“Fighting the Good Fight:” The Real and the Moral in the Contemporary Hollywood Combat Film

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The author gratefully acknowledges that financial support for this research was received from a grant funded by Wilfrid Laurier University operating funds.

Notes

¹McKellar identifies these three distinct phases. Studlar and Desser identify two waves of Vietnam films: the right-wing revisionist wave, including Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)—which coincide with McKellar's “revenge film” phase—and the more realistic wave, including Platoon (1986), Hamburger Hill (1987), Full Metal Jacket (1987)—McKellar's “realist combat film” phase (104). The revenge film is typically focused on the rescue of POWs and MIAs rather than combat.

²See Hodgkins 75.

³Sturken uses the term “docudrama” and critics like Christopher Sharrett and Mike Felker comment on the style of Full Metal Jacket as almost a “documentary” or “documentary-style” approach.

⁴“Skinnies” is an epithet used to refer to the Somalis.

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Philippa Gates

Philippa Gates is an Assistant Professor and Film Studies Program Coordinator and Undergraduate Officer in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research interests include classical Hollywood film, contemporary American film, genre studies, gender studies (specifically masculinity), film history, and film theory. Her recent publications include articles on black masculinity in the Hollywood detective film in the Journal of Popular Film and Television (forthcoming 2004), nostalgia in the television adaptation of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables for the British Journal of Canadian Studies (forthcoming 2004), and pleasure and melodrama in John Woo's films in the Journal of Popular Culture (2001), as well as an edited collection on villainy in detective fiction and film for Greenwood Press (2002).