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Aug 20, 2020
If you're courageous enough to engage with some challenging ideas then I dare you to read Curtis White's review essay "Saving Private Ryan: Don’t try to do no thinkin'!" Go ahead, I dare you. Here's a link to the essay followed by an excerpt: <https://web.archive.org/web/20081011223942/http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/article/show/7> "For a literate culture which wishes to understand that our narratives do serve to construct what we are, what our 'content' is, and which trusts that the citizens to this culture know in some ultimate way what it means to 'read' so that we may have some basis for moving among narrative options, this all implies a crisis of proverbially nightmarish proportion (oh, a quiet crisis, to be sure, in between the simulated explosions of mortar shells and other forms of synthetic, orgasmic, cinematic bliss). But without the self-consciousness that Reading provides, we are merely (as Louis Althusser would have it) dumbly 'interpellated' into subject positions in a very mechanical State Apparatus. In short, being able to read is a large part of what it means to be human as opposed to being a mere social function." P.S. There is much stylistically and substantively in White's essay with which I disagree. Nevertheless, his point about the importance of being able to "read" a film is well-taken.