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A People’s History of Empire, or the Imperial Recuperation of Vietnam? Countermyths and Myths in Heaven and Earth

Gloria Kwok

Truman State University

Using the concept of myth, this essay mounts a diagnostic critique of Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth to interrogate its historical and political significance. The film provides critical correctives to the limited representations of most Hollywood Vietnam War films, contributing to a fuller historical accounting of the war. As a political construction, it contributes to the American recuperation of Vietnam as an object of neoliberal imperialism. The film’s historical and political-economic context suggests that its countermyths are in the service of a new type of intervention by the United States: enclosing Vietnam within the neoliberal economic Washington consensus.

Key Words: Hollywood Vietnam War films • Heaven and Earth • political economy of culture • representation in cinema • imperialism and Vietnam

Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 3, 256-272 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0196859905275241


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