Masculinity and rape - Part 2

Hollywood goes to Vietnam

Neither Angela nor I were aware that there was a Hollywood movie which centred on the ‘incident’ at Hill 192.  I only discovered its existence after Angela died last year, when I re-read Robert Bly’s book Iron John (I reviewed it here). Bly refers briefly to the film, Casualties of War, when discussing his belief that boys need to be initiated into manhood.

I recently watched this film  - with some trepidation, having realised that it was directed by Brian De Palma, the director of Dressed to Kill (a film which I think I protested against in the early 1980s). Casualties of War was not as exploitative as I feared it might be, but I was not surprised that its interpretation of what was going on between the men on Hill 192 differed significantly from the understanding that Angela had been developing in 1982.

De Palma’s framing

Daniel Lang’s factual account, written in 1969, of the gang rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman on Hill 192 in 1966 was based on lengthy interviews with Robert Storeby (Eriksson‘s real name, disguised at the time to protect him and his wife from revenge attack), and on his study of seven volumes of court records of the trial. Brian De Palma’s 1989 film dramatises what happened on Hill 192, and crucially adds a 25 minute long fictional prelude which is clearly intended to frame how we view the subsequent events.

This fictional prelude starts with Eriksson on a metro, drifting into sleep, and into dream flashbacks of his war experience. These supposed flashbacks encourage us  to believe that, before the real life events on Hill 192,

• Meserve has saved Eriksson’s life, twice

• Eriksson naively connects with Vietnamese villagers as farmers, who remind him of his small farming community back home

• Meserve and the other platoon members are realists who see all Vietnamese people as either potential Viet Cong, or at least likely VC sympathisers, and relate to them as such

• When Brown, Meserve’s friend, is shot in an ambush, Meserve  places one hand on Brown’s wound to stanch the bleeding, while continuing to fire at the ambushers with his other hand. The closeness of Meserve’s relationship with Brown, who is black, implies that Meserve is not inherently racist

• Eriksson’s capacity to empathise compromises his effectiveness as a soldier - he looks on in horror at Brown’s suffering, while behind him a Viet Cong grenade thrower is escaping into a tunnel

• Meserve is traumatised when he learns that Brown has died - something inside him snaps, and a man who had been happy-go-lucky becomes cold and calculating

• Meserve intends to avenge his friend’s death by going into town to “get laid”, and he is outraged when the platoon’s access to a brothel is blocked by military police, precipitating his plan to abduct, rape, and murder a villager to compensate for this deprivation.

De Palma’ s framing colours how we interpret the subsequent events, and in particular the interactions between the men, throughout their abduction, gang rape and murder of a young woman. For Meserve and the other rapists, Mao, the young woman they abduct, becomes a “VC whore” who deserves her fate. She stands in for the actual prostituted Vietnamese women they were prevented from abusing the previous evening, and for the Viet Cong who have killed American soldiers, including Brown. For Eriksson, though, “she’s just a farm girl”.  Meserve tries to understand Eriksson’s refusal to take part in the rape - he asks “don’t you like girls?…Are you a faggot?”. He thinks Eriksson must be both gay and unAmerican - he can’t think of any other reason why an American would not want to use this opportunity to rape a woman and avenge Brown’s death. That this is about men - how they relate to each other, and how they abuse women - is apparent.  But, echoing the framing in the Observer’s introduction to Lang’s article, De Palma and scriptwriter David Rabe seem to suggest that the ‘real significance’ of the story is how Americans came to be corrupted by the war.

What this interpretation leaves out is very evident in the final fictional scene of the film. Eriksson is waking up from horrific memories of the war and his inability to save Mao from being gang raped and killed. He is still on the metro, which has by now emerged from below ground, and is clearly in San Francisco. He notices a woman who reminds him of Mao, seated in front of a man reading a newspaper with the headline  ‘Nixon Resigning’.  She gets up and leaves the carriage. He notices that she has left her scarf behind. He picks it up, and runs out of the train to give it to her. She asks (to choral accompaniment from Ennio Morricone’s powerful score) “Do I remind you of someone? You had a bad dream, didn’t you? It’s over now, I think. Chao.”

That war may be over. But the actual event on which the film was based wasn’t a dream. And male violence against women, in war and in peace, continues.

Back to Iron John

Robert Bly, a poet who had been a leading anti-war activist before going on to promote ‘men’s liberation’, believed that Casualties of War illustrated one of the key themes in his book Iron John. The crucial moment in the film for him is when Eriksson shudders at what his fellow soldiers are doing - “His ability to shudder is his most adult aspect”.  Shuddering, Bly suggests, is what happens when a young boy responds empathetically to cruelty. An ability that, for many boys, is erased as they grow up. The four rapists on Hill 192,  he claims, are boys who are unable to shudder, and who hate those who can.

There’s the germ of a valid insight here. But Bly does not go on to explore what has intervened to take away boys’ capacity for empathy. He is unable to contemplate the possibility that the forced break with the mother under patriarchy might be involved. Instead, Bly blames the lack of proper initiation into manhood - initiation by an older man. “From the initiator’s point of view, none of the four is properly a man at all, but they are brutal boys, stuck in some stage before ashes and descent.”

Bly’s incoherence, and inability to confront the reality of patriarchy, are demonstrated when he continues, on the next page, to describe his vision of what proper initiation entails.  It is here that he urges older men to help boys “to move from the mother’s world to the father’s world.” And where he celebrates the male initiation rites of the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, rites which centre on the sexual abuse by older men of boy children aged between eight and twelve.