Word: sergeanting
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...Stone, Dye found a kindred spirit who wanted Platoon's actors to experience the fatigue, frayed nerves and fear that preyed on the Viet Nam infantryman and to understand the casual brutality that often emerged. Willem Dafoe, who plays Sergeant Elias, the platoon's conscience, recalls that "we certainly did get some taste of exhaustion, frustration and confusion." Tom Berenger, who plays the soul-dead Sergeant Barnes, agrees. "We didn't even have to act. We were there...
...paralyzed with fear, as the enemy approaches and another new boy dies. On a second patrol the platoon enters a village that might be My Lai; anger goads Chris to spit bullets at the feet of a petrified Vietnamese, and before the day is over the group's leader, Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), has seen to the slaughtering of villagers before the entire place is torched. During a third battle, Barnes tracks down a woods-wise sergeant, Elias (Willem Dafoe), who had interrupted Barnes' massacre, shoots him and leaves him for dead. On the final patrol Chris flips into heroism...
...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 be a spiritual father, even after his death. They are like Claudius and the Ghost wrestling for Hamlet's allegiance...
...motivated, except to get out. Survival was the key. It wasn't very romantic." Each of the three combat units he served in was divided into antagonistic groups, as in the film: "On one side were the lifers, the juicers ((heavy drinkers)) and the moron white element. Guys like Sergeant Barnes -- and there really was a sergeant as scarred and obsessed as Barnes -- were in this group. On the other side was a progressive, hippie, dope- smoking group: some blacks, some urban whites, Indians, random characters from odd places. Guys like Elias -- and there really was an Elias, handsome, electric...
...energy and unpatron-izing affection for the grand old forms than Eastwood. He also knows that by grounding his work with a few simple ironies, he can humanize his basic screen character, that of the dutiful loner, and separate it from upstarts like "Sly" Stallone and Chuck Norris. The sergeant's swearing, for example, is well beyond the grunting demands of realism; it is an aria of obscenities and more a commentary on macho posturing than an assertion of it. Same thing with the women's magazines he reads. See, he hopes to re-up with his ex-wife (Marsha...