60 chApter one
cripple.” Citing the final scene of the 1949 psychoanalytic film Home of the
Brave, directed by Mark Robson, Fanon writes: “The crippled war veteran
of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your color the way
I got used to my stump; we’re both victims’ ” (1967c, 140). Fanon responds
to his own citation of the film by declaring that “with all my strength I
refuse to accept that amputation.” (And interestingly here, the racially un-
marked body of the cripple produces an understanding for the reader that
the body of the cripple is a white body.)
Fanon’s gloss on this film is not incidental, since Home of the Brave is
among Hollywood’s inaugural engagements with race and war, and since
the film revolves around the psychoanalytic treatment of a black patient,
Private Peter Moss (played by James Edwards). Moss is a topography spe-
cialist in the army undergoing psychoanalysis (not coincidentally, by a Jew-
ish analyst played by Jeff Corey) for a psychosomatic condition that has
paralyzed him from the waist down in the aftermath of a secret mission
on a Japanese- invaded island on the Pacific Ocean (fig. 1.1). We come to
learn through flashbacks that Moss has witnessed the death of Finch, his
only white friend and ally. As viewers we believe that Moss’s paralysis is the
result of guilt born from Moss’s repudiation of his interracial friendship
when, just before his friend is shot, Finch (despite his antiracist desires)
calls Moss a “yellow- bellied nigger.” The killing of his ally at the hands of
the Japanese enemy (an enemy that remains a dangerous though altogether
invisible presence in the film) becomes a convenient offing at the moment
that the white friend betrays his own racism. Through the doctor’s narco-
synthetic treatment (injections that prompt the patient to relive his trau-
matic experiences), we come to believe that Moss is paralyzed by the guilt
of disavowing his friend at the moment before death.
What the analyst finally reveals, however, is that Moss’s paralysis is not
a result of guilt born from racism but about the guilt of feeling relief when
it is his best friend and not he who is killed in war. The analyst therefore
reorients the orientation specialist, curing Moss’s paralysis by pointing
him toward a universal response to war that is detached from racial poli-
tics. At the end of the film, Moss is sent home with Sergeant Mingo (Frank
Lovejoy). Mingo is a new amputee who has lost his right arm, having been
shot on the island with Moss. Throughout the film, Mingo has been rather
apathetic to the problem of racism on which the film hinges. In the final
scene, however, as the two men wait to be escorted back to the United