1 July 2001
Stephen Wood

Set against the backdrop of the Japanese attack on the eponymous US naval base, the story is simple enough: two buddy-boy soldiers, childhood friends, fall for the same girl. She (Kate Beckinsale) is a nurse, and the first part of the film lingers obsessively upon her task, with lots of close-ups of needles being stuck into soldiers' bottoms (which is, apparently, all the training they receive).

This is how she meets and falls for Ben Affleck's character, who then goes missing in action, giving his best friend the opportunity to make it with his girlfriend, then - whoops - comes home, causing all sorts of problems for the three of them. Oh dear.

Of course, by this time the three of them are stationed at Pearl Harbour, so while they try to sort their lives out, the audience is aware that pretty soon they're going to be united in adversity (when the bombs start dropping) and that most likely one of the friends will lose his life, honourably giving the other the chance to live a decent, simple life with the girl of his dreams. If I've spoiled it for you by telling you the plot, be of good cheer, because it's all rubbish anyway.

It's not the rubbishness of this film I want to discuss, because frankly it didn't come as a surprise. What really upset me was the way it demonised the Japanese. That it did this in order to canonise the US is even more of a worry.

Even though the American characters are all stereotypes, at least they're individual stereotypes, distinguishable from one another in the broadest sense. The Japanese characters, on the other hand, are all the same stereotype.

The film makes no effort to even gesture at the interior lives of the non-WASPs. It doesn't even give them anything interesting to say. The Japanese don't move around, laugh or bond or affect one another in the way the Americans are allowed to do. They just stand there, ramrod-stiff, facing each other in twos or threes across tables strewn with maps, usually in front of a billowing Japanese flag, speaking their lines through gritted teeth.

In this film the Japanese all speak Japanese, with English subtitles, which you would think was a good thing, but in this context the device is actually racist, because it serves to depersonalise and render the Japanese as abject as monsters from Dr. Who. You can almost hear the film going 'There they are! Get them! Kill! Kill!'

It's true that the Japanese army committed atrocities in the Pacific during the second world war, but so did everyone involved. Especially, one might say, the US. I don't take issue with the historical facts as they have bubbled to the surface of our general consensus-awareness, only the way they have been deployed here.

There's nothing really wrong with turning the past into entertainment, if it's done responsibly, except that historical films are also about the present, in terms of the way the subject gets treated. This film not only contains racist depictions, it is structurally racist, which means that as well as telling us a story about what happened in the Pacific in 1941, Pearl Harbor is also telling us something about contemporary US attitudes towards Japan, attitudes which currently may apply to China as well.

Whether or not you believe in the collapse of metanarratives and the end of history, for most people the H word still has some authority. Six days after the bombing, life at Pearl Harbour was beginning to show signs of returning to normal. It took a lot longer than that for Japan (and the rest of the world) to get over Hiroshima.