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CHAPTER 1

“Imaging the Mind”

Military Psychiatry Meets Documentary Film

“Wars today, accompanied by their terrific mechanical developments, create emotional stresses which are bound to hurt seriously large numbers of those engaged in them. It is the basic and major function of military psychiatrists to care for these people who have been made emotionally sick by the pressures of stresses of modern warfare.”

—Dr. John Milne Murray, psychiatrist, Army Air Forces, 1947¹

Between 1925 and 1940, the cost of caring for “psychologically disturbed” ex-servicemen, who occupied nearly half of all beds in Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals, approached one billion dollars.² By 1947, the situation had become graver still, with the VA forced to note that “the numbers of beds assigned to neurological and psychiatric patients exceed those of all other types put together,” and that “there is nothing vague about these figures.”³ World War II had dramatically expanded the cultural visibility of post-traumatic conditions, compelling the military to directly address this pronounced “psychiatric problem” through documentary film. As early as 1942, medical officers were given crash courses in psychiatry at, among other establishments, the Army’s School of Military Neuropsychiatry on Long Island, and psychiatrists were increasingly incorporated into the armed forces in an advisory capacity. World War II represented, as Rebecca Jo Plant puts it, “a major boon to American psychiatry”; it “spurred the ascendance of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches and the destigmatization and normalization of mental disorders, setting the stage for the flourishing of postwar therapeutic culture.”⁴ Many at the VA nevertheless believed that more needed to be done to draw attention to the psychological problems that veterans continued to confront in the postwar period. As Dr. Daniel Blain, chief of the VA’s Neuropsychiatry Division, put it in a 1947 report, “The size of the job to be done in this field has suffered from vagueness, exaggeration, misunderstanding, and sometimes a Pollyanna attitude of wishful thinking.”⁵ Such naïve optimism, Blain and others felt, could be countered through the ongoing distribution of “serious” films about trauma—works of nonfiction that, endorsed by the military, examined some of the practical difficulties of psychiatric treatment, particularly in understaffed or otherwise inadequate state facilities.⁶

Focusing on World War II and its immediate aftermath, this chapter offers a genealogy of a particular documentary tendency, one tied to the concurrent rise of military psychiatry and of the military-industrial state. As the psychiatric treatment of combat-traumatized soldiers gained greater institutional and cultural visibility, so did particular techniques associated with—but scarcely limited to—documentary film. In accounts of the period, American documentary is typically understood as having been stymied by the needs of a federal government that had previously (as with the formation of the United States Film Service in 1938) placed a premium on documentary’s formal development as a tool for communicating government policy.⁷ Some scholars go so far as to argue that the Second World War merely extended the constraints that the Great Depression had placed on documentary artistry, ensuring a “patriotic” homogeneity in the wake of congressional attacks on the arguably partisan work of Pare Lorentz and others. Michael Renov rehearses this claim when he writes, “The priorities enforced by the Depression and World War II reined in the experimentalism and unabashed subjectivity of expression that had so enlivened documentary practice in the 1920s.”⁸ This is, of course, hardly true if one considers the contributions to wartime documentary of such creative, often self-aggrandizing figures as Frank Capra, John Ford, and John Huston, who inscribed their “government work” with various authorial signatures. But it is perhaps even less true if one looks at the priorities of military psychiatrists and other psychological professionals, which reach expression in a number of films that have long been left out of accounts of documentary’s development in the United States. Renov goes on to note that “[p]rivate visions and careerist goals have always commingled with the avowed social aims of collective documentary endeavors,” demanding precisely the kind of reevaluation of wartime nonfiction that he does not undertake in his account of historically-specific conservatism—a reevaluation that would bring to light the vital impact of individuals who, while not nearly as famous as Ford and Capra, far outnumbered such uniformed auteurs.⁹

This book looks at some of the subjectivities—some of the “private visions” and “careerist goals”—of military psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose influence is abundantly evident in a range of “documentary endeavors,” including those carried out both (and often simultaneously) by Hollywood studios and various military filmmaking outfits, from the Signal Corps Photographic Center to the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Despite their substantial contributions to documentary praxis in the 1940s, these individuals have largely been ignored, including by the few scholars who have touched upon Huston’s famous Let There Be Light, the production of which relied heavily upon the input and authority of four men: George S. Goldman, the psychiatrist who oversaw the military’s multipronged development of “psychiatric documentaries”; M. Ralph Kaufman, a psychiatrist who had developed (and filmed) hypnosis techniques for the treatment of those traumatized in the Battle of Okinawa, and who was a member of the teaching staff at Mason General Hospital, where Huston’s film was shot; John Spiegel, a psychiatrist who, with Roy Grinker, had advanced the use of sodium pentothal in a procedure known as “narcosynthesis”; and Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist who served as a liaison between Huston and the others, and who supervised the scriptwriting efforts of the director and his co-author, Signal Corps Captain Charles Kaufman. However illustrious, Hollywood filmmakers were hardly essential to this diagnostic and psychotherapeutic institutional enterprise, and their ideas had to be vetted by psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose presence was rapidly expanding throughout the military. The number of physicians assigned to the neuropsychiatric corps increased from thirty-five in 1941 to twenty-four hundred in 1946, and it was in this context of psychiatric expansion and experimentation that documentary and realist films began to centralize war trauma as a common yet treatable condition.¹⁰

The experimental uses to which certain films were put, and their shifting meanings in the treatment of the combat-traumatized, recall Nathan Hale Jr.’s description of World War I as a “human laboratory” that “gave psychiatrists a new sense of mission and an expanded social role.”¹¹ By World War II, this social role had come to encompass new duties associated with documentary film production, distribution, and exhibition. The military psychiatrist did not, however, enjoy anything like the privilege of final cut. In most cases, he was subordinate to the chief of the medical service, who, while not a psychiatrist, was often called upon to approve scripts about war trauma.¹² There is no evidence to suggest that any such chief actually rejected or even tweaked film scripts, but some were known to be “entirely uninformed or even antagonistic to psychiatry,” and their mediating function was, at the very least, an odious source of delays for many psychiatrists eager to see their efforts translated from script to screen and disseminated to audiences.¹³ Such efforts helped to ensure, as psychiatrist William C. Menninger suggested, “wider acceptance and better understanding of psychiatry,” making war trauma and its treatment “evident to the layman.”¹⁴

From the initial “narrow assumption that almost any type or degree of neurotic disturbance was a counter-indication for military service” to the later embrace of psychiatric treatment for active-duty soldiers, “psychiatrists’ approach to military problems broadened during and, particularly, since the war,” in the words of one former military psychiatrist who, looking back on his work, stressed how psychiatric concepts “were expanded in several major respects,” including through the pedagogic and therapeutic use of documentary film.¹⁵ “We psychiatrists are primarily doctors,” said Air Forces psychiatrist John M. Murray in 1947, noting that, throughout World War II, “we were called upon to perform many auxiliary and secondary functions,” not only supervising and participating in the production of documentaries but also contributing to debates about the potentially deleterious effects of Hollywood films that, through various fictive devices, “distorted” military psychiatry.¹⁶ “World War II was a key point in the history of American psychoanalysis,” argues Jonathan Michel Metzl; it “allowed for the first demonstrated ‘success’ in the treatment of neurotic symptoms in noninstitutional settings” such as the camps and convalescent centers near the North African front lines where Grinker and Spiegel administered “interactive” drug therapies, or the soundstages on which their psychiatric disciples made reenactment a central technique in military documentaries about war trauma—a way of “reviving” the recent past for therapeutic and filmic purposes.¹⁷

The rhetoric of visibility and invisibility would inform the work of psychological experts throughout the postwar period. The clinical psychologist John Watkins, for instance, would dedicate his 1949 casebook Hypnotherapy of War Neuroses “to the many veterans whose wounds, though real, are invisible,” but his efforts were frequently coopted by filmmakers eager to visualize war trauma.¹⁸ Watkins’ wartime work at the Welch Convalescent Hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida, which involved exhorting hypnotized patients to imagine “a large movie screen” on which to unfold various fantasy scenarios, was occasionally filmed in order to be studied (and, of course, duplicated at other facilities), its commitment to “the inner unconscious content of the patient’s emotional life” nevertheless constituting an object of visual documentation.¹⁹ Set during World War II, the service comedy Imitation General (George Marshall, 1958) reflects this historical development, as a traumatized soldier (who’s “really in terrible shape” and “ought to be in a hospital”) confesses that “what’s wrong” with him “is nothing you can see”: “I think it must be what they call combat fatigue.” Adding “You know what it is—you’ve seen it,” the soldier points to a paradox that military documentaries were increasingly designed to manage—that of the sheer invisibility of a “mental disease” that cinema alone promised to make visible and knowable. “I can’t find a scratch on him!” complains a hospital corpsman of one of his traumatized charges in the Navy’s The N.P. Patient (1944); the film proceeds to “visualize” neuroses through the “psychodramatic,” proto-Method acting of both experienced and nonprofessional performers. Using animation to indicate how the scars of tuberculosis may be seen via X-rays, the Army’s Shades of Gray (1947) suggests that “psychiatric disturbances” are equally invisible to the naked eye, requiring the intervention of documentary film, which promises a “deeper understanding” of mental health, in order to achieve intelligibility.²⁰

Shorts and features about unseen “matters of the mind” reliably contributed to the American documentary tradition that Jonathan Kahana has identified with the term “intelligence work,” “making visible the invisible or ‘phantom’ realities that shape the experience of the ordinary Americans in whose name power is exercised and contested.”²¹ Following a period of medical uncertainty and official suppression, such films quickly became key mediators among multiple, at times competing systems of knowledge, lending trauma—especially war trauma—an audiovisual coherence made widely accessible via an abundance of state and private film distribution organs. That the identification and treatment of trauma continued to be characterized by professional disputes did not diminish but, rather, enhanced the documentary legitimacy of associated films. As Kahana argues, progressive documentary in the 1930s and 1940s tended to tackle that which was “not yet frozen in an established idea, position, or institution,” even as it promised to concretize various complex political, medical, and sociological concepts.²²

