Three years after the release of Top Gundirector Oliver Stone clips Tom Cruise's wings in Born on the 4th of Julyan exciting adaptation of the memoirs of a Vietnam War veteran.
In 1989, America's great comeback ended. (« Let’s Make America Great Again ! ») dreamed of by Ronald Reagan. The B-movie actor catapulted to the White House nine years earlier folds up shop definitively and gives way to George Bush Sr. The curtain then comes down on everything a viscerally chauvinistic, militarist, Manichean and virilist part of cinema that embody the « hard bodies » of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and other bodybuilders (see Cinema of the Reagan yearsunder the direction of Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb).
This imperialist triumphalism obliterates a not-so-distant past when the United States was bogged down in the South Asian jungle. After having it condemned (Journey to the end of hell), sublimated (Apocalypse Now)rewritten (The Green Berets) et repatriated (Rambo)America relegates the Vietnam War in the closet and with her, veterans fooled by the motherland. It is in this country struck by amnesia that a surviving filmmaker inoculates a double dose of antidote to the Reagan virus. Three years later Platoon, Oliver Stone exposes to the public a different kind of war in Born on the 4th of Julystory of the return carried by a Tom Cruise fees paid from Top Gun Tony Scott.
The eternal return
In 1976America, colorful in blue, red and white, celebrates the bicentenary of its Independence. The administration of President Gerald Ford surrendered three years after the proclamation of a cease-fire in Vietnam. While broken faces and Vietnamese refugees flock to the country's gates, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) regurgitates his militia paranoia in the streets of Dante's New York. Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese.
Thousands of kilometers away, a Francis Ford Coppola on lithium films his Apocalypse Now in Manila. At the end of the year, pre-production of Journey to the end of hell. In this atmosphere of resilience appear in bookstores the memoirs of a Vietnam veteran, Ron Kovic, Born on the 4th of July.
« It was the dramatic story of a Long Island boy, American from head to toe, who grew up in a large family where patriotism was second nature. He enlisted in the Marines and was seriously injured in Vietnam. The heart of the work focuses on the way in which Kovic adapts to this new life which no longer has anything to do with the previous one.«
Oliver Stone — In Search of the Light
Producer Martin Bregman (Serpico, A dog's afternoon) rushes to acquire the rights, to script the life of Kovic and to give it to his friend Al Pacino. The perilous enterprise fails in the hands of Oliver Stone, an ex-GI who attended New York University, whose only baggage is an experimental short film inspired by his war experience. “I didn’t want to identify with this man who had suffered so much.” Nor confront the impasse of a scenario of his own on the return of a young one-armed veteran.
If he fears “Bregman's merciless injunctions », control freak as hell, Stone took on the task after having met Ron Kovic at length. William Friedkinin disgrace after the bitter failure of Convoy of Fear, agrees to bring this first version to the screen provided that we restore order to this film dripping with Americanness “pure sugar”.
The triumphant release of Back the Hal Ashbythe story of a former football champion who returned mutilated from the front for which Ron Kovic was consulted, dissolves the fine team of Born on the 4th of July. “I hated all of Hollywood, this bunch of cowards! Nobody liked what I was doing, nobody wanted my films! Nobody wanted to see the true face of Vietnam! »bellows the director in his memoirs, disgusted to witness, helplessly, the swarm of vengeful comeback films: Rambo II, Missing…
After Platoonanother project long mistreated by Hollywood, Stone brings his film back from the drawer, this time without Al Pacino, but with a young Samaritan, Tom Cruise, head of the US Air Force. Born on the 4th of July will interweave three stories of America from the 60s to the 80s.
Three men and one destiny
Station at do not hastily compare the story of Ron Kovic and that of Oliver Stone. Although they were born in 1946, they do not live in the same America.
« Ron had been everything I hadn't been in New York in the 1950s: boy scout, baseball star and wrestler. He had several brothers and sisters, his father ran a grocery store, his mother attended church regularly and hung crucifixes on almost every wall in their house. He was deeply religious, and President Kennedy's call to serve his country […] had affected him considerably.«
Oliver Stone — In Search of the Light
At the same time, Oliver Stone, originally from Manhattanprefers the conservatism of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. His Vietnamese experience began in 1965 whenhe taught English for six months in Saigon. Kovic, born in Massapequa, already has one year of experience in the field. Stone returned to Vietnam in '67, this time in volunteer. A few months later, a bullet lodged in Kovic's spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed. With the Purple Stone and Bronze Star on his chest, Oliver Stone returned to New York in 1968, almost physically intact but broken from the inside.
« Vietnam showed me violence at its peakhe explains in an interview with the magazine MovieMakerin 2023. I thought the Vietnam War would be over, but I found […] a second war [aux États-Unis]. » That of the impossible honorable amends of a defeated country which, shamefully, displays the glorious veterans of the Second World War in its 4th of July parades as illustrated by one of the first sequences of his film where we see the very young Ron Kovic staring at bedridden survivors on the main street of Massapequa.
Ironically, a film to glorify the American army rearmament Born on the 4th of July. Biggest commercial success of 1986, Top Gun revitalizes the archetype of the young American hero in a context of nuclear war fantasized by Washington. The arrogant Maverick annihilates with the contagious youthful energy of Tom Cruise the Travis Bickle, Benjamin Willard (Apocalypse Now) and others.
Confined to a wheelchair for two hours, does the actor clear his good conscience in Born on the 4th of July ? Beyond mutilating teen jumping from Risky Businesswhich earned Cruise his first Oscar nomination, Oliver Stone turns the weapons put into his hands against the United States willy-nilly.
The enemy from within
Feverish and feverish film, Born on the 4th of July wants to be less a post-Vietnam biography in the vein of Back – or too little known Hero by Jeremy Kagan – herean allegorical story. Oliver Stone encapsulates the timed of America in the 60s to the sound of a superb, but little-quoted, soundtrack by John Williams mixing martial trumpet with a certain melodrama.
The doloristic injunctions of the high school sports teacher (“Kill!” To win, you have to suffer! ») buzz in the ears of Ron, indoctrinated to the core both by his family, pious but bellicose, as by pop culturewhich Stone doesn't bother to point out despite the flashy staging. “Before leaving for Vietnam, Ron and I only knew about war through the movies et la BD : Sergent Rock, Audy Murphy, John Wayne »explains the director in the columns of Mondein 1989.
Born on the 4th of July work against propaganda cinema broadcast by Hollywood from the 40s to the 80s. Three central sequences offer a visceral reverse shot to this nationalist production which cultivates its own mythology. The first, in which a recruiter extols the merits of “13 weeks of hell on Parris Island” at Massapequa high schools repeats almost identically », underlines Louis Blanchot judiciously in The lives of Tom Cruise, a scene of the same ilk in Top Gun.
The purely Vietnamese part of Born on July 14, saturated with crimson hues, crystallizes the aesthetic and ideological project of the film. The explosion of blood and dust captured by Stone's bumpy camera responds to the battle rewritten and glorified by Allan Dwan in It Jima. The open-air mass grave is followed by a filthy hospital setting in the Bronx where Kovic, neglected, struggles to literally get back on his feet, a performative martyr to which a glamorous young Marlon Brando submits in the clean dying of They were men Fred Zinnemann.
Cruise's plea (“I just want to be treated like a human being!”) drowns in the socio-cultural chaos of the early 1970sbetween the awakening of Black Power (“Vietnam is shit for us! »launches an African-American nurse) and the deconstruction of sexualities. On the sidelines of his counter-offensive, Oliver Stone depicts masculinity in crisis through the figure of a tragic emasculated anti-hero who doesn't know what to do with his sexuality without his genitals.
A subsidiary narrative line that the filmmaker abandons (too quickly), curiously anxious to achieve reconciliation in an almost messianic tone. Invited to speak at a Democratic Party convention, Kovic disappears in a halo of light, signaling the start ofan “American-style” resurrection.
Platoon et Born on the 4th of July do not completely liquidate Oliver Stone's Vietnamese trauma. The filmmaker added a final opus to his diptych in 1993, Between heaven and earth with Tommy Lee Jones, melodramatic and pompous reverse shot inspired by the ordeal of an uprooted Vietnamese peasant woman.
