Empathy with the Devil:
Hollywood's Portrayal of the Enemy in Conflict

“It is hard…to be called an Arab apologist here at Brown and then at home to be called an American apologist, when I think I’m saying the same thing in both places”
- Anonymous student speaking after September 11th (Blight and Lang).

“I would always be in-between...south, north...east, west...peace, war...Vietnam, America.
It is my fate to be in-between Heaven & Earth”
-Le Ly Hayslip in Heaven and Earth.

America is fighting a seemingly obsequious, yet to be identified enemy in Iraq as ambiguous as any since the War in Vietnam. A look at Hollywood’s portrayal of the enemy in past American conflicts will inform our evaluation of and reaction to the present situation. By looking at how the native Vietnamese are, or more aptly are not, portrayed in Hollywood’s Vietnam War Narratives, we may determine how the inclusion of Iraqi voices in our discussions may influence our own understanding of the War in Iraq.

Since the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Hollywood has saturated American and international discourse with narratives on the war. From the release of The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) in the late seventies to the opening of We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002) this year, the interest in a conflict that the U.S. government pulled out of over twenty-five years ago has not waned. Such intrigue, in fact, has resulted in the creation of a film genre entirely dedicated to the Vietnam War narrative. Many film critics have lauded such depictions of the war as the previously mentioned Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) for the honest portrayal these films provide of the experience during the war; however, critics such as Philip Melling have pointed out the ethnocentricity in a genre of film that has the tendency “to ignore the social fabric of Vietnamese life in the popular and political culture of the United States” (89). In an attempt to incorporate the Vietnamese point of view into Hollywood’s portrayal of the war, Stone constructed his third film on Vietnam Heaven and Earth (1993) out of the true to life story of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese refugee writer. While it received negative reviews in the press and culminated in one of the least successful films of his career in regards to box-office sales, Heaven and Earth, nevertheless, offers Hollywood audiences the opportunity to consider an alternative perspective on the conflict in Vietnam. U.S. critics and audiences alike, perhaps still interested in the typical Vietnam narrative as told from the American perspective, often overlook or altogether disregard this aspect of Heaven and Earth. Although the film is marred with flaws already addressed by the critics, I will discuss the importance of looking at Oliver Stone’s attempt to portray the other point of view in Heaven and Earth in order to encourage the consideration of alternative perspectives in the United States’ current War in Iraq.

Scholars have recently investigated the political ignorance influencing the war in Vietnam. In fact, such a shift in critical perspective leads Renny Christopher to directly critique the inherent Ameri-Eurocentric point of view in the most often used phrase to describe the war America took part in, and which also took place in Vietnam. In order to understand the other perspective, we must begin by recognizing what we call the Vietnam War to be more accurately described as the American War in Vietnam. As Heaven and Earth will explain to Western audiences, many wars took place in Vietnam prior to America’s involvement in that country. A shift in perspective can begin to produce empathy for the Vietnamese people, a goal not only of Stone in Heaven and Earth but also of my own in this paper. As Milton Bates points out, the notion arises that if “we Americans lost the war because we failed to recognize and adapt to the otherness of the enemy, then we are in danger of losing it a second time by losing its lessons, unless we try to see the war as others—particularly the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—saw it” (6-7). A plea to portray the other side of the conflict appears in both Christopher’s and Bates’ arguments. The critics’ growing urge for empathy with the Vietnamese experience in the mid-nineties echoes, while curiously not necessarily acknowledging, Oliver Stone’s agenda in his earlier attempt to articulate Hayslip’s story to the American masses in the 1993 release of Heaven and Earth.

Stone recognized the relevance of looking at the Vietnamese experience to help understand our situation with other members of the world. In an interview from 1994, a year after he released Heaven and Earth, Stone articulates the relationship between America’s involvement in Vietnam with situations in other parts of the world: “Vietnam has applications to any of seven or eight interventions in the Third World by America. I’m amazed people don’t see the relevance of it. We have played the global policeman. Whether the helmets are in Panama or the [Middle East] is totally irrelevant. It’s the same human beings who are going to war” (qtd. in Kilday 115). Stone’s argument, therefore, focuses on suggesting a possible link between the experience in Vietnam and our current situation in Iraq, or, quite simply, American Imperialism.

