Written and Directed
by Oliver Stone
Orion Pictures
Watching the scenes of combat in Platoon, I found it difficult at times to breathe.
Oliver Stone is a masterful director who uses all the resources of his medium to place the viewer squarely in the center of jungle fighting — which is to say squarely in the center of hell. Stone’s camera darts from a soldier’s face down to his running feet as they set off a trip wire; our split— second apprehension before the explosion feels like a blow to the solar plexus. When a sergeant, wanting to conceal an atrocity he’s committed, decides to murder a fellow soldier, Stone cuts from the eyes of the victimizer to the eyes of the victim and back again just before the trigger is pulled; the moment becomes a crystal of moral and physical horror. When the young protagonist sees the NVA [the North Vietnamese army regulars] for the first time and freezes in horror as the enemy glides through the night into ambush position, his heartbeats fill the soundtrack.
Stone’s special effects are not used to satisfy our jaded connoisseurship of film technology but to keep us aware of the fragility of flesh amid so much expensive and pernicious war machinery. Violence gains in horror by being merely glimpsed: a mutilated soldier staggers out of a booby trapped shelter, and Stone cuts the shot off at the exact moment that we realize the victim is trying to grope his way with arms which simply aren’t there anymore.
All of these shocks are placed within the context of an inescapable swampy heat that is perhaps more soul-destroying than danger. The initial march, seen under the credits, is the first movie patrol that fully conveys the horror of having to move when you can no longer move, of having the strange men behind you (your fellow soldiers who feel anything but fellowship for you) snarl at your back because you’re holding up the line, of feeling insect life crawl up your back and neck while your arms are too encumbered with equipment to swat or scratch. The non-stop profanity that fills the dialogue, or rather is the dialogue, is real profanity — obscenities expressing anger and disgust — and not just some nit-wit scriptwriter’s effort to tittilate a public increasingly difficult to tittilate. Platoon places us in the middle of the sleepless, reason-suppressing listlessness of war, a listlessness which seems to cry out for violence to disperse it. When violence does come, it is all the more shocking by being somehow welcome. By making us share the horror and fatigue of his characters so viscerally, Oliver Stone has made the most immediate of war movies.
Yet, strictly speaking, Platoon isn’t a war movie. It’s a combat film that wants to say something about war. But, finally, it only tells us about combat.
My distinction may need some clarification. A fiction about war seeks to understand the effects of martial strife upon human beings both on and off the battlefield. Especially off. For only after first observing the behaviour of characters in everyday life can we then witness how the cataclysm of war shatters and/or reassembles personality.
Thus, the special poignancy of the scene in War and Peace in which the wounded Prince Andrei lies on the battlefield and ignores the appearance of Napoleon in favor of contemplating the vast, impersonal beauty of the sky, derives from the fact that we have gotten to know Andrei well in peacetime. We know him to possess, among other qualities, a certain vanity about himself as a dashing officer bound for glory.
Bonaparte is Andrei’s revered enemy, a majestic adversary who must be conquered so that both self and fatherland can be vindicated. So when the wounded Andrei realizes that Napoleon’s majesty is as nothing before the majesty of nature, we are able to contemplate the shifting of Andrei’s disposition, the movement of his soul. Combat has both shattered and liberated him. But how would we realize this if we hadn’t come to know Andrei apart from combat? If War and Peace remains the greatest of war novels, it’s partly because it fully details the collision of war and civil life.
But a combat novel, such as James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, has a narrower scope. It describes only the collision of warrior against warrior, or warrior against machinery. As Jones’s soldiers dodge bullets, lob grenades, and cringe from bomb blasts, their humanity (i.e., the civilization that survives within them) only shows itself in their interactions with each other (and occasionally with the enemy) in the face of the common, overarching horror of war. On the other hand, Norman Mailer, trying to write a novel (The Naked and the Dead) about a single patrol mission during World War II, found himself postponing that patrol for three hundred pages, devoting the bulk of his book to the peacetime past of his dogfaces. In other words, Mailer discovered that he didn’t want to write a combat novel, after all, though combat was his ostensible subject matter. He wanted to write a war novel showing in what direction Western civilization was being taken by World War II.
