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The Oriental Obscene
Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era
By SYLVIA SHIN HUEY CHONG
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4854-2
Chapter One
BRINGING THE WAR HOME
Spectacles of Violence and Rebellion in the American 1968
The people of America are deeply concerned about violence. They have seen a President struck down by an assassin's bullet, and then seen the assassin himself slain while in police custody. They have seen other assassinations of national figures, and none more devastating than the killings earlier this year, first of a major leader of the civil rights movement, and then of the brother of the dead President.
Americans have seen smoke and flames rising over the skylines of their cities as civil disorder has spread across their land—holocausts of rioting, looting, firebombing, and death—a pattern of disorder and destruction repeated in city after city.
Americans have seen students disrupt classes, seize buildings and destroy property at institutions of learning. They have seen young people confronting police at the Pentagon and at draft induction centers across the country. They have seen them heckling, vilifying and even physically abusing public officials. They have heard them shouting obscenities and the strident rhetoric of revolution.
Americans have also come to know the fear of violent crime. They know that robberies and assaults have increased sharply in the last few years. They know that a small fraction of all such crimes is solved.
For many Americans this is the sum and substance of violence.
But many Americans see additional kinds of violence. They see the violence of overseas war. At home, they see the violence of terrorist murders of civil rights workers, of four little black girls bombed to death in a Sunday school class, the violence of police dogs, fire hoses and cattle prods; others see "violence" in discrimination and deprivation, disease, hunger, and rats. They see the violence of capital punishment, of slaughter on the highways, of movies, of radio and television programs, of some professional sports.
In the minds of some Americans all these different sorts of violence overlap.
—National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Progress Report, 1969
In the wake of Robert Kennedy's assassination in June 1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson formed one of the final commissions of his administration, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, to be chaired by Milton S. Eisenhower. The introduction to the commission's Progress Report, released in January 1969, provides an interesting conflation of forms of violence. Speaking from the point of view of the imagined community, this introduction interpellates the nation into being through the pronoun "they," casting this national subject as the addressee of these acts. Each repeated citation reveals a stunning repetition compulsion, wherein assassinations and revolutions are not singular events linked to proper names and specific dates but rather generic instances in a series full of imitations and variations. The categories of violence also mirror and blur into one another, as the body of the slain leader becomes like the burning city, each a symbol of the nation whose boundaries are threatened by dissolution. Violence also extends to the disruption of social roles, as the examples of rioting and student unrest suggest a populace out of control, its members refusing to stay in their proper places. The U.S. that emerges as "home" in this report appears to be a land in the process of disintegration, witnessing the "terrorist murders of civil rights workers" within its boundaries and "overseas war" without.
But in seeking a diagnosis of the plague of violence breaking out in the American body politic, the Eisenhower Commission targeted not only acts of violence such as war, riots, and crime, but also the representation of violence in television and film. In this wide-ranging description of American violence there is a constant emphasis on sight rather than experience: "Americans have seen." The repetition of this phrase at the beginning of nearly every sentence, in comparison to the rare instances of the verbs "know" and "hear" and the complete absence of "experienced," "felt," or "survived," suggests the primacy not of lived experience but of the consumption of visual media, and in particular of television news. Calling television a "technology of memory," Marita Sturken argues that the cultural memory of the Vietnam War era necessarily exceeds the bounds of immediate experience and official historical discourse, residing instead in a range of cultural products such as fictional dramas, television images, and public memorials that "entangle" with personal memory and historical fact. If, as the Eisenhower Commission's report concludes, "in the minds of some Americans all these different sorts of violence overlap" into one single scenario, then television might be the literal screen on which these screen memories collide.
Screen Memories of 1968
If the televisual apparatus embodies the nation's memory, what do we make of a memory of a memory—that is, a memory of watching television? Long before John Rambo became a household name symbolizing Sylvester Stallone's muscle-bound body and the American military's will to power, he was simply a character in the debut novel of a newly minted American literature professor named David Morrell. Morrell loosely based his novel, First Blood (1972), on the traumatized Vietnam veterans beginning to filter back to the U.S. in the late 1960s and trickling into the classes he taught as a graduate student at Penn State. In a later essay, "The Man Who Created Rambo," Morrell traces the genesis of Rambo back to what might be called a televisual primal scene. He recounts seeing the images that inspired First Blood juxtaposed on the CBS Evening News one "sultry August evening" in 1968:
The first showed a fire fight in Vietnam. Sweaty American soldiers crouched in the jungle, shooting bursts from m-16s to repel an enemy attack. Incoming bullets kicked up dirt and shredded leaves. Medics scrambled to assist the wounded. An officer barked coordinates into a two-way radio, demanding air support. The fatigue, determination and fear on the faces of the soldiers were dismayingly vivid.
The second story showed a different sort of battle. That steamy summer, the inner cities of America had erupted into violence. In nightmarish images, National Guardsmen snapped bayonets onto m-16s and stalked the rubble of burning streets, dodging rocks, wary of snipers among devastated vehicles and gutted buildings.
Each news story, distressing enough on its own, became doubly so when paired with the other. It occurred to me that if I'd turned down the sound, if I hadn't heard each story's reporter explain what I was watching, I might have thought that both film clips were two aspects of a single horror. A fire fight outside Saigon, a riot within it. A riot within an American city, a fire fight outside it. Vietnam and America.
What if I wrote a book in which the Vietnam war literally came home to America? There hadn't been a war on American soil since 1865. With America splitting apart because of Vietnam, maybe it was time to write a novel that dramatized the philosophical division in our society, that shoved the brutality of war right under our nose.
