inventing vietnam the war in film and television by michael anderegg

5/24/2018 Inventing Vietnam the War in Film and Television by Michael Anderegg

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Inventing Vietnam the War in Film and Television by Michael AndereggReview by: Pat AufderheideFilm Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 42-43Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1213038.

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Inventing VietnamThe War in Film andTelevisionEdited by Michael Anderegg. Phila-delphia: Temple University Press,1991. $49.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.This anthology follows on the heels of otheranthologies on Vietnam and culture that at least stressfilm, some with more seasoned contributors, such asFrom Hanoi toHollywood: The Vietnam WarinAmeri-can Film (edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud,Rutgers University Press) and The Vietnam War andAmerican Culture (edited by John Carlos Rowe andRick Berg, Columbia University Press). Italso followsSusan Jeffords' thoughtful monograph The Remas-culinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War

(IndianaUniversity Press). Anderegg's anthology mayhave its strongest value in alerting academics to ap-proaches in current research, although it may notinspire them.The 14 disparate contributions were not, appar-ently, written around a common objective. They doshare an unarticulated approach-roughly a literary-criticism-derived one that teases implications out ofnarrative and dialogue. They mostly share an alsounarticulatedunderstanding of the relevant data,whichis big-name, fictional industry productions with a cen-trist or liberal perspective from 1978-80 and 1985-89.In terms of time, the film Casualties of War wouldseem the outer limits of the publishing schedule; it isbarely touched on. In terms of ideology, right-wingfilms hold little interest as such for most of thesewriters, a major exception being Tony Williams (whosees them as an instrument for conservative ideologi-cal forces to regroup ).Even so, the authors do not overlap much in theirsubject matter, which tends to be a discrete facet or twoof the phenomenon-Oliver Stone's films; Tour ofDuty; Rambo. Two intriguing exceptions are DavidDesser's impressive survey of images of Vietnamesein recent films and the editor's comparison of JohnWayne and Jane Fonda's celebrity status in relation tothe war.The question of whether the Vietnam film is agenre, and if so in what it consists, is addressed by someauthorsand not by others. Two writers venture beyondsubjectmatteralone to findVietnamese themes. CynthiaFuchs argues that Taxi Driver is actually about theunrepresentability of the war, although this point

appearsmore posited than demonstrated. Ellen Draperargues that action films better express how the dis-placed trauma of Vietnam recurs as the failure ofAmerican culture than do Vietnam films. This argu-ment rests, however, on her priorequation of Vietnamwith thecollapse of American cultureon every level.(Curiously, with the exception of one sentence in thewhole anthology, there is no discussion of covertVietnam films such as the war-era Soldier Blue andLittle Big Man.)The style of most essays hovers midway betweenthe obscurantism of some theoretical film journals andthe lucidity andbreadthof, say, J. Hoberman's brilliantVietnam: The Remake in Barbara Kruger and PhilMariani's Remaking History (Seattle: Bay Press). Anattentive editor might have flagged sentences likePlatoon (1986) illustrates Bakhtin's recognition of[the bildungsroman's] antihistorical tendences (118)and [Travis Bickle's] radical decentering into vio-lence begins with his attemptto derail his 'morbid self-attention' through association with the self-threaten-ing Other, named and mastered, as it was in Vietnam,through the mythology of mission (39). (And maybeit's time for personal computer spellcheckers to in-clude counts with alarm systems on words such asrigorous, trope, diagetic, and representation. )Thomas Slater's essay on teaching Vietnam filmsis invigorating for several reasons. Virtually alone inthe volume, he considers film as more than a story lineand set of characters, asking questions about, for in-stance, editing and camera perspective. He makeshistorical comparisons between films on similar sub-jects. He clearly has investigated the production con-text of the films he uses (and indeed has invitedproducers into his class).Many of the essays by contrast suffer from a kindof textual tunnel vision, which they share with muchacademic writing on popular culture. This is doublyunfortunate because it is so unnecessary. Currentandrecent popular films offer a rich variety of data forcritics and analysts farbeyond the text itself, includingnewspaper and magazine articles, especially in trademagazines, often superbly indexed; film-makers, whoare often available for at least a phone interview;sociological and historical analysis of related issues;and memories and attitudes of university students whoviewed and review the films. With these resources andothers it is possible to go beyond speculation when, forinstance, one wants to know why the industry suddenlybegan bankrolling Vietnam films or whether othersocial groups sharewhite liberals' critiques of Rambo.Carolyn Reed Vartanian's essay on China Beach

