Review

General Books

History educators who dismiss the work of film director Oliver Stone and perceive no role for cinematic history in the classroom would do well to consult Oliver Stone's USA edited by Robert Brent Toplin, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and author of numerous scholarly studies on the role of film in American history and culture. This volume is an outgrowth of the film director's appearance before the 1997 meeting of the American Historical Association and Toplin's editing of special issues for the academic journal Film & History on Stone's cinema.	1
While Toplin is often critical of Stone's work, he acknowledges the filmmaker's courage and honesty in confronting his scholarly critics in the historical profession. Accordingly, Toplin has edited a volume in which scholars focus their gaze upon seven of Stone's most controversial films: Salvador, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. In response, Stone read the scholarly contributions and sat down with Toplin for a series of interviews in which the director passionately defended his work. The juxtaposition of the academic essays and Stone's counter arguments make for provocative reading.	2
Educators who have reservations about the use of popular film in the classroom would most benefit from Robert A. Rosenstone's essay in which the film scholar insists that Stone is a historian, whose works vision, contest, and revision history. Rosenstone concludes, "Perhaps in a visual culture, the truth of the individual fact is less important than the overall truth of the metaphors we create to help us understand the past" (p. 38). Therefore, Stone should be evaluated not by factual detail but by whether he is on target with larger historical truths. In opposition, Stone asserts that he is a dramatist and not a "cinematic historian," a term which the director denies ascribing to himself.	3
The contributors are generally positive regarding Stone's Vietnam War films. Randy Roberts and David Welky describe the director as the "most influential historian of America's role in Vietnam" (p. 67). They also maintain that the Vietnam films are based upon Stone's personal experiences in the war, a perspective which the filmmaker acknowledges. Noted journalist David Halberstam contrasts the realism of Platoon with the naivete of John Wayne's The Green Berets. Le Ly Hayslip is complimentary of Stone's treatment of the Vietnamese people and culture in his film adaptation of her memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. In his piece on Born on the Fourth of July, Jack E. Davis describes Stone's film of the Ron Kovic memoir as revisionist history, employing emotion to question the mythical heroic legacy of World War II for promoting a culture celebrating war. Diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber praises Stone's efforts in Salvador to hold American foreign policy responsible for much of the violence in Central America during the 1980s; a crisis which Stone compares with Vietnam of the 1960s.	4
In his essay on Wall Street, Martin Fridson chastises Stone for focusing upon hostile takeovers and insider trading as representative of American culture in the 1980s, although Stone asserts that he never argued that his film was intended to be the "definitive 1980s film" (p. 233). Likewise, Stone expresses dismay that James R. Farr criticizes the director for focusing upon the Doors as symbolic of the 1960s. Stone concurs that the Beatles were probably the most representative musical group of the era, but he makes clear his admiration for musician Jim Morrison as a Dionysian figure. Stone is even more combative in his reaction to David Courtwright's assertion that Natural Born Killers was a "misfired attempt at outrageous satire with contradictory religious overtones: essentially a failed experiment" (p. 201).	5
Nevertheless, the book's most contentious passages focus upon JFK and Nixon. Michael L. Kurtz credits Stone's labors on JFK for pressuring Congress to declassify documents dealing with the assassination, but he insists that Stone's argument that Kennedy would have taken the United States out of Vietnam is not based on a solid reading of the historical record. On the other hand, Arthur Schlesinger agrees with Stone on Kennedy and Vietnam, but the historian finds fault with the director's adherence to conspiracy theories. George McGovern applauds Stone for recognizing the tragedy of Richard Nixon, who was overwhelmed in the final analysis by character flaws. Stephen Ambrose has little use for Stone as a historian, dismissing the filmmaker's allegations regarding Nixon's role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Ambrose maintains that in his cinema Stone is advocating a radical agenda for change in America, falsely claiming that American democracy is controlled by the military-industrial complex or "the beast" as it is termed in Nixon.	6
In response, Stone passionately asserts, but with some documentation, his case for a conspiracy in the killing of John Kennedy, Nixon's engagement with the Bay of Pigs, and Kennedy's plans for ending the Cold War and withdrawing from Vietnam. He reserves his harshest comments for Ambrose. Incensed that Ambrose was critical of Stone for advocating change, Stone writes, "Presumably Ambrose does not want to change the country, and in so stating reveals the true meaning of the conservative movement in this country, abetted by men such as him with falsely nostalgic journeys to the American past of Lewis and Clark and the Second World War" (p. 255).	7
While the Stone-Ambrose exchange is rather fascinating, the major contribution of this volume concerns how Stone's film works may be employed to introduce the historian's craft of evaluating evidence and interpreting the past. Teachers may want to use some of the essays contained in this volume, along with clips from Stone's films, to invigorate classroom discourse on the nature of post World War II American history and culture. Students will continue to gain a great deal of their history from the popular cinema of such artists as Stone, and history teachers who ignore the impact of cinema do so at their own peril and that of their students. Toplin's Oliver Stone's USA makes a strong case for the inclusion of cinema studies within the history curriculum.	8
Sandia Preparatory School, Albuquerque, New Mexico Ron Briley

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