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4 We simply note that Stone, bringing allegorical methods to bear upon the Vietnam War, is in good company, as critics like John Hellmann, Albert Auster and Leonard Quart have shown, and as Michael Herr and Michael Cimino reveal in their screenplay notes and annotations to Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter.5 Certainly, realism is important, and a historical fiction like Platoon may rightly be lauded (or criticized) in terms of it. [...] realism is an uncertain concept and remains subordinate to storytelling or, in nonfiction settings, to the rationalized forms of historical narrative.6 For example, when among her praises for his powers of versimilitude, Pauline Kael complains of Stone's literary pretensions-"too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity"7-she understresses that Platoon, good or bad, likable or not, is necessarily popular art first, historical representation second.

In criticism on Platoon (1986), Oliver Stone's allegorical methods and sources have been commonly misunderstood. At best, the Christian motifs which distinguish Stone's narrative of war and personal growth are only passingly recognized. It is easily demonstrated that these borrowed motifs are not deeply hidden secrets which must be deduced or invented from vague hints. Stone gives clear identifications of them, both in the film itself and in its published screenplay. But we should not be surprised; Stone has said that the war was for him a "religious" experience.1

In his "Foreword" to the screenplay of Platoon, Stone identifies Chris, the main character, as autobiographical; he also calls Chris "Ishmael," an "observer, caught between those two giant forces" Barnes and Elias. In addition to Melville's Moby Dick, Stone also declares mythic associations to Homeric myth and rock music; Barnes is an Ahab or Achilles, and Elias is a Jim Morrison (of The Doors) or Hector.2 But in fact, Melville, Homeric and pop music icons are left quite out of the substance of the story.3 Platoon's source is the Christian Bible, and, as it were, the lone "observer" is the movie's audience.

Allegory is an ancient, respected sort of narrative, across which flicker tensions between "fiction" and "reality." Modern manifestations of allegory are at least as various as T.S. Eliot's "mythical method," Freud's and Jung's literary psychologies, the Marlboro Man, and William Manchester's battlefield seduction by a mythic "Whore of Death."4 We simply note that Stone, bringing allegorical methods to bear upon the Vietnam War, is in good company, as critics like John Hellmann, Albert Auster and Leonard Quart have shown, and as Michael Herr and Michael Cimino reveal in their screenplay notes and annotations to Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter.5 Certainly, "realism" is important, and a historical fiction like Platoon may rightly be lauded (or criticized) in terms of it. But realism is an uncertain concept and remains subordinate to storytelling or, in nonfiction settings, to the rationalized forms of historical narrative.6 For example, when among her praises for his powers of versimilitude, Pauline Kael complains of Stone's literary pretensions-"too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity"7-she understresses that Platoon, good or bad, likable or not, is necessarily popular art first, historical representation second. But a critique of the "art" in Platoon, as with any film, can easily fall prey to speculation and generalization; my primary purpose here is quite simply to document Stone's allegorical structure.

The film begins with a title snipped from Ecclesiastes 11:9, "REJOICE, O YOUNG MAN, IN THY YOUTH" (11).8 Flooding the soundtrack is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, stately and, as Tom O'Brien suggests, "elegiac,"9 setting an ironically contrasting tone. Stone does not complete the quoted verse, which ends ". . . for all these things God will bring thee into judgement." What is missing reveals the depth of his ironic direction. Until this verse in its eleventh chapter, the Book of Ecclesiastes says nothing about "judgement." Now, however, it resolves its well-known existentialism through a less often noticed orthodoxy of moral absolutes. The Old Testament voice says that not only does our dust return to the earth and our spirits return to God (12:7), but directs us to "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil" (12:13-14). In other words, there is no existential dilemma. As Stone has described his artistic caveat, "You have to make films as an idealist. You've got to make them to the greater glory of mankind."10 And through the mythos level of his film, Stone returns to this orthodoxy of moral absolutes again and again.

