The Other Living-Room War: Prime Time Combat Series, 1962-1975
1998; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoA writer sardonically observed that was price paid for America's love affair with World War II. After V-J Day, Munich analogy and surprise attack on Pearl Harbor became ideologically potent symbols for twin dangers of appeasement and lack of preparedness, exerting a profound impression on mind-set and conduct of Cold War. Social historian Studs Terkel even ironically dubbed World War II the good war; indeed, bile of only enriched mythos of World War II-ever more good in relation to that very bad in southeast Asia. For hawk and dove, young and old, soldier and protester, World War II was paradigm for way Americans ought to fight a on battlefield and home front alike. disappointed everybody. The War's bitter social divisiveness for Americans must be understood in relation to actual, remembered experience of World War II and, just as important, subsequent mythologizing of that experience in literature, movies, television, and other cultural forms. During World War II, with support and encouragement of federal government, Hollywood enthusiastically boosted effort by producing dozens of combat films and war-related pictures that added propaganda plugs to its traditional entertainment. But during long years of unpopular and undeclared in southeast Asia, with important exception of John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), Hollywood virtually fell silent. Prime-time network television, which had largely succeeded in becoming America's chief medium of popular entertainment, similarly ignored Vietnam. Although a few network series in 1962-1964 occasionally mentioned military advisory mission in South Vietnam, from 1965 to 1968 especially, as American commitment swelled to more than half a million troops and casualties mounted into tens of thousands, War became virtually a taboo topic for prime-time entertainment.' Worse, TV attempts to depict warfare or military life in midst of bloody in yielded, most notoriously, Hogan's Heroes (CBS, 1965-1971) and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (CBS, 1964-1969). The irony, of course, was that increasingly dominated network evening newscasts and documentary reportage in those years, prompting journalist Michael J. Arlen to coin emblematic phrase living-room war to evoke America's simultaneously intimate and distant relationship to Vietnam.2 The actual conflict-and growing domestic controversy-was almost never permitted to penetrate TV's fictional entertainment. As media scholar Todd Gitlin put it: During years of mass demonstrations and counterdemonstrations and ever more violent polarization, no one could imagine how to broach unbroachable without offending at least one large bloc of potential audience . Vietnam was like a plague, says TV writer Howard Rodman.... If anyone touched it, your arm would rot away (226-27). Combat dramas and military sitcoms, most with World War II settings, had begun airing in early 1960s. By 1964, as crept up on American consciousness, networks offered four service comedies and three combat dramas. On fall schedules in 1965, six months after first large-scale deployment of ground combat troops to Vietnam, no fewer than eight military sitcoms and three combat dramas were airing. As in 1940s, Hollywood was gearing up for war, but paralleling political strategy of Johnson administration, it was doing so in an evasive fashion. Newsweek observed this phenomenon in late 1966: Why sudden revival of interest in [World War II]? It's a classic period, says Combat producer Richard Caffey. It has all elements of life and death. Also, unlike in Vietnam, World War 1 does not present problems of potential controversy. It gives you a chance to be definitive, says Hogan's Heroes' producer Ed Feldman. …
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