I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

So, if Nolte was up there in the movie, where was Playbwoy? Playbwoy was the nickname I secretly gave to another Nam vet shelter resident, a black man who admired my black shoes: “Back in Nam we wore those, called ‘em Playbwoys.” Playbwoy definitely had the jive poetry but not the conflicted perspective on the war of Robert Downey Jr.’s character’s character. When we discussed the Iraq War, Playbwoy would complain that its failure was the same as Vietnam’s failure: “They send us in there, then they won’t let us take the gloves off. The other dude, he got his gloves off, day one. If you wanna win the damn thing, you got to fight same way they fight.” I wasn’t so surprised to hear Donald Rumsfeld’s old rationale for a reckless war on terror coming from a Nam combat veteran, because roughly half of the men I’ve spoken with who actually fought on the ground made similar comments.

Of course, Tropic Thunder isn’t really a war satire but a sendup of war movies and Ho’wood politics– not liberal/conservative (despite Ben Stiller’s Save the Pandas and adoption crusades or the set pyro expert’s jingo-nihilism) so much as the intramural politics of agent-director-star-mogul power plays. The film makes it clear that no one onscreen has any more of a grasp of geo-political/historical doings than, say, the Quentin Tarantino who once noted that the 9/11 plot was a stale ripoff of an earlier action movie. Stiller and his co-screenwriter, the actor Justin Theroux (veteran of David Lynch’s showbiz surgeries Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire) are savvy enough to guide their satiric missiles at nothing of any relevance to the current military quagmire.

Tropic Thunder works best as a (rather late) indication of the future of film criticism and cultural commentary in general: film. Stiller has trod this turf before with The Cable Guy, which donned the skin of the very beast it loathed (A.D.H.D. cable TV culture) and played it as thoroughly, as absurdly as Downey’s T.T. character does the black thing. Now in the Blu-Ray/DVR era (beyond the cable era’s channel surfing into absolute random access madness), Stiller does such a thorough job of replication that there’s no distinguishing between the real pre-show trailers and the fake ones that open Tropic Thunder. The Fatties: Fart Two looks no less insipid than Eagle Eye or Disaster Movie.

The Village Voice’s Robert Willonsky is dead right that Tropic Thunder amounts to little more than Stiller “nibbling gently at the soft, manicured hands that feed him.” Stiller’s old satirical TV show and The Cable Guy may mark him as a pioneer of some sort, but his industry sanction, hookups and increasing budgets insure that the nibbling will only get softer. The real insurgency has been going on for years, on YouTube and other outlets, by filmmakers who understand Ho’wood’s follies just as intimately but have nothing to lose by rendering them in merciless detail. The only insider who would have dared is another shaggy Nolte lookalike, long dead: Hal Ashby.