“The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there,” says president Johnson in a speech about the United States’ presence in Vietnam. Peter Davis centralizes this thought, in his documentary Hearts and Minds, as he seeks to display the demoralized position the United States held in a persecuted and victimized Vietnam. Davis does this in part by visually showing pain and suffering on the account of the Vietnamese and then juxtaposing this visual with a supposed American mentality provided by an interview with General Westmoreland.
To open this particular sequence, the camera view focuses in on a very informal Vietnamese funeral characterized by a heartbroken motherly figure and a stricken child, serving to openly display the value the Vietnamese place in their loved ones. In the early parts of the scene we witness the mother figure become so stricken by the loss of her loved one that she attempts to climb into his grave as it is being filled. She is so disoriented and stricken that it takes several people to withhold her from her woeful induced actions. The camera then moves about the scene, stopping on occasion to focus in on a downcast face before it focuses in on the fit of a young boy. The boy expresses himself by means of uncontrolled sobbing and unsuppressed wailing as he drags himself towards and places his face against the picture of a loved one, setting atop a grave.
After this chaotic and remorseful scene, Davis moves to an interview of General Westmoreland where Westmoreland downplays the value the Vietnamese place in life. In a very serene and peaceful natural landscape, General Westmoreland himself is dressed very professionally, but in a way that doesn’t draw any connection between him and his military career. Westmoreland is simply portrayed as the ideal American embellished businessman who knows what he is talking about. In this context, Westmoreland is completely separated from that which he seems to be able to offer so much insight. As he puts it, “Well the oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a westerner.”
Ironically the scene soon shifts back to a Vietnamese landscape, which is blown away by a series of explosions at a magnitude that only the American military was capable. Through this conflict of actions versus words, Davis draws a complete picture of the hearts and minds of all those involved. He portrays an American nation unloading on a nation of which it has a skewed and biased view. I feel Davis is trying to ask: Does the outcome really depend on the heart and minds of the Vietnamese people, or does it depend more on the heartlessness and mindlessness of an oppressive America?
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