“. . . innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

Hollywood has as its goal entertainment, not education. Still, we know that many Americans, both children and adults, learn their history more from Hollywood and the other media than from textbooks or from our classrooms. (Not, of course, that either our textbooks or our classrooms are less suspect than Hollywood and the media!) Over the past several years, much of the Hollywood/media focus has been World War II. Saving Private Ryan is blockbuster exhibit #1, with Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book Greatest Generation in a support role, and the monument soon to appear on the Mall in Washington, D. C. is part of the same phenomenon. Now comes Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor offers misleading history. As with the made-for-TV feature Shogun in the 1970s, we who teach Asia will be dealing for years with students for whom Pearl Harbor is part of their prior education. For me, Pearl Harbor’s most damaging specific historical errors are the following:

• that in 1941 in the Territory of Hawaii there were so few Asians;
• that—in the words of Josh Hartnett’s Danny Walker during the attack—“I think World War II just started”; and
• that—in the words of Jon Voight’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—the U.S. after Pearl Harbor was “on the ropes.”

In our teaching we should alert our students to each of these errors.¹

AMERICAN INNOCENCE

Still, the central issue Pearl Harbor poses for us as teachers is not specific errors of historical fact, but the film’s insistence on American innocence as both starting point and ending point. In its visuals, the film traces an arc from a crop-dusting plane of 1923 in Tennessee (a politically safe border state?) to the same plane in the late 1940s. The visuals start us out at home, lead us away from home, then take us back home—from rural America to war and then back to rural America (Tennessee is warm and fuzzy both times). We begin with the boyhood friendship of Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker; we end with the father-son relation of Rafe and Danny, Jr., biological son not of Rafe but of Danny.

A number of commentators have picked up on this use of innocence as starting point. Here is Tom Carson, writing a film review in the New York Times: “To quote the ad campaign for Pearl Harbor, what happened that Sunday morning in 1941 was ‘the end of innocence.’ Not least because this formula is applied to virtually every traumatic event in our history, it must be cause for some derision from the surviving Iroquois, among others; yet we’re in earnest every time.”² And we hear it as well from the film’s star Ben Affleck: “I talked to a variety of survivors and pilots, and after a while it became like Rashōmon, with everyone remembering things slightly differently. In the end, I relied a lot on radio shows of the period for the language and letters written by the servicemen. What I came across repeatedly was this innocence. So I said, ‘OK, this is about a loss of innocence.’”³

In Saving Private Ryan it was the soldiers and General George Marshall who demonstrated American virtue; here it is the flyers, General Jimmy Doolittle, and President Roosevelt. During Rafe’s heroics in the Battle of Britain, his British commanding officer says to him, “If there are any more back home like you, God help anyone who goes to war against America.” And as Doolittle’s Raiders sail toward Japan, Doolittle himself (Alec Baldwin) comments that the U.S. will win because of men like the Raiders—“volunteers.” Virtue inheres in the men and, by extension, in their nation; indeed, the men epitomize the nation.

The Japanese poster for Pearl Harbor may not be wide of the mark in substituting love for history: “The drama of the century, dedicated to the hearts of the whole world. On the day when the blue of the ocean and sky were stained a deep crimson, in an instant love was the last remaining haven for the young.”

But this focus on individual courage drains history from Pearl Harbor: Pearl Harbor becomes a time of trial and something that complicated the lives of two men and a woman. As they part after Pearl Harbor, Kate goes to Rafe to explain that she loves him and always will, even though she is now pregnant with Danny’s child: “But then all this happened.” “All this” includes, apparently, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, and the pregnancy. The Japanese poster for Pearl Harbor may not be wide of the mark in substituting love for history: “The drama of the century, dedicated to the hearts of the whole world. On the day when the blue of the ocean and sky were stained a deep crimson, in an instant love was the last remaining haven for the young.” And, in 2001, it is the last remaining haven for Hollywood.

INNOCENCE DEFINED

Innocence has many meanings. According to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (second ed., 1987), those meanings include: (1) “freedom from sin or moral wrong,” (2) “guiltlessness,” (3) “absence of guile or cunning,” (4) “lack of knowledge or understanding,” (5) “harmlessness,” and (6) “chastity.” It is definitions #3 and #4 that concern us here. Normally, “innocent children” mature into guileful or knowing adults; if they don’t, they—and we—are in trouble. The Quiet American is still the best novel to come out of the French-American and American wars in Indochina; in it Graham Greene says of Pyle, his title character: “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”⁴ An innocent adult is a danger to himself and to all around him. Late in the book Greene’s alter-ego thinks to himself about Pyle: “What’s the good? He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. . . . innocence is a kind of insanity.”⁵ Innocence that does not mature into understanding—that is the problem. What is the transition in Pearl Harbor? From innocence to trial by fire and then not to maturity but back to innocence. Randall Wallace, the film’s screenwriter, gets credit for the “novel” Pearl Harbor (he did both script and book for Braveheart, too). The book’s Part I (chapters 1–15) is “Innocence”—up to December 6; Part II (chapters 16–34) is “Infamy.” There is no part III. The movement is not toward development or maturation or understanding, but from U.S. innocence to Japanese infamy—and back to U.S. innocence. In chapter 34—the final lines in the book and the final visuals in the film—Rafe takes Danny Jr. for a flight in that old plane.

