Posted on 07/02/2016 7:28:22 PM PDT by EveningStar
Michael Cimino, who won Oscars as director and a producer of "The Deer Hunter" before "Heaven's Gate" destroyed his career and sped up the demise of 60-year-old United Artists, has died. He was believed to be 77.
(Excerpt) Read more at variety.com ...
Talking to you is exactly like talking to a brick wall. Movies are wonderful escapist entertainment - until they cross over into churlish Lefty propaganda. In every one of the movies you cited, those of us who were the few with the guts to fight were shown as either psychotic criminals or costumed nitwits. That wasn’t done to WW II vets, or Korean War vets, or even now for the current wars. Just us - and we deeply resent it.
Hollywood hasn’t got the talent to make a realistic war movie. The best they can come up with for a military consultant is the ubiquitous Dale Dye whose only claim to fame was being a Public Affairs NCO while he was in the Marines. He never saw combat.
If you think that painting an insulting portrait of us Vietnam veterans is “just artistic expression”, then you’re a fool. You weren’t at the wrong end of it.
I think those were supposed to be Pennsylvania mountains.
Chimino certainly wasn't the first director to shoot stuff that was supposed to happen back east out west (in this case the Cascade Mountains of Washington State).
You could go crazy if you let the California light and scenery in every movie that's set somewhere else get under your skin.
I didn’t find it insulting. I did not come away with a negative view of Vietnam Vets after seeing those two films.
Jane Fonda hated The Deer Hunter too.
That should count for something.
I’ve never seen these movies as insulting to the soldiers in Viet Nam. They’re very insulting to American politicians and military commanders who deliberately wasted American lives in a war they lacked the will to win. The most they ever really say about the soldiers is that if you’re stuck in an insane situation (like fighting a war your country doesn’t actually want to win) long enough you go insane yourself. Which given the PTSD rates we got out of Viet Nam isn’t far from reality.
That’s because you weren’t there. You didn’t see what we saw, or go through what we went through. I can still see those guys like it happened yesterday.
Anybody with real talent could have made a terrific movie about the war we experienced but nobody was interested in showing what it was really like.
One small example: a real firefight is stunning. They start with a couple of fast, panicked shots and quickly goes to a thunderous roar as hundreds of weapons fire as fast as they can be fired. Every few seconds, a steel-door slam of grenades going off . It’s stunning, dizzying, overwhelming. Tracers (red) going out and tracers (green) coming in. The firefights were so intense that if you weren’t in the middle of it, you couldn’t intervene. You had to wait until the volume of fire slowed down to get near to help.
The real thing was hellish and the young men who lived through it and coped with it were superb Americans. Too bad nobody had the talent or motivation to show our war as it really was.
Oh, do pound sand. Our “PTSD rates” are no different than any other war. I’m not in the mood to talk to somebody who parrots the crap the liberals and Left pushed during our war.
We had good men to serve with, a vicious enemy to fight, and nice people to protect. We were just saddled with treasonous twits to the rear.
Actually your rates are a lot higher than those of previous wars. Though very much in line with Iraq and Afghanistan. The obvious link there being unpopular wars we lacked the guts at home to win.
Nobody is parroting crap. You’ve just decided to be angry at everybody. Which, BTW, is a symptom of PTSD, which puts you right there in the 4 in 5 the NVVR study says suffer from it. I hope you get better. These movies didn’t insult you, I didn’t insult you. Maybe some day you’ll see that. Good luck.
Your error is that “the PTSD rate” was ever acknowledged much less measured for combat troops during WWII or Korea. The veterans I knew from those wars suffered exactly as much or more than we did.
I’m angry because I’ve gone through a half century of insults, dismissive attitudes, and misinformation. I’m very proud of us and how we fought our war. And really sick of the characatures of us in the media and movies.
The majority of the film was shot in Ohio & Pa. http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/d/deerhunter.html#.V3xEgDW3k6Y
Actually they did estimates, remember PTSD has been acknowledged under various names for a long time. But even low ball estimates for Viet Nam vets (from the 70s) are 15% compared to the 9% estimates for previous wars. It’s a simple fact, veterans who fought in unpopular war without the full backing of the government and people come back a bit more messed up than those who had support. Which makes perfectly good sense, being in the foxhole knowing your country is behind you has got to be a vastly different experience than being in the foxhole knowing your country doesn’t give a $%^&.
Problem is you’re seeing insults where they don’t exist. DH and AN do NOT insult you and other VN vets, they simply don’t. It’s not in the content, it’s not in discussions the makers of the films have had about the movies. There are movies that do, but not those. It’s simply not there.
It wasn't that the characters in the story went out west. Chimino went for more dramatic scenery because that's what he does.
I am sure that PTSD is pretty much a constant in any war, among men who were in direct combat. Combat is fear, more sustained fear than human beings are geared to withstand and anyone who has gone through that has a good chance of permanent damage. I think that figures that show us as having a greater incidence of PTSD compared to veterans of Iwo Jima or Normandy or the Chosin Reservoir are incorrect.
Combat, real combat not just being in a place where might possibly get hurt - it’s day to day murder and there aren’t any soft ways to describe it. We had some people who learned fast and well and they were the ones who were most effective. We had others - most, really - who did what they were supposed to and carried their part of the load but never developed the talent for it. And then we had some luckless souls who weren’t going to make it, no matter what you did for them.
