Horrors of War : The Undead on the Battlefield by Miller Cynthia J.; Van Riper A. Bowdoin & A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Author:Miller, Cynthia J.; Van Riper, A. Bowdoin & A. Bowdoin Van Riper [Miller, Cynthia J. & Riper, A. Bowdoin Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

Making Monsters

Chapter 10

Pall in the Family

Deathdream, House, and the Vietnam War

Christopher D. Stone

“Vietnam, I never thought I’d be coming back. I guess we never really can leave, can we?”

—Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)1

“Wars can be fought and won only when the dead are buried and forgotten.”

—Irwin Shaw, Bury the Dead (1936)2

All wars leave their mark on human bodies, scarring them, obliterating them, and profaning them. This simple, yet unavoidable fact creates a challenge for societies at war: broken bodies and forfeited lives must be explained, and their loss inscribed with meaning. The “official” response to this challenge is, typically, to treat the dead as a collective and interpret their deaths as sacrifices that allow the nation to endure. Such remembrances, however, hinge on forgetting. They merge the individuals who died—people with specific connections, experiences, and memories—into an undifferentiated mass so as not to undermine the nationalistic aims of official commemorations. After all, if one conceives of war as extinguishing individual lives rather than sacrificing unnamed soldiers, grief and righteous anger might overwhelm patriotic pieties. This possibility explains official culture’s insistent need to memorialize: Mourning cannot be allowed to overtake mythmaking, lest the ability of policy makers to wage future wars be compromised. In short, as Irwin Shaw notes, societies must bury the dead, both physically and metaphorically, or risk being haunted by them.

But what if the dead (or more precisely cultural imaginings of the fallen) fail to cooperate? This question becomes more pressing when dealing with the Vietnam War, which American culture obsessively revisited for nearly two decades after it ended in 1973. This essay engages the issue by examining how filmmakers have used the undead to comment on the Vietnam War. The undead have figured into multiple Vietnam-themed productions, including Zombie Brigade (1986), Flatliners (1990), Jacob’s Ladder (1990), and Universal Soldier (1992), but this chapter focuses on two lesser-known examples: Deathdream (1972) and House (1986).3 Viewed together, these films speak to fundamental shifts in representations of the Vietnam War from the 1970s to the 1980s—shifts that exemplify the concurrent rightward turn in American politics and culture—while offering an extended commentary on masculinity and its relationship to the American family.

Deathdream: Father as Villain, Undead as Scourge

Deathdream had its origins in Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972), the first cinematic collaboration between director Bob Clark and screenwriter Alan Ormsby. Impressed by what the duo achieved with a miniscule budget, producers Peter James and John Trent of Quadrant Films offered to finance their next project.4 Ormsby responded by pitching Deathdream. As Clark recalls, the producers did not see its antiwar message as a commercial stumbling block. If anything, they saw it as a selling point, assuming that its commentary would resonate with many filmgoers.5 Indeed, according to Ormsby, the script generated buzz beyond Quadrant Films, with many hailing it as an interesting spin on David Rabe’s Tony Award–winning Sticks and Bones (1971).6

Deathdream and Sticks and Bones do share similarities. Each text is the story of a

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