Dam and Blast

Letters

Vol. 4 No. 21 · 18 November 1982

From John Corner

SIR: I enjoyed reading David Lodge’s reflections on The Dam Busters (LRB, 21 October), particularly his attempt to show how this popular war film differs, in its clipped-back tones and rather chilly finish, from many others of its genre. Nevertheless, in moving from literary criticism to a more broadly speculative cultural commentary Lodge runs into one or two problems. In particular, his use of what one might call the English department ‘we’ begs large questions. Lodge describes how, at the end of the film, Gibson attempts to console Barnes Wallis, distraught at hearing of the aircrew losses, by commenting: ‘Even if all those fellows had known from the beginning that they wouldn’t be coming back, they would still have gone for it.’ Lodge then observes of this remark: ‘But even if he really believed it, we certainly don’t.’ Oh don’t ‘we’ indeed – and ‘certainly’ too! I can assure him that when I first saw this film as a schoolboy I certainly did ‘believe’ the remark, and so, perhaps, did many others in the audience, though I don’t intend to set up any interpretative unity to counter his. Was it not one more affirmation of quietly heroic sacrifice? Or, at the very least, one of those statements for which the popular mythology of war demanded a patriotic suspension of disbelief? Nothing that Lodge says about the nature of the ending need conflict with this kind of interpretation, which relies on some notion of the terrible majesty of loss and which I imagine many post-Falkland audiences might be as inclined to share as those of the Fifties.

John Corner
Centre for Communication Studies, University of Liverpool