Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

5. Betraying Feminine Virtue: Collaborative Effects and the Transnational Circuits of Vietnamese Popular Culture

5 / Betraying Feminine Virtue: Collaborative Effects and the Transnational Circuits of Vietnamese Popular Culture On a balmy summer evening in 2004, the crowds for Vũ Ngọc Đãng’s Những Cô Gái Chân Dài, or Long-Legged Girls, at the Korean-owned Diamond Plaza in Hồ Chí Minh City were enormous. Sleek motorbikes were parked in rows around the mall; animated throngs of young, fashionable people congregated for drinks before they watched the new film. The mall is flanked by tall business towers and lies adjacent to the Notre Dame Cathedral and a national park that is, by night, a notorious meeting place for lovers and for prostitutes and their clients. Diamond Plaza offers foreigners and a flourishing Vietnamese middle class an air-conditioned respite from the heat during the summer months. It remains a place of leisure for a well-heeled generation of Vietnamese youth, called the “@ generation.” Comprised of four levels, Diamond Plaza is devoted to various consumerist pleasures that include the latest in domestic and foreign movies, screened in the plush cinema on the top floor. Diamond Plaza is not, however, the only theater in Hồ Chí Minh City. The other cineplex is located at the outskirts of downtown, near a famous ice cream parlor and the infamous Backpacker’s Alley. Run-down and cavernous, the theater offers cheap tickets priced at less than $2.00. At the Vinh Quang Cinema, among an audience of mostly young couples, I saw a murky, videotaped version of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Featuring painted movie posters along its exterior walls, the theater provides creaky seats that are large enough for two, accommodating those who want a covert sexual tryst. In fact, movie theaters in Việt Nam provide the few dark spaces for people’s sexual betraying feminine virtue / 149 encounters, since distinctions between private and public spaces are blurred. The domain of the home often includes both close and extended family members, while liaisons can occur in places like the park outside of Diamond Plaza. These cinema-going experiences at Diamond Plaza and Vinh Quang—their stark contrasts and unevenness in terms of projection and sound quality, atmosphere and space—are reflections of the country’s economic trajectory that have wrought scattered transformations since Đổi Mới. A quick look at these two spaces, where the semipublic expressions of sexuality, youth culture, consumerism, and technology all converge, frames my interrogation of the vibrant context of Vietnamese popular culture. This chapter asserts the importance of reading Vietnamese popular culture and the collaborations that underlie it. In particular, I explore male filmmakers’ parody of feminine virtue in “low” cultural texts like Long-Legged Girls and Nguyễn Quang Dũng’s Hồn Trương Ba Da Hàng Thịt [Souls on Swings] (2006). In using the term “low” to describe commercial popular culture, I suggest that films deemed “market-oriented” (thị trường) stand in opposition to those productions that are “artistic” (nghệ thuật) in ways similar to Western academic classifications of “low” and “high” cultures, with their connotations of gender and class.1 As cultural critics have demonstrated, such cultures are often pitched against the other; “high” culture is usually associated with the masculine and the elite, while “low” culture is most often associated with the feminine and the masses. These classificatory terms, while historically situated within capitalist and industrial societies, resonate in the neoliberal economies of Việt Nam and diasporic communities. Even as I recognize that the divide between “high” and “low” cultures is highly relational and culturally specific, I employ these distinctions here because they are useful in delineating how Vietnamese culture flows between homeland and diaspora. Cultural elites in both the homeland and the diaspora understand Vietnamese popular cultural items to be “lowbrow,” apolitical, and shallow —and thus not consistently worthy of censorship by the Vietnamese state or deserving of protest by the Vietnamese diaspora. In this way, the films’ classification as popular entertainment ensures their mobility across political and national borders. Through the transnational collaboration of Vietnamese production and distribution companies, such films travel without the taint of communist politics as they circulate within Việt Nam and from Việt Nam to the diaspora. In contrast, films with more overtly political themes by auteurist directors like Đặng Nhật 150 / betraying feminine virtue Minh have been met with protest in the...