Stones in 'Nam

To end this blog, I wanna pull out an example of a more contemporary date. In the comedy film Tropic Thunder (Stiller), the shooting of a Vietnam film goes horribly wrong, as the director blows up and the archetypal cast is left alone in the jungle. In one of the scenes Ben Stiller's character runs in the jungle, with the song playing in the background.


The song, dating from 1968 was of course released during the height of the Vietnam War, and is part of that canonical Vietnam soundtrack, that films' covering the war have been presenting. Just think of The Doors The End, featured in Francis Ford Coppola's dark Apocalypse Now (1979), heard right in the beginning when a treeline is napalmed in slow motion.

Another classic Vietnam film is Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), and in that film Jefferson Airplane's song White Rabbit is immortalized, heard while the troops are getting high on marijuana during some rare down time (incidentally White Rabbit also features prominently in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Dr. Gonzo wants Raoul Duke to kill him "when White Rabbit peaks").


Or indeed another canonical war film, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). Think of Nancy Sinatra singing These Boots are Made for Walking or another Rolling Stones classic Paint it Black, playing during the end credits.

Sympathy for the Devil epitomizes a specter of different things. It is a document of the late sixties culture, the way Tropic Thunder uses it, it is a inter textual literary song, it is about the seductive sexually charged Devil manifested in Mick Jagger's characteristic strut. It is all of these things and more.