"In a sense," said Oliver Stone, whose movies "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" were two of several major films about the Vietnam War and its aftermath, "Tom Cruise already did the Persian Gulf war in 'Top Gun.' " It's hard to imagine what a film maker could do that the war itself, and previous movies, haven't done already. It was a war so carefully scripted for television that it was in a way already a movie. It lacked the sense of national anguish, disillusionment and painful self-scrutiny that inspired many of the books and movies that emerged, in particular, from the Vietnam War. It seems as though the gulf war, rapid and militarily successful as it was, fell short of several of the ingredients that previous wars had in great quantities. But if this war has produced a surge of national pride reminiscent of 19, there is no guarantee that it will, like the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, produce a commensurate art. A traditional ticker-tape parade will be held in New York tomorrow for the victors of the Persian Gulf war. When on that great day in 1918 Americans and others celebrated the end of World War I, they could not have known that the dreadful conflict was going to produce great art - the poems of Rupert Brooke, such films as "Grand Illusion," plays like "What Price Glory?" and hundreds of other works.
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