Bottoms of Barrels

It is strange that the scene that I consider as being one of the most powerful and compelling is probably one of the least significant and memorable scenes in Platoon. There are a number of terrifying and insightful moments throughout the movie that clearly stand out in my mind; however, I was most deeply impressed by Oliver Stone’s mastery at giving his audience a deeper look at the characters. He accomplishes this task in one fell swoop, almost undetectable, during the scene in which Chris Taylor and his platoon go out on patrol that later gets ambushed. In this scene, Chris Taylor is narrating the letter that he had written to his grandmother. He begins by explaining the reasons that drove him to drop out of college and to volunteer to join the American forces in Vietnam; one of the reasons being that he wanted to lead a different life than the one led by his parents, “respectable, hard-working, a little house, family”. This is everything that Chris and his generation despised, and Stone very clearly captures this most fundamental idea in just a couple of sentences. Chris simply wants to be “anonymous, like everybody else, in my share for my country”, but he does not begin to realize what it really means to be “anonymous” until he shares the night out in the jungle with his platoon. Stone gives us the entire background of Chris’s character in this one scene by telling the viewer where Chris came from, what kind of family he was raised in, what his moral convictions are, and the reasons behind him taking on this “crusade”. Stone also gives a very brief, yet poignant, overview of each of the characters by classifying each of them as being truly “anonymous”. They are all “guys that nobody really cares about”. Chris is deeply bothered by the fact that these men are the poor, the unwanted, “the bottom of the barrel”, and yet they are the ones fighting for this country, “for our freedom”. Stone makes this scene more personal by closely zooming in on each one of the character’s faces as Chris describes them, and by doing this he is making it clear that each one of these men has his own life, his own goals, his own identity, and that it is a grave mistake to forget the men who gave their life for this undeserving cause.