MM
a variety of approaches to cataloguing the war. The first wave of films included The Deer Hunter (1978) which explored the impact of the war on a small mining community in Pennsylvania, although it is possibly best remembered for its Russian roulette sequence and for the many criticisms of how Vietnamese characters are represented. Coming Home (1980) looked at the problems surrounding veterans returning from the war, trying to readjust to a normal life. Francis Coppola’s dreamlike epic Apocalypse Now (1980) transposed the Joseph Conrad novel The Heart of Darkness to the depths of the Vietnam jungle. The second wave of films came over a decade
after the end of the war, and saw the emergence of a Vietnam auteur who had served in the country and seen combat. Oliver Stone’s trilogy of films Platoon (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1990) and Heaven and Earth (1993) took a variety of angry perspectives on the war and its aftermath on both the men who served there, and the local population. Other noteworthy films were Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly realised minimalist Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Brian DePalma’s more conventional, but nonetheless extremely powerful Casualties of War (1988). There were also variations on the genre with the very successful comedy-melodrama and Robin Williams’ vehicle Good Morning Vietnam (1988) and later with the simple tale of a simple man Forrest Gump (1994) whose wartime exploits turn him into a national hero. The problem for television and film producers
concerning the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t been so much how to offer a broad perspective to the events, but how to garner the mood of a prospective audience. The alleged illegality of the war in Iraq and the mounting fatality and casualty rate amongst allied soldiers both had to be taken into account. There was also the initial, misguided link between the invasions and the defining moment of the decade, the 9/11 attacks, which to an extent still resonates deeply in
For many media and film students, finding
an area of study which is explicitly or implicitly linked to real social, cultural and political contexts can create many difficulties. This may be partly due to a lack of engagement with the news media outside of celebrity gossip and innuendo, so that your knowledge of major stories of the day may well be patchy. This is a great shame, because fictional media texts very often debate and reflect on current conflicts in extremely revealing ways, enlightening the audience with a range of scenarios rooted in an interpretation of real-life events. The recent military incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States and their allies, including Britain have, perhaps surprisingly, provided a wealth of both television and film interpretations of the conflicts extremely quickly.
Far from Vietnam These films are quite unlike those representing
the last major war that the Americans were involved in – Vietnam. The only major war film
20 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
made during its long duration, John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), was a flag-waving, overtly patriotic mission in damage limitation and was in direct contrast to the growing opposition to a deeply unpopular military campaign. It took some time for film-makers to confront the horrors and realities of that war in an upfront manner. Unlike World War Two where the Allied forces had saved the world from the possibility of a Fascist dictatorship, the war in South-East Asia had cast the US not as an all-conquering hero, but as a big bully meddling in the affairs of a poor and weak country. Of course, the films that followed World War Two were often simplistic, morally unambiguous combat movies, mainly centring on the mixed band of comrades confronting German or Japanese stereotypes. These films, for example, avoided addressing the horrors of the Holocaust or the atomic nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In comparison, the first wave of Vietnam films released from the late Seventies onwards took
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67