The Men Who Stare at Goats: a new Vietnam myth?

Bob Wilton (McGregor) comfortably fills the shoes of the greenhorn outsider plunged headlong into the savage wilderness, and is reliant for survival upon Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney): as archetypal a “man who knows Indians” as you are likely to find this side of the 1960s. The vast, unforgiving desert landscape, the threat to a normative white American polity, the captivity narrative at the hands of a dark-skinned enemy… these and countless other tropes lifted straight out of the classical Hollywood Western are too obvious to justify any more space in this brief missive.

The real point of interest this film offers the viewer, from an historiographical perspective at least, is its use of the recent conflict in the Middle East as a surrogate for the mythos surrounding the Vietnam War. A perilous, alien locale upon which white America’s ideological crises are projected and not necessarily resolved, the “Iraq” we see here is an amalgam of reference points: cultural, historical and cinematic. The appearance of countercultural icon Jeff Bridges as hippie soldier Bill Django – along with the counter-narrative to US militarism which he represents – is especially poignant, redolent of the radicalised appropriation of the Western which proliferated from the late 60s throughout the 70s, and constituted one of many death-knells to the genre’s affirmative ideological function (not least in two Westerns starring Bridges himself: Bad Company (1972) and the much-maligned Heaven’s Gate (1980)). The same underlying desire to rewrite the traumatic history of post-war US imperialism is tangible throughout Heslov’s film.

It is said that Vietnam killed the Western twice over: firstly, by destroying the moral certitude upon which the genre had constructed its narrative of inexorable progress, manifest destiny and regenerative violence; and secondly, as the War itself ended and passed into the collective memory as a repository for the USA’s national narrative, by replacing the Western as Hollywood’s primary mythic stage. It is too early to judge adequately, but The Men Who Stare at Goats indicates that the parallels so frequently drawn between Vietnam and Iraq may extend beyond the reductive clichés so beloved of the sensationalist press, and effect an equivalent shift in the popular imagination.