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Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy.(Review)
Olive Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy Edited by Robert Brent Toplin, with commentary by Oliver Stone University Press of Kansas, 335 pages, $34.95
Oliver Stone makes memorable and maddening films about recent American history--Kennedy's assassination, Nixon's downfall, the Vietnam War, and so forth. He is driven by ideological animosity against anticommunists and a fantastic vision of a completely hidden because perfectly successful vast rightwing conspiracy. Stone's films are full of obvious and overwhelming errors of fact and interpretation.
Oliver Stone's USA presents a showdown between Stone and some leading historians. They evaluate his films, and he responds. I opened the book expecting that the clever but deranged propagandist would finally get what's coming to him. But not so! Most of the historians in question say that his films raise important issues and cause us to think disconcerting thoughts. Stone is a good man with admirable concerns about war, political corruption, and the nefarious American Right. With a couple of exceptions--most notably the honorable Stephen Ambrose--the historians not only let Stone off easy, they essentially endorse his films!
Stone is left unturned in part because so many of these historians believe that all historical narratives are subjective anyway. We can't really know what happened; so we evaluate historical tales via mythic imagination and political intention. And, when it comes to JFK, Nixon, and Vietnam, Stone and most of these historians are on the same political side.
These scholars are no match for the filmmaker. Stone for the most part views them with condescension. He knows he is more imaginative than they are, and so do they. Acknowledging that Stone's films are far more influential than their books, one of the historians observes that reading has today become "an elitist endeavor." Most Americans' knowledge of their past now comes from the screen, big and small.
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