Winter Street Review

Ten Conspiracy Theory Movies Worth Seeing

Editor — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:02:38 +0000

America loves conspiracy theories, and so does Hollywood. Conspiracy has been one of the most repeatedly film themes for more than half a century, appearing in everything from docudramas to science fiction and everything in between. Here is a sampling of just a few conspiracy theory movies that are worth seeing if you’re just getting started.

The Parallax View (1974). From director Alan J. Pakula, the story of this film follows a reporter (Warren Beatty) as he investigates a mysterious corporation that seems to be behind high profile assassinations. The result is an entertaining and well-crafted, if slightly dated, movie that builds on that era’s growing public suspicion of high-level conspiracy.
All the President’s Men (1976). Director Pakula continued the conspiracy theme in this riveting retelling of the all-too-true Watergate conspiracy and cover-up. Based on the acclaimed book by Washington Postreporters Woodward and Bernstein, the film stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as the journalists who discover and begin to untangle the secrets that brought down the Nixon presidency.
Capricorn One ( 1978 ). Though a film that sits squarely in the “B” movie category, this entertaining story follows conspirators inside NASA as they fake a mission to Mars and then engage in a deadly cover-up on a massive scale. Complete with conspiracy theory hallmarks such as black helicopters, this movie has a lot in common with actual conspiracy theories that claim the real-life NASA mission to the Moon in 1969 was also fake. Directed by Peter Hyams and starring Elliott Gould, Sam Waterston, James Brolin, O.J. Simpson and other Hollywood regulars.
Big Jim McLain (1952). Western star John Wayne stars in this story of an FBI agent hot on the trail of communist conspirators in Honolulu during the Korean War era. An excellent example of the anti-communist films amidst the tensions of the McCarthy era.
JFK (1991). Director Oliver Stone’s account of the alleged conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination is in many ways the mother lode of all conspiracy-theory films. Deftly blending traditional Hollywood staging, real archival footage, and faux documentary segments, the director presents a film that makes for compelling viewing, even if it is questionable history.
Seven Days in May (1964). An under-rated thriller that was released shortly after the Kennedy assassination, director John Frankenheimer presents a chilling story that recounts an attempted military coup at the height of the Cold War. This outstanding film features stellar performances from Hollywood legends Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, and Fredric March.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962). By the time he made Seven Days in May, Frankenheimer had already made news by directing The Manchurian Candidate. It tells the story of a communist attempt to assassinate leading American political figures by brainwashing an unwitting American soldier. With stand-out performances by Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury.
Chinatown (1974). Sometimes not recognized as a conspiracy film at all, this late example of film noirmovie-making is, in fact, steeped in conspiracy story-lines. Roman Polanski directed Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway star in this detective story with many layers of deception and intrigue.
Three Days of the Condor (1975). The late Sydney Pollack directed this Robert Redford vehicle that follows the story of a low-level CIA analyst caught in a web of murder and deception. The story suggests that conspiracy is found not only originating from outside the United States, but also from deep within U.S. government itself.
Conspiracy Theory (1997). Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts star in this story about an ordinary man who thinks he sees conspiracies all around him. When he later stumbles onto a real conspiracy, he finds that his life is in danger and there are few who will believe him.

You can read more about these and many other movies, and about the times in which they were created, in Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics (2008) from Praeger Publishers.

5 movies about politics worth seeing

Editor — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:25:01 +0000

MOVIES

5 movies about politics worth seeing

In this era of rampant cynicism, Americans are at once fascinated by and repulsed by politics. We often don’t know whether we want to be more engaged in that aspect of our society or run for cover. Despite this love-hate relationship, Hollywood has often turned to the subject. Some of the results have been quite forgettable, but others have made a lasting impression. Here, for your consideration, are five movies worth seeing that offer differing takes on the world of politics. Each is the product of its own era, of course, but these movies also comment on the political realm in ways that have lasting impact.

