“I've loved you for a long time,” the Vietnamese sex worker tells the US military, spinning her hips as she attacks her services. “Are you a party?” Stanley Kubrick's first female character Vietnam War The classic “full metal jacket”, she appears a bit, and in the middle of the film.
Similarly, it's an hour Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse NOW When the helicopter suddenly puts three women on stage. They are poorly covered playboy bunnies, with choppers in to crush the army. They also show up for a few minutes.
The Vietnam War produced some of the most memorable films of the late 1970s and 1980s. Kubrick, CoppolaOliver Stone and others are working on that painful legacy. However, few people had classic or three-dimensional female characters. Jane Fonda Oscar.
However, these films were almost exclusively exclusive, as just a device for female characters to tell their stories, while the opposition of Vietnamese films about conflict was often true. Many of these were told from the perspective of women, for example, the tales of brave and loyal women left their families together.
Here are a few ways Classic Vietnam War Movie Use female characters to tell your own story.
A girl waiting for her back home
Michael Simino's Multi-Oscar Award Winner “Deer Hunting” Focusing on lifelong companions in Pennsylvania's steel town, they go out into battle and bring traumatic consequences.
The 1978 drama begins and ends at home, so there is space for the female character, the girlfriend of Meryl Streep's Linda, Nick (Christopher Walken). Streep in his early career was a magnetic presence like Linda and had won an Oscar nomination, disguised a rather thin role that advanced mainly the male story.
The rare contrast was Hal Ashby's “Going Home” in the same year. Fonda and John Voight won an Oscar for the story of a injured veteran at the rehabilitation center where she volunteers, and a Marine wife caught up in a fierce incident.
Film director Tony Buy, who teaches Vietnam War Cinemas at Columbia University, points out that Commuting Home is the only Hollywood film about war with a female protagonist. “It really says something,” he says.
Village Extra and Playboy Bunny
Though the tortured journey to the screen is a drama in itself, 1979's Apocalypse Now is considered a masterpiece of the genre as Martin Sheen is an army captain tasked with assassinating a rebel US colonel (Marlon Brando). Like many Hollywood Vietnamese films, women are village extras, screaming and running around from shootings and fatal explosions.
Then there's a playboy bunny circling towards “Sussy Q” as the army gets more and more insane with erotic excitement and eventually sprints across the stage.
Ran Duon, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Southern California, sees Coppola trying to develop a relationship of sex, war and masculinity.
“White women in America, especially are considered part of American myths about masculinity,” Duon says. She says her authentic manliness with raging hormones is “as American as apple pie.”
The enemy has been dehumanized
1986's “Platoon,” depicting the Stone's Oscar-winning Jungle War, depicting the women's expression, as US military killed hundreds of innocent villagers, My real life of genocide. During the massacre, idealistic soldier Chris (Charlie Sheen) meets a soldier who rapes a young woman. “She's human!” he cried. They respond: “You do not belong to 'Nam, man'. ”
These women are not given a voice. They appear to be “only in regards to violence inflicted by men,” says Bui.
In Brian de Palma's “The Victims of War” (1989), the tragic rape victim actually becomes the central figure in the plot. However, this does not mean learning much about this Vietnamese girl (Thuy thule).
Based on the actual event, the film follows five soldiers whose leader (Shawn Penn) devises an unpleasant plan. The group invites young girls for “recreation” during the mission.
Pvt only. Erickson (Michael J. Fox) Object. The others rape the girl and eventually pump her up with a bullet. Erickson files a lawsuit against his boss, who advises him to drop it. But Erickson lasts and the man gets punishment.
Importantly, this brutal girl is silent again. “She's going to suffer more from suffering and get killed more, and that's her arc,” says Bui, who includes the film. Criterion Channel Collection He curated in Vietnamese films.
Sex Worker and Sniper
Kubrick's memorable 1987 “Full Metal Jacket” contains two short stereotypical scenes involving sex workers. However, the most interesting scenes involving female characters come during battle. There, a sniper targeting the US military turns out to be a scary girl with pigtails. She quietly begs, “shot me.” The soldiers are obligated.
The stereotypical nature of the sex worker scene is somewhat redeemed by the character of the sniper (Ngoc Le) who is recognized for his courage.
In Bui's own “Three Seasons,” a Vietnamese-American production in 1999, sex worker LAN (Diep Bui) is central to the story, an exploration of postwar life in Ho Chi Minh City. Cyclo's driver falls in love with LAN, chases her around the city and tries to help her find a better life.
Widows and Orphans
Bui says his research has discovered that more than half of Vietnamese films about conflict have female protagonists. One of the most famous Hải Ninh's groundbreaking “The Little Girl of Hanoi” (1974) follows a young girl (Lanhương) looking for a family in bombed Hanoi.
The other, When The Tenth Month (1984), in “When the Tenth Month Comes” (1984), tells the story of Duyen (Lê Vân), a young wife and mother in a rural country where her husband goes to war. Her sick stepfather frequently asks why the soldiers don't write at home. One day, Duyen learns that her husband has been dead for a year, and recruits teachers from a local school to help hide it by forging an eloquent letter.
The characters represent the way Vietnamese culture has long portrayed women. He is fierce, loyal and resilient in the face of adversity, Duon argues.
“She's beautiful. She's in pain. She's loyal to her dead husband's memory,” Duon points out. “It is claimed by nhhậtminh herself… she says she is a symbol of the nation itself. So it really becomes a rich parochial phor for the filmmaker.”
The risk is that such characters can act as symbols and lack dimensions.
Changes in the focus of the stone
Stone is one of the only directors who explicitly dealt with the minimal role of women in Vietnamese productions, saying “Platoon” is a deliberately male-driven story.
However, his third and final Vietnamese War film, Heaven & Earth (1993), shifted the stone to the perspective of a real-life woman in Vietnam.
“There's a certain degree of truth to my criticism of how women are treated.” Stone said While making a movie. “There's a lot to learn about, not just women, but everything.”
Clearing his point, Stone dedicates the film to his mother, Jacqueline Stone, for the last time.
