri:you know, that the, the authenticity was definitely up there, but it's
Henri:a curious thing to, to Thank you.
Henri:Try to recreate such a specific place because the history can stand there,
Henri:you know, opposed to you the whole time.
Henri:Um, whereas if we're watching a movie like Platoon, that we understand that, that
Henri:script, that, that, um, that Oliver Stone amalgamized different parts of it and put
Henri:different things together to make it more compelling, not to make it inauthentic.
Henri:Today we're not gonna talk about training or deployment of hundreds of thousands
Henri:of Americans, British, French, and so on.
Henri:Participated.
Henri:Participated in the evasion, uh, both in the English channel like
Henri:Tom Hanks and his pals in the movie.
Henri:Um, huge airborne drops from into Normandy behind enemy lines.
Henri:Massive bombardment of the coastline.
Henri:Um, we're not talking about the full picture of coastal
Henri:defenses by the Germans.
Henri:We're not discussing PSYOP's campaigns by the Allies to try to shift
Henri:German assets in different places.
Henri:Um, you know, we're not talking about the fact that You know, truly that four of
Henri:five deaths in Europe at that time in, in World War II were cumulative, cumulatively
Henri:on the Eastern front as the U.
Henri:S.
Henri:only lost about 600, 000 troops, Russia lost 27 million folks
Henri:between military and civilian.
Henri:What we are discussing today and what you need to center your mind on as
Henri:you're listening to us is that this is one very small section of Omaha Beach.
Henri:And they took it and they made this 25 minutes, so everything that I
Henri:just mentioned, we have to understand that we're not getting the full
Henri:picture of any of those things.
Henri:Of course, we're not getting the full picture in the 25 minutes, but it is
Henri:much more honest than a demonstration of the rest, but it goes back to us
Henri:focusing on the individuals, on the individual wounds, on the individual
Henri:arms lost and people blown up.
Henri:Drowned in the, in the surf.
Henri:And, and of course all those things happen.
Henri:A horrific, horrific place to be any kind of a human being, much less a troop
Henri:of some kind on one of those beaches.
Henri:Um, one other aspect though, just so I don't forget to mention it later, is that
Henri:much like a film like Black Hawk Down, that this film focused on American forces.
Henri:I don't remember seeing any number of Brits, French, Canadians, um, All of the
Henri:varying types of people that actually took part in this, and you know, different
Henri:countries ended up taking full on different beaches, um, but then we move
Henri:on to the actual scene, and history says that at this particular sliver of sand,
Henri:that this was the worst casualty wise.
Henri:It's important to emphasize here that Omaha beach was the most casualty heavy
Henri:area of the initial beach landings.
Henri:What you see in the film, while inaccurate in many ways, does give the
Henri:viewer a better grasp on how awful that morning was for the invading troops.
Henri:Why did Spielberg choose this beach?
Henri:Was he attempting to give viewers a sense of how hopeless or
Henri:difficult the place really was?
Henri:Or was it chosen to make a huge action sequence that allowed for only binary
Henri:assessments of what was happening?
Henri:Of course, both points aren’t mutually exclusive.
Henri:It can be both extreme hopelessness and a huge action piece that focused on
Henri:individuals reacting to heavy violence without equally showing the other side.
Henri:During the Normandy beach landings, that more people died in this small sliver of
Henri:ground that included Charlie Company, 2nd Rangers, that was actually captained by a
Henri:guy named Captain Ralph Goranson, um, and then immediately to their left, I believe,
Henri:is Alpha Company, 116th Regimental Combat Team, 29th Infantry Division.
Henri:And I say that because when the scene opens, when they're opening
Henri:the boats for the first time and Tom Hanks and Tom Sizemore run out
Henri:there, there are already men from that alpha company dead on the beach.
Henri:Their company was almost completely wiped out.
Henri:In that section, the Rangers did better, only a little better, and I
Henri:don't know to put it on Rangers or just they had good leaders and were able to
Henri:make the most of the horrifying place.
Henri:Also possibly just dumb luck.
Henri:.Absolutely.
Henri:No, there's, there's so many different factors that can come into it.
Henri:Um, one thing that Saving Private Ryan didn't include in the front
Henri:thing was that there were a couple of incidences of friendly fire.
Henri:That was mainly when, uh, Naval bombardments, they were able to signal
Henri:back to British naval ships and get them to provide them artillery support
Henri:and sometimes there were misfirings, they hit places where there were actual
Henri:Allied troops instead of German troops.
Henri:And they also, the troops on the beaches, used white phosphorus grenades.
Henri:To clear out the bunkers and pillboxes that the Germans were in.
Henri:I hope I don't need to emphasize to anybody listening to this podcast, but
Henri:I'm going to anyway, how horrifying white phosphorus burns are, and how
Henri:even after you've been able to get the fire out, which is a chemical fire, one
Henri:that can't be put out by water, um, but it's just a horrifying thing, but of
Henri:course that one, I could see Spielberg easily saying we're not going to show
Henri:that, and certainly we're not going to show that happening to any Americans
Henri:if somebody missed threw a grenade, and even though they do show stuff like that,
Henri:um, throughout the film, that it was, they didn't include any of those kind
Henri:of things, so we're American centric, doesn't include Friendly Fire, doesn't
Henri:allow us to know about that other company that is being entirely shredded to bits.
Tom Secker:All you've just said makes me think This sequence is
Tom Secker:known for being, or at least in our generation anyway, for being like
Tom Secker:the definitive depiction of combat in all its horrible, brutal glory, etc.
Tom Secker:And yet, everything you're saying says it's actually quite sanitized
Tom Secker:and quite carefully sanitized to give the impression of exactly what they're
Tom Secker:going for, which is what Spielberg said.
Tom Secker:And he said this ludicrous thing, it's a quote I came across when I was Reading, I
Tom Secker:think it was actually Larry Seward's entry on Saving Private Brian, which is alright.
Tom Secker:One of the better entries in his not especially impressive book.
Tom Secker:Um, yeah, anyway, Spielberg said, you know, there have been, I think he said
Tom Secker:84 American films that depict combat in war, and this will be the 85th, and
Tom Secker:it'll be the first one to tell the truth.
Tom Secker:I'm thinking, firstly, you've ripped off this opening from
Tom Secker:The Longest Day, so that's just bullshit straight out of the can.
Tom Secker:And secondly, how arrogant to say that, and then to avoid Some of the real chaotic
Tom Secker:nastiness of what really happened, some of the real, the real horror show, and
Tom Secker:instead it's basically just machine guns, lots and lots and lots of machine
Tom Secker:guns, um, and obviously being hit with an industrial machine gun, having
Tom Secker:your gut shredded by it, is not a good thing, but we don't actually see people
Tom Secker:dying in the way a lot of people died.
Tom Secker:It's often quite quick, for one thing.
Tom Secker:Yeah?
Tom Secker:You don't see, apart from the guy who actually has his guts hanging
Tom Secker:out and he's screaming and there's, you know, there's a bit of that,
Tom Secker:but it's kept to a relative minimum.
Tom Secker:We do just see a lot of people getting hit by bullets and now they're dead.
Tom Secker:Like the idiot who comes along and takes his helmet off and then is immediately
Tom Secker:shot and it's like, that's such a war movie cliché, that's so, I mean,
Tom Secker:what were they going for with that?
Tom Secker:Were they trying to make it funny?
Tom Secker:It's almost slapstick, given what's going on around them, given all these
Tom Secker:other people who've died, and are dying, and are, you know, lying on
Tom Secker:the beach, missing a leg, and so on.
Tom Secker:So yeah, what you're saying is actually, rather than being the truth about combat,
Tom Secker:as Spielberg was promoting it, possibly self promoting, It's actually quite
Tom Secker:clean given what truly happened there.
Henri:There was a lot of deaths on the day of the invasion that happened simply
Henri:because the troops were dropped off from their Higgins boat or whatever kind
Henri:of craft was taking them to the beach.
Henri:Um, that so many of them drowned.
Henri:You know, they never made it to the beach.
Henri:And we see that a little bit.
Henri:We see a few guys struggling in the water.
Henri:There's, you know, a couple floating in the water, although it's close
Henri:enough, you don't know whether it could have been gunfire or just
Henri:the water or a combination thereof.
Henri:And the stories, the little snippets that I've read through, uh, doing
Henri:research for this has almost every guy.
Henri:Who gets mentioned saying that they were helping somebody else who was wounded,
Henri:you know, guy broke his leg trying to come out of the water guy gets trapped under
Henri:a rock and so, so much of the soldiers time on the beach when they're supposed
Henri:to be moving forward is just dealing with the casualties and not even specifically
Henri:being dealt with by the medics.
Henri:Um, no, sure.
Tom Secker:Just being grabbed and dragged around and someone's
Tom Secker:trying to patch you up.
Tom Secker:All of that.
Henri:So the beach action, it did include a little bit of that and it did
Henri:include some of that hopelessness that there was that one dude that Captain
Henri:Miller drugged for a little bit and then I think is immediately after he
Henri:stopped dragging him, he got shot.
Henri:On the ground.
Henri:And, and that's, you know, like the thing with the, with the helmet, you
Henri:know, those things do happen in, in combat, but they are also cliches.
Henri:They, they are, they fit into their, they think that they're instilling
Henri:something with wisdom and they're just encouraging lazy writing, you know.
Tom Secker:Well, that's the thing.
Tom Secker:It's like everything that actually happens in that opening sequence,
Tom Secker:give or take, did actually happen.
Tom Secker:It's all the stuff that also happened that is missing from that
Tom Secker:opening sequence that undermines it.
Tom Secker:And I'm reminded of the sequence in Wonder Woman where she goes over the
Tom Secker:top, where she's marching through no man's land and, you know, deflecting
Tom Secker:all the bullets with a shield and again it's a machine gun because it's Germans.
Tom Secker:And that is perhaps the most iconic action sequence in that film about World War One.
Tom Secker:And it is a complete lie about the true nature of trench warfare and
Tom Secker:what going over the top was like.
Tom Secker:Going over the top, i.
Tom Secker:e.
