Hollywood's Imperial Wars: The Vietnam Generation and the American Myth of Heroic Continuity

When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie.The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years. How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando JosÉ Prats explores in Hollywood’s Imperial Wars.The book offers a new way of understanding the cultural and historical significance of Vietnam in relation to Hollywood’s earlier representations of Americans at war, from the mythic heroism of a film like Sands of Iwo Jima to the rupture of that myth in films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. As early as the mid-1940s, Prats suggests, fears aroused by the Cold War were stirring anxieties about sustaining the heroic myth-anxieties reflected in the insistent, aggressive patriotism in film