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Remembering Vietnam through Film – Apocalypse Now

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Remembering Vietnam through Film – Apocalypse Now

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Francis Ford Coppola’s 'Apocalypse Now' (1979)s portrayal of the Vietnam War is known as one of the most powerful cinematic films. Drawing inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the film/story’s message about colonialism to focus on American power in Southeast Asia. Apocalypse Now, through its surrealistic imagery, its episodic structure and descent into psychological fragmentation, effectively destabilises heroism and binary narratives of moral clarity. Apocalypse Now asks viewers to interrogate the ideological foundation that underlies U.S. militarism by presenting war not as a stage of national purpose but as a stage of moral collapse and existential disorientation. Its aesthetic choices - hallucinatory sequences, dissonant soundscapes, and symbolic excess - mystify war as both a entertainment & discomfort, for both perpetrator and victim. The film adopts an ambiguous epistemological positioning in the cultural memory of Vietnam, It serves two purposes, both as a mythic story of decline and as a symbolic space for collective healing of the psychological and moral wounds caused by the Vietnam War.

Released during the time the United States was withdrawing from Vietnam, Apocalypse Now came at a time of self-doubt for the country. The war had undermined trust in the government, provoked massive anti-war demonstrations, and resulted in many war veterans suffering from various forms of disabilities, both physical and psychological (Hagopian, 2009). During this time, Hollywood began to define the war in the imaginations of soldiers and in the minds of civilians. Apocalypse Now was notable because it depicted war as confusing and dream-like, without obvious heroes or villains. Rather than glorifying the war or portraying it in super-patriotic terms, the film forced its audience to confront its psychic damage and moral ambiguity (Anderegg, 1991).

A critical way the film conveys war is through its disorienting narrative and encapsulating visuals. Captain Willard is traveling up a river to kill Colonel Kurtz, while also calling forth and capturing Willard's slow psychological breakdown. The river is both a literal pathway and a metaphor of nature and fate in the bizarre and brutish domain of war (Hellmann, 1991). One notable scene shows U.S. helicopters attacking Vietnamese villages with Wagner opera music playing as U.S. soldiers burn and pillage. This intermingling of music with destruction emphasises the absurdity of the high drama of war. When Willard finally arrives at Kurtz's jungle camp, the film becomes further dreamlike. Kurtz is portrayed as a figure devoid of morality and the centre of regard for the collapse of America's psychological confidence and moral authority (Anderegg, 1991).

Apocalypse Now, through a cultural memory lens, depicts war memories as broken, mythical, and unresolved. When analysed through trauma theory, the film becomes a narrative haunted by the inability to fully articulate traumatic experience. The unclear temporal structure of the film, often dreamlike sequences, and ambiguous ending are all examples of what Sturken (1997) refers to as “technologies of memory”, which are ways in which trauma is traversed and contested in popular culture. The film also offers very little of the Vietnamese perspective or a broader aspect of U.S. cultural memory, focusing primarily on American pain and guilt, obliterating Vietnamese experiences (Sturken, 1997; Kaplan, 2005). Apocalypse Now, despite the huge praise it has received, has been subjected to substantial criticism as well.

Some scholars (Kaplan, 2005) believe Apocalypse Now is justified as an anti-war film, as it aestheticises and desensitises violence. Others discuss the film’s lack of the Vietnamese voices, agency, and experiences of war, which positions the film as complicit with the imperial logics it was trying to critique. Regardless, the fact that Apocalypse Now continues to be referenced, quoted, and watched shows its lasting influence, and its significance as a site of collective memory. Apocalypse Now contains, as both a work of art and cultural archive, the ambivalence of a nation attempting to remember, understand, and memorialise the traumatic experience of war.

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Memorialisation and Absence – Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

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Memorialisation and Absence – Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. designed by Maya Lin and opened in 1982, is one of the most powerful and controversial memorials in contemporary American history. Unlike glorifying, or celebratory monuments that memorialise heroism or military victory, Lin's memorial is a simple black granite wall inscribed with the names of over 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War. The form radically differs from the figurative or narrative commemorations common to most memorials, instead building a space in which reflection, sorrow, and individual connection with loss could happen. Lin, then a 21-year-old student of architecture at Yale, imagined a design that would "allow everyone to respond and remember in their own way" (Lin, 2000, p. 5). Lin's abstract design worked against the established dominant forms of patriotic memorialisation, while challenging viewers to a more challenging relationship with the memory of a war that divided the American public.

The memorial's spatial design is at the heart of how the memorial mediates individual and collective memory. As visitors walk down the V-shaped wall sunken into the ground, they gradually deal with the weight of loss, name by name, in historical order. The reflective granite surfaces create an eerie two-dimensionality, where the names emerge, literally reflecting the viewer's image, thus creating a conversation, relationship, representation of the past and present, absence and presence. This quality falls in line with Pierre Nora's (1989) concept of lieux de mémoire, which is situated memories that create tension between lived experience and official history. In this sense, the wall functions as a ritual site where personal mourning can happen publicly, disentangled from state narratives. As Doss (2010) states, Lin's memorial illustrates the emergence of "memorial mania" in late 20th-century America, where affective and participatory approaches to remembering have become fundamentally entwined with national identity (pp. 70-74). The Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not offer a single story to communicate history, but allows for emotional and collective ambiguity.

