Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [393]
Francis Ford Coppola’s hugely indulgent but visually magnificent Apocalypse Now (1979) rounded off the vanguard of postwar Vietnam combat movies. Described by one critic as “Film as opera…it turns Vietnam into a vast trip, into a War of the Imagination”, the picture’s Dantean snapshots of the war rob Vietnam of all identity other than as a “heart of darkness”. Fuelled by his desire to convey the “horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war”, Coppola totally mythologizes the conflict, rendering it not so much futile as insane. The usual elements of needless death, casual atrocity, moral decline and spaced-out soldiers leaning heavily on substance abuse are all here, played out against a raunchy soundtrack. However, with its stylized representation of montagnards as generic savages deifying Westerners, and its depiction of the Viet Cong as butchers who happily lop the arms off children who have had “American” inoculations, Apocalypse Now is little more enlightened than The Deer Hunter. Coppola subsequently compared the creation of the film itself to a war: “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us. We had access to too much money and too much equipment and little by little we went insane” – a process graphically depicted in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991).
Vietnam in the movies |
Returning home
The precedent set by Coming Home of sympathetic consideration for returning veterans’ mindsets spurred many movies along similar lines in subsequent years. These focused on the disillusionment and disorientation felt by soldiers coming back, not to heroes’ welcomes, but to indifference and even disdain.
One of the first of these movies was First Blood (1982), which introduced audiences to Sly Stallone’s muscle-bound super-vet, John Rambo. As we witness Rambo’s torment in small-town America, the picture is more “shoot ‘em up” than cerebral. Yet its climax, in which Rambo’s former colonel becomes a surrogate father figure to him, underscores the tender ages of the troops who fought the war. Other movies of the genre – among them Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July (1989) – reiterated the message of stolen youth and innocence by screening idyllic, elegiac scenes of childhood. Stone has his hero (played by Tom Cruise) swallowing the anti-Communist line, and returning to an indifference symbolized by the squalor of the army hospital in which he recuperates and by the breakdown of his relationship with his mother. In Birdy, doctors at a loss as to how to treat a catatonic patient turn to a fellow vet for help – this sense of America’s inability to relate to returnees subsequently resurfaces in Jacknife (1989).
Vietnam in the movies |
Rewriting history
Not content with squaring up to the war in Vietnam, Hollywood during the 1980s attempted, bizarrely, to rewrite its script, in a series of revisionist movies. Richard Gere had made the armed forces hip again in 1982’s weepie An Officer and a Gentleman; a year later the first of an intriguing sub-genre of films hit cinemas, in which Americans returned to Vietnam, invariably to rescue MIAs, and “won”. Given a righteous cause (and what could be more righteous than rescuing fellow soldiers), and freed from the chains of moral degradation that had shackled him in previous movies, the US soldier could now show his true mettle. In stark contrast to the comic-book superhuman Americans of these pictures, are the brainless Vietnamese, who appear only as cannon fodder.
Uncommon Valor (1983), a rather silly piece about an MIA rescue starring Gene Hackman, kicked things off, closely followed by Missing in Action (1983), in which Chuck Norris, the poor man’s Stallone, karate-kicks his way towards the same