The Talkies/Poltroon
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES POLTROON by Bruce Bawer T he parking lot outside the Wadsworth Theater was filled with Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, and BMWs. "Gee," 1 said, "Beverly Hills must be empty tonight." "A lot...
...Syria is in constant conflict with Turkey and has vowed to annex the Turkish region of Alesandretta, "as soon as we settle the score with the Zionist enemy...
...The enemy was in us...
...Largely, I think, because the protagonist was one of them...
...In Syria, an officer corps dominated by the minority Alawites suppresses dissent with mass murder...
...Then he added that he was confident that the "liberal thaw" presently underway in the USSR would result in a spate of films by Soviet filmmakers critical of the Soviet role in Afghanistan...
...Just as "The Day After" was used to support arguments in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament, so Platoon is meant in part as an argument against American involvement in Vietnam—and, by extension, an argument against our involvement in Central America...
...Oliver Stone, in a revealing article that appears in the January/February issue of American Film, remembers himself as a "solitary, wide-eyed youth standing under those raggedy Asiatic clouds, looking out at the sea with . . . fantasies of Lord Jim and Julie Christie . . .") All that is clear is that Chris had no idea war was so icky...
...A young lady then offered the opinion that the end of the picture was too didactic...
...Ronald Reagan's 1984 inauguration . ALSO . . . rare film footage of the Hiss-Chambers hearings . . . the young Richard Nixon . . . Hollywood union chief Ronald Reagan...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 35...
...There were one or two folks who had complaints...
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...I didn't think it was anti-American," declared a middle-aged man who sounded as if he was ready to take on the entire state of Georgia, and Alabama too...
...Blacks are routinely kept as slaves in Saudi Arabia...
...as body bags containing the remains of American soldiers lie waiting on the tarmac to beloaded onto a plane, a number of young men who have come to take their place—including our hero, Chris Taylor (played by Charlie Sheen, son of Martin)—step down for the first time onto Asian soil...
...and on not being from Georgia...
...Sergeant Barnes (his face disfigured by a gruesome wound) is unspeakably evil, a human exterminator whose dedication to destroying the enemy knows no bounds...
...It's being kept alive by those whose political purposes it serves...
...This week there was a "bonus screening," which meant that the students could bring guests...
...It tirelessly works to overthrow the regime in Baghdad...
...Arab violence against the Jews, inside and outside Israel, is common knowledge...
...the Nazis'?] it's about time we got ours kicked...
...Besides, as Chris explains to a black member of his platoon named King (Keith David), the poor always do most of the fighting in wars...
...His latest book, The Contemporary Stylist, has just been published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...New authors welcomed...
...None of these conflicts has anything to do with Israel...
...All of this fury would continue unabated if Israel did not exist...
...Indeed, that rich boy was not only the film's protagonist but its moral conscience...
...10001 THE ONSER V A 11 IV ES As shown on PBS Order now...
...Most powerfully of all, the film evokes the terrible suspensefulness of a progress through the jungle, the suddenness with which a few clumps of leaves can turn out to be a horde of armed and camouflaged Vietcong,-the utter chaos of the ensuing combat, and the apparent randomness with which bullets in the night find their marks, booby traps find their victims, the Angel of Death finds his prey...
...A man with a cane, who politely identified himself (to the immediate derision of the crowd) as a conservative, asked whether it bothered Stone that Platoon might persuade young American men that their country wasn't worth serving, and whether he thought such a film could be made in the Soviet Union about, say, the Soviet war in Afghanistan...
...The extraordinary story of the conservative movement—told through rare historic film footage, photographs and the firsthand recollections of those who made it happen • Barry Goldwater • William F. Buckley • Jeane Kirkpatrick • Russell Kirk • Clare Boothe Luce • Milton Friedman • Patrick Buchanan • Phyllis Schlafly • Art Laffer . . . and many more...
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...Now you can re-live these dramatic events as you watch the actual films of: • Barry Goldwater: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...
...His expectations of Vietnam have been sharply contradicted by reality, but exactly what those expectations were and how he came by them is never explained...
...A lot of rich folks come to these things," my sister replied...
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...Virtually every Arab leader has been the target of assassination...
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...Both films are symphonies of death, full of graphically depicted corpses, many of them mutilated, many of them children's...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work and for these messages...
...Virtually every Arab state has been in armed and bloody conflict with its Arab neighbors...
...Though Stone does take pains to portray intelligent, well-meaning Americans who feel otherwise, the ultimate message in both films is that America's military presence in places like Vietnam and Central America serves only to make the lives of the local peasantry more miserable and tragic—it's the powerful rich destroying the lives of the helpless poor...
...To say this is not to deny that the film, which follows the fortunes of Chris and his platoon over a period of several months, is extremely effective in many ways...
...since 1 was in town, my sister had invited me...
...King isn't impressed by this talk: "Shit, you gotta be rich in the first place to think like that...
...there have been times when "I felt like a child of those two father...
...Thanks largely to Robert Richardson's fine cinematography, Claire Simpson's editing, and Yves De Bono's special effects, Platoon—whichwas shot on location in the Philippines—is a genuine triumph of atmosphere...
...I feel as if 1 should get a Purple Heart"), how drained they felt, how eye-opening it was, how much it had taught them, how much better they understood things now...
...or your money back...
...This ad has been published and paid for by Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America PO...
...For all its sheer cinematic effectiveness, then, Platoon, considered as a serious statement on Vietnam, amounts to nothing more than a high-priced piece of faulty logic...
...Chris, we are led to understand, has turned his back on his real father—an Establishment type, apparently, who wanted him to stay in college—but in his platoon he finds two antithetical father figures, both of whom strain credibility...
...He informed us that all the members of Chris's platoon were based on people with whom he had served in Vietnam, and explained that he had helped his actors to capture the sound, the bearing, even the look of real jungle-weary soldiers—which they had captured, remarkably so, down to that chilling, half-mad look in the eyes—by making them dig their own foxholes, making them sleep in those foxholes, You deserve a factual look at . . . "The Palestinian Problem": Is it the cause for unrest in the Middle East...
...Stone suggested that many viewers, especially in places like Georgia, would consider Platoon anti-American...
...It is being kept alive by the PLO and others who, for their own political purposes, wish to keep this matter unresolved...
...Domestic violence is a constant in the Arab world...
...l'm probably gonna do something about Wall Street," he replied, to the crowd's delighted whoop of laughter and applause...
...The films are introduced by the course's "professor," film critic Stephen Farber...
...Patently, it made these affluent people feel virtuous to applaud Stone's indictment of America, and of the American rich, in particular, for sending poor boys to do their fighting for them—and yet they felt comfortable applauding these sentiments because they were voiced by a rich boy who himself (if we take the liberty of identifying Chris with Oliver Stone) returned home, after the war, to be the big success that his parents wanted him to be...
...Well, you're obviously a liberal," he said, and the man beamed proudly...
...Most of the other "students" laughed affectionately and applauded, congratulating themselves on being liberals...
...Apropos of Barnes and Elias, hesays that since the war...
...The Palestinian problem is only one of the many conflicts in the area...
...Somebody asked Stone what his next project was...
...Both of them pretend to be contributing to intellectual discourse upon a significant issue, when all that they actually have to offer is a searing visceral experience that sheds no light on anything...
...Only that war is hell—which these presumably well-educated adults should already have known...
...Saudi Arabia-spreads largess in order to appease all potential enemies...
...Platoon's logic was much the same as that used by anti-nuke propagandists in connection with the television film "The Day After": just as "The Day After" presented an uncompromisingly realistic picture of the possible consequences of nuclear war, so Platoon assaults its audience with a ground soldier's view of Vietnam...
