Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Hearts and Minds: Manipulative or Truthful?
A certain scene in the documentary struck me as making a very powerful statement. It first shows a Vietnamese funeral where soldiers are burying what seems to be a Vietnamese soldier. The soldier's grandmother, overcome with grief, tries to jump into the hole to prevent the soldiers from burying her grandson. It then shows the boy's brother who is staring at his brother's picture crying with desperation in his eyes, wishing his brother wasn't dead. Immediately after, the documentary jumps to an interview with General Westmoreland where he says that the Vietnamese don't place as high a value on life as a Westerner does, that life is cheap and unimportant to them. It seems like this contrast is made to portray Westmoreland as ignorant beyond belief. The placement of the two scenes makes the viewer angry at Westmoreland and shines an incredibly bad light on his character. But on the other hand, maybe the documentary's main goal was not to depict Westmoreland like that, but rather to portray America's ignorance and detachment as a whole to what was happening in Vietnam. Maybe this was truly how most Americans viewed the Vietnamese at the time, as savages that didn't care whether a loved one lived or died. What do you think the overall purpose was, and was it achieved?
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I believe that the overall purpose was to highlight the hypocrisy of some who believed the war was justified, yet looked down upon the people they were supposed to be helping. For example, when a returning war hero speaks at a school, he denigrates the character of the Vietnamese people, making very little effort to distinguish between the Communist forces and the Vietnamese civilians whose government he was sent to protect. Combined with Westmoreland's blanket statement about the Vietnamese people's views on the value of life, this purpose was certainly achieved.
ReplyDeleteThe statement made by Westmoreland really bothered me. It seemed like he was trying to justify American actions in the war by de-humanizing the Vietnamese and making them seem completely different from Americans. I thought there was a noticeable contrast between the first set of interviews with people involved in the war and the second set, specifically with the pilot.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the pilot in his first interview talked about how 'neat' the bombings were from his point of view and that he couldn't see any blood or anything like that. However, when they interview him later he is shown as being choked up about the children he had killed with 'anti-person' weapons like napalm.
This is also around the point (I think) when the grandmother is shown as trying to jump in the grave with her dearly departed. I think that the purpose of this was to show the other side of the story, what the American troops involved in the war realized AFTER the fact, when they realized they were killing real people, real children, real parents. It shows the decided ignorance of the American troops in regards to the Vietnamese people.
I think the purpose of this film was to tell the truth, i mean it is a documentary. All the guilt that soldiers, politicians, and even the american people felt after the vietnam war. Its value lies in how much it connects the audience to not only the feelings of the vietnamese during the war, but also the american people and soldiers after the war. You start feeling intense empathy for the vietnamese almost immediately and that feeling increases and so does the anger at american actions during that time, but by the end of the movie you also begin to feel at least a little empathy towards the soldiers, who realized and regret their actions. I think the purpose of this film is to prevent another vietnam to some extent, view everyone as living breathing human beings not just enemies that need to exterminated because the higher-ups say so, and to develop an individual within the american people that doesn't just follow the masses.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it is true that a lot of this documentary emphasized the hypocrisy of the "authority figures" in the Vietnam War, I think it is also important to consider some of the scenes that depicted American civilians who were completely ignorant. For instance, there was an interview with truck driver who said he really had no idea who or what we were fighting for in Vietnam and then proceeded to ask if we were fighting against the North. Also, I think this documentary draws a lot of sympathy from the viewer towards the injured veterans. The soldiers' interviews start with close-ups of their faces as they tell their stories from Vietnam but only towards the very end of the film did the camera zoom out to show a paralyzed man in a wheelchair or an amputee. This dramatic camera work really makes me sympathize with the veterans, who seemed to not realize the full extent of their dangers until it was too late.
ReplyDeleteThis documentary depicted true emotions and events that happened in the Vietnam War. I agree with the comments above, that the emotions of the war was portrayed through the means of empathy. I think the scene of the soldiers burying the boy was significant because it allowed the audience feel what the grandmother was feeling (I even heard a few sniffles in the audience). I think that American soldiers viewed the Vietnamese as savages because they were ordered to kill them- it was their job to. Since they were killing villages of families, they had to tell themselves that they were savages even if they did not truly believe it; they had to keep their sanity somehow.
ReplyDeleteWhile the documentary exposed many of the devastating truths about the Vietnam war, I felt that it was obviously one sided. I realize that some of the scenes in the video are plainly the truth and their is no way to defend certain actions/statements of some of our American citizens and military people. It is hard to "defend" the opposing view when there are several parts of information that we do not know. For instance, in one part of the video a man describes how the President lied about the Communist threat in the first place, which defeats the whole purpose to why we entered the war. It is clear that the video did not show the American who helped the Vietnamese children get food, or the interview of the person who was educated about the reason of war... this was all to prove the point of the video and have the emotional impact that it did. The video had a strong antiwar message. I think we all need to take into account that the soldiers who join the military sign up to do a job. Some people might call them heartless as they send bombs into a city, but this is their job and they are told what to do in order to defend our country. It was really depressing watching the brutality and by no means am I saying that what some of those clips showed was morally correct, and I don't think we should be proud, as Americans, of certain actions. But I also want to stress the importance of taking a glimpse at the other perspective and realize what war is, why we go to war, and obviously what takes place during a war. The creator of this wanted to depict a specific message to the audience and taking in to account more of the "opposing view" would not have helped their message.
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