“Now, I got no fight with any man who does what he’s told, but when he don’t, the machine breaks down. And when the machine breaks down, we break down. And I ain’t gonna allow that in any of you. Not one.” – Platoon
Syphilis, AIDS and a Timeshare: what’s difference? You can get rid of syphilis.
I saw Platoon in the theater when it came out.
I watched Platoon, and left the theater as the credits rolled.
I was filled with Raisenettes®, yet exhausted with no desire to ever watch that movie ever again. But last weekend it showed up in the “movies you might like to watch” and since The Mrs. hadn’t seen it, we started watching it. Only I finished, since she fell asleep while on patrol and was caught in a firefight with some NVA regulars. But I finished it.
Again.
As a movie, Platoon looks and feels like a slice of reality coming from the “nerdy dolphin talking about hang gliding” me who has never been to Vietnam nor been in a foxhole with Charlie Sheen. I’ve seen many films shot on bigger budgets that don’t feel nearly as real as Platoon. I imagine that part of that is because the writer/director, Oliver Stone, actually did serve in Vietnam as a ground-pounder and this movie is certainly based on his actual experiences there.
I have a lot of thoughts about Vietnam, but this post isn’t about Vietnam. This post is about what the movie Platoon really was: propaganda to make you hate America and traditional American values in 1986.
Let’s start with the time that this movie came out: 1986.
1986 was part of Reagan’s Morning in America. The GloboLeft hated that because the GloboLeft loved the Soviets. I mean, they also love illegal immigrants, but they really love the Soviets. 1986 was also the year of Top Gun, which was the top grossing movie of the year.
My friend the physicist said that he’ll only play volleyball in a vacuum with perfect spheres.
Why was Top Gun the highest earning film of the year even though it wasn’t that great of a movie?
Because people loved America. And yes, I liked Top Gun, but you’ve got to admit it didn’t really have a plot. Top Gun: Maverick at least had a plot.
I digress.
Back to the “people love America” thing. Hollywood© had changed since Reagan was there. When Reagan was there, Hollywood was subversive, but it didn’t hate absolutely everything about America.
Now a majority of Hollywood© did. So, it created one of the most effective propaganda movies of all time, Platoon. I must admit, the message of the movie makes Trotsky look like a patriotic America and Charlie Sheen look morally upright.
Charlie Sheen drew the line at cocaine.
What, then, was the message?
- Traditional American values suck. Almost* every leader was shown to be either out of touch, incompetent, sycophantic, or evil. In one scene almost* all of the leadership of the titular (heh) platoon was in a barracks. It wasn’t fun. It looked like your grandpa’s poker night with his old smelly friends, ruled over by the despotic and disfigured Satan of our story: Staff Sergeant Barnes.
This is an effective scene. Your brain subconsciously looks at pretty things and thinks that they’re good. The opposite holds true as well. Barnes is established and reinforced as the antagonist. He is, for this movie, Evil personified.
Wait, what? This is a war movie, aren’t the enemy supposed to be the bad guys? Not for a large chunk of Hollywood©. Remember Hanoi Jane Fonda? They hated America and wanted communism.
The Vietnamese in this movie aren’t the bad guys, they’re just some sort of natural occurrence, like the weather. Put the story on a boat and replace the Vietnamese with a storm and it’s the same movie.
- But, move to the cool kid bunker! They had dope! They had cool music! They were doing cool and groovy things! No leadership here, at all, except for cool and groovy dope-smoking Sergeant Elias.
Elias isn’t the protagonist, the protagonist is the character played by Charlie Sheen, who might as well have been called Pvt. Nobody as cardboard as he is, since he only takes one action in the entire movie. No. Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, is Jesus. His betrayal and final death scene with his arms outstretched as if on the cross is heavy-handed. Even young me got that.
If only I can die with such symmetry!
And, in this movie, Jesus was cool and smoked pot. Dafoe would play Jesus in another movie two years later: The Last Temptation of Christ. This was back at a time when the Catholic Church actually managed to be against something other than being against people saying mean things about rapefugees.
