The Vietnamese Amnesia
1974 onward was a time of great disillusionment and a hazed
denial of America’s involvement in the Vietnam war, the 80’s developed a
revival of interest and reflection within the failings of the U.S. Army and its
overestimation of the countries of Vietnam, Laos and unofficially Cambodia. The
lack of faith towards the Army and other governing bodies was misplaced with
the Republican Reagon and the rise of the efficient and affluent workplace.
This amnesia of the events that had been shipped back to the United States
through the testimony of such veterans as Ron Kovic and the Nightly News had
been all but forgotten, even though the Vietnam War was the most graphically
portrayed in the nation’s history.
This reinvigorated interest brought about by a malaise of
psychological denial of many citizens whose history of glory has left them in
such an unpatriotic place allowed a retelling of the American story of the
Vietnam War.
Authors, articles and Government inquiry built a strong
basis for the Hollywood machine to adapt the story into a conventionally ‘Good’
vs ‘Evil’ tale. The Deer Hunter (1978)
showed the damaging Psychosis of the Vietnam veterans, hardened and often
inhuman because of the very nature of the War, Vietnamese Brutality and the
effects of returning to a home that no longer holds the childhood innocence
that made it so. Again the Physical effects were captured with the Veteran
returning Handicapped from infection, similarly displayed in Born on the Fourth of July (1989) where
the biographical basis shows it’s realism, the lead character returns still
patriotic but also separate from those who have not experienced the War. The
1980’s drafted the concepts very differently with Heroic feats of bravery and
honesty at their forefront.
Platoon (1986) was
that very example, covering a wide diversity of meaning, such as the Race
issues, drug use, and the disillusioned soldiers for whom the war is another
day on the calendar, the depiction of the end battle with the protagonist
surviving solely, through his own defiance, Apocalypse
Now has the protagonist survive yet the war is not painted in such a way as
to drescribe salvation.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial however is scarcely that of
the film industry, it is ‘A Shrine to the Dead’
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