Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 5: U-Z

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VERSACEENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

Morrison went on to teach English at the University of Texas and

drive a tugboat in his spare time. Tucker raised a family and released a

number of critically praised solo albums. Cale also released numerous

solo albums and produced important albums by Jonathan Richman’s

Modern Lovers, Patti Smith, the Stooges, Squeeze, and Nico (the

Cale-produced Nico solo albums, Desert Shore and Marble Index, are

considered classics). While all the members of the Velvet Under-

ground have maintained a substantial cult following, it is Reed who

has occasionally had the highest proﬁle, as well as the only hit, with

1972’s ‘‘Walk on the Wild Side.’’ (Reed even made the mainstream,

playing at the White House in front of President Clinton and a number

of foreign dignitaries in 1998). In 1993, the group ﬁnally patched up

their differences to do a brief tour of Europe in 1993 (sans Nico, who

died in a bike accident in 1989), which resulted in the live recording

Live MCMXCIII. But their egos soon clashed and they went their

separate ways again; the group dissolved before they recorded a

planned studio album. Sterling Morrison died in 1995, putting an end

to speculation that the group might again record under the Velvet

Underground moniker.

—Kembrew McLeod

URTHER READING:

Bockris, Victor, and Gerald Malanga. Up-Tight: The Velvet Under-

ground Story. New York, Omnibus, 1983.

Heylin, Clinton. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk

History for a Post-Punk World. New York, Penguin, 1993.

Thompson, Dave. Beyond the Velvet Underground. New York,

Omnibus, 1989.

Zak, Albin. The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of

Commentary. New York, Schirmer Books, 1997.

Ventura, Jesse (1951—)

With his surprise election as Governor of Minnesota in 1998,

former professional wrestler Jesse ‘‘The Body’’ Ventura (whose real

name is James Janos) captured the attention of the nation. Represent-

ing the Reform Party, Ventura parlayed his gift for gab, his celebrity

status, and public disgust with ‘‘politics as normal’’ to become an

instant icon. Within days of his election, Ventura was the talk of the

nation—appearing on countless talk shows (where he announced that

he should now be dubbed ‘‘The Mind’’), becoming the subject of both

serious news analyses and numerous jokes, and morphing into a

Doonesbury character. The A&E cable channel quickly put together

an episode of Biography, two networks started work on TV movies,

and Ventura found time to pen a political autobiography called Ain’t

Got Time to Bleed.

Ventura’s diverse resume includes time as a Navy Seal, TV

broadcaster, radio talk show host, and a very successful stint in

professional wrestling. Ventura was named the ‘‘The Body’’ due to

his impressive physique, but when a blood clot forced his early

retirement from the ring, it was his ability behind the microphone as a

color commentator, coupled with a penchant for boas and outrageous

costumes, which earned him an impressive fan base and won notice

by Hollywood producers. Ventura acted respectably in roles in

Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), and Batman & Robin

Jesse ‘‘The Body’’ Ventura

(1997). As typiﬁes late twentieth century American popular culture,

the road to politics was only a step away.

—Patrick Jones

URTHER READING:

Gray, Paul. ‘‘Body Slam.’’ Time. November 16, 1998.

Lentz, Harris M. Biographical Dictionary of Professional Wrestling.

Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, 1997.

Tapper, Jake. Body Slam: The Jesse Ventura Story. New York, St.

Martins, 1999.

Ventura, Jesse. I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Rebuilding the Body Politic

from the Bottom Up. New York, Villard Books, 1999.

Versace, Gianni (1946-1997)

As a boy, Versace observed his mother’s dressmaking studio in

Reggio Calabria, Italy; as a man, Versace moved to Milan to design

for other companies from 1972 to 1977 and established his own

company in 1977. A consummate dressmaker, Versace rocked the

world of fashion by other principles: featuring hot models; packing

VERTIGO ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

runway shows with celebrities; dressing famous men and women

from Elton John to Princess Diana to model Elizabeth Hurley; and

creating body-conscious clothing for the most self-conﬁdent clients.

His body-exposing black safety-pin dress worn by Hurley to a

London movie premiere was the most photographed dress of 1994.

Leather and metal-mesh dresses from his last collection in 1997

referred to Byzantine art, but clung to the body. In sensibility and life,

Versace was ﬂamboyant and larger-than-life. He realized fashion as

media and created Cinderella fantasies for the 1980s and 1990s. He

was murdered on the steps of his Miami mansion in July 1997.

—Richard Martin

URTHER READING:

Martin, Richard. Gianni Versace. New York, Metropolitan Museum

of Art/Abrams, 1997.

———. Versace. New York, Universe, 1997.

Vertigo

Released in 1958, Vertigo is often singled out as Alfred

Hitchcock’s most important ﬁlm. The ﬁlm combined a complex

storyline with equally complex cinematography. Vertigo debuted

Hitchcock’s now famous combination of forward zoom and reverse

tracking. His unique zoom and tracking method along with other

James Stewart and Kim Novak in a scene from the ﬁlm Vertigo.

creative and technical complexities of the ﬁlm exerted a tremendous

inﬂuence on an entire generation of ﬁlmmakers, especially the French

New Wave. Vertigo’s presence is felt in ﬁlms as diverse as Jules et

Jim (1961), High Anxiety (1977), Body Double (1984), and Twelve

Monkeys (1995). Vertigo was unavailable for decades because its

rights, along with those of four other ﬁlms, were left by Hitchcock as a

legacy to his daughter. Vertigo and the other four ﬁlms were re-

released in 1984 to much popular and critical acclaim. Because the

ﬁlms are so popular as well as creatively and technically complex,

Hitchcock’s ﬁlms complicate the distinction between high and low art.

Vertigo is a complex psychological thriller—it opens with San

Francisco police detective Scottie Ferguson’s letting a fellow ofﬁcer

fall to his death during a rooftop chase of a suspect. After the accident,

Ferguson is hired by an old friend to investigate the friend’s wife,

Madeleine, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of a turn-of-

the-century belle, Carlotta. Madeleine reenacts Carlotta’s suicide by

jumping off a mission bell tower while Scottie stands by helplessly,

paralyzed by his vertigo. The remainder of the ﬁlm details Scottie’s

nervous breakdown and his discovery of a woman named Judy who

uncannily resembles Madeleine. Scottie recreates Madeleine in Judy,

forcing Judy to adopt Madeleine’s makeup, clothing, hairstyle, and

speech. When Scottie realizes he has been the dupe of a complex

murder plot he attempts to cure himself of his vertigo by revisiting the

scene of Madeleine’s death. Able to conquer his vertigo, Scottie is

nevertheless unable to save Judy, who falls to her death.

