Jerry Lembcke The Spitting Image, Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998)

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.The anti-war movement, having beenwritten out of history by filmmakers until the war was lost, wasbrought back as an enemy of the Vietnam veteran, the reason why thewar had been lost (as in Tracks), and even, in Hamburger Hill (1987),the reason why the war had been fought.Anti-war Vietnam veteranswill remain marginal in Hollywood s renditions of the war and organ-ized veteran opposition to the war will stay offscreen.The disparage-ment of Vietnam veterans, which had become standard fare by 1978,Myth, Spit, and the Flicks 161continued throughout the 1980s.The image of the armed and violentvet continued to be prominent.What is new from 1978 on is theconflation of cause and effect in the presentation of the psychopathicveteran.Up to 1978, most on-screen representations of gun-toting vet-erans implied that the veteran s wartime experiences accounted for hispostwar violent behavior.Beginning in 1978, cause and effect are notalways so clear.As treatments of the war and the postwar experiencesof veterans are depoliticized, narratives about them become increas-ingly psychologized.In effect, the disparagement of the veteran imagewas given still another twist: did the brutality of the Vietnam Warproduce a generation of damaged veterans or did the damaged psycheof American males produce the brutality of the war? Two blockbusterfilms of 1978 put the question on the screen and struck the fatal blowto veteran credibility.1978The popular wisdom with respect to Vietnam War films is that Holly-wood ignored the war until 1978.Film buffs are likely to say that therewas only one film on the Vietnam War before Coming Home and TheDeer Hunter opened that year and that was The Green Berets in 1968.Scholars might add that there was also the documentary, Hearts andMinds, from 1974.But even with these qualifications, the perceptionremains that 1978 was the signal year for the genre.The reality, however, is somewhat more complex.Hollywood hadbeen making films about Vietnam for almost fifteen years by 1978.True, all of these films, with the exception of The Green Berets, werecoming-home narratives about Vietnam veterans rather than filmsabout the war per se.But Coming Home and The Deer Hunter continued,rather than departed from, the trend toward displacing the story ofthe war itself with stories about soldiers home from the war.Thesetwo award-winning films consolidated well-worn approaches to theVietnam War in film and reflected the historical revisionism alreadyunderway.6162 Myth, Spit, and the FlicksAs coming-home narratives, for instance, they perfected the pres-entation of the war as something that had happened to AmericanVietnam veterans rather than as a historical and political event.Prob-ably more effectively than any other film, Coming Home revised historyso that the American people, and even many Vietnam veterans, re-member the war as a veteran home-coming story.Coming Home alsoadded to the marginalization of Vietnam veterans, giving us the para-lyzed, if political, Luke and the frightening, wigged-out Bob, whileThe Deer Hunter used racist caricatures of the Vietnamese to establishan image of veterans with unbelievable appetites for violence.ComingHome revised the history of the relationship between the anti-warmovement and veterans from one of solidarity to one of hostility; TheDeer Hunter simply left politics out.The Making of Coming Home Coming Home was a keystone in the building of an interpretation inwhich the war became, in popular consciousness, a story about themen who fought in Vietnam and how they were treated upon returnhome.The film was Jane Fonda s project from its inception.Fonda hadbegun to speak out politically while living in France in 1968.Whenshe returned to the United States, she helped set up a GI lobby servicein Washington, D.C.She also formed the Free Theater Association(FTA), which presented antimilitary skits that were very popular atoff-base GI coffeehouses in this country and in Southeast Asia.(FTAwas also the acronym for a military recruitment slogan, Fun, Travel,and Adventure, which anti-war GIs had appropriated to stand for Fuck the Army. ) By 1971, Fonda had declared herself a revolution-ary, and in July 1972 she traveled to Hanoi to talk to American pris-oners of war and to broadcast a plea to American pilots to stop thebombing of North Vietnam.Eighteen months later, Fonda marriedTom Hayden, a founder of Students for Democratic Society and adefendant in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial.Fonda s professional identity as a filmic sex kitten was out of syncMyth, Spit, and the Flicks 163with her political identity as a radical activist.So in 1973 she begansearching for scripts that, as she stated in an interview published thefollowing year, would reduce that contradiction as much as possi-ble. But how much was possible? The country was already beginningto turn conservative.Nixon had been reelected the year before and theOPEC oil boycott was signaling what life in a declining world empirewas going to be like.The returning POWS were tugging at the coun-try s patriotic heartstrings.Fonda herself was feeling the effects of apolitical backlash, as boycotts by the Young Americans for Freedomand the Veterans of Foreign Wars threatened the market strength ofher films.Wishing to avoid being typecast as a young revolutionarywoman, Fonda said she wanted to play the antithesis of what I feela prowar or apolitical kind of woman existing in a situation mostaverage people live in. Fonda turned to her friend Nancy Dowd towrite a script for her.7In March 1973, Fonda contracted with Dowd to write the first draftof a screenplay.Dowd s draft, apparently completed in late 1975, wastitled Buffalo Ghost, and its story was essentially unchanged in ComingHome.Between the time Buffalo Ghost was completed and Coming Homewas made, were months during which the principals involved in themaking of the film reflected on the war and postwar years and dis-cussed among themselves what they wanted to put on the screen.They proceeded with a level of self-consciousness seldom seen in theindustry.The archival record of the making of the film, found in theMargaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts andSciences in Beverly Hills and the UCLA Research Library containhundreds of pages of transcribed recordings, including a hard copy ofrecorded story conferences in which Fonda, screenwriter Waldo Salt,writer Bruce Gilbert, and director Hal Ashby, sometimes accompaniedby others, discussed everything from the story line of the script, tocasting, character development and production [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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