By Mike Budd
The seven-part television series The Sympathizer premiered on HBO on April 14, 2024 to good reviews, with The New York Times praising it as “not just a good story,” but also “a sharp piece of film criticism” for its satire of Vietnam war movies and Hollywood (and U.S.) racism. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen and created by co-showrunners Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave) and Don McKellar, the series, like its source novel, centers on a Captain in South Vietnamese military intelligence who is also a spy for the Communist North Vietnamese. Framed by the Captain’s repeatedly revised voice-over narration written in a postwar North Vietnamese reeducation camp, the story follows mostly Vietnamese characters through the fall of Saigon in 1975 to their resettlement as refugees in Los Angeles in the late seventies, the making of a Hollywood film about the war, and the Captain’s return to Southeast Asia and the narrative’s frame.
Visual essay of the TV series,
part one
1-2. First image, The Sympathizer. During a period when U.S. audiences are becoming more accepting of subtitles and languages other than English, the main title of The Sympathizer appears first in Vietnamese, then translated into English. The title sequence includes images of film sprocket holes and mechanical title change and sounds of a film projector, introducing conventionally self-reflexive stylistic elements to denote the historical period and genre. Even before the narrative begins, the discursive perspective has shifted away from the expected, conventional Hollywood “Vietnam War” story to a Vietnamese-centered story about the “American War” and its devastating consequences for Vietnamese, including death and the cataclysm of refugee status.
3. After an explanatory intertitle, this title introduces the theme of memory:
“All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” —quotation from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 memoir, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, p. 4.
4. The Captain is writing and rewriting his confession in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp at the beginning of Episode 1, “Death Wish,” where the constant command from his guards is, “Start again.” This leads to repeated revisions in his voiceover narration, which is also a forced confession by someone who believes himself to be a good Communist. This forced confession, constantly rewritten, produces complications and potential unreliability, with conflicts between the Captain’s narration and what viewers experience within the narrative or already know. By the end of the series, viewers may better understand the traumas and deeply conflicted inner life of the Captain, and perhaps sympathize along with the Sympathizer. Compositions and camera movement emphasize the order and rigidity of camp life for prisoners.
5. An establishing shot of reeducation camp in Episode 7, “Endings are hard, aren’t they?” provides crucial context for rereading the Captain’s voiceover narration that has helped to unify the whole series. This and other later episodes may invite or force us to retrospectively rethink our initial assumptions about the conditions under which the Captain’s voiceover narration was produced, since most viewers usually accept the veracity of reliable characters as narrators. Stylized, spectacular settings include long stairs to Commissar’s quarters, from which he addresses prisoners, “educatees.” Brutal, oppressive settings and actions are shown, including torture, resulting from wartime and postwar conditions among the Communist North Vietnamese. These compare to the torture scene early in Episode 1 where the cynical South Vietnamese intelligence officers seem to enjoy brutalizing the Communist spy.
Visual essay of TV series, continued
6. Early in Episode 1, the Captain waits for Claude, his CIA handler in front of a Saigon movie theater. In contrast with the spartan wartime conditions of the Communist reeducation camp, the South Vietnamese military, backed by the rich capitalist Americans, sets up its torture chamber in a working movie theater, one of the worldwide sites of consumer distraction and spectacle of capitalist prosperity. But the scene inside the theater will show the real life brutality that makes those capitalist spectacles possible.
In this elaborate opening shot, the Captain is shown, then hidden here, then revealed again as the huge publicity image of Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974) is lifted up over the theater marquee. Within this complex spectacle of camera movement and the Hollywood publicity apparatus, director Park Chan-wook compresses the power relations of the U.S. military-industrial-entertainment complex, the “soft power” complementing the “hard (military) power” of the war machine. The relative size and power of the Captain (and the Vietnamese generally) in relation to the size of the U.S. global entertainment machine is quickly and visually condensed in this shot. But while we Americans could easily control our puppets the South Vietnamese, most Vietnamese supported the Communist government out of commitment or necessity, resulting in a world historical defeat for the U.S. military empire.
Director Park Chan-wook, from a well-educated South Korean family, became a film writer-director after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Vertigo, which immerses us in the post-traumatic reconstruction of a new love object, played by Kim Novak, by an obsessive detective played by James Stewart. Although his film style is very different, like Hitchcock Park repeatedly draws his audience into identification with a central character through familiar conventions, then challenges and complicates that easy identification in multiple ways.
