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.
     First, a recap of “Bizhan and Manizheh”: the story begins with the arrival at the Persian court of a delegation from a region known as Ermani, who complain that they are being overrun by boars. When the king asks if any of his warriors are up to the challenge, only one, a young warrior known as Bizhan, volunteers for the task. Bizhan sets out accompanied by a man named Gorgin who happens to know that particular countryside very well. Gorgin leads him to the area and when Bizhan asks if he wishes to fight alongside him, Gorgin rather peevishly replies that he has been appointed only to be his guide.  Bizhan kills all the boars and while he is collecting their heads, Gorgin mischievously suggests that he knows a place nearby where regular festivals are held and where there will be lots of pretty girls. Gorgin tells him that a particular beauty named Manizheh will be there (she is the Turkish king’s daughter; the reader must note that the Turks and the Persians are at war) and that Bizhan should seek her out. Gorgin then disappears and Bizhan meets up with Manizheh. The two become enamored of one another and when it comes time for Bizhan to leave, Manizheh schemes to have him all to herself by drugging him. When Bizhan falls unconscious, she bears him away to the castle of the Turks, whereupon he wakes in his beloved’s arms, but under dangerous circumstances, for once the king finds out that his daughter is romancing a Persian boy, he orders the boy to be taken captive and chained up in a pit deep down inside the earth. The pit, furthermore, is sealed with a giant, mythical stone and Manizheh, as a punishment, is told to keep watch over her beloved’s prison. She manages, however, to dig a deep hole so that she can funnel food down to her beloved.
     Meanwhile, when the Persians find out that Bizhan has disappeared – Gorgin recounts the story and begs forgiveness – they send for one of their greatest warriors, Rostam, to go and fetch him out of enemy territory. Rostam appoints seven mighty warriors to accompany him, and together the company sets out disguised as merchants riding a train of camels loaded with silks and jewels and other precious items. When they arrive in the streets of the city near the Turkish castle, the population flocks to them to buy goods, but Manizheh instinctively senses that Rostam must know something and so she approaches him, asking about whether or not the Persians know what has befallen their warrior Bizhan. Rostam at first pretends that he knows nothing, but then he gives a special ring to Manizheh to give to Bizhan as a sign that help is on the way. Then, late one night when everyone is asleep, the warriors find the place where Bizhan is imprisoned, and Rostam lifts the gigantic stone that seals him into the earth and reaches down into the pit to pull Bizhan out, snapping all the iron chains that bind him.
     They do not just flee the country, however, for they wish to teach the Turks a lesson, so they assault the palace where everybody is asleep, and the Turkish king narrowly escapes with his life. Then the warriors flee toward Persia. However, the episode sparks a major conflict, and the Turkish army sets out in pursuit of the warriors, who battle with them in a fierce melee. Finally, they emerge victorious, and arrive in Persia with the Turks giving up on them.
     Though it is a very different story in terms of its surface structures, one notices that “Bizhan and Manizheh” shares the same basic deep structure with Saving Private Ryan. The descent of a small group of warriors on a specially appointed mission into enemy territory in order to rescue one warrior, at the risk of a major conflict, is the deep structure shared by both narratives.
     And the point? the impatient reader by now is asking.
     There is yet another story, an older one than the Bizhan narrative in the Shahnameh (c. 1000 a.d.), which is associated with a cycle of stories surrounding the Manichean creation myth that was articulated by the Persian prophet Mani in the third century a.d. In it, the Kingdom of Light is about to be attacked by the demons of the realm of Darkness down below, and so the Lord of Light appoints his son, the Anthropos, to descend down into the darkness and do battle. He puts on his armor made out of light and descends into the realm of matter, but the demons attack him and pull off his armor of light, devouring it, so that the light becomes trapped in material darkness. The fallen Anthropos sends up a prayer to the Lord of Light, his father, who then appoints the Holy Spirit, together with his five sons, to go and rescue him. The Spirit descends and pulls the Anthropos up from the realm of darkness, while the sun and moon and stars are created out of the fallen light that has been purified. The warriors of the demons slain in this battle serve as the basic matter from out of which the material world of creation is made. Light, the point of the myth goes, is imprisoned everywhere in the material world seeking to escape and it is the job of each one of us to help it find a way back to its heavenly abode.
     Manicheanism was a sort of Zoroastrian heresy persecuted both by the Zoroastrians as well by the early Christians during the third century a.d. and so it is not difficult to imagine  how this basic structure could have crept into a narrative like the story of the rescue of Bizhan from his prison in the land of the Turks in the Shahnameh, an epic meant to celebrate the early kings of the Zoroastrian epoch of Persian civilization.
