Generic Revisionism
and
the Vietnam War
•By the 1960s and 1970s, classic
genre production was on the
wane
•Genre films had run their
course, and audiences were
changing
•Like genres, audiences have
cycles, too
• A younger, often university-trained wave
of American filmmakers were positioned
uniquely to look back upon the history
of genre filmmaking
• This awareness of genres made for an
intriguing period of genre production
in the 1970s
• We can organize genre production
during this period into four broad
categories...
REVIVAL
•
A number of genres were
revived during the 1970s,
many of them in nostalgic
homage to the classic
gangster films, films noirs, and
musicals of the 1930s-1950s
NEW GENRES / SUBGENRES
•
The 1970s famously
inaugurated many new genres:
Blaxploitation; X-rated
porno; cop; slasher; rape
revenge; rock opera; martial
arts/Kung Fu, etc.
GENRE SPOOFS / PARODIES
•The genre parody emerged
•
from this period and has
remained ever since
It often combines the revivial
film’s reverence for classic
genre with the revisionist film’s
tweaking of the rules
• Like both, it alludes to and is aware of
the genre it spoofs
• The humor derives in large part from
this awareness and the subversion of its
own laws
• Many genre parodies, as well, tinker
with generic tones, making comedies of
dramatic, serious, or scary genres
REVISIONISM
• Revisionism involves challenging a
•
society’s consensus of accepted,
usually long-standing ideologies
(learned cultural belief systems); it
usually involves a revision of
historical events and movements.
Because genres package and
circulate ideologies they are an ideal
arena for also challenging and
revising them
The Vietnam War & its Legacy
• After World War II, the U.S. was in the throes of
the Cold War and thus fearful that countries
would become Communist and align with China
and the Soviet Union
• America’s involvement in Vietnam began in the
early 1960s under false pretense (Gulf of Tonkin)
in order to justify war
• The northern portion of the country, run by the
Viet Cong, was communist and the southern
portion run by a U.S.-friendly govt.
• By the mid-1960s, hundreds of thousands
of American soldiers and staff were in
Vietnam
• Many predicted an easy victory for the
U.S., but the war raged on due to the
difficulty American troops encountered in
the jungle and the will of the Vietnamese
people
• By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. was in
the middle of a very unpopular war
• The Vietnam War was the first televised war, and its
images played a key role in making the war unpopular
on such a wide scale in the U.S.
• Every day the news would report on the number of
casualties, and journalists were embedded with the
soldiers reporting the carnage
• As a result of this war, the U.S. lost its status as
world savior (achieved from WWII)
• Just as many of the veterans dealt with Post-
Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so did the country
• No films were made on the war until the end
of the 1970s, and the U.S. Government learned
its lesson on televising the war, restricting the
reporting of the Gulf war and its casualties
• 50,000+ American soldiers died; 3 million
Vietnamese died