The Vietnam War for the US film industry

Résumé du document

The Vietnam War represents a crucial moment in U.S. contemporary history and has given rise to the conflict, which has so intensively motivated the American film industry. Although some Vietnam movies were produced during the conflict, it has been since the end of the war that the subject has become one of Hollywood's best sellers. Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Rambo or Platoon are some of the titles that have created so much controversy.

Cinematic representations seem to have supplanted even so-called factual analysis as the discourse of the war, as the place where some kind of reckoning will need to be made and tested.

Why should films be so intimately associated with the reality of what has come to be known as the Vietnam experience? One answer is that the Vietnam War was the most visually represented war in history, existing, to a great degree, as moving image, as the site of a specific and complex iconic group.

Extraits

[...] There was enough of that to go around for everyone”. The identification of the detective figure with the murderer, never allowed in the hard-boiled formula, is brought to its disorienting climax in the scene that Coppola has called the most important in the film,[5] the shooting by Willard of the wounded Vietnamese woman, followed with Willard's explicit explanation: “We'd cut'em in half with a machine gun and give'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies”. [...]

[...] In the Vietnam cinema, the war is not presented so much in the realm of history or memory as it is projected beyond history and memory into the present. By the late seventies, Hollywood was able, for the first time since The Green Berets (1968), to engage the war directly. Both The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now take their narrative cues from popular forms of American literature: the western in The Deer Hunter and the hard-boiled detective story in Apocalypse Now. [...]

[...] Conceiving of the Vietnam War as a western in which the captivity experience is the pivotal episode, Cimino makes The Deer Hunter deeply disturbing on the most resonant level of cultural myth. The Deer Hunter presents Vietnam as a frontier landscape so hostile that America, having come as hunter with dreams of omnipotence, is help captive in it and forced to confront the full implications of its own impulses. The point is to determine how a culture proceeds once it has experienced the inversion of its central assumptions about itself. [...]

[...] Thus Apocalypse Now shows Vietnam forcing the hard- boiled detective hero into the investigation of his unconscious. While the hard-boiled formula is completed by Willard's rejection of his attraction to Kurtz when he sees that he's indeed a murderer without method at and by his resistance to Kurtz's intimidation and brainwashing in order to fulfill his mission, he himself knows that his slaying of Kurtz is at the latter's direction. “Everyone wanted me to do it, him most of all”. [...]

[...] Unlike The Green Berets (1968), an unthinking use of the western formula, The Deer Hunter is a western affected by the shift in the landscape. The Deer Hunter is an important artistic interpretation of the war precisely, because it so fully comprehends the essence of its source and self-consciously explores its meaning in reference to recent American experience. In The Deer Hunter, the actions and character of a lonely hero, Michael Vronsky (Robert De Niro), are closely associated with wilderness landscapes, the basis for a structure of violent conflicts and sharp oppositions. [...]