Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Restaging the War: "The Deer Hunter" and the Primal Scene of Violence
Author(s): Sylvia Shin Huey Chong
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter, 2005), pp. 89-106
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies
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Restaging the War:The Deer Hunterand the
PrimalScene of Violence
by SylviaShinHuey Chong
Abstract: The Deer Hunter's controversial representation of the Vietnam War
reveals how violence figures an imaginary relationship between the American
subject and its Oriental other. This article examines thefilm's reception and relationship to media images of the war,particularlyEddie Adams'sphotograph Saigon
Execution.
No one willgo out of the houseto see the Vietnamwaron a moviescreen.TheAmericanpeopledon'twantto confrontthe waryet. Everyone of these movieswill die.
-Anonymous Americanmovieexecutive,November19771
Michael Cimino's 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, came rather late in the string of
Vietnam movies released that year-Coming Home (Hal Ashby), The Boys in Company C (Sidney J. Furie), Good Guys Wear Black (Ted Post), and Go Tell the
Spartans (Ted Post). None of these earlier films did much at the box office, although critics wrote favorablereviews of Coming Home and Go Tellthe Spartans.
When Universal Pictures decided to show The Deer Hunter at special screenings
in November and December 1978, there was healthy skepticism about how the
film would be received. In addition to its Vietnam theme, which was still considered a liability,the film had a running time of 183 minutes-a challenge to both
filmgoers'attention spans and theater owners'schedules. Even with Robert DeNiro
prominently featured in the ads, would filmgoers turn out to see a three-hour
Vietnam saga directed by an unknown and featuring an otherwise obscure cast?2
The answer turned out to be an emphatic yes. The initial run, designed to
qualify The Deer Hunter for the Academy Awardsin April, showed to standingroom-only audiences in both Los Angeles and New YorkCity. Even with theater
owners complaining about its length, the film grossed nearly $55,000 during its
one-week run.3By previewing the movie in New Yorkas well as Hollywood, Universal was able to exploit positive reviews in the national media in its advertising.
The Deer Hunter eventually won five Oscars-for picture, director, sound, supporting actor (Christopher Walken), and editing (Peter Zinner)-and eventually
earned more than $49 million on a budget of $15 million.4Roughly two-thirds of
SylviaShinHuey Chongis an assistantprofessorat the Universityof Virginia,whereshe
teachesfilmandAsianAmericanstudies.Sheis writinga book,tentativelyentitledTheOrientalObscene:Violenceand the AsianMaleBodyin AmericanMovingImagesin the VietnamEra.Thisessaywonthe top prizein the SCMSstudentwritingcompetitionfor2003.
? 2005 by the Universityof TexasPress,P.O.Box 7819,Austin,TX78713-7819
CinemaJournal 44, No. 2, Winter 2005
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89
The Deer Hunter takes place in the United States rather than in Vietnam. Still,
many commentators focused their discussions on the war itself ratherthan on the
film, further blurring the line between representation and reality.5Though the
war was over, material traces remained in the present, most notably in the presence in U.S. towns and cities of Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnam War veterans. Just as reviewers debated the meaning of The Deer Hunter'sinfamous Russian
roulette scenes, which restaged the "Saigonexecution" during the Tet Offensive,
the U.S. government was attempting to deport Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South
Vietnamese general who executed a Vietnamese communist spy on camera ten
years earlier.6The Deer Hunter did not simply represent a historical past-it was
animating a war that had never really ended for America.
In reanimatingthe war, The Deer Hunter displaced the Vietnamese depicted
in Eddie Adams'sfamous photograph, Saigon Execution, and recentered the narrative on Americans as victims. While retaining the style and structure of violence
as shown in Adams'sand other media images, The Deer Hunter inserted Americans into that structure, resulting in a reracializationof both form and content.
If Vietnamwas such a disturbingsite of Orientalizedviolence in the American
imagination,how did Americansend up at the center of that violence? The answer
lies in the imagined relationshipbetween U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers that breaks
through the dichotomy of victim/aggressorimplied in the film's narrative.By explicitly restaging the Saigon Execution in a visual style that I term the "oriental
obscene," The Deer Hunter creates an intimate relationship between the American and the Vietnamese soldiers that might not be supposed from a narratological
or political viewpoint.
The Asian body became visible to the American body politic during the Vietnam War era largely through the trope of violence. The oriental obscene thus
describes a phenomenon of mimetic contagion in which violence circulates from
Asian to non-Asian bodies in American popular culture. This article concentrates
on the interplaybetween the photograph Saigon Execution and the film The Deer
Hunter as an example of this circulation. I thereby draw new lines of relations
between differently racialized subjects in American culture. I propose that the
politics of identification in The Deer Hunter lie not in its verisimilitude and historical accuracybut in its stylizationof violence. Thus, The Deer Hunter implies an
identification between American soldiers and their VC counterparts that is disavowed on the level of the American body politic, as exemplified in the Nguyen
deportation case.
Between Art and Politics: Loving and Hating The Deer Hunter. If the contemporary reviews of The Deer Hunter were any indication, it was impossible to
come away from the film with a neutral opinion. As Robin Wood states, "TheDeer
Hunter raises fundamental questions about the relationshipbetween politics and
aesthetics."7Opinions fell precisely along this fault line, with those who admired
the film emphasizing its artistic value and those who disliked it focusing on its
politics. A collection of critical opinion printed in Film Quarterly claimed the film
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was "xenophobi[c]"(Michael Dempsey), "fatallyoversimplified" (David Axeen),
and "herald[ed]a new wave of reactionaryjingoism" (Marsha Kinder).8
In many ways, the divide over The Deer Hunter mirrored that between supporters and opponents of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Defenders of The Deer
Hunter were more likely to link its critique of violence to war in general, thus
foreclosing discussion of the war in Vietnam more specifically. As an editorial in
the Christian Century remarked, "If The Deer Hunter is seen as a work of cinematic art projecting Cimino'svision, then it becomes clear that the question of
war'smoralityis not at issue. The debate that tore this nation apart... is not the
subject of this film."9What, then, is its subject? Love between men, the nobility of
the Americanworking class, survivalof the fittest in the inferno of combat? Is it in
essence a narcissisticreflection of America and American masculinitythrough the
mirrorof Vietnam?