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uses production information well to bolster her argu-ment that the TV show constructed the Vietnam vet asa traditional hero.Students and beginning researchers will be helpedby the selective bibliography and the nicely annotatedfilmography, although each person who has readin thisarea will quibble with choices. In the bibliography, Imiss Hoberman's aforementioned article. (I have alsowritten an article, Good Soldiers, on Vietnam filmsin Mark Crispin Miller's Seeing through Movies [Pan-theon, 1990], but it may have come out too late forinclusion.) Inthe filmography atleast seven apparentlyrelevant films, including Dear America, HeartbreakRidge, and Bat 21 are not listed.PAT AUFDERHEIDE

* Pat Aufderheide teaches at AmericanUniversity and is a senior editor of In TheseTimes.

Method ActorsThree Generations of anAmerican Acting StyleBy Steve Vineberg. New York:Schirmer Books, 1991. $24.95.Method acting is usually thought of as anactor's reaching into him- orherself for the emotions to

play a scene, and what leaps to mind when one thinksof it are the performances of two or three actors(Brando, Clift, Dean) in a dozen or so films of the1950s. Steve Vineberg's book reminds us that therewas and is much more to the Method than that. Hecredits its influence with an ongoing move towardrealism in ouracting, andhe makes a good case for this.It's a mark of the Method's impact to recall thatafter all these years it is still controversial. It was atarget for parody almost as soon as, direct from NewYork, it hit Hollywood's shores; from Sid Caesar'sMontgomery Bugle clear through to Barton Fink,it's still an easy target. Critical schools of the past 30years have had little use for it-auteurist critics preferscreen icons like John Wayne to theatrical perform-ers like Marlon Brando, and a modem scholar ofgender like RichardDyer finds a sexual bias in its claimto authenticity. But it has always had its fans. The bestperformances in the Method tradition,male andfemalealike, are as fresh and affecting as when they weregiven. Steve Vineberg's exhaustive viewing of films

uses production information well to bolster her argu-ment that the TV show constructed the Vietnam vet asa traditional hero.Students and beginning researchers will be helpedby the selective bibliography and the nicely annotatedfilmography, although each person who has readin thisarea will quibble with choices. In the bibliography, Imiss Hoberman's aforementioned article. (I have alsowritten an article, Good Soldiers, on Vietnam filmsin Mark Crispin Miller's Seeing through Movies [Pan-theon, 1990], but it may have come out too late forinclusion.) Inthe filmography atleast seven apparentlyrelevant films, including Dear America, HeartbreakRidge, and Bat 21 are not listed.PAT AUFDERHEIDE

* Pat Aufderheide teaches at AmericanUniversity and is a senior editor of In TheseTimes.

Method ActorsThree Generations of anAmerican Acting StyleBy Steve Vineberg. New York:Schirmer Books, 1991. $24.95.Method acting is usually thought of as anactor's reaching into him- orherself for the emotions to

play a scene, and what leaps to mind when one thinksof it are the performances of two or three actors(Brando, Clift, Dean) in a dozen or so films of the1950s. Steve Vineberg's book reminds us that therewas and is much more to the Method than that. Hecredits its influence with an ongoing move towardrealism in ouracting, andhe makes a good case for this.It's a mark of the Method's impact to recall thatafter all these years it is still controversial. It was atarget for parody almost as soon as, direct from NewYork, it hit Hollywood's shores; from Sid Caesar'sMontgomery Bugle clear through to Barton Fink,it's still an easy target. Critical schools of the past 30years have had little use for it-auteurist critics preferscreen icons like John Wayne to theatrical perform-ers like Marlon Brando, and a modem scholar ofgender like RichardDyer finds a sexual bias in its claimto authenticity. But it has always had its fans. The bestperformances in the Method tradition,male andfemalealike, are as fresh and affecting as when they weregiven. Steve Vineberg's exhaustive viewing of films

famous and obscure, and of kinescopes which go backto the dawn of television, calls our attention to many ofthem.Vineberg provides a readable gloss of the historyof an importantbranch (some would say the importantbranch) of American acting history, from the 1930sthrough the 1980s. He traces the Method's roots to

Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, usefullydefines suchcontroversialtermsas affective memory,and locates its first flowering in America, the GroupTheatre, amid the militant idealism of the 1930s. Un-fortunately, his condescending attitude toward thatidealism lets him muff the Group's political back-ground; he calls his chapter on Clifford Odets et al.Passionate Moderates -a misreading, I think, oftheirvalues. The ascendency some dozen years laterofMethod players in Hollywood at the same time that itsoriginators were either being blacklisted or cooperat-ing, like Kazan, with anti-Communist authority hasbeen readby some commentators (PeterBiskind comesto mind) as part of a cultural move from ideology topsychology demanded by the Cold War. There's noneof that here. Vineberg seems completely unaware ofpost-1960 critical approaches to mass entertainment,choosing instead to quote such period stalwarts asRobert Warshow and Mary McCarthy.At the heart of the book lie Vineberg's prose re-creations of Method performances, hundreds of pagesof detailed commentary on Method, Method-inflected,or at least arguably Method-like performances. Hemanages to work in a section on some 1930s actors-Robinson, Stanwyck-he likes, plus a whole chapteron Jason Robards toward the end, which is reaching forit, since Robards is not Method-trained. Vineberg alsoall but ignores and dismisses the work of JohnCassavetes, which owes at least as much to Methodnotions of acting as Robards'. Virtually everyone asso-ciated with the Method is included, although EliWallach, Shelley Winters, and Robert De Niro aremissing in action. A throughline is traced from earlylandmarks of Method acting like Lee J. Cobb's perfor-mance in Death of a Salesman to Dustin Hoffman'sWilly Loman of 1984. The sections on Clift, Brando,Newman ( the great proletarian Method actor ), andHoffman are particularly strong.Vineberg opens his book with a brilliant compari-son of Rod Steiger's kinescope Marty of 1953 andErnest Borgnine's non-Method, more obvious screenMarty of two years later. On the level of detailedobservation-of little hand movements, eye twitches,how an actoruses his orherbody-Vineberg is consis-tently perceptive, frequently insightful, and not a little

famous and obscure, and of kinescopes which go backto the dawn of television, calls our attention to many ofthem.Vineberg provides a readable gloss of the historyof an importantbranch (some would say the importantbranch) of American acting history, from the 1930sthrough the 1980s. He traces the Method's roots to

Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, usefullydefines suchcontroversialtermsas affective memory,and locates its first flowering in America, the GroupTheatre, amid the militant idealism of the 1930s. Un-fortunately, his condescending attitude toward thatidealism lets him muff the Group's political back-ground; he calls his chapter on Clifford Odets et al.Passionate Moderates -a misreading, I think, oftheirvalues. The ascendency some dozen years laterofMethod players in Hollywood at the same time that itsoriginators were either being blacklisted or cooperat-ing, like Kazan, with anti-Communist authority hasbeen readby some commentators (PeterBiskind comesto mind) as part of a cultural move from ideology topsychology demanded by the Cold War. There's noneof that here. Vineberg seems completely unaware ofpost-1960 critical approaches to mass entertainment,choosing instead to quote such period stalwarts asRobert Warshow and Mary McCarthy.At the heart of the book lie Vineberg's prose re-creations of Method performances, hundreds of pagesof detailed commentary on Method, Method-inflected,or at least arguably Method-like performances. Hemanages to work in a section on some 1930s actors-Robinson, Stanwyck-he likes, plus a whole chapteron Jason Robards toward the end, which is reaching forit, since Robards is not Method-trained. Vineberg alsoall but ignores and dismisses the work of JohnCassavetes, which owes at least as much to Methodnotions of acting as Robards'. Virtually everyone asso-ciated with the Method is included, although EliWallach, Shelley Winters, and Robert De Niro aremissing in action. A throughline is traced from earlylandmarks of Method acting like Lee J. Cobb's perfor-mance in Death of a Salesman to Dustin Hoffman'sWilly Loman of 1984. The sections on Clift, Brando,Newman ( the great proletarian Method actor ), andHoffman are particularly strong.Vineberg opens his book with a brilliant compari-son of Rod Steiger's kinescope Marty of 1953 andErnest Borgnine's non-Method, more obvious screenMarty of two years later. On the level of detailedobservation-of little hand movements, eye twitches,how an actoruses his orherbody-Vineberg is consis-tently perceptive, frequently insightful, and not a little

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inventing vietnam the war in film and television by michael anderegg

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