O Cinema de Oliver Stone e o Projeto Nacionalista da “Era Reagan”

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the political role of the movies Platoon and Born on the fourth of July, both of the Oliver Stone director, on the political developments of the national project idealized for the Ronald Reagan president. These questions will be analyzed from the perspective that historical movies are past representations constructed by political disputes of their groups in their production contexts. The Vietnam War is understood in this research as an crucial event for the American history, since that it was responsible for new political directions, therefore, a new representation of this event in the 1980s has became essential to discuss the established political project on that decade. The analyzed movies composed a critical picture of deconstruction of Reagan national program, as the aggressive foreign policy, the militarization of the State, the black people and immigrant issues and the reinterpretation of the “American experience”, as well as of a “imagined community”, based in the rescue of the civil nationalism values idealized by Democratic Party leaders of the 1960s.