Introduction xxi resistance struggle of other countries and once again present Americans as embodying guerilla values. “Becoming Charlie,” Chapter 5, is about the complex reverberations the war in Viet Nam had on the American gue- rilla narrative. Here fi lmmakers have confronted the fact of U.S. involve- ment in Southeast Asia—an extended, ultimately futile counterinsurgency war of attrition marked by massive expenditures of fi repower and manpower—by refi ghting the war on screen as a guerilla war (often imperfectly and in unexpected ways), seizing as American the very tools of the enemy at whose hands the United States was defeated. Th e volume’s fi nal chapter, “Fantasy Wars, Guerilla Fantasies,” extends the application of the American guerilla narrative into the future, examining how fi lm- makers have adapted these structures to imagine science fi ction wars. Film after fi lm, some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters in history have been structured by the same guerilla narratives, refl ecting “Ameri- can” ways of war as literally, universally good.
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