REVIEW: Oliver Stone’s ‘Chasing the Light’ — an epic memoir befitting an epic life

In a 1992 interview with Arthur Miller, Charlie Rose asked him what quality the great playwrights have shared in common, distinguishing them from the not so great ones in any given age?

After a pause to gather his thoughts, Miller replied that the “big ones share a fierce moral sensibility” and that “they are all burning with some anger at the way the world is.” “The littler ones,” Miller continues, “have made their peace with it. The bigger ones can’t make any peace.”

Oliver Stone is an artist whose work (his early work especially) is, as with Miller’s and all the “bigger ones”, suffused with the passion and fire of a man who refused to make peace with the world he both experienced and observed around him after serving two tours in Vietnam as an infantryman, prior to emerging determined to live life on his own terms or not at all.

The period covered in Chasing the Light runs from Stone’s his childhood and formative years all the way to the mountaintop that is Oscar night in 1987, when he picks up the Oscar for best director for Platoon, which also wins the award for best picture, editing, and score. In between we are taken on a journey of Sisyphean magnitude as he battles to overcome personal demons as a result of fraught-ridden teenage years in the midst of his parents’ divorce, which shatters any semblance of security and certainty he’d enjoyed as a child of relative privilege and affluence. Those demons were key in his decision to volunteer for Vietnam, which he does bent on either death or spiritual rebirth in this hell of his own choosing.

I wanted to be like everybody else, an anonymous infantryman, cannon fodder, down there in the muck with the masses I’d read about in John Dos Passos.

Greek mythology is a key theme in the book and in his life during this seminal period — in particular the epic character Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), hero of Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, and also a key character in its prequel, the Iliad. Stone uses Odysseus as his inspiration in choosing to forego the safe and steady path of convention and instead embrace the wisdom enshrined in Nietzsche…