The Hollywood War
by Julia Faragher

At the beginning of 2021, I decide to watch all eight movies nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. I’m excited by the prospect that a woman might win Best Director for only the second time in the Academy’s 93 year history and for the first time since I started obsessively watching the Oscars in 2010. Just the thought of Chloé Zhao holding up that trophy fills me with a mix of admiration and anxiety. I am desperate to see her fingers clutched around the golden figure, but afraid that the Academy will ignore yet another talented Asian woman. As a kid, I used to fantasise about standing on that stage. As an adult, I’ve learnt to be more realistic with my dreams. 

Many of the nominated movies are not films I would seek out normally—they are all serious dramas and after the year that has just passed, I am in desperate need of a laugh. But I can’t spend my summer on a faraway beach as I would like to, so I stay inside and watch them all. 

I dread watching The Trial of the Chicago 7, Aaron Sorkin’s new courtroom drama. I am extremely sceptical of any American movie that claims to be about the Vietnam War. I already know every beat of the story before I hit play; I know who the hero will be and who will be left on the cutting room floor. So I grit my teeth as Sorkin’s mostly white and male characters crack egg jokes and trade political quips while people die in an offscreen war.  

I expect the other movies to be better, but what surprises me is how many of the films mention the Vietnam War. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is about the reaction to an anti-Vietnam War protest, so that’s not a shock. Neither is Judas and the Black Messiah which is set in the same time period. The surprises come from Nomadland and Sound of Metal, both quiet and understated character studies where the protagonists encounter veterans on their respective journeys.  

The Vietnam War is mentioned in four out of the eight best movies of 2020.  

Not a single one features or is made by a Vietnamese person. 

‘American foreign policy is horrendous, cause not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what’s worse, I think, is that they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.’ 

– Frankie Boyle, Hurt Like You’ve Never Been Loved 

Coming Home and The Deer Hunter were the first two American films about the Vietnam War released after the fall of Saigon. They share several common traits: they were both released in 1978, both box office successes, both won multiple Academy Awards and both starred an American soldier-veteran as the protagonist. In essence, they both took an international conflict that had dominated the world stage for years and narrowed it down to the individual experience. Thus began Hollywood’s revisionist history of the Vietnam War: it’s no longer about the overall picture, it’s about the individual American man. How hard was it for him? What did he go through? How did he fight the demons in his own mind? As Steve Palay wrote for The New York Times in 1987, ‘The movies certainly make it an American war…It seems we want Americans to be the good, the bad and the ugly. Even in our nightmares, we’re the stars.’ 

These movies sought to depoliticise the war. To distract from the conflict—don’t remind the American public that they lost—and to shift memory to the humans and their personal sufferings. Michael Cimino, director of The Deer Hunter, echoed this sentiment when he declared that the war ‘is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story…I have no interest in making a “Vietnam” film, no interest in making a direct political statement. I really wanted to make a film about these kind of people’. 

These movies reveal that in Hollywood, Vietnam is a war. Not a people or a place. A war. The foundations were laid quickly as the dust settled in Saigon, and they were built upon by film giant Francis Ford Coppola with the release of Apocalypse Now in 1979. At Cannes Film Festival, Coppola decreed, ‘My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.’

It is endlessly depressing to only ever see Vietnam onscreen as a war, to be repeatedly told that our only cultural value in the West is as a battleground.  

Sometimes I want to pretend that these films are not important. I want to shut my eyes and tilt my head towards the ground. But movies matter because they shape memory. Because even though I have heard real war stories, not everyone has family members who can fill in the gaps for them.  

‘That was the whole point: Americans and Vietnamese are dying in this war. And for Sorkin, it’s only the American lives that matter.’ 

– Jon Wiener, Scheer Intelligence 

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is better and worse than I expected. It is a technically excellent movie, well-executed and finely polished. Even Aaron Sorkin’s writing is less insufferable than usual. There is an ensemble cast of great performances, including Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale.  

Chicago 7 is a courtroom drama that follows the events of an anti-Vietnam War protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as it descended into riots and highlights how the US government were determined to go to any lengths necessary to imprison the organisers. The big problem with Chicago 7 can be neatly summarised by examining its ending.

The movie finishes on an inspirational and powerful note as Eddie Redmayne’s voice of reason character Thomas Hayden is given a chance to speak after the majority of the 7 have been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. But instead of expressing any regret for his now criminal actions, Hayden takes the opportunity to read out the names of all the American soldiers who have died in the war since the trial began. It’s a fittingly dramatic end to a dramatic movie, carefully orchestrated to bring a tear to one’s eye. The camera slowly zooms out and the music swells as the room explodes into applause and cheers, drowning out the judge’s objections. Sorkin pulls at your heartstrings as much as possible in this moment: the 7 may have lost their case, but think of all the brave American men who have lost their lives.

