ABSTRACT
Historical amnesia and Rambo-style revisionism had apparently done their work, and the "national trauma" was fit to be recycled as action-adventure for a generation too young to remember or too upwardly mobile to care. Granted, all films about Vietnam face a representational problem hitherto unique: that of portraying a war whose repertoire of images is numbingly familiar from the nightly news. The scenes of Ron Kovic's Vietnam wounding and torment in a hellish veterans' hospital are compelling, as is the Grand Guignol of dueling wheelchairs when he hits bottom among a community of the mutilated in Mexico. Though Michael Cimino shows the dark satanic mills of his characters' working lives, and their ritual affirmations of community, he establishes no continuity between the society they inhabit and the society that sends them to Vietnam. Russian roulette is, of course, Cimino's governing metaphor tor the war, and a perverse one at that.