Tom Secker:everyone just piles over the top of the trenches and charges towards the
Tom Secker:opposition's trench, and most of those people just get cut down, most of
Tom Secker:those people die, exactly like here.
Tom Secker:And, okay, this is a far more realistic film than Wonder Woman,
Tom Secker:and this is still a far more realistic sequence than that one was.
Tom Secker:But it has the same troubling dimension to it, that it's taking the mass, I
Tom Secker:don't want to say suicidal, because it's not suicidal, but it's near as damn it
Tom Secker:being sent on a suicide mission, for a lot of those people, taking that and
Tom Secker:turning it into something simple and heroic that can be overcome quickly.
Tom Secker:Because that's the other problem with it, is that after 25 minutes,
Tom Secker:they're basically one, it seems, and it just sort of stops.
Tom Secker:And you don't get a sense of, oh, this is just this little part of the beach,
Tom Secker:there's still a hundred fights going on up and down the coastline, and there's
Tom Secker:still lots of people dying and lots of stuff going on, it just sort of almost
Tom Secker:goes quiet, and then they get the mission to go off and save Jack Ryan, and
Tom Secker:That I also find deeply troubling, because as you say, this was a very
Tom Secker:varied invasion in terms of the scale of what was happening on different
Tom Secker:beaches and which forces were involved and so on, and of course how many people
Tom Secker:died and how many people survived.
Tom Secker:And it made it seem like the invasion of Normandy was just Tom Hanks
Tom Secker:having to blow up a bunker or two.
Henri:Pretty much, yeah.
Tom Secker:So again, this is something that is really morally problematic
Tom Secker:about it, because people take it as being a gruesome, gritty depiction
Tom Secker:of combat that's actually been kind of squashed into a tiny little.
Tom Secker:ball of what they want you to see, that doesn't actually tell
Tom Secker:you what this thing was like.
Tom Secker:It doesn't, it's, it's very impressionistic.
Tom Secker:I think that's ultimately the problem with it.
Tom Secker:But, okay, the sound design is fantastic, the camera work is fantastic,
Tom Secker:it's beautifully edited together.
Tom Secker:But ultimately, does it really give you an impression of suffering and
Tom Secker:death and the futility of this?
Tom Secker:Or does it just make you move on so fast that none of that really resonates?
Tom Secker:When, surely, that should be the point?
Tom Secker:And that seems to be the point that a lot of people have taken from it, even though
Tom Secker:that's not what the film has given them.
Tom Secker:So, I'm left wondering how they ended up with that reaction.
Tom Secker:I'm very confused by people's reactions to this movie being so
Tom Secker:very different to mine, obviously.
Tom Secker:Um, and normally I can understand that, but with this one, the more I break
Tom Secker:down that sequence in my mind, the less I understand why people think it's so
Tom Secker:Iconic for one thing, but also profound.
Tom Secker:It's actually saying anything about either the Normandy
Tom Secker:invasions or combat in general.
Tom Secker:Is it, I mean, are you coming from a different place here?
Tom Secker:Can you see some kind of moral or statement or something that
Tom Secker:they're actually trying to say there that I'm just missing?
Tom Secker:No.
Henri:No.
Henri:No.
Henri:There just isn't.
Henri:There just isn't.
Tom Secker:Do you remember what the Pentagon said about forrest Gump?
Tom Secker:They said it had a nihilistic view of the Vietnam War.
Tom Secker:I'm starting to wonder, does Saving Private Ryan have kind of
Tom Secker:a nihilistic view of World War II?
Henri:That's a good, that's a really good point, man.
Tom Secker:Even though it's interpreted in such a different way to that,
Tom Secker:that's not how most people see the film and most people remember it.
Tom Secker:That's how I'm reacting to it right now.
Henri:Well, one thing I This film would fit into Before my army time it would
Henri:fit into a category of films that most people only ever saw once And that was
Henri:as far as they thought that they could stomach it and so in you know, in their
Henri:remembered reflections of what they got from the movie, I think that it People
Henri:are, are filling in more blanks than Spielberg gave them blanks to fill in.
Henri:The biggest FU to me, and I don't know why screenwriters allowed this to happen
Henri:to their work, but that the original script for Saving Private Ryan was a
Henri:much better, much more honest An open depiction of what war was, um, during
Henri:that time, um, a couple of good examples that, um, even after the Rangers get off
Henri:the beach, um, before they are sent to go after Ryan, that in order for them to
Henri:brief Captain Miller on the mission, they have to literally remove him from combat.
Henri:He and his soldiers are fighting right there, and his soldiers keep fighting
Henri:while he's briefed, he then goes back, takes the ones that he determines are
Henri:going to come, and then they end up leaving, and then for them, there are
Henri:no shortage of horrifying events that On their way to try to find Ryan and try
Henri:to, try to bring him back to wherever they were supposed to bring him back to.
Henri:Um, and so it's, it's, uh, and then, and then the final thing, and I think
Henri:this, this definitely goes to what you're talking about in terms of the,
Henri:the minimization of really, Horrifying wartime kind of violence, um, is
Henri:the final battle that I think is, is sterilized in very much the same way.
Henri:Um, but when you compare it to the original script, that sequence of
Henri:the movie is much, much longer.
Henri:You see them take Hours and hours and hours preparing the battle space, moving
Henri:rubble around, setting up machine guns, deciding what angles of fire are the best.
Henri:In the portion we saw in the movie, mmm, 10 minutes?
Henri:Maybe?
Henri:Something, you know, a very, very short thing.
Henri:Um, and then of course there's the ending and the, the, earn this and
Henri:all that other bullshit and such.
Henri:Um, but it, it It just looking at how much it was downgraded
Henri:from the original script.
Henri:And of course, that's the, you know, this Spielberg, this Spielberg
Henri:special, um, to go ahead and do what he wants and make and make changes.
Henri:And however he feels, because he's, he's the God with the Oscars.
Henri:Um, But it's really important that the, the, that we point out the, um, the
Henri:sterility of the movie, of the entire movie, there's sterility in the, in
Henri:the violence, and certainly in the more sentimental moments, there's also this
Henri:sterile sentimentalism, you know, like when Ryan's mom gets the telegrams and
Henri:we haven't really talked much about the original story But we'll we'll get to
Henri:that in a little bit But when in the film you see Ryan's mom get the telegrams
Henri:She gets of course gets all three of them at once and you never see her face.
Henri:She's at this at the sink washing dishes She looks out her window She sees in the
Henri:distance the chaplain's car coming to her home And of course once she realizes that
Henri:of who it is, she sits down on the porch So I'm sure she's beside herself if we
Henri:could see her face Does she have a face?
Henri:We don't know.
Henri:We didn't get to see it.
Henri:Um, and, and the other thing, and this one, this one hit me much, much harder.
Henri:Maybe it was because I was a soldier or that it just goes
Henri:back to older, older parts of me that I'm not noticing right now.
Henri:But, um, when Ryan, when Private Ryan is initially told that his three
Henri:brothers are dead, he falls on the fucking ground and loses his mind.
Henri:I mean, he is beside himself at the thought that all three of them.
Henri:We don't see any of that in Matt Damon's performance of Private Ryan.
Henri:We see a much more manly, hold it in, you know, kind of thing.
Henri:Um, and it's clear, you know, he loves his brothers, that little story about
Henri:the bra and the barn and all that shit.
Henri:And to be fair, I could understand that at a moment like that, that, you know,
Henri:you're so confused trying and he's trying to remember his brother's faces and he's
Henri:not sure at that moment how to do that.
Henri:But again, it's, it's, that's not.
Henri:The reaction, Matt Damon's performance is not the reaction of someone who
Henri:just lost their three siblings.
Henri:And that whole thing just flattens out over the whole film.
Henri:Like they're giving us a secondary lesson in American male masculinity in
Henri:addition to all the bullshit in the film.
Henri:That this is how it's how we're supposed to be, instead of understanding
Henri:that people lose it, people who lose their children in war lose it, and
Henri:that should be acceptable, fair, in a film, in a war film, it should be,
Henri:yeah, it's uncomfortable as fuck to watch somebody cry and mourn and lose
Henri:their mind, and it's supposed to be.
Henri:That's one of the aspects of war that we do leave out so much, you
Henri:know, you have your mom with a single tear as opposed to a mom that can't
Henri:get out of bed for a month because their son is dead, or something.
Tom Secker:Well, like you say, we don't actually see the face,
Tom Secker:we just see them face in hands, silhouette from behind, weeping.
Tom Secker:Yeah, and then it will quickly fade into something else to not linger on that.
Tom Secker:Um, so just as they don't linger on the physical suffering.
Tom Secker:In that first sequence, in the combat, they don't linger on the emotional
Tom Secker:suffering, which is supposed to be the thing that drives the entire plot.
Tom Secker:That's the whole reason why we should care about this, right?
Tom Secker:We want this kid to survive because he's the only son left.
Tom Secker:We want this woman to get her only surviving son back.
Tom Secker:And yet, again, they never introduce her, really, we don't get to know her,
Tom Secker:we don't get to know why her son matters to her so much, I mean, we're just
Tom Secker:sort of left to presume all of that.
Tom Secker:And like you say, when they eventually actually get to Jack Ryan, I keep
Tom Secker:calling him Jack Ryan but I'm going to keep doing that anyway, um, I know
Tom Secker:that's not his name in the film but when we eventually get to him, his
Tom Secker:emotional reaction is Neither one of shock and shutting down, nor one of
Tom Secker:exploding and falling to the ground, like you say in the original script.
Tom Secker:So, quite what are we supposed to make of the emotional through
Tom Secker:line to the entire movie?
Tom Secker:And how is that supposed to link up with the bookends that we've already discussed?
Tom Secker:Given that Spielberg was evidently trying to make that kind of film,
Tom Secker:I think he screwed up, basically.
Tom Secker:Um, I think he missed what the emotional beats in this movie were
Tom Secker:supposed to be for that story to work, and cheated the audience.
Tom Secker:Out of both, a realistic, truly realistic depiction of the combat at Normandy,
Tom Secker:particularly that bit of the beach.
