Contrary to the stereotype of most teenage girls, I love documentaries. (Yes love. Be still thy beating heart) So I started watching Hearts and Minds with a pretty positive attitude...and I ended up pretty upset about all of it. Mission accomplished.
This is why I love documentaries. They make you feel all sorts of strong emotions, and in away it's okay for them to do so, because they're suppose to. It's like the little movie that could, it elicits all of these reactions and isn such a unique way. But enough about the general genre.
Hearts and Minds was upsetting to me primarily because of the sequences in which clips of were put together. Once scene that's serves as a really good example of this happens towards the end. It starts out with a clip of a Vietnamese family crying and grieving for a dead family member. It then cuts to Gen. Westmorland saying "An Orient does not have the same value for life as a Westerner does". I had to pause it at that point and just fume for a little bit. I though WHAT? did we not just see that last clip?
One other scene that I felt strongly about was the scene in which Lt. Coker is talking to the children. By that point in the documentary I'd written Coker of as an idiot. What man could, after all he'd seen and been through, find any justification for the war he was in. I don't care if he was a POW, that's not an excuse. What made me angry about this scene is that he was making children, kids, probably not even out of elementary school believe that the war was justified. That the people who did not want to fight had no right to stay in this country. It was his blind patriotism and the fact that he was sharing it to impressionable children is what got my goat.
Little scenes like these come are what make documentaries enjoyable for me. I don't like hearing stories all the time. Sometimes I want to be made angry, and sometimes I want to think about what I've just seen
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