Saving Private Ryan
Dateline: September 30, 1998
Steven Spielberg's movie Saving Private Ryan is still in theaters, but I don't know for how much longer. If you haven't seen it, I suggest that you do - and if you are paranoid about having any portion of a movie revealed to you in advance, you should approach this essay with caution. It isn't quite a movie review, although it could certainly function as one. Instead, I wish to focus on one of the central themes of the movie and explore its significance for humanists. This will require providing some details, so you should consider yourself forewarned.
The Movie
Before going further, I'd also like to state that this is one movie which will definitely suffer some from the transition to video tape. One of the most defining aspects of the film is the incredible intensity of the experience of battle presented on-screen. I'm not simply speaking of the oft-referenced blood and gore, which do play a role. Instead I'm talking about the oft-ignored role played by sounds. Most movies which involve gun-play use fake gun sounds for their sound effects - but not so with Saving Private Ryan. The filmmakers found a weapons collector in New Jersey who owned original examples of all the personal weapons seen in the movie, and those weapons were used to make the sounds you experience in the theater. Those are real guns you hear going off around you, and combined with digital Surround Sound, the effect is unparalleled. If you have any interest in seeing this movie, don't underestimate the impact of the theater experience and don't simply wait for home video.
The central plot of Saving Private Ryan is, obviously, to save a certain Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon). His brothers have all been killed and the army wishes to send him home so that his family is not completely decimated. To this end, they send out a team of combat veterans immediately after D-Day to search for him in Normandy and bring him back. A question of great significance runs throughout the movie. It arises first at the highest levels in the military when the original decision to send the team is made and later again with much more immediacy at the lowest levels of the military among the soldiers charged with Ryan's safe return: what is the value of one man's life?
Valuing Life
Indeed, can this question ever be answered with any degree of satisfaction? I don't know for sure myself, but the movie explores a number of possible answers, and I like where the question is taken in the end.
As should be expected, the soldiers on the team are not of the opinion that Private Ryan's life is in any way worth risking their lives. Against tremendous odds they had just survived the carnage of landing on the beaches of Normandy. My grandfather landed there, too - and scenes of those landings in any movie have always had an effect on me, especially in this movie. Naturally, after such experiences, these soldiers aren't interested in risking their necks yet again on what is described as a "public relations" mission. They openly wonder why they are being sent to find Private Ryan and why they should risk their lives for this one man. So what if finding Ryan will help his mother - don't they have mothers too?
Early questioning is answered by their Captain Miller, played by Tom Hanks, with the principle that "orders are orders," and since they have orders to find Private Ryan, then that is good enough and should suffice. But of course it didn't suffice, and experience of the search causes even the unflappable Captain to question his mission.
In examining the question of the value of a man's life and the wisdom of his mission, the Captain tells how he has managed to lead men to their death. As he explains it, he justifies to himself that the loss of a soldier ultimately saves the lives of others - two, five, maybe ten other men. To him, the math worked out: trade one life for the lives of many others. In his calculus, the lives of men could only be weighed against the lives of others, but now he is faced with trading the lives of possibly several of his men in order to save the life of one, and his math no longer works for him. Before, a man could die for the sake of a mission goal, but now a man was the mission goal.
To compensate, he expresses the hope that Private Ryan does something important like cure a disease or invent a longer lasting light bulb - here, the lives of his men are weighed against a larger benefit to American society. Now, the lives of men are compared to the benefits to others.
Is that the value of a man's life? Is it worth sacrificing to save a life if that life provides a larger benefit to society? Is it worth sacrificing lives if those lives save a larger number of lives? I don't think that these should be the principles, or at least the sole principles, upon which we make such decisions, and fortunately the movie provides us with a more positive alternative.
[Now's the time to stop reading if you don't want anything significant revealed to you about the movie....]
Sacrifices
In the end, out of a team of eight, only two of the men sent out to find Private Ryan survive. The last to die is the Captain, and in his last words Ryan are "Earn this. Earn it." What he is doing is telling Ryan to earn the sacrifice of six men who died in the effort to get him back home. But how can he possibly earn it? What's the value of his life compared to the lives of those who died to find and save him?
The value of those lives cannot be quantified and weighed, balanced and compared.
Each life is unique and has a value all its own. Ryan cannot possibly hope to "earn"
the sacrifice of those six men by curing a disease or inventing a consumer convenience
- he cannot say "now I've invented enough to have earned that sacrifice."
Any attempt to do so would not only be futile, but would in fact hinder him from
doing the one thing which would really matter: actually living. Ryan comes back to
Normandy when he's an old man, a grandfather - he stands before the Captain's grave
marker and says that he's lived the best life he knew how. In the book version of
the story, he explains that he hasn't invented anything or cured any disease - instead,
he has worked a farm and raised a family. What he has done is live the best life
he knows how. He hopes that, in the Captain's eyes, he's earned what that team went
through. But he isn't sure.
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Quote of the week: "I used to think it was terrible that life was so unfair. Then I thought 'wouldn't it be much worse if life really were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us occur because we actually deserve it.'" Marcus, Babylon 5. "You can't kill the truth...Actually you can kill the truth, but it always comes back to haunt you" Sheridan, Babylon 5. |
We can never be sure, of course - but it's my opinion that he has done all a person could ever do to "earn" the sacrifice of others. Living the best life a person knows how is all that anyone can ever do in the end - and when we do, we enrich our own lives and the lives of those around us.
American soldiers were sent to Europe to fight and kill and, if need be, to die for long-term preservation of the ideals of liberty and freedom in American society and in other societies. That's something worth dying for, and it is something which the men can understand. So why throw away the lives of six men to save only one? Why not make better use of their skills in "more militarily important" situations, as one of the soldiers asks? But American society is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people." American society is not an entity which does or can exist independently of American citizens - and American society cannot have any value if the citizens do not, as individuals, have value.
So if a single human being is not worth sacrificing for, how could a society of such human beings be worth sacrificing for? It is only through the value of each and every human being that a society achieves value itself.
Questioning
This question is key to understanding the movie, but it is also key to understanding our society. Ryan was asked to earn the sacrifice of the rescue team - but have we? The movie demonstrates in graphic detail what American soldiers went through in Europe and the incredible sacrifices they endured. Ryan, in an effort to earn those sacrifices, lived the best life he could - it didn't involve medicine or inventions, but just living. He worked with his hands and raised a family, doing the best he could and remembering why. Do we? For some, living the best life one knows how might indeed include fantastic achievements benefiting large numbers of people - but for most, it won't.
Ryan's life had meaning and value on its own terms, in particular because lived it on his own terms and as he best could. Can we say the same about our lives? Will we earn those sacrifices? Can we?
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