The film's narrative structure departs from the mold of other Vietnam War
movies such as The Boys in Company C and Go Tellthe Spartans in that much of
The Deer Hunter is set in the United States. Of the film's three acts, the first and
third take place in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a small town filled with Russian immigrants and centered economically around a steel mill where the three main
characters-Michael (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven
(John Savage)-work. Even the second act, which takes place in Vietnam, does
not depict combat per se but focuses on the characters' experiences in a VC
prisoner-of-war camp, where they are forced to play Russian roulette with one
another. After they escape from the camp, they go to Saigon, where they spend
time in military hospitals, brothels, and a unique gambling hall whose main attraction is again Russian roulette, this time played for profit. No references are
made in the first or third act to the war supposedly dividing the nation or to the
characters' impending military service. "The war is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story,"claimed Cimino. "It'spart of their
lives and just that, nothing more."'l
As Cimino's comment suggests, the Vietnam War forms more of a backdrop
for than the focus of the human drama that unfolds around Michael, Nick, and
Steven. For example, in the elaborate Russian Orthodox wedding that takes up
almost thirty minutes of screen time at the beginning of the film, the only hint that
the countryis at war is the presence of a Green Beret veteran in the bar next to the
reception room. "What'sit like over there?" Michael asks eagerly. "Fuck it," the
veteran replies, foreshadowing the horrors awaitingthe men.
Later in the film, when Michael goes back to Vietnam to rescue Nick from the
gambling halls, news footage of the chaotic evacuation of Saigon, showing South
Vietnamese desperately clinging to helicopters and scaling embassy walls, is interspersed with Michael's arrival. Yet the major news event takes a back seat to
Michael'squest to find Nick. The only Vietnamese portrayed at length are either
VC, ruthlessly vicious in their treatment of American and South Vietnamese soldiers, or upper-middle-class civilians in Saigon, equally vicious in their disregard
for life while gambling on human lives.
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91
The Deer Hunter'streatment of the Vietnamese disturbed some critics, many
of whom had opposed the war.As Wood pointed out, "The rejection of the film on
political grounds is in fact closely involved with the issue of realism and the confusions that almost invariablyattend the use of that term."" Critics of the film focused almost exclusively on realism as historical veracity. In light of the
disproportionate amount of violence Americans inflicted on Vietnamese during
the war,Cimino'sfocus on Vietnamese violence againstAmerican soldiers seemed
perversely counterfactual. Even when U.S. news coverage reported on American
casualties, the visual representations almost exclusively portrayed the casualties
among the Vietnamese.12
Historian Bruce Cumings referred to the Vietnam scenes in The Deer Hunter
as revisionist"printnegatives"that inverted the power relations of the war:"Itwas
the Vietcongterroristswho burned villages,"ratherthan the U.S. marines.'3Pauline
Kael remarked:"The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things
over there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally;the Vietcong were cruel and
sadistic. The film seems to be saying that the Americans had no choice, but the
V.C. enjoyed it.'14According to these interpretations, Cimino not only distorted
the historical record of American atrocities but also justified U.S. acts of violence
committed on screen by deferring to the ethics of warfare.
Cimino maintained that The Deer Hunter ought to be taken as "surrealistic"
ratherthan realistic:"Iused events from '68 (My Lai) and '75 (the fall of Saigon) as
reference points rather than as fact. But if you attack the film on its facts, then
you're fighting a phantom, because literal accuracywas never intended." Yet the
biographicaldetails Cimino disseminatedconstructed an auraof authenticitybased
on his personal"experiences.""Forme, it'sa very personalfilm,"Cimino explained.
"Iwas attachedto a Green Beret medical unit. My charactersare portraitsof people
whom I knew."15Among those who accepted Cimino'sdefense was David Denby,
who deflected criticism from The Deer Hunter. "Putting the 'correct' attitudes
into a movie isn't so hard, especially now; what really counts is authenticity of
experience, which this movie has by the ton." Cimino's life story, however, was
later debunked by Tom Buckley in Harper's.l6
Ironically,critics used the same aura of authenticity that Cimino abused to
defend their versions of historical truth. Gloria Emerson, who called The Deer
Hunter "the most racist film I have ever seen," stated that "the most brilliant dissections of The Deer Hunter have come not from professionalcritics but from men
who reported the war in Vietnam." Other critics of the film also prefaced their
remarks by stating their personal qualifications. John Pilger, who renamed the
film "The Gook-Hunter,"began his editorial:"I have spent much of my adult life
in Vietnam and the United States as a journalist and documentary-film maker. I
have been with American soldiers when they were killed or maimed."'7
The Deer Hunter was held up to veridical criteria as well as to ideological and
aesthetic scrutiny. It was compared not only with other fictional films about the
Vietnam War but also with prior news coverage of the war. Accordingly,the ultimate arbiters of the "truth"were the journalistscovering the war.
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This equation of news coverage with the "real"is particularlyproblematic. A
fictional film is accountable to a different set of aesthetic and formal standards
than television news coverage. With the exception of the event captured in Saigon
Execution, violence was rarely caught "live."The act of violence was usually temporally displaced by a past-tense narrationby a foreign correspondent or by showing only photographsof forensic evidence.18In contrast, post-1968, American film
directors such as Sam Peckinpah employed a form of hyperrealism in order to
stylize violence and make its effects on the human body extremely,even obscenely,
visible.19These techniques, involving closely framed squib work and quickly edited montage sequences, highlight the body'sloss of control over its contents and
its movements. On the one hand, such exaggerationsseem contrived when compared with documentary-styletelevision news coverage. On the other hand, they
pack tremendous psychological force within the context of a film narrative."How
is this film a distortion of history,"one filmgoer asked critics of The Deer Hunter,
"if it evokes, better than any other, feelings comparableto those of the total chaos
and mind-breakingdestruction that occurred in Southeast Asia?"20
The hyperrealism used in the scenes of violence in The Deer Hunter conflicts with the film's fantastic historicism with regard to the war and calls into
question the moral authority associated with the "truth-telling"of visual realism.
In an essay on the film, Peter Lehman pointed out that "the critics who were
deeply offended by Cimino's 'unrealistic' portrayal of Vietnam were seemingly
quite satisfied with the 'realistic' portrayal of the Pennsylvania steel town."21
Whereas the social realist style of the Clairton sequences rely on a thickness of
naturalistic detail, the Vietnam scenes draw on the thickness of corporeal experience and perception-specifically blood.
