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The confrontation scene has the central function of laying out the geography of gender in this no man's land beyond "civilization." [Meserve] has left [Eriksson] and Diaz to guard the "hootch" with the patrol's gear while he presumably uses the excuse of reconnoitering to talk Hatcher and [Clark] into backing him up in the rape plot. The separation of the five also allows Diaz to tell Eriksson he wants no part of the rape, and Eriksson indicates they will back each other up. When Eriksson refuses to join the gang rape, Meserve tells him, "Don't fuck with me! You're takin' your turn," and when Eriksson still refuses, Meserve adds, "Motherfucka, you standin' upta me? Whatsa matter? Don't you like girls? Haven't you gotta pair? Is that your problem?" When he notices Eriksson looking to Diaz to back him up, he divides and conquers by browbeating Diaz into the rape as a matter of "following orders." Then, to isolate his antagonist further, he even suggests that Eriksson desires Diaz, rather than the girl. "You're takin' your turn." Clark, who seconds his sergeant's homophobic attack on Eriksson, "Maybe he's a queer," spurs Meserve to the performance of his most radical masquerade of masculinity. Meserve mocks Eriksson, "Maybe he's a faggot, a ho-mo-sexual," while he holds his rifle butt to his mouth to mimic fellatio.

Meserve further genderizes the encounter by calling Eriksson "Cherry." The term "cherry," or "virgin," is one that has become familiar to audiences of Vietnam films, based in its currency among Vietnam veterans as a denotation of the new arrival in "the Nam," as veterans called it. In John M. Del Vecchio's (1982) Vietnam novel The 13th Valley, for example, the recent arrival is encouraged to think of himself as the "Cherry" of his nickname: "It made little difference to him that they called every new man Cherry and that with the continual rotation of personnel there would soon be a soldier newer than he and he would be able to call the new man Cherry" (p. 1). Later in the film, once Eriksson has lost his innocence with a vengeance, a very new arrival appears. This character is even listed in the film credits as "Cherry," perhaps because he never survives long enough to pass the nickname along to a newer man. This "Cherry" is so whiny and wimpish as to make it incredible that he even survived basic training. Unable to protect his vulnerability in this hostile land, "Cherry" falls into a booby trap and his corpse stares up at the camera with bamboo spearheads on which he has been impaled, a grim reminder of what might have happened to his earlier "Body Double," or "doppelganger," Eriksson, had it not been for the good-shepherding of the macho Meserve, whom Eriksson is bent on having called up on charges that could mean imprisonment at hard labor. This "Cherry" has been so "feminized" by his position of vulnerability in Vietnam, before he has even encountered the battlefield, that the audience is almost encouraged to find the macho Meserve a more appealing construction of masculinity.

The Construction of Masculinity in Brian De Palma's Film Casualties of War

Brian De Palma's (1989) film Casualties of War provides another strong indication that Hollywood has decided we are ready to probe the wounds of our misadventures in Southeast Asia a generation ago. Perhaps because the film appeared amid other recent Vietnam War films such as Born on the Fourth of July (Stone, 1988), Full-Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987), and Platoon (Stone, 1986), Casualties of War was greeted with a higher level of respect and sympathy than we might expect for a film directed by someone of Brian De Palma's somewhat dubious reputation and starring an actor of Michael J. Fox's relative inexperience in serious roles. Some of the respect that the film garnered was certainly for its screenplay by David Rabe, whose reputation for tough depictions of Vietnam in plays such as Sticks and Bones (1972) and Streamers (1975) made him an obvious choice to write the screenplay. Some of the sympathy for the film was also probably the result of the risky business that De Palma and Columbia Pictures were seen as investing in by attempting to film a true story of American soldiers involved in war crimes. As film critic Vincent Canby (1989a) reminded the film's first audiences, Casualties of War could not have been made twenty years earlier, and even in 1989 it drew fire from veterans' groups still sensitive to the casting of Americans in Vietnam as criminals. Other film critics were also respectfully sympathetic. No less an eminence than Pauline Kael (1989) mentions Casualties of War in the same breath as Grand Illusion and The Night of the Shooting Stars, seeing it as similar to classics in its powerful and memorable effect on its audience. Kael begins her discussion of the limitations of Casualties of War with the assertion, "Great movies are rarely perfect movies." Some years later, it becomes clear that the efforts of Rabe and De Palma in Casualties of War may have induced highly respected film critics such as Canby and Kael into praising the film for what they perceived as a more liberal approach to Vietnam than the films of the Rambo ilk. By responding so sympathetically to the film's politics, Kael (1989) asserts that "this new film is the kind that makes you feel protective" (p. 76). However, early reviewers ignored the very disturbing encoding of gender constructions by the film makers.

