Screen Wars: The Battle for Vietnam
Adams, William
The Reagan era has bequeathed to us much, including, ironically, a new version of the materialist theory of the politics of culture. The essential claim of this theory is seductively simple:...
...Extending this conclusion to the homefront, postwar dramas like Birdy, Distant Thunder, and Jackknife define their veterans as victims of moral theft: they completed their end of the bargain, but America did not...
...Shifting the object and scale of such anger, the herc of one of HBO's War Stories ("The Mine") muses over his imminent death: "God's just been fuckin' with me, now he's through...
...The Vietnamese civilian population is predictably "inscrutable," alternately the object of vengeful violence and missionary concern...
...The egalitarian impulse is also registered in unabashedly populist sentiments, and in this respect the Vietnam films follow more closely the prescriptive formula of the World War II film: wars are fought by common men...
...For this war was a journey into not only physical danger but the special torments of a conflict that carried no sustaining logic and that was only briefly supported by the society that organized and financed it...
...We see it first when his buddy Davey, desperately resisting Megs's missionary impulses, demands to see Megs's hands...
...When he finally succumbs, momentarily, to his own demons near the film's conclusion, we know that in Megs, too, there is a reservoir of violent energy, closely connected to the war and contained only with great vigilance...
...The combat stories—Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, War Stories, Hamburger Hill—document the violent histories from which such blemishes emerge...
...The high ranking American officer murdering prostitutes turns out to be a WINTER • 1990 • 71 Culture In an Age of Money bitter non-commissioned officer dressed up in the uniform of an army colonel...
...Off Limits is the story of the multiple murders of Vietnamese prostitutes, murders committed, as we learn in the opening scene, by a high ranking American officer...
...The ultimate horizon of meaning is the tiny platoon...
...Like the figures just mentioned, Chris Taylor, the film's hero, is a romantic, eager to learn about himself and the world through the ordeals of warfare...
...Hamburger Hill features two extended sequences in similar terrain and Full Metal 68 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money Jacket chooses to fuse the two moments in its portrayal of the Tet offensive...
...The knuckles and wrists bear multiple scars, remnants of his many encounters with panes of glass...
...The demonic forces loosed in the world are temporarily brought to bay by the herodetectives, Sergeants McGriff (Willem Dafoe) and Albaby (Gregory Hines), the standard bearers of order in a Saigon filled with pimps, druggies, gamblers, and deserters...
...As a Vietnam vet, Davey is a disaster...
...I fuck nuclear waste" trumpets Blaster, an appealingly demented character in Uncommon Valor during a moment of happy machismo...
...The combat films—Hamburger Hill, Platoon, Bat 21, War Stories—cast a steadily jaundiced eye toward the officer corps, the most available incarnation of authority...
...The hero of Birdy (1985) retreats into a mute fantasy world while caged in the mental ward of a military hospital...
...Thus Mark Libby in Distant Thunder the central figures in all the coming70 • DISSENT Cullum in on Ago of Money home dramas are psychologically and morally stained...
...The plot unfolds within similarly restricted perspectives...
...This flashy symbolism is complemented throughout the film by passages that carefully connect the American presence in Vietnam with prostitution...
...Vietnam was that moment in history when we questioned our own innocence...
...The fascination is in part voyeuristic...
...Anxiety over the internal rage and violence that surfaced in the war, and perhaps explains it, does not always appear in the form of violent wishes, acts, or memories...
...GIs kill my brothers, make fuck-things my sisters...
...Cinematic Saigon is the frontier town in Asian drag, site of marginality and perversion, the border of the civilized world...
...The criticism is painfully inchoate, but its dramatic pitch and function are clear...
...It is, Taylor learns, in the recesses of one's own soul...
...A good bit of the pathos the cinematic "Vietnam veteran" has come to embody, and thus a good deal of his sentimental and box office appeal, is due to the fact that he did what he was asked to do in spite of it all...
...Army...
...And when it's my time . . . if that's the only decoration they bury me with . . . well, I'll rest in peace...
...Since the deeds are so often heinous and so disconnected from satisfying purposes, the hero is himself bound to be scarred...