The overwhelming critical and popular response to Vertigo’s re-

release raises the question of why the ﬁlm is such a vital text for ﬁlm

criticism and theory. The ﬁlm itself has been interpreted in a variety

of ways: as an allegorical tale of man’s descent into the underworld in

search of a lost love; as a psychological parable of guilt, obsession,

and repression; and as an experiment in generic collage, drawing on

the generic conventions of realism, fantasy, and the women’s ﬁlm.

Together with Rear Window, Vertigo has often been discussed as a

document of late 1950s culture, as a portrayal of the alienation and

rootlessness of the 1950s, as well as of the constructions of 1950s

femininity. It is these latter issues—the representation of women and

the relationships among power, sexuality, and gender—which have

garnered the most critical attention.

Hitchcock is frequently understood as a misogynist whose ﬁlms

entice audiences to participate in sadistic fantasies about women

(such as Scottie’s efforts to make over Judy into Madeleine, despite

Judy’s plea that he love her the way she is). Certainly Hitchcock’s

ﬁlms are both fascinated by and horriﬁed by women’s (potential)

power. Hitchcock’s ﬁlms can also be read, however, as exposures of

the mechanisms of patriarchy—Vertigo can be read, for example, as a

critique of the ways in which femininity in our culture is largely a

masquerade and a male construct.

Hitchcock’s ﬁlms are central to ﬁlm theory and feminist criti-

cism because they are all about scopophilia—voyeurism, fetishism,

and the interrelated questions of epistemology, identiﬁcation, and

spectatorship. One of the most important essays of feminist ﬁlm

criticism, Laura Mulvey’s 1974 essay ‘‘Visual Pleasure and the

Narrative Cinema,’’ uses readings of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and

Vertigo to argue that classic Hollywood movies inevitably transform

women into passive objects of male voyeurism and sadism. Mulvey’s

essay also claims that Hitchcock’s female characters both represent

and assuage male spectators’ anxieties and desires, while female

spectators are trapped into a masochistic identiﬁcation with the

female victims on screen. Later feminist ﬁlm critics also turned to

Vertigo as a central text. Tania Modleski, for example, uses Vertigo to

VICTORIA’S SECRETENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

elaborate upon the notion of the female spectator. She argues that

identiﬁcation is a more complex mechanism than heretofore consid-

ered and suggests that the female spectator is implicated in a split

position, identifying with both the passive female object and the

active male subject. Hitchcock himself seems to suggest this position,

when, in a pivotal scene in the movie, we see things from Judy’s point

of view as well as Scottie’s. Indeed, it is Vertigo’s multiple points of

view, and hence of knowledge and of identiﬁcation, that suggests that

the movie’s appeal lies in its very ambivalence toward women and

their potential to upset the male spectator’s position.

—Austin Booth

URTHER READING:

Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and

Feminist Theory. New York, Methuen, 1988.

Mulvey, Laura. ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ Screen,

Vol. 16, No. 3., 1975, 6-18.

Sloan, Jane. Alfred Hitchcock: A Guide to References and Resources.

New York, G. K. Hall, 1993.

Viagra

Viagra, a little blue pill made by the pharmaceutical company

Pﬁzer Inc., became the ﬁrst oral medicine approved for male impo-

tence by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Its approval in

March 1998 set off a worldwide demand and sent Pﬁzer stock

soaring. Hardly a day went by when newspapers, radio, and television

did not have stories of the Viagra craze. The pill, which sold by

prescription for about $10 apiece retail, was taken by men with sexual

problems about an hour before they expected to have sexual activity.

Their performance during the sex act improved dramatically. The

drug, chemically named sildenaﬁl, had been used unsuccessfully as a

medicine for heart problems. When some heart patients reported to

doctors they were getting erections after taking the pill, it was

developed to treat sexual impotence.

Clinical studies of about 4,000 men with erectile dysfunction

showed that up to 72 percent reported they had successful intercourse

after using Viagra, against 23 percent of men who took a placebo.

Viagra works by improving the blood ﬂow to the penis. More

speciﬁcally, it inhibits the effects of an enzyme that acts to reverse

erections after sex. Before Viagra came along, men with erectile

problems had to forego sex, rely on mechanical devices such as a

small pump to produce an erection, have surgical penile implants, or

inject medicines directly into the penis.

Once the Viagra craze spread, so did reports of problems

associated with taking the pill. Some men reported problems with

their vision, seeing green or blue. There were stories of dizziness and

headaches or upset stomachs. Men with heart problems who took

nitroglycerin or nitrates were warned not to use Viagra because it

could act to reduce blood pressure. By late 1998, the Food and Drug

Administration issued warnings that Viagra could be hazardous to

some men with heart ailments, and that using the pill could lead to

heart attacks or strokes. The drug watchdog agency said that although

Viagra was still considered safe and effective, it posed potential

problems for men with very high or very low blood pressure, so that

patients should get careful examinations before taking the pill. The

FDA also said that 130 reported deaths of men who had taken Viagra

could not be attributed directly to the drug. The average age of those

who died was 64 and many of the men who died had had serious

health problems aggravated by sexual activity, which ended in heart

attacks or strokes. ‘‘The people who died had underlying cardiovas-

cular problems,’’ Dr. Lisa Rarick, director of an FDA division, told

reporters during late 1998. She added that men with heart problems

should ask their doctors, ‘‘Is sex good for me?’’ Many of the men who

died had impotence problems because of their medical conditions. By

the time of the warning some six million prescriptions had been

written for about three million men.

The underlying demand for Viagra could be linked to a major

study, released in 1999 by the Journal of the American Medical

Association, of the sexual habits of nearly 5,000 people, the largest

such study since the report of biologist Alfred Kinsey some 50 years

earlier. The new research revealed that sexual problems were wide-

spread in the United States. On the basis of personal interviews with

1,749 women and 1,410 men, the research showed that about two out

of ﬁve women and one out of three men had some forms of

sexual dysfunction.

The clamor for Viagra in other countries spurred some swindlers

to peddle pills made to look like Viagra. But cashing in on demands

for a silver bullet to cure sex problems was not new. The search for a

magic potion that could produce erections on demand has gone on for

centuries, encouraging charlatans who sold bogus remedies to unwit-

ting, desperate men. Among the miracle cures thus ballyhooed to have

been miracle cures have been underwear electriﬁed to stimulate the

penis, rhinoceros horns pounded into powder, and tiger penises made

into soups.

—Michael L. Posner

URTHER READING:

Katzenstei, Larry. Viagra: The Potency Promise. New York, St.

Martin’s, 1998.

