Steven Spielberg’s film Empire of the Sun (1987), based on J. G. Ballard’s novel,1 is a cross between a boy’s adventure and a prisoner-of-war film: the boy’s adventure is, of course, a Spielberg speciality, and so is the World War II film—although not until Empire did he focus on the grim side of war. David Lean, who has made classic films in both genres—Oliver Twist (1948) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—was scheduled to direct the project until he asked Spielberg to take over. After The Color Purple (1985), Empire allowed Spielberg to continue to grow as a filmmaker, adapting critically acclaimed popular novels for a more mature audience. Spielberg, aided by Tom Stoppard’s thoughtful adaptation and perhaps inspired by Lean, created a visually stunning war epic filled with rich imagery, and something new for his career: a psychologically profound character study. Instead of the flattened affect of Ballard’s novel, he presents a moving, child’s-eye view of war. The boy hero, Jim, is forced to grow up fast when he is separated from his parents in the chaos of wartime Shanghai and interned in a Japanese camp. He survives his early adolescence (from about age nine-thirteen) under enormous stress; the film thrusts us into the distorted, dreamlike perceptions of his war-induced neurosis, and we get not so much a realistic war movie as a study in mania: a boy’s fantastic dream of war.
I will admit the flaws of the film: it is too long and sometimes too slow, spectacle occasionally overwhelms narrative and threatens to glamorize war, and John Williams’s spiritual music becomes obtrusive. Spielberg has sweetened Ballard’s story by making Jim braver and the other characters kinder (for example, Spielberg’s Jim, because of his bravery, is inducted into the American POW barracks as an honorary GI) and by eliminating some of Ballard’s more gruesome elements, such as public stranglings and piles of maggoty corpses.2
Nevertheless, I prefer the film to the novel. Ballard is a master of entropic despair, and his account of war is curiously flat and unemotional, for all its cataloguing of horrors, or perhaps as a defense against his material, that might have made for a grisly but uninvolving film. Spielberg has retained much of Ballard’s narrative movement and dialogue, capitalized on his suggestive imagery, and realized the emotional potential of the story.
He says that Empire offered him the first opportunity since Duel (1971) to tell a story “nearly exclusively through visual metaphors and non-pretentious symbolism.”3 Thus Spielberg has discovered haunting visual equivalents to Ballard’s surreal effects. The film is carefully orchestrated through repeated contrasts of imagery: luxury juxtaposed with poverty, plenty with deprivation, and play with war. The mob scenes are splendid, but so is the focus on small things which become matters of life and death: a pair of shoes, a potato. Some images are subtly echoed or transformed: coffins and a suitcase, a metal cigarette pack and a metal dinner pail, and a school uniform and a bomber jacket. One of the key images in the film is the giant wall poster advertising Gone with the Wind: the smoke of a burning Shanghai mingles with the painted flames of a burning Atlanta, signifying that Jim’s privileged colonial world has vanished with the war.
Aside from making careful use of Ballard’s rich and dreamlike imagery, Spielberg, with his sentimental, melodramatic, Dickensian instincts, has put back into the story the emotion that Ballard left out, both the warmth and the horror. The emotions that dominate the film are Jim’s highs and lows: his wonder, terror, and elation, and his separation anxiety, panic, and depression. Ideally, the film should put viewers through a psychological journey similar to the boy’s, a manic-depressive experience of alternate rapture and despair.
Mania and depression seem to me to be Spielberg’s characteristic filmic territory: Close Encounters and E.T. alternate between the two, ending on the side of pure euphoria (or, if you prefer, UFOria); the out-of-control farce 1941 errs by being unmitigated mania. I think Empire of the Sun is better than Close Encounters because Spielberg has gained some psychological distance from his own hang-ups; in other words, he has matured. Rather than validating his hero’s neurosis, as he does in Close Encounters, he both sympathizes with and critiques Jim’s mental disturbance. Whereas Roy Neary ascends into the heavens in a chariot of the gods, Jim only flies in his imagination.
The themes of Empire, as critics have pointed out, are similar to those of many previous Spielberg films: “the collapse of civilization and the disappearance of the family,”4 “the child searching for the parents,”5 and “the sanctity of childhood, the urge to make contact with some large, transcendent power.”6 But Empire reverses Spielberg’s Peter Pan syndrome and negates his usual sweetness and light. This is not a feel-good film: I left the theatre drained and exhausted, as though I had suffered through a long, harrowing ordeal with the young hero.
Spielberg made Empire as an act of personal exorcism; he went against the grain of his previous movies in a deliberate effort to grow up, which was evidently a painful experience for him as well. He says,
It [the 1940s] was the end of an era, the end of innocence, and I had been clinging to it for most of my adult life. But hitting 40, I really had to come to terms with what I’ve been tenaciously clinging to, which was a celebration of a kind of naivete.
I thought Empire was a great way of performing an exorcism on that period.... I wanted to draw a parallel between the death of the boy’s innocence and the death of the innocence of the entire world . . . it’s as dark as I’ve allowed myself to get. And that was perversely compelling to me.... I was very disturbed making this movie.... This was not a happy experience.... It was a real internal struggle to get this thing on the screen.7
Empire gives a child’s-eye view of war as an irrational, overwhelming, terrifying, yet oddly compelling and at times even horrifyingly beautiful experience. Jim’s terror lies in being cut off from his family and his privileged world and faced with all the perils of war; his exhilaration lies in his newfound freedom. He adapts to and even likes the war because what is catastrophic to adults can sometimes seem like adventure to children. Jim’s imagination is so vivid and confused that the war is to him surreal, a gigantic spectacle he has dreamed up. The battles we witness in a way reflect Jim’s internal struggles. In the novel, Ballard writes, “Jim had begun to dream of wars.”8
I believe that the real achievement of the film lies in its use of elements of the fantastic and the oneiric to suggest Jim’s psychological states. Ballard, best known as an author of apocalyptic science-fiction novels and stories, did not write a standard realistic war novel, for all its autobiograhical basis. And Spielberg, best known as a director of science fiction and horror, brought to the war movie some of the qualities of fantasy film. The imagery and sound are so stylized that it becomes as difficult for the viewer (at least, for this viewer) as for Jim to distinguish the “real” from the fantastic, for the filmic reality of Empire constantly approaches the texture of a dream. Thus I would like to consider Empire as a fantasy, a child’s dream of war.
Psychologically, it seems to me that Jim introjects the war, so that the film resembles his waking dream. Jim is a disturbed youngster who defends against his mourning and depression over his lost parents by manic behavior; a manic behaves like someone lost in a dream of bliss while still awake. I don’t mean to reduce Jim to a diagnosis: he is a complex fictional creation with a unique combination of character traits, and he survives terrible circumstances. But understanding the characteristics of the psychological disorder of mania may help us to interpret some of his behavior and to interpret the style and imagery of the film in a different light. His mania, for example, helps me to understand the stylistic appropriateness of the dreamlike quality of the film and of the frequent use of moving camera and soaring music. Thus I want to focus on the scenes in the film that struck me as particularly fantastic or dreamlike as a way to approach the hero’s states of mind.
For me, the film first enters a twilight state between dream and reality in an early scene. We hear a flash and see planes lit by flickering light. Then we realize that this is not a scene of war but Jim’s bedroom: the sound is his mother lighting a cigarette and the planes are models hanging from his ceiling. Spielberg seems to be demonstrating that appearances are deceiving; like Jim, the audience cannot always trust its initial impressions in this film.