1. DUCK SOUP (1933)

In this classic Marx Brothers farce, the tiny nation of Freedonia is in a dire financial situation and forced to borrow money from a wealthy benefactor. In this case, the loan is from a certain Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), not the People’s Republic of China. Enter Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) as Freedonia’s new prime minister. His unorthodox ideas to solve the crisis may or may not seem more absurd to you than certain ideas put forth in the recent very real financial crisis, but the results are certainly much funnier. Filled with the usual Marx Brothers mayhem, the whole situation is complicated by the antics of spies from a rival nation, played by Harpo and Chico Marx. Directed to wonderful effect by Leo McCarey.
2. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

An antidote to the cynicism that characterizes contemporary attitudes about politics, director Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is probably a movie that more people know about than have actually seen. Yet, regardless of what you already know about this movie, it is well worth seeing for a first, second, or even third time. Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart is a standout in the lead role of Jefferson Smith, an idealistic man appointed to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. Few in the political establishment think that Smith will be up to the job. They wrongly assume that he will present little obstacle in their business-as-usual world of sleazy backroom politics. But Smith is a an idealist on a mission, and soon powerful forces aim to bring him down. One of Capra’s best.

3. ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

Talk about backroom politics. Director Otto Preminger rakes Washington over the coals in Advise and Consent, a film that deserves a more prominent place in the pantheon of movies from the 1960s than it has. The plot involves an unpopular president who makes a controversial cabinet appointment. The president’s political enemies pull out all the stops in efforts to derail it. Yet, the slimy political trickery is not restricted to the president’s enemies. Opportunists in the president’s own party use threats and blackmail as they try to sway the outcome. Starring Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Charles Laughton, Peter Lawford, and a host of other Hollywood luminaries.

4. WAG THE DOG (1997)

Does your candidate have skeletons in the closet that could make for disaster at the polls? Why not start a war to divert attention elsewhere. That’s the premise behind director Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, in which a president with a sex scandal to hide uses spin and manipulation in order to stay in office. The producers of the film used the tag line “A Hollywood producer. A Washington spin-doctor. When they get together, they can make you believe anything” when it was first marketed in the late 1990s. This is a funny and witty film, albeit it one with disturbing overtones. Starring Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Andrea Martin, Denis Leary, Anne Heche, Kirsten Dunst, and others.

5. PRIMARY COLORS (1998)

Mike Nichols directed this entertaining treatment of Joe Klein’s thinly veiled version of the 1992 Clinton campaign. Here, the presidential candidate in question is a southern politician named Jack Stanton, a man with one eye on the pressing political problems of the day and the other on many of the women he encounters along the campaign trail. On the surface, the movie may seem rather limited in its aims, but film as critic Roger Ebert wrote, Primary Colors is“a superb film–funny, insightful and very wise about the realities of political life.” With John Travolta, Emma Thompson, and other notables.

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There are other titles worth seeing, of course, and this list merely represents one set of viewing options. (Among obvious possibilities are two Robert Redford films:The Candidate, from 1972; and All the President’s Men, the Watergate story released in 1976.) Don’t see your favorite? Let us know about it.

– G.A.

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IMAGES (above): Duck Soup DVD; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington DVD; Advise and Consent DVD; Wag the Dog DVD; Primary Colors DVD — all available at Amazon.com

This article originally appeared in the online Bread and Circus Magazine

10 popular films from 1977 that weren’t directed by George Lucas

Editor — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:23:07 +0000

10 popular films from 1977 that weren’t directed by George Lucas

By G. Arnold

Thirty years ago, Star Wars premiered in American movie theaters. Before its release, the film didn’t elicit much enthusiasm, even from its own studio. But soon after opening, the George Lucas fable became a sensation. Audiences in 1977 waited in long lines, and many came back for second, third, and even more viewings.

But what about other popular films released that year? Was 1977 a good vintage for directors? You be the judge. Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of some other movies from 1977. Not necessarily a run-down of the highest grossing films, this eclectic list shows the wide range of movies that attracted audiences of the day.

