The coffins of US military personnel are prepared to be offloaded at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, 2004. Photograph: EPA
So that's that, then: the war in Iraq is over. Or, at least, if any portents about its outcome were needed four years on from the fall of Baghdad, they would seem to have arrived with the news Hollywood is to unveil what look awfully like autopsies on the whole debacle. As Ewen MacAskill reported yesterday, a slew of major films are about to be released detailing the US' travails in both Iraq and Afghanistan - first up Lions for Lambs, starring Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep as directed by Robert Redford (and it doesn't get much more Hollywood than that), to be followed by projects from the stellar likes of Paul Haggis, Kimberly Pierce and Brian De Palma.
As a sign of America's loss of faith in the Iraqi adventure, the implications couldn't be clearer. After all, despite the liberal bias right-wing commentators fancy to be at work in the movie industry, their guiding principle is, of course, economics, a logic in this context best summed up by an old line from The Simpsons: "Never say anything, unless you're sure everyone feels exactly the same way you do." And it's that sense of reflecting public disgust even while Bush is still talking up his latest "surge" that's the most striking difference between how the movies have handled the current conflagrations and the treatment of Vietnam - when The Deer Hunter et al only emerged in the years after the last Marine left Saigon.
And yet, while mirroring the public mood is certainly a factor here, one of the explanations in MacAskill's otherwise fine piece as to why the movies are responding so much faster this time around feels less persuasive - that in the era of 24-hour TV news, Hollywood's treatment of the war is simply subject to the same frantic acceleration as everything else connected with current affairs. Personally, I'm not sure the story is that simple; I think it has at least as much to do with the nature of the news being broadcast, and with a potential change in the role of cinema as a result.
Of course, TV news in the 70s was a cumbersome beast in comparison with that of today. But what American viewers saw during Vietnam was footage not just of the war but of their own country unravelling - the horrors of the Kent State Massacre just the most dramatic of countless mass protests, the nightly sight of coffins shrouded in the stars and stripes being returned to grieving families. As such, by the time the war finally ended, the public's mood (and the movies' responses to it) were marked by weary bewilderment - a stunned attempt to process and recover.
This time, however, not only has there been no reprise of the bloody trauma of Kent State; there have also been hardly any coffins. After all, one of the Bush administration's first diktats on launching Operation Iraqi Freedom was the refusal to allow news media to photograph them - a perfect emblem of the many heavy-handed but ever-less successful attempts at stage-managing what America has known of the war, attempts that nonetheless left people forced to join the dots themselves as the suicide bombings kept up and the troops kept not coming home.
But even if the truth has been held off-camera, it seems now to have finally outed. And if the cinematic response to Vietnam was dazed and delayed by what a nation had seen every night, it's tempting to see this new flood of movies as the opposite - a furious retort to what's not been seen, with the medium of film untainted by TV's role in the chicanery, and re-energised by the mass popularity of documentaries.
But perhaps the biggest difference in cinema's response to these two disasters of US foreign policy has yet to make itself apparent. After all, America did eventually leave Vietnam - yet for all that Hollywood's attentions might be a symbolic final nail for the war in Iraq, the troops stay, and with them the grim promise of who knows what while they do. Rather than being Hollywood's ultimate response to Iraq, you can't help the dread feeling this wave of movies might have to prove the first of many.
