Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 57
B orn on the Fourth o f Ju ly :
A Reflection of Value
Transformation
In Vietnam Veterans
The Vietnam War was an epochal event in U.S. history, one
which continues to haunt society today, more than twenty years after
the last American troops returned home. Countless hours of television
news broadcasts provided first hand accounts of U.S. casualties in
Vietnam. But extensive coverage of the war presented in motion
pictures was not always popular. Until the late 1970s, Vietnam War
films were usually viewed by major studios as unprofitable and,
therefore, were not widely produced. The exception to this trend was
the 1968 film. The Green Berets, produced primarily as a public
relations piece for the U.S. military, starring John Wayne.^ More
recently, however, Vietnam War films have portrayed the war
differently. Films directed by Michael Cimino, Stanley Kubrick,
Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone have depicted the atrocities
of war in ways previously ignored by other Vietnam War films.
Their films deviated from the pro-war theme which dominated The
Green Berets, and raised questions about the American military role
in Vietnam. These alternative perspectives caused many Americans
to examine the internal conflict they felt as a result of the war.
Central to the discussion was the question: How and why do current
Vietnam War films differ from earlier films in their depiction of the
war? Specifically, critics have celebrated the "realism" of Vietnam
created recently on screen by Ron Kovic and Oliver Stone.^ This
article examines Stone's work in Born on the Fourth of July to explore
answers to the question of how popular culture forms enable American
society to face national tragedies such as the Vietnam War. In
addition, how do these films illustrate the struggle between
competing value systems implicit in opponents or supporters of the
war? To answer those questions, I examine the factors that
discouraged production of Vietnam War films prior to the late 1970s,