Traumatic Imprints - Noah Tsika

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Signal Corps short The Atom Strikes!, which insists that the trauma of the titular bomb has left traces—imprints—that only military expertise can identify, and that only documentary film can adequately communicate.8 These traces are both visible (“lines literally blasted into the stone” of a war memorial, the discoloration of a smokestack, flash burns on a lamppost) and invisible, both empirical and postempirical, explicitly recalling the lessons of wartime military psychiatry, which often insisted on trauma’s dual character—its capacity to combine externalized symptoms (tremors, tics) with traits indiscernible on the surface.9 The dead, charred trees of Hiroshima, like the razed buildings of that city, are thus juxtaposed with the imperceptible effects of radiation, which medical experts must explain in terms of an “inner development” akin to the progression of neurosis.10

      If The Atom Strikes! tends to skirt the psychological traumas wrought by the bomb, focusing almost exclusively, in empiricist fashion, on its effects on buildings and bridges, other military documentaries of the period present the human mind as the principal bearer of war trauma. It was precisely the latter approach that rankled many military officials, including Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who, despite being a “zealous proponent of educational film,” and despite his stated desire to “care for the minds of men as well as their bodies,” balked at the prospect of producing documentaries about “invisible” ailments.11 Hollywood films had addressed this dilemma throughout the interwar period. The traumatized protagonist of George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932), for instance, complains that his “invisible” condition generates “not honorable scars, not medals and glory,” but merely “years in hell,” remaining utterly imperceptible to others. In 1942, Marshall complained about such “invisibility” in a special report on war neuroses—an indictment of military psychiatry that was quickly leaked to a Washington newspaper. Rather than halting the development of documentaries about war trauma, the leaked report all but ensured their production, as curious Americans—including soldiers struck by the disconnect between official psychiatric policy and Marshall’s own brand of empiricist bluster (which he shared with General George S. Patton)—were deemed in need of the interventions of educational films.12

      War trauma had the force of a structure of feeling during and in the wake of World War II, informing a range of cultural productions, and its power was inextricable from the contradictions that it seemed at once to manage and exacerbate. Consider, for instance, a casual joke about war trauma in the film A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949), which stands in stark contrast to the subject’s sober discussion in the exactly contemporaneous Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, 1949).13 Consider, as well, the era’s tendency to depict the promiscuous character of war trauma—its capacity to bleed inexorably into civilian life. In Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine (1943), the civilian protagonist suffers from a “nervous condition” that is worsened by thoughts of war. “I can’t stand violence—it terrifies me,” he confesses. “Noise and explosions—something happens to me.” The severely traumatized daughter of a World War II veteran is compared to a combat soldier in MGM’s Shadow on the Wall (Patrick Jackson, 1950), and she eventually develops “hysterical muteness,” along with a range of other symptoms. “You’re familiar with shellshock in adults?” asks a psychiatrist (played by Nancy Davis). “Well, children can be that badly upset, too.”

      Even Lassie, the canine character created by Eric Knight (who co-wrote scripts for the Why We Fight series and was instrumental in introducing the British documentary movement to Signal Corps filmmakers before his death in 1943), suffers from war trauma in Courage of Lassie (Fred M. Wilcox, 1946), surviving a horrific battle in the Aleutian Islands Campaign only to “crack up,” initially lapsing into a catatonic state and later exhibiting violent behavior.14 The dog’s diverse symptoms inspire considerable terror, and it is up to a local rancher to explain war trauma as a common yet eminently treatable condition, one that extends not merely from soldier to civilian but also from soldier to dog.15 That a rancher is capable of explicating the vagaries of war trauma suggests the sheer availability of psychotherapeutic discourses in the 1940s, and his eloquent disquisition provides Courage of Lassie with an instructive power, however partial and fleeting, that evokes documentary’s translational character.16 It is precisely because some of the traumas of World War II are “new”—as the rancher himself suggests—that they require creative interpretation, infiltrating even a children’s film and forcing it to confront the challenges of rehabilitation and reintegration.

      Defining a structure of feeling as “a social experience which is still in process,” Raymond Williams offers a useful framework for thinking about the inchoate aspects of war trauma, as well as the capacity of new symptoms, diagnostic criteria, and treatment methods to spur public debate and encourage the hybridization of filmmaking strategies. The fluidity of war trauma was often sufficient to collapse previously sacrosanct distinctions in American public life, inspiring such catchphrases as “Are you fed up with the setup?” and “Are you nervous in the service?”17 Thus while rhetorical convention clung to a binary opposition between soldier and civilian, the latter was, if employed in war production, considerably more likely to die or suffer serious injury, her traumas encompassing the physical as well as the psychological.18 Addressing these realities, military documentaries consistently couch war trauma as a universal phenomenon—a sweeping consequence of “total war” and, in particular, of shockingly destructive new technologies—while simultaneously striving to identify the peculiarities of combat-related neuroses.

      Hollywood’s wartime engagements with the subject of trauma occasionally emphasized its growing accessibility. Focusing on the dramatic experiences of the U.S. Merchant Marine, Victor Fleming’s Adventure (1945), for instance, stresses the traumas to which civilian mariners are subjected, as well as the availability of information about the development and treatment of psychoneurosis. Visiting a public library, the traumatized Mudgin (Thomas Mitchell), who “lost [his] soul” after his ship was torpedoed, learns much about his condition from librarian Emily Sears (Greer Garson). Pointing to “some excellent studies”—including one by an American colonel, entitled Facts on Combat Fatigue—Emily explains that “the strain of war . . . sometimes causes psychoneurosis.” She proceeds to confidently psychoanalyze Mudgin, doing her part to align him with combat soldiers—and to “prove,” moreover, that “anyone” can comprehend the previously unknown etiologies of trauma.

      Far from avoiding any resemblance to such star-driven, studio-bound representations, or denying that techniques of intervention and reconstruction constituted part of the terrain of documentary (in the manner of later objections issued, however disingenuously, by proponents of direct cinema), military filmmakers repeatedly linked trauma’s diverse and sometimes contradictory symptomatology to a variety of documentary methods, arguing that the latter could ably serve the former, and vice versa. Describing documentary filmmaking as a realist enterprise whose restrictions all but disappear during times of institutional crisis and in the face of traumatic experience, Navy psychiatrist Howard P. Rome wrote in 1945 of a “realistic flexibility which has very few limitations.” Because trauma’s symptoms often included false memory and other fictive strategies of self-representation, and because its treatment entailed “creative reconstruction” (as in the psychodramatic interactions of patients and therapists, or the “memory work” of narcosynthesis), any attempt to document it had to embrace “drama and dynamics” that included “[scripted] words, music and sound, and even color.”19 Regarding the latter, Rome had in mind special effects that, however symbolic and anti-illusionist, would nevertheless “accurately illustrate” a patient’s mental state. Thus if a traumatized combat veteran claimed that he could see nothing but blood—both his own and that of his fallen comrades—the filmic image of him could be given a red tint to reflect and perhaps resolve this fixation, “desensitizing” him to his greatest fear.20

      Traumatic Imprints considers some of the consequential intersections among Freudian psychoanalysis, military psychiatry, and documentary film in a period that long predated the codification of war trauma as PTSD. At stake in my reevaluation of wartime and postwar military media is a broader understanding of how war trauma and psychotherapy were articulated

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