Critical essay, part two

Changing cultural formations:
residual, dominant and emergent [11]

Nguyen’s novel in 2015 and then the television series in 2024 appeared at a historical moment when the “Vietnam generation” of Americans was aging and declining, when fewer Americans were perhaps invested in the dominant militarist myths that had been ritually repeated, reinvented and undercut by their country’s invasion and defeat in Vietnam. Something different was happening. Those militarist myths no longer seemed contemporary. They were receding into memory, new myths about new wars revising collective memories.[12] [open endnotes in new window] Hollywood auteur films of the seventies and eighties like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were not aging so well. They had helped to make visible the older, more explicit racism of films like John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), but now their implicit racism was becoming visible in an emergent, more diverse United States, their racism located in the overall perspective or imperial gaze of whiteness or American-ness rather than in the blatant racism of older stereotyped characters and plots.

Younger, more nonwhite audiences, while not necessarily politically progressive, were less responsive to the conventional American version of Vietnam or Asia, either in politics or in entertainment. As audiences and political actors in social formations gradually withdrew belief from such tropes, a whole dominant cultural formation, a set of hegemonic assumptions and memories about the meaning of the American war on Vietnam slowly became residual, began to lose its power to compel belief and provide reassuring entertainment. These liberal films, mostly made by boomers, could show individual or groups of Americans as racist, but their humanist orientation still constructed the war around individual evil or tragic actions rather than collectively inhumane, genocidal or imperialist ones. Just as establishment framing and news media coverage of My Lai and other massacres by U.S. troops largely followed the familiar story line of “a few bad apples,” virtually all U.S. fiction films and television also limited the horror of U.S. military actions with tropes of individual tragedy and distracting spectacle.

With Asians, women and nonwhites growing in public and consumer influence, other alternative conventions and narratives began to form, coalesce and combine into genres and different cultural formations, especially around gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. New social formations created the conditions for a new cultural formation and new meanings to emerge within a limited range. The new social and cultural formations aren’t necessarily more progressive or emancipatory than the old, but they are different, and the change makes room for liberatory possibilities.

Arriving in 2015, the novel The Sympathizer helped to coalesce a new, somewhat more cosmopolitan, less provincial cultural formation critical of the prevailing view of the “Vietnam war” as an American tragedy and other distractions from U.S. racism and imperialism. The conditions were emerging for direct confrontation with and satire of the worn-out fragments and ideological tropes of the Vietnam war film and its militaristic baggage. A few earlier films seemed to move in that direction, including Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Ben Stiller’s Vietnam war comedy Tropic Thunder (2008).

Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July in the eighties were followed by Heaven and Earth (1993), forming an informal Vietnam trilogy in which he seemed to follow to their limit the logic of the Hollywood war movie conventions he had inherited and used. Modifying those conventions in line with the recent Hollywood practice of constructing the director as auteur or author, Stone began in Platoon by confronting his young infantryman, the audience (and authorial) surrogate, with two sergeants embodying good and evil. Evil destroyed good in a tragic mode acceptable to American militarism as substitute for now-outdated celebratory Good War conventions or a more accurate history of American brutality unrepresentable within any commercial practices. In the second film of the trilogy, Born on the Fourth of July, it was Stone’s patriotic young American hero himself who was symbolically destroyed, shot and paralyzed in battle, tragically descending into a hell of physical disability, nightmarish veterans’ medical care and nihilism before being reborn as a national antiwar leader. Based on the true story of Ron Kovic, the film harnesses Stone’s intense style to a critique of U.S. warmaking unusual in Hollywood films.

The third film, Heaven and Earth, based on two memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese survivor of the war and refugee in the U.S., took the next logical leap by telling the story of the war and its aftermath from a mostly Vietnamese viewpoint, though with much attention to her traumatized American veteran husband in the later part of the film. Likely because it had no recognizable star in the central role, the film was unsuccessful commercially, but remains an honest attempt, within Hollywood conventions, to represent a Vietnamese woman’s life. Stone’s trilogy traced a path whose implications Stone himself could not adequately develop. A coherent critique of the U.S. role in the war would have to shift the perspective more fully away from Americans to Vietnamese and address U.S. imperialism in larger global perspective. In that way the trajectory of the trilogy looks forward to Nguyen’s novel and Park and McKellar’s television series, both of which have a much firmer grasp on the historical period and ways of representing complexity.

Conditions: history and the repressed

It’s not just in the realm of discursive and cultural formations that the novel and television series of The Sympathizer take their places. It’s in the way those discursive and cultural formations of meaning are formed by larger historical, material processes whose existence and memory can be repressed and disappeared, at least temporarily, for most people by powerful economic, military and geopolitical formations.

First, a brief reminder of the history of the American War on Vietnam, now so thoroughly distorted for most Americans by commercial and state propaganda.

