American Media and the Memory of World War II

Debra Ramsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138057043
• eBook ISBN: 9781317617891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia social

For three generations of Americans, World War II has been a touchstone for the understanding of conflict and of America's role in global affairs. But if World War II helped shape the perception of war for Americans, American media in turn shape the understanding and memory of World War II. Concentrating on key popular films, television series, and digital games from the last two decades, this book explores the critical influence World War II continues to exert on a generation of Americans born over thirty years after the conflict ended. It explains how the war was configured in the media of the wartime generation and how it came to be repurposed by their progeny, the Baby Boomers. In doing so, it identifies the framework underpinning the mediation of World War II memory in the current generation's media and develops a model that provides insight into the strategies of representation that shape the American perspective of war in general.

Part I

1 Notes on Approach: Memory and Generations

As the focus of a range of different disciplines—psychology, sociology, history, media studies, to name just a few—it is perhaps unsurprising that there are manifold understandings of the concept of memory and a proliferation of terms associated with it. From Maurice Hallbwachs’ (1952), notion of “collective memory” through Pierre Nora’s (1996) “lieux de mémoire,” Jan Assman’s (1995) “cultural memory,” Jeffrey Olick’s (1999) idea of “collected memory,” and the more recent notion of “connective memory” (Hoskins, 2011), to psychological understandings of “cognitive memory,” “screen memory,” and “traumatic memory,” even this briefest survey of terms makes apparent the tangle of theories of memory and approaches to how we process the past. It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive overview of the field in this chapter, but because of the range of possible theories and perspectives, it is necessary to identify the approach to memory taken within this book and to explain the reasons for its implementation.¹ This chapter is divided into two sections. The first begins by considering very briefly some of the key ways in which the relationship between media and memory has been theorized. As established in the Introduction, I consider memory as a procedural and transmedial phenomenon. The understanding of memory as a process operating across media is explained in more detail in this chapter, and this approach is located within the broader spectrum of media and memory studies. As will also be clear from the Introduction, this book is concerned not only with how the process of memory making extends across media but also with how that process develops over time. One of the most effective ways of exploring the diachronic dimension of mediated memory is through generational mediascapes. As with memory, the concept of generations is understood in a number of different ways across a range of different disciplines.² Drawing primarily on the work of Sofia Aboim and Pedro Vasconcelos (2014), I consider generations not as stable entities with fixed boundaries and shared characteristics but as fluid and dynamic cultural constructs. The second section of this chapter explains how generations intersect with both media and memory, establishing what is meant by the term “mediascape.” This chapter ultimately outlines the systems and structures of both memory and generations as they are understood in this book.

Memory and Media

Underlying most approaches to memory is the understanding that media play an essential role in the processes of memory making. According to Astrid Erll (2011, 116), media are so thoroughly imbricated in memory that the history of memory can be understood as the history of media. Even the earliest formal approaches to memory conceived of it in terms of the media available at the time. The Greek art of memory, or ars memoriae, as it is commonly known, for example, is known for its technique of locating elements that the practitioner wished to remember within the mental reconstruction of a place or architectural structure, but painting, sculpture, and inscriptions on wax tablets were also all invoked metaphorically as ways of improving recall.³ Yet despite the intimate and long-standing connections between memory and media, the relationship between the two is not always harmonious. The introduction of new forms of media has at times initiated changes in processes of memory and prompted reevaluations of the relationship. Plato’s observation that the advent of writing would herald the destruction of carefully cultivated memory practices is perhaps the earliest example of one such moment, as mnemonic aids went from internal practices of memorization to external methods of recording and storage (Phaedrus 1938, 274). At other times, media technologies have been heralded as the “savior” of memory and history, as Scott McQuire (1998, 124) describes a widespread perception of photography in the nineteenth century—a period when “the past was under threat and time itself seemed to be accelerating.” The arrival of digital media, as briefly mentioned in the Introduction, signaled another series of reassessments of the relationship. Yet despite the attention such moments receive from scholars and other observers, they are relatively rare in the history of memory and media, as Geoffrey Bowker points out (2008, 2). Memory and media are so profoundly integrated that more recently theorists such as José van Dijck argue that the relationship between them is in fact mutually transformative (2007, 21). In van Dijck’s model, which is also the perspective adopted within this book, mediated memory is understood as a dynamic process that blurs whatever lines are thought to exist between the public and the private and that facilitates the connection between self and culture in an ongoing integration of past, present, and future. When memory making is understood as an ongoing process, it becomes clear that media cannot be considered as impersonal mechanisms for simply recording and somehow storing the past.