The names of the characters are the simplest keys to Stone's typologies. "Chris" usually is a short form of "Christopher" or "Christian," names which secondarily or directly refer to Christ. And indeed, Chris's character does ultimately constellate about Christ. But Chris has three other coordinating biblical parallels as well: with Elijah's disciple Elisha, with Jesus's principal disciple Peter, and with a sweeping run from the two creation stories in Genesis to the Apocalypse which, among other things, recalls the legendary distinction of Christ as the second Adam.11 The persona of the "good" sergeant Elias reflects a similar coordination of allusory characters. "Elias" is the New Testament, or Greek, form of the Old Testament's "Elijah," an equivalence Stone makes full use of, though most explicitly in the screenplay. Also, by some conflated identifications recorded in the gospels (e.g., Matt. 16:14), Stone legitimately borrows from John the Baptist and Jesus to help build "Elias." Moreover, allusions to events in Christ's story are found chronologically correct but staggered between Elias's and Chris's narratives. And finally, although Barnes is called "Captain Ahab" by Chris, the reference to Melville's nihilist hero is misleading. Barnes's allegorical pedigree is only somewhat similar to Ahab's. Behind both characters lie aspects of Elijah's Baal-supportive opponent. King Ahab, but Barnes's more vivid ancestor, as we shall see, is the beast in Revelation 13. As the story unfolds, Barnes is revealed as evil-incarnate, the appropriate opponent for the Christian savior-heroes, Elias and Chris.

The sets of allusions are purposefully interwoven, as tradition dictates they should be. Chris's movement from Genesis to Revelation associations is inseparable from the escalating moral contest between Elias and Barnes. Together, these narrative lines follow the basic, eschatological outline of Christian biblical "history." Stone does this in a clever way. When Elias, as both crucified Christ and Elijah, dies and leaves the narrative, the story's aspects of Old and New Testament expectation depart with him and leave only Chris-as-christ, the trans-historical typos, to fulfill the climactic allegorical pattern. This is much the way Christian thought concatenates the Old and New Testaments, making the New Testament the fulfillment of intentional forecasts and prefigurations in the Judaic texts. Christ is there implicit at the beginning of time and there again at the end, as well as appearing in the flesh in between-as in the first verse of the Gospel of St. John. Similarly, Chris is there at the beginning and at the end of the movie, in between which moments he grows into his identification with Elias.

After the credits and the quotation from Ecclesiastes, the story begins in earliest Genesis, an arena of chaos and Creation. Disgorged from a transport's rear, Chris passes through clouds of yellow dust, innocent and shocked by the body bags and haggard figures he sees. Dangerously naive, he is called "new meat" and "fresh meat" (19, 20, 21, 27). The raw sensual mystery washing over Chris's unseasoned character recalls the formless moment before Creation when everything was still inchoate and without name. Immediately plunged into the jungle and put at point for the patrol with Barnes and Elias, he fails miserably. Barnes curses him out, and coldly walks on. Passing by, Elias stops to help him. In this fashion. Stone quickly sets out the duality of the story's conflict, who is dark and who is light.

Soon after, back at the company camp, the lieutenant and the NCOs plan a night patrol. The meeting finished, Elias walks away. Behind his back, Sergeant O'Neil complains, "Guy's in here three years and he thinks he's Jesus fucking Christ or something."12 Nothing has justified this association yet, but the rhetoric prepares us for the climactic allusion explicit in Elias's later death.

In the rain that night, alone on patrol watch, Chris squats in the undergrowth among the ruins of an overgrown temple, and a shadowy Buddha looms in the background much as God watched over his primeval garden (Gen. 3:8). In the solemn intonations of his voice-over letters, we listen to Chris's social conscience, of his love for and identification with the common man, but also to his damnation of his parents' lifestyle and materialistic hopes for him. In contrast to the world he has left behind, he says his fellow grunts are "the heart and soul," the downtrodden and unwanted, the kind of men to whom we imagine Jesus would have ministered. With his social conscience and structuring judgmental myths, Stone's Chris will imitate what Jesus liked to call himself: the "son of man." Then he adds: "I've found it finally, way down here in the mud-maybe from down here I can start up again and be something I can be proud of, without having to be a fake human being" (32). We hear the allusion to Adamic Creation: how "a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground-then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground" (Gen. 2:6-7). In the dripping, steaming, primal jungle, Chris sits soaking "way down here in the mud," despising his past and wanting to be recreated into a real person.

