Vietnam War

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Vietnam War

AMERICAN CINEMA AND THE CHALLENGE OF VIETNAM: 1964–1975
VETERANS AND ALLEGORIES: 1964–1975
AMERICAN CINEMA AFTER THE WAR
FURTHER READING

After France withdrew its troops from Indochina in 1954, its former colony was partitioned by the Geneva Accords into North and South until elections could be held to determine the leadership of a united Vietnam. Fearing that Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969)—leader of the North who with the Viet Minh had defeated French troops at Dien Bien Phu—would succeed in uniting the nation as a communist state, the United States supported the South. Over the next decade, US military support for the South escalated, culminating in 1964 air strikes over North Vietnam and the deployment of ground troops the following year. Although the conflict was never officially declared as a war, it was represented and fought as such. By 1975, when the last remaining Americans were airlifted from Saigon, the United States had used in Vietnam over twice the amount of military force that it expended in World War II in both the European and Asian theaters; despite its efforts, North and South Vietnam were united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.

Through advanced firepower and chemical weaponry deployed during more than a decade of military involvement in the region, the United States and its allies succeeded in transforming Vietnam's political, economic, and social realities. But this transformation was not the one envisioned by US political leaders; nor was it the one communicated to the American people when they embarked upon military action in the area. A conflict that had a lasting effect on both the American culture and the Vietnamese culture, the Vietnam War as portrayed in US cinema bears witness to the difficulty the government had in promoting the cause of this war during the conflict and its problematic status in US popular culture for decades to come. Ultimately, the Vietnam War demonstrated both the terrible power and the limitations of America's political aims and national ideology as they were deployed by military action and promoted by the fantasy-making apparatus of cinema.

AMERICAN CINEMA AND THE CHALLENGE OF VIETNAM: 1964–1975

In contrast to the central role played by Hollywood in World War II, representations of the Vietnam War were rare in mainstream American cinema while US troops occupied Southeast Asia. Although a variety of fiction films referenced or showed the influence of the war, few combat films were made about Vietnam during the period of actual combat. Instead, the primary media representation of combat was television news coverage. Because Vietnam was the first "television war," some critics have surmised that an excess of and explicitness in television coverage made the combat film unappealing to audiences—just as some government leaders accused the news media of turning the population against the cause of war. Some vivid, even horrifying, images of the war appeared in print and on television; yet content analyses of television news has shown that, on the whole, war coverage was neither as plentiful nor as sensational as its critics have suggested.

Other factors, both industrial and ideological, appear to have had a more direct effect on the production of war films during the period. Hollywood studios were suffering in the late 1960s from a recession brought on by post-World War II industrial and cultural changes and by their consequent investment in some disastrously unsuccessful blockbuster films. Likewise, there was some difficulty in finding appropriate means to communicate the goals of America's action in Vietnam, as the US government discovered in its failed attempt to utilize techniques drawn from World War II documentary for its first Vietnam-era production, Why Vietnam? (1965). Its title and style deliberately echo Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (1943–1945), as did its rhetorical methods: it attempted to bring a clear moral purpose to the US role in Southeast Asia by comparing Ho Chi Minh to Hitler and Mussolini, thereby representing US action as primarily defensive. It was publicly criticized in 1967, and in 1971 the US Department of Defense report United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967 (also known as the Pentagon Papers) revealed that it had included deliberate misrepresentations. Troubled in its reception, the documentary never achieved its hoped for audience; and, although it continued to be shown to troops, it was pulled from civilian distribution. Similarly unsuccessful in its effort to present the nobility of the American cause, the US Information Agency documentary Vietnam! Vietnam! (1971), a full-color feature-length film executively produced by Hollywood veteran John Ford, was made for international distribution that it never achieved; its clear-cut representations of good versus evil were no longer, considered relevant by the time of its release. Thus for economic and political reasons, both Hollywood studios and the US government were hesitant to put this new war on screen. As a result, by 1970 a number of otherwise successful screenwriters, such as Samuel Fuller, Sy Barlett, and Stanley Kramer, had scripts in circulation that focused on the Vietnam War, but they found no support from studios or from the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, the Department of Defense Motion Picture Production Branch supported only one film during the war, with an estimated $1 million worth of military hardware and expertise: John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968). Studio and governmental reluctance to support projects dealing with Vietnam highlighted what appeared to be the particular difficulty of telling its story—or at least the difficulty of applying the generic formulae that had worked for previous wars, whereby the cause of America is transparently good, the enemy undeniably evil, combat goals clearly defined, and failure unthinkable.

