NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben speaks with culture writer Daniel Chin about how the new HBO series The Sympathizer differs from other Hollywood depictions of the Vietnam War for NPR
Beth Dubber/HBO
Hollywood depictions have long helped inform America’s understanding of the Vietnam War, whether it’s portraying the traumatized war veterans from TheDeer Hunter playing out ugly jungle warfare in Platoon or documenting Captain Willard’s journey upriver to face Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
But there was usually one thing missing from these Vietnam War stories: the Vietnamese perspective.
For Vietnamese Americans, like author Viet Thanh Nguyen, the experience of seeing war movies like Apocalypse Now as a child led to him feeling confused about his own heritage, sharing in an interview with Fresh Air:
“I didn’t know who I was supposed to identify with — the Americans who were doing the killing, or the Vietnamese who were dying and not being able to speak?” Nguyen said.
Telling a different story
Nguyen did do something about it — his 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel was The Sympathizer, and centered on a Vietnamese double agent embedded in a South Vietnamese community in the U.S. while spying for the communist north.
But a novel, even a Pulitzer Prize-winning one, can only reach so many people, as Nguyen suggested in his Fresh Air interview saying:
“Hollywood produces $200 million, $500 million blockbuster epics that will totally destroy my book.”
Now, Nguyen’s novel has been adapted into a new HBO series, eponymously named with the book. Can this show change the tide of a singular narrative?
A new kind of representation
Daniel Chin is a staff writer for The Ringer and reviewed the show for the site. In that review, he says The Sympathizer confronts Hollywood’s history of the Vietnam War in an unprecedented way.
The show takes place soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and follows the protagonist, known only as “The Captain.”
Chin says that even centering a Vietnamese character sets the series apart. But the depths of his character build the series even further.
“He himself is a bundle of contradictions, where he is a North Vietnamese double agent and he is part of the communist movement,” Chin said in an interview with NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben.
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“But there’s this great line in the first episode where he confesses to his friend, a man, who is also communist, that he is fascinated and repulsed by America. And his friend tells him that that’s what it means to love America. And so we really get to see him kind of struggle with that inner turmoil as the show goes on.”
There are other touches that Chin says allow the show to subvert longstanding tropes in Vietnam War media, like having Robert Downey Jr. play four separate roles within the show.
“It’s kind of a funny commentary on how, again, how interchangeable Asian actors are in Hollywood, where it really doesn’t matter where they’re truly coming from as long as they’re Asian.”
Listen to the Podcast below
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, HOST:
The scene is breathtaking and terrifying.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNIDENTIFIED PERFORMANCE OF WAGNER’S “RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES”)
KURTZLEBEN: Wagner blares from the speakers of American-flown helicopters as they descend upon a village in Vietnam, raining down napalm and gunfire.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNIDENTIFIED PERFORMANCE OF WAGNER’S “RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES”)
KURTZLEBEN: With fire and smoke blazing around him, a swaggering lieutenant strolls through the aftermath, breathing in the carnage.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “APOCALYPSE NOW”)
ROBERT DUVALL: (As Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore) I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
KURTZLEBEN: It’s the iconic line delivered by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now.” But it’s his line soon after that might be more telling.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “APOCALYPSE NOW”)
DUVALL: (As Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore) Someday, this war’s going to end.
KURTZLEBEN: Officially, the Vietnam War ended in 1975, but Hollywood would continue to fight the war on screen. Still to come were the tortured war veterans in films like “The Deer Hunter” and the first “Rambo” movie.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “FIRST BLOOD”)
SYLVESTER STALLONE: (As Rambo) It wasn’t my war. You asked me. I didn’t ask you.
KURTZLEBEN: The ugly jungle warfare and brutality seen in films like “Casualties Of War” and “Platoon.”
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “PLATOON”)
KEVIN DILLON: (As Bunny) Do him, man. Do him.
CHARLIE SHEEN: (As Chris Taylor) What are you smiling at, huh? You want something to smile at, huh? You want something to smile at?
KURTZLEBEN: What united these films was a moral ambivalence about a war that has a dark and unresolved legacy, as one Vietnam vet reflected on in Ken Burns’ documentary about the conflict.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “THE VIETNAM WAR”)
KARL MARLANTES: It was so divisive, and it’s like living in a family with an alcoholic father. Shh, we don’t talk about that. Our country did that with Vietnam. It’s only been very recently that, you know, the baby boomers are finally starting to say, what happened? What happened?
KURTZLEBEN: But there was another thing these films all had in common. They all looked at the Vietnam War through an American lens. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen had this on his mind when he wrote his debut novel, “The Sympathizer.” He spoke on Fresh Air about first watching “Apocalypse Now” as a kid and feeling conflicted as a Vietnamese American about who to root for.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
VIET THANH NGUYEN: I didn’t know who I was supposed to identify with, the Americans who were doing the killing or the Vietnamese who were dying and not being able to speak. And that moment has never left me as the symbolic moment of my understanding that this was our place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective and that eventually, I would have to do something about that.
KURTZLEBEN: But a novel, even a Pulitzer Prize-winning one, can only reach so many people, as Nguyen later suggests.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
NGUYEN: Hollywood produces $200 million, $500 million blockbuster epics that will totally destroy my book.
KURTZLEBEN: So what happens when that book then becomes an HBO series? Consider this – Hollywood has written the narrative of the Vietnam War from an American perspective. Coming up, we talk about a show that seeks to challenge that perspective.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KURTZLEBEN: From NPR, I’m Danielle Kurtzleben.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KURTZLEBEN: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. Hollywood has helped inform America’s ideas of the Vietnam War, but there was usually one thing always missing from those stories, the Vietnamese perspective. HBO’s new series, “The Sympathizer, ” is the rare exception.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE SYMPATHIZER”)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We were all marching. We were on your side.
HOA XUANDE: (As The Captain) Really? And which side was that?
KURTZLEBEN: Based on the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer” centers on a Vietnamese double agent embedded in a South Vietnamese community in the U.S. but spying for the communist North. Daniel Chin is a staff writer for The Ringer and has watched the show. In an article for the site, he says “The Sympathizer” confronts Hollywood’s history of the Vietnam War. So we called him up to talk about it. Welcome.
DANIEL CHIN: Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. Well, so first, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that history that I mentioned. Those notable American films about the Vietnam War we just ticked through – how has Hollywood tended to approach that conflict?
CHIN: Yeah. So, I mean, really, the Vietnam War led to all of these post-war films that you’re mentioning, like “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon,” which really show the horrors of the war and the horrors of this war in particular but really only from an American perspective. So we see the terrible loss of life, the brutality of what happened in the Vietnam War, but it’s really focusing on just the pain and the sacrifice being made by American soldiers, for the most part. And, you know, really, we see a lot of the psychological toll that it takes on them and how it’s turned certain individuals into bloodthirsty monsters or sexual abusers. But it’s always limited to their perspective.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah, it seems complicated – right? – because it’s not depicted, like, you know, in so many World War II films, as an American triumph or anything. The war is depicted as monstrous and terrible, but Vietnamese people often really don’t get portrayed in these. When they are included, how are they portrayed or depicted?
CHIN: Quite often, the Vietnamese characters are the ones that are the ones being abused, or on the other side of that, they are the savages, the killers, and we see the brutality on that end. But really, they also just serve as kind of the silent extras in the background, where, you know, even if they have speaking lines, they’re not being translated or subtitled because, really, what they’re saying doesn’t matter in the scope of these films and the perspectives that they’re really interested in telling.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. Well, so let’s look at “The Sympathizer.” It takes place soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and it follows our protagonist, a guy known only as The Captain. And he’s a South Vietnamese soldier who’s secretly working for the communists. Now, this kind of protagonist, not only Vietnamese but also a communist, is pretty much nonexistent in Hollywood entertainment about Vietnam. I mean, I’ve certainly never seen it. What is so striking about The Captain to you?