The 1974 Hollywood film, Death Wish, starred Charles Bronson as a quiet New York architect who became an urban vigilante after his wife was murdered and his daughter raped. At an historical moment when right wing U.S. demagogues were amplifying urban crime into a reactionary political issue, and the Watergate scandal and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam were undermining faith in political leaders and public authority, the story of a model citizen turned vigilante became a big hit in the United States and other countries. For conservatives in the U.S. and elsewhere, many of whom believe strongly in family or tribal vengeance over law, the courts, and imperfect public justice, a vigilante is an ideal figure for their political narrative. The Charles Bronson character in Death Wish is a model citizen, an easy identification figure for audiences. His transformation into a violent vigilante through the logic of emotional justice in many Hollywood films likely moves that character and identification into a new narrative, genre and political context, something closer to fascism, with the good white tribe surrounded and threatened by nonwhite and other savages. As other contemporary films like Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981) and the Dirty Harry series (1971-1988) proposed, in Death Wish urban United States resembles the wild west, with criminals mostly black and brown (contrary to real life), and upstanding police and (white) citizens fully justified in becoming vigilantes, taking the law into their own hands and using frontier justice from wish-fulfillment Hollywood westerns to protect their property and families.
This model of violent vigilantism, traumatized masculinity, and white settler colonialism could also include the rehabilitation of the biggest contemporary embarrassment of the U.S. empire, the traumatized Vietnam veteran, whom conservatives blamed for the U.S. defeat along with “traitors” among U.S. leaders. Death Wish was a key part of the ideological transformation of the U.S. combat veteran of the Vietnam war from a perpetrator of violence and atrocity into an imaginary victim, summarized in the last part of my essay, during the seventies and eighties. The innocent white urban dweller and the innocent white U.S. draftee in Vietnam made vigilantism and war crimes more consumable by commercial culture.
7. Follows image 6 by a second or so, with moving objects and figures in the moving frame. As the Captain corrects himself, revising his confessional narration, the huge image of feminine lips (Emmanuelle, 1974) is carried away horizontally while the even bigger image of the white vigilante in Death Wish is lifted into place above the theater marquee, revealing the Captain waiting for Claude. The viewer as well as the character of the Captain may be distracted by the advertising spectacle and movement transitioning from the Hollywood iconography of sex, Kiss Kiss, to Hollywood violence, Bang Bang, summed up in Pauline Kael’s influential 1968 collection of film reviews, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the 2005 Hollywood film of the same title, starring Robert Downey Jr..
Is the visual movement of the advertising images confirming the Captain’s voiceover or suggesting that the visual “evidence” is also unreliable, or both?
8. A moment later, Claude arrives from off-screen, for the first of several times surprising the Captain in another visual compression of power relations, the colonizer constantly using superior resources to outmaneuver the colonized.
The other Americans and colonizers, all looking alike because played by Robert Downey, Jr., also surprise the Captain with their power over him and other Vietnamese. The five characters are played by the same actor not only because the character of the Captain finds it difficult to distinguish among them for cultural reasons, but because in terms of their social power, they are part of the same colonizing system, virtually identical.
9. The scene moves from in front of the movie theater to inside. Visual and sound elements present the Captain’s subjective sympathies constantly conflicting with his duties as a Communist spy, surrounded by threatening figures. The Captain and Claude look offscreen left at real torture in a theater where fantasy violence and torture are usually institutionalized and habituated for entertainment and profit. The suggestion of sexual violence with the coke bottle against the Captain’s comrade is later confirmed when the Captain, under torture in the reeducation camp in the last episode, 7, changes his story. This change among others suggests that the film’s visual presentation of the Captain’s account of events, not just his voiceover narration, is sometimes unreliable. He has denied or repressed his experiences. Why? What is the effect of this unreliability on how you understand this film?
Characteristically casual and cynical, Claude implicitly challenges the Captain for the authority of omniscient narrator. The Captain is pained and sympathetic because he knows the Vietnamese woman captured is, like him, a Communist spy and comrade. He was her contact and she won’t reveal him. This shot seems to initiate a conventional shot reverse shot or glance between characters, here the Captain and the other spy, with their eyelines roughly matching. The camera or frame thus functions as an invisible guest, privileged to see and hear what seems to be happening without our presence, yet is entirely organized for our viewing pleasure. This continuity system of classical cinema encourages viewers to grant the fictional narrative a believability and credibility as pleasurable, consumable entertainment. Art cinema like The Sympathizer partially questions this believability and the consumerist system it upholds but does not fundamentally subvert such consumerism.
10. In the reverse shot of the woman spy in long shot, she returns the gaze as a hateful gaze—at whom? It could be the Captain in silhouette, or Claude, one of the Captain’s bosses, spatially and politically associated. Her accusatory gaze appears to be aimed directly at us, the viewer and the invisible camera, not to the side, matching the eyeline of the Captain’s gaze. This editing construction modifies and perhaps disturbs the convention of the voyeuristic camera and viewer.
11. During the later part of this scene, the South Vietnamese General, the Captain’s other boss, in charge of the Secret Police, enters and takes his place looking over the Captain’s other shoulder, suggesting the parallel power relations of their constant domination and surveillance of him. Like Claude, he is callous and casual about the torture and its theatrical setting. From an insouciant position of imperial immunity, Claude can talk to the Captain as if grooming him to become an elite American. In contrast, the more provincial General, atop a local military hierarchy totally dependent on U.S. power, tells the Captain to pick up his dry cleaning and angrily reprimands the “crapulent Major,” busy with torture, for cutting durian, the regional fruit which, he loudly complains, fills the theater with the smell of shit. The contrast between the usually-aestheticized violence in Hollywood fare and the uglier violence actually happening in front of the big screen here is emphasized and made visceral by the similar contrast between the pleasant aromas of popcorn and food usually wafting through theaters selling fantasy and the smell of shit here.