Vaughn, Susan C. Viagra: A Guide to the Phenomenal Potency-

Promoting Drug. New York, Pocket Books, 1998.

Victoria’s Secret

Perhaps given a boost by the openness of the Sexual Revolution,

the Victoria’s Secret retail chain almost single-handedly redeﬁned

America’s conception of lingerie beginning in the early 1980s.

Despite the secrecy promised in the franchise’s moniker, each of its

stores replaced the modest, tucked-away, department-store displays

of women’s underwear with an openly luxurious atmosphere that

recreated a nineteenth-century boudoir. At the same time, Victoria’s

Secret decidedly built its image with a fairly conservative, middle-

class shopper in mind and avoided any connotations of sleaziness

which lingerie might carry. While some critics have contested the

sometimes reactionary portrait of femininity developed in the store’s

VICTORIA’S SECRET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

Models display the latest fashions from Victoria’s Secret, 1997.

designs and advertising campaigns, Victoria’s Secret helped women

of all shapes and sizes, if not tax brackets, feel that sensuality need not

be limited to models and celebrities.

Victoria’s Secret was launched through the personal vision of

entrepreneur Roy Raymond, an ambitious graduate of Stanford

University who found himself dissatisﬁed working in the lower rungs

of large corporations. Raymond’s brainchild came to him in the mid-

1970s as the result of his own experiences of buying lingerie for his

wife. A shy man by nature, Raymond found himself made uncomfort-

able by the probing glances of lingerie salespeople in department

stores and moreover thought the wares of such stores to be either

excessively frilly or blandly conservative. Believing that many men

and women alike shared in his desire for a middle ground between

these two poles, Raymond decided to embark on the risky venture of

creating his own boutiques. In 1977, he borrowed a total of eighty

thousand dollars—half of it from his parents—and opened the doors

of the ﬁrst Victoria’s Secret in a shopping center in the southern

outskirts of San Francisco. Decorated to resemble a popularized

Victorian bedroom, the premiere outlet was furnished with opulent

Oriental rugs and period vanities whose drawers housed ﬁttingly

plush bras and panties made by upscale designers such as Vanity Fair

and Warner’s. Although subsequent stores were less customized than

Raymond’s prototype, this balance of seduction and ‘‘classy’’ charm

continued to rule the sensibilities of Victoria’s Secret.

In its ﬁrst year of business, the San Francisco store had amassed

sales of an impressive half a million dollars, allowing Raymond to

expand Victoria’s Secret into four new locations, in addition to a

headquarters and warehouse. Raymond’s creative vision was not

equaled by ﬁnancial mastery, however, and in 1982 he was forced to

sell Victoria’s Secret to the Columbus, Ohio-based conglomerate The

Limited for the relatively slight sum of four million dollars. Although

it was already a nationally known fashion enterprise, The Limited

kept the personalized image of Victoria’s Secret intact, albeit in a

mass-produced, cost-efﬁcient manner. Rapidly expanding into the

terrain of America’s malls throughout the 1980s, Victoria’s Secret

blossomed from a handful of stores to more than four hundred and

solidiﬁed its exclusive image by appending its own label to all of its

offerings as a brand name. In addition to volume growth, the company

was able to vend a widened range of products with the aid of a popular

mail catalog issued eight times annually. While corsets, teddies, and

silk pajamas remained at the hub of the Victoria’s Secret wheel, home

shoppers could buy shoes, evening wear, and perfumes—such as

Wild English Gardens and Heather’s Embrace—all under a single

banner promising both middle-class reﬁnement and daring sexuality.

By the early 1990s, Victoria’s Secret had become the largest

American lingerie outﬁtters, easily surpassing both the even higher-

priced Cacique chain and the racier Frederick’s of Hollywood.

However, despite the fact that the company had topped the billion

dollar mark, its growth showed signs of stagnation. In 1993, Grace

Nichols took over the executive helm from former president Howard

Gross and immediately addressed allegations that the quality of

Victoria’s Secret’s merchandise did not match its elevated price tags.

In addition, Nichols placed added emphasis upon an older age group

as the company’s target concern. Nevertheless, while Nichols stressed

that thirty- to forty-year-old women need not feel out of place in sexy

underwear, the company’s advertising campaigns continued to exclu-

sively portray younger models with svelte, busty ﬁgures. Indeed,

some critics saw the Victoria’s Secret formula of femininity as a

limitation to the majority of American women and argued that the

company’s image (highlighted in design series such as their English

Lace line) implicitly promoted an overly bourgeois conception of

‘‘good taste.’’ Whatever class and gender ramiﬁcations Victoria’s

Secret might have entailed, the company grew once again under

Nichols’s care throughout the 1990s, as millions of women—and

men--continued to ﬁll out their fantasies with the satin-lined aid of

offerings such as the Angels bra series and, perhaps Victoria’s

Secret’s single biggest contribution to the public imagination, the

uplifting Miracle Bra.

—Shaun Frentner

URTHER READING:

Schwartz, Mimi. ‘‘A Day in the Life of Victoria’s Secret.’’ Mademoi-

selle. Vol. 96, April 1990, 238–39.

Woodman, Sue. ‘‘Victoria Reigns . . . Again.’’ Working Woman. Vol.

16, September 1991, 77.

Workman, Nancy V. ‘‘From Victorian to Victoria’s Secret: The

Foundations of Modern Erotic Wear.’’ Journal of Popular Cul-

ture. Vol. 30, Fall 1996, 61-73.

VIDEO GAMESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

Vidal, Gore (1925—)

Thanks to the broadcast media, which continually gives public

platform to the curmudgeonly wit and iconoclastic political observa-

tions of Gore Vidal, he has become one of those rare authors who is as

famous for what he says as for what he writes. Considered to be one of

the most promising members of the generation of writers emerging

from World War II (a group which included his arch-rival and

eventual sparring partner, Norman Mailer), Vidal ﬁrst made his mark

with a fairly well received novel based on his army experiences,

Williwaw, in 1946, then followed up with two more books, the second

of which, The City and the Pillar (1948), stirred waves of controversy

because of its frank treatment of homosexuality. ‘‘Not until that third

book,’’ Vidal has recalled, ‘‘did I begin to get bored with playing

safe.’’ Ever since, ‘‘playing safe’’ is a charge which has never been

leveled against Vidal, by himself or by anyone else. With his literary

career in a slump, he supported himself by writing television plays,

ﬁnding in that infant medium great success which he soon was able to

transpose to Broadway. This in turn led to screenwriting assignments,

and in due time Vidal was able to return, with mixed success, to novel

writing. His most notorious book was 1968’s story of transsexuality,

Myra Breckinridge, a personal favorite of the author’s. While penning

historical novels and essays, Vidal has also kept himself in the public

eye through appearances on TV interviews and talk shows, and even

an occasional acting stint on ﬁlm. In his TV appearances, Vidal’s

gadﬂy manner and contentious political views have entertained and,

some would say, enlightened the public in a forum denied to most

other scribblers. Vidal has even run for public ofﬁce and, though

never elected, was one of those unsuccessful candidates—Barry

Goldwater, Vidal’s political opposite, was another—whose views

have nonetheless had an inﬂuence upon the electorate.

