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The overture takes off from Losey's King & Country with an interrogation of heroic statuary ominously scored to the whirring of helicopters, a dash of agitprop montage to kick off Emile de Antonio's roasting of imperialist swines. "Well, I didn't get you in Vietnam," says LBJ. "You've been in Vietnam ten years!" David and Goliath in Southeast Asia, a history lesson and a rebuke to self-declared peacemakers, newsreel footage and interviews are the instruments of immersion. Ho Chi Minh as George Washington is not the birth of a nation but rather the latest stand in its extended string of invasions (Mongolian and Japanese prior to French and American), the revolution's stated goal is a bowl full of rice. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the fracturing of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem as "our man in Saigon." A paranoid mantra (the star of de Antonio's Point of Order turns up in a cameo, warning of America becoming "an island in a communist sea") stokes the military-industrial Moloch, the sheen of Western righteousness is scrapped off to expose "the arrogance of power." For Prof. Paul Mus a Confucian vision, for Gens. Curtis LeMay and Mark Clark a matter of "traditional Oriental patience" and lesser regard for human life. The jungle negotiated with fires and chainsaws and bulldozers, dry official explanations intercut with soldiers whomping peasants and terrorizing crones. The Chinook helicopter's grinning skull then a day at the beach, an Apocalypse Now prototype reviewed by Thruston Morton: "How silly can you get?" A certain surreal timbre ("La Marseillaise" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" are filtered through Indochinese harp and flute), de Antonio assembles it with lucidity and anger. Subsequent documentaries and wars attest to the verdict on U.S. quagmires, "not a vicious circle—a downward spiral." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |