Concealment and Disclosure: From "Birth of a Nation" to the Vietnam War Film

Abstract

This article contends that film and other forms of popular culture place enormously sensitive resources for practical reasoning at the disposal of students of politics and society. After an historical exploration of the role of cinematic representations of war and its aftermath in the development of American political culture, the article analyzes an increasingly complex, philosophically disturbing, and ideologically ambiva lent cinematic genre of the past two decades, films concerned with the American war in Vietnam. While Hollywood films about the Vietnam war to date have disclosed the psychological and subjective dimensions and the toll the war took, they have systematically concealed the tougher, more important moral and political lessons that that tragedy has to teach us. As a form of mass entertainment, films may not exist primarily to help teach us such painful lessons; that social science and political theory can show us that they might is one of this article's animating hopes.

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