...We just go back and forth blowin' the shit out of each other for hills nobody wanted," says one of the characters in War Stories...
...Off Limits employs the conventions of the detective genre to this end...
...The same sort of desire preoccupies the central figure of the first episode of HBO's War Stories, a clerk in Vietnam who wants nothing more than to see some action...
...In addition to the violence that lurks "out there," in the mysterious force of the enemy, there is also the violence that lurks in the heart of the ordinary combat soldier...
...But there is also a more general sense of political obligation lurking in Hazard's professionalism...
...Even the cartoon-like Johnny Rambo is portrayed as an outlaw, a figure of the margins looking in on the normal routines of American life...
...It is a beautifully formed question, repeated in various ways throughout the film...
...The treatment of violence in Vietnam films of the 1980s is instructive in this sense...
...The Americanization of a Symbol The considerable interest aroused by the Vietnam War films of the 1980s is closely connected to their strangely paradoxical vision, at once so alienated from yet dependent upon the traditional cultural landscape...
...The cinematic veteran of Vietnam is distinguished from the rest of us by his passage through an ordeal both physical and existential...
...But it hinges on two crucial moments in the past: a single battle in Vietnam, where both Megs (Robert De Niro) and Davey (Ed Harris) are wounded, and the earlier time in Davey's life when he was the star of the football team, the idol of his classmates, the quintessential all-American boy...
...And this, in turn, makes possible the release of equally congenial cultural values: equality, pluralism, individualism...
...Consistent with the reflective and psychological turn of these films, the savage has migrated within...
...It was not, significantly, until the full bloom of Reaganism that the Vietnam War became an acceptable subject for film...
...Such virtue must appear from the outset in very anti-heroic form...
...If the wilderness is finally to be tamed, it is not without a certain risk that one will "go native" in the process, or regret in the end that one did not...
...Like the generic town in the Western, it is marginal civilization, still defined by the vast and dangerous Nature that surrounds it...
...Off Limits and Good Morning, Vietnam take place in Saigon...
...Their stories consist largely of the purgative cleansing of their souls...
...What is distinctive about this scenario in the case of the Vietnam narratives is that the work of civilizing and domesticating is only rarely directed outward, toward some uncivilized "Other" who haunts the wilds...
...Like a good horror story, the Vietnam War is an intriguing subject for cinematic representation because of the brutal excess it contains...
...Chris Taylor in Platoon describes his comrades as "salt of the earth types," a view elaborated in great detail, and with more than a little enthusiasm, throughout the genre...
...There is a deep and sometimes comic bitterness that issues from these reversals...
...Distant Thunder, the latest version of the postwar readjustment narrative, is the story of Mark Libby's struggle to leave a small community of veterans living in the mountains of Washington and return to the world he has abandoned...
...The hill" educates its victims in democratic virtue, through collective oppression and a deeper recognition of human likeness...
...The Wilderness Metaphor What complicates this picture is that most of its horror is delivered in familiar and finally reassuring garb...
...But it is also intended as commentary on the aimlessness of the war...
...Hamburger Hill aims its rage at liberal politicians, journalists, and college students, all compromised by their class connections and antiwar sympathies...
...But it is Oliver Stone's Platoon that pushes such preoccupations furthest...
...From painful taboo to cultural icon, the Vietnam War had suddenly become a rich source of popular fictions, a story we could not hear repeated often enough...
...We are a long way here from John Wayne and Audie Murphy, even in this otherwise conservatively congenial film...
...Like more traditional romantic voyages, these journeys are extended ordeals, trials of character and virtue...
...Clell Hazard (James Cann), the old war horse, veteran of World War II and Korea, paragon of military honor and virtue, describes the war as "bad judgment . . . a screw up...
...Similar goals are achieved in the authority bashing so pronounced throughout the genre...
...The coda of Platoon— "We didn't fight the enemy in Vietnam, we fought ourselves" —here takes on still further allegorical significance...
...Our deepest problem in Vietnam, these films suggest, was our own nervous self-regard...
...In this case the scene is a very dark version of Saigon, a den of ". . . gangsters, cowboys, refugees, deserters, druggies, insects, black marketeers...
...Oliver Stone's Platoon produces this sense of aimlessness in its photographic technique and narrative structure...
