About our post-show talk with Kevin Ruane and Jan Harlan
Last night, we were joined for a post-show talkback at Southwark Playhouse by Kevin Ruane - Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University and one of the UK's foremost experts on the Vietnam War - and Jan Harlan - long-time collaborator and confidant of Stanley Kubrick and executive producer on his films, Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). It was a privilege to hear them speak on topics as diverse as Belgian tank collecting, the self-fashioning of American national identity, anti vs. pro-war filmmaking, and the Micky Mouse Club soundtrack.
Jan kicked off the talk by explaining to us that, '[artists] don't strive for realism, they strive for real', and that this mantra was especially resonant for Kubrick. It was one of the features of the performance of Last of the Boys that Jan was most drawn to, in fact - that reality was heightened, or even distorted, to convey repressed emotions, ghosts, fears, desires. Indeed, he explained, this is the same impulse in filmmaking, to create an illusion of what's really there. Practically, that task is about building an environment wherein those events can convincingly take place. In the case of Full Metal Jacket, Beckton Gas Works in East London became the Vietnam of Kubrick's imagination, a world in which boys - grown, but emotionally incomplete - had been sent to perform the roles of men. As such, the casting and even the soundtrack was an attempt to convey a sense of doomed youth.
As Kevin explained, films continued to be made long after Communist tanks crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace in Saigon in 1975 (marking the end of the Vietnam War) because Vietnam represented, and continues to represent, a "David and Goliath story" of the world's greatest superpower being humbled and eventually defeated by a relatively tiny, distant, critically-situated, predominantly agrarian nation. So, on the occasion of Bob Dylan's 75th birthday, and as President Obama was addressing dignitaries at a historic state visit in Hanoi, it felt as if - for the day at least - we were all talking about the great untalked-about war.