Airport 1977—This much can be said: Without the Airport movies, later movie spoofs such as Airplane! (1980) would have had less material to satirize. Veteran actor Jack Lemmon plays the captain of a private 747 jetliner that’s filled with art treasures. The plane spends much of the film underwater. Here’s the praise that the industry paper Variety could muster: “The story’s formula banality is credible most of the time.”
Annie Hall – Director-comedian Woody Allen was hugely popular with movie critics and with his target audiences, which tended to be composed of educated (some might say snobby), East Coast (okay, more like New York-oriented) cultural liberals. This semi-autobiographical tale contains Allen’s famous encounter with an escaped lobster.
Saturday Night Fever – This disco-flavored look at urban nightlife features music by the Bee Gees and other disco acts of the day. It also revealed, somewhat surprisingly to some, that lead actor John Travolta could make a successful transition from television (he was Vinnie Barbarino in the situation comedy Welcome Back, Kotter) to the big screen.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – His friend George Lucas made huge waves with Star Wars in the spring of 1977, and later that year Steven Spielberg introduced his own entry into the sci-fi genre. The BBC’s reviewobserves that the movie “is saturated with imagery that fascinates, terrifies, and utterly consumes the viewer with the desire to discover the secret that’s eating away at the on-screen characters.” It’s a vintage Spielberg movie, pure Hollywood in many ways, but also quite entertaining.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar – This somber movie intends to show audiences a picture of hidden life in the 1970s. The all-star cast features Richard Gere, Diane Keaton, Tom Berenger, Tuesday Weld, Levar Burton, and Brian Dennehy. In the story, Diane Keaton’s straight-laced character, a teacher of deaf students, decides to use her free evenings for cruising bars in search of sex and drugs. It all seemed quite serious and edgy when it premiered, but today the ending rings more of Hollywood’s earlier days than the liberated 70s.
High Anxiety – Comic Mel Brooks rode to box office glory with his classic Western send-up, Blazing Saddles (1974). In High Anxiety, he aimed his sights at the movies of director Alfred Hitchcock, known as the “master of suspense.” Brooks plays the new director of Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. And yes, this is the movie that introduces audiences to the forbidding Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman).
Oh, God! – This vehicle for the aged George Burns paired the popular comedian with singer John Denver, who had entertained (some folks used a less kind word) radio audiences with such hits as “Rocky Mountain High,” now the second official state song of Colorado. (The first is “Where the Columbines Grow.”) In the story, the Almighty (Burns) chooses a grocery clerk (Denver) to be his modern messenger to humanity. Who are we to argue with the Almighty?
Smokey and the Bandit — Burt Reynolds, the 1970s icon, stars as a bootlegger, but the real story here, as wisely noted by Variety, involves “many different ways to crash cars.”
The Deep – Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bissett star as a couple vacationing in Bermuda when they cross paths with treasure hunters of the kind who do not make television specials for National Geographic. Novelist and screenwriter Peter Benchley had already hit pay-dirt with Jaws a few years earlier, and here he tries to keep his menace-and-water theme going, with rather uneven results.
The Spy Who Loved Me – The James Bond franchise kept chugging along in the 1970s, though by then Bond movies didn’t so much simply contain spoof elements as have them as their central feature. Many people’s least favorite Bond, British actor Roger Moore, stars in the title role. Barbara Bach, wife of Beatle Ringo Starr, appears as his opposite number, a Soviet agent with whom Bond has to “cooperate.” The title song, “Nobody Does It Better,” and musical score were nominated for an Academy Award, as was the art direction. The rest of the movie? Well…not so much.

So, these are the sort of movies that were popular with the stalwart audiences of the Carter years. Like most movies, maybe, these tell us more about the life and times of their era than may have been apparent at the time. Are they still entertaining? Some are worth a look. Others, however, make us ask, “What were they thinking?”

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G. Arnold is the author of the books Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics ( Praeger 2008 ) and The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam ( McFarland 2006 ). Contact him here.

This article originally appeared in the online Bread and Circus Magazine

Looking Back at Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”

Editor — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:19:41 +0000

FILM

Looking Back at Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”

By G. Arnold

Twenty years ago, director Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing hit American movie theaters. Lee was only 22 years old at the time, but the youthful director had done what more experienced directors had seldom acomplished. He made a powerful movie that looked at America’s race relations head on. The result was a major film that caught mainstream audiences by surprise. Now, two decades later, the movie still has much to say to us.

The questions Lee raises in Do the Right Thing remain highly relevant and, in some respects, still only partially answered. The world has changed since the late 80s, obviously, and society has made some strides in reducing racism and discrimination. But not all such problems have been fully resolved. Misunderstanding remains all too common. There are still situations that are interpreted very differently, sometimes along racial lines. We were recently reminded of this in the controversy that resulted from the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates this past summer.

