By Kai Curry
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
It has been called the end all be all of Vietnam War stories. The last story about the Vietnam War that needs to be told. Time and audience appreciation will tell, though, if this is the last time “The Sympathizer” is told. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel has been brought to life as an HBO Original Limited Series, which starts on April 14.
Words on the screen at the start tell you some of what you need to know.
“In America, it’s called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, it’s called the American War.” The “sympathizer,” who goes by “the Captain” (Hao Xuande), tells you the rest.
“All wars are fought twice.” Once on the battlefield. Once in memory. And that he is “cursed to see every issue from both sides.”
The Captain is a Communist agent whose mission, handed down by his blood brother, Man (Duy Nguyễn), has been to infiltrate the Americans and the American-supported South Vietnamese military to the point where he is one of them. He’s done his job so well that it’s hard for him to be the good Communist he’s supposed to be, just as it’s hard for him to be 100% American or non-Communist. When he has success convincing his boss, “the General” (Toan Le), that he’s on his side, he feels bad. When something goes wrong for the General, he also feels bad.
For three years, he’s been doing his job well, which he partly attributes to the fact that he is already, by birth, “half and half” (his father was a [very unethical] French Catholic priest). Now, as Saigon falls, the Captain wants to stay in Vietnam to reap the harvest that the Communists have brought forth. Instead, Man tells him that he will serve the cause better if he accompanies the General to the United States, and keeps an eye on the General’s intention to take back their country. Along the way, the Captain, who is supposed to not care about anyone who isn’t Communist, does care about his other blood brother, Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), and does like American culture. In other words, he goes a long way towards his own destruction when at last, or at first (as we see it in the beginning of the show), he is called upon by the victorious Communists in Vietnam to write his confession. But wait. I worked for you guys! Convince us.
“The Sympathizer,” show and book, is a series of efforts by the Captain to write this confession. Time and time again, his captors, supposedly his brothers-in-arms, send him back to the drawing board. They are not convinced. He doesn’t use enough rhetoric. He seems too, you got it, sympathetic. He doesn’t step forward when he should have (such as to save a Communist agent), and he does step forward when he shouldn’t have (such as to save Bon, not a Communist). You will question, how is that fair? If he helps an agent, his cover is blown. If he doesn’t help the people he’s supposed to be allied with, again, his cover is blown. But, as the story progresses, we get a sense that there really is something divided in the Captain. And people know it.
The series is uncomfortably exaggerated in nearly all of its characters. If we think of it as “reality,” then the amount of caricature, especially of Americans (white people), is disturbing. It seems it could have no result but to fuel an unproductive hatred in the name of bringing to light truthful and painful contradictions and tragedies of the War. If we look at it as a dream world concocted by the Captain as he writes his confession, the effect is different. We can’t know which it is until we watch the whole series. There is a hint it’s meant to be an exaggeration—as in the Captain purposefully gives his interrogators what they want, the degenerate westerner—in the fact that every single major white/American player in the Captain’s life is acted by the same person—Robert Downey, Jr. (in his continued efforts to make us all forget he was Ironman).
That’s pretty surreal and weird. When it first happened, I could tell from a mile away that the person now playing the Department Chair who gives the Captain a job back in the U.S. is the same person who played the American agent and torture expert, “Claude,” the Captain’s primary mentor. Downey has a really distinctive walk. He also plays the American director making a movie about the War. All three are callous. All three are racist. Although Claude was the least, in the book, just doing his job, you could say, in the series he is over-the-top disgusting during a torture scene of a Communist agent—using sexual terms that the original Claude did not use. Similarly, the Department Chair, who is, yes, a rabid orientalist before we all decided that wasn’t a good thing to be, has his entire office kitted out like a Japanese restaurant, forces his secretary to dress in a kimono, and has wild Japanese-themed parties. To make him even more “degenerate,” he has an effete flair to his gestures, not to mention undressing right in front of the Captain, with his crotch directly in his face, while smacking his big, overindulgent belly. Yikes.
If you take these roles at face value, it’s unsettling. If you take them as purposeful exaggerations by the Captain—as part of his confession—wherein he is attempting to convince his captors how much he hates America, it falls into place. Of course, there is truth in all stereotypes and some caricatures. These people existed (exist), yet I was just a bit thrown off by how much less balanced the show was compared to the book. The book gives you that sense of the sympathizer who sits on both sides of the fence. The show makes it a bit more lopsided. Also, the actor who plays the Captain is a lot more expressive than I imagined the Captain would be in my head. I thought of him as able to conceal his emotions. This guy has his feelings written all over his face, to the point that I have no idea how he stays undercover. Some of his actions are super obvious as well, like ducking into the General’s office right after he asked the General’s secretary, “Hey, do you know where he keeps that top secret list?” Ummm. I figured the Captain was more stealth than that. Internally in turmoil, yes, but not externally.
Sometimes, it feels like the creators of the series think that we, the audience, are kind of dumb, and we need these things spelled out for us. But that, too, is something that lessens if you think of it all as a made up lie by the Captain who just wants to stop writing his confession. Will he succeed? Will he finally get to go home and be a part of building a new Vietnam? Will he ever be whole? I can’t guarantee you’ll get the answers. Is this the last story about Vietnam we need forever? I would agree that, in terms of telling both sides of the story, or a side we hadn’t seen enough of before, then yes, this will do. Is it the last version of “The Sympathizer” that I’d like to see made? For that, I think I could stand for someone to give it another go.
Kai can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.