…was screened in San Pedro last night.
So we went, of course.
Along with Tenacious G (who is Japanese-American), Middle Guy, Littlest Guy, and two friends…a young Dutch computer programmer and a psycho ex-Los Angeles County Sheriff who is one of my best friends.
There were a bunch of people there…I’d estimate the theatre’s capacity at a little over a thousand, and that it was three-quarters full or better.
There were four or five Pearl Harbor vets there, recognizable by their age, Hawaiian shirts, and white pants, along with a number of exhibits of WW II era hardware, including a beautiful Packard convertible with 1941 Hawaiian licence plates, and two restored carbon-arc searchlamps which lit the sky.
We got there early (the tickets said 5:00, but it turned out that the program started at 6:30), so took Littlest Guy out for a bite then went back just as the program started.
It was small-town Americana at it finest. Little League politics all the way.
The local VFW had a color guard of aging, potbellied men march the flags down the aisle. My first reaction was slightly disparaging; amusement at these older men clinging to the uniforms of their youth, their self-importance and the somewhat shabby display.
But then a couple of funny things happened.
The crowd snapped to silence (at least the folks in the auditorium) and stood as one when they saw them enter. And the regard of the crowd changed my view of the men I was watching. I didn’t see men pathetically clinging to their moment of glory or artifacts of their youth. I saw them as I believe they saw themselves, as bearers and guardians of our nation’s sacred symbols, and more importantly, as those who had participated in some way in consecrating those symbols.
And when they walked back up the aisle and out, the mood of the crowd was different.
A Pearl Harbor veteran stood up and recited some anecdotes from a stack of 3 x 5 cards, and basically told about his war. The stories were self-depreciating, funny, occasionally frightening. He told of reporting to his hangar the morning of the attack, after spending the night on liberty, and finding one of his colleagues casually shoveling dirt onto a stream of molten metal from one of their destroyed Catalina seaplanes, so no one would burn their feet when walking on it. His friend turned to him and asked “So, did you have a good time??”, and they both laughed. He discussed taking a hammer and a cold chisel to a live 500lb bomb so it would fit into the new bomb racks, and the gentle suggestion from his commanding officer that he might want to do that just a little further away from the hangars.
He was an awful speaker. His stories were mundane, not exciting, not bloodily horrible. But he was riveting all the same, because in the mundane events that he’d seen through his war, he was a perfect example of an American archetype, of Willy and Joe trudging through horrors of war in Europe while talking about their socks and whether rain on a helmet sounds like rain on a tin roofed house.
There were three interesting political notes in the evening.
A woman (who I assume was associated with the city-owned theater) came up as he finished his talk, and made the very pointed point that this was the first in a series of “movies about war and peace. We’ll be showing other war movies, and then a series of peace movies.” I don’t know if it was just that my skin is oversensitized to it, but it felt schoolmarmish. This was a night to remember the fallen from a war, and a war that we waged and won. Questions of war and peace are much on many of our minds these days, but it seems as inappropriate to have interjected this here as to have interjected a salute to the Delta Force at a Quaker prayer circle.
The crowd didn’t react overtly to much in the film, except for a smattering of applause when Yamamoto first expressed his doubts about angering America, and wild applause when the first P-5140 shot down a dive bomber.
Lots of applause at the end,when they displayed Yamamoto’s famous non-quote (he never said it) “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve”.
The film itself was good, if somehow unexciting…maybe because it was so consciously realistic and kind of documentary-like. It should make Jerry Bruckheimer and the rest of the folks behind Pearl Harbor a little bit ashamed, since so much of it was a lift (rent Tora Tora Tora and see for yourself).
But the event was a reminder to me that the roots of greatness in our nation aren’t in the salons of the powerful, but in the shabby displays of patriotism out here in the hinterlands.