Hearts
and Minds is a
documentary film about the United States’ intervention in the war between the
communist and non-communist forces in Vietnam. The film was released in 1974; a
year after the Paris Peace Accords and a year before the fall of Saigon to the
communists. Several scholars have already assessed Hearts and Minds often coming to slightly indecisive conclusions as
to whether the film does distort the reality of the Vietnam War. For incidence McCullough
notes that the director Peter Davis ‘presents the truth of what happened in
Vietnam, but through manipulation and editing, furthers his anti-Vietnam war
point of view.’[1]
This discussion will attempt to show that distorting the past is an accusation
that most historical accounts cannot avoid and is certainly inevitable when
referring to the Vietnam War. This view will be complemented by points made by
other public and academic commentators concerning this film, the Vietnam War
and documentary filmmaking.
Walter Goodman was one of Hearts and Minds’ initial critics,
labelling it ‘propaganda’ for distorting real images and events in order to
support a simplified thesis about the Vietnam War.[2] In
the commentary of the 2002 DVD version of Hearts
and Minds Davis acknowledges the affect his personal bias had on the film and
says he never claimed to provide an objective account on the war. Film scholar
Barnouw defends this viewpoint stating that documentaries cannot avoid
subjectivity, ‘one can hardly imagine a documentary, or a film, or any kind of
communication that is not propaganda-
in the sense of trying to present evidence that may enlarge understanding and
change ideas.’[3]
Hunt remarks that while academic literature may be more complex and nuanced
than history on screen, each new addition to the discourse is still essentially
a ‘polemical interjection’ primarily due to the author’s attempts to apply
meaning to past incidents in order to understand them. Hunt states that such
accounts need to confront the broader scholarship via a dialectical process in
order to be accepted as a viable perspective that can be incorporated into the subject’s
historiography.[4]
Hearts
and Minds is primarily
based upon Davis’s personal experience of collecting nearly 200 hours of
original film footage in Vietnam and the United States during the latter stages
of the war. Davis’s experiences and footage informed his outlook of the war and
allowed him to create a narrative with a
montage of sources including testimonies of people who had some connection to
the Vietnam War and from other film footage he felt related to the topic.[5]
Davis states in the commentary that as he became more intimately involved in
the subject while filming, ‘I became much less opinionated and much more in the
way of feeling.’ Viewers of the film share some of Davis’s despair for the
inhumanity of war as they witness real suffering and raw emotion from all sides
of the conflict. Even critics like Kanfer acknowledge,
‘Throughout, Hearts and Minds displays
more than enough heart. It is mind that is missing. Perhaps the deepest flaw
lies in the method: the Vietnam War is too convoluted, too devious to be
examined in a style of compilation without comment.’[6]
Hearts
and Minds has no
narrator, Davis says in his commentary that this was done in order to, ‘remove
that curtain that comes between a person and the experience on film of people
feeling.’ The lack of an
authorative voiceover means that Hearts
and Minds primarily conforms to the traits of an ‘observational documentary.’
Warrington defines this genre as being a compilation of, ‘the recording of
phenomena as they happen, with little or no commentary.’[7]
The audience sees little intervention on the part of the film crew,
augmenting the notion that the filmmaker merely witnessed past events and is
not an agent in its representation via recording and editing. This facilitates
an impression that the whole film is a literal representation of reality.
Barnouw assumes documentary
filmmakers make their intentions clear, thereby acknowledging the film’s agenda.[8] This
does not apply to Hearts and Minds. Most
detractors of Hearts and Minds criticise
it for excluding coverage of communist atrocities in Vietnam while emphasising
ones committed by Americans and their allies.[9]
Davis defends himself during the film’s commentary by saying his film only
contemplated American actions. However the audience is unaware of his
objectives and therefore believes the film is considering the whole war.