Early responses to the film, such as Canby's and Kael's, speak to the earnest attempts of Rabe in his screenplay and De Palma in his direction to explore the motivation of the soldiers involved in criminal acts. Especially in the character of Sgt. Meserve (Sean Penn), who is the instigator of military misconduct, the film makers seem bent on probing the enigma of the good soldier who goes bad. Kael ponders: "Has something in Meserve snapped?" (p. 77), and Canby calls him "possibly psychotic" (1989, p. C10); they thereby attempt to rationalize Meserve's descent into violence as a simple case of war-induced insanity. During his tour of duty in Vietnam, Meserve had been cited for valor several times, and the film makers clearly find him the most attractive figure on the scene, coming close to excusing his macho brashness in the early scenes as the result of his battlefield experience and his background. Unlike the Eriksson character who speaks as though he might have been drafted out of college, Meserve in Penn's rendition has the dialect and manner of a kid who grew up on the mean streets of New York or Philadelphia (Note 1). In any case, whether it is Canby worrying over Eriksson's role as a "stool pigeon," to use Canby's term, or it is Kael speaking of the "reckless bravery of youth" in Meserve, these early responses to Casualties of War belie an unwillingness to read the film's construction of masculinity (Note 2) as evidence that American culture has had difficulty in resisting the attraction of Meserve's badboy behavior and in accepting Eriksson as a hero facing threats to his masculinity and to his very life. Much as the text seems to deplore violence, it is fatally attracted to the allure of the abduction, rape, and murder it purports to be condemning.

RECONSTRUCTING VIETNAM

Rabe's screenplay and De Palma's film are reconstructions of a book by Daniel Lang that first appeared in 1969 in the New Yorker. Lang interviewed "Eriksson," the man who risked his life by turning in his buddies (Note 3). Because the Lang text is readily available as a reconstructed history of the events, as told by Eriksson and corroborated by the testimony of others in the courts-martial, we have an unusual opportunity to see how "Hollywood" rewrites "history" to serve its own purposes. In one sense, the film had an extremely long gestation period: De Palma wanted to film the Lang book virtually from its appearance in 1969 (Norman, 1989, p. 13) and Rabe, himself a veteran of Vietnam, also saw possibilities for dramatization in the Lang text. Both offer a clear index of the "earnest" intention of the film makers in further textualizing these events.

To offer his screenplay narrative "justification" for Meserve's transformation, Rabe constructs several early scenes with no basis in Lang's narrative. The film opens with Eriksson riding a train in California, in what we know to be 1974 because we can read the bold newspaper headline "Nixon Resigning." Eriksson and the film's audience are jolted back to Vietnam in the first of three scenes theatricalizing the special gender predicament of the American soldier in Southeast Asia. In a nod to a conventional psychoanalytic context of this "return of the repressed," we see American soldiers involved in a night battle with the Viet Cong. The context also prepares us psychologically for a journey into the darkness of Eriksson's past and our country's as the film makers take us back down into the murky depths of our unconscious where the guilty spirits of "Vietnam" have not yet found their resting place.

Suddenly, Eriksson falls through the roof of a Viet Cong tunnel in what an old-fashioned Freudian might read as entrapment in a "dark continent" of treacherous and menacing female sexuality. That reading is problematized by the camera's need to see, more specifically to focus on Eriksson's vulnerable "manhood" exposed to the enemy, a VC assailant in the tunnel's rosy glow crawling toward the lower half of Eriksson with a large knife between his teeth. And when the stereotypically macho Meserve rescues Eriksson from death, or perhaps a fate worse than death, he raises the stakes of their future confrontation by assuming the traditional role of responsibility for the man he saves. Meserve saves him twice, in fact, because in standard horror-film style just when Eriksson has been pulled from the hole the VC assailant pursues him above ground and the veteran combatant Meserve has to "grease" him before Eriksson's, and our, astonished gaze. What a traditional psychoanalytic interpreter might make of Meserve's yanking of the naive Eriksson from the "hole" in which he almost perishes can only be left to the imagination.

Meserve further genderizes the encounter by calling Eriksson "Cherry." The term "cherry," or "virgin," is one that has become familiar to audiences of Vietnam films, based in its currency among Vietnam veterans as a denotation of the new arrival in "the Nam," as veterans called it. In John M. Del Vecchio's (1982) Vietnam novel The 13th Valley, for example, the recent arrival is encouraged to think of himself as the "Cherry" of his nickname: "It made little difference to him that they called every new man Cherry and that with the continual rotation of personnel there would soon be a soldier newer than he and he would be able to call the new man Cherry" (p. 1). Later in the film, once Eriksson has lost his innocence with a vengeance, a very new arrival appears. This character is even listed in the film credits as "Cherry," perhaps because he never survives long enough to pass the nickname along to a newer man. This "Cherry" is so whiny and wimpish as to make it incredible that he even survived basic training. Unable to protect his vulnerability in this hostile land, "Cherry" falls into a booby trap and his corpse stares up at the camera with bamboo spearheads on which he has been impaled, a grim reminder of what might have happened to his earlier "Body Double," or "doppelganger," Eriksson, had it not been for the good-shepherding of the macho Meserve, whom Eriksson is bent on having called up on charges that could mean imprisonment at hard labor. This "Cherry" has been so "feminized" by his position of vulnerability in Vietnam, before he has even encountered the battlefield, that the audience is almost encouraged to find the macho Meserve a more appealing construction of masculinity.

