MORRIS DICKSTEIN
609
spheric
Bataan
(1942), for example, a story of defeat, made when the out–
come of the war still hung in the balance.
Even when the overt patriotism is muted, these movies are hymns to
discipline and collective effort. They show us war almost as a civilizing pro–
cess: subduing a vicious, unprincipled, almost subhuman enemy, defending a
cause worth dying for, and welding an unruly, cacophonous, disparate group
of men into a unified fighting force. Just as the great European films like
Grand Illusion
focus on class differences, or national differences, to be sur–
mounted by the ultimate recognition of a common humanity, American
movies - in line with such novels as
The Naked and the Dead
-
reflected the
regional, ethnic, and religious conflicts ofa more plural, more fragmented so–
ciety.
The GIs in most World War Two movies were seeing the world -
and seeing other kinds ofAmericans - for the first time, but they were also
learning to subdue their differences towards some larger social goal (working
together, achieving some kind ofjustice, winning the war, defending our ide–
als) that was never seriously to be questioned. These were parables of
Americanism, of acculturation. Hence, war movies attracted not only the su–
per-patriotic John Waynes but also the sentimental Hollywood liberals for
whom the Army was a microcosm of American society, a force for
assimilation and mutual tolerance, besides serving as our bulwark against
fascism.
The first half hour of
Born on
the
Fourth ofJuly,
beginning with the ti–
tle, is a crude caricature of this traditional ethic of personal sacrifice and na–
tional crusade. With an exceptional heavy-handedness, Stone tries to give us
the dreamy essence of small-town Americana, from the exhortations ofJohn
Kennedy, who brings the message of the World War Two generation to the
early, hopeful years of the sixties, to the naive religious patriotism of Ron
Kovic's parents, blue-collar ethnics who were especially receptive to
Kennedy's call to sacrifice. The young Kovic gets the same message from
boyhood war games, from Fourth of July parades, from his bloodthirsty
wrestling coach, and from ramrod Marine recruiters, as if middle America
in the postwar years, beneath its innocent surface, were simply a powder
keg of macho violence waiting to be ignited. (This is also conveyed by the
brutal elisions of Stone's technique, with its choking close-ups and wild
camera angles.)
Ron Kovic is yet another vehicle for Oliver Stone's overheated
autobiography, his obsession with the problems of a young man growing up
in
America. In the name of a higher cause Kovic buys into the sickening male
fantasy, a power trip, a distorted ideal of manhood, even choosing to make
war not love by skipping his high school prom. This foreshadows the way
the war later robs him of his potency, until the antiwar movement restores
him
to a
full
sense of his own humanity.
