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Push-button Death
From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud
Was there a Gulf War? Already the question seems less absurd than it would have done a week ago, despite the destruction rained from the air and the huge number of casualties on the Iraqi side. After the arcade video-game of the bombing campaign, the ‘100 hours’ of ground fighting, filtered through the military and TV censors, were scarcely enough to root the reality of the war in our minds. Push-button death is a game with few risks, at least to the television viewer. The devastated Basra escape highway looked like a traffic jam left out to rust, or a discarded Mad Max film set, the ultimate autogeddon. The absence of combatants, let alone the dead and wounded, suppresses any reflexes of pity or outrage, and creates the barely conscious impression that the entire war was a vast demolition derby in which almost no one was hurt and which might even have been fun.
Will Hollywood cope more happily with the Gulf War than it did with Vietnam? Reportedly, several Desert Storm movies are in active preparation, and one can easily imagine Chuck Norris or Stallone rushing the berms and single-handedly strangling the Republican Guard in their own tank tracks.
Soon after the disastrous US intervention in Lebanon, President Reagan was heard to say: ‘Boy, I saw Rambo last night; now I know what to do next time.’ In retrospect, this seems a remarkably shrewd comment, and no doubt his military aides snapped their fingers as they recognized an astute career move. At first sight, the Gulf War and the invincibility of the American killing machine might seem the purest expression of the Rambo ethos. But as many of the contributors to From Hanoi to Hollywood point out, the hero of Rambo: First Blood Part II was the very opposite of a technological superhero – all he had going for him were his hate-driven will, his Indian hunting skills and, of course, immortality, qualities which General Schwarzkopf had no need to call upon.
The Vietnam War lasted at least ten years, and continued in the American mind long after its routed troops were airlifted from the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975, perhaps only ending with George Bush’s recent press conference pronouncement: The Vietnam syndrome is dead.’ Yet during the war Hollywood released only one Vietnam film, John Wayne’s preposterous Green Berets. Such was the war’s legacy of ‘lies, errors and impotence’, in the editors’ words, and so deep the crisis in the American imagination provoked by the war, that it was only in the late 1970s that the first large-scale Hollywood films began to appear.
Many of these films, from The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now to Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July, openly confront the tragedy of American failure in the war (the vastly greater tragedy that befell the Vietnamese is rarely touched on), and the unhappy position of the returning veterans who, for the first time in American history, found that being a veteran was not something of which to be proud. Despite their huge budgets and the self-conscious literary references to Heart of Darkness and Fenimore Cooper, Hollywood’s Vietnam films rarely match their lofty ambitions, and only succeed in presenting the war as a bloody Superbowl. They trivialize death not because they accord it no value, but because they treat it with the bogus respect of a poignant camera angle.
Nonetheless, two great lines survive the unending gunfire: from Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kilgore’s ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, worthy of some Armalite-toting Robert Lowell, and Rambo’s plaintive ‘Do we get to win this time?’ from First Blood Part II, in many ways the most interesting of the American war films, though universally detested by the essayists in this book. Platoon, which they grudgingly prefer, seems to me a tiresome buddy film, while First Blood Part II does contain an ambiguous and many-layered message – that all governments and military bureaucracies are corrupt, that the ordinary fighting man is an expendable victim, but that he alone loves his country and is prepared to die for it.
The essayists, almost all American academics, condemn virtually the entire output of Hollywood Vietnam films, faulting them for evading any serious consideration of what they see as America’s misguided and racist involvement in Vietnam and for failing to offer any insight into the long-term consequences of the war. But Hollywood, especially when it puts on its battle fatigues, is not a branch of the peace or civil rights movement, and it puzzles me that these well-meaning academics could expect the conventions of the entertainment movie to cope with the complexities of the war, and one moreover that America lost.
Though the undisputed genius of popular entertainment, Hollywood has rarely made a successful war film. The realities of war, which Americans have totally mastered while they are awake, run counter to everything they hold dear when they dream. The best war films ever made – Rossellini’s Open City, the Japanese Fires on the Plain and The Burmese Harp, and the greatest of them all, Klimov’s Come and See, about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, are visions of desolation, meaninglessness and despair, qualities that are true to war but do nothing for the box office.
As well, the conventions of the entertainment movie reduce war to the subjective experience of a single hero, for whom combat is the ultimate catharsis that allows him to find his true self. This rarely happens in war, as Leo Cawley, himself a Vietnam veteran, comments in the best essay in the collection:
There is almost no human activity that is as intensely social as modern warfare … When a military unit loses its internal cohesion and starts to fight as individuals there is such a radical and unfavourable change in the casualty ratio that it is almost always decisive … Every general staff in the world since 1914 has known that the bravery of individual soldiers in modern war is about as essential as whether they are handsome.
Guardian 1991
Hobbits in Space?
Can I offer a dissenting opinion? There seems to be a profound need everywhere to admire Star Wars, and a resentment of any response other than loving affection. Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, is engaging, brilliantly designed, acted with real charm, full of verve and visual ingenuity. It’s also totally unoriginal, feebly plotted, instantly forgettable, and an acoustic nightmare – the electronic sound-wall wrapped around the audience is so over-amplified that every footfall sounds like Krakatoa.