Stone also realized the inherent opportunity to portray a different perspective in a film based entirely on a Vietnamese woman. Until Heaven and Earth, nearly every Vietnam War narrative portrayed Vietnamese women as either prostitutes, hootch maids or bar girls (Puhr, 172). The purpose of Stone’s endeavor lies in conjunction with the Vietnamese refugee writers’ attempt to alter this path that had become typical of the Vietnam narrative. They aim “not to separate themselves from their history, but to make that history as real for American readers as it is for them, and thus alter the American historical narrative” (Christopher 34). For this reason, Heaven and Earth represents more than merely another movie on Vietnam, as many critics regarded the film upon the time of its release. As Susan Mackey-Kallis points out in Oliver Stone’s America: ‘Dreaming the Myth Outward’, instead of following the traditional path of the typical narrative regarding the war, Heaven and Earth broke away from the norm: “Although the Vietnamese culture figures to greater and lesser extent in most Vietnam films, until recently American cinema audiences have not been treated to sympathetic or complex portraits of either the North or South Vietnamese people. Heaven and Earth is a startling exception to both rules” (82). Historically, U.S. audiences have sought an explanation of what tend to be primarily genuine American experiences (Temperley 18), which forewarns a high box-office risk for Stone in making a film like Heaven and Earth; however, he saw America “headed towards a new era in the twenty-first century, I hope, of total consciousness. People of all colors will be sharing this planet. It’s necessary for us to get out of our skins and cross this spiritual and divisive gulf that people have formed” (Stone qtd. in Kagan 212). Of course, due to Stone’s previous work that in fact assisted in building such a divide, critics were skeptical of his ability to “get out” of his own point of view (Yang 58). Nevertheless, several years before Renny Christopher and Milton Bates began publishing articles stressing the importance of understanding the Vietnamese perspective in our culture’s portrayal of the war, Oliver Stone understood the significance of articulating the under-represented voice in mainstream Vietnamese narratives. Similarly, we must consider all point of views involved in America’s War in Iraq. As I will explain, even though Stone’s American perspective inevitably influences his film, the director distinguishes Heaven and Earth from the traditional Hollywood narratives regarding the war in Vietnam by basing the story upon Hayslip’s own narrative.

Early on in the film, Stone portrays the extent to which politics will influence Hayslip’s life. Including various political points of view in the framework of her identity, particularly that of the communist Viet Cong, which I will focus on, immediately distinguishes Heaven and Earth from the traditional Vietnam narrative: “The more popular personal narratives and films of Vietnam soldiers focus almost exclusively on the more intimate, individual or collection of separate voices…they present the government and the military as monolithic and indifferent” (Jeffords 4). Stone’s earlier films on the war, Platoon and Born On the Fourth of July, used and consequently reinforced this characteristic of Vietnam narratives. Both his works on Vietnam prior to Heaven and Earth focus on the individual story of the soldiers and intentionally neglect to incorporate any substantial political aspect responsible for the situation in which the characters find themselves. In their book How the War was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam, Albert Auster and Leonard Quart notice how the narrative structure of a film like Platoon does not require Stone to “graft a developed political consciousness onto men who are mainly interested in survival” (136); however, they immediately address the flaw in such an ethnocentric narrative. While the individual characters may not be concerned with politics, the overall narrative should acknowledge the different perspectives involved in the war: “Despite our traumatic internal divisions and conflicts, an external enemy did exist: a nation and culture that was devastated by and suffered from the war in ways the United States never did” (Auster 137). In a plea for consideration of alternative perspectives in the Vietnam narrative five years prior to the release of Heaven and Earth, Auster and Quart signify the growing movement that eventually spawns Stone’s film.

