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Traumatic Imprints. Noah Tsika
Читать онлайн.Название Traumatic Imprints
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520969926
Автор произведения Noah Tsika
Издательство Ingram
TRAUMATIC TIMES
“We all have war jitters.”
—Val Lewton, 194494
Merely alluding to the high incidence of psychiatric disorders during World War II may seem controversial—even nonsensical. After all, as Penny Coleman points out, the war “is not associated with combat-related stress in the popular imagination.” It is instead “remembered as the ‘good war’ whose soldiers defeated an unequivocal evil and returned with Gene Kelly optimism.”95 Yet even Gene Kelly, while serving in the Navy, was called upon to portray a severely traumatized veteran in his directorial debut Combat Fatigue: Irritability (Gene Kelly, 1945), a work that was widely distributed as an entry in the Navy’s five-part film series on war trauma. The persistent availability of such films—even outside of government archives—has seemingly done little to influence retrospective accounts. “Today, few Americans associate war trauma with the so-called good war and the greatest generation that fought it,” writes Rebecca Jo Plant. “But the proportion of men discharged from the U.S. military on neuropsychiatric grounds was in fact significantly higher in World War II than in World War I, Korea, or Vietnam.”96 As the narrator of the Navy’s The N.P. Patient (1944) puts it, “The size of the problem will startle you.”
Discharge rates were so high, in fact, that films about psychoneurosis were developed, in part, to prepare inductees for the “exceedingly traumatic” experience of being “let go” because of a “mental problem.”97 World War II, which remains “the most destructive conflict humanity has yet seen,” forced millions of Americans to confront the realities of war trauma.98 The number of psychiatric patients in VA hospitals nearly doubled between 1940 and 1948; in 1946, roughly 60 percent of all VA patients were classified as “neuropsychiatric cases.”99 Such sobering figures demanded the fashioning of what Eva Moskowitz calls a “psychological front”—an unprecedented attempt to incorporate psychological expertise into the prosecution of war.100
Even before the United States entered World War II, the military was carefully cultivating the work of psychological experts, particularly through the Research Branch of the Army’s Morale Division (later known as the Information and Education Division), which was established in October 1941.101 By this time, the military’s visual cultures reflected a deep investment in “matters of the mind.” In 1942, the clinical psychologist Molly Harrower introduced the Group Rorschach Test, which involved projecting images of inkblots onto screens, walls, and curtains—a proto-cinematic experiment that, while never widely adopted by the military, still suggested a growing commitment to visualizing the psychological.102 During the war, similar projections of diagnostic materials supplemented actual film screenings. The Army psychiatrist Daniel Jaffe, for instance, favored projecting the “cartoonish diagrams” originally published in the journal War Medicine, which purported to illustrate various emotional states, in order to educate officers about mental health.103
Contrary to conventional wisdom, military documentaries of the 1940s and 1950s insisted on the centrality of psychiatric and psychological treatment to the rehabilitation of veterans. Emphasizing the sheer diversity of “so much challenging clinical material,” the institutional documentary The Navy Nurse (1952) notes that patients’ “ills may be either of the body or the mind.” Even films believed to have been beyond the ken of psychological experts in fact reflected their work. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John W. Appel, for instance, supervised the production of the Why We Fight films, which, as a result of his interventions, “exemplified a new kind of Signal Corps documentary,” as Charles Wolfe argues, “one in which the historical and psychological conditions of combat took precedence over a narrow technical or tactical approach.”104
Teaching filmmakers basic Freudian concepts, Appel was part of a movement within military psychiatry that embraced film for its pedagogic as well as therapeutic potential, and that sought to normalize psychoneurosis as a consequence of war.105 “There is no getting used to combat,” Appel wrote in December 1944. “Each moment of it imposes a strain so great men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus, psychiatric casualties are just as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.”106 As one character says to another in Sam Fuller’s postwar drama House of Bamboo (1955), “You got battle fatigue. It happens to the best of us. It’s nothing personal.” For its part, the earlier Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (Roy William Neill, 1943) depicts “convalescent officers”—“all fine fellows, [with] wonderful war records and everything”—who are nevertheless “all victims of combat fatigue.” It falls upon the titular detective to confidently proclaim that this is “not unnatural.”107
For soldiers, military training increasingly entailed exposure to therapeutic rhetoric, with the average enlistee coming to learn that “nothing was wrong with seeking psychological help; in fact, to do so was a sign of unusual strength and maturity.”108 The first two years of American involvement in World War II were marked by a commitment to “screening out” anyone suspected of a “psychological deviation” (including “sluggishness,” “overboisterousness,” and homosexuality).109 By 1945, after the establishment of the Army’s Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division and the termination of the practice of automatically discharging psychologically “suspicious” inductees, the military had shifted toward an entirely different model, one premised on the efficacy of psychiatric treatment.110 Medical centers (including Brooke General Hospital at Fort Sam Houston, Lawson General in Atlanta, and Mason General on Long Island) acquired schools of military neuropsychiatry, all of which heartily embraced films as teaching tools, recognizing “the fact that tremendous educational value may accrue to the benefit of the Army, the public, and ultimately the individual psychiatric patient, through the utilization of carefully developed motion pictures and photographs of neuropsychiatric activities.”111 The film program at St. Albans, a hospital for war veterans located in Queens, New York, was especially advanced, screening a range of military-sponsored shorts and features.112 Thanks in no small part to such visual aids—all of them premised on the treatability of various disorders—wartime military psychiatry achieved “a comprehensive ‘normalization’ that altered the subjects and purposes of clinical work by reorienting theory and practice away from mental illness and toward mental health.”113 This “normalization” was increasingly central to the military’s public relations strategies: the armed forces were reconfigured as sites where mental health could be found, not permanently lost—places where the potentially disturbed could be treated, not peremptorily excluded.114
Drawing on the interpretive work of military psychiatrists, and presenting this work, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, as “somehow complete and self-sufficient,” trauma-themed films are fundamentally concerned with disabling a rather obvious question: if war trauma is as terrible as it is inevitable, why wage war at all—why continue to pursue military action around the globe?115 In wartime and postwar military documentaries, then, trauma itself is not the “unthinkable” that needs to be repressed; rather, it is the questionability of military power that lies beyond the films’ boundaries—that seems, in fact, to necessitate the presentation of trauma as a consequence of modernity that only the military, with its wide-ranging faculties, can adequately “handle.”116 Looking back on the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, Herbert Schiller and Joseph Phillips dismissed “simplistic notions of domestic conspiracy,” positing instead a liberal-capitalist framework in which “open discussions” of military power are understood as “healthy”: “Secrecy is not the essence of the relationship between the military and the large industrial corporations that are [its] principal contractors,” they wrote in 1970.117 Borrowing from Donna Haraway, Mimi White has suggested that therapeutic