In that case, why all the fuss? And what does the amazing success of Star Wars indicate, for good or ill, about the future of s-f cinema? Although slightly biased, I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. Why, then, has it translated so uneasily into the cinema? Unlike the western, which long ago took over the literary form and now exists in its own right, the s-f film has never really been more than an offshoot of its literary precursor, which to date has provided all the ideas, themes and inventiveness. S-f cinema has been notoriously prone to cycles of exploitation and neglect, unsatisfactory mergings with horror films, thrillers, environmental and disaster movies.
The most popular form of s-f – space fiction – has been the least successful of all cinematically, until 2001 and Star Wars, for the obvious reason that the special effects available were hopelessly inadequate. Surprisingly, s-f is one of the most literary forms of all fiction, and the best s-f films – Them!, Dr Cyclops, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Alphaville, Last Year in Marienbad (not a capricious choice, its themes are time, space and identity, s-f’s triple pillars), Dr Strangelove, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Barbarella and Solaris - and the brave failures such as The Thing, Seconds and The Man who Fell to Earth – have all made use of comparatively modest special effects and relied on strongly imaginative ideas, and on ingenuity, wit and fantasy.
With Star Wars the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way, towards huge but empty spectacles where the special effects – like the brilliantly designed space vehicles and their interiors in both Star Wars and 2001 - preside over derivative ideas and unoriginal plots, as in some massively financed stage musical where the sets and costumes are lavish but there are no tunes. I can’t help feeling that in both these films the spectacular sets are the real subject matter, and that original and imaginative ideas – until now science fiction’s chief claim to fame – are regarded by their makers as secondary, unimportant and even, possibly, distracting.
Star Wars in particular seems designed to appeal to that huge untapped audience of people who have never read or been particularly interested in s-f but have absorbed its superficial ideas – space ships, ray guns, blue corridors, the future as anything with a fin on it – from comic strips, TV shows like Star Trek and Thunderbirds, and the iconography of mass merchandising.
The visual ideas in Star Wars are ingenious and entertaining. Ironically it’s only now that the technology of the cinema is sufficiently advanced to represent an advanced technology in decline. I liked the super-technologies already beginning to rust around the edges, the pirate starship like an old tramp steamer, the dented robots with IQs higher than Einstein’s which resembled beat-up De Sotos in Athens or Havana with half a million miles on the clock. I liked the way large sections of the action were seen through computerized head-up displays which provided information about closing speeds and impact velocities that makes everyone in the audience feel like a Phantom pilot on a Hanoi bombing run.
In passing, the reference to Vietnam isn’t undeserved – the slaughter in Star Wars, quite apart from the destruction of an entire populated planet, is unrelieved for two hours, and at times stacks the corpses halfway up the screen. Losing track of this huge bodycount, I thought at first that the film might be some weird, unintentional parable of the US involvement in Vietnam, with the plucky hero from the backward planet and his scratch force of reject robots and gook-like extraterrestrials fighting bravely against the evil and all-destructive super-technology of the Galactic Empire. Whatever the truth, it’s strange that the film gets a U certificate – two hours of Star Wars must be one of the most efficient means of weaning your pre-teen child from any fear of, or sensitivity towards, the deaths of others.
All the same, as a technological pantomime Star Wars makes a certain amount of sense. There’s the good fairy, Alec Guinness, with his laser-wand and a smooth line in morally uplifting chat; the pantomime dame/ wicked witch, the Dark Lord Darth Vader, with black Nazi helmet, leather face-mask and computerized surgical truss; the principal boy, the apparently masculine robot Artoo-Detoo who in fact conceals a coded holographic image of the Princess Leia, which he now and then projects like a Palladium Dick Whittington flashing her thighs.
However, George Lucas has gone badly astray with his supporting cast – what looks like an attempted tour de force, the parade of extraterrestrials in the frontier-planet saloon, comes on hilariously like the Muppet Show, with shaggy monsters growling and rolling their eyeballs. I almost expected Kermit and Miss Piggy to swoop in and introduce Bruce Forsyth.
What is missing in all this is any hard imaginative core. Star Wars is the first totally unserious s-f film. Even a bad episode of Star Trek or Dr Who has the grain of an original idea, and the vast interplanetary and technological perspectives of 2001 were at least put to the service of a steadily expanding cosmic vision. The most one can hope, I think, is that the technical expertise now exists to make a really great s-f film. Star Wars, in a sense, is a huge test-card, a demonstration film of s-f movie possibilities.
20th Century-Fox’s advance publicity describes the modern motion picture as ‘the most magnificent toy ever invented for grown men to play with and express their fantasies’ – presumably with Lucas’s approval, and Star Wars may well be more prophetic than I give it credit for. In many ways it is the ultimate home movie, in which Lucas goes back into his toy cupboard and plays with all his boyhood fantasies, fitting together a collection of stuffed toys, video games and plastic spaceships into this ten-year-old’s extravaganza, back to the days, as he himself says, when he ‘dreamed about running away and having adventures that no one else has ever had’.