Defending the artisticbrillianceof The Deer Hunter as a whole, Vincent Canby
nonetheless admitted that
thefilmrepeatedly
exploitsviolencethroughimagesso graphictheyestablishnewboundat the sametimemakingone wonder
ariesforthe cinemaof simulatedblood-and-guts,
whetherthiskindof graphicdetailisn'ta kindof theatricalblackmail.Showingus preciselyhow a man looksat the instanthis brainsare being blownout by a bullet is,
indeed,a spectacleto elicitstrongemotionalresponses.22
Canby described the scenes of violence in The Deer Hunter as an act of violence
on its audience: the film wields its violence like a threat to prevent viewers from
turning away from the screen. Summarizingthe attacks on the film following the
Academy Awards, Aljean Harmetz pointed out the contradiction between the
hyperrealism of some of the details and the counterhistorical claims of the narrative itself: "The rising backlash against the movie may come partly from the increasing knowledge that the seemingly realistic sequences of violence are not
The graphic effects of violence, plus the camera'srelentbased on any reality."23
less slow-motion stare, seem to equate visibility with truth. Yet their application
to such clearly counterfactual material leads to the sense of being cheated to
which Harmetz and Canby refer.
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93
The oppositionbetween an artisticand a politicalapproachto TheDeer Hunter
breaks down when we consider how Cimino'saesthetic choices-in particular,his
deployment of multiple film realisms-give the film its "political"meaning. The
bulk of The Deer Hunter's aesthetic energy is devoted to representing violence.
The graphic violence was very important in the marketing of the film, such that
Universal Pictures erroneously used language reflective of an X rating in its first
ads for the movie.24
Given that Cimino used such different visual styles for the sequences of the
men playing Russian roulette and in the sequences in Clairton,what is the meaning conveyed by this visual style? An analysis of these formal choices can explain
how and why TheDeer Hunter became linked with Adams'sinfamousphoto, which,
unlike news clips of the evacuation of Saigon, never appeared in the film.
Have We Seen This Before? Watching Russian Roulette. In a 1985 issue of
Wide Angle devoted to Vietnam War movies, Judy Lee Kinney noted how Cimino
was "presid[ing]over the ritualizingof one of the most famous visual icons of the
War."25
The image to which Kinney referred was Saigon Execution, Adams's1968
Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. Film reviewer Philip Rule stated glibly,"Anyone who saw a South Vietnamese policeman execute a North Vietnamese spy before a television camera during the height of the war knows what the Russian
roulette scenes were all about."26But what does knowing this connection reveal?
For one thing, while there are resemblances between the two images, they are not
exactly the same. In The Deer Hunter, those playing Russian roulette shoot themselves; they are not executed. And in the third act, they are not even forced to
shoot but do so willingly. For another, Saigon Execution depicts only Vietnamese
inflicting and receiving violence, whereas The Deer Hunter focuses on both Vietnamese and white Americans. In other words, if Saigon Execution is to help us
understand the Russian roulette sequences, we must account for both the transference of the violence from the Vietnamese to the Americans and the condensation of interpersonalviolence into a self-reflexive act.
The Deer Hunter employs two metaphors to describe the Vietnam War:the
hunt and the game. The first metaphor derives from the allusion within the film to
James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Deerslayer (1841). There are many similarities between the characters of Natty Bumppo in Cooper's novel and Michael in
the film: both men are skilled hunters who experience war and the need to kill
another human being for the first time; both are taken captive by their respective
enemies, the Indians and the Vietnamese; both eschew the company of women,
preferringmale camaraderie;and both espouse the hunting philosophy of the "one
shot" as the measure of masculinity.In his analysis of the American myth of "regeneration through violence," Richard Slotkin argued that Cooper's hunting narratives appropriateNative American mythology to characterizethe hunt as
a marriageof manandbeast .... Sincethe hunterbecomesone withhis preyat the
momentof the kill,he mustpreparehimselfto be a fit andequalopponentforit. In the
killitself,he assumesthe powersof the thinghe hasdominatedandslainandtherefore
takeshis newnameandcharacterfromhisvictim.27
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A double cannibalizationoccurshere, one that recallsthe psychicworkingsof narcissism:the Americansubjectinternalizesthe mythsof his racialother in orderto identify with his prey;in turn, these others become proxiesfor the colonized land.Just as
Natty Bumppo'snickname,Deerslayer,implies an identificationbetween the hunter
and his prey, Michael'ssteely nerves and survivalinstinctsliken him to the VC leader
who forces Michael, Nick, and Steven to play Russianroulette.28Although the VC
charactersin The Deer Hunter are reduced to sadistic,subhumancaricatures-their
untranslatedspeech akin to animalisticgrunts29-they are simultaneouslyelevated
to a mythic force of pure masculinity,to which Michael aspires.Here, masculinityis
less the ability to kill with "one shot"than the reciprocalinjunctionto receive the
"one shot"duringthe Russianroulette game without fear or hesitation.30Moreover,
the identificationbetween hunter and hunted causes violence to implode such that
the hunter ends up shooting at himself ratherthan at an externalobject.
In contrastto the strongintentionalityof the metaphorof the hunt, the Russian
roulette game emphasizes the random nature of fate, whereby actions have little
effect on outcomes. The game of Russianroulette, in which death becomes a matter
of statisticalodds, thus mimics the fate of the Americansoldiers,who could fall victim at any time to the ambushes, mines, and booby traps of guerrillas.However,by
presenting the violence of the war in Vietnam as random and senseless, the game
metaphorobscures the idea that war is organizedand politicallymotivated.
A caption in Esquire magazine interpreted Russian roulette as "men, and nations, committing senseless suicide in Vietnam,"ignoring that South and North
Vietnamentered the war for reasons that were anythingbut senseless. Rene Girard
terms such violence "reciprocal";that is, a logic of sameness infects the entire
chain of such violence, enabling the substitution of one set of victims for another.31
In this case, this logic leads to the replacement of the Vietnamese men for Americans. This logic also allows the subject positions in Russian roulette to shift
phantasmaticallywithout a corresponding change in the relations of power. Thus,
the gun passes from the South Vietnamese to the American prisoners, who then
turn it on their VC captors.But althoughMichael "wins"againstthe VC, the Americans still "lose"the war, as symbolized in the film by their chaotic withdrawalfrom
Saigon in 1975. Assuming the active position in a scenario of violence does not
translate into gaining power over the political situation.