His mother has evidently come to tuck Jim in for the night and found him just awakened from a dream. He says, “I was dreaming about God.” But God told him “Nothing. He was playing tennis.” Jim speculates, “Perhaps that’s where God is all the time. And that’s why you can’t see him, do you think? ... Perhaps he’s our dream, and we’re his? ... Mother, if God is above us, does it mean up like flying?”9 His mother dismisses his boyish curiosity; she can’t answer his questions.
After his parents leave, the camera focuses in a high-angle shot on Jim as he gazes up with awe at the model planes dangling above him. Eerie, tinkling music plays. The same shot of Jim’s upturned face and the same music is repeated in the atomic bomb scene; the dreamlike imagery here foreshadows that apocalyptic climax.
Although Jim later claims to be an atheist, nevertheless he dreams about God, and his imagination is troubled about God. His spiritual confusion about God the Father may be connected with his relationship with his real father, for the God of his dream is an incommunicative tennis player, like Jim’s father (Jim invites Basie to play tennis with his father after the war). But God is associated not only with his father but also with airplanes and pilots, his heroic ideals. These brave pilots float in the heavens in their powerful machines, like angels; their heroism perhaps compensates for the inadequacies of Mr. Graham.
In Empire, airplanes serve Jim as substitute parents and gods, fetishes and magical totems: the ultimate incarnations of power. They are for him dreamlike, exalted objects of worship, the chariots of the gods. “Jim’s obsession with airplanes takes on cargo-cult proportions,” writes J. Hoberman.10 In fact, the religious aura surrounding airplanes in this film is similar to the awestruck wonder about flying saucers in Close Encounters. Spielberg admits to a fascination with flying: “As a child I used to build model planes . . . and I was attached to flying the way Jim is.”11 Flying or airplanes figure in many of Spielberg’s films, from his early script for Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies (1973) through 1941 (1979), “The Mission” (on the television series Amazing Stories in 1986), the Indiana Jones films (1981, 1984, and 1989), and Always (1989).
One critic complained that “Spielberg seems to be placing the planes—and the ultimate transcendent power they represent—beyond good and evil, into some Nietzschean realm of amoral grandeur and primal glory. There is nothing innocent or wondering about the boy’s passion. He is in love with death.”12 Nevertheless, it seems to be that there is a dual impulse at work in the film. On the one hand, Spielberg seems to want his audience to participate in Jim’s dreams, to experience Jim’s rapture with airplanes and pilots through surreal, dreamlike imagery and soaring music. On the other hand, he wants us to be aware of the reality of the death and destruction the airplanes bring and to recognize that Jim is an imaginative, confused, and troubled boy who worships airplanes and cannot distinguish between his dreams and reality. Whereas the characters in Close Encounters who believed in UFOs were treated as crazy by the “normal” characters, the audience was sure that they were sane. But the evidence of Empire convinces me that we are not supposed to consider Jim as, at all times, sane.
In certain ways, Jim’s confusion is excusable. He is a child with a vivid imagination, who cannot always tell the difference between dream or play and reality. Moreover, he lives in a strange, hothouse world, a privileged Eden, surrounded by the exoticism and poverty of Shanghai and the increasing violence and chaos of wartime Asia. Jim’s colonial enclave is an unreal world, a false paradise, a precarious bubble about to be punctured by the Japanese occupation.
The juxtaposition of alien, coexisting worlds—English and Chinese, or English and Japanese—makes for some of the most bizarre, memorable imagery in the film. In this regard, the film resembles Spielberg fantasy films like Close Encounters and E.T., which also create their effects by juxtaposing alien worlds.
The confrontation of two strange worlds is vividly presented in an early scene, the dreamlike drive to the Lockwoods’ Christmas costume party. The family’s chauffeured Packard glides silently through the streets of downtown Shanghai, as if floating through the packed crowds. The car seems to exist within a narrow band of safety as the crowds press against it. The four scenes in the film which take place inside the car grow progressively more claustrophobic; by the fourth scene, they must flee the car into the panicked Chinese mob or be crushed by a tank. On the drive to the Lockwoods’, all sound within the car is suppressed, and we hear only the abnormally loud street noises and eerie, nondiegetic music. The scene alternates between smooth tracking shots following the car as it seems to glide through the crowd, over-the-shoulder or subjective camera from Jim’s point of view, and reaction shots of Jim gazing in fascination at the passing scene. The boy watches the spectacle with the rapt attention of a spectator at a movie, and the car window serves as a frame within the frame. The effect that the camera movement and the music gave me was of floating suspended in a dream.
Three close-up shots, as people or objects move aggressively toward the camera, particularly struck me in this scene: first, a European nun nods and smiles pleasantly at Jim; second, a chicken carried by a street peddler bumps against the window, leaving a smear of blood; and third, a street boy presses aggressively forward to beg, crying, “No mama, no papa, no whiskey soda!” The boy is beaten by a policeman. These three dreamlike images seem to me to foreshadow much of the film: the nun, the most pleasant image in the scene, suggests the maternal comfort for which Jim yearns after he is separated from his mother; the blood suggests the coming war, from which their luxurious car will not protect them; and the beggar boy, who returns later to steal Jim’s shoes, foreshadows Jim’s fate once he too becomes an orphan of the streets.
Later in the scene, as the parade of rich Europeans’ cars crosses the bridge, the juxtapositions are particularly surreal. The contrast reminded me of images of the French Revolution: painted aristocrats inside their luxurious carriages, dressed up as clowns or Marie Antoinette, while outside the throngs of starving, hysterical peasants are just barely held back by the violence of police swinging batons. In E.T., the parade of children in Halloween costumes down the suburban street at twilight was comic and charming, a celebration of innocence and creativity; here the masquerade suggests instead the decadent frivolity of the ancien regime. These protected Europeans are unaware that the mob of Chinese coolies represents the chaos and misery of their own immediate future. It is all quite ominous, and yet, because of the eerie music and the surreal clash of images, detached and dreamlike.
When Jim plays in the crashed Japanese plane, the effect again felt dreamlike to me—in this case, not an ominous but an ethereal dream. Jim is in an exalted mood: he looks upon the plane as if he has discovered a magic lamp; he is even dressed like Aladdin. As he plays war in the cockpit, his toy glider banks and soars in the glowing heavens for what seems an impossibly long time. In his game, it becomes an enemy aircraft he is engaging in midair combat, and the soaring music and swooping movement of the camera toward him create the momentary illusion that his grounded plane is really flying (the same camera move in on a static Jim is repeated later in the P-51 attack on the Japanese airfield). The stylized scene allows us access into Jim’s vivid imagination, in which play is close to reality.
But the initial mood of pleasant wish-fulfillment fantasy changes abruptly into nightmare in the same scene when Jim stumbles upon Japanese troops encamped nearby. In a striking confrontation, the boy dressed as Aladdin is menaced by a grown-up, armed soldier. The music changes to drumbeats and woodwinds, percussive instruments which signify danger of Empire. Play has turned into deadly reality.
The contrast between dream and reality, playing at war and being at war, structures the film. It is epitomized in the poster for Empire: a little boy plays behind barbed wire with a toy plane, while above him a real plane goes down in flames. Pauline Kael praises this aspect of the film: “it speaks to our understanding of the gap between children’s play and grownup behavior—the gap that is closed in wartime.”13 The ambiguous relationship between playing and war is expressed in our language in terms such as “war games.”14 The novel, like the film, is filled with analogies between war and make-believe, such as play, games, dreams, and movies: Jim plays “games of war and death.”15
This same striking juxtaposition of war play and real war is next seen in the film in the Japanese attack on the HMS Petrel in Shanghai harbor, which coincided with their attack on Pearl Harbor. As the scene opens, we see the shadow of a plane: as in the previous bedroom scene, we can’t tell at first if it is real or a toy. Then we see Jim on the bed in his hotel room, playing with a model plane and a flashlight. Bored, he goes to the window. It is dark outside but just before dawn: a twilight state in which reality is uncertain. When he sees the Japanese signalling with a light across the harbor, he makes a game of it and signals back with his flashlight. Suddenly, an explosion rattles the window and knocks him off his feet. The image of Jim on the floor is tripled in the three wardrobe mirrors, suggesting to me both the shattering beginning of the war and the shattering of Jim’s peacetime, boyhood identity. (The same tripled reflection of Jim is repeated in the shot of a window in the P-51 scene). His father enters, and Jim pleads “I didn’t mean it! It was a joke!” as if his play had started the war. The boundaries between fantasy and reality have dangerously broken down.