Tom Secker:And, kind of cheated them out of the rest of the film too, because it's,
Tom Secker:as I said, he ripped off the start from The Longest Day, the rest of the
Tom Secker:film, and he's quite open about this.
Tom Secker:He ripped off from a film called A Walk in the Sun, which is about a small group
Tom Secker:of American GIs in Italy, I think, who are looking for a bridge they have to blow up.
Tom Secker:So it's just them.
Tom Secker:Like in most of, uh, Saving Jack Ryan, um, just traipsing across
Tom Secker:the countryside, talking about stuff, and then things happen.
Tom Secker:Um, why try and make both of those films at once?
Tom Secker:Make one or the other.
Tom Secker:Or, as you say with the original script, if you are going to
Tom Secker:do it, have it like that.
Tom Secker:Have it that they're kind of pulled out of combat.
Tom Secker:So you get the sense that the fight is still going on on the beach, and then
Tom Secker:as they move away, they engage in more of a fight, they discover, you know,
Tom Secker:there's just sort of random chaos, bits of war going on all around them, and
Tom Secker:they're trying to move through this.
Tom Secker:That's presumably what they were going for, even with the toned
Tom Secker:down and sanitized version, but it's not what we ended up with.
Tom Secker:What you end up with is something that's sensorily overwhelming,
Tom Secker:but then goes quiet, and then gets a bit dull for quite a while.
Tom Secker:Because, as I say, how are we supposed to care about all of these people when we
Tom Secker:haven't been introduced to them, and we don't really know who they are, or Why all
Tom Secker:of this matters the person that we really are supposed to care about is the mother
Tom Secker:back home Who we hope will one day get to see her son again but we spend no time
Tom Secker:with her because the only women in this film are either typists or a mother who
Tom Secker:we'd never see her Face because this is a very very sexist movie in that respect.
Tom Secker:Yeah, it's like a Michael Bay movie The women are there to
Tom Secker:cry And it'd be an emotional anchor point and that's about it.
Henri:It really, it really, uh, it really lends itself to, uh, American and British
Henri:military notions about women in combat.
Henri:About, you know, because we could tell, we could, you know, they
Henri:could include those kind of things.
Henri:They could include, you know, nurses that happen to come ashore.
Henri:With, uh, the medical teams sometime later on, and for some reason
Henri:there's fresh fighting going on nearby and they could go over it.
Henri:I read about this.
Henri:I read about all kinds of things like that.
Henri:No, there weren't, uh, there weren't women specifically on the beach, but
Henri:there were women everywhere else in that.
Henri:There were women loading bombs.
Henri:There were women, you know, as part of the, um, like I said, a big part
Henri:of the medical, medical crew there.
Henri:And they could have included those things, and they chose not to.
Henri:It's just, you know, that there, there are, there are so many great stories like
Henri:that in, in American and British history about women going, you know, and I don't
Henri:want to, I don't want to go over to the, to the combat worship side of it, but just
Henri:in terms of the survival of a human being against amazing odds and being helpful at
Henri:a time when society said Women shouldn't be in combat, around combat, near combat.
Henri:They might get scared.
Henri:They might get this, whatever bullshit they happen to throw out at that point.
Henri:They can be every bit as good as men in being warmongers.
Henri:There is no reason to not do that.
Henri:And it's, it's their own lack of imagination of including that.
Henri:And especially like you mentioned about Spielberg and his many, the many cliches
Henri:and things that he borrowed from places.
Henri:Um, it begins to make you wonder if he ever writes anything truly original.
Henri:But, uh, that would be a long subject for a different day.
Tom Secker:It would also involve watching all of his films again and concluding the
Tom Secker:answer to that question is probably not.
Tom Secker:Especially after Ready Player One, which is just a mashup of all his pre existing
Tom Secker:films and some other stuff that he likes.
Tom Secker:Um,
Henri:have a
Tom Secker:strange
Henri:guy, Spielberg.
Henri:He really is.
Henri:He's a, yeah.
Henri:He did.
Henri:Um, I, I think the best thing that he's ever made in my mind, and of course he
Henri:was only executive producer of it, but my favorite Spielberg thing is Animaniacs.
Henri:That, uh, that, that, that is where I put it because that's some
Henri:good stuff and he didn't write it.
Henri:He just was the, he was just the dude on the executive producer
Henri:thing, you know, so, but good show.
Henri:Good show.
Tom Secker:Animaniacs was great.
Tom Secker:Yeah.
Tom Secker:Yeah.
Tom Secker:No, I can see that.
Tom Secker:No, I can see that.
Tom Secker:I just wasn't expecting you to mention it.
Henri:So, I want to, I want to key up on one thing that happened, and this
Henri:goes right to, I think, to the heart of what you're discussing here, Tom, about,
Henri:about what characters find importance and how do we make our attachment to that.
Henri:Ryan's comment, right after meeting Captain Miller and hearing the
Henri:whole spiel and wanting to take him home, and Ryan retorts to the
Henri:Captain, he says, You can tell.
Henri:Her, my mom, when you found me, I was with the only brothers I have left.
Henri:Now, from a real simplistic soldier kind of standpoint, I could understand
Henri:him saying like that, but his brothers were literally just killed.
Henri:He's a member of the 101st Airborne, which means at that point where he was.
Henri:If we're to take all of that at face value, he had already seen a
Henri:whole host of death and destruction.
Henri:Why is it that he would place such stock in his comrades lives, knowing
Henri:that his own brothers were just killed?
Henri:This same way, why would he say anything lofty about the value of life when life
Henri:at that point that he was living, so, so fucking cheap, um, is it a, is it a,
Henri:uh, you know, kind of a, a front, you know, we're putting one foot in front of
Henri:the other and that is our retort to say.
Henri:Again, it's the theme here totally lost in the sauce in terms of
Henri:where that's supposed to go.
Henri:You know, him falling on his knees and crying, hearing about his brothers, people
Henri:can relate to, people can grab onto.
Henri:But if you're going to, if it's always going to fit into that male
Henri:centric, masculine presentation, John Wayne with the helmet and the cigar.
Henri:Um, then we're not going to get any closer to the real reality of
Henri:the emotions in times like these.
Henri:Um, and, and that's the other thing about the conclusion of the film that I think
Henri:was a sincere fuck up on Spielberg's part is that When Ryan ultimately
Henri:gets rescued, when the Mustangs fly overhead and bomb the bridge and push
Henri:back the Germans and everything, there is nothing to say that Ryan couldn't
Henri:have died 10 minutes after that, or 10 hours after that, or 10 days after that.
Henri:Um, remembering that all of those guys that came to rescue him
Henri:died, and he was left by himself.
Henri:Now, of course, if there's If there's allied air power overhead, that may mean
Henri:that ground forces are not far away, but that doesn't guarantee it in any instance.
Henri:So, I feel like that by moving immediately from that point back to
Henri:our sterile, uh, cemetery, and Grandpa Ryan trying to deal with his thousand
Henri:yard stare and everything, um, that there's something missing there.
Henri:There's something that, you know, and it, how, how did he fucking get home?
Henri:Even a short, very short little montage sequence of riding in the back of the
Henri:truck back to the beaches, getting on a boat, going back across the channel,
Henri:and then eventually Making it all the way back home, um, at least that could have
Henri:given us a connection and understanding that his war, his portion of the war, was
Henri:truly done right there, but it didn't, it didn't give us anything close to a
Henri:period on what was actually happening there, and that whole area, everything
Henri:about the Normandy beaches, about the Allies movement inland towards, um, bigger
Henri:German forces was all very tentative.
Henri:There was, there was nothing to say that the Germans wouldn't be
Henri:come back in a much greater force.
Henri:But, the film firmly tells us, we're stopping right here.
Henri:Here's where the fucking story ends.
Henri:What other story there is?
Henri:Well, you know, whatever people are thinking some people would be like,
Henri:okay Well, I'm glad the movie's over.
Henri:I don't have to go through that shit anymore.
Henri:And some other people who would have been, you know, more World War II Knowledgeable,
Henri:you know would have in their mind.
Henri:Okay, I guess he's going home now They don't have to explain that but that's
Henri:not the nature of war And so it's I think that that's a really big another missed
Henri:beat Along with a lot of the other stuff that we've been, we've been talking about.
Tom Secker:Yeah, because like you say, the reason why we're supposed to
Tom Secker:care about the people we're following through this journey, rather than seeing
Tom Secker:a wider scale movie that, as you say, could keep moving back to the beach,
Tom Secker:and show that this is still going on, as these guys are gradually making
Tom Secker:their way across the countryside and trying to find Ryan, that there is
Tom Secker:still a war going on all around them, and there is people dying constantly.
Tom Secker:But they didn't make that film.
Tom Secker:They made, uh, A Walk in the Sun, a small group of guys.
Tom Secker:But if you want to have a small group of guys, your opening half hour to the
Tom Secker:movie probably shouldn't be everyone but your small group of guys getting shot.
Tom Secker:It should probably be a conversation, maybe, between your small group
Tom Secker:of guys, establishing who the hell they are, so we can care about them.
Tom Secker:And then they try and do that.
Tom Secker:That all seems to sort of happen in the second act.
Tom Secker:Instead of the first.
Tom Secker:So again, the movie is sort of restarted once more.
Tom Secker:Um, third beginning now, just keeping score.
Tom Secker:Um, and that's when we start to get to know these guys.
Tom Secker:For one thing, it seemed like they just slapped everyone who was hot in
Tom Secker:the late 90s into a World War II army uniform and stuck them on the screen.
Tom Secker:And I don't think the characterization was done that well.
Tom Secker:They don't really stand out to me.
Tom Secker:I don't remember anyone in this film apart from Matt Damon
Tom Secker:and Tom Hanks, particularly.
Tom Secker:Maybe that's just me.
Tom Secker:Maybe other people feel differently.
Tom Secker:But even if that is what they were going for, and even if they accomplished that
Tom Secker:part of it, and some people may feel that they did, it gets very confused by
Tom Secker:all of these different things saying, oh no, but the individual doesn't matter.
Tom Secker:Your relationship to individual soldiers fighting in this war is irrelevant.
