Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [394]
Vietnam in the movies |
“It don’t mean nothing”
The backlash to the patent nonsense of the revisionist films came in the form of a series of shockingly realistic movies which attempted, in the words of the director Oliver Stone, to “peel the onion” and reveal the real Vietnam, routine atrocities, indiscipline and all. There are no heroes in these GI’s-view movies, only fragile, confused-looking young men in fatigues, emphasizing that this was a war that affected a whole generation – not just its most photogenic individuals.
In Platoon (1986), Oliver Stone, himself a foot soldier in Vietnam, created the most realistic cinematographic interpretation of the American involvement yet. Filmed on location in the Philippines, this movie reminded audiences that killing gooks wasn’t as straightforward as Rambo made it seem. As well as portraying the depths to which humankind can sink, Stone shows the circumstances under which it was feasible for young American boys to become murderers of civilians. Its oppressive sensory overload powerfully conjures the paranoiac near-hysteria spawned by fear, confusion, loss of motivation and inability to discriminate between friend and foe. Inherent in its shadowy, half-seen portrayal of the enemy is a grudging respect for their expertise in jungle warfare.
If Platoon portrays a dirty war, in Hamburger Hill (1987), which dramatizes the taking of Ap Bia hill during May 1969’s battle for the A Shau valley, it has degenerated into a positive mud bath. As troops slither and slide on the flanks of the hill in the highland mists, they become indistinguishable, and the image of an entire generation stumbling towards the maws of death is strengthened by the fact that the cast includes no big-name actors – the men who fall on the hill are neighbours, sons or brothers, not film stars. American losses are taken in order to secure a useless hill, a potent symbol of the futility of America’s involvement in the war; as one soldier says, time after time, in a weary mantra, “it don’t mean nothing, not a thing.” Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) picks up Hamburger Hill’s theme of the war’s theft of American youth in its opening scene, as the camp barber strips conscripts of their hair and, by implication, their individuality. A brutal drill-sergeant completes the alienation process by replacing the soldiers’ names with nicknames of his choosing, and then sets about expunging their humanity – on the grounds that it will only hamper them when they experience firsthand the insanity of the war. However, as US troops plod wearily through a smouldering Hué in the movie’s final scene, the usual macho marching tunes are replaced with a plaintive echo of youth: “Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me, M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E”.
Vietnam in the movies |
A different perspective
French cinema only began to tackle the subject of Vietnam in the 1990s. If in Dien Bien Phu (1992) it confronted its own ghosts, on the whole its output has been limited to visually captivating colonial whimsies, to which the Vietnamese setting merely adds an exotic tang. For example, The Lover (1992) works not because it does justice to Marguerite Duras’ poignant rites-of-passage novella, but because its extended interludes of heaving flesh are cloaked with a veneer of Oriental mystique created by location filming in Ho Chi Minh City and Sa Dec. Indochine (1993) starts off in similarly rose-tinted fashion amid the seductively rarefied atmosphere of a French colonial rubber plantation, and from there it veers off to take full advantage of the romantic