Of Warrior Poetics and Redemption: Space: Above and Beyond's TC McQueen

Abstract

Since the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, there has been considerable unease in America's screen portrayal of its military officers. From the arrival of John Wayne's Colonel Kirby in The Green Berets (1968) through Kilgore and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) to Tom Cruise's gung-ho self-oriented Lt. Mitchell in Top Gun (Scott, 1986), from M*A*S*H to Tour of Duty, the soldier's integrity and honor so constant and unquestioned in earlier Hollywood films have been ravaged by the horrors lurking in the collective psyche of postVietnam America. A state of impasse exists for these screen soldiers and rather than creating an arena for the re-examination and evolution of U.S. values, representations of the war have created a large-scale renegotiation and regeneration of the interests, values, and projects of the patriarchy, and a revitalization of the traditional frontier values of bourgeois individualism (Jeffords xi). The problem percolates through all the genres, confused as they have been since the 1960s. Wolfgang Petersen's 1997 Air Force One is perhaps the summation of this inability to locate, let alone adhere to, any set of principles which can be isolated from the reactionary and fundamentalist militaristic political ideologies still emerging from America's experience in Vietnam.1 With the president's plane under the control of terrorists, instead of doing his painful duty-using the escape pod, protecting the office of the President, and therefore dealing from a position of powerPresident Marshall (Harrison Ford) remains on board in an heroic attempt to rescue his wife, daughter and colleagues, in essence sacrificing country for family. Films such as this identify and endorse the kind of outraged altruism which has led to involvement and conflict, whether under the convenience flag of the UN or in stoic solitude, in such diverse locales as Central America, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Grenada, the Persian Gulf. They may occasionally provide good drama, but fearful isolationism or confused principles based upon patriarchal individualism lurk close to the surface of such seductively heroic Hollywood offerings.2 America's very insistence upon its isolationism juxtaposed with its generous involvement creates a paradox. As Ryan and Kellner say in Camera Politica: (t)he posture Hollywood initially adopted towards Vietnam is best summed up in the title of Julian Smith's book-Looking Away ...... (197). They go on to explain how, with one or two exceptions, only after the war ended did American cinema attempt to deal directly with any issues connected to the war itself. The early films focused upon alienated or violent returned veterans, later films suggest that they were confused and wounded victims, while others use the vet motif to justify ...the kind of violent and racist disposition that initiated the war in the first place (197-98). Finally, they became a means of affirming the militaristic, patriarchal and entrepreneurial base of the 1980s, creating as it were, a new, post-Vietnam era. As Ryan and Kellner suggest: ... from a conservative political point of view the period of the post-Vietnam war syndrome was characterised by national self-doubt, military vacillation and a failure of the will to intervene overseas, then the appropriate counter in the post-syndrome period of national revival was a triumph of the will, a purgation of doubt through action, and an interventionist military stance that broked no restraint of the sort that led to the United States' first military defeat, tarnished national prestige and shamed American military manhood. Both The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now contribute to that revival by incorporating Vietnam not as a defeat from which lessons can be learned, but as a springboard for male military heroism. (200) And this identifies the problem precisely. What the Vietnam War created in the United States was a resurgence of militarism, and war films of the late seventies join in what is essentially a conservative backlash. …