The few combat films made about the Vietnam War during the conflict reflect these difficulties: The Green Berets as well as A Yank in VietNam (1964), Operation C.I.A. (1966), and To the Shores of Hell (1965) made an effort to fit America's complex relation with Vietnam within the parameters of the classic Hollywood narrative and the combat genre, by focusing on a well-defined mission or target; and, each is marked with its own type of ambiguity. Most notable in these terms is the The Green Berets, which applied generic elements of both the World War II combat film and the western in its effort to depict the heroism of the Special Forces and their struggle to protect Vietnamese peasantry from the hostile "Cong." An attempt to garner support for the war when, according to a 1967 poll, public opinion was beginning to move in opposition, it tells the story of a cynical journalist who is swayed to the cause of the war when he witnesses enemy atrocities. In doing so, the film dramatizes the notion that only eyewitnesses can really understand America's war in Vietnam, a war unlike previous wars because its nature and purpose are effectively unrepresentable. The difficulty of understanding and representing Vietnam and its consequent difference from previous wars are themes that persisted in its fictional—and documentary—representations. Films such as the Oscar^®-winning documentary feature La Section Anderson (The Anderson Platoon, 1967) and A Face of War (1968) underplayed political explanation and contexts to focus instead on the day-to-day experiences of war and privileged the "grunt" point of view as the primary site of knowledge about the war.

VETERANS AND ALLEGORIES: 1964–1975

For many critics, the failure of The Green Berets to tell an accurate story of the war and to find and persuade an audience signaled the end of the combat film as a genre. For the duration of the war, Vietnam was represented on screen not by images of battle but by images of the war's veterans. Films focusing solely on individuals tended to depoliticize and personalize the conflict. The earliest of these were low-budget, independently produced "exploitation" pictures that incorporated Vietnam veterans into narratively simple, sensationalist, and action-oriented biker, blaxploitation, and horror films designed to capitalize on the topicality of Vietnam. Later these films would be joined by a few independent features, studio-produced exploitation pictures, and made-for-television melodramas. Taken together, they demonstrate the way that Vietnam was first imagined on screen as primarily a domestic problem for the United States and as a violent disruption of the status quo—another thematic trope that continued in representations of the war well after 1975.

Biker films produced by companies such as American International Pictures (AIP) featured violent veterans, often characterized as former Green Berets whose fighting skills are used in and against the United States. In such films, war's violence comes home with the veteran who fights against the police, the establishment, and other gangs, as in Angels from Hell (1968) or The Hard Ride (1971); or veterans may take over the role of the police as dispensers of vigilante justice, as in The BornLosers (1967) and Chrome and Hot Leather (1971). Although such films had little to say about the war directly, their emphasis on the rage and violence of veterans is worth noting—particularly given the fact that they were most heavily distributed in those rural and urban areas of the United States where the draft hit hardest. Of particular interest in these terms are black-themed action or blaxploitation films that featured black veterans who return to battle the mob, drug dealers, and murderers of their family and friends. In the way that such films as Slaughter (1972), Black Gunn (1972), and Gordon's War (1973) focused on black communities and families alienated from white lawmakers and official sources of power, they blended references to the Vietnam War with representations of militant black power. In doing so, they obliquely referenced the politicization of black soldiers and civilians and their opposition to a war viewed as irrelevant to the needs and priorities of black America.

In addition to these action-oriented films, low-budget horror films likewise featured violent veterans as a metonym for war brought home to America. Such films as Psycho a Go-Go (1965) and The Crazies (1973) associated the war with psychosomatic transformations that produce monsters. The low-budget Canadian-produced Deathdream (also known as Dead of Night, 1972) voiced tacit criticism through its graphic horror, as an undead veteran systematically takes revenge on the family and community members who sent him to war.

Outside of generic exploitation formats, other low-budget independent productions dealt with many of the same tropes of war invading the home through the figure of the veteran. Such films offered space for directors blocked from mainstream production to comment on the war and its effects, for the low-budget milieu of the domestic melodrama or the art cinema feature allowed them to circumvent Pentagon support and the large-scale, studio-based funding required for films in the combat genre. For instance, when Elia Kazan was unable to obtain studio backing for his Vietnam War screenplays, he shot what he called a "home movie," using his own home as a set and a script written by his son, Chris. In The Visitors (1972), which mixes family melodrama with graphic violence, veterans visit an old buddy who testified against them for war crimes, kill his dog, and rape his wife before leaving. Brian De Palma's Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970) work for more comic effect with draft dodgers and psychotic veterans who blend in with the generally surreal landscape that is De Palma's vision of America during the war years.

By 1971 low-budget films featuring violent vets had become lucrative enough to attract the interest of Hollywood, in particular, the sequel to Born Losers, Billy Jack (1971), which by 1973 had grossed $60 million and attracted a family audience with its fight-for-peace vigilantism. Just as in the 1960s Hollywood studios had borrowed aspects of European art cinema to win over younger and more educated audiences no longer interested in its standard family entertainment fare, in the 1970s they imported plotlines, marketing strategies, and exhibition techniques from exploitation pictures. Along with simplified plots and sensational violence, they took up the theme of returned veterans-turned-violent vigilantes: in 1973 Magnum Force and The Stone Killer and their stars Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, respectively, ushered in a new generation of action heroes. By the mid-1970s the figure of the violent, often psychotic, veteran was so familiar that in Taxi Driver (1976) a brief mention of Vietnam provides ample motivation for the psychosocial and physical transformations experienced by its troubled protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro).

At the same time that the combat genre was replaced by films that represented the war indirectly in the person of the returned Vietnam veteran, and low-budget exploitation films capitalized on Americans' emotional responses to Vietnam, some mainstream productions appeared to offer covert criticism of the war. The western, like the combat film, had long served as a vehicle for America's perception of itself and its history, offering mythic representations of the frontier, Manifest Destiny, the relation between civilization and wilderness, and the nature of heroism and masculinity. Released after revelations of the My Lai massacre in 1969, revisionist westerns like Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1970), and Ulzana's Raid (1972) appeared to reference such atrocities in their representation of violence between Native Americans and white settlers; in doing so, they critically reconsidered the mythic basis of American identity and offered a tacit critique of US policies in Southeast Asia. Such allegorical representations notwithstanding, explicitly antiwar films were as rare in American mainstream cinema as combat films were during the conflict. However, the year after US troops were withdrawn, the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), which combined archival footage and interviews with veterans to excite emotional responses against the war, was widely distributed throughout the United States and won an Academy Award^® the same year.

AMERICAN CINEMA AFTER THE WAR

Fewer representations of Vietnam veterans appeared on screen for several years after the withdrawal of troops, but this changed with a series of films, such as Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), Coming Home (1978), and Birdy (1984), that featured violent or victimized veterans who stand in for the war's effects on America. Coming Home, for example, narrowly focuses its antiwar message on the damage inflicted on the bodies and minds of American soldiers. It seeks to resolve the problems of war—which it imagines primarily as problems of masculine identity—within the conventions of melodrama, by working through a love triangle that includes two veterans with very different perspectives on the war and their role as soldiers, along with the political-but-bankable star, Jane Fonda.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
b. Detroit, Michigan, 7 April 1939

Francis Ford Coppola is an independent whose career has undergone wide fluctuations both in critical and popular reception and in financial resources. A major figure of the so-called "movie brat" generation, he emerged in the 1960s among the wave of filmmakers who had studied film formally before making them. Known primarily for The Godfather trilogy—The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and The Godfather: Part III (1990)—Coppola's greatest achievement in film may be his Vietnam war epic, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Raised in a family involved in the arts, in the early 1960s Coppola studied film at UCLA, a program that has produced a number of other important filmmakers. While still in film school he worked on several films, including his first feature, Dementia 13 (1963) for B-movie king Roger Corman. Coppola's thesis project, the youth comedy You're a Big Boy Now (1966), was distributed theatrically by Warner Bros. He established his own production company, American Zoetrope, in 1969, but the company foundered financially and eventually filed for bankruptcy. The Conversation (1974), about a troubled surveillance expert, which he wrote and directed, garnered both Oscar^® nominations and a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival; the film displayed Coppola's art-film aspirations, but the commercial success of The Godfather—at one point it ranked as the most successful film of all time—was more influential on Coppola's career.

Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, is the story of a Special Forces captain (Martin Sheen), who is assigned to travel up the Nung river in Cambodia during the Vietnam War in search of an infamous rogue officer (Marlon Brando), who has established his own violent cult society somewhere upriver, and "terminate him with extreme prejudice." The making of the film was plagued by a number of legendary difficulties (as well as a ballooning budget); as a result of long delays in production, the film loses a degree of narrative coherence but gains in its place an almost hallucinatory power in evoking the absurdity and confusion of a war that few Americans understood.

