ENGLISH WRITING(1) - Film Analysis Essay--Draft for Peer Review

Using the literary/narrative terminology covered in class and described in materials on the website, analyze a sophisticated narrative film of your choice with its release preferably dating from January 2017 until the present (other films are subject to advance approval from me, so contact me first on those. Please note the list of overused and overdone films on the website and refrain from using those). Be sure to choose a film with a strong narrative component, so that you can carry out a plot analysis. Follow the instructions in the webpage document on how to carry out the first film analysis essay. Minimum 1400 words for peer review. Maximum roughly 1600. (Final submission will be 1500-1600 words after revision). Submission should be in doc, docx or pdf format. Composition of the essay must be in either Microsoft Word, LibreOffice or Open Office. No use of Google Docs, Pages, or Hangeul Word Processing allowed. (For the Korean version of MS Word, four defaults have to be changed. International versions are likely OK but check first). Be sure to do a Works Cited entry for the film on the last page or on a separate page. You should follow the documentation format from Purdue University for MLA citation that is linked on my webpage. Any instances of plagiarism will mean a failure on the assignment as well as the course. Please be forewarned. The complete draft of the essay is due at the beginning of class on Friday, May 19. Please note that a grace period DOES NOT APPLY to the workshop draft. It might be well worth your time to review the lectures on academic writing from the second week of class as well as the lectures and documents related to this assignment, including narrative vocabulary, how to carry out the film analysis essay, and how your film analysis essay will be evaluated. You may find these materials on the website. Please post your draft here on LearnUs and also bring two printed copies of the draft to class for peer review--one for your partner to be determined and one for me for a preliminary check. Please note that students who do no come prepared with a completed draft for peer review at the start of class on the 19th will not be considered for "+" grades in the class. Other penalties will also apply, including a recorded absence for the class.

As you write, bear in mind the six "do nots" for academic writing about film:

1.     Do not write about the audience of your film AT ALL in your essay. I do not care about the audience, how they feel, what they think, or how immersive their experience is. Doing so is irrelevant to the assignment, and it shows me that you have nothing to say about your film. It indicates that you are relying on or speculating about effects rather investigating causes. Instead, focus on the object in front of you rather than the people sitting behind you while watching the film. Writing about the audience of the film demonstrates to me that you are a C writer and do not have any interest in improving. I do not mean to say that the audience is not important but rather that the film is far more important and can be more directly ascertained since that is what you are supposed to be analyzing, and it lies in front of you. The audience could be thinking virtually anything about the film and is likely to change on the day the film is viewed and by whom is watching it. Moreover, you will not know what an audience actually thinks unless you to talk to them directly, and that is outside the purview of our assignment.

2.     Do not write about the director of the film. You may mention the director’s full name in your introduction when you introduce your film and its title. After that, I do not want to hear anything more about the director. Your task is to analyze the film, not the director.

3.     Do not write about yourself or how the film makes you feel and think about it. Your feelings and reactions are personal, not analytical. They do not belong in your essay, and they suggest that you might be writing a personal diary rather than an academic essay.

4.     Do not write about how a film uses narrative/literary vocabulary. These terms/concepts are tools for critics like you to read film. They are not used by filmmakers though filmmakers may be aware of them on some level. To say that a film uses such terms is to get the story backward. YOU are reading these terms into the film in order to illuminate it.

5.     Do not write a long summary about the film. Summary must be used as a tool, not a goal. Writing a long summary indicates you have nothing substantive to say about the film. Also, we write plot analyses, not plot summaries. In doing so, we summarize briefly in order to indicate key plot points. However, we do not allow summarizing to obscure our analyses. This fact we learned in WAM Chapter 1.

6.     I would greatly prefer that you do not provide a long laundry list of topics you will cover in your thesis statement. It is far better for you to make a clear point based on implicit meaning of the film rather than supplying a list. Lists are boring to read. Many of the sample essays on the website employ such lists unfortunately. It would be truly great if you did not follow those particular examples in that one respect.

 

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Oh, SH

 

Professor W. A.

 

Writing 1

 

12 May 2023

 

Saving Private Ryan: The pathetic rationalization

 

          The year is 1944, during World War 2. In the middle of the ruined, war-torn town, which is located somewhere in France, stood an old church. The church inside is poorly lit, with only a few candlesticks. The church inside is so dim that the faces of the people inside can barely be seen. The dark orange candle lights reveal only the dark, vague contours of the soldier's face. Inside the church are seven soldiers. They are trying to take a short nap, but most of them are still awake. The soldiers look exhausted, both mentally and physically. In the middle of the church chapel is Captain John H. Miller, who is in charge of the soldiers. He is sitting in the middle of the chapel, leaning against one of the pews. The camera shows his shaking hand grabbing a rusty tin mug as he puts his hand near the candle. It is as if his severely shaking hand is trying to tell what its owner had undergone in the war. While his men are taking a break from the war, Captain Miller tells his aide, Sergeant Horvath, that whenever he ends up killing his man on the battlefield, he tells himself that it happened so he could save the lives of ten or maybe a hundred others. This reveals how Captain Miller rationalizes the difficult decision of choosing between the mission at hand and the men under his command. But as soon as Sergeant Horvath listened to it, he responded. "Except that this time the mission is a man." Besides being a memorial to the US veterans of WW2 and showing the realistic indirect experience of WW2 soldiers, Saving Private Ryan poses a question that is difficult to answer. Whether sacrificing men to save only one man is reasonable? Whether the mission of saving one man is worth risking eight of the men’s lives?

