American films about the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby's Coming Home and Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn't going to get told. John Wayne's film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn't tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on - indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and politicians like to promise - and although terrible damage is still done almost exclusively to Americans in these movies, even worse harm is inflicted on America, on the country's best idea of itself.

LRB 8 May 2008 | PDF Download