The American War. The Vietnamese call it that because it came after hundreds of years of domination by the Chinese to the north and more than seventy years of French colonialism that ended in 1954 only to be replaced by a massive U.S. military invasion in support of the puppet South Vietnamese government that fell in 1975, two years after U.S. forces left the country. When I visited Vietnam decades after serving in the U.S. Army there, our travel guide responded this way to my questions about the Vietnamese view of the American war:

“The Chinese were here for a thousand years and we finally kicked them out. The French were here for a hundred years and we finally kicked them out. You were here for twenty years and we finally kicked you out.”

That sort of put things in a more useful perspective, a practical anti-imperialism. He was kind enough not to mention that while there’s a beautiful and moving memorial in Washington, D.C. to the more than fifty thousand U.S. soldiers killed in “the Vietnam War,” there’s no U.S. acknowledgement of the two to three million Vietnamese (and Laotians and Cambodians), most of them civilians, killed by the United States during the war. Or the many injured and maimed for life, born with birth defects due to Agent Orange and other poisons we sprayed over huge sections of Vietnam in a futile effort to deny cover to “the enemy.” Or the many postwar injuries and deaths, many to rural children, from unexploded bombs and other ordnance now nearly a half century old. Or….

But I digress. The point is the massive national amnesia and infantilization necessary to maintain the American global empire, the enormous but mostly futile repression of memory and experience by returning soldiers and much of the public, and the downward spiral of psychic and physical violence caused by endless U.S. wars compounding the effects on both perpetrators and victims. The repressed for both Vietnamese and Americans returns in a more liberatory and enlightening form in the novel of The Sympathizer, written by someone born in Vietnam who came to the U.S. as a refugee with his family.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: humanism and contradiction

Viet Thanh Nguyen has perhaps partially sublimated his anger at his adopted country with acknowledgement of his strong affection for it, including the commercial popular culture that suffuses The Sympathizer. The mixed anger and affinity help to produce the deeply conflicted viewpoint of his protagonist, The Captain, and continue in Nguyen’s more recent sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed (2021), and in the television series of The Sympathizer, which Nguyen influenced but did not write or direct. Nguyen sometimes talks publicly and sincerely about his own humanism in ways very similar to those of his protagonist. At the same time, he also confronts sincere humanism as a prevailing narrative and political stance, challenging his readers by presenting multiple incompatible viewpoints and memories, held sincerely, convincingly and often without hypocrisy:

“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”[13]

In his mentoring of the Captain in the fifth episode, “All for One,” Claude explains and performs the acid cynicism of power that eats away at human sincerity and solidarity, including the popular humanism of mainstream commercial films:

“Movies are important, right? Especially if made by a significant director. It’s imperative for us to keep an eye on these artist types. They need reassurance that they’re subversives, but we can’t allow them to flip all the way. Long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism, but without actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless. Take The Hamlet. Our guys, they slip up every once in a while. [Shifts into mock-heroic, Ned Godwin-esque speech-making.] But in the end, all it takes is one morally upstanding, heroic American soldier to straighten everything out. That’s the true strength of this country. [Reaction shot of Captain, credulous and sincere.] A country that lives and dies by its conscience. [Claude drops the heroic mode, giggles at his own performance, returns to casual, uncaring CIA persona.]”[14]

There are no depths of cynicism and insincerity below which this confident insouciance of geopolitical power will not go. But despite the fallen, paranoid world in which the Captain lives and acts, tortures and murders, he never abandons his sincere humanism, perhaps embodying Nguyen’s hopes and expressed in the final scenes of the series.

Repressions of public memory
of the United States’ endless wars

At a more general level, we can understand the U.S. military, political, economic and ideological formations within which The Sympathizer, novel and television series, is produced and received by tracing those formations from the 1970s, when the novel and series are set, through the half century until the series appears in 2024. But that understanding reveals not a conscious connection between the United States and its war, but mostly a willed, institutionalized disconnection, a repression of public memory. Americans enjoy the imperial privilege of ignoring the devastating consequences of our actions in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. U.S. institutions and ideological formations mostly succeeded in repressing collective and public memory, absolving U.S. soldiers, and by extension our nation, of any responsibility for our invasion and brutalization of a whole country.

Adapted primarily from Nadia Abu El-Haj’s extraordinary 2022 book, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America (Verso), the brief history below sketches some of the conditions of reception for U.S. readers and audiences, the target audience for The Sympathizer. Against the endemic U.S. culture of narcissism, exemplified by the insouciant U.S. ignorance of most things foreign, The Sympathizer, novel and TV series, allied with other forces, seeks to strengthen an oppositional political-cultural formation more internationalist, left-liberal and anti-imperialist, reconstructing a collective historical memory.[15]