The reversal of American and Vietnamese positions in The Deer Hunter can
be better understood if we consider that the game metaphor alludes not only to
the Saigon execution but also to the My Lai massacre. My Lai also took place
during the Tet Offensive but was not discussed in the American press until late
1969. In this high-profile incident, a group of U.S. Army personnel were accused
of killing Vietnamese civilians, mainly elderly, women, and children, on the suspicion that they were VC sympathizers.Cimino references a similar atrocity in The
Deer Hunter in the first scene that takes place in Vietnam, in which Steven, Nick,
and Michael see a North Vietnamese soldier throwing a grenade into a bomb shelter where women and children are hiding. The Russian roulette scenes, too, have
an uncanny link to an article in Life magazine on My Lai that described American
soldiers psychologicallytorturingthe villagers before shooting them:
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95
Wecapturedfoursuspects.... Theywerebeingbeatenkindof hardandthe kidnamed
the oldermanas an NVA[NorthVietnameseArmy]platoonleader.[CaptainErnest]
Medinadrewhis .38,tookout fiveroundsandplayedRussianroulettewithhim.Then
he grabbedhimby the hairandthrewhimup againsta tree. He firedtwoshotswitha
rifle,closerandcloserto the guy'shead,then aimedstraightat him.32
As opposed to the incident shown in Saigon Execution, in which the victim was
quickly shot almost before either he or the photographer realized it, the incident
from the My Lai massacre prolongs the instant of violence through the game of
Russian roulette.
Each of the fictional Russianroulette scenes in The Deer Hunter was skillfully
edited to heighten suspense, prompting BarbaraGrizzutiHarrisonto describe the
violence in sexualterms: "Because the violence erupts at predictable intervals,you
know exactly when to put your fingers over your eyes-and when to peek. I find
this calculated foreplay obscene."33The same element of randomnessthat informs
the game metaphor also produces the temporal elongation associated with the
slow and deliberate hunt, building to the scene's singular,violent climax.
Although The Deer Hunter seems to borrow from the news coverage of the
events surroundingboth the Saigon execution during the Tet Offensive and the
massacre in My Lai, the film continually shifts the roles within the scenario of
violence, so that instead of the Americans inflicting violence on the Vietnamese,
the Vietnamese inflict violence on the Americans and on each other. Such permutations recall the structure of psychoanalyticfantasy and dreamwork, apt frameworks for scenes that Cimino himself deemed "surreal."Instead of focusing on
characters as stable positions of identification, Cimino emphasizes the kernel of
the dream and the fantasyin the act of violence itself by abstractingthe act to the
level of pure verb-to shoot, to kill, to die. Despite the focus on the central action,
Cimino also gives the subject positions added significance in relation to one another. To borrow from the game metaphor: Why these particular players? And
according to what rules do they switch positions? The answers lie in the structure
of fantasy and in its relationship to confused temporality between Saigon Execution, the My Lai massacre, and Cimino'sfilm.
The Saigon Execution as the Primal Scene of Violence. The Russian roulette scenes in The Deer Hunter cannot be understood through a lens that strictly
separates reality from illusion. To elaborate on this, I turn to a set of related concepts from psychoanalysis:psychic reality,the primal scene, trauma, and fantasy.
In The Interpretationof Dreams, Sigmund Freud posited that psychic realitywas
distinct from "materialreality"and associated the former with the unconscious,
where mnemic traces of perceptual experience reside.34Psychic reality is important to Freud's understandingof the primal scene-a scene of parental sexual intercourse witnessed during patients' early childhood.
In his case study of the Wolf Man, Freud cautionedthat "itdoes not necessarily
follow that these previouslyunconsciousrecollectionsare alwaystrue. They way be;
but they are often distorted from the truth, and interspersed with imaginaryelements."35
What is intriguingabout Freud'scomments is the way he theorizes the act
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of witnessing and a subject'srelationshipto his or her own history.Freud'swarnings
against accepting the primal scene as pure fact are not repudiationsof their truth
value but ratherreflect a shift in emphasis from the content of memory to the act of
remembering itself. The collective memory that constitutes the Americanpublic's
experience of the VietnamWar evokes the primal scene in that the war seemed to
catalyze an "adult"sensibilitytowardviolence, much as the primal scene belatedly
inauguratesadult sexualityby retroactivelyimplantingimages in the child'spsyche.
Only years after the initial"experience"of viewing images such as SaigonExecution
were Americansready to re-view them, but this time by inserting themselves into
the scenario.
Paralysisgoverns both the experience of the primal scene and of events that
become markedas traumas.The film viewer'srelationshipto a scene in a movie is
also like an infant'sexperience witnessing the primal scene: both scenes unfold before an immobilized viewer, who watches events that he or she comprehends only
Film critic Janet Maslinwittily commented about the first Russian roupartially.36
lette scene, "Atthis juncture, The Deer Hunter ... has introduced an element of
genuinely unbearableviolence, and still has two hours to go. Will you, the captive
In the prisoner-of-warcamp,
audience, spend the rest of that time being scared?"37
the firstvictims forced to play Russianroulette are not even the Americansbut two
Vietnamese. Michael and the others are kept in a waterycell underneathwhere the
actionis occurring.They watch througha crackin the floor.The audience'scaptivity
parallels that of the characters. But while we watch along with Michael, we are
drawnto the Vietnameseman, who witnesses the action that Michaelcannot see. It
is difficult to tell which vantage point is more disturbing:being forced to listen to
horrorsone cannot see or being forced to stare at these horrorsdirectly.
As film theorist ChristianMetz has pointed out, our identification does not lie
primarilywith film characters but is invested in the omniscient point of view of
the camera.38However, in The Deer Hunter, the camera's position as an omniscient gaze is destabilized as a point of identification and hence as a position of
mastery. The profusion of perspectives during the first Russian roulette scene is
particularlydisorienting, so that identification is diverted from both the characters and the camera and onto the action.
The game takes place in a small, one-room hut, and Michael, Nick, and
Steven witness the events only in fragments. Further disorienting the spatial
logic of the scene, Cimino refrainsfrom shot/reverseshot structures.The spectator's
gaze bounces randomly about the hut and below to the prisoners. We see the
body of the Vietnamese man falling to his death in three separate shots. These
are interspersed with reaction shots of Michael and Steven, who can only hear
the gory actions, and of the other Vietnamese "player."As the blood pours out
of the man on the floor, recalling the "after"images in the NBC footage and in
Adams's photograph, the camera swivels 90 degrees. These images match neither the eyelines of the reaction shots nor the points of view of the other identifiable characters.
