Get me fact check!

Clever boy Wolcott points to a clumsy movie review lede that repeats the debunked myth that will not die: People spat on returning Nam vets, man. It's a myth, appropriately enough, propagated by boneheaded Hollywood action flicks.

Here's how Ken Tucker's review of the documentary Gunner Palace begins:

Watching Gunner Palace, I initially wondered whether the filmmakers, Michael Tucker (no relation) and Petra Epperlein, were like the people who used to spit on Vietnam veterans when they returned home.

Ouch. Here's why Wolcott takes offense:

Mother of pearl, that old canard? No matter how many times this urban myth gets debunked, it's dug out of the closet yet again and dusted off to condemn the antiwar movement and an ungrateful America. It's the sort of thing one expects from rightwing talkshow/columnist hacks, but I thought Ken Tucker was brought better than that.

Me, too. But isn't it also kind of the job of, say, the New York fact-checker [ha ha ha ha ha, I kill me] to, you know, check the veracity of the first sentence of a piece? Problem is, both Tucker and this mythical fact checker have been subjected to enough movie versions of this part of history that it's easy to believe it's real, common knowledge. Cinematic Stockholm Syndrome--another candidate for the DSM.

Thanks to J. Hoberman, the cinetrix read Holy Cross prof Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. You should, too. Lembcke conducted laborious research which revealed that spitting on vets was impossible to document or verify. But the rumors about it gave rise to a convenient shorthand image, one that filmmakers seized upon in jingoistic movies made after the war had ended, during the Hollywood administration of Ronald Reagan. We're talking the sort of simplistic rabblerousing that gave the world the stand-up-and-cheer antics of Rambo, people.

That Tucker should set up a review of a movie that, among other things, captures how young soldiers' ideas about war have been shaped at the cineplex by repeating one of Hollywood's most successful pieces of cinematic disinformation is disheartening, to say the least. You have to get four paragraphs in before Tucker comes to his real problem with the film: He finds it inept, not disloyal.

It becomes clear, as Gunner Palace proceeds, that the filmmakers don’t intend to exploit the soldiers (indeed, Tucker was once a reservist himself, his father, a Vietnam veteran), but the film is inept at conveying in what sense it’s on the soldiers’ side.

Now you tell us. Seems we're always fighting the last war, even in the movies.