While it may seem paradoxical to align military-sponsored films with the progressive frameworks that Kahana explores, to polarize the two categories is to fail to recognize important formal as well as ideological continuities. As Alice Lovejoy argues, the state is necessarily multifaceted, the military often “at the vanguard not only of media technology but also of media aesthetics”—a “laboratory for film form and language,” “a pioneer in cinema’s applications and institutions.”²³ By the 1940s, American military filmmakers were, to varying degrees, familiar with the writings of documentary critics John Grierson and Paul Rotha, and their ranks included (at least for a time) the Dutch socialist Joris Ivens, who worked for the Army Signal Corps.²⁴ State documentary remained, in this period, distinctly amenable to experimentation—at times rooted in actual clinical practice—while simultaneously offering, as Kahana puts it, “a means for grounding political abstractions like state, party, movement, and nation in the apparently natural formation of the American people.”²⁵ Psychological traumas and their exploratory treatment constituted ripe terrain for documentary—a word that was widely used in this period, including to refer to “mere” military films made in a variety of styles. Take, for instance, a single 1944 issue of the trade paper Motion Picture Herald, which offered no fewer than ten uses of the term to describe military-sponsored films, at one point carefully explaining that William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944)—a production of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit—is more than a simple “aviation report,” and is in fact a “war documentary.”²⁶ This liberal application of “documentary” extended even to military films that weren’t made by Oscar-winning directors like Wyler—that, in fact, arrived as anonymous accounts of various mundane activities, or that, like many a dramatic treatment of trauma and psychotherapy, suggested the carefully staged action of a Hollywood studio production. Taking their cues from the military as well as from the widely circulated work of Grierson and Rotha, Motion Picture Herald and other publications regularly employed the term “dramatic documentary” throughout the war, echoing its use among psychiatrists and other psychological experts who believed that trauma could best be addressed via reenactment and other theatrical, even fantasmatic techniques.²⁷

“The most misunderstood of all human ills are those due to problems of the mind,” reads the opening crawl of the 1944 documentary The Inside Story of Seaman Jones. “It is, of course, impossible to fully cover this subject in any single book or picture, but this presentation, made for you, endeavors to clarify the most common, fundamental troubles that beset us as a result of emotional upset.”²⁸ Produced by Paramount Pictures as a Coast Guard training film, and based, in part, on psychiatrist Robert H. Felix’s work at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones would soon become one of the most widely distributed of all military documentaries made during World War II, its depiction of “emotional disturbances” at once responsive to the unique realities of armed service and potentially relevant to individuals in all walks—and at virtually all stages—of life. As its official distributor, the Navy remained committed, for over two decades, to ensuring the film’s broad circulation as both an instrument of instruction and a source of therapy. In short, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones was thought to be good publicity for the military, especially as the United States (like the film’s young male subject) entered a new “life phase”—a postwar period of global leadership. By 1946, with the film reaching members of all branches of the armed forces as well as secondary schools, businesses, churches, and community centers nationwide, its opening address to the viewer could easily be recast as capacious in the extreme, the words “made for you” addressed as much to students in the classroom as to workers in the factory.²⁹

One of many trauma-themed military films produced during and after the war, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones boasts sequences that purport to explain dissociation as well as a range of psychosomatic symptoms, crosscutting between cartoon characters (such as a censor whose job is to “police” the borders between the conscious and unconscious mind) and live-action subjects who simulate psychogenic illness and its careful treatment. The film focuses on the plight of Pat Jones, a former football hero—the star of his small-town high school—who begins to “crack up” upon entering the military, with its innumerable demands. “The change is a big one,” explains the film’s voice-over narrator, “and he’s having a hard time adjusting himself to this new life. Seaman Jones is homesick, unhappy, and disturbed. Lots of things seem to be combining to worry him.” He begins to struggle with his coursework, and, “panicked and lost,” he develops acute anxiety, which leads to horrific nightmares. “Am I going nuts?” he asks himself. “Maybe I’m going nuts!”

Recognizing Pat’s problem, the sympathetic narrator points out that, while anxiety can be crippling, “at least [Pat] can have [it] taken care of”—and by a “mighty good doctor,” at that. Disturbingly, Pat starts to experience severe knee pain, but a non-psychiatric physician can find no organic cause. “What can be wrong?” asks the narrator. “[Pat] had better do something about it! He does—the most sensible thing he can possibly do: goes to the mental health department and sees the psychiatrist, for naturally an emotional upset must be treated differently from an organic illness.” Close-ups of the books in the psychiatrist’s library (with titles like Mental Health, Diseases of the Mind, and Psychosomatic Medicine) establish the seriousness of the man’s endeavor, and the film proceeds to detail his credentials while presenting him as a “normal” and “natural” part of military life. The narrator praises this Navy psychiatrist for “not using a lot of strange, highfalutin terms,” thus couching the film itself as a readily interpretable extension of his vernacular prowess—one whose messages are “easily understood.”

FIGURE 2. Pat Jones awakens from an “anxiety dream” in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

The Inside Story of Seaman Jones suggests the expansive value of a docudramatic recounting of trauma and psychotherapy, and the film’s influence can be felt in the Navy’s Combat Fatigue: Insomnia (1945), whose narrator critiques “vague medical terms” and aspires to translate trauma into an intelligible vernacular—precisely, he says, the job of the “helpful,” “patient” military psychiatrist. Various dramatizations reinforce this point: “You know, what you need is—” says one sailor to another, unable to finish the sentence with a reasonable prescription for the treatment of anxiety because he himself is not a psychiatrist. “Hell, I can’t help him—that’s the doc’s job,” he later admits. “Sure, see the doc!”

More than a “mere” training film intended to acquaint enlistees with the challenges and benefits of life in the armed services, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones is a similarly explicit advertisement for military psychiatry—part of an entire cycle of nontheatrical films designed to address the subject of war trauma, which, as Pat’s case makes clear, is hardly limited to battlefield experiences. The demands of war are, the film suggests, so extreme—so psychologically disruptive—that they affect even those who, like Pat, have never seen combat. Luckily, however, the military is committed to “handling” as well as “preventing” mental illness. Anticipating America’s postwar responsibilities, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones also stresses the military’s capacity to “mold minds” both at home and abroad. “Today, we’re making a scientific study of the mind,” the psychiatrist tells Pat, “and we’re finding some very encouraging things.” Not only is military-psychiatric expertise responsible for effectively explaining to Pat that “emotions actually can cause real physical pain,” but the psychiatrist himself is also available to “counsel” the young man, suggesting that “a lot of boys feel about the way you do”—including “a big, strapping lad” who won multiple Golden Gloves tournaments. Upon entering the wartime military, this “very pretty fighter” developed severe, psychogenic stomach pains. Like Pat, he was forced to see a military psychiatrist—an encounter that, the film suggests, changed his life for the better.

The universality of emotional disturbances—and of psychogenic illnesses in particular—is thus a central theme of The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, which endeavors to implicate all Americans as beneficiaries of military psychiatry. The eponymous enlistee, with his recognizable character flaws, is allegedly representative of his countrymen—“each one a Seaman Jones.” Such rhetoric undoubtedly fueled the film’s broad uptake in the postwar period. It proved so popular in secondary schools in part because it provided a clear object of identification in the Pat Jones who goes from high school football field to “new responsibilities,” and it was perhaps equally welcome in factories because of its focus on Pat’s prewar role as a junior foreman—a job that the film flatteringly (and strategically) links to military service.³⁰

Fittingly, Pat is transformed into a source of useful information about mental health—a comprehensible conveyor of psychoanalytic wisdom, much like the film itself. Pat’s psychiatrist hands him a pamphlet on “the mind”—a set of notes on his specific condition—that he studies before “advising” his fellow servicemen, who gather around him to discuss their troubles. If the film endorses the claims made in this pamphlet—an actual “medical circular” seen in instructive close-up—it also supplants it, suggesting that documentary, with its capacity to assimilate everything from animation to staged reenactment, is a superior vehicle of psychiatric instruction. It is also, of course, an instrument of statecraft, as the narrator makes clear at the close of the film: “Sound mental health is our nation’s greatest asset, and this we must maintain.”

FIGURE 3. Expelled from the conscious mind, “self-pitying thoughts” attempt to arouse Unconscious Mind (“the dormant parent of all your emotions”) in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

FIGURE 4. After learning “the basics” from a plainspoken Navy psychiatrist, Pat Jones proceeds to teach his fellow enlistees about “matters of the mind” in The Inside Story of Seaman Jones (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

DOCUMENTING MENTAL HEALTH

“[W]hen the boys come home from the battlefields overseas, you will find they have changed. . . . The war has made Americans think, and they aren’t going to be so interested in trivial, trashy movies anymore.”