Tom Secker:And yet the ending of the film is all just one individual survives.
Tom Secker:And as you say, he says this line about my family brothers, my blood
Tom Secker:brothers are gone, but these are my new family, my new brothers.
Tom Secker:And then they all die.
Tom Secker:So, how is that line supposed to have much emotional resonance,
Tom Secker:when, okay, his first family's dead and now his second family's dead?
Tom Secker:Why does it even matter whether he survives at that point?
Tom Secker:Let alone the question of how does he survive, as you say.
Tom Secker:He's still in the middle of a war, and the notion that, oh, that's the end of
Tom Secker:Didn't he just, like, parachute in the day before, or that morning, or You
Tom Secker:know, it didn't seem like that was his whole mission, was to parachute in, get
Tom Secker:blown off course, and then get rescued.
Tom Secker:Um, I assume he had some other business that he would have to attend to before
Tom Secker:they just let him go out of France.
Tom Secker:Yeah, the whole, I mean, the whole premise of the film is screwed, because the notion
Tom Secker:that they would send off people in the midst of all of this to go and find one
Tom Secker:guy, and I know you've got some notes just to go through on, like, real life
Tom Secker:stories that may have inspired this, or certainly I think did inspire this.
Tom Secker:This, just to say, this is one of the things that the U.
Tom Secker:S.
Tom Secker:Army had a problem with themselves.
Tom Secker:As they said, the premise of the movie is kind of screwed.
Tom Secker:Not just because you open with Ryan, but then we're following Tom Hanks.
Tom Secker:So we assume Tom Hanks is the old guy at the end of the film, but then he dies.
Tom Secker:But Ryan was never on the beach, so the whole flashback thing
Tom Secker:doesn't actually follow through.
Tom Secker:They were criticizing this.
Tom Secker:That's the U.
Tom Secker:S.
Tom Secker:Army who said they had a problem with this.
Tom Secker:Now they also said the premise of sending off a bunch of guys to track down one
Tom Secker:soldier in the midst of a war, which is encompassing many hundreds of thousands
Tom Secker:of people, many many tens of thousands of whom are basically just dying every
Tom Secker:moment, doesn't make any sense either, and we wouldn't have actually done this.
Tom Secker:And there is also the whole problem of, how does the news
Tom Secker:get to the mother so quickly?
Tom Secker:I think there's actually one of the script notes that says, well, they
Tom Secker:didn't have email or faxes in the 1940s.
Tom Secker:So that was just physically impossible.
Tom Secker:Let alone the notion that they're all arriving at once,
Tom Secker:which is extremely unlikely.
Tom Secker:Um, you know, even they were picking holes in this very stupid script.
Tom Secker:Um, but yeah, it's particularly that through line of Does
Tom Secker:the individual matter?
Tom Secker:Because the film's sort of saying it does, but undermines that at almost every turn.
Tom Secker:And do the bonds of battle matter?
Tom Secker:It's saying yes, but undermines it at every turn.
Tom Secker:So, what actually matters?
Tom Secker:What are we left with except Guardian Cemetery?
Henri:That's pretty much it, and I think that kind of circular logic
Henri:and the schmaltz of the beach and everything, it really fits well in
Henri:other, among other American films about, you know, American centric thinking
Henri:about our military and what it does.
Henri:Um.
Henri:But it, you know, it's, it's very much, you know, as, as you're saying, you know,
Henri:this individual matters, they die, that individual matters, they die, um, and,
Henri:and, and nothing else better is, comes from that, and, and I'm really glad that
Henri:the army and that soldiers pointed that kind of thing out, and it, about, you
Henri:know, sending, sending a bunch of guys to kill and die for one, one person,
Henri:and Spielberg, He said the same thing.
Henri:He said he wanted to demonstrate the, um, the futility of what
Henri:it was they were trying to do.
Henri:Not just the actual mission, but the idea of sending that many, you know,
Henri:sending that many people ostensibly to die for this one dude to come home.
Henri:Um, but the thing is, is our mythology, American mythology, in that way, does
Henri:Attach itself really well to that, you know, to one of the, I don't remember
Henri:if it was the code of conduct or which, which army thing you're supposed to
Henri:resuscitate about this, but where it mentions leave no man behind.
Henri:And, you know, the, the whole, you know, if, if, if we were to take Blackhawk
Henri:down as being a second chapter of, of Saving Private Ryan, you would see,
Henri:you know, this repeated choice for military leaders to say, I'm going to
Henri:send a whole bunch of people to stop a very few people, or I'm going to spend
Henri:a whole bunch of people to rescue a very few people instead of cutting, you
Henri:know, cutting their losses and saying, I'm sorry, we can't, it makes no sense.
Henri:There is no sense to it.
Henri:Um, but again, like you're pointing out here is that Spielberg did
Henri:it so much throughout the film that there is never anything
Henri:concrete to grab onto in that way.
Henri:Um.
Henri:But, um, let's, um, let's move on a little
Tom Secker:bit.
Tom Secker:If anything, actually the most, the most powerful emotional beat
Tom Secker:that I felt in the film is in the, um, the wrong Private Ryan scene.
Tom Secker:Mm hmm.
Tom Secker:That was, that was
Henri:a good one.
Henri:That was a
Tom Secker:powerful one, yeah.
Tom Secker:Yeah, that's, that's how it should actually be when they
Tom Secker:find the real Ryan, yeah?
Tom Secker:And it's the wrong one.
Tom Secker:It's a scene that doesn't need to be in the film, and is in fact a
Tom Secker:bit of a waste of everyone's time.
Tom Secker:They probably could have left that out and just moved the fuck on with the story.
Tom Secker:But then they're actually missing the only emotional beat that
Tom Secker:landed in the entire film for me.
Tom Secker:So, I get that no matter what they did, I would have criticized it.
Tom Secker:But you see what I mean?
Tom Secker:He managed to create, in that moment, greater emotional depth, with a character
Tom Secker:that has no bearing on the plot.
Tom Secker:He's just got the same name and someone makes an administrative mistake.
Tom Secker:BF WATCH TV 2021 Then he did in the entire rest of the movie with the
Tom Secker:characters that we're supposed to care about, such as the mother, such
Tom Secker:as Tom Hanks, such as Matt Damon.
Tom Secker:How did he manage to create a greater emotional anchor with an entirely
Tom Secker:tertiary irrelevant character that, as I say, could just be written out and
Tom Secker:no one would miss him, than he did with the actual story he was trying to tell?
Tom Secker:I think maybe he got lost in the notion of futility.
Tom Secker:If he was trying to say that this was futile, I mean, firstly, that begs the
Tom Secker:question, why make the film, Stephen?
Tom Secker:Um, if your story is ultimately futile, maybe don't make it, but also, if
Tom Secker:you're trying to depict futility, you need to see the struggle of the
Tom Secker:people who are trying to do something futile, which means ultimately you
Tom Secker:do need to relate to their struggle.
Tom Secker:Great.
Tom Secker:Otherwise, you just end up with a kind of cold, emotionally flat film that
Tom Secker:doesn't really go anywhere and starts by saying the Normandy landings were
Tom Secker:over in about 20 minutes and finishes by saying we won World War II by
Tom Secker:saving or and or blowing up one bridge.
Tom Secker:And it's quite a small bridge as well.
Tom Secker:It's not like we're talking about the bridge over the river Kwai here.
Tom Secker:It's that was another thing that puzzles me about that ending.
Tom Secker:It's so small scale.
Tom Secker:They're trying to make this the big climax of the film, but it's just like
Tom Secker:one little bridge that, you know, you could probably rebuild that in about
Tom Secker:two days if you really wanted to.
Tom Secker:Probably faster if you get some Army Corps of Engineers in there or something.
Tom Secker:Um, and yet Tom Hanks makes this his last stand?
Tom Secker:Why?
Tom Secker:Why does he care?
Tom Secker:Why should we care?
Tom Secker:Sorry, you wanted to move on to something else.
Tom Secker:Please, please do, because I'm just ranting about how little
Tom Secker:I care about this meeting.
Henri:Um, so we need to talk a little bit about the real, um, basis.
Henri:For the story of, of Saving Private Ryan, and of course it is, it is only one
Henri:aspect that is among many other aspects from many other films and ideas that,
Henri:um, get input in here, but the real story is quite different, but I think it's a,
Henri:it's an important one to put alongside.
Henri:Um, so a partial basis for this story is the tale of the Nyland brothers,
Henri:but the, before we come to them, we need to first talk about the Sullivan
Henri:brothers, the Sullivan brothers were five biological siblings who enlisted.
Henri:In the Navy after Pearl Harbor and were assigned together on the USS
Henri:Juneau, which was part of the U.
Henri:S.
Henri:Pacific Fleet.
Henri:George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert Sullivan.
Henri:The Navy agreed to the request that all five would serve on the same ship.
Henri:It wasn't a common practice by the U.
Henri:S.
Henri:military to place siblings together, but it wasn't discouraged either.
Henri:Some officials saw it as a way to keep family morale high.
Henri:In fact, at least 30 sets of brothers were serving on the Juneau when it sank.
Henri:Um, it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes in 1942 with no known survivors.
Henri:And so the fallout from the deaths of the so brothers led to significant
Henri:changes in policies at the, uh, the war department about siblings or close
Henri:relatives being stationed together.
Henri:Um, now this was prior, prior, you know, this was the war department before it was
Henri:changed to the DEF Department of Defense.
Henri:Mind you, at this point in World War II, the Sullivans were, of course, only one
Henri:very small portion of sibling groups who had died together, so the War Department
Henri:created its own sole survivor policy.
Henri:It was this policy that affected the Nyland brothers, um, Edward,
Henri:Fritz, Preston, and Robert Nyland.
Henri:And then their postings among American forces were a direct
Henri:result of this new policy.
Henri:One was assigned to the U.
Henri:S.
Henri:Army Air Corps in the Pacific, while the other three were assigned to various
Henri:infantry units in the European theater.
Henri:In fact, three of them were stationed in England at the same time in
Henri:preparation for the Normandy landings.