12. After the conversation among the three observers of the Communist spy’s torture, she glares back accusingly at us and them in another, closer shot. It’s now clearer and more confrontational that she is glaring at the Captain, even though we learn in an accompanying scene that she is performing anger to fool her captors, and the Captain already knows this. Her image is large and powerful enough that her angry gaze may disturb the comfortable safety of our consumer distance as it disturbs the Captain’s.
This direct look at the camera somewhat disturbs the consumerist editing guideline that characters should never look back at us, never break the “fourth wall” of conventional live theater. It is occasionally used in commercial films for emphasis, spectacle and distraction, but seldom enough that it still has the power to startle when used carefully. In The Sympathizer it becomes a unifying motif, connecting disparate parts of the complicated series narrative through repetition of this technique in the representation of various events and situations. Through direct engagement with and performance of the fictional Captain’s subjective conflicts and by possible extension those of real viewers as well, the gaze and address of various characters directly to the camera and frame can develop accusatory, manipulative, confrontational and many other strong emotional connotations.
13. In the first episode, when the Captain is deep “in the shit,” torturing his Communist comrade, he recalls in voiceover,
“I tried to remember the last time I still felt beauty and hope, because what is it that makes this struggle worthy of enduring such sacrifice?”
In analogy with the speed of emotional association, thought and consciousness itself, his question is immediately answered with a simulated fast-motion rewind of his memory images to this tender scene with the Captain’s adopted family, including his blood brothers Man and Bon and Bon’s wife and child. For a small Asian country whose global image has been largely established as background for the generic action of the Hollywood culture industry, this television series and its Vietnamese characters are groundbreaking even in its conventional scenes like this one. This scene reinforces the humanity of characters who are usually other to U.S. and even world audiences, providing important motivation for the central character’s hope through all the suffering he will endure and cause as the Sympathizer.
14. Continuing the direct address to the audience in images 10 and 12, the direct look at the camera in this shot becomes threatening. Man is no longer just his intimate blood brother, but his military commander in life and death situations, and the direct address is a visual translation of Man’s commands. As so often in this series, the emotions evoked in this shot feel destructive of the hope evoked in the previous family scene, image 13.
Critical essay, part one
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer, 2015
Published to positive, even rapturous reviews, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel wove together multiple genres—sprawling historical drama, war story, spy intrigue, self-reflexive narrative and wild political satire. The novel’s precise style, its startling and complex blend of tones, memories, voices and genres characteristically featured intense irony, contradictions on contradictions and a lacerating humor. Focusing on the impossible place of the colonized subject, the novel constructed a long-overdue perspective switch in representations of Vietnamese (and Asian) others and U.S. subjects. Instead of the conventional racist and amnesiac U.S. narrative perspective, presenting Americans as central and Vietnamese as peripheral to a war that was fought in their country, Nguyen foregrounded Vietnamese characters and their complex subjectivities, starting his narrative at the end of the war and following them into the U.S. diaspora. The Captain’s divided loyalties, the centrality of his identification with and sympathy for both sides of his bitterly divided nation, and the contradictions of his fluidly recalled memories reduced narcissistic Americans to supporting characters. It placed the self-involvement of imperial Americans of a half century ago in satirical perspective, opening our inflated national self-image to ridicule.
The novel of The Sympathizer developed a strong following of loyal and influential readers and critics, attracting Hollywood’s interest. It wasn’t so much an inversion of the usual violent white male U.S.-centric perspective as a stinging satirical critique of that viewpoint, a thorough dismantling and tentative construction of a Vietnamese alternative. In this text, the subaltern speaks, the Asian Other creates, remembers and populates a story seemingly familiar but now uncanny, with Vietnamese characters’ subjectivities explored sympathetically while virtually all the American characters look alike. This focus is then carried over from novel to television series.
From Nguyen’s novel (2015)
to the television series (2024)
Born in Vietnam and raised in the U.S., a refugee from the American War along with his whole family, Viet Thanh Nguyen was a protestor at Berkeley during his student days, acquiring the passionate commitment to both politics and art that continues in his recent work. From his memoir, A Man of Two Faces:
“You leave UC Berkeley with four misdemeanors,
three diplomas, two arrests and an abiding
belief in solidarity, liberation, and the
power of the people and the
power of art.”
[Ed. note, in the original, text is to the right and first and second lines are combined.”]
