opacity

This essay explores major networks’ programming within the context of its responsibilities: to harness its power of immediacy (Torres 16), to adhere to a narrative of war (Ponce de Leon 75), and to maintain objective reporting (Ponce de Leon 74). Television materials analyzed consist of scheduled (evening news/weekly reports) and irregular (“special report”) programs, onsite broadcasts and studio commentary, live (often, battlefield) footage and talking heads. Though its multitude of programming strived to produce a comprehensive view of the war, Vietnam War coverage ultimately produced a fragmented, disorienting view of American involvement in Vietnam.

This essay explores disorientation through definitions of “opacity”. Each mode of televising – live, studio, or a hybrid of both – delivers opacity through the “obscurity of senses” (“Opacity” Merriam-Webster) in its audiovisual rhetoric. Live footage of battlefields, bombers, and burning villages obscures subject matters by withholding context. Viewers are left to grapple with key questions – just what the scale of events are, who the people being displaced are, why the US carries out certain missions, and form a literally and figuratively blurry basis for evaluating the war. Studio coverage addresses these opacities and overcompensates for its lack of liveness by providing diagrams/maps and talking heads commentary. Such commentary goes beyond mere informing viewers: it provides evaluation of events as “wins” or “losses”, orienting them through verbiage about “the enemy” and reassuring viewers of American military prowess. However, this mode of depicting Vietnam is obscured by a temporal lag in exemplifying these subjects. They remain intangible strategies and concepts. 

Televisual coverage of Vietnam is not modularly singular, often interlacing studio commentary with live footage, sometimes via an onsite reporter. Yet any televisual coverage would fail to provide an understanding of Vietnam first and foremost as a people, for no reporting provides humanizing clarity for the Vietnamese subject matters it represents. Herein lies the reason for disorientation. Television simultaneously evaluates the Vietnamese people as both victims (helpless, in need of American salvation) and enemies (at best irrelevant, untranslated, at worst worthy of death). This dual depiction likens the Vietnam War to a civil war. This questions the very presence of the United States in Vietnam, exemplified in Cronkite’s 1968 analysis (“CBS News Special Report: A Report From Vietnam”).

To remove opacity, I manipulated sequences from major networks’ (ABC, NBC, CBS) coverage of Vietnam. By providing closed captions, I bring to light pieces of Vietnamese history, culture, and language that got lost in original programs, deemed trivial in American reporting. For instance, I introduced Cam Ne’s artisan craft to underline the richness of Vietnamese culture, reclaiming the village’s restorative and creative qualities, not just its tragic past. I censored American reporters – figures of authority, by television’s design – to redirect viewers to other elements of the reports: the surrounding Vietnamese landscape or the visceral destructive power of the American military (using bomber planes’ audio from later in the broadcast, bridging the aforementioned temporal lag). I overlay talking head segments with scenes of their subjects not just to bridge the gap of illustration, but to juxtapose the devastation of war with the measured, “voice of God” (Ponce de Leon 81) reporting style, thereby exposing the absurdity of balancing both objectivity and liveness. A different absurdity, caused by the tension between liveness and narrative, is explored in a sequence where an ad (scheduled media) is intercutted with the special program on a guerrilla attack (an unscheduled program, timing and subject matter-wise). These opacities, “because things have been intentionally kept secret or made complicated” (“Opacity” Cambridge), still persist. It is difficult to obtain television recordings from this era: the publicly accessible materials are low quality, incomplete, or unaccompanied by official verification (highlighted by a screen recording of the Library of Congress website). The video concludes with an overlay montage of all television sequences featured to underscore the fragmented, obscured, absurd understanding and resulting American disorientation of the Vietnam War.

The making of this videographic essay also challenges my personal orientation of the war. In parts of my early education, American soldiers are similarly reported on: at best statistics without histories, at worst enemies. In reviewing footage for this videographic essay, I encountered footage of American soldiers enjoying live performances, cracking jokes, hopeful for the end of their deployment. These humanizing, re-orienting moments of clarity influenced my decision to include a piece of non-major network media, the Bob Hope 1967 Christmas Special, in the televisual analysis. They also motivated my choice of soundtrack. Mong Chieu Xuan is a 1972 love song released by a Republic of Vietnam record label. Pre-1975 music was heavily regulated in Vietnam. Songs with “uncomely” sentimentality and devoid of orienting themes such as national unity were subjected to scrutiny (Nguyen). Spotlighting this song acknowledges an aspect of wartime previously opaque to me.

Having directly impacted my parents’ and grandparents’ lives, the Vietnam War (or as I know it, the American War) shaped everything I know: my education, the understanding of my nation, the evaluation of my identity, and my political orientation in the world. By examining these instances of televisual image-making, I become more attentive to the intricacies of humanity. This analysis is poignant to me, now seeing television as beyond a means to comment on the immediate present but to record a complicated history and create a nuanced, humane future.