Traumatic Imprints - Noah Tsika

Скачать книгу

and their families were among the most vocal proponents of the production and wide distribution of documentaries about trauma and psychotherapy, and their growing political influence, which helped lead to the passage of the National Mental Health Act in 1946, was a decisive factor in the military’s continued commitment to “mental health films.” Rebecca Jo Plant has written of “the curious development of American psychoanalysis in the immediate postwar years, a period of sustained professional growth and unprecedented popularization.”151 I argue that this development was made possible, in large part, by the film work of military psychiatrists, which circulated widely and for many years via an expanding nontheatrical distribution network. Nontheatrical nonfiction film thus played a crucial yet understudied role in the establishment and survival of a popular movement for mental health, and the roots of this movement in military psychiatry demand serious attention.

      Military documentaries about trauma and psychotherapy were by no means uniform in their messages. In The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, the title character is told by his doctor that there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown—a claim that boldly contradicted those of many real-life military psychiatrists, who not only insisted on the legitimacy of the term “nervous breakdown” but also suggested that it was synonymous with “psychoneurosis.”152 Such contradictions inevitably spilled over into Hollywood fiction films, including Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love (1947), in which a sympathetic military psychiatrist explains, “Most people have the wrong idea about [psychoneurotic] soldiers. It’s more like a nervous breakdown. They’re not crazy—just overtired. They’ll get well if you give them a chance.” With these words, the doctor echoes the narrator of Psychiatric Procedures in the Combat Area, who refers to the victims of combat trauma by averring, “They’re not quitters, but are truly ill.” The basic psychological lexicon at the center of The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, with its principled eschewal of the term “nervous breakdown,” is thus dramatically different from that employed not only in such fiction films as The Man I Love and Walsh’s later Glory Alley (1952) but also in the Navy documentary Combat Psychiatry: The Division Psychiatrist (1954), which, in detailing “sudden, severe psychological trauma,” characterizes it by “attacks of the nerves.” Marlisa Santos has drawn attention to the similarly blatant contradiction between the “opening caution” of Let There Be Light, which warns against conflating war trauma and “peacetime neuroses,” and the claims made in other psychiatric and cinematic discourses of the era—particularly those of film noir, which, according to Santos, emphasize the “scant difference” between soldiers and civilians in their shared vulnerability to various psychological disorders.153 Such comparisons are taken to bizarre extremes in Shades of Gray, which likens lofty “military concerns” to worrying about a mortgage—or even “a letter two days overdue.” The film, which purports to offer “a summary of experience gained in the prevention and treatment of neuropsychiatric cases in World War II,” notes that “the stresses of military and civilian life” are “equally complex and important.”

      Because the condition seemed to demand a number of different, sometimes opposing modes of articulation and treatment, documentaries that tackled the contours of war trauma also adopted a wide range of approaches. Indeed, it is possible to perceive in certain trauma-themed military documentaries of the 1940s and early 1950s the seeds of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, as well as of the testimonial function of activist films like Winter Soldier (Winterfilm Collective, 1972) and Interviews with My Lai Veterans (Joseph Strick, 1971), among other styles informed by—even generative of—various configurations of trauma and psychotherapy. Just as the fantasy of a “pure” documentary, devoted entirely to “neutral” observation and predicated on the invisibility of filmmaker and filmmaking apparatus alike, is unsustainable in the face of innumerable challenges and thus no basis for documentary theory and criticism, the notion that trauma is limited to a familiar expressive repertoire and a stable generic context is insensitive to some of trauma’s historical conditions and physical, psychological, and textual effects. Military documentaries about mental illness were designed to heal as well as to teach, and many a military psychiatrist proclaimed their success as therapeutic tools, echoing an institutional belief that these films “could accomplish literally anything”—including the psychic rehabilitation of the combat-traumatized soldier.154 But they were also designed to recruit, as well as to perform a number of other institutional functions, serving as ideal instruments of public relations precisely because they didn’t deny the traumatic effects of combat, or the incidence of soldiers needing extensive psychiatric treatment. In viewing some of these films today, it is tempting to regard them as the “truthful” alternatives to so many absurdly hyperbolic movies about the beauty and efficacy of American patriotism, and to praise their commitment to the psychic rehabilitation of their earliest audiences. However, as Anna McCarthy warns, “recounting governmental reason should not automatically affirm its efficacy, nor discount its close connections to private interest.” 155 Wartime military documentaries may have enjoyed extensive afterlives in factories and secondary schools, their exhibition mandated by management as well as by various educational leaders, but that does not mean that their methods were automatically appreciated or their prescriptions unthinkingly followed. As Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose point out, “Things, persons, or events always appear to escape . . . the programmatic logic that seeks to govern them.”156 We should not assume that military documentaries did what many of them said they would do—“heal the mind” and “restore the spirit,” to quote the Army’s Combat Exhaustion (1945)—and their identifiable ties to military and private interests suggest several reasons why we should not. As Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland argue, the paradoxical purpose of many examples of “useful” cinema is “to both promote change and to resist it”; films that reflect the ambitions of a particular institution inevitably “help to preserve and reproduce that institution,” whatever their ostensible deviations from convention.157

      In considering how military psychiatry shaped particular cinematic practices in the 1940s and early 1950s, I hope to avoid suggesting an uncritical appreciation of filmic innovation and institutional reform—hence my commitment to uncovering how even disturbing films about war trauma are implicated in the military-industrial complex and in political efforts to normalize the war-based economy. At the same time, I certainly do not want to underestimate the lasting pedagogic and therapeutic value of some of these films. Diagnosed with PTSD in the spring of 2016, I found myself turning, in addition to formal psychiatric treatment, to the Navy’s Introduction to Combat Fatigue (1944), a film whose officer-narrator, in directly addressing the camera, seemed to speak sympathetically to my own condition. Communicating across the gulf of seventy-plus years and from within the functional dimensions of institutional documentary, Introduction to Combat Fatigue helpfully reinforced what I was learning about my own anxiety states, reminding me that I was neither dying nor “going crazy” (as I had long suspected) but instead suffering from a distinct and treatable disorder, one born (at least in part) of repeated exposure to the threat of gun violence.158 (“Oh, no, you’re not gonna die,” says a soothing voice on the soundtrack of Combat Fatigue: Insomnia. “We know how you feel.”) I do not doubt that a fair number of other viewers, forced to watch these films in classrooms and factories, have shared my sense of recognition across the longue durée of the American military documentary. Thus my own “transferential and affect-laden implication in the object of study,” to quote Dominick LaCapra, is such that I cannot help but appreciate the reparative potential of so many wartime and postwar military documentaries, despite their obvious political shortcomings.159 The usefulness of “useful cinema,” then, may persist well past the point of contact between particular films and their initial audiences, animating instructive strategies and therapeutic regimens for years to come.

      Solemn Venues

       War Trauma and the Expanding Nontheatrical Realm

      In 1943, the Army psychiatrist George S. Goldman was placed on full-time duty to develop a “general program” of “psychiatric films”—original documentaries that could “contribute to mental health” by “removing some of the mystery connected with psychiatry and

Скачать книгу