Time Out 1977
A User’s Guide to the Millennium
When it turns to science fiction, cinema closes its eyes and moves into a rich and uneasy sleep. The collective dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century have found their most vivid expression in this often disparaged but ever popular genre. A few great directors, from Fritz Lang to Steven Spielberg, have worked in science fiction, but until the sixties most s-f films were little more than B-movies. With limited special effects, minor actors and minuscule budgets, and usually ignored by the critics, the only things that these films had going for them were powerful stories, unrestrained imagination and, first and foremost, a hot line to the unconscious. In these often modest films, as almost nowhere else in the popular arts of our age, classical myth and scientific apocalypse collide and fuse.
Like most of my fellow s-f writers, American and British, I nurse ambivalent feelings towards the science-fiction movies. Despite our heroic efforts, it is not the printed word but the film that has defined the images of science fiction in the public mind and also, incidentally, exerted a huge influence on architecture, fashion and consumer design. Even now, the future is anything with a fin on it.
Far from being a medium of escapist entertainment, the science-fiction film has always been a sensitive barometer of the cultural and political climate of the day. Our deepest fears of an irrational superscience stalked its blue corridors long before latter-day environmentalists became concerned for our planet’s future. In the fifties, Cold War paranoia and the terrors of nuclear Armageddon prompted a cluster of remarkable science-fiction movies, among them Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, which were handicapped by their meagre – by present-day standards – special effects. Unlike the novelist, the film director cannot leave his locations to the reader’s imagination.
In the sixties, however, the special effects at last began to match the inspiration of the filmmakers. Indeed, within a decade the technology of film design became sufficiently advanced (as in Star Wars) to show an advanced technology in decline.
At its worst, the science-fiction film offers the sheer exhilaration of the roller coaster. At its best, and to its credit, it tries to deal with the largest issues facing us today, and attempts, however naively, to place some sort of philosophical frame around man’s place in the universe.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
This remarkably stylish colour film is a quantum leap forward in visual confidence and in the richness of its theme – an update of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Walter Pidgeon plays the Prospero figure, Dr Morbius, a brilliant but flawed scientist living alone with his daughter on an isolated planet. Robby the Robot is the ever obliging Ariel, and the crew members of a visiting spaceship are the stranded mariners.
The film’s real originality, however, lies in making the brutish Caliban figure an externalization of Morbius’s own libido. This gives an unsettling force to the final confrontation, as Morbius’s lustful id, never seen directly, throbs and oozes along in full Oedipal splendour, melting down steel doors on its way towards a quivering Anne Francis. The special effects were unequalled until 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Nearly twenty-five years after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s black satire has lost none of its impact. In this story of an insane US Air Force general who launches an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, Kubrick cunningly mixes documentary realism with the ultimate in graveyard humour – the death of mankind treated as scarcely more than the last sick joke.
Kubrick’s masterstroke is to tilt the dramatic action of the film so that the audience’s sympathies slide across the value scale and eventually lie with the targets being satirized. We come to admire the magnificent B-52S with their sleek A-bombs and brave if baffled crews; we despise the wimpish president for trying to do a deal with the Kremlin, and we almost welcome the nuclear Armageddon when it comes. By enlisting us on the side of our darkest fears, Kubrick exposes all the sinister glamour and unconscious logic of technological death.
Alphaville (1965)
This moody and powerful allegory is Jean-Luc Godard’s most accessible film, made for that consumerist and politically conscious sixties audience that he dubbed ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. Alphaville blends utopian satire, pop art and comic-book imagery to create the alienated landscape of the distant planet Alphaville, whose cowed population is tyrannized by an evil computer. However, Alphaville is in every way indistinguishable from contemporary Paris. The ‘spaceship’ of secret agent Lemmy Caution is his Ford Galaxy, and similar linguistic plays link the action together in a far more convincing way than might seem possible.
For the first time in the science-fiction film, Godard makes the point that in the media landscape of the present day the fantasies of science fiction are as ‘real’ as an office block, an airport or a presidential campaign. His original title was Tarzan versus IBM, but the film transcends its pop imagery to create a disturbing world that resembles a chromium-plated 1984. Sadly, after Alphaville Godard abandoned the genre.
Barbarella (1968)
Sex, which many enthusiasts thought they had invented in the sixties, here makes its appearance in the science-fiction film. The relationship between sex and science fiction or, more to the point, its virtual absence from the genre, has always been a puzzle – explained, I would guess, by the fact that science-fiction writers constitute an authentic community of naifs, generally nervous of change, politically ultraconservative, eager not to think about what adults do after dark.
At any rate, it is inconceivable that the masters of classic science fiction could have come up with this rich and saucy confection, in which the interplanetary sex adventures of the French comic-strip heroine are elegantly transferred to the screen. Roger Vadim, who in And God Created Woman created Brigitte Bardot, here turns his affectionate and ironic eye on another of his wives, Jane Fonda, who achieves immortality as she cavorts naked in a fur-lined spaceship.
