Athena Massey’s body parts (7/13/01)
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Pearl Harbor. [Michael Bay, 2001. With thirteen producers besides Jerry Bruckheimer; and maybe even a writer.]
The romantic triangle formed by sweet innocent Swing Kids Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale is complicated by the militaristic ambitions of the Empire of Japan: Yamamoto Is The Iceberg, or, Gone With the Divine Wind. — With Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle, Cuba Gooding Jr. as the kid who turns out to be even better with a machinegun than he was with a potato peeler, Jon Voight doing his best as FDR, and Dan Ackroyd [if only] as an intelligence officer.
Sample dialogue: “Why ya always bustin my ass, Rafe?” — “After two years of training you think a forty five thousand dollar airplane is just there for your amusement?” — “They call it an homage, sir.” [Yeah, right.] — “That’s bullshit! But it’s very very good bullshit.” — “Don’t preach to me about duty. I wear the same uniform you do.” — “You don’t dogfight with manuals.” — “Ma’am, please don’t take my wings.” — “You are so beautiful it hurts.” “It’s your nose that hurts.” “No, it’s my heart.” [Only after I wrote this down on the popcorn bag, laughing in the dark, did I realize that the critic for the New York Times got to it first. Shit.] — “If I had one more night of my life to live, I’d want to spend it with you.” — “I will come back.” — “Just make sure to come back for the both of us, all right?” — “Are all Yanks as anxious to die as you, Pilot Officer?” “Not anxious to die, sir. Just anxious to matter.” — “We’re building refrigerators while our enemies build bombs!” — “Dear Ellen...it’s different than I thought it would be here...it’s cold...so cold that it gets into your bones...” “Dear Rafe...I miss you so much...” — “Pearl Harbor is too shallow for a successful aerial torpedo attack...we’ve bunched our planes together to make them easier to defend.” “You analysts have it all figured out.” — “I always knew whatever trouble I got into, I wouldn’t be alone.” — “Brilliant, Admiral.” “A brilliant man would find a way not to fight a war.” — “You ever wonder if this war’s going to catch up with us?” — “I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant.” — “There’s nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.”
Obviously this was absolutely excruciating. Fortunately, just at the point when I really thought I was going to have to get up and walk, the attack began and restored my [qualified] faith in Bay and Bruckheimer: three-quarters of an hour of an incredibly vivid recreation of the carrier launch, the approach, the bombs falling, the torpedoes churning through the water, the Arizona exploding, the Oklahoma capsizing, the sailors in the water getting machinegunned by strafing Zeroes, the panic in the hospitals — stuff blowing up on a really grand scale, as only the guys who nearly destroyed the Earth could pull it off; not entirely photorealistic, of course, but realized with an attention to detail and a painterly elegance of composition that more than made up for minor lapses in verisimilitude. — When this began I was still harboring the usual liberal war guilt about nuking Hiroshima. After about twenty minutes I was down to mild regret. After forty minutes I was ready to do it again, just in case those lousy Nip cocksuckers didn’t get the message the first time. — Of course everything actually worth saying about Pearl Harbor has been said long since, and most of it was said right then and there. Admiral Halsey put it best, when he got a look at the aftermath of the attack: “When we get through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell.” Just about.
And, sure enough, the good guys eventually won the war; though you’d never know why from the remainder of this motion picture, which immediately relapses into unbearable fatuity. — I’d like to be able to report that Beckinsale is struck by a falling shell and Affleck and Hartnett fall into one anothers’ arms and vow to continue the conflict like Homeric warriors, or that the three of them set off on a secret mission behind enemy lines and crashland on a lost jungle island inhabited by dinosaurs and giant apes, but no such luck. — No, the authors immediately reintroduce Alec Baldwin/Jimmy Doolittle and throw our heroes into preparation for the famous air raid on Tokyo of April, 1942; which, we are led to believe by portentous looks and swelling music, was no mere turning-point, but, nay, the very knockout punch of the conflict. Which all leads up to that cosmic Jerry Bruckheimer Moment when Baldwin stares brooding across the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet at his handsome young pilots and confides to his straight man “I know why we’re going to win this war.” And when the straight man obligingly asks why, he says, gesturing at Affleck and Hartnett: “Because of them.” — Pure Hollywood; pure bullshit. — With such appeals to elan French generals ordered cavalry charges against machine-gun emplacements in the First World War. More to the point, as the solemn predawn slowmotion sequence that exhibits the Japanese pilots preparing themselves for the attack was deliberately designed to evidence, with such religious appeals to the sanctity of their higher collective purpose and the purity of the individual warrior spirit Yamamoto and his deputies inspired their own handsome young pilots to fly off and wreak the havoc we just witnessed. — Baldwin, in other words, has just explained why the Japanese were going to win the war. Great.
Not to demean the memory of General Doolittle, who was, by all accounts, a daring and imaginative commander and a great man. But his sixteen B-25s dropped only a few bombs on Tokyo, to little real effect. When Curtis LeMay dispatched his command to firebomb Tokyo in March, 1945, he sent three hundred twenty five B-29s carrying ten thousand pounds of incendiary explosives apiece; they burned sixteen square miles of the city to the ground, and killed a hundred thousand people. The idea with a sword is little in itself; it is industrial organization that makes the difference.
Winston Churchill was, as you might expect, a starry-eyed military romantic, and would undoubtedly have loved samurai movies; but he also loved facts and figures, and the cable he drafted to the Imperial envoy Yosuke Matsuoka in April 1941 was succinct and went straight to the point: if the Japanese contemplated war, he said, they might well reflect on the fact that though their annual steel production might be roughly equivalent to that of Great Britain, it was only one-tenth that of the United States. Indeed, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with 343 planes launched from six aircraft carriers; by 1944 the American navy had thirty thousand planes and [counting the escort ships that won the submarine war in the Atlantic] something in excess of a hundred aircraft carriers. Most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were dug out of the mud, repaired, and put back to sea [the Nevada shelled the German positions at Normandy; the West Virginia, the Pennsylvania, the California, and the Maryland took part in the Battle of Leyte Gulf that eliminated the remnants of the Japanese navy and reclaimed the Phillipines]; on the Japanese side, by contrast, four of the six aircraft carriers that launched the attack were sunk at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and never replaced. — Henry Ford won the fucking war, long before it started. Rosie the Riveter won the fucking war. The geeks who cracked the Japanese codes and perfected radar won the fucking war. Bushido did not win the fucking war. Alec Baldwin did not win the fucking war. Ben Affleck did not win the fucking war.
But he did sell seventy-five million dollars’ worth of tickets over the weekend. Ah, what’s the use.
Point of trivia [I am not making this up]: in a war-gaming exercise in 1932, Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell launched a highly successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor [on a Sunday morning, yet] with planes from the aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga. Obviously this was later studied by the Japanese. Boy, were his ears red.
Just for the record: Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now [probably the best war movie ever made] is being reissued in a new director’s cut about an hour longer than the original. It premiered at Cannes to very favorable notices; there may actually be an American theatrical release. — The best war movie about The Big One was, I think, Malick’s
The Thin Red Line; the cast, which was phenomenal, included Sean Penn, who would have punched out anybody who handed him this screenplay. [And that’s why we won.] — The best war movie I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks I caught by accident at three in the morning on AMC: John Wayne in
The Flying Tigers. Ya gotta love those jackets.
____________Immanuel Kant (6/1/01)
