by John Pilger
“When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favorable – well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, ‘politics,’ included comments such as: ‘This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.’
By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The Deer Hunter which, according to Time, ‘articulates the new patriotism.’ The film celebrated immigrant America, with Robert de Niro as a working class hero (‘liberal by instinct’) and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots, or ‘gooks.’ The dramatic peak was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam. ‘I have this insane feeling that I was there,’ he said. “Somehow… the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.’
The Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic critics. ‘The film that could purge a nation’s guilt!’ said the Daily Mail. . . .
My own 2007 film The War on Democracy, which inverted the ‘war on terror’ in Latin America, was distributed in Britain, Australia and other countries but not in the United States. ‘You will need to make structural and political changes,’ said a major New York distributor. ‘Maybe get a star like Sean Penn to host it – he likes liberal causes – and tame those anti-Bush sequences.’ . . .
These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove.” (Read more from antiwar.com)