In his commentary Davis states
that Hearts and Minds sought to
address three questions about the United States; ‘Why did we go to Vietnam?’,
‘What did we do there?’ and ‘What did the doing in turn do to us?’ To help
address these questions Hearts and Minds provides
juxtaposing testimonies of supporters and opponents of the American
intervention in Vietnam. However there isn’t much dialectical tension because the
arguments made by people who supported American intervention are always
unconvincing and therefore undermine their own stance. Davis’ editing and
selection of sources emphasizes this notion by contrasting their arguments with
more compelling perspectives and by showing them discrediting themselves. Most
infamously this occurs near the end of the film with the testimony of General
Westmoreland, the commander of US military operations in Vietnam between 1964
and 1968. Westmoreland states that, ‘The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life
as does a Westerner...as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not
important.’ This testimony was preceded by four minutes of distraught North and
South Vietnamese people mourning the loss of their loved ones, including a man
who accuses Nixon of murdering his daughter. Westmoreland’s racist statements
are not only reinforced as immoral but also fatal because he represents a
faction of the United States who had responsibility for conducting a war effort
to ‘save’ one set of Vietnamese people from another. Westmoreland’s statements
suggest that such people did not understand the Vietnamese nor value them as
equals, a point made by opponents of American intervention earlier in the film.
Barbier’s survey of the history and historiography of the Vietnam War notes how
many but not all American policymakers and historians have been ignorant of
Vietnamese perspectives due to their perception of the War as American.[10]
Testimonies in Hearts and Minds that assert
that Americans never understood the Vietnamese are partially legitimated by
Barbier’s analysis while the simplified version presented by Davis provides
complete vindication.
Conversely
testimonies against the war are not challenged or discredited. Daniel Ellsberg declares
that South Vietnam was nothing more than an American creation. Ellsberg’s
testimony is succeeded by South Vietnam’s former President Khanh. Khanh
unintentionally supports Ellsberg’s claim as he provides evidence showing the
American ambassador telling Khanh to leave Vietnam which Khanh says was the
result of his refusal to submit to Washington’s demands. Loicano states that
South Vietnam continues to be remembered by many historians as a nation created
by the United States. Loicano challenges this historiography by showing South
Vietnam did have genuine political and historical reasons to declare
independence from the North but that these claims couldn’t withstand Hanoi’s dominant
narrative of a united Vietnam.[11]
Whether Ellsberg’s assertion is a distortion of the past remains part of a
historical debate; however Hearts and
Minds doesn’t suggest there is one.
Moscardo explains that audiences
can either be rendered ‘mindful’ or ‘mindless’ by what they are presented. A
‘mindful’ audience is aware of multiple perspectives, while the other is
reliant on one source of information without being aware of alternatives.[12]
While the opposing perspectives are provided in Hearts and Minds one is so thoroughly discredited it does not seem
a viable alternative to the reinforced argument that the American intervention
in Vietnam was immoral and careless. Hearts
and Minds’ weighted evidence and illusions of reality means that many uninformed
viewers won’t come away curious but overwhelmed at how ignorant the United
States had been. For this reason the historian Steirer feels obligated to instruct
students of the topic to ‘compensate’ for the film’s ‘purposeful distortion’ by
doing further research in order to come to a deeper understanding of the
subject rather than one that is solely based on emotions.[13]
The Vietnam War is renowned for
being a subject that divides opinions beyond scholarship. Recently Barbier
observed that ‘even a college course’ would still probably be unable to provide
students with an accurate historical picture of the war due to the complexity of
the subject and the debate that attempts to define its meaning.[14]
Barnouw notes that while the documentary series Vietnam: A Television History was acclaimed by many historians for providing
popular audiences with a thorough, multifaceted and indefinite presentation of
the war it was attacked by those who had a more simplistic and often
self-serving perspective of the war.[15] The
divisive legacy the Vietnam War continues to maintain means reaching a historical
consensus proves to be difficult and makes accusations of distorting the past
an inevitability for any accounts on the subject.