The second scene of preparation takes place on what seems the next morning as the patrol makes a sweep through a Vietnamese village. We see the boyish Eriksson plowing behind a water buffalo in the rice paddies in an incredibly exposed position, especially given his recent encounter with the "hidden" VC. He is interrupted by Meserve's African-American buddy Brown (Erik King), or Brownie, due to be shipped home, like Meserve, within the month. Eriksson's escapade in the rice paddy allows the film makers not only to exaggerate his naive boyishness but also to provide some crucial exposition: Eriksson is not only married but the father of a daughter. We have to presume that she is an infant daughter, because Michael J. Fox's familiar, eternally youthful face makes Eriksson look as though he barely needs to shave. It also allows the establishment of Brownie as the platoon joker. Here, he warns Eriksson to avoid his exposed and therefore "feminine" position out in the open, eroticizing Eriksson's action by asking, "Don't you wanna be gettin' home to do your own plowin'?"

This intrusion of joking into this apparently idyllic, pastoral scene further contributes to the gender constructions in these relationships. As Jerry Aline Flieger (1991) brilliantly argues in her reading of Lacan's rendition of Freud's insights in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the butt of the joke is always a "woman," for to be exposed to the joke's "punch line" is to be "feminized," or rendered vulnerable in the structuring of power in the joke paradigm. In a similar vein, Peter Lyman (1992), writing in the context of the "sociology of jokes," asserts that "gender is not only the primary content of men's jokes, but the emotional structure of the male bond is built upon a joking relationship that `negotiates' the tension men feel about their relationship with each other, and with women" (p. 145). As we shall see, the joke framework as a means of "negotiating" male tension will be central to Meserve's immodest proposal as he later subsumes Brownie's function as platoon joker.

Brownie moves from the site of his joke, literally, by leading the exposed Eriksson back to the protection of Meserve whom Brownie embraces in comradely fashion. In this way, the rice-paddy scene allows the film makers the space in which to confirm once again the homosocial positions of these soldiers. Meserve and Brown are locked into the traditional "male bonding" of battle-seasoned "comrades," setting them apart from Eriksson and the others who are more recent arrivals in the Nam. As comrades they are intimately in "touch" as long as they refrain from "touching" each other. Here we have the very essence of the military space as homosocial: emotional intimacy grounded in the repression of sexual intimacy. As J. Glenn Gray (1959) in The Warriors points out, this is a comradeship (Note 4) distinct from friendship because it is grounded in the erotic charge of those who share danger and suffering and willingly sacrifice individuality to the group's identity (pp. 89-90). This battlefield comradeship might also be seen as an expression of what Richard Dellamora (1994) has called "Dorianism," the sublimation of the erotic into the community of warrior-comrades supporting the circulation of homoerotic desire without even the suspicion of homosexual activity. Writing of another film, Kubrick's Full-Metal Jacket," Susan White (1991) points out that "the line between male bonding and the baldly homoerotic is a fine one" (p. 208).

Suddenly, Brown's joking camaraderie is interrupted by a sniper's bullet tearing open his neck. Obviously he is mortally wounded, and Meserve sets out on his mission to avenge him, with the passionate rage of an Achilles bent on revenge for the killing of his "comrade" Patrocles. This revenge motif stands in starkly dramatic contrast to what Eriksson reported to Lang: what he saw in Meserve was merely a heightening of physical abuse toward the Vietnamese, with no single incident of provocation such as the one the film supplies. It goes without saying that the interracial comradeship between a white like Meserve and a black like Brown has its roots deep in the cultural terrain of America, as Leslie Fiedler (1948) pointed out almost a half-century ago in his provocative essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Brownie's death not only furthers the "revenge plot" but also removes him from contamination in the abduction/rape/murder, making it clear that he would never have allowed the criminal acts to take place (Note 5).

The final scene of preparation returns the platoon to Basecamp Wolf and offers yet another eroticizing of the text. Meserve relays the news of Brown's death and leads his soldiers into town for some "R & R"--only to be told their passes have been canceled. In Meserve's words, "The fuckin' Cong's in town tonight; that's why it's off limits. Charlie's in the whore-house; Charlie's gettin' laid. He works hard killin' us." Unlike the A.R.V.N., or Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, whom American soldiers called "faggots" (Note 6), the Viet Cong are "real" soldiers and therefore "real men." Or, almost real men, since they refuse to fight like "men" in the open. They hide behind "women"--i.e., all those who are not "men," children and old people, as well as women literally.