Like so much of Nguyen’s style, this passage is complex and ambivalent. The second person pronoun “you” slightly distances the self of memoir from the “I” of autobiography, and the countdown from four to one alternates powerful political commitments with academic accomplishments, the culminating one severed in two, politics and art. The visual shortening of each successive line of text against the right margin emphasizes the part-whole relations in the sentence. Thus Nguyen brings into productive tension an intense left political commitment and an equally intense commitment to the individual political independence necessary to make art. This tension marks his reflexive representation of the central character and his memories, indeed the complex and fractured narration itself, in The Sympathizer as well as his related nonfiction writings and interviews.
Nguyen was a tenured professor of English at USC when the novel was published. During the next nine years, he has continued to publish both fiction (The Committed, 2021, a sequel to The Sympathizer) and nonfiction (Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, 2016 and A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, 2023), extending his readership and influence beyond the academy as a serious writer and public intellectual on the porous border between liberalism and the left.
Within the relatively narrow limits of approved public and political discourse in the United States, Nguyen has negotiated those lines in his fiction, nonfiction, public presentations and interviews, using his institutional freedom to test hegemonic boundaries. His fiction presents a kaleidoscope of voices constantly crossing those boundaries in both directions (both presenting and critiquing left culture and politics) while his nonfiction blends literary themes of memory, war, and identity with political issues of colonialism and imperialism. He appears in the New York Times but also in left venues like Democracy Now! where he talks about Gaza or anti-Asian hate or is paired with left writer Ariel Dorfman to talk about refugees. Elsewhere he is paired with left filmmaker Raoul Peck (I am not Your Negro, Lumumba). Although The Sympathizer and much of his work is about imperialism, he seldom uses the term. Imperialism seems to be one of those words and concepts which tacitly defines the borders of U.S. cultural and linguistic hegemony. If you use it too much and too seriously, it can mark you as a doctrinaire Marxist in U.S. liberal circles. Apparently sensitive to the limits of approved speech, in an interview Nguyen notes that Park Chan-wook, not him, mentioned imperialism in reference to The Sympathizer.
Within the difficult conditions imposed by Hollywood studios, much of the credit for the success of the television series of The Sympathizer must go to Viet Thanh Nguyen. He was able to negotiate productively with Hollywood studios by finding non-American collaborators like Canadian Don McKellar, who helped avoid the aging colonialist American conventions about the Vietnam war, especially the centrality of American experiences of the war. He developed clear and reasonable demands—the story had to center on mostly Vietnamese characters, played by Vietnamese actors, speaking Vietnamese where possible. These conditions could be met in part because Nguyen knew from the beginning of the adaptation process that he wanted South Korean Park Chan-Wook as director, and McKellar had previously worked with Park. Park’s Oldboy (2003) was a major influence on the novel of The Sympathizer, and Nguyen has also referenced Park’s The Handmaiden (2016). Park’s film style and Nguyen’s literary style are both marked by distinctive mixtures and breaks in tone and genre, including disturbing violence and “a pitch-dark, absurdist humor,” and they have mentioned the similar histories of their countries, both living under postwar U.S. imperialism.
Novel to series: commercial conditions
To adapt this challenging novel for a much bigger and less-informed audience, the producers and creators had to perform the usual capitalist compromises, negotiating the current limits of the Hollywood industry’s hyper-commercialism and corporate censorship. To do so in a market for streaming television likely past its peak profitability and becoming ever more risk averse, A24 Films and HBO were making a somewhat risky bet on an historical drama with lots of unknown Vietnamese actors often speaking Vietnamese—plus some hilarious and provocative political satire of U.S. imperialism. But they also hedged their bets by trimming some of the sharper edges of Nguyen’s satire and, more important, by casting major star Robert Downey Jr. in five different parts, showcasing his acting talents and representing different facets of U.S. global power.
Although the television series necessarily loses some of the wild and bitter satirical power of the less commercial novel, Park Chan-wook’s brilliant idea to cast Downey in five different parts helped attract a bankable star to the project while constructing two very different, perhaps overlapping interpretive frameworks for series audiences. A global Hollywood star attraction for the larger audience, one more likely to be looking for conventional entertainment, becomes simultaneously readable as something very different, less commercial and more politically critical, even culturally decolonizing—a startling Vietnamese gaze at Americans, in which a Vietnamese, not an American, has trouble differentiating racial Others, and it is now Americans who all look alike. Since these Americans (and one French priest), all played by Downey, represent different aspects of the U.S. imperial power structure and history, the commercial “stunt casting” of Downey in multiple roles can also constitute a critique of U.S. imperialism. The central commercial “gimmick” of the series is also key to a reading more critical of that commercialism. The most apposite comparison here is perhaps to Stanley Kubrick’s still-powerful 1964 Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, cited as an inspiration by Park himself, in which Peter Sellers played three different parts, multiple dimensions of American power.
Visual essay of the TV series,
part two
15. Robert Downey Jr. as Claude keeps showing up unexpectedly as the narrative mostly follows the Captain, these appearances constituting both a threat of constant surveillance within the story and an amusing opportunity for scene-stealing by the star. Here Claude appears as a “homosexual” with a “foofoo dog” to blend into the neighborhood.