Henri:Um, although because they were in different units and preparing for
Henri:different missions, they didn't actually have much contact with each other while
Henri:they were in England still getting ready for the invasion in May of 1944
Henri:Edward Nyland was shot down over Burma and was declared missing believed to
Henri:be dead next on June 6th 1944 the first day of the Normandy landings the three
Henri:brothers Each participated in the landings albeit in very different places Robert
Henri:was killed in action on the 6th On, I want to say, on one of the beaches, and
Henri:then on the 7th, the same fate befell Preston, and the last brother, uh,
Henri:Frederick, or Fritz, as he was called, was missing, having jumped in with the
Henri:101st the night prior to the invasion.
Henri:Now, I'm gonna, next part, I'm gonna quote a little bit here from Band of
Henri:Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, and he is What was for the long time, one of the
Henri:main historians around some of this stuff, a very prominent one, but also a very U.
Henri:S.
Henri:centric one.
Henri:Quote, the previous day, Nylund had gone to the 82nd to see his brother, Bob,
Henri:the one who had told, told Malarkey in London that if you wanted to be a hero,
Henri:a hero, the Germans would see to it fast, which had led Malarkey to conclude
Henri:that Bob Nylund had lost his nerve.
Henri:Fritz Nylund had just learned that his brother had been killed on D Day.
Henri:Bob's platoon had been surrounded and he manned a machine gun, hitting the
Henri:Germans with harassing fire until the platoon broke through the encirclement.
Henri:He had used up several boxes of ammo before getting killed.
Henri:Fritz next hitched a ride to the 4th Infantry Division, and this
Henri:is all, of course, post landing.
Henri:Um, And, uh, 4th Infantry Division positioned to see another
Henri:brother who was a platoon leader.
Henri:He, too, had been killed on D Day on Utah.
Henri:By the time Fritz returned to Easy Company, uh, which he was part
Henri:of Easy Company, uh, what is it?
Henri:2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment.
Henri:Um, by the time he returned to the company, Father Francis Sampson
Henri:was looking for him to tell him that a third brother, a pilot in
Henri:the China, Burma, India theater, had been killed the same week.
Henri:Fritz was the sole surviving son and the army wanted to remove him from
Henri:the combat zone on the same day.
Henri:Father Sampson escorted Fritz to Utah Beach where a plane flew him
Henri:home, flew him to London on his first leg of return to the states
Henri:and he actually served stateside as an MP until the end of the war.
Henri:And so obviously Saving Private Ryan diverges from this super fucking strongly,
Henri:um, keeping only the deaths of the three brothers in close succession and the
Henri:quote unquote rescue of by the army.
Henri:Although the rescue If we're to call it one and all, it
Henri:was very different in reality.
Henri:Um, the survival of Edward after his release from the POW camp wasn't included
Henri:in any way in the final film or the journey Fritz took to find his brothers
Henri:after the initial D Day landings.
Henri:Um, and of course, no soldiers were sent individually or as
Henri:a unit to bring back Fritz.
Henri:Inspiration for Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:I don't know about you, Tom, but I would have found a movie that told the story of
Henri:this brother Fritz going to find out about his brothers by himself, mind you, would
Henri:have made a much better film and a much more authentic film than anything that
Henri:Saving Private Ryan can spit back at us.
Henri:Um, you know, and it, it, and this is how it happened.
Henri:The hero of the matter, if there's to be a hero, was a chaplain.
Henri:Someone who, you know, he wasn't part of the fighting or anything,
Henri:but recognized what was happening and took it upon himself.
Henri:I think he actually turned the packet of paperwork into his command
Henri:on behalf of Fritz in order to get him to be able to go home.
Henri:I mean, would, I can't imagine that anybody on the Normandy side of
Henri:things would consider wasting Time on something like that when they're
Henri:having to deal with actual battleship.
Henri:I
Tom Secker:totally agree.
Tom Secker:That sounds like a much better film.
Tom Secker:Not just because it's a real story, but because it's a better story.
Tom Secker:It's, I
Tom Secker:mean, okay, that's quite, that would actually be quite difficult to write.
Tom Secker:Nonetheless, it's evident that they picked up on stories like this one,
Tom Secker:possibly that family in particular, as the basis for Saving Private Brian.
Tom Secker:And yet, they missed the opportunity.
Tom Secker:To make Ryan the central character, I guess, is partly
Tom Secker:where they went wrong with that.
Tom Secker:Just from a storytelling point of view, again, they needed
Tom Secker:to establish Ryan earlier on.
Tom Secker:And if they were telling that story about that family, presumably, Fritz
Tom Secker:would be in the opening reel of the film.
Tom Secker:He'd be established quite early on.
Tom Secker:They'd even establish the relationships between the brothers.
Tom Secker:They could maybe establish the chaplain quite early on in the film.
Tom Secker:Yeah, you could tell a so much better story, while still having the war
Tom Secker:going on around them, while still having it depict action and combat
Tom Secker:and, if you want, the futility of it, certainly the chaos and the noise
Tom Secker:and the cinematic side, but still tell that particular kind of a story.
Tom Secker:where it's more tightly focused.
Tom Secker:I mean that's another problem with Saving Private Ryan is there's kind of too many
Tom Secker:men in this troupe that they send off.
Tom Secker:If they just sent off a couple of guys and it's about their relationship
Tom Secker:or at least that part of the film is about those two guys and some
Tom Secker:kind of back and forth but it isn't.
Tom Secker:It's about Tom Hanks and some people.
Tom Secker:So you see what I mean if you pack too many people into that group you don't
Tom Secker:give any of them enough time to breathe so you don't ever get to really know them.
Tom Secker:Whereas in the story that you're describing with Fritz,
Tom Secker:You could establish all of those people well enough, the ones that die,
Tom Secker:their deaths matter, and the ones that survive, their mission, their sense
Tom Secker:of purpose, their journey matters.
Tom Secker:Instead of this kind of meandering, not quite sure what this film is about, not
Tom Secker:quite sure who is this guy that they're looking for, maybe he's dead, anyway.
Tom Secker:Maybe that would have made for a better film as they eventually
Tom Secker:get there and Jack Ryan's dead.
Tom Secker:I mean, you want to talk about a story of futility, tell that story.
Henri:Right.
Henri:Yeah, we've talked about that one before, yeah, definitely.
Henri:So,
Tom Secker:no, you're right, you're right.
Tom Secker:Real life is always better.
Tom Secker:And that is actually quite an amazing story from Normandy from World War II.
Tom Secker:There's, yeah, that's kind of an amazing thing to do,
Tom Secker:particularly in the midst of a war.
Tom Secker:Right.
Tom Secker:Particularly when there's a million other things pressing on you at every moment.
Tom Secker:Um, for people to find that sense of, I guess, caring, to find it within
Tom Secker:themselves to actually give a shit enough, to just help someone out like that.
Tom Secker:When you don't have to, you know, yeah, that chaplain, I don't know who they
Tom Secker:could get to play him, but yeah, yeah, that would have made a really nice
Henri:movie.
Henri:Yeah, I think so too.
Henri:I think it would be a very interesting perspective, especially among American
Henri:war films, which if a chaplain's there, it's because somebody's dying or dead.
Henri:That's that's the only reason that the chaplains fight alongside and they
Henri:have a much greater role in that in that way Um, they're there to make
Tom Secker:death sacred.
Tom Secker:Basically.
Henri:Yes.
Henri:Yes.
Henri:Yes, absolutely Um,
Tom Secker:it's more about in the story you're telling it's more
Tom Secker:about making life sacred, right?
Tom Secker:Which is not a point that ever gets made in Jack Ryan Even though the whole film is
Tom Secker:supposed to be about the survival of one man and why that should matter Spielberg
Tom Secker:got very confused when writing this.
Tom Secker:He really did.
Tom Secker:The
Henri:writing of this movie Maybe his co creator was off that week, who knows?
Henri:Um, so there's a second historical part of this that I want to mention real quick.
Henri:And it has to do with the use of what's called the Bixby
Henri:letter in Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:And this letter was written by either by President Lincoln or Lincoln's
Henri:personal secretary to a mother who was believed to have lost five sons.
Henri:In the Civil War and the local, local politicians and the governor
Henri:in Massachusetts, they put in the request for Lincoln to, to write this
Henri:letter and it's beautiful, but it's also honest, um, you know, he talks
Henri:about how we, how we can fruitless any words of mine might be to comfort you
Henri:in a moment like this, um, but it's.
Henri:I feel like that it doesn't feel right for, um, the movie because, because
Henri:again, we're getting into, we, we've, we finally found a limit to our futility,
Henri:Tom, and it's called Saving Private Ryan, you know, um, and I think that that, in
Henri:addition to the whole earn this thing, they almost feel like fourth wall breaks.
Henri:It almost feels like Deadpool should be showing up and cussing at us in
Henri:these moments because that's kind of.
Henri:How the moment seems to feel.
Henri:And I have a lot of questions about that whole scene with the Chief of Staff,
Henri:you know, General George Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of the Army during
Henri:World War II, and of course is a very famous and beloved general here in the U.
Henri:S., um, that, uh, would George Marshall have time at, what is it, two days
Henri:after D Day, after the landings, to I Have enough information to actually
Henri:know that this has happened and then actually be able to order an individual
Henri:group, a single squad of soldiers to go and do something about it.
Henri:Um, and, and there's a, there's a bit of back and forth.
Henri:There's the other officers there.
Henri:Dale Dye is in that scene and he mentions about all the airborne
Henri:misdrops and how you may be sending your guys to on a, on a wild goose chase.
Henri:Some of the only, um, outside pushback in the movie, of course, the soldiers going.
Henri:Talk about it a little bit, but very seldom are we hearing
Henri:anybody higher up, even Captain Miller, saying anything about it.
Henri:Um, but the, the, the idea of losing five sons, or in the case of Mrs.
Henri:Ryan, having lost three sons and one son come home.
Henri:For the military and the kind of combat operations and, and conflicts that
Henri:American personnel end up these days, that It, it, we just can't fathom, and
Henri:they don't even try anymore, filmmakers don't even try to help us fathom the scale
Henri:of what some of these things are, and I think that they say to themselves, okay,
Henri:we're going to focus on an individual, and he'll have the values that we're
Henri:trying to get across, whatever stupid army bullshit is going on, you know.
