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106 4 fighting outward, looking inward violence in the s vietnam film it is not without some irony that the 1980s, the decade in which screen violence was being packaged more and more for easy mainstream consumption , marked the first sustained period in which U.S. filmmakers dealt openly with the memory of the Vietnam War. However, the studios ’ depiction of Vietnam was far from consistent or harmonized. Such stridently different Hollywood films as Rambo: First Blood Part II and Platoon powerfully suggest the disparity with which Hollywood filmmakers approached the topic. Unlike the pure action genre, which was covered in the previous chapter, Vietnam films in the 1980s constituted a cycle of deeply conflicted films, some of which staunchly reinforced the mainstream conservative ethos of the era, while others questioned the very nature of American identity. Much has been written over the years about Hollywood’s representations of Vietnam, especially since the cycle of Vietnam films peaked in the late 1980s, but little has focused primarily on the depictions of violence in these films. My contention is that the use of violence in Reagan-era Vietnam films—specifically, at whom the violence is directed—is central to understanding their ideological approach to the war and its implications . The complicated social, psychological, and moral issues raised by depictions of violence in these films also offer a crucial and telling example of the inherently difficult nature of the major studios’ desire to package violence—whether fantastical or realistic—for the pleasures of mass consumption in the 1980s. Vietnam in Hollywood The Vietnam War was a multi-decade, often undefined and misunderstood military conflict that produced deep strains of divisiveness throughout FIGHTING OUTWARD, LOOKING INWARD 107 the United States. Long after the U.S. military had removed all troops from Vietnam in 1975, negative sentiments lingered on both sides of the political divide, with some bemoaning the United States’ unprecedented loss of the war, while others were angry that the country had gotten involved in the first place, especially since the popular perception was that the government had consistently lied to the public about the situation in Southeast Asia. Regardless of one’s political or ideological stripe, the very word “Vietnam” conjured for Americans painful, negative memories of national loss and identity crisis. Given the difficult and divisive emotional, ideological, and political baggage associated with Vietnam, it is not surprising that the major Hollywood studios were not eager to represent the war and its aftermath on-screen. In fact, they effectively avoided it altogether. Aside from John Wayne’s then-popular but ultimately ridiculed The Green Berets (1968), a jingoistic and defensive attempt to adapt the successful formula that had fueled so many World War II films to the situation in Vietnam, there were no Hollywood films about the war set in-country until 1978, five years after all U.S. combat units had left the country. That year saw the release of two independently produced but major-studio-distributed films about the war in Vietnam: The Boys in Company C (distributed by Columbia), which prefigured the boot-camp-to-Vietnam narrative arc used by Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Go Tell the Spartans (distributed by Avco Embassy), which is set in 1964 when the U.S. military was still in its advisory role and makes explicit historical connections with the failed French Indochina War (1946–54). Of course, it was also in 1978 that Universal released Michael Cimino’s controversial and Oscar-winning mythopoetic epic The Deer Hunter, a major studio production that, despite its resounding emotional impact, was not an accurate representation of the experiences of combat troops. The following year saw the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a notoriously expensive and troubled film that had actually begun production back in 1976 and was still technically “unfinished” according to Coppola when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the festival’s top prize with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel). Despite being set entirely in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now further entrenched Hollywood’s distance from the war by restaging Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness in Southeast Asia and thus treating the war in largely symbolic terms. There are moments throughout the film that speak directly to the surreal absurdity of Vietnam—particularly Lieutenant Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) attack on a village to secure a point for...

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