16. Here Downey is right-wing Congressman Ned Godwin, introduced by the “crapulent Major” at an event in Los Angeles.
17. The establishing shot for a clever set-piece, a power scene in which the Captain meets all four representatives of different dimensions of the U.S. security establishment—CIA Agent Claude, Right Wing Politician Ned Godwin, Orientalist Professor Hammer and Big Hollywood Director Nicos Damianos, all played by Robert Downey Jr. This shot may be an homage to the power architecture in shots of the “war room” in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical Dr. Strangelove, likely influential on this series.
18. Congressman Godwin and Professor Hammer, both played by Downey, appear together in the same shot in a digital composite image in the Captain’s meeting with his American mentors and superiors. This now-routine “movie magic,” one of a range of similar digital techniques made possible by Hollywood’s technical-industrial complex, is seen by the industry’s capitalists as adding monetary (or exchange) value to the experience of film viewers. They reason that people will pay more for entertainment experiences that include lots of magical illusions (spectacle) along with various permutations and simulations of narrative “realism.” Thus seemingly realistic digital manipulation allows the U.S. entertainment industry to maintain an advantage in its managed global competition with other film and media industries in ways usefully compared to the international arms race among nations.
19. At the Captain’s meeting with the look-alike members of the U.S. security establishment, the CIA agent Claude occasionally intervenes to manage the competing interests expressed, especially the inflated ego of Damianos, “the Auteur.” This suggests how U.S. intelligence agencies coordinate and manage the foreign policy of both the U.S. government and multinational corporations.
20. Always seeking to dominate every scene and social encounter, the movie director Nicos Damianos makes a dramatic late entrance at the restaurant meeting. He’s in the business of turning real life experiences, including intense violence and trauma, into saleable, stereotypical pseudo-experiences. So when he meets someone different whom he wants to employ and control as “my Vietnamese guy,” he immediately demands status superiority. Asking the Captain if he knows “the (unspecified) movies,” he demands that the Captain immediately acknowledge his obvious fame and status. Expecting a fawning greeting and not getting it, Damianos must insult a potential employee by drawing attention to the Captain’s less-than-purely-Vietnamese looks. This portrayal of Damianos mixes some publicly-available lore about Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather I and II, Apocalypse Now) with popular imagery of self-important Hollywood directors, especially during the seventies. The title of this streaming chapter, “Good Little Asian,” names the film’s dissection of U.S. racism throughout.
21. The Hollywood recreation of a rural Vietnamese village for the production of The Hamlet immerses the Captain in the sights and sounds of his childhood, temporarily carrying away his political skepticism and prompting a reverie on the love of his mother, Que Linh, for him. In this short scene of deep and tender emotional connection, the standard shot-reverse shot editing structure matches their eyelines of mother and young son so they seem to be looking into each other’s eyes. But as in image 12, at the moment in the scene of greatest emotional immediacy, the editing structure changes to an even more intimate look by his mother, her look at the camera directly addressing us, real viewers. Through the fictional character, the Captain’s powerful memory image helps viewers construct the subjectivity of both characters. The direct address shows us how the Captain’s mother has raised him to be a sympathizer.
The series continually draws attention to its own devices and techniques, implicitly showing us how it’s constructed. But as with those other devices, the direct look at the camera arguably intensifies rather than challenges the consumerist narrative construction, encouraging viewers toward uncritical immersion and distraction, consistent with other experiences in consumer capitalist industries and societies.
22. However, immediately following and assaulting the Captain’s tender memory of his cherished Vietnamese childhood come scenes of the emotionally-exploitative orgy in the club room of what Claude calls “the quintessential American institution, the steak house, natural habitat of the most dangerous creature on earth, the white man in a suit and tie.” Then comes another of the Captain’s sympathetic memories. From behind a fast-food bag sporting a happy-face corporate logo, which the Captain had used to hide his gun, emerges the crapulent major’s face after the Captain’s bullet has torn it apart. The repressed returns as memory of trauma, but through the mediation of consumer culture.
As in the opening of the first episode (images 6 and 7), images of desensitized, commodified violence directly follow those of desensitized sex, but here the trivializing and brutal imagery has intensified and seems to attack the sensitive central hero’s most precious memories, perhaps implicating viewers as well. This repeated pattern of intense contradiction, irony and emotional disillusionment also characterizes the series as a whole. It’s also a pattern found, in different ways, in Nguyen’s source novel and Park’s films.
23. In the final chapter, under torture, the Captain’s memories and imaginings return mingled in an overwhelming rush of associations, their tone indicated by the chapter title, “Endings Are Hard, Aren’t They?” Within this mixed flood of images, the Captain’s biological father appears—a French Catholic priest played by, yes, Robert Downey, Jr. (his fifth role in the series, plus an occasional disguise). He offers the child a French cookie which the child loves but which the adult Captain will vomit up from their understandably “bad associations.” The priest addresses the child directly to the camera, followed by nearly identical shots of the four Americans also played by Downey, Jr. to clarify their similar dominating role in his life and in the historical life of the Vietnamese more generally. The priest has raped his mother as a colonialist act, part of the long history of the present.
