"Nervous out of the service" : 1940s American cinema, World War II veteran readjustment, and postwar masculinity
Abstract
Conventional wisdom tells us that World War II veterans were greeted by an
adoring public, moved smoothly from battlefield to suburb, and never looked back. A
close look at American culture in the 1940s, however, reveals that concern about
returning veterans and their possible impact on society surfaced nearly everywhere.
Public and professional discussion of the “veteran problem” in a short-lived but
substantial genre of non-fiction literature began during the latter stages of the war and
continued into the early years of peace. At the center of this discourse was a debate about
the impact of the war on those who fought it. Some psychiatric experts suggested
virtually every discharged soldier would return psychologically damaged, coarsened by
military life, and potentially dangerous. Left progressives and New Deal liberals argued
instead that society could not disappoint veterans, who had risked their lives for
democratic ideals, by allowing injustice and reaction to continue at home. All feared
that, in one way or another, the homecoming would be difficult.
viii
This study examines Hollywood’s participation in that culture of “reconversion”
by considering a wide range of movies in the context of public debates about the social
function and responsibility of the motion picture, the larger discourse about veteran
readjustment, the increasing authority of psychiatric experts, and the first stirrings of
Cold War politics. Hollywood developed a standard narrative that encouraged veterans
to abandon their wartime identities and idealism by moving into the role of mature male
breadwinner, but some filmmakers challenged that narrative by presenting reconversion
as an attempt to undo the ideological lessons of the war. Social problem films and films
noirs at the end of World War II abound with men back from the war and out of sync
with American society, and what emerges is an often contradictory portrait of the veteran
as confused neurotic, crazed psychopath, zealous crusader, or cynical loner. The eventual
triumph of therapeutic reconversion defined the social and political parameters of
masculine “maturity” and as a result established precedents for the critiques of masculine
conformity, concerns about teenage rebellion, and the culture of consensus in the 1950s.