Similar to the characters in Platoon, Le Ly Hayslip was neither aware of nor concerned with the political aspects of the conflict in her country as a peasant girl; however, politics later wed with the individual and Hayslip in fact dedicates her narrative, as she has her life, to uniting a people estranged by two conflicting political ideologies yet bound by god through warfare (Hayslip xiv). Thus, in attempting to portray Hayslip’s life on film, Stone inevitably had to bridge the gap between the individual and the political in the Vietnam narrative. Contrary to David Shipler’s interpretation in his review of Hayslip’s autobiography, politics are intricately and constantly wed with Hayslip’s humanity. Accordingly, throughout the film, Stone must remain conscious of the Viet Cong influence in shaping Hayslip’s identity or, if nothing else, her consciousness. In so doing, Stone portrays a perspective of the war that his previous works, as well as most films in the mainstream Vietnam genre, had regarded as unacceptable and particularly abhorrent. Heaven and Earth therefore proves revolutionary among Hollywood films, even if only within its own industry, and deserves an academic analysis of its attempt towards empathy for the enemy in conflict.

After quickly encapsulating the earlier French invasion of Hayslip’s happy hometown Ky La during the opening credits, Stone immediately turns the attention of the film towards the Viet Cong influence on her identity, a perspective inherently missing from the conventional Vietnam narrative. Just before the Viet Cong soldiers invade Ky La, Hayslip comes running through a field and into the foreground of the shot with her brother Sau playfully chasing behind her. Through the narration describing the soldiers’ arrival as the event that would change the peasant countryside forever and the Buddhist monk tolling a bell just before they come onto the screen, Stone signifies the importance of the Viet Cong’s influence on Hayslip’s experience. Stone contrasts the Viet Cong’s entrance in this scene with the American-supported Republican forces’ invasion later in the film by having the Viet Cong subtly enter the picture, as opposed to the loud, forceful invasion by the foreign, U.S. forces. As Dale Dye, the technical adviser for Heaven and Earth and a war comrade of Stone’s in Vietnam, points out, “‘When we shot, we had mist and rain and the scene called for the VC to melt out of the bush. You see them as specters literally just melting out of the background. When we did it, I was standing next to Oliver. Seeing those guys come through the mist…was spooky. The hair stood up on the back of our arms’” (qtd. in Riordan 473). Such an overwhelming feeling of fright portrays Dye’s unacknowledged yet ever-present Eurocentric perspective stemming from his own involvement as an American GI during the war. For the scene also depicts the origins from which the Viet Cong emerged. Hayslip’s reaction, and thus the film, contradicts Dye’s feeling of spookiness as she cautiously but nevertheless curiously walks toward the soldiers with a sense of wonder. This response, along with having the Viet Cong enter the scene on land as opposed to by air, as we first see the American forces, articulates and begins to portray Hayslip’s level of sympathy with the communist Viet Cong. After all, as Jim Neilson indicates while speaking of The Green Berets, the communists America fought were above all else Vietnamese (112), and Hollywood cinema has historically placed the sympathy with the imperial power by shooting the scene of invasion with the camera accompanying the position of the Western soldiers (Shohat 52). In Heaven and Earth, the camera shows Hayslip’s perspective on land, in the same space as the communist soldiers. More importantly, the camera, in order to further emphasize the point of view of the film, continues to shoot from Hayslip’s perspective on land when the U.S. forces invade by air. In order for Stone to make a film based on a Vietnamese life, he had to show where the Viet Cong came from and how they fought for the freedom of Vietnam.

Stone then cuts from the arrival of the Viet Cong to the scene in which a Viet Cong soldier addresses the townspeople of Ky La. Just as importantly, the soldier serves to speak to the uninformed Western audience, representing the communist perspective of the Viet Cong whose point of view most Hollywood films fail to consider significant enough to portray. True to Hayslip’s autobiography, the soldier immediately states that the Viet Cong’s sole purpose in the war is the freedom of the Vietnamese people from the oppression of outside imperial forces. In a twist of fate, the language of the Viet Cong soldier’s speech plays to the sympathies of America’s own battle for freedom from England perhaps further evoking a sense of empathy from U.S. audiences. Hayslip understands the potential appeal her narrative could have to American audiences and hopes it may change the way they think of Vietnam:

They don’t see that the people who live in the land know nothing but the land and their ancestors. We talk about freedom in the United States. The freedom of speech, freedom to vote, freedom of religion. In Vietnam before the war, the Vietnamese had freedom. Freedom to us was to live on the land with one little house. To be born in the house and die in the house. Freedom for us was not the freedom to vote because we didn’t know how to read or write or what the issues were about. Freedom was to walk from city to city and only have to be scared of the dogs. To move from one village to another and cut down a bamboo tree and build a hut. Everything you want right there. Make a living from the rice paddy and have drinking water from a spring and a well. And nobody to hurt you or make you fight. That is freedom. (qtd. in Riordan 478-9)

Hayslip not only reemphasizes her naïve, indifferent concern early on in life for politics, which the war suddenly forced her to take into consideration, but more importantly, she expresses the inherent Vietnamese desire for freedom depicted by the Viet Cong soldier in Stone’s film. Referring to the townspeople as brothers and sisters and to the Viet Cong as their family, the soldier uses such patriarchal terms to articulate the Viet Cong’s relationship to the nation, reiterating Stone’s objective in the previous scene. Similarly to that scene, which parallels the American invasion of Ky La, this scene portrays Viet Cong politics in contrast to that of the American forces depicted in an identical scene later in the film in which a Republican soldier will speak to the people of Ky La. Unlike this Republican soldier who stands in front of the crowd shouting orders and promising monetary rewards for individuals who cooperate, the Viet Cong soldier walks among the people, speaking of their history relative to this conflict. Stone perhaps includes this scene out of response to Lynne Bundesen’s negative review of Hayslip’s book in which he criticizes the author for not providing enough background for American audiences. In Heaven and Earth, Stone anticipates an audience unfamiliar with the wars and history of the Vietnamese people and, thus, uses the Viet Cong soldier to describe that experience.

The Viet Cong soldier then asks the townspeople to make up their own minds regarding the growing conflict. The communists will not promise money in return for the townspeople’s actions but only the assurance of equality within the system. He speaks of outside forces splitting their country in half and, after the soldier concludes that “a nation cannot have two governments any more than a family can have two fathers”, Stone cuts to Hayslip who stares up admiringly at the Viet Cong soldier as she tells her brother that she agrees. This scene therefore portrays the Viet Cong perspective, which, in spite of critics such as David Halberstam’s adulation for the historical and political accurateness of Stone’s earlier films (Coliss 57), is grossly underrepresented in Vietnam narratives; it also shows the degree to which Hayslip’s sympathy with the Viet Cong continues to develop. At this point, while emotionally tied to the main character of the film, the audience has no choice but to sympathize with the Viet Cong side of the conflict as well. The point of view of the film increasingly provides an alternative perspective to the traditional Vietnam narrative.

Beyond the cruelties that the American forces inflict on Hayslip as a result of her presumed association with the communists, the portrayal of her psychological sympathy with the Viet Cong increases most as her youngest, and closest brother Sau leaves home to fight for the North. Once again, politics are tied to Hayslip’s individual story. Before cutting to the scene in which Sau joins the Viet Cong, Stone depicts a party in which Hayslip dances in near hypnotic merriment with her younger brother, and the narrator articulates how much her brother means to her by claiming that it is he whom she loves most. After such a claim, Stone does not allow Sau’s character to leave the narrative simply because he has left home. A series of dream sequences will highlight the height of Hayslip’s emotional bond with her sibling and, furthermore, empathy with the Viet Cong.

On the night the Viet Cong have reinvaded Ky La, Hayslip dreams of her brother. For the purposes of the film, the dream serves as a montage of the previous scenes involving the relationship between Hayslip and her brother, and provides a glimpse into Hayslip’s fear for her brother’s safety after joining the Northern forces. Since the dream comes from Hayslip’s perspective, Stone indicates the thoughts and reasoning of Hayslip, which is important to keep in mind as the sequence ends. In the dream, Stone reiterates the role Sau plays in Hayslip’s life by showing, in black and white this time to indicate Hayslip’s unconscious thoughts, the scene of the two siblings dancing around the campfire after the Viet Cong soldier’s speech. A quick cut then shows Sau listening to the Vietnam soldier, which indicates the persuasive effect of the speech since the next cut then replays Sau leaving home to join the Viet Cong cause. This cut implies the relationship between her beloved brother and the communist ideology. The dream sequence shows us the Vietnamese perspective in reasoning to fight with the Viet Cong. All Viet Cong soldiers are not bloodthirsty animals who kill for no reason as most traditional Vietnam narratives from Hollywood assume, but are instead human beings who rationally decide to fight for the freedom of their country.

