ABSTRACT
How did a film as conventional and predictable as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan find so warm a reception among so many Americans? In this chapter, the author suggests that the oedipal issues that have long underpinned Spielberg's work have led him once again to touch his viewers at an especially vulnerable spot in their unconscious minds. Most of what Spielberg does show in Saving Private Ryan should be familiar to anyone who has watched war movies such as The Steel Helmet, Catch-22 and Full Metal Jacket. What is new in Saving Private Ryan is the post-Vietnam project of consolation and what Jacques Derrida would call 'guilty nostalgia' for the war years. It is also an excellent example of what Herbert Marcuse has called 'surplus repression'. Americans are currently being asked to repress more than just oedipal hostility against fathers who fought in World War II.