...There are journeys within journeys, too...
...In the vision of Platoon, the war in Vietnam is a conflict that will not be made sense of...
...I no talk GIs," a Vietnamese whore tells one of the investigators during an official interrogation...
...Adrian Cronauer of Good Morning, Vietnam is a less virulent and threatening version of Joker, and similarly estranged from the official world...
...But after this . . . I just don't know anymore...
...The theme of political disintegration emerges most dramatically in the suspicion, nearly universal in Vietnam films, of official elites...
...Like the original wilderness, cinematic Vietnam is the kind of place where mythical forces do battle for souls...
...The Killing Fields (1985) passionately dissects the cool and abstract logic of national interest that permitted the United States to bomb and support a coup in Cambodia, illegal actions that helped unleash the Khmer Rouge...
...The equation is tempting, especially in the case of one of the more notable cultural bequests of the decade: the films of the Vietnam War...
...It also takes shape in the symbolics of sexuality, specifically in ubiquitous, almost obligatory, references to prostitution...
...But taming is nonetheless the name of the game, in Westerns as well as narratives about the war, and a number of recent films have given us interesting variations of the domesticating sequence...
...The possibility was first raised in Apocalypse Now...
...The enemy, seen only in fleeting moments, is essentially unavailable and mysterious...
...For just as Vietnam will not bear the narratives of just causes, it will not support the normal troupe of heroes performing the usual heroic deeds...
...Here the line to the politics of Reaganism is unmistakable...
...The shapes of virtuous missionaries, liberators, anticommunists, to cite a few of the mythical figures in which we have invested cultural capital, are for the most part glaringly absent from the films of Vietnam...
...Hazard's surrogate son, Jackie Willow, confesses a similar sort of confusion in a letter from Vietnam shortly before his death...
...Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) sustains the bitterly satirical characterizations of civilian and military authorities characteristic of his earlier works, Paths of Glory and Dr...
...Rafterman, the Marine photographer in Full Metal Jacket, brutally rephrases Willow's naive longing: "I want to get into the shit," he tells Joker (Matthew Modine), the film's cynical and irrepressible hero...
...After making countless references to the futility of the war, and repeatedly acknowledging its destructive consequences, Clell Hazard, the hero of Gardens of Stone, decides to return to Vietnam...
...Where such estrangement is not literal, it is at least psychological...
...So, too, are insensitive "higher authorities" who issue the dangerous and often incomprehensible orders that compound the miseries of combat...
...A large part of Good Morning, Vietnam takes place in "Jimmy Wah's Bar," an archetypal Saigon strip-joint where almost any sort of pleasure can be had for ten bucks...
...And not by some implacable Fate or malevolent Other but through internal, self-generated, self-destructive disorders...
...In the few unflinchingly conservative Vietnam films of the 1980s —Rambo: First Blood Part II (1984), Uncommon Valor (1983), and the rabid Hanoi Hilton (1987)—the allegorical significance of the war is revealed as a crisis of national will...
...It is significant, however, that such contempt never leads to open rebellion...
...The question underscores the absence of political logic and purpose, the fundamental aimlessness of the war...
...This image is reproduced quite literally in the exhausting and operatic Hamburger Hill, a story based on a real and very bloody operation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968...
...Jackknife explores the disjunction between these moments...
...Here the standard location is enhanced by a peculiar narrative twist...
...The symbolic association of Vietnam with a savage natural landscape continues even when the setting is urban and cosmopolitan...
...What are the charges...
...To look in on the movies or television is to see darkly the social foundations of Reaganism: the reaffirmation of "traditional values" (the family, patriotism, work), the resuscitation of anticommunism, fetishes of the marketplace, the attack on alternative lifestyles...
...In spite of all the pain, something like "the American character" endures in the darkly charismatic, inverted heroes who suffered and ultimately survived the war...
...The seat of chaos is not out there, in "the other...
...In the films focused on the combat story — PPllaattoooonn,, Full Metal Jacket (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), HBO's War Stories (1987), Bat 21 (1988)—irony takes the form of an implacable futility...
...It is an alarmingly precise and provocative statement...
