Hearts and Minds
So the Rio Film Festival started last Friday (with a sold out midnight showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’m proud to say), and so far it’s been all golden oldies for me: Barbarella, Festival Express, Blood Simple (Director’s Cut). Bucking no trends, tonight some friends and I went to see “Hearts and Minds”, Peter Davis’ 1974 masterful attempt to make some sense of the Vietnam war only a few years after it had ended.
First off, how had I – or anyone else with us tonight -- never heard of this film? The cinema was literally packed, mostly young, fashionable Cariocas, and the film was introduced by one of the directors of the Festival, who told us how she and her cinema-of-resistance diehard friends had religiously watched washed-out copies of it in improvised screening rooms back when it came out, when Brazil was still under military rule; how she never dreamed she would be showing a restored print in the restored Odeon theater (one of the oldest and most elegant cinemas remaining in Rio and now the jewel in the crown of the Festival); and how she really never expected the film to be introduced by Peter Davis himself, who proceeded to stand up and attempt to introduce the film in the face of a standing ovation.
And I had never even heard of this guy?
O.K., I never took a History of Film course in college, I’m no Vietnam buff, and documentaries in general don’t have the staying power of narrative fiction (like, say, Barbarella) but surely this film is bigger than a couple of niche markets. The real crime here is that over the summer I must have read ten full reviews, two dozen op-eds and who knows how many hundreds of posts on Fahrenheit 9/11, and not one mention of this obvious and absolutely essential predecessor.
(“Predecessor” isn’t really fair to Davis. It is obvious that Moore cribs from Davis’ bag of tricks (who for all I know cribbed from someone else -- I’m not trying to write definitive film criticism here) – intercutting devastating war footage with self-exculpatory prattle from pro-war officials, allowing the eloquence of disillusioned soldiers and the pain of the mothers of war dead to speak for themselves, and perhaps most profoundly, the assemblage of both present-day and archival Americana to try and point at something deep and unhealthy in our collective psyche. But Davis’ film strikes me as somehow much more: more profound, more sincere, more of an accomplishment, both artistically (more moments of poetry) and, if I may use the word, spiritually. You can’t really fault Moore for that, though. The raison d'etre of his film is different: he wants to beat Bush, and end the war. For Davis, the war is over; he is trying to come to terms with what happened, as he said in his introduction, not only to the Vietnamese, but to us. One task calls for cunning (are you listening, Google?), the other sincerity.)
As with Gimmie Shelter and Woodstock, the film transports you back to another era through sheer accumulation of accessories: eyeglasses, shirts, hairstyles, cars, the look of stock footage. But what shocks above all in the film is how little the important rhetoric has changed. There is the buildup of the threat: in this case, the snarling tentacles of Communism and the inexorable logic of the domino theory, but most chillingly, the idea that we have to take the fight to them, before they bring it to us. There is the horrifyingly similar nature of the enemy: the VC, like the terrorists and “rebels” in Iraq (I’ll explain in a later post why the quote marks), seamlessly woven into (and fed by) the local population. There is, as a result, the same vicious circle: distrust by Americans of any and all Vietnamese (slash Iraqis), leading to interrogation, illegal imprisonment, and atrocity, fueling hatred of Americans and swelling the ranks of the opposition, leading to more American casualties, leading to more distrust, etc. There is the startling certainty on the part of government ideologues (in particular, the chillingly unrepentant Walter Rostow) that we were in the right, and the blind conviction of the military leaders (a ghost-like General Westmoreland) that only a few more troop shipments could/would have turned the tide. There is the abject absurdity of our hand-picked “democratic” puppet government, propped up entirely by our military and economic aid, clearly lacking the will and means to fight the war for itself (just watch the “Vietnamization” sequence and then read this), and worse, our government’s poker-faced assertion that we are on the side of right (and winning!) and that those fighting us are ipso facto on the side of evil.
Indeed, everything that comes out of the mouth of the 5 presidents shown in the film seems not only poker-faced, but eerily familiar: the Gulf of Tonkin nonsense, the endless guarantees of victory, even Nixon’s clever packaging of our defeat as a kind of victory (c.f. Rumsfeld’s newest bar-lowering efforts). Most disturbing of all, there is the sometimes willful ignorance of the American people, the lack of any human interest in a far-away and dark-skinned people (in one brilliant scene, a native American Vietnam vet reflects on how strange it is that he was able to call the Vietnamese “gooks” and dehumanize them in his mind when he himself had been the subject of racial epithets all his life, and even in his own platoon), the almost pathological desire to believe that our leaders are wise and honest and to just leave the thinking up to them, and the unquestioning manipulation of that desire by leaders sold on a set of ideological bullet points. As Daniel Ellsberg – one of the film’s heroes -- so pricelessly puts it, “It is a testament to the American people that the government felt the need to deceive them. It is not a testament that they could be deceived so easily.”
