PLATOON: OF HEROES AND DEMONS

...It is a memoir that begins in romance and descends into irony...

...It is, in any case, through the image of such rites of passage that Platoon, ironically, continues to inform us of the romantic possibilities of war...

...Stone tracks this journey through the device of letters directed to the hero's grandmother...

...Newsweek put it nicely in its cover story of January 26: "Platoon: Vietnam As It Really Was...

...But the focus of Stone's own highly literate and sophisticated romanticism was not Audie Murphy or John Wayne...

...At several levels of meaning, the claim is powerfully descriptive and just: the violence the soldier finds lurking in himself...

...IT IS IN THESE IRONIC REVERSALS that Platoon finds its clearest and most powerful voice...

...Platoon meditates and allegorizes on similar themes...

...But Stone has extracted a tiny existential slice of that immense and jumbled history and buried the camera in it...

...It seems obvious now, but until Stone no one approached the war in quite this way, at least on film...

...Shortly before Sergeant Barnes leads the platoon on a murderous rampage in a Vietnamese hamlet, Stone suddenly thrusts us into the world of Moby Dick...

...the invisible and finally unavailable enemy, revealed in the open, and apart from the nervous gaze of the Americans, only once in the entire film...

...There are difficulties, as well, with the broader moral and political claims of Platoon, condensed in Chris Taylor's final reflection...

...And it does so, I think, in the manner in which Stone concludes his narrative...

...for to "remember," as Stone urges us so strenuously to do, could not, I take it, mean to withdraw even further into the bag of mythology which we manage so easily to wrap around us...

...Finally, there is the film's apocalyptic conclusion, itself a parody of Coppola's, where recognition and transformation blaze forth in a furious rush of images of destruction and rebirth...

...As a piece of storytelling, it also opens out upon all those other stories it implicitly evokes, challenges or undermines, telling us something interesting and even useful in the process about our collective representations...

...More graphically, the film ends shortly after Taylor has brutally executed Barnes...

...For Melville knew and wrote a good deal about demons...

...Platoon is essentially a war memoir...

...This is consistent both with things Stone has said about his own preoccupation with Vietnam and with certain qualities of the film itself...

...The Vietnam War was indeed a screened event, and it lingers exactly like a movie in the mind, inseparable from the images by which it came to us around dinner, or wedged between Bonanza and the late night show...

...The wisdom of the hero is always dearly bought, but in this case, Platoon suggests, it may not be worth the price...

...Even more significantly, perhaps, it is this irony that leads to the subdued but noteworthy political perspective of Platoon...

...But Platoon is nonetheless a piece of fiction, and one, moreover, that is guided by a series of quite specific, and nonrealistic, literary and cinematic conventions...

...In the very center of this microcosmic community stand two sergeants, Elias and Barnes, the personifications of good and evil, and the foci of Taylor's longings, temptations, and rage...

...Significantly, it is an image perfectly consistent with Stone's personal biography, recast and reinterpreted in the figure of Chris...

...Just remember what that war was...

...And Herr is surely right that many of those who fought in Vietnam cut their teeth on Audie Murphy and John Wayne, who were our Achilles and Aeneas, ancient longings in modern form...

...At the same time he wins a kind of victory in forcing Chris to become his double...

...It is a fable based upon the soldier's story, the personal report of one who went, survived, and 383 came back to share his vision...

...There is, as I have said, a very striking criticism of American political culture implicit in Platoon, a criticism that attempts to couple the highly rationalized language of foreign policy with the darker impulses of our historic demonology...

...She might become the dictatress of the world...

...Chris drops into the bloody inferno of war, does combat with real and imaginary enemies, and finally emerges, transfigured, in the final sequence...

...He realizes almost immediately that his romantic longings, and the war they have brought him to, will have terrible consequences, grotesquely out of proportion to his expectations...

...Both writer and speaker intend this remark on the level of biography, as a symbol of the battle waged between the murderous and binding impulses in Taylor's soul...

...Remember what war is...

...Abstract psychology is here reconnected to history...

...Stone eschews blatant ideological perspectives, of right or left...

...We didn't fight the enemy in Vietnam," he has Taylor conclude, "we fought ourselves...

...But it is a treacherous point of view as well...

...More important, the surface structure of Platoon is classic romance...

...This is an image especially seductive among Vietnam veterans themselves, and it is no doubt part of the explanation of the film's remarkable success...

...He is the bearer of a special sort of wisdom, unavailable to all but those who have endured the crucible of combat...

...the mortal struggle of destructive and humane impulses that has been the subject of the literature of war since The Iliad...

