The Works Oliver Stone and the Voyage Between and Beyond the Reality of American Exceptionalism.

Help Completing Thesis: Writing and Editing

Here are the instructions for the thesis

Please see the attached documents for your reference. 

I need some assistance completing my thesis.  I already have 10 pages of it from a previous essay that I am building off of.  While the initial thesis is about the films of Oliver Stone and the Auteur theory, this essay is going further and dissecting how the entire works Stone shine and light and offer a critique of the concept of American Exceptionalism and American history/society as a whole.

The 1st essay, without citations, is around 14 pages long and focuses on the movies of Oliver Stone regarding the presidency, JFK, NIXON, and W. 

This thesis will go further regarding his entire body of work and how it demonstrates a critique of American Exceptionalism. The concept of the American Dream can also be analyzed and critiqued under American Exceptionalism. As the American Dream, if it ever was real, is certainly unreachable for many today, and those that have achieved it, have had to to many terrible things in order to achieve it and ultimately results in their downfall, either end up in prison or even death. 

60 page minimum, 80 page maximum (with citations)

Please see the following abstract, which can be utilized or altered as the introduction and methodology sections:

Oliver Stone is considered by many scholars and film critics, and historians to be one of the most impactful filmmakers of American cinema. It could certainly be argued that most of his career in films, documentaries, etc had mostly been critical of the thought of American exceptionalism, that the United States is not in fact a “Shining City on a Hill,” but in reality, there are many aspects of American history and culture that should be addressed. Many of his works offer critiques of many aspects of the United States, whether political, economic, or cultural.  Essentially, much of his work analyzes, critiques, and shines a light of different facets of American history and culture.  that often challenges the concept of American exceptionalism. Stone’s seems to highlight that while there are parts of the United States that are admirable and that there have been exceptional people, there are also many negative aspects. Stone demonstrates his such as his admiration for people and movements and their struggle against the negative aspects of American society. This thesis will explore the writings of contemporary historians, scholars, and film critics’ reception and understanding of Stone’s works and also examine how Stone can be considered one of the most influential filmmakers in American history in that his works have actually challenged cultural norms, American myths, and in some cases, directly influenced government policy. 

Please write the introduction and methodology section.  The methodology section will state that his works will be explored by analyzing the works of contemporary academics and film critics as well as those of the times when the works were released

Briefly go over Oliver Stone life and career, with a focus on how he came from a background of privilege, he came from a wealthy family, a Wall Street father, and got into Yale University but left to teach English.  He ended up enlisting to fight in Vietnam and requested combat duty.  This experience shaped his worldview and his future artistic creations. 

After Vietnam, he went to NYU to study film, where Martin Scorsese was one of his professors. 

He wrote Scarface, starring Al Pacino, which was partially inspired by Stones own cocaine use at the time.  Interestingly, this film has attained a cult status, wherein audiences triumph the main character as a successful businessman who immigrated to the United States and accomplishes the American Dream, but his success ultimately leads to his downfall and death..  This movie shows the first critique of American society/exceptionalism/capitalism, showing what one must do and must become to actually achieve the American Dream. 

Please discuss the following works and how they relate to American Exceptionalism and American culture in society in addition to the films already mentioned from my previous essay:

In 1986, Stone directed two films back to back: the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful Salvador, shot largely in Mexico, and his long in-development Vietnam project Platoon, shot in the Philippines. 

Platoon was the first of three films Stone has made about the Vietnam War: the others were Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth, each dealing with different aspects of the war. Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about Stone’s experience in combat; Born on the Fourth of July is based on the autobiography of US Marine turned peace campaigner Ron Kovic; Heaven & Earth is based on the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, in which Le Ly Hayslip recalls her life as a Vietnamese village girl drastically affected by the war and who finds another life in the USA. 

1987’s Wall Street, starring Charlie Sheen & Michael Douglas, which obviously criticizes the excesses of American capitalism and the American Dream  

Stone’s satire of the modern media, Natural Born Killers was released in 1994. Originally based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, but significantly rewritten by Stone, Richard Rutowski, and David Veloz,[39] critics recognized its portrayal of violence and the intended satire on the media. Before it was released, the MPAA gave the film a NC-17 rating; this caused Stone to cut four minutes of film footage in order to obtain an R rating (he eventually released the unrated version on VHS and DVD in 2001).

He came back to criticize Wall Street with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in 2010.