The man who would later christen himself Gore Vidal was born

Eugene Luther Vidal at West Point, New York, on October 3, 1925. A

greater inﬂuence on his childhood than his parents, who soon di-

vorced, was the boy’s blind grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, Okla-

homa’s ﬁrst senator. Young Vidal read to his grandfather the Con-

gressional Record and constitutional history, a formative experience

that instilled political ambitions in the lad. As a young man, Vidal

decided to forgo Harvard in favor of the military, a decision he claims

never to have regretted. The army at least provided fodder for Vidal’s

ﬁrst novel and also his most successful teleplay, the satirical Visit to a

Small Planet, which concerns the misadventures of an alien from

outer space who wants to start a war because, he says, ‘‘it’s the one

thing you people down here do really well.’’ Planet made a successful

transition from TV to stage, as did Vidal’s trenchant melodrama about

rivalry between would-be presidential candidates at their party’s

convention, The Best Man. The latter play also made for a ﬁne ﬁlm

starring Henry Fonda, but Vidal was so displeased with the rewriting

and the miscasting of Jerry Lewis in the ﬁlm version of Planet that he

has disowned the movie. (Subsequently, Vidal would be equally

displeased with the ﬁlm version of Myra Breckinridge; he would also

sue to have his name removed from Bob Guccione’s infamous

production of Caligula). Vidal was responsible for the screenplay of

his friend Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly, Last Summer and

made some major, although uncredited, contributions to the script of

Ben-Hur. (To the continued annoyance and denials of Charlton

Heston, Vidal insists that he persuaded director William Wyler to

insert a homo-erotic subtext into the ﬁlm’s key relationship between

Judah Ben-Hur and his boyhood friend, Messala.)

Vidal, who once criticized the United States as ‘‘the land of the

dull and the home of the literal,’’ nevertheless always wanted to be its

president. He campaigned for representative in 1960 and senator in

1982, losing both battles but nevertheless winning many converts to

his somewhat extreme positions (such as his proposal to tax

church income).

Although he dabbled with science ﬁction in one of his novels

(Messiah, 1954), most of his latter-day books have been such histori-

cal novels as Julian (1964), Burr (1973), and Lincoln (1984). The

Smithsonian Institution (1998) manages to combine both the science

ﬁctional and the historical.

There was a time in Vidal’s own history when his public spats

with other literary ﬁgures, such as Truman Capote and William F.

Buckley, Jr., led to much-publicized lawsuits. In the case of his feud

with Norman Mailer, it even led to ﬂung drinks and ﬁsticuffs.

(Covering the 1968 Democratic Convention for ABC-TV, the unlike-

ly team of Vidal and Buckley ended up calling each other, respective-

ly, ‘‘crypto-Nazi’’ and ‘‘queer.’’) Vidal in his later years, however,

can hardly be said to have mellowed. ‘‘There is no warm loveable

person inside,’’ he proclaims, ‘‘beneath my cold exterior, once you

break the ice, you ﬁnd cold water.’’

—Preston Neal Jones

URTHER READING:

Parini, Jay, editor. Gore Vidal: Writer against the Grain. New York,

Columbia University Press, 1992.

Vidal, Gore. The Essential Gore Vidal. Edited by Fred Kaplan. New

York, Random House, 1999.

Vidal, Gore and Robert J. Stanton, editors. Views from a Window:

Conversations with Gore Vidal. Seacaucus, New Jersey, L. Stu-

art, 1980.

Video Games

When the basic ‘‘electronic tennis’’ game, Pong, ﬁrst appeared

in American bars in 1972 it created a sensation that has only since

been replicated by the 1990s Karaoke boom in Japan. In relative

terms, of course, Pong was as fun and innovative in the 1970s as any

video game now, but the basic principles of video gaming have

always, in any case, remained the same—score the points, beat the

enemy, come back for more. The term ‘‘video game’’ could only

really be applied when Atari and Nintendo introduced game consoles

into the home throughout the 1970s; the idea being that you would slot

your Pong cartridges into the console and play the games through

your television set—hence video rather than computer games. But the

term has come to cover the main aspect of the medium, playing sight-

and-sound games through any convenient screen.

In some sense, the arcade boom that began in 1978 took the

group appeal out of video gaming. School children were still taking

part in a mass fad, perhaps, but they were also cutting themselves off

from others, with the distinction that while Pong required a human

opponent, battling against pixellated aliens just pitched the player

VIDEO GAMES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

A boy playing the arcade video game Q-bert.

against the machine. Of course, after the release of George Lucas’s

blockbuster movie Star Wars in 1977, battling aliens became the rage

in the ﬁrst popular coin-operated machines, such as Space Invaders,

Asteroids, and Galaxians. Breakout may have introduced a puzzle

element and Pac Man offered a maze race, but video games have

essentially always been based on the same principle: ‘‘your’’ pixels

blasting, avoiding, or racing against ‘‘their’’ pixels. Technological

developments, however, have made the experience of playing these

games more visually and aurally realistic, to such an extent that you

will not notice that you are only rearranging pixels.

With the introduction of Donkey Kong in 1981, there was an

attempt to make a ‘‘story’’ as attractive as the ‘‘action.’’ Hence the

player now had a character to portray, in this case that of a boy

rescuing a princess from an ape monster, as opposed to the previous

standard of the player as ‘‘thing’’—a tennis racquet, a spaceship, or a

pac man. It is because of this sort of narrative appeal that Nintendo

was able dominate the console market throughout the 1980s. Their 8-

bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), released in 1983, took

away the market from the Atari 2600, even managing to compete with

the personal computer boom—in fact, it is estimated that, by 1990, a

third of American homes owned Nintendo consoles. Part of the

success of Nintendo in the 1980s was not only their 8-bit monopoly

but also the blanket marketing of their games. Again, part of the

‘‘humanizing’’ factor was to bring in a character as appealing as

Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald, hence the introduction of

Mario, the cute Italian-American plumber who would go on to save

the world in as many imaginative variations on the platform game

formula as possible. First appearing in the Mario Bros. coin-op in

1983, the NES Super Mario Bros. became the ‘‘greatest video game’’

of its generation in 1984, only to be surpassed by Super Mario

3 in 1988.