Through the firefight that follows, Stone leaves Genesis with a play on names and an open allusion to man's Fall and Exile from Eden. The other "new meat" we know, the hapless, innocent, aptly named Private Gardner, dies here. At first thought he is simply a victim of the time-worn "You will die if you show a picture of your honey before entering battle." However, Gardner also showed a wallet photograph of Raquel Welch to Chris (29). Consequently Stone has moved past the cliché to the effects of sin; by undermining his own innocence with this sexual curiosity, Gardner gets a hard boot out of what Stone calls a "garden of Eden" ( 124). With his curious passing, this boy marks the story's entrance into the harsh, contested world of history and war, a violent, sinning world rooted in the exile from Eden (Gen. 3:14-23) and resolvable only by the Apocalypse.

Beginning with these passages of Old Testament introduction. Stone is moved by his Christian vision, or at least Christian exegetical frame, to exercise strands of biblical narrative indicating the omnipresence of Christ throughout biblical history. As a consequence, his narrative gains a certain density from the complexity with which its mythic references intertwine with each other.

Slightly wounded in the neck during his baptism of fire, Chris thinks he is dying. On one level, the sequence is like Christian baptism, where the initiate first dies to the flesh, then is reborn into the Spirit, able finally to enter the community of the faithful. On a second, narcotized level, the experience is analogous to Jesus's own baptismal vision of heaven and the Spirit of God (e.g., Matt. 3:16-17). The Spirit does not immediately fill Chris; there is first a trip to the hospital. Back at camp, King invites Chris to the 'heads' bunker, where Rhah presides over ritual and festivities.13 Chris is new to this fellowship, and Rhah does not understand his being there: "Watcha doing in the underworld Taylor?" King answers for Chris: "This ain't Taylor. Taylor been shot. This man is Chris, he been resurrected" (45). Elias in his John the Baptist mode initiates Chris into the quasi-cult with the aid of spirit-enhancing narcotics. Blowing the sacramental smoke into the breech of a shotgun, Elias has Chris put his mouth over the muzzle and breathe it in.14 He asks Chris if it is his first time. It is. "Then," says Elias, "the worm has definitely turned for you man" (47).15

Simultaneously, in the barrack of the "lifers, the juicers . . . the moron white element"16 and the loners, O'Neil asks Barnes whether he thinks the lieutenant will live, and we learn that Bames, in contrast to life-giving Elias, is intimately associated with death, if just teasingly right now. Also, O'Neil reveals that the weak, despised lieutenant is Jewish, a significant reference in light of Stone's Christian allegory. Puerile, treacherous, subservient to both Barnes and Captain Harris, Wolfe lets Barnes run his murderous course. In the Gospel of St. Luke, Jesus calls Herod Antipas "that fox" (13:32), meaning to denigrate the secular Jewish ruler of Palestine who was responsible for John the Baptist's beheading, and who would be partially responsible for Jesus's crucifixion. A wolf and a fox are similar enough to make curious Stone's choice for the lieutenant's name. Jumping ahead for a moment to the frustrated prospect of a court-martial, we may speculate too on Captain Harris, whose role correspondingly echoes the figure of Roman authority, Pontius Pilate. If Wolfe and Harris are understood in these terms, then Stone is beginning here to align allusive referents for Barnes's later sermon on the "system."

From baptism and role clarification, Platoon moves into allusions to the Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness and also to the moral struggle between God's prophet Elijah and the evil king Ahab. The next day. New Year's 1968, the platoon patrols along the Cambodian border, "walk[ing] through the jungle like ghosts in a landscape" (55). The platoon explores an NVA bunker complex, posting Chris and Manny as lookouts. While Chris waits tensely in the woods, a snake slides between his legs and he is "frozen with dread" (57). Nothing happens, but the serpent's appearance is appropriate to the myth of Jesus's Temptation, in which as the satanic "tempter," it tries to lure Jesus into catastrophic sin (e.g., Matt. 4:1-11). Since Chris is about to be tempted into sharing Barnes's hotblooded rage, the snake's presence is not simply atmospheric. Immediately, a bomb kills two men, and soon after, Manny, missing, is found grotesquely slaughtered down by the river as the platoon heads toward a village. Bent on revenge, the men proceed: "If [the villagers] had [known] they would have run. . . . Barnes was at the eye of our rage-and through him, our Captain Ahab-we would set things right again. That day we loved him" (61). But this "love" bred of violence and soured brotherhood turns out to be short-lived.

