Vietnam War Movies Representations of a Controversial War From CHINA GATE (1957) to RESCUE DAWN (2006). Samuel Fuller’s CHINA GATE (1957) Werner Herzog’s RESCUE DAWN (2006) Name: Bart van Tricht Student number: 0162914 Course: Master Thesis Master: American Studies (AMS) Advisor: prof. dr. Maarten van Rossem Date: 10/07/2008. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................. 3 Relevant Facts about the Vietnam War................................................................... 9 Chapter I: Popular Culture and American Studies.................................................... 11 Chapter II: Representations....................................................................................... 14 Chapter III: Before the Vietnam War Movies........................................................... 22 Chapter IV: The Vietnam War Movies..................................................................... 31 From CHINA GATE (1957) to APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)...................................... 34 From John Rambo to BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989) .............................. 47 From the Nineties into the 21st Century ................................................................ 64 WE WERE SOLDIERS (2002) and PATH TO WAR (2002)........................................ 69 Chapter V: RESCUE DAWN (2006), a Short Narrative Analysis ............................... 79 Conclusion................................................................................................................. 87 Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 93 Vietnam War Movies (sorted by year) .................................................................. 97 Documentaries....................................................................................................... 98 Television Programs.............................................................................................. 98 Internet Sources ..................................................................................................... 99 2 Introduction A lot of mainstream Hollywood movies have been made about World War II and the Vietnam War; some were created during, but a whole lot more were made in the many years following these wars. But whereas World War II has been generally portrayed as ‘a good war’ which ridded the nation of ‘economic and social ills,’1 the Vietnam War has a different legacy. It left the US with a national trauma resulting from different factors, most obviously its painful defeat and many casualties, but also America’s (publicized) war crimes, such as the My Lai massacre.2 Moreover, this war laid bear some of the internal divisions in American society - patriarchal, racial, and economic divisions, to name a few- and resulted in a reassessment of the public’s belief in America as the undefeatable moral leader of the world. Put in stronger terms, America lost its innocence as well as its ‘heroic self-image’ as a result of this war.3 As Liberal Arts professor Gordon Arnold argued in an article on his book The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam (2006): “[…] the repeated incarnations of the war in politics and on screen are part of the continuing nation’s efforts to come to terms with disillusionment and disappointments from the conflict.”4 With that in mind the importance of studying these movies becomes clear. It is a way to get a better insight into this tumultuous era in American history; an era which not only gave us a war in the distant land of Vietnam, but also showed us America’s internal problems, something we can still learn from. The first thing that comes to mind is America’s current involvement in Iraq, which raises some similar questions. For example, questions about America’s right to interfere in another country’s affairs; questions about the tremendous amount of money which America could have used to take care of its own domestic issues; as well as questions about the many (American) casualties. 1 Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore 1994) 2 Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered (New York 1988) 35. 3 Mitchell K. Hall, “Preface,” in: Crossroads: American popular culture and the Vietnam generation (Lanham 2005) 4 Gordon Arnold, “The Strange afterlife of the Vietnam War” (21-08-2006) on: hnn.us/articles/28641.html 3 Nevertheless, it is also clear that there are some big differences between the Vietnam War and America’s current endeavor in Iraq. But these dissimilarities put aside, we are left with some comparable issues, among which are the political negligence concerning returning veterans;5 America’s ever growing deficit; the difficulty to fight against an unconventional enemy; the role of the press; and the negative public opinion, to name a few. Although the latter is nothing compared to the anti-war demonstrations in the sixties. Scholars, like those of the 1988 Boston conference with the title “The War Film: Contexts and Images,”6 seem to collectively agree that it is important to know more about the filmic representations of this conflict. This opinion seems to be shared by most of the essayists in the anthologies From Hanoi to Hollywood. The Vietnam War in American Film (1990) and Inventing Vietnam. The War in Film and Television (1991), as well as by the authors of the filmic overviews How the War Was Remembered (1988) and Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second (1999). In one way or another, they generally argue that these movies can be used to contribute to the “[…] ongoing national effort to retrieve and assimilate this chapter in […] [America’s] recent history.”7 Overall, filmic representations of this war can be read in different ways and a new perspective can “[…] result in a fuller understanding of the past and positive action in the future.”8 This is also one of the main reasons why this thesis will further address these movies. When you look at American libraries it becomes very clear that a great deal has been written about the Vietnam War and the different movies that represent it. Movies are a way into the war itself, but also a way to find out more about a nation’s collective memory on such an important issue. Especially in the late eighties and nineties many articles and books have been published on the subject, apparently by then the time was ripe to delve deeper into this 5 Dan Lohaus (dir.) VPRO’s Import: WHEN I CAME HOME (documentary; USA 2006). 6 Ditmar and Michaud, From Hanoi to Hollywood. The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick 1990) xi. 7 Ibidem, xi. 8 Ibidem. 4 traumatic ordeal. As a result we are presented with an in-depth view of Vietnam War films and especially the changes that have occurred in their themes and narrative, their filmic ‘development’ so to speak. This will also be the primary focus of this master thesis. More accurately put, I will explore the various themes, narratives, characters, and topics, as well as the way these films represent social circumstances, politics, veterans, the Vietnamese, and combat, etcetera. Additionally, it is also interesting and important to determine how they portray the war (e.g. positively or negatively); what kind of things have made an impact on their narrative; what their cinematic style is; as well as how and why all these things might have changed over time.9 Unfortunately not every decade has brought many films on the subject, which results in a bigger focus on specific periods of time. For example, whereas the late seventies and the eighties have brought us many different filmic representations of the war, not that many films have been made since the early nineties. Nevertheless, four rather mainstream Hollywood st movies have been released since the start of the 21 century, namely TIGERLAND (2000), WE WERE SOLDIERS (2002), PATH TO WAR (2002) and RESCUE DAWN (2006). Unfortunately, most of the research on this topic has been written in the late twentieth century, and as a result there is not as much scholarly research on these contemporary representations of the conflict. Therefore, these movies will be addressed in some detail at the end of chapter four: “The Vietnam War Movies.” Furthermore, the last of these movies, namely Werner Herzog’s RESCUE DAWN, will be used as a case study in the final chapter. All with the intention to find out more about contemporary Vietnam War films and if their representation of the conflict is any different from those made at an earlier time. In short, I will address some of the major ‘trends’ and ‘changes’ within the narrative, themes, and style of mainstream Hollywood films that directly represent the Vietnam War. 9 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York 2001) 5 In addition, questions as to how and why specific movies represent the conflict in a particular way, will be thoroughly dealt with as well. In order to distinguish between the different topics and decades of filmmaking this thesis is divided into five chapters as well as numerous paragraphs. The first chapter addresses the importance of popular culture to the discipline of American Studies. The latter of which is the scholarly perspective from which this master thesis has been written, and subsequently explains the focus on American society through the lens of popular culture, more specifically film. The second chapter will deal with representations and how they shape the way we look at the world