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World War II holds a celebrated position in the benign meta-narrative of American foreign relations. This narrative holds that the United States is a benevolent nation whose foreign policy is based not on pure self-interest but rather on the greater good of all humankind. Clearly this meta-narrative ignores, discounts or minimises the importance of a host of brutal episodes and self-interested policies that riddle American history. At least until the late 1960s, Hollywood films about World War II served the purpose of affirming the national perception that the war was the Good War. The moral certitude of the World War II era, and indeed the early Cold War, was thrown into disarray by America's first defeat in war: the Vietnam War. Between 1998 and 2001, four major-release films addressed various aspects of the American role in World War II. Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line, U-571 (2000) and Pearl Harbor (2001). This chapter explores the issues of gender and racism in World War II films.

This chapter examines how certain American films that emerged after the First Gulf War manipulated narrative time in order to construct national identity, beginning with a discussion of triumphalism, arguably the dominant national narrative of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Triumphalism is a mythical inversion of colonial reality that has existed in American cinema since (at least) The Birth of a Nation (1915). The chapter first looks at Saving Private Ryan (1998), focusing on its use of flashback in conjunction with character memory, to determine how this contemporary movement-image facilitates the construction of a triumphal national narrative. Its use of narrative time to negotiate the recent transformation of America – from cold warrior to small-scale interventionist global police force – provides a clear contrast against which to then measure Memento's (2000) deterritorialisation of triumphalism. Memento is a time-image ‘caught in the act’ of becoming a movement-image. It offers a critique of the national narrative, using character memory, a fragmented narrative structure and national allegory to deterritorialise the triumphal narrative that dominates many American action-images.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989 provoked a revaluation of the meaning of World War II in American culture and a shift away from the complexities of trauma to a more triumphantly nationalistic vision of the war. No less metaphysical and no less mythic, this more recent revision of World War II is more explicitly focused on glorifying American virtue, as illustrated in the fight over the Enola Gay exhibit in the National Air and Space Museum, the reception received by Paul Fussell’s book Wartime, the film Saving Private Ryan, and the ceremonies surrounding the building of the National World War II Memorial. This conclusion looks closely at the ways our historical understanding of World War II have changed and how our understanding of war generally is always in flux and in conflict. War is never reducible to a set of essential metaphysical truths, but is rather always a historically bound social practice, made meaningful and making life meaningful for specific peoples, in specific times and places, and in historically specific ways.

The introduction lays out the structure of Hymns for the Fallen in broad strokes, noting the chronological scope of the study (35 war films made after the close of the Vietnam War), the subgenre (prestige combat films) and the book’s larger approach to film sound and film music. The three elements of the soundtrack—dialogue, sound effects, and music—and their relationship analytically within the book are also introduced. The book’s larger analogy between serious war films and war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is drawn by comparison of scenes from Hamburger Hill (1987) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The formative impact of the Vietnam War on Hollywood combat film production is also noted. The figures of the American soldier and veteran are presented as central both to combat film narratives and to the target audiences for these films.

This chapter details how sound effects are used by combat filmmakers to tell coherent battlefield stories. The narrative potential of individual weapons’ sounds—such as grenades and RPGs—and the use of sound effects to direct the audience to particular plot, character, or thematic ends is described in extended analyses of battle sequences from The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Zero Dark Thirty, and Platoon. Sound effects prove important to directing viewer engagement during combat scenes along a spectrum between immersion in the immediate danger of battle and reflection on the experience of war for the individual soldier. Episodes of subjective sound prove important, as does the use of explosions to punctuate combat narratives and effect sonic transitions. In all these ways, sound effects work towards the making of meaning in serious Hollywood war films. Select battle scenes using music are also discussed.

This chapter looks at the work the ABMC has been doing since World War II ended. The chairmanships of Generals Jacob Devers and Mark Clark are explored in some detail. Maintenance of the memorials is a mission of remembrance that the ABMC is strongly upholding. Some additional sites have been created since 1960, and “interpretive centers” continue to be added to the World War I and II memorials. Presidential visits to some of the cemeteries since the Carter years have expanded public awareness of these places of memory. The commission directed the construction of the WWII Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that was dedicated in 2004. This chapter concludes with an assessment of the enduring importance of the work of the ABMC. The WWI veterans have all passed away, and WWII veterans are becoming fewer. The ABMC’s efforts to maintain the beautiful memorials, monuments, and cemeteries keep the many stories, examples learned, and sacrifices continually fresh in the public mind.