Taking a glance over his filmography, it’s quick to surmise Brian De Palma’s lack of interest in the words “Inspired By” or “Based on a True Story.” His attraction to images leans so heavily towards their natural falsity rather than some kind of prosaic yet still wholly phony verisimilitude. But one of the few exceptions lends a tragic weight that few of his films have.
The true story in question is what’s commonly referred to as Incident on Hill 192: in 1966, an American army squad in the Vietnam War kidnapped a young village girl, then subsequently gang-raped and murdered her. Journalist Daniel Lang brought this to further public attention with a 1969 article in The New Yorker entitled Casualties of War, of which De Palma’s film would share the name.
It caught the attention of screenwriter David Rabe and then De Palma, who had, since the late ’70s, been interested in making a film out of Lang’s article and later book; of course, with such blatantly uncommercial subject matter, it faced a difficult time getting made, even within the landscape of “downbeat” New Hollywood cinema. Yet having the way paved by the critical and commercial success of The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, the film landed in the summer of 1989, where it must’ve seemed utterly alien to a season that hosted numerous blockbuster sequels.
Despite coming off a number of studio assignments and sleazy thrillers, De Palma’s attraction to the material wasn’t necessarily difficult to detect; amidst the Kael-Sarris Hitchcock-centered culture wars, it seemed forgotten that he began as an overtly political filmmaker taking aim at American culture, government, and, in particular, the Vietnam war with early works such Greetings and Hi, Mom! in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Yet with a twenty-year gap between the publishing of Lang’s article and the release of De Palma’s Casualties of War, there comes the feeling of needing to interpret all this as some kind of exorcism of the war. In separating it from Vietnam-film predecessors, the easiest thing to note is how the scope is reduced from an all-encompassing “war is hell” howl into the night to a specific incident, the statement one could make being that Casualties of War sought to tackle a moral failing that spoke for all of the conflict — or, even grander, the United States’ ugly imperialist history.
The Summer of De Palma continues with Casualties of War.
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