...Charging a man with murder in this place is like giving speeding tickets at the Indy 500," Willard muses...
...The conflicts are racial and social, as well as personal, but consistently connected to the miserable futility of the lives the grunts have in common...
...But although the antihero from the Vietnam war, unlike his straighter predecessors, does not occupy the moral center of things, he remains a compelling figure...
...Platoon opens with a large troop plane disgorging the young, wouldbe hero on the steamy runway of distant Vietnam, a prototypical scene repeated or implied in various forms in Hamburger Hill, Good Morning, Vietnam, and Full Metal Jacket...
...Like their less ambiguous World War II predecessors, the narratives of Vietnam supply us with a stock of attractive heroes...
...A similar psychology is represented by Megs (Robert De Niro) in Jackknife...
...From the perspective of tradition, both cinematic and political, the Vietnam War was profoundly subversive...
...the suspicion of authority and power surrounded and softened by a vague and sentimental patriotism...
...q 72 • DISSENT...
...In the current version of this theory, the conservative political and social forces of the 1980s have defined the contours of its mass culture...
...Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone (1987) is emblematic in this regard...
...Off Limits goes even further in this direction...
...Real or imagined, such rejection is typically answered by withdrawal...
...Depicting a "Bad" War The trail of paradox begins with the fact that the better part of the genre builds upon the assumption that Vietnam was the model of a bad war...
...There is corrosive energy at work in most of the cinematic renderings of Vietnam produced in this decade, but there is also a subtle form of compensation...
...The problem of lost innocence is also rendered psychologically...
...They have big party Vietnam...
...Even politically muted films like Gardens of Stone or Bat 21 or the flaccid Tour of Duty contain clear signals that their heroes are in some important ways different, off-beat, and unable to fit into conventional social patterns...
...Much more than an isolated event or disaster of foreign policy, the war was, and still remains, the great metaphor in the neoconservative lexicon for the 1960s, and thus for the rebellion, disorder, anti-Americanism, and flabbiness that era loosed among us...
...And as if to seal the legitimacy of the war as a subject for popular treatment, network television gave us two series, China Beach and Tour of Duty...
...Hamburger Hill documents a series of dangerous confrontations between members of the platoon it follows...
...This war ain't about freedom, it's about pussy," says a wisecracking Marine in Full Metal Jacket...
...But we are closer than might at first be thought to some archetypal and oddly reassuring conceptions of civic and martial virtue...
...As numerous episodes in the story suggest, Mark's essential problem is that he cannot control the aggressive impulses he learned in the war...
...Although invested with warmth and genuine humanity, there is also a dangerous, unpredictable rage in Megs...
...This means not only no heroes' welcome, a master theme in all coming-home films, but that the heroes themselves are exiles in their own land...
...One of the not so hidden themes here is that the war itself was a collective violation, perhaps a criminal endeavor, in the psychological if not the legal sense of the word...
...Vietnam became an imaginary psychic and physical landscape where all sorts of normally forbidden impulses were given sudden freedom...
...The allegorical intent in all of this is unmistakable: the Vietnam War was finally our civil war, a story of collective as well as local disintegrations, a WINTER • 1990 • 67 Culture in an Age of Money struggle inside the American mind and body politic...
...For in the iconography of Reaganism, Vietnam was the protean symbol of all that had gone wrong in American life...
...No matter how desperate our urge to domesticate the war or locate within its darkness some form of compensatory light, we will only with great difficulty be able soon to reengage the narrative that broadly defined the pre-Vietnam American world, the United States as "the great locomotive," in Dean Acheson's famous metaphor, "puffing away to pull the rest of the world into civilization...
...This subject is for the most part broached in the form of the ritual passage of the young soldier into the fraternal order of combat...
...It is a world rich in private and intimate experience and knowledge, but stunningly short of political, historical, or cultural references...
...Chris Taylor of Platoon murders his platoon sergeant, while Mark Libby in Distant Thunder literally lives outside the boundaries of the civilized world...
...All my life . . ." he writes, "I knew . . . I'd live and die in WINTER • 1990 • 65 Culture In an Ale of Money the Army...
...With the exception of several brief flashbacks, the story unwinds in the present...
