Spectral Imaginings and National (Be)Longing in When the Tenth Month Comes and Spirits

Dang Nhat Minh’s When the Tenth Month Comes (1984) revolves around a woman who safeguards her husband-in-law’s family from the fact of her husband’s death during Viet Nam’s war with Cambodia. Shot in black and white, its expressive qualities are translated on-screen through the actors’ emotional gestures and facial expressions. The film invites spectators to experience alongside the female protagonist the processes of mourning that mark her character development and denouement within the narrative. On the other side of the spectrum, Spirits (2004) is a film made by Vietnamese American Victor Vu. Filled with horrifying images of female ghosts, this film employs well-known Vietnamese American actors from Southern California to play the major leads. In fact, Vu has made several films that deal with the experiences of Vietnamese Americans. Here, however, Vu changes the terrain entirely: he shoots his film in Santa Ana, California, yet sets his film in present-day Viet Nam within an abandoned haunted house. As I will argue, despite the setting, the imprint of a Vietnamese American sensibility limns the film’s frames both in terms of its production and themes. What unites the two films is the suturing function that the ghosts perform for the characters in the films, making the protagonists conscious of the atrocities of the recent past. The notion of a recent temporality is key and provides the basis for the films’ critiques; the ghosts are not hoary figures from long ago, but rather, they are reminders of the still-present horrors of the contemporary era. This essay interrogates the ideological effects and visual performances of the ghostly repressed as contemporary figurations of Vietnamese imperialism and patriarchy