War films cannot depict the reality of war

Click here to read an accessible and interesting article relevant to Mother Night and the issue of fiction representing reality (thanks for the link, Dr. McMahon!). "Carnage and Glory, Legends and Lies," by Michael Norman (see image at right) originally published in the New York Times in July, 1996, contends that war films cannot depict the reality of war.

It begins:

For the record, I know the drill. I've saluted my superiors and spit shined my shoes and marched till my arches were aching. I've aimed a rifle and reeled at the awful result. In short, I'm a typical American paradox, a veteran who still boils at the Beltway blockheads who bloodied his generation and a former marine who will always step forward for his beloved corps.

Image from Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986).

One fine Tuesday many movie seasons ago I carried this baggage into the Sherry Netherland Hotel in Manhattan to interview a film maker, then relatively unknown, named Oliver Stone. Someone thought it might make interesting reading if a combat-hardened reporter was dispatched to encounter a combat-hardened director, especially when that director was peddling his war record as the bona fides for his new movie, Platoon.

 So -- what did you think?" he said as I settled into a chair opposite him. The marketing campaign, as I remember, was to position Platoon as the real thing, the first Vietnam movie to present the war as it really was. "You were there too," he kept saying. "What do you think?"

"I was a little naive in those days; I'd been covering politicians and murderers and had no experience with the more dangerous characters from Hollywood. I took the director's question literally; I thought he was talking about psychological sense, existential verity, the real war, the one that rages in a warrior's head and heart and soul. I thought -- God forgive me my innocence -- I thought he was talking about the truth.

I went on to write some polite and, I now know, some very wrongheaded things about Platoon. In truth I hated the movie almost as much as I hated the war. But the legacy of that day is not the feckless story I delivered. It is in the last words of the director as I thanked him for his time and turned to leave. He asked if I'd seen his movie Salvador, and as it happened I had.

"Wasn't the makeup on the corpses great?" he said, beaming. "I'm proud of those corpses."

 I thought about that bizarre remark for a long time. I was sure that Mr. Stone was talking about verisimilitude, how he'd tried to make the dead seem so lifelike, so real. Then two years later I found myself in Chicago in the middle of winter with Gene Hackman . . . 

In the video below, Norman, who is now a professor of journalism at NYU, talks about literary reportage.



Click here to see the trailer for Platoon: