Saving Private Property: Steven Spielberg's American Dream Works

Abstract

IN A QUIET MOMENT BEFORE THE climactic battle to defend the bridge in Saving Private Ryan, the eponymous hero of Steven Spielberg's 1998 film confesses to Tom Hanks's Captain Miller that, try as he may to remember his brothers, he can't their Since it was the swift and sudden deaths of those three young men that led to the mission to rescue Private Ryan in the first place, we may safely assume that this lapse is meant to signal Something Big. And in fact Captain Miller suggests a solution to Ryan's problem that indirectly confirms its symbolic import: You've got to think of a he replies, and lest we miss its significance Spielberg releases a few blows to hammer the point home. Ryan, it turns out, doesn't know what context is (What's that mean? he asks), so Miller obligingly provides the image of himself lying on a hammock in his backyard at home, watching his wife prune the rose bushes while wearing his work gloves. Imagining myself lying in the hammock, seeing the rose bushes, the gloves all that's context, Miller explains, and that's how I'm able to remember my wife. Having now grasped what context is, Ryan responds with the story of his brother Dan's attempted sexual encounter in the Ryan family barn with Jardine, a girl who took a nosedive from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, an effort that ends with Alice being knocked unconscious and the barn catching fire.' That was it, Ryan concludes. That was the last time we were together.2 As it happens, this scene is as important as Spielberg makes it out to be, and not just because of the way it offers a moment of identification for teachers everywhere. (What historian or cultural studies scholar has not discovered that she not only must provide her students with historical context but also must explain the importance of establishing context in the first place? What literature professor has not had appeals to the memory of the Garden answered with tales of family conflagration?) For Saving Private Ryan is a film that presumes to provide its own context (I refer, of course, to the framing scenes in the military graveyard near Normandy) and, through the exchange between Private Ryan and Captain Miller, further presumes to school us on the necessity of contextual understanding: charged to remember the dead, we must establish context in order to properly see their faces. These

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