“Hey, Danny,” Rafe said to him. “You wanna go up?” The boy had no idea what the man he called daddy was saying. But he smiled, like the first Danny once did, a smile full of wonderment, joy, and life eternal. Evelyn stood beside Danny’s monument . . . and watched Rafe lead the boy toward the bright plane, and knew she had found that one place on earth that she would always know as home.⁶

Yet in reality, if Pearl Harbor is a turning point in U.S. history, it is a turn away from rural America and its values to the internationalism of the wartime Establishment and the postwar military-industrial complex. The concluding voiceover—the voice is a woman’s—speaks vaguely of events that “tried our souls.” The book (few will read it) is more forthcoming: “. . . it was a war that changed the world. Before it, America could watch Hitler storm across the whole of Europe and say it was a local problem; after it, even a civil war in a place as remote as Vietnam would seem to be an American problem.”⁷ Pearl Harbor marked the end of isolation and the beginning of America’s role as global policeman, a role that leads not back to Tennessee but to Korea and Vietnam and the Gulf War. The crop-duster of the 1920s leads rather to the firebombers over Tokyo and other Japanese cities, to the B-29 Enola Gay over Hiroshima, to the B-52s of Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Force, to ICBMs, to Cruise missiles over Baghdad, and to George W. Bush’s “strategic missile defense.”⁸

INNOCENCE AND NATIONS

During and soon after World War II, it was possible to create the impression of American innocence in part by painting the home team as innocent, in part by painting the “Japs” as treacherous and fanatic subhumans; witness virtually all Hollywood’s “Japs” from 1942 up to Tora, Tora, Tora in 1970. But a subhuman enemy is no longer acceptable—especially given the role the Japanese market plays in Hollywood’s balance sheet. (Apparently the filmmakers plan significant changes for the Japanese version, most notably in the final voiceover—less America, more love story.) Pearl Harbor’s Japanese are not particularly likeable, but they do have reasons for acting as they do—the oil embargo, children flying kites on a hill, the thought of parents.⁹ But as the antagonist—the Other—becomes less a caricature, the depiction of the protagonist has to carry more image-building weight. In Pearl Harbor, American innocence is the key. Can innocence be a trait of nations? Surely not. By December 1941 the United States had on its record: the fate of indigenous peoples; Black slavery; Asian exclusion; wars of expansion, including brutal military suppression in the Philippines; and so on. More narrowly, it had backed Japan into a corner with the oil embargo (July 1941). On July 21, days before the administration’s decision to cut off Japan’s oil, Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, had forwarded to the president a memo from Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, Stark’s Director of the War Plans Division of the Navy Department: “An embargo would probably result in a fairly early attack by Japan on Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies and possibly would involve the United States in early war in the Pacific.”¹⁰ Five months later Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary for November 25, 1941: “[The president] brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. We conferred on this general problem. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”¹¹ F. D. R. was looking for a pretext to intervene in Europe, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor provided it. The phrase “A day which will live in infamy” is great propaganda but poor history. Individuals not in the know—Rafe and Danny and Kate—could feel innocent when Japan attacked; officials in the know—Stark and Stimson and Roosevelt—could not.

F. D. R. was looking for a pretext to intervene in Europe, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor provided it. The phrase “A day which will live in infamy” is great propaganda but poor history. Individuals not in the know—Rafe and Danny and Kate—could feel innocent when Japan attacked; officials in the know—Stark and Stimson and Roosevelt— could not.

Innocence since 1941? In the years since 1941, the United States has added to its record Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, covert wars, and so on. Nations aren’t innocent; we only want to think that our own nation is innocent. In apotheosizing the fliers and moving from “innocence” to “infamy” and back, Pearl Harbor serves a purpose that is perhaps unintended but nonetheless critical: to wipe the slate clean. As individuals, as groups, we remember selectively. The sundial records only the sunny hours; Pearl Harbor is a national sundial. Here is columnist Ellen Goodman: “This is nothing if not a tale about America’s loss of innocence, circa 1941. But Pearl Harbor is more than that. It’s a conscious restoration of our innocence about war itself, circa 2001. . . . [S]itting in a darkened theater, I sense dangers in getting ‘past’ the ambiguity of wartime right and wrong, dangers in getting ‘over’ an understanding of the essential brutality of combat. Dangers in retreating to a belief in the good war.”¹² New York Times columnist Frank Rich has referred to the film’s “virtual patriotism” (virtual as in virtual reality): “At the same time, this virtual patriotism helps us repress more recent memories of our own war, Vietnam—a debacle that, not so incidentally, was cooked up by dogtag-wearing members of the greatest generation, including J. F. K. No matter how much we talk about World War II, it’s still the Vietnam ghosts that most haunt the country. They leapt out of the closet again with the revelations about Bob Kerrey, but boomer politicians and journalists alike couldn’t wait to lock them up again—which we did with remarkable speed by throwing up our hands and saying ‘Who are we to judge?’ and ‘War is war’ and ‘Everybody did it.’”¹³ Focusing on Pearl Harbor is one way not to focus on other events; portraying America as innocence is one way not to portray America’s dirty hands. Stay in your seat as the lengthy credits roll, and listen to the film’s final music (not the love song as the credits begin). It is ethereal music, accompanied voices singing words that are not intelligible. Though not specifically identified in the credits, the music is imitation sacred music. (Similar music occurs at least twice earlier: in the desperate hospital scenes at Pearl Harbor and as Danny dies in China.) This virtual cantata is fitting, for Pearl Harbor is less reality than myth, less history than American triumphalism and master-narrative, less entertainment than a service in the church of America’s civil religion. O come, all ye faithful! Innocence awaits! It’s one thing to alert our students to factual errors in Pearl Harbor. It’s quite another—and far more difficult—to alert them to its broader function in embodying American triumphalism, the American master-narrative. But, as with the textbooks we use in our classrooms, so with the film: much of our effort should be to identify triumphalism as triumphalism, master-narrative as master-narrative, to help our students see what triumphalism and master-narrative are, how they function, and what they must ignore.