Like Tolstoy and Mailer, Oliver Stone wants to create something more than a story of combat. He wants to show the oscillation of a soul between good and evil. But the moral movement in his film is as uncertain as the moral grounding of the war itself. In this regard, the movie betokens the ethical ambiguity of the Vietnam conflict. But we needn’t pretend that this uncertainty results in a satisfactory movie.
Chris Taylor, a college student who has foregone deferment and volunteered for a tour in Vietnam, is the movie’s protagonist. Charlie Sheen has the right look for the part and the ability to project inquiring, bruisable innocence. But Stone must have felt that close-ups of Sheen’s face would not be enough to bespeak spiritual triumph and descent. So we not only watch Chris throughout the movie, we hear the contents of his letters home to his grandmother. They are meant both to give Chris a past and to elaborate his reactions to the events unfolding onscreen. The device fails both functions.
Chris tells his grandmother that by enlisting he is rejecting his parents’ middle-class, materialistic values and is seeking to learn some truth about himself. Fine. But why didn’t he become a hippie instead of a soldier? Or a Peace Corps volunteer? Please understand I’m not saying he should have become a hippie; I’m merely asking why this specific choice. Chris also says he’s seeking total anonymity by enlisting. Shades of T. E. Lawrence! But Lawrence was an infinitely complex and tormented man, with much blood on his conscience by the time he sought anonymity in the R.A.F. How can the freckle-faced Chris shoulder such angst? It sounds like something he picked up from a book.
Oliver Stone himself was a college kid who dropped out to enlist. But, in interviews, Stone has convincingly explained his motivations: a privileged childhood shattered by divorce and economic ruin, an early teaching job in 1965 Saigon that led to an infatuation with both the Orient and the military (“…the G.I.’s from the 1st Infantry Division were just arriving. There were guys walking around with pistols, no curfews, shoot-outs in the streets. The place was like Dodge City.”), and the rejection of his first novel. Why did Stone put all this into Time magazine and not into the movie? Perhaps he didn’t want to bog the film down in exposition.
But it’s a test for the skillful scriptwriter economically to suggest the burden of the past on the present. Consider how well Horton Foote conveyed Robert Duvall’s drunken past in Tender Mercies without using a single flashback. In the press much has been made of the fact that Platoon is autobiographical. I don’t think it is autobiographical enough. By giving Chris such a paltry background, Stone has dimmed the audience’s interest in the movement of this particular soul between the powers of good and evil.
As embodied by Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe as Sergeants Barnes and Elias, these powers themselves are interesting. Stone has not attempted a realistic balance of vice and virtue within each of these characters; in moral terms, they are truly poles apart. Barnes is a man sodden by war and, in a permanently aggrieved way, in love with it. He does not wade through blood to reach a goal but swims in it for its own sake. In Apocalypse Now, the Brando Kurtz character spoke portentously of using total violence to win a confusing, shapeless war. Outside Kurtz’s but heads from the special effects department were stuck on poles. The talk remained talk. But when Barnes shoots an old woman because she is jabbering too much and then, trying to get information from an old man, puts a gun to his granddaughter’s head and clearly intends to pull the trigger, we see that this no longer is a case of the end justifying the means but of the means devouring the end. Nothing can satisfy Barnes’s violence save the ruin of all Vietnam. But then weren’t we in Vietnam to save Vietnam? The audience gasps with relief when Barnes is struck to the ground before he can pull the trigger.
The arm that strikes him belongs to Sergeant Elias. Critics have written inaccurately of this character, saying that Stone has created a sort of hippie saint to oppose the killer Barnes. Only Stanley Kauffmann(in The New Republic) correctly stressed that Elias is a skillful jungle warrior. In fact, Elias is shown to be more devastating in combat than Barnes. In combat. That is the heart of the Barnes/Elias conflict. With respect to the warrior’s craft, Elias can fight the Cong on their own terms. With respect to ethics, however, he is an old-style warrior who cuts down the enemy only on the field of battle. If Elias is a saint, he is a martial saint: a St. George, not a Gandhi. He carries into war the civilian ideal of justice: one does not destroy the innocent to get at the guilty.
