1. Tigerland Tigerland

2. The American War Movie ► Films using war as their subject have been around almost since the beginning of the medium (e.g. D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation 1915), but since the 1960s there has developed a sub-genre of the Vietnam war film focussing on psychopathic warriors, incompetent commanders, conspiracy and soulless anti-heroism; with action fuelled more by drugs and rock ’n’ roll than adrenalin (e.g. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter 1978; Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now 1979) ► What features of Tigerland conform to a ‘Hollywood Vietnam’ genre?

3. Boot camp ► ‘Basic training’ can be seen as a sub-genre of the war film and has been used as much for army recruitment propaganda (satirised by Bill Murray in the 1982 comedy Stripes) as anti-war protest. ► As an examination of how men are dehumanised in order to be taught to kill, the most powerful examples are in Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front and Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war (Vietnam) film Full-Metal Jacket.

4. ► To what extent does Tigerland ending before the new soldiers even reach Vietnam make it less of a war movie?

5. Heroes ► In what ways does the film construct the character of Roland Bozz as a hero?

6. Johnny Got His Gun The novel Bozz is reading – about a young man initiated into the horror of war in the trenches of WW1 – was originally written in 1948 as a protest against WW2 by Dalton Trumbo (novelist, screenwriter of classic films like Spartacus, & victim of US anti- communist fears in the 1950s). However, having reached in America the cult status of anti-war novels like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, it was republished in 1970 – a year before Tigerland is set – as part of the enormous wave of popular protest against the Vietnam war (viz. riots, draft dodging, the musical Hair, the movie M*A*S*H, etc.). ► What does Roland Bozz’s choice of reading matter suggest about his character?

7. My Lai ► What signs are there in the film that Tigerland’s training could very easily produce another ‘My Lai’ massacre?