But otherwise, time does not treat Platoon well, despite its Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Like its artier predecessors The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), it batters the facts not into a conspiracy theory but into a pseudo-tragic allegory, one that should have seemed embarrassingly sophomoric even then.
Nonetheless, Platoon’s triumph marked Stone as a filmmaker who was willing to show the truth, however unsettling. To quote a line from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a film that came out the same year and was perhaps more deserving of honors, this seemed like moviemaking capable of “seeing something that was always hidden.”
Such a characterization might apply more fittingly to another film Stone made in 1986, Salvador. In it James Woods starred as down-and-out, real-life journalist Richard Boyle (he co-wrote the screenplay), who, desperate to turn his life around, drives to the Central American country of the title with his druggie sidekick, played by Jim Belushi. It’s Fear and LoathingMeets theDeath Squads, and despite being derivative of such previous films as Missing, its lurid authenticity, rollicking pace, and political prescience — it came out the same year as the Iran-Contra scandal — remain vital today. It scored with critics but not with audiences, and earned a couple of Oscar nominations (Best Actor, Best Screenplay) probably on the coattails of Platoon. But audiences didn’t buy it. It was too immediate, too real, too close to what they were seeing on depressing news broadcasts.
Or would see, if the networks had the guts to show it. More than merely an exposé of the US government’s unholy collusion with fascist death squads south of the border, Salvador would prove the first in a series of films in which Stone would analyze the state of the media and find it wanting. By the time of Salvador, the heroic investigators of Watergate in All the President’s Men (1976) have given way to a besotted loser like Boyle, whose few moments of revelatory integrity are ignored by the superficial, cowardly, and vain journalistic powers that be. In Talk Radio (1987), the clarity and decency of such news pioneers as Edward R. Murrow have been corrupted into the bullying irrationality of talk-show screamers. And in Natural Born Killers (1994), Bonnie & Clyde takes a Tarantino-esque detour through Network to demonstrate how the media no longer just reports on violence and sleaze, but creates it as well.
Each of these films has flaws in its arguments; Talk Radio did predict the overwhelming popularity of that format, but saw it as liberal-leaning and not shriekingly right-wing, as it would turn out. While Killers condemns the media for pandering to trash, sensationalism, and human debasement, it hypocritically exploits these vices as well, all the while suggesting a need for censorship. And Salvador, the best of the three, nonetheless succumbs to a simplistic myth of macho posturing. But the three films indicate that Stone saw a need for another outlet, aside from the media, for reporting the truth in America: movies; Oliver Stone movies.