...In Distant Thunder (1988), Mark Libby (John Lithgow), the nervous and introverted hero, retreats to a wild veterans community in the Washington mountains where he and several war buddies live as hostages to their own memories...
...In Full Metal Jacket, Private Joker is set apart from the world around him by his sardonic vision...
...The display of such passions, as well as the particular events releasing them, have a good deal to do with the intrinsic fascination of these stories...
...Things could be much worse, of course, for the very problems that make some kind of salutary meaning necessary also ensure that whatever affirmations these stories have to offer, they cannot reproduce (the Reagan era notwithstanding) the political consciousness that preceded the event they retell...
...He does, though not in the way he anticipates...
...A closer look at the recent Vietnam films reveals instead a tangle of impulses: self-criticism and reaffirmation, toughness and sentimentality...
...He, too, gets his wish, with the predictably ironic conclusion that his first shots fired in anger are his last...
...Like any good detective story, Off Limits takes place in a setting of corruption and disease...
...The phrase is marvelously supple...
...And it is also a place where fear and fascination are mixed in almost equal measure...
...The agents of disorder in Apocalypse Now, Off Limits, Birdy, Distant Thunder, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and The Killing Fields are all Americans or American institutions, and the taming of them is finally a matter of collective self-discipline...
...Since there was no obvious sustaining logic to the conflict, no enemy in the conventional sense, we turned the guns—in bitterness, regret, self-contempt—on ourselves...
...Kurtz is the individual analogue of the American war machine, the same craft a bit further upstream...
...Symbolically, at least, such proximity explains why the city is so regularly portrayed as the scene of gambling, prostitution, drugs...
...Jackie Willow, the young and doomed hero of Gardens of Stone, hankers after the day he will win the Combat Infantry Man's Badge, the sign of the battle-initiated...
...Platoon is silent on this matter, but nearly all other "in-country" films feature the rituals of whoring...
...Like some wayward character of Genet's, his violence is revenge on the status he has always wanted...
...It is convenient, then, to assume that the sudden appearance of "the Vietnam War film" on the cultural scene is linked to the conservative agenda, or at least to expect that the infant genre will reproduce the original political conflict: hawks against doves, cold warriors against new leftists, The Green Berets (1968) against Apocalypse Now (1979...
...Will we be allowed to win this time...
...In the absence of legitimating ends, the destructive passions of war turned in Vietnam into a riot of private, and potentially criminal, desires...
...Just as they resent the social inequalities implicit in their experience of the war, the working-class or underclass figures who typically occupy the foreground of Vietnam films are contemptuous of power as part and parcel of their democratic character...
...The remark describes the dangerous conflict in Taylor's platoon...
...Taylor's personal education ends with the discovery that the battle between Barnes and Elias is really a battle within himself...
...Such fear is clearly etched into the mood of all the 1980s Vietnam combat films...
...He thus has no choice but to live as an outcast, the savagery of his surroundings mimicking the wildness of his impulses...
...And the distinction between his individual transgressions and the normal business of the war are deliberately obscured...
...Secular or metaphysical, political or personal, this bitterness signals the deeper pathos that is by now characteristic of the Vietnam soldier's story...
...Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams), the sardonic disk-jockey hero of the darkly comic Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), directs his wit at the alternately inept and malicious American war machine...
...Strangelove...
...Platoon develops this code through a claustrophobic cinematography, burying the camera in the close and oppressive surroundings of "the boonies...
...The characters in Platoon eschew ideology and indeed political language of any kind, as if it were impossible to bridge the gap between the brutal realities of the war and the abstract understandings—geopolitics, anticommunism, containment—given to frame it...
...Robert De Niro' s Megs in Jackknife is an earthy and compelling blend of quiet tenderness and buried violence etched against the gritty background of a working class neighborhood in Meriden, Connecticut...
...Off Limits (1988), a military detective story set in Saigon during the war, comes closest to deliberately articulating this message...
...What derails that mighty image is mythic Vietnam, a place of inner demons as well as nervous satisfactions...
...This patriotism is most clear in the final stages of the antihero's journey...
...The war, after all, is "family business," and Clell is bound to play the old warrior's role of guide, protector, teacher...
