Acid Cinema Special Edition: The VIETNAM Experience

The topic of critical backlash against INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is still hot two weeks after the film opened, and seems aimed primarily at the "light" portrayal of the plight of the Jewish people under Nazism, and the Jewish-American commando squad's glorified brutality-- the "fire with double-fire" approach. These issues point me to a dilemma that afflicts many Americans, the refusal to see beyond the bogus facade of "civilized morals"--even when their own lives hang in the balance.

When Wes Craven or Charles Bronson turn the other cheek back around and start blasting and hacking, we're supposed to go "oh how quickly civilized behavior falls away to reveal the savage!" and supposedly go home and feel bad about how quickly civilized behavior falls away to reveal the savage and worse, how much we enjoyed seeing it happen. But to me, I just feel bad that it's not quick enough, that the sucker vacationers in American horror and revenge movies don't start reverting to savagery until needless damage has been done to the RV, and when they do, there's little celebration of their return to the true wilderness of the chthonic. Once you realize you're in a horror or war film and no rescuer is going to hear your screaming and whining, you can begin to fight back, to find self-reliance, the true warrior spirit. It's like when a kid sent to his room until he learns to behave, he kicks and cries and gets it out of his system, he never stops crying or kicking but then after awhile realizes he's stopped, is calmer, and goes downstairs all at peace, realizing instinctively he's able to rejoin his parents, and they're going to not even bring up his tantrums but just accept the newfound man.

Hollywood's forgotten or doesn't want to remember this parenting strategy because it still thinks mom will come if it just cries and screams long enough. Maybe I was lucky to have parents who let me figure it out for myself, who were trained by whatever 70s child psychology Jaycees speaker wandered their way to resist their instinctive urge to soothe my fits of tears and rage. So maybe its this parental weakness across the board that has led to the change of a nation of adults to a nation of infants expecting, as Camille Paglia says, the law to behave like nurturant mother. Now when the final girl finally kills the slasher, she no longer bellows her victory cry but instead reverts back to being a frazzled whiner...

And it all leads me to ask why and realize that my Acid Movie thread must now address Vietnam. Before I begin, please keep in mind this DISCLAIMER, that I'm always only really talking about movies, not "reality." I have no idea what being a soldier is actually like, and I thank god I missed the draft, but I'm a big WW2 history enthusiast, played war nonstop up until the age I started smoking weed instead, but I am fascinated by the whole process, again, as seen in films and documentaries. And taking acid is a little like losing yourself to a primal savagery that can move beyond civilized empathy as needed. As a man you are far less likely to let a girlfriend manipulate her with tears and sniffling.

The story of acid in the America of the 1960s is a story of a nation in conflict between a renewed lust for life and an enhanced drive towards death, between the Rebels and the Republic, the old guard Don Draper types clinging by their fingernails to the 1950s American dream as it dissolved around them and the crazy peaceniks mocking and deriding everything that dream stood for. While dad swilled a cold beer and cheered the bombers on the news, his kids were out in Central Park, dropping tabs and flashing peace signs. Seldom before or since in American history has the line between old and young, life and death, love and hate, conformity and free-thinking, been so sharply and clearly drawn. And, in the field of combat, the same line existed between delusional top brass notions of "heart and minds" and the real blood-and-ambiguity-drenched quagmire of the killing field.

LSD erased all those lines...as well as all other artificial social constructs. It could make you very peaceful with yourself as you committed horrific violence against yourself or others, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream of disconnect... On acid, you realize that even killing can be an expression of love... just ask the Manson family! Or the babysitter nuking the kid in the microwave and putting the TV dinner to bed (as the old wives' take went), or Native Americans apologizing to the buffalo as they kill it, understanding that they're killing themselves for all is connected. All murder is just projected suicide. The Native American's knew we always only ever eat ourselves. On acid, we knew it too. We tasted it. And it tasted like majestic purple mountains.


Taking acid certainly could prove a boost to your perception, heightening and sharpening your senses enabling the user to transcend their usual social more-laced strait-jacket. Whether over in the war or at home, what seemed like unshakable bedrocks only hours before--marriage, church, state, government, patriarchy, tradition--became suddenly clownish, yesterday's papers, tools of hypnosis to keep the cattle placid. Acid made killing 'real' to non-combatants because it shuckered them loose from the grip of the patriarchy, helped them think like the enemy, or how they imagined the enemy thought; slinking through the jungle, hard-wired and alive to every flapping beetle wing and blowing leaf, and best of all, free of all the moral inhibitions about killing that would mean almost certain death if left unchecked back in boot camp. Mashing open an innocent Vietnamese farmer's face with the butt of your rifle (as in PLATOON) would be intolerable sober, but is just another freaky thing to trip out once you surrender to the fact that you're living in a world... of... shit, as Private Pyle puts it in FULL METAL JACKET (1987). They didn't give acid out in the boot camp though, but beatings. Same result.

