The cinema of Oliver Stone

Art, authorship and activism

Ian Scott, Henry Thompson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526108715
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526107114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

An insightful study of the master filmmaker's work, enriched by unprecedented access to the director himself.

1

War

Introduction

This I feel. A curse. Mother said it more than once, ‘You could be killed over there, Oliver,’ as if I were incompetent, not man enough to take care of myself; I hated her motherlove arrogance. Did I listen? Did it make sense? Mothers are cowards. Curses passed down the vaginal passageways deep to man. True as true can be. I told her that I didn’t really want to go back to Yale, I was an adventurer, just like her and went to Vietnam instead. But I wonder what she’ll say when she finds out about this. My limbs stiffening, waiting in this groin wound of a rotten field in Vietnam.¹

Oliver Stone penned these words, not as part of some reflective memoir of his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War, but immediately upon return from his first trip to Saigon in 1965 where, during a year away from his studies at Yale University, he had done nothing more dangerous than work as an English teacher in a Catholic school. US forces had begun arriving in Vietnam during that year as part of a dramatic escalation, although the ground war that would engulf American foreign policy for the next decade was not yet properly underway. Gripped with the desire to make his mark as a writer, the trip to Asia provided the raw material for Stone’s first writing project: a semi-autobiographical novel that lay dormant for many years before being published in the 1990s as A Child’s Night Dream.

The themes of suicide and death reverberate through the pages of this early writing, and it is not hard to see how the American post-Second World War psychoses of power, responsibility, guilt and redemption dictate much of Stone’s thinking. Midway through the book, Stone imagines scenes of jungle combat between Americans and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) almost as though he was wishing a destiny for himself and his nation that was already tilting towards a frightening reality. Indeed, these self-absorbed imaginings of an impressionable young student were transformed at the end of 1967 on Stone’s entry into the US army, into the unforgiving reality of a stripped back infantryman who quickly had to adjust to the speed of combat, chaos of friendly fire and freezing effects of fear. The manuscript had played its part in this transformation. Its rejection for publication, along with associated criticism from his father Lou (Figure 1) about the wisdom of seeking a career as a writer, had catapulted Stone into volunteering for the army: an impulsive move fused with anger and feelings of rejection that would expose him to fourteen months of front line jungle combat.

Figure 1 Lou and Oliver Stone, Hong Kong, February 1968

By any standard, Stone has been a product of war: intrigued by it, physically and psychologically marked by it, propelled to action by it, and galvanised in opposition to it. The world he grew up in – a post-war America that conspired against communism abroad, and ran scared of its shadow at home – was forged in the call to war that newspaper editor Henry Luce entreated Americans to embrace in his 1941 article, ‘The American Century’:

In the field of national policy, the fundamental trouble with America has been, and is, that whereas their nation became in the 20th century the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact. Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power – a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.²

To use Luce’s own phrase, there is much ‘brassy trumpeting’ of the American condition throughout his piece. In noting that the twentieth century was America’s moment of maturation, he suggested that the country was already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world. Within the hyperbole also lay the threads of an American foreign policy that, from the end of the Second World War, would have such a profound effect on the baby boomer generation to which Oliver Stone belonged. Luce lamented the ‘moral and practical bankruptcy of any and all forms of isolationism’, and called both to the Republican Party to shake itself free of its historical aversion to engagement, and to all Americans to support Franklin D. Roosevelt in a way that would ensure that his third term in office would be marked by a break from the isolationism of the previous eight years. The point for Luce at least was that America already had become the ‘powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice’ throughout the world – and it was now time to fully embrace that pre-eminence.³

After the Second World War, Luce’s philosophy emerged in key policy statements such as the Truman Doctrine, NSC-68⁴ and anti-communist ideology more generally, conditioning America to its late-twentieth century wars and infusing the central tenets of Oliver Stone’s life. Unsurprisingly, his ‘Vietnam trilogy’ has received some of the most intensive scrutiny among all his films, and the pictures certainly do parade Stone’s preoccupations with political judgement, Cold War consensus and, of course, the nature of conflict, as much as they do his cinematic pretensions. Yet few studies have really addressed these planks of his cinematic oeuvre, much less Stone’s engagement and viewpoint with the wider military and cultural consequences of the ‘American Century’, let alone its later manifestation suggested by the ‘War on Terror’.

