War and Popular Culture Midterm Please write a 3-4 page double-spaced essay in r

War and Popular Culture
Midterm
Please write a 3-4 page double-spaced essay in response to ONE of the questions below. The
midterm aims to evaluate your skills in fashioning an analytical argument regarding at least one
work of pop culture, and supporting it using concepts from class lectures and readings. Please
strive for the following standards: clear explanations of relevant concepts or theories, a
coherent thesis that is well-supported with illustrations and evidence from course materials and
your own analysis of work(s) of culture, reference to multiple authors where appropriate, and
good writing mechanics such as organization. Although we do not take off points for
grammatical or spelling mistakes, too many will interfere with our ability to grasp your
argument. So please edit. Please make clear the authorship of ideas by citing your authors after
quotes or paraphrases in the following simple formats: (author, page number; or indicate that
the idea is by an author mentioned in class lectures; postcard can be identified by title and year
if available, videos can be identified by filmmaker, title, year etc). If you worry about citation
format, you can use either MLA or Chicago intext citation styles. It would be good practice to
include a list of reference at the end, but you are not required to do so unless you use outside
sources.
Questions:
1. We discussed the colonial ways of looking at the colony. Please explain the effects of
this mode of looking that produced both desire and a sense of threat. Do you see
elements of this colonial gaze operating in the post-empire film Indochine (dir. Régis
Wargnier, 1992)? If so, to what purpose? If not, how would you characterize the way
the film depicts the relationship between France and Indochina? Please draw on,
modify, or argue against Panivong Norindr to make your case. Please give a little
historical context for Indochine, and explain relevant ideas/concepts, including from
Norindr.
2. We discussed colonial modes of producing knowledge about the Other, including
Orientalism. Kleinen makes the argument that Orientalism continues to frame how we
view and understand the Vietnamese in anti-war American films after the war ended.
Can you push further than Kleinen and make an argument relating such tropes to the
historical context of at least one post-Vietnam war film or fictional text (i.e. Stanley
Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried)? For example, you
could choose to examine your work(s) of culture in connection to the American
“Vietnam syndrome” while the US must maintain its status as a global empire. Or you
could examine your work(s) of culture in connection to gender and racial relations in the
US during and after the Vietnam War. You are not limited to those 2 possibilities.
However, you will need to explain Orientalism and Kleinen’s claim, as well as relevant
ideas from at least one other author such as Susan White or Jen Dunnaway to help you
make your argument.
3. Tina Chen points out the knowledge connection between popular culture and warmaking. Please explain the ideas/concepts from Chen regarding the flow back and forth
between pop culture and war-making. Do you see such connection during the Vietnam
War? Explain with an analysis that discusses at least one work of American pop culture
on the Vietnam War. If you select an American cultural work that came out after the
war itself (post 1975), please carefully explain their relationship to war-making in that
post-war context.
Film: Full Metal Jacket (1987), dir. Stanley Kubrick; Optional Apocalypse Now, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 (warning for both: explicit violence and sexual content), streamed under Media Resources
Film: Indochine, dir. Régis Wargnier, 1992 (Stream under Media Resources)