Of course, Jim didn’t start the war, but all his play had become absorbed by it: he dreamed of war, played at war, and was eager for the excitement to begin. It seems to me that Spielberg is implying here that fantasy can have deadly consequences and that the destructiveness of war springs in part from the dreams of childhood. Empire is thus indirectly a criticism of the assumption of the innocence of fantasy and childhood in previous Spielberg films, such as Close Encounters and E.T.
The dreamlike effect next occurs in the mysterious scene in the mother’s bedroom. Like so many memorable scenes in the film, it is almost pure imagery, with no dialogue; the suggestive images leave room for interpretation. Whether or not the footprint he sees in the spilled talcum powder on the floor is Jim’s mother’s and whether or not a violent scene has actually taken place in the room, the importance of the image lies in its effect on Jim. Desperately seeking his mother, he smiles at what he takes to be a sign of her or of her recent presence (just as Elliott and his brother smile in E.T. when they encounter an old T-shirt that smells of their absent father’s aftershave). But the other bootprints and handprints on the floor suggest danger, the violation of her room or her person. And when the wind blows the powder and the footprint away, it is as if the boy has irretrievably lost his mother. Jim in this scene is in a state of mourning, and the mind of the mourner can often play tricks on him, making him believe that the absent object is really present.16
Jim’s mind plays a similar trick on him when he returns to his home with Basie and Frank, only to find the house lit up and his mother’s music playing; he can even vaguely see white-robed figures moving inside. Jim runs to the door, crying “Mother,” but his elation disappears when the gowned figure turns into an angry Japanese soldier in a white kimono. The effect here is like the condensation and displacement of a dream, in which one figure blends into another; we are as surprised as Jim. (Spielberg has perfected such tricks on the audience in his previous films.)
The scene ends with a stylized “burn to white,” the opposite of a fade to black, a device more common in experimental films than in Hollywood products.17 A “burn to white” is also used after the atomic bomb scene. The white-out can be considered a dreamlike device: we are momentarily confronted with a blank screen, a reminder of the movie screen itself, which is a version of the original “dream screen” on which we project our mental images.18
Once the dissolve ends, we find Jim babbling in a fever dream about aerial combat: “Red to gold leader,” he murmurs. “Come in. Engine two on fire. On fire.” Now that he has lost his parents and also appears to have lost Basie, the Fagin-like character who had served as a substitute parent, Jim evidently feels like he is going down in flames (the fever would certainly contribute to that feeling) and calls out to a leader for rescue.
Part one of the film ends with the surreal image of Jim touching a Zero and then saluting three Japanese pilots as the choral music soars and the sparks fly upward (there is a similar scene in 1941 involving a woman touching a plane, but that is played strictly for raunchy comedy). This scene seals his defensive maneuver of identification with the aggressor. In other words, airplanes are his substitute for idealized parents. Even more, they are meat and drink to him. As he explains later about the American bombers, “P-51! You’re beautiful! I touched them! I touched them! I felt their heat! I could taste them in my mouth! Oil and cordite!” The connection between food, parents, and airplanes is also made explicit in the novel: “When he was hungry or missed his parents, he often dreamed of aircraft.”19
The climactic scene where Jim touches the airplane is the fulfillment of his dream, so he moves like someone possessed or sleepwalking. And he caresses the airplane as if he has found his long-lost parents. In the novel, the scene is described this way: “Jim hoped that his parents were safe and dead. [Death now appears to him as the only safe escape from the war.] ... he ran toward the shelter of the aircraft, eager to enfold himself in their wings.”20 “Their” is deliberately ambiguous: parents or airplanes? In the absence of his family, Jim has turned to his fantasies of war to defend and nourish him. In the movie, the ending of part one, in which Jim caresses a plane, is deliberately echoed by the ending of the film, in which Jim caresses his mother.
I find an explanation of some of Jim’s strange behavior in the notion that Jim is expressing his mourning for his parents by becoming manic. According to Freud, “in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together, so that the person, in a mood of triumph and self-satisfaction, disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the abolition of his inhibitions, his feelings of consideration for others, and his self-reproaches.”21 Mania can be a defense against the depression and severe self-reproaches typical of mourning. One critic calls Jim a “chirpy hysteric,”22 and Spielberg says, “He [Jim] aspires to be in control in such a maniacal way.”23
At various times, Jim demonstrates, singly or in combination, all the characteristic features of mania: (1) hyperactivity (“the manic moves a great deal, romps, plays”); (2) flight of ideas (“the variety of content and the apparent speed of thought”); (3) unwarranted, dangerous, and excessive cheerfulness (“the dream life of the narcissistic pleasure ego ... free from anxiety and any affect other than good spirits”); (4) mystic language and religious transports the language of mania is like “that used by mystics in describing their transports and sense of fusion with God”); (5) talking jags; and (6) appearing to be wide awake or excessively awake but acting like a sleepwalker or someone lost in a blissful dream (“Elation repeats . . . the wish-fulfilling dreaming sleep of a somewhat older child; it is a substitute sleep, or a sleep equivalent, guarded denial”).24 A manic might be said to be dreaming while awake. In a passage in the novel, “Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of war and yet dreamed of by the war.”25
None of the characteristics of mania enumerated above are necessarily dangerous—they are often normal attributes of childhood, and almost everyone, child or adult, exhibits some of them from time to time—but one must judge by their patterned recurrence, their severity, and their context whether they might be symptoms of classical, full-blown mania. Jim’s behavior at points in the film might strike many viewers as more than youthful high spirits.
I saw signs of Jim’s incipient mania in part one: his restlessness, his mysticism about airplanes, his talking jag when he meets Frank, and his excessive cheerfulness on the truck to the camp—he yells excitedly despite the blood pouring down his face. But Jim is at his most manic in the camp. Once he loses his parents, his defenses harden. In he opening scene of part two (the liveliest, sunniest, most cheerful one in the movie), Jim races through the camp, rapidly trading items, never pausing. Then he becomes excited at the hospital when he thinks he has revived a dead woman by pumping her chest. Jim is so elated by his apparently godlike power that Dr. Rawlins must calm him down from his dangerously overexcited state (as he does again in the P-51 scene). As Jim rushes away on yet another of his endless errands, Dr. Rawlins calls after him. “Rest, Jim. You’ll wear yourself out taking care of everyone.” And Rawlins’ nurse adds, “Keeps himself busy, doesn’t he?” Their comments suggest that Jim’s activity is something more than normal boyish enthusiasm: it may be a compulsive restlessness and a defensive maneuver.
Another aspect of his mania is his perverse delight in explosions. During a nighttime bombing raid, he turns from watching the aerial display to spying on his neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Victor, as they make love. This classic primal scene suggests the association of two ideas in his mind: love and death, or at least sex and violent explosions. Later, the death of Mrs. Victor, a substitute mother as well as a figure of erotic interest for Jim, coincides with the explosion of an atomic bomb.