Stone’s early life and career were dominated by the effects of Vietnam. Much later with Nixon (1995), Stone was still piecing together his personal and cinematic treatise on what the country and the conflict meant to himself and his fellow Americans – and his work has returned to that territory and its wider Cold War ramifications time and again. However, there has been a shift too. His post-9/11 films, Alexander (2004), World Trade Center (2006), W. (2008) and Savages (2012) also had plenty to say about war, but for the most part they said it in a more understated manner. It has been left to Stone’s emerging documentary work in the 2000s to air his forthrightness. The ambitious ten-hour series, The Untold History of the United States, which began airing in the USA on Showtime in November 2012, and in Britain on Sky Atlantic in May 2013, was co-written with Associate Professor of English at American University, Peter Kuznick. The series and accompanying book⁵ challenged conventional Cold War history and emphasised themes and facts which the authors believe had been excised or downplayed in a host of studies of the twentieth century. The themes of empire and perpetual war were important reference points in this reassessment. Therefore, as a project, Untold History was nothing less than a repudiation of Luce’s prophecy and the corresponding call to arms and psychological hold that his ‘American Century’ concept had had on the nation’s psyche for more than seventy years.

Despite the vehemence of this repudiation, Stone’s public declarations and cinematic position on war and empire have never simply aspired to isolationism. He is not a pacifist. He does not advocate disengagement from the threat of international terrorism in the modern age, but he does see the US administration’s tendency towards militaristic solutions as ultimately self-defeating. Its intelligence gathering, as events in the 2010s gave testimony to, covered an ever-increasing multitude of confusing sins. Of course, Stone’s past as a combat veteran looms large in his politics and attitude to conflict, and it is easily forgotten that this has made him a difficult target for critics who normally would lambast their adversary for a pretender’s ignorance in such matters. With Stone, his military record cannot even begin to entertain such criticism.⁶ Neither boastful nor contrite about this past, he has used it to construct a critique of foreign policy that no one else in Hollywood could come close to emulating.

Indeed, war is the central mantra of almost all that Stone does, in his films and life. The battle to craft images and meaning is no easier, or less challenging, than it was when he started making films, and his dogged application to the task belies nothing less than a personality forged in war. Off-set, his perspective has been affected more than any other filmmaker by a society long geared for conflict: a country that has come to know war almost as an extension of its being, from the Cold War to the ‘War on Terror’. Why that should be so has been Stone’s rallying call from the moment he stepped back on American soil in November 1968, and it has become an increasingly urgent question for him in the years since 9/11.

In this chapter we take as our premise that Stone’s perspective on war provides a firm footing from which to interpret not just his films or the wider Hollywood machinery, but to think more carefully about the American polity and its constant, historical and reiterating focus on the mantra of war. Thus Stone’s later films are examined as part of the response to 9/11 and how America has confronted twenty-first-century war, including World Trade Center (2006) and W. (2008) as well as the Untold History (2012) documentary series. As a first step towards that exploration, this chapter begins by revisiting Platoon (1986). As anchor, motivator, point of national recognition and window into Stone’s preoccupations, the film remains a crucial component in any retrospective.

Platoon

In July 1976, Stone began work on a screenplay that, in time, would concretise not just his perspective on Vietnam, but his position as a filmmaker in Hollywood. It was populated almost entirely with a cast of characters and events from his period of active service in 1967–68, and the retelling was as much an act of personal catharsis as it was any desire to speak the truth about the situation there. The immediate effect of the war on Stone was not some damascene conversion to liberal politics, but the germination of an angry disillusionment felt by many returning veterans from South-East Asia, exemplified in the 1971 march in Washington, DC by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.⁷ Having abandoned attempts to record his experiences on paper – a task rendered impossible in jungle conditions – Stone had taken belatedly to photographing the country as a personal record of his time there (Figure 2). The combination of his writing and the stark imagery that he managed to capture on film triggered his imagination, and produced a dawning realisation that photography provided a bridge between internal writing processes and the outside world.⁸

Figure 2 Oliver Stone, Vietnam

Stone arrived back in the USA in November 1968, to a country changed by the war in a manner later brought to life in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). The clichés and stereotypes have now taken a hold in the popular imagination, but for Stone, the fallout and rehabilitation were all too real. He took a road trip through California and on into Mexico. Upon his return, he was arrested in San Diego for possession of drugs: a habit that had become near enough a way of life in his bid to put the experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 War
• 2 Politics
• 3 Money
• 4 Love
• 5 Corporations
• Conclusion
• Interviews
• Bibliography
• Index