Steven Spielberg is far too keenly alert to the power of myth in America not to be aware that when in Saving Private Ryan a vital bridge is named "Alamo", he is placing a reassuring hand on his American audience. It's all right: this tale conforms with popular requirements of filmic legend. Saving Private Ryan belongs to that American Olympus where John Wayne to this day remains Apollo. The film even fades out on a fluttering Stars and Stripes. Plus ca change . . .
Naturally, Saving Private Ryan is full of special bloody effects unlike any ever seen on screen: but it remains within the mainstream of popular expectations, of what the Australian historian Alistair Thomson calls the "prevalent public narrative". In other words, it is further confirmation that Spielberg is a deeply unadventurous, but technically brilliant story-teller; but for all his technical bravura, there is a caution, even timidity in his narrative.
Omaha Beach's place in American mythology has intensified hugely since the 40th and 50th anniversaries of the D-Day landings. Most American children could probably tell you that Omaha was where the bravery of US troops, trapped under murderous German gunfire, and at colossal cost in human life, finally broke through the enemy defences in the decisive encounter of the D-Day landings. The British and the Canadians might appear in this account - but largely as a sideshow, with the antic figure of Gen Montgomery being simultaneously vain, Brit and deeply incompetent.
Some of this is correct. The initial waves of troops landing at Omaha beach were cut to pieces by the German defences, largely because the US bombers who had been given the task of obliterating enemy positions missed their targets by several miles - what US myth would have made of this had the bombers been British, we might well imagine - and the surviving American soldiers on the beach, amid scenes of indescribable carnage, were extraordinarily brave.
But neither myth, nor Saving Private Ryan, mentions that what turned the battle of Omaha Beach was the arrival close off-shore of two British destroyers which blasted the German positions at point-blank range. This is not to diminish the magnificent courage of the US soldiers, but merely to state what happened.
The 500 US dead of Omaha were only high by the standards of US experience; the RAF had lost the same number of men killed in a single raid over Nuremberg not long before. And such numbers were miniscule by the standards of where the second World War was fought and won, on the eastern front - in the battle of Kursk the previous summer, the Soviets had lost more than half a million. Soviet losses for the war have now been revised to 40 million.
Such a hecatomb is simply incomprehensible, and quite beyond mythologising: the human mind can just about cope with a calamity on the scale of Omaha. Yet despite all the promotional material declaring that this film shows the reality of war, Private Ryan is mythic in the true Hollywood tradition.
Firstly, its actors are far too old - Tom Hanks is 42, yet he is playing a mere captain, in a campaign in which infantry were in their teens and 20s and generals running the war were of Hanks's age - Gen Gavin of the US 82nd Airborne was 37, the RAF's Normandy commander, Air Vice Marshall Broadhurst, was 39, and the Canadian, Maj Gen Keller (whose war-service was ended when his headquarters were unfortunately and unfilmically wiped out by US bombers) was about Hanks's age.
War is the greatest subject for film, and the one which film by definition cannot capture, for war is 99 per cent tedium and 100 per cent confusion. Every soldier who talks about his experience of war will confess to an almost overwhelming sense of ignorance about what is going on; yet confusion is the one quality film-makers avoid. Their profession is narrative-driven, yet there is no narrative in a battlefield. Only the myth-makers subsequently place a pattern on its heroic confusion.
The battle-scenes at Omaha in Private Ryan are without question the most harrowing ever shown on film, and it is said that many US veterans of the second World War have been deeply traumatised by the memories they have evoked. Yet for US forces in Europe, Omaha was unique in the concentration of its losses. Even in the Pacific campaign, relatively few soldiers would have seen anything like the appalling carnage which Spielberg has generated in the opening minutes of the film, and for which he employed "corpse and animal effects" designers.
Considering the reported reaction in the US, it is probably fair to wonder to what degree the personal recollections of veterans have been enhanced, coloured or even created by what they have seen on television and in the cinema, and which has unintentionally fabricated a shared and mythic discourse about what happened in the last world war. This is precisely the pattern Alistair Thomson has been able to study among Australian veterans of the Great War, and it does genuinely raise questions about the authenticity of so many personal accounts of the time.
