Sympathy for ‘The Sympathizer’

 The very opening titles of The Sympathizer on HBO tells us viewers that what in the United States we call the Vietnam War, in Vietnam, they call the American War. The deeper meaning of this statement is the importance of memory in national mythmaking. The quote isn’t actually from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen on which The Sympathizer is based, just an afterword in some editions, with a deeper self-descriptive irony than is readily apparent. The Captain, played by Hoa Xuande, claims to be a dialectical materialist, and the show presents him to us as intellectually superior to The General played by Toan Le on one side and the CIA agent Claude played by Robert Downey Jr. on the other side because he can correctly quote Lenin.

But they present him to us as being morally superior as well, because he sympathizes with every side of the war, despite not actually seeming to understand any of them, or even wanting to.

An A24 project, The Sympathizer shows remarkable similarity to the Civil War from Alex Garland earlier this year in terms of its deliberately obtuse relation to the idea that wars happen for reasons. The Sympathizer does, admittedly, have a big advantage to that project in that Park Chan-wook took charge of the story–another layered irony that’s a lot to unpack in and of itself. South Korea’s relationship to the Vietnam War is quite complex; on a per capita basis, the country actually contributed more to the Vietnamese War effort than the Americans did, because dictator Park Chung-hee lent the United States soldiers at a bargain rate. People barely discuss this aspect of the Vietnam War today, as it makes both the American and the South Korean governments look really bad.

Consequently, South Korea lacks the United States’ lost cause mythology about the war.

Park Chan-wook doesn’t demonstrate the slightest awareness of any of this complexity in his adaptation, although it’s not like they hired him for that reason anyway. Park Chan-wook makes cool, stylish action flicks about smart people trapped in absurd societies, which The Sympathizer certainly is. Well, sort of. As hard as Robert Downey Jr. mugs for the camera in four distinct flavors of the same white racist blowhard, there’s nothing especially absurd or incomprehensible in the United States in which The Captain finds himself trapped.

The people there have a high quality of life in large part because the global empire the United States government controls uses force, or the threat of force, to compel other countries to submit to our hegemony. The Vietnam War was one such expression of that, but since this obviously isn’t a very sympathetic way to frame the issue, people like auteur filmmaker Niko Damianos, make propaganda films like The Hamlet to provide a better argument.

Credit where it’s due, the HBO version of The Sympathizer does make the whole movie-within-a-story element a lot more coherent. Where the book version of The Hamlet rather confusedly mixed The Green Berets with Apocalypse Now, the screen version plays more like Platoon. Of course, I could write an entire other essay about why its grossly misleading to act as if these three movies have anything in common with each other aside from all dealing with the Vietnam War in some way…well, that’s kind of the issue here in general.

It’s not that anything The Sympathizer ever does really rises to the level of uniquely malicious lies, they’re just weird little misleading factoids. Like suggesting that Ivy League educated officers in the seventies commonly pretended to be part African-American, or that gay men in this same era were very civically responsible about cleaning up dog poop. Some stereotypes are just that timeless- in that we assume they must have been true fifty years ago just because they’re true today.

More timeless stereotypes, in the sense that they also appear in the very Vietnam War films The Sympathizer claims to be criticizing, deal with the framing device of how The Captain is writing a confession evaluating his performance as a spy. The Viet Cong who lord over The Captain in this camp are virtually indistinguishable from the vicious, murderous thugs the Viet Cong have always been portrayed as even in allegedly anti-war movies. What little chances these characters get to justify their actions in broad historical perspective are also nearly identical to how your typical American liberal might describe the war: The Viet Cong fought colonial oppression,  the Soviet Union manipulated them for its own ends, and perhaps they inevitably had to become the very same authoritarian oppressors they claimed to be fighting against because that was all they knew.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Vietnam’s experience and retrospective of the war is a lot more complex than that, if only because the war didn’t really end. The nascent Vietnamese state had to fight subsequent wars both with China and with Cambodia, not because the Viet Cong were a naturally bloodthirsty people, but because the political situation of Indochina was unstable for reasons that went far beyond the war itself. The Viet Cong themselves knew this, is why they infiltrated the South Vietnamese government less for spycraft like what The Captain engaged in but more to negotiate with civil servants for a smooth power transition. The Taliban, incidentally, reclaimed Afghanistan in 2021 so quickly in part by using the same playbook.

This is all fascinating and still relevant history that English language discourse has pushed aside for the sake of lost cause narratives. So it’s more than a little frustrating that despite claiming to be defying those narratives, The Sympathizer uses these tired, historical tropes anyway as it holds pretensions of subversive thought. To what purpose, though?

Well, the short answer is, because The Sympathizer isn’t really about Vietnamese people at all. It’s about Vietnamese immigrants, or Vietnamese-Americans, who are a completely different group of people with competing interests. The Sympathizer reminded me of Pachinko a bit in that way, another novel turned series which simply assumed that racist prejudice is the same everywhere, and all people who share that ethnicity are equally qualified to tell that story, since it’s the same story.

Indeed, The Captain’s credibility as our hero derives almost entirely from his multiple identities. Both Americans, and Vietnamese people, are racist to him as a mixed race person. He’s spent much time in both cultures, and we know he reads books. Therefore, he’s effectively an underacknowledged, underappreciated expert on all of these subjects.

Can you really call someone an expert on anything, though, if he can’t answer the simplest questions about what he even believes?  The Captain understands Robert Downey Jr.’s Robert Hammer, and the viewer by proxy, to be a racist academic snob because he believes orientalist cliches like how people in the East don’t value human life. The Sympathizer doesn’t even attempt to address the irony of the fact that as far as we can see from the text itself Robert Hammer is completely correct. Nearly every single Vietnamese character except for The Captain is extremely cavalier about human life, culminating in a doomed attempt to reinvade Vietnam.

However accidentally, this part of The Sympathizer spotlights many of the innate flaws of representationalist rhetoric. If a right-wing Vietnamese character agrees with Robert Downey Jr.’s Ned Godwin about Vietnamese politics, are they sympathetic and Ned Godwin wrong solely because of their respective skin colors? Is Niko Damianos’ movie bad because it promotes an imperialist agenda, or because he didn’t put enough effort into giving meaty leading roles to Vietnamese actors? The Sympathizer almost poses these questions, but in the end, takes the path of least resistance and simply assures us that even on our worst day, the kind of white person who would watch a show like this isn’t as racist as a Robert Downey Jr. character.