Jacob Lawrence, "War No. 8," 1947
Jacob Lawrence, War No. 8: Beachhead (1947)
Can a Game Be Literature?

Mark's Pages

September 16, 2004:

Reversals.

Freud defines the principle of negation as one of the simplest mechanisms of the unconscious. Simply flip something. The emotional pole: sad becomes happy. The answer: yes becomes no. The actors: executioner becomes executed.

H. Bruce Franklin has a very strong discussion of these reversals in his interesting Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. He documents the way the famous image of General Loan's execution of an NLF prisoner is transformed over time into fictional images of American prisoners executed in The Deer Hunter and elsewhere. It's not us, it's them.