On Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan: A Reassessment in Light of an Iranian Myth
By John David Ebert
While reading Dick Davis’s excellent new translation of the Shahnameh the other day, the insight came to me that one of its stories, the tale of “Bizhan and Manizheh,” tells essentially the same tale as that of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a film which I had watched only about a month ago for the first time since its release in the late 1990s. And since Spielberg is so often dismissed as a merely facile, shallow inventor of roller coaster style entertainment with no other purpose beyond that of thrill-seeking, I thought it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment on this blog in order to demonstrate the thoughtlessness of such a view.
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