An integral -- though demonized by the liberal press-- part of boot camp is hazing, the beating of lagging cadets with soaps wrapped in towels, to toughen them up, give them a face-to-face taste with unendurable pain, the kind that transforms and darkens you, makes you less afraid since you know it can't get any worse. Anything less than that level of prolonged and traumatic beating up is just business as usual from then on; the volume is turned way down. This tradition is nothing new, and corresponds to Native American rituals that involve hanging by pierced shoulder muscles until you see your white buffalo vision and know you are a man. Women have the agony of childbirth; men have to find their own.

Or, you could just try taking too much acid, a sort of self-induced hazing. Either way, you have to do something to free yourself from living life in a state of fear-based wussiness... it takes a jolt to your whole body-mind-spirit in order to shake the civilized cowardice out of a man, to obliterate all breadcrumb trails back to mommy. You can't wait to turn savage after you're savagely killed, by then it's too late. You have to be already on fire to fight fire with fire. A shrink might call it trauma-induced sociopathy but then again, that in itself would hardly disqualify you from the draft.

In Private Pyle's case, the hazing works all too well, but he doesn't even wait to get to the jungle before he has to start blasting. There's always that one dopey kid in your circle who makes the mistake of letting the newly freed inner demon take over completely. Rather than just harnessing its energy. This dopey Pyle-type always has to do something stupid like mess with the cops or pull out his stash in public, or try and rape an elderly lady in the middle of the park, or play one last round of Russian roulette.


But if you do it right and stay open to change, just allow the demon to have a share in the company and not full ownership, then you're in business. You can let the demon out when you need to be cold and merciless, such as when breaking up with a long-time lover; breaking a dog's neck to put it out of its misery after you accidentally run it over; pulling the plug on comatose grandma's breathing apparatus, and so on. With the demon at the reins, hearing someone plead for their life doesn't break your heart anymore. Don't they see that death is no different than life? That they're just scared of the unknown, of change? That they're behaving like a kid trying to talk his mom out of making him leave for the first day of school? Death is just the kindergarten of the next level education system. Really it's their ego that's scared, for it knows it will be truly dead, for the ego does not endure, and once the ego is dissolved, all fear goes with it. When your brain is exploding with the eternity of existence, you no longer whine to yourself about whether your friends are giving you enough credit for its luminosity. And so, what is war but an amusement park, a roller coaster on which you give your war shout and wave your hands (because if you don't you'll probably scream like a buried-alive Poe character?


In Oliver Stone's PLATOON (1986) the life/death line is drawn between the "cool" soldiers who smoke pot and dance and sing like a bunch of ANIMAL HOUSE-meets-MASH regulars, headed by Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) vs. the bourbon-swilling homicidal conservatives, represented by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger). You may be too young to remember, but PLATOON really hit a national nerve when it came out in 1986. Vietnam vets would see it and cry afterward, right in the theater, I know because I saw one, finally recognizing and then releasing some of the horror they had been holding in for so long. I was a sophomore in college and our homework in America in the 1960s class was to get out to the off-campus theater and see it, and so my gang of hippies and we figured, why not eat mushrooms beforehand? We called a cab, piled in, and the cool driver takes one look at our tie-dyes and said "go ahead and smoke a joint if you want."

We knew this homework assignment had become something akin to a living myth.


For me, the film and shrooms kicked in at once to result in a quick descent into a palpable madness of paranoia and nihilism. In the surround-sound theater, I could sense every bug buzz, every snap of a twig, in the jungles all around me, knowing the buzzing gnats slowly moving around might turn any moment into VC twig snaps, that every possible rustle of leaves might mean death. The experience was so vivid, my friend Jason had to leave during the Mai Lai massacre segment, but I was really into it... It was that feeling of "why not just kill 'em all?" that comes from being pushed past your limits, the realization that insanity has a purpose, a grisly kind of freedom. I was 19, the perfect draft age. The mushrooms in conjunction with the movie had shown me the ambivalent killer I could have been with just the flick of a switch.


This "death-embracing" aspect of LSD is something America never has been able to reconcile with its more peaceful half, just throwing baby and bathwater alike into prison and barring the door on any further conversation, at least in the US. In England the late-inning demonizing was taken with a grain of salt, and the Nietzschean rebirth from civilized wanker into super-warrior via psychedelics thing appears in British films to this day. Leo DiCaprio taps into it for his psychedelic interlude during a stretch of THE BEACH (2000) and Cillian Murphy finds his inner psycho for the climax of 28 DAYS LATER (2002). Shauna Macdonald (above) experiences a similar death/rebirth when falling into a pit of menstrual blood signifier slime in THE DESCENT (2005). It's the last straw of horror that snaps her free into CARRIE-style warrior woman.


The Japanese have always been fans of this conversion and the slew of samurai films such as SWORD OF DOOM (1966) illustrate a cosmic understanding of the difference between sympathy and true compassion. The antihero main character played by Tatsuya Nakadai, for example, kills a weary old man he meets on a hill, just because he seems to be a burden to his granddaughter. In sword battle contests he only cares about perfection of technique, barely noticing the corpses he leaves in his wake. Perhaps the Japanese, British, and Germans for that matter, are just a little better at "going there." May I venture to guess it comes from being bombed (more than once)?