...Since there was no obvious, sustaining logic to the war, because the reality of the place turned out to be so wildly out of joint with the political understanding given 384 to frame it, we turned the guns—in bitterness, regret, self-contempt—on ourselves...

...Nothing, it seems, can bridge the gap between political reason, on the one hand, and the actual, terribly concrete business of killing people, on the other...

...Without doubt Platoon is the most significant film to be produced about Vietnam to date, for it challenges not only a revisionist history of American involvement there, but an older cinematic tradition of heroic storytelling as well...

...That means not only that the reality of war turned out to be different from the image, though that was true enough...

...It also means that we were seduced by notions of personal and collective heroism, prepared for destruction by dazzling images of virtue that were ultimately, and merely, deadly...

...Avatar of violence and death, Barnes in some sense gets what he deserves...

...Perhaps Paul Fussell is right that all war memoirs are inevitably romances, in spite of their intentions...

...Maybe I can learn something I don't yet know," he tells her, "see something I haven't yet seen...

...For it is finally the battle in Taylor's mind, the internal and psychic confrontation of murderer and saint, that counts...

...But Herr had, I think, something even more serious and bitterly ironic in mind...

...Platoon is at one level unquestionably ironic, a journey that undoes its hero...

...The larger problem over which this film forces one to brood is how events become memorialized, how memory serves imagination, and, inescapably, how imagination arouses, seduces, even punishes...

...Hell is inside me, Taylor discovers, in the dark and untraveled recesses of the soul...

...For they are indeed romanticized figures, parodic images of good and evil, the sort of model and antithesis one demands in all romantic narratives...

...The incompletion attests in part to the limits of Stone's interpretation...

...Early in the film, he admits to his astonished platoon mates that he volunteered for Vietnam, out of a mixture of guilt, patriotism, and some deeper, inchoate desire to experience the war...

...Stone's allegorical memoir thus comes close at moments to reproducing precisely what it otherwise draws into its critical light, the imperial temptation to see the world and one's actions within it as reflections of an internal revery...

...Appropriately enough, Platoon is constructed around the exigencies of this mythic, transformative journey: the dark, primeval jungle that constantly limits the hero's (and our) perspective...

...But it also seems to me that at some deeper level Stone undermines his own irony, limiting the reversals he permits his hero to undergo...

...It is also scrupulous in its look...

...But there is a definite form of political argument hidden in the folds of these silences...

...For Platoon is in part a study in irony, and in particular the ironies of the imagination...

...The civil war in the spirit recrystallizes in the dramatic struggle between Barnes and Elias, outward emblems of inner forces, and between the platoon members gathered in the wake of their charismatic powers...

...But the widest, though less visible, referent of the theme of civil war is American society and culture itself, torn by its own collective conflicts and demons...

...I made a mistake," Taylor writes to his grandmother shortly after his first experience in combat...

...It is a brief and jarring allusion, but one that resonates loudly on reflection...

...Platoon is at once much less and much more serious than reality...

...I do not mean that the film does not in places employ the conventions of cinematic and narrative realism, for of course it does, at times with great power...

...The antihero is, after all, a kind of hero, a darkly charismatic and seductive persona, at once exemplar and object of a certain kind of longing...

...We'd all seen too many movies...

...For surely in another sense the claim that we went to Vietnam and fought only ourselves is profoundly, almost obscenely false, even at the figurative level at which it is intended...

...it was our imagination that killed us...

...This was, we were told, the first true film about Vietnam, for it showed the war as it was on the ground, for the grunts, stripped of the hysterical machismo of Sylvester Stallone and the surreal Symbolics of Francis Coppola and Michael Cimino...

...This response is arresting, for while there is much to say about this film, it is surely not that it is "realistic...

...At this level of historical and political allegory, the political as well as personal lesson of Taylor's epic journey in irony coincides with the haunting and nervous warning of John Quincy Adams, recently resurrected by William Appleman Williams: "America goes not in search of monsters to destroy...

...It is hard not to wonder if Stone, reader of Conrad, did not find in Vietnam, 385 and thus in Platoon, exactly what he was looking for: antihero, counterromance, transfiguring journey into the heart of darkness...

...It is also a war film quite self-consciously set within the tradition of American war films, and in its own ironic rendering of the heroic mythos, it is not only a commentary upon that tradition, but a claim on collective memory as well...

...The problem emerges in the wider ranges of implication of Stone's summation...

...He was our Ahab," Chris writes to his grandmother, "the focus of our murderous rage...

...the decay of the order of loyalty, comradeship, and patriotism into anarchy...

...Moby Dick "II keep thinking," Michael Herr writes in Dispatches, "about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good...

...This, it seems to me, is a much more interesting state of affairs...

