Vietnam: A Seismic Cultural Shift

One of the first big-budget Hollywood films to confront the Vietnam War, “The Deer Hunter,” showed captive American soldiers tortured and forced to engage in a grisly game of Russian roulette. The film’s grim depiction of young Americans’ loss of innocence stirred raw emotion in audiences in 1978, three years after the war’s end.

Ned Tanen, then the president of Universal Pictures, felt the intensity at a preview showing in Detroit. “The screening was a blood bath,” Tanen said. “Some people were very moved, but we had walk-outs and lots of people who were enraged and totally shocked.”

Tanen himself was confronted by a beefy auto worker who stormed out of the theater. “He said, ‘Do you have anything to do with this [expletive] movie?’ And when I said yes, he grabbed me by the throat and wrestled me to the ground. . . . I mean, this is the same film that won the Oscar, but here’s this guy trying to punch my lights out in the lobby.”

The tumultuous response to “The Deer Hunter” mirrored the divisions the war wrought in American society. For young and old, rich and poor, white and minority, Vietnam became the great divide, the catalyst for a seismic shift in contemporary pop culture.

The antiwar movement, coupled with the disillusionment of Watergate and the youth culture’s embrace of mind-altering drugs, helped create a new breed of alienated antiheroes who have held sway in the culture for a generation, from John Lennon and Jack Nicholson to Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur.

This new pop culture sensibility embraced a provocative anti-authoritarianism that offered a clean break from the sunny optimism of most films and music in the 1950s and early 1960s. The war sparked an era of distrust, paranoia and cynicism among musicians, filmmakers, novelists and comedians. It could be heard everywhere, but especially in pop music, in the protest ballads of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, then in Top 40 hits like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and Edwin Starr’s “War.”

Hollywood didn’t directly address Vietnam until the war was over. But many of the most acclaimed films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, including “The Godfather,” “Chinatown,” “Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy,” were seen as heavily influenced by a distrust and cynicism that grew out of the war.

As critic Pauline Kael wrote in a 1973 essay called “After Innocence”: “The Vietnam War has barely been mentioned on the screen, but you could feel it in the conviction-less atmosphere, the absence of shared values, the brutalities taken for granted. . . . the heroes didn’t believe in anything and didn’t pretend they did.”

The war disturbed some artists while it inspired others. “Vietnam changed everything because it changed the way we looked at everything,” says David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, coauthor of “Stand and Be Counted,” a new book about pop artists and politics. “The war was such a visceral issue that people couldn’t help but create great art from it.”

Counterculture Icons Molded by Conflict

Pop icons who embodied the mercurial spirit of this new counterculture were all shaped by the war: John Lennon performed at peace concerts; Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight crown for refusing to be drafted; Jimi Hendrix, a onetime member of the 101st Airborne division, regularly played “Machine Gun” in concert, dedicating the song to “all the soldiers fighting in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York and, yeah, all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.”

Hendrix’s feedback-laced version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” became so fixed in youth culture consciousness that when Francis Ford Coppola made “Apocalypse Now,” the director hired Randy Hansen, a Hendrix impersonator, to re-create the late guitarist’s raw style on the film’s soundtrack.

The war provoked art that fed the burgeoning “us versus them” antiwar spirit of the times.

“The war changed the music, and the music helped galvanize the antiwar effort,” says Howie Klein, president of Reprise Records, who was active in college protests in the ‘60s. “The war was this hammer that split everything apart. Once you questioned the war, you began to question everything.”

In Vietnam, soldiers listened to Hendrix, Dylan and the Jefferson Airplane. Black Marines in Da Nang started a riot when officers removed R&B; records from the PX jukebox.

In the last days of the war in 1975, the troops played the Animals’ “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place.” As Michael Herr wrote in his wartime memoir, “Dispatches,” when he returned to the United States he couldn’t tell “the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse.”

‘Deeply Tortured Feeling’ Drove Art

At home, musicians embraced the antiwar cause and provided the voice of the counterculture. “We were the town criers of the culture,” says Crosby. The night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968, Crosby stayed up and wrote “A Long Time Gone.” After Neil Young heard the news that National Guardsmen had killed four Kent State college protesters in 1970, he wrote “Ohio.” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded the song the next day. The song was on the radio a week later.

“The war provoked artists,” says film director Arthur Penn, whose 1970 movie about a survivor of the Indian Wars, “Little Big Man,” was inspired by his outrage against Vietnam. “It made people angry and depressed and involved. Great art isn’t created in benign, complacent times like we’re living in now. It’s created when there’s a deeply tortured feeling in the culture, when everything is in disarray.”

Network prime-time television didn’t deal directly with the war until “China Beach,” a dramatic series set in an Army hospital in Vietnam, which arrived in the late 1980s. But the war, which was on network news every night, seeped into TV through routines on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and the hit sitcom “All in the Family,” which used clashes between hawk Archie Bunker and his longhaired son-in-law, “Meathead,” to air debates about the draft and other war-related issues.

