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.”[4]

[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.[5] [open endnotes in new window]

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.[6]

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.[7]

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.[8]

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.[9]

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.[10]