Whose Point Is It Anyway?

Abstract

By Thomas Myers Oxford University Press, 1988 Since the end of the Vietnam War, literature, films, personal narratives, and histories of the war have become increasingly noticeable parts of US culture. Not only has the popularity of narrative texts and films grown, but so has their apparent quality-that is, their ability to be accepted within established frames of representational constructions-with Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, and Larry Heinneman's Paco's Story winning National Book Awards. For all the academic innuendos about the quality of films like Rambo, Missing in Action, or Hamburger Hill, these films are more popularly accepted and thus more culturally cogent than the late '60s and '70s B movies that had Vietnam veterans as characters, films like Bruce Kessler's Angels from Hell or Jack Starrett's The Losers. Oliver Stone's Platoon, of course, won the 1986 Oscar for best film, while Stone himself won an Oscar for best director for his 1989 film, Born on the Fourth of July. In a different medium, television's China Beach has been heralded as one of the best series to appear in recent years and has been the winner of several Emmy awards. Keeping in step with this shift in cultural attention is the growing number of academic studies of representations of the Vietnam War, with inaugural publications of Philip Beidler's American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, James Wilson's Vietnam in Prose and Film, and John Newman's Vietnam War Literature in 1982, followed by John Hellmann's American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986), Timothy Lomperis's Reading the Wind' The Literature of the Vietnam War (1987), and Thomas Myers's Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam (1988).1 A new journal, Vietnam Generation, takes the Vietnam War as its point of departure. And with a production count that is rivalled only by the volumes of personal narratives published about the war, volumes of collected essays have been appearing with seemingly inexhaustible frequency throughout the last decade, with more to come in the '90s.