Comparing that noble if square sentiment with a fashionably cynical trope I've been seeing around lately -- that we'd better hope that the president is consciously lying, because the notion that he actually believes what he is saying is even scarier -- points up what to me is the only real difference between now and then: a sense of gravity that was not merely a pose. Presidents Truman through Kennedy (at least, and maybe Johnson too) really believed in the domino theory, that Communism was a serious and impending threat, and that action had to be taken. I'm just going on my own sense of things here, it was before my time, but I'd bet that in their heart of hearts, when they lied to the American public, they probably believed that in some way they had to, that it was for the ultimate good of the nation, like Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor. Each leader’s tragic inability to get out of Vietnam was not admirable – nobody wanted to be the first President to lose a war – but it was not a purely electoral consideration either. It was, at least, sincere: Johnson, after all, was so distraught at the prospect of presiding over defeat and withdrawal that he chose to end his political life.
What has changed in 30 years is precisely that: Bush’s war may have, in the last year, configured itself along shockingly similar lines to the conflict in Indochina, but his attitude is and has always been different. Manipulation of the public has never been seen as a necessary evil but a birthright, not a grave decision but a kind of natural reflex. The threat at hand (Al-Qaeda, remember?) seems never to have been taken that seriously -- did anybody at the White House really believe that terrorists could somehow conquer the US or render us powerless? -- and was soon essentially archived to focus on a personal agenda. Above all, the outcome of the war itself, in the minds of those fighting it, has been entirely secondary to the outcome of the upcoming election.
Johnson’s fears seem lost on Bush: he doesn’t seem to care whether his war is called a failure by some, or even by a majority. He doesn't even seem to care if it is a failure. Maybe he rests easy in the knowledge that his think tanks and intellectual shills will be there, proclaiming his greatness and calling any doubters friends of Al-Qaeda. Maybe he just figures that at worst, we walk away from a shitstorm of our own devising, blame it on evil, and he’s made a ton of money for his friends at the taxpayer’s expense (who knew? his domestic and foreign policies make a coherent whole after all). Whatever the case, the only thing that really matters is the election. The rest is theater.
As the man said, first time around, tragedy, second time around, farce.
First off, how had I – or anyone else with us tonight -- never heard of this film? The cinema was literally packed, mostly young, fashionable Cariocas, and the film was introduced by one of the directors of the Festival, who told us how she and her cinema-of-resistance diehard friends had religiously watched washed-out copies of it in improvised screening rooms back when it came out, when Brazil was still under military rule; how she never dreamed she would be showing a restored print in the restored Odeon theater (one of the oldest and most elegant cinemas remaining in Rio and now the jewel in the crown of the Festival); and how she really never expected the film to be introduced by Peter Davis himself, who proceeded to stand up and attempt to introduce the film in the face of a standing ovation.
And I had never even heard of this guy?
O.K., I never took a History of Film course in college, I’m no Vietnam buff, and documentaries in general don’t have the staying power of narrative fiction (like, say, Barbarella) but surely this film is bigger than a couple of niche markets. The real crime here is that over the summer I must have read ten full reviews, two dozen op-eds and who knows how many hundreds of posts on Fahrenheit 9/11, and not one mention of this obvious and absolutely essential predecessor.
(“Predecessor” isn’t really fair to Davis. It is obvious that Moore cribs from Davis’ bag of tricks (who for all I know cribbed from someone else -- I’m not trying to write definitive film criticism here) – intercutting devastating war footage with self-exculpatory prattle from pro-war officials, allowing the eloquence of disillusioned soldiers and the pain of the mothers of war dead to speak for themselves, and perhaps most profoundly, the assemblage of both present-day and archival Americana to try and point at something deep and unhealthy in our collective psyche. But Davis’ film strikes me as somehow much more: more profound, more sincere, more of an accomplishment, both artistically (more moments of poetry) and, if I may use the word, spiritually. You can’t really fault Moore for that, though. The raison d'etre of his film is different: he wants to beat Bush, and end the war. For Davis, the war is over; he is trying to come to terms with what happened, as he said in his introduction, not only to the Vietnamese, but to us. One task calls for cunning (are you listening, Google?), the other sincerity.)