Even more threatening, the VC may actually be women, as in the case of the female sniper with devastating consequences in Full-Metal Jacket. Exploring the motif of "enemy-as-woman" in his essay "Charlie Don't Surf," David Desser (1991) alludes briefly to Casualties of War, then asserts: "In fact, the image of VC-as-woman, the ubiquity of women who are VC, is a near-hysterical reaction to the shock to the (masculine) American psyche that this physically, technologically inferior race could defeat the hypermasculinized, hypertechnologized American soldier" (p. 96). The misogyny inherent in this "near-hysterical reaction" is closely linked to racism. Indeed, Casualties of War, like other Vietnam films, offers an expression of what Susan White (1991) has termed "Hollywood Orientalism," or "a tendency ... in films about Vietnam ... to conflate various Eastern cultures with corrupt sexuality, a degraded or treacherous femininity, and male homoeroticism" (p. 216). Susan Jeffords (1989) is exactly correct when she argues that

Vietnam representation is only topically "about" the war in Vietnam or America's military strength or political policy making. Its true subject is the masculine response to changes in gender relations in recent decades, its real battle that of the masculine to dominate and overpower its "enemy"--the feminine. (p. 167)

DEVOLVING INTO THE HOMOPHOBIC

Meserve gives his men the order passed down to him that they will accompany him on a reconnaissance mission for five days and that the patrol will leave an hour early to make a detour into a Vietnamese village. There Meserve proposes to "requisition ourselves a girl ... a little portable R & R," in his sinister, joking phrases. Once again, Meserve's framing of his proposal within the joke paradigm suggests that this discourse represents a customary negotiation of relationships between men and with women. Those presumptions make it tragically impossible for Eriksson to deal with this "joke." He talks about the proposal with a seasoned buddy named Rowan, but he fails to report it to the captain of the unit because both Rowan and he are convinced Meserve has to be joking. Indeed, it is Meserve's subsuming of the dead Brownie's function as joker (Note 7) that makes him the increasingly menacing figure conventionally associated with the plots of countless thrillers. Meserve will act out Brownie's role as joker, but in a lethal manner to avenge the men's loss of their fallen comrade: as Meserve's second-incommand Clark eulogizes, "Brownie could make me laugh." By the time Eriksson discovers his sergeant's immodest proposal is no joke it has become too late to stop Meserve from kidnapping and ordering his men to join him in raping the young woman.

Because Eriksson has made it clear that he wants no part of the rape scene, his confrontation with Meserve looms with a sense of inevitability, but with no sense of conflict within Eriksson concerning what he will do. Indeed, the film's Eriksson, like his historical counterpart in the Lang text, seems never to have had any doubts about his decision to refuse his commanding officer's orders in this military context with "Nuremberg Trials" connotations (Note 8). Perhaps, the casting of Michael J. Fox with his boy-next-door, nice-guy appearance stacks the deck to such a degree that the absence of any possible moral dilemma in Eriksson forces the film makers to turn the conflict between him and Meserve into a melodrama of "good and evil," in which the never-flinching but not dynamic resolve of Eriksson is eclipsed by the powerfully macho performance of Meserve, especially with the superior acting ability of Sean Penn's own performance. From the outset of Penn/Meserve's "portable R & R" proposal, there is, sadly, no possibility of Fox/Eriksson's participation-- "sadly," because the studies of "acquaintance rape" indicate that the typical rapist is the "boy next door" who might well look like Michael J. Fox. Here again, Gray's (1959) "meditations" on Eros and Ares from nearly a half-century ago are helpful: "But there is enough of the rapist in every man to give him insight into the grossest manifestations of sexual passion" (p. 66).

The confrontation scene has the central function of laying out the geography of gender in this no man's land beyond "civilization." Meserve has left Eriksson and Diaz to guard the "hootch" with the patrol's gear while he presumably uses the excuse of reconnoitering to talk Hatcher and Clark into backing him up in the rape plot. The separation of the five also allows Diaz to tell Eriksson he wants no part of the rape, and Eriksson indicates they will back each other up. When Eriksson refuses to join the gang rape, Meserve tells him, "Don't fuck with me! You're takin' your turn," and when Eriksson still refuses, Meserve adds, "Motherfucka, you standin' upta me? Whatsa matter? Don't you like girls? Haven't you gotta pair? Is that your problem?" When he notices Eriksson looking to Diaz to back him up, he divides and conquers by browbeating Diaz into the rape as a matter of "following orders." Then, to isolate his antagonist further, he even suggests that Eriksson desires Diaz, rather than the girl. "You're takin' your turn." Clark, who seconds his sergeant's homophobic attack on Eriksson, "Maybe he's a queer," spurs Meserve to the performance of his most radical masquerade of masculinity. Meserve mocks Eriksson, "Maybe he's a faggot, a ho-mo-sexual," while he holds his rifle butt to his mouth to mimic fellatio.