Critical essay, part two
Changing cultural formations:
residual, dominant and emergent
Nguyen’s novel in 2015 and then the television series in 2024 appeared at a historical moment when the “Vietnam generation” of Americans was aging and declining, when fewer Americans were perhaps invested in the dominant militarist myths that had been ritually repeated, reinvented and undercut by their country’s invasion and defeat in Vietnam. Something different was happening. Those militarist myths no longer seemed contemporary. They were receding into memory, new myths about new wars revising collective memories. Hollywood auteur films of the seventies and eighties like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were not aging so well. They had helped to make visible the older, more explicit racism of films like John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), but now their implicit racism was becoming visible in an emergent, more diverse United States, their racism located in the overall perspective or imperial gaze of whiteness or American-ness rather than in the blatant racism of older stereotyped characters and plots.
Younger, more nonwhite audiences, while not necessarily politically progressive, were less responsive to the conventional American version of Vietnam or Asia, either in politics or in entertainment. As audiences and political actors in social formations gradually withdrew belief from such tropes, a whole dominant cultural formation, a set of hegemonic assumptions and memories about the meaning of the American war on Vietnam slowly became residual, began to lose its power to compel belief and provide reassuring entertainment. These liberal films, mostly made by boomers, could show individual or groups of Americans as racist, but their humanist orientation still constructed the war around individual evil or tragic actions rather than collectively inhumane, genocidal or imperialist ones. Just as establishment framing and news media coverage of My Lai and other massacres by U.S. troops largely followed the familiar story line of “a few bad apples,” virtually all U.S. fiction films and television also limited the horror of U.S. military actions with tropes of individual tragedy and distracting spectacle.
With Asians, women and nonwhites growing in public and consumer influence, other alternative conventions and narratives began to form, coalesce and combine into genres and different cultural formations, especially around gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. New social formations created the conditions for a new cultural formation and new meanings to emerge within a limited range. The new social and cultural formations aren’t necessarily more progressive or emancipatory than the old, but they are different, and the change makes room for liberatory possibilities.
Arriving in 2015, the novel The Sympathizer helped to coalesce a new, somewhat more cosmopolitan, less provincial cultural formation critical of the prevailing view of the “Vietnam war” as an American tragedy and other distractions from U.S. racism and imperialism. The conditions were emerging for direct confrontation with and satire of the worn-out fragments and ideological tropes of the Vietnam war film and its militaristic baggage. A few earlier films seemed to move in that direction, including Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Ben Stiller’s Vietnam war comedy Tropic Thunder (2008).
Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July in the eighties were followed by Heaven and Earth (1993), forming an informal Vietnam trilogy in which he seemed to follow to their limit the logic of the Hollywood war movie conventions he had inherited and used. Modifying those conventions in line with the recent Hollywood practice of constructing the director as auteur or author, Stone began in Platoon by confronting his young infantryman, the audience (and authorial) surrogate, with two sergeants embodying good and evil. Evil destroyed good in a tragic mode acceptable to American militarism as substitute for now-outdated celebratory Good War conventions or a more accurate history of American brutality unrepresentable within any commercial practices. In the second film of the trilogy, Born on the Fourth of July, it was Stone’s patriotic young American hero himself who was symbolically destroyed, shot and paralyzed in battle, tragically descending into a hell of physical disability, nightmarish veterans’ medical care and nihilism before being reborn as a national antiwar leader. Based on the true story of Ron Kovic, the film harnesses Stone’s intense style to a critique of U.S. warmaking unusual in Hollywood films.
The third film, Heaven and Earth, based on two memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese survivor of the war and refugee in the U.S., took the next logical leap by telling the story of the war and its aftermath from a mostly Vietnamese viewpoint, though with much attention to her traumatized American veteran husband in the later part of the film. Likely because it had no recognizable star in the central role, the film was unsuccessful commercially, but remains an honest attempt, within Hollywood conventions, to represent a Vietnamese woman’s life. Stone’s trilogy traced a path whose implications Stone himself could not adequately develop. A coherent critique of the U.S. role in the war would have to shift the perspective more fully away from Americans to Vietnamese and address U.S. imperialism in larger global perspective. In that way the trajectory of the trilogy looks forward to Nguyen’s novel and Park and McKellar’s television series, both of which have a much firmer grasp on the historical period and ways of representing complexity.
Conditions: history and the repressed
It’s not just in the realm of discursive and cultural formations that the novel and television series of The Sympathizer take their places. It’s in the way those discursive and cultural formations of meaning are formed by larger historical, material processes whose existence and memory can be repressed and disappeared, at least temporarily, for most people by powerful economic, military and geopolitical formations.
First, a brief reminder of the history of the American War on Vietnam, now so thoroughly distorted for most Americans by commercial and state propaganda.