Do the Right Thing is an ensemble film that looks at the trials and tribulations of a racially changing Brooklyn neighborhood during a brutal heat wave, when tempers were short and emotions were close to the surface. The multi-faceted story follows a number of characters as they go about their daily lives while waiting for the heat to break. At the center of the story is a young African-American man named Mookie (played by Lee himself) and Sal (played by Danny Aiello), his employer. Sal, a middle-aged white man and owner of the local pizzeria, has trouble adjusting to changing racial profile of the neighborhood. His relationship with Mookie is complicated and unfolds slowly. As the story progresses, the heat wave magnifies tensions beneath the surface.

Near the end of the film, a confrontation between white police officers and a neighborhood youth (a regular at the pizza shop) turns ugly. It yields a tragic outcome, and a riot erupts. As the story takes this violent turn, the director asks the tough questions. But in the movie, as in life, there are no easy answers.

More than any other film of its era, Do the Right Thing casts an unflinching eye at race relations in the America of its time. In many ways, this was an unexpected development in late-1980s movie-making. Actually, it would have been unexpected at almost any time.

Race has always been one of the most prominent social and political issues in the United States, of course. But relatively few films have directly addressed it as a theme. To be sure, the history of film is littered with stereotyped portrayals and implicit statements about race and race relations. Usually, however, such movies look at the subject through the eyes of white movie-makers. And usually the stories have been earnest, but ultimately simplistic, treatments of a topic that is unforgiving in its complexity.

Indeed, it seems that for the Hollywood establishment the subject of race has often been regarded as too hot to handle directly or substantively. (Or perhaps it has been viewed by studios as too likely to promote controversy of the kind that would not yield greater box office receipts.) Regardless, while race has continued to be a major factor in modern American life, Hollywood — with only a few exceptions – has usually treated it superficially.

Lee’s movie was refreshingly different, however. He scanned the late 1980s racial climate and then channeled his observations into the movie’s characters. A large and impressive cast brings these people to life. Among the most memorable characters are Radio Raheen (played by Bill Nunn), Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), and Tina (Rosie Perez).

The resulting movie is not only a serious, probing look at an important facet of American life. It is also a movie with a lot of heart. Do the Right Thing demonstrates masterful storytelling that belies the director’s young age at the time. It’s a movie that is entertaining, even as it challenges viewers to question their understanding of the world they think they know. Perhaps most remarkably, Lee teaches us something without letting the movie become a didactic exercise.

Writing at the time of the movie’s original release in 1989, film critic Roger Ebert concluded that Do the Right Thing “comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time.” He added, “It comes out of a weary, urban cynicism that has settled down around us in recent years.” (See Ebert’s review as it appeared in the The Chicago Sun-Times, June 30, 1989, here.)

Twenty years later, these assessments still ring true. Revisiting Do the Right Thing, we see a film that may be slightly dated but has lost very little of its original power. It is still compelling viewing on many levels.

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This article originally appeared in the online Bread and Circus Magazine.

Image (above): Cover of Do the Right Thing (DVD), Criterion Collection.

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Book news…

Editor — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:54:39 +0000

Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics (Praeger Publishers) received a “Recommended” rating in the April 2009 issue of CHOICE Reviews.

Noting that the book “places seeming conspiracies in the context of the histories of the social and political cultures that harbor them or invoke them as explanations of otherwise inexplicable events,” the title by Montserrat College of Art professor Gordon B. Arnold is suggested for undergraduate and general readers.

A widely consulted publication issued by the American Library Association, CHOICE is available at most academic libraries and many public libraries in the United States and Canada.

New Book — Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics

Editor — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:58:44 +0000

NEW BOOK

Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics has just been released by Praeger Publishers. The volume surveys the development of the conspiracy-theory theme on screen since the early days of the cold war.

The widespread growth of conspiracy-theory thinking is one of the most startling developments in American popular culture and politics. Hollywood played an important part in this story, issuing scores of movies and TV shows that often mirrored the mood of real-life politics and events.

The book includes discussion of many of these productions. Some are well-known, such as The Manchurian Candidate, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All the President’s Men, Conspiracy Theory, The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. Others — including Rambo, Get Smart, Men in Black, and The Truman Show – have less obvious connection to the theme but were instrumental in promoting it.