Rosenstone advocates that like
other mediums films should be acknowledged as contributing to our understanding
of previous times due to their ability to reflect upon the zeitgeist and our
retrospective capacity to see how they are received.[16] Historians
will regard Hearts and Minds as
lacking the multifaceted narrative required to tell the story of the United
States’ intervention in Vietnam. However in many respects the film is more
provocative than historical. During the film’s commentary Davis states that his
primary objective was to reach a wide audience in order to encourage people to consider
or reconsider the war. The parade sequence at the end of the film highlights a
concern that many morally-informed war opponents had at the time, that Americans were wilfully forgetting
the lessons and terrible consequences of the Vietnam War.[17]
Tallent feels that while the film is one-sided it is justified due to
its attempt to make people contemplate a serious issue. Tallent adds that Hearts and Minds’ antiwar message does
not resort to lying and demonising the opposition like American policymakers
and the mainstream media did for so many years in order to generate support for
the war effort.[18]
Brigham also praises the film for providing a platform for the ordinary
Vietnamese who opposed American intervention. Brigham asserts that before Hearts and Minds many Americans ignored
or were unaware of these people’s perspectives and suffering.[19]
The admiration the film has received from the Academy Awards and by public
commentators decades later not only indicates the film’s ability to leave a lasting
impression upon audiences, but also emphasizes how effective moral arguments
were for the anti-Vietnam War cause.[20] Conversely
the condemnation it aggravated highlighted some of the alternative perspectives
of the subject. By provoking a response Hearts
and Minds inspired debate in public and academic spheres. To an extent this
has enhanced our understanding of the Vietnam War because it exposes how it has
been remembered.
In the majority of cases singular historical
narratives, whatever their medium, do distort our perspective of the past to
some degree due to their inability to incorporate all viewpoints and factors. Hearts and Minds is no exception,
however this is not necessarily a flaw due to the fact it presents a viable and
convincing perspective of the past that was created to counter a dominant
narrative that was guilty of greater distortion for self-serving purposes. Its
primary fault is its subtle authorative tone, which is achieved by editing actual
events into a seamless argument that strongly implies a literal representation
of the past rather than a subjective one.
[1] M. McCullough, ‘Vietnam in a
different light’, Trinity University
(2006),
http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/documentary/m.mccullough.2006.hearts.and.mi
nds.pdf
(21 April 2012).
[2] W. Goodman, ‘The False Art of
the Propaganda Film’, The New York Times,
23 March 1975, p.109.
[3] E. Barnouw, Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film (2nd edn, Oxford,
1993), pp.344-5.
[4] T. Hunt, ‘How Does Television
Enhance History?’, in History and the
Media, ed. D. Cannadine (Basingstoke, 2004), pp.94-5.
[5] ‘Peter Davis on Hearts and
Minds’, http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/peterdavisham.html (15 April 2012).
[6] S. Kanfer, ‘War-Torn', Time, 17 March 1975, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912958,00.html (17 April 2012).
[7] M.H. Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History
on Film (London, 2007), p.128.
[8] Barnouw, Documentary, pp.344-5.
[9] Goodman, ‘Propaganda’, p.109; ‘Hearts
and Minds – A Must to Avoid’, http://vva.org/blog/?p=278 (18 April 2012).
[10] M.K. Barbier, ‘Introduction:
Vietnam in history and memory’, in America
and the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a Generation,
eds. A. Wiest, M.K. Barbier, and G. Robins (New York, 2010), pp.3-5.
[11] M. Loicano, ‘Vietnam divided:
regional history and the Vietnam wars, 1598-1975, in America and the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a
Generation, eds. A. Wiest, M.K. Barbier, and G. Robins (New York, 2010),
pp.15-34.
[12] G. Moscardo, 'Mindful Visitors:
Heritage and Tourism', Annals of Tourism
Research 23 (1996), pp.380-4.
[13] W.F. Steirer Jr, 'Hearts and
Minds', The History Teacher 9 (1976), pp. 664-5.
[14] Barbier, ‘Vietnam Memory’, pp.1-2.
[15] Barnouw, Documentary, pp.319-320.
[16] R.A. Rosenstone, History on film/film on history (Harlow,
2006), pp.22-31.
[17] D. Grosser, ‘ “We Aren’t on the
wrong side, we are the wrong side”: Peter Davis Targets (American) Hearts and
Minds’, in From Hanoi to Hollywood: The
Vietnam War in American Film, eds. L. Dittmar and G. Michaud (New Jersey,
1990), pp.270-1.
[18] C. Tallent, ‘Hearts and Minds:
Analysis of war propaganda and
dehumanization’,
Trinity University (2006),
[19] R.K. Brigham, ‘Hearts and
Minds’, The Criterion Collection (2002),
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/213-hearts-and-minds (12 April 2012).
[20] D. Thomson, ‘Hearts And Minds'
Recaptured’, The Washington Post, 22
October 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51347-2004Oct21; ‘History Worth Repeating’, The Guardian, 5 November 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/nov/05/features (11
April 2012).
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