Mark's Pages

September 14, 2004:

John Wayne's pro-war propaganda film The Green Berets shares its mythic core with The Lord of the Rings. Small band of noble warriors, brothers-in-arms, fighting the good fight against masses of evil antagonists who die in enormous numbers yet keep on coming, because they're, you know, not quite human. Tolkien's Helm's Deep is Wayne's Camp A-107.

This is the core mythos of imperialism. One white person is superior to a gazillion non-whites. Bring 'em on.

Despite its intentions Wayne's movie is a clash of dominant versus dominated narratives. The dominant one is the band-of-brothers story with its racist premiss. The dominated one is there for all to see, without being seen by the filmmakers. The vast majority of the Vietnamese depicted are willing to die to expel the Americans. Not only soldiers but civilians: they have sympathizers everywhere, including the American camp. If democracy is understood to be the rule of the majority, the film shows that it's not democracy we're fighting for. This is an example of ideology as a form of narrative which makes the obvious invisible.

Peter Jackson nails it in the commentary. "This is the classic sortof a Zulu type battle really, isn't it, which is a sort of a small number of goodies defending somewhere against overwhelming odds... I always used the movie 'Zulu' as my prototype, really..."