Hollywood's Imperial Wars: The Vietnam Generation and the American Myth of Heroic Continuity

When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie. The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years.

How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando José Prats explores in Hollywood’s Imperial Wars. The b...