The problem with the ending to Chicago 7 is that it’s not true. Thomas Hayden never read out the names of the fallen, it was David Dellinger. It wasn’t at the conclusion of the trial before sentencing, it was on Vietnam Moratorium Day partway through the trial. Dellinger didn’t get to read all the names, he was shut down by Judge Hoffman and penalised with a contempt charge. And the real kicker: the list wasn’t limited to American troops, it contained the names of all the Vietnamese people who died as well. In a movie that doesn’t take place in Vietnam or feature any Vietnamese people, it is a new low that Sorkin doesn’t even permit his characters to utter Vietnamese names. It’s another Americanisation of the story at the cost of all others. It’s the erasure of Vietnamese people from their own narrative. What Palay wrote in 1978 is still true of Chicago 7 in 2020: Americans must be the stars of their own nightmares. 

In reality, the 7 used their sentencing speeches as an opportunity to call out racial injustice in the United States, particularly in light of Bobby Seale being abused, bound and gagged for seven days of the trial. ‘Whatever happens to us,’ Dellinger said in real life, ‘however unjustified, will be slight compared to what has happened already to the Vietnamese people, to the Black people in this country, to the criminals with whom we are now spending our days in the Cook County jail.’ 

 ‘All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’ 

– Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies 

I am already in a bad mood by the time I arrive at the Australian War Memorial, having discovered that my car had been broken into earlier that morning, the glass lying in thick shards along the gutter while some fragments stubbornly stuck together in the window frame. 

After I finally walk up the front steps of the War Memorial, I go to the front desk and ask for a map. A friendly man hands me a glossy piece of paper and warns me that because the gallery is closing soon, it won’t be possible to see everything. ‘I’m not that ambitious,’ I tell him and make my way to the gallery marked ‘Conflicts 1945 to today’. After peering into a few rooms, I find the one with a bright red neon sign that says ‘Vietnam War’. I take out my phone and open my Spotify app. Undoubtedly I will need music to get through this, but my usual upbeat playlist feels out of place. I settle on a pop punk song called again&again. It feels appropriate.  

I put my phone away and start to take in my surroundings. Just standing in the Vietnam War gallery is enough to make me feel uncomfortable. It is not a place designed for me. I can’t help but remember the veteran who berated me for never having been to Vietnam when I visited the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne as a teenager and wonder if I will ever feel comfortable in a war memorial again.  

The gallery opens with a timeline. I go straight to the end and see that the last entry is ‘30 April 1975: Saigon falls to NVA forces, ending the war. The country is reunited under communist rule.’ Funny, I think. For me, that was the beginning. That’s what brought my mum to Australia, where she met my dad, and I came into existence. I stare at that last entry for a while and think about the 80,000 people who are missing. Wars don’t end when the fighting stops. The effects of the Vietnam War reverberated for years yet the memorial timeline ends on 30 April 1975. 

I make my way through the gallery in a murky haze. I try to read the information on the walls but it’s mostly meaningless to me. Battle after battle. I reach the part about the Tết Offensive and realise that this is the only time that I get to see the Vietnamese word for new year. People outside of my family are content to wish me a happy Chinese New Year. Tết is the name of a battle we were taught about in school. 

It’s not until I reach the end of the gallery that I find the word that I’ve been looking for: refugee. Honestly, I am pleasantly surprised to see it. The last panel in the room is the singular profile of Danh Duc Tran—I don’t know if his name was originally spelt with any accents, but they aren’t printed on the sign—a South Vietnamese man who was thrown into a labour camp before fleeing to Australia by boat and plane. He is supposed to represent all of us. He’s not doing a bad job: he’s a lawyer, same as me. 

There are no numbers. No reference to scale. But somehow, my standards are so low that I am impressed that refugees are mentioned at all. I think of Chicago 7 and how American movies won’t even speak Vietnamese names and realise that I expected the same of the Australian War Memorial. I couldn’t find any mention of Vietnamese refugees on their website, so I thought the gallery would be the same. I am so used to seeing Vietnamese people written out of the story that I am shocked to see someone acknowledge the truth. 

It feels like I have spent an eternity walking through the gallery. I check my phone: it’s only been 11 minutes. 

‘Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.’ 

