Empathy with
the Devil: Hollywood’s Portrayal of the Enemy in Conflict
(abstract)
“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.
