1.
Vietnam films have historically had a hard time depicting the Vietnam experience. This could probably be that there was no definition of the Vietnam "experience-. While each producer was trying to make a box office hit, in which some ultimately were, others also flopped. But that does not mean that they were trying to tell us something about the war in Vietnam, historically accurate or not. Some were more overt in their views than others and some were more focused on the literary aspect of story telling which then again ultimately means bending the truth.
A political focus in the Vietnam War movies can be both very useful and dangerous at the same time. It is useful in the way it is trying to form a consensus in the public by forming a context that everyone can understand. It is also very dangerous because it is easy to misinterpret. Andrew Martin explores this occurrrence in his book, Reciption of War: Vietnam in American Culture: "Hollywood declined to get involved with the Vietnam War, precisely because there appeared to be no way of approaching the subject without automatically alienating large numbers of potential viewers.""2.
Hollywood and the Vietnam War, the most controversial issue of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War, only began to be seriously examined on the screen in the late '70s. Although many films of the late 60s and early 70s embodied the bitter aftertaste of the war, the conflict itself remained strikingly absent from the screen, as Hollywood, like the country as a whole, had difficulty adjusting to the grim legacy of a lost and troubling war. During the conflict, Hollywood produced only a single film dealing with Vietnam--John Wayne's The Green Berets.
In general, Hollywood has portrayed Vietnam as a kind of phantasmagoric limbo, untrammelled by dates or place names, all "middle- with no real, definable beginning or end. The Vietnamese are usually denied psychological equality with the american characters.