When Michael and Nick emerge from their cage to play the game, the composition is the same as in Saigon Execution and in the previous death scene: each
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97
Figure 1. The first Russian roulette scene, featuring Michael (Robert DeNiro)
and Steven (John Savage), in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (Universal Pictures, 1978).
player faces the camera, the gun directly to the left of his temple. The repetition of
identically framed images reinforces the centralityof the style and syntaxof death
rather than the specific narrativerole that Russian roulette plays in the film.
To read Saigon Execution as a primal scene enables us not only to bracket the
issue of historicalveracity in The Deer Hunter but also to move beyond a model of
cinematic identificationin which the main Americancharacters,Michael and Nick,
are the sole sites of identification for Americans. As a fantasy, the primal scene
serves as a structurewithin which desire plays out, and this structure focuses more
on the syntaxof the scene than on its representational content. To put this in linguistic terms, if we phrase the scene as the sentence He is shooting a man, what
counts are not the specific nouns he and man but the relationship between them
as represented by the verb shoot. What is stable in this scene are not the specific
roles the actors are playing but the syntacticalrelationship between them.
In their book The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and J.-B.
Pontalis describe a fantasy in which there are shifting roles and narrativelines: a
fantasy is "not an object that the subject imagines and aims at ... but rather a
sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and in which permutations
of roles and attributionsare possible."39In Freud's "AChild Is Being Beaten," the
prototypicalbeating fantasy is a single scenario that moves through three phases:
(1) Myfatheris beatingthe childwhomI hate.
(2) I ambeingbeatenby myfather.
(3) A childis beingbeaten(I amlookingon).40
In each phase of the scenario, the position of the fantasizing subject shifts constantly,from active to passive to voyeur, such that the focus of the scenario lies in
the action takingplace (beating) ratherthan in the role of any individual(the beater,
the beaten). Likewise, in The Deer Hunter, audiences and critics are drawn to the
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Figure 2: Nick's (ChristopherWalken) suicide, in the final Russian roulette scene
of The Deer Hunter (Universal Pictures, 1978).
main action of the Russian roulette scene but comment little on the fact that the
players shift so regularly.Significantly,this scene alters the syntax of Saigon Execution, such that the object of the sentence He is shooting a man becomes reflexive: I am shooting myself. Not only do the actors shift in this scene but the subject
is also split among various roles.
When Nick commits suicide during the final Russian roulette game, the point
of identification is further displaced from the characters to the act of shooting
itself. This scene differs from the earlier scenes involving Russian roulette because Nick is willingly playing the game, eerily drawn to a restaging of the death
he cheated while in captivity.His suicide offers a view of how visual traces of the
oriental obscene are violently incorporatedinto the body of the American subject.
The confusion of identities provoked by the Vietnam War cause Nick to commit a
solipsistic act of self-violence. He identifies with the whole of the scenario: detached from his own identity, he simultaneously becomes shooter, victim, and
watcher.Although Michael reappearsin this scene to "rescue"Nick, Nick does not
even recognize him; Michael's presence is superfluous to the game, which has
become a violent self-contained fantasyof Nick'sstaging. Nick even dons the white
shirts and red headbands of the Vietnamese players. As further evidence of his
complete bodily incorporationof the oriental obscene, Nick exhibits needle track
marks on his arm, evidence of his heroin use, another sign of Asiatic corruption.
Nick'ssuicide, which occurs after real news footage of the Saigon evacuations,
signifiesAmerica'swithdrawalfrom the war throughan implosion. Nick does not get
killed in battle but dies by his own hands. However,the violence he performsagainst
his body is orientalin origin, learned first at the VC prisoner-of-warcamp and then
from the Vietnamese gamblers in Saigon. In describing the inward movement of
fantasy,Laplanche argues that "it is the reflexive (selbst or auto-) moment that is
constitutive:the moment of a turningback toward self, an 'autoeroticism'in which
the object has been replacedby a fantasy,by an object reflectedwithin the subject."41
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99
Likewise, the reflexive syntax of I shoot myself is constitutive of the act of
internalizing the scene of violence as fantasy:the fantasy itself is an object violently penetrating the subject. In other words, reflexivitylies not only in the content of the fantasy but is also constitutive of the fantasy'sstructure, its relation to
the fantasizingsubject. The aggressive aspects of fantasy,wherein one inflicts violence on an other, also reflects an inherent self-aggression. Laplanche describes
these permutations thus: "Introjectingthe suffering object,fantasizing the suffering object, making the object suffer inside oneself, making oneself suffer: these are
four rather different formulations, but our practice shows the subject constantly
moving from one to the other."42If The Deer Hunter imagines suffering Vietnamese bodies, it also shows the American subject incorporatingthat suffering. When
the self and the incorporatedother become indistinguishable,that sufferingemerges
as self-inflicted violence.
The Deer Hunter posits a violent, self-dissolving fantasyin which visual fascination ends at a radicalpoint of nonbeing. In encountering violence both as radical other and through the racialother, the American subject internalizes the visual
"style"of violence and comes face to face with himself, thus simultaneously imploding and exploding. When Nick incorporates the oriental bullet, he exchanges
it for the blood now projecting from his body, thus completing his assimilationof
the abject model represented by the executed VC in Adams'sphotograph.
Nick exhibits one final display of capitalist expenditure before the arrivalof
the communists in Saigon. Despite Michael's desperation, neither nostalgia for
home nor love for friends is able to make continent for Nick what was incontinent-that is, to restore control and volition-to one mimetically infected with
violence from within.
Nick's suicide complicates the critique that The Deer Hunter is a mirrorthat
narcissistically reflects American identity and values and that ignores Vietnamese subjectivity.If a crude form of racist dehumanization allows killings like those
in My Lai to take place-I can kill the other because the other is merely object to
me-then that objecthood is broughtuncomfortablyclose to one'sown subjecthood
through participation in violence-if the other can kill me, I am thus potentially
an object myself. In a structure that destabilizes human subjectivity so radically,
what would it mean to "humanize"the victims of the Vietnam War? Even if we
were to "rectify"the representational politics of The Deer Hunter by restoring
Americans to the role of aggressor and the Vietnamese to that of victim (as it
"really"was), we cannot escape the permutational logic that flows from the primal scene of violence.