Following advances in video gaming is just a matter of tracing

developments in the game consoles themselves (bearing in mind that,

throughout the 1980s and 1990s, arcade machines and personal

computers were also advancing the cause). When Sega introduced

their 16-bit Mega Drive in 1989, Nintendo was caught off-guard in

the ‘‘next generation’’ of console wars. Sega began the 1990s with the

christening of a new hero, Sonic the Hedgehog, but Nintendo released

their own 16-bit machine, the Super NES in 1990 and was able to win

ground with the ‘‘greatest video game’’ of this next generation, Super

Mario World. Such were the advances in technology, however, that

the mid-1990s came to be characterized by the 32-bit wars, Nintendo

seemingly missing out in 1994 when Sega introduced their Saturn and

Sony entered the market with the Playstation. And it is the Playstation

which came to dominate the market in America, Japan, and Europe,

making games ‘‘trendy,’’ fun, violent, and often intelligent enough to

appeal to ‘‘children’’ of all ages, from three to 33.

For every quick-ﬁre arcade variant, the Playstation also man-

aged to follow the PC (Personal Computer) route into adventure

gaming; and altogether combining both speed and strategy with

‘‘ﬁlmic’’ production values. Between 1994 and 1998, titles like

Doom and Wipeout 2097 became instant classics, and for the growing

number of Playstation fans, the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy series

became ways of life. Although missing out on the 32-bit market,

Nintendo headed the next ‘‘next generation’’ war with their Nintendo

64 in 1996. With 64-bits to play with, Nintendo’s ﬂagship title, Super

Mario 64, took Mario out of the 2-dimensional platform world and

into a whole new 3-dimensional environment. That games were

becoming more like movies was demonstrated by one of the most

successful ﬁlm tie-ins ever, the intelligent and action-packed James

Bond spy simulation, Goldeneye (1997); and that Nintendo could

corner the same adult market as the Playstation was demonstrated by

the glorious prehistoric gore of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (1998).

Clearly, the basic generic patterns of video gaming have been

set—shoot-em-ups, sport, and simulations—but the presentation of

video games, sound, graphics, and game play has become nothing

short of spectacular. In 1998, Sega launched their Dreamscape, and in

1999 the Playstation 2 completes the 64-bit circuit. With the next 128-

bit cycle, however, players will want whole rooms full of equipment

in order to experience completely the sights, sounds, and total

immersive capacity of these games, the hardware ﬁnally expanding to

match the immense virtual horizons of the software itself.

—Stephen Keane

URTHER READING:

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern

Science Fiction. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1993.

Jones, Steven G. CyberSociety. Thousand Oaks, Sage, 1995.

VIDEOSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

Trushell, John. ‘‘Interactive Games and Other Fairy Tales: Or,

Player(s) in Search of Authority.’’ Foundation: The International

Review of Science Fiction. No.70, Summer 1997, 58-70.

Videos

By late 1987, over one-half of American households owned a

videocassette recorder (VCR). With unprecedented speed, the small

device had entered the home and taken up its place alongside the

television as the premiere electronic consumer item. As with many

other consumer products, videocassette recording technology had a

long development period, and one that dovetailed with the develop-

ment of other forms of media. Necessary innovations came in the ﬁrst

half of the twentieth century. Dr. Fritz Pﬂeumer received a 1928

German patent for the deposition of magnetic powders on paper

or plastic backing media. The German companies, Allegemeine

Elektrizitats Gelleschaft (AEG) and BASF, produced quantities of

magnetic tape between 1934 and 1944 exclusively for the German

radio broadcasting stations. In 1944, the American 3M corporation

began its own experiments with magnetic coatings, but it was not until

after World War II that John T. Mullin, a United States electronic spe-

cialist, went to Germany and returned home with four ‘‘Magnetophon’’

recorders. These audiotape recorders were scrutinized, re-wired with

parts from the United States, and ﬁnally demonstrated to the Institute

of Radio Engineers in 1946. Mullin joined the Ampex Electric

Corporation in 1948, which later that year introduced the ﬁrst

successful American audiotape recorder. Although other American

companies, including RCA, experimented with videotape recording

during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ampex, due largely to its

advanced research in audiotape recording, was able to develop the

ﬁrst feasible professional videotape recorder—the VR-1000, which

premiered in 1956, weighing 900 pounds and sporting a price tag of

$75,000 a unit.

The vast majority of these recorders were purchased by stations

and studios afﬁliated with one of the three major television broadcast-

ing companies—ABC, NBC, and CBS—who employed them in the

retransmission, delay, and temporary archiving of programming.

Technological innovations during the 1950s largely served the ends

of professional engineers and included enhancements in mobility,

advanced editing capability, and the addition of color recording. CBS

was the ﬁrst to broadcast from videotape, presenting Douglas Ed-

wards and News in 1956 using Ampex recorders. Quickly, the

technique diminished the need for ‘‘live’’ broadcasting. Stations

could now provide uniform ‘‘clock-times’’ for shows coast-to-coast,

functionally eliminating differences introduced by time zones and the

erratic adoption of Daylight Savings Time in some regions. Video-

tape recording also freed performers from the anxiety of ‘‘live’’

performances. Errors could be corrected and re-taped as in ﬁlm

production, and the possibility of the ‘‘re-run’’ was created. Record-

ing technology allowed the networks to concentrate on technical

quality and the consolidation of viewing markets. Little attention was

yet paid to the development of a viable consumer videotape recorder,

although videotape’s impact on television viewing was already

being felt.

The 1960s marked the beginning of ‘‘consumer’’ videotape

recording. The high cost of the Ampex VR-1000 provoked Japanese

manufacturing into developing a domestic alternative. Research had

begun at Sony as early as 1953, but no signiﬁcant gains were made

until the Japanese company Toshiba developed a helical-scanning

recording head in 1959. Helical-scanning technology, the basis of

today’s VCR, wound its tape around a spinning, drum-like recording

head, a novel method which avoided restrictions imposed by Ampex’s

numerous patents. In 1961, the Victor Company of Japan (JVC)

introduced an improved dual, helical-scan head. These innovations

allowed for an increased recording quality with a slower tape trans-

port, resulting in decreased tape use and cost savings. Yet, these early

units were inferior in image quality and unacceptable for broadcast use.