...Everyone knows, of course, that the source of such futility is not geography...
...Hamburger Hill is full of such types, presented in the appropriate ethnic and racial mix...
...For the truly dangerous conflict that Taylor must endure is not the struggle with the enemy, but the struggle between his immediate superiors, Sergeants Barnes and Elias, symbols of sheer destructiveness on the one hand and a binding humanity on the other...
...The powerful conflicts in the body politic let loose by the war are rooted somehow in the destructive urges of the collective psyche...
...The fulfillment of civic obligation and the abstract and sentimental patriotism in which it is rooted take us to the very heart of the charisma of the anti-hero...
...It undermined a powerful set of expectations concerning the virtues of heroism and patriotism and the practices that nurture them...
...He is a victim who remains tethered to the polity, and thus to the victimizer, in the midst of his pain: he is the exemplar, in the inverted logic of this mythos, of the ultimate political sacrifice...
...But for the most part, the drama of lost innocence figures very differently...
...Behind such displays of populist enthusiasm, and quietly reinforcing it, is a steady drone of class resentment...
...We all no-good dumb niggers on this hill," says Doc, the impassioned black medic in Hamburger Hill...
...We been up and down this same terrain before," says one of the grunts in Hamburger Hill: "For what...
...The real mystery, his gaze announces, is how one from such favored origins could have strayed so far from 66 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money the path of promise, especially since that path followed the prescribed route of heroism and patriotic virtue...
...The dangerously energetic young lieutenant, often compromised by his class background as well as martial enthusiasm, is an almost requisite figure in combat stories...
...But in the case of Vietnam, the trial has taken on a special quality...
...The characters in Hamburger Hill muse bitterly over the now legendary story of returning soldiers being greeted by bands of shit-slinging antiwar protestors...
...It is difficult in these films to find anyone with positive thoughts about any form of authority, military or civilian...
...Near the end of the film, Davey finds his way back to his high school and stares drunkenly into the trophy case where his exploits are memorialized...
...To WINTER • 1990 • 69 Culture In an Age of Money rejoin the family, society, the world is to come out of the woods, to choose the civil over the natural...
...Less conservative narratives refocus these complaints, but grapple nonetheless with corrupt and corrupting officialdom...
...This vague but alluring notion of internal chaos, both personal and collective, appears with striking consistency in a number of films that have appeared since Platoon...
...This domestication is achieved in part through the symbolism of setting...
...Indeed, the antihero of these narratives is typically outside the normal boundaries of society, an outlaw and rebel...
...But neither expectation fits well with the stories most of these films tell...
...The renegade Colonel Kurtz is consistently portrayed as a criminal...
...In the peculiar logic of Vietnam reminiscence, it is this moral ambiguity that supplies the anti-hero with much of his sentimental and romantic power...
...The familiar figure here is of course "the wilderness," a quintessentially American narrative setting, which takes, in the case of Vietnam, an exotic and mysterious form...
...Alcoholic, withdrawn, and bitter, he cannot find his way back to the war, and thus to the root of his rage...
...Johnny Rambo asks before his first redemptive voyage into postwar North Vietnam...
...This opposition is repeated throughout the genre: most obviously, perhaps, in the equation of Vietnam with the jungle, a savage and mysterious habitat where equally savage and mysterious passions come to be exercised...
...Warped and Appealing Heroes It is not simply the mythical resonance of setting that makes many of the Vietnam stories familiar...
...The characters in Hamburger Hill resort to a kind of dark stoicism: "Don't mean nothin," they chant, "not a thing...
...But this superficial intrigue is mixed with a more serious and complicated enthrallment...
...A Country Coming Apart The profound political anxiety that rumbles about in these films is that the long episode in Vietnam has somehow subverted the assumptions that define our culture...
...Focusing on a few days in the life of an infantry platoon, the film follows the doomed cast in its horrifying assaults on entrenched North Vietnamese soldiers, a process that consumes most of the principal characters...
...The deeper worry of the majority of these films, good and bad alike, is that the old story of American goodness was fatally subverted in Vietnam...
...Never get out of the boat," Willard nervously reminds himself in Apocalypse Now as he drifts deeper into the primeval green...
