The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era by Sylvia Shin Huey Chong (review)

In The Oriental Obscene, Sylvia Shin Huey Chong argues that Asian bodies in journalistic photographs, films, and television mobilized and made visible racial phantasmatics in the United States. These racial phantasmatics “describe imagined relations of identification, projection, transference, and countertransference between different racial subject positions, in ways that exceed the actual social relations between racialized subjects” (9). Chong traces how visual representations of Asians moved into other bodies from the late 1960s through the early 1980s as Americans struggled to make sense of the Vietnam War. She posits the oriental obscene as “the trauma of the imagined oriental body [and] the oriental body as the index of trauma within the national body” (21) and connects earlier representations of incontinent bodies ruptured by violence to later representations of the self-mastered body in martial arts films. This argument also traces how white masculinity reasserted a semblance of control against the encroachment of the oriental obscene by redefining itself against Asian masculinity.

Chong builds her argument in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis and film theory, drawing particularly on Freud’s explorations of the beating fantasy and primal scene, the concept of Nachträglichkeit in trauma theory, Laplanche’s definition of the phantasmatic, and Deleuze’s movement-image. This theoretical discussion unfolds in a historical register, offering a cultural history of the formative decades of Asian American identity and politics. The discussion of particular visual texts affords a rich consideration of the optical unconscious underlying how Americans processed the events and effects of the Vietnam War. The book consists of two main parts: the first considers how images of broken bodies condensed into a fantasy of the obscenity oriental and white American male incontinence, and the second explores how these images transformed into an assertion of masculine self-control over the body and violence, culminating in recuperations of the white Vietnam War veterans’ violated bodies.

In chapter 1, Chong theorizes 1968 as the primal scene of the post–Vietnam War moment, a year that serves as the condensation of historically significant events in the antiwar protests and urban black rebellions of the era. Although a few events such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy did occur that year, other events commonly associated with the eruptions of 1968 took place earlier or later. Chong argues that the impulse to flag 1968 specifically as the year of transformation allows it to function like Freud’s primal scene regarding the individual. For America, this year is a primal scene that exceeds historical reality and fact, crossing into the phantasmatic and participating significantly in the creation of a national unconscious regarding race, violence, and national identity. Chong’s central text in this chapter is David Morrell’s novel First Blood (1972) and Morrell’s reflections on his creation of the Rambo character. In chapter 2, Chong turns to journalistic reporting of the Vietnam War, analyzing iconic images including “Saigon Execution” (1968), “Massacre at My Lai” (1969), and “Napalm Girl” (1972) that circulated in print and television media. This discussion foregrounds the visual immediacy of the war, as other critics have examined, while developing an understanding of these images in the vein of Deleuze’s film criticism and to “analyze trauma from the perspective of the phenomenology of visual form” (78–79).

In chapter 3, Chong analyzes the late 1970s wave of Hollywood films that restaged the Vietnam War, including The Boys in Company C (1978), Go Tell the Spartans (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979). These films were among the first to return to Vietnam after the fall of Saigon to feature scenes of war rather than just the aftermath of veterans dealing with life in America after their return. Chong draws on Laplanche’s work on the beating fantasy (expanding on Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten”) to consider how...