Henri:Um, but it, I don't know about you, but the idea of using it, granted
Henri:it, I can't, it feels like they're trying to give us so much fake
Henri:grief that it becomes just farcical.
Henri:It's doesn't feel real anymore.
Henri:It doesn't feel like something that we can attach on to, you know, we hear five guys.
Henri:This mom lost five sons and it's like the emotion of it.
Henri:You almost want to take a deep breath.
Henri:That's what they're counting on.
Henri:It's not about understanding that the, you know, the real futility of it.
Henri:Why didn't, you know, they could have talked about it in the movie.
Henri:Uh, George Marshall could have talked about how many different
Henri:pairs or brothers died in this movie.
Henri:They could lay that on really thick.
Henri:Hey, I've got a stack of files over here that says all these
Henri:families no longer have sons.
Henri:Yeah, let's try to get this one back.
Henri:And like you said, anything like that is absent from this shit.
Henri:It doesn't, it doesn't give it to us.
Henri:So they say, okay, well, we'll just wrap it all around one asshole.
Henri:We'll just say he's gonna be the one asshole and we'll
Henri:see if people care about him.
Henri:And obviously the film really doesn't teach us to, it teaches us to, to
Henri:tokenize him, to see his service as something to place on a pedestal.
Henri:And of course, as we all know, when we place things on pedestals,
Henri:we begin to forget parts of them.
Henri:They often become more mythological than factual or historical.
Henri:And that's what America wants people to do with soldiers.
Henri:They want us to look that way.
Henri:You know, soldiers are and especially wounded and dead
Henri:soldiers, are forms of currency.
Henri:That politicians can use to bring them to the State of the Union, all kinds
Henri:of different things that they can be performatively, um, appealing to
Henri:those people that really care about.
Henri:Or at least say that they really care about veterans of the military or etc.
Tom Secker:Sure, sure.
Tom Secker:Well, the thing about that letter, I mean, that's just, why bother with that?
Tom Secker:Unless the whole attempt is to create a kind of sense of this is, I guess, an
Tom Secker:inevitable part of the American mythology?
Tom Secker:Something like that?
Tom Secker:What exactly are they even trying to evoke?
Tom Secker:That this happened during the Civil War?
Tom Secker:Yeah, the Civil War was a fucking horror show.
Tom Secker:Yes, it was.
Tom Secker:Yeah, a lot of people died.
Tom Secker:And you could say that was fairly futile.
Tom Secker:Um, or a lot of it was anyway.
Tom Secker:But why does that matter in this moment?
Tom Secker:Again, it's like the sort of dragging in all of these little things from
Tom Secker:outside, from the bigger picture, without actually ever giving us that bigger
Tom Secker:picture or saying Why we care about this.
Tom Secker:It's just like, Oh, we want to revoke something.
Tom Secker:Want to give an impression of something.
Tom Secker:Oh, this is, this is Americana.
Tom Secker:This is the American experience.
Tom Secker:Well, for some people it is.
Tom Secker:Yeah.
Tom Secker:So what?
Tom Secker:I mean, what, what, what next?
Tom Secker:What's the end of that sentence?
Tom Secker:Um, and as you say, why not have the general, if he's apparently
Tom Secker:this well informed, this quickly, about all the people who are
Tom Secker:dying and who they're related to, surely he would be on top of this.
Tom Secker:Surely he'd be aware that this is actually happening left, right and centre.
Tom Secker:And as you say, they could use that as, you know, that's just the moment he says,
Tom Secker:no, we're going to, we can't do anything about this massive stack of files that are
Tom Secker:all about, you know, three dead brothers, four dead brothers, five dead brothers,
Tom Secker:but we're going to make this one matter.
Tom Secker:And you could even have a great 1980s style moment where someone says, why?
Tom Secker:And he goes, because we can.
Tom Secker:Even that, cheesy, but would have been better than what they did, having
Tom Secker:a guy who just sort of decides it.
Tom Secker:I'm in a position to decide this, so I'm going to, because I believe
Tom Secker:it's quite the thing, to become such.
Tom Secker:There's never any sense of this being a moral mission.
Tom Secker:No.
Tom Secker:Because it's so confused and implausible.
Tom Secker:As you say, you used the phrase earlier about it being cinematic
Tom Secker:gaslighting, and it is like that.
Tom Secker:It's sort of, oh, this guy's life really matters.
Tom Secker:But does it?
Tom Secker:No.
Tom Secker:So we're going to send these guys off to find him, because, you know, the
Tom Secker:bonds between People who've served together and fought together means that
Tom Secker:they'll get it, but they don't get it.
Tom Secker:And actually the captain of that, or leader of that troop, thinks the
Tom Secker:whole thing's kind of stupid, and doesn't understand why he's being sent
Tom Secker:off on this mission at this moment.
Tom Secker:Every time they offer you something that you could latch on to,
Tom Secker:they then take it away again.
Tom Secker:To the extent that it almost feels deliberate, it almost does feel like
Tom Secker:someone is deliberately manipulating and just teasing you with this
Tom Secker:so that they can then go, nope, and slap you in the face again.
Tom Secker:And again, from a filmmaker who's usually so good at identifying what
Tom Secker:are the emotional anchors, what are the emotional beats, what is this story
Tom Secker:actually about on a basic human level.
Tom Secker:And with this film, he seems to have got distracted trying to do something else,
Tom Secker:or he's done it in this really weird way deliberately, thinking, as long as I.
Tom Secker:Give enough impressions of emotional beats, people will fill
Tom Secker:in the blanks for themselves.
Tom Secker:Because people are so prepped going into this by all of the documentaries
Tom Secker:on the History Channel about World War II, by all the stuff in the
Tom Secker:classrooms, by all of the, I don't know, parades and razzmatazz and everything.
Tom Secker:They're already conditioned, pre conditioned, to see in this film what I
Tom Secker:want them to see and have the reaction I want them to have, almost regardless of
Tom Secker:what I actually put up on screen for them.
Tom Secker:Um, even if I base this whole thing around a central character who you
Tom Secker:think is going to survive but actually dies, And another guy who does survive,
Tom Secker:but we never get to meet him until about two hours into the movie anyway,
Tom Secker:so why the hell should anyone care?
Tom Secker:You see what I mean?
Tom Secker:It's this constant rug pull of anything that could be considered deep, or
Tom Secker:profound, or even a clear statement.
Tom Secker:What the hell does this film even say about itself, about its own story?
Tom Secker:The main character in it tells us the whole story is stupid
Tom Secker:and the premise is fucked.
Tom Secker:Is that not stupid?
Tom Secker:Is that not Spielberg kind of confessing that this isn't a very good
Henri:film?
Henri:He's
Tom Secker:got Tom Hanks of all people up there telling us
Tom Secker:this film is fucking stupid.
Tom Secker:I'm starring in it and it makes no sense.
Henri:There's uh, there's also, there's something about the title that I think
Henri:lends itself to pointing to a lot, a lot of what we're talking about here
Henri:that the talking about saving anything, because, in addition to the, the rescue
Henri:kind of saving as in what they're trying to do here, that, um, Saving, I
Henri:think, could apply to two other areas.
Henri:One, a Christian, uh, invocation, you know, in terms of that, that we're
Henri:doing, we could be doing God's work if we're trying to save Private Ryan, you
Henri:know, that that's the best thing to do.
Henri:That's what God would want us to do.
Henri:I think that there's, there's, there's some of that in there.
Henri:Um, but there's also about mom.
Henri:There's also about Mrs.
Henri:Ryan, does the title and the notion of quote unquote saving Ryan to save his
Henri:mother further harm, um, cause even, cause we do talk about that a very
Henri:little bit, but not very much, I feel like all of that, it really rings false.
Henri:It's attempting to kind of mythically lift up a gold star mother and I, I,
Henri:I don't agree with that saying, but everybody knows what I'm talking about
Henri:when I, I mentioned it, um, in a way that ordinary people, non military affiliated
Henri:people, maybe people who aren't World War II history buffs, that they can't
Henri:appreciate that we, like, you Right now, the United States is contemplating
Henri:big moves towards Iran because of the two, um, or excuse me, three Army
Henri:Reserve soldiers that were killed.
Henri:In, uh, in Jordan recently, um, three dead people and they're ready
Henri:to go kill a few thousand more.
Henri:That is that, you know, that when we were, if we're to really look back
Henri:at world war two, and this of course comes across to in Vietnam and other
Henri:big, bigger things that most people never really attached themselves
Henri:to how horrifying it really was.
Henri:I remember reading a story about a guy working on an airfield, I think, I don't
Henri:know if it was in France, but in World War II, where a plane comes in and crashes,
Henri:and that because of the design of the plane, the guys that are underneath,
Henri:like the bombardier, the navigator, or whatever, they get crushed to death and
Henri:set on fire, and the guys standing on the side Of the airfield listening to it,
Henri:listening to these people burned alive.
Henri:And again, these are their pals.
Henri:The aircraft crash did not come as a result of enemy, enemy, anything.
Henri:It's just there and there's no sense to be made of it.
Henri:There isn't.
Henri:It's just a horrific thing, but we only, you know, like we're talking about the
Henri:sterilized, you know, opening scene and, and, you know, not including some
Henri:of this stuff is that it had to be.
Henri:So terrifying.
Henri:But there was a, there was a firm, firm ceiling in that, like we were mentioning
Henri:earlier that, um, it won't go past that.
Henri:And that makes it easier for people to mythologize it.
Henri:It's like when them cutting out cursing out of military movies is somehow people,
Henri:you know, uh, Conservative Christian folks will watch those kinds of things
Henri:and because there's no cussing, it doesn't bother them as much because
Henri:they've been primed to care far more about cursing than they have about mass
Henri:violence or the real reality of anything.
Henri:So I felt like it's holding up this, this mom and we do feel for her and I think
Henri:that we should, um, but are we sending her to a place where no one understands
Henri:what the fuck is going on with her?