...Brutality and brutalization are almost inescapable subjects in stories dealing with war, but in the case of Vietnam they have taken a peculiarly reflective turn...
...More recent films of Vietnam advance related suggestions...
...Gardens of Stone and Off Limits feature the common man in military dress: the senior enlisted corps, black and white, of the U.S...
...This ubiquity suggests that the whorehousebarstrip-joint is not just another place in the war but the source of a potent thematic message...
...Unlike many World War II films, where the experience of combat creates or intensifies social solidarity, the Vietnam stories are haunted by images and episodes of disintegration...
...The characters in Hamburger Hill comment relentlessly on the college students who escaped their fate, while Gardens of Stone paints a disparaging portrait of the officer corps...
...Indeed, Vietnam has become in our filmmakers' imaginations a macabre sort of romantic voyage, a testing journey in physical space and the moral geography of the soul...
...The political logic of antiheroism begins to appear in the darkly demotic sense of fraternity that shines through this abuse...
...The more recent Jackknife (1989), the first film of distant retrospection in the Vietnam genre, ties together the separate moments of the ironic cycle in the friendship between two veterans, still struggling, after some twenty years, to come to terms with their memories and one another...
...For those who do not die of it, the lesson in irony is completed on coming home to a society violently divided over the war and indifferent, or downright hostile, to its participants...
...In Platoon, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) concludes his own experience of the war with the striking summary: "We didn't fight the enemy in Vietnam, we fought ourselves...
...The same is true for the plot of Distant Thunder, which returns the wild veteran to the domestic orders of fatherhood and marriage by taming his aggressive impulses...
...the dazed and drunken Captain Willard asks the military policemen who bring him his orders in the opening scene of the film...
...The HBO War Stories episode "The Pass" takes place entirely inside the sort of makeshift bar and whorehouse that typically surrounded base camps in Vietnam...
...His logic is in part professional...
...Bat 21 literally drops its hero into the inferno of war, as the ubiquitous helicopter does with infantry soldiers in most of the combat stories...
...Being good detectives, McGriff and Alababy in Off Limits are also figures of the edges, part criminal, part saint...
...Platoon plants the viewer in the dense immediacy of the jungle, forbidding a larger tactical or strategic view...
...But their Saigon is a special kind of urban landscape...
...Most of Hamburger Hill takes place in the mud and tangled undergrowth of "the hill," a place of Dantesque proportions in its slimy and gruesome detail...
...Other films insist upon a more literal connection between criminality and violent desire...
...In Distant Thunder, Mark Libby's memories of the war, and the destructive impulses it left him with, are continuously counterposed to the natural setting of his community in exile...
...The same sort of commitment is characteristic of the grunts in Hamburger Hill and Platoon, who complain steadily about the stupidity of it all but in the end do what they are told...
...The only film to date that deals seriously with professional military characters and institutions, Gardens of Stone records the frustration and confusion produced when the Vietnam soldier's experience is pressed against traditional forms of patriotic loyalty and heroism...
...As the stage for antiheroic romance, cinematic Vietnam extends to the war an arc of symbolism integral to our own mythical history and mind...
...What is so disturbing in the Vietnam story is that it subverts the traditional narrative framework of American history and identity...
...Platoon (1986), the epitome of the 1980s Vietnam film, was closely preceded or followed by nearly a dozen major productions...
...Indeed, the critical, ironic energy of most of these films is typically constrained by a notion of civic discipline sustained by a muted, abstract, but profound patriotism...
...The POW/MIA subgenre mentioned above (Rambo: First Blood Part II, Uncommon Valor, Hanoi Hilton) chew rather morosely on a bitter and powerfully reactionary sense of betrayal by the highest political authorities...
...The difference is that the Vietnam genre departs wildly from the traditional standards of attractiveness...
...The essential claim of this theory is seductively simple: cultural expression reproduces, through all the appropriate "mediations," the topography of social life...
...Just something I knew...
...What has taken their place is irony, images of disintegration, and fitful meditations on violence, desire, and inner demons...
...The veteran is not merely a victim of miscalculation, stupidity, corruption, or betrayal, to note the range of implicit "explanations" for the Vietnam debacle in these films...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
