Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Vietnam

  • The Same as It Ever Was

    So I just finished writing this paragraph, and it occurs to me that at some point I stopped writing about the past.

    Mailer captures something of this revolutionary sensibility early in The Armies of the Night, when during his drunken speech he incites roars of applause by describing the American bureaucrat’s heart as “full of shit.” “He was off into obscenity,” Mailer writes, and what follows is a three-page meditation on profanity as a defining characteristic of American life. For Mailer, the aesthetic of obscenity is profoundly democratic and egalitarian, a by-product of story-telling traditions in small towns and city streets. But within the context of the Cold War, profane language — like the profane acts it represents — serves as a necessary corrective to the hypocrisies and injustices of modernization and the permanent war economy. “The American corporation executive,” Mailer writes, “who was after all the foremost representative of Man in the world today, was perfectly capable of burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese jungles, yet felt a large displeasure and fairly final disapproval at the generous use of obscenity in literature and in public” (49). That Mailer’s opinion of the corporate executive echoes exactly D.J. Jethroe’s is no coincidence, for this selective amnesia — this sense that all is permissible so long as it is state-sanctioned, to the benefit of American markets, and hidden from plain view — is, according to Mailer, precisely why America was in Vietnam.

    D.J. Jethroe, by the way, is the narrator of Why Are We in Vietnam?, the novel Mailer published just months before the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. Yeah, so that’s me engaging in some word play in that last sentence.

  • Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

    Images: All of the Kubrick trademarks are on display here: languid tracking shots, perfectly symmetrical compositions, slow dissolves, Barry Lyndon-style zoom outs, and thematic changes of color temperature (most noticeable in both blue-tinted scenes involving Pyle). Favorite images: Joker’s “war face,” the long shot of Mr. Touchdown’s crumpling body, the interview segments, “the Jungian thing, sir,” and Pyle’s “major malfunction.”

    • • •

    “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.”
    — Michael Herr, Dispatches

    Full Metal Jacket has been unfairly characterized by many as a deeply flawed narrative, a film whose brilliant first act overshadows the “in country” sequences that follow. I’ll admit to having spent some time myself in that camp. Lee Ermey’s kinetic performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is a sight of strange beauty; his uber-masculine, profanity-fueled taunts are terrifying both for their misogyny and for their undeniable appeal. Likewise, Vincent D’Onofrio’s turn as the pathetic Private Pyle invites us to experience Parris Island by way of a comfortable narrative convention: the bildungsroman. Though unusually impersonal and free of easy sentiment (both Kubrick trademarks), the basic training sections of FMJ essentially conform to our classic genre expectations, mapping out the well-worn path from raw recruit to U.S. Marine.

    That Kubrick undercuts his coming-of-age story with Pyle’s brutal murder/suicide has led many to call Full Metal Jacket an anti-war movie, one that challenges America’s call for “a few good men” and the very processes (militaristic and sociological) that create them. While that’s certainly true—and I’ll soon return to Kubrick’s critique of masculinity—I wonder if it might be more useful to call FMJ an anti war-movie movie. For the auteur is obviously fascinated, in a deliberately self-reflexive way, with the influence of images and storytelling on the formation of what might be described as ideological mythology, that is, the conventions of belief and behavior imposed upon us through cultural narratives by various makers of meaning. Kubrick, always an intellectual filmmaker (and I would deny the negative connotations so often attached to that word), destabilizes those familiar myths, appropriately representing the Vietnam War by way of a narrative that, like the war itself, frustrates expectations and refuses progress.

    Private Joker’s opening line—”Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?”—serves as a refrain throughout FMJ, making explicit the unspoken ties that bind America’s victory in WWII (and the subsequent cinematic representations of it) to the Cold War ideology that made Vietnam possible. In the film’s most self-reflexive sequence, a camera crew interviews a platoon of grunts, who affect bravado, but seem genuinely bewildered by the failure of their actual war experience to conform to their preconceived notions of “heroism,” “bravery,” and “sacrifice.” The aptly named Private Cowboy (Arliss Howard) describes the battle at Hue as the first to be like “what [he] thought a war was supposed to be. There’s the enemy. Kill him.” Another wonders why the locals are unappreciative of their efforts: “They’d rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards.” The stories of American masculinity and historical progress—written during WWII by their fathers, political leaders, and commanding officers—are revealed to be little more than Tall Tales.