Jim’s most “manic” behavior occurs during the attack of the P-51s on the airfield next to the camp. This crucial and psychologically revealing scene takes place at a low point in part two, when Jim is feeling most acutely orphaned: rejected by Basie, he has left the American barracks, but afraid to return to the British barracks, since the Victors had also rejected him, he sleeps outdoors. Jim’s great fear is that nobody wants him; in part one he lost his parents, could find no place he belonged, and couldn’t even surrender successfully to the Japanese or be sold to the Chinese. As Frank told him, “Nobody wants you. You’re worth nothing.” Now the outcast Jim wakes at dawn and salutes the departing kamikaze pilots, singing the Welsh hymn “Suo Gan” out of a desperate desire to belong to their gallant fraternity. But his worship of suicide pilots seems also to express a love of death or a death wish. And death comes sooner than he expected; as his song ends, an American air raid commences.
During the P-51 raid, Jim exhibits all the characteristics of mania listed above. And his breakdown at the end of the scene reveals the underlying state of mourning and depression which his mania has been masking. Excited by the power of the American planes, the noise and eruption of flames from the bombardment, Jim rushes to the roof of an abandoned building to get a better view. Ignoring the danger, he moves restlessly back and forth, thrilled and overcome by what he is witnessing. Then he seems to launch completely into a dream. All diegetic, “real” sound (airplane engines and explosions) ceases and the music soars like choirs of angels as a P-51 flies nearby him in impossibly slow motion. The pilot grins and waves at the boy from his open cockpit. As he passes, the camera swoops in for a reaction shot of Jim, in a movement similar to one in the wrecked fighter plane scene in part one. Jim shrieks in ecstasy: “P-51! Cadillac of the sky!” and “Horsepower!” He becomes a crazed one-boy cheering squad for this awesome display of death and destruction. The bombing seems to provide the violent release of feeling Jim wanted, the answer to his dreams. Even more, it is presented in such a stylized manner that the attack seems in part to be his dream.
Once again, it takes Dr. Rawlins to bring Jim back to earth from his manic flight. I have already quoted Jim’s speech to Dr. Rawlins in which he says hysterically, “I touched them!” The rest of the dialogue of the scene suggests to me the crux of Jim’s problem, the mourning, depression, and deep anxiety about death Jim is defending against through mania:
Jim: Dr. Rawlins, do you remember how we helped to build the runway? If we’d died like the others, our bones would be in the runway. In a way, it’s our runway.
Dr: No, it’s their runway, Jim. Try not to think so much. (Grabs him.) Try not to think so much!
Jim: (breaks down) I can’t remember what my parents look like. I used to play bridge with my mother in her bedroom. She used to comb her hair. She had dark hair. (Jim is in tears.)
The boy sobs as Dr. Rawlins, clearly moved, embraces him and carries him downstairs as if he were a little child. As Jim is cradled by Dr. Rawlins, he repeats to himself the conjugation of a Latin verb: “Amatus sum. Amatus es. Amatus est.” This hypnotic spell or mantra, intended to soothe and comfort him, refers, of course, to what Jim is missing because of his absent parents: love.
According to the psychiatrist Bertram D. Lewin, the elated mood is a “screen affect” which hides real affect. Elation is a defense against anxiety and “defense against reality and against the effective admission of known dangers, losses, rejections, and defeats.”26 Jim cannot complete his mourning because he does not know if his parents are dead, and if they are alive, whether he will survive to see them again.
The airplanes are a symbol for Jim, a substitute ratification: both phallic symbol and breast, both a representation of the parents and an expression of his desire for power and his wish to overcome anxiety. They gave him substitute nourishment (“I could taste them in my mouth!”), sadomasochistic gratification, participation in the potency of the war god (“Horsepower!”), and liberation from fear through his identification with them and the manic flight they permit him.
But what Jim really craves, beyond these neurotic fetishes, is represented by the magazine illustration he pins over his bed in the camp of the sleeping child watched over by two loving parents, echoing the scene in his bedroom in part one. And what he wants, it seems to me, is also represented by the Welsh lullaby “Suo Gan,” sung at three points in the film. The words translate:
Sleep, child, on my breast,
Warm and secure it is here.
Your mother’s arms are round about you.
A mother’s love is in my breast.
No fear can ever come around you.
Nor anything wake you from your rest.
Sleep quietly, dear child,
Sleep sweetly upon your mother’s breast.27
According to one psychoanalytic theory, the ecstasy of mania duplicates the union of the infant with the breast. Lewin claims that “the manic employs all means to attain a close relationship to a symbolic breast.”28 For me, this helps to make sense of a repeated pattern in the film: Jim steals milk from the refrigerator at home, and milk is the first item he opens when the American supplies are dropped by parachute after the war; Jim eyes Mrs. Victor’s breast as her husband touches it; he must touch the planes and talks of tasting them in his mouth; and he sings about his mother’s breast in the lullaby.
I see Jim’s hunger for milk and the missing mother’s breast as part of a larger pattern in the film, an emphasis on oral deprivation, as in all the close-ups of starving characters wolfing down their food. For example, when Jim returns home, he finds the refrigerator, formerly a cornucopia, empty except for a few stale or foul scraps. And the full swimming pool is now drained. Starving and thirsty, Jim sucks the water faucet at home, but he is sucking a dry teat. When he is discovered by American troops at the end of the film, he offers them a can of milk: he surrenders the item of greatest value to him.
Jim keeps running into bad mothers who won’t love or nourish him: the Chinese nanny who slaps his face, the Chinese cook who flings hot soup in his face, and the weary, sick Mrs. Victor—he must feed her instead of the other way around. And Mrs. Victor abandons him too, by dying. Even the ambivalent Basie could be considered in part as a substitute mother: when they first meet, he feeds Jim (although he also takes food from him), and he smokes cigarettes and plays music like Jim’s mother. In one scene, Basie even dresses all in white, Jim’s mother’s favorite color. Although Jim clings desperately to Basie, like an infant who won’t let go, Basie is yet another bad mother who keeps rejecting or abandoning him.
Despite Jim’s desperate desire for reunion with his mother or, symbolically, with the mother’s breast, I see an ambivalence attached to mother figures in the film (as in the character of Basie) or to references to the mother, suggesting an underlying fear. The mother is often associated with death. In the opening image, a bird’s-eye view, coffins and disintegrating floral wreaths bob on the water (water could be considered a symbol of the feminine); the coffins are then pushed aside by the prow of a Japanese battleship, plowing through the water in a kind of phallic invasion of the frame. The music, in ironic counterpoint, is the haunting “Suo Gan,” with its lyrics about the mother’s breast. But rather than neutralizing the images of death and destruction, “Suo Gan” seems to me to become linked with them by its strategic repetition throughout the film: in other words, the underlying association I see is that the infant’s sleep at his mother’s breast is implicitly equated by the film with the sleep of death. When Jim next sings “Suo Gan,” it is as a hymn to kamikaze pilots; the song concludes with death, as a Japanese plane explodes in midair. Throughout the film, Jim seems to me to be yearning for his mother and flirting with death. He is, as in the line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” “half in love with easeful Death,” and death and the mother seem united for him into a single ambiguous figure: death is the ultimate mother.
