The Horror, the Madness, the Movies

“You remember all the films, and you’re gonna think about the glory of other wars. I’m telling you, it ain’t like it is in the movies. That’s all I want to tell you.”

--Jon Voight as Luke Martin

in “Coming Home”

*

All right, you pukes and grunts. Listen up.

I’ve inhaled the choking dust at Da Nang, cherished the smell of napalm in the morning and humped innumerable clicks through sweltering, insect-ridden jungles. I’ve smoked hooch, dodged snipers and wasted unfortunate civilians with beaucoup airstrikes. I’ve got “Born to Lose” tattooed on my arm and “Born to Kill” scrawled on my helmet. Hell will hold no surprises for me, because I’ve spent my time in the ‘Nam.

Sort of.

Actually, I’ve never been to the real Vietnam, either as a combatant or, more likely these days, as a tourist. What I am is the last man standing after a recent Vietnam War movie marathon. For hours on end I locked and loaded my VCR, pumping round after round of video firepower into my nervous system. My mission (sir! yes sir!): to examine a cross section of these films and determine how they looked and what they said from the perspective of a conflict whose end is now a quarter-century in the past.

Hollywood didn’t embrace Vietnam with the avidity it showed toward World War II (the wonderful American Film Institute Catalog for the 1940s lists nearly 400 films that touched on the war in that decade alone). But enough movies were made on the Southeast Asia conflict that to revisit them all is to risk cinematic shell shock. If sanity weren’t an issue, I would have reexamined “Casualties of War,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Killing Fields,” “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “84 Charlie Mopic” and several others.

The half-dozen films I selected were the ones that came most readily to mind as historically significant, dramatically successful or both: “The Green Berets,” “Coming Home,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July.” Besides the pleasure of encountering unremembered actors in minor roles (Johnny Depp as a soldier in “Platoon,” Lili Taylor as a widow in “Born on the Fourth of July”), the first thing you notice about these pictures is how they still crackle with the energy of involvement, though the newest of them is more than a decade old.

That’s because dealing with that divisive war was nothing less than a tonic for American filmmakers, inspiring them to the same kind of self-examination that invigorated Eastern European productions grappling with the heavy hand of communism. Resistance to Vietnam and what it stood for came to define a significant part of a generation, and that sense of importance is visible in these films almost across the board.

That passion also made up for the fact that, except for the clumsy “Green Berets,” all the most significant Vietnam films were postwar efforts. But while they came out too late to impact public opinion during the conflict, these films influenced our feelings toward it after it was over. More than that, they helped to codify standard American reaction to a war that could seem both distant and confusing.

It’s almost a given that postwar films are going to be despairing; even after the glorious and undeniable triumphs of World War II, disenchantment with American reality lead to the darkest of domestic movie genres, film noir. It was inevitable that Vietnam films, dealing as they did with an unpopular war, would up the ante, presenting us with a cumulative picture of the conflict that was disillusioned and disillusioning.

This was, the movies insisted, a Rolling Stones war, a conflict that nihilistic Stones songs like “Paint It Black” (from “Full Metal Jacket”) and “You’re Out of Time” (from “Coming Home”) seemed to fit perfectly. It was a war that was set in the midst of an alien culture and landscape (“the worst place in the world,” someone says in “Apocalypse Now”) that our presence turned hellish by the constant infusion of fire and flame.

The war on film was also one that seemed to do without the balm of conventional heroism. Yes, individuals might exhibit bravery, but cynicism toward the war’s aims and self-protection while on the ground made that kind of behavior seem naive and even dangerous. Typical is the cinema verite section that opens “Coming Home,” when the hospitalized vet who talks about the sense of moral obligation that made him want to go overseas is derided as a fool and worse. (It’s probably not too far off to speculate that part of former Vietnamese POW John McCain’s success as a public figure comes from the pleasant shock of realizing there were heroes in that war after all.)

*

Given all of what came afterward, 1968’s “The Green Berets” is especially boggling to see today. It starts with a preposterous theme song (“fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die, men who mean just what they say, the brave men of the Green Berets”) and just gets more absurd as it goes along.

A John Wayne production all the way, with the Duke co-directing as well as starring as a Green Beret officer who shows the Viet Cong what for, this film holds a horrible fascination for several reasons, not the least of it being the age of arteriosclerotic warriors like Wayne and Aldo Ray, venerable enough to make coronaries as much a health danger as unfriendly fire.

It’s not only the actors who have seen better days, it’s the cliched story points (like the cute war orphan with big eyes) as well. What “The Green Berets” wants desperately to do is shoehorn the Vietnam War into simplistic movie formulas left over from World War II forays like “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” “Guadalcanal Diary” and “To Hell and Back.” Needless to say, it wouldn’t fit.