    In that sense, John Wayne, I guess, is like Pecos Bill. Despite the interesting moral ambiguity of some of his finer roles, for many critics of the Cold War he serves more often as an icon, a shorthand referent to the nostalgia and arrogance that continues to characterize so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy. In Dispatches, journalist and FMJ co-writer Michael Herr complains that neither the Duke’s brand of flag-waving patriotism nor the traditional Hollywood films in which it was trumpeted could possibly make sense of the morally ambiguous Vietnam experience. “The Green Berets doesn’t count,” Herr writes. “That wasn’t really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.” Hartmann’s murder, then, is a symbolic gesture for Kubrick, a violent erasure of an anachronistic icon. Watch the scene again, and notice how closely Hartmann’s voice and swagger mimic John Wayne’s when he learns that Pyle’s rifle is loaded: “Now you listen to me, private pyle, and you listen good.”

    Like Herr’s and several of the other landmark accounts of Vietnam—Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, in particular—Full Metal Jacket proposes a new narrative form, one that capitalizes on the contradictions of war instead of reducing them to an impossibly coherent heroic myth. Gone are the noble feats of bravery that would lead, inevitably, to the taking of Pork Chop Hill or to victory at Iwo Jima. Gone are the rag tag group of soldiers who share stories from “back home” and pour over letters from Mom. Instead, Kubrick splices the “in country” acts into disjointed episodes, leaving viewers, like the soldiers onscreen, wandering without direction.

    Nowhere is Kubrick’s narrative strategy more obvious and effective than in the film’s closing sequence, that moment when we most desire closure. After showing Joker (Matthew Modine) fire his pistol into a dying female sniper, Kubrick cuts to a long shot of soldiers on the march from left to right across the screen, their figures silhouetted by the fires burning throughout Hue. Then, in the final cut of the film, Kubrick deliberately breaks the 180 degree rule: we now see Joker in a medium shot as he and the others march from right to left. By maintaining continuity through the soundtrack, Kubrick prevents the unusual cut from being as jarring as one might expect, but the implications are obvious: unlike traditional war films, Full Metal Jacket has refused to honor our journey by arriving at any prescribed destination. Instead, we continue to hump it back and forth, longing for the direction and ideological stability of Parris Island.

    • • •

    As a side note, I felt almost compelled to write this response after watching Full Metal Jacket last night—the first time I had seen it in several years. Despite my deep affection for Kubrick, I had always felt strangely ambivalent about this film, mostly, I think, because I considered it a retread of concerns that had already been tackled in better films: the possibility of noble action in war (Paths of Glory), technological hubris (2001), Cold War ideology (Dr. Strangelove), and the dehumanizing influence of the State over the individual (A Clockwork Orange). But after spending several months knee-deep in some of the best literature to emerge from the Vietnam experience, Full Metal Jacket struck me with something of the force of revelation. This really is an impressive film. One of Kubrick’s best.

    Reading suggestions:

    • David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and Sticks and Bones
    • Michael Herr: Dispatches
    • Gustav Hasford: The Short-Timers
    • Tim O’Brien: Going After Cacciato
    • Bobbie Ann Mason: In Country
    • Joan Didion: Democracy

  • Planning for War (and Whatnot)

    In my response to Bush’s UN speech, I welcomed his desire to address the human rights violations occurring in Iraq, but did so knowing that he was only paying lip-service to those very real problems for rhetorical and political ends. This hypocrisy is the subject of Fred Hiatt’s wonderful op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post. After detailing the abuses in North Korea and Burma (neither of which is currently scheduled for an American induced “regime change”), Hiatt concludes:

    “So it is naive to think that people will link “regime change” to “brutal repression” as a regular matter anytime soon. Yet to the thousands of North Koreans who even today are scraping bark off trees or boiling grasses in an effort to survive, who are chipping coal in labor camps, who are deprived of donated American food because they are deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime, the proposition of international responsibility might not seem so outlandish.”

