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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 FILM, HISTORY AND CULTURAL MEMORY: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF VIETNAM-ERA AMERICA DURING THE CULTURE WARS, 1987-1995 James Amos Burton, BA, MA. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2007 Abstract My thesis is intended as an intellectual opportunity to take what, I argue, are the “dead ends” of work on the history film in a new direction. I examine cinematic representations of the Vietnam War-era America (1964-1974) produced during the “hot” culture wars (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 Hollywood’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 wars), the circulating promotional discourses that accompany them, and the always already circulating notions of their subjects. The introduction outlines my methodological approach and provides an overview of the relationship between the twinned discursive moments. Subsequent chapters focus on representations of returning veterans; representations of the counterculture and the anti-war protest movement; and the subjects 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 Acknowledgments First of all, I wish to thank Sharon Monteith for being the most inspirational, generous, and compassionate supervisor I can imagine. I thank Paul Grainge for his timely interventions and direction in his role as supporting supervisor. I would 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 Cartwright, Rayna Denison, Kerry Gough, Joanne Hall, David McBride, Sinead Moynihan, Catherine Nash, Donna Peberdy, Adrian Smith, Simon Turner, and Peter Urquhart. I would also like to thank Ann McQueen and Helen Taylor for their wonderful assistance and understanding. I would like to thank the British Association of American Studies for their award of a Short-Term Travel Grant that supported invaluable research at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, in July 2005. I offer equal appreciation to Universitas 21 for the Prize Scholarship that enabled a research visit to the University of Virginia in April and May 2005. I would 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 Heymann, the Dean Moore, and the Andrew Handry Endowed Postgraduate Scholarships for the assistance that their awards provided. I also thank the Graduate School at the University of Nottingham for the Travel Prize that enabled me to present a version of chapter two of this thesis at the Film and History 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 few years. Finally, I thank Elsie Walker whose inspiration and infectious enthusiasm changed everything and keeps me going in every way. ii Contents Introduction 1 One Making Amends and Emphasizing Redemption: Rehabilitating the Vietnam Veteran. 50 Two Defending the Legacy of the Sixties: Reasserting the Idealism of the Era during the Culture Wars. 115 Three The Battling Biopics: The Assertion of Unconventional Lives. 160 Four “Decency, Honor and Fidelity Triumph Over the Values of Hollywood”: The Right’s Enlistment of Forrest Gump. 223 Five Contrasting Histories in the Post-Gump Moment: The Cases of Apollo 13 and Nixon. 257 Coda 301 Bibliography 308 Filmography 320 iii Illustrations Figure 1. Distant Thunder Theatrical Release Poster. Page 60 Figure 2. Jacknife Theatrical Release Poster. Page 61 Figure 3. In Country Theatrical Release Poster. Page 62 Figure 4. Running on Empty Theatrical Release Poster. Page 133 Figure 5. Jim Garrison. Page 182 Figure 6. Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison in JFK. Page 182 iv Introduction American cinema has long been fascinated with recreating American history on film. From D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the plethora of filmic interpretations of the war in Iraq due for release in the later months of 2007, filmmakers have sought to express their translations of the past on screen. Within this thesis I focus on cinematic representations of Vietnam War-era America (1964-1974) produced during the particularly heated period of the culture wars (1987-1995) because this discursive period is characterised by the right’s concerted attacks on the social, political, and cultural legacies of the “sixties.”1 During this time, filmmakers produced a significant number of historical films that consciously engaged in these debates about the sixties and which offer striking examples of the impact of cinema on cultural memory. These films are striking examples for the ways in which they have been explicitly used and appropriated, both positively and negatively, by politicians, media personnel, as well 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 wars can be traced at least from the electoral strategies of George Wallace and Richard Nixon’s conception and utilisation of the “silent majority” and are certainly still being fought, I choose to focus on a particularly heated period from 1987 to 1995. 1987 saw the surprising popularity of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind that contextualised declining standards in liberal education within the changes to the university wrought by the upheavals of the 1960s. The resulting explosion of rhetoric that, for many on the right, saw the very foundations of the “western tradition” as under attack from the social forces unleashed by the new social movements of the 1960s, created a climate in which the meaning and reforms of that era were very much “up for grabs.” This politics of values set the tide for the Gingrich Republicans capture of Congress in 1994 on a platform that was reliant on notions of tradition under threat, but by the end of 1995 their “counterrevolution” was spent as the Bob Dole-led Senate voted against many of their proposed reforms. 1 the sixties 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 intertextual 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 within 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 always recognized that an “overtly ‘concerned’ cinema could lend prestige to its producers” and the industry as a whole 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 wide range of contemporary problems from Depression-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 Cold War and the domestic “red scare”; and Robert B. Ray has identified the left and right cycles of production that emerged in response to the social and industrial turmoil of the 1960s.3 In addition to these relatively direct responses to contemporary social and political questions, historical films have frequently excavated the American past. As Robert Brent Toplin observes, such films often reference the present to draw attention to the contemporary resonances of their interpretations by 2 Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 293. 3 Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 298-325. 2 incorporating “subtle hints about their stories’ connections to current issues.”4 Alternatively, the historical film can be seen to engage and reflect evolving historiographical trends. It is possible, for example, to read silent films of the 1910s and 1920s about the Civil War as cultural representations of that era’s predominant reconciliationist historiography, to read Gone With the Wind (1939) as a cinematic exemplar of the “Moonlight and Magnolias” view of the conflict, and to read more recent texts such as Roots (1977) and Glory (1989) as reflecting the reassertion of slavery as a central reason for the war.5 What makes the films under discussion in this thesis distinctive in relation to the political and sociological discourse inherent in other eras of Hollywood history is not only that they represent concentration on a particular historical period across an unusually large number of films, but that they historiographically engage with popular dialogues at a time when the very meaning of the 1960s is under debate and “up for grabs” within the larger culture.
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