The dream continues, as Stone portrays an American soldier taking Sau hostage with the off-screen sound of a helicopter indicating personal peril, as it often will throughout the movie. With a cut to inside the helicopter, an American GI screams, “which one is first” and then points to Hayslip’s brother. Another GI takes the blindfold off of Sau’s eyes and presents him with an ultimatum that Stone will reiterate in future scenes: “Hey buddy, this is it. You talk now or it’s bye bye Charlie!”. Just before the American soldiers throw her brother from the helicopter, Stone cuts to a GI taking the blindfold off of Hayslip’s face and we realize for the first time that she is in the dream with her brothers. Thus, Stone indicates that the perspective in the dream sequence has been Hayslip’s own all along. Her brother is mercilessly hurled to his death and the GI turns to Hayslip. The G.I. grabs her and throws her on the deck so that her head hangs outside the door of the helicopter. Then, Stone depicts Hayslip helplessly on her back with a soldier on top of her. The shot foreshadows a later scene in which two Viet Cong soldiers rape Hayslip but, at this point, the Americans are the perpetrators and Stone further directs the empathy of the film towards Hayslip’s identification with the Viet Cong. Besides portraying the most sympathetic experience of the Viet Cong soldier up until this point in the film, the dream sequence more importantly depicts Hayslip’s allegiance to the Viet Cong side of the conflict, foreshadowing and legitimizing her conscious decision to join, though only momentarily, the North in their battle against outside forces.

The following scenes depict Hayslip’s intimate relationship with the different members of her family and, in turn, further justify her empathy with the Viet Cong. Immediately following the dream, a local wizard comes to the home and instructs Hayslip’s family to build a larger shrine outside their home for her beloved brother Sau who has died. Upon showing what we understand to be Sau’s spirit looking at Hayslip from the corner of the room, Stone articulates the importance of spiritual kinship in Hayslip’s life and, again, stresses the influence of the Viet Cong in forging part of her identity. The next scene further articulates the reasoning behind Hayslip joining the Viet Cong, recalling her father’s lesson taught to Hayslip just after Sau left home:

You understand that a country is more than a lot of dirt, rivers and forest. You know your brother Sau may not come back. I told you many times, the Chinese ruined our land. Many died…your grandfather fought and died against the Japanese just before you were born. We suffered much…Freedom is never a gift Le Ly, it must be won and won again. You understand? You see this land? Vietnam, it’s going to be yours now. If the enemy comes back, you must be both a daughter and a son now. (Heaven and Earth)

Indeed, the enemy has returned, this time in the form of the American forces. Hayslip must heed her father’s advice and brother’s example and join the Viet Cong battle for freedom.

The Western audience must understand and, hence, be willing to acknowledge Hayslip’s reasoning. While preparing weapons for the North, the voice-over narration explains that the Viet Cong instilled a sense of duty to their nation and expresses the appeal of the Viet Cong to the peasants of Ky La, which has already been alluded to in earlier scenes: “If the Viet Cong won the peasants over it was because they lived their lives with us”. Although he will later depict the Viet Cong influence in Hayslip’s life in a negative light, Stone departs from the Eurocentric norms of the traditional narrative if only in his attempt to articulate the Vietnamese perspective and reasoning behind fighting for the Viet Cong.