Initially criticised, but ultimately celebrated, Lin's design was quickly criticised for being too depressing, too non-representational, too "un-American", and a few people even objected to the design being attributed to a young Asian-American women (Hagopian, 2009). As a way to calm popular criticism, a more traditional bronze sculpture/collage of three soldiers was constructed near the original memorial, yet the original wall is the emotional and symbolic heart of the memorial. The wall's refusal to aestheticise war or offer moral certainty persists, especially for veterans and the family members of the deceased. The memorial's silence is what many render to be the museum's not offering an explication, nor symbols of heroism and value, is not an absence, but an explicitly discursive memorial space for memory work. As Linenthal (1995) writes, the memorial offers a space for "incomplete mourning", and in this memorial space, visitors become engaged in acts of meaning-making (pp. 20–22). From its architecture and public receptiveness, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial refuses to ever close, and instead asks us to consider how we re-member contested histories.

In conclusion, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial shifts public memorialisation from a collective expression of the past to offer personal experience, emotional engagement, and explore memory-related practice and representation. It illustrates a larger shift in commemoration, from collective national victory to collective trauma and continues to be a valuable site of memory work in the American cultural landscape.

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Fragmented Memory and Vietnam War Trauma: Reclaiming Voice in Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989)

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Fragmented Memory and Vietnam War Trauma: Reclaiming Voice in Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989)

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'When Heaven and Earth Changed Places' (1989) tells a powerful story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese girl. As a young girl in the village of Ky La, Hayslip's narrative goes beyond her experiences of war, displacement, and eventually, resettlement in the United States. This memoir is a counter-narrative to dominant Western portrayals of the Vietnam War and emphasises the lived experiences of Vietnamese people both of perpetrators and victims. Her work is important to the field of war memory as it creates an image of conflict within the context of lived individual's experiences, especially women, and it pushes against the historical accounts which can often marginalise voices like these.

Hayslip offers a disjointed and provocative telling of trauma in her memoir. She presents horrendous acts, such as torture from the South Vietnamese and social exclusion from her community & friends. These acts reflect the confusion of her identity and the inherent moral ambiguity of her experience during the war. Hayslip recalls, “I was arrested and tortured by the South Vietnamese government for being a Viet Cong, then tortured by the Viet Cong for being a traitor” - (Hayslip, 1989; p. 120). The persecution here depicts the troubled and precarious position where many civilians found themselves, continuously targeted and punished, even though they were not part of either side of the civil conflict. The memoir’s disordered structure, moving back and forth in time, draws on the disordered and fragmented representation of traumatic memory described by Cathy Caruth, who states that “trauma is experienced later, that is, never fully” (Caruth, 1996; p. 4). Additionally, Hayslip's reflections connect to Marianne Hirsch's idea of post-memory, as her narrative merges personal memories with collective historical trauma, passing those memories onto future generations (Hirsch, 1997, p. 22).

The memoir also complicates the retelling and blurring of truth and story, as well as introduces inquiries about memory and narrative. Hayslip acknowledges this difficulty, saying, "I can only tell what I remember, and sometimes memory plays tricks" (Hayslip, 1989, p. 15). Hayslip's reflective admission ultimately illustrates the docile nature of memory, and the nature of narrative construction. Scholar Chow Sheat Fun points out that Hayslip employs "strategic ambiguities" to contend with her multiple identities constructed for different audiences (Sheat Fun 2014, p. 775). This strategic narrative approach allows Hayslip to offer a deep, meaningful record that communicates the complexities of her many experiences in emotional detail even if some of those memories are constructed, or interpreted.

In conclusion, Le Ly Hayslip's memoir 'When Heaven and Earth Changed Places' (1989) represents an important chronicle of the individual and collective trauma of the Vietnam War. In her painful yet fragmented narrative, Hayslip protects the memories that may be buried, while also presenting a complex perspective against official memory. Her memoir contains documents of the strength of people living through a war as well as displays the importance of personal testimonials in understanding the complex impact of war on individuals.

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Remembering Vietnam Through Film References

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Remembering Vietnam Through Film References

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• Anderegg, M. (1991). Inventing Vietnam: The war in film and television. Temple University Press.

• Hagopian, P. (2009). The discourse of healing and the “black gash of shame”: The design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In The Vietnam War in American memory: Veterans, memorials, and the politics of healing (pp. 79–110). University of Massachusetts Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk0pt.8

• Hellmann, J. (1991). American myth and the legacy of Vietnam. Columbia University Press.

• Kaplan, E. A. (2005). “Why trauma now?”: Freud and trauma studies. In Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature (pp. 24–41). Rutgers University Press.

• Sturken, M. (1997). Tangled memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the politics of remembering. University of California Press.

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• Doss, E. (2010). Memorial mania: Public feeling in America. University of Chicago Press.

• Hagopian, P. (2009). The discourse of healing and the “black gash of shame”: The design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In The Vietnam War in American memory: Veterans, memorials, and the politics of healing (pp. 79–110). University of Massachusetts Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk0pt.8

• Lin, M. Y. (2000). Boundaries. Simon & Schuster.

• Linenthal, E. T. (2001). The unfinished bombing: Oklahoma City in American memory. Oxford University Press.

• Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520

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Le Ly Hayslip's 'When Heaven & Earth Changed Places' References 

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Le Ly Hayslip's 'When Heaven & Earth Changed Places' References 

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• Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. Johns Hopkins University Press.

• Hayslip, L., & Wurts, J. (1989). When heaven and earth changed places: A Vietnamese woman’s journey from war to peace. Doubleday.

• Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: Photography, narrative, and postmemory. Harvard University Press.

• Sheat Fun, C. (2014). Strategic ambiguities in Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Life Writing, 11(4), 765–781. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2014.921508