—Darryl F. Zanuck, 1945³¹

Responding to the deadliest conflict in human history, a series of American documentary and realist films—produced or commissioned by the United States military—developed an aesthetic of trauma in the 1940s and early 1950s. In their narrative emphasis on illness and recovery, rupture and rehabilitation, social isolation and gradual reintegration, these films sought to convert complex psychiatric concepts into vernacular terms and to disseminate those terms to as wide a public as could be gathered beneath the broadening umbrella of nontheatrical exhibition. New Deal documentary provided a template for much of this work, as the trauma of the Great Depression (and associated ecological catastrophes like dust storms and flooding) gave way to the work of rebuilding and re-enfranchisement encapsulated in such films as The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936) and The River (Pare Lorentz, 1937), with their optimistic emphasis on the state’s reparative potential. Painfully aware of the political and psychiatric failures of an earlier era, when traumatized veterans of the First World War did not receive adequate attention for their conditions (particularly amid widespread debates about “malingering,” pensions, and the stigma of asylums), military filmmakers fashioned a way of addressing war trauma as a national problem with emphatically national solutions. This figuration of trauma and rehabilitation was also a kind of visual and rhetorical shorthand for the military-industrial state.³² For if that state was responsible for the treatment of war-traumatized Americans, including through the Veterans Administration (VA), it was also responsible for returning them to forms of employment that often explicitly involved contributions to military power.³³

The remarkable survival of trauma-themed films through nontheatrical distribution helped promote the belief that psychic recovery could be attained through an individual’s close, cooperative involvement with the military-industrial state. “The Second World War gave nontheatrical films their greatest chance for service and their greatest public recognition,” wrote Gloria Waldron, a member of the educational staff of the Twentieth Century Fund, in 1949.³⁴ Seeking to account for the lasting popularity of military documentaries in particular, the educational researcher Charles F. Hoban observed that “their use involved little or no expense to the user”; production, distribution, and exhibition costs were typically “borne by [the Army, Navy, Air Forces, and U.S. Office of Education], not by the user of the films.”³⁵ Corporations routinely acquired free prints for in-house use, including for explicitly “inspirational” and even “therapeutic” purposes. Businesses that had lost employees to combat were encouraged by the War Activities Committee to request filmed records of the deceased, such as John Huston’s San Pietro (1945), which featured men of the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 36th Division, many of whom, after “playing themselves” for Huston, were killed in action in Monte Cassino.³⁶ Huston’s earlier documentary Report from the Aleutians (1943) was even abridged as a special “home movie” to comfort the father of one of its “stars,” a first lieutenant; with the blessing of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, the Signal Corps covered the cost of Kodachrome processing (of “corded off footages”) by the Eastman Kodak Company.³⁷ Seven years later, the Army established a mere $30 licensing fee for each of a number of nonfiction films, which, sold to American television stations via a specialty distributor, were broadcast “over and over without further cost,” filling federally mandated public service time.³⁸

This transformation of wartime documentaries into postwar television programs was widespread, and it represented the logical evolution of films engineered to be vehicles of military public relations—to bridge gaps between a professional-intellectual class (whose membership increasingly included psychiatrists and psychologists) and the so-called “common man” whose very ordinariness could be telegraphed through his traumatic symptoms. These, the influential Army Air Forces psychiatrist John M. Murray maintained, “could affect anyone”—even, he added, “Everyman” (thus evoking historian Carl Becker’s 1931 identification of “Mr. Everyman,” who, despite or perhaps because of his very “normality,” found himself “living history”).³⁹ Paramount’s glossy Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), in which Ginger Rogers’ high-powered magazine editor reluctantly undergoes psychoanalysis in order to resolve her romantic dilemmas, took a dramatically different approach to trauma, couching it as a distinctly bourgeois affliction—something reserved for an uppity “boss-lady”—and its box-office success seemed to portend a cycle of films predicated on the stylish trappings of the talking cure.⁴⁰ “Psychiatry in Technicolor,” read a promotional headline in Motion Picture Herald, which later claimed that the success of Lady in the Dark was “tantamount to a starter’s pistol signaling the opening of a new frontier for producers and writers to cross over and explore beyond”—a claim that David Bordwell endorses in Reinventing Hollywood, asserting that Leisen’s film singlehandedly “launched the therapeutic cycle.”⁴¹ But Lady in the Dark hardly broke new narrative ground in 1944, and its depiction of psychoanalysis can be traced back at least to the interwar period—and even to another Ginger Rogers film, the RKO musical Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), costarring Fred Astaire as a psychiatrist who experiments with sodium pentothal. If the deeply derivative, altogether misogynist Lady in the Dark symbolized anything for filmmakers and psychological professionals fundamentally concerned with war trauma, it was a misplaced approach to mental illness—an advertisement for psychiatry as a wealthy woman’s pursuit, which films about “ordinary” yet “nervously wounded” men would have to counter, and quickly. The Austrian-American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, whose work would influence that of Roy Grinker, John Spiegel, and many other doctors forced to confront war trauma, condemned Lady in the Dark as “abhorrent”—an albatross around psychiatry’s increasingly public neck, its commercial success demanding corrective depictions of trauma as anything but rarefied.⁴² Military documentaries about mental illness were, for Moreno and others, ideal ambassadors of psychiatric and psychological treatment. Their principal aim was to normalize trauma and psychotherapy as far removed from the sort of “feminine” exclusivity centered in a Technicolor extravaganza like Lady in the Dark, and their modest style was reinforced by their television appearances in the 1950s, which built upon earlier uses of the medium as an intimate therapeutic agent for “average Joes.”⁴³ In 1944, for instance, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased a series of newspaper ads touting television as “a daily reality” for thousands of servicemen then being treated in Army and Navy hospitals, where its subsidiary NBC telecast allegedly salubrious images of “the outside world.”⁴⁴

While television stations were recycling them as nonprofit public service broadcasts in the postwar period, extending their strategic appeals to “everyday Americans,” military films were also serving as key instruments of private enterprise, helping to fill corporate coffers by legitimizing continued production and, moreover, the sort of alliance identified—as early as 1947—with the term “the military-industrial complex.”⁴⁵ Even the abovementioned “therapeutic telecasts” were intended to advertise NBC and RCA, which both insisted that the new medium was ready for massification despite concerns about broadcast standards. Such bold claims, which directly contradicted those of CBS and the FCC, depended upon the pronounced public relations value of media associated with veterans’ education and rehabilitation, even as they were clearly part of the process by which, as Herbert Schiller put it, “television prematurely was hurried into the economy by impatient equipment manufacturers and broadcasting networks, eager to sell sets and screen time.”⁴⁶ Anna McCarthy has documented the emergence of institutional advertising on American television, highlighting corporate sponsorship of public service programming, which was frequently designed to advance private interests via a liberal pluralist understanding of good governance.⁴⁷ Such interests were plainly compatible with those of the U.S. military during and after World War II, as “the future of advanced corporate capitalism” increasingly depended on “the efficient linkage of commercial objectives . . . and military conquest”—a “politico-economic structure” in a “powerful imperial system.”⁴⁸

From the perspective of the increasingly robust military-industrial state, cheaply produced military documentaries were, in promotional terms, scarcely different from the two-and-a-half-million-dollar Lady in the Dark. Like the latter, whose tie-ins included a special fragrance by Dorothy Gray and a high-end men’s clothing line by The Kleinhans Company, military documentaries enjoyed numerous sponsors and generated at least as many commercial spin-offs. When the Allied co-production Tunisian Victory (Frank Capra et al., 1944)—which ads breathlessly described as “the real thing—filmed under fire!”—was exhibited at Loew’s Columbia Theatre in Washington, it brought with it a “mammoth military display” that took up the entire block and included trucks and Jeeps, as well as a large 40mm anti-aircraft gun and range finder in a “complete action demonstration.”⁴⁹ Reviewing Lady in the Dark alongside Wyler’s The Memphis Belle, critic Manny Farber seemed to miss this capitalist connection, arguing that the two 1944 releases “resemble each other only in that they are both color films.” In Farber’s reading, the style of Lady in the Dark “makes each shot look like the domestic interiors in linoleum ads,” relying as it does upon “the kind of costuming, interior decorating and makeup that occur most frequently in department stores’ windows.” He went on, “Scenes like the ones in the analyst’s office amount to displays of what the well dressed analyst and analyzee [sic] should wear, what the one should write with and the other lie on: a special pencil gadget that unhooks from the belt, and a great green-leather monster that curves so you don’t need pillows.”⁵⁰ The “smart, effective,” admirably “realistic” “opposite” of Lady in the Dark, Wyler’s The Memphis Belle in fact shares—and arguably even exceeds—the other film’s promotional imperatives, supplementing simple commodity fetishism with a more sophisticated form of institutional advertising designed, as Douglas Cunningham argues, to advance the political struggle for Air Force autonomy, precisely by presenting it in terms of anthropomorphic metaphors that made the titular “belle” seem in need of more appreciative (and more munificent) treatment.⁵¹

If Lady in the Dark functioned to enrich Paramount while selling perfume and other fast-moving consumer goods, The Memphis Belle and other military documentaries had even broader, more consequential capitalist goals. Wyler’s film, in particular, was made not merely to support the continued manufacture of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, but also to agitate for what would finally be achieved in 1947 with the signing of the National Security Act—namely, the establishment of the Air Force as a discrete service on a par with the Army and the Navy.⁵² By the end of World War I, the American armed forces had become what Aeron Davis calls “promotional cultures,” cannily borrowing strategies from advertising and public relations.⁵³ Writing in 1920, George Creel, former head of the Committee on Public Information, likened military-industrial activities to a vast “advertising campaign . . . shot through and through with an evangelical quality.”⁵⁴ Numerous companies—including those devoted to arms manufacturing—remained committed to screening military documentaries like The Memphis Belle in order to encourage worker productivity, even long after the end of hostilities. Films about mental health were especially useful in such contexts because they insisted that psychological rehabilitation could enhance one’s employability, and thus provided a model for companies interested in preparing individuals for the possibility of experiencing—and, eventually, recovering from—traumatic workplace accidents. Military documentaries joined a whole host of other films that purported to provide “industrial therapy” amid the postwar efflorescence of psychiatry and psychology.⁵⁵

A major agent of cinematic exchange between the military and private industry was the U.S. Office of Education’s Division of Visual Aids for War Training, which was established in 1941 in order to instruct millions of war industry workers. Producing “practical” as well as “inspirational” and even “therapeutic” films that often relied upon footage from the Army—and that just as frequently fed the Army’s own compilation films—the Division of Visual Aids for War Training maintained strong yet complicated ties to the armed forces.⁵⁶ In some cases, the division considered its finished films sacrosanct, imposing numerous restrictions on military use. For instance, in 1946—its final year of production—the division complied with the Army’s request for its “inspirational documentary” Employing Disabled Workers in Industry (1946), outlining its restrictions in a letter to the Signal Corps: “[The film] must be shown to audiences where no charge is made for the showing and it cannot be cut, changed, or altered in any manner whatsoever.”⁵⁷ Those at the Signal Corps Photographic Center were apparently happy to comply, labeling Employing Disabled Workers in Industry a “War Department Official Film” and earmarking it “for distribution to film libraries of hospitals designated for amputee care,” where it could better prepare veterans for postwar work than, say, a newsreel like United News, whose November 1945 edition featured a mere fifty seconds of footage of disabled veterans learning, as the voice-over narrator puts it, “the highly skilled trade of watchmaking.”⁵⁸ By contrast, the twenty-minute running time of Employing Disabled Workers in Industry allowed the film to explore a range of employment options for injured veterans—including the “war work” (such as weapons testing and aircraft manufacturing) that so concerned both the Division of Visual Aids for War Training and the military itself.