In the sack of the village Chris faces and overcomes temptation. Distraught with fear, horror and the lethal opacity of the Vietnamese landscape, Chris nevertheless catches himself and pulls back from butchering a mother and her crippled son. Similarly, after his baptism by John, Jesus went into the wilderness and was tempted, but did not succumb, instead returning "to the world" to begin his mission. Chris begins his own mission in the village by stopping a gang rape, although with unpolished eloquence:

CHRIS: All you're fucking animals!

TONY: Fucking A Fuck!

CHRIS: You don't fucking get it man, you just do not fucking get it.(72-73)

The fight between Elias and Barnes, an interruption which keeps the sack and rape of the village from becoming a virtual slaughter, completes the Temptation moment, and turns what were simply the differing styles of the two men into a mortal and morally clarifying opposition.

In the platoon's culture, divided as it is between liberal-druggie-spiritualists and lifer-alcoholic-demonics, the struggle between the two charismatic cult leaders splits the platoon, creating, as Chris says in the film, a "civil war." While Stone may see a sympathy between Barnes and Captain Ahab, it is a sympathy of character, not of narrative rôle. Rhetorically and structurally, the parallel is with the outrage and civil struggle between God's prophet and the cult of Baal maintained under King Ahab.17 King Ahab asks, "Art thou he that troubleth Israel?" Elijah answers, "I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and thou hast followed Ba'alim" (I Kings 18:17-18).

In their brawling challenges echoing this biblical exchange, Barnes actively reveals his black soul, Elias his enlightened outrage, and what Stone calls the "narrowing drama" propels the movie further and further into the confines of structural and symbolic allusion.

As the platoon leaves the burning village-which Stone describes as a "Bosch-like canvas" (74), equating his scene of moral conflict with the Flemish painter's phantasmagorias of Temptation and Judgment-the first allusion on the road to Elias's death and to Chris's spiritual inheritance is seen on Lerner's helmet. The word "GRACE" and a crucifix have been drawn on it with a magic marker, symbolically categorizing the revelation we have just witnessed and hinting at the destiny of the Elias-Christ figure. However, as Stone seems to know well, the prophet Elijah had his passing-on, too. When Elias dies, Chris will inherit his principal role much as the disciple Elisha was given his prophetic status by Elijah.

But first the narrative lines must be brought to their respective, conflating heads. Reporting to the company commander, Barnes and Wolfe contradict Elias about the events in the village. An investigation will have to wait, but Captain Harris is adamant: "I promise you if I find out there was an illegal killing there will be a court-martial."18 Prescient shades of My Lai, but with Wolfe and Harris typologically echoing specific Jewish and Roman authorities, the prospective court-martial is also an allusion to the trials forced upon Jesus and Elijah. Complaining to his followers immediately after, Barnes calls Elias "a waterwalker"-like Jesus, we note.

At this point in the screenplay (76-78), in a scene absent from the film, Barnes's metaphorically phrased complaint is immediately balanced by the "heads" ruminations on his demonism. He is said to come from Hell, figuratively of course. Like the "beast" in Revelation 13, he remains indomitable although wounded seven times; a "fact" repeated later in the film. Rhah says, "Remember the Devil does God's work too," placing Barnes within the context of the fallen angel whose struggles with God are yet part of God's design. "LOVE" and "HATE" are tattooed on Rhah's knuckles (a detail, Lerner hints, borrowed from the preacher in Charles Laughton's nightmare fantasy Night of the Hunter); HATE is for Barnes, LOVE is for Elias, who came into the world "naturally"-like Jesus again, we note, and in obvious contrast to Barnes's place of origin. Also, we find out about Elias's troubles with a "Jezebel," an open allusion to Elijah's own troubles in I Kings 19:2-4. Finally, we hear, "You're fighting for your SOUL . . . if you'se a man, wrestle with that angel," which given the discussion's context of heaven and hell, alludes to an individual's own "wrestle" with the "rulers of darkness" described in Ephesians 6:12, rather than Jacob's "wrestle" with a heaven-sent angel in which "Israel," not Jacob's soul, is the issue (Gen. 32:24f). We may only wonder why the scene was dropped, though the number and tumbling, obvious natures of the allusions could have had something to do with it.

