Session 10: Film, Trauma
and Change
Chair:
Joss Hands
Reinhart Lutz
- Transformations of Trauma without Rehabilitating Failure: The Dual
Attempt at Reshaping America’s Memory of the War in Viet Nam in
Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2002)
Department of English and Film Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton,
CA 95204, USA.
We Were Soldiers (2002) seeks to recover, for commercial
mass audience entertainment purposes, a part of the American historical
experience which has caused deep traumatic fissures in American society
and has often been considered an emblematic American failure. Through
its carefully selected and produced slice of history, the film relies
on a sufficient recuperative transformation of cultural attitudes among
its domestic audience, and seeks to accelerate and help shape this process.
It aims to re-valorize select aspects of its historical subject at a
precise historical moment, shaped by cinematic, cultural and political
developments, which is deemed advantageous. Yet the film also seeks
to acknowledge the overall historical failure of America, with its parallel
massive disruption of civic consensus and political order. It tries
to avoid critical dismissal by refusing to project a monolithic message
too directly at odds with a still lingering, if slowly receding, negative
collective memory and the factual outcome.
To achieve its dual ambition of a recuperative and partially sustentative
transformation of its subject, the film chooses an event set at the
relatively pre-traumatic onset of the conflict, in November 1965. It
confines itself almost exclusively to the military war at a time when
North Viet Nam’s strategists were somewhat obliging this American
desire. The film builds on a re-valorization of battle, utilizing visual
and sonic aesthetics which Saving Private Ryan established for the genre.
Yet it is careful to allow for some degree of alterity and divergence.
It opens to a flashback of French soldiers, expressing with “pays
merde, guerre merde” a common subsequent American sentiment. At
rather minimal levels still surpassing previous generic norms, screen
time is given to the side of the “Other,” ironically played
by Vietnamese-Americans from California, where the film was shot. Graphically,
with a heap of North Vietnamese war dead reclaimed after American departure
from the battlefield, the movie introduces a note of dissonance reinforced
by a North Vietnamese officer’s statement that this early success
will only lead the Americans into a deeper tragedy. Thus, the film reflects
the most current transformation of America’s collective memory
of a traumatic war experience.
Hanh
Nguyen - Capturing Changes in a Changed Land: Tony Bui’s
Three Seasons and Images of Transformation in Post-War Vietnam
University of California, Riverside, Department of English, Riverside,
CA 92521, USA
Tony Bui’s Three Seasons (1999) is a remarkable
film, itself the product of changing political and economic attitudes
in a changing country. The film seeks, with uncanny clarity, to kaleidoscopically
capture some of the ruptures and temporary results of the transformations
triggered by the new economic and political policies of the Socialist
Republic of Viet Nam in the aftermath of the mid-1980’s articulation
of doi moi, a strategic blueprint for bringing economic change
to a society previously committed to the global application of Socialist
ideology, while maintaining the near-exclusive hold on political power
by the country’s Communist Party, Ðang Cong San. The film
is analyzed as a material cultural document which exhibits the consequences
of transformations in both Viet Nam and in the attitudes of a hegemonic
United States in its relationship to the “Other,” with whom
it has long generated an often traumatic relationship.
Findings discussed are the factors which enabled Bui and his Vietnamese-American
and European-American talent and crew (including his sister, Zoe Bui,
and Harvey Keitel) shooting the film on location in Viet Nam, indicating
a sea change in both Vietnamese-US relations and those of the local
Vietnamese and visiting overseas “Viet Kieu,” the members
of the post-war diaspora whom the West has often called the “boat
people.” Next, focus is on the transformations in Vietnamese society
captured by the film: the effects of an easing of Socialist hegemony
and the concomitant rush into early Capitalism, ironically reminiscent
of the very labor and class situations encountered by Karl Marx in the
mid- to late 1800’s Great Britain; massive exploitation of labor
and open re-emergence of prostitution and the lumpenproletariat, and
the curious side story of a European-American father’s quest for
his Eurasian daughter (a figure of some problematic cultural consequence
in the country of her birth, indicative of an intra-societal institutionally,
culturally and politically sanctioned racism).