Overall, Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics suggests that we’ve been exposed to a lot more conspiracy theory than we might realize.

The hardcover book is widely available from major on-line booksellers, including:

Read more about this new publication at the CONSPIRACY THEORY IN FILM book bog here.

Remembering director Sydney Pollack

Editor — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:52:46 +0000

Here’s a piece that originally appeared in the now-defunct VCB blog.

FILM NOTES

REMEMBERING DIRECTOR SYDNEY POLLACK

Original publication date: May 27, 2008

Director Sydney Pollack, one of Hollywood’s more versatile and well-spoken elder statesmen, has just passed away. (Read the full story in The Hollywood Reporter.)

Even if you don’t know Pollack as a director, you may know him from one of his many screen appearances as an actor. He acted with George Clooney in the 2007 film Michael Clayton and was also seen in such varied productions as Eyes Wide Shut, Husbands and Wives, A Civil Action and The Majestic. On occasion he also acted for television, appearing in recent series, such as The Sopranos and Will and Grace, and also in such vintage shows as The Twilight Zone and Have Gun Will Travel.

Although he was an actor and producer, it was in his work as a director that Pollack made his biggest mark. He is perhaps best known for Out of Africa, but the scope of his work was rich and varied. His first directing experiences were for television, with episodes of such shows as Ben Casey, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and many others in the early 196Os. Making the switch to movies, he first came to widespread notice with a 1969 movie having the unusual title of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

As a director, Pollack’s films — some of which are Tootsie, Random Hearts, Absence of Malice, and The Firm — reflected wide-ranging interests and hinted at a director who wouldn’t settle for making just one type of film. His movies were clearly molded in the tradition of Hollywood, for which he had a clear affection. In fact, Pollack never seemed to tire of talking about the important place of cinema in American culture and about the films he loved. Indeed, he had a thorough knowledge of film history and liked films from many eras. (In a Sight and Sound interview, he said some of his favorites were Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Grand Illusion, The Godfather Part II, The Seventh Seal and Raging Bull.)

In keeping with Hollywood traditions, Pollack was never shy about trying to reach for a mass audience with his own work. Yet, his films surely reflect a personal vision.

If you don’t know his films, I recommend having a look. You can find a complete listing at the always useful Imdb.com.

UPDATE — If you have a favorite Pollack film or performance, feel free to share it with others by posting a comment to this post. Thanks!

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Postscript – By the way one of my personal favorites, which I recently wrote about, is Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, a conspiracy thriller from the post-Watergate era.

Newly noted…

Editor — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:12:40 +0000

If you read Vietnamese, you may be interested in a piece I recently wrote for the BBC, which they translated for their audience. The article, entitled “Cuộc chiến Việt Nam và chính giới Mỹ,” discusses the continuing effects of the Vietnam War on American presidential politics. You can find it on the BBC World Service’s Vietnamese website.

Click here to read “Cuộc chiến Việt Nam và chính giới Mỹ” at BBC.com.

Book news

Editor — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:17:03 +0000

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with columnist Julie Muhlstein of the Herald newspaper in Everett, Washington. We talked about how past wars have reappeared in popular memory, which was the topic of my book The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam. Her own views on this subject, which appear in her column of March 19 entitled “War Comes to Life in Pop Culture,” are well worth considering no matter where you happen to live.

On the topic of books, my Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics ( forthcoming from Praeger in 2008 ) has been announced in the Greenwood Publishing Group’s new 2008 POP CULTURE catalog, which includes many interesting new titles. See the detailed information here.

–G. Arnold

The Strange Afterlife of the Vietnam War

Editor — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 01:26:23 +0000

FROM THE ARCHIVES

July 2006–

As the hostilities in Iraq continue, the United States faces the difficult task of defeating a stubborn and violent insurgency. Some Americans today see uncomfortable parallels to America’s lost war in Vietnam. Others believe the differences far outweigh the similarities. In this debate one thing is clear. The Vietnam War is still among the most toxic labels in all of American politics. Although the nation shows due respect for the many military veterans who served in Vietnam, it is still bitterly divided about the policies that got and kept us in Southeast Asia more than a generation ago.

