Comment on Oh jeez
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 3 months agoVietnam movies were usually either about POW experiences or about the absolute pointlessness of it all, which doesn’t really line up with “bombing your country and then making movies about how sad it made them”
I have literally never seen a depiction of Vietnam that was positive or shy of direct condemnation of how terrible it all was.
Seriously, even Forrest Gump’s innocent portrayal of it still managed to underline in bold that it was all pointless, needless, and cruel beyond reason.
turmacar@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Not sure what about any of that doesn’t line up with “sad”. None of those adjectives border on happy or nonchalant.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Because that’s not “made the soldiers sad” it’s “this entire thing was awful and a fucking crime.”
You’re trying to insist that media that would agree that it was a bad thing is exploitation media because…it agrees with you?
daltotron@lemmy.world 3 months ago
No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that’s going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into “I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn’t understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it”. And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that’s inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they’re placed into, it’s just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they’ll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.
Obviously that’s not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that’s touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I’m talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.
That’s my recommendation. Go watch “the breadwinner”.