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History and the Last Man,24 with its conceit that the liberal democracies (led by the USA) had reached the pinnacle of cultural evolution. Adherents of this thinly disguised piece of neo- conservative rhetoric could bask in the afterglow of the first Gulf War and the emergence of a new lone superpower: truly the final word on the emergence of the ‘American Century’ trumpeted by Henry Luce fifty years earlier. Against this changing backdrop, Talk Radio had sat comfortably within an era of film writing and production that had been celebrated for a discreet set of
). Their life in America promises idyllic recompense for the horrors of the war, but Butler’s memories are too immediate, and 43 Th e ci nem a of Ol iver S to ne 44 the nightmares too overpowering. Tragedy ensues, and the film finds only crumbs of hope in a future of uncertainty for Le Ly and her family at the end. In the space between Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth, the first Gulf War had driven a wedge into the American psyche. During the period of formal hostilities, German reunification had been concluded in October 1990. The troubling lessons
’s attention did not waver, but arguably that of the American audience did; caressed first with the hubris that washed in after the first Gulf War and the embrace of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis;10 and later with the celebrity scandals of O. J. Simpson and Michael Jackson, together with easy political distractions such as the Monica Lewinsky story.11 Stone’s history in Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Nixon was wholehearted and demanding, but the end of the Cold War had untethered the USA and left the past not as prologue –as Stone’s adopted Shakespearean
, as he uses the murder to galvanise support for the war against Persia. In W. the first Gulf War, the failure to topple Saddam Hussein in 1991, and the defeat of his father, George Bush Sr, in the 1992 presidential election, are all seen as staging posts in the politicisation of George W. Bush and shapers in his prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’. Picking up the story, co-written with Stanley Weiser, of Bush (Josh Brolin) in 2002, Stone used a conventional biographical structure employing a series of flashbacks to move between the Bush administration’s preparations
commented in his review on release: ‘[In Stone’s] other films, the leading characters are just vehicles to examine an issue. In Nixon they are the issue.’46 The Watergate saga from break-in to resignation had been played out on national television, and its effects on the country’s psyche were nothing short of cataclysmic. Stone’s portrayal of political figures fixated on power called for self-examination from a population that already had feasted on the first Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and who, a full year before the film’s release, had signed up