You're Dead to Me: Platoon

In this series we’ll be running through some films, books or T.V. shows that once illuminated our lives but now, have fallen from grace and are seen for the pale harlots they really are.  In a fit of Justice I will bury, in my garden, the offending material.

In the Oscar winning best picture in 1986 Platoon:

We find a magnificent cast headed by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger.  These two perfect men are played against each other in the now tired Good cop/Bad cop routine.  Only this time the interrogative subject is you.  Joined by a fantastic cast including; Francesco Quinn, Forest Whitaker, John Depp, the indefatigable Dale Dye and starring the conflicted Charles Sheen.  The questioning posited in this film is really a lecture from Professor Stone.

Oliver Stone was in the army and stationed in Vietnam during the war.  Clearly it had a profound effect on him.  Just as clearly he has gone completely around the bend with just about every movie he has made since.  Making every appearance of looking for villains while in actuality just regenerating the class warfare myth and the basest conspiracy theories.  This has been common practice in Hollywood since the sixties.  Wasn’t there something wrong with our country when Senator Kerry MA. (Then Officer Kerry of the Navy) came home from the war proud of his service and against the war?  Finding a bank of network news cameras outside the White House, getting in front of them and throwing his medals over the fence yet keeping his ribbons!

I liked Platoon because of that superior feeling of pity for a group of people, in this case American soldiers being duped into sacrificing their very lives for an evil enterprise.  Where the highest form of communication is outrage; in a world that only caters to the rich and powerful.  But still, we're allowed to believe in the “Good” guys, with a Peter Pan like innocence.  I can indulge myself, lose myself in manufactured sorrow on their behalf.  It fit right into my worship of the anti-hero narrative so prevalent during the decade following our self-imposed Loss of the war.  The heroes of this film teach us through regret.  Remember Ginsberg’s admonition “do as we say not as we do.”  So much for the sixties liberation counterculture.  It’s more important to regret your ideology than be responsible for your actions.  This responsibility is always put upon the leading man from above in the nouveau tragedies.

I am saddened I can't keep this emotional whirl-wind of a film any longer.  To do so would make a mockery of my maturation and comprehension of America's place and responsibility in the world at large.  To stand publicly and state an aversion to war, or to be a part of anti-war protests (which is what Platoon is), demonstrates the ultimate in straw-man arguments.  War is to be abhorred and avoided at all costs!  I think you'll get no argument from the soldiers of our Armed Forces.  But to have the Liberty and affluence provided so people like Oliver Stone can spend the next thirty years making films castigating the United States and its volunteers.  Well, that smells very much like shitting where you eat!  So, I bury this once enjoyable, childish demonstration of acting out and I commit it to your memory.

B.I.H.  U.B.L.