"Vestments of civil life" in Caine Mutiny and Attack

Abstract

Differing in theaters of operation and branches of military, Caine Mutiny (1954) and Attack (1956) both focus on unquestioning obedience to authority and on competency of commanding officers within United States military in Second World War.2 While two narratives each explore complex and uneasy interaction between military service and ideals, they evoke and reflect very different understandings of World War II and War America. This essay explores contrasting and philosophic reflection(s) within two films. Caine Mutiny embodies War's emphasis on obedience to authority, subordination of individual to corporate body, and harmony.3 Attack, in contrast, illustrates continuity of Front articulation of the rhetoric of class and need for a new moral economy with which could resist privilege, organizational corruption, and authoritarian control. Historian Michael Denning argues, for example, that social, cultural, and political alliances of Front produced a cultural front which reshaped culture. Such a Popular Front public took three political forms: a social democratic electoral politics; a politics of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist solidarity; and a civil liberties campaign against lynching and labor repression.4 Together, these two films demonstrate lack of a Cold War consensus on very definition of ideals or on implications of militarization. In praising journalist Marion Hargrove's See Here, Private Hargrove, on experience of induction and boot camp, a New York Times article described Hargrove as a true American understandably impatient in presence of hierarchy and red tape.5 Hargrove's initial resistance to military is a manifestation of what military historian John Keegan has termed culture shock experienced by men who entered military's system of subordination and autocracy which is alien to values.6 In fact, one of dominant literary themes of Second World War was that true Americans found authoritarian, hierarchical, and inefficient military structure hard to take. Even military acknowledged that its ranks were full of such incorrigible civilians.7 Thus, as Jeanine Basinger points out, Hollywood-produced combat films of World War II championed, for duration, subordination of individualism to greater goals of unity and cooperation within military.8 The War, however, demanded a standing peacetime military and celebrated corporate organizational structure. This shift resulted in rewriting of both nature of military and definition of true American. Caine Mutiny reflects both of these trends with its suggestion that obedience and subordination demanded in military service conforms to, rather than directly contradicts, values and ideals. The film justifies its call for unquestioning obedience on grounds that military is actually a meritocracy and not moribund bureaucracy portrayed in literature and personal accounts of war. In this reconstituted military, those who are most capable, loyal, and skilled rise to high rank. It is an anyone-can-succeed salute to War's myth of a classless America. Attacking those who criticized military red-tape, hierarchy, and authority, Caine Mutiny celebrates War era militarization of life. As Hanson W. Baldwin, military editor at New York Times, pointed out, great question of Caine Mutiny is the issue of unreasoning, unquestioning acceptance of orders.9 Having successfully defended Lt. Maryk on a mutiny charge, conscience of film, Greenwald, castigates Maryk and his fellow junior officers for their happiness, which comes at expense of Lieutenant Commander Queeg. Greenwald first argues that there were in fact no objective lapses of courage or command on Queeg's part that could have possibly justified a junior officer removing him from command. …