These two ideas—death and the mother—I also see conjoined in the climactic explosion of the atomic bomb. The scene, like so many key ones in the film, is dreamlike and takes place at dawn (the film favors twilight or dawn, transition states between sleeping and waking). A statue of a sleeping woman dissolves into Mrs. Victor lying on the ground; she has died during the night as she lay next to Jim. The sleep of the living thus changes imperceptibly into the sleep of death. Now he watches over this dead mother figure. Suddenly the diegetic sound (chirping birds) ceases and an eerie tinkling begins—reminiscent of the scene in Jim’s bedroom in part one—as the image of Mrs. Victor and Jim becomes solarized. The tinkling sound, perhaps produced by the wind blowing the crystal chandeliers in the stadium, continues as Jim looks upward, as he had done in the bedroom scene in part one. In an aerial shot, we see the stadium and a bright light growing on the horizon, like the creation of an artificial sun; a ring of light expands across the sky. As choral music rises, Jim looks up reverently at the light spreading across the sky, and exclaims, “Mrs. Victor!” Later he says that he thought the light was her soul ascending into heaven, and he compares the light to “God taking a photograph.” Mania often mimics the mystic’s sense of union with the divine.
The bomb explosion, like so many scenes in the film, is dreamlike. Although the Nagasaki explosion was witnessed hundreds of miles away, and Shanghai is 500 miles across the sea, the scene is presented in such a stylized way that the light could be taken as Jim’s imagination or hallucination. Spielberg says:
I wanted to draw a parallel story between the death of the boy’s innocence and the death of the innocence of the entire world. When the white light goes off in Nagasaki and the boy witnesses the light—whether he really sees it or his mind sees it doesn’t matter. Two innocents have come to an end and a saddened world has begun.29
The confrontation with the “Mystic Light” (a term used by Mircea Eliade) is a key scene in most Spielberg fantasy films as well: Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.30 The light can be either divine or demonic. The exploding atomic bomb in Empire resembles the light from the skies at the climax of Raiders, in which an angry, Old Testament God smites the unworthy but spares the hero.
One aspect of this dreamlike scene that seems to me psychologically noteworthy is that the white light coincides with the death of a mother figure, Mrs. Victor. I would suggest that Jim defends against his underlying fear of death and fear of the mother—fears which have become connected for him—through an apocalyptic fantasy of seeing the mother (and many others) devoured by a wrathful father. Thus the atomic bomb scene. And thus also the suggestive opening scene of the coffins pushed aside by the Japanese battleship.
The Japanese are stem, angry fathers whom Jim admires. He identifies with the aggressor, learns their language, and even earns the grudging respect of Sgt. Nagata, the camp commander, who honors Jim with the only English words he speaks in the film: “Boy—difficult boy.” But his identification with the Japanese, and later with the Americans, involves a disidentification with the British, which includes Jim’s own father.
Dr. Rawlins provides a substitute father in the camp for Jim, passing on lessons in British patriotism and liberal humanism: he also nervously rubs his upper lip, a gesture characteristic of Jim’s father. But Dr. Rawlins’s teachings do not seem entirely to take, and Jim is also drawn to the aggressiveness of the Japanese and the lessons in selfishness and survival of the scoundrel Basie. What takes place in the film is at first a dismantling of the image of the father, represented realistically by Jim’s losing his father and symbolically by the dismantling of the giant poster of Chiang Kai-shek by the Japanese. Jim then tries to create a substitute father out of the characteristics of the different men who surround him. It is a bewildering responsibility, and Jim grows confused as he loses the internal images of the parents to guide him: “I can’t remember what my parents look like.”
In this epic of loss, Jim loses not only the image of the parents but also his identity, his image of himself. Shortly after the atomic bomb explosion, the death of Jim’s childhood, innocent self is sealed by the murder of his Japanese friend by one of Basie’s gang. This teenage, would-be kamikaze pilot is Jim’s symbolic double: they are united across the barbed wire by a shared love of flying and death. As Jim desperately tries to revive his friend (another manic scene), he attempts to deny all his destructive wishes, to transform himself from a worshipper of the destructive war god into God the healer Himself. In Dr. Rawlins’s hospital, Jim believed he could raise the dead. Now he tries to undo his entire wartime experience. “I can bring everyone back. Everyone,” he chants over and over, expressing a belief in the omnipotence of wishes and words. Each time, as he bends to pump the boy’s chest, a lens flare crosses the image, caused by the light of the sun, which is associated in the film with mystic, divine power. Abruptly, the Japanese boy changes in Jim’s imagination into Jim’s innocent, schoolboy self of part one. But both the Japanese boy and little “Jamie” are hopelessly dead. Having lost his youthful innocence and ideals, he has nothing with which to replace them. In the final scene of reunion with his parents, he is so numbed that he behaves as if he were catatonic.
Bertram D. Lewin refers to mania as an expression of what he terms “the oral triad” of closely related unconscious wishes: the wish to devour, to be devoured, and to fall asleep. These wishes, he claims, are connected because they originate in the situation of the infant at the breast: first feeding, then relaxing, and finally falling asleep.
The manic state proper, with its overactivity and denials, is an attempted compromise between the wish to sleep and the wish to stay awake, i.e., to die and to live.... the overactive manic state salvages one component of the oral triad, the pleasure of active cannibal orality . . . and the active pleasure screens and denies the desire for the other components of the oral erotic triad.31
Lewin’s theory helps me as one way of understanding the closing scene: the war over, Jim’s manic defenses have finally broken down, and his hyperactivity has ceased. In its place is the underlying depression he was defending against. The depression is so extreme that it resembles catatonia. When he is finally reunited with his parents and held close to his mother’s breast, he is able to yield to the wishes he had attempted to deny through mania, the wishes to be devoured and to fall asleep. In the last image of Jim in the film, in extreme close-up, he closes his eyes. It is a compelling and psychologically apt conclusion to his journey; Jim has found not the peace of death that he feared but the peace of sleep at the mother’s breast.
I take the warfare in the film then, as being as much psychological as real, a projection outward of the boy’s internal struggles. That is the reason for the fantastic, dreamlike quality of the film: we are intended to perceive Empire of the Sun not so much as a realistic war movie but instead as primarily a boy’s dream of war. For most of the film, Jim is at war, seeking, but at the same time afraid of, the bliss of the maternal breast, which he associates with death. In defense, he indulges in manic denial and celebrates the cannibalistic, oral devouring of others in death by the cruel god of war, which could be considered both a projection of his own apocalyptic fantasies and a version of the father. The ambiguous psychological mixture of this dreamy, death-laden film about loss and the yearning for an absent mother seems to me best approximated by some lines from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning”:
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.32
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 3.
For negative reactions to Empire, see J. Hoberman, “Golden Boys,” The Village Voice, December 22, 1987, p. 102; Dave Kehr, “Steven Spielberg at the Crossroads,” San Francisco Examiner, January 16, 1988, B-2; and Pauline Kael, New Yorker, December 28, 1987, pp. 93-95. On the differences between the novel and the film, see Hoberman, pp. 85 and 102, and Kael, p. 94. For representative positive reviews, see “A Childhood Lost to War,” David Ansen, Newsweek, December 14, 1987, p. 83, and “The Man-Child Who Fell to Earth,” Richard Corliss, Time, December 7, 1987, p. 79. Empire was a box-office disappointment. It didn’t win any Oscars but was named Best Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review and made the year’s top ten lists of nearly 70 critics nationwide.
Spielberg, quoted by Myra Forsberg, “Spielberg at 40: The Man and the Child,” New York Times, December 9, 1987, p. 21.
Hoberman, “Golden Boys,” p. 102.
Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Home Movie Companion (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1989), p. 198.
Kehr, “Steven Spielberg,” p. B-2.
Spielberg, quoted by Forsberg, “Spielberg at 40,” pp. 21 and 30.
See note 1.
Empire of the Sun. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Based on the novel by J. G. Ballard. Screenplay Tom Stoppard. Photography Allen Daviau, Music John Williams, Exec. prod. Robert Shapiro, Prod. Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall. With Christian Bale and John Malkovich. Warner, 1987 (154 min., VHS). All other quotations from Empire come from this version of the film.
Hoberman, “Golden Boys,”p. 85.