In 2016 he made a film Snowden, which is about an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

A specific section of the thesis can and should be devoted to his documentary work, including the following:

Stone made three documentaries on Fidel Castro: Comandante (2003), Looking for Fidel, and Castro in Winter (2012), essentially analyzing American policy towards Cuba, but also to Latin America as a whole. He made Persona Non Grata, a documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations, interviewing several notable figures of Israel, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Shimon Peres, as well as Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, offering interviews and context to the United States involvement with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

In 2009, Stone completed a feature-length documentary, South of the Border about the rise of leftist governments in Latin America, featuring seven presidents: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, the Kirchners of Argentina, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, all of whom are critical of US foreign policy in South America. Stone hoped the film would get the rest of the Western world to rethink socialist policies in South America, particularly as it was being applied by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.Stone defended his decision not to interview Chávez’s opponents, stating that oppositional statements and TV clips were scattered through the documentary and that the documentary was an attempt to right a balance of heavily negative coverage. He praised Chávez as a leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, a movement for social transformation in Latin America, and also praised the six other presidents in the film.

A subsection of this thesis can also focus on In 2012, the documentary miniseries Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States premiered on Showtime, Stone co-wrote, directed, produced, and narrated the series, having worked on it since 2008 with co-writers American University historian Peter J. Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham.[52] The 10-part series is supplemented by a 750-page companion book of the same name, also written by Stone and Kuznick, published on October 30, 2012, by Simon & Schuster.[53] Stone described the project as “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done. Certainly in documentary form, and perhaps in fiction, feature form.”[54] The project received positive reviews from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,[55] The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald,[56] and reviewers from IndieWire,[57] San Francisco Chronicle,[58] and Newsday.[59] Hudson Institute adjunct fellow historian Ronald Radosh accused the series of historical revisionism,[60] while journalist Michael C. Moynihan accused the book of “moral equivalence” and said nothing within the book was “untold” previously.[61] Stone defended the program’s accuracy to TV host Tavis Smiley by saying “This has been fact checked by corporate fact checkers, by our own fact checkers, and fact checkers [hired] by Showtime. It’s been thoroughly vetted … these are facts, our interpretation may be different than orthodox, but it definitely holds up.”[

There is a focus on seemingly forgotten and rarely mentioned figures of American history, such as Henry Wallace, with the main thesis of this specific work being that most of the worlds military conflicts of the 20th century were done for financial benefit for Wall Street and military contractors of the military-industrial complex under the guise of fighting fascism/communism/socialism.

Stone was interviewed in Boris Malagurski’s documentary film The Weight of Chains 2 (2014), which deals with neoliberal reforms in the Balkans.[65]

On March 5, 2014, Stone and teleSUR premiered the documentary film Mi amigo Hugo (My Friend Hugo), a documentary about Venezuela’s late President, Hugo Chávez, one year after his death. The film was described by Stone as a “spiritual answer” and tribute to Chávez.[66] At the end of 2014 according to a Facebook post Stone said he had been in Moscow to interview (former Ukrainian president) Viktor Yanukovych, for a “new English language documentary produced by Ukrainians”.

Two years later in 2016, Stone was executive producer for Ukrainian-born director Igor Lopatonok’s film Ukraine on Fire, a documentary written by Vanessa Dean. In the film, Lopatonok showed the historic background of divisions in the region; Stone interviewed ousted president Yanukovych and Russian president Vladimir Putin about the removal of Yanukovych in the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Narratives in the film such as by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry described the rise of US-funded NGOs active in the area and suggested that the Maidan Revolution was a US-backed coup d’état.[67]

Stone’s series of interviews with Russian president Putin over the span of two years was released as The Putin Interviews, a four-night television event on Showtime on June 12, 2017.[68] On June 13, Stone and Professor Stephen F. Cohen joined John Batchelor in New York to record an hour of commentary on The Putin Interviews.[citation needed] In 2019, he released Revealing Ukraine, another film produced by Stone, directed by Lopatonok and featuring Stone interviewing Putin.[69] During these interviews Putin made an unproven claim about Georgian snipers being responsible for the February 20 killings of protesters during the Euromaidan demonstrations, a hypothesis Stone himself had earlier supported on Twitter.[70]

In June 2021, Stone’s documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass was selected to be shown in the Cannes Premiere section at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.[71]

In 2021, he also produced and featured in Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, directed by Lopatonok, an eight-hour film consisting of Stone interviewing Kazakh politician and former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. The movie has been criticized for its non-confrontational approach in the interview and because no opposition members were interviewed, according to some critics this resulted in a promotion of the authoritarian rule and cult of personality of Nazarbayev.[72][73] The film received at least $5 million funding from Nazarbayev’s own charitable foundation, Elbasy, via the country’s State Center for Support of National Cinema, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Stone and Lopatonok had denied any Kazakhstani government involvement.[74][75][76] According to Rolling Stone, “What little attention Qazaq did receive was largely negative, with critics decrying the film for its glowing depiction of Nazarbayev.

As there is a maximum page count of 80, feel free to edit the sections and selections of his work, specifically of the documentary section of his work.  I feel that the most important work to mention in this section is The Untold History of the United States and that this should be mentioned at least if the other documentaries need to be cut.