Meserve and Clark's combined homophobic assault on Eriksson makes his continued resistance to participation in the gang-rape incredibly heroic. Like Brownie, we know from the rice-paddy scene that Eriksson is married and a father, sufficient certification for the audience of his heterosexual orientation. Brownie has been eliminated, however, by the film makers, and thus perhaps only the audience knows what Meserve and Clark may not know. On the other hand, even if they did know and have strategically forgotten that knowledge here, it would not matter essentially. As Gregory Lehne (1992) points out in his essay "Homophobia Among Men," "The male role is predominantly maintained by men themselves. Men devalue homosexuality, then use this norm of homophobia to control other men in their male roles." He adds: "Homophobia is only incidentally directed against actual homosexuals--its more common use is against the heterosexual male.... Homophobia is a threat used by societies and individuals to enforce social conformity in the male role, and maintain social control" (p. 389). Gary Fine (1992) would agree and asserts as much when he states,

Being gay has little to do with homosexual behavior; rather it suggests that the target is immature. Indeed, some homosexual behavior (for example, mutual masturbation) occurs among high-status boys who would never be labeled gay. Being gay is synonymous with being a baby and a girl. (p. 138)

Fine may be talking about the behavior of boys; however, the very premise of Meserve's patrol is that for five days he and his men will be out from under the supervision of their superiors to operate as independent agents. It is this escape from the eyes of the "brass" and the restraints of civilization that licenses Meserve's reversion to boyhood and the freedom to play "Genghis Khan" to the admiring reaction of Clark and to a lesser degree Hatcher.

Meserve's homophobic assault on Eriksson is, of course, for the benefit of Diaz as well; and once Diaz has finally been coerced into joining the rapists, Eriksson stands alone. With this last accession to power, Meserve turns on Eriksson with the threat that clarifies the paradoxical nature of homophobia. Meserve threatens, "Maybe after I'm done humpin' her I'll hump you," and adds, "We got two girls on this patrol." As we have just seen in the comments of Lehne and Fine, homosexuality has little to do with taboo sexual acts and everything to do with the enforcement of acceptable male behavior, or with the suppression of the "feminine." Indeed, in a very common expression of male (il)logic, Meserve could engage in sodomy with Eriksson, as long as he is the active participant and Eriksson the passive object of this sexual assault. As Joseph Boone (1995) has recently pointed out in his "Vacation Cruises; or The Homoerotics of Orientalism," this has, in fact, been the very (il)logic that has allowed heterosexual males in masculinist cultures like those of the Arab Middle East to engage in same-sex encounters as long as they maintain the subject position and avoid the object position in the "sentence structure" of this sexuality.

No longer certain when Meserve is joking, Eriksson defends his vulnerability, or openness, to sexual assault, with his own weapon--the weapon that his government has issued him, a grenade launcher. Joking but dead-serious, Meserve raises the stakes of his phallocentric discourse one last time by mocking the standard military statement that recruits must learn in boot camp: "This is my rifle, this is my gun." Meserve rewrites the statement to confirm the phallocratic construction of the impending rape by performing his subversion of the military's received wisdom. He waves his rifle in one hand calling it his "gun" and in the other grasps his genitals as his "weapon." Immediately Meserve enters the hootch and begins to rape the young woman to show the way to those of his men whom he has coerced into submitting to his power and to demonstrate to Eriksson what he would like to do to him--if he dared this other kind of rape.

