missing
saigon
by Douglas Messerli
Peter McDowell (screenwriter and
director) Jimmy in Saigon / 2022
Peter McDowell was only 5 when his
eldest brother died in Viet Nam in 1972. Although his brother had served in the
military previously, he did not die as a Viet Nam war hero. In fact, Jimmy, who
began as a young war protester in college, was drafted, served in the War,
survived his horrific experiences, and returned to the family home in
Champaign, Illinois becoming a pacifist, a viewpoint that he had debated
embracing even before his number came up on the draft.
The family was delighted he had survived and had come back to them. As
Peter describes him, “He was sort of a hero to my brothers and sisters as a
kid. Because there were six of us, he
was kind of like an adjacent parent to the rest of the family.”
But something vague and unsettling drew Jimmy—as the family members
called him—back to the country which in terms of his military service he
couldn’t wait to leave. As Peter obliquely observes, “He really went back
because he loved the country. He loved the people in general, and he loved
specific people as well.” If nothing else, it was clear that Jimmy did not love
the US to which he returned and that he was missing something that he’d found
in Saigon.
He lived there as a civilian, writing only a few letters home before the
news came of his death. Something had happened that made his father even visit
Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in attempt to uncover the truth—without success.
Growing up, Peter sensed that something mysterious must have occurred since,
after his father’s death, his mother and older sisters didn’t want to talk
about it. Clearly, he guessed it might have something to do with drugs.
As the years passed, Peter, who now lives in Los Angeles working as an
independent documentary filmmaker, grew increasing curious about Jimmy,
particularly about why he returned to a country at war, evidently living in a
suburban area of the city that was not generally even visited by Westerners for
fear of being killed by the growing hatred of Americans. Jimmy had worked as a
reporter, translator, and various other jobs, but didn’t seem interested in
developing a full career. He claimed to have a Vietnamese girlfriend, whose
picture had been sent to the family, but little else was known about his
private life. All Peter could determine is that there was some sense of shame
connected with the beautiful young man he’d seen in family pictures.
Coming out to his family as a gay man, and being involved in music and
opera, Peter perhaps could not resist the sheer drama of it as he begin to
explore what the family did not at all want to confront. For over 10 years,
with travels to France, Viet Nam, and throughout the US, Peter McDowell slowly
tracked down the details that began with family photos, letters, and unspoken
clues that family members hadn’t been interested in following.
McDowell, for his part, is as often as
unforthcoming throughout the first third of the film as was his family. He is
obviously a patient and carefully probing man, certainly not quick to make some
of the conclusions that many of us watching this “mystery” are much quicker to
draw.
There is only one moment early on
when he suggests a sense of frustration about his family’s refusal to further
help in the full exploration of what happened to their son so many years ago.
Yet when he speaks to the mother and his
sisters, even a brother briefly who it is intimated may have his own serious
drug problems, they seem reasonable, well-adjusted Midwesterners, who despite
their basically conservative values seem to have dealt well with Peter’s
sexuality and even with many of what become increasingly apparent were Jimmy’s
quirks.
The mother, indeed, had her own
suspicions which she never shared until carefully probed by Peter. After his
death, the girl in the photo, Luyen, evidently wrote Jimmy’s mother, explaining
that she hardly knew Jimmy and was certainly not his girlfriend; but she added
that Jimmy was very close to her brother Dũng,
with whom he lived.
But even then Peter does not leap to
obvious suspicions, particularly since Jimmy and Dũng
are described only as very good friends.
But at least the plot has opened and in the fairest, most open-minded
manner possible, Peter moves forward with his explorations, discussing his
brother with a good friend in France who later inhabited the same area in which
Jimmy lived, helps look for traces of Dũng and
Luyen in the backstreets of the suburb, asking everyone he meets whether they
have ever seen the brother he shows in a picture with Dũng
on the beach.
Gradually he uncovers friends and family members who identify both men
and knew the sister, telling him that Dũng had died, heartbroken evidently
after Jimmy’s death, and Luyen, in another photo, had moved to the US.
Yet years pass before Peter is able to track down Luyen in Des Moines,
who reiterates the truth that she was not Jimmy’s close friend; it was her
brother.
But even then, after numerous
testimonies of how close the two men were, how everyone imagined them being a
couple in love, Peter still will not commit fully to the brother being gay.
Even though, after talking with a doctor who was there when Jimmy died in the
American hospital, he is told than Jimmy did not die of heroin as the medical
records read, but of a severe staph infection, Peter will not rule out heroin
as a cause since it appears Jimmy occasionally smoked it, as did numerous of
the US soldiers stationed in Viet Nam. Perhaps because of smoking it he was not
capable of realizing of how serious his infection was, postulates O’Dowell.
Jimmy’s extreme hesitancy to describe his relationship with Dũng as
being anything but that of friend is attributed to the times, particularly
given the attitude about homosexuality in Viet Nam during the 1970s.
I might certainly bow to that fact, but why Jimmy still felt that he
could not possibly discuss his sexuality with his family doesn’t entirely hold
water. I realized that at his death in 1972 I would have been 25, just a few
months older, and by that time my companion and I had been together for two
years already, revealing our sexuality openly, even to my own midwestern
somewhat conservative parents. It is as if Jimmy, having remained out of the US
for such a long period had not fully comprehended the changes that occurred
regarding being gay back home. But living in the closet in Viet Nam did not
mean that he necessarily had to remain there in his homeland, and surely
knowing that truth would have helped to relieve his parents’ confusion and
mistaken notions concerning what seemed to be his perverse reasons, attributed
in his own writing to “hedonism,” for his returning to the country where he
hated serving in the military.
Yet, of course, McDowell is well aware that everything in his film makes
quite apparent that Jimmy was gay and had returned to the country after falling
in love with the young Vietnamese jeep driver, perhaps 16-18 at the time of
their meeting. Perhaps in his very respect for the privacy his brother had
fought for, McDowell has been a bit too coy. One wonders whether he doesn’t
share in some of his family’s reticence to embrace the full truth. But,
obviously, no good documentarian rushes to assumptions. And there is no
question that someone who has devoted over 10 years searching for truth is not
obfuscating, but merely not making easy presumptions.
But we do make those assumptions, and feel some anger and hurt that such
a truly beautiful looking young man should not only have to suffer, as did so
many thousands of US young men, the terror and horrific experiences of that
meaningless war, but on top of all that had to hide the one thing that may have
helped to regain his sense of balance, his love and his sexual relationship
with Dũng
Eventually even Peter cannot resist offering up an animation at the very
end of the film, wherein the two young men squatting on that beach in Viet Nam,
stand, embrace, and walk together along the ocean shores.
Returning to Ho Chi Minh City, Peter attempts to see the city it has
become today and even is able to visit the very apartment in which his brother
lived, looking out over the city of so long ago.
I wished he had explored just of few of the other charms that his
brother Jimmy had written home about. Perhaps they have all also disappeared.
But it would be worth knowing what the war-time Saigon offered to Jimmy beyond
the boy he so deeply loved. But then perhaps we need read Graham Greene to
imagine that lost world of imperialist intrigue and confusion, wherein innocent
Americans just like Jimmy cause total chaos.
Los Angeles, October 26, 2002
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (October 2022).
