Susan Mackey Kallis - Oliver Stones America: Dreaming The Myth Outward

Oliver Stone's America

Dreaming the Myth Outward

Susan Mackey-Kallis

First published 1996 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1996 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28181-6 (hbk)

In any scholarly undertaking, one never works completely alone. Accordingly, there are a number of people who have supported me and offered much-needed guidance and friendship throughout. I extend my thanks to Tom Frentz for his critical but supportive review of two chapters of this book in draft form. I deeply appreciate the efforts of Janice Hocker Rushing, who took the time to meet and speak with me about my work and who offered sections of her recent book manuscript to aid in the development of my thinking about Stone's films. I give my heartfelt thanks to my editor Gordon Massman for believing in this book and doing all in his power to bring it to fruition. I humbly thank Oliver Stone for taking the time to meet with me and share some of his own ideas about his work. I will forever be indebted to Mr. Stone for his warm words of praise and his continued belief in my critical insights into his films. I also want to acknowledge Villanova University for its support in the form of a summer research grant that enabled me to write this book. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Kyriakos Kallis, for pushing me to work harder and better, particularly during the times I felt like slacking off or giving up. And thanks, Mom and Dadyou always believed in me, even when I sometimes forgot to believe in myself.

Susan Mackey-Kallis

Oliver Stone is one of the most successful directors currently working in Hollywood. He is also a polemicist with a liberal perspective who is making films about recent U.S. history and culture. That Stone is a successful mainstream filmmaker with an overtly leftist agenda seems surprising, if not counterintuitive, given the history of political filmmaking in Hollywood and conventional wisdom's understanding of the mass media appetite of most Americans. This book is an attempt to account for Stone's success as a filmmaker, to critique his major films, and to place them inside the tradition of political filmmaking in Hollywood.

Oliver Stone, like everyone else a member of Marshall McLuhan's global village, is a storyteller, like the bards of old, weaving parables for the millions of Americans sitting around the international mass-mediated campfire. Like the philosopher king in Plato's allegory of the cave and the Biblical prophets who spoke to the people through parables, Stone has been interpreting three decades of "the shadow play upon the wall,"Stone is all of these. But most of all he is a passionate, if "flawed," moralist who has found a way to sustain a popular and powerful leftist vision of American life. Sometimes Stone's camera is as explosive as a gunshot, designed to startle us out of a naive or politically complacent stupor. At other times it serves as an eviscerating scalpel that leaves us bloodless and drained but somehow better for the cleansing. And often his work weaves a psychedelic love song or Rimbaudlike verse that seduces us, turns us on, and lets us see visions and dream dreams, in turn, of other places, other worlds, other possibilities.

Oliver Stone's major release films, Salvador, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, The Doors, JFK, Talk Radio, Wall Street, Heaven and Earth, and Part of that fictionalizing for Stone involves universalizing historical events and individuals. In order to convey his political perspective, Stone's films create arguments out of images and icons out of individuals. His use of mythological constructions to represent social actualities accounts, in part, for the controversy that surrounds his films, as well as contributing to their power and popularity.

My approach to Stone's work can broadly be defined as rhetorical. Rhetorical criticism of film is a mode of analysis that "regards the work not so much as an object of aesthetic contemplation but as an artistically structured instrument for communication."

Specifically, my analysis of Stone's films is sociopolitical and psychomythological in focus. Sociopolitical critics of mass media identify the larger pictures that films both draw upon and reflect about the sociological and political structures in society. Critics explore how mass media reflect and create particular political ideologies or mythologies; they also examine how ideology and mythology constrain meaning making.Psychomythological criticism explores the mythic dimensions of film, focusing on archetypes, both historical and literary, in their relation to the viewers' experiences. Critics explore how a film's mythic structures, viewed as cultural or universal, draw upon the audiences' unconscious (psychoanalytic) structures as they are played out in a larger social context.

Because Stone's films are rhetorical arguments, powerful mythopoetic polemics that speak eloquently about the problems with American economic, political, and social life, it is particularly useful to explore not simply what they say but also the cinematic means by which they speak. Additionally, it is helpful to understand how the films were received by the critics and the public, and what effects, if any, they may have had on American political life. Oliver Stone's JFK, for example, although not the first film to adopt a conspiracy perspective regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has certainly been the most popular and most widely criticized conspiracy film. It also has the distinction of being one of only a few films in U.S. history that has prompted political action as a result of its release.

In , I consider at length Oliver Stone's history as a screenwriter and filmmaker working inside mainstream Hollywood. I also explore the critical response, both positive and negative, to Stone's screenplays and films as a way to begin revealing the sociopolitical and mythological polemic to which audiences are invited to respond.