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Reproducing the Past: Popular History and Family Melodrama on China Beach

Reproducing the Past: Popular History and Family Melodrama on China Beach Though certainly ironic, the relation of maternal sacrifice to the perpetuation of US military power that Smith observes in Fuller's China Gate is not accidental-but structural. Lucky Legs, in the moment of mother love and self immolation that secures her family and defeats the Communists in Indochina, exemplifies the mythic opposition between "the Good Mother" and "the Just Warrior" which was instrumental to maintaining the "just war" tradition in the US through the 1940s and 1950s.2 Such images have likewise been important for the more recent process of domesticating America's past experience of Vietnam. In 1984, William Broyles, creator of the television series China Beach, recalls such representations of gender and war in his statement in Esquire magazine that "war is for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death.":' The division between experiences of war and maternity that Broyles neatly, if crudely, outlines supports and maintains belief in the efficacy of and necessity for war by grounding it in a natural order of gendered predisposition." It is the same one that provides the stable structure by which the series China Beach organizes http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Camera Obscura Duke University Press

Reproducing the Past: Popular History and Family Melodrama on China Beach

Howell, Amanda
Camera Obscura , Volume 12 (2 35) – Jan 1, 1995
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1995 by Camera Obscura
ISSN
1529-1510
eISSN
1529-1510
DOI
10.1215/02705346-12-2_35-158
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Though certainly ironic, the relation of maternal sacrifice to the perpetuation of US military power that Smith observes in Fuller's China Gate is not accidental-but structural. Lucky Legs, in the moment of mother love and self immolation that secures her family and defeats the Communists in Indochina, exemplifies the mythic opposition between "the Good Mother" and "the Just Warrior" which was instrumental to maintaining the "just war" tradition in the US through the 1940s and 1950s.2 Such images have likewise been important for the more recent process of domesticating America's past experience of Vietnam. In 1984, William Broyles, creator of the television series China Beach, recalls such representations of gender and war in his statement in Esquire magazine that "war is for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death.":' The division between experiences of war and maternity that Broyles neatly, if crudely, outlines supports and maintains belief in the efficacy of and necessity for war by grounding it in a natural order of gendered predisposition." It is the same one that provides the stable structure by which the series China Beach organizes

Journal

Camera Obscura – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1995

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