Media technologies and industries are firmly enmeshed in consumerism, culture, and politics, relationships that exert pressures of their own on the formation of memory. Because the choices made by all of us as to which versions of the past we incorporate into our lives and through which media technologies more often than not involve commercial transactions, Barry Schwartz (1990) describes memory making as an activity in which individuals or groups of individuals have the resources to convince others what aspects of the past are worth remembering. Mass media texts in particular have consequently been criticized and marginalized in general critiques on commodity culture that see products of consumerism as empty of meaning, obscuring rather than facilitating the understanding of the past. Jean Baudrillard’s (1997) notion of a “sale” of memory at the end of the last millennium is one example of the perception that the commodification of memory through mass media in particular leads to the loss of the past. However, a number of theorists have taken critiques of mass media to task. Two of these warrant further discussion as they touch on elements that are important for this book: Alison Landsberg and Marita Sturken.

Where Baudrilllard (1997) sees media producing spectral events and likens them to “phantom limbs … which hurt even when they are no longer there,” Alison Landsberg (2004) sees mass media creating memories that are “worn” on the body like a prosthesis, enabling empathic connections across temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries. In Landsberg’s approach, mass media provide memories of moments outside an individual’s direct experience and also potentially beyond his or her social and cultural milieu, allowing for the generation of empathy, which Landsberg defines as an “intellectual and emotional negotiation with the plight of the ‘other’ ” (2004, 108). I return to touch on Landsberg’s idea of empathy and prosthetic memory in Chapter 6, but for now it is enough to acknowledge that Landsberg advocates a progressive view of mass media by suggesting that they are crucial in allowing memories to be shared across national and temporal boundaries.

Marita Sturken, in turn, suggests that in a society in which the boundaries between commercialization, memory, culture, and art are irrevocably blurred, the dismissal of the products of consumerism as worthless is no longer a “viable option,” if indeed it ever was, as Sturken points out (1997, 22–12). Sturken’s notion of “tangled memories” is perhaps one of the more useful metaphors to apply to the process of memory making, inasmuch as it conjures up a network of interrelated texts and phenomena, although Sturken uses it specifically to describe the relationship between “cultural memory” and history, which she suggests is so occluded that it is practically impossible to distinguish between the two (5). Within Sturken’s model, different versions of the past compete within the tangle of memory and history in a process by means of which national identity is “established, questioned and refigured” (13). Sturken’s (1997) work is thus significant in acknowledging the role that mass media play in circulating narratives about the past that compete for a place in both history and memory and that contribute to the construction of national identities. The intimate connection between mass media texts and industries and ideas of history and national identity is a theme explored throughout this book, which proceeds from the work of both Landsberg (2004) and Sturken (1998) in its consideration of popular forms of media as particularly significant in the process of memory making.

However, although both Sturken and Landsberg are instrumental in countering critiques of the commodification of memory through mass media, the proliferation of digital technologies initiated further revisions of the understanding of the mediation of memory. Andrew Hoskins (forthcoming), for example, calls for a “conceptual shift” that moves away from what he identifies as the co-related and outdated paradigms of collective memory and mass media. To account for the ubiquity of media in today’s world, Hoskins instead posits an approach that draws on Media Ecology. Although Media Ecology is a theoretical framework for the study of media first formalized in the 1970s, its attempt to account for relationships between media technologies and society can be useful in considering the implications of the current profligate spread of media. Media Ecology was first formalized in the 1970s by Neil Postman but owes much to Marshal McLuhan’s (1964) well-worn principle that the technologies of media remake us and the world we live in. Postman (1970) explains how this school of thought, later identified as the North American tradition of Media Ecology, considers the study of each medium as the study of an environment or “complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” As the word “imposes” suggests, the North American approach to the relationship between media systems and human beings is rooted in technological determinism. According to Michael Goddard (2011), however, more recent pathways by European theorists into media ecologies, rather than Media Ecology, regard the North American tradition as limited because it considers media as “parts of relatively stable environments from which normative ideas about human beings form the center.” Matthew Fuller is a key figure in the European school. For Fuller, the use of the term “ecology” implies “dynamic systems in which any one part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those connections, and always variable, such that it can be regarded as a pattern rather than simply as an object” (2005, 4). Fuller’s use of the concept of media ecologies here is very much as Hoskins (forthcoming) applies it in advocating a “holistic” approach to the study of media and memory, one that acknowledges that the mediated environment is undergoing constant change but that also attempts to account for the relationships among media industries, technologies, the objects, and texts they produce, as well as social institutions and individuals.

The idea of media environments functioning as complex systems is a recurring theme running through both schools of thought on media ecology, and it also surfaces in Hoskins’ work. I want to explore systems theory in a little more detail because it cuts through the debates concerning the supposed stability of environments, as opposed to the dynamism of ecologies, and instead shifts attention onto the procedural nature of mediated memory. As will already be apparent from even this briefest of overviews of some of the central theories of memory and media, the field is infested with metaphor (memory as prosthetic limbs, as entangled networks, etc.)—some more useful than others—and systems theory is no different inasmuch as it takes the functionality of computerized memory for its allegory of memory.⁴ Systems theory, as explained by Elena Esposito, understands memory as operating like a “computing device” that does not so much store or record data as implement a set of “procedures that generate the data again, and in a different way, each time” (2008, 184). I have already established that media cannot be considered as simple containers for memory, but systems theory allows us to move beyond the notion of storage completely and into an understanding of media as part of a system that constantly reworks and reconstitutes aspects of the past. Systems theory describes memory making as a “procedural capability realizing a constant re-categorization” (Esposito 2008, 185).

