Film Diary: COMBAT SHOCK (Buddy Giovinazzo, 1980)

‘It all looks the same. I can’t tell one place from another [….] I can no longer tell where one torture ends and the next begins’.

Marrying the disturbed-Vietnam-veteran premise of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) with the oddball depiction of domestic pressures of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Buddy Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock begins with some unconvincing footage of the Vietnam war and soon journeys to America. Once back home, Frankie – alienated from his father after being declared MIA in Vietnam – struggles with crime, poverty, his nagging wife and their mutated baby which cries incessantly. (The baby’s horrifying appearance is, we are told, a product of Frankie’s exposure to chemical weapons during his time in Vietnam.)

Where the ‘Nam-set opening is unconvincing, looking for all the world like it was shot in woodland or a park (which, no doubt, was the case), the film’s street scenes have a cinema verite-style authenticity to them. We see people hustling and struggling to get by, lining up at a soup kitchen, and seeking escape through drugs. Every relationship in the film is based on exploitation and manipulation: friends exploit friends; lovers exploit lovers. Frankie’s wife nags him incessantly; Frankie reaches out to his estranged father, with the aim of acquiring some financial help, only to find that his father has lost his business and is now in a nursing home.

The film continually crosscuts Frankie’s experiences in Vietnam with his life after returning home – not just to suggest that Frankie is ‘haunted’ by his experiences in the combat zone, but seemingly to establish an equivalence between his torture there, at the hands of a defined and identifiable enemy, and the more covert and socially-acceptable abuse he suffers at home. ‘I go back every day, dad’, Frankie tells his father. The film’s final sequences have an apocalyptic finality to them, which consolidates the film’s depiction of contemporary America as a form of Purgatory.

Viewing Notes. The Arrow Video UK DVD release contains both the shorter Combat Shock cut (running a little under 92 mins) and the longer ‘director’s cut’, titled American Nightmare (running 96:52 mins). The 16mm-shot film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. A second disc containing numerous extra features is included in the package.

2020-4