In the late seventies a new subgenre of movies started to emerge, Vietnam war movies, which dealt with the trauma of the war and the havoc wrought by its long-lasting effects in the American psyche and mostly in the way America projected itself onto the world. Vietnam had always been a conundrum for the American strategists and the fears of communist spreading all over Asia led president Kennedy ad later Lyndon Johnson to take some actions against the Vietnamese communist-ruled part of the country. The war was waged with many convolutions but when troops started to withdraw and defeat was a fact impossible to conceal America had to grasp one of its most painful moments in its history. What better way to deal with it than with cinematic representations of trauma? Vietnam movies of the seventies are quite different from the ones of the 80s; especially the first Rambo movie and its sequels.
While the seventies underlined the idea of a collective male experience- having been there was equated with experience and a shared male poignancy- which saw the war as a transforming psychological ordeal, the eighties attempted to heal wounds of masculine pride. Most of the narratives of Vietnam war movies deal with pain, with loss of innocence and a kind of coming- of -age process through which young soldiers coming up against a deceitful, cunning enemy are caught unawares by the turmoil of battle and its ravaging, destructive effects. The Deer Hunter by Michael Cimino (1978) or Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola emphasize the enemy as the savage Other, a tendency strongly rooted in the American experience of the frontier and the Indian wars. But here the enemy is not the Indian but the Vietcong also nicknamed Charlie. If The Deer Hunter painfully underscored how the war destroyed the personal lives of a small immigrant community, concentrating on male bonding especially the one embodied by the characters played by Robert de Niro (Michael) and Christopher Walken (Nick), Apocalypse Now is an hallucinating trip through the jungle whereby Martin Sheen is supposed to track down an American general,
In the eighties this idea of assuaging male trauma and pain was dealt with differently. We do have some strong examples in the same vein of the 70s movies like Platoon (1986) by Oliver Stone, a coming-of-age story whereby Charlie Sheen (whose father had starred in Apocalypse Now) is divided between two father figures who regard combat in a substantially different way: William Dafoe, as always a Christ-like figure, and Tom Berenger. Likewise, Born
on the 4 th of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) also dwells on pain, expanding on the main tenets of these films, the ex-veteran who feels misunderstood and let down within a social context that seems to resent defeat. The crippled character is himself an embodiment of an almost sexually inadequate, “castrated” figure and the film delves into self-victimization and self-pity as paralyzing feelings. One sees here the epitome of a wounded masculinity, anxiety-ridden, crippled by its own feeling of inadequacy and alienation. One of the most interesting examples of this subgenre is Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) as it scrutinizes the dynamics of marine training offering not only the battle field as a scenario of “spectacle” and horror (as happens in Apocalypse Now) but also soldiers’ initiation into military life as a process of masculine “toughening up” whereby any traits that might be equated with femininity are disavowed 1 Actually the film’s script is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of darkness”through ridicule and derision. The film weaves then a harsh criticism around militarism and marine indoctrination as a powerful process though which men are supposed to become men, eschewing anything that the female realm might represent since the latter is always potentially castrating and emasculating. But then we have the Rambo movies projecting Reagan’s reliance on militarist strength. Stallone represents the misunderstood veteran but one that is capable of retrieving American pride again as he goes back into the jungle to rescue some “missed in action” soldiers, captive of the cunning, always “insidious” Vietcong. “Do we get to win this time?” became one of the most famous lines of the Rambo movies and it encapsulates the American need to deal with the traumatic repercussions of defat and to disavow them at last …
Elsa Andrade
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