That evening, Elias and Chris sit alone together talking under the starry sky, a quiet scene suggestive of Jesus and Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, or of Elijah and Elisha musing somewhere. In the movie's neutered version of the scene, Elias says, "I love this place at night. The stars . . . there's no right or wrong in them, they're just there." He goes on to say that he respects Barnes's commitment to the war. He once held it too, but now thinks, "What happened today's just the beginning. We're gonna lose this war. . . . It's time we got our own asses kicked." Then a shooting star crosses the sky, symbolically sanctioning the forecast.

This short, lean scene in the film is far longer and allusively rich in the screenplay, where, according to the descriptive notes, Elias "sermonize[s]" to Chris about moral life and the war, and they discuss death and reincarnation (79-81 ). The scene's allusions to the Last Supper, to Jesus's subsequent agony in the garden of Gethsemane and to Elijah's sojourn in the wilderness are striking. At the Last Supper, Jesus calls the bread his body, the wine his blood and their ingestion the absorption of his "new testament" (e.g., Matt. 26:260. As at Chris's "baptism," narcotics again have sacramental capacity; their eucharistie faculty accompanying Elias's liberal testament is unmistakable: "like a power passed between 'em" when Elias shares a joint with Chris and punches him once, saying, "you know it till you die . . . that's why the survivors remember. 'Cause the dead don't let em forget" (Stone's emphasis). Furthermore, when discussing reincarnation, Elias says, "Maybe a piece of me's in you now," a conflation of the Eucharist with a foreshadowing of Chris-as-the-risen-Christ's "reincarnation" of the original incarnation, Elias. The jungle setting of this scene recalls the garden of Gethsemane where after the Last Supper and in the company of Peter, Jesus agonized over his fate. Aware of Barnes's hatred, Elias, Stone notes, covers "his own uncertainty" with a "certain bravado," certainly an echo of Jesus's, "What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matt. 26:40-41). The final and most interesting allusion within this scene is to Elijah, and comes when Elias ponders his reincarnation. Threatened by Jezebel, Elijah fled into the wilderness, where the "Word of the Lord" came to him, saying:

Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains ... but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (I Kings 19:11-13)

Similarly, Elias tells Chris, "I'm gonna come back as ... as wind or fire-or a deer . . . yeah, a deer." Wind, fire, and a deer, and then the wish-fulfilling falling star. Wind, fire, blast, and a quietly grazing deer all appear near the end of both the screenplay and the movie: the napalm blast is a fiery wind, and when Chris wakes up the next morning a gentle deer is watching from the edge of the forest.

Stone skips a Judas kiss that night, and the day Elias dies begins with the platoon flying back into the forest. They land near the white ruins of a mission church-"a decaying French Catholic Church from the 19th century," Stone writes, which he built for the movie (10, 81)-and after this symbolic reminder of the story's context, they walk into an ambush. Chris proves his combat mettle in the immediate crisis, and goes with Elias, Rhah, and Crawford to head off an enemy flanking movement by the river. Along the way, Elias leaves the three men to defend an intermediate position while he goes on solo. Chris wants to go with him. "No," says Elias with a grin, "I move faster alone" (91).

Treacherously shot by Barnes, Elias dies in the open as Chris and everyone else watch helplessly from the helicopters above, reversing the looking up at Jesus on the Cross. Stone calls the mode of Elias's death "Elias crucified" (97). There is no mistaking the symbolic gesture when we see it ourselves-the torture, the arms outstretched, the martyrdom-and this is the one specific allusory moment most critics pick up on.19

But there is another powerful allusory structure being played out at this moment, whose conclusion, along with Elias's "crucifixion," leaves the mythic field free for Chris-as-christ to lead us into Revelation.

The time for Elias's namesake on earth is over: "It came to pass, when the Lord would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind" (II Kings 2:1). The prophet says to his disciple, "Elisha, Tarry here, I pray thee, for the Lord hath sent me to Bethel" (2:2), but Elisha refuses, and follows his master instead. This happens once again with Jericho the destination, and finally with the Jordan River. After they cross the river, Elijah asks Elisha what he can do for his disciple before ascending. Elisha asks for a "double portion of thy spirit" (2:9). Elijah agrees, but adds that Elisha will get the gift only if he sees the ascension, which he in fact does see: ". . . behold, there appeared a chariot of Tire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it" (2:11-12).

