The Vietnam Reader (35 page)

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First Wave of Major Films

Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong.

While TV and the print media made the war inescapable, and in fact, a staple of their daily coverage, during the actual fighting Hollywood pointedly ignored Vietnam. Between the Marines landing at Da Nang in 1965 and the final withdrawal of ground troops in 1973, the major studios released exactly one Vietnam combat film, John Wayne’s
The Green Berets.

Unlike its source, Robin Moore’s novel,
The Green Berets
(1968) is an unashamedly gung-ho melodrama that justifies the U.S. presence and methods on the grounds of a single VC atrocity. It is, in a sense, an old-style John Wayne Western with the Viet Cong playing the role of the savage and justly defeated Indians. The American soldiers are tough, gutsy, and heroic, the South Vietnamese incompetents and victims, the Communists vicious, good only for cannon fodder. As in his World War II films, Wayne is portrayed as the professional soldier, even more so than Robin Moore’s portrait of the character Sven Kornie.

The mode of storytelling the film purports to use is documentary realism, though big production Hollywood style. Through LBJ himself, Wayne secured the help of the Army in making the film, hoping, one supposes, that their consultants and hardware would give the film an authenticity impossible to match. And it’s true that some of the action sequences look good. But the movie is cliché-ridden, right down to the cute orphan Wayne befriends, and by 1968 the American
media—if not the public at large —understood that the war wasn’t a matter of circling the wagons and breaking out superior firepower. The movie met a scathing critical reception, and though the theme song, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” topped the
Billboard
chart for a few weeks, the movie was widely picketed, generally vilified and quickly forgotten. Gustav Hasford’s ironic treatment of the film in his book
The Short-Timers
is completely deserved.

The Vietnam War inspired no
Casablanca,
nor even a
Pork Chop Hill.
Hollywood’s silence was notable, broken only rarely by allegories disguised as politically enlightened westerns
(Little Big Man)
or as other wars
(M*A*S*H, Catch-22, Patton).
Perhaps the studios thought America could no longer be sold war as adventure or war as a moral duty in the same way World War II and even Korea were sold. At the same time, they were too timid to try an outright anti-Vietnam war movie, and so through the mid-seventies, the only movies that dealt in any way with the Vietnam War were a series of schlock films about crazed returned vets, usually linked in some way to motorcycle gangs. Whether heroes like Billy Jack or antiheroes like
Taxi Drivers
Travis Bickle, in the end these vets let loose their rage and skills in a bloody and satisfying climax, just as Rambo would a decade later. It was an easy demonization of vets, portraying them as outsiders prone to violence, sometimes implicitly blaming them for the loss of the war, and for years after, this stereotype would hold sway.

Some critics, most notably John Hellman in
American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam,
have argued that the
Star Wars
trilogy (beginning 1977) can be read as an analogy for the younger generation trying to regain American innocence and power from their corrupt fathers. Others cite Akira Kurosawa’s
The Hidden Fortress
(1958) as George Lucas’s source for the series, laying out an interesting list of similarities between post-war Japan and America after the fall of Saigon and the need to replace irreparably damaged national myths. How much of the possible allegory was actually apprehended by moviegoers, or is now, a year after the triumphant first run of the re-released trilogy, is another question.

But back then, after the shame of Nixon, the conciliation of Ford, and the hoopla of the Bicentennial, the climate of the Carter administration
was decidedly self-analytic, if not self-loathing, as the first wave of major books attests. A colder self-regard replaced the confusion and ardor of the late sixties and early seventies. The economy stumbled. American foreign policy was less strident, matching that of the Russians, whose offer of détente the State Department cautiously embraced, all the while keeping an eye on (and a hand in) El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. The loudest policy decision the Carter administration made with respect to Vietnam was to extend amnesty to draft resisters, a rare official admission that perhaps the war was wrong. That Carter could implement this policy over the objections of the military only a few years after the final withdrawal of ground troops—while veterans’ health concerns such as Agent Orange were routinely ignored—is a rough barometer of popular opinion. In this relatively anti-Vietnam, antiwar, antimilitary climate, the long-awaited first wave of major films arrived.

After the war, the first major studio release directly addressing Vietnam was supposed to be Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now
. At the time Coppola was riding high, coming off
The Conversation, The Godfather,
and
Godfather II,
as well as producing
American Graffiti.
Technically brilliant as well as a reasonably aware social critic, Coppola seemed equal to the task. In the spring of 1976 he took his entire cast and crew into the Philippine jungle, expecting to emerge by fall with his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,
a major statement about Man and Evil and The War.

Months passed. Coppola fired his star, Harvey Keitel, and replaced him with Martin Sheen. He was already millions over budget when a typhoon struck, destroying his major sets. The helicopters he’d rented from dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s air force regularly heeled off during shots, called away to fight the Communist rebels in the south. United Artists refused to bankroll him anymore, and Coppola himself had to raise the cash to keep going. The monsoons came, and still it wasn’t done. Sheen had a heart attack. Rumor was, Coppola didn’t have an ending, that he was improvising, hoping to stumble onto something. The messy epic became an industry joke,
Apocalypse Later, Apocalypse Never.

Meanwhile, Michael Cimino delivered
The Deer Hunter
to Universal, who rushed it into theaters. An ex-Marine (though not a Vietnam vet), Cimino had previously cowritten the second Dirty Harry film,
Magnum Force,
with John Milius (who shares writing credits with Coppola for
Apocalypse Now
), and directed another Clint Eastwood vehicle,
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
With these meager credits, he seemed an unlikely candidate to pull off an ambitious and thoughtful film about Vietnam, and yet
The Deer Hunter
became—nearly immediately—the best known and most widely talked about Vietnam film until
Platoon.