After the Americans lose their innocence in the game of Russian roulette,
there is no "coming home" for the hunters, no healing of wounds caused by the
war. In this marriageof violence, both the deer and the hunter are sacrificed.
Assimilation, Incorporation, Expulsion: The VC Follow the Vet Home.
The threat of violence that the racialother poses is not isolated to the foreignness
of Vietnam as a foreign "yellow peril." In American orientalism, this danger extends to the internal threat posed by the specter of the Asian immigranton native
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soil. In describing the post-1965 Asian immigrantas the return of the repressed of
American neocolonialism in Asia, Lisa Lowe, in her study of Asian American cultural politics, argues that these immigrants,who came mainlyfrom Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Taiwan, and South Korea,
embodythe displacementfromAsiansocietiesin the aftermathof warandcolonialism
to a UnitedStateswithwhosesenseof nationalidentitythe immigrantsarein contradiction precisely because of that history....
These immigrants retain precisely the
memoriesof imperialism
thatthe U.S.nationseeksto forget.43
The immigrants'bodies are corporealized memento mori of acts of violence
that America wants to forget. In particular,the bodily presence of Vietnamese
immigrants in the United States uncannily evokes images disseminated prior to
their arrival through television, photographs, and film. Against this highly
corporealized imagery, the arrivalof actual immigrants might seem less real, reversing the usual association of spectralitywith the image and corporealityof the
real. Even more than in the case of the coverage of My Lai, the principles of
Nachtrdglichkeit(belatedness) and traumagoverned the perception of the arrival
of Vietnamese immigrants and refugees. Thus, the encounter between America
and Vietnam in Asia continued to be replayed like a bad dream in the United
States, inhibiting the easy assimilationof Asians into the American body politic.
Much has been written about the extraordinarycharacter of post-1965 Asian
immigration, particularlyabout how the 1965 system of preference rules favored
the immigrationof familymembers of U.S. citizens and skilled, middle-classworkers. Although the majorityof Vietnamese immigrantswere refugees who arrived
in the 1980s, the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s were quite
different. The first wave had many advantages over the later immigrants: they
were better educated, English-speaking, and urbanized, making them similar to
the rest of the post-1965 Asian immigrants.44
Among this first wave of Vietnamese immigrants was Nguyen Ngoc Loan,
who arrived in 1975 and moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.45In 1976,
after borrowing $8,000 from his "Americanarmy friends,"Nguyen and his family
opened a restaurantcalled Les Trois Continents, which served all-Americanfare
in addition to Vietnamese and Chinese dishes. A 1979 Esquire article on Nguyen
encapsulated the absurd contrast between his previous infamy and current immigrant "success story":"Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulled that trigger in 1968 and became
a symbol of the Sixties. Now he sells pizza. A symbol of the Seventies."46He was
the "model minority""as homo economicus"-a self-sufficient economic entity
readily absorbed into the mainstreamof American capitalism.47
Nguyen'sascension to model minoritystatus seemed to mock the brutal act of
violence he had committed in 1968 as a proxyfor the American military,as well as
insult Americanveterans who returned to a countrythat was in an economic downturn. Nguyen'ssuccess revealedthe shadowyunderside of the model minoritymyth.
As Robert G. Lee notes in Orientals:Asian Americans in Popular Culture:
The modelminorityhas two faces.The mythpresentsAsianAmericansas silentand
thisis theirsecretto success.Atthe sametime,thissilenceanddisciplineis
disciplined:
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101
usedin constructing
the AsianAmericanas a newyellowperil.... TheAsianAmerican
is bothidentifiedwiththe enemythatdefeatedthe UnitedStatesin Vietnamandfiguredas the agentof the currentcollapseof the Americanempire.48
Whereas the threat posed by the oriental other in Vietnam was physical, the
Vietnamese immigrantwas an economic "peril."Nguyen embodied both threats.
One symbolic victim of this new yellow peril was George Rivera, a veteran featured in the CBS news specials The Worldof Charlie Company (1970) and Charlie
Company at Home (1978). Rivera had been awarded thirteen medals in Vietnam
but could not find a job when he returned to New YorkCity and later emigrated to
Puerto Rico. The message of such stories was that Rivera,too, was a "casualty"of
the Vietnam War.49Americans could not win the war in Vietnam, yet the Vietnamese could come to America and beat Americans at their own game by living the
American dream.
This irony was more than some could handle. In November 1978, three years
after Nguyen immigratedto the United States,the Immigrationand Nationalization
Service (INS), at the behest of two members of the U.S. Congress,began proceedings to deport him. He was accused of"moralturpitude,"based on the executionhe
committed that was capturedin Adams'sphotograph.Reportsof these proceedings
were broadcaston television and printedin newspapers,and the Adamsphotograph
began recirculatingjust as The Deer Hunterwas scheduled to premier in New York.
Althougha New YorkTimeseditorialagreedthat Nguyen'sactionswere clearly"morally indefensible,"both liberal and conservativecommentatorsjumped to Nguyen's
defense.50WilliamBuckleyJr.,in the NationalReview, and MurrayKempton,in The
Progressive,both pointed out the hypocrisyof blamingNguyen while the realvillains
went unpunished.51Yet, throughout these discussions, Nguyen was present only
through his photographicproxy.It was as if, to defend Nguyen'sright to remain in
America,one had to disavowthe absoluteviolence that his photographhad symbolized. Nguyen eventuallywas allowedto remainin the United States,not because his
past actions were proven to be morally defensible but because President Jimmy
Carterpardonedhim to avoid a largerpublic relationsscandal.52
There are parallels between Nguyen's deportation ordeal and the "crime"he
was accused of perpetrating. Both imagine the violent transgression of a boundary that provokes outward reaction-the immigration of a criminal who must
then be deported or the entrance of a bullet and the exit of blood. The same
dynamics of assimilation, incorporation, and expulsion were also at work in the
constitution of the American body politic. In her book The Melancholy of Race:
Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Anne Anlin Cheng describes
the assimilation of Asian Americans in terms of a bodily schema of incorporation
and expulsion modeled on eating:
Freud'snotionof this uncomfortableswallowingand its implicationsfor how loss is
processedandthen securedas exclusionlend provocativeinsightsinto the natureof
the racialotherseen as "theforeignerwithin"America.In a sense,the racialotheris
in fact quite "assimilated"into-or, more accurately,most uneasilydigested by-American nationality.53
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From this perspective, Nguyen represented the immigrant who could not be digested by a body politic that desired to forget its participationin a failed imperialist endeavor.