Spielberg, quoted by Forsberg, “Spielberg at 40,” p. 21.
Kehr, “Steven Spielberg,” p. B-2.
Kael, p. 94.
On the relationship between play and war, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element on Culture (London: Routledge, 1949), pp. 89-104.
Ballard, Empire of the Sun, p. 278.
See John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss. Vol. III: Loss, Sadness, and Depression (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 27-28, 86-93.
Gerald Mast, Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience (New York: Harper, 1977), p. 127.
Robert T. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). Eberwein borrows the concept of “the dream screen” from the psychoanalyst Bertram D. Lewin.
Ballard, Empire of the Sun, p. 84.
Ballard, Empire of the Sun, p. 123.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (1921; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1960), p. 82.
Hoberman, “Golden Boys,” p. 85.
Spielberg, quoted in “Dialogue on Film: Steven Spielberg,” American Film, June 1988, p. 14.
Bertram D. Lewin, The Psychoanalysis of Elation (London: Hogarth, 1951), pp. 9, 92, 86, 57, and 102.
Ballard, Empire of the Sun, p. 204.
Lewin, Psychoanalysis, p. 74.
This translation was provided by a broadcast on NPR radio in December 1987.
Lewin, Psychoanalysis, p. 134.
Spielberg, quoted by Forsberg, “Spielberg at 40,” p. 21.
Thomas Lee Snyder, Sacred Encounters: The Myth of the Hero in the Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy Films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Diss., Northwestern University, 1984, Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986, 8423307. Snyder gets the concept of the “Mystic Light” from Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, vol. 2., ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper, 1976), p. 329.
Lewin, Psychoanalysis, pp. 142—43.
Wallace Stevens, Poems by Wallace Stevens, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Vintage, 1950), p. 9.
In the film adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, the same joke is played three times. The first time is in the American hut in the camp at Lunghua. “Hey kid, want a Hershey Bar?” an American prisoner asks Shanghai Jim, the protagonist. “Yes please,” he replies, always the polite well-brought up English child. “So do I kid,” the American quips.1 The second shows Jim after his victorious excursion outside the wire, marching to the hut. He plays the same joke on a little girl watching him go. The third occasion is near the end of the film when Basie, Jim’s American mentor in the art of survival, asks the question and this time actually throws a Hershey bar to Jim.
These small incidents, absent from the novel, serve to demonstrate some of the difficulties involved in the interpretation of film adaptations. The traditional analysis of a novel finds it easy to ascribe the elements within it to one particular mind or consciousness. We know that there may be certain features which are the product of the editor or publisher but in general we believe that what is in the novel is the intention of the author. There are difficulties with such an approach to film, not simply because film production is a more collective process, but also because it is a more industrial and commercial one. While it may not really matter if we call the film of Empire of the Sun Steven Spielberg’s (or for that matter Tom Stoppard’s, who wrote the screenplay)—we have problems if we are to speculate about the commercial and financial considerations involved in the production.
Although hidden for a long time, Hollywood is now openly admitting that product placement is a valid way of helping to finance a film production. We can speculate about the amount of money Spielberg may have received for the three endorsements of the Hershey bar—the product is actually mentioned by the two main characters and given a close-up “pack shot” at the end—but we are unlikely actually to know whether the Hershey bar is there as a piece of disguised advertising or whether it was intended by the director or screenwriter as a significant, symbolic item contributing to the overall meaning of the film.
In fact, as readers of the film we have no alternative but to accept the Hershey bar as significant. How do we interpret? If it were not for our suspicions of the commercial reasons for its inclusion we would think that it had a very meaningful place in the narrative. As it does not appear in the novel, we think the screenwriter or director must have deliberately chosen to place it in the film. It is not simply a throwaway joke, designed to add a bit of color or flesh out a character. Its repetition makes it a motif and suggests significance.
When the joke is first played on Jim he is trying to be accepted by the Americans around Basie. It is a cruel joke but one which Jim takes as a lesson in realism. When he does it to the little girl, it is a sign of his acceptance into the American group. When it happens near the end of the film it is a symbol of a return to normality, and a parting gift from Basie, weakening the final split between him and Jim, recuperating Basie once again, making him a likable rogue. The Hershey bar then points to one of the main alterations the film makes: the shifted emphasis onto the role of the Americans. To recoup its investment, an English-language film must appeal to the biggest English-speaking audience, the United States, which it does in this case by making the American presence much stronger than in the novel and by changing the character of Basie. Hollywood production values demand stars to sell movies and stars need starring roles. The shifts in the characters of Basie and Mrs. Victor, played by John Malkovich and Miranda Richardson, to accommodate this also alter the meanings of the text.
Ballard’s concerns are more aesthetic and ideological than commercial. In the introduction to the French edition of his 1974 novel, Crash, Ballard writes of his concern about the modern world and about the role of the writer.
The balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.2
The reality that Ballard invents in Empire of the Sun is a representation of World War II, different from the normal Euro/American perceptions, themselves partly created by cinema as history is rewritten by the victors in endless fictional replays. Jim’s illusions about war, and his gradual disillusionment, form the novel’s core, but a sense of unreality is at the heart of the book: a sense expressed in a nightmarish vision of bodies and death, which would not be out of place in a modern “visceral” horror movie.
The film adaptation of the novel avoids this sense of nightmare, replacing it with dreamlike surrealist sequences serving to show how attractive the war is to Jim, a great adventure, and thus avoiding the novel’s critical edge.
Although Empire is the closest Ballard has come to a conventional novel, it retains elements of the science fiction and horror which mark his other work. In the preface to Crash—at the time of writing the next film project of David Cronenberg, master of body horror and director of The Fly and Videodrome—Ballard claims that “science fiction represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century.” He attacks the mainstream modern novel, identifying its dominant characteristic as “its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the hallmark of 20th century consciousness.”3
Ballard denies that this is a true picture of twentieth-century consciousness, suggesting instead that the real subject matter of the mainstream novel is a rationalization of guilt and estrangement. But, he claims: “if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivete and a guilt free enjoyment of all the mind’s possibilities.”4
Ballard writes horrifically (in Crash he also writes pornographically) about the modem world as a warning to his readers. We have appropriated both the past and the future into our present, rewriting them, recreating them, trying out possible futures.
Towards the end of Empire of the Sun as print-text, the hero, Jim, walks out into the streets of Shanghai and sees three gigantic cinema screens endlessly replaying propaganda movies of battles fought and won in the Second World War. Cinema is one of the recurring motifs in the book. We first encounter Jim at the start of his war watching the same kinds of newsreels in the crypt of the Shanghai Anglican Cathedral. Such images pervade Jim’s dreams. References to films and cinema form a grotesque and ironic comment on the action in the novel; from the honor guard of fifty hunchbacks in medieval costume outside the cinema showing The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to the ironic giant poster showing the ransacking of Atlanta and Gable/Leigh from Gone with the Wind. Jim is imprisoned in an open-air cinema and his chauffeur is an actor in locally made films. Ballard’s style, indeed, reveals many cinematic techniques, from long, slow tracks through the streets of Shanghai, to dramatic cuts at the ends of chapters or sections.
The film makes some use of these references, at one point showing Jim, a tiny figure in his school uniform, against the giant poster of Gone with the Wind. Long, slow tracks follow Jim through the streets of Shanghai and around the house. But the film fails to draw out the full significance of the metaphor. Ballard’s references are reflections on the ways in which modern communications systems represent and create the realities we inhabit in the twentieth century.