The first moment in the history of U.S repression and forgetting of the war occurs in the early seventies, while the United States is still making war. By the beginning of the seventies more and more U.S. Vietnam veterans were telling their stories of disturbingly common atrocities they had participated in or witnessed to Veterans Administration and other psychiatrists and in vets’ own “rap groups.” In 1971 125 antiwar vets gathered to tell those stories in Detroit at the Winter Soldier event, and U.S. opposition to the war was peaking.[16] Among the psychiatrists absorbing these stories of combat trauma, vengeance, war crimes and debilitating guilt, an increasing number understood those stories as true, not as psychotic fantasies, and some made tacit alliance with the antiwar movement, then increasingly fronted by vets themselves. Prominently including Robert J. Lifton, whose 1973 book Home from the War: Neither Victims nor Executioners became influential, these radical psychiatrists theorized a “post-Vietnam syndrome,” a condition of “moral injury” of U.S. soldiers who had perpetrated or witnessed murder or rape in Southeast Asia, violating their fundamental human sense of right and wrong. [17]

But this radical critique of both conformist, individualist psychiatry and the U.S. war became only a marginal moment in the developing history of psychiatric and larger public constructions of the war. By 1980, five years after the end of the war, “post-Vietnam syndrome” was being medicalized out of existence, and the retrospective rewriting of Vietnam vets’ experiences was well underway to make those experiences less disturbing, more comforting. That year a relatively new concept, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), appeared in the new Third Edition of the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), along with psychiatry itself now less humanistic, increasingly physiological and empiricist. Influenced by the conservative political movement lifting up victims of crime and the feminist movement supporting women victims of rape and sexual assault, medical science increasingly understood PTSD in war through the lens of civilian trauma, and U.S. soldiers more conveniently as victims rather than perpetrators.

As conventional wisdom among both conservatives and liberals became more conformist and conservative from the late seventies on, white middle class Americans increasingly denied responsibility and lost interest, counseling that the war had been some mixture of a terrible human tragedy and a massive error of judgment by national leaders. And among conservatives, by the eighties in full triumphalist mode, rising reactionary voices, supported by some veterans, loudly asserted that the heroic U.S. military could have won the war if only unqualified, defeatist and traitorous civilian leaders had not held us back. Agreeably, psychiatry’s new orientation helped construct the popular media figure of the blameless but traumatized American soldier, commercially conventionalized to deny and substitute for the real historical trauma of widespread atrocities, neither universal nor unusual, by Americans against Vietnamese in Vietnam.[18]

This heroic figure of fantasy is exemplified by the character of Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in the long-running multimedia franchise of that name, replacing the figure of John Wayne for a younger generation. Although the first of the five Rambo films is somewhat progressive, the second opens with John Rambo, when given the opportunity to return to Vietnam, replying, “Do we get to win this time?” He spoke for many Americans embittered about their country’s defeat and fantasizing about a successful new invasion and victory, indirectly referenced in the fictional South Vietnamese “invasion” led by the General in Episode Six, “The Oriental Mode of Destruction,” in The Sympathizer.[19] The figure of the traumatized and violent American soldier, now a cliché, its ideological work largely done, appears satirically recontextualized in the figure of Ryan Glenn (David Duchovny) in the fourth episode, “Give Us Some Good Lines,” of The Sympathizer.

“Thank you for your service.”

After more than a century of a growing U.S. global empire, the post-9/11 War on Terror brought a new chapter in the hollowing out of American institutions. The failure and defeat of the U.S. military in Vietnam and the alienation of many Americans from our military contributed to the end of the draft in 1973. Now the “all-volunteer” military (facilitated by a continuing “economic draft” through structural poverty) is coming increasingly to resemble a separate military caste. In this castelike social structure,1% of the population do all the fighting around the world for the 99%, who overwhelmingly choose not to enlist or send their children into the military and who can mostly forget about their very lethal military even as their society becomes ever more militarized. [20] In the 21st century United States, presumably traumatized soldiers and veterans thus have special authority and credibility in public life. The unhealed soldiers and vets have become iconic citizens because of their status as victims, what El-Haj calls “supercitizens,” since their assumed sacrifice requires deference from ordinary citizens who lack their special knowledge and experience. And “support the troops” must include pretending they are all heroes, inflating their ordinary human characteristics into the realm of imaginary Hollywood superheroes.

This deference toward soldiers and veterans takes the form of the statement, “Thank you for your service,” a ritualized expression of respect for the military caste when one meets a veteran, since ordinary citizens have now become mere civilians. A hypermilitarized society imagines itself to be the egalitarian and democratic society of its largely commercialized imagination, and thus it cannot recognize itself.[21] “Thank you for your service” is a kind of band-aid on a huge, festering national wound, a pathetic way to forget or not see the piles of bodies and the damage still being done around the world. It’s a symptom of the unacknowledgeable gulf of caste that feels awkward, even hypocritical when said and heard between two Americans. It claims to respect the sacrifices and values of the 1% even as it’s clear that most of the 99% do not want to share in those sacrifices or even in many cases military values. This moment is socially unlike almost any other moment. It can feel both sincere and hypocritical, since many of those who say thank you don’t really value the military in the way that they profess, and mostly don’t want to know what violence is being done in their name. In a way, at least for Americans, it is the complacency and banality in this “thank you for your service” that The Sympathizer and its allies seek to satirize into obsolescence and transform through a new internationalism.