Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

3. National Identity, Gender Identity, and the Rescue Fantasy in Born on the Fourth of July

Born on the Fourth of July can be read as a particularly complex variant of the cultural tendency that Susan Jeffords has called “the remasculinization of America”: the restoration of patriarchal concepts of nation through narratives that emphasize the renewal of masculine identity in the post-Vietnam period.1 Whereas Oliver Stone’s film pointedly criticizes traditional myths of masculinity based on concepts of “punitive agency,” it nevertheless asserts the importance of the masculine role in a changing narrative of nation. Linking the iconography of nationalism to the symbolism of gender in an overt way, the film anatomizes the failure of masculinist national ideals in the Vietnam period , offering in its closing scenes an alternative image of nation based on the metaphor of a maternal, social body America, an “America who can embrace all her children.”2 But despite the film’s attempt to revise the gender dynamic of national identity, the metaphor of nation as woman in Born on the Fourth of July serves mainly to set the scene for a narrative in which the male hero gains authority by “rescuing” the nation from its own weakness, a pattern that closely resembles the unconscious fantasy that Freud calls the “rescue motif.”3 Whereas the film defines the role of the male hero in ways that suggest alternative approaches to masculine identity, its symbolic structure, organized around a series of maternal stereotypes, reveals a deep gender ambivalence . Its metaphors for nation range from maternal love (the nation as “milk-giver”) to the nation as “blood-seeker” (a vampire), as if the 57 3 National Identity, Gender Identity, and the Rescue Fantasy in Born on the Fourth of July film’s uncertainty toward its own nationalist agenda were projected onto the female figures in the text.4 In Born on the Fourth of July—the film’s title underscores the dominance of the metaphor—maternal images are elevated into emblems of national cohesion on one side or degraded to images of perversion and division on the other. In its symbolic and metaphoric trajectory, the film thus appears to confirm Jeffords’s thesis that by reaffirming masculinity, the Vietnam narrative also reaffirms other relations of dominance, particularly those of patriarchy. Indeed, this view constitutes the currently accepted critical perspective on the Vietnam film, a perspective that also discerns a straightforward oedipal patterning as the basis of the drama of masculine subjectivity in these films.5 But Born on the Fourth of July also departs from Jeffords’s description of the “masculine frame of narration” in significant ways as well, particularly in its equation of what Laura Mulvey has called “the overvaluation of virility under patriarchy” and the social problems of the Vietnam era.6 Casting the protagonist as a victim of patriarchal society, the film draws on the generic resources of melodrama, a genre long associated with feminine emotion, to articulate the gap between masculinist cultural ideals and the lived experience of the protagonist. Moreover, whereas the suppression and subordination of the feminine serves, in the view of many critics, as the fulcrum of masculine renewal in Vietnam films, Born on the Fourth of July links the recovery of the male hero to the rescue scenario, with its emotions of “gratitude,” “love,” and “tenderness,” and to the substitution of a feminine ideal of national identity for the fracturing violence of patriarchal concepts of nation.7 In its portrait of the Vietnam veteran as victim of patriarchy on the one hand and as rescuer of a nation imaged as feminine on the other, the film solicits a more complex reading of masculine agency in the Vietnam film than has been given to date.8 Jeffords argues that narratives about Vietnam are most deeply concerned with the restabilizing of gender roles, that gender is what representations of the Vietnam era are about: “Though Vietnam representation displays multiply diverse topics for its narratives and imagery , gender is its determining subject and structure. . . . Gender is the matrix through which Vietnam is read, interpreted and reframed in dominant American culture.”9 Despite the Vietnam narrative’s characteristically critical perspective—its display of the “apparent dissolution of traditional forms of power”—it functions largely, in Jeffords’s under58  Rescue Fantasy in Born on the Fourth of July standing, to reinforce the authority of the state: “Along with the renegotiation of masculinity has come a renegotiation and reempowerment of the state. . . . rather than the Vietnam experience challenging...