It is interesting to contrast Nguyen's narrativeof failed assimilationwith The
Deer Hunter's consolidation of white ethnics (Russian or UkrainianAmericans)
into the American body politic through their participation in the Vietnam War.
Despite the Cold War association of Russia with communism, and the explicit
naming of the game in The Deer Hunter as Russian roulette, communism and
violence are constantly displaced onto the Vietnamese. In keeping with the racial
assimilationismof other Vietnam War films, The Deer Hunter shows how the experience of violent adversitybrings (American) men together. In a Saigon hospital, a doctor asks Nick if his last name, Chevotarevich, is Russian, to which Nick
testily replies, "No, it's American."And after Nick's Russian Orthodoxfuneral, his
friends sing a bittersweet "God Bless America"in John'sbar. These assertions of
white solidarity disavow similaritywith the oriental other, yet the experiences of
the war and Nick's suicide give the lie to that disavowal.
Cimino's interest in white ethnics is evident in his later films, Heaven's Gate
(1980) and Yearof the Dragon (1985). The latter movie also posited a structural
opposition between white ethnics and their Asian counterparts. As Robert Lee
remarked about Year of the Dragon, "New York'sChinatown is Vietnam; Asian
America is the ground on which the Vietnam War can be fought again and again,
and this time won for white America."54By metonymy,Asians in America come to
stand in for the Asia in which America lost its first majorwar,and the assimilation
of Asian characters such as the newscaster Tracy Tzu (Ariane) is premised on
America'srepudiation of ChinatownVietnam.
Although Nguyen was allowed to remain in the United States, the stigma of
"moralturpitude"never wore off. When Nguyen passed awayin 1998, SaigonExecution was trotted out againto summarizehis life. Adams later regretted havingtaken
the picture because it visually froze Nguyen into the role of the perpetual Asian
enemy.55The problem of being the "foreignerwithin"never faded for Nguyen; he
was forever seen in terms of the oblique threat he and his country posed for the
Americanbody politic. Nguyen'sobituaryshowed that, even as late as 1991, he was
plagued by the ramificationsof an act that neither he nor Americanscould put behind them: "Asa message scrawledon a restroomwall [in his restaurant]put it, 'We
know who you are.'"56How could a nation that could not define itself vis-a-visthe
VietnamWar recognize its reputed enemy so easily? Precisely because it saw itself
reflected and absorbedinto this scenarioof the orientalobscene.
Notes
1. Quotedin EarlC. GottschalkJr.,"AfterLongStudy,MovieMakersFinda NewWarto
Fight,"WallStreetJournal,November1, 1977, 1.
2. "FilmReviews:The Deer Hunter,"Variety,November29, 1978,24.
3. HarlanJacobson,"'Deer'Problemat 70%,Its 3 Hr. Time:N.Y.ShowmenFace Dilemma,"Variety,December13,1978,3,41;"Pre-Xmas
SlumpCrimpsL.A.,but'Brinks'
Boffissimo$40,000;'DeerHunter'Bullseye$38,000,"Variety,December13, 1978,8;
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103
and "'Superman'a Leaping $1,500,000, in 61; 'Oliver's'Likely $400,000; Santacade
Opens in Gotham,"Variety, December 20, 1978, 10.
4. "Business Data for Deer Hunter,"Internet Movie Database, October 7, 2003, http://
us.imdb.com/title/tt0077416/business.
5. In addition to the reviews cited below, by Tom Buckley,Gloria Emerson, Pauline Kael,
and James M. Wall, another notable example is Frank Rich'sreview, which includes an
image of the Vietnamese storming the U.S. embassy during the fall of Saigon next to
images of ChristopherWalken and Robert DeNiro-all taken from The Deer Hunter,
further mixing diegetic and extra-diegetic realities. See Rich, "In Hell without a Map,"
Newsweek, December 18, 1978, 86.
6. The term "VC"was created by the South Vietnamese government under President
Ngo Dinh Diem to refer to South Vietnamese working with the National Liberation
Front against Diem's regime. See George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The
United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2d ed. (New York:Knopf, 1979), 68.
7. Robin Wood, Hollywoodfrom Vietnam to Reagan (New York:Columbia University
Press, 1986), 270.
8. Michael Dempsey, MarshaKinder,David Axeen, and Ernest Callenbach, "Four Shots
at The Deer Hunter,"Film Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1979): 10-22.
9. James M. Wall, "TheDeer Hunter: History or Art?"Christian Century, May 30, 1979,
603.
10. Production notes, The Deer Hunter DVD, Universal Studios, 2002.
11. Wood, Hollywoodfrom Vietnam to Reagan, 272.
12. Bernie Cook, "Over My Dead Body: The Ideological Use of Dead Bodies in Network
News Coverage of Vietnam," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 2 (2001):
203-16.
13. Bruce Cumings, Warand Television(London:Verso, 1992), 95. For more on an August
1965 CBS broadcastwith Morley Saferthat showed U.S. soldiersusing Zippo lightersto
set fire to thatch huts in the village of Cam Ne, see Daniel C. Hallin, The "Uncensored
War":The Media and Vietnam(New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1986), 132.
14. Pauline Kael, "TheCurrent Cinema:The God-Bless-AmericaSymphony,"New Yorker,
December 18, 1978, 72.
15. Quoted in Leticia Kent, "Readyfor Vietnam?A Talkwith Michael Cimino,"New York
Times, December 10, 1978, D15, D23.
16. David Denby, "Nightmare into Epic," New York, December 18, 1978, 98, and Tom
Buckley, "Hollywood'sWar,"Harper's, April 1979, 84. See also Gloria Emerson's description of Leticia Kent'sexperiences interviewing Cimino for the New YorkTimesin
"Oscarsfor Our Sins," The Nation, May 12, 1979, 541. Another essay that made the
same allegations about Cimino was Richard Grenier, "A New Patriotism?"Commentary, April 1979, 78-79.
17. Emerson, "Oscarsfor Our Sins,"541, and John Pilger, "The Gook-Hunter,"New York
Times, April 26, 1979, A23. The journalists Emerson referred to were Tom Buckley,
Seymour Hersh, and Peter Amett.
18. See the discussion of direct cinema and cinema v6rit6 and their impact on American
television news in Rick Berg, "LosingVietnam:Coveringthe Warin an Age of Technology,"in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Holllywood:The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990),
41-68.
