Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. For more on Hollywood and history, see, among others, Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood looks at U.S. history (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Mark C. Carnes, Past Imperfect: history according to the movies (New York, Henry Holt, 1995); Richard Francaviglia and Jerome Rodnitzky (eds.), Lights, Camera, History: portraying the past in film (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2007); Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2005); Peter C. Rollins (ed.), Hollywood as Historian: American film in a cultural context, revised edition (Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Robert A. Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History: film and the construction of a new past (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995); Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: the use and abuse of the American past (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1996); and idem, Reel History: in defense of Hollywood (Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 2002). 2. Kevin Hillstrom and Laurie Collier Hillstrom, The Vietnam Experience: a concise encyclopedia of American literature, songs, and films (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1998), 192. The Killing Fields won the awards for cinematography, film editing, and actor in a supporting role (Haing S. Ngor). The film also won eight British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards, including the award for best film. 3. For merely a sampling of works on film and the Vietnam War, see Gilbert Adair, Hollywood's Vietnam: from The Green Berets to Full Metal Jacket (London, Heinemann, 1989); Michael Anderegg (ed.), Inventing Vietnam: the war in film and television (Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1991); Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (New York, Praeger, 1988); Jeremy M. Devine, Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second: a critical and thematic analysis of over 400 films about the Vietnam War (Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 1995); Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (eds.), From Hanoi to Hollywood: the Vietnam War in American film (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1990); Scott Laderman, Hollywood's Vietnam, 1929–1964: scripting intervention, spotlighting injustice, Pacific Historical Review, 78(4) (November 2009), 578–607; Michael Lee Lanning, Vietnam at the Movies (New York, Fawcett Columbine, 1994); and Julian Smith, Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975). 4. Gene Siskel, The Killing Fields, Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1984. 5. David Hwang, Are Movies Ready for Real Orientals? New York Times, August 11, 1985. For a similar assessment, see William J. Palmer, The Films of the Eighties: a social history (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 102. Ironically, however, it would not be unreasonable to argue that The Killing Fields’ unusual attention to the Cambodian people muted its critical potential. ‘Because the film worried more about the Cambodian victims than whom to blame,’ noted Terry Christensen, ‘some viewers may have missed its criticism of U.S. policy, or even seen it as primarily anti-Khmer Rouge.’ Terry Christensen, Reel Politics: American political movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon (New York, Basil Blackwell, 1987), 195. 6. For several recent works on Hollywood and US foreign policy, see Daniel J. Leab, Orwell Subverted: the CIA and the filming of Animal Farm (University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Cold War Fantasies: film, fiction, and foreign policy (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (eds.), Why We Fought: America's wars in film and history (Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2008); and Tony Shaw, Hollywood's Cold War (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). 7. Alan Karp, Director Roland Joffé Talks About The Killing Fields, Boxoffice (February 1985), 15. 8. Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: the making of the American military image, revised edition (Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 467. 9. Vincent Canby, Reporters Are a Continuing Story for Moviemakers, New York Times, November 18, 1984. 10. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: race, power, and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1996), 16. See also Michael Haas, Cambodia, Pol Pot, and the United States: the Faustian pact (New York, Praeger, 1991). 11. Ben Kiernan, The American bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973, Vietnam Generation, 1(1) (1989), 4. 12. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on U.S. Air War, Japan Focus, May 12, 2007, at <http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2420> (accessed June 23, 2008). I am indebted to the work of Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, in the Japan Focus article as well as elsewhere, for not only its important findings but also for its identification of a number of crucial sources. 13. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 24; Owen and Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia. On the earlier range of 50,000 to 150,000 civilians killed, see also Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: colonialism, nationalism, and communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975, second edition (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2004), xxiii. 14. Evidence of this phenomenon is legion. In 1972, for instance, a report for Dispatch News Service disclosed how one young peasant, having experienced a bomb attack that killed 50 people in his village, a few days later joined the revolutionary army. Boris Baczynskyj, Bombing turns Cambodian villagers into refugees, Asian Reports, 3(4) (February 21, 1972), 2. Scholars’ and journalists’ interviews of refugees revealed comparable cases. Kiernan, The American bombardment of Kampuchea. A revolutionary commander who fled Cambodia in 1979 told two Western interviewers in 1982 how the Khmer Rouge used the bombing to ‘stigmatize the U.S.’ and suggest that the campaign was both ‘an attempt to make us an American satellite’ as well as a ‘manifestation of simple American barbarism.’ This proved crucial in ‘educat[ing] the people politically,’ he claimed, rendering it easy for the insurgents to transform the peasants’ fear and anger into ‘cooperat[ion] with the Khmer Rouge.’ Chhit Do, in an interview with François Ponchaud and Bruce Palling, quoted in Kiernan, The American bombardment of Kampuchea, 21–22. US intelligence evidently concurred. A declassified May 1973 CIA cable noted how the Khmer Rouge was ‘using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,’ an approach, the Directorate of Operations added, that had ‘resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men for the [Khmer Rouge] forces.’ CIA Directorate of Operations, Efforts of Khmer Insurgents to Exploit for Propaganda Purposes Damage Done by Airstrikes in Kandal Province, Intelligence Information Cable, May 2, 1973, quoted in Kiernan, The American bombardment of Kampuchea, 13–14. The insurgency consequently grew from what Pol Pot described as ‘fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas … scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders’ into, by 1973, ‘more than two hundred thousand troops and militia forces.’ Owen and Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia. 15. Kiernan, The American bombardment of Kampuchea, 4. The journalist Richard Dudman, for example, noted in the Washington Post in 1975 that ‘American bombs and tanks were a catalyst’ in radicalizing the Cambodian peasantry. Richard Dudman, The Cambodian ‘People's War,’ Washington Post, April 24, 1975. 16. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, for instance, maintained in 1979 that it ‘surely’ was ‘not in doubt that it was U.S. intervention that inflamed a simmering civil struggle and brought the horrors of modern warfare to relatively peaceful Cambodia, at the same time arousing violent hatreds and a thirst for revenge in the demolished villages where the Khmer Rouge were recruited by the bombardment of the U.S. and its local clients [that is, the forces of the Lon Nol government and the Republic of Vietnam].’ Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: postwar Indochina and the reconstruction of imperial ideology, Volume II of The Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston, MA, South End Press, 1979), 137. (This book aroused—and has continued to arouse—great controversy given its authors’ skepticism over claims of a Cambodian genocide. For a thoughtful essay that situates the book within its relevant historical context, see Christopher Hitchens, The Chorus and Cassandra, Grand Street [Autumn 1985]: in Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: selected essays and minority reports [New York, Hill and Wang, 1988], 58–77.) Likewise, two scholars of Southeast Asia, Gareth Porter and David Chandler, had testified along the same lines before Congress in 1977. ‘What drove the Cambodians to kill?’ Chandler asked rhetorically. ‘Paying off old scores or imaginery [sic] ones played a part, but, to a large extent, I think, American actions are to blame.’ Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, Human Rights in Cambodia, 95th Congress, 1st Session, May 3, 1977 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1977), 14. 17. Dialogue on Film, David Puttnam, American Film, 10(2) (November 1984), 16. 18. Samuel G. Freedman, In ‘The Killing Fields,’ a Cambodian Actor Relives His Nation's Ordeal, New York Times, October 28, 1984. 19. Dialogue on Film, 14. 20. For Gray's account of the making of The Killing Fields, see Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia (New York, Theatre Communications Group, 1985). 21. William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the destruction of Cambodia (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1979), 294. 22. Sydney H. Schanberg, Bomb Errors Leaves Havoc in Neak Luong, New York Times, August 9, 1973. 23. Shawcross, Sideshow, 294. 24. Telephone transcript of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (8:45 p.m.), December 9, 1970, in Thomas Blanton and William Burr (eds.), The Kissinger Telcons, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123 (May 26, 2004), at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2029,%20File%202,%20Kissinger%20%96%20President%20Dec%209,%201970%208,45%20pm%20%200.pdf> (accessed June 27, 2008). 25. Telephone transcript of Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig (8:50 p.m.), December 9, 1970, in Thomas Blanton and William Burr (eds.), The Kissinger Telcons, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123 (May 26, 2004), at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2029,%20File%202,%20Kissinger%20%96%20Haig,%20Dec%209,%201970%208,50%20pm%20106-10.pdf> (accessed June 27, 2008). 26. Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, Iraq: more Cambodia than Vietnam? Overland, 190 (Autumn 2008), 52. 27. Kiernan and Owen, Iraq, 52. 28. Kiernan and Owen, Iraq, 52. 29. Shawcross, Sideshow, 174. 30. Elizabeth Becker, A City Under Siege, Far Eastern Economic Review, April 16, 1973, 11. 31. ‘Although it is a British production,’ wrote political scientist Terry Christensen, ‘The Killing Fields was made for America, and Warner Bros. had an interest in it.’ Christensen, Reel Politics, 194. The New York Times reported prior to its completion that Warner Bros. contributed $4 million of its estimated $16 million cost. Aljean Harmetz, David Puttnam, A Force in International Films, New York Times, May 3, 1983. 32. James Park, Bombs and Pol Pot: Puttnam, Joffé, and Robinson on Cambodia, Sight and Sound, 54(1) (Winter 1984/1985), 16. The script itself was based on a celebrated article by Schanberg in the New York Times Magazine. See Sydney Schanberg, The Death and Life of Dith Pran: A Story of Cambodia, New York Times Magazine, January 20, 1980, 16–24, 35–53, 64–65. I am indebted to Park's essay for introducing some of the ideas I explore further in this article. 33. Commentary by director Roland Joffé, The Killing Fields (Warner Home Video, 2001). 34. Park, Bombs and Pol Pot, 16. 35. Park, Bombs and Pol Pot, 16. 36. Dialogue on Film, 16. 37. Harmetz, David Puttnam, A Force in International Films. 