The American War. The Vietnamese call it that because it came after hundreds of years of domination by the Chinese to the north and more than seventy years of French colonialism that ended in 1954 only to be replaced by a massive U.S. military invasion in support of the puppet South Vietnamese government that fell in 1975, two years after U.S. forces left the country. When I visited Vietnam decades after serving in the U.S. Army there, our travel guide responded this way to my questions about the Vietnamese view of the American war:
“The Chinese were here for a thousand years and we finally kicked them out. The French were here for a hundred years and we finally kicked them out. You were here for twenty years and we finally kicked you out.”
That sort of put things in a more useful perspective, a practical anti-imperialism. He was kind enough not to mention that while there’s a beautiful and moving memorial in Washington, D.C. to the more than fifty thousand U.S. soldiers killed in “the Vietnam War,” there’s no U.S. acknowledgement of the two to three million Vietnamese (and Laotians and Cambodians), most of them civilians, killed by the United States during the war. Or the many injured and maimed for life, born with birth defects due to Agent Orange and other poisons we sprayed over huge sections of Vietnam in a futile effort to deny cover to “the enemy.” Or the many postwar injuries and deaths, many to rural children, from unexploded bombs and other ordnance now nearly a half century old. Or….
But I digress. The point is the massive national amnesia and infantilization necessary to maintain the American global empire, the enormous but mostly futile repression of memory and experience by returning soldiers and much of the public, and the downward spiral of psychic and physical violence caused by endless U.S. wars compounding the effects on both perpetrators and victims. The repressed for both Vietnamese and Americans returns in a more liberatory and enlightening form in the novel of The Sympathizer, written by someone born in Vietnam who came to the U.S. as a refugee with his family.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: humanism and contradiction
Viet Thanh Nguyen has perhaps partially sublimated his anger at his adopted country with acknowledgement of his strong affection for it, including the commercial popular culture that suffuses The Sympathizer. The mixed anger and affinity help to produce the deeply conflicted viewpoint of his protagonist, The Captain, and continue in Nguyen’s more recent sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed (2021), and in the television series of The Sympathizer, which Nguyen influenced but did not write or direct. Nguyen sometimes talks publicly and sincerely about his own humanism in ways very similar to those of his protagonist. At the same time, he also confronts sincere humanism as a prevailing narrative and political stance, challenging his readers by presenting multiple incompatible viewpoints and memories, held sincerely, convincingly and often without hypocrisy:
“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
In his mentoring of the Captain in the fifth episode, “All for One,” Claude explains and performs the acid cynicism of power that eats away at human sincerity and solidarity, including the popular humanism of mainstream commercial films:
“Movies are important, right? Especially if made by a significant director. It’s imperative for us to keep an eye on these artist types. They need reassurance that they’re subversives, but we can’t allow them to flip all the way. Long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism, but without actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless. Take The Hamlet. Our guys, they slip up every once in a while. [Shifts into mock-heroic, Ned Godwin-esque speech-making.] But in the end, all it takes is one morally upstanding, heroic American soldier to straighten everything out. That’s the true strength of this country. [Reaction shot of Captain, credulous and sincere.] A country that lives and dies by its conscience. [Claude drops the heroic mode, giggles at his own performance, returns to casual, uncaring CIA persona.]”
There are no depths of cynicism and insincerity below which this confident insouciance of geopolitical power will not go. But despite the fallen, paranoid world in which the Captain lives and acts, tortures and murders, he never abandons his sincere humanism, perhaps embodying Nguyen’s hopes and expressed in the final scenes of the series.
Repressions of public memory
of the United States’ endless wars
At a more general level, we can understand the U.S. military, political, economic and ideological formations within which The Sympathizer, novel and television series, is produced and received by tracing those formations from the 1970s, when the novel and series are set, through the half century until the series appears in 2024. But that understanding reveals not a conscious connection between the United States and its war, but mostly a willed, institutionalized disconnection, a repression of public memory. Americans enjoy the imperial privilege of ignoring the devastating consequences of our actions in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. U.S. institutions and ideological formations mostly succeeded in repressing collective and public memory, absolving U.S. soldiers, and by extension our nation, of any responsibility for our invasion and brutalization of a whole country.
Adapted primarily from Nadia Abu El-Haj’s extraordinary 2022 book, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America (Verso), the brief history below sketches some of the conditions of reception for U.S. readers and audiences, the target audience for The Sympathizer. Against the endemic U.S. culture of narcissism, exemplified by the insouciant U.S. ignorance of most things foreign, The Sympathizer, novel and TV series, allied with other forces, seeks to strengthen an oppositional political-cultural formation more internationalist, left-liberal and anti-imperialist, reconstructing a collective historical memory.
