In the films about the
Vietnam War, it is common for the Vietnamese to be portrayed in ways that only
put them down. Not often do we see Vietnamese people do something good or something
respectable, in fact most of the time, they are disrespected and often disrespected
characters. The films that are about the Vietnam War never really dive into the
problems the Vietnamese people had to go through. The only problem viewers see is the Vietnamese
get shot at by soldiers. We also see, specifically in Full Metal Jacket, that there isn’t a lead character that is
Vietnamese. Sure the female sniper in the final scene is important, but she’s
just an enemy that is killed. Mike Felker of Jump Cut discusses the role of
Vietnamese in films. “In U.S. films,
the Vietnamese merely provide a backdrop to our soldiers' macho posturing and
ethical questioning,” (Felker). The role of the Vietnamese in the films only
made our American soldiers look better. The Vietnamese people we see in this
film are thieves, prostitutes, and villains. None of those roles help the image
of the Vietnamese.
These themes and motifs connected with the negative
portrayal of the Vietnamese are connected to how people in America actually
viewed them. First of all, the idea that all of the Vietnamese were a sneaky
and evil people, stemmed from something seen through American eyes at the time,
and most of the time, this view was fabricated to get a unified America against
Vietnam. In my genre analysis paper for class, I talked about the way the news
and media shifted the eyes of America in whatever way they pleased. And
journalists sometimes went out of their way to make the Vietnamese seem worse
than they actually were. A New York Times article from 1966 describes the
people in the city of Saigon:
Saigon’s workers
live, as they always have, in fetid slums on the city’s
outskirts
... Bars and bordellos, thousands of young Vietnamese women
degrading
themselves as ... prostitutes, gangs of hoodlums and beggars
and
children selling their older sisters and picking pockets have become
ubiquitous
features of urban life.
(Sheehan qtd. in Chomsky qtd. in Williams p 217)
Chomsky
reveals that this article was not accurate and was somewhat fabricated to make
a statement, but this is not to say that the negative view of the Vietnamese
was fabricated.
The soldiers fighting did have their opinions and they
weren’t shy to tell the media what their opinions were. In Full Metal Jacket, there is a sequence where television and film
journalists interview the soldiers addressing issues of the purpose and cause
of the war. In the scene, there are quotes about fighting for people who don’t
want to be fought for and shooting the wrong ‘gooks’. They were told the Viet
Cong were the enemy, but if the soldiers in the war, and in the films didn’t
know which Vietnamese were which, how was the American public expected to
interpret them either? This is why the soldiers didn’t really have any problem
killing random people like in the helicopter scene. They also did always
respect the dead, Crazy Earl even takes a picture with a dead Vietnamese
soldier who they are ‘throwing a party for.’
The Vietnamese people are much more than what we see in
films. Obviously, not every Vietnamese person was a thief or a prostitute.
Directors chose these portrayals to make viewers more comfortable with the
issue at hand. Fighting a war against a people who aren’t necessarily good
people is easy to justify and I believe that is why the Vietnamese people were
made out to be bad people film and media. As Crazy Earl says, “After we rotate
back to the world, we’re gunna miss not having anyone around that’s worth
shooting.”
Felker, M. (1988). “Platoon.
Full Metal Jacket. Back to Vietnam.” Jump
Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. From Jump Cut, no. 33, Feb. 1988 pp. 28-30.
Retrieved from Web 03 Oct. 2011. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC33folder/platoon-FmetJacket.html
Williams, P. (2003). “What A
Bummer for the Gooks: representations of white American masculinity and the
Vietnamese in the Vietnam War film genre 1977-87.” European Journal of American Culture Vol. 22 Issue 3, pp.215-234.
Retreived from EBSCO web database 03 Oct. 2011
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