    One day before Tony Blair is scheduled to finally reveal the mysterious dossier that will apparently prove the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the Prime Minister must first convince his own cabinet that war is necessary. His international development secretary, Clare Short, voiced serious reservations yesterday, and in the process made a statement the likes of which I have yet to hear from an American politician:

    “We should be ready to impose the will of the UN on them if they don’t cooperate but not by hurting the people of Iraq. We can’t inflict pain and suffering on the people of Iraq, they are innocents. Each one of them is as precious as the 3,000 people who were in the twin towers.”

    Here is a really interesting Hawk/Dove breakdown of Blaire’s cabinet, including links to further information about each member.

    Want a preview of the upcoming war? Here is an overview of the Pentagon’s latest proposal, or, more precisely, the latest proposal shared with the press. This article feels like a sick PR piece to me, complete with the requisite double-speak from Rumsfeld. His intense bombing campaign will be an “attack on a government, not a country”; his target is the “dictatorial, repressive” Hussein: “The United States has not and never has had any problem or issue with the Iraqi people.”

    When I read these articles about our precision attacks, our gung-ho bombing campaigns, I’m reminded of Michael Herr’s remembrances of his childhood, when he first saw photos of dead bodies in Life magazine:

    “Even when the picture was sharp and clearly defined, something wasn’t clear at all, something repressed that monitored the images and withheld their essential information. It may have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn’t have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at porn, all the porn in the world.” (Dispatches)

    When he says “I remember now,” Herr is referring to his experience in Vietnam, where he saw first-hand the effects of America’s intense bombings. His porn analogy seems even more appropriate today, when technology allows us to watch a precision guided missile hitting its target from a first-person point of view. How disgusting to think that we are now made to identify not with human victims, but with the weapons that kill them. It’s Eisensteinian montage at its most perverse.

  • The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

    The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

    Dir. by Tran Anh Hung

    Images: Remarkably lush, sensuous images of natural world: palm fronds, ripened fruit, insects and frogs, rain. Instead of using traditional establishing shots, Tran often changes scenes by cutting to extreme close-ups that only become recognizable once the camera has pulled away. Another important visual motif is created by lateral tracking shots that follow characters from room to room, usually from a perspective outside of the building, peeking in through windows and open doorways.

    • • •

    When we first meet Mui (Lu Man San), she is ten years old and a recent transplant to Saigon, where she has come, alone, to support herself as a servant. She is welcomed into a home that seems incapable of escaping its own grief: the master’s mother is reconciled to a life of solitary prayer and mourning for a husband who died decades earlier; his photo is joined on the family shrine by that of the master’s daughter, who would have been Mui’s age had she survived a childhood disease. The master and his wife (Truong Thi Loc, in the film’s finest performance) are distant, both emotionally and physically, leading to his periodic escapes with the family’s money. For Mui, life settles quickly into a domestic routine, whose rites she inherits from Thi (Nguyen Anh Hoa), the family’s older servant.

    The heart of the film is Mui’s emotional development, a process mirrored by the film’s two-act structure. After the grandmother’s death, Tran cuts to a scene set within the same home a decade later. The father is now gone, one son is married, and Mui has grown into a beautiful young woman (now played by Tran Nu Yen-Khe), who remains confined to a life of servitude. When she is forced for financial reasons to leave the home, Mui is mourned by Truong, who behaves as if she were losing another daughter. It’s a touching scene: the mother hands to Mui the heirlooms that would have belonged to the young girl whom she has tragically replaced. The remainder of the film concerns Mui’s developing relationship with her new master, Khuyen (Vuong Hoa Hoi), a wealthy, young composer who spends his days at the piano.

    The Scent of Green Papaya is an impressive film, one most memorable for its remarkably sensuous imagery and elegant camera work. By deliberately slowing his pace, by cross-cutting images of the natural and civilized worlds, and by scoring the film largely with the sounds of nature, Tran immerses his viewers in a cinematic Walden, a space of near Transcendental harmony. Thoreau’s fascination with the battling ants outside of his window is even reenacted by a child in Mui’s home. There is something particularly beautiful in Mui’s graceful acceptance of her lot. Even as an adult, she finds a quiet joy in communion with nature, a joy we are allowed to share with her (if only artificially) in the very act of experiencing the film.