The process of constantly recategorizing sets of data is central to this book, which explores how particular constructs of memory are reformulated not only across various media but also through time. The idea that memory is always reconstructed to serve the needs of the present is central to most theories of memory, but understanding the mediation of memory as a process of continual recategorization allows for a far more nuanced perspective of the relationship between past, present, and future. As this book progresses, it will become apparent that aspects of the past are not only reformulated in response to the needs of the present but that they may also exert pressures of their own as they are repurposed. Unlike Sturken, therefore, I am not so much concerned with how different versions of the past compete for a place in history but rather with how they combine to create continually evolving mnemonic configurations. I draw on the perspective of media ecologies, as well as on José van Dijck’s work, to acknowledge the significance of mutually transformative relationships among media industries, technologies, and texts, as well as individuals and their sociohistoric contexts. This book is concerned with how these relationships feed into the procedural capabilities of the system of memory to generate patterns through which we interpret and understand the past.

The way in which patterns of representation circulate through the system of memory and media is, as Astrid Erll observes, an area of memory studies that is only just beginning to be investigated, although Erll puts forward Aby Warburg’s work as an early example of the examination of how particular aspects of the past might “travel” across media and through time (2011, 143). Warburg tracked the recurrence of specific symbols from the Ancient Greeks through to the Renaissance and identified what he referred to as “pathos formulas,” or focal points for intense emotion.⁵ While specific symbols have undoubted longevity and ongoing significance, as products of memory systems they offer a concentrated but essentially limited understanding of the evolution of larger patterns of recollection. Frederick Bartlett’s (1932) notion of psychological “schema” is perhaps more useful as a starting point for understanding the processes of reformulation that characterize the operation of memory as a system. Bartlett identified schema as “living, momentary” arrangements or “organized settings” (a term Bartlett preferred) that come into play in individual responses to changing situations and environments ([1932] 1955, 201). Bartlett’s theory resonates, albeit very distantly, with systems approaches in that it works against the idea that memory operates as an inert storage “faculty” and suggests instead that memory is an active and integrative process with a myriad different components ([1932] 1955, 12–13).

Traces of Bartlett’s concept of organized settings or configurations of memory can be found in the idea of media templates. According to Jenny Kitzinger (2000, 61), media templates function as a kind of “rhetorical shorthand” by recalling an event in the past in order to shape the understanding of an event that is perceived as similar in the present and to guide discussions in the future. Similar to Bartlett’s schema, in Kitzinger’s view, templates are not stable, fixed constructs. Although templates provide a structure of meaning through which to interpret present events, they are also retrospectively reframed by the present; as Kitzinger puts it, “osmosis occurs in both directions” (69). Kitzinger focuses on the narratives constructed in news media, but Andrew Hoskins (2004) suggests that images operate in a similar fashion. For Hoskins, certain images function as “visual prompts” that are “instantly and widely recognizable as representing a particular event or moment in history” (2004, 6). Hoskins calls these images “flashframes” and argues that they are used routinely by television news networks to impose meaning on current events as well as to suggest potential future outcomes based on those of the past (37). Both Kitzinger and Hoskins are concerned with examining specific points of intersection between templates and events—incidents of suspected child abuse in Kitzinger’s case and the Vietnam War and the two wars in Iraq in Hoskins’. They do not examine in any great detail how such templates might evolve over time or how or why they might travel across different media forms. The concepts of premediation and remediation offer insight into the temporal dimension of templates, as well as an explanation of how they flow across various media.

In Richard Grusin’s (2004) original conceptualization of the term, “premediation” is identified as the consequence of an intense desire to avoid repeating the shock of the extreme immediacy produced in American media by the events of September 11, 2001. According to Grusin, the “logic” of premediation attempts to establish that the “future, like the past, is a reality that has always already been mediated” (2004, 29). From this perspective, premediation can be understood as a deliberate attempt to create media templates before they are needed, thereby creating reassuring frameworks that can be applied to future events, neutralizing their potential impact for social and cultural disruption. Astrid Erll, on the other hand, extends the notion of premediation to apply to all “existing media circulating in a given context [that] provide schemata for future experience” whether by design or not (2011, 141). While Grusin, Kitzinger, and Hoskins all concentrate on contemporary news media, Erll’s interpretation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Objects on the Shelf and Long-Running Stories
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion: Stories without End
• Index