...Actually, the screenings are the course...
...Yet it presses territorial claims against the smaller states of the Gulf...
...When Elias speaks, we are meant to take his word as gospel—and this is where one's problems with the movie really begin...
...Such a documentary is horrifyingly overdue I can think of no better producer than Neal Freeman, whose talent I have observed for over twenty years...
...But Berbers, Kurds, Copts, Circassians, Christians, and Blacks are mercilessly persecuted and, where possible, bloodily exterminated...
...Stone himself, born in New York City, attended Yale for a year before going to Nam—first as a teacher, then as a soldier...
...Libya has clashed with Egypt, Tunisia, and the Sudan...
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...He wants to serve his country,wants to learn something about Life, and wants to be "anonymous...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 and allowing them only two or three hours of sleep each night during the weeks of filming...
...T o be sure, the film did have a stunning immediacy, perhaps unparalleled in any other war movie...
...Please send me copies of the 90-minute videotape "The Conservatives" at $79.95 plus $4 postage and handling...
...By the end of the film we've seen not only atrocities but more than one incident of "fragging" (the deliberate killing of one American soldier by another), the attempted rape of a little girl, and an unnerving nocturnal battle in which so many men are killed that, in the morning, a bulldozer must be used to scoop their bodies into a ditch...
...Outside, members of his Happy and noble peasant army sing "el futuro sera nuestrd' ("the future will be ours...
...Stone does a magnificent job of re-creating the experience of the typical foot soldier in the Vietnam bush: the jungles, swamps, mud, and rain, the leeches, insects, and snakes, the pounding music and mind-altering drugs, the friction between blacks and whites, the contrast between the wholesome, inexperienced, college-boy lieutenant and the tough, haunted-looking "grunts...
...Stone replied, "I like it that way...
...The Conservatives" is a living history of some of the most memorable events of our times—more vivid than any book...
...Barnes, as enacted by an almost unrecognizable Tom Berenger, rather reminds one of the sick foul-mouth played by Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet—the difference, of course, being that Hopper meant to be excessive to the point of self-parody...
...ing that Stone had himself been a soldier in Vietnam, that Stone was a "left-of-center" director whose intention in all of his films was to "epater le bourgeoisie," and that tonight's flick—which, as Stone would later affirm, was highly autobiographical—would be "abrasive," "disquieting," and "disturbing...
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...We fought ourselves...
...William F. Buckley ". . . a fast-paced and thoroughly absorbing account of the conservative movement . fascinating.—William Rusher, Newspaper Enterprise Association To order, use coupon below or call 800/247-5256 during business hours "The Conservatives...
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...Iraq is one of the most aggressive, and though at present much concerned with its war with Iran, spews subversion and terrorism against its Arab neighbors...
...The root causes of upheaval in the Arab world are the Arabs' radicalism, their religious fundamentalism, and their xenophobic hatreds...
...Its purpose is to combat media inaccuracies, through public education and publicity...
...They believe that if this problem could be solved, peace and tranquility would prevail in this troubled area...
...The six-year war shows no sign of abating...
...E The record of aggression by Arabs against non-Arab states is as bloody...
...the film seeks to identify him with Christ...
...At movie's end, as Chris—twice wounded, like Oliver Stone, and therefore free to return home—ascends from the scene of carnage in a helicopter, he tells us in a heavily didactic voice-over that "We did not fight the enemy...
...And he concludes by saying that it has been his aim, since the war, to try "to find a goodness and meaning to this life...
...they're "the best I've ever seen, Grandma—the heart and soul...
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...Tonight's treat was a Vietnam war movie called Platoon, and the evening's guest was its writer and director, Oliver Stone...
...PLUS Ronald Reagan in an exclusive interview, telling his own story from his historic 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater to his triumphant victory as Republican presidential candidate in 1980...
...It's September of 1967 and we are on an airstrip in Vietnam...