For Meserve, the real battlefield is the stage he has constructed in the hootch. His is a war to preserve American masculinity against the "feminizing" threats of its enemies who refuse to fight like "men" and the leaders, or womanly fathers, an ocean away who refuse to let Meserve and his phallic brothers fight the war like "men." As Susan Jeffords (1989) demonstrates in her useful study, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, "Vietnam" became a construction of gender issues resulting from what many American men saw as the "feminizing" of our culture during the counter-culture period of protest against the war--the age of the "hippie" and the rise of the Women's Movement (Note 9). As I pointed out earlier, the film has difficulties restricting the allure of the "bad-boy" Meserve and bolstering the "good-boy" Eriksson whose caring for others, like the abducted/raped Vietnamese woman, may make him seem a "feminized" hero. If the audience had any earlier confusion about how Eriksson got drafted when he had a wife and child it dissipates here as we see his masculinity put to the test by Meserve. Eriksson's heterosexuality must be authenticated by his marriage but more importantly by his having fathered a child. In the memoir Eriksson married soon after he was drafted and had no child even two years after returning from Vietnam. Obviously, the film makers want to take no chances on Eriksson's "manhood," even with the apparently heterosexual orientation of Fox, his portrayer, who was involved in the shooting of Back to the Future II and III, when Casualties of War was released. Once again, however, "homosexuality" may have less to do with same-sex acts than with departures from the authorized construction of masculinity, inherent in patriarchy. As Joseph Pleck (1992) reminds us, patriarchy is a structure in which a few men have power over all women but also over most other men.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Mixed in with the "message" of the Rabe-De Palma text are various other encodings of contemporary gender issues. First, the very theatricalizing of the Eriksson-Meserve conflict by the casting of Fox and Penn indicates, as I just suggested, that the film makers wanted to take no chances with Eriksson's sexual orientation. At the same time, they emphasize the rampant homophobia of the military without clarification of the blatantly patriarchal posture of the intensely homophobic Meserve threatening to "hump" Eriksson after he finishes with the woman he is about to rape. Furthermore, they introduce but seem unwilling to offend their audience by developing the homoerotic desire implicit in gang-rape, or any other sexual activities between a woman and two or more men. And, finally, the film makers seem naively unaware of the double bind resulting from the desire implicated in the camera eye.

This last subtext requires further development. Film theory, especially feminist film theory, traces many of its insights back to Laura Mulvey's (1975) essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which she argues that the camera's eye functions as the male gaze of desire for the feminized object. As Peter Brooks (1993) more recently reminds us in his study Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, narratives are generated out of the desire to know, or "epistemophilia," a knowing through the eye. From the moment that Eriksson discovers Meserve is not joking about "taking" a woman on the patrol, the Rabe/De Palma text manipulates the desire of its male viewer: will this plot end in the "climax" promised? and what will it "show"? As Brooks (1984) argued in his earlier study, plot is always generated out of the tension between the desire for the end, to know what happens, and the desire to postpone the end, given that the end is always a kind of "death."

In one clear sense, Meserve arrogates to himself the agency of authority, or authorship. Like the film makers, he draws his men into the plot of his desire, generated in similar fashion out of the tension between will-he-or-will-he-not keep his promise to give them what they desire. Unlike Meserve, the film makers can have it both ways. They can arouse desire in a well-intentioned text with embarrassing associations with what have been colloquially termed "snuff" films, in which women were actually raped and murdered, and at the same time deplore the very desires that any depiction of rape, especially when postponed in the text, may very well incite. They authentically depict this gang rape: it is "planned in advance," like most gang-rapes (see Hood, 1992). Furthermore, it is, as with other gang-rapes, "much more likely than single-offender rapes to involve violence far beyond what would be necessary to restrain the victim" (Hood, 1992, p. 366). The film makers, however, seem unprepared to deal with these elements of premeditation and "excessive" violence along with their consequences.

Given his reputation, or perhaps more aptly his notoriety, for making films depicting high-intensity violence--a "sanguineous style," to borrow Michael Norman's (1989) term--De Palma as this film's director is central to these issues of textual intent, unconscious as well as conscious. As indicated earlier, De Palma wanted to film Lang's Casualties of War shortly after it appeared in 1969. In what appear to be De Palma's responses in an interview with Norman, he casts the Lang book into what Norman calls a "morality play." De Palma told Norman:

It showed that we were over there basically fighting ourselves instead of the enemy [and] that to the boys of that age the whole world of this strange land must have been like being on a different planet where values can get turned upside down. (quoted in Norman, 1989, p. 13; Note 10)Like Canby (1989b) in his article "My Hero May Be Your Stoolie," Norman goes on to explain that De Palma rewrote history by stiffening the sentences of the four involved. One of the ironic features of the Eriksson narrative is his awareness of how "the system" almost immediately began to find mitigating circumstances to reduce the sentences of the four. Most important, De Palma chose to suppress the largest "irony" of the courts-martial: Meserve was acquitted on the charge of rape, although sentenced for his part in the "unpremeditated murder" of the woman (Lang, 1969, p. 101). De Palma told Norman that he "felt, emotionally speaking, there should be some peace on earth for the character Eriksson and that justice was done." What is left unsaid here, however, is De Palma's impulse to make the film, in Canby's words, "more optimistic, even uplifting, that it has any right to be" (p. 17). This impulse to punish the rapists/murderers more severely than the military did speaks to the film's desire to frame the episode as a nightmare from which it allows the film's hero, and its audience, to awaken.