Throughout the rest of the film, Stone does not factor the communist perspective into Hayslip’s life as much as some critics might wish. Although Hayslip’s older brother does speak from a communist point of view in the final scenes, Rebecca Stephens points out the Eurocentric portrayal of the Vietnamese exile’s life in the second half of Heaven and Earth. While the later portions of Stone’s film might deserve such criticism, Stephens neglects to consider the earlier scenes, in which the director acknowledges the influence communism had in forming Hayslip’s identity: “In Heaven and Earth, I tried very hard to show that Vietnam is not this ‘other’ place. That the Vietnamese have families. That they care about life. And they may have a little wiser perception of the soul” (Stone qtd. in Mackey-Kallis 84). In Heaven and Earth, Stone portrays a complex story of an individual who admittedly is torn between east and west, defined by both Vietnamese communism and American capitalism. The director’s commitment to depicting Hayslip’s complete identity, which includes an equally significant American influence, might explain the lack of communist perspective towards the end of the film; or, such neglect may simply result from an attempt to appease Warner Brothers, the American Hollywood studio financing the picture. Regardless, critics have unjustly overlooked the early scenes that portray the communist influence on Hayslip’s life and indeed break away from the traditional Vietnam Narrative. Despite Stone’s often-discussed lack of consideration for such a perspective in the later half of the film, the fact that Heaven and Earth surpasses any previous Vietnam narrative’s portrayal of the communist perspective in Vietnamese life indicates the struggle required to express such empathy with alternative perspectives in conflict, a difficult but necessary battle we must fight in our present war in Iraq.

In the article “Obstacles to Empathy: Teaching About Vietnam and the War on Terrorism” that describes their course at Brown University in the fall of 2001, James G. Blight, a professor of international relations, and Janet M. Lang, an adjunct associate professor, indirectly articulate the relevance of analyzing Stone’s empathetic portrayal of the Vietnamese perspective to the current situation in which America finds itself:

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon came a little more than 12 hours after we finished the first meeting of our Brown University senior seminar, ‘The Vietnam War Revisited’. Trying to make sense of the initially incomprehensible events of September 11, we began to ask ourselves: How was the situation similar to that which the United States faced in Vietnam, and how was it different? We found the experience of using our analysis of the past to think about the chaotic present both interesting and therapeutic.

Blight and Lang recognized the relevance between acknowledging the perspective of our current enemy and considering the communist perspective in the war in Vietnam. If such a desire for cultural understanding seemed arduous to Stone in Heaven and Earth, so it seemed to the members of Blight and Lang’s class during the weeks following September 11th: “[W]hat we were all learning in the crucible of our seminar – is that while empathy may be an essential element of stable, peaceful relations between nations, and while in principle, it may always be possible to achieve empathy with others, in reality it can be very difficult to understand others whose views and actions one regards as unacceptable, even abhorrent” (Blight and Lang). This might explain why it took Hollywood twenty-eight years and the fall of the communist block to even attempt to give the Vietnamese point of view due justice in Heaven and Earth; however, we must not repeat the past and ignore the just consideration of our enemy until the threat has conveniently subsided. Instead, we should be willing to consider different perspectives during this time of war, when the consequences are most relevant.

Such hesitation to didactically depict the ways in which communist ideologies may appeal to the Vietnamese might explain why it took Hollywood so long to release a film like Heaven and Earth; but, let us not so quickly disregard perspectives in the war in Iraq. Though Hollywood has yet to broach the situation, it will one day attempt to explain the American War in Iraq; and, as we see in Heaven and Earth, there are at least two and often more sides to consider in every story. The same must be true in our present situation. Christopher describes the underlying importance of Hayslip’s Vietnamese exile narrative: “All of us who read and write about the American war in Viet Nam should remember that no matter what the conditions of writing of both of her books, the stories are hers, and her work to put them in front of the American reading public is pioneering and will remain important” (86). We should commend Stone accordingly for his attempt, if nothing more, to articulate Hayslip’s narrative to a similarly unwilling viewing public; and, if we are to learn from our past, Hollywood, and America at large, too should follow such leads when deciding how to portray Iraqi individuals while (re)telling our present war on screen. As Stone must do with the communists while considering Hayslip’s story, Hollywood, as well as the world, must consider, no matter how difficult, the possibility of at least acknowledging, if not sympathizing with, the perspective of the enemy in conflict in order to better comprehend the situation overall in Iraq.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blight, James G and Lang, Janet M. “Obstacles to Empathy: Teaching About Vietnam and the War on Terrorism”. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 29 March 2002
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i29/29b01201.htm.

Bundesen, Lynne. “Vietnam: One Woman’s Story.” Rev. of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, by Le Ly Hayslip. Los Angeles Times Book Review 25 June 1989: 4.

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