War-Torn

By Stefan Kanfer

HEARTS AND MINDS

Directed by PETER DAVIS

Procrustes was a mythic giant with a notorious bed. If his guests were too short, he stretched them to fit. If they were too tall, he chopped off the excess. In Hearts and Minds, the giant is impersonated by the film makers. The bed is the film itself.

Beginning with the noblest of motives--examination of the roots and consequences of the Viet Nam War--this vigorous, chaotic documentary manipulates time for its own ends. The bombing of Haiphong harbor, John Foster Dulles' domino theory, J. Edgar Hoover's fears of "common-ists," a brutal football game, '40s war movies--all flow back and forth like sand in an hourglass. The confusion is deliberate. Hearts and Minds, says Producer-Director Peter Davis, "is not a chronology of war so much as a study of people's feelings."

Yet without chronology there can be no perspective, and without perspective there is no history. The viewer is thus left with a winding gallery of glimpses. Some of those glimpses are indelible. The late Georges Bidault, ex-Premier of France, remembers the time before the fall of Dien Bien Phu: "John Foster Dulles asked me, 'And if we were to give you two atomic bombs?' " An intelligence officer recalls the distaste American soldiers had for mutilating bodies. Instead of terrorizing North Vietnamese with human eyes stuck on the back of a corpse (a psy-war trick), the Americans made do with the "eye" of the CBS logo. The camera's harrowing examination of soldiers and beggars, of coffinmakers and grieving fathers, displays an abiding sense of pity and outrage.

But when the camera swings to the Anglo-Saxon side of the Pacific, com passion is jettisoned. That football game, for instance: manifestly the scrimmage is seen as a microcosm of American platitudes. But if sport so accurately reflects a society, what are we to say of the Indians' bloody game of lacrosse? Or the Latin American madness for soccer? The film's visits to Middle America strive for irony and, often, emerge as smugness or crass caricature. An ex-P.O.W.'s return to New Jersey is played against a background of red-white-and-blue-blooded patriots and wide-eyed schoolchildren. The camera, which amply records the agonies of South Vietnamese political prisoners, seems uninterested in the American lieutenant's experience of humiliation and torture.

Yellow Peril. Even on unassailable territory, Hearts and Minds cannot let hell enough alone. When General Westmoreland makes the infamous statement that the Oriental does not prize life as highly as the Westerner, the footage is juxtaposed with a sequence of weeping Vietnamese as a body is lowered into the parched earth. Weaker still is the film's examination of popular culture. Clips are offered from the 1942 film Bataan, from Bob Hope movies and American Legion war games of the McCarthy epoch. These imply that motion pictures are instruments of behavioral conditioning: we fought the Viet Nam War because the screen trained us to hate the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril. The notion that films so easily mold an audience trivializes evil.

Nations and wars are too complex for such simplism. Hearts and Minds discounts those who were genuinely confused or frightened by Communism, and who were being used by McCarthy and his cohort. It minimizes or patronizes those for whom patriotism was more than the fatuous wearing of a flag in a lapel, yet never understood why their sons were sent off to die. On occasion, it brilliantly illustrates America's grievous misunderstanding and savage oversimplification of the Viet Nam War. But, oversimplifying itself, it dismisses those who perceived the intricacies of history, who refused to condone totalitarianism simply because they loathed our Viet Nam intervention. Historical events, like the Korean War, are soon lost in this cinematic shuffle. Attempts at temporal sequence are left to a sentimental Daniel Ellsberg and an unregenerate Walt Rostow.*

Throughout, Hearts and Minds displays more than enough heart. It is mind that is missing. Perhaps the deepest flaw lies in the method: the Viet Nam War is too convoluted, too devious to be examined in a style of compilation without comment. And righteous indignation may tend to blind the documentary film maker to his prime task: the representation of life in all its fullness, not only those incidents that conform to his thesis. Peter Davis is the talented creator of much-prized TV documentaries (Hunger in America, The Selling of the Pentagon). But these were simpler projects on a smaller screen. The subject and scope of the Southeast Asian conflict are too large for such narrow-gauge examination. Unhappily, the war has not yet finished exacting its terrible penalties and distortions. Like so many before it, the procrustean Hearts and Minds began as a warrior; it ends as a casualty.

sbStefan Kanfer

* Rostow recently sued, unsuccessfully, to stop exhibition of the film, claiming that, through tricky editing, he was quoted out of context.

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