But I digress. Again.
The movie is clear. Barnes, who represents traditional American society and traditional American values, is bad. Elias, who represents stoner culture, is good.
When you analyze propaganda, another questions to ask is, “Who is it aimed at?”
Charlie Sheen was the stand-in for the target, the person the audience is supposed to identify with. In several masterfully shot scenes, I felt like I was in Private Sheen’s place. That’s effective film making. Sheen is early wave Gen X.
This makes sense, since Gen X was the target.
Early, Atari© Xers like myself were the primary ticket purchasers of R-rated movies at the time Platoon came out. It’s where we took our dates on a Friday night, and young men were the primary decision makers when it came to selecting a movie to see.
Platoon was demoralization aimed straight at Gen X. Here is what it was saying:
“Reagan making you feel good? Perhaps a bit too good? Enjoyed Red Dawn or Top Gun? Well, white people are awful, except for the stoner socialists who hate America. Those are the real good guys. And Hollywood©. Hollywood™ loves you.”
Imagine how surprised Jeff was when he committed suicide! (meme as found)
Hollywood© does not love you. But they loved this movie with the heat of a thousand sons. Nominated for seven Academy Awards®, it won three, including best picture and best director. Hollywood© loved this movie. So did critics. And it did well at the box office, finishing up third for the year, behind the previously mentioned Top Gun and the heavy period drama that was Crocodile Dundee.
I bought two tickets to it, so my $10 was in the $138,530,565 that it’s credited with.
When I finished watching it, I wanted to take a shower because in the end, the character I’m supposed to identify with, Pvt. Cardboard, kills the stand-in for America: Sergeant Barnes. On purpose. Murder. Demoralization.
Again, I didn’t have the words to describe nor the wisdom to understand the propaganda at play in the film. I just know that I felt revolted.
What does a serial killer do when he finds Waldo®? Wears Waldo™.
But now I see what was going on through clear eyes.
Maybe it was because I didn’t have any Raisenettes™?
Barnes shot Elias and left him to die, Pvt. Cardboard meted out the required justice in the end. Propaganda? Hatred of America? I didn’t get that from the movie. Then again, what the hell do I know?
Yessir, Top Gun Maverick did indeed have a plot, they stole it from the original Star Wars. All that was missing was Maverick telling the DEI group of youngsters how he used to bullseye womp rats in his F-14 back home.
The movie made Barnes shoot Elias to set up the situation.
Barnes is reality. Elias was the Jesus vibe in that movie.
FMJ was always a favorite due to the Sarge.
He trained them up and most survived.
But leaving doughnuts out?
Red Dawn and the Terminator were the movies that prepared Gen X for what we are living now. Thankfully, they resonated and worked!!
Those were movies I liked. And they weren’t set up to make Americans hate themselves for being American.
The first 30 minutes of Full Metal Jacket is amazing. the rest is… meh. Best war movie ever made is IMO ‘Das Boot’. Second place belongs to Apocalypse Now.
Ermey made that flick.
Apocalypse Now was made as an Anti War movie but thanks to Robert Duvall, it became a gung ho “Let’s kill some commies and towel heads movie.
I never saw Platoon. Now, after your commentary, I’m never gonna.
Platoon was from 1986. I did see Full Metal Jacket in 1987 because Kubrick. A brilliant movie technically, but again, very anti-American message. That was just the nature of the Hollywood beast – then and now.
Both are technically brilliant.
Perhaps you also have strong feelings about “Casualties of War”?
My father told me that Platoon was $&@# and that (get this) Dudikoff in Platoon Leader was more realistic.
I thought I was the only person who saw that one!
Can’t remember the last “war” movie I saw. Perhaps a rerun of “Kelly’s Heroes” on HBO 15+ years ago. Unless if you call “Josey Wales” a war movie.
Josey Wales is my favorite Eastwood movie.