When it was not working directly with the Signal Corps, the Office of Education was outsourcing film production to independent companies, whose work would reliably blur the line between documentary pedagogy and institutional advertising. The formal and ideological resemblance between military documentaries—including those about war trauma—and industrial and advertising films is at least partly attributable to such subcontractors, whose commercially opportunistic flexibility lent them a remarkably broad purview as early as the interwar period.⁵⁹ Consider, for instance, Castle Films: established in 1924, this relatively small producer-distributor made advertising films for major corporations; in the 1940s, the company began producing shorts and features for various branches of the armed forces, including the Navy, which commissioned Castle’s Film Tactics (1945), a twenty-two-minute dramatization of how best to use actual military films in the classroom. In Film Tactics, which focuses on the “optimal utilization” of the Navy’s 1945 instructional short The Countermarch (also produced by Castle), a voice-over narrator exhorts officers to “get [enlisted men] ready for the film”—to “prepare their minds” by saying more than that “regulations require that we watch it”: “You’ve got to tell them what to look for in the film!” When a soldier becomes an inattentive film spectator, a hot, stuffy room may well be to blame, but “inner conflicts” are always worth considering, and they must be “overcome” not merely by the spectator himself but also by his superior officer, who must employ “psychological tactics” in order to “inspire” the serious viewing of a didactic short. Film Tactics takes us, as the narrator phrases it, “inside the mind,” where distractions abound, and specific neuroses—anthropomorphized in a manner that recalls the style of The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, and that evokes the dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí in the exactly contemporaneous Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)—conspire to prevent men from paying attention to potentially life-saving instructional films. Here, the arena of reception is at once a military classroom and a “cluttered mind” that must be cleared through the psychotherapeutic entreaties of a “film instructor.”

FIGURE 5. The “cluttered,” neurotic spectatorial mind in Film Tactics (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

This symbolic outsourcing of psychotherapy to non-medical officers, and the associated cultivation of techniques of self-management among all enlisted men, suggest the expanding influence of psychiatric and psychological discourses during World War II. Depicting the screening room as a workplace where “matters of the mind” must be “managed,” Film Tactics reflects then-current beliefs—most famously voiced by John Grierson—that the social technology of documentary could effectively unite disparate classes, its translational character “responsible at once to the individual instance and the totality,” as Jonathan Kahana puts it.⁶⁰ Grierson was a known quantity among the military’s in-house filmmakers and subcontractors in the 1940s, his work providing some key templates for their efforts. It was Grierson who, upon becoming the inaugural commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in 1939, began subcontracting private companies (including Crawley Films and Associated Screen Studios) in order to meet the wartime demand for documentary, and his close personal ties to Hollywood producers—including Walter Wanger, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during World War II—did not go unnoticed in American military circles. Throughout the 1940s, numerous NFB filmmakers, including George L. George, would go on to work for the U.S. Army Signal Corps on Grierson’s recommendation—an informal exchange program that helped to situate Griersonian ideals at the center of American military filmmaking.⁶¹ Establishing certain precedents for later military films, Wanger’s Private Worlds (Gregory La Cava, 1935) features a psychiatrist (played by Claudette Colbert) who decides to work in a mental hospital in order to understand the “lost souls” of the “lost generation,” including her lover, who, in a panic, fled the horrors of combat and was shot for cowardice. Both Grierson and Wanger were well acquainted with Walter Lippmann (Grierson had studied Lippmann during his tenure as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Chicago, while Wanger had served alongside Lippmann as an officer in U.S. Army Intelligence and as a member of Woodrow Wilson’s staff at the Paris Peace Conference), and Lippmann’s famous insistence that a special cadre of experts was required for the management of American political and social life has its own analogues in military documentaries that tout psychiatrists and psychologists.⁶² (Even Private Worlds, made over a dozen years after the publication of Lippmann’s Public Opinion, features a Lippmannian collection of renowned psychiatrists who must learn to work together for the betterment of “all Americans.”) “Although Grierson is usually associated with a specifically British framework of governmental and liberal-capitalist institutions,” Kahana notes, “his programmatic statements from the 1920s through the 1940s presume a broadly Anglo-American philosophical and political field of discourse,” and they certainly had a bearing on the production of military documentaries about war trauma and its psychiatric treatment.⁶³ Following the model of Grierson’s National Film Board, the U.S. Office of Education commissioned Caravel Films, a New York-based producer of industrial, advertising, and training films, to turn out a series of shorts on war trauma as a “workplace problem,” one tied to physical and emotional “handicaps.” The resulting collection of films included the fourteen-minute Establishing Working Relations for the Disabled Worker (1946), which depicts the absorption of psychiatric and psychological expertise by a machine-shop supervisor forced to contend with a war veteran’s “problems of readjustment.” Subcontractors were not always required for the production of films about the therapeutic cooperation of the military and private industry. Produced and distributed by the U.S. Veterans Administration, the fifteen-minute Day for Decision (1953) addresses the VA’s vocational counseling services, which, as depicted here, overwhelmingly emphasize the restorative potential of “work for the military.”

Because such documentaries often addressed “the peculiar mental and emotional processes of the military mind,” they remained relevant to the schools, churches, civic organizations, and community centers that increasingly accommodated military recruitment during the postwar period.⁶⁴ But they also, as the above examples indicate, spoke to the political-economic assemblage known as the military-industrial complex, often promoting “defense work” as a means of recovering and sustaining mental health—a source of therapy unto itself.⁶⁵ Building on the work of the military’s “industrial incentive” programs, which entailed the production of films “‘angled’ to establish the relationship between production on the home front and success on the battle front,” documentaries about trauma and rehabilitation tend to link “defense of the mind” to defense of the nation, defining therapeutic self-governance in terms of the dividends that it pays to the state.⁶⁶ Far from being a pathological and contradictory element of the military machine, the traumatized soldier, as a beneficiary of military-psychiatric treatment, became the symbol of a new therapeutic order, one that was consistently limned through nontheatrical nonfiction film. As Michael Chanan argues, documentary “is one of the forms through which new attitudes enter wider circulation,” and such was the function of military films committed to normalizing psychotherapy as an instrument of state power.⁶⁷

FIGURE 6. The “clean,” focused spectatorial mind—free of any neuroses—in Film Tactics (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Typically dismissed as “ephemeral films”—a designation that is often wrongly conflated with “nontheatrical films”—military documentaries were, in fact, designed to last.⁶⁸ This is particularly obvious when one examines the public relations directives of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, along with the related goals of the American Association for the Advancement of Psychology, the American Association for Adult Education, and the Carnegie Corporation, which often subsidized the production and distribution of military-approved films.⁶⁹ Numerous national organizations embraced these films long after the end of the war. For instance, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which in the late 1940s had 325 local offices (each with its own film library), regularly acquired “old” military documentaries (particularly those about the Holocaust, atomic power, and psychotherapy), which it lent free of charge to community groups and other interested parties.⁷⁰ Similarly, the League of Women Voters, various Junior Leagues, and the National Publicity Council for Health and Welfare Services all used military films to further their shared commitment to “mental hygiene,” screening these documentaries alongside works produced by the National Film Board of Canada (such as The Feeling of Rejection [1947]) and the United Auto Workers (such as Brotherhood of Man [1946]).⁷¹ At the same time, film societies—including Amos Vogel’s legendary Cinema 16—were instrumental in cultivating appreciation for “films of fact and purpose,” particularly those that featured psychological experiments (such as Aggression and Destruction Games: Balloons [1941], produced by a group of psychologists at Vassar College) and various other “psychological demonstration films” (such as works initially intended for military use).⁷² Trauma-themed films produced by and for the armed forces remained very much at home in this environment—instruments and illustrations of a new therapeutic ethos.