A quick review of CBS Nightly News broadcasts from 1968 shows that the images Morrell recalls could not have appeared in a single news broadcast that year: the riots of the "long, hot summer" reached their height in 1967, whereas images of fighting in Vietnam did not escalate until after 1968. Yet the importance of his recollection lies not in its ostensible truth value, but in the explanatory value accorded to this origin story and its particular condensation of images.
Morrell's origin story for Rambo is a phantasmatic screen memory that provides a condensation of the many images that formed his and many other people's conception of the 1960s. In this anecdote, as well as throughout the novel First Blood, Morrell references many of the iconic events of the Vietnam era, such as the Tet Ovensive and the string of urban riots stretching across the country, from Watts to Newark. Morrell's phrase "America splitting up because of Vietnam" invokes not only these events alone, but also the accelerating intensity of antiwar protests in the late 1960s, most visibly represented by the "Battle of Chicago" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Like many commentators, Morrell conflates the urban riots with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, describing the urban rebellions as "Civil Rights riots [that] had begun and were destroying several of America's inner cities." The most brutal scenes of the Vietnam War itself, except for those of the Tet Ovensive, had not been broadcast or published at the time Morrell locates his anecdote; scenes of the My Lai massacre appeared in 1969 and the napalmed young girl in 1971. Morrell's purported night of television news watching encompasses a decade or more of images, connected through links both visible and invisible.
Morrell's recollections reveal a fascinating and phantasmatic triangulation between traumatized white war veterans, black urban rioters, and oriental guerrillas, all mediated through the screen memory of television news. In each news story the white soldier or policeman is besieged by the violence of the racial other, although in Morrell's recounting these racial others are invisible, represented only by the proxy of their respective home spaces, Vietnam and the inner city. The absent presence of these two racial others also morphs the spaces of Vietnam and America into distorted mirror images of one another, connecting the late capitalist landscape of "devastated vehicles and gutted buildings" with the primitivist, premodern "jungle" of "dirt and shredded leaves." With the soundtrack removed the images merge into a dreamscape, allowing all three racialized characters to condense eventually into the figure of Rambo.
It is not coincidental that Morrell imagines the origin of First Blood in 1968. Like many other artists and writers, he posits 1968 retroactively as a phantasmatic point of rupture between an America that used to be, before the Vietnam War, and the America that it will become, after this violent encounter with the oriental obscene. In this chapter I consider what it means to posit the American 1968 as a historical and representational origin of the Vietnam era, and in particular how 1968 functions as a primal scene in the nation's visual unconscious from which other texts will emerge. I flesh out the concept of the primal scene—one of the privileged sites of fantasy in Laplanchian psychoanalysis—in relation to the televisual apparatus in order to understand the link between this phantasmatic cultural imaginary and the historical reality it purports to represent and mediate. The primal scene, like many other forms of traumatic memory, is characterized by a complicated temporality designated by the term Nachträglichkeit, often translated into English as "belatedness" or "afterwardness," which takes on new meanings in the context of the temporal lag between historical events and their cinematic, photographic, and televisual representations. If mass media images of violence can only be understood nachträglich—after the fact, belatedly—then what sorts of condensations or structural relations can be found latent in the image, even upon its initial reception?
The racial condensations and triangulations dealt with in this chapter—between white, black, and oriental—also form the basic constellation of substitutions that are considered, in various permutations, throughout the rest of the book. As First Blood shows, the oriental obscene underlies the racial interactions that structure its narrative, even while the oriental remains missing, appearing only in the black and white figures that stand in for it. Morrell's primal scene sets up the Vietnam War as the primary scenario through which other American civil disorders, such as civil rights protests, urban race riots, and antiwar protests, are to be understood, even while the actual war remains off-screen. The next chapter looks closely at the Vietnam War itself; this chapter explores the links between these other scenes of violence that frame by analogy the meaning of the Vietnam War for Americans. What does it mean to link black rioters or white protesters with Vietnamese guerrillas? How is black and oriental racial difference to be understood with respect to whiteness, as well as to each other? What is politically at stake in each of these connections? If Morrell frames First Blood as an illustration of what might happen if "the Vietnam war literally came home to America," we might reframe what Rambo brings home of the war as not simply violence but also the oriental obscene, premised on a cross-racial identification in a shared scenario of violence.
The American 1968 as Primal Scene
Morrell's account of the genesis of First Blood is also a phantasmatic origin story for the American 1968 as the starting point of the Vietnam era. Although the various strands of events in this origin story can obviously be traced even further back—in the civil rights movement to the murder of Emmett Till or Montgomery bus boycotts in 1955, in the Vietnam War to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964—they condense into a particularly visible public scene around 1968, made possible by the simultaneous growth in television news in the late 1960s. Sasha Torres argues that television news first established its authority and prominence by its coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, positing itself as a "national medium" capable of forging a "national consensus" on what seemed to be problems isolated in the South. Part of the power of television news over the print media was its monopoly on realism, especially in representing seemingly unmediated spectacles of black suffering for the white (i.e., national) gaze. In the late 1960s the Vietnam War began to take the place of the civil rights movement as the content in this equation between the news apparatus and the body politic, with equally abject spectacles of oriental suffering. Newscasts' oft-noted desire for authenticity, objectivity, and immediacy were well aligned with the growth of cinéma vérité styles that privileged mobile, hand-held cameras and synchronous, live sound, especially when representing exotic images of foreign warfare. According to Daniel Hallin, "television news came of age on the eve of Vietnam," being both ideologically and technologically primed to convey the war. Morrell's First Blood becomes a savvy index of media consumption, situating Morrell as a member of a larger imagined community of television viewers consuming the "living-room wars" for the first time. That Morrell singles out this year as the moment for this novel to emerge from his imagination suggests that 1968 functions as a kind of primal scene: an imagined point of origin from which other fantasies of violence will emerge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Oriental Obscene by SYLVIA SHIN HUEY CHONG Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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