Ideological Restrictions and Utopian Visions in Ted Post’s Go Tell the Spartans

Abstract

Go Tell the Spartans (1978) is one of the first post-Vietnam War movies narrating the end of the French presence in Vietnam and the early involvement of the United States there. It  depicts the United States’ bourgeois ideology after WWII and its reactions against the spread of communism. This article analyzes the conflict between ideological restrictions and utopian visions in Ted Post’s movie  Go Tell the Spartans as a literary text more than as a cinematic production. At the ideological level, this article shows that the movie sustains the United States’ exceptionalism or heroism and reinifornces the steotypical representation of the Vietnemese within the context of the Other. Nevertheless, at the utopian level, this article highlights the United States’ military advisors’ rejection of Vietnam War and their attempt to establish a solidarity with Vietnemese as human beings  beyond the United States’ othering of them as “enemy.” Significantly, this article mainly adapts Paul Ricœur’s dialectical analysis of ideology and utopia as the main literary theory. Thus, it discusses ideological constraints and utopian visions according to Ricœur’s concept of the ideology as a source of distortion and legitimization, and a utopia within the concept of  critique and rupture more than futuristic visions.