ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the value and significance of positioning an allegorical representation of Vietnam within the Gothic tradition, particularly interrogating how the Gothic tradition shapes and broadens the film's allegory following the return of repressed historical and contemporary traumas, national wrongs and transgressions that are violently punished. While Southern Comfort certainly satisfies the superficial generic requirements of the Gothic, its allegorical depiction of Vietnam denotes a deeper engagement with the Gothic tradition, regurgitating still-undigested national traumas to explore historical sins and contemporary male anxieties that haunt America throughout the 1970s and 80s. The Gothic in Southern Comfort reveals not only the inherent monstrosity of white American masculinity, but the "madness" underpinning American institutional militarism. Ultimately, in Southern Comfort, male institutional violence cannot exorcise masculine crisis or erase national sins and traumas, because in the encounter with his other in the Gothicized Vietnam battlefield only one thing is certain: that you lose you in there.
