The Vietnam and Iraq wars have been controversial, yet total catnip for filmmakers

Vietnam. Iraq. Arguably the two most disastrous wars and biggest foreign policy miscalculations in American history. And from “The Deer Hunter” to “The Hurt Locker,” absolute catnip for filmmakers.

The latest example of this is director Ang Lee’s film adaptation of Ben Fountain’s prize-winning novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” Set before, during and after an over-the-top, jingoistic and utterly surreal halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys game, the story follows a platoon of Iraq war heroes being feted for their bravery, yet each seems alternately stunned, appalled and amused by the circus atmosphere surrounding him.

Fountain has said he got the idea for the book around 2004 while watching a real Dallas halftime show that was “completely insane.… Just another day in the mind of America, where militant patriotism, Destiny’s Child, marching bands, baton twirlers, soldiers, the American flag, advertising and fireworks all get mashed up into one big stew.”

In other words, like the movies about Vietnam, it’s an attempt to understand a war that might actually be beyond comprehension. Yet writers and filmmakers keep trying — and in the case of the latter, there are as many similarities in the various war pictures as there are differences.

Movies about both conflicts, for example, “almost never talk about why we are at war; there is always a focus on the soldiers,” says Patricia Keeton, author of “American War Cinema and Media Since Vietnam.” “A film like ‘Platoon’ is talking about what it’s like to be a soldier fighting on the ground, and it’s the same focus in the films about Iraq.”

“I can’t think of any films about [military] leaders,” adds Stacey Peebles, author of “Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq.” “In Vietnam, they are drafted, in Iraq, they are volunteers, and [the films] all deal with issues of class.”

One way in which these movies really diverge, however, is when they were produced. Nearly all the major films about Vietnam — “The Deer Hunter,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Coming Home,” “Platoon” — were made years after the war had ended, while Iraq pictures like “American Sniper,” “In the Valley of Elah” and “The Hurt Locker” were released while the conflict was [and still is] raging. This, says Martin Barker, author of “A Toxic Genre: The Iraq War Films,” has led to significant differences in how the conflicts have been portrayed.

“The Vietnam movies responded to, and contributed to, the myth-making that was going on around the actual war,” he says. “Whereas, the Iraq war cycle were interventions, trying to shift perceptions of the conflict as it was going on.”

“Especially with the earlier films about each war, you see Hollywood trying to figure out what’s the story,” adds Peebles. “Is this John Wayne in ‘The Green Berets,’ or ‘The Deer Hunter?’ Is it ‘American Sniper,’ which is pretty pro-war, or is it ‘In the Valley of Elah,’ which is antiwar?”

One thing is for certain when it comes to the enemy: They are almost never seen as human beings, and, as in the notorious Russian roulette scene in “The Deer Hunter,” are often portrayed from a thoroughly racist perspective. “You almost never see anything from the viewpoint of the people they are fighting” in these films, says Keeton. “In Vietnam, they certainly demonized the enemy. And in the Iraq war, you really don’t have an idea who the enemy is; you’re going building to building, it’s urban warfare. There’s almost no film where you get to know the people.”

“With war, generally, it’s harder to shoot someone if you recognize them as human,” adds Peebles. “In the movies, most of the mainstream films don’t do that. Especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, they deal with civilians a lot more, but you don’t see them being fleshed out.”

And then there’s the home front, where the two wars have been seen in radically different ways. Because there was a military draft during Vietnam, many more people were directly affected by the conflict, which was dramatized in such antiwar films as “Born on the Fourth of July” or campus protest flicks like “The Strawberry Statement.” In general, however, says Barker, the home front, especially in Iraq war films, “is presented as uncaring, not understanding, cut off, ridiculous. Only soldiers know the truth.”

Peebles feels that one of the best in the home-front cycle is the Oscar winning 1978 movie “Coming Home,” in which Army wife Jane Fonda, whose officer husband Bruce Dern is fighting in Vietnam, has an affair with wounded vet Jon Voight. “The film focuses on the wife, her sexual pleasure,” says Peebles. “There haven’t been many movies that do that, because usually, the wives and friends are token figures, like in ‘American Sniper’ and ‘The Hurt Locker.’ ”

Ultimately, movies about each war seem to be trying to say something about how the horrors of conflict affect the individual. In the Iraq movies, says Barker, “the recurrent element is the incorporation into the films of PTSD as an account of what the war was doing, and soldiers coming to terms with it.”

Whereas in the Vietnam War pictures, it’s “where we start dealing with issues of trauma and disability,” says Peebles, adding that these films also talk about “what it means to be a man in these changing times. If you’re drafted and have to fight, what happens to your idea of yourself as an American man?”

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