It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie."" .
- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried.
This is not about the coverage of the Vietnam War, rather, it is about Hollywood's representation of the war. It's all about the power. The power to make images that may displace, distort and destroy knowledge of the history in which those lives participated. Delving into Hollywood's history, the essay will concentrate on fictional movies rather than documentaries due to the fact that fictional stories tend to hold more ideology.
Movies act as a medium to let us, the younger generations, experience what happened before us. We can see and feel Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral and to an extent feel the paints of war or at least learn the pains of war through film. By the same vision, feeling and pain are ours to take in and remember, whatever form they are passed down to us in. It is our choice whether we want to accept these films with or without questions. Films depicting the Vietnam "experience- for better or for worse, acts as a tool for memories of those who were not there first hand to experience it.
News reportage of the war has been providing the narrative to cinema with a style of representation that enhances the sense of immediacy and realism in a number of films. The visual and acoustic treatment of such episodes as the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in "The Deer Hunter- (1978), the burning of a Vietnamese village in "Platoon- (1986), and the troops in the field listening to US armed forces broadcasts in "Good Morning Vietnam- (1987) is derived directly from the content introduced by the american public by television in its coverage of the war.