Coppola's career since Apocalypse Now has been uneven. One from the Heart (1982), his first film after Apocalypse Now, is fascinating as a stylish musical set entirely in an expressionist Las Vegas, but it failed to connect with audiences. The overblown Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) was more successful at the box office; his two adaptations of S. E. Hinton's novels about youth growing up in 1960s Oklahoma, Rumble Fish (1983) and The Outsiders (1983), are among his most interesting work. Coppola also has produced films by other important directors such as Wim Wenders and Akira Kurosawa and been involved in a number of publishing ventures.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), Gardens of Stone (1987), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

appeared to feel confident enough in their audience to put Vietnam combat on screen for the first time. Late 1970s war films reflected Americans' ambivalence about—and its exhaustion from—the war. The Boys in Company C (1978) and Go Tell the Spartans (1978), both relatively modest but carefully scripted encounters with the madness of that war, attracted little critical response. By contrast, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) both won multiple awards for their epic treatments of the war and its insanity. Cimino's film portrayed the effects of war on a community of second-generation Ukranian-American steelworkers, employing a blend of naturalism (in setting, acting, cinematography) and fantasy (motifs of the "one shot" of Russian roulette) designed to evoke an emotional response to its image of shattered innocence and belief. The stylistic excesses of Coppola's film, offering a nearly surrealist image of the war, were used in a similar way to evoke a subjective sense of the war's losses. Garnering praise for their style, performances, and direction, both films were also strongly criticized for their lack of historical specificity. Instead of a historically accurate depiction of the war, they offered a mythic space in which national and personal ideals were explored and challenged. Rather like Hollywood's representation of the West in frontier days, such representations were best understood not according to their historical veracity, but in terms of their applicability to the contemporary values and beliefs of the audience.

The films that followed in the early 1980s likewise constructed a mythic Vietnam: the POW/MIA revenge films Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) all combined the spectacular elements of action cinema with right-wing nationalistic fantasy to refigure the vigilante of 1970s exploitation cinema as a lone veteran who returns to Vietnam, this time "to win." In each case the focus of the veteran/soldier's quest is the MIA/POW: soldiers unaccounted for after the repatriation of POWs in 1973 were, according to the logic of these films, still alive; likewise, the Vietnam War had never ended. A complex figure, despite the simplicity of its film treatment, the MIA/POW of these films stands in for all that was lost during the turbulent period of the war, including trust in the government in the wake of the revelations of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The vigilante heroes of these films fight as much against government corruption as they do against evil communists; the films offer narrative engagements with the numerous conspiracy theories that circled around America's conduct of the war and its treatment of its own soldiers.

During the latter half of the 1980s, a more recognizable war returned to the screen in such films as Platoon (1986), Hamburger Hill (1987), Full Metal Jacket (1989), Casualties of War (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and 84C MoPic (1989). These works made a stylistic shift from the action-adventure films that preceded them in the first part of the decade; they were marketed and praised for the realism, authenticity, and verifiability of their presentation of war. Employing the generically familiar traits of the World War II combat film, they reference extra-cinematic authorities, eyewitness accounts, and real historical events to buttress their claims to historical truth. They provided a sense of authenticity in their settings, with 1960s fashions, consumer goods, and recognizable locations. They were perhaps most persuasive—and influential on the war film—in their representation of the visual and aural texture of battle; We Were Soldiers (2002), which depicts the war's first major battle of 1965, is evidence of their ongoing influence. While a film like Apocalypse Now affected viewers with the surreality of its image of Vietnam, these films focused instead on its visceral character: their sense of verifiability was confirmed by camera movement that referenced combat and documentary reportage; and their soundtracks heightened the effect with period rock music, bone-shaking weapons' fire, and the slap-thud of Hueys.

Yet, at the same time that they offered a Vietnam never before seen—or heard—on screen, the representations of combat in these 1980s films were indebted to earlier representations of the war that likewise invoked the individual, eyewitness experience as the key to understanding it. Similar in these terms was the TV-documentary Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987), made for HBO and later given theatrical release. Featuring dramatic readings of letters from soldiers, their families, and their loved ones, it emphasizes personal experience over politics and ideology to produce a therapeutic text of remembrance. Its critics viewed it as a profoundly political film, however, for the way that it forestalled any critical or oppositional stance toward the war via its emotional engagement with the soldiers' experience.

In the 1990s and 2000s, following the American victory in the Cold War and its—somewhat anticlimactic and short-lived—triumph in the Persian Gulf, the Vietnam War was less prevalent on screen, despite the fact that documentaries such as Daughter from Danang (2002)—which recounted the reunion of an Amerasian woman and her Vietnamese mother—served as a reminder of the ongoing effects of war on both soldiers and non-combatants. Some critics observed that the popularity of Forrest Gump (1994) signaled the end of America's struggle with this chapter of its history: its slow-witted protagonist's affability and ignorance effectively smoothed the edges of every major event of the 1960s in which he unwittingly participated—including the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, Coppola's remixed and restored Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) seems as relevant as its 1979 predecessor as a film that recognizes and confronts the madness and excess of war: Vietnam was not the first—or last—conflict to inspire such films, but they are an important part of its legacy in American cinema.