Disappointingly for those who seek drama in war, the majority of military experience is, in contrast to Omaha, unfilmically banal.
For example, Paddy Devlin, from Moycullen, Co Galway, landed with 1st Royal Ulster Rifles by glider behind German lines on D-Day. He and his fellow Irishmen were so overwhelmed by the aerial armada above that they forgot their orders to deploy and advance and simply gazed up in awe - until one soldier remarked, "I don't know about you lot, but I'm having a widdle." The rest of them followed suit.
Paddy Devlin never saw any of his colleagues die. Of the 27 men in his section who landed on D-Day, 22 came out without a scratch. He was later wounded during the Rhine crossing - but his memory of both episodes is of confusion, of a sedulous avoidance of unnecessary action, of keeping his head down, and never, ever taking on tanks. "I remember in Normandy spending most of my time sitting with my back to the hedge, sunning myself. For all I knew people could be getting blown up and dying in the next field, and you'd have no idea, and you'd pay no heed."
Paddy did see some Germans die - he thinks he might have killed a couple himself, but that is unusual. Most soldiers in the second World War never saw the enemy or used their guns against him - the US General Marshall discovered that even in elite units, only 10 per cent of men ever fired a shot in anger. That is the striking thing about so much war - how little war there actually is: people in Omagh, Enniskillen, Coleraine, Belfast and countless other scenes of terrorist atrocity might have seen worse than many soldiers have, and would have more compelling reason to avoid Saving Private Ryan.
The greater truth about Saving Private Ryan is that far from portraying the truth about war, it is simply a more brutal example of its broader genre - Terminator IV: Normandy. The chopped off arms, the scattered entrails, the headless corpse spouting blood: these are the special effects we have seen in countless science fiction films of the past few years. Having become inured to them in humanoids and robots, we have developed the stomach for their use in the war film. More and worse will follow - we can be sure of that.
What is perhaps more interesting about the film is how it follows the conventions of the war genre in detail. Tom Hanks plays Capt Miller, a captain in the elite American Rangers unit, and a veteran of North Africa and Tunisia. But even this is a fiction. The Rangers' first action was on D-Day: yet the rules of the Hollywood mythic norm demand that men such as Miller a) belong to specialist units and b) are battle veterans. There is even a perfectly gratuitous conversational detour (with Ted Danson as a paratrooper captain: Danson is 50) to ridicule Montgomery, inaccurately, which virtually all American films on this subject do, even though Montgomery was the mastermind behind the invasion plans. Omaha Beach would certainly have been far less bloody if the Americans had, as he had urged, used beach-clearing armour there.
The Omaha sequences, with their exploding corpses and flying limbs, are in fact no more than an almost gratuitous prelude to the main narrative drive of the film - the hunt for Private Ryan, whose three brothers have just been killed in action and who the US army has decided must be sent home to his mother. "Bullshit," observes Paddy Devlin. "All those blokes being killed, do you think they'd send a squad to rescue one man?"
Certainly not. This is again where the film is a restatement of American mythic priorities - that the US (and needless to say, its army) is uniquely caring with values that would justify such an improbable departure from the rules of military common-sense.
But even this deep-penetration raid into largely German-held positions is characterised by a vast amount of violence and derring-do, and most of all, with a psychological and geographical clarity which was simply absent from the Normandy of June 1944, never mind the particular circumstances of this film.
So even though the patrol led by Capt Miller to find Ryan has no idea where he is - the airborne forces he landed with are scattered over a German-held area the size of Kildare - it embarks upon its mission with a Homeric certitude, disposing of Germans as Ulysses might have slain sea-serpents. Why not? This is myth - and yet it is not. Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "What I tried to do in this film was approximate the look and the sounds and even the smell of what combat is really like."
It is possible Spielberg actually believes that he has created a film which replicates the reality of war. It is barely relevant. We know nothing about the real Ulysses, and increasingly, we know nothing about the world Hollywood portrays. The image is more real than the reality it reflects. And over-riding all that is the greater truth, inescapable and irreducible, that young men did give their lives for freedom in Normandy and elsewhere 54 years ago.
And it is probably better to mythologise that truth than to forget it altogether.