Hide Article Text (OCR)
Days of the Rambo presidency are over• rBy Michael Kinsley *1 mean, jeez, if you want all that realism, if you want to be depressed, you can watch the news atnight.”Thus social observer and kung-fu artist Chuck Norris comment' ing oil the surprise blockbuster movie “platoon.” Norris is one of the very few conservative intellectuals who. has dared to dissent from the virtually unanimous acclaim for a movie that portrays the Vietnam War in deeply ignoble terms.Platoon” is not a great film. It’s affecting, but that’s not hard. There's no challenge to getting people choked up by showing them two hours of young men being senselessly slaughtered while an orchestra saws away at Samuel Barber's lugubrious “Adagio for Strings/'The characters are stereotypes. The voice-over narrative (a young soldier's letters to his grandmother) is strictly cornbali cliches. Writer-director Oliver Stone makes his various and predictable points seriatim, as if he were checking them off on a shopping list.The central plot tension — the battle for a young private's soul between a “good'’ sergeant who has retained his humanity and a bad sergeant who has become a killing machine — is not very tense. We never believe for a moment that the nice kid we identify with could actually turn into a brutal killer. When he does commit a premeditated murder at the end of the Him, the storyline has given him such a good reason that no one will worry his soul is in danger.In the chaos and confusion ~of 4‘Platoon’”s spectacular battle scenes, it's hard to follow the plot anyway. “Platoon” enthusiasts will argue, with some justice, that this is the point: War is a meaningless hell of chaos and confusion. Whether making that point, however vividly, qualifies as art is an aesthetic judgment I leave to better-qualified critics. But it's certainly interesting that a movie with such a message should become the No. 1 box-office success in what we all thought, until recently, was the Age of Rambo.Of course, let's be honest: Part of “Platoon’s appeal is the same as that of “Rambo.” Perhaps despite himself. Stone, makes war seem glamorous as well as horrible. There can't be many men, at least, in the audience who don’t feel a twinge of desire to be in theFROM WASHINGTONaction. Indeed, many who had no trouble resisting the appeal of Sylvester StaUone's cartoon battlefield will succumb to Oliver Stone’s more sophisticated seduction.But the overt political spin of “Platoon” is clearly “Rambo’”s opposite. The movie is full of left-wing signifiers. The bad sergeant drinks bourbon; the good sergeant smokes dope. The bad sergeant is a fever of swaggering macho; the good sergeant is sensitive, caring, even somewhat androgynous, though deeply courageous .More fundamentally, the presentation of war as an existential nightmare conveys, in today's political circumstances, an unavoidably left-wing message. It is the same message conveyed by the Vietnam Memorial, which critics are right to see as an insult to that war — and to war in general — although not to the veterans, as their own overwhelming approval demonstrates.When the memorial opened in 1982, many conservatives de* nounced it as unheroic and therefore unpatriotic. To dramatize the horrors and costs of military action without reference to its value and occasional necessity, they said, breeds appeasement, isolationism, defeatism. Yet the conservative ranks are strangely silent today, when a hit movie makes the same point even more explicitly.Together with the Iranamok scandal in Washington and the insider trading mess on Wall Street, the wild popularity of Hollywood^ “Platoon” is more evi-dence of the cultural collapse of Reaganism. A friend of mine argues that the movie wouldn't have been a success six months ago, before Oliver North gave extremism in the defense of liberty a bad name. That may not give Oliver Stone enough credit, and it may not give his audience enough credit, either. Americans are not so flighty. The dream of Reaganism — of cost-free national self-assertion, of painless prosperity — is one we were bound to wake up from around now, one way or another.President Reagan alwaysunderstood the dream better than his most ardent supporters. He knew that the popular success of his '4standing tall posture depended on the Rambo illusion of invulnerability. .He never asked the citizenry to endorse the real-life vision of “Platoon” — “all that realism, as Chuck Norris nicely puts it. Reagan’s war was Grenada — the hindsight war, the one we literally won in our sleep.The relation between “Platoon” and Iranamok is not that thescandal changed public attitudes and made the movie’s popularity possible. It’s that the public's true attitude toward war, as tapped by Platoon/' is what drove the Reagan administration to conduct an illegal war in secret, which led to the scandal. Let*s hope there still are things Americans are willing to shed blood for — even their own blood. But the days of the Rambo illusion are over.Michael Kinsley is editor of The New Republic magazine.ALMANACToday is Friday, Feb. 27, the 58th day of 1987. There are 307 days left in the year.Today's highlight in history:On Feb. 27, 1033, Germany's parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, burned down. The Nazis, charging a Communist plot, used the fire as a pretext for suspending civil liberties.On this date:In 1801, the District of Columbia was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress.In 1807, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was bom in Portland, Maine.In 1883, the first practical cigar-rolling machine was patented by impresario Oscar Hammer* stein, grandfather of Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein n.In 1922, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed the right of women to vote.In 1939, the Supreme Court outlawed sit-down strikes.In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai issued the Shanghai Communique at the conclusion of Nixon's historic visit to the. People's Republic of China.In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Kneein South Dakota, the site of the1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. The occupation lasted until May.Ten years ago: Ugandan President Idi Amin postponed a scheduled meeting with Ameri* cans in his country. Amin had barred the departure of U.S. citizens until he could meet with them.Five years ago: Wayne B. Williams was found guilty of murdering two of the 28 young blacks whose bodies were found in the Atlanta area over a 22-month period.One year ago: William Rogers, chairman of the presidential Challenger commission, bluntly denounced NASA for what he called a “clearly flawed” decl-slon-making process that led to the disastrous shuttle launch in January that killed seven crew members.Today's birthdays: Actress Joan Bennett is 77. Former Texas Gov. John Connally is 70. Actress Joanne Woodward is 57. Actress Elizabeth Taylor is 55. Sen, Malcolm Wallop, R-Wyo.,is 54. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader is 53* Actress Barbara Babcock is 50. Actor Howard Hesseman is 47.Thought for today: Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending; many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse/’ — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82).Reduceif overweight.WE!^ FIGHTING FOR KXJRUFEAmerican Heart Association
Newspaper Details
Doylestown Intelligencer
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, US
Fri, Feb 27, 1987
Page 54
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 15 Jan 2020
Other Publications Near Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Doylestown Intelligencer
Intelligencer
Doylestown Daily Intelligencer
