Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David E. Whillock

Critical Essay by David E. Whillock

SOURCE: "Defining the Fictive American Vietnam War Film: In Search of a Genre," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1988, pp. 244-50.

[In the following essay, Whillock analyzes themes and images in Vietnam combat films and points out the disparities between these films and World War II combat films.]

What should the Vietnam War look like on film? What were the motifs, visual, and thematic, that would emerge as dominant, that would reappear in film after film—with greater or lesser variations—to evolve into a codified 'Vietnam style'?

                     Gilbert Adair Vietnam on Film

The "visual style" that Adair alludes to is the concept of genre and its application to films about Vietnam. One of the major academic pursuits in critical discourse is the application of categories to certain "like" narratives in literature and cinema studies. This "pursuit" has become a major source for critical discourse in film. However, while...
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