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Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America During the Culture Wars, 1987-1995

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Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America During the Culture Wars, 1987-1995 Burton, James Amos (2008) Film, history and cultural memory: cinematic representations of Vietnam-era America during the culture wars, 1987-1995. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10493/1/FINAL_SUBMISSION.pdf Copyright and reuse: The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions. · Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. · To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in Nottingham ePrints has been checked for eligibility before being made available. · Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not- for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. · Quotations or similar reproductions must be sufficiently acknowledged. Please see our full end user licence at: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For more information, please contact [email protected] FILM, HISTORY ,N. C0LTUR,L MEMORY2 CINEM,TIC R13RESENTATIONS OF 4IETN,M5ER, ,MERIC, .0RIN6 TH1 C0LTUR1 7,RS, 198751995 James ,mos Burton, BA, M,. Thesis submitted to the 0niversity of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2007 Abstract My thesis is intended as an intellectual opportunity to take 2hat, I argue, are the 6dead ends7 of 2ork on the history film in a ne2 direction. I examine cinematic representations of the Vietnam War-era America (1964-1974) produced during the 6hot7 culture 2ars (1987-1995). I argue that disagreements among historians and commentators concerning the (mis)representation of history on screen are stymied by either an over- emphasis on factual infidelity, or by dismissal of such concerns as irrelevant. In contradistinction to such approaches, I analyse this group of films in the context of a fluid and negotiated cultural memory. I argue that the consumption of popular films becomes part of a vast intertextual mosaic of remembering and forgetting that is constantly redefining, and reimagining, the past. Representations of history in popular film affect the industrial construction of cultural memory, but Lollywood’s intertextual relay of promotion and accompanying wider media discourses also contributes to a climate in which film impacts upon collective memory. I analyse the films firmly within the discursive moment of their production (the culture 2ars), the circulating promotional discourses that accompany them, and the al2ays already circulating notions of their s-INects. The introduction outlines my methodological approach and provides an overvie2 of the relationship bet2een the t2inned discursive moments. Subsequent chapters focus on representations of returning veteransR representations of the counterculture and the anti-2ar protest movementR and the s-INects foregrounded in the biopics of the period. The fourth chapter examines Forrest Gump as a meta-sixties film and as the fulcrum of my thesis. The final chapter posits that an uplifting version of the sixties has begun to dominate as the most successful type of production in the post-Gump marketplace. i Ac(nowle.gments Sirst of all, I wish to thank Sharon Monteith for being the most inspirational, generous, and compassionate supervisor I can imagine. I tha(1 Taul Urainge for his timely interventions and direction in his role as supporting supervisor. I 2ould like thank the postgraduate research community at the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham for contributing to a stimulating research environment. In particular, I offer appreciation for friendship and support to Sophie Cart2right, Rayna Denison, Kerry Gough, Joanne Lall, David McBride, Sinead Moynihan, Catherine Nash, Donna Teberdy, Adrian Smith, Simon Turner, and Peter Urquhart. I 2ould also like to thank Ann McQueen and Helen Taylor for thei0 2onderful assistance and understanding. 4 2ould like to thank the British Association of American Studies for their a2ard of a Short-Term Travel Urant that supported invaluable research at the Margaret Lerrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, in July 2005. I offer equal appreciation to Universitas 21 for the Triae Scholarship that enabled a research visit to the University of Virginia in April and May 2005. 4 2ould like to thank the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham for the School studentship that made it possible for me to pursue this degree. I thank the Leymann, the Dean Moore, and the Andre2 Landry Endowed Postgraduate Scholarships for the assistance that their a2ards provided. I also thank the Uraduate School at the University of Nottingham for the Travel Triae that enabled me to present a version of chapter t2o of this thesis at the Silm and Listory League conference in Dallas, Texas, in November 2004. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my family for all of their understanding and love, especially over the past fe2 years. Finally, I thank Elsie Walke0 2hose inspiration and infectious enthusiasm changed everything and keeps me going in every 2ay. ii 1ontents Introduction 1 cne Making Amends and Emphasiaing Redemption: Rehabilitating the Vietnam Veteran. 50 T2o Defending the Legacy of the Sixtiesd Reasserting the Idealism of the Era during the Culture Wars. 115 Three The Battling Biopicsd The Assertion of Unconventional Lives. 160 Sour 6Decency, Lonor and Sidelity Triumph cver the Values of Hollywood7d The Right’s Enlistment of Forrest Gump. __e Sive Contrasting Histories in the Tost-Gump Momentd The Cases of Apollo 13 and Ni1on. 257 Coda 301 Bibliography 308 Silmography 320 iii 2llustrations Sigure 1. 3istant Thunder Theatrical Release Toster. Tage 60 Sigure 2. 8ac:nife Theatrical Release Toster. Tage CA Sigure 3. In Country Theatrical Release Toster. Tage C_ Sigure 4. Running on Empty Theatrical Release Toster. Tage Aee Sigure 5. Jim Uarrison. Tage 182 Sigure 6. Kevin Costner as Jim Uarrison in 8FB. Tage 182 iv Introduction American cinema has long been fascinated with recreating American history on film. From 7.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the plethora of filmic interpretations of the 3ar in Iraq due for release in the later months of 2007, filmmakers have sought to express their translations of the past on screen. 8ithin this thesis I focus on cinematic representations of Vietnam 8ar-era America (1964-1974) produced during the particularly heated period of the culture 3ars (1987-1995) because this discursive period is characterised by the right’s concerted attacks on the social, political, and cultural legacies of the OsiI1ies.P1 7uring this time, filmmakers produced a significant number of historical films that consciously engaged in these debates about the siI1ies and 3hich offer striking examples of the impact of cinema on cultural memory. These films are striking examples for the 3ays in which they have been explicitly used and appropriated, both positively and negatively, by politicians, media personnel, as 3ell as by the general public in order to advance particular ideologically-loaded arguments about the present. They are striking in that they are connected through their serious attempts to represent 1 Although the culture 3ars can be traced at least from the electoral strategies of George 8allace and Richard Nixon’s conception and utilisation of the Osilent maTorityP and are certainly still being fought, I choose to focus on a particularly heated period from 1987 to 1995. 1987 sa3 the surprising popularity of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the 1merican Mind that conteI1ualised declining standards in liberal education within the changes to the university 3rought by the upheavals of the 1960s. The resulting explosion of rhetoric that, for many on the right, sa3 the very foundations of the O3estern tradition” as under attack from the social forces unleashed by the ne3 social movements of the 1960s, created a climate in 3hich the meaning and reforms of that era 3ere very much “up for grabs5P This politics of values set the tide for the 9ingrich Republicans capture of Congress in 1994 on a platform that 3as reliant on notions of tradition under threat, but by the end of 1995 their Ocounterrevolution” 3as spent as the Bob Dole-led Senate voted against many of their proposed reforms. 1 the siI1ies in relation to pre-existing, politically charged conceptions of what that period of American history means. They are striking for their self- conscious participation in the processes of interteI1ual relay and their influence on collective cultural memory. They are striking in that they have been insufficiently analysed in terms of the multifarious influences manifest 3ithin them and surrounding their making. There have been many generic cycles and trends in the course of film history that have engaged with specific ideological and social preoccupations, and, as Richard Maltby has noted, studio heads have al3ays recogniYed that a) Oovertl4 Zconcerned’ cinema could lend prestige to its producersP and the industry as a 3hole through underlining cinema’s importance in national dialogues.2 This social engagement has taken many forms: the social problem films of the 1930s and 1940s interrogated a 3ide range of contemporary problems from 7epression-era inequalities and suffering to organised crime and race relations; science fiction films of the 1950s cast an allegorical eye upon the nuclear anxieties of the Col2 8ar and the domestic Ored scareP; and Robert B.
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