    Despite both my sincere fondness for it and my admiration for Tran’s skill, The Scent of Green Papaya strikes me as somewhat politically naïve (as does Walden, actually), particularly on two accounts. It is set in the early-1950s and 1960s, a period of French colonialism in Vietnam. Tran paints the era in nostalgic hues, though, seldom (if at all) questioning the destructive influence of Europe on native culture. Khuyen’s devotion and debt to Debussy, for instance, stands him in stark contrast to the father and brother who play traditional harmonies at the start of the film. That the father deserts his family while Khuyen acts as a Prince Charming to Mui’s Cinderella reflects a reductive privileging of Western practices.

    The same could be said of Tran’s ambivalent treatment of women, who, by in large, are relegated to domestic spheres. (I’m still trying to forgive him for burdening Mui with a caged pet, which was the most hackneyed of overt symbols even when Susan Glaspell used it in Trifles eighty years ago.) Tran undoubtedly cares deeply for the women — particularly for the mother, who evidences impressive strength throughout — but he seems deliberately unwilling to allow Mui a happy ending outside of maternal bliss. In the film’s most moving sequence, we hear the adult Mui’s voice for the first time as she reads to Khuyen. It’s a moment of potential self-realization, but one that, unfortunately, appears to go unrealized. The film soon ends, and we are prevented from hearing Mui express her own thoughts in her own words through her own voice. Instead, she remains barely distinguishable from the natural world that surrounds her: an object of sensuous beauty on which we project our desires. The film actually becomes more interesting to me if I imagine Mui in twenty years, her beauty faded, her husband gone, and her spirit empowered.

  • The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)

    By David Rabe

    That’s just this whole damn army messin’ with me and it ain’t ever gonna end but in shit.
    — Pavlo Hummel, before attempting suicide

    I am in a world of shit.
    — Private Pyle, before committing suicide in Full Metal Jacket

    I began to think about Kubrick’s film long before I reached the end of the first act of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. I knew little about Rabe’s play, other than what I had picked up from reading his own introduction. Most notably, I knew that it was built in two sections: a first act that showed Hummel’s development from raw recruit to “Regular Army,” and a second that took place in Vietnam. It’s that same structure that so struck me the first time I saw Full Metal Jacket. By the time Hummel began equating his world with shit (seen most clearly in the drama’s finale), I found it difficult to ignore his connection to Pyle. There are other similarities as well—the “blanket party” both young men suffer, the “friend” who tries to help (Pierce in the play, Joker in the film), and, of course, the gruesome death that both men meet. Of more interest to me though, is that Pavlo Hummel, again like the film, is difficult to neatly classify into any one particular genre. In his introduction to the Viking edition of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Rabe responds to the label “antiwar” which has been frequently applied to his work:

    I have written them to diagnose, as best I can, certain phenomena that went on in and around me. It seems presumptuous and pointless to call them “antiwar” plays . . . I think these labels [antifamily, antimarriage, antiyouth, and anticrime] do not exist because family, marriage, youth, and crime are all viewed as phenomena permanently a part of the eternal human pageant. I believe war to be an equally permanent part of that pageant. (xxv)

    As is the case when I watch Full Metal Jacket, I find Pavlo Hummel much more interesting when viewed in this light—as an examination of “the eternal human pageant,” that constant process of interaction, performance, and construction.

    Rabe bookends Pavlo Hummel with Hummel’s death scene. It’s an interesting device. I’ve read several novels (most recently Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies) and seen a few films (Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures and, of course, Citizen Kane) that use the structure to reinforce the development of a character, either by building a mystery (“Rosebud”) or by creating a suspenseful, and at times melodramatic, sense of inevitability. Pavlo Hummel, though, seems to do the exact opposite, pointing out how little its main character is capable of developing. As the play opens, Hummel is a loud-mouthed kid, boasting loudly of his own sexual prowess and jumping blindly to retrieve a live grenade. Two hours, and more than a hundred pages later, he is unchanged. It’s a great manipulation of our expectations. We come to the play expecting to see a green recruit, one stupid enough to volunteer for firemen duty, grow into manhood—a nice, typical bildungsroman. Instead, we watch his journey knowing that he will be blown to bits. “You had that thing in your hand, didn’t you?” asks Ardell in the opening scene. “What was you thinkin’ on, you had that thing in your hand?” Even after his “basic training” and a tour of combat duty, Hummel, still the green recruit, is capable of only jumping into action. He is oblivious to any causal relationship. “[I was thinkin’] About throwin’ it,” he replies, as if the explosion were in no way inevitable.

