The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans MemorialOrder Description• Sturken, Marita. “The Wall and the Screen Memory: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” Representations No. 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories (Summer, 1991), 118-142.•only use this article nothing else. I will upload it. Use these questions to guide your response: What is the main thesis of the article? How does the author support this thesis (what claims does the author make and/or what examples does the author use?) What are some of the key concepts and how are they defined? you need to indicate the specific article you are summarizing at the top of the page or when you are identifying the thesis mention the author’s name and title of the article. Your understanding of the thesis should be clear. try to synthesize a bit more and balance the key points/examples with the larger argument that is being made. make sure its clear understanding, make sure conclusion is clear and makes senselessThe Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans MemorialMarita SturkenRepresentations, No. 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories. (Summer, 1991), pp. 118-142.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-6018%28199122%290%3A35%3C118%3ATWTSAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-YRepresentations is currently published by University of California Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ucal.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]://www.jstor.orgWed Aug 29 21:21:40 2007MARITA STURKENThe Wall, the Screen,and the Image: The VietnamVeterans MemorialTHEFORMS REMEMBRANCE TAKES indicate the status of memorywithin a given culture. In these forms, we can see acts of public commemorationas moments in which shifting discourses of history, personal memory, and culturalmemory converge. Public commemoration is a form of history-making, yetit can also be a contested form of remembrance in which cultural memories slidethrough and into each other, merging and then disengaging in a tangle ofnarratives.With the Vietnam War, discourses of public commemoration have becomeinextricably tied to the question of how war is brought to a closure in Americansociety. How, for instance, does a society commemorate a war for which the centralnarrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose history is highly contestedand still in the process of being made? As Peter Ehrenhaus writes, “The traditionof U.S. public discourse in the wake of war is founded upon the premises of clarityof purpose and success; when such presumptions must account for division,equivocation, and failure, and when losing is among the greatest of sins, commemorationseems somehow inappropriate.”‘ Yet the Vietnam War-with its divisionand confusion, its lack of a singular, historical narrative defining clear-cutpurpose and outcome-has led to a very different form of commemoration.I would like to focus this discussion of public remembrance on the notion ofa screen, in its many meanings. A screen can be a surface that is projected upon;it is also an object that hides something from view, that shelters or protects. It canbe a surface, or even a body-in military language a screen is a “body of men” whoare used to cover the movements of an army. Freud’s screen memory functionsto hide highly emotional material, which the screen memory conceals whileoffering itself as a substitute. The kinds of screens that converge in the VietnamVeterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., both shield and project: the black wallsof the memorial act as screens for innumerable projections of memory and history-of the United States’ participation in the Vietnam War and of the experienceof the Vietnam veterans since the war-while they screen out the narrativeof defeat in preparing for wars to come. Seeing the memorial as a screen alsoevokes the screens on which the war was and continues to be experienced-

ea?s late? was pouled out zn the flood of wa? books was aqthzng but expe~zence thatgoes mouth to mouth And t h e ~ ew as nothzng g.ema?kable about that Fol never hase~perzenceb een contradzcted rnore thorough13 than strategzc e~pe~z encbej tactzcalwafare, economzc e~pe~z encbej znfitzon, bodzly experience 6) rnechanzcal warfala,rnoral experzence bj those zn pouler A generatzon that had gone to school on a horsedrawnstreetcar now stood under the open skj zn a countrjszde zn whzch nothzngremazned unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, zn a fzeld of fo?ce ofdestluctzve tolrents and exploszons, was the tznj, jlagzle, hurnan bod)–Walter BenjaminJ4The incommunicability of the experience of the Vietnam War has beena primary narrative in the Vietnam veterans’ discourse. It was precisely this incommunicabilitythat rendered, among other things, the construction of the VietnamVeterans Memorial necessary. This incommunicability has been depicted as asilence rendered by an inconceivable kind of war, a war that fit no prior imagesof war.While the Vietnam Veterans Memorial most obviously pays tribute to thememory of those who died during the war, it is a central icon for the veterans. Ithas been noted that the memorial has given them a place-one that recognizestheir identities, a place at which to congregate and from which to speak. Hence,the memorial is as much about survival as it is about mourning the dead.The construction of an identity for the veterans since their return from thewar has become the most present and continuing narrative of the memorial. Thecentral theme of this narrative is the way the veterans had been invisible andwithout voice before the memorial’s construction and the subsequent interest inThe Wall, the Screen, and the Image 129discussing the war. Veterans have told innumerable stories of the hostility thatgreeted them upon their return from Vietnam, and there has been a noticeablelack of interest in the war in popular culture until recently-the direct result ofan ambivalence toward the war due to an inability to fit it into traditional paradigms.The experience of the Vietnam War as different from all previous ones hasmade the process of narrativizing it particularly difficult.Unlike World War I1 veterans, Vietnam veterans did not arrive home enmasse for a celebration but one by one, without any welcome. Many of themended up in underfunded and poorly staffed Veterans Administration hospitals.They were expected to put their war experiences behind them and to assimilatequickly back into society. That many were unable to do so resulted further intheir marginalization-they were labeled social misfits and stereotyped as potentiallydangerous men with a violence that threatened to erupt at any moment.According to George Swiers, a veteran,The message sent from national leadership and embraced by the public was clear: Vietnamveterans were malcontents, liars, wackos, losers. Hollywood, ever bizarre in its efforts tomirror life, discovered a marketable villain. Kojak, Ironside, and the friendly folks at HawaiiFive-0 confronted crazed, heroin-addicted veterans with the regularity and enthusiasmSaturday morning heroes once dispensed with godless red savages. No grade-B melodramawas complete without its standard vet-a psychotic, axe-wielding rapist every bit asinsulting as another one-time creature of Hollywood’s imagination, the shiftless, lazy, andwide-eyed black.25The portrayal of the veteran as a psychopath was a kind of scapegoating thatabsolved the American public of complicity and allowed the master narrative ofAmerican military power to stand. For Thomas Myers, “To ask the veteran to playthe villain is a way to quiet a loud memory, to rewrite a new national narrative sothat it can be joined, without disturbance, to older ones.”26 Implied within theseconflicting narratives is the question of whether or not the veterans are to