The Silver Screen vs. the Printed Page

Film has created some of the most indelible images of Vietnam, particularly for those too young to have watched news coverage of the war. Given the powerful sensory experience of viewing a movie on the big screen, what can books provide that a trip to the local theater can’t? “A book is more participatory,” says Tim O’Brien. “I make up the face of a lead character, but in a movie, I see Al Pacino up there. When I’m reading, I feel like I’m in the book, an actor in it. The scenes stick with me a little more.” Which isn’t to say O’Brien doesn’t enjoy going to the movies as much as the next person; two of his books, Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, are under option, and he quickly calls to mind two films about Vietnam that have made an impression on him.

“I love The Deer Hunter for its central metaphor of Russian roulette,” he says. “Although it’s entirely invented, it carries the feel of combat — the gun against the head feel. Click, I’m alive. Click, I’m alive. But there’s a sense that in the next moment, you won’t be. It’s hard to watch but nonetheless a great piece of art.”

O’Brien says he never met anyone in Vietnam quite like Lt. Colonel William Kilgore, the surfing fanatic played by Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. Yet the scene in which Kilgore commands an air attack on a beachside village with one eye on the surf, bellowing about the smell of napalm in one moment and wave quality the next, has an undeniable authenticity. “I may not have seen anything like that, but the whole war struck me that way,” says O’Brien. “Absurd and peculiar and a little nuts.”