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FORMULAIC
PEARL HARBOR ADMITS TO RACISM, BOMBS A JAPANESE AMERICAN,
AND PERPETUATES A MYTH
 Pearl
Harbor has the distinction of having more advance
publicity than any film in recent memory, but of course the
$140 million project commemorates events exactly sixty years
ago and doubtless will be re-released on December 7. Although
the trailer may have fooled us into believing that the film
is merely a remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970),
what emerges in more than three hours is a variation on five
hit films. The role of the Japanese comes right out of Tora!
Tora! Tora!, including the statement of Admiral Isoroku
Yamamato (played by Mako) about awakening a "sleeping giant,"
but Pearl Harbor adds President Franklin Roosevelt
(played by John Voight) and the heroic 1942 Tokyo raid led
by Lt. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle (played by Alec Baldwin). From
Titanic (1997), director Michael Bay borrowed
the syrupy love story and many of the special effects of the
disaster at sea; but he also interviewed survivors of the
December 7 attack to ensure authenticity of very small details,
such as using Coke bottles for blood transfusions, though
he opted for the slang and sexual mores of the 1990s, not
the 1940s. In addition, Pearl Harbor raises
the ante in providing film footage of the human and physical
destruction of war over both Saving
Private Ryan (1998) and The
Thin Red Line (1998); the forty minutes of bombs
and bullets on the screen, which resulted in some 2,400 American
deaths (nearly half entombed in the USS Arizona) and the destruction
of 18 warships and 188 airplanes, is the length of the first
wave and about one-third the length of the actual attack.
But Randall Wallace, who wrote the story and screenplay appears
to have borrowed most from the love story in From Here
to Eternity (1953). Pearl Harbor’s story
begins in 1923, when Rafe McCawley (played by Ben Affleck)
and Danny Walker (played by Josh Hartnett) are boys on a Tennessee
farm, dreaming that someday they will be able to fly; Rafe’s
father has a crop duster plane that the two use as a toy.
Fast forward to 1940, when Rafe meets Evelyn Johnson (played
by Kate Beckinsale), an Army nurse, and the two fall in love.
In 1941, after volunteering for combat with the Royal Air
Force in Britain, Rafe tells Danny to comfort Evelyn if he
does not return alive, and soon the latter two are transferred
to Pearl Harbor. Therein lies the seeds of a love triangle,
as Rafe’s plane is shot down, and he is presumed dead. Danny
dutifully carries out his assignment to ease Evelyn’s pain
on losing the love of her life, but in time the two fall in
love and have sex. When Rafe later shows up unexpectedly in
Pearl Harbor, the love triangle part of the film unfolds.
Frustrated that her memory kept him alive and now she is his
best friend’s girlfriend, Rafe demands an explanation, and
Evelyn then admits that she is carrying Danny’s child.
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But before telling Danny about her pregnancy, December 7 comes,
Roosevelt insists on a reprisal, Doolittle puts together his
force with Rafe and Danny, and only one of the two returns
from the mission alive. Stirring music of Hans Zimmer throughout
culminates in an emotional song as credits roll. Although
the story is basically formulaic, the authenticity of the
attack is the most gripping part of the film. However, the
political elements bear close attention. We see that Roosevelt
responds to pressure from Winston Churchill to move battleships
from Pearl Harbor to the Atlantic to the chagrin of military
commanders in Honolulu, while General Walter Short believes
that domestic sabotage is more likely than an aerial attack
and aligns airplanes in rows. Yet Pearl Harbor
strangely does not acknowledge the foresightedness of Admiral
William Halsey, who insisted during the weekend of December
7 on training exercises of American aircraft carriers, one
of which later enabled Doolittle’s Raiders to launch their
attack. Yet another oddity is a fabricated scene in which
a Japanese American dentist receives a telephone call from
Tokyo, falsely implying that some Japanese Americans were
spies for Japan, a gratuitous scene clumsily re-shot to erase
the implication instead of cut from the film. Captain Thurman,
a totally fictional cryptologist (played by Dan Aykroyd),
is ignored when he insists that ambiguous information from
Tokyo indicates something is afoot, and that an attack on
Pearl Harbor is what he would order if he were fighting for
Japan. The film makes clear that a racist belief in the inferiority
of Japan deluded many, including President Roosevelt himself.
Similarly, Dorie Miller (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.) demonstrates
how African Americans were foolishly segregated in a ship’s
galley instead of manning antiaircraft, as he did in the chaos
of December 7; he became the first Black Navy Cross recipient,
a medal personally conferred by Roosevelt in the film, though
he died later in the war. The film’s tagline, "It was the
end of innocence, and the dawn of a nation's greatest glory,"
nostalgically suggests that the purity of heart of Americans
before and during World War II was lost somewhere. Pearl
Harbor tries to show, in contrast with the American
role in Vietnam, that the initial bungling by the military
brass could be overcome by inspired presidential leadership
and heroic soldiers who bonded together on behalf of a just
cause. Thus, Pearl Harbor is the latest war
picture to perpetuate a myth, the subliminal antigay thesis
that the military depends upon heterosexual-based unit cohesion.
MH
FILMS
ABOUT VIETNAM FEATURED IN 25TH WORKING PAPER
Films
About Vietnam surveys more than 100 films focusing
on Vietnam from 1936 to the present. The 25th Working
Paper of the Political Film Society, the essay was
originally presented to the conference of Asian Studies on
the Pacific Coast at Monterey on June 9 by Michael Haas. To
obtain a copy, send $5 to "Political Film Society" at the
above address. For information on the other Working
Papers, consult the website of the Political Film Society.
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