LITMIR.BIZ

      FIGURE 2. Pat Jones awakens from an “anxiety dream” in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

      The Inside Story of Seaman Jones suggests the expansive value of a docudramatic recounting of trauma and psychotherapy, and the film’s influence can be felt in the Navy’s Combat Fatigue: Insomnia (1945), whose narrator critiques “vague medical terms” and aspires to translate trauma into an intelligible vernacular—precisely, he says, the job of the “helpful,” “patient” military psychiatrist. Various dramatizations reinforce this point: “You know, what you need is—” says one sailor to another, unable to finish the sentence with a reasonable prescription for the treatment of anxiety because he himself is not a psychiatrist. “Hell, I can’t help him—that’s the doc’s job,” he later admits. “Sure, see the doc!”

      More than a “mere” training film intended to acquaint enlistees with the challenges and benefits of life in the armed services, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones is a similarly explicit advertisement for military psychiatry—part of an entire cycle of nontheatrical films designed to address the subject of war trauma, which, as Pat’s case makes clear, is hardly limited to battlefield experiences. The demands of war are, the film suggests, so extreme—so psychologically disruptive—that they affect even those who, like Pat, have never seen combat. Luckily, however, the military is committed to “handling” as well as “preventing” mental illness. Anticipating America’s postwar responsibilities, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones also stresses the military’s capacity to “mold minds” both at home and abroad. “Today, we’re making a scientific study of the mind,” the psychiatrist tells Pat, “and we’re finding some very encouraging things.” Not only is military-psychiatric expertise responsible for effectively explaining to Pat that “emotions actually can cause real physical pain,” but the psychiatrist himself is also available to “counsel” the young man, suggesting that “a lot of boys feel about the way you do”—including “a big, strapping lad” who won multiple Golden Gloves tournaments. Upon entering the wartime military, this “very pretty fighter” developed severe, psychogenic stomach pains. Like Pat, he was forced to see a military psychiatrist—an encounter that, the film suggests, changed his life for the better.

      The universality of emotional disturbances—and of psychogenic illnesses in particular—is thus a central theme of The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, which endeavors to implicate all Americans as beneficiaries of military psychiatry. The eponymous enlistee, with his recognizable character flaws, is allegedly representative of his countrymen—“each one a Seaman Jones.” Such rhetoric undoubtedly fueled the film’s broad uptake in the postwar period. It proved so popular in secondary schools in part because it provided a clear object of identification in the Pat Jones who goes from high school football field to “new responsibilities,” and it was perhaps equally welcome in factories because of its focus on Pat’s prewar role as a junior foreman—a job that the film flatteringly (and strategically) links to military service.³⁰

      Fittingly, Pat is transformed into a source of useful information about mental health—a comprehensible conveyor of psychoanalytic wisdom, much like the film itself. Pat’s psychiatrist hands him a pamphlet on “the mind”—a set of notes on his specific condition—that he studies before “advising” his fellow servicemen, who gather around him to discuss their troubles. If the film endorses the claims made in this pamphlet—an actual “medical circular” seen in instructive close-up—it also supplants it, suggesting that documentary, with its capacity to assimilate everything from animation to staged reenactment, is a superior vehicle of psychiatric instruction. It is also, of course, an instrument of statecraft, as the narrator makes clear at the close of the film: “Sound mental health is our nation’s greatest asset, and this we must maintain.”

      FIGURE 3. Expelled from the conscious mind, “self-pitying thoughts” attempt to arouse Unconscious Mind (“the dormant parent of all your emotions”) in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

      FIGURE 4. After learning “the basics” from a plainspoken Navy psychiatrist, Pat Jones proceeds to teach his fellow enlistees about “matters of the mind” in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

      DOCUMENTING MENTAL HEALTH

      “[W]hen the boys come home from the battlefields overseas, you will find they have changed. . . . The war has made Americans think, and they aren’t going to be so interested in trivial, trashy movies anymore.”

      —Darryl F. Zanuck, 1945³¹

      Responding to the deadliest conflict in human history, a series of American documentary and realist films—produced or commissioned by the United States military—developed an aesthetic of trauma in the 1940s and early 1950s. In their narrative emphasis on illness and recovery, rupture and rehabilitation, social isolation and gradual reintegration, these films sought to convert complex psychiatric concepts into vernacular terms and to disseminate those terms to as wide a public as could be gathered beneath the broadening umbrella of nontheatrical exhibition. New Deal documentary provided a template for much of this work, as the trauma of the Great Depression (and associated ecological catastrophes like dust storms and flooding) gave way to the work of rebuilding and re-enfranchisement encapsulated in such films as The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936) and The River (Pare Lorentz, 1937), with their optimistic emphasis on the state’s reparative potential. Painfully aware of the political and psychiatric failures of an earlier era, when traumatized veterans of the First World War did not receive adequate attention for their conditions (particularly amid widespread debates about “malingering,” pensions, and the stigma of asylums), military filmmakers fashioned a way of addressing war trauma as a national problem with emphatically national solutions. This figuration of trauma and rehabilitation was also a kind of visual and rhetorical shorthand for the military-industrial state.³² For if that state was responsible for the treatment of war-traumatized Americans, including through the Veterans Administration (VA), it was also responsible for returning them to forms of employment that often explicitly involved contributions to military power.³³

      The remarkable survival of trauma-themed films through nontheatrical distribution helped promote the belief that psychic recovery could be attained through an individual’s close, cooperative involvement with the military-industrial state. “The Second World War

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