Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War

5. Victimized Veterans and Disappearing Women: The Vietnam War Film

5 Victimized Veterans and Disappearing Women The Vietnam War Film If numerous oral accounts testify to the fact of rape and sexual abuse in the war, and later literary works confirm this testimony and explore the reasons for and the complications of woman abuse, how is it that rape and sexual abuse came to be glossed over and erased from the Vietnam War as it is commonly understood within the United States? Clearly the literature does not propitiate veteran and American guilt; on the contrary, it confesses it. Instead, the more ubiquitous visual media provide the redemption of the Vietnam veteran, and by proxy America. Visual media—specifically Hollywood films—are the primary vehicle of forgetting violence against women in Vietnam. In this chapter, after giving a brief overview of the history of Vietnam War film from the war years through contemporary times, I will then compare several of the literary works discussed earlier with film adaptations of them, including Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (Hasford’s The Short-Timers), Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (Lang’s report), and Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth (Hayslip’s memoirs), as well as his Platoon. I will show how, though the literary works they adapt are explicitly concerned with and propose reasons for sexual violence toward women, this concern has been dropped entirely (Jacket), contained (Causalities), and appropriated (Heaven) in such a way as to deradicalize it. I will also discuss rape and sexual violence as a structuring absence in other Hollywood representations of the war; in these films, Vietnamese women are absent altogether or propositioning sex workers who con naive GIs, and Vietnamese victims have been replaced by American victims, most notably POW/MIAs. I will speculate as to why the transference to visual media enables, perhaps even requires, a 123 124 Ideologies of Forgetting disappearance of the Vietnamese woman’s trauma. The trope of “friendly fire” as described by Katherine Kinney will bear forcefully on this discussion , as the absence of violence against women allows the Vietnam War to be portrayed as a bloody and destructive fight between Americans, and ultimately it allows only American male trauma to be spoken and validated, obscuring the cultural and military attitudes that condoned sexual violence against Vietnamese women. Of course, I am not arguing that visual media producers collectively conspired to erase the violence done to women; rather, I will show that, as a market-driven industry, in their effort to produce dramas to which audiences would respond, they subtly converted narratives that focused on violence to Vietnamese women to avoid offending audiences. In doing so, these films erased violence toward women, which enabled them to appropriate the language of trauma for the veteran and by extension the nation. This was both uncontested and sustained by other producers of national culture, for Hollywood’s depiction of male victimization was also part of the tendency in the eighties toward “remasculinization,” Susan Jeffords’ descriptor of the cultural move to reclaim and reexalt (white) militarized masculinity against the preceding decade’s advancement of women by positioning Vietnam veterans as victims. Erasing evidence of militarized masculinity’s violent excesses and its traumatizing prescriptions , which had been highlighted by veteran literature and testimony, Hollywood films instead vilified Vietnamese women and posed American men as the true victims. Hollywood’s Wars: Beginnings Before launching into a history of the Vietnam War in film, it is important to understand Hollywood’s historical place in the American war machine, for film has long been integral in shaping Americans’ attitudes toward and understanding of wars. Before and during World War II, Hollywood cooperated with the Office of War Information (OWI)—the government liaison to the media—to produce films that, while positively influencing audiences toward the war effort, would not obviously propagandize . The ideal war film would introduce the government’s messages casually and naturally with ordinary language.1 OWI and Hollywood’s relationship, though sometimes antagonistic and ultimately disintegrating , was extremely fruitful. One strain of the hundreds of war films Hollywood churned out that has particular bearing on the Vietnam War was that dealing with the Japanese enemy. Disregarding OWI’s encouragement to forgo “hate 125 Victimized Veterans and Disappearing Women pictures,” which portrayed the enemy as embodying all evil, Hollywood depicted the Japanese almost exclusively as what Koppes and Black term “the beast in the jungle” (p. 248). While German soldiers were often presented...