Vietnam war movies at Teater Utan Kayu

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): What is it about Vietnam War films that warrants a special look and commentary? War films have always been part of the American motion picture industry, dating back to its earliest days (when the world was indeed in war). Filmgoers have been familiar with movies set in the time of World War I and World War II, with stories of courage and heroism, from All Quiet on the Western Front in the 1930s to The Longest Day in the 1960s.

But going into the 1970s and the 1980s, Vietnam War films appeared and presented a different type of war movie. Like the war films that preceded them, these films also depict the horrors and ravages of war as seen through the eyes of the protagonists. But there's a difference: the Vietnam War experience ensconces a national stigma -- the first military defeat in U.S. history.

How this trauma and other issues are approached in Hollywood movies can be seen in the screenings of six important Vietnam War films at Teater Utan Kayu on July 7-8, 2000. The program includes cinematic classics such as The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, along with one interesting selection: Rambo: First Blood Part II, which completes the wide range of Vietnam War movies.

The screenings will be followed by a lecture by Janet Steele, an Associate Professor of Journalism at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and a former Fullbright professor at the American Studies program at the University of Indonesia (1997-1998), titled "Do We Get to Win This Time?: Conflict, Culture, and National Healing in American Films depicting the War in Vietnam."

Steele will bring up the issues and questions that have resonated in American popular culture since the end of the War, focusing her presentation particularly on The Deer Hunter and Rambo: First Blood Part II, which she says are two movies that address those issues in different ways.

"Perhaps more interesting than the actual content of the films is what they suggest about American culture and mythology," says Steele, "and how Americans have struggled to come to grips with the first major defeat in U.S. history."

Most of the films to be shown here are award-winning films from "big" names like Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick. Both The Deer Hunter and Platoon won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director in different decades. Coming Home earned Oscars for its lead actors, Jon Voight and Jane Fonda; Apocalypse Now is a Palme D'Or winner which also won Oscars; while Full Metal Jacket received an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Rambo: First Blood Part II may seem like an anomaly in the company of these films, but its inclusion is important to represent the kind of jingoist spectacles that also feature the Vietnam War as a crucial aspect of their storylines.

Coming Home and The Deer Hunter were released just after the War ended, they appeared during what Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner in their book Camera Politica imply as "the period of the returning vets." Coming Home features a paraplegic veteran, played by Voight, who has an affair with the wife (Fonda) of a fellow Vietnam veteran (Bruce Dern). The three-hour-long movie, The Deer Hunter, is about three small town friends (Robert De Niro, John Savage, and the Oscar-winning Christopher Walken) who try to grapple with their mental traumas after concluding their services in Vietnam.

Apocalypse Now is probably in a class of its own with its rather surreal depiction of Vietnam, but it is mainly an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It remains one of the most quoted movie classics, with unforgettable lines like "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," spoken by the charismatic Robert Duvall, who only appears briefly but remains one of the most memorable characters in the movie.

The film's disastrous one-year shoot in the jungles of the Philippines is now made legendary by the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.

Both Platoon and Full Metal Jacket take us directly into the battlefield, adopting an even more critical assertion about the War. Rambo, meanwhile, features a different kind of battle, with Sylvester Stallone's monosyllabic hero beginning his adventure with the line "Do we get to win this time?" a quote used by Steele for her presentation.

Whatever they represent, Vietnam War movies are worth paying attention to, especially since no new ones are likely to emerge anytime soon. Three popular films at the end of the 20th century: Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful have indicated that Hollywood is returning to World War II.