I saw Platoon after it came out on videotape. It obviously didn’t make much of an impression because I hardly remember anything from it. My only lasting impression from it, in fact, was that I wanted a push dagger like the sergeant had.
And did you get one?
They have hated us for almost a century now. McCarthy and Enoch Powell were both correct. I am wondering when freedom lovers are going to realize we ARE at war here and now. The Red Rabbits Know it.
They do.
Funny story about when that movie came out where I was, since it was R rated, you had to be 18 technically. Usually not an issue tho, except when me and my pals went to it when it opened, an annoying Cee You Next Tuesday from my high school was working the ticket booth, so she carded us, and we didnt get in, so we went a few doors down and drank at one of the bigger bars on the street (have to be 19 to drink). We got to see it eventually on another night she wasn’t working, interesting Devon Stack style breakdown of the movie in your post, since I am a Canuck, we didn’t have a popular view of that war (we passed on it, and let your draft dodgers come live up here) so it rang more to us on just that ‘nam war was bad vs USA bad. Top Gun was popular up here as well, despite the weak plot, back then if the action was good, it didn’t matter (I mean Arnold wouldn’t be Ah-Nald if we demanded great writing from our action heroes then). The Anglosphere was tilting conservative then, you had Ronnie, Maggie and Brain Mulroney up here had a huge majority a la Ronnie’s second one.
Devon is really good at it.
That is how I felt about Zulu for the first time not so long ago, because I knew the story of the heroic battle long before I saw it.
I might have influenced the husband on that one a tad, yelling imprecations at the book tube.
Another late GenX film (early 1990s pre Clinton) “American Dreamer” I remembered fondly: So cute! So funny! Like Romancing the Stone. It sold frivorce and betrayal to young women.
That DVD ended up in the trash.
watch The Naked Prey lol movie from time when people didn’t shit in their mess kits
Sgt. York is 100% surely never getting a remake
>When Reagan was there, Hollywood was subversive, but it didn’t hate absolutely everything about America
“Hollywood” has always hated everything about America. They just weren’t as confident about their power yet to be so open about it back then.
I don’t know “Who run Bartertown?” but we do know who runs Hollywood. So how could it be otherwise? But don’t take it personally. They hate everyone not Them. They also hate each other; the average person has no clue how many mutually-loathing factions there are among Them. And the ones who have done the most to destroy the West (the leftist, mostly atheistic ones) usually hate themselves (true personal, individual, self loathing, hence the uncapitalized “themselves”) as well.
Please don’t tie your id of the team of “they” to a particular ethnic/genetic/religious group. The group which is playing “they” changes over time from Darwinism.
And it’s been going on for a long time. I still see no reason we were involved in World War I. So at least that long.
Almost every [ruler] *is* either out of touch, incompetent, sycophantic, or evil. That’s why they position themselves as a “ruler”. If they were a *leader* then people will follow them voluntarily, without them ordering people around at gunpoint.
Yup. And we’re all out of leaders.
WWII veterans have said in taped interviews that they weren’t “fighting for freedom and ‘Mom’s Apple Pie’ ‘- many knew “War is a racket” (Genreal Smedley Butler) and fought their asses off to keep themselves and their buddies alive. Veterans returning from the ‘Sandbox Wars’ have said the same thing. While I agree that Follywood has been foisting guilt upon the American Ideal, and thus her People, the movie mainly presented a critical view of American foreign policy, anf the corruption within the M.I.C.KE.Y. (Military Industrial Complex Keeping Everyone Yoked). We went to war in 1918 because the British needed us to bail them out and were promised our involvement by Zionistas (Balford Agreement). Americans were adamantly opposed to getting involved in that debacle, but propaganda prevailed. There are plenty of other receipts regardiing the other wars we’ve been led to sacrifice our blood for over the last century.
And it’s amazing how well that propaganda worked.
The American Banks were lending massive amounts to England and France and would have taken a major haircut had the Central Powers won.