So-called “mental health films” made their way to Cinema 16 thanks to the efforts of the New York University (NYU) Film Library, which, during the war, was made the exclusive distributor of these and other “psychological documentaries.” That such films were valued for their pedagogic as well as therapeutic potential had much to do with precedents set by the military. “There is vast and effective use of films in the armed services, and the public is well aware of this,” wrote the board of NYU’s Educational Film Institute mere weeks after V-E Day.⁷³ Two years earlier, many at NYU were already envisioning ways of supplementing the work of the Office of War Information (OWI), the War Activities Committee, and other government agencies by ensuring the continued circulation of a variety of nonfiction films, including those produced by or for the military. “The war will revolutionize education,” predicted Robert Gessner, chairman of NYU’s Department of Motion Pictures, in 1943. “Over 3,500 Army and Navy training films are demonstrating that the human mind can be taught and trained in difficult subjects in a shorter time and in a more thorough manner than the old lecture-textbook method . . . Today an American soldier can say that one reel of training film is worth a thousand textbooks.”⁷⁴

With its reflexive emphasis on the effective translation of typed “psychiatric notes” into a dynamic documentary film, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones seemed to concur. When, in the early 1950s, the film was essentially “retranslated” into written form, the resulting mass-market paperback (entitled simply The Inside Story and written “under the direction” of Yale psychiatrist Fritz Redlich and VA psychologist Jacob Levine) contained a “layman’s preface” explaining that cartoons can be reliable conveyors of psychoanalytic insight. Much as the film features animated sequences that purport to visualize the “inner workings” of the human mind, the book boasts over one hundred cartoons portraying various “human predicaments”—all of them reminders of the film’s mimetic flexibility, its insistence that psychoneuroses can be modeled in many ways.⁷⁵

It is now widely accepted that, as Damion Searls puts it, “World War II was the turning point in the history of mental health in America.”⁷⁶ Less understood is the role that cinema—and, in particular, nontheatrical nonfiction film—played in this process. If, in Ellen Dwyer’s words, World War II “helped psychiatrists move out of the asylum and into the community at large,” documentary films were among the most reliable vehicles for their transportation, not only translating medical knowledge into vernacular terms but also familiarizing audiences with the faces, voices, and clinical techniques of particular therapists.⁷⁷ The military had long since accepted the superiority of audiovisual media to more “static” pedagogic forms as a means of educating enlisted men and women about psychological matters. This institutional shift from written documents, such as the Selective Service’s Medical Circular No. 1 (1940)—derided by psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan as “a child’s guide to psychiatric diagnosis”—to more sophisticated audiovisual techniques laid much of the discursive and material groundwork for the later use of “therapeutic films” in a wide variety of civilian settings.⁷⁸

Whether to communicate the military’s “humanitarian” aims and its lasting commitment (ostensibly shared by the Veterans Administration) to rehabilitating its traumatized members, or simply to advertise the achievements of military psychiatrists increasingly responsible for treating civilian patients, these films were recycled via a range of nontheatrical distribution networks, surviving well past the cessation of hostilities and certainly irrespective of whatever labels (“classified,” “restricted,” “educational,” “training,” “orientation”) were once nominally attached to them. John Huston’s Army Signal Corps documentary Let There Be Light (1946) offers a key case in point. “Suppressed” by the military, which denied it a commercial theatrical release until 1980, the film was nevertheless given a very public “tour of the state” of Minnesota by governor Luther Youngdahl in the late 1940s—part of Youngdahl’s campaign to improve conditions in state mental hospitals and promote a military-approved conception of psychiatric care. On a single day in January 1949, nearly three thousand Minnesotans saw Let There Be Light in back-to-back screenings at the historic Lowry Hotel in Minneapolis, where Huston’s “special attraction”—prints of which were purchased from the VA by the State of Minnesota, their public use sponsored by such organizations as the Interclub Council and the Ramsey County Citizens Committee on Mental Health—was upheld as a source of inspiration and a catalyst for community action. The film remained a magnet for Minnesotan audiences for years to come.⁷⁹ Scholarship on the film has, however, routinely asserted that it went unseen until 1980. Thomas Doherty claims that it was “withheld from public screening,” while Mark Harris has more recently alleged that “Let There Be Light would not be shown publicly for 35 years.”⁸⁰ The film was, in fact, so widely—and so publicly—circulated in the five months immediately following its completion that a Signal Corps memorandum from May 1946 bemoaned the condition of the much-used distribution print in its possession. As one officer noted in a handwritten addendum, this print was “mutilated beyond projection [or] duping,” so frequently had it been “borrowed” by medical educators within and beyond the military.⁸¹ Accepting one (erroneous) narrative—that Let There Be Light was successfully “hidden” in response to Huston’s “heroic” truth-telling—has enabled widespread ignorance of the role that the film played, along with a number of other documentaries, in publicizing certain practices of military psychiatry and their civilian applications. It has also meant sustaining certain assumptions about the purposes of state-sponsored documentary as well as a particular (and peculiarly narrow) historiographic approach to the American armed forces and their relationship to media.

A series of postwar articles in Hollywood Quarterly set certain myopic precedents for scholarly accounts of military documentaries, bemoaning the “little-seen” status of these films because their only metric was commercial theatrical exhibition, or focusing on Frank Capra and the Why We Fight series (1942–1945) at the expense of the thousands of other works produced.⁸² What Michel Foucault calls “popular memory”—in this case, memory of the many trauma-themed films screened in classrooms, churches, factories, offices, town squares, and elsewhere—appears to have been blocked, or at least recast, by the apparatuses committed to regulating historical knowledge. These include the “popular literature,” schools, and academic studies implicated in Foucault’s critique, but also commercial media that, in the “heroic mode,” invariably focus on the exploits of Capra, Huston, John Ford, George Stevens, William Wyler, and other directors-in-uniform.⁸³ The refusal to consider films made by individuals other than these widely celebrated “great men” threatens the intelligibility not simply of a rich and revealing history of nontheatrical film production and distribution but also of the particular political and economic agendas that these “orphan films” directly and indirectly served. As Haidee Wasson points out, “there is another story to be told about cinema as a wartime apparatus, one not well addressed by focusing on the familiar.” Wasson rightly recognizes “the wide range of film types made by and for the military in the 1940s,” and it was within this wide range that documentaries about war trauma and psychotherapy functioned as instruments of education and vehicles of public relations—though they are all but forgotten today.⁸⁴

In his account of the ideologically fraught struggles over the public memory of World War II, Foucault provides an important framework for understanding what is at stake in this neglect of films that exceed the familiar dimensions of “state propaganda.” For Foucault, the regulation of memory and knowledge is more about meeting present ideological needs than about “accurately” rendering past events. An awareness of xenophobic, jingoistic propaganda on the order of Capra’s Prelude to War (1942) is perhaps more palatable—more readily digestible—than knowledge of the subtler explorations of trauma and psychotherapy that helped through their therapeutic discourses to promote the solidification of certain aspects of the military-industrial state. Positing the ideological crudeness of the largely racist, warmongering Why We Fight films, and limiting one’s analysis to them, means widening the gap between past and “enlightened” present—and thus, perhaps, absolving oneself of responsibility for investigating the links between trauma-themed films, with their broad uptake by the national mental health movement, and the consolidation of certain kinds of military-industrial power.

This carefully curated knowledge of the past—this production of “common sense” about what military documentaries were and what purposes they served—permits reformation, as Foucault puts it, only “along certain lines.” “People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been”: not complicit in the normalization of the military-industrial complex, but regrettably tolerant of the historically-specific racism “required” to win the war, as well as of the embarrassing optimism allegedly characteristic of the period—ostensibly an easier problem to fix, because it is (allegedly) about the changing tides of taste and behavior, and not political-economic assemblages in a broader, less tractable sense.⁸⁵ Far from the simplistic “good war” of popular myth, World War II in fact “laid the structural foundations in politics for the modern American empire,” as Michael Rogin points out. It effectively “established the military-industrial state as the basis for both domestic welfare and foreign policy,” all while demanding the production of films that could reach recalcitrant Americans, conditioning them to accept the permanence and therapeutic utility of a large-scale military force.⁸⁶ That such coercion was deemed increasingly necessary is a testament to the confusions characteristic of the era. As a postwar psychiatric report pointed out, “there was little explicit agreement about goal norms among the American soldiers,” who offered wildly divergent explanations for “why we fight.”⁸⁷ Yet scholars of cinema and the Second World War have tended to rely on some rather narrow frameworks of interpretation. In his influential book War and Cinema, Paul Virilio goes so far as to allege that wartime military documentaries “were withdrawn from circulation”—rendered permanently irrelevant as “the convalescent joy of the immediate postwar period was gradually extinguished.”⁸⁸ Virilio is wildly wrong on multiple counts, of course, for his assertion presupposes cheerful patriotism as a motif of all wartime military documentaries (a tired historiographic tactic even when War and Cinema was first published in 1989), while simultaneously ignoring the numerous nontheatrical distribution networks that, in reality, ensured that these films would not be “withdrawn from circulation”—and that, more to the point, they would persist in advertising the military establishment, whether as 8mm reduction prints for the private home, as audiovisual artifacts to be studied in school, or as television programs that aired in public service time.

Virilio’s affection for florid overstatement—as in his equally misplaced assertion that cinema, after Abel Gance’s day, “would be no more than a bastardized form, a poor relation of military-industrial society”—is all too easy to discredit by paying close attention to the nontheatrical sector, but it speaks volumes about the sort of scholarly myopia that maintains an investment in stale narratives of World War II.⁸⁹ Hence the widespread resistance to the study of “mere” training and orientation films—and the reluctance to bestow the lofty label of documentary upon them, which Alice Lovejoy rightly reads in terms of a “general mistrust of ‘sponsored’” fare.⁹⁰ Frequently rejected out of hand, or consigned to the purgatory of YouTube, where they allegedly index the inanities of the mid-twentieth-century mindset, these were, in fact, remarkably durable works of “useful cinema” (to adopt Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland’s indispensable term) that did more than just normalize war trauma and psychotherapy.⁹¹

Viewing these films today, one comes face to face with a particular public-relations strategy that hasn’t gone away—that views diagnosis and therapy as the crux of institutional power and liberal individualism. David Serlin notes that, because of their noncommercial character, public health films are often wrongly assumed to “operate outside of the visual culture of modern consumerism and, in particular, genres of communication defined by advertising and marketing,” when in fact they have long been central to such genres, linked as much to the pharmaceutical industry as to the aims of various political campaigns (like Governor Youngdahl’s) and government agencies.⁹² The films addressed in this book are key examples of works that proved instrumental first to the waging and winning of war; later to the emergence and popularization of the national mental health movement; and finally to the normalization of the military-industrial state, with its claims on defense of the national body as well as the individual psyche.