In 1959, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers

(SMPTE) adopted standards for the manufacture of videotape record-

ers, thus potentially allowing any manufacturer to enter the market-

place. The early 1960s also saw the use of transistorized electronic

components, resulting in more compact recorders and potential

portability. Nevertheless, the 1963 Nieman Marcus Christmas catalog

offered the gigantic $30,000 Ampex VR-1500 videotape recorder /

‘‘entertainment center.’’ In 1965, Sony introduced the helical-scan,

black-and-white, reel-to-reel, CV-2000 which used an extremely

compact 1/2’’ tape (as compared to the 2’’ tape of the older Ampex

VR-1000). Brieﬂy offered as a consumer model, marketers later

emphasized its sale to broadcast and industrial markets. By 1967,

Ampex claimed to have sold 500 recorders for ‘‘home-use,’’ and by

1968, a number of consumer machines were available in the $800 to

$4,000 price range. Most of these, however, such as Cartrivision,

failed to capture a signiﬁcant home market due to either high price or

technical shortcomings.

Signiﬁcant inroads were ﬁnally made in the 1970s when Sony

introduced the 3/4’’ tape U-Matic VCR to the American market in

1972. The development of the video-cassette served as a signiﬁcant

leap beyond older reel-to-reel tape formats and completely removed

the need for a skilled engineer/operator. Although consumers still

resisted the notion of a home videocassette recorder, broadcast

engineers began to utilize the Sony U-Matic for news reportage, an

area still dominated by ﬁlm recording. The 1968 Mexico City

Olympics games had been covered by at least one older-generation

Ampex videotape recorder, and in 1974, a U-Matic was used to

document Nixon’s historic trip to Moscow. Sony followed in 1975

with the 1/2’’ Betamax recorder/television combination ($2,300) and

the 1976 Betamax stand-alone model ($1,300), each capable of

recording one hour of programming. Whereas the U-Matic tape had

been the size of a large hardcover book, the Betamax cassette was

now that of a paperpack. Coupled with improvements in tape media

and recording method (Beta being a term in Japanese for a calligraphic

stroke so rich that completely covers the material below; in this case,

where the video signal completely saturates the tape), Betamax was

strongly posed to enter a market already cluttered with competitors.

The result was revolutionary.

Betamax launched its United States marketing program in fall of

1975. The pitch was simple: ‘‘any time is prime time.’’ This was a

‘‘time-shift machine,’’ one capable of recording a single program

while you watched another, and could begin a pre-set recording even

when the user was not at home. A total of 55,000 home VCRs were

sold by the end of 1976, 160,000 by the end of 1977, and over 400,000

by the close of 1978. According to a trade magazine poll in January

1977, 40 percent of Americans knew what a Betamax was. Yet,

according to a 1979 Nielsen poll, the total number of households in

the United States owning VCRs was only 475,000, a mere one-half of

one percent of the total homes owning televisions. Although other

polls placed the number at closer to 800,000, the situation was not yet

considered threatening by the majority of the commercial broadcast

VIDOR ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

executives. Sales of prerecorded videocassettes hovered at approxi-

mately one tape for every two VCRs. Sales of blank videocassettes

continued to climb sharply, prompting some in the industry to ask to

what use these tapes were being put.

In 1977, RCA had introduced the Video Home System (VHS)

VCR, capable of recording two hours of programming on its slightly

larger tape cassette. This increase in allowable recording time was

followed by a two-hour Betamax recorder in 1977. RCA responded

with a four-hour VHS in 1977, and again in 1979 with a six-hour

model. Stiff competition erupted between the two incompatible

formats although sales of prerecorded material continued to stagnate.

By the end of 1979, VHS had captured 55 percent of the VCR market,

a share which would only increase over the next seven years when

production of the Betamax recorder was discontinued. Although JVC

and other manufacturers rushed to augment their models with features

such as ‘‘stop-action’’ and ‘‘pause,’’ it was not until Sony’s introduc-

tion of the Betascan in 1979 that the VCR threatened to severely alter

the viewing patterns of American households. By allowing the viewer

of recorded broadcast material to ‘‘scan’’ across the tape while

simultaneously viewing it, Betascan users could easily skip commer-

cial advertisements. This feature was rapidly incorporated into JVC’s

VHS model released in 1979.

In 1984, a major Nielsen survey stated that 36 of the respondents

used the ‘‘stop’’ or ‘‘pause’’ feature of their VCR to delete commer-

cials from shows they where both watching and taping. Nearly half

said that they ‘‘frequently’’ used the ‘‘fast-forward’’ capability to

skip taped commercials. Debate raged over what this meant for the

future of commercial viewing. Some analysts adopted an almost

apocalyptic tone, saying that the VCR would mean the end of viable

commercial broadcasting. Others adopted the more modest stance

that while VCRs increased the difﬁculties of directing commercials at

speciﬁc target audiences (children, female homemakers, etc.), they

had potentially opened an entirely new group of viewers for their

programming. While television viewing did decrease on Friday and

Saturday evenings as viewers turned to other prerecorded materials or

shows taped earlier in the week, the overall time spent viewing

television increased from six hours and 10 minutes in 1977 to seven

hours and seven minutes in 1986.

The sales of prerecorded materials got off to a slow start. Andre

Blay founded the Video Club of America in 1977, offering a slim

catalog of 50 ﬁlms on video mostly licensed from Twentieth Century

Fox; none of the titles were more recent than 1973, and all had been

sold to television. Nevertheless, Blay’s Club was the ﬁrst serious

offering of prerecorded feature ﬁlms at a time when adult ﬁlms

comprised the vast majority of videocassettes publicly available.

Warner Home Video began releasing prerecorded videotapes of

Hollywood ﬁlms in 1980. Starting with a very modest 25 titles, this

number increased as consumer demand climbed. Warner Brothers,

like other ﬁlm producing companies, had originally expected that

consumers would purchase these recordings outright. Yet, much to

their chagrin, stores had sprouted up which offered to rent titles to

viewers. These ‘‘middlemen’’ were perceived as a potential threat,

much like television production companies had considered the VCR

itself. Copyright was, for them, the right to completely dominate and

control the marketing and distribution of their programming and

ﬁlms. MCA/Universal Studios and Walt Disney Production had

attempted to sue Sony beginning in 1975, just after the release of the

Betamax recorder in the United States. The case had wound its way

though the Federal court system until the Supreme Court decided in

January 1985 that ‘‘neither the consumers who tape television pro-

grams for their own use nor companies that make and sell video

recorders violate Federal copyright law.’’ In light of the ‘‘Betamax

case,’’ ﬁlm companies opted for the creation of licensing agreements

over expensive litigation which, in turn, paved the way for a wide-

spread increase in available titles.

Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post in 1985: ‘‘The Thing

of the Year: the videocassette, which in the past twelve months has

had a tremendous effect on American television viewing and Ameri-

can family life. We have gone from being a television nation to being

a video nation.... By 1955, you felt naked if you didn’t own a TV set.

By 1965, you felt a tad underdressed if you haven’t gone to color. In

1975, it began feeling a little nippy if you didn’t have cable TV. And

1985 was the year you felt positively indecent unless you had a

VCR.’’ In the 1980s, video made itself felt in other ways. The cable

station Music Television (MTV) was launched in August 1981 with

the appropriately titled ‘‘Video Killed the Radio Star’’ by The

Buggles. It soon became a market force in the music industry and a

serious creator of youth culture. Performers, once content with the

studio/radio/tour mode of production and promotion, now had to

consider visual elements often unrelated to the music itself. In 1983,

Sony introduced the Betamovie camera, the ﬁrst camcorder. Al-

though Sony had introduced the bulky ‘‘PortaPack’’ several years

earlier, the Betamovie was the ﬁrst truly portable video camera.

Largely due to the public’s penchant for creating documentary

‘‘home movies,’’ camcorder sales increased throughout the 1980s,

eventually displacing the traditional 8mm ﬁlm camera in that role.

Although never ubiquitous as the VCR, the video camera enjoyed a

higher proﬁle in the late 1980s and 1990s. Through television shows,

such as America’s Funniest Home Videos, and the increasing use of

‘‘amateur’’ footage in news broadcasts, the videotaped events be-

came common viewing. Their importance would perhaps become

most clear as the public witnessed the tapes of the Rodney King

beating and the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

—Vance Bell

URTHER READING:

Cubitt, Sean. Timeshift: On Video Culture. London/New York,

Routledge, 1991.

Frith, Simon, editor. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader.

London, Routledge, 1993.

Hall, Doug, and Sally Jo Fifer. Illuminating Video: An Essential

Guide to Video Art. New York, Aperture, 1990.

Lardner, James. Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the

Onslaught of the VCR. New York/London, W.W. Norton Compa-

ny, 1987.

Marlow, E., and E. Secunda. Shifting Time and Space: The Story of

the Videotape. New York, Praeger Publishers, 1991.

Vidor, King (1894-1982)

In a 40 year career, Texan-born pioneer ﬁlm director King Vidor

necessarily adapted to commercial considerations, but his personal

vision, and his concern with the problems of society and the individu-

als within it, resulted in two silent masterpieces (both his wives,

Florence Vidor and Eleanor Boardman, were leading silent stars) and

VIETNAMENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

a handful of signiﬁcant sound ﬁlms. He established his reputation

with a powerful anti-war statement, The Big Parade (1925), and

secured it with The Crowd (1928). This profoundly realistic examina-

tion of struggle and alienation in the big city revealed a virtuoso use of

the camera. Vidor’s eclectic tastes and wide interests informed the

watershed all-black musical Hallelujah (1929), the huge hit The

Champ (1931), and the Depression drama Our Daily Bread (1934).

Later work ranged from Stella Dallas (1937) and The Fountainhead

(1949), to Westerns Duel in the Sun (1947) and Man Without a Star

(1955) and the epic War and Peace (1956). A ﬁve-time Academy

nominee, he retired in 1959 and received an honorary Oscar in 1979 for

‘‘incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.’’

—Robyn Karney

URTHER READING:

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social

Conscience in the Silent Era. London, Jonathan Cape, 1990.

Finler, Joel W. The Movie Directors Story. New York, Crescent

Books, 1986.

Vidor, King. On Filmmaking. New York, Daniel McKay Co., 1972.

———. A Tree is a Tree. New York, Longman’s, Green & Co.

Ltd., 1954.

Vietnam

American involvement in Vietnam began in the mid-1950s, as

the French, defeated on the battleﬁeld by the communist Viet Minh,

began to withdraw all military forces out of their former colony.

Fearing a vacuum that the communists might soon ﬁll, the United

States helped establish the Republic of Vietnam in the southern half

of the country. In the face of North Vietnam’s determination to unite

all of Vietnam under its control, a series of U.S. administrations

provided support to the South Vietnamese government—ﬁrst with

economic and military aid under President Dwight D. Eisenhower,

then military advisors under President John F. Kennedy, then combat

troops under President Lyndon Johnson, and ﬁnally by invading

Cambodia under President Richard Nixon.

As the commitment to Vietnam grew, so did protest at home.

Many Americans (often, but not always, college students) opposed

the war on moral grounds, frequently extending their opposition to the

Selective Service system whereby young men were ‘‘drafted’’ into

military service. Other (often older) Americans, motivated by patriot-

ism, anti-communism, or the conviction that ‘‘our leaders know

best,’’ supported the war effort and often disdained those who

protested. The nation was thus polarized as it had not been since the

Civil War a century earlier. Eventually, U.S. combat casualties and

the lack of signiﬁcant military progress eroded much of the support

for the war. President Richard Nixon gradually disengaged and

withdrew most American troops. Under his ‘‘Vietnamization’’ poli-

cy, all ﬁghting was gradually turned over to the South Vietnamese

army, which, Nixon said, was fully capable of achieving victory.

South Vietnam fell to the communists in April 1975.

Vietnam ﬁrst entered American popular culture through articu-

lation of what became known as the ‘‘domino theory.’’ At a press

conference in April 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower was asked by

a reporter to assess the importance of French Indochina for American

An American soldier in Vietnam.

national security. Eisenhower replied, ‘‘You have a row of dominos

set up, you knock over the ﬁrst one, and what will happen to the last

one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could

have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most

profound inﬂuences.’’

The image of falling dominos as a metaphor for the conse-

quences of a communist victory in Vietnam was a compelling one,

and many leaders who followed Eisenhower made use of it in policy

discussions. It was endorsed by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and

Nixon, as well as their surrogates and spokesmen. Scholars and

pundits debated the domino theory’s merits in print and in person, and

it even showed up in an episode of the popular late-1960s television

show, The Monkees: the boys have an arrangement of dominos set up

on a table. One of them says, ‘‘Look, Southeast Asia,’’ and pushes the

ﬁrst domino over, with predictable results for the others.

One of the earliest literary discussions of Vietnam also appeared

during Eisenhower’s time with William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s

1959 book The Ugly American. Less a novel than a collection of

loosely-related stories, it is a stinging indictment of U.S. diplomacy

throughout Asia—especially in the ﬁctional country of Sarkhan, a

thinly-disguised Vietnam. The book depicts U.S. diplomats through-

out the region as ignorant, incompetent political hacks, who spend

their time at embassy cocktail parties while the communist agents

VIETNAM ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

move among the people, speaking their language, respecting their

culture, and gaining their allegiance. Several scholars claim that The

Ugly American inspired President John F. Kennedy (who had read

and endorsed the book when it ﬁrst appeared) to create the Peace

Corps; others contend that reading it led Kennedy to transform a

small, neglected U.S. Army unit called the Special Forces into those

fabled champions of counterinsurgency, the Green Berets.