...THESE ROMANTIC SENTIMENTS AND DEVICES are never definitively countered by the irony which otherwise shadows the plot of Platoon, and in this respect Stone has sustained, indeed made a stunning contribution to, a literary archetype already well established in the American imagination: Vietnam veteran as antihero, survivor, victim, and outcast, cut off from the rest of society by his unique, and preferably ineffable, form of suffering and knowledge...

...Something akin to such thoughts must have been at work in the mind of Oliver Stone in the making of the film Platoon...

...The realities of exhaustion, fear, and confusion overwhelm the political language of geopolitics and national interest...

...Essentially what I wanted to say," as Stone himself put it, "was, Remember...

...As IF IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF STONE'S INTENTION, the public response to this film, extraordinary in view of its relatively small budget, has taken shape chiefly in terms of its claim to realism...

...A wounded and decorated veteran of Vietnam, Stone admits to having been seduced by the image of distant and exotic danger, not once but twice in his life...

...There will be few small or large boys coming away from Platoon with visions of combat dancing in their heads...

...It was Lord Jim...

...They are figures of truly mythic proportions, worthy adversary and model for the mythic sojourner...

...What Stone proposes in place of ideology and conventional political analysis is psychohistory...

...focused, compressed, internal...

...Ideological language is absent from the landscape of Platoon because it was in fact irrelevant and unavailable, the film suggests, to the soldiers caught within the real, historical landscape of Vietnam...

...And as the conclusion of the film finally makes clear, it doesn't matter much whether they exist or not...

...But the metaphor pushes outward, like rings in a pool...

...Yet there are also things about Platoon that are disturbing, and precisely where it is most ambitious...

...There are insurmountable problems, to begin with, in the romantic structure of the memoir Stone uses as his narrative vehicle...

...But it is also connected in revealing ways to the broader field of cultural imagination and memory the film engages and attempts to reform...

...Platoon is at moments bizarrely sentimental, particularly in light of its tough and "realistic" pretensions...

...If Platoon is a counter-fable, an effort to construct a subversive myth of both the war in Vietnam and the broader problem of war and heroic virtue, it is also a truncated alternative, incomplete in both its personal and political vision...

...The monster Ahab pursues is as much the creature of his own imaginary obsessions as it is the work of nature...

...The tantalizing suggestion in Chris Taylor's concluding epigram—"we fought ourselves"— is that the very conception of the war, its perceived purpose and necessity, rested on a demonology engendered in the depths of our collective political imagination...

...There is something dreamy about the conclusion of Platoon, as if the entire Vietnam experience were some phantasm of the national spirit, begun and concluded in the imagination, cut off from history and the invisible "others" who were finally, and merely, bit players in this extended drama of the American psyche...

...386...

...Yet that is precisely the symbolic momentum of the final scene of Platoon, the wounded hero whisked from the scene by the ubiquitous helicopter, his gaze turned inward on the vast mystery of his own nature...

...and finally, the fraternal order of arms, the platoon, that surrounds Taylor and provides him with his insight and pain...

...it is a fable of heroism...

...The romantic quality of the quest that brings Chris Taylor (and Stone) to Vietnam lingers on, in other words, in spite of the misery it brings about...

...In opposition, to begin with, to the dominant cinematic tradition of war stories, and the facile view of heroism that they have notoriously represented...

...The crucial difference between Platoon and the conventional war romance is the irony that attends and steadily undermines it, first announced in the bitter epitaph from Ecclesiastes that accompanies the opening frames: "Rejoice oh young man in thy youth...

...She would no longer be the mistress of her own spirit...

...It is a wonderful and horrible epigram...

...It is an appropriate introduction, for neither hero nor viewer is allowed to conclude that the journey was enviable or admirable, at least in the traditional senses of these words...

...In the age of Reagan and the contras, it should ndt be hard to see the value of this perspective...

...thus, too, its oddly abstract, uprooted feeling, "somewhere in the jungle," "sometime in the war...

...The hero, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), is a self-confessed romantic...

...It matters greatly, of course, that the war is Vietnam...

...Thus the stunning absence of explicit politics and history in this film...

...private, public, and the kinship between the two...

...There is some risk, in other words, that by internalizing the war, at both the personal and political level, one becomes both critic and victim of a national mythology...

...The boy-man who reflects over the final sequence of the film bears the unmistakable mark and charisma of one transfigured by his passage through hell...

...A final and obviously unintended irony...

...More telling, perhaps, is the manner in which Stone constructs the characters of Elias and Barnes, the towering figures Taylor confronts and internalizes in his journey...

...For viewed as representation instead of reality, Platoon can be assessed in terms of what it much more clearly is: a piece of interpretation, a reconstruction of the past, a claim on how we should see ourselves...