That we are still living with the consequences of these strategies—and still subjected to their coercive character, whether in the form of commercials for the armed forces (and such associated charitable organizations as Support Our Troops and The Wounded Warrior Project) or of docudramatic films like American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) and 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers (Nicolai Fuglsig, 2018)—is all the more reason to scrutinize the period when they were relatively new. As Walter Benjamin warns, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”⁹³ Losing sight of the formation and initial flourishing of a particular public relations tactic, we run the risk of misrecognizing that which remains very much an instrument of the military-industrial state.

TRAUMATIC TIMES

“We all have war jitters.”

—Val Lewton, 1944⁹⁴

Merely alluding to the high incidence of psychiatric disorders during World War II may seem controversial—even nonsensical. After all, as Penny Coleman points out, the war “is not associated with combat-related stress in the popular imagination.” It is instead “remembered as the ‘good war’ whose soldiers defeated an unequivocal evil and returned with Gene Kelly optimism.”⁹⁵ Yet even Gene Kelly, while serving in the Navy, was called upon to portray a severely traumatized veteran in his directorial debut Combat Fatigue: Irritability (Gene Kelly, 1945), a work that was widely distributed as an entry in the Navy’s five-part film series on war trauma. The persistent availability of such films—even outside of government archives—has seemingly done little to influence retrospective accounts. “Today, few Americans associate war trauma with the so-called good war and the greatest generation that fought it,” writes Rebecca Jo Plant. “But the proportion of men discharged from the U.S. military on neuropsychiatric grounds was in fact significantly higher in World War II than in World War I, Korea, or Vietnam.”⁹⁶ As the narrator of the Navy’s The N.P. Patient (1944) puts it, “The size of the problem will startle you.”

Discharge rates were so high, in fact, that films about psychoneurosis were developed, in part, to prepare inductees for the “exceedingly traumatic” experience of being “let go” because of a “mental problem.”⁹⁷ World War II, which remains “the most destructive conflict humanity has yet seen,” forced millions of Americans to confront the realities of war trauma.⁹⁸ The number of psychiatric patients in VA hospitals nearly doubled between 1940 and 1948; in 1946, roughly 60 percent of all VA patients were classified as “neuropsychiatric cases.”⁹⁹ Such sobering figures demanded the fashioning of what Eva Moskowitz calls a “psychological front”—an unprecedented attempt to incorporate psychological expertise into the prosecution of war.¹⁰⁰

Even before the United States entered World War II, the military was carefully cultivating the work of psychological experts, particularly through the Research Branch of the Army’s Morale Division (later known as the Information and Education Division), which was established in October 1941.¹⁰¹ By this time, the military’s visual cultures reflected a deep investment in “matters of the mind.” In 1942, the clinical psychologist Molly Harrower introduced the Group Rorschach Test, which involved projecting images of inkblots onto screens, walls, and curtains—a proto-cinematic experiment that, while never widely adopted by the military, still suggested a growing commitment to visualizing the psychological.¹⁰² During the war, similar projections of diagnostic materials supplemented actual film screenings. The Army psychiatrist Daniel Jaffe, for instance, favored projecting the “cartoonish diagrams” originally published in the journal War Medicine, which purported to illustrate various emotional states, in order to educate officers about mental health.¹⁰³

Contrary to conventional wisdom, military documentaries of the 1940s and 1950s insisted on the centrality of psychiatric and psychological treatment to the rehabilitation of veterans. Emphasizing the sheer diversity of “so much challenging clinical material,” the institutional documentary The Navy Nurse (1952) notes that patients’ “ills may be either of the body or the mind.” Even films believed to have been beyond the ken of psychological experts in fact reflected their work. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John W. Appel, for instance, supervised the production of the Why We Fight films, which, as a result of his interventions, “exemplified a new kind of Signal Corps documentary,” as Charles Wolfe argues, “one in which the historical and psychological conditions of combat took precedence over a narrow technical or tactical approach.”¹⁰⁴

Teaching filmmakers basic Freudian concepts, Appel was part of a movement within military psychiatry that embraced film for its pedagogic as well as therapeutic potential, and that sought to normalize psychoneurosis as a consequence of war.¹⁰⁵ “There is no getting used to combat,” Appel wrote in December 1944. “Each moment of it imposes a strain so great men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus, psychiatric casualties are just as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.”¹⁰⁶ As one character says to another in Sam Fuller’s postwar drama House of Bamboo (1955), “You got battle fatigue. It happens to the best of us. It’s nothing personal.” For its part, the earlier Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (Roy William Neill, 1943) depicts “convalescent officers”—“all fine fellows, [with] wonderful war records and everything”—who are nevertheless “all victims of combat fatigue.” It falls upon the titular detective to confidently proclaim that this is “not unnatural.”¹⁰⁷

For soldiers, military training increasingly entailed exposure to therapeutic rhetoric, with the average enlistee coming to learn that “nothing was wrong with seeking psychological help; in fact, to do so was a sign of unusual strength and maturity.”¹⁰⁸ The first two years of American involvement in World War II were marked by a commitment to “screening out” anyone suspected of a “psychological deviation” (including “sluggishness,” “overboisterousness,” and homosexuality).¹⁰⁹ By 1945, after the establishment of the Army’s Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division and the termination of the practice of automatically discharging psychologically “suspicious” inductees, the military had shifted toward an entirely different model, one premised on the efficacy of psychiatric treatment.¹¹⁰ Medical centers (including Brooke General Hospital at Fort Sam Houston, Lawson General in Atlanta, and Mason General on Long Island) acquired schools of military neuropsychiatry, all of which heartily embraced films as teaching tools, recognizing “the fact that tremendous educational value may accrue to the benefit of the Army, the public, and ultimately the individual psychiatric patient, through the utilization of carefully developed motion pictures and photographs of neuropsychiatric activities.”¹¹¹ The film program at St. Albans, a hospital for war veterans located in Queens, New York, was especially advanced, screening a range of military-sponsored shorts and features.¹¹² Thanks in no small part to such visual aids—all of them premised on the treatability of various disorders—wartime military psychiatry achieved “a comprehensive ‘normalization’ that altered the subjects and purposes of clinical work by reorienting theory and practice away from mental illness and toward mental health.”¹¹³ This “normalization” was increasingly central to the military’s public relations strategies: the armed forces were reconfigured as sites where mental health could be found, not permanently lost—places where the potentially disturbed could be treated, not peremptorily excluded.¹¹⁴

Drawing on the interpretive work of military psychiatrists, and presenting this work, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, as “somehow complete and self-sufficient,” trauma-themed films are fundamentally concerned with disabling a rather obvious question: if war trauma is as terrible as it is inevitable, why wage war at all—why continue to pursue military action around the globe?¹¹⁵ In wartime and postwar military documentaries, then, trauma itself is not the “unthinkable” that needs to be repressed; rather, it is the questionability of military power that lies beyond the films’ boundaries—that seems, in fact, to necessitate the presentation of trauma as a consequence of modernity that only the military, with its wide-ranging faculties, can adequately “handle.”¹¹⁶ Looking back on the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, Herbert Schiller and Joseph Phillips dismissed “simplistic notions of domestic conspiracy,” positing instead a liberal-capitalist framework in which “open discussions” of military power are understood as “healthy”: “Secrecy is not the essence of the relationship between the military and the large industrial corporations that are [its] principal contractors,” they wrote in 1970.¹¹⁷ Borrowing from Donna Haraway, Mimi White has suggested that therapeutic discourse “can be seen as organizing new forms of power”; in White’s interpretation, it is a “discourse of transition,” and that is precisely how I am using the concept here—as one of the pivots of the permanent war economy and of the military-industrial state more broadly.¹¹⁸ In doing its part to normalize psychotherapy, the military was thus attempting to naturalize its own ascendance as an agent of massive transformations both at home and abroad.

By insisting on the ideological labor that nontheatrical nonfiction films were called upon to perform as pedagogic and therapeutic agents of the military-industrial state, I hope to move away from what Foucault called “this sacralising modesty that insists on denying that psychoanalysis has anything to do with normalization.”¹¹⁹ Psychotherapy is as much an instrument of state power as a mechanism of social control, and its initial appearance in military documentaries must be understood as such. This complex institutional role was neither inevitable nor easily won, however. It grew out of complex negotiations among government agencies, military psychiatrists, and civilian organizations concerned about how best to communicate to the general public the scale of the country’s “psychological problem.” In response to questions about the loss of military manpower through unprecedentedly high rates of “neuropsychiatric rejection,” the War Department elected to impose a “publicity blackout” in 1943. Lasting until the spring of the following year, the blackout was intended to limit public knowledge of “mental illness among soldiers,” but it was stymied by frequent leaks to the press—including to the Washington Post, which reported (accurately if with colloquial abandon) that the percentage of rejections due to “crackups” was significantly higher than in World War I.¹²⁰

