THE VIETNAM SYNDROME IN FORREST GUMP MOVIE SCRIPT

Abstract

Considered the most controversial war in the 20^th century, the Vietnam War deeply divides the American society. Especially, it causes the Vietnam Syndrome which still is an obsession of American people until today. The research is carried out on a movie script of one of the most famous Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, Forrest Gump. The collected data are analyzed on the basis of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework for critical discourse analysis (CDA). The study aims to reveal the different aspects of the syndrome considered as a psychological trauma expressing in many factors such as the topic, the plot, the characters, the setting, the genre, the theme songs, and the language of the whole movie. Moreover, the movie script exposes a long period of problematic and tragic time in the history of the United States.