ABSTRACT
Passionate reds and pinks also populate the joyful decor of weddings, but they cut across the borderlines of both Western and Eastern cultural traditions. The imperative to produce meaning according to established rationales presents itself repeatedly in the form of moralizing information: every film made should inform the masses, raise their cultural level, and give objective, scientific foundation to all explanations of society. Every spectator mediates a text to his or her own reality. Every spectator has a Vietnam of his or her own. For general Western spectatorship, Vietnam does not exist outside of the war. In the costuming and make-up of Vietnamese opera, red symbolizes anger; black, boldness; and white, treachery. Every effort at challenging reductive paternal bilaterism and at producing a different viewing of Vietnam is immediately recuperated within the limits of the totalized discourse of red is red and white is white.