The Deer Hunter
follows three friends—Michael (Robert DeNiro, who played Travis Bickle), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage)—from their hometown of Clairton, Pennsylvania, to the jungles of Vietnam and back home again. Surprisingly little time is spent in Vietnam; rather, Cimino and his scenarist, Deric Washburn, concentrate on how these men fit into the community before and after their part in the war.

The film opens on a truck barreling through the early-morning darkness, its smokestacks throwing sparks. Cimino then takes us into the fiery violence of a steel mill, all noise and heat. The shift ends, and our major players emerge from the bawdy male camaraderie of the locker room into the parking lot, where they pile into Michael’s white whale of a Cadillac. Cut to Steven’s bride, Angela (Rutanya Alda), in her gown, looking at herself in a mirror; she turns in profile, smooths the fabric over her growing belly. Stevens mother makes a veiled complaint about this to a priest, who ignores her.

The storyline seems simple: After Steven and Angela’s wedding, the other men are going to go deer hunting with their friends one last time before shipping off to Vietnam. But rather than briefly summarize these events—say, with a montage—Cimino walks us through the wedding preparations, then the wedding itself, the reception (a huge, bravura set piece in which we see Michael’s attraction to Nick’s girlfriend Linda [Meryl Streep]), and, in the same basic sequence, the preparations for the hunt, the hunt itself, and the aftermath. By the time we segue to Vietnam (through the same match-on-action ceiling
fan Coppola opens
Apocalypse Now
with), the major concerns of the film are solidly in place.

The Vietnam section opens with a chaotic assault on a village. Michael watches as a VC kills a bunkerful of helpless villagers. In a scene that recalls the iconography of World War II, Michael torches him with a flamethrower. The fighting ends, and by coincidence, Nick and Stevie show up; Michael walks right by them, oblivious.

The three men are captured by the VC and kept in half-submerged tiger cages. The VC force them to play Russian roulette, and Michael, following his dictum of “there’s no such thing as a sure thing,” gambles with their lives and wins, though at a high price for both Nick and Stevie. They escape, though Nick is so damaged by his experience that he can’t bring himself to get back in touch with Linda. He wanders Tu Do Street until he finds a paying game of Russian roulette run by a sinister Frenchman.

Michael returns home alone. Linda has organized a party for him, but, like Nick, Michael can’t seem to reconnect, and asks the taxi driver to go on. The next morning, when all his friends have left, Michael visits Linda, and the two awkwardly try to comfort each other. We find out Steven is in a VA hospital and refuses to come home, and that Angela is nearly catatonic with grief. Michael tries to blend in with the old gang, except he’s different now (“I feel a lot of distance”) and wears his dress greens everywhere. Everyone still looks to him as the leader, the hero, but when the men go hunting again, Michael seems to relinquish his “one shot” philosophy of hunting (and life), calling “Okay” to the sky as he stands by a thundering waterfall.

After this, Linda succeeds in taking Michael to bed, and soon Michael tries to bring first Stevie and then Nick back from their separate limbos. Stevie flatly tells him, “I don’t want to go home. I don’t fit.” Nick seems to be in Hell; Michael has to take a punt through flaming water to reach the final game of Russian roulette. When he gets there, Nick doesn’t recognize him. Michael begs him to “come home … home,” and talks about “the trees,” which Nick earlier said were what he liked about the hunt: “the way the trees are.” For an instant it seems Nick remembers, but what he remembers is Michael’s now
outmoded philosophy. Nick smiles and says, “One shot,” and blows his brains out. From this Cimino cuts to actual footage of Hueys being tossed over the side of an aircraft carrier to make room for more refugees. The war—for America, at least—is over.

Back home, we go to Nick’s funeral, the mill chuffing out clouds in the background, only a single spindly tree in the churchyard. At the bar, John (George Dzundza), who has always brought the community together with food and drink and song, cooks them breakfast. Tearfully, he breaks into “God Bless America,” and the rest sing along with him. The End.

Emotionally, the movie is undeniably powerful. The Clairton scenes are shot with a patient and gritty realism, which makes Cimino’s melodramatic Vietnam scenes all the more strange. Two of the most gripping scenes in the film involve Russian roulette, first as a form of torture by the VC, and second as a spectacle or game run in the back streets of Saigon. Neither has any historical validity, and so it seems apparent that Cimino is using it as a metaphor for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, both collectively and individually. He also substitutes the snow-capped Cascades for the hills of western Pennsylvania and gives us the wrong kind of deer for the area; in addition, the time scheme is a wreck, Michael going back as Saigon falls (1975), meaning he’s been wearing his dress greens for at least two years. Surely Cimino was invoking poetic license, yet contemporary critics were baffled by these slips, asking for a monolithic realism. Even more worrisome to them was Cimino’s portrayal of the Vietnamese.

In
The Deer Hunter,
the VC are plainly evil, killing civilians and playing games with American lives, and the South Vietnamese aren’t much better. We see them as whores and black marketeers, allies unworthy of our help. The movie, critics said, seems to blame Vietnam for what it’s done to America rather than vice versa, and in this they saw
The Deer Hunter
as apologist and prowar. Furthermore, with its allusion to James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Deerslayer,
the film thrusts Michael into the role of frontier hero, lone protector of society from the savage natives, half outcast himself. They saw the Russian roulette torture sequence and escape as part of an overall captivity narrative, in which the Americans—especially Nick—are martyred.
(Others see it as a Western, with the escape a card game turned shootout, the wedding reception some kind of saloon, complete with dance-hall girls.) Some went on to say that the innocent, close-knit, religious-based community Cimino gives us is false and idealized, that Cimino seems to be celebrating—especially in the final “God Bless America” scene—a sentimentalized America that simply doesn’t exist. Where are the protesters? they asked.