A Vietnam Memorial: Maya Lin's Simple Mesasge

After I watched Maya Lin, I had to write about it right away because I had so many different thoughts about the movie. I really liked the beginning scenes about the Vietnam War Memorial Wall, I was effortlessly captivated by everything I was watching. To know how strongly people opposed it, how it came about, who supported it, all of the background knowledge you don't get from just looking at pictures was information I found really interesting. For me, the first half of the movie was amazing, but the second half of the movie was more or less not as interesting. I think the transition of her work from the memorial to her later works were necessary in the documentary's progress through her work as an architect but had it been solely based on the Vietnam War Memorial I would've liked it a lot more. Not that I wasn't a fan of the latter half of the movie, I just felt disconnected because I hadn't been studying and researching civil rights, or women at Yale, we had been focused on the Vietnam War and reading about it and in turn becoming apart of its history with our progress through our class. I think it was with this connection with what the author had written, in this case what Maya Lin had designed, that I became enveloped in her cause. I could feel the pain and emotion as I looked at the wall and saw all the names on the screen. In its vastness is where the emotion was provoked, in its vastness and simplicity was where Maya Lin engraved the sacrifice of these countless people so it would forever be remembered that they fought for our country.
In many ways Maya Lin is an amazing rhetorician. On the surface her design is simple, but on a deeper level, its connection and message to the author is undoubtedly breathtaking. This message however, was not recognized by all audiences right away, i.e. those who opted to add a statue and flag, which I thought were completely unnecessary and like Maya Lin said took away from the memorial rather than add. In her design, it was so simple compared to the ones shown in the contest but it held so much power. I think this was due to the fact that she knew that those who would visit the memorial would be those who had family or friends who died in the war, so there was already an emotional attachment that the audience was coming with and need not be created by the piece itself. In this way, Maya Lin understood who this memorial was for and why it would work the way she designed it, she understood her audience. As we are reminded time and time again, rhetoric is very much based on your relationship with your audience and I think in this instance, Maya Lin nailed it. For a loved one to scroll through and look through a sea of Smiths would make them feel as though their loved one was just another Smith, but by chronologically placing the names their loved one had a place in history to call their. I think the simple placement of names was such a powerful symbol to use. Had she used sculptures or pictures, she could not have expressed the number of soldiers killed but by using names, she was able to solidify each and every sacrifice in memory forever; and because we know each name belong to a son, a father, a brother, or a friend, its emotional power is immense once we see how many names are on the wall.
I know I focused heavily on the subject matter of the Vietnam War Memorial Wall aspect of the movie, but I feel all of us would have generally geared towards this side of the movie because we have a connection with the Vietnam War. Not having a connection with the latter half of the movie indefinitely swayed my interest for the bad, as I became increasingly disinterested as time progressed and even became sleepy. Overall I believe the movie was more than just the memorial as it showed the strength and courage of Maya Lin's designs and how even without a voice, everyone could hear their message, but it was the Vietnam War Memorial that I connected the closest with and therefore was most attracted to.