Overview

When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie. The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years. How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando JosÉ Prats explores in Hollywood’s Imperial Wars. The book offers a new way of understanding the cultural and historical significance of Vietnam in relation to Hollywood’s earlier representations of Americans at war, from the mythic heroism of a film like Sands of Iwo Jima to the rupture of that myth in films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. As early as the mid-1940s, Prats suggests, fears aroused by the Cold War were stirring anxieties about sustaining the heroic myth—anxieties reflected in the insistent, aggressive patriotism in films of the period. In this context, Prats considers the immeasurable cultural importance of John Wayne, the cinematic apotheosis of wartime valor and righteousness, whose patriotism was nonetheless deeply compromised by his not having served in World War II. Prats reveals how historical and cultural anxieties emerge in well-known Vietnam movies, in which characters inspired by the heroes of the Second World War are denied the heroic legacy of their fathers. American war movies, in Prats’s analysis, were forever altered by the loss in Vietnam. Even movies like American Sniper that exalt war heroes are marked as much by the failure of the heroic tropes of old Hollywood war movies as by the tragic turn of actual historical events. Tracing what Prats calls the “anxiety of legacy” through the films of the World War II and post–Vietnam War periods, this book offers a new way of looking at both the Hollywood war movie and the profound cultural shifts it reflects and refracts.

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9780806193755

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Reviews

"""Hollywood's Imperial Wars is a richly detailed account, analysis, and critique of the roots of white male American heroism in its Hollywood forms from Westerns to proto-colonialist, World War II, and Cold War movies to Vietnam and its aftermath. Armando José Prats shows us how and why the heroic myths of American triumphalism were replaced by tragic and ironic accounts of loss and betrayal in the wake of historical defeat in Vietnam. Going beyond Prats's earlier books about cinematic narration (The Autonomous Image) and the representation of indigenous Americans in Hollywood Westerns (Invisible Natives), this is an illuminating and provocative study of American exceptionalism and its discontents.""--Mark A. Heberle, author of A Trauma Artist: Tim O'Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam ""Hollywood's Imperial Wars provides a compelling new perspective on the cultural complexity of the films under discussion and unfolds how the ""heroic legacy"" and the sense of entitlement to that legacy and fears about its legitimacy have traced a bloodstained path through the history of Hollywood and the United States.""--Susan M. White, author of The Cinema of Max Ophuls ""Armando Prats' Hollywood's Imperial Wars is an incisive history and critique of the way war movies shaped Americans' myth of heroic identity, and how filmmakers have responded to the fracturing of that myth by the failed wars in Vietnam and Iraq.""--Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation"

"""Hollywood's Imperial Wars is a richly detailed account, analysis, and critique of the roots of white male American heroism in its Hollywood forms from Westerns to proto-colonialist, World War II, and Cold War movies to Vietnam and its aftermath. Armando Jos� Prats shows us how and why the heroic myths of American triumphalism were replaced by tragic and ironic accounts of loss and betrayal in the wake of historical defeat in Vietnam. Going beyond Prats's earlier books about cinematic narration (The Autonomous Image) and the representation of indigenous Americans in Hollywood Westerns (Invisible Natives), this is an illuminating and provocative study of American exceptionalism and its discontents.""--Mark A. Heberle, author of A Trauma Artist: Tim O'Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam ""Hollywood's Imperial Wars provides a compelling new perspective on the cultural complexity of the films under discussion and unfolds how the ""heroic legacy"" and the sense of entitlement to that legacy and fears about its legitimacy have traced a bloodstained path through the history of Hollywood and the United States.""--Susan M. White, author of The Cinema of Max Ophuls ""Armando Prats' Hollywood's Imperial Wars is an incisive history and critique of the way war movies shaped Americans' myth of heroic identity, and how filmmakers have responded to the fracturing of that myth by the failed wars in Vietnam and Iraq.""--Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation"

Author Information

Armando JosÉ Prats is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kentucky and the author of Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western.

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