ABSTRACT
Every spectator mediates a text to his or her own reality. To acknowledge the problem of class in dealing with class, middle- class spectatorship believes it can simply evacuate class content from its safe observer's post by reiterating the objectifying Look, the Spectacle 's totalitarian monologue. Every spectator owns a Vietnam of his or her own. For general Western spectatorship, Vietnam does not exist outside of the war. All reflections on socialist Vietnam which do not abide by a certain socialist orthodoxy, positively embrace the system, and postulate the validity of its social organization, are crudely distorted as they are forced into the mold of hegemonic worldview. Vietnam as spectacle remains passionately an owned territory. In the society of the male-centered spectacle, gender will always be denied, even and especially when the spectacle exalts feminism.