     Thus, the narrative structure of the rescue of the being of light from his prison in the hell of the material world might also be glimpsed to lie somewhere behind the surface structures of the narrative of Saving Private Ryan (though, of course, in an entirely naive way on the part of the screenwriter). If so, then we must ask, what is Hell as defined by this celluloid narrative? And what does the being of Light signify? And who, or what, are the demons which are eating up and entrapping all the Light?
     In the opening half hour of Saving Private Ryan, we are introduced to Spielberg’s idea of Hell, a modern vision of a descent into the Inferno. Hell, in this vision, consists of a war in which gigantic machines produced by a nascent military industrial complex are battling with one another: huge, rumbling tanks; shaky, amphibian vehicles disgorging their loads of soaked soldiers onto Omaha Beach; machine guns which tear those soldiers into fragments; flamethrowers, grenades, explosives; bunkers etched into the cliffs to peer out over vast gray-blue distances. We are shown here a vision of the human being in process of being ground up into hamburger by thumping, grinding, pulsating machines which are products of an industrial nightmare unleashed upon the earth. Thus, after the closing half hour, we are witness to a vision of the modern world, in which the human being has become a prisoner of a technological  dystopia that is not only physically grinding up his meat body, but is spiritually threatening to render him obsolete, as well. The mission, then, is clear: the human being must be saved from this hell of machinery.
     During the rest of the movie, the Tom Hanks character and his small band of soldiers is appointed to descend into Nazi occupied France in order to rescue private Ryan, since all his brothers have been killed and he must therefore be returned home to his mother, since he is all she has left. Private Ryan, on the analogy with the Manichean creation myth, corresponds to the Anthropos, the being of Light who has fallen into hell – here defined by Spielberg for us as a technological  dystopia – and who must be rescued. In Manichean myth, the Anthropos must be saved because he represents the principle of Light which must be rescued from darkness, as an exemplary model for the spiritual life which must be lived by each one of us, in our efforts to wrest the principle of light from the darkness of our own animal nature. Private Ryan, however, as the principle of Light in Spielberg’s film represents the human being in an abstract sense: he is the primal soul of humanity itself which must be saved from the hell of its own technological-industrial prison. Spielberg, in other words, is saying that in rescuing private Ryan, it is the human being which matters, the human being lost in the labyrinth of his own industrial nightmare that must be saved and rescued at all costs.
     The message of Saving Private Ryan, then, is an essentially humanistic one. The film asks us to perform a Gestalt switch in our perceptions of modernity, in which the human being becomes the figure against the background of technology, for the human being has fallen into a world that is populated by demons. These are not, however, the demons represented by the clichéd, cardboard Nazis who are so often so simplistically represented as “evil.”  The evil ones in Spielberg’s film, the demons which correspond to those of the realm of matter and darkness in the Manichean creation myth, are those beings which the great German mystic Rudolf Steiner termed the “Ahrimanic” beings who have taken up residence inside of our machines and who have tempted us away from the spiritual world of light and life and humanistic tradition and led us along  a dark and confusing pathway in which mastery over the physical plane by means of machines is the only goal held up as worth striving for. These are the demons hiding in the machines in Spielberg’s cosmology, and these demons, be it noted, have taken control of the mentalities of both the Nazis as well as the Allies, for in the modern world, the whole of Western civilization must struggle against the demons of its machines.
     Hence, the Pyrrhic victory of the Allies in World War II: for in allowing us to triumph over fascism we have merely replaced it with a totalitarian world in which the human being is shrunken down and intimidated and pushed around by bureaucratic powers backed up by the brute force of its huge, grinding, thumping machines. If any individual dissents from this worldview in favor of the mere human spirit, he is crushed, overwhelmed and intimidated by the megamachine that now surrounds and controls his every waking moment.
     Thus, Spielberg’s vision is that it is the human spirit which must be saved in this world of machines that has engulfed Western civilization and swallowed up his soul. The machines are the manifestation of a dark undercurrent in the human psyche which has arisen from subterranean channels and now taken possession of him totally. Today we are living in a world in which Faust’s bill has come due, and Mephistopheles has arrived to collect his debt.
     So far from being the shallow, facile film that Spielberg’s movies are so often accused of being, Saving Private Ryan has an essentially humanistic message to deliver, for those who have ears to hear it.
     And, of course, eyes to see it.