Thus described, these two characters may sound schematic, and fundamentally they are. But onscreen they live. Tom Berenger plays Barnes with a still, Satanic dignity. His voice is the growl of the eternal redneck, but his eyes have seen and accepted and now overlook more agony than was ever sung about in a country-western ballad. While Berenger projects Barnes’s inward isolation even when he’s elbow to elbow with others, William Dafoe keeps Elias in touch with humanity even when he’s swinging in a hammock in the corner of a marijuana-saturated hut. Dafoe’s performance is the one hardest to describe because it’s composed of little touches and sharp changes of tempo: quizzical looks, sudden tiny smiles, a voice that never insists. Lowering himself down into a bunker that’s possibly a Cong lair, Dafoe quips, “See ya next week.” This is heroism that doesn’t announce itself, and therefore is all the more heroic. When Barnes murders Elias two-thirds of the way through the film, the audience is ready to murder Barnes.
At the end of the movie, Chris does murder Barnes. Audiences may cheer, but what is the import of the scene? Rough justice or moral horror? The answer can only be given if we know what was Chris’s moral progress (or regress) to this deed.
After the near-slaughter of the peasant village, Chris (functioning now as narrator) says: “I don’t know the difference between right and wrong anymore.” But this remark does not tally with what we have seen on the screen. For we have just witnessed Chris twice acting in a profoundly moral way. First, after coming close to shooting a retarded boy (“Why are you so frightened, damn it! I didn’t do anything to you, did I? You want me to give you something to be frightened of?”), he forces himself away from the boy even though nearby soldiers are urging him to kill. The look on Chris’s face shows us he is ashamed of himself. A few moments later, he stops other soldiers from assaulting two prepubescent girls. When the thwarted rapists taunt him, “What’s wrong? You homosexual or something?”, he looks at them in disgust and answers, “You just don’t get it, do you?” Meaning that he does get it, that he does know right from wrong and can act upon that knowledge. Why, then, does he tell us that he doesn’t one scene later?
When Chris learns that Barnes must have murdered Elias, he urges some of his fellow privates to “frag” the staff sergeant. One of them angrily turns on Chris, reminding him that Chris himself used to praise Barnes for his ruthlessness in protecting the platoon. Chris admits this, but claims he knows better now. The second time I saw Platoon I looked very carefully for any scene in which Chris lauded Barnes. There was none. Why? Did it end up on the cutting room floor? Or was it never filmed? If such a moment happened, then surely there was also a later pivotal scene showing Chris swinging over from Barnes to Elias.
My hunch: the addition of the line about not knowing right from wrong and the possible deletion of a scene showing a switch of role models means that Stone pulled back from the implications of Chris’s last punitive action. If Chris has been acting with some moral deliberation all along, then the murder of Barnes is an execution and Chris must perceive himself as an avenging angel. I don’t think that Stone is quite ready to ask his audience to accept this.
The act itself is shot in a slightly ambiguous manner. We see Chris in medium close-up looking down on Barnes. Then a medium close-up of Barnes crawling on the ground, calling for a medic. Back to Chris, who looks grim, determined. He takes aim. Back to Barnes, who looks up fatalistically at Chris and mutters: “Go ahead. Do it.” An invitation? A dare? Up to now Barnes has expressed no death wish, unless his whole life is meant to be taken as a death wish. The camera stays on Barnes, and a couple of seconds pass. Then bullets drill his chest and stomach. It’s a murder all right, but keeping the camera off Chris’s face at the moment of execution and giving Barnes a line assenting to his own death softens the blow.
What really lightens the movie is the very last scene, in which the wounded Chris is evacuated by helicopter. On the soundtrack Chris tells us that it’s the duty of all who served in Vietnam to teach the meaning of the experience to all who didn’t, and that the beauty and meaning of life must be rediscovered. Fine civic-minded thoughts, but coming from a man who has just arrogated to himself the role of executioner? On whose face is a weary but almost beatific look? That look on the face of a boy who has murdered a man in cold blood? Maybe when Chris gets back to college he’ll chance upon certain sentences in Nietzsche: “Do not look too deeply into the abyss lest the abyss look into you. Beware of fighting monsters lest you become a monster yourself.”
There is still no consensus of opinion in this country about the Vietnam intervention. Now Oliver Stone has made a film about it which captures superbly its texture. Heat, flame, pain, stupor, anger: the elements and elemental emotions are handled by Stone with brutal integrity. Yet he has also made a film which leaves us wondering what kind of person its hero was before he landed in Vietnam, and even more, what kind of person is the war returning to the U.S.A. Platoon is a superb combat movie. But it is as morally ambiguous as the Vietnam war itself.