Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (52 page)

Kovic’s story also shows how easily this dark side can be foisted onto the next generation. As he rides through a crowd during a Fourth of July parade, his eyes come to rest on a boy who looks much as he once did. The child’s Yankees cap and his toy gun suggest that little has changed since his own youth. By exposing America’s dark side, Stone pushes his analysis of Vietnam beyond that presented in
Platoon
. Unlike
Platoon
, which made no effort to explain the larger issues behind the war,
Born on the Fourth of July
suggests that Vietnam, and war in general, are a product of America’s own moral deficiencies, a theme that he would further explore in later films.

Kovic’s and Stone’s disillusionment is fueled by outrage, because they believed that they had been duped by their country’s martial culture. The film implies that only the true believers, boys like Kovic born on the Fourth of July, evinced a willingness to fight and die for their country. Most of Kovic’s high school classmates cannot understand why he wants to enlist; they do not feel particularly threatened by communists, and they are not moved by any overwhelming impulse to be “part of history.” They seek only normal lives and a chance to prosper financially. When Kovic returns from Vietnam in a wheelchair, his friends have moved on with their lives. They are husbands, fathers, budding entrepreneurs, as distant as people can be from what he experienced on the other side of the world. Perhaps even more than his injuries, his friends’ apathy gnaws at him. While he is consumed with the war, they could not care less. A hospital orderly tells him, “You can take your Vietnam and shove it up your ass.” “They don’t give a shit about the war,” his friend Stevie adds. Even his mother switches the television station to
Laugh In
when a story about a Vietnam War protest comes on the news.

Stone shared Kovic’s attitude toward America and his desire to shake his sleeping countrymen. The messages of Born on the Fourth of July are don’t forget and get involved. America fought and lost the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a needless, senseless war, the product of a military culture and blind ideological faith. And unless Americans begin to question that culture and that faith, it will happen again. On this point, Stone and Kovic are products of the late 1960s and early 1970s political radicalization. Conservatives argue that protest movements had no effect. Stone disagreed. “That’s why making Born was a particular thrill,’cause it was flying in the face of that shit,” he said. “People were outraged, I’d get letters saying... there was no protest, no hatred, why are you bringing up all this divisiveness? But I remember the late’60s as a very rough time....A lot of people can’t face their past, you know.”

Stone felt so strongly about the message of the film that he allowed it to interrupt the narrative flow. Most of the film deals with Kovic’s coming to terms with the forces that shaped him, a struggle that is largely internal and intellectual. The film ends, however, with sketchy scenes of Kovic’s political activism, and the manipulation of historical footage to put Cruise/Kovic at the 1972 Republican Convention contrasts sharply with the camera work of the rest of the film. But the transition from internal search to external activism, personal to political, is the message of
Born on the Fourth of July.

Stone’s concern for America’s involvement in the war runs even deeper, however. It was not enough for the director just to show the impact of the war on an individual, on Ron Kovic, Chris Taylor, or Oliver Stone. It was not enough just to be the cinematic Hemingway of the Vietnam War. Stone wanted to be the war’s historian as well. As a historian of the war, Stone moves on two levels: personal and political.
Platoon
and
Born on the Fourth of July
are primarily personal statements, though the political lurks beneath the surface. Both films were huge critical and commercial successes (
Born on the Fourth of July
was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including an Oscar for Stone for best director).

Heaven and Earth
(1994) is also largely a personal film of selfdiscovery, although it too has a historical and political message. The war, Stone says, was not only, or even mostly, about the United States. The overwhelming majority of people who were killed in the war were Vietnamese, and most of them were civilians. It was their land that was destroyed, their economy that was shattered, and their culture that was threatened with ruin. Stone commented that he made the film for two reasons: first, to explore the themes of Buddhist spirituality, reverence for ancestors, and respect for the land, and second,

to respond to, in part, the blind militarism and mindless revisionism of the Vietnam War as typified by a certain odious brand of thinking that has snaked its way into our culture over the past decade or so, in which the conflict is refought in comic-book style by American superheroes, with a brand new ending... we win! Within the moronic context of these ideas, hundreds of nameless, faceless, Vietnamese are blithely and casually shot, stabbed, and blown to smithereens, utterly without the benefit of human consideration. Entire villages are triumphantly laid to waste, with not one microsecond of thought or care given to those inside the little bamboo hamlets being napalmed. Who were they?

In his attempt to give “the reverse angle” of the war, Stone succeeds. He depicts Phang Thy Le Ly Hayslip’s world in loving detail, from the agricultural cycle to the serene beauty of the land to the peaceful stability of village and religious life. Seldom has a commercial filmmaker devoted so much attention to the undramatic nature of a third-world culture. When Stone finally turns his attention to Americans, he portrays them as rich, barbaric invaders. They intrude into the Vietnamese civil war, overlay it with an alien ideological meaning, then take it over, destroying or corrupting everything they touch. They disrupt nature by destroying entire villages, defoliating forests, and severing the rice cycle. American forces turn Le Ly’s “most beautiful village on earth” into a scene from Dante’s
Inferno
. Culturally, American capitalism corrupts the country, sending villagers to cities and bases where they become pimps, prostitutes, and black marketeers. Drawing not only on Le Ly’s memoirs but also on his own experiences as an MP, Stone is at his best when showing American GIs at their worst.

Stone even contends that Americans are at their worst when they are trying to be at their best. In one scene, South Vietnamese soldiers, American allies, use honey donated by the United States and angry ants to torture Le Ly. On a metaphoric level, Stone uses Steve Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) as the representative American. A twisted, misguided killer, Steve attempts to atone for his own sins by showering Le Ly with jpgts and by taking her out of her natural environment and dropping her in the United States. But just as the relationship between the United States and the Republic of South Vietnam rotted, so the unnatural union of Steve and Le Ly turns expletive and violent. Steve’s suicide reinforces Stone’s view of the results of the American mission in Vietnam.

