- 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 a

The threat being posed to a film’s key character and his extension to his national identity is usually displaced in varying degrees from the morality and politics of US intervention in Vietnam to the people and landscape of Southeast Asia. Racist stereotypes of Asian and Asians are used to represent a mysterious and precarious subject. The moral confusion of the war is characterized by a landscape that seems to preclude any proper orientation. More importantly, the sense of U.S. moral degradation is placed onto the people of Vietnam, who are almost always representated as prositutes, pimps, and or a enemy acting like a friend.

The perspective on the war provided by naïve minds leaves very little room for the details of the history. The conflation of the key character’s moral position with national identity precludes the representation of aspects of the war that would make the (re)creation of that identity as democratic, moral and just.

Some topics in this essay:
Vietnam War, Asian Asians, King Jr’s, Morning Vietnam”, Berets Hollywood, Receptions War, Asia Consequently, Frederic Jameson, , William Gibson, vietnam war, hollywood vietnam, hollywood vietnam war, war films, vietnam war films, war film, film’s key character, film’s key, national identity, intervention vietnam, fourth july, born fourth, born fourth july, key character, vietnam war film,