Dirty Harry Goes to War

[deutsey]

http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2641

Back in 1979, reviewers liked to point out that Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now was so plagued with difficulty and confusion (the star suffered a heart attack during shooting and a devastating typhoon destroyed all the sets) that the making of the film paralleled the reality of the Vietnam War itself.

A similar observation might be made of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper about Iraq. Like the Iraq War itself, Eastwood’s movie begins by exploiting a historically inaccurate delusion and, then, sustains itself for two hours on the mission to protect US soldiers against the insurgency that arose in opposition to the US invasion and occupation based on the initial delusion.

SNIP

American Sniper is a classic example of how American culture latches on ways to officially forget the horrors and the cruelties we have perpetuated on others. In order to move on, we love to thump our national chest, in love with our own exceptionalism. It’s exactly the same state-of-mind the US government and Pentagon are employing right now to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. March 2015 will be 50 years, based on the Marine landing in DaNang in March 1965. The US went wrong vis-à-vis Vietnam in 1945, but that’s another story, one that incorporates complex political reality into the mix. The official commemoration of the war features a timeline that emphasizes first and foremost the awarding of Congressional Medals of Honor for bravery. As if the Vietnam War was only about individual US heroism. The horrors wrought upon the Vietnamese people from decades of mechanized war by a superpower military is an unrecognized shame. The Vietnamese people never threatened the United States, and following WWII, when they were our ally, they borrowed the words of our Declaration of Independence to be free of the French colonial yoke. None of that historical complexity makes it into the 50th Commemoration website. The war was all about heroes.

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[upaloopa]

1. Just to be honest here both sides of the Vietnam

war wrought horrors on the Vietnamese people. I was there to see it.

[deutsey]

2. I don't think there's any doubting or denying that

[leveymg]

3. Senseless slaughter does not produce heroes.

The German Army certainly had brave soldiers, but should they be remembered as heroes?

[jakeXT]

5. Some are

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_German_Resistance

[jakeXT]

4. We have come full circle where movie like Apocalypse Now

Last edited Wed Jan 21, 2015, 03:28 PM - Edit history (1)

influenced soldiers in the Iraq war.

It is one of the most famous and chilling scenes in cinema. A fleet of Hueys, assault helicopters of the 19th Airborne Cavalry, appear over the horizon at sunrise. As they approach the apparently peaceful Vietnamese village, an eerie sound can be heard above their engines and beating rotors: a kind of screaming or wailing, or perhaps even singing. For the commander of the fleet, Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore, this noise is his signature and accompanies every airborne assault because he believes ‘it scares the hell out of the slopes’. For this reason, the Hueys are not just equipped with rockets and guns, but an elaborate sound system linked to a reel-to-reel tape machine that can blare out the beginning of Act III of Die Walküre by Richard Wagner, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. Part of the original screenplay by John Milius, the scene is one of the highlights of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), but it is a curious scene that bears no relation to any actual event in the Vietnam war. Certainly the US military used loud speakers, but as would be expected they broadcast propaganda in Vietnamese, and if they played music they played Vietnamese music. Rather than terror, it is not likely that Wagner would be greeted by the Vietnamese with anything other than incomprehension. The sinister sound of rotors signalling the helicopters’ approach would in itself have terrified a Vietnamese village far more than some weird foreign music almost certainly drowned out by the noise of the engines. The scene is purely cinematic and what it conveys has significance only for a cinema audience.

2In these globalized days, however, the US’s enemies are much more likely to be familiar with Hollywood movies and their conventions. Indeed, as Jonathan Pieslak recounts in Sound Targets, his book on the recreational and operational use of music in the Iraq war (2003-4), it was the knowledge that ‘Saddam Hussein liked old American movies’ that inspired US soldiers to blast Wagner’s ‘Ride’ on the outside of their trucks as they attacked Baghdad (85); that and the desire to persuade the Iraqis that they were ‘freaking insane’. ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ features in a number of old American movies, of course, most notably in the original score of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) at the climactic scene of the third act when a number of white Americans, threatened by a group of liberated slaves, are rescued by the Klu Klux Klan. One assumes, however, that Hussein was a Coppola rather than Griffiths fan (surely The Godfather films would have been favourites). Apocalypse Now is a movie that is routinely voted one of the most powerful war films of the twentieth century, but it also significant as the inspiration for the use of music as a psychological weapon of war even, as we see, being used as such a weapon itself.


http://volume.revues.org/3380