The blackout was therefore largely ineffective, failing to prevent, for instance, the radio program The March of Time from broadcasting, in the spring of 1944, a pair of special reports by the Surgeon General and the director of the Army’s Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division.¹²¹ It would, in any event, be naïve to assume the efficacy of any measure designed to limit trauma’s intelligibility in the early 1940s. Exhibited in commercial theaters across the country, MGM’s short film The Woman in the House (Sammy Lee, 1942), an entry in the series John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade (1938–1949), opens with images of global war—from panicked populations besieged by bombs to traumatized Americans suffering from “night terrors”—and argues that, because of the war, “we have all come to know the meaning of fear as never before.” Luckily, however, psychiatry provides a reason to hold out hope for humanity: “Because we are all afraid of something, a new science has sprung up which attempts to treat fear as a disease.” This “new science of psychiatry” is, we are told, rooted in the horrors of war; “one of history’s worst moments” is thus one of the best for psychiatry, which flourishes in such “troubled times.” The film goes on to depict a “victim of fear” (played by Ann Richards) who is traumatized by news of her fiancé’s death in combat, and it concludes with an awkward expression of gratitude to war trauma for “generating” so widely useful a profession as psychiatry. Similar arguments were offered in widely read publications of the period, including J. R. Rees’ The Shaping of Psychiatry by War (1945).¹²² Though marred by outmoded nomenclature and speculation regarding the role of carbon monoxide in the development of “shell shock,” Norman C. Meier’s 1943 book Military Psychology further introduced war trauma to a broad readership, arguing that it “may affect almost anyone.”¹²³ Even Eleanor Roosevelt, writing in her newspaper column in the fall of 1942, emphasized the importance of giving each draftee “a sufficiently careful psychiatric examination.”¹²⁴ At the time, notes Alison Winter, “there were fears that as many as half the troops might ultimately be lost to psychiatric problems,” making the subject of war trauma difficult to avoid in American everyday life.¹²⁵

Despite considerable pressure from the American Psychiatric Association to make pertinent information more widely available, the War Department remained committed, for a period of several months, to limiting public as well as institutional knowledge of psychoneurosis. This meant placing a moratorium on the Psychiatric Film Program recently established under the leadership of military psychiatrist George S. Goldman at the Office of the Surgeon General, which had yielded the Army documentary Combat Exhaustion in 1943.¹²⁶ Nevertheless, British documentary imports (particularly Neuropsychiatry 1943 [Michael Hankinson, 1943], which insists that military psychiatry will “benefit not only the individual but also the society in which he lives”) were widely screened in military settings prior to and during the blackout. In an indication of British influence on the development of the Psychiatric Film Program, the American military psychiatrists Lloyd J. Thompson, Ernest Parsons, and Jackson Thomas had made Combat Exhaustion at the 312th Station Psychiatric Hospital in England; when they returned to the United States, however, their film was virtually alone among American-made works that purported to teach psychiatric techniques, at least until the blackout was finally lifted in the spring of 1944.

Given the sheer impossibility of limiting public knowledge of the astonishingly high incidence of psychiatric cases in all branches of the armed forces, the War Department eventually pivoted toward an embrace of film’s utility as a psychotherapeutic vehicle of public relations—a means not of denying the prevalence of trauma among American men but rather of convincing audiences of the military’s capacity to treat and even prevent the condition. At least one of the military’s own public relations specialists was discharged on the basis of a psychiatric disorder: Mike Gorman, who suffered from anxiety, anorexia, and insomnia, later became a renowned mental health lobbyist, pushing for the continued application of military-psychiatric lessons to all Americans, including through film.¹²⁷ Addressing the Army’s belated production and distribution of “psychiatric documentaries,” one psychiatric advisor noted that, in order to counteract any alarmism caused by the abovementioned leaks (and by general press coverage of the military’s “psychiatric problem”), “it was necessary that each film perform as many functions and reach as wide an audience as possible.”¹²⁸ The publicity blackout did succeed in obscuring certain statistics and suppressing some carefully prepared documents—including a fact sheet entitled “The Mental Health of the U.S. Soldier,” which was intended to assure “the woman in the home” that the men fighting for her protection were not, in fact, all “mental cases.”¹²⁹ By 1945, however, the official message had changed. The War Department’s goal was no longer to trumpet the mental health of all servicemen—that would have been impossible in light of revelations about discharge rates—but instead to normalize trauma, including and especially through film, adopting a confessional mode as the intimate scaffolding on which to build bold claims about military-psychiatric treatment and its implications for American power in the postwar world.

This new policy—one of “absolute frankness and honesty about the total situation”—required careful management.¹³⁰ In the fall of 1944, an investigation by the Army’s Inspector General had led to the recommendation that the military’s Bureau of Public Relations “assign a full-time public relations officer to handle the planning and execution of a program relative to publicity and public education of psychiatry in the Army.”¹³¹ That the recommendation was never followed speaks, in part, to the importance increasingly attached to film as a vehicle of public relations, for no one official could possibly be expected to oversee the promiscuous circulation of documentaries whose purpose was explicitly to “spread knowledge.”¹³² As Winter points out, military documentaries “were sometimes the primary form of enculturation that turned doctors from other specialties into rough-and-ready psychiatric practitioners,” but they were also part of a “liberal policy of public education” that demanded their use in schools, factories, and a variety of other nontheatrical, nonmilitary locations.¹³³ Refining this policy in the early months of 1945, the Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division, rejecting the premise behind the earlier blackout, argued that “full publicity of the psychiatric problem should be given in a factual manner,” with “factual” here signifying a certain documentary ideal.¹³⁴ Films about the military’s “psychiatric problem” thus provided the occasion for debates about the nature and limits of documentary realism.

Discursively, psychiatric treatment, with its emphasis on individual minds, was often deployed as a useful rejoinder to the perceived regimentation and “mindlessness” of fascist fighting forces. The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, for instance, argued that American servicemen undergoing treatment stood in “contrast to marching troops who are ‘men without faces,’” and military psychiatry, rather than concealed as a shameful index of weakness, was instead loudly touted in antifascist propaganda.¹³⁵ The tendentiousness of such propaganda is readily evident in its emphasis on Germans’ allegedly congenital commitment to the community or Volk as opposed to the individual so identifiable—and so valued—by psychoanalysis.¹³⁶ In fact, numerous German and Austrian psychoanalysts (with the conspicuous exception of Sigmund Freud, who rejected the notion of film as a psychoanalytic instrument) had participated in the production of motion pictures in the interwar period, supervising, for instance, the making of G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926) in the very manner in which their American counterparts would later advise the shooting of such wartime Hollywood films as Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944) and Spellbound.¹³⁷ The allegedly uniquely American dimensions of “therapeutic film” were nevertheless identified in and through wartime and postwar military documentaries, particularly as psychoanalysis was forbidden in communist countries where Freud himself was a banned author.¹³⁸

The notion that documentaries could serve to fortify the minds of “fighting men” was widely embraced not only by the military but also by the American popular press. Even the editors of Look magazine insisted that “wounded soldiers derive unconscious therapeutic benefit” from film screenings.¹³⁹ In their 1945 volume Movie Lot to Beach Head, the editors argued that documentaries intended for the “treatment of psychoneurotics” represented the apotheosis of the military’s “medical films”—works designed to “aid and protect our wounded.”¹⁴⁰ Surveying how soldiers are “conditioned psychologically” by the use of nonfiction film, the Look editors emphasized the function of military documentaries as “therapeutic stimuli,” particularly in such nontheatrical settings as field hospitals, rest camps, and troopships.¹⁴¹ If such an investment in the “psychological dimensions” of cinema can be dated all the way back to the work of Hugo Münsterberg, whose The Photoplay: A Psychological Study was published in 1916, it was also influenced by new clinical developments. During World War II, military psychiatrists repeatedly identified “post-traumatic syndrome” as a principal “neuropsychiatric problem” plaguing current and former servicemen, and films reflected this discovery by insisting on the complexity of trauma’s lasting effects.¹⁴²

TRAUMATIC IMPRINTS

“To this day, that first face of death [in combat] is imprinted on my mind like a leaf in a fossil, never to fade away.”

—Sam Fuller¹⁴³

“Traumatic imprints” are both tangible—haptic in the sense epitomized by fallout from the explosion of the first atomic bomb, which contaminated faraway cornstalks used to package film for Eastman Kodak, whose shipments were irrevocably damaged as a result—and suggestive of the extent to which “war neuroses” function in tropological terms in American cinema.¹⁴⁴ Produced by Cascade Pictures of California for the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (1947–1959), the short film Self-Preservation in an Atomic Bomb Attack (1950) vividly illustrates these two interpretations of traumatic imprints. The film opens with disturbing footage of the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sight of which, the voice-over narrator says, “sorta gave a guy the shakes.”¹⁴⁵ Just as he is about to elaborate, the film strip breaks—and is thus revealed to have been constitutive of a film-within-a-film. At the outset, then, Self-Preservation in an Atomic Bomb Attack creatively suggests the traumatic impact of its own subject, literalized through the obliteration of the medium’s very materiality. In this respect, the film recalls the Navy’s 1945 short This Could Be America, which shows the death of the Army Air Forces cameraman responsible for much of its footage; his corpse carefully laid out for the camera, he is presented as a victim of the film’s very subject. It also anticipates a remarkable moment in the anthology film Far From Vietnam (Joris Ivens, et al., 1967): while she was filming the activities of the Viet Cong, Michele Ray’s camera “went berserk,” as the narrator puts it. “She tore up the film, and perhaps the result”—which Far From Vietnam presents in all its Brakhage-esque abstractness—“resembled the cry she wanted to express.”

Cutting from the film strip’s spontaneous destruction (as though the celluloid itself were unable to sustain an investigation into the psychological effects of atomic warfare), Self-Preservation reveals a typical nontheatrical exhibition site—a military classroom, where four uniformed men (including a puzzled projectionist) have gathered to engage with images “imprinted” by nuclear weapons. Celebrating the tearing of the film strip, one soldier requests a replacement—“something easier to take,” such as a “rootin’-tootin’ western, with men fighting it out the old-fashioned way” (a request echoed by the narrator of Let There Be Light, who, ventriloquizing through patients forced to watch so many military-produced documentaries, asks, “How ’bout a good movie for a change?”). Another audience member echoes the soldier’s resistance, denouncing upsetting representations of “that atom business.” Both men must be schooled by an officer who somberly insists on the pedagogic value of “traumatic” documentaries—what Self-Preservation in an Atomic Bomb Attack itself represents.

