Word: nam
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...other war, they would have made movies about us too. Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch from Dong Ha, maybe even A Scrambler to the Front . . . But Viet Nam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up." So wrote Michael Herr in Dispatches, published in 1977, a year before the first spate of Viet Nam dramas. (The mid-'60s had offered a couple of World War II wheezes disguised as topical films: A Yank...
Trouble was, most of these films were not about Viet Nam. Coming Home was a disabled-vet love story -- The Best Years of Our Lives with Jon Voight in the Harold Russell role. The Deer Hunter was . . . well, what was it? An incoherent parable about male bonding through Russian roulette. Bats and beautiful, it stood like Ishmael on the prow of its pretensions and declared, "Call me masterpiece." Apocalypse Now was fine as long as it accompanied its doomed, questing hero (played by Martin Sheen, Charlie's father) upstream on the River Styx; then it fogged off into fantasyland with...
Hollywood (and not just Hollywood) refused to see that Viet Nam was different. All the old givens -- beau geste, military master plans, unswerving belief in the officer class -- were fatally irrelevant to a guerrilla war. Forget the World War II narrative line of tanks and tactics, which moved with the ponderous sweep of a Golden Age Hollywood plot. Viet Nam, set in jungles without beginning or end, was a flash of episodic, aleatory explosions; it was modernism brought to war. And a new kind of war demanded a new look at the war-movie genre. Platoon fills the bill...
...Vietnamese are either pathetic victims or the invisible, inhuman enemy. In the scheme of Platoon (and not just Platoon) they do not matter. The nearly 1 million Vietnamese casualties are deemed trivial compared with America's loss of innocence, of allies, of geopolitical face. And the tragedy of Viet Nam is seen as this: not that they died, but that we debased ourselves by killing them...
...course, Platoon need not be every possible Viet Nam film to be the best one so far. It is enough that Stone has devised a drama of palpable realism that is also a metaphor for the uncivil war that raged in the U.S. and can flare up anytime in any family. Indeed, at the film's molten core is the tug of wills between two strong men, outsize figures of shameless strutting charisma, for parentage of their platoon and for their new recruit, Chris. Barnes, the staff sergeant, could be Chris' legal father; Elias, the romantic renegade, could...