Propoganda, Hollywood & Ideology | The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The greatest art makes you question. Question who you are, what you believe. Question the assumptions you make about the world around you. Question the fabric of reality, the nature of being. Question free will or fate. Question systemic influences of behavior, or intrinsic human desires. It does not answer, at least it doesn’t provide easy answers, because in these we find a more shallow understanding of ourselves and of the world’s complexity.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of these great pieces of art. Its questions are not concerned with your preexisting notions of the Vietnam War, nor will it dichotomize the opposing sides into good and bad, right and wrong. The complexities of the War are not simplified, and our American-centric perspective is challenged at every turn. If you read closely and mindfully, you may finish the book having examined the very nature of your way of thinking, our collective desire to neatly place thought into ideological boxes that give us an easy position on any issue.

Check out my video essay below, or continue reading if you’d prefer.

Part 1: A Man of Two Faces

In Viet Than Nguyen’s eyes, the Vietnam War had no “winners”. The communist revolutionaries were victorious, yes, but at what cost? 20 years of brutal, deathly war tore the country apart. Somewhere between two and six million died, between the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Americans, and Koreans. The country was poisoned, its lands decimated by constant shelling, napalming, and use of pesticides by the US. Not to mention the 2.5 million refugees created by the war, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians that were massacred by all sides.

Nguyen isn’t interested in picking sides in the war. People on each side, he says, perpetrated lies, hypocrisies, failures, stupidities, vile immorality, and corruption.  These people may have known what they were doing was immoral, or they may have bought so completely into their respective ideology that they were blinded to their sins. Whatever the case, it was their very ideologies they used to justify their actions.

The story simply presents a story, fictionalized but rooted in truth, and makes you think for yourself. The story’s protagonist, whose name is not revealed so I’ll refer to him as “the narrator”, is a perfect vehicle for the nuanced examination of the Vietnam War that Nguyen wishes to present.

The Narrator is “a sleeper, a spy, a spook, a man of two faces … able to see any issue from both sides.” He is also a “half-breed,” a product of his mother’s rape by a French priest, and a womanizer, alcoholic, misogynist, and a murderer.

But I think Nguyen’s message goes further than simply seeing an issue from “both sides”. There are many sides to any issue, and seeing the world through a false dichotomy not only limits your understanding of its complexity, but if vilifies, or in some cases idealizes, the “other” and distracts your attention from truth. For instance, any US perspective on the war—pro or anti—is ultimately an American perspective that ignores Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian suffering.

The narrator’s split psychology—as a bastard, a revolutionary masquerading as a capitalist, and later, a non-white in the U.S.—mirrors Nguyen’s own experience as a Vietnamese refugee living in America since a boy of 4 years. Nguyen said in a talk with Politics + Prose that as a child, he felt “deeply, intimately American.” But as Nguyen went to college and educated himself, he began to see America through clear eyes. He never felt belonging in America, and when he eventually visited Vietnam as an adult, he felt out of place for a parallel set of reasons.

The story begins just before the Fall (or Liberation, depending on your POV) of Saigon, and during this first act, we also meet three key characters, “blood brothers” who sealed their eternal friendship in blood at 14: the narrator, Bon, and Man, who is the narrator’s handler and main contact within the North Vietnamese army. As the city falls, Bon and the Narrator escape to the US, and much of the story follows their experiences as refugees from the war.

For the sake of concision, I’m going to skip ahead to two plot lines that best illustrate my point—the Narrator’s work on a Hollywood blockbuster about the Vietnam War, and another plotline I won’t reveal yet, as it spoils the last act of the book.

But know that there is so much more to this novel: Nguyen’s expert use of satirical humor, somehow finding the right balance between absurdist comedy and serious rage while he explores the collective trauma of his people brought on by a needless war and its aftermath. One of my favorite instances of satire involves a wild “Oriental Studies” Professor with a fetishistic obsession with all things “Oriental”, including the narrator’s embodiment of the “symbiosis of Orient and Occident,” a statement that causes the narrator to “clear my throat of a sour taste. (p. 65)”. But let’s set aside the satire, and for a moment, focus on the rage.

Part 2: Asian American Rage

In the U.S., The narrator finds work as an “authenticity consultant” on a film called The Hamlet, which bears suspicious resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but really serves as an allegory for Hollywood in general and how it marginalizes and mocks minorities all while propagandizing America and softening its image, not only to its citizens, but to the world that eagerly consumes its products.

“Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and yes, even the box office bomb. (p. 172)”

The narrator went into the project with good intentions, hoping to promote more respectful and accurate representation of his people, but quickly discovers that, “The longer I worked on the Movie, the more I was convinced that I was not only a technical consultant on an artistic project, but an infiltrator into a work of propaganda.”

If you are rolling your eyes or doubting Nguyen’s criticism, I’d point you to this video, which I’ll link below: The US Government’s Not-So-Secret Propaganda Department. Not only does the Department of Defense pay for and help produce many Hollywood cash-cows—including but not limited to, Captain America, Top Gun, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, King Kong, Jurassic Park, Karate Kid, Godzilla, Indiana Jones, WandaVision, even Call of Duty—they have final say on the script! If they don’t like the way the US Military is portrayed, your movie is simply not allowed to come out. None of this is a secret, people seem to be content living in blissful ignorance.

