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.