As with Gimmie Shelter and Woodstock, the film transports you back to another era through sheer accumulation of accessories: eyeglasses, shirts, hairstyles, cars, the look of stock footage. But what shocks above all in the film is how little the important rhetoric has changed. There is the buildup of the threat: in this case, the snarling tentacles of Communism and the inexorable logic of the domino theory, but most chillingly, the idea that we have to take the fight to them, before they bring it to us. There is the horrifyingly similar nature of the enemy: the VC, like the terrorists and “rebels” in Iraq (I’ll explain in a later post why the quote marks), seamlessly woven into (and fed by) the local population. There is, as a result, the same vicious circle: distrust by Americans of any and all Vietnamese (slash Iraqis), leading to interrogation, illegal imprisonment, and atrocity, fueling hatred of Americans and swelling the ranks of the opposition, leading to more American casualties, leading to more distrust, etc. There is the startling certainty on the part of government ideologues (in particular, the chillingly unrepentant Walter Rostow) that we were in the right, and the blind conviction of the military leaders (a ghost-like General Westmoreland) that only a few more troop shipments could/would have turned the tide. There is the abject absurdity of our hand-picked “democratic” puppet government, propped up entirely by our military and economic aid, clearly lacking the will and means to fight the war for itself (just watch the “Vietnamization” sequence and then read this), and worse, our government’s poker-faced assertion that we are on the side of right (and winning!) and that those fighting us are ipso facto on the side of evil.
Indeed, everything that comes out of the mouth of the 5 presidents shown in the film seems not only poker-faced, but eerily familiar: the Gulf of Tonkin nonsense, the endless guarantees of victory, even Nixon’s clever packaging of our defeat as a kind of victory (c.f. Rumsfeld’s newest bar-lowering efforts). Most disturbing of all, there is the sometimes willful ignorance of the American people, the lack of any human interest in a far-away and dark-skinned people (in one brilliant scene, a native American Vietnam vet reflects on how strange it is that he was able to call the Vietnamese “gooks” and dehumanize them in his mind when he himself had been the subject of racial epithets all his life, and even in his own platoon), the almost pathological desire to believe that our leaders are wise and honest and to just leave the thinking up to them, and the unquestioning manipulation of that desire by leaders sold on a set of ideological bullet points. As Daniel Ellsberg – one of the film’s heroes -- so pricelessly puts it, “It is a testament to the American people that the government felt the need to deceive them. It is not a testament that they could be deceived so easily.”
Comparing that noble if square sentiment with a fashionably cynical trope I've been seeing around lately -- that we'd better hope that the president is consciously lying, because the notion that he actually believes what he is saying is even scarier -- points up what to me is the only real difference between now and then: a sense of gravity that was not merely a pose. Presidents Truman through Kennedy (at least, and maybe Johnson too) really believed in the domino theory, that Communism was a serious and impending threat, and that action had to be taken. I'm just going on my own sense of things here, it was before my time, but I'd bet that in their heart of hearts, when they lied to the American public, they probably believed that in some way they had to, that it was for the ultimate good of the nation, like Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor. Each leader’s tragic inability to get out of Vietnam was not admirable – nobody wanted to be the first President to lose a war – but it was not a purely electoral consideration either. It was, at least, sincere: Johnson, after all, was so distraught at the prospect of presiding over defeat and withdrawal that he chose to end his political life.
What has changed in 30 years is precisely that: Bush’s war may have, in the last year, configured itself along shockingly similar lines to the conflict in Indochina, but his attitude is and has always been different. Manipulation of the public has never been seen as a necessary evil but a birthright, not a grave decision but a kind of natural reflex. The threat at hand (Al-Qaeda, remember?) seems never to have been taken that seriously -- did anybody at the White House really believe that terrorists could somehow conquer the US or render us powerless? -- and was soon essentially archived to focus on a personal agenda. Above all, the outcome of the war itself, in the minds of those fighting it, has been entirely secondary to the outcome of the upcoming election.
Johnson’s fears seem lost on Bush: he doesn’t seem to care whether his war is called a failure by some, or even by a majority. He doesn't even seem to care if it is a failure. Maybe he rests easy in the knowledge that his think tanks and intellectual shills will be there, proclaiming his greatness and calling any doubters friends of Al-Qaeda. Maybe he just figures that at worst, we walk away from a shitstorm of our own devising, blame it on evil, and he’s made a ton of money for his friends at the taxpayer’s expense (who knew? his domestic and foreign policies make a coherent whole after all). Whatever the case, the only thing that really matters is the election. The rest is theater.
As the man said, first time around, tragedy, second time around, farce.
posted by Benjamin Lessing at 11:15 AM
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