38. Aljean Harmetz, New Films Trying to Remain Apolitical, New York Times, August 20, 1984. ‘The consensus in Hollywood,’ wrote Harmetz, ‘is that “The Right Stuff” got into trouble partly because the movie became inextricably tied to John Glenn's campaign for the Democratic nomination for President and was perceived more as a documentary than as a rousing piece of entertainment.’ 39. Karp, Director Roland Joffé Talks About The Killing Fields, 15. This echoes David Puttnam's comments to the New York Times: ‘David Puttnam, the producer of The Killing Fields, said that the John Glenn connection had ruined The Right Stuff financially and that no one would pay to see a movie they thought was a political polemic. He said he wanted to make sure that his movie was discussed in the entertainment pages of newspapers, not the political pages. “It is not a political tract,” he said about the movie. “If people see politics in it, let them see this after they consider it as drama.”’ Harmetz, New Films Trying to Remain Apolitical. Elsewhere he insisted, though while confessing he ‘may be naïve,’ that it was ‘apolitical.’ Dialogue on Film, 16. 40. Vernon Young, Of Mozart, Proust, and Cambodia, Hudson Review, 38(1) (Spring 1985), 114. 41. Richard McRoberts and Marcia Pope, A Student's Guide to Roland Joffé's Film The Killing Fields (Ballarat, Victoria [Australia], Wizard Books, 1993), 26. 42. Janet Maslin, Critics’ Choices for Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend, New York Times, November 23, 1984. 43. Lanning, Vietnam at the Movies, 259. 44. Samuel G. Freedman, The War and the Arts, New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1985, 51. 45. Seth Mydans, Marcos Campaign Shows His Power, New York Times, February 4, 1986. 46. ‘Through Pran,’ notes Eben J. Muse, ‘the film reveals the Khmer Rouge as a savage group of ideologues—an image perceived by Schanberg and accepted as the whole truth—but also as a variety of groups struggling for control of their revolution and their destiny. Pran's second Khmer captor is a caring father and humanitarian who attempts to stop the killing.’ For his moderation, however, he is ruthlessly executed by his comrades. Eben J. Muse, The Land of Nam: the Vietnam War in American film (Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 1995), 215. 47. Kissinger quoted in Owen and Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia. 48. United States Embassy in Jakarta to Secretary of State, December 6, 1975, in: William Burr and Michael L. Evans (eds.), East Timor Revisited: Ford, Kissinger, and the Indonesian invasion, 1975–76, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 62 (December 6, 2001), at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf> (accessed July 2, 2008). 49. Kenton Clymer, Jimmy Carter, human rights, and Cambodia, Diplomatic History, 27(2) (April 2003), 246–247. 50. Jimmy Carter, Human Rights Violations in Cambodia, April 21, 1978, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1978, Volume I (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1979), 767; Clymer, Jimmy Carter, human rights, and Cambodia, 246. 51. It is true that the Carter and Reagan administrations’ internal documentary record was not available to the film-makers in the early 1980s when The Killing Fields was in production. It would thus be unfair to fault them for omitting mention of the covert support discussed by Kenton Clymer, for example. However, the basic contours of American policy vis-à-vis the Cambodian genocidaires were apparent. Most obviously, Washington continued to recognize the Pol Pot regime at the United Nations as the legitimate government of Cambodia until 1992. (After 1982, the Khmer Rouge joined forces with Sihanouk and a former prime minister to form the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. In reality, wrote Ben Kiernan, the entity was ‘neither a coalition, nor a government, nor democratic, nor in Cambodia’ but was, rather, a Khmer Rouge-dominated fig leaf that sought to overthrow the Vietnamese-installed government in Phnom Penh. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, xxviii.) The United States, moreover, ‘winked, semipublicly,’ at direct Chinese and Thai aid to the Khmer Rouge while concurrently ‘push[ing] through international aid to Khmer Rouge-controlled camps on the Thai border.’ Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: the voices of Cambodia's revolution and its people (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1986), 440; Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, xxix. As these resources were flowing to the genocidaires, the government in Phnom Penh was placed under an international embargo that left it economically and politically isolated. And despite the heinousness of the Pol Pot regime's crimes, the United States not only failed to pursue legal charges against the surviving remnants of the Khmer Rouge but, in fact, Secretary of State George Shultz actively opposed international efforts to achieve justice. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, xxix. Suffice it to say, none of this was disclosed to viewers of The Killing Fields. 52. Edwin A. Martini, Invisible Enemies: the American war on Vietnam, 1975–2000 (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 136. 53. Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam War in American memory, in: Jayne Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (eds.), The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American perspectives (Armonk, NY, M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 248. 54. Marcia Pally, Red faces, Film Comment, 22(1) (January–February 1986), 36. 55. Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: national identity and U.S. foreign policy (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2008), 11. 56. John Simon, Automata, National Review, December 28, 1984, 47. 57. Park, Bombs and Pol Pot, 16. 58. See, for example, Adam Jones (ed.), Genocide, War Crimes, and the West: history and complicity (London, Zed Books, 2004). 59. Harmetz, New Films Trying to Remain Apolitical. 60. Report to the Economic and Social Council, July 2, 1985, 4/SUB, 2/1985/6, quoted in Samantha Power, ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the age of genocide (New York, Harper Perennial, 2002), 154.