Even more than the premeditation and the violent content of the film narrative, it is the visualizing of the rape scene that has the largest, unacknowledged impact for the viewer. During the interviews, Eriksson told Lang that Meserve, then the other three, raped the Vietnamese woman without being observed, except for Clark's watching Diaz through a peephole (Note 11). If Eriksson's memory is accurate, the gang-rape on which Casualties of War is based was unusual in its avoidance of the specular or visual. Susan Brownmiller's accounts of rape stories from Vietnam stress rape as a performance for the benefits of the rapist's buddies. One soldier, for example, said: "They only do it when there are a lot of guys around.... They won't do it by themselves" (quoted in Jeffords, 1989, p. 69). As Jeffords herself generalizes: "Gang-rape combines collectivity and display as the masculine bond performs itself as a group, with itself as audience" (p. 69).

In the film, the elements of performance and spectacle are deliberately enhanced for dramatic effect. The hootch door is left wide open so that the camera eye can direct the male gaze toward Meserve's excessively violent assault. (Meserve ties her hands behind her before he begins.) Indeed, Meserve looks back over his shoulder during the rape to ask Eriksson if he intends to watch, indicating that it is perhaps his desire to be watched by his antagonist so that Eriksson might see what Meserve would like to do to him for subverting his construction of masculinity. Then, as an index of his power, Meserve stops the eager Clark from becoming the next rapist in order to force Diaz to follow him and then Meserve watches his successor, perhaps to know the pleasure of Diaz's entering the space in which he has just inscribed his own force. Rendered vulnerable, or "feminized," by Meserve's phallocentric mastery of language, Diaz is shown to take off first his shirt and then the remainder of his clothes before he lowers himself reluctantly on Meserve's victim.

This exposure is extremely problematic, since it is the film's only nudity, even though in his memoir Eriksson reported that when he entered the hootch following the gang-rape the woman was nude. Perhaps the film makers felt uncomfortable about how close they were coming to pornographic texts and opted instead for this "male" exposure. The latter fashion of exposing male rather than female nudity, from the back of course, has its own coding: nudity still equals vulnerability, which in turn equals "femininity." As a result, the camera eye must remain behind the male nude so that the phallus is veiled and therefore maintains its power (Note 12). Even so, Diaz is feminized as the object of the gaze--the camera's as well as Meserve's. It cannot be lost on the viewer that Diaz is the lone Latino in a squad of Anglos. As Jeffords (1989) argues, "By emphasizing masculinity as a mechanism for the installation of patriarchal structure ... groups oppressed via defined categories of difference [such as ethnicity] can be treated as women--`feminized'--and made subject to domination" (p. xii).

By foregrounding the gaze, with its desire to "know" the desire of its "feminized" object--female or male--the film enforces some degree of complicity on its audience. Viewers--at least, male viewers--are drawn into a kind of homosexual "rape" of Eriksson through his surrogate Diaz as the object of Meserve's desiring gaze. Meserve is "too much of a man" to act out his threat to "hump" Eriksson, even though as an expression of power and dominance rape involves physical assault rather than sexual gratification. However, in his earlier innuendo that Eriksson desires Diaz rather than the Vietnamese woman, Meserve is demonstrating that he, Meserve, can "have" Diaz by forcing him into the place of heterosexual desire that he has just prepared for Diaz/Eriksson as his successor in the hootch. Whether the film makers intended to, they have created a text that exposes Meserve, and by extension our culture's construction of masculinity, in a powerfully revealing manner. Consistent with the paradox of gender, Meserve in the exposure of his desire locates himself in an essentially "feminine," or vulnerable, position as he demonstrates the intensity and range of that desire.

If this approach seems to make too much of the visual aspects of the rape scene, we might do well to return to the Lang book. Lang describes Eriksson thus: "Eriksson moved away from the entrance to the hootch, where he had been standing, and sat down alone on the grassy turf to one side of the structure; periodically he raised his field glasses to gaze at distant points." When asked under cross-examination at Meserve's courtmartial why he did that, Eriksson replied:

Well, sir, these gentlemen seemed to me--oh, I should say kind of enthused about what was going on. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach. I figured somebody would have to be out there for security, because there were V.C. in the area. (p. 36)

BRINGING THE (GENDER) WAR HOME

The text of this film, I would argue, is highly problematic because its makers either lacked awareness of its gender encodings or knowingly ignored the implications of those encodings. The film struggles with the difficulties inherent in the conflict between the different constructions of masculinity in Eriksson and Meserve. It earnestly wants to credit Eriksson's courage in confronting homophobic attack and death threats, yet is attracted to Meserve's phallocentric power. It theatricalizes the homosocial without confronting its homoerotic underpinnings, unwilling to focus on key elements within Meserve's seemingly conventional heterosexual desire; namely, the paradoxically homoerotic desire in his performance of aggressive (hetero)sexuality for his male audience in his homophobic attack on Eriksson and, more important, Meserve's solitary gaze at the rape he coerces Diaz into committing as Eriksson's surrogate.