Another recurring image in the novel is of coffins floating in the water of the Yangtze, surrounded by flowers, borne backwards and forwards on the tide. The novel begins and ends with this image. In the Ballard text, the meanings of the opening and closing passages cluster around the circularity of time. It is one of the main philosophical themes connecting with such images as Jim’s attempts at resurrecting the dead Belgian woman and the Japanese airman. It connects also to Jim’s perception that when one war ends another is beginning. Eastern conceptions of time are more cyclical, producing attitudes which the West, with its linear notions of time and progress, consider to be pessimistic. Jim’s experience of life and death and war teach him to experience life in this way as a means of coping with the horror which surrounds him.
Part of its strength is its narrative drive and rapid pacing and this is likely to pose problems for the adaptor of any novel. On the whole Stoppard/Spielberg’s version is excellent in its pacing, and the resulting loss of complexity, particularly in characterization, seems inevitable and perhaps not too much of a price to pay for narrative tautness and tension. The cropping of much of the middle section with Jim and Basie in the detention center and their trip to Lunghua, adds to the shift in power relations between Jim and Basie. Jim is a much stronger character in the novel, Basie a much weaker one, with Jim keeping Basie alive. When they drive around looking for a prison camp, it is Jim who liaises with the Japanese, who gets them water and food.
Jim assumes responsibility for the survival of many people in the novel, a process foreshadowed in his belief that his game with the flashlight and the Japanese destroyer started the war. Jim’s childish assumption of guilt is a reflection of the personal guilt which the twentieth-century individual accepts and Ballard’s narrative technique, where the point of view is almost exclusively the child’s, lets us reflect ironically on that.
Jim is confused about war. He was a spectator of the Japanese/Chinese war from the age of six. He recalls driving out to the battlefield at Hungjao with the other Europeans dressed in their Sunday best.
All around were the corpses of the dead Chinese soldiers, they lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches, beneath the burial mounds, hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.5
He is unsure when the war begins and when it ends. The European war which he sees on the newsreels and in his dreams began in 1939. It ends before his war ends. The armed gangs which roam the countryside after the defeat of the Japanese tell of other wars to come and the flash of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which Jim thinks he sees, is the beginning of a Cold War lasting more than forty years—a war which has only recently ended.
Ballard’s point is a political as well as a philosophical one. Those who write the histories may tell us the dates of the wars but the struggles for power and for survival are continuous. Time is cyclical for which the Western notion of linear progess is demonstrably inadequate. Ballard’s may be a more pessimistic message, but it is a truer one. The war did not end. We just changed enemies and friends.
The film cannot deal with such a fatalistic philosophy. It satisfies Hollywood’s demand for a happy ending by inventing a scene where Jim is reunited with his parents. The meaning of the print-text is reversed and the film becomes a celebration of individualism. Narrative closure suggests that the problems can be solved, the disruption of normality which began with the Japanese invasion, is over. Everything is back in its place and Jim has managed to survive and reap the reward of the return to family. The final shot of the film, Jim’s box floating among the coffins and garlands is a neat narrative rhyme but the meaning is entirely different from Ballard’s ending. Jim’s war life floats away in this coffin. His war personality is dead. He is once again Jamie, safe in his mother’s arms.
The film makes the loss and search for parents a major theme, foregrounding a psychological strand. Jim’s relationships with Dr. Rawlins, Basie, and with Mr. and Mrs. Victor are presented this way. His voyeurism becomes a kind of Freudian moment, another step in his adolescent growth towards manhood. While such relationships are there in the novel they are of minor importance.
The film also avoids the visual horror of the book. In the novel the countryside is dotted with burial mounds—corpses rise from earth washed away by the rains. Rats eat holes in the shallow mounds which cover the dead in Lunghua. Jim witnesses the beheading of Chinese peasants with the same disinterest with which he watches the newsreels. If Spielberg were to reflect this, the film would resemble a George Romero zombie movie. So Ballard’s nightmare vision is softened to a slightly disturbing but interesting dream.
But by avoiding references to the corpse-filled earth, the film also unbalances another major theme, Jim’s desire to fly. In the novel it can be read as a contrast to the reality of the earth in which he digs graves and buries the dead of the camp. It becomes symbolic of the human desire to rise above the material and the gross, to become godlike in a sense. That spiritual sense is linked to technology, both a bearer of death and a means of escape, and it offers one of the main optimistic notes of the novel. Despite the horror of life we have the capacity to transcend. Spielberg’s treatment of the theme, apart from Jim’s conversation with his mother early in the film where he asks if god lives in the sky, makes of it a more mundane symbol; a boy’s interest in aeroplanes, a link with his lost past which drives him over the edge during the Mustang attack on Lunghua airfield.
As earlier noted, Hollywood’s demands for stars requires the alteration of characters. Film’s economy of narrative makes similar demands. Mrs. Victor takes on the actions and roles of a number of other characters in the novel. Mrs. Philips on the walk from Nantao, Mr. Maxted, dying in Jim’s arms in the stadium. Spielberg has collapsed a number of different novel characters into the role of the young kamikaze pilot and in doing so has again shifted meaning. For Jim the Japanese are not enemies; their depiction in the novel is very far from the stereotyped ideas we have gained from war films like Bridge on the River Kwai. Jim admires their bravery and skill as pilots. He admires their codes of honor. It is the Japanese who feed him when he is wandering around Shanghai at the start of the war. He knows how to talk and act with them.
What is lost by the amalgamation of characters is a sense of the individualism and complexity of the Japanese. The film’s Sergeant Nagata becomes a stereotyped figure whom Jim can sometimes appease because he understands strange Japanese concepts like “face.” The boy pilot becomes much more closely identified with Jim. His friendship becomes part of the psychological theme of the film. He is like Jim in many ways, caught up in the horrors of war, with a boy’s desire to fly. Their similarity is emphasized in the opening shot of the second section when we see the silhouette of a figure running and flying a toy plane and we only gradually come to realize that it is not Jim. That identity is reinforced when Jim tries to pump life back into the shot pilot and in a hallucinatory point of view shot we see him working on his own younger body. Jim’s resurrective powers in the film are thus directed inwardly to try to recreate the happy state of lost childhood. In the novel they are directed outward. Jim wishes to resurrect everyone. In the novel the incident fits into a wider theme that life is more than the personal. Earlier Jim knew that inmates of Lunghua were dead though they remained on their feet and walking. Now he knows that they can be brought back to life. There are cycles of return rather than linear beginnings and ends.
If the representation of the Japanese suffers because of the demands of film and the representation of the Americans is more positive because of the demands of audience, what happens to the other nationalities in translation? Ballard’s description of Shanghai is historically accurate when he describes the prewar international community. Many other Europeans are present in the novel, but the film only concentrates on the British presence.
One scene shows the alteration particularly well. Again there is a masterly economy of narrative and again it shifts meanings in important ways. There is an almost surrealist sequence when Jim and his parents drive through the market on the way to a fancy dress Christmas party and from the “screen” of the car we see strange images of fascists and bar girls and sailors and a nun and the boy “No mama, no papa, no whisky soda.” The parallels are drawn with thick lines. The English in their carriages, dressed up and on their way to the party through the teeming crowds of Chinese being beaten by the police, are shown as bewildered outsiders who cannot understand the reality of their situation. Jamie is in Sinbad costume—a stranger on a strange voyage in a strange and magical land; his mother in a white Pierrot costume, his father rakish as a pirate—reminding us of the origins of the Tai Pans’ wealth. In other cars we see someone dressed as a clown, someone as a Chinese mandarin, and the last shot is of powdered, bewigged French eighteenth-century aristocrats. Like Marie Antoinette, they do not understand how history is about to roll over them.
