Watching Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds left me with a sort of shock; I sat in my dorm room completely mesmerized as the credits rolled and the American troops marched on happily to the beat of a drum and some merry trumpets. I thought to myself: what was the point? Not the point of the film, for that is clear. But what was the point of America’s involvement in Vietnam? In his film, Davis uses exquisite cinematic rhetoric in order to persuade even the most conservative viewers of the horrors of the Vietnam War. Furthermore, he incorporates captivating footage that frames the Americans as the bad guys that no proponent of the Vietnam War could defend against.
Where to start, where to start? Hearts and Minds is full of foils and ironies that portray the tragedies of war. The film begins with nothing terrifying: U.S. troops walking peacefully through a Vietnamese village with some nice local background music. Then, a brief history of what led up to the war. Ever so slowly, Davis begins to build his argument against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The first example of when Davis begins to depict the U.S. as ignorant is with footage from an interview with Walt Rostow, an aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. When asked why the Vietnamese need the U.S. there, you see him stumble as he attempts to answer; perhaps because he doesn’t have a good one?
As Davis’ argument becomes stronger and stronger, he begins to use the same pattern of rhetoric in order to win his argument: he will show a clip of the Vietnamese and then foil it with an American saying the complete opposite, thus accomplishing his goal of making the U.S. look bad. And this technique works brilliantly. It is also shocking to note some of the quotes he gets from the Americans. In many cases, his rhetoric isn’t even needed because the idiots make the case against themselves. For example, take the officer talking about the church service: “I turned around and looked at their faces...and my feeling for America just soared...they looked determined and reverent at the same time, but still they're a bloody good bunch of killers.”
Throughout most of the documentary, there is still a slight argument that could be posed against Davis’ attitude, which is that there were obviously many Americans being killed in gruesome manners as well. However, he seals the deal in two ways: repeatedly stating that WE were the intruders and, most effectively, with a quote from a big shot, General Westmoreland: “the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.” It left me with a feeling of shame for my country. Of course, there are two sides to every story, and I do not believe that any particular American or even America as a whole is 100% to blame for every atrocity that occurred in Vietnam. However, it makes me sad that so many of us don’t respect human life equally. Hearts and Minds successfully points out how much death occurred in the war…and to what end?
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