As Charlie Sheen’s character in Platoon, Chris Taylor, is helivaced out of the Vietnamese jungle, he narrates: “Those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To teach to others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.”
The casualties of war are not just those who lose senses or limbs, but also those whose scars lie hidden from the sympathetic eye. Whose keloids hide in the recesses of the mind; superficial tissue hiding wounds too deep to ever heal.
Hollywood has far too often shied away from those wounds, preferring to paint war as the grand chess game, rather than “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”, as Dwight D Eisenhower put it.
From the glamourised chaos of the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, to the popcorn pleasures of The Great Escape, the Hollywood war machine has trundled over the facts… that war is bloody, it always hurts the innocent, and it’s inevitable.
But there have been few films that have portrayed war at its most horrific, when it affects the individual, be it a civilian or a soldier. And in their truth, they have been masterpieces. The Hurt Locker, nominated for the Best Picture award at this year’s Oscars is a case in point. Centring around a bomb disposal squad in Iraq, it’s about people, rather than the herd. It’s about individual brush strokes rather than the canvas.
What we tend to forget is that soldiers, once exposed to the horrors of war, very rarely revert to ‘normalcy’. They have seen humanity at its very worst. They have seen the blind rage of youth, channelled by politicians and tyrants onto the petri dish of our insanity. No, they can never be the same. And when they return, the nightmares of the reality they have lived through haunt their daydreams. For some, like SFC William James in The Hurt Locker, it becomes all they know, and in turn the only thing they feel: The parasite takes over the host.
But for others it’s about finding their feet in a society that loathes and reveres them in equal measure. It’s about finding, in a loved one, the strength to deal with demons. The Deer Hunter, directed by the ill-fated Michael Cimino, and starring Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken may only be partly set in Vietnam, but it shows how a conflict being fought in one country can span the globe in its effect on families and friends of those doing the dying. As does another of this year’s Oscar nominees, The Messenger and the Toby Maguire-Jake Gyllenhall-starrer Brothers.
But it was Hal Ashby, arguably the most underrated director in Hollywood history, who directed the ultimate tapestry; the last word on the shockwaves of our hate. Coming Home is about finding peace in a time of war, it’s about coming to terms with death; it’s about resurrection; it’s about change.
John Voight plays Luke Martin, a Vietnam vet who returns a paraplegic. It’s Luke who sums up the jingoism that often pervades Hollywood, and the fantasy of bravery that makes war seem less foolish.
“I know some of you guys are going to look at the uniformed man and you’re going to remember all the films and you’re going to think about the glory of other wars and think about some vague patriotic feeling and go off and fight,” he says, “And I’m telling you it ain’t like it’s in the movies. I wanted to be a war hero, man, I wanted to go out and kill for my country. And now, I’m here to tell you that I have killed for my country or whatever. And I don’t feel good about it. Because there’s not enough reason, man, to feel a person die in your hands or to see your best buddy get blown away. I’m here to tell you, it’s a lousy thing, man. And I don’t want to see people like you, man, coming back and having to face the rest of your lives with that kind of shit. I’m just telling you that there’s a choice to be made here.”
With films like The Hurt Locker, The Messenger, Brothers and Stop-Loss, and TV shows like Over There and Kill Generation, the providers of our ‘entertainment’ seem to have made a choice: War is hell. No glory, no warriors, just plain old people like you and me, fighting for something they may not even believe in, in a place they don’t know, for a people who couldn’t care less about.
All this, coming to a cinema near you.
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