The fact that our people back home didn’t support us did hurt, no question. I don’t think it materially affected my own recovery mentally or physically (I was shot. Where I was, almost everyone was wounded at least once). All it did was make me closer to my fellow veterans and less likely to associate with everyone else.
Our war was different than any of the movies supposedly made about us. As I said before, the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and Platoon and MASH and Rambo were cruel cartoons. How should we have felt?
The closest they got was Hamburger Hill and Forrest Gump - but I cringed while Lt Dan kept yelling on patrol. Seriously, who the heck would make any noise at all on patrol? At least there seemed to be an honest attempt to make it seem authentic.
I am proud of us and our war. I’m just sick of the cartoon-like images that are all we have.
MASH was about the Korean War. Unless you mean metaphorically.
Everybody knew that it was really aimed at the Vietnam War even if it was supposedly in Korea.
I walked out of the theater, disgusted at all the cute crap with wounded men in the background, blood everywhere. Only the Left would have found that funny.
I think they’re accurate. Not that WWII guys came out unscathed, but they had support during and after. Sure maybe vets of some of the big nasty battles wound up in the same mental boat, but that’s another one of the difference, Viet Nam was always nasty, always at that extra level that does the extra damage.
The lack of support has to have effected you. It’s of course impossible to know for sure, but the coming home process alone has to have broken some Viet Nam vets. No heroes, no eagerness for support. As a society we treated Viet Nam vets like ex-felons, didn’t want to give them jobs, didn’t want to have them in the neighborhood, preferred if they just kept quiet. That’s not good for you.
Rambo I can see. That was retarded. Platoon was based on Stone’s experience actually there, and again was really focused on a command structure that dumped unprepared people into a war they didn’t want to win. MASH was similar, it wasn’t against the soldiers, one of the big motifs in MASH (movie here, TV show was vastly different) is that when it came time to do their jobs they were all consummate professionals, it’s the rest of the time they were driven mad.
I think it’s easy to filter a movie through expectations. Certainly there are plenty of times Viet vets were portrayed very poorly in cinema and TV and one can easily write it all off as the same. But it really isn’t, some of those movies when they show bad behavior from the soldiers aren’t talking about the soldiers, they’re talking about what would drive somebody to that. And with these things hitting close to home you just might not be able to see through that. I can’t see any movie with computer whizbang people randomly slapping their keyboard to hack into systems without wanting to puke. I’ve got a friend that’s a forensic scientist and just cannot stand any of the modern age of cop shows. Anything that comes close to where we live tends to hit us wrong because we just can’t see it the way it’s intended, we see what they did wrong, we one whacky character as an insult to our group. It doesn’t mean it’s actually supposed to be that way, it just means we’re too close and have lost the forest through the leaves.
It was quintessential late ‘60s irreverence at established institutions. Interesting background...
The film was scripted by American communist Ring Lardner Jr. who had been one of the Hollywood Ten and produced by his long time literary agent Ingo Preminger (who had also represented Dalton Trumbo) and was directed by liberal Democrat Robert Altman. It was based on the 1968 novel by Korean War vet and military surgeon H. R. Hornberger who was not thrilled with how different the film was from his novel.
You are correct that they at least had the impression that they were supported by the American public and that probably helped them psychologically. They also had a distaste for the rear area commandos, War Critical Workers and the 4Fs that stayed home and had a great old time while they risked their lives and saw things that no young person should ever see. In a generation that was conditioned by their culture to suck it up and keep quiet, it would be very difficult to identify and assist those who experienced more than they could handle. The approach taken was and sometimes still is, to take to the bottle and self-anesthetize.
Your description of how we were treated when we got back is accurate and it was damaging. There were no places for us to resolve our problems except with each other. Our campuses were overflowing with know-it-alls and pro-enemy disrupters, our news agencies competed with each other to present the most negative interpretations, and our government acted as though they had no role at all in defending us or helping us recover. We had to deal with things that no other veterans ever had to deal with. I was refused service in a restaurant because I was in uniform – even though I was with my parents and had crutches and a steel full-length leg brace on. I had a woman – a very beautiful woman – spit in my face in front of all my employees at J.C. Penneys when she heard that I had served in Vietnam. I had my fellow workers at Lockheed Aircraft drop sheet metal behind me on the concrete floor to see me flinch and yelled “hit the deck” to roaring laughter. A friend of mine once said that “we knew that our country didn’t love us anymore”.
The movies were just one aspect to add to the mess. They developed the stereotype of the costumed Vietnam veteran loser who either was gibbering coward or a war criminal or a super-lethal nutcase that could go off at any moment. The caricatures have stayed with us, thanks to movies like those we have mentioned and many more. The war as we experienced it was much more conventional than Hollywood wanted everyone to believe. We went out, we searched for the enemy and when we found them, fixed them, pounded them with supporting arms, then annihilated them. We had three enemies; the local VC, the Main Force VC (“Hard core”) and the North Vietnamese Army (“Hard hats’). Each had their own set of capabilities and we had to deal with the differences. You’ll never know from the movies that the enemy had artillery and in some cases, tanks but they did.
The real story has never been told and we have never been depicted as we really were. It’s a shame.
It was an ugly movie - and it fit well in an ugly time. It figures that the communists were heavily involved.
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