Lands of Sorrow: Melancholic Nationalism in Films about the Second Indochina War

Abstract

Lands of Sorrow analyses the Second Indochina War's (IWII) depiction in narrative films by the United States, Communist Viet Nam, South Viet Nam, and exiled South Vietnamese. I argue that melancholia underscores the films' production and reception. Rather than just understand melancholia as Sigmund Freud conceptualised it--as a pathological and individual experience of grief--I also situate melancholia at the intersection of postcolonial and memory studies. Melancholia thus names the process of cultural memory construction belonging to nation-states with histories of imperialism and colonialism. In this way, melancholia highlights instances where films encourage nationalist identification through depictions of remembrance and desire. Melancholia also enables analysis of how these tropes sustain the postcolonial entanglements between the communities named above. Films produced during the IWII rally nationalism through specific imaginations of political communities--idealised nations that the destructive IWII revealed to be unattainable. Post-1975 films must then depict national cohesion and the competing knowledge of this cohesion to have been irretrievably lost. To do so, imagined community becomes 'imaginary community'--a term I develop by synthesising Benedict Anderson's imagined community with Jacques Lacan's theory on the Imaginary register. Just as this register is formed through an infant's misrecognition of its wholeness in the mirror image, imaginary community fosters misrecognition of the nation's fetishised images to disavow melancholic loss. Chapter 1 traces the transformation of American political community from imagined to imaginary through analysis of The Quiet American film adaptations (Mankiewicz, 1958; Noyce, 2002). Chapter 2 extrapolates the theoretical frameworks to Communist Vietnamese films of two different eras: wartime and Renovation. Chapter 3 turns towards South Vietnamese cinema to discuss common approaches to imagining a fledgling community while Chapter 4 analyses this cinema's preservation and reception by the exilic community. Chapter 5 returns to mainland Viet Nam to investigate neoliberalism's impact on depictions of the IWII. Finally, Chapter 6 closes out the thesis by looking at the implication of IWII narratives on American politics today. The imaginary communities in Chapter 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 ultimately make up a reactionary cinema, in which a fixation on past psychic injuries hinders alternative visualisations that can contribute to social progress. As the first sustained comparative study of films about the IWII using melancholia, Lands of Sorrow responds to critical conversations on cinema, the nation, and memory. Foremost, the thesis contributes to scholarship on Vietnamese cinemas. Doing so not only confronts hegemonic cultural memories of the IWII in Western discourse, but also elucidates how contemporary Vietnamese film cultures continue to rely on the IWII to narrate national formation and destruction. The thesis further highlights gender relations as fundamental to these narratives and how the films position spectators. Case studies analysed herein show that female characters model devotion towards the men and the ideal nations that the latter symbolise. Film editing sustains this investment by asking the spectator to adopt not only the characters' memories, but their subjunctive desires as well. Through what I term 'memory-fantasy', this editing technique seeks to articulate film representations of traumatic displacements--a worthwhile project considering the global refugee crisis. Similarly, melancholia and imaginary community hope to explain how nationalism continue to fuel reactionary politics at a time when global solidarity remains far from reach. Show more