We Americans can't abide freedom from resolve-weakening liberal head games without a little help from our lysergic friends. We need far more of a push to shed our civilized moral paralysis, as we see in our terror of issues like euthanasia, castration and abortion. Comatose, paralyzed, dying patients are kept alive for years, and convicted sex offenders begging to be castrated are turned down flat due to minor health risks. Every hospital should have a man like Willard/Kurz in APOCALYPSE NOW or SWORD OF DOOM's Tatsuya Nakadai (above) to walk through the wards and dispassionately off the incurably sick or comatose, castrating and severing and doing whatever needs to be done. But it's shocking just to think of it. We are too scared to face death square in the eye! Won't someone think of the children!!?!?!

But we do have Vietnam, a shorthand signifier of the 'state of mind' where American hypocrisy collapses on itself and leaves you standing there in the bush with a gun in your hand, clinically insane from lack of sleep, and with a head full of contradictory orders.



APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) is the ultimate trip for Vietnam, the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY of war films, updating the original acid story, Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS to accommodate a broad spectrum of black comic situations. Brando's ambiguity as Kurz in the last section is always a bit of a let-down to what came before (maybe Brando wasn't 'experienced' anymore by then?). But before he bogs it up, the peaks happen often, most notably in the big bridge scene that's preceded by Lance mentioning to Chef (Frederic Forrest) as they're cruising up to the final checkpoint, beyond which is Cambodia: "You know that last tab of acid I had? I dropped it." Forrest replies, as if barely listening, "Far out."

Willard (Martin Sheen) gets off the boat at the bridge, bringing Lance with him like a magic protection symbol, like the white cloth pinned to the nurse's jacket in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. Everyone fighting at this bridge seems lost and abandoned ("Who's in charge here?" / "Ain't you?") until they find a taciturn spectral presence named Roach (the Duane Jones zombie figure equivalent from IWAZ) who they bring out of his pot-smoke-and-Hendrix-filled cubby hole so he can take out a crazed VC sniper in the black night distance. "He's close man... real... close", says the Roach, his eyes glazed over with the 1000 yard stare. He loads his grenade launcher and just fires it straight up into the air without even looking, BAM, all is quiet, no more sniper. Roach's face barely changes except to snarl a bit as he whispers, "motherfucker" and pops out his grenade shell


"Soldier," an impressed, spooked Willard asks him. "Do you know who's in charge here?"

"Yeah" says Roach before disappearing back into the blackness. Who does the Roach mean? the devil? Or something even more bizarre, past duality, the Kali energy loosed upon the world? Roach is the end point of the Lance and Bunny mystical surrender/conversion... the ultimate acid soldier. His very name is synonymous with adaptation and survival: Roach will inherit the earth and in his stoned, gone expression is the true spirit of the Vietnam War -- at least as understood by the hippie layman.

Willard's question is, to Roach, Jimi Hendrix's same question in that song, "Are you experienced?" i.e. have you taken acid and 'passed' the test it dropped on your desk? The answer to both is the same: "yeah." (Roach looks a lot like Hendrix might in the war). No doubt that Roach is "experienced."

Earlier in the film we see the crew panic and machine gun a boat full of Vietnamese, but it's they who then label Willard the cold blooded killer when he shoots the sole wounded survivor. Willard notes that the American approach to Vietnam was "to shoot you full of holes and then give you a band-aid." and that the brass wanting to take down Kurz for killing a few suspected spies is "like passing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." We can't really blame the crew, just kids who know--as we do--any false move on the part of a seemingly innocent boat family might result in a suicide bomb or pulling a machine gun from a bag of rice.

According to the documentary, HEART OF DARKNESS, Coppola, cast and crew did lots of acid on set in the Philippines and you can feel it in the film's pulsing dissolves and apocalyptic imagery. Similarly, for PLATOON, Oliver Stone was actually there as a foot soldier in Vietnam and is admittedly very much "experienced." In each case you can feel the understanding of the killer instinct and the refusal to condemn it in the hypocritical "give 'em a band-aid" way of the American social structures.

THE DEER HUNTER focuses on the moment of facing this fear of death, but it never gets past it. Walken's addiction to Russian roulette indicates a kind of suicidal ideation autopilot. But the moods of APOCALYPSE NOW and PLATOON move beyond fear of death and into deep archetypal breakdown like true acid poetry. Cimino can't get beyond his own limited leftist jaundice.

In the end, you need to overcome your fear of death in order to become a true warrior. For some reason the bulk of cowardly Middle America thinks of tripping as somehow treason against humanity, and yet it would make for better soldiers, less afraid of dying. Almost all the people who want psychedelics to stay illegal have never tried them, just as people who want guns illegal don't own them. People are against the death penalty because their loved ones were never murdered. It's all part of the same hypocrisy.

Who's in charge here? Anyone with the balls to let go of fear and stick out their tongue for the real eucharist. As Brando advises in APOCALYPSE NOW, "you must make a friend... of horror." It's the only true thing he says, even if he already said it in LAST TANGO IN PARIS.