One other phenomenon that the film circumvents is a more sophisticated notion of gender, one disconnected from biology. Such a notion of gender is especially evident in spaces such as those episodes of Casualties of War where power is exercised in violent forms. If gender can be understood in such a context as the result of being situated in a position of exposure or vulnerability--"Vietnam," where the enemy refuses to come out and "fight like a man"--then the "masculine" must always see itself as engaged in a fight for its very existence against the "feminine." Finally, as Susan Jeffords (1989) and others argue, "Vietnam" may be read in our decade as the textualizing of a "war" to preserve the "masculine" against the threat of "feminization" in the larger culture in the decades after America's first military defeat. In this sense, the Vietnam War has indeed been brought home to our country where it can serve as a metaphor for large and powerful efforts to (re)construct American masculinity.

NOTES

1. "Meserve" in Lang's book is from northern New York State, near the Canadian border, but he is a high-school dropout from a broken home.

2. The phrase occurs in the title of Michael Kaufman's (1992) essay, "The Construction of Masculinity and the Triad of Men's Violence." However, I am uncertain who is the originator of the useful term.

3. Michael Norman (1989), in his film review, asserts that "Eriksson" is still living somewhere in the Midwest under an assumed name. Also, Vincent Canby (1989b) indicates that Elia Kazan made a low-budget film in 1972 called The Visitors in which two soldiers punished for rape in Vietnam return to terrorize the buddy who "blew the whistle," threatening his wife and child as well.

4. Interestingly, Gray (1959) calls this comradeship "another kind of love," presumably without awareness of D. H. Lawrence's association of that phrase with the Blutbruderschaft Rupert Birkin aspires to with Gerald Crich in Women in Love. The phrase recurs tellingly in the title of Christopher Craft's (1994) Another Kind of Love: Male Homoerotic Desire In English Discourse, 1850-1920.

Much of what Gray concludes after having "meditated on love and war" has been useful to this reading of Casualties of War and especially the transformation of Meserve. Gray's comments seem pertinent to Meserve's mourning of the fallen Brownie:

Friendship cut off in its flower by war's arbitrariness is likely to seem the height of unreason and madness. What earlier had been luminous, ordered, and purposeful in experience becomes suddenly emptied of meaning. Unlike other loves, the preciousness of friendship has no connection with its precariousness. (p. 94)

5. Race is problematic in Casualties of War. Although we know that African Americans served, and suffered casualties, in disproportionately large numbers, there seem relatively few African Americans in the cast. Viewers of the film might suspect that Rabe/De Palma eliminated "Brownie" to mitigate any racist stereotyping of African Americans as perpetrators of sexual assault; however, the patrol Meserve leads in the Lang text has no African Americans either. The platoon captain is an African American who tells Eriksson a story of having lost his first child when the segregated Alabama hospital refused to admit his wife in labor. Perhaps this Capt. Reilly simply feels that it is time for others to be placed in especially exposed positions, as African Americans had in the early years of the fighting. That overexposure, in fact, came close to exposing the military to charges of racism in the deployment of African American and led to more careful assignment of troops.

6. See Charles J. Levy's (1992) "ARVN as Faggots: Inverted Warfare in Vietnam."

7. It seems a bizarre coincidence that the viewpoint character in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is nicknamed "Joker."

8. Norman (1989) asserts: "Clearly Lang was echoing the lessons learned during the war crimes trials at Nuremberg after World War II. Where, he asks between the lines, does obedience end and individual responsibility begin?" (p. 13).

9. Because her book appeared the same year the film was released it could not include a discussion of Casualties of War; at the same time the present study of De Palma's film owes a large debt to Jeffords (1989) for her substantiation of the case for Vietnam films as textualizings of gender conflict in the past two decades.

10. Although he leaves Francis Ford Coppola's (1979) Apocalypse Now unnamed, De Palma distinguished his film's intent thus: "Most Vietnam movies are documentary in an episodic way, hallucinogenic or surrealistic; you know, `The horror, the horror'" (quoted in Norman, 1989, p. 13). The phrase, "the horror, the horror" suggests Coppola's film as a reading of Joseph Conrad's (1971) Heart of Darkness.

11. In the Lang book, there are actually two Diazes, cousins assigned to the Meserve patrol. Neither had very much of the aversion to the rape of the film's "Diaz," although one of the cousins told Eriksson he could not have confronted the verbal abuse Meserve concentrated on Eriksson. Perhaps because the film Meserve slurs Diaz's ethnicity, the film makers wanted to restrict the group of eager rapists to whites.

12. Jacques Lacan (1977) writes:

In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a phantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) in the sense that this term tends to accentuate the reality pertaining in a relation. It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes. And it is not without reason that Freud used the reference to the simulacrum that it represented for the Ancients.

For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. (p. 285)

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