"Infamy" and Other Legacies

Abstract

Like many people who ought to have known better, chose to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of America's most famous military disaster by taking my family to see Jerry Bruckheimer's execrable movie Pearl Harbor (2001). It wasn't a complete waste of time. About halfway through, we got our money's worth. The audience, eyes glazed like a franchise doughnut after slogging through ninety minutes of possibly the least interesting love story in cinema history, was rewarded with a battle sequence that ranked among the wildest ever filmed. The fact that the navy permitted director Michael Bay to blow up ten actual warships while recreating Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters contributed immeasurably to the scene's visual impact, but Bay deserved some credit, too; his skill at orchestrating epic disaster spectacles, already demonstrated in Armageddon (1998) and Bad Boys (1995), was once more in evidence, and stood in customary contrast to his ineptitude with dialogue and character development. One image in the attack scene was genuinely haunting, as rescuers attempted to cut through the hull of the capsized battleship Oklahoma with an acetylene torch; several hands reached up through the narrow incision made by the torch, groped frantically, and then went limp as water levels rose within the ship and the trapped sailors drowned. For a moment, Pearl Harbor succeeded in making its title something more than a cliche. But then screenwriter Randall Wallace spoiled everything-at least the historians in attendance-by having the character of Danny (played by Josh Hartnett) bark into a telephone: I think World War II just started! That asinine line underscores a key point in Emily S. Rosenberg's book A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory: for most Americans, the historical narrative of World War II often begins with the Pearl Harbor attack, establishing American military action as reactive and defensive (p. 15). Obviously, the citizens of other belligerent nations do not share this historical narrative. As Rosenberg notes, [t]he attack on Pearl Harbor ... is