...Farber prepared us for Stone's newest effort by explainBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...In February 1982, President Assad's forces killed up to 25,000 civilians in the city of Hama and, according to The New York Times, "turned half the town into a parking lot...
...Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley debating the Panama Canal Treaty...
...Though Stone's political position is not as explicit here as in his previous film, Salvador—a "fictionalized" story about an American photojournalist in 1980 El Salvador—Platoon and its predecessor have much in common...
...Then the audience began putting in its two cents...
...Chris Taylor might well have been their own spoiled Ivy League brat, off on an ill-advised idealistic tear...
...It perceived post-revolutionary Iran as weak and ripe for plunder...
...It is one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent world history...
...The Coppola and Cimino films, he said, were symbolic in their approach...
...Presumably the Peace Corps was full...
...Morocco and Algeria are constantly at each other...
...and the Westwood audience—possessed of an irresponsi ble, self-congratulatory variety of pacifism that was barely distinguishable from est or TM or any of a dozen other self-indulgent, quasi-religious, feel-good-about-yourself California movements—loved every minute of it...
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...The two Yemens regularly war with each other...
...We're gonna lose this war," Elias tells Chris...
...20036 ^ YES...
...One after another, the Beverly Hills types stepped up to the microphones at the front of the auditorium to tell...
...What are the facts...
...This was one movie that had found its audience in record time...
...In short, the hypocrisy of Platoon was breathtaking...
...Platoon opens with an epigraph from Ecclesiastes which is obviously intended to carry bitter irony: "Rejoice 0 young man in thy youth...
...The "Palestinian problem" could have been solved almost 40 years ago...
...Yet even before Chris has seen any combat action, his illusions have begun to be shattered...
...But what does either of these films really prove...
...Stone how powerful his film was ("I feel as if 1 was there,"said a slim, bearded gent who looked disturbingly like New York magazine's John Leonard...
...Conflict is endemic in the Middle East...
...Chris has volunteered for several reasons...
...In reply to another audience member's question, Stone compared Platoon to two other Vietnam war films, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter...
...For Chris, in other words, going to war is in large part a rich boy's way of rebelling against Daddy and of escaping—only temporarily, of course—from the oppression of wealth...
...Since the outbreak of open civil war about ten years ago, as many as 200,000 people have died—with no end in sight...
...We were in Westwood, city of Los Angeles...
...And this is only the beginning...
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...But what, 1 reflected, could Platoon really have "taught" anybody about war in general or Vietnam in particular...
...Both are relatively plotless and are filmed in a brilliantly effective faux-documentary style...
...And so it was, right from the git-go...
...B ut if the harrowing mise en scene of Platoon strikes one as astonishingly realistic, the plotting too often seems romantic, even melodramatic, and at least a couple of the characters are absurdly one-dimensional...
...More applause and warm laughter...
...W hen Platoon ended, the Westwood crowd applauded enthusiastically, and it applauded again when Stephen Farber brought Oliver Stone onstage...
...his film was "realistic...
...In the heart of the Middle East, Syria constantly threatens Jordan...
...Plainly, Stone is going to spend his life trying to atone for being born rich...
...Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), whose years in Vietnam have left him disillusioned, is almost saintly...
...Its designs on Lebanon are well-known...
...one even had the feeling, at times, that though it assailed capitalism and wealth, Platoon was informed by the perhaps unconscious assumption that a rich white boy's moral sense is likely to be superior to that of the average poor black boy...
...The slaughter of the ancient Assyrian community in Iraq, the cruel fate of over 500,000 Blacks in Southern Sudan, and the forcible resettlement of over 200,000 Kurds are a few examples of this never-ending bloodshed...
...Both show American (or American-supported) soldiers killing peasants for being "Communists"—in parts of the world where, according to Stone's way of thinking, words like democracy and Communism don't really mean anything...
