Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [392]
The war in Vietnam was a much dirtier affair than The Green Berets made it seem, its politics far less cut and dried. As the struggle turned into tragedy and popular support for it soured, movie moguls sensed that the war had become taboo. “Vietnam is awkward,” said the journalist Michael Herr, “…and if people don’t even want to hear about it, you know they’re not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up.” It was to be a full decade before another major combat movie was released. Instead, film-makers trained their gaze upon returning Vietnam veterans’ doomed attempts to ease back into society. The resulting pictures were low in compassion: America’s national pride had been collectively compromised by the failure to bring home a victory, and sympathy and forgiveness were at a premium.
A raft of exploitation movies was churned out, boasting names such as Born Losers (1967), Angels from Hell (1968) and The Ravager (1970), in which the mental scars of Vietnam provided topical window-dressing to improbable tales of martial arts, motorbikes and mayhem. At best, vets were treated as dysfunctional vigilantes acting beyond the pale of society – most famously in Taxi Driver (1976), which has Robert De Niro’s disturbed insomniac returnee, Travis Bickle, embarking on a one-man moral crusade to purge the streets of a hellish New York. At worst, they were wacko misfits posing a threat to small-town America. With veterans being portrayed as anything but heroes, it was left to the stars of the campus riot movies, and films lionizing draft-dodgers, to provide role models.
Vietnam in the movies |
Coming to terms with the war
Only in 1978 did Hollywood finally pluck up enough courage to confront the war head-on, and so aid the nation’s healing process – movies-as-therapy. In the years since John Wayne’s Green Berets had battened down the hatches against Communism, America had first lost sight of justification for the war, and then effectively lost the war itself. Movies no longer sought to make sense of past events, but to highlight their futility; for the generation of young Americans unfortunate enough to live through Vietnam, mere survival was seen as triumph enough. As audiences were exposed to their first dramatized glimpses of the war’s unpalatable realities, they were confronted by disaffected troops seeking comfort in prostitution and drug abuse, along with far more shocking examples of soldiers’ fraying moral fibre.
Such themes were woven through the first of the four movies of note released in 1978, The Boys in Company C, which follows a band of young draftees through their basic training stateside, and then into action. In one particularly telling scene, American lives are lost transporting what turns out to be whisky and cigarettes to the front. A similar futility underpins Go Tell the Spartans, in which Burt Lancaster’s drug- and alcohol-hazed troops take, and then abandon, a camp – an idea reused nine years later in Hamburger Hill.
Coming Home (1978), which cast Jane Fonda as a military career-man’s wife who falls in love with a wheelchair-bound veteran (Jon Voight), was significant for its sensitive consideration of the emotional and physical tolls exacted by the war, and initiated the trend for more measured and intelligent vet movies.
Similarly concerned with the ramifications of the war, both home and away, was The Deer Hunter (1978), in which the conscription of three friends fractures their Russian Orthodox community in Pennsylvania. The friends’ “one-shot” code of honour, espoused on a last pre-Vietnam hunting trip, contrasts wildly with the moral vacuum of the war, whose random brutality is embodied in the movie’s central scenes of Russian roulette. The picture’s ending, with its melancholy rendition of God Bless America by the central characters, is only semi-ironic, and alludes to the country’s regenerative process. For all its power, The Deer Hunter is marred by overt racist stereotyping of the Vietnamese who, according to John Pilger, are dismissed as