Classy

Watching the Golden Globes tonight, they just happened to play a clip where Tom Hanks as Cpt Miller mentions getting home to his wife in Saving Private Ryan.
So, he could have told his wife, through Ryan, goodbye, and he didn’t.
Asshole.

(See below for my initial discussion with the void on the topic of Saving Private Ryan as a problem play.)
The argument could be made, of course, that Miller broadly represents the sacrifice in effort and blood of an elder generation of Americans in WW2, and Ryan, relatively safe, protected by that sacrifice, represents the younger generation which should ‘earn’ that sacrifice by being awesome at America.
In that scenario, Miller’s ‘Earn this’ becomes a call to modern era Americans to not forget the sacrifices that brave servicemen made during World War 2, which, on the one hand is a valuable reminder. It assumes that the brains of younger Americans are made of sand, and that the current generation is incapable of remembering basic concepts, but it’s sometimes good to say something really simple, lest we lose sight of it. It’s not like public schools are well funded, after all.
So, maybe the film’s intent is that. In which case, I still think Miller’s a dbag. It’s still a guilt trip. It’s still cruelly reductive, and it assumes an enormous amount about Ryan, a man Miller barely knows. He could go out on an up note. Miller goes out being a jerk.
Screw that guy.

The other day, I was thinking about movies I’d seen, which is what I do when I want to go to a movie but don’t want to have the horribly unpleasant experience of going to a movie.
Anyway, I was thinking about it, and I realized something about Saving Private Ryan that i’m going to share with you. It will ruin the film if you haven’t seen it, so proceed in whatever fashion that information implies to you.
If you do decide to read this, I encourage you to hold a drink close to your chest, affect a close lipped smile, nod, and excuse yourself at the first opportunity to check out the snacks since that tends to be what happens when I bring this sort of thing up at parties.
In a nutshell, the idea is this: Tom Hanks’s character, Cpt. John Miller, is a fucking asshole.
I base this somewhat on his behavior throughout the film (for example, when Vin Diesel gets shot, Tom Hanks blames Vin for not following his order. I think that a Captain worth shit (and, keep in mind, I know what I’m talking about, having never been anywhere near the military) would accept responsibility for his subordinate. After all, why didn’t Vin fall in line? Weak leadership?). But mostly I base this on his behavior right after he gets shot. It’s the end of the movie just before that really cheeseball morphing thing happens to Matt Damon, turning him into a guy that IMDB tells me is named Harrison Young. You guys remember, right?
So, put yourself in Miller’s boots for a second:
-You’ve tramped around france a bit, looking for this guy, rather than fighting the war, which is bad.
-Then you fell backward into making things hard for the Nazis on a pretty epic level, which is good.
-On the other hand, you’ve seen most of your men blown to hell, which, even if you refuse to accept responsibility for their well being, is bad.
-But you met Ted Danson, and that’s always good.
-Finally, you went and got shot, and you could have avoided it if you’d gone all Gitmo on that German prisoner you had. You probably feel like a real asshole about it, which is bad.
So, on the whole, not the most positive experience a human being might have, and you might be a little peeved. But, you know you’re dying, and you have only a little bit of time to tell Matt Damon something, anything, before embracing eternity.
As pissed as I’d be, I’d like to think that in Miller’s position, I would say something nice for him to relay to my loved ones. However, Tom Hanks seems like a loner. He mentions only that he’s a school teacher, and a quick image search reveals he’s not wearing a wedding ring. If that’s the case, I’d like to think I’d say something nice to Matt Damon because the kid probably feels pretty bad. He’s watched Miller and most of Miller’s men get shot or blown up in an effort to save him, which is only being made because Ryan’s brothers have all been killed. Ryan has lost most of his family. And I’m not sure you could even say the people who came to save him were successful. Ryan lives, but in all of the getting blown up and shot that Miller’s men do, none of them actually got in the way of a bullet meant for Ryan, far as i could tell. It’s hard to say what happens to him if they don’t show.
Anyway, the upshot is, Ryan didn’t ask for this. He didn’t ask for Miller to ride in, get most of the men with him killed, and finally get shot in the back. Maybe if Miller doesn’t have someone at home he wants to send some comfort to, he could at least take the opportunity to say, ‘Don’t worry kid. Not your fault.’
But no. Miller looks up at Ryan, and decides that the best way to shuffle out of the world is to say this:
‘Earn this.’
Christ, what an asshole.
That’s an epic guilt trip. A mind fuck that there is no recovery from. Earn the deaths of all these people? When you didn’t have any hand in it? The person who uses his last moments on earth to do that to someone, especially someone who has shown Ryan’s bravery, is a douche.
It’s a good thing Miller gets shot. Fucker got most of his men killed, basically failed to complete every objective that he was given, and left this world committing an act that emotionally crippled a boy whose brothers had all been killed. I’m pretty sure he was trying to lose us the war.
It only took me eleven years to come up with that.

i could choose anything, but i decided on this:

happy 2009.

this will be our year.

watch the cw 11’s ten o’clock news.

watch the ‘help me howard’ segments.

study them.