More than thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Americans still have not resolved the controversies that surrounded it. With the passing of time, our collective memory of the war has splintered. A bewildering array of movie and television portrayals has sped this process along. Hollywood’s many treatments of the topic have been vivid and at times masterful. More than simple entertainments, however, these fictional accounts in movies and television have helped blur perceptions of the past.

Screen versions of the Vietnam War run the gamut of interpretative perspectives. In the late 1970s, films like Apocalypse Now presented the war as savage madness. During the heyday of Vietnam War movies a decade later, the Rambo and Missing in Action films reinforced Reagan’s view of the war as a “noble cause.” They showed a picture of the war in which America’s leaders undermined the U.S. military’s heroic efforts. Later in that decade, more nuanced and conflicted retellings of the war appeared in movies such as Platoon, Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket. Finally, in 1990s and beyond, movies as varied as Forrest Gump, Heaven and Earth and We Were Soldiers, entertained audiences with still more interpretations of the Vietnam War.

Hollywood’s versions of the Vietnam War continue the long battle for “hearts and minds,” which has been waged nonstop since the early 1960s. This aspect of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam is often cited as the least successful aspect of the conflict. People frequently take this to mean that the U.S. did not do a good job of convincing the Vietnamese people to take more effective action in fighting communist forces. Yet more importantly, it was a fight that was waged and lost in the American homeland. Initial support for the war unraveled by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and was never regained. Domestic disagreement about the war was deeply polarizing. The military conflict ended in Vietnam in the 1970s, but the battle in American for hearts and minds never did.

Viewers receive a variety of inconsistent messages about the Vietnam War through Hollywood productions. Yet some common themes, which are also fixtures in political rhetoric, do come across. Of these, the theme of American hegemony, not only in politics, but in human experience, is the most obvious. Despite the fact that they look at the war from differing world views, the Vietnam War films almost universally emphasize that the conflict was primarily an American experience. Seldom do the films look at the Vietnamese people or culture. Usually, in fact, Vietnamese people are portrayed in a flat, one-dimensional way. Often, they are shown in stereotyped roles as villains or victims. As dramatis personae, they serve as foils against which American characters can act out their heroism or cowardice. We learn little of them as individuals or as a people.

Americans, too, are often reduced to only a basic dichotomy: the hero-patriot and the coward-villain. Heroes have a duty to perform and must do so with honor. The ultimate screen hero in Vietnam War movies is undoubtedly John Rambo, who in three films spanning the 1980s defeated numerous well-equipped military foes single-handedly. Although few other films went to this extreme, in most the heroism of the American soldier is a central theme. In this respect, the Vietnam War films fall neatly into the long line of Hollywood war films.

Dramatic films of all sorts require conflict, and in war films a pre-determined enemy usually fulfills most of that role. In the Vietnam War movies, however, villains are not confined to the official enemy. Frequently, they are also embodied in misguided, cowardly, or simply evil Americans who undermine the efforts of the heroic soldiers. Oddly, these characters might be morally corrupted government officials or they might be counter-culture anti-war types. The presence of these characters suggests to viewers that American troops faced not one, but two enemies during the war: the communist Vietnamese forces and fellow Americans who undermined their efforts. In this logic, it is only a short step to the conclusion that Americans did not lose the war to a foreign enemy, but instead lost it to themselves.

Indeed, one of the strongest legacies of the Vietnam War is the trauma that Americans felt about losing a war. (Of course, it was not really that simple, since by the time the Saigon government fell in 1975, the U.S. had already signed its own peace accords with North Vietnam and had mostly disengaged from the fighting.) The very idea of this loss has been so anathema to Americans that other explanations needed to be found. The war’s outcome violated the moral framework in which Americans view their nation. It was more comforting to believe that the United States had defeated itself than to believe a small communist nation could inflict such pain on its superpower adversary.

As reported in The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam, the repeated incarnations of the war in politics and on screen are part of the continuing nation’s efforts to come to terms with disillusionment and disappointments from the conflict. Because of our fractured understanding of how the Vietnam War fits into the American saga, it is a particularly dubious proposition to employ the Vietnam metaphor in current international conflicts. It is difficult to see how using failed consensus about one war as the basis for unity in a new one will have satisfactory results.

–Gordon Arnold

This piece originally appeared in The History News Network in 2006.