whimsyful

I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over. Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot. I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended, with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur’s imagination and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.

The Book

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is written as a confession from the POV of an imprisoned, unnamed narrator, a double agent of French and Vietnamese descent who is supposedly working for the pro-American South Vietnamese side while secretly spying for the side of the Communists during and after the Vietnam War. It tackles a bunch of serious themes like the war, American imperialism, anti-Asian racism, how Hollywood perpetuates and distorts these previous topics, and the costs and aftermath of successful revolution. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

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Given all this, what I was really surprised by was not only what a crackling read this was, but how funny it was. For such an incredibly brutal book, filled with every trigger warning you would expect as well as several you wouldn’t (seriously, look up the content warnings if you do want to read this book), I was frequently giggling or snorting at some of the passages, and I couldn’t help but share them out loud to my partner. It’s a dark, absurdist humor, that is fuelled by an ever-present simmering rage roiling underneath, and which frequently shoots over the line of being offensive so hard it circles back to being funny again. The entire sequence where the narrator is hired to work as a cultural consultant on the set of a thinly-veiled expy of Apocolypse Now alone is worth the price of admission.

The weakest part of this book, unfortunately, is in the writing of the female characters. (Several quotes from this novel have made their way onto the r/menwritingwomen subreddit.) To be fair to the author, he is intentionally writing from the point of view of a very misogynistic and screwed up narrator (who, at one point, lampshades the fact that he has never actually considered what a woman could want or be thinking of). I got the sense that Nguyen was trying to show that his female characters have more going on than what the narrator notices, but compared to the dazzlingly effortless skill on display when he’s writing about other difficult topics this aspect came across as significantly clunkier and more strained. I complained at one point that it felt like almost every female character in this book can be defined by three things: how sexy they are, their thoughts/beliefs when it came to Asia/America relations, and one other trait.

Despite all that, this book has stayed in my head ever since I first read it relatively early in 2024. It has made me think, and it has made me feel a wide spectrum of emotions ranging from joy to horror to disgust, and now and again a line from it floats across my mind. One of the best read of 2024 for me.

The TV Show

Me to my spouse (who also read and loved the book): “Hey, A24 is making a tv adaptation of The Sympathizer. It’s going to be directed by Park Chan-wook, and Robert Downey Jr. And Sandra Oh are going to be in it.”
S: “…do you think they’ll keep that scene with the squid?”
Me: “…this is Park Chan-wook.”
S: “…you’re right, what am I saying, keeping that scene was probably a condition for him agreeing to direct.”

Overall, I thought this was a pretty solid adaptation, but not as good as the source, and mainly because it is much more conventional and straightforward.

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The biggest example of this is the difference in how much more likeable characters are in the book vs show, starting with the narrator, The Captain. In the book, for a mildly spoilery example, at one point he is put in charge by his CIA handler (who is unaware of his being a double agent) of the interrogation of a captured Viet Cong bomber. However, during the interrogation The Captain loses his temper when the prisoner insults him by (accurately) calling him a bastard, and retaliates by giving a speech that drives the prisoner (who is on his side) into committing suicide. In the show, The Captain secretly signals to the prisoner that they’re actually on the same side, and then assists the prisoner in his suicide attempt—which is portrayed as an act of mercy since otherwise the prisoner will be brutally tortured by the CIA for information. Another change is in his relationship with Lana, the much younger daughter of the South Vietnamese General the narrator works for, which is changed from an older man lusting after and romantically pursuing a nubile young woman to his treating her mostly like an annoying little sister.

Now, a lot of change is inevitable given the transition from page to screen, but Viet Thahn Nguyen had this really great quote in one of his interviews about this book:

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of the Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people’s eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we’re also inhuman at the same time.

Everybody in this book, especially our protagonist, is guilty of some kind of terrible behavior. For me, the ability to acknowledge that we are all both human and inhuman at the same time is really critical because that acknowledgement also characterizes dominant culture. For example, in American movies about the Vietnam War, Americans want to be on screen regardless of whether they have to be villains or antiheroes. It’s much better to be able to do that than to be the virtuous human extra in the margins. Dominant culture is perfectly willing [to feature], and often claims, inhumanity as part of subjectivity. It makes for a great movie and it makes for great art.

And I can't help wondering if the show softened some of the protagonist's worst traits out of a fear that the audience would be alienated, a fear that doesn't happen nearly as much with popular prestige shows starring morally questionable white men (ex. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos).

Granted, several of the white male characters are also softened, albeit for a different reason. In the novel, Nguyen carefully constructed it so that every single white male character is a one-dimensional stereotype, the Orientalist Professor or CIA Handler or Sleazy Politician or Auteur Filmmaker, forced to be a stock character in the same way that non-white characters in media made by white creators often are. The show neuters this decision by having Robert Downey Jr., one of the most successful and popular white male actors currently working, play all of these characters. He's excellent in this, but because he's excellent and he's RDJ in-show the stock characters he's portraying are no longer flat, and outside the show a lot of the conversation about this tv adaptation ends up revolving around him and his performance. I actually wish they'd gotten a talented but not relatively well known character actor to play these parts instead. Ultimately the show is a solid adaptation of a novel that is inherently very difficult to adapt, but ironically it ended up proving the book’s point (about how Hollywood inevitably tries to center whiteness even in media supposedly about people of color) in some ways.