19. For more on Peckinpah's technique, see Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam
Peckinpahand the Rise of UltraviolentMovies (Austin:Universityof TexasPress, 1998).
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20. Devon Scott, "Mailbag:Vietnam and Artistic Integrity,"New York Times, June 17,
1979, D23.
21. Peter Lehman, "'Well,What's It Like over There? Can You Tell Us Anything?':Looking for Vietnam in The Deer Hunter," North Dakota Quarterly 51, no. 3 (summer
1983): 137.
22. Vincent Canby,"How True to Fact Must Fiction Be?"New YorkTimes, December 17,
1978, D23.
23. Aljean Harmetz, "Oscar-Winning'Deer Hunter' Is under Attackas 'Racist'Film,"New
YorkTimes, April 26, 1979, C15.
24. "U Self-Rates 'Hunter' Stricterthan MPAA,but It's a Mistake,"Variety, November 22,
1978, 4. The ads appeared in the New YorkTimes, November 19, 1978, D10-11. Although the film had already been rated R, which means that audiences under seventeen would be admitted only if accompanied by a parent or guardian, the ads carried
the following warning used for films with an X rating:"Due to the nature of this film,
no one under the age of 18 will be admitted. (There will be strict adherence to this
policy.)"
25. Judy Lee Kinney,"The MythicalMethod: Fictionalizingthe VietnamWar,"Wide Angle
7, no. 4 (1985): 40.
26. Philip C. Rule, "The Italian Connection in the American Film: Coppola, Cimino,
Scorsese,"America, November 17, 1979, 304. See also Wall, "TheDeer Hunter,"604.
27. Richard Slotkin,Regenerationthrough Violence:The Mythologyof the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 499.
28. Robin Wood calls the VC leader both "Mike'sdouble and Mike'sopposite" in describing how this Vietnamese Doppelgdnger embodies both Michael's "control freak"tendencies and the sadistic, moral opposite of Michael'smotives. Wood, Hollywoodfrom
Vietnam to Reagan, 285.
29. The Vietnam scenes in The Deer Hunter were filmed on location in Thailand, and Thai
actors played all the Vietnamese and VC roles. Although the Thai actors are ostensibly
speaking Vietnamese in this scene, they utter only a few words over and over again,
such as "Mau!"(Quick!). Thanks to Peter Zinoman, professor of history and chair of
the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for
consulting with me about this scene.
30. This version of masculinityhas its parallelsin Cooper'sThe Deerslayer. Natty Bumppo,
who has fallen into the hands of the Mingo Indians, is tied to a tree while Mingo
warriors take turns throwing tomahawks and shooting rifles at his head. This ordeal
was not meant to kill the Deerslayer but to scare him and hence extract an admission
of fear and weakness. However, the Deerslayer endured these trials stoically,without
moving or otherwise betrayingemotion, which led the Mingo to admire Natty'sstrength
of character.
31. Jean Vallely, "Michael Cimino's Battle to Make a Great Movie," Esquire, January2,
1979, 91. According to Ren6 Girard, "It is violent reciprocity, on the rampage everywhere, that truly destroys differences." Girard,Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick
Gregory (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 64.
32. John Kinch, quoted in Joseph Eszterhas and Ron Haeberle, "The Massacre at My
Lai,"Life, December 4, 1969, 44. This quote is also in Seymour M. Hersh, My Lai 4: A
Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York:Vintage, 1970), 85-86.
33. BarbaraGrizzutiHarrison,"ALast Clean Shot at The Deer Hunter,"Ms., June 1979, 32.
34. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (1953; reprint,
New York:Avon Books, 1966), 658-59.
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105
35. Sigmund Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," in Three Case Histories
(New York:Touchstone, 1963), 208.
36. The immobility of the film spectator is a central tenet of apparatustheory,whereby the
ontological situation of the spectator vis-a-vis the camera is likened to the prisoners in
Plato's allegory of the cave. See Jean-Louis Baudry,"Ideological Effects of the Basic
CinematographicApparatus,"in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A
Film Theory Reader (New York:Columbia University Press, 1986), 286-98.
37. Janet Maslin, "Screen Violence-How Much Is Too Much?"New YorkTimes, February 25, 1979, D19, D36; emphasis added.
38. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier:Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia
Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 50.
39. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York:Norton, 1973), 318.
40. Sigmund Freud, "AChild Is Being Beaten," in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Worksof Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans.James Strachey (New York:Norton,
1955), 185-86.
41. Jean Laplanche,Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans.Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 88.
42. Ibid., 97.
43. Lisa Lowe, ImmigrantActs: On Asian AmericanCulturalPolitics (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996), 16-17.
44. MorrisonG. Wong, "Post-1965Asian Immigrants:Where Do They Come from, Where
Are They Now, and Where Are They Going?"in Franklin Ng, The History and Immigration of Asian Americans (New York:Garland, 1998), 202-20, and Ronald Takaki,
Strangersfrom a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York:Penguin,
1989), 451.
45. Betsy Carter, "The Haunted General,"Newsweek, May 3, 1976, 11.
46. Tom Buckley, "The Villain of Vietnam,"Esquire, June 5, 1979, 61-64.
47. David Palumbo-Liu,Asian/America:HistoricalCrossingsof a Racial Frontier(Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 240.
48. Robert G. Lee, Orientals:Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia:Temple
University Press, 1999), 190.
49. "The Case of Nguyen Ngoc Loan" [editorial], New YorkTimes, November 13, 1978,
A22.
50. "CharlieCompany at Home: The Veterans of Vietnam,"CBS News Special, January
17, 1978.
51. William Buckley Jr., "Deport General Loan?"National Review, December 8, 1978,
1526, and Murray Kempton, "Finding a Fall-Guy," The Progressive, January 1979,
10-11.
52. MartinTolchin, "CarterWill Not Seek to Deport Former Vietnam General, Aide Says,"
New YorkTimes, December 2, 1978, 20.
53. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2001), 10.
54. Lee, Orientals, 197.
55. Eddie Adams, "The Tet Photo," in Al Santoli, ed., To Bear Any Burden (New York:
Dutton, 1985), 182-85.
56. Robert McG. Thomas Jr., "Nguyen Ngoc Loan, 67, Dies; Executed Viet Cong Prisoner,"New YorkTimes, July 16, 1998, A27.
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