New Left, Revisionist, In-Your-Face History: Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July Experience

Davis I New Left, Revisionist, In-Your-Face History: Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth ofJuly Experience Jack E. Davis University of Alabama at Birmingham New Left, Revisionist, In-Your-Face History: Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth ofJulyExperience During his second tour, SgtRon Kovic (Tom Cruise) hits the dirt. 6 I Film & History Oliver Stone as Cinematic Historian | Special In-Depth Section Several years ago, I was reminiscing with a friend about our enlistments in the military. I was astonished to learn that the 1973 movie Cinderella Liberty had prompted him to join the Navy. The film had inspired the same impulse in me. Childhoods saturated with box office blockbusters like The Great Escape and a weekly barrage of television programs like Combat, not to mention the unrelenting Saturday-afternoon serials of war documentaries , had groomed us for military service. By the time I had reached enlistment age, Cinderella Liberty's leading character, James Caan, had eliminated any doubt about which branch of the armed forces to join. He plays a modern-day swashbuckler —strong, independent, self-assured, and sexy. I watched the redoubtable Caan and dreamed of foreign ports, tough-guy rumbles, respectability, and women. I dreamed of manhood. Combining this with the Navy's dashing dress blues, complete with bell bottoms and Dixie-cup, was too much for a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old male to resist. Then on the first day ofboot camp, the real-life experience ofmilitary regimentation immediately shattered my celluloid dream world. The truth proved to be too strong a match for the myths that Hollywood and television projected. The Navy dealt me five miserable years, most of them in the post-Vietnam era. I encountered an undisciplined culture of alcoholism, drug abuse, indolence, racism, misogyny, and indifference. As nearly ruinous to my experience and in gross betrayal to my image of the seafaring life, the Navy had phased out the traditional cracker-jack dress uniform and issued a terribly uninspired replacement. Caan, as my friend and I reflected, had lied to us in 1973. Three years later, ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic published his scorching memoir about how the military shattered his own dream world and also his body. Not since Dalton Trumbo's 1939 Johnny Got His Gun had there been written such a graphic and outspoken document against war.1 As with many young males of his generation, the cinematic illusions of war had convinced Kovic that the military would bestow his manhood; instead, a crippling spinal cord injury sustained in battle stole it from him. Once a love-it-or-leave-it patriot, he chose the year of the nation's bicentennial to share his experiences with America. The outgrowth of his antiwar activities, Kovic's autobiography subverts the post-World War II popular cultural romance with war and replaces it with the grisly truth ofhuman sacrifice in battle and the institutional indifference to Vietnam veterans.2 Kovic's journey in pursuit of the American dream to the nightmarish discovery ofVietnam stirred the emotions of Oliver Stone, himself a combat veteran, who envisioned his own life and America's Vietnam experience as variations of the same journey.3 Eventually, he and Kovic adapted the best-selling memoir to the screen. What Stone produced in Born on the Fourth of July embodies elements ofboth illegitimate and legitimate history. He employs a methodology, medium, and rigor that differ from those of academic historians, and at times he resorts to sensationalism, composite images, and even fiction. Mythmaker, presentisi, reductionist, and manipulator offacts all describe Stone as a film artist. These are labels that also apply to any academic historian, many ofwhom would gladly accept the label of artist and wear it with pride. And if historians engage in iconoclasm, mythbreaking, and historical revisionism, Stone as filmmaker accomplishes the same. Indeed, Born is more honest and forthcoming than the typical institutional history, and it rejects the ancestor worship pouring forth from public history. Stone's film can also be seen as an actual inquiry rather than a mere presentation. He frames the movie around a historical problem, addresses critical questions about the American experience, and offers an interpretation of...