In one of the stranger twists in self-aggrandizement, Hollywood renders Americans as the antiheroes, which might seem odd given that Hollywood is America’s unofficial ministry of propaganda. For Americans, Hollywood turns a defeat by Vietnamese people into a conflict that is actually a civil war in the American soul, where Americans’ greatest enemies are actually themselves. Watching “Vietnam War” movies is my own personal “Groundhog Day” experience, because I know, without fail, how Hollywood will represent the Vietnamese and Americans.
Unfortunately, I have watched almost every “Vietnam War” movie that Hollywood has made.
In its own typically solipsistic, American-centered, whitewashed fashion, Hollywood has been waging this war on celluloid ever since John Wayne’s atrocious “Green Berets” in 1968, a film so nakedly propagandistic it could have been made by the Third Reich.īorn in Vietnam but made in America, I have a personal and professional interest in Hollywood’s fetish about this war. This is certainly true for what Americans call the “Vietnam War” and what the victorious Vietnamese call the “American War.” Both terms obscure how a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese was also fought in Laos and Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands more and leading directly to the Cambodian genocide. The Third Wife has been screened in the United States, with a run continuing till October.All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.
Vietnam's censors have reportedly asked Mayfair to submit an edited version of the movie for screening clearance. "But with The Third Wife, new talent Mayfair reclaims just a few of those silvery strands from the neglect of history and weaves them into a film so sensuous we can lose ourselves in it, but so vividly real we might also be able to find ourselves there." Hollywood trade publication Variety, in its review of the film, said: "In May (portrayed by My) and in Ha and Xuan (the other two wives), there are all the women and girls of the past who've been ignored, abused, forced into competition with one another, made to endure a degradation of spirit and a commodification of body so complete it should have resulted in their annihilation, like silkworms steaming alive inside their cocoons". My, who is now 15 and was said to have convinced her parents that she could perform the role, is upset that the movie cannot be seen by Vietnamese, even as it has drawn applause elsewhere. My was reportedly selected after the director auditioned more than 900 candidates. We talk about women's rights and we are very critical about patriarchal traditions that have been in the country for centuries."
They can't attack us on those grounds so there have been attempts to smear the ethics of the actress' mother, publishing her personal details online and saying she had sold her daughter for money."ĭefending the subject matter in her film, she said: "These questions are open for debate and I have no problem with that. Mayfair told the Hollywood Reporter: "We didn't do anything wrong and we broke no law.