In the movie, the break from this paradigmatic myth is that Chris "ascends," not Elias. The other elements are all there: The first destination of Elijah and Elisha was Bethel, meaning "House of God"; the platoon lands near that ruined church. Their second destination is Jericho, famous for its battle with Joshua; the platoon walks into the ambush. And then there is the third destination, the Jordan River; Elias, Chris and the others head for the river. As well, there are the attempts to dissuade the disciple from following, the disciple watching the passage of the master, and the whirlwind of chariot and horses of fire (the "air cavalry" have insignia of a white wing crossed by lightning painted on their noses20). The allusory pattern is precisely followed.

Chris's ascension in place of Elias-an exchange of Elijah's and Elisha's relative positions-makes sense in Stone's myth format. Although Chris ascends to safety, he nevertheless acquires Elias's mantle through a shared moment of horrific revelation. Stone uses Elias's death to draw together and close the several biblical strands that Elias and Chris assumed: the Elijah strand is complete, so are the John the Baptist, the Elisha, the Peter, and the "living Jesus" strands. Only Chris is left, as a Christ-figure resolving his righteous fury amid allusions to the New Testament's Apocalypse.

The passage of Christian history has its promised end in the Apocalypse, and this is the specific climax toward which Stone drives Platoon. Back at divisional camp, Chris works up a vengeful frenzy, but Rhah interrupts saying: "Barnes been shot seven times and he ain't dead, that tell you something? Barnes ain't meant to die. Only thing can get Barnes ... is Barnes!" (99) Stone confirms Barnes's enormous scar as fact in the Foreword to the screenplay (9), but Rhah's information also has a remarkable parallel in Revelation. The beast, the principal servant of the dragon (the Devil or Satan, Rev. 20:2), has seven heads, according to John of Patmos:

And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast . . . Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? (13:3-4)

. . . the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. (13:14)

Through Rhah's warning, Barnes's facial wound and the peculiar use of "seven times," Stone is simply rhetorically partaking in Christian myth. The meaningful parallel to Revelation comes when Barnes intrudes upon Chris and Rhah, and lectures them on the nature of society:

I AM reality. There's the way it oughta be and there's the way it is. 'Lias he was full of shit, 'Lias was a crusader-I got no fight with a man does what he's told but when he don't, the machine breaks down, and when the machine breaks down, WE breakdown... and I ain't gonna allow that. From none of you. Not one. (99-100)

It is, of course, Barnes's turn to give a sermon, and we recognize his contrasting tone to Elias's earlier expressions of fairness and love. Associated with Barnes and death, the machine's model is the Antichrist's social order, which in Revelation immediately follows the passage on the beast's heads:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Rev. 13:16-17)

This "mark," "name" or "number" is a symbolic token of an authoritarianism as foul and ordered as Barnes's "machine." In Barnes's paraphrase of Revelation, society is beholden to the "machine"; the breakdown of the "machine" means the disintegration of reality. And this is the lie the Antichrist promulgates. But Elias and Chris think contrarily, as we have seen and as their typological models demand.

After the crucifixion. Stone moves quickly into the patterns of the Apocalypse. But there is a final play on the gospel story of Jesus's burial and resurrection. The next day, the platoon flies back over the church on its way to battalion camp. "I felt like we were returning to the scene of a crime," Chris says, echoing one interpretation of the crucifixion.21 Most significantly, though, in an allusion to Christ's empty tomb and resurrection, we are shown the mission church and its cemetery, but no body of Elias. A mysteriously vanished Elias actually makes structural sense, since Revelation is propelled by a risen Christ, not a simply dead one. First narratively and now visually. Stone has cleared the deck for Chris's epochal transformation.

As evening approaches, Chris and King dig their foxhole on the battalion perimeter, preparing for the expected attack that night-the imminence of personified evil. Watching a patrol go out. King says, in words familiar from Barnes's apocalyptic persona, "Glad I ain't going with 'em. Somewhere out dere man is de Beast and he hungry tonight" (102). A "hungry" enemy appears again in the screenplay (110), but more interestingly the other instance of "the Beast" in the screenplay designates the U.S. Army (82). Noting this, we understand more clearly Stone's dichotomy in which Barnes represents the omnipresent evil against which those who embrace "life"-the 'heads'-must struggle. In other words, "good" and "bad" are not geopolitical entities in this Vietnam, nor, since the NVA are also the "Beast," is Stone involved in a simple denunciation of America.

