BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY
In Vietnam war films, U.S. troops are over there because they’re over there because they’re over there. Not one feature film–unless you count John Wayne’s frothing right-wing fantasy The Green Berets (1968)–ventures a plausible reason why billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives (and over a million and a half Vietnamese lives) were squandered cruelly in Southeast Asia. What we tend to get on-screen instead of explanations are bits and pieces of pretty pathetic mumbo jumbo. There’s the notion, for example, permeating The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) that a sort of metaphysical jungle rot infected and addled American soldiers so that they became, like Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando, the paunchy commando in Coppola’s epic), capable of extremely unsportsmanlike conduct. In Full Metal Jacket (1987), Stanley Kubrick suggests, through Private Joker’s lips, that the hideous source of all the conspicuous horror was the “duality of man.” You know, the Jungian thing. Ah. So that’s why we were in Vietnam.
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Perhaps it’s just as well that feature filmmakers leave serious inquiry to documentaries (for example, Emile de Antonio’s 1969 In the Year of the Pig and Peter Davis’s 1975 Hearts and Minds). That way they can round up the usual cinematic elements: helicopter gunship attacks, billowing napalm blasts, a “grunt’s-eye view” of gruesome ground combat (which recently reached an apogee in the vivid “you are there” subjective camera gimmick of 84 Charlie MoPic), and inadvertent atrocities–or even deliberate ones, as in De Palma’s Casualties of War. By now these make up a cavalcade of cliches, but they spare filmmakers (and nervous producers) from taking a controversial stance and thus risking the alienation of potential ticket buyers.
Although Fourth of July supplies a set of cute vignettes–a first kiss, a Little League homer–there’s no mistaking the ambivalence with which Stone views this narrow, sheltered milieu. The father is kind yet full of quiet desperation, and Mrs. Kovic is a rigid, frightened, religiously overwrought woman who calls down her idiotic God’s wrath–in the future form, perhaps, of a VC bullet snapping a spinal cord–upon her son for possessing a Playboy. Ron is easy prey for John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” an extraordinarily ambiguous message that sent Green Berets and Peace Corps volunteers alike fanning out across the globe. Ron the teenager (Tom Cruise) passionately wants to serve a government that, as the record shows, lied and lied and lied about the Vietnam war. Stone wisely caves in to temptation, inserting a chilling cameo by Tom Berenger, a resurrected psychotic Sergeant Barnes of Platoon, as a marine recruiter.