Vietnam also inspired a new generation of acerbic satire. The originators of “Saturday Night Live” and the National Lampoon were twentysomething comics who came of age during the height of the antiwar movement. For them, anyone in authority was the enemy, an attitude that fueled films like the 1978 hit “Animal House.”

Richard Belzer, the stand-up comic turned co-star of “Homicide” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” recalls buying a Mad magazine after the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians; the magazine had Alfred E. Newman on the cover, dressed as My Lai participant Lt. William L. Calley Jr., saying, “What, Me Lie?”

“One of the big turning points was seeing the Smothers Brothers get kicked off CBS for doing antiwar material,” says Belzer, referring to the role the show’s battle with network censors played in its cancellation in 1969. “When artists are repressed, it turns them into radicals. There was such a pervasive distrust of government that comedy became very political. A lot of great comics were doing satire--Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, George Carlin. It got to the point where every joke wasn’t just a joke anymore. It was about questioning authority--it turned a lot of us from coincidence theorists into conspiracy theorists.”

The movie industry, a far more cautious business than music or comedy, kept its distance from the Vietnam ferment until the war was safely over. One of the few antiwar films made while the conflict was still raging was “M*A*S*H,” a 1970 comedy directed by Robert Altman and set during the Korean War. Its subversive air was perfectly in sync with the Vietnam protest era.

“Altman used to say that ‘M*A*S*H’ wasn’t an antiwar movie but a movie against movies that made war seem acceptable,” says Larry Gelbart, a writer-producer on the first four seasons of the “M*A*S*H” television series, which premiered in 1972. “It’s no wonder that Vietnam was too hot to handle in Hollywood. After the Cold War and the blacklist, Hollywood was very hesitant about criticizing the government. No one wanted to be tainted by a brush with red paint on it,” Gelbart adds, referring to Hollywood’s shutting out, in previous decades, of industry figures suspected of Communist connections.

Studio executives viewed movies about the war as the ultimate lose-lose proposition--they were controversial and downbeat. One of the few movies made that dealt directly with the war before it ended was John Wayne’s jingoistic “The Green Berets,” made in 1968.

“Everybody was spooked by the subject of Vietnam. It was so divisive,” recalls producer David Foster, who made “Heroes,” a 1977 film starring Henry Winkler as a troubled Vietnam vet traveling the country looking up his war buddies. “Half the country was for the war and half the country was against it, so who are your customers? The only reason ‘Heroes’ got made was that we had Winkler, who was The Fonz on ‘Happy Days,’ so the studio thought everybody would like him.”

Few Former Activists Made Antiwar Films

Even after “Heroes” did well at the box office, Vietnam remained a sensitive topic. Jerome Hellman, who produced the 1978 Jon Voight-Jane Fonda antiwar film “Coming Home” at United Artists, says every other studio turned him down. Mike Medavoy, who was head of production at United Artists when the studio made “Coming Home” and “Apocalypse Now,” says that even though most ‘70s-era Hollywood filmmakers were sympathetic to the antiwar cause, the movies still had a divided reaction.

“After our marketing people saw ‘Coming Home,’ they came into my office and said, ‘How dare you make this movie?’ ” he recalls. “They thought it anti-American. They said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ ”

By the late 1970s, Hollywood was full of young executives who had been active in the antiwar movement. Yet few of them ended up making overtly political movies. Director Rob Cohen, whose first film, “Small Circle of Friends,” was based on his activist years at Harvard, says there was a young antiwar executive at every studio. “But they ended up doing movies about bowling and country music stars,” he says. “When you have people who are anticapitalist working in a highly capitalist business, you come out being a capitalist in sheep’s clothing.”

Still, many believe that Hollywood’s liberal politics influenced the tone of Vietnam films. “There’s a lot of guilt in those ‘70s films because very few young filmmakers ever served in the war,” says critic David Thomson, author of “A Biographical Dictionary of Film.”

“It’s also why you see so many shattered-Vietnam-vet movies. People in Hollywood thought soldiers should come back without their legs as a symbol of America’s decadence and stupidity.”

Writer-director Patrick Duncan, who served in the 173rd Airborne in Vietnam, says he and his friends who had served in the war saw “Coming Home” and loathed its “negative stereotype” of despondent, disturbed Vietnam veterans.

“The movies created this new myth of the crazed Vietnam vet, when in reality 99% of us went back to our lives,” says Duncan, who wrote “Courage Under Fire,” set during the Gulf War, as well as the HBO series “Vietnam War Stories.”

“It had a big impact on all news coverage. If a guy wore fatigues and carried a gun, every story would say, ‘Crazed Viet Vet Shoots Up McDonald’s,’ even though he turned out to be a nut who’d never served in any war.”

Mistrust of Authority Was Common Theme

Hollywood painted a considerably darker view of Vietnam than it did of World War II, though many would argue that it was an accurate reflection of the prevalent view in society. “Everyone stopped trusting the government . . . in films like ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ on the left or ‘Dirty Harry’ on the right,” says Peter Biskind, author of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of 1970s Hollywood.

“The common denominator is that you can’t go to the government and expect justice--you have to do it yourself, which is all linked to the trauma of the war.”