That elite commando force is also the subject of one of the few

ﬁctional works about Vietnam written while the U.S. was militarily

engaged there: Robin Moore’s The Green Berets (1965). Although

the book was published during the Johnson Administration, it was

Kennedy who gave Moore permission to accompany a Special Forces

‘‘A’’ team to Vietnam—provided the author ﬁrst went through

Special Forces training himself. The resulting book was hugely

popular, inspiring both a song and a motion picture.

The ﬁlm, John Wayne’s 1968 production The Green Berets, was

blatant propaganda on behalf of the war and against its critics. Wayne,

whose right-wing sympathies were well known, starred, directed, and

installed his own son as producer. The Pentagon, on President

Johnson’s orders, loaned Wayne immense amounts of military equip-

ment and charged him cut rates for its use. In return, the Defense

Department had approval rights on the script, and it was not dis-

pleased with the result. The ﬁlm gloriﬁes the Special Forces, viliﬁes

the Viet Cong, and portrays the war’s American opponents as

uninformed and misguided.

The music that accompanies the ﬁlm’s opening credits is a

choral version of Barry Sadler’s ‘‘The Ballad of the Green Berets.’’

Sadler, a Special Forces NCO, wrote the song while serving in

Vietnam and later saw his recording of it reach number one on the

singles chart.

In addition to using Wayne’s ﬁlm to inﬂuence public opinion on

the war, the Johnson Administration also produced a ﬁlm of its own.

Why Vietnam? was released in 1965 by the Defense Department and a

copy was made available for loan to any school, club, or civic

organization that was interested in screening it. The 40-minute

documentary was done in the melodramatic, end-of-the-world style

of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight ﬁlms that was effective in the 1940s.

But 1960s audiences often found the approach hokey. In addition, the

historical perspective that the ﬁlm gave of the reasons for U.S.

involvement in Vietnam was not only one-sided but at times simply

untrue—as when the ﬁlm’s narrator claimed that the planned 1954

national plebiscite that would have united Vietnam was sabotaged by

the communists in the North (South Vietnam was actually responsi-

ble, with U.S. concurrence).

A very different documentary was released in 1974, just as the

war was nearing its end. Hearts and Minds, directed by Peter Davis,

was an uncompromising indictment of American involvement in

Vietnam. The winner of an Academy Award for Best Feature-length

Documentary, the ﬁlm uses juxtaposition—for example, Nixon justi-

fying his ‘‘Christmas bombing’’ of 1972 followed by footage of a

Hanoi hospital destroyed in that bombing—and interviews with

Vietnamese peasants to show the devastating damage that the United

States inﬂicted on Vietnam.

News coverage, especially on television, was of vital concern to

the several U.S. administrations that waged war in Vietnam. It was

believed, not without reason, that the focus and tone of the news might

well have an effect on public support for the war. Consequently, both

civilian and military ofﬁcials tried to inﬂuence the coverage—they

emphasized some aspects of the war, downplayed others, withheld

some and lied about more than a few. These efforts at news manage-

ment were fairly successful for several years; many journalists, both

print and electronic, produced stories that were generally favorable to

both the American goals in Vietnam and the ways those goals

were pursued.

The Tet Offensive changed everything. At 3:00 a.m. Saigon time

on January 30, 1968, the traditional Lunar New Year truce was broken

when Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army units simultaneously

attacked targets all across South Vietnam. A number of images

arising out of this campaign found their way into America’s living

rooms, and they did not help the Johnson Administration’s cause:

dead Viet Cong on the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, the

walls of which had never before been breached; the head of the South

Vietnamese National Police, General Loan, drawing his pistol and

shooting a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head; a U.S. army Major,

explaining the devastation of a hamlet called Ben Tre by saying, ‘‘We

had to destroy the village in order to save it.’’

Tet marked a turning point in media coverage of the war.

Reporters, who had listened for months to the claims of American

ofﬁcials that the Viet Cong were defunct, now grew cynical in the

face of clear evidence to the contrary. News stories began to be more

critical of the ‘‘ofﬁcial’’ version of events. CBS News anchorman

Walter Cronkite, who polls showed to be the must trusted man in

America, said on television that he thought the war to be hopeless-

ly stalemated and that the United States should negotiate with

the communists.

Meanwhile, U.S. antiwar protesters were receiving media cover-

age, too; much of it was unsympathetic. News reports tended to focus

on the most dramatic or shocking aspects of antiwar activity—if 500

people demonstrated peacefully and three others burned a U.S. ﬂag,

then the latter group would almost certainly be featured on the

evening news. Further, as antiwar protests became more common,

many journalists declined even to cover them, unless they involved

large numbers of people or were likely to turn violent. Astute

demonstrators thus learned how to draw media attention through

destructive or shocking behavior—but the very acts that brought

news coverage also alienated most of the middle-class audience

watching or reading at home.

Although many popular musicians of the period appeared oblivi-

ous to the war, there were some who became known for their antiwar

material: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Barbara Dane were

prominent among these. Other individuals and bands recorded a song

or two critical of the war effort, including Country Joe McDonald’s

‘‘Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,’’ The Animals’ ‘‘We Gotta Get

Out of This Place,’’ Buffalo Springﬁeld’s ‘‘For What It’s Worth,’’

The Association’s ‘‘Requiem for the Masses,’’ Barry McGuire’s

‘‘Eve of Destruction,’’ The Doors’ ‘‘Unknown Soldier,’’ and Crosby,

Stills, Nash and Young’s ‘‘Ohio.’’

But there was reaction against protest, even on the radio. Some

country artists, in particular, whose fan base tended to be more

conservative than that of rock musicians, recorded songs that were

supportive of the war, or critical of protesters, or both. These included

two Merle Haggard records, ‘‘Okie from Muskogee’’ and ‘‘The

Fightin’ Side of Me,’’ as well as Maybelle Carter’s ‘‘I Told Them

What You’re Fightin’ For,’’ Johnny Wright’s ‘‘Hello, Vietnam,’’ and

Dave Dudley’s ‘‘Vietnam Blues.’’

Although the war’s end in 1975 also brought a halt to the musical

battle being waged over the airwaves, most other aspects of American

popular culture continued to ﬁnd the Vietnam conﬂict a worthy

subject. One of these manifestations involved memoirs: a number of