Recognizing the individual’s face, or even a people’s collective visage, is important, particularly if we speak of faces destroyed by war machines. But equally important is understanding how recognition is produced, how an industry of memory creates memories. An “industry of memory” differs from a “memory industry” in the same way that a “war machine” is not the same as an “arms industry.” At worst, invoking a memory industry brings to mind a cottage industry, a provincial economy geared toward producing something easily bought and ironically forgettable: key chains, coffee mugs, t-shirts, animal or human safaris, or, in Vietnam, pens and necklaces supposedly made from American bullets. At best, a memory industry calls forth the professionalization of memory through the creation of museums, archives, festivals, documentaries, history channels, interviews, and so on. But the work that memory industries do is only part of an industry of memory. To mistake memory as just a commodity for sale, or information to be transmitted by experts, would be like considering a gun and its manufacturer, or a surveillance system and its designers, to be simply products of an arms industry. Arms industries are only the most visible parts of a war machine. In war machines, the bristling armaments are on display, but more important are the ideas, ideologies, fantasies, and words that justify war, the sacrifices of our side, and the death of others.
Likewise, an industry of memory includes the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industries. Certain kinds of memories and remembering are possible because an industry of memory depends on, and creates, “structures of feeling.” That term by Raymond Williams pulls together both the concrete (a structure) and the immaterial (a feeling).9 A feeling, no matter how invisible, houses us, shapes us, lets us see the world through its windows. As structures vary from rich to middle class to poor, from wealthy nations and metropolises to colonies and hamlets, so do feelings themselves vary. The world pays attention to the feelings of the wealthy and the powerful, because those feelings matter when the wealthy and the powerful make decisions that can burn. The feelings of the poor and the weak are much less visible, except, of course, to the poor and the weak. As it is with feeling and its structures, so it is with memory and an industry of memory, where the memories of the wealthy and the powerful exert more influence because they own the means of production. As Marx and Engels said, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”10 So, too, are their feelings and memories the most powerful, made, packaged, distributed, and exported in ways that overshadow the feelings and memories of the weak.
While the memories of the weak matter to them, as the individual’s memory matters to the individual, they only matter for the world when an industry of memory amplifies them. This industry is more than a set of technologies or cultural forms through which memories are fashioned, like the novels, movies, photographs, museums, memorials, or archives populating this book.11 This industry is more than the network of professionals who curate, design, and study memories, or the artists, writers, and creators of cultural works of memory. The industry of memory includes these and more, incorporating the processes of individual memory, the collective nature of memory’s making, the social contexts of memory’s meanings, and, ultimately, memory’s means of production. All these determine how — and whose — memories are made and the reach and impact of their distribution. The blast radius of memory, like the blast radius of weaponry, is determined by industrial power, even if individual will shapes the act of memory itself. So while Thich Quang Duc showed indomitable belief and discipline while fire and smoke consumed his body, the global fallout of his act occurred because Western media seized on it. People have immolated themselves since then, during the war and after, in the country and outside of it, even in America, but those self-sacrifices did not achieve the visibility of the burning monk. Sacrificing one’s self in order to be heard is not enough. Until those whose memories are left out not only speak up for themselves but also seize control of the means of memory making, there will be no transformation in memory. Without such control, those who speak up for themselves and others will realize they do not determine the volume of their voice. Those who control the industry of memory, who allow them to speak, set that volume.
Struggles for memory are thus inextricable from other struggles for voice, control, power, self-determination, and the meanings of the dead. Countries with massive war machines not only inflict more damage on weaker countries, they also justify that damage to the world. How America remembers this war and memory is to some extent how the world remembers it. Even if the United States is a reduced industrial base in an age of increasing competition from rising Asia, it is still a superpower in the globalization of its own memories, symbolized in Hollywood and its movies, which feature American memories as well as American armaments. By far the most powerful of its kind, the American industry of memory is on par with the American arms industry, just as Hollywood is the equal of the American armed forces. The global domination of weapons and memories by the United States leads other countries, regardless of their own memories of the war, to confront Hollywood goods and those instantly infamous snapshots that struck viewers between the eyes. As the essayist Pico Iyer noted, by 1985, “Rambo had conquered Asia … every cinema that I visited for ten straight weeks featured a Stallone extravaganza.”12 The technology that makes possible this global distribution and world-class quality of American memories is embedded throughout American society, including at my own University of Southern California. The campus is home to the most advanced cinema school in the world, as well as an army-funded research center that develops high-tech virtual reality simulators for the military. In the same institution where Hollywood’s future directors learn their craft and where buildings carry the names of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, these virtual reality simulators allow soldiers to practice war via cinema or to be treated for trauma from war.13 The philosopher Henri Bergson implied that memory is a kind of virtual reality, and this simulator demonstrates that virtual reality is also the staging ground for battle and its recuperation.14 Weaponized memory becomes part of the war machine’s arsenal, deployed in the struggle to control reality.
Elsewhere on campus, students learn how to develop software for video games, a genre of weaponized memory not to be ignored when one thinks of the human mind as the most strategic of all battlefields. The mind must be won virtually before a real war can ever be fought. War has long been a subject for video game storytelling, and this war is no exception, as realized in the Call of Duty series. More successful than many Hollywood franchises, this $11 billion revenue product belongs to the subgenre of the first person shooter, a name that makes obvious how weapon and narration go hand in hand.15 In this subgenre’s iteration on the Vietnamese landscape, Black Ops, the gamer views the chiaroscuro world of heroes and villains through the eyes of an American warrior. The game’s trailer evoked movies, the most important one being Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter, where Viet Cong torturers force American prisoners of war to play Russian roulette. Although no historical basis existed for this scene, there might have been an historical inspiration. When actor Christopher Walken presses the barrel of a.38 against his head, it evokes the iconic bullet to the head on the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive. Evokes and yet erases, for instead of Vietnamese shooting Vietnamese, the movie centers on an American about to shoot himself. Americans love to imagine the war as a conflict not between Americans and Vietnamese, but between Americans fighting a war for their nation’s soul. Russian roulette makes the solipsistic revision of the war a literal one, substituting American pain for Vietnamese pain. Black Ops goes further, for while the torturers in The Deer Hunter are Vietnamese, the chief villain in the video game trailer is Russian. If the Vietnamese are to be villainous, could they not at least be the chief villains?