– Kelly Marie Tran, I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment 

Not only are American soldier-veterans the stars of the Vietnam War movies, but there are barely any other Vietnamese stories being made in Hollywood. I rarely get to see Vietnamese bodies onscreen so if I do, it’s cause for celebration. 

Two names come to mind when I think of Vietnamese actors in Hollywood: Kelly Marie Tran and Veronica Ngo. I discovered both of them in 2017 when I went to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I had already cried for joy when I learned that Kelly Marie Tran was joining the Star Wars universe, but I lost it again when I watched the movie and discovered that there were two Vietnamese actresses in the one film. After a lifetime of Star Wars fandom, it was incredible to see Vietnamese women in the stories I had playacted as a kid. 

But even that moment didn’t last for long. After the release of The Last Jedi, Tran was subject to such a large and overwhelming amount of sexist and racist hate online that she was forced to delete all of her previous Instagram posts and become a social media recluse. She did have people in her corner, including writer/director Rian Johnson and co-stars like legend Mark Hamill, but the voices of the trolls were loud enough to make her disappear for a while. She resurfaced in late 2018 to write about the experience for The New York Times, saying that harassment was the unfortunate reality of growing up Vietnamese in the United States and that she refused to be defined by it.   

Tran may not have been marginalised by online harassment, but the damage had been done and Disney had seen it. When Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker came out at the end of 2019, Tran’s character had been reduced to nothing more than an ornamental set piece. She was barely onscreen, gave pathetic excuses as to why she couldn’t accompany the other leads on their exciting quests of self-discovery and blended into the background. It appeared that most of her lines had been given to Dominic Monaghan, a white male actor who earned his role in the film by winning a soccer bet with his friend of 15 years, director J.J. Abrams. 

I left the cinema after The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker in completely different moods. The first time, I was full of hope. The second time, I felt crushed for daring to dream that things might change. The Oscar stage felt further away than ever before. 

 ‘I fed in a sheet of blank paper. At the top of the page, I typed ‘ETHNIC STORY’ in capital letters. I pushed the carriage return and scrolled down to the next line. The sound of helicopters in a dark sky. The keys hammered the page.’ 

– Nam Le, Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice 

Vietnamese people have so many stories to tell that aren’t about the war. Viewing an entire country, an entire people, through a war, means that they cannot escape being defined by it. They cannot be conceived of as real human beings when they are just the backdrop to white Americans and their superior emotions. Most often they are not even in the background, they are offscreen, in that other country, that space where nobody will go.

My family has an incredible story about how they fled Vietnam and came to Australia. Absolutely Oscar-worthy. Too wild, even, that you wouldn’t believe it. Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write it. But I don’t really want to tell it. Not now. Not when people of colour are expected to hang their trauma out to dry on white people’s washing lines. Not when Western cinema had the opportunity to tell Vietnamese refugee stories as they were happening and let it pass by. Now, I want more. 

I want to write about the painting hanging on the one hook in the bedroom of my rented Braddon apartment. It shows two orange tulips with yellow outlines and green stems in front of a frosted glass window. You wouldn’t know it, just looking at the picture in its golden frame, that it was painted by my grandmother based on a photograph I took of a bunch of flowers my mother bought for me. That as I sleep, there are always three generations of Le women in the room with me. I want to write about how my brother got into medical school and I rang him straight away to scream congratulations into the phone while our parents flooded the family Whatsapp group chat because our mum was cycling through Taiwan and our dad was at a conference in Dubai. Even though we were spread across four cities in three countries, nothing was going to stop us from celebrating. I want to write about watching with glee as Chloé Zhao won not one, but two Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. I want to write about visiting Vietnam for the second time and learning that my family are việt kiều, which means Vietnamese people living overseas, and how incredible I felt learning that there was a word specifically made for me. I want to write about the joy in our lives, yes, the joy that we have because while my mum and her family were lucky to flee Saigon when they did, I want to focus on the joy we have now, close to 50 years later.

I don’t know if I could make a film about those kinds of things. It wouldn’t be a film that got me on the Oscar stage. It would be a film just for me, just for my family, and for our shared joy. 

EXT. SAIGON – DAY 

The movie opens as the sun has just begun to rise. It’s a slow sunrise: the colours creep into the black sky as the light cracks through the clouds. At first, all you can hear is a chorus of birds chirping but they fade away as the music kicks in. Music is important to this movie—now that the music has started, it won’t stop. As the sun rises, the opening credits play, allowing you to catch your breath and settle in before the story begins. Soon, there is a burst of golden glory and a new day is beginning. The camera pans down to reveal that the streets are already a mess, motorbikes everywhere and pedestrians weaving between them. Shops are opening. The lake is calm, even as people rush across the bridge. You are in Saigon. 