Heaven and Earth differed from Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July
in its public reception. Expensive to make, it failed miserably at the box office. Production costs exceeded the combined costs of
Platoon
and
Born on the Fourth of July
, but
Heaven and Earth
grossed only $6 million in the United States. Although it was critically applauded—one reviewer called it “Stone’s ultimate war film”—it failed to reach the audience the director intended it for. It had a message for all Rambocheering, Reagan-voting Americans, but few people paid it even passing attention.

After the success of
Born on the Fourth of July
and before the debacle of Heaven and Earth, Stone moved on to new topics. Instead of fulfilling his dream of making a comedy, he decided to catalogue the life of his musical hero, Jim Morrison. But even before
The
Doors was completed, he had laid the foundations for a bold return to the Vietnam genre. By the late 1970s, he had decided that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had drastically altered the course of the war and America’s future, but it was not until 1988, when book publisher Ellen Ray gave him a copy of Jim Garrison’s
On the Trail of the Assassins
in an elevator in Havana, that he became convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. Stone devoured Garrison’s work, buying the rights to it with his own money. He then immersed himself in the “serious research” required of any historian. He read every book on JFK and the assassination that he could lay his hands on and, along with screenwriter Zachary Sklar and coproducer A. Kitman Ho, conducted over 200 interviews with conspiracy theorists and other people with knowledge of the case.

Stone’s conception of the film soon outgrew the mere circumstances of the assassination. “The central historical question” that courses through the movie centers on neither Jim Garrison nor the identity of the president’s killers. Instead, Stone used the murder as a means of exploring the event that was central to both his and, he believed, his nation’s life: Vietnam. In this way, he was building on issues he had explored in his previous films.
Platoon
was an autobiographical study that showed how the everyday horrors of the war affected a young man.
Born on the Fourth of July
carried the war home by examining how indifference, misunderstanding, and the perverted nature of American life affected Ron Kovic’s life. But now, Stone cast an even wider net.
JFK
is a biography of America since World War II, with Vietnam serving as the defining event for the period.

Stone begins
JFK
by rehabilitating the slain president’s image. A narrator informs the viewer that Kennedy represented “change and upheaval” in American government. We see Kennedy as he wanted to be seen, making conciliatory speeches toward the Soviets and frolicking with his family. Most importantly, we learn that Kennedy, through no fault of his own, found himself embroiled in a war in Southeast Asia. After the assassination, a stricken black maid, perhaps the mother of a grunt, sobs as she tells a reporter what “a fine man” Kennedy was. Meanwhile, Guy Banister (Ed Asner) cheers the killing, ripping Kennedy for letting the “niggers vote.” Those who supported and those who objected to Kennedy are neatly delineated. Stone seems intent on transforming Kennedy into the stained-glass hero that the Vietnam War never had.

Vietnam barely ripples the surface of the first half of the film. As New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) initially becomes obsessed with the assassination, there is little indication that the war plays a pivotal role in anything. Instead, the war appears, as it did in the mid-1960s, as background noise always present, but rarely commented on. A brief clip shows Lyndon Johnson declaring his intent to vigorously prosecute the war. Another quick mention informs us that Johnson is asking for more money and more men to fight the war.

As Garrison unearths more information, however, Vietnam becomes increasingly central to the story. The pivotal scene comes when Garrison travels to Washington, D.C., to meet Mr. X (Donald Sutherland). Mr. X gives him the broader perspective that the DA could never have unearthed on his own. Mr. X cannot tell Garrison who killed Kennedy, although he suggests that top government officials were involved; when he refers to “the perpetrators” and calls the killing a “coup d’ etat,” Stone flashes images of LBJ. He can, however, give Garrison information on the more important issue
why
“they” killed Kennedy. Kennedy had irritated powerful militarists with his refusal to invade Cuba and his decision to eliminate the CIA’s power to conduct covert activities during peacetime. The central issue, however, was Vietnam. Kennedy wanted to pull out of Vietnam by 1965, a decision clearly unacceptable to the military and the big arms dealers, who stood to make a killing if the killing continued. Somehow, these forces colluded, perhaps in combination with others, to remove the offending executive and replace him with the more hawkish Johnson, who was “personally committed” to Vietnam. Once Kennedy was out of the way, the war could start “for real.” Kennedy’s murder and the continuation of the war marked the final triumph of the military-industrial complex, a powerful junta that could run roughshod over any elected official. The personalized war Stone presented in
Platoon
had thus grown into a critical event that marked a decisive shift in the power structure of the United States.

JFK
was a mortar lobbed at the establishment, and it set off a firestorm of controversy. Many critics ignored Stone’s central thesis, seizing instead on the idea that he had proposed a grand conspiracy involving the CIA, FBI, elements of the military, anti-Castro Cubans, New Orleans homosexuals, the Dallas police department, and God only knows who else. Others blasted Stone for lionizing Garrison, who had, in real life, used some questionable methods (including truth serum and questioning hypnotized subjects) to gather his evidence, and for presenting speculation and composite figures as factual. Indeed,
JFK
attains the highest level of realism in any of Stone’s films. As in
Platoon
, the camera acts as an eye, as fallible as any human being’s. The camera jerks as we see something out of the corner of our eye. Did we really see what we thought was there? Stone never provides an answer. Further, Stone has mastered the technique (first seen in the 1972 Republican Convention scene in
Born on the Fourth of July
) of combining documentary and new footage into a seamless unity. His realistic approach went too far for many of his detractors, one of whom referred to
JFK
as “the cinematic equivalent of rape.”