The Tillman Story
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jar132
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoOn a 2004 Fox News program, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter refused to believe that Cpl. Pat Tillman, recently deceased in Afghanistan, admired Noam Chomsky and planned to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Her refusal to release Tillman from the hero box in which she and others had imagined him indicates Tillman's role as national signifier, a role explored in Amir Bar-Lev's 2010 documentary film, The Tillman Story. The film avers that at the time of Tillman's death, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan becoming quagmires, the American people—and especially military and government leaders—needed to validate the conflicts with the story of a pure, selfless, and valiant patriot fighting to the death. Though the George W. Bush administration attempted to mold the Tillman story into the myth of a heroic death, the story as told by his outraged family in this film could not—would not—gratify that effort. As his mother, Dannie Tillman, laments near the film's conclusion, “he was a human being … by putting that saintly quality on him, you’re taking away the struggle of being a human being.”
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