    On one level then, the play does criticize the basic training, as seen in act one, as a failed means of constructing some cookie-cutter-like masculine identity. For Rabe, the training is nothing but hollow ritual. (Though Rabe throws off the label “antiwar,” the political ramifications of this, particularly when situated in early-70’s America, are obvious.) As the act closes, Hummel, reeling from his failed suicide attempt, is chastised by Ardell for consistently proving himself to be a fool. “What kinda shit this?” he yells, after seeing Hummel’s uniform lying on the floor. “Your poor ole Sarge see this, he sit down on the ground and he cry, man. Poor ole Sarge, he work himself like crazy tryin’ ta teach you so you can act like a man.” But the Sarge’s lessons are lost on Hummel. His attempts all end in failure—he drags his pants across the floor, oblivious to the dirt they collect. Finally, Pierce and the other men come to his aid. “All is ease now,” writes Rabe in the stage directions. “It is a ritual now: Pavlo must exert no effort whatsoever as he is transformed.” That passive verb is interesting. The act ends with Hummel in full dress uniform, complete with sunglasses, staring at himself in the mirror. “Who you see?” asks Ardell. “That ain’t no Pavlo Hummel. Noooo, man. That somebody else. An’ he somethin’ else.” But Hummel’s transformation has been passive. He has relied on others to define himself as “Regular Army,” just as before he had relied on lies, foolish boasting, and empty quips to define himself as a streetkid. As Rabe mentions in his “Author’s Note,” “real insight never comes [for Hummel] . . . he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where.”

    Questions of masculinity inform nearly every scene in Pavlo Hummel. After Hummel’s transformation at the end of Act One, the play shifts dramatically, moving to the “real” world of Pavlo’s home. There he is united with his half-brother, Mickey, and the two share stories over drinks. Their conversation is littered with verbal attacks and retaliations. Mickey calls Hummel a “fuckin’ myth-maker” and a “goddamn cartoon.” Hummel protests, screaming, “I’m not an asshole anymore!” and “I don’t need you anymore.” But Hummel’s reliance upon his new-found identity as a soldier is unconvincing. He imagines himself part of a new fraternity, referring to his fellow soldiers as “real brothers.” But Mickey doesn’t allow Hummel any victory, calling him a bastard and their mother a whore, and playfully mentioning Joanna, thereby reminding Hummel of his virginity.

    These questions of masculinity are only intensified once Hummel reaches Vietnam. The first scene “in country” is a disorienting collage of images:

    Hummel and Brisbey. Brisbey has been literally emasculated—”got seventeen years in the army; no legs no more, no balls, one arm.” It’s only beside him that Hummel appears virile.

    Hummel and Jones. Hummel is pure green compared to Jones, the man who brokers Hummel’s first sexual experience.

    Hummel and Yen and Sgt. Tower. Yen undresses Hummel while Tower holds up an M-16 and chants, “You got to love this rifle, Gen’lmen, like it you pecker and you love to make love.” Rabe’s phallic imagery is none-too-subtle. (I can’t help thinking of the recruits in Full Metal Jacket who sing, “this is my rifle, this is my gun” as they marched, their hands grasping their M-16’s and their crotches.) It’s no surprise that Brisbey asks to hold a rifle or that Hummel describes his first lay as: “I just about blew this girl’s head off.”

    Hummel and the Captain. Again, Hummel attempts to define himself by emulating the examples he sees around him. “I want to feel,” he says, “that I’m with a unit Victor Charlie considers valuable enough to want to get it.” The consequences of such a request are lost on him.

    Hummel’s combat duty is further proof of his emptiness. He is injured repeatedly, but is so mesmerized by the idea of being a soldier that he passes up a chance to go home. “How many times you gonna let ’em hit you?” Ardell asks. “As many as they want,” Hummel replies. But he is never able to define himself in his own terms. I love that image of the men looking to the North Star to find their own place, their own direction. Ardell asks Hummel if he’s ever seen the North Star in his life and Hummel can only say, “I seen a lot of people pointin’.”