...You'll want to keep it forever, to show your family now, and to pass down to your children and grandchildren as a keepsake of the years you lived through...
...Violence is a fact of political life in the Arab world...
...Not a thing...
...Stone replied that he considered himself a patriotic American, and quoted Gore Vidal on the real meaning of patriotism...
...Stone—whose attitude throughout the ensuing half hour or so would best be described as smug—offered some inside dope: he said that he had written the film in 1976, had been unable to interest an American studio in making it, and had finally secured financing from an English company...
...Almost like real people...
...Disconcertingly, Stone spoke of the hardships he imposed upon his actors with an almost sadistic glee, so that one had the feeling that, his anti-war rhetoric notwithstanding, there was a part of him that positively reveled in the role of drill sergeant, in the idea of putting a cast of- pampered young actors through some tough paces—a part that reveled, indeed, in war itself...
...II But the Arabs reserve their most aggressive fury against the non-Arabs living among them...
...rr here are those who think that the so-called "Palestinian problem" is the cause for 1 unrest, turmoil, and slaughter in the Middle East...
...The record shows that...
...Clearly, the great majority of the audience was in love with both Stone and his movie...
...It's just one of its many manifestations...
...I think 1 made a big mistake coming here, Grandma," he writes, his tone that of a Yalie who has foolishly chosen to spend his junior year abroad in London rather than Paris...
...Yet why were these affluent folks in the Westwood auditorium so struck by the film...
...Chris thinks the rich should do their part, too...
...Hiss is lying...
...afterwards, Farber appears onstage in the company of someone connected with the film, and the "students" ask questions...
...More applause...
...Whittaker Chambers: "Mr...
...Egypt occupied Yemen for eight years...
...Kuwait worries about Iraq, which claims it in its entirety...
...Libya has invaded Chad...
...What makes this callow boy's point of view so problematical is that it is also the film's point of view: King's sardonic remark notwithstanding, Stone does not regard either Chris's initial rich-boy illusions about war, or his subsequent facile moralizing about it, with the slightest hint of objectivity...
...It is involved in subversion and conspiracy on a global scale...
...Chris's early communications to Grandma are almost impossibly starry-eyed and idealistic: he's thrilled to be serving alongside the "poor" and "unwanted...
...Feuding sects in that unhappy country have battled each other for centuries...
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...Prior to Platoon, Stone had written or co-written Scarface, The Year of the Dragon, Midnight Express, and Conan the Barbarian, and had written and directed Salvador...
...Iraq, of course, is a special case...
...Chris—who, out of sheer exhaustion, tension, and fear, has come close himself to committing an atrocity or two—writes Grandma that he's losing his strength, his sanity, his sense of right and wrong...
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...After Barnes and a protege named Bunny (played by Matt Dillon's kid brother Kevin) bloodthirstily waste a couple of peasants during a search for VC in a remote village, and Elias forcibly prevents them from committing further atrocities, the platoon begins to break into pro-Barnes and pro-Elias camps...
...Just as Stone romanticizes Sergeant Elias in Platoon, so in Salvador he romanticizes a leader of the rebel army who, standing in his tent before a portrait of Marx and Lenin, tells a group of journalists that "the will of the people and the march of history cannot be changed—not even by the norteamericanos...
...Our overhead is minimal...
...It's not the cause of this violence...
...Chris, who narrates the movie in a series of voice-over excerpts from successive letters to his grandmother, is a rich white boy who has dropped out of college and, against his parents' wishes, has volunteered for the infantry...
...And then, of course, there is Lebanon...
...We had driven over the Santa Monica Mountains from the San Fernando Valley to this theater in the Veterans Administration complex, where my sister attends weekly screenings of about-to-be-released films as part of an extension course she takes at UCLA...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 33 (Apparently you don't have to read All Quiet on the Western Front or the poetry of Wilfred Owen to get into Yale...
...Stone grinned...
...Hearty applause from the audience...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
