Oliver Stone: America is an “outlaw nation”

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Across a four-decade career in the movie business that has encompassed three Academy Awards, 18 narrative films and several documentaries as a director, and innumerable side projects as a writer and producer, Oliver Stone has been obsessed with one topic: America. Indeed, during what you might call Stone’s classic Hollywood period, from “Salvador” in 1986 to “Nixon” in 1995 – and I don’t exclude such apparent detours as “The Doors” and “Natural Born Killers” – his central subject has been all the ways the United States has driven itself crazy, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, in the years since his own Eisenhower-era childhood.

Given that background, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken Stone this long to tackle a straightforward nonfiction project like his Showtime miniseries “The Untold History of the United States,” which tries to counter the jingoistic mythmaking and obligatory “American exceptionalism” of most public discourse about 20th-century history. That phrase refers to a creed that still holds sway (or so polls suggest) among a large proportion of the U.S. population, although it hasn’t been taken seriously by historians for many years: The idea that America has a special and even sacred role to play in world history, and cannot be compared to other nations driven by the grubby realities of politics and economics.

Salon.com > The Untold History of the United States

Oliver Stone: America is an “outlaw nation”