Henri:That we have to treat her like an angel floating in the atmosphere and
Henri:not a real literal person who lost her sons and still has to try to go on
Tom Secker:living.
Tom Secker:And this is a point you've made in our emails when we were back and forth
Tom Secker:being trying to figure this one out, is that an awful lot of the emotions
Tom Secker:in this film give way to spirituality.
Tom Secker:Yes.
Tom Secker:So rather than keep them grounded, as you say, in human beings, which help people
Tom Secker:empathize, because, you know, human beings can empathize with one another, especially
Tom Secker:when they see something of themselves in the other person that they're,
Tom Secker:yeah, um, this stuff isn't complicated.
Tom Secker:But
Henri:also in the
Tom Secker:way that the overall narrative Which is not so much as a
Tom Secker:saving of Private Ryan or a rescuing of Private Ryan, but seemingly
Tom Secker:an attempt to save World War II from its own futility, perhaps?
Tom Secker:Um, it's underpinned by this Christian or Judeo Christian
Tom Secker:religiosity or spirituality.
Tom Secker:I've got in my notes here, 21 minutes in, so After we've had about 20
Tom Secker:minutes of the big battle sequence, everyone starts finding God.
Tom Secker:The sniper starts muttering his Jesus stuff to himself.
Tom Secker:And there's some other, if not necessarily religious, certainly
Tom Secker:religious feeling moments.
Tom Secker:They're like religious experiences going on.
Tom Secker:And then they all start committing war crimes.
Tom Secker:They start executing prisoners of war.
Tom Secker:They start executing people who are unarmed and surrendered.
Tom Secker:There's the bit where Uh, they're all burning in the bunker, and he says,
Tom Secker:don't shoot, just let them burn.
Tom Secker:When the main thing would be to just shoot them and kill them.
Tom Secker:Put them out of their suffering at that point.
Tom Secker:So, it seems that, if anything, the throughline of this film is
Tom Secker:a kind of religious vengeance?
Tom Secker:Maybe?
Tom Secker:Uh, or certainly, that's how that opening sequence plays out.
Tom Secker:And it comes back at the end, you know, you have a sniper up in the
Tom Secker:tower who gets shot by the tank, um, and he's doing the same thing again.
Tom Secker:He's sort of muttering, not necessarily biblical verses to himself, but something
Tom Secker:of that nature as he's shooting people.
Tom Secker:Um, that's odd in a film like this, particularly when the enemy
Tom Secker:are mostly white Christians.
Tom Secker:But of course we never really get to meet any of the Nazis or talk to them very
Tom Secker:much so none of the Germans are really even considered human beings in this
Henri:film.
Henri:There's, there's also the huge inclusion of peoples that they
Henri:had captured and were forced into being part of the German forces.
Henri:But, you know, we're Polish, Romania, all kinds of different places and that was a
Henri:good portion of their replacements that were working in Normandy at the time.
Henri:And of course, like you said, all we see are white, German, uh, bad guys.
Henri:We don't see anybody that could show us some, some other aspect of that.
Henri:It's just exactly what we would expect to see.
Henri:And
Tom Secker:so ultimately, is this movie Not an emotional tale of human
Tom Secker:beings at all, but fundamentally a spiritual myth about a futile war,
Tom Secker:but because it was spiritual, that somehow elevates it above being.
Tom Secker:I mean, it's like futile in a human sense, it's futile in an
Tom Secker:everyday, grounded, this is the real world and people are dying sense.
Tom Secker:And that doesn't actually come across that strongly to me, but I get.
Tom Secker:You know, some of the things that they included in the film, what they
Tom Secker:were going for with that, I guess.
Tom Secker:But what elevates it, or what they're trying to elevate it with,
Tom Secker:is that spirituality or religiosity.
Tom Secker:And bear in mind, this is Spielberg, who did make Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is
Tom Secker:essentially a Jewish revenge fantasy about killing Nazis using the power of God.
Tom Secker:So, we're not reaching here.
Tom Secker:This is something that is in Spielberg's filmmaking repertoire
Tom Secker:somewhere along the lines.
Tom Secker:Um, I know he produced that one and George Lucas directed, but whatever.
Tom Secker:Um, it's still his work.
Tom Secker:Was it
Henri:the other way around?
Henri:Yeah, yeah.
Henri:Regardless, I think it was Lucas that directed that
Tom Secker:one, yeah.
Tom Secker:The two of them made that film together.
Tom Secker:Um, and that is what that film is ultimately about.
Tom Secker:And this is the only other film that he made about Nazis.
Tom Secker:Uh, aside from the three, I mean the three, but two Indiana
Tom Secker:Jones films that cover Nazis.
Tom Secker:Um, so, the notion that this would be some kind of religious
Tom Secker:quest, is that what they were on?
Tom Secker:Because it doesn't make any sense from a strategic or logistical
Tom Secker:or straight up military resources point of view or any of that.
Tom Secker:So why are they doing it?
Tom Secker:Why do they even go along with it?
Tom Secker:It's not like anyone's gonna There's no one there to tell them off if
Tom Secker:they start just ignoring this stupid order that they've been given.
Tom Secker:You know what I mean?
Tom Secker:There's too much going on for anyone to really care whether
Tom Secker:or not they end up finding Ryan.
Tom Secker:No one's in the scheme of this is even going to notice probably, um, if they
Tom Secker:just decide to like fuck off to Belgium.
Tom Secker:And let it be someone else's problem.
Tom Secker:No one's going to stop them.
Tom Secker:So, but they keep going, and they keep going to an end where our quasi
Tom Secker:Christ like leader, the man who's shifting the week through the valley
Tom Secker:of darkness, ends up being sacrificed.
Tom Secker:Mm hmm.
Tom Secker:Yeah?
Tom Secker:Yep.
Tom Secker:You see where I'm going with this interpretation?
Tom Secker:I do, totally, yeah, yeah.
Tom Secker:Yeah, yeah.
Tom Secker:I think that might be ultimately what this film is.
Tom Secker:Because this was the other question that we kept batting back and forth
Tom Secker:is what even is Saving Private Ryan, even setting aside what Spielberg
Tom Secker:was trying to do, sort of what film did we actually end up with?
Tom Secker:Yeah, you take over, because I'm rambling about Jesus again.
Tom Secker:I don't want to piss off Christians.
Tom Secker:If I keep talking, I will.
Henri:Well, like, we know it can't possibly be considered a historical movie.
Henri:If it's a war movie, it's a war movie in a very specific sense,
Henri:and not in anything traditional about the nature of Uh, war films.
Henri:Um, I do, I think it's, I, it, I think the, you know, the, the spiritual aspect
Henri:that you're mentioning, that I think that those, those may have been the real beats
Henri:that they were trying to go after that.
Henri:And, and of course you had, it was twofold in that way.
Henri:One, there are lots of people that would wanting to see something that had been
Henri:said to have additional authenticity.
Henri:Like they had taken a syringe of authenticity steroid and.
Henri:Suck it right into Tom Hanks ass or something, but we have a lot of those.
Henri:America is filled with history buffs, especially World War II history
Henri:buffs, and so you could definitely see it in that way that in terms
Henri:of a, it could maybe be a war porn.
Henri:Or, you know, just a pornographic depiction of very specific sliced
Henri:events that Spielberg put together.
Henri:Um, and then the other half is what exactly I think exactly what you're
Henri:pointing out here is that the, the religious aspect of it, the, um, you
Henri:know, we're wanting to save Ryan, save his mother to, you know, to.
Henri:Meet our understanding of God being supportive of this endeavor that God was,
Henri:God was on the side of the allies that, you know, God understands that things
Henri:make mistakes and you drop bombs on wrong people, and God forgives those things.
Henri:And, um, yeah, I think, I think that you have to hit the nail on
Henri:the head with, with that part of it.
Henri:And it, and it does, it leaves ordinary film goers, especially discerning film
Henri:goers to, to sit and ask you, is it?
Henri:Did it fulfill anything in that way other than just a propagandistic notion
Henri:of how the higher ups, how the folks at entertainment liaison offices ever
Henri:want things to be seen in that way?
Henri:It has to fit into a certain thing or it's going to upset a certain
Henri:type of veteran or certain type of film buff or history buff.
Henri:Um, Because don't, you know, the people will say that I've read all the books
Henri:on a single subject and I'm like, well You've read all the books that everyone's
Henri:written, or you've only, have you only written, read books that came from
Henri:the same point of view that you were already emphasizing, um, and You just
Tom Secker:read the other books that those books were based
Henri:on Exactly, exactly, and that's the, like, the easiest way of mentioning
Henri:Stephen Ambrose is that, yes, there's a lot of good stuff in his work, but
Henri:there's also a lot of other stuff He was one that, uh, I think he actually lied
Henri:about being a pen pal with Eisenhower before Eisenhower passed away And wrote
Henri:a whole thing on that, but it's, it's a very American centric, even for everything
Henri:that it's honest about, for its own authenticity, it's a very American centric
Henri:view, so, and, and that's the thing is, I can see churches having Saving
Henri:Private Ryan nights here in the US, I can see that very easily, that would be
Henri:a, you know, we wouldn't, we certainly wouldn't let the young kids come watch
Henri:it, but, um, but yeah, it would fit, uh, perfectly Uh, in that kind of, in that
Henri:kind of scenario and fall into the same kind of, you know, typical Protestant
Henri:evangelical line of thinking about God and war and who we send to war and who's
Henri:special and who's is, who isn't and then ultimately what we end up not saying.
Tom Secker:Okay, so four quick things.
Tom Secker:One, this whole Lincoln letter thing is making me think of the hateful
Tom Secker:eight and Eisenhower fake pen pal and
Tom Secker:I can only assume that's what Tarantino was playing on.
Tom Secker:Two, Jack Ryan is the chosen one.
Tom Secker:Three, the only other big emotional beat that lands in the movie is the scene in
Tom Secker:the church that you mentioned earlier.
Tom Secker:And four, the opening of the film isn't the invasion of Normandy, it's the Jews
Tom Secker:crossing the sea to get out of Egypt.
Henri:Sounds right to me.
