The Vietnam War was the first truly visual conflict for Americans, who watched it unfold nightly on their televisions and opened up their daily newspapers and weekly magazines to find graphic photos of violence and chaos happening some seven thousand miles away in Indochina. Several of those pictures, including those of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack, and Nguyen Ngoc Loan's shooting of a Viet Cong prisoner, are now iconic images burned into American memory of the conflict, and they have been the subjects of numerous studies about wartime journalism, the imagery of the Vietnam War, and how Americans remember the conflict. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong joins the conversation about visual representations of the war, analyzing photographs and films produced during and after the conflict. She argues that depictions of the Vietnamese in American media constituted an “oriental obscene” which encapsulated a host of US anxieties about Asian immigrants, Far East politics, and challenges to race and gender conventions since the 1960s, in addition to reflecting American conceptions of the Vietnam War.

At the center of the book are the usual suspects; in addition to the Phuc (“Vietnam Napalm”) and Loan (“Saigon Execution”) photographs, Chong analyzes Ronald L. Haeberle's pictures of the My Lai massacre, as well as films such as Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, First Blood, and Rambo: First Blood II, all of which have been the subjects of books and articles by historians and literary critics. Equally derivative are the arguments each chapter puts forth – that media “brought the war home” to American living rooms, that depictions of Vietnam veterans in the immediate postwar period portrayed them as broken outsiders, that Stokely Carmichael linked black freedom struggles in the US with anticolonial movements in the Third World, and that 1960s urban unrest and the violence in Vietnam are worth comparing. Chong makes an intriguing contribution to the scholarly conversation about Vietnam War imagery with her analysis of the rise in popularity of martial arts films in the US, in which she examines how white actors such as Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone played characters who embodied a reconstituted masculinity similar to Norman Mailer's “white negro.” This fascinating section of the book contends that performing “oriental” via martial arts mastery was a form of minstrelsy that was grounded more in white American fantasies of the “oriental obscene” than in concrete knowledge of Vietnamese culture. Just as Mailer's white hipsters were rejuvenated by what they perceived to be the dangerous, liberated lives of black men, Norris's warrior derived his power from an Asian style of fighting. Chong's analysis would have been strengthened with a lengthier discussion of the historical context about post-Vietnam masculine identity and gender politics; indeed, the entire work would have benefited from a deeper grounding in the history. As written, it is not clear how the book advances any new knowledge about the Vietnam War and its impact on American society and culture.

Only readers familiar with the jargon of film studies and critical theory will be able to make sense of parts of the book, which, at times, plods along through a nearly impenetrable forest of phrases like “racial phantasmatics,” “optical unconscious,” “intrapsychic origins,” and “indexical media.” Chong, an associate professor of film and Asian American studies, clearly wrote this book for scholars in her field, and perhaps they may find it useful. Audiences outside her discipline might struggle with the specialized writing style.