Oliver Stone’s Platoon: Jesus Christ Superstar vs. the Marlboro Man
In Oliver Stone’s award-winning film, Platoon (1986), Charlie Sheen plays Chris Taylor, a “coming of age” infantry soldier trying to reconcile his identity between the influences of two sergeants in his US Army platoon. I refer to these two men and the contrasting themes they represent as “Jesus Christ Superstar” vs. “the Marlboro Man.”
Neuromancing the Code: When IT Changed
During the 1980s, a different sort of conversation about computers and data networking emerged. I was an undergraduate at the time doing an internship about Asian computerization at the East-West Center in Hawaii, and I remember the transition. The personal computer with its IBM clones was becoming popular, and the Apple Macintosh held most of […]
Figuring Criminality in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street
Perhaps no other film captured the economic changes taking place in the 1980s as did Oliver Stone’s (1987) Wall Street. Much of the financial world started to change dramatically as deregulation and technical innovation created new dangers and new opportunities for both the abuse and the creation of wealth. This post looks at how that […]