The motif of imprinting is thus, in this book, a multidirectional one, as much responsive to a Bazinian conception of realism as to the efforts of military psychiatrists to use cinema as a means of training members of the armed forces (including fellow physicians). As Alison Winter argues, “it is likely that, in many cases, the on-screen instructor was the best that could be offered to [medical] trainees” amid the relative scarcity of military psychiatrists.¹⁴⁶ Documentaries about psychoneurosis and psychotherapy were thus intended, in part, to imprint medical staff members with an awareness of trauma’s effects, cultivating certain psychotherapeutic patterns of clinical behavior. But they were also meant to reflect the dialectics of visibility and invisibility that could render intelligible various “unphotographable mental illnesses,” as Brian Winston calls them.¹⁴⁷

Numerous military psychiatrists insisted that, far from being impossibly elusive, trauma in fact imprinted the human mind, and that these imprints could be revealed through the diverse devices of documentary (from animation to reenactment to the on-camera, synch-sound interview). Roy Grinker and John Spiegel argued that combat trauma “is not like the writing on a slate that can be erased, leaving the slate as it was before. Combat leaves a lasting impression on men’s minds.”¹⁴⁸ By employing the motif of the imprint, I hope also to evoke Derrida’s claim that psychoanalysis “does not, by accident, privilege the figures of the imprint and of imprinting”—that “its discourse concerns, first of all, the stock of ‘impressions’ and the deciphering of inscriptions, but also their censorship and repression.”¹⁴⁹ For Derrida, such repression itself “leaves an imprint” whose traumatic character is rehearsed again and again—much as war, implicated as traumatic yet “vindicated” through the work of military psychiatry, has become a permanent condition of American power.¹⁵⁰

PSYCHOLOGICALLY “USEFUL CINEMA”

“At present, I am working in Hollywood, as an advisor on psychosocial pictures. That means I tell producers and directors how different minds should react under different conditions in these psychological pictures. It used to be you went to a theater, and you sat down, you watched a picture, and you relaxed, and when you walked out you said, ‘Isn’t that wonderful? The boy married the girl.’ You enjoyed yourself. That’s no good! My job is to make you sit on the edge of your chair and worry and suffer and figure out why this should happen.”

—Sid Caesar’s parody of a Viennese psychiatrist in Columbia’s The Guilt of Janet Ames (Henry Levin, 1947)

During and after the war, the military was able to aggressively pursue the broad and persistent publicizing and distribution of its own films as well as those that it had sponsored or otherwise “adopted.” Contrary to conventional wisdom, these included numerous documentaries about war trauma and psychotherapy—subjects that, far from being anxiously denied, were in fact the fulcrum of postwar efforts to spread military influence through nontheatrical film. Such funders of the behavioral sciences as the Office of Naval Research (established in August 1946) and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (established in May 1946) were committed to furthering the wartime cause of psychological rehabilitation through the sponsorship of nonfiction films, and their efforts dovetailed with the burgeoning mental health movement to ensure the survival of these films beyond limited institutional contexts.

Veterans and their families were among the most vocal proponents of the production and wide distribution of documentaries about trauma and psychotherapy, and their growing political influence, which helped lead to the passage of the National Mental Health Act in 1946, was a decisive factor in the military’s continued commitment to “mental health films.” Rebecca Jo Plant has written of “the curious development of American psychoanalysis in the immediate postwar years, a period of sustained professional growth and unprecedented popularization.”¹⁵¹ I argue that this development was made possible, in large part, by the film work of military psychiatrists, which circulated widely and for many years via an expanding nontheatrical distribution network. Nontheatrical nonfiction film thus played a crucial yet understudied role in the establishment and survival of a popular movement for mental health, and the roots of this movement in military psychiatry demand serious attention.

Military documentaries about trauma and psychotherapy were by no means uniform in their messages. In The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, the title character is told by his doctor that there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown—a claim that boldly contradicted those of many real-life military psychiatrists, who not only insisted on the legitimacy of the term “nervous breakdown” but also suggested that it was synonymous with “psychoneurosis.”¹⁵² Such contradictions inevitably spilled over into Hollywood fiction films, including Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love (1947), in which a sympathetic military psychiatrist explains, “Most people have the wrong idea about [psychoneurotic] soldiers. It’s more like a nervous breakdown. They’re not crazy—just overtired. They’ll get well if you give them a chance.” With these words, the doctor echoes the narrator of Psychiatric Procedures in the Combat Area, who refers to the victims of combat trauma by averring, “They’re not quitters, but are truly ill.” The basic psychological lexicon at the center of The Inside Story of Seaman Jones, with its principled eschewal of the term “nervous breakdown,” is thus dramatically different from that employed not only in such fiction films as The Man I Love and Walsh’s later Glory Alley (1952) but also in the Navy documentary Combat Psychiatry: The Division Psychiatrist (1954), which, in detailing “sudden, severe psychological trauma,” characterizes it by “attacks of the nerves.” Marlisa Santos has drawn attention to the similarly blatant contradiction between the “opening caution” of Let There Be Light, which warns against conflating war trauma and “peacetime neuroses,” and the claims made in other psychiatric and cinematic discourses of the era—particularly those of film noir, which, according to Santos, emphasize the “scant difference” between soldiers and civilians in their shared vulnerability to various psychological disorders.¹⁵³ Such comparisons are taken to bizarre extremes in Shades of Gray, which likens lofty “military concerns” to worrying about a mortgage—or even “a letter two days overdue.” The film, which purports to offer “a summary of experience gained in the prevention and treatment of neuropsychiatric cases in World War II,” notes that “the stresses of military and civilian life” are “equally complex and important.”

Because the condition seemed to demand a number of different, sometimes opposing modes of articulation and treatment, documentaries that tackled the contours of war trauma also adopted a wide range of approaches. Indeed, it is possible to perceive in certain trauma-themed military documentaries of the 1940s and early 1950s the seeds of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, as well as of the testimonial function of activist films like Winter Soldier (Winterfilm Collective, 1972) and Interviews with My Lai Veterans (Joseph Strick, 1971), among other styles informed by—even generative of—various configurations of trauma and psychotherapy. Just as the fantasy of a “pure” documentary, devoted entirely to “neutral” observation and predicated on the invisibility of filmmaker and filmmaking apparatus alike, is unsustainable in the face of innumerable challenges and thus no basis for documentary theory and criticism, the notion that trauma is limited to a familiar expressive repertoire and a stable generic context is insensitive to some of trauma’s historical conditions and physical, psychological, and textual effects. Military documentaries about mental illness were designed to heal as well as to teach, and many a military psychiatrist proclaimed their success as therapeutic tools, echoing an institutional belief that these films “could accomplish literally anything”—including the psychic rehabilitation of the combat-traumatized soldier.¹⁵⁴ But they were also designed to recruit, as well as to perform a number of other institutional functions, serving as ideal instruments of public relations precisely because they didn’t deny the traumatic effects of combat, or the incidence of soldiers needing extensive psychiatric treatment. In viewing some of these films today, it is tempting to regard them as the “truthful” alternatives to so many absurdly hyperbolic movies about the beauty and efficacy of American patriotism, and to praise their commitment to the psychic rehabilitation of their earliest audiences. However, as Anna McCarthy warns, “recounting governmental reason should not automatically affirm its efficacy, nor discount its close connections to private interest.” ¹⁵⁵ Wartime military documentaries may have enjoyed extensive afterlives in factories and secondary schools, their exhibition mandated by management as well as by various educational leaders, but that does not mean that their methods were automatically appreciated or their prescriptions unthinkingly followed. As Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose point out, “Things, persons, or events always appear to escape . . . the programmatic logic that seeks to govern them.”¹⁵⁶ We should not assume that military documentaries did what many of them said they would do—“heal the mind” and “restore the spirit,” to quote the Army’s Combat Exhaustion (1945)—and their identifiable ties to military and private interests suggest several reasons why we should not. As Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland argue, the paradoxical purpose of many examples of “useful” cinema is “to both promote change and to resist it”; films that reflect the ambitions of a particular institution inevitably “help to preserve and reproduce that institution,” whatever their ostensible deviations from convention.¹⁵⁷

In considering how military psychiatry shaped particular cinematic practices in the 1940s and early 1950s, I hope to avoid suggesting an uncritical appreciation of filmic innovation and institutional reform—hence my commitment to uncovering how even disturbing films about war trauma are implicated in the military-industrial complex and in political efforts to normalize the war-based economy. At the same time, I certainly do not want to underestimate the lasting pedagogic and therapeutic value of some of these films. Diagnosed with PTSD in the spring of 2016, I found myself turning, in addition to formal psychiatric treatment, to the Navy’s Introduction to Combat Fatigue (1944), a film whose officer-narrator, in directly addressing the camera, seemed to speak sympathetically to my own condition. Communicating across the gulf of seventy-plus years and from within the functional dimensions of institutional documentary, Introduction to Combat Fatigue helpfully reinforced what I was learning about my own anxiety states, reminding me that I was neither dying nor “going crazy” (as I had long suspected) but instead suffering from a distinct and treatable disorder, one born (at least in part) of repeated exposure to the threat of gun violence.¹⁵⁸ (“Oh, no, you’re not gonna die,” says a soothing voice on the soundtrack of Combat Fatigue: Insomnia. “We know how you feel.”) I do not doubt that a fair number of other viewers, forced to watch these films in classrooms and factories, have shared my sense of recognition across the longue durée of the American military documentary. Thus my own “transferential and affect-laden implication in the object of study,” to quote Dominick LaCapra, is such that I cannot help but appreciate the reparative potential of so many wartime and postwar military documentaries, despite their obvious political shortcomings.¹⁵⁹ The usefulness of “useful cinema,” then, may persist well past the point of contact between particular films and their initial audiences, animating instructive strategies and therapeutic regimens for years to come.