RECASTING NARRATIVES: ACCESSING COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR IN MODERN POPULAR MEDIA TEXTS Tyler Wertsch A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2019 Committee: Andrew Schocket, Advisor Jeffrey Brown ii ABSTRACT Andrew Schocket, Advisor The question of how the Vietnam War has is remembered in American public memory is a difficult one. While a tremendous body of work exists that explains the nuances of and tribulations of American memory of the conflict through examinations of film, memorial sites, and museums, very little work exists that addresses how comic book-based television shows and films or video games access or even influence memory. As more recent American conflicts begin to occupy spaces previously reserved for memory of older conflicts, synergies of disparate memories and memory structures may occur, especially in the realm of entertainment that commodifies memory for mass consumption. This study explores intersections of popular media and the Vietnam War by: 1) consulting and synthesizing memory theory relevant to this area of memory, including work by John Bodnar, Carol Gluck, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Allison Landsberg; 2) contributing new models to theorize memory structures, including intersections of market forces and official memory in the way media is organized for consumers and how anxieties related to older events manifest themselves in media set in later times; 3) how comic-based media are rich texts for memory analysis, particularly as they are adapted for wider consumption; and 4) how modern military shooter video games access and reinforce potentially damaging patterns of American memory. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Andrew Schocket, who was also my committee chair, Jeff Brown, my committee member, and my parents, James and Mary Wertsch, for their patience, thorough editing, and support throughout this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. MEDIA, MEMORY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RECOLLECTION 1 Key Texts……............................................................................................................ 4 Theoretical Synthesis for this Project ........................................................................ 16 Reading Memory ....................................................................................................... 24 CHAPTER II. COMIC-BASED MEDIA AND RECAST NARRATIVES ........................ 26 The Power and Function of Memory in Mass Culture .............................................. 28 PTSD, The Weight of Memory, and Ennui in Marvel’s The Punisher ..................... 35 Echoes of Memory ..................................................................................................... 43 CHAPTER III. INTERACTIVE DIGITAL NARRATIVES AND PLAYING MEMORY 46 Violence, Narrative, and Framing in Modern Military Shooters ............................... 50 Memory, Violence, and Trauma in Spec Ops: The Line ............................................ 61 Echoes of Vietnam in Narrative Construction ........................................................... 68 CONCLUSION……… .......................................................................................................... 71 WORKS CITED……............................................................................................................. 77 1 CHAPTER I. MEDIA, MEMORY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RECOLLECTION Since the publication of On Collective Memory by Maurice Halbwachs in 1950, the term “collective memory” has been catapulted into public and academic discourse, though the meaning and application of the term, let alone the structure of defining collective memory or its theoretical or temporal impact, is still hotly debated. Broadly speaking, memory scholars largely investigate memory in the macroscopic context of what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities” in his seminal book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, measuring and interpreting the zeitgeist of a particular people at a particular time with regards to a particular event or series of events and treating memory, much as the imagined communities themselves, as socially constructed. The methods for those investigations, however, are as varied as the scholars who employ them. This study explores direct and indirect American recollections of the Vietnam War through textual analysis of sites of memory in popular media artifacts of fiction. It differs slightly from earlier works in the vein, such as that of Allison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory, in that it includes more emphasis on popular culture artifacts such as video games, comic books, films, and television shows rather than sites of remembering that have received analysis in other work, such as memorials, biopics, museums, and history texts. This project focuses on the intersections of modern American collective memory and popular media, specifically in the way that I believe the trauma and collective memory of the Vietnam War is being accessed through these media forms. I argue that the trauma of Vietnam is still quite present in narrative structures designed for modern popular consumption, particularly in the ways we engage with concepts clustered around military history and identity, organized violence, and trauma. In effect, when we craft fictional 2 media to remember violence and trauma and how it relates to the American condition, we are also accessing memory of Vietnam. This project will focus on several key aspects of memory that cover both modern mnemonic needs and those of Vietnam, such as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, which was not very present in collective American consciousness and discussions of war until the mid- 1970s to early 1980s and took longer still to work its way into popular media and layman knowledge of trauma. Media that access Vietnam memory also explore the ugly realities of collateral damage to civilians in wartime, particularly the ways in which Americans changed their perceptions of wartime action in the wake of culturally salient moments like the My Lai Massacre report, and the gradual erosion of public trust in the ethical character and workings of the U.S. government particularly in the collective shock of the Pentagon Papers report and the Watergate scandal. In this investigation, I will analyze several case studies and identify specific patterns of remembering in which people consciously or unconsciously tailor current traumatic collective experiences—in this case the U.S. military presence/wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria—to mirror past traumatic experiences such as those of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In studying collective memory, scholars must confront the reality that human memory is a profoundly imperfect tool. In fact, this is the very reason why memory is a fascinating field of study—we remember differently as imagined communities because we must in order to meet the existential needs of the groups to which we belong. In so doing, the imagined community is further narrowed to one that shares an ideological base as well as common cultural markers, resulting in the phenomenon Eviatar Zerubavel labeled the “mnemonic community” (Zerubavel 15). Human memory does not function as a photograph or chronicling of events. Rather, we reconceptualize events, adding and editorializing motivations, philosophies, and denouement. 3 The natural human trend towards narrativization colors not only memory but the chronicling to events through time. There are some scholars, like Rauf Garagozov in his book Collective Memory: How Collective Representations about the Past are Created, Preserved and Reproduced, who argue the very use of the word “history” implies a narrativizing mnemonic presence, and, perhaps equally importantly, this is not a new phenomenon (Garagozov 21-25). The questions of how and why specific narratives are changed function in this study as methods of determining what kinds of mnemonic tags are most profitable, both in sociological and economic means. A fundamental assumption of memory studies is that memory and the narratives associated with it are able to survive the death of those who were witnesses to the event in question through retelling and collective recollection. The quality and method of remembering often changes in this process, however. For the purposes of this study I will employ generational memory theory as presented by Jürgen Reulecke in his article “Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory.” Reulecke posits that there are mnemonic “generations” bound together by shared experience, a process he calls “generationality.” An example for Americans might be the shared memory of the Vietnam War, which, though involving millions of people in numerous capacities, left an indelible mnemonic mark upon its observers. That shared generationality cannot be directly passed, of course, as those younger than the war could not have observed or participated, though this bolus of collective memory can be ideologically transferred to a younger generation, a process Reulecke labels as “generativity.” Thus, while many Americans were not alive to participate in the process of the war itself, many still hold abstract mnemonic conceptions about what that war meant and how it felt, a set of interpretations that are unique to particular mnemonic communities. Through generativity, we can collectively 4 remember that even for which we were