On MOVIES, IRAQ, REALITY, AND VIETNAM

For three years, I lived, studied, and breathed Vietnam. I spent a year learning the language and then worked in Hanoi for two more. Before Vietnam, YTP Spouse worked for six months in Iraq at the beginning of the war and in one of its most dangerous places. After Vietnam, we moved to Los Angeles. YTP Spouse and I love movies; as I posted here, we are, in fact, addicted. This collection of experiences and interests may seem unrelated, but in today’s socio-political culture, they are not. In fact, the intersection of Iraq and Vietnam, the meeting point between Hollywood ideas created in the warm, safe world of California and the boring, bureaucratic realities of real-life in Washington, D.C. — these interactions shape not just America, but the world’s understanding of what is “truth,” what is “conspiracy,” what is “false.” To live in LA after all we have seen is sometimes disorienting, because this is a city that believes its own movies and TV show scripts almost more than D.C. believes its own press statements. So when I read Ross Douthat’s article in the Atlantic.com about “The Return of the Paranoid Style,” it was like watching someone take eight years of my thoughts in quiet moments and bundle them up neatly into an articulate, well-researched narrative. By the end of the article, my internal applause-o-meter was all the way over to “Encore!”. You can find the full text here, but I’ve excerpted below the paragraphs that had me jabbing at my LCD screen and yelling, “Yes, yes! That’s it exactly!”.


“But the ’70s revival isn’t simply a case of supply responding to demand; it’s also a case of Hollywood giving the audience what Hollywood wants to give it. The ’70s were in many ways dreadful years for America, but they’re remembered much more fondly in the film industry. There’s no surer way to establish your artistic (and political) bona fides than to name-drop a ’70s movie—whether it’s George Clooney bringing up All the President’s Men (1976) while promoting Michael Clayton, or Stephen Gaghan remarking that of course he was “thinking about The Parallax View and also Three Days of the Condor” while making Syriana. The suggestion is always the same—that the age of leisure suits and sideburns was also the high tide of politically engaged filmmaking, before the studios embarked on the relentless pursuit of the blockbuster and the Reagan reaction pushed American culture steadily to the right.

The age of George W. Bush and the Iraq War meshes much more neatly with the industry’s ’70s nostalgia. Just not quite as neatly, perhaps, as Hollywood seems to think. As we’ve seen, the broad-brush similarities between the two decades have been used to impressive cinematic effect. But because the two decades don’t map precisely onto one another, the ’70s revival is more successful, both artistically and at the box office, when it’s intimated than when it’s made explicit. And the closer a movie hews to real-world events, the greater the strain of making the Vietnam-era mood fit the Iraq-era facts.

The paranoid style of filmmaking, for instance, is defined in both its Vietnam- and Iraq-era incarnations by the insistence that villains at home are more dangerous than any enemies abroad. This was a plausible point of view when the enemy abroad was Ho Chi Minh: the Vietnam War didn’t begin with “Charlie” bombing downtown Manhattan, and there was little chance that VC cadres would follow America back home. It’s a tougher sell in the age of Osama bin Laden, and as a result an air of omission, even denial, hangs over this genre’s contemporary incarnations.

The point is not that similarities don’t exist between that conflict and this one—the Iraq War has more than its share of follies in high places, wartime atrocities, and home-front miseries. (De Palma and Haggis both drew on real-life incidents for their films.) But the entertainment industry, in its haste to re-create the ’70s, hasn’t come to terms with the differences. The differences in our war aims, for one thing. The differences in the enemies we face, for another. The differences in our military—not only in its composition, morale, and leadership, but in the way it’s regarded by civilians back home. Nor has the industry come to terms with what this last distinction says about the impact of the Iraq War on the American psyche—namely, that although the conflict has made us doubt our leaders, it hasn’t made us doubt ourselves.

That is, in the end, the key distinction. The Vietnam War was a bipartisan fiasco that took place amid profound social disarray, and everyone was understood to be complicit—Democrats as well as Republicans, ordinary citizens as well as politicians, the soldiers on the ground as well as the Best and the Brightest shipping them overseas. The conflict in Iraq is occurring during a time of relative domestic peace, and as a result the pessimism it’s produced, though real enough, hasn’t shaken our civilizational confidence in nearly the same way.

The difference is readily apparent in our politics. The Vietnam era had riots and rallies, the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, because the rot seemed to go so deep that only desperate measures were worth contemplating. The resistance movements of this era, by contrast, spend most of their time raising money for Democratic candidates, because it seems to many people that winning a few elections could make the nightmare go away. And what’s true for MoveOn.org is true for the entertainment industry. The popular culture of the 1970s reflected the widespread sense that only a revolution could set things right. But nobody’s going to write a 21st-century version of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), a book about the revolutionary spirit and countercultural excesses of ’70s Hollywood stars; this generation of stars is too busy fund-raising for Hillary and Obama.

All of this suggests that the ’70s revival, though pervasive at the moment, may not have that much staying power. The original decade of nightmares didn’t end when the Vietnam War did; it persisted through Ford and Carter, oil shocks and stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. The new ’70s may go out with George W. Bush.”