Tom Secker:Um, bearing in mind that Spielberg is Jewish and there is
Tom Secker:quite a lot of biblical symbolism knocking around in his films in
Tom Secker:one place, in one form or another.
Tom Secker:So yeah, the more I think about this, the more this is a film about some kind
Tom Secker:of Judeo Christian spirituality that just happens to be set in World War II.
Tom Secker:I didn't think of that thing about, you know, the parting of the seas
Tom Secker:and the walking up onto the sand.
Tom Secker:I didn't think about that until just now.
Tom Secker:While you were talking, and now I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
Henri:It just so easily fits into that niche of where
Henri:people would accept it again.
Henri:Like the, you know, the, there's only limited cursing in it, which is something
Henri:I know I mentioned this earlier, but.
Henri:People, Christians are, it's a huge, huge thing in the United States about
Henri:using cursing, so if you keep all of the violence, whatever kind of violence that
Henri:happens to be in your film, but you remove or minimize the cursing, you're going to
Henri:have created something that a lot more people would be openly willing to do.
Henri:Watch, especially if it's like a, you know, a TBS or TNT version
Henri:that's, you know, made to be 17 hours long with commercials.
Henri:Um, yeah, it's
Tom Secker:much more acceptable to the concerned housewives of America,
Tom Secker:or whatever they call themselves.
Tom Secker:Yeah, yeah.
Henri:But they do, it ends up being, but it ends up being just, just you're
Henri:complaining about window dressing.
Henri:You know, you're complaining about it is, it's like the, you know, the
Henri:broken windows policing that they they've done in New York city, that
Henri:we care about these tiny little things that the big things matter.
Henri:And, and again, going back to Spielberg again, like you said,
Henri:is that maybe that was the idea he got in his mind is it's like, I got
Henri:all these other things together.
Henri:I just got to hit these specific beats with these specific places,
Henri:fill in the rest, and we got ourselves a really great war movie.
Henri:And of course, for ordinary people, because it is.
Henri:A very different war film, if we want to call it that, that they
Henri:don't know what they're looking at.
Henri:And of course, I know for me, like the first time I saw it is the first
Henri:25 minutes leave you raw mentally, just, just trying to take that in.
Henri:So I don't know that I paid as much attention to the movie until
Henri:the very end for that reason.
Henri:But again, we, as we talked about that probably was done on purpose to prime
Henri:people for the, for the hits, the beats that Spielberg was going after.
Tom Secker:Because it's curious to lack so many of the emotional
Tom Secker:set up and pay off that should be in the film, and yet The moments.
Tom Secker:Okay, so what the hell in the Bible is the wrong Jack Ryan?
Tom Secker:I'm now playing, you know, gotcha with myself in terms of Bible studies,
Tom Secker:and I'm not actually that okay with
Henri:the Bible.
Henri:I've got no idea.
Tom Secker:Maybe listeners can make some suggestions as to if that is also supposed
Tom Secker:to be some kind of religious metaphor or spiritual reference or something.
Tom Secker:What that scene is about and why that scene.
Tom Secker:You got any ideas?
Henri:No?
Henri:Not off the top of my head at the moment.
Henri:Um, there's a fellow
Tom Secker:Email us, anyone, if you've got Because I am now actually
Tom Secker:quite interested in this film.
Tom Secker:Having spent the last, what, nearly two hours slagging it off and saying
Tom Secker:how boring and futile and pointless this movie is, I'm now actually quite
Tom Secker:interested in it as a religious metaphor.
Henri:Hey, no, sometimes it's just, it's just, what is it that you're looking at?
Henri:You know, and, and, and, you know, by, and, uh You know, and I, and I want to
Henri:say, you know, I, I haven't, it's not something that I've spent a lot of time
Henri:thinking about but certainly there have to be a lot of those other religious
Henri:feats and other prominent military war films, you know, Black Hawk Down, Forrest
Henri:Gump, there's a whole, a lot of, a lot of Jesus and religious stuff in there and,
Tom Secker:um.
Tom Secker:Yeah, but that's usually quite explicit.
Henri:True, yeah, it's not, it's not underlying, it's not just themed
Henri:with that other, other context.
Tom Secker:And those films have emotional throughlines that make more sense to me.
Henri:True, very true.
Henri:They are, they do much, much better that way.
Henri:I rewatched Forrest Gump recently with, my son had never seen it.
Henri:And I, you know, I forget how well made of a film it is.
Henri:It's really well made in a lot of its aspects.
Henri:It's still a propagandistic piece of shit in a lot of other ways.
Henri:But, you know, it's finely crafted.
Henri:The film knows what it is.
Henri:Robert Zemeckis knew what he was doing and followed it through and it
Henri:made so much sense that like saving, saving Jack Ryan, he got me to do it.
Henri:I was going to, um, just while I'm thinking about it, uh, Bill.
Henri:Bill, if you're watching, if you're listening to this episode, Bill's a long
Henri:time follower of the podcast, and he's also a chaplain, um, and he does sometimes
Henri:opine on little things like that.
Henri:So, Bill, if you're listening, you got a chance to email us.
Henri:Please do let us know what you think.
Henri:Um, like Tom said, uh, mentioned earlier for everybody else, you know, Going
Henri:through these films and understanding them thematically is a lot of layers
Henri:and, like Tom mentioned, we emailed back and forth for a long time about
Henri:a whole bunch of different aspects of this film and where it goes,
Henri:where it leads, where it all goes.
Henri:So, but yes, please folks, take, take the time, send us a line, tell us
Henri:what you thought of the episode and if you have any thoughts on the, on the
Henri:religious themes of it, um, and, uh.
Tom Secker:And the symbolism in particular, I'm now trying to decode
Tom Secker:this symbolically in my own head, but I may You're going to force me to actually
Tom Secker:watch this film again, aren't you?
Henri:That was my plan from the start.
Tom Secker:Evil scheme to make me actually enjoy Saving Jack Ryan.
Tom Secker:After having spent probably 20 years not despising this film, just
Tom Secker:almost feeling nothing towards it.
Tom Secker:Right, right.
Tom Secker:I'm now actually finding it really quite interesting and provocative.
Tom Secker:Even though I'm also staring at one of my notes here that just says music constant
Tom Secker:to try to justify ludicrous premise.
Tom Secker:It's The crafting in this film seems to be taking place somewhere other than,
Tom Secker:like, in the film, it's not that well made, but somehow there's something in
Tom Secker:it that I've missed up until this point.
Tom Secker:And so now, yeah, yeah, anyone who can help me delve more into this
Tom Secker:and, like I say, understand some of the symbolism and some of the
Tom Secker:biblical allusions and all of that.
Tom Secker:Feel free to get in touch, I mean there's a contact form on my site,
Tom Secker:you can email Henri and he'll forward stuff to me, whatever.
Tom Secker:But I am actually now, now genuinely curious.
Tom Secker:I started out, as I say, not despising this film, but feeling essentially
Tom Secker:apathetic towards it, and not really wanting to have this conversation,
Tom Secker:which is why it's taken us, I don't know how long to actually get to this
Tom Secker:point of having this conversation.
Tom Secker:Um, and now suddenly you've turned me around.
Tom Secker:I don't know how to react to this.
Tom Secker:This isn't how I was expecting this conversation to conclude.
Tom Secker:It was with me being more interested in the film than I ever was before.
Henri:That's just me doing my job, Tom.
Henri:You have done an excellent job.
Henri:I'm a really good American propagandist.
Henri:So I think we've got a really good place to wrap up here for today.
Henri:The, uh, the one thing that I wanted to, to mention again, re mention before
Henri:the end of the episode is that for anybody who's seen it and for anybody
Henri:that watches war films, uh, in general, that, um, ask yourself as you're watching
Henri:it, as you're taking it in about the sights and the sounds and how the
Henri:violence and, and those kinds of things are impacting the way that you see
Henri:what's actually happening in the story.
Henri:Um, remember that filmmakers in these.
Henri:Genres, they want you to center on characters, very
Henri:much like Saving Private Ryan.
Henri:Always tell yourself, you know, you want to look at things certainly from
Henri:a historical perspective, and you want to remember that a filmmaker's
Henri:choice to center on an individual, a single, single individual or group of
Henri:individuals is an effort to get you to narrow your focus on the topic.
Henri:So, Make sure you broaden your focus.
Henri:Make sure if you are one of those people that reads all the books on a subject
Henri:that you read them from all sides of the political aisle and and try to
Henri:understand it more comprehensively, except Rush Limbaugh or Jordan Peterson.
Henri:You can burn that shit.
Henri:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Henri:Um, but Tom, any, uh, any final remarks?
Tom Secker:Uh, only that the, I never got round to it.
Tom Secker:The best thing on that trip to France, to Normandy, when I was
Tom Secker:a kid, wasn't actually the beach, it was the Bayeux Tapestry.
Tom Secker:If anyone doesn't know what that is, look it up, because it's truly amazing.
Tom Secker:And if you ever get the chance to go to the town of Bayeux and go to
Tom Secker:the Musée de la Tapisserie, I think it is, the Museum of the Tapestry,
Tom Secker:go there, because it's incredible.
Tom Secker:Sounds great.
Tom Secker:Nothing to do with.
Tom Secker:Saving Jack Ryan except that it's in Normandy.
Tom Secker:But yeah, look it up, buy a tapestry, seriously people.
Henri:I will, I will do that as soon as we get off here.
Henri:Um, alright folks, thank you very much for uh, joining us
Henri:today on Fortress On A Hill.
Henri:I hope that the, the discussion was informative and, and I know that these
Henri:episodes have usually been good ones for us, that, that, that it gives
Henri:people a lot to think about, especially when, you know, maybe you saw Saving
Henri:Private Ryan once or twice a long time ago, um, to, to really understand what
Henri:its power is in the way that Spielberg and filmmakers like him use that.
Henri:And especially just American filmmakers in general using
Henri:that, that great propaganda tool.
Henri:Tom Hanks with his, his smile and his charm and everything
Henri:in, in whatever way they can.
Henri:thank you very much for joining us.
Henri:We'll see you next time.
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