That swish-swish sound you hear? That's me, rubbing my hands. This whole flap over Spielberg's film and whether to show it on network TV (1) on Veteran's Day (2) during a war--vs. damning the FCC torpedoes--is just too juicy; I cannot resist.
The precipitating event is a few entertainment conglomerates (most of which I've never heard of) yanking Saving Private Ryan from tonight's Veteran's Day broadcast schedule, all thanks to Janet Jackson and oh yeah, Bono.
J.J. accidentally-on-purpose flipped her right nipple at us during the Super Bowel--oopsie!--and Bono got so enthusiastic about a music award that he actually said THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT! on network TV, causing the networks involved to be hugely fined by the FCC for "obscenity." Quelle horreur, etc.
Evidently (nipples being not so much in evidence), the language in Private Ryan is the issue; apparently, the actors in this film actually use the actual language that actual soldiers use in actual war. Quelle horreur, again. And then there's some other mumbly stuff on CNN about whether American Folks At Home can stand seeing such graphic representations of the activities their sons/lovers/brothers/husbands are currently engaged in, over there in Fallujah etc.
Here, at the tail end of the argument, is where I get excited: the collapse of distinction between language and violence, as to obscenity. Apparently--and I hope I'm not overstating the case--somebody in charge of these nobody/nowhere outlets suspects that the sight of American forces--primarily enlisted men, calculated sacrifices for "the greater good"--drowning in their own blood on Omaha Beach might be deemed by the FCC as being as obscene as hearing the survivors say fuck.
Well, boys and girls, it's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern all over again, and that's why I'm sooooo gleeful. R&G are the Two Stooges of Hamlet--his college roommates, recruited by Claudius, Hamlet's uncle/stepfather to betray their frat bro. But our hero, the Prince of Denmark, gets the drop on his drop-in buddies in this exchange:
H [to R & G]: My good lads! How do you both?
R: As the indifferent children of the earth.
G: Happy in that we are not overhappy. On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.
H: Nor the soles of her shoe?
R: Neither, my lord.
H: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?
G: Faith, her privates, we.
H: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true! She is a strumpet.
In other words, "Gentlemen, you're about to get fucked."
In 1928, a WWI veteran named Frederick Manning, who understood the meaning of obscenity as it pertains to war, wrote a memoir/novel of his experiences in the trenches, called Her Privates, We.
Decades later, Ernest Hemingway, himself a WWI vet, had this to say about Manning's book: "Her Privates, We is the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it over once a year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them."
Her Privates, We is still in print, I'm happy to tell you. Has the FCC read it? or are the hinterlands just afraid it has?
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