All night, the battalion struggles against a flood of NVA. But Chris comes into his own, or more exactly, he grows into Elias's role of an ultimate warrior. With the camp overrun and falling, Captain Harris calls in an air strike. Just before the plane arrives, however, Chris and Barnes find each other in the flashing shadows of the perimeter. Barnes attacks Chris and is about to strike the fatal blow when the plane's silhouette fills the sky directly above his raging form. Significantly, in the screenplay Stone calls the airplane "a great white whale" (123); in the movie the plane is black, and it does not kill Barnes and destroy the Battalion (or the platoon) as Moby Dick kills Ahab and sinks the Pequod. Having kept one eye on the Book of Revelation, we find the structural and symbolic forerunner to the plane and to Chris in the image of Christ as "The Word of God," whose "eyes were as a flame of fire" and who "was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood" (Rev. 19:13 and 1). The battle-ending bombing strike resembles Christ's invincible "flame of fire," and Chris's blood-soaked clothes in which he wakes the next morning emphatically evoke Christ's sanguine "vesture."

Like a vengeful Christ crucified, conspicuously nursing his left hand and wearing an ankh crucifix we have not seen before, Chris staggers to his feet, picks up a rifle, looks for Barnes, finds him, and kills him. So in Revelation, the "Word of God" defeats the beast and the beast's army in the battle at Armageddon.

We can tell that the battle in the movie is built from the penultimate battle rather than from the final one by the incongruous symbols which embellish Chris's rescuers. Their armored personnel carrier has enormous shark teeth painted on it, and a Nazi flag flies from its radio antenna (125). Although Barnes is dead and Chris is alive, the metaphors of the machine live on.

Stone closes Platoon with Chris's ascension in the medi-vac helicopter, the red cross on its nose "now rising to meet God," as Stone says in the screenplay (128), a clear indication of his imaginative frame. Down below, the bodies of the battle dead are heaved into bomb craters, perhaps recalling the "lake of fire" into which the beast and the "false prophet" were thrown after losing the next-to-last battle (Rev. 19:20). Finally, the screen whites out with the sun's light as Chris begins his concluding voice-over, the most sermon-like of them all, neatly terminating the mythic plot.

Using the trio of Chris, Elias, and Barnes, Stone plays out his story's moral conflict on idealized grounds which reveal the non-documentary truth he is driving at, a sort of moral epiphany achieved in recent history's crucible. The story is Chris's, but the controlling figures are Elias and Barnes, charismatic personalities whose allusive characterizations stretch taut an oppositional duality that transcends their contemporary social differences. Chris's story is his choosing between them, and then having made his choice, his unequivocal emulation, defense and fulfillment of Elias's role.

To the credit of Stone's historical sense, he does not follow his allegorical model to its ultimate conclusion, a pure fiction by secular reckoning. When Chris leaves the battle scene, the mythic narrative immediately dissipates because post-Vietnam history is hardly the thousand years of blessed sovereignty which succeed Armageddon in the Book of Revelation (20:1-6). However, Stone's sudden recoil from the supporting myth is a failure of artistic, idealizing will: Chris's closing sermon does not assert the absolutes we would expect after the allegorical ride we have been on. As with his ironical use of Ecclesiastes in the first frames of the movie, Stone again disingenuously conceals his story's bedrock sense. Among other fair-minded bromides, Chris equivocates about his role model, calling himself a son of both sergeants!

Notwithstanding his final stumble, Oliver Stone's visionary statement on the Vietnam War is yet a powerfully constructive one, so unlike the absurdity of The Green Berets (1967) or the nihilism bred into Apocalypse Now (1979), Coming Home (1978), and their many sympathetic forerunners and imitators. Like Michael Cimino's nearly medieval The Deer Hunter and Stanley Kubrick's Jungian Full Metal Jacket, Platoon is a mythic reinvention of the war, a displacing of a grand historical statement on the United States' wrong or right involvement, and an assertion in its place of the individual's or the small group's religious or psychological experience. This shift of perspectives could very well be the natural reaction of these moviemakers (and their audiences, too?) to a painful inability to gather a concordant rational sense from the history of the war. And so in dark theatres, at least, we are treated to balms of the irrational; in the case of Platoon, to the comforting familiarities of religious narrative and the archetypal experiences contained within.

Avent Beck