The scene is followed by one at the party in which the racism and complacency of the English are displayed. We meet the only real Chinese character in the film and see the ridiculous English “gentleman” in grass skirt and dinner jacket making offensive remarks about “Chinks.” The sequence is followed by one in which Jim confronts a Japanese soldier and we learn from the old hand, Mr. Maxton, that you should not run when faced with the Japanese but be calm. Spielberg undercuts this display of knowledge. Maxton does not realize the threat from the Japanese. He talks of it being time to leave, time to go somewhere safe—“like Singapore.” The irony of the remark, on the eve of Pearl Harbor as we have been told at the beginning, serves to reinforce a picture of the British as unrealistic, existing in a dream world.
The organization of the novel’s narrative, with Jim as the focalizer—where his perceptions and thoughts form a lens through which we see the world—allows for the development of an ironic perception in the reader. To take one example, when Jim thinks that the war is over and the Japanese have won after the takeover of Shanghai, we allow ourselves amusement at his naivete. At the same time we are invited to reflect on a main theme of the novel: When do wars begin and when do they end? Who writes the histories and allocates the dates and from whose point of view are the histories written?
Similar distancing processes happen in Jim’s perceptions of other nationalities. Europeans are simply there, part of his natural life, their role only vaguely questioned by Jim, his eleven-year-old mind more concerned with the pattern the tire makes running over the foot of the beggar who sits outside the door of his parents’ house than in reflecting on relations of power and wealth.
For Jim, Basie’s nationality is a minor aspect of his character. More important is his knowledge, skill, and will to survive. For Jim too, the Chinese are not to be dismissed in stereotyped descriptions. They have an elemental and mysterious quality, a tide washing back and forth, their bodies sprouting out of the ground and floating down the river. The Chinese are a part of the landscape as inevitable as death. Nationality is another small illusion measured against the more vast truths of life and death and history. The players of this historical game are as circumscribed and rule governed as the Chinese peasant victims.
For Spielberg, the strangeness of the Japanese serves to connote all the problems of understanding Eastern culture and references to the Chinese are minimal. We see them in their thousands, but they are a mere backdrop to Jim’s adventures; they have no effect on the narrative.
In the Spielberg/Stoppard version the discourses of national identity are not so much inflected as deflected. In Ballard’s, when we again encounter Jim in Lunghua, the camp is in a much more desperate situation than in the film. All British community spirit has been dissipated by hunger and illness. Faced with the realities of life, British culture—Shakespeare readings, lecture programs—has disintegrated proving no bastion against the basic realities of disease, hunger, and death. It is the poverty of this explanation of the world, this British way of thought, the inability to cope with real life situations, to which Ballard draws our attention. Jim has to go elsewhere for his lessons in survival.
Naming the sewage stained paths between the rotting huts after a vaguely remembered London allowed too many of the British prisoners to shut out the reality of the camp, another excuse to sit back when they should have been helping Dr Ransome to clear the septic tanks.... The years in Lunghua had not given Jim a high opinion of the British.6
The film has to show the disintegration of the British stiff upper lip in a more collapsed time than the novel. In the opening sequence to the second part of the film we are introduced to the camp, major themes are reiterated, characters reintroduced and developed. But—and here we are tempted to speculate again about the commercial pressures which shape the film’s narrative—Jim’s ultimate goal on his journey around the camp is the American hut. The picture we get of the camp is initially relatively pleasant. Prisoners are still practicing amateur drama, a vegetable garden is being tended, there is organization—even, in the American hut, a kind of escape committee making compasses from needles, corks, and bowls of water.
In the novel all optimism has long disappeared and what’s left seems much closer to the kind of passive acceptance of death which we were earlier shown as a Chinese trait. It is Jim’s will to survive and his belief in his own miraculous resurrective powers which are the focus of the narrative. In the film, Jim’s hope rests on the pragmatism of the Americans. The planned escape, Jim’s scouting through the wire, its dangers, and the heroism mark a rite of passage, the reward being to bunk with the big boys. The film does not present the Americans as simplistically heroic. The sequence in which the whole American hut watches Jim and bets on his life or death is chillingly satirical within the narrative context of the film and read as a wider metaphor for America’s capitalist spirit.
Nevertheless, we are invited, with Jim the focalizer of discourse as well as narrative, to admire the pragmatism of the Americans and to contrast it with the illusions of the British with their insistence on learning dead and useless knowledge, the Latin verbs which Jim rattles off.
Towards the end of the film more ambiguous readings are invited. The “fridges from the sky” can be read as symbols. While American consumerist abundance saves the day, it also marks the kind of intervention in Far Eastern (and world) politics which America was to develop from the end of the war.
Such a political reading is correct in one sense. It points to the real power relations which existed in the East after the war, but it is correct from a narrow, historical perspective refused by Ballard. By avoiding national stereotypes of British and Americans, certainly of Japanese and perhaps less successfully of the Chinese who still seem a little “inscrutable,” Ballard takes us to a deeper historical truth about the differences which exist between the philosophies and ideologies of the East and West. He suggests that the failure of understanding condemns us to the continuation of war. As indeed it did and does.
Contrast the final chapter of the novel again with the final scenes of the film. Spielberg’s personalization of the war, as Jim’s psychological loss of his parents, his search for substitutes, and his eventual tearful reunion with them, have nothing to do with Ballard’s conclusion. Jim’s parents don’t actually reappear in the novel. He refers to them but they are “off stage.” He is cool and dispassionate about them. The Jim of the final chapter is much more grown up than the shattered, broken child of the film. And what does he watch in the novel? American and British sailors urinating on Chinese.
Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge.7
Spielberg’s Seventh Cavalry intervention to save the crazy cycling Jim satisfies conventional audience demands and is more likely to provoke narrative relief than ideological questioning.
To some extent this indicates the problems and opportunities for the filmmaker in the late twentieth century. We now live in a world where audiences are “superliterate.” The community of shared knowledge of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was tiny compared to that of today and that community of knowledge is no longer restricted to a small, literate, educated class fragment. Film and television, mass publishing of novels and magazines, mean that there are shared representations of events, peoples, and histories. There are also shared narrative codes, expectations of how a story should be told. The liberating aspect of this is that an author, an artist, a director can now quote, through reference to shared cultural icons, a whole complex of ideas and feelings by the use of one reference. (In linguistic terms, a shift from the iconic to the symbolic.)
An image of Marilyn Monroe no longer merely represents a specific person; it is full of meanings. Her whole life history, her roles in films, her tragedy and public life, her value as a symbol for women can all, potentially, be invoked. Agglomerations of meaning can be manipulated through such a sign, given new contexts and thus new meanings. The problematic side is how to cope with the audience’s sophisticated expectations of a text. In our context what does a writer do with the readers’ expectations of the prison camp novel or film? You can ignore them and try to describe the camp in a way not tried before. But ignoring audience expectations not only threatens the popularity of the text but can also avoid ideological and political engagement. Past representations of the world are political constructions. To avoid confronting Tenko and Colditz and The Great Escape is to seal the text hermetically and is very unlikely to be successful. Ballard is successful in dealing with our prison camp narrative expectations. The failed attempts of the British to maintain their cultural identity are not given narrative precedence. Instead Jim’s rapid disintegration is presented in nonnationalistic (as well as less Freudian) terms. He is a human being and his disintegration holds a universal message. His thoughts and feelings are not simply those of an English boy, but those of us all in similar extremes.
Empire of the Sun—produced and directed by Steven Spielberg ©1987. Distributed by Warner Bros. Available on Warner Home Video.
J. G. Ballard. Crash, London: Triad/Panther, 1985, p. 8.
Ballard, Crash, p. 6.
Ballard, Crash, p. 6.
J. G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun, London: Grafton, 1985, p. 32.
Ballard, Empire of the Sun, pp. 167-68.
Ballard, Empire of the Sun, p. 351.