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Monthly Archives: December 2010
Good mooooooorning Vietnam!
Hi poker fanatics and readers of all kinds of cruelty in the world. I wanted to see a movie the other day and my friends had told me a lot of times that I HAD to watch the movie ‘Platoon’ some time. So when I finally found the time for it, I decided to give it a go.
In fact I liked it very much and it got me starting to think about the way the American people tried to deal with the Vietnam trauma. I already saw movies like ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (duh^^) and ‘Apocalypse Now’ of course, and this one fits perfectly in that company. Hollywood seemed to play a very important role in processing the things that happened in that terrible war. They have all one thing in common: they represent the American soldiers as naïve, young guys who were fighting a war without knowing where’s it was all about. Besides: the ennemy is portraited as very cruel and being everywhere. In this way, Hollywood tried to clarify why soldiers went mad and commited the cruelties they did.
Of course Full Metal Jacket is the best example here, as it literally shows that it’s possible to create ruthless killers out of innocent young boys. But you can also take it too far: Rambo. Those movies are just trying to recover the wounded feeling of national pride by actually declaring that the US had in fact WON the war…