driven to enlist, it quickly becomes much more insidious. The Green Berets exists in a haven of assumed American victory and righteousness, an idealised vision of a Vietnam war without defeat. The critic Ronald J Glosser observed that ‘there is no novel in Nam, there is not enough for a play, nor is there really any character development. If you survive 365 days without getting killed or wounded, you simply go home and take up again where you left off.’ There is no easy narrative from Vietnam, and all the films which followed were forced to confront this issue in the stories that they told. Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter, the next chronologically among the films that I have looked at, creates a more effective character arc, and rationalises defeat by examining the War as something symptomatic of issues found in the American mainland. As three friends from dysfunctional working-class families from the dysfunctional working-class town of Claireton Pennsylvania are sent off to war and ultimately ruined by their experiences, the focus of the film is not so much on their actual experiences of combat, but on what those experiences mean relative to how, and if, they can continue to lead vaguely normal lives afterwards. The film begins with a 51minute-long wedding sequence, dripping with sweat and cheap lager, but also a sense of naivety, as three drunk, laddish friends harass a lone soldier at the bar, pestering him to know what the war is like while also displaying pride at their own enlistment. War, it seems to them, is an escape from their hometown, just as the act of hunting, the central motif of the film, is. This escape, however, will come to ruin them, as one is permanently disabled, another killed in a game of Russian roulette in Saigon, and the neurotic but seemingly heroic Sergeant Mike Vronsky, played by Robert De Niro, left to suffer awkwardly through the consequences. The motif of hunting takes on a seemingly pacifist angle as the film runs on, from a noble pastime in the mountainous idyll of rural Pennsylvania to an act which Sergeant Vronsky cannot bring himself to continue, climactically letting a cornered deer escape in the film’s fourth act. It may not be a perfect piece of anti-war filmmaking, especially in its depiction of the Vietnamese people in a cruelly inferior manner
that would not have been out of place in The Green Berets, but at the time it was an important film in dealing with its subject matter. It was seen as subversive by major studios, prompting the president of Universal Studios, Sid Sheinberg, to deem the film ‘poking a stick in the eye of America’, with particular reference to the film’s ending: following the funeral of the last of Sergeant Vronsky’s friends to return from Vietnam, the remaining characters sing a slow and almost ironic ‘God Bless America’, finding fault in a nation, not an army, defeated. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Palme d’Or-winning film Apocalypse Now takes an entirely different approach towards rationalising Vietnam than The Deer Hunter, avoiding questions of blame and responsibility by depicting the War as a ‘bad trip’, a chaotic nightmare in which the worst of men could realise their darkest dreams. Coppola himself described Apocalypse Now as having been not so much a film about the war so much as it was having used ‘the war as a backdrop’, allowing him to make the most of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his source material. It is not a strongly ideological film, neither criticising nor supporting the reasons for American involvement in Vietnam, but instead takes much of its force from exploring how different characters react to the trauma of war. From the belligerent bravado of the insane Lieutenant Kilgore (‘Charlie don’t surf’) to the primeval kingdom founded by Colonel Kurtz, the film confronts the viewer with visions of insanity certainly not in fitting with how the US government would have wished to portray the war (unlike with The Green Berets the US military was not at all willing to support Apocalypse Now), but it is never forced to examine the American defeat as The Deer Hunter does. It is understandable why the film avoided major controversy considering the need to recoup its $30 million budget, but that is not to say that it is entirely apolitical. Coppola still manages to shock the viewer with insanity he depicts, shaming the viewer for getting swept up in the Ride of the Valkyries madness of it all. Defeat, however, remains irrelevant, far from the harsh domestic reality of The Deer Hunter and the jingoistic naivety of The Green Berets.
27
