Saving.Ryan's.Privates
Aside: That's the second-funniest (or at least silliest) porno title: "Saving Ryan's Privates". (The funniest, and one of the best bits of parody in human history altoghether, is “A Clear and Pleasant Stranger”, which remains just absolutely inspired.)
I recently rewatched “Saving Private Ryan” and some of the things that annoyed me when I was younger and more/less easily annoyed annoyed me still. I'll leave those for another day. But something I hadn’t been able to put my finger on after rewatching it a couple weeks ago, or so, is well-stated by Adam Gopnik below.
Looking again at my defunct, 20-year-old blog, I found this, which addresses a nagging, undefined bother the rewatch gave me:
From An Old Interview With Adam Gopnik
Robert Birnbaum: When you use the word 'shallow' about America's sense of history, I think that may be generous. It would seem to be regularly trivialized...
AG: I was stunned by that when Saving Private Ryan opened in France. The Americans did all the fighting. Not only were there no French people involved in the war, but no Canadians, no Brits. One of the things about Omaha Beach is that it was a horrible fuck up. It was the one fuck up on D-Day. The Canadians took their beaches. In a relatively untroubled way the British took theirs. The Americans just fucked up. Yet, we represent that fuck up as the only event and as in itself heroic.
The interview (which I have not yet reread in full, but quoted at the time) also contained these two unrelated but noteworthy observations from Gopnik:
Essayists generally — and certainly me particularly — tend to be more like performers than novelists. Novelists are like architects or builders. They are willing to sit in a room for five or six years and build something and they at some level don't give a damn what the public thinks. They want to make a cathedral for themselves to live in and then they open the doors. If you come in to worship that's fine. And if you don't that's fine, too. Essayists aren't like that. At least this one isn't. You have to have a bit of the ham in you. You like to do the thing and feel that the people are reacting.
And:
At some point as a writer you learn it's not what you want to do, it's what you are capable of doing, what you do well.
One of my favorite things is listening to writers talking about writing.