In light of the later Vietnam films, it’s fascinating to see how this one scorns the journalist played by David Janssen for having the temerity to say, “It’s a war between the Vietnamese people. It’s their war, let them handle it.” No sir, says Beret Sgt. Muldoon (Ray) significantly, “what’s involved is communist domination of the world.” (By contrast, when Tom Cruise’s mother in “Born on the Fourth” uses almost the same language, the film treats her as completely delusional.) And what can you say about an ending that has Wayne and the orphan walking off hand-in-hand as the sun famously sets in the South China Sea (which, in the real world, lies east of Vietnam) and the Duke says to the tyke, “You’re what this is all about.”

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t wimpy civilians but the soldiers who were fighting in Vietnam who had the most adverse reaction to “Green Berets.” According to one news report, the film so angered soldiers at one screening “they reportedly turned their M-16s on the screen.”

Watching Wayne and company today, it’s clear that those soldiers were furious at the film for more than its misleading view of Vietnam. “Green Berets” called to mind all those earlier combat movies, the ones Voight’s character referred to in “Coming Home,” whose unrealistic view of war had help snooker them into Vietnam in the first place. The soldiers who shot at the screen reacted in a way many more must have felt but never put into action.

Released a decade later and three years after the end of the war, both the Hal Ashby-directed “Coming Home” and Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” found it more efficacious to split their focus between combat and the effect the fighting had at home, on returning veterans as well as the women who had stayed behind.

Both Jane Fonda, as the wife whose gung-ho husband (Bruce Dern) is off in Vietnam, and Voight as the disabled veteran she has an affair with, won Oscars for “Coming Home,” as did the script, by Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones from a story by Nancy Dowd. But seen today, it’s Voight’s performance (as well as Ashby’s quietly sensitive direction) that most holds our attention.

Starting from the classic meet-cute moment when his character, drunk and furious, runs into Fonda in a VA hospital hallway and spills a bag of urine onto her best Junior League outfit, Voight gives a performance that is sensitive, varied and commanding. And he is the spokesperson for an overriding cynicism about the war that even then was on its way to becoming conventional wisdom, for a bitterness and feeling of betrayal about the way good, idealistic men were made fools of and led to the slaughter.

“The Deer Hunter” took five Oscars that same year, including best picture, best director for Cimino and best supporting actor for Christopher Walken. It’s the work of a self-consciously epic filmmaker who, in the story of a trio of good-hearted steel mill buddies (Robert De Niro, John Savage and Walken) who were devastated by the war, found a frame strong enough to hold his considerable ambitions.

Though “Deer Hunter” can be interpreted any number of ways, one of its more xenophobic themes is the extent to which the taint of this foreign war has infected the hearts and minds of innocent Americans. In the film’s most memorable scene, not even De Niro’s declaration of brotherly love can bring Walken back from the state of living death (symbolized by an addiction to Russian roulette) this fraudulent war has thrust upon him. The stain of corruption is simply too deep. On the other hand, the way the film’s survivors sing “God Bless America” at the close holds out a faint hope for national resilience and revival.

*

Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979, is a film that remains now, as it was then, both indulgent and brilliant. “My film is not a movie,” the director said at Cannes. “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy.”

One of the first of the new wave of Vietnam films to focus on the experience of being in country, “Apocalypse Now,” especially in its interminable closing Marlon Brando section, plays like it had lost its own bearings in the process of re-creating an illogical war. Co-written by John Milius and Coppola and wonderful at capturing the surrealism of the conflict--witness the image of a bare-chested Robert Duvall wearing a cavalry hat and preparing to make Vietnam safe for surfing--”Apocalypse” wanted to go beyond reporting to capture the essence of the madness. What Dennis Hopper’s character says of Brando--”The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad”--is this film’s final word on the entire conflict.

Two of the most powerful and definitive of Vietnam movies, 1986’s “Platoon” and 1989’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” were fittingly directed by a man who had served in combat, Oliver Stone. Taken together, they provide the most eloquent and telling recapitulation of what have become familiar themes. One is the lost-boys quality, the sense that this war was about a forced and painful loss of American innocence. “Hell is the impossibility of reason,” Charlie Sheen’s character writes his grandmother in “Platoon.” “That’s what this place feels like. I hate it already. I’ve been here only a week.”

More than the lack of logic, the characters in these films hate the terrible waste of life and squandering of youthful idealism that the Vietnam War represented, the carnage that went on for no discernible reason and led to a wave of generation-wide cynicism that has yet to completely recede. “For the life of me,” says the father of a friendly-fire casualty to Cruise’s Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth,” “I still can’t figure that war out. Why we had to go all that way to fight it. Why we had to lose so many young men. Can’t figure it out.”

Finally, neither can anybody else. *