INT. SAIGON – DAY 

DAUGHTER wakes up, snoozing her alarm for the tenth time. She pulls back the crisp white bedsheets and goes to the bathroom to wash her face. You watch as she splashes herself with cool water and rubs it into her eyelids. She reaches for her makeup bag and pulls out only her favourite products. No time to bother with fancy creams or serums today—all DAUGHTER wants to do is brush her long hair up into a ponytail and add a touch of glitter to the edges of her eyes. She joins MOTHER and GRANDMOTHER for breakfast in the hotel restaurant where a feast of food is laid before her. There are dishes from half a dozen cuisines—not just Vietnamese, but French, Japanese and Chinese, too. She loads up her plate with things she’s never seen before, asking GRANDMOTHER for names and meanings. She doesn’t know what order to eat them in, but it doesn’t matter. Each bite is satisfying, some sweet and others sour. DAUGHTER pulls a face and MOTHER laughs at her. But it’s not a mocking laugh, it’s a shared one. MOTHER remembers the first time she had that dish—now she gets to watch DAUGHTER try it. 

EXT. HẠ LONG BAY – DAY 

DAUGHTER stands next to BROTHER on a boat as it enters Hạ Long Bay. This is probably the image of Vietnam they have seen the most, but it’s new to see it in person. Even though they’d heard of the floating village, it’s another thing to be a tiny boat in a beautiful stretch of ocean. The surrounding islands are impossibly tall and vibrantly green with moss. DAUGHTER is obsessed with taking photographs. She loves twisting her lens to find new angles and zooming in close to see the details. She’s put in a lot of work to become good with a camera. Over the years, she’s learnt how to adapt to any lighting situation and how to think on her feet to capture the world as it changes before her eyes. Here, she just has to hold her camera and press the button. She probably couldn’t take a bad photo if she tried.

EXT. DA NANG – DAY 

DAUGHTER never really gave much thought to Vietnamese beaches. Maybe it’s because Australian beaches are so famous, celebrated as the best in the world. But of course, Vietnam has beaches too, and DAUGHTER can’t believe how perfect they are. She takes small steps on the sand, appearing nervously cautious. It’s hot to touch but it doesn’t take long to adjust and soon it becomes comforting and warm. DAUGHTER abandons her things on the shore, watched over by GRANDMOTHER who has her nose buried in a book, and runs headstrong into the ocean to join FATHER in the water. DAUGHTER shrieks as she enters the crisp water but it quickly turns to laughter at herself. She pulls her goggles on, counts to three and ducks under the water to fully immerse herself. She comes up for air, salt sticking to her tongue, expecting to feel relief from the cool water. But she doesn’t, because it’s not cold anymore. She floats as the waves roll over her, and the blue of the ocean merges with the blue of the sky.

EXT. HỘI AN – NIGHT  

You watch as Hội An comes alive at night. The streets are flooded with people and it’s a pleasant, cool temperature. THE FAMILY emerge from a restaurant, ready to go for a wander before returning to their hotel. DAUGHTER has read about the lanterns in Hội An, how they cover the walls and command the city. There’s nothing that can prepare her for the moment when she turns the corner and sees the river at night for the first time: thousands of lanterns line the river banks for as far as she can see, and everything is duplicated in the calm water. It creates a sea of red, yellow, green and blue dots floating in the air. Slowly, the camera zooms in on DAUGHTER’s face as she looks up at the lanterns hanging directly above her on tight strings. Her face is cast in a faint red glow, accenting her features with sharp shadows. Her eyes glance upwards and she breaks out into an infectious smile. She finally possesses the knowledge she has always wanted: this is how it feels to come home to a place you’ve never been. 

SLOW FADE TO BLACK. 

CREDITS ROLL. 

THE END 

Julia Faragher is an artist, writer, photographer and filmmaker. She is mixed-race with Vietnamese and British heritage and currently lives in Canberra/Ngunnawal. She was recently awarded a residency at Bundanon Trust through the Accessible Arts 2021 Artist-In-Residence Program and the Cook Creative Writing Prize by the Capital Arts Patrons’ Organisation for her #LoveOzYA manuscript. She won the Young Canberra Citizen of the Year Award for Arts and Multimedia 2019 and was nominated for ACT Young Woman of the Year 2020 in recognition of her work directing and producing documentary series From Amateur to Artist and her ongoing contribution to the Canberra arts community.