Others believe Hollywood grew out of step with the mainstream. “Most Americans admire and trust the military, yet Hollywood makes movies which are profoundly anti-military,” says critic Michael Medved. “The Gulf War, for example, was hugely popular with the public, yet the only Hollywood treatment of it has come in dark films like ‘Courage Under Fire’ and ‘Three Kings.’ Outside of the films made by Oliver Stone and a few other Vietnam veterans, Hollywood’s Vietnam movies were made by people who had a tremendous desire to justify their reasons for avoiding serving in the war.”

Hollywood’s interest in Vietnam revived during the second term of the Reagan administration, with the box office success of “Rambo: First Blood II” in 1985. The hit film spawned a new cycle of Vietnam films, which included the boldly antiwar “Platoon” and the pro-military “Hanoi Hilton.”

Perhaps the most influential film from that era was “Top Gun,” a modern military drama that barely mentioned Vietnam but captured the gung-ho ebullience of the Reagan-era 1980s, much as “M*A*S*H” had captured the anti-authority mood of the ‘60s.

“Those movies were very much a reaction to the futility people felt about the war,” says USC history professor Steven J. Ross, who is writing a history of American politics as seen through movie stars and their films. “The message was, ‘We didn’t lose the war, we just lost the will to win.’ ”

In pop music, the gulf between Vietnam critics and supporters was just as wide a decade after the war had ended. In 1984, when Reagan was running for reelection, Bruce Springsteen released “Born in the U.S.A.,” whose title song spoke in the voice of an embittered Vietnam veteran. The widely divergent reactions to the album, whose cover had Springsteen in front of a huge American flag, showed how easily pop images can mean different things to different people in different political eras.

Rock critics viewed “Born in the U.S.A.” as a bitter indictment of America’s involvement in Vietnam, but many fans saw the song as an endorsement of patriotic values. After seeing Springsteen in concert, George Will wrote an admiring column, praising the star’s blue-collar outfit of T-shirt and headband, which reminded Will of another pop symbol: Robert DeNiro in “The Deer Hunter.” Soon Reagan was on the bandwagon, praising Springsteen during a New Jersey campaign stop, saying America’s future “rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: Bruce Springsteen.”

Springsteen let his music speak for itself. But his use of Vietnam as a metaphor for his disillusionment with ‘80s Reaganomics helped inspire a new generation of socially conscious musicians.

“There’s not a line in the song that I hadn’t felt about myself as a kid growing up during that war,” says maverick singer-songwriter Steve Earle. “I’ve written a helluva lot of songs about the loss of innocence, which is pretty much what Vietnam was all about.”

But in an era like today, when pop music is ruled by teen idols and when movies that evoke the ‘60s--most notably “Austin Powers”--focus on style over substance, does Vietnam still have any hold on the pop culture imagination? Or do Da Nang and Hue feel as far away as Gettysburg and Verdun?

System Co-Opted Movement’s Images

Haskell Wexler, who directed “Medium Cool” and was the cinematographer for “Coming Home,” says the antiwar movement’s politics were, to him, co-opted by the system.

“When I was making ‘Medium Cool,’ my crew couldn’t get served in restaurants because they had long hair, and my actresses were arrested for suspicion of prostitution because they weren’t wearing bras,” he says. “A few years later, TV anchormen had long hair and everyone stopped wearing bras. The movement changed the appearance of culture, but its more serious message got choked off.”

Others see Vietnam-era activism alive in a host of new political issues.

“Kids in their 20s are still anti-establishment, but it’s more personal. They don’t always connect it to politics,” says director Robert Greenwald, whose new film, “Steal This Movie,” chronicles the life of antiwar leader Abbie Hoffman. “My daughters and their friends have a real ‘60s envy; they want to know what it was all about. But the issues that move kids today are different--they’re involved in protests against genetic engineering or the Seattle confrontation over world trade.”

Danny Goldberg, the former head of Warner Bros. and Mercury Records who helped organize the 1979 “No Nukes” antinuclear concerts, contends that the activism of the Vietnam era is still a major influence on pop culture.

“The war is gone, but it helped fuel the culture wars that still exist today, whether it’s the environment, abortion rights or gay rights,” says Goldberg, who now runs Artemis Records. “Look at the many ways that Vietnam vets have made their presence felt, from Oliver Stone to John McCain. The war cast a big shadow. When we’re 80, we’ll all still be arguing over who was right and who was wrong.”

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LESSONS AND LEGACIES

Twenty-five years after the war, The Times is looking at Vietnam’s impact on America, including its popular culture. Today in Sunday Calendar:

How filmmakers portrayed the war.

How war changed TV careers and coverage.

A visit to Maya Lin’s veterans memorial, left.

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Lessons and Legacies: 25 Years After Vietnam

The longest war America has ever fought--and the first one it lost--Vietnam continues to provoke questions and evoke emotions both vivid and complex. The U.S. was involved in Indochina from the late 1950s until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Through the rest of this month, The Times will examine the impact of that turbulent time on American society and popular culture and on institutions from the military to the media.

Also see https://www.latimes.com