Embassy compound in the city that would never again be called Saigon. Schneider’s literal peddling of Stalinist propaganda led Francis Coppola, the director of the Godfather movies, to speak wistfully: “Getting this positive, human, optimistic message was such a beautiful idea to me,” he said, especially since “after what we did to the Vietnamese people, you’d think they wouldn’t forgive us for 300 years.” “We must be doin’ something right to last 200 years” is the key line from the song that opens Nashville , released in 1975. In this unjustly celebrated piece of tedious flapdoodle, director Robert Altman made the title city’s supposed provincialism and taste for casual violence a metaphor for the America he reviled. Altman makes it clear immediately that we are to think America has done “nothin’ right” – the singer who warbles “200 Years” turns on his session pianist and
fires him for having long hair. “You don’t belong in Nashville,” he says. Why would he want to? Nashville is terrible, like the country it represents. Two generations ago, this casual yet ever-present attitude was standard issue. Even so, the mystic chords of anti-Americanism stretching from every multiplex to every living flat screen and Xbox all over this broad land are still touched by the worst angels of our pop culture. But there is nothing unmixed, even when we hit our nadir. Four years before Schneider’s shameful performance, Coppola won the first of his Oscars for the screenplay of Platoon , a film made at the height of the Vietnam war utterly unironic in its celebration of American fighting virtues. It offered a bold portrait of its morally problematic title character as exactly the kind of man we needed to save civilization from the Nazis. Four years after Schneider, Coppola showed he had the capacity to grow following his idiotic praise of the “beautiful” North Vietnamese propaganda message. The release of his own Vietnam movie, Apocalypse Now , demonstrated a far more complex understanding of the war and America’s role in it. Even more striking, the year Apocalypse Now was released, Hollywood gave the best picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter , a movie about Vietnam and its effect on people who would, four decades later, hand the presidency to
Two generations ago, this casual yet ever- present attitude was
standard-issue. Even so, the mystic chords of anti- Americanism stretching from every multiplex to every living flat screen and Xbox all over this broad land are still touched by the worst angels of our pop culture.
American Consequences
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