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2001 COLUMNS *
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5
June, 2001
"PEARL
HARBOR" IS
HOLLYWOOD, NOT HISTORY
I saw the movie "Pearl Harbor," on opening day, and came out feeling somewhat relieved. Mostly, it was innocuous in a thoroughly Hollywood way. Which is to say, it truly is (as Disney hyped) a love story, framed around the attack which is really just a plot device and an excuse for producer Jerry Bruckheimer's typical explosions and fireballs.
| The Japanese may as well be Martians for the attention Bruckmeister and director Michael Bay pay them. |
In fact, with more than 45 minutes left after the attack, the rest of the film takes a long denouement following the April 1942 propaganda bombing mission over Japan by Col. James Doolittle's B-25 bombers. This long ending accomplishes several things: It allows the love triangle -- the core of the story -- to be resolved nicely though tearfully; it allows the shock and anger and perhaps the hatred of the "sneak attack" to dissipate before audiences leave the theatre; and like the actual Doolittle raid itself, it allows the film's viewers (at least in the US) to leave the theater on a jingoistically upbeat note. "Yeah, we showed 'em! How dare they bomb Pearl Harbor; we scared 'em silly by dropping some bombs over Tokyo. We showed 'em!"
I can't blame Hollywood for ending the film this way -- Hollywood is nothing if not the factory of happy endings, right? -- and maybe such a treatment will really help distract audiences from any racist tendencies they may have against Japanese, or Asians in general.
I don't think the movie will fan the flames of anti-Asian sentiment amongst Americans, except perhaps within those who already feel animosity against Asians. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese attackers in the film weren't demonized at all.
In a weird way, the Japanese portrayed in the movie were dismissed, almost faceless. Mako, the veteran JA actor with the craggy face, plays Admiral Yamamoto, one of the few Japanese speaking parts and the only Japanese character we get to know in the film. The rest of the Japanese may as well be Martians for the attention Bruckmeister and director Michael Bay pay them. Is that a good thing? It didn't hurt the love story....
The one irritating thing about the film, however, was the lack of Asian involvement throughout. It's one thing for the Japanese to be generally faceless, but it's downright weird to show lots of scenes of 1941 Honolulu and hardly have any Asian faces in the crowds, not even working as servers.
In one momentary scene a Japanese American doctor who is played by a Chinese American actor is brushed away by an injured soldier who refuses to be treated by a damn "Jap." There were no other Asian military, doctors, nurses or civilians in all of Honolulu, we are made to believe, except for a Japanese tourist who is a spy taking photos of the ships in Pearl Harbor, and a JA dentist who gets a mysterious phone call in Japanese asking about the ships in the harbor outside his window. Although the JACL protested this dentist's appearance in the film, the movie makes clear he's no spy but just some unlucky Japanese-speaking soul who was called at random by the Japanese military for a last-minute look at the ships before the attack.
Except for one fleeting glimpse of a hula dancer entertaining troops on the beach, I don't even remember seeing any native Hawaiians in the movie.
For anyone who cares, "Jap" was used only about a dozen times in the movie, and the use didn't bother me. That's what they were called back then, after all. (I once interviewed a WWII veteran who told me all about the "Japs" for an hour and then stopped to tell me he didn't mean me when he used the term, he was talking about the Japs he was fighting. I didn't take offense -- too much.)
But it is noteworthy that there were no epithets used for the Germans that Rafe (Ben Affleck), one corner of the love triangle, fought in his time flying with Britain's Royal Air Force. And in a somewhat bizarre twist, the "n-word" was never used once in the movie even though a subplot was the racism faced by African Americans in the military.
In the scene that introduces Cuba Gooding Jr. as Doris Miller, the first black sailor to be awarded a Navy Cross, he's boxing a white sailor with men around the ring shouting at both fighters. One of the white men yells out "Show that cook what you got!" or some other silly rubbish. A black sailor responds with "Win this for all the cooks and dishwashers!" or some other weird line, as if Disney, the studio that made the movie, couldn't force itself to use the "n-word" for historical accuracy even though it felt comfortable using the "j-word." That's what political correctness has gotten us -- a distortion of history, albeit a history ripe with racism.
The subplot of Doris Miller's heroism, by the way, was pretty gratuitous, since it had nothing to do with the romance except for the fact that the character was treated by nurse Evelyn Stewart (Kate Beckinsale), the woman in the love triangle, after his boxing match.
The film mangles other historical facts, starting with the impossibility of a US Army pilot being allowed to volunteer to fly in the RAF over Britain when the US hadn't declared war against Germany. Admiral Yamamoto's role is vastly simplified for the audiences' consumption -- there is no sense of the doubt he felt at going to war against the US (Yamamoto was educated at Harvard and knew this would likely unite the US, not beat down Americans' spirits). It also completely ignores the internal tension within the Japanese high command, the literal tug-of-war between the Army's aggressionist policies and the navy's reportedly peaceful tack (according to most histories and films such as "Tora! Tora! Tora!). Doolittle's character and some of the facts of his raid are also fudged for Hollywood's sake.
But most of the attack scenes, which are a big draw for their special effects (they're not as gory as the portrayal of war in "Saving Private Ryan") seem to have been treated with a fair amount of historical accuracy.
So, at the end of it, I laughed, I cried, and I pretty much enjoyed the film -- as a Hollywood blockbuster movie, and nothing else. Will it inflame racism against Asians? Maybe, but I think only in people who probably hate us already anyway. Is it a great movie? Not really. It's mostly like "Titanic" in both feel and effect. Is it a bad movie? Film buffs and critics will think so.
Don't be scared of it -- see it for yourself and then decide.