The first moment in the history of U.S repression and forgetting of the war occurs in the early seventies, while the United States is still making war. By the beginning of the seventies more and more U.S. Vietnam veterans were telling their stories of disturbingly common atrocities they had participated in or witnessed to Veterans Administration and other psychiatrists and in vets’ own “rap groups.” In 1971 125 antiwar vets gathered to tell those stories in Detroit at the Winter Soldier event, and U.S. opposition to the war was peaking. Among the psychiatrists absorbing these stories of combat trauma, vengeance, war crimes and debilitating guilt, an increasing number understood those stories as true, not as psychotic fantasies, and some made tacit alliance with the antiwar movement, then increasingly fronted by vets themselves. Prominently including Robert J. Lifton, whose 1973 book Home from the War: Neither Victims nor Executioners became influential, these radical psychiatrists theorized a “post-Vietnam syndrome,” a condition of “moral injury” of U.S. soldiers who had perpetrated or witnessed murder or rape in Southeast Asia, violating their fundamental human sense of right and wrong.
But this radical critique of both conformist, individualist psychiatry and the U.S. war became only a marginal moment in the developing history of psychiatric and larger public constructions of the war. By 1980, five years after the end of the war, “post-Vietnam syndrome” was being medicalized out of existence, and the retrospective rewriting of Vietnam vets’ experiences was well underway to make those experiences less disturbing, more comforting. That year a relatively new concept, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), appeared in the new Third Edition of the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), along with psychiatry itself now less humanistic, increasingly physiological and empiricist. Influenced by the conservative political movement lifting up victims of crime and the feminist movement supporting women victims of rape and sexual assault, medical science increasingly understood PTSD in war through the lens of civilian trauma, and U.S. soldiers more conveniently as victims rather than perpetrators.
As conventional wisdom among both conservatives and liberals became more conformist and conservative from the late seventies on, white middle class Americans increasingly denied responsibility and lost interest, counseling that the war had been some mixture of a terrible human tragedy and a massive error of judgment by national leaders. And among conservatives, by the eighties in full triumphalist mode, rising reactionary voices, supported by some veterans, loudly asserted that the heroic U.S. military could have won the war if only unqualified, defeatist and traitorous civilian leaders had not held us back. Agreeably, psychiatry’s new orientation helped construct the popular media figure of the blameless but traumatized American soldier, commercially conventionalized to deny and substitute for the real historical trauma of widespread atrocities, neither universal nor unusual, by Americans against Vietnamese in Vietnam.
This heroic figure of fantasy is exemplified by the character of Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in the long-running multimedia franchise of that name, replacing the figure of John Wayne for a younger generation. Although the first of the five Rambo films is somewhat progressive, the second opens with John Rambo, when given the opportunity to return to Vietnam, replying, “Do we get to win this time?” He spoke for many Americans embittered about their country’s defeat and fantasizing about a successful new invasion and victory, indirectly referenced in the fictional South Vietnamese “invasion” led by the General in Episode Six, “The Oriental Mode of Destruction,” in The Sympathizer. The figure of the traumatized and violent American soldier, now a cliché, its ideological work largely done, appears satirically recontextualized in the figure of Ryan Glenn (David Duchovny) in the fourth episode, “Give Us Some Good Lines,” of The Sympathizer.
“Thank you for your service.”
After more than a century of a growing U.S. global empire, the post-9/11 War on Terror brought a new chapter in the hollowing out of American institutions. The failure and defeat of the U.S. military in Vietnam and the alienation of many Americans from our military contributed to the end of the draft in 1973. Now the “all-volunteer” military (facilitated by a continuing “economic draft” through structural poverty) is coming increasingly to resemble a separate military caste. In this castelike social structure,1% of the population do all the fighting around the world for the 99%, who overwhelmingly choose not to enlist or send their children into the military and who can mostly forget about their very lethal military even as their society becomes ever more militarized. In the 21st century United States, presumably traumatized soldiers and veterans thus have special authority and credibility in public life. The unhealed soldiers and vets have become iconic citizens because of their status as victims, what El-Haj calls “supercitizens,” since their assumed sacrifice requires deference from ordinary citizens who lack their special knowledge and experience. And “support the troops” must include pretending they are all heroes, inflating their ordinary human characteristics into the realm of imaginary Hollywood superheroes.
This deference toward soldiers and veterans takes the form of the statement, “Thank you for your service,” a ritualized expression of respect for the military caste when one meets a veteran, since ordinary citizens have now become mere civilians. A hypermilitarized society imagines itself to be the egalitarian and democratic society of its largely commercialized imagination, and thus it cannot recognize itself. “Thank you for your service” is a kind of band-aid on a huge, festering national wound, a pathetic way to forget or not see the piles of bodies and the damage still being done around the world. It’s a symptom of the unacknowledgeable gulf of caste that feels awkward, even hypocritical when said and heard between two Americans. It claims to respect the sacrifices and values of the 1% even as it’s clear that most of the 99% do not want to share in those sacrifices or even in many cases military values. This moment is socially unlike almost any other moment. It can feel both sincere and hypocritical, since many of those who say thank you don’t really value the military in the way that they profess, and mostly don’t want to know what violence is being done in their name. In a way, at least for Americans, it is the complacency and banality in this “thank you for your service” that The Sympathizer and its allies seek to satirize into obsolescence and transform through a new internationalism.