 

          Saving Private Ryan is a 1998 film directed by well-known director Steven Spielberg. The movie is set in 1944 in France during World War 2. The main character of the film is Captain John H. Miller, played by all-time famous actor Tom Hanks. After he and the men under his command have landed on the beach of Normandy in France on D-Day, June 6th, 1944, he gets the mission to find the man whose name is James Francis Ryan and send him home. Private Ryan lost his three brothers in the war, so he is ordered to be sent home alive. Captain Miller gathers seven soldiers and starts the search and rescue mission. As they are carrying out the mission, they raise the issue of whether the mission of saving one man is worth carrying out. Besides this main story, the film also shows the horrors and cruelty of war by depicting war scenes in highly realistic detail and showing Corporal Upham, who is unable to contribute to the war effort and eventually ends up letting his comrades dead.

 

          One interesting word in the film is that the slang “FUBAR," made and used by us soldiers during World War II, is frequently mentioned in the film. The term FUBAR is an acronym of the phrase "fucked up beyond all repair". The term shows how the soldiers would have felt when they were reminded how meaningless and unnecessary it is to risk eight men for only one man. The term FUBAR also is a symbol of Corporal Upham losing his innocence due to the cruelty of war. He didn’t know the meaning of the word in the first half of the movie. But as the story develops, he frequently uses the term. By understanding the meaning of the word "FUBAR”, he gets to understand the reality of war.

 

          Although there are some tales of valor, heroism, and patriotism about the veterans who fought bravely in the war, it can be clearly seen that Captain Miller's and his soldier’s deaths are meaningless and evitable, and the mission of saving one man at the expense of six men is a bad deal. From the start to the end of the runtime, the film keeps rationalizing the deaths of innocent soldiers who died in the war. The film starts with an old man who went to the memorial cemetery with his family. He then stops and collapses in front of one cross headstone. The camera shows his sad face, and then his face fades away, and the story goes into Captain Miller’s memory of participating in Operation Overlord in Normandy on D-Day. The film is composed of frame structures, and the inner storyline is chronological, mostly following the view of Captain Miller. Around ten minutes of the Normandy landing scene are considered to be Spielberg’s masterpiece of all time. The scene is appreciated for being very accurate and realistic. This scene also shows the cruelty and unhuman aspects of the war. This shocking scene serves as a good introduction to the movie by inviting audiences into the stark battleground of France. The rising action of the film starts with the end of the Normandy landing scene. The camera shows hundreds of dead soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. The camera stops on one of the dead bodies, which is lying dead on his stomach. The camera closes up on his name, Ryan, vividly written on his back. It is discovered that three out of four of the Ryan brothers who went to war got killed, and the youngest, James Ryan, is missing in action. The chief of staff for the US Army ordered his men to find him and send him home. The order goes to Captain Miller, who just landed on the beach of Normandy. He gathered six of his men and an interpreter who could speak German and French. They go on a mission to find Private Ryan. Even though the title of the film contains Private Ryan, it is Captain Miller, not Ryan, who is the main character of the film. We can see through his inner conflict and rationalize the main idea of the film: the inevitable choice of doing as ordered by sacrificing his men and the meaningless death of the soldiers in the war. The other developed character is Corporal Timothy Upham. He speaks German, French, and English, so he went to war as a non-combatant. But he ended up in the middle of the battleground and ended up losing his innocence.

 

          Two main conflicts are shown in the film: one is a conflict between Miller and his soldier, both explicitly and internally, over whether the mission is worth carrying out. The other is a conflict between US soldiers and the German soldier Steamboat Willie, who is the main antagonist of the film. Steamboat Willie is involved in at least four deaths in Captain Miller’s squad, including Captain Miller himself. The conflict between Miller’s team members develops when they argue over whether they should execute Steamboat Willie and proceed the mission, which is seemingly unnecessary and impossible. One of the soldiers suggests that Ryan is already dead. The other conflict develops as Steamboat Willie, who got captured and was released by Captain Miller, goes back to the German troops and comes to fight back. The conflict further develops as Steamboat Willie kills Mellish and Horvath and shoots Captain Miller in the chest with his rifle. The film reaches a climax as a German tiger tank approaches Captain Miller, who got shot in the chest and lying on the bridge. Besides him, there is James Ryan.

 

          The theme of the paradox of saving one man at the expense of sacrificing many is shown in the film when Miller’s team encounters the Glider Brigade. The glider that the general took is heavier than other gliders because, to maximize his survivability of the general, the bottom of the glider plane is reinforced with heavy sheet metal. The weight made the glide difficult to maneuver, and it ended up plummeting to the ground, killing the general and 22 men aboard.

 

          The movie turns into falling action as the fighter plane comes out of nowhere and drops a bomb on the tiger tank, destroying it and saving Ryan. In the resolution, Captain Miller leaves his last word to Private Ryan: "Earn this, earn it". And then he dies. The camera shows surviving private Ryan’s face and then fades away, showing an old man in the cemetery. The situational irony is that it turned out that the old man in the cemetery at the beginning of the film is not Captain Miller but survived Private Ryan, who got older and became a grandfather.

 

          The film Saving Private Ryan is a desperate attempt to find the reason for the deaths of the men who died in the war. Throughout the film, the movie keeps rationalizing the difficult choices of choosing mission over innocent young men’s lives. The film rationalizes to an extent by conveying the implication that without the men’s deaths in the war, we don’t exist by showing the three-generation family of Private Ryan. In the film Ryan keeps rationalizing their vain death by asking his wife whether he lived a good or bad life.