CHIN: Yeah, I mean, he’s really just such an interesting protagonist in the way that he himself is a bundle of contradictions, where he is a North Vietnamese double agent, and he is part of the communist movement. But there’s this great line in the first episode where he confesses to his friend Man, who is also a communist. He confesses to him that he is fascinated and repulsed by America. And his friend tells him that that’s what it means to love America. And so we really get to see him kind of struggle with that inner turmoil as the show goes on.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s all about internal conflict. That seems, from what I’ve seen, to be the – such a main thread in this series. You know, the show is presented, I should say, within this frame story as a series of confessionals from The Captain to an as-yet-unknown captor. I say as yet because the whole series isn’t out yet. Daniel, what do some of these confessionals present about how the Vietnamese people thought about this war at the time that Hollywood just hasn’t addressed yet?
CHIN: Yeah, the framework itself is really interesting in that as the series goes on, you see just the conflict within the community itself and how they are the South Vietnamese, like, characters like The General who is fighting desperately to try to reclaim their homeland and return while the rest of this now Vietnamese American community is trying to adapt to living to America. Meanwhile, the double agent – he’s still trying to work with his friend Man and to support the North Vietnamese cause. And it just gets more and more complicated as the series goes on as he has to grapple with what side he’s really fighting for at this point and what he’s fighting for as the war is over.
KURTZLEBEN: You know, there’s one episode in particular I want to get at. It takes explicit aim at Hollywood’s treatment of the war. The Captain – again, our protagonist – he’s hired as a consultant on one of these big-budget epics being directed by a kind of arrogant, fanatical director who is played by Robert Downey Jr. Here’s a clip.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE SYMPATHIZER”)
XUANDE: (As The Captain) Why don’t we give our Vietnamese characters some lines? That way that can describe their suffering in just a couple of lines.
ROBERT DOWNEY JR: (As Niko Damianos) So predictable. Forgive me, but when you say that, I know you don’t understand cinema. Not a bit. I don’t want to hear people talking about their stuff. I want to feel it. You understand? It’s an emotive medium.
KURTZLEBEN: It’s clearly inspired by films like “Apocalypse Now.” And in writing the book, the author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, has talked about writing the sequence as his, quote, “revenge on Hollywood.” Well, now it’s being depicted by Hollywood. So I’m wondering, how successful do you think that revenge is on the screen here in this series?
CHIN: I think this episode works really well, and I think it’s definitely the most pointed satire across the entire season. And it’s so effective in that it’s really spoofing scenes and just the tropes that we see in movies like “Apocalypse Now.” Like, for example, there’s an early scene where there is an older woman who’s reaching into a basket, and it looks like the entire squad is about to fire on her, and that evokes a scene that happens in “Apocalypse Now,” when an entire boat is slaughtered by the American soldiers when she was really just going for a puppy. And it’s revealed that this is actually just a Chinese woman who’s yelling at them in Chinese. And to them, to the American filmmakers on the set here, it didn’t really matter, like, who she was.
KURTZLEBEN: Right.
CHIN: And it kind of speaks to the interchangeability of Asians in Hollywood’s perspective.
KURTZLEBEN: You know, I think, as I’ve said earlier in our conversation already, that overwhelmingly, these Vietnam War stories – they’re told from the American military perspective. But watching this show, I was thinking about an interview that I had seen with the author of “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen, where he pointed out that he didn’t really learn much about the Vietnam War in school. And I can say I know I didn’t, and I think a lot of American kids don’t. I think a lot of people get their education about the Vietnam War from popular culture. So I’m wondering, a series like this, how much of an impact do you think it will have on the broader cultural understanding of the war?
CHIN: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point. And, you know, Nguyen has called Hollywood as an industry the memory industry in that same way where so much of our, to your point, popular culture really is what’s driving our understanding of how events have happened. So when we have shows and novels like “The Sympathizer” that kind of pushes back on that and shows another perspective, it really just adds a lot more nuance to the conversation, and it allows it to really grow in, I think, really positive ways.
KURTZLEBEN: All right. Well, Daniel Chin is a staff writer for the culture site The Ringer. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
CHIN: Thanks again for having me on.
KURTZLEBEN: This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun. Thanks to our CONSIDER THIS+ listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. Learn more at plus.npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KURTZLEBEN: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Danielle Kurtzleben.
This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
