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to come.⁷⁹ Scholarship on the film has, however, routinely asserted that it went unseen until 1980. Thomas Doherty claims that it was “withheld from public screening,” while Mark Harris has more recently alleged that “Let There Be Light would not be shown publicly for 35 years.”⁸⁰ The film was, in fact, so widely—and so publicly—circulated in the five months immediately following its completion that a Signal Corps memorandum from May 1946 bemoaned the condition of the much-used distribution print in its possession. As one officer noted in a handwritten addendum, this print was “mutilated beyond projection [or] duping,” so frequently had it been “borrowed” by medical educators within and beyond the military.⁸¹ Accepting one (erroneous) narrative—that Let There Be Light was successfully “hidden” in response to Huston’s “heroic” truth-telling—has enabled widespread ignorance of the role that the film played, along with a number of other documentaries, in publicizing certain practices of military psychiatry and their civilian applications. It has also meant sustaining certain assumptions about the purposes of state-sponsored documentary as well as a particular (and peculiarly narrow) historiographic approach to the American armed forces and their relationship to media.

      A series of postwar articles in Hollywood Quarterly set certain myopic precedents for scholarly accounts of military documentaries, bemoaning the “little-seen” status of these films because their only metric was commercial theatrical exhibition, or focusing on Frank Capra and the Why We Fight series (1942–1945) at the expense of the thousands of other works produced.⁸² What Michel Foucault calls “popular memory”—in this case, memory of the many trauma-themed films screened in classrooms, churches, factories, offices, town squares, and elsewhere—appears to have been blocked, or at least recast, by the apparatuses committed to regulating historical knowledge. These include the “popular literature,” schools, and academic studies implicated in Foucault’s critique, but also commercial media that, in the “heroic mode,” invariably focus on the exploits of Capra, Huston, John Ford, George Stevens, William Wyler, and other directors-in-uniform.⁸³ The refusal to consider films made by individuals other than these widely celebrated “great men” threatens the intelligibility not simply of a rich and revealing history of nontheatrical film production and distribution but also of the particular political and economic agendas that these “orphan films” directly and indirectly served. As Haidee Wasson points out, “there is another story to be told about cinema as a wartime apparatus, one not well addressed by focusing on the familiar.” Wasson rightly recognizes “the wide range of film types made by and for the military in the 1940s,” and it was within this wide range that documentaries about war trauma and psychotherapy functioned as instruments of education and vehicles of public relations—though they are all but forgotten today.⁸⁴

      In his account of the ideologically fraught struggles over the public memory of World War II, Foucault provides an important framework for understanding what is at stake in this neglect of films that exceed the familiar dimensions of “state propaganda.” For Foucault, the regulation of memory and knowledge is more about meeting present ideological needs than about “accurately” rendering past events. An awareness of xenophobic, jingoistic propaganda on the order of Capra’s Prelude to War (1942) is perhaps more palatable—more readily digestible—than knowledge of the subtler explorations of trauma and psychotherapy that helped through their therapeutic discourses to promote the solidification of certain aspects of the military-industrial state. Positing the ideological crudeness of the largely racist, warmongering Why We Fight films, and limiting one’s analysis to them, means widening the gap between past and “enlightened” present—and thus, perhaps, absolving oneself of responsibility for investigating the links between trauma-themed films, with their broad uptake by the national mental health movement, and the consolidation of certain kinds of military-industrial power.

      This carefully curated knowledge of the past—this production of “common sense” about what military documentaries were and what purposes they served—permits reformation, as Foucault puts it, only “along certain lines.” “People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been”: not complicit in the normalization of the military-industrial complex, but regrettably tolerant of the historically-specific racism “required” to win the war, as well as of the embarrassing optimism allegedly characteristic of the period—ostensibly an easier problem to fix, because it is (allegedly) about the changing tides of taste and behavior, and not political-economic assemblages in a broader, less tractable sense.⁸⁵ Far from the simplistic “good war” of popular myth, World War II in fact “laid the structural foundations in politics for the modern American empire,” as Michael Rogin points out. It effectively “established the military-industrial state as the basis for both domestic welfare and foreign policy,” all while demanding the production of films that could reach recalcitrant Americans, conditioning them to accept the permanence and therapeutic utility of a large-scale military force.⁸⁶ That such coercion was deemed increasingly necessary is a testament to the confusions characteristic of the era. As a postwar psychiatric report pointed out, “there was little explicit agreement about goal norms among the American soldiers,” who offered wildly divergent explanations for “why we fight.”⁸⁷ Yet scholars of cinema and the Second World War have tended to rely on some rather narrow frameworks of interpretation. In his influential book War and Cinema, Paul Virilio goes so far as to allege that wartime military documentaries “were withdrawn from circulation”—rendered permanently irrelevant as “the convalescent joy of the immediate postwar period was gradually extinguished.”⁸⁸ Virilio is wildly wrong on multiple counts, of course, for his assertion presupposes cheerful patriotism as a motif of all wartime military documentaries (a tired historiographic tactic even when War and Cinema was first published in 1989), while simultaneously ignoring the numerous nontheatrical distribution networks that, in reality, ensured that these films would not be “withdrawn from circulation”—and that, more to the point, they would persist in advertising the military establishment, whether as 8mm reduction prints for the private home, as audiovisual artifacts to be studied in school, or as television programs that aired in public service time.

      Virilio’s affection for florid overstatement—as in his equally misplaced assertion that cinema, after Abel Gance’s day, “would be no more than a bastardized form, a poor relation of military-industrial society”—is all too easy to discredit by paying close attention to the nontheatrical sector, but it speaks volumes about the sort of scholarly myopia that maintains an investment in stale narratives of World War II.⁸⁹ Hence the widespread resistance to the study of “mere” training and orientation films—and the reluctance to bestow the lofty label of documentary upon them, which Alice Lovejoy rightly reads in terms of a “general mistrust of ‘sponsored’” fare.⁹⁰ Frequently rejected out of hand, or consigned to the purgatory of YouTube, where they allegedly index the inanities of the mid-twentieth-century mindset, these were, in fact, remarkably durable works of “useful cinema” (to adopt Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland’s indispensable term) that did more than just normalize war trauma and psychotherapy.⁹¹

      Viewing these films today, one comes face to face with a particular public-relations strategy that hasn’t gone away—that views diagnosis and therapy as the crux of institutional power and liberal individualism. David Serlin notes that, because of their noncommercial character, public health films are often wrongly assumed to “operate outside of the visual culture of modern consumerism and, in particular, genres of communication defined by advertising and marketing,” when in fact they have long been central to such genres, linked as much to the pharmaceutical industry as to the aims of various political campaigns (like Governor Youngdahl’s) and government agencies.⁹² The films addressed in this book are key examples of works that proved instrumental first to the waging and winning of war; later to the emergence and popularization of the national mental health movement; and finally to the normalization of the military-industrial state, with its claims on defense of the national body as well as the individual psyche.

      That we are still living with the consequences of these strategies—and still subjected to their coercive character, whether in the form of commercials for the armed forces (and such associated charitable organizations as Support Our Troops and The Wounded Warrior

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