Coming Home (1978)

The film Coming Home was released in 1978. It is set in the late sixties and concerns the Vietnam War. It makes a good companion piece on that war along with the film Platoon that was made 8 years later. Platoon depicts the war itself and its impact on the soldiers as they were engaged in it. Coming Home? by contrast? describes the soldiers before they left home? why they went to war? the women they left behind? &? as the title indicates? the permanent wounds and scars on their souls and bodies that changed the way they lived and died after they came home. (Cunningham 58-9) The film focuses on two soldiers and the one woman they both loved. The first? Bob (Bruce Dern) is an officer married to Sally (Jane Fonda). He is hardly waiting to go to Vietnam. His wife supports but "doesn't understand" why he so wants to go. Sally is a woman of the 50's; she never lived alone; never worked outside the home; and her patriotism was strong and extended to her insisting that a friend not turn off the television set at night until the national anthem played behind the American flag closed the television station's broadcasting for the day. The other soldier? Luke (Jon Voight)? has already returned wounded? crippled? and unable to walk for life. His ordeal and the ordeal of others confined to the veterans' hospital is graphically depicted. He is not even able to "be a man" in the sense of participating in the act of sex as he did before. Sally? who volunteers to work in the hospital after her husband leaves for war (he did not want her to get any kind of job)? is horrified both by the suffering of these veterans and by the callous disregard they face both from the society they fought for and from the officers' wives on the base.

Discovering that she knew Luke back in high school when he was the captain of the football team and she a cheerleader? she finds herself attracted to him again. They develop a relationship that becomes physically intimate when Sally returns from a disappointing trip to see her husband in Hong Kong. (Cook 98-110) The contrast between the only two scenes of explicit lovemaking in the film? the first between Sally and Bob before he leaves for Vietnam and the second with Luke ...