This subplot, I think, is where Nguyen’s rage burns most fervently. He grew up an American, watched Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and more blatant pro-America propaganda such as Rambo, saw the racist and misrepresentative portrayal of his people, and internalized this anger. “In seeing [the movies], it was clear that the Vietnamese were not seen, they were seen through.”

The Auteur ignores the narrator’s guidance at every turn, and all the narrator manages to achieve in the movie is double-pay ($2 per day instead of $1!) for the less-desirable roles of Viet Cong, and the addition of three speaking roles for Vietnamese—who end up being played by other Southeast Asians rather than actual Vietnamese.

Before shooting the grand finale, the Auteur strokes his ego to the crew, saying that “Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won’t even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war. (p. 178)”

Herein lies the dangerous truth about history. While the Auteur’s claim is objectively absurd, is he wrong? Apocalypse Now is hailed as a classic, the gold standard in war movies. It is anti-war, yes, but how many of us have seen or read the Vietnamese perspective on the war? I admit, until recently, I had not. This is why books like The Sympathizer are so important. “I had no doubt that in the Auteur’s egomaniacal imagination he meant that his work of art, now, was more important than the three or for or six million dead, who composed the real meaning of the war. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. (p. 179)”

Part 3: Independence & Freedom

This next portion will spoil the last act of the book, so if you want to avoid that, jump to here.

The Narrator and Bon are captured on a South Vietnamese scouting mission, thanks to the Narrator’s tipping off of the communists. And here is where the story gets really interesting. I will do my best to relay the complexity of Nguyen’s message, but really, you should read the book, because the way he pulls everything together is miraculous.

We learn that the framing of the Narrator’s “confession”, which has told the entire story to this point, is actually taking place within a North Vietnamese “re-education camp”. We also learn that the Commandant who is reviewing the Narrator’s confession is not pleased with it. The Narrator has written countless versions over the course of one year in solitary confinement, and it’s clear that the Communists see him as a lost cause, a mind infected by capitalist ideals and too much time in America. The Commandant tells him, “you are addicted to the social evils of alcohol, prostitution, and yellow music.”

“Aren’t we all comrades? I asked the commandant at an earlier session. Yes, he said, but not all comrades have the same level of ideological consciousness.”

Luckily, the Narrator has one man within the camp sympathetic to his position as a sleeper agent that has fallen too deep into Western culture. He is a mysterious “faceless man”, flesh burned red and mottled with scars, later revealed to be from a Napalm attack. The prisoners, and even their guards, fear him.

The Narrator finally meets the commissar in his quarters, notices the famous Ho Chi Minh quote, “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” And upon seeing the commissar’s horrific face, “eyes bulging from withered sockets, nostrils reduced to holes without a nose, the hairless, earless skull one massive keloid scar, leaving the head to resemble one of those dried, decapitated trophies swung on a string by an ebullient headhunter,” the Narrator recognizes him. It’s his best friend, his protector, his handler, his comrade, Man.

Guards shove him onto a mattress and tie him down, deprive his sense with a blindfold and ear plugs, but do not let him sleep. The narrator’s subsequent torture is brutal—not physically, but psychologically—and it is made more brutal by the fact that it is his blood brother inflicting the pain.

But Man explains his side of the story; really, truly, he is powerless to free the Narrator. It’s only because of Man that the Narrator and Bon are not dead already. “You frighten [the commandant]. You are nothing but a shadow standing at the mouth of his cave, some strange creature that sees things from two sides. People like you must be purged because you bear the contamination that can destroy the revolution’s purity.”

The Narrator must convince the commandant, as well as the commissars above Man, that the virus of Western sympathy has been eradicated, to have any hope of being released. And so Man must torture him, blast his retinas with bright light, shock him electrically to keep him awake, all in hopes that he will realize what he has forgotten.

As Man continues his torture, begging an answer to the question, “what is more important than independence and freedom?” Eventually, after a long, visceral session of torture, the Narrator realizes the answer to the question: Nothing! Nothing was the answer. “While nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan was Ho Chi Minh’s empty suit which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was a tricky joke. It was Uncle Ho’s empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that only a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear.”

Man is a tragic character, which the narrator fully understands. “…while he was setting me free, he himself could never be free, unable or unwilling to leave this camp except through death, which at least would be a relief from his living death.” He commits evil deeds for the same reason many Nazi SS officers or Christian Crusaders or ISIS terrorists commit evil deeds—because they are so deeply bought into their ideologies that they are convinced that any violence is purely essential to advance the cause. Either that, or the manipulative or terrorizing systems of which they are propping up feel inescapable, and their only option, in their eyes, is to conform to what is expected of them.

It's never explicitly revealed where Man falls in this spectrum. The Narrator speculates that there is madness in his eyes, and certainly his unimaginable trauma of having his flesh melted by napalm contributes to his actions, but ultimately, it does not matter how much of his actions were through his own volition vs. peer pressure. The fact is, the revolutionary ideology that states “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom,” that any faction who gets in the way of must be stamped out, leaves no room for individual thought. Your options are to conform or to be subject to reeducation or death at speaking your thoughts.

Part 4 – Question Everything

“What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing? We can only answer these questions for ourselves.”

These are the questions our Narrator leaves us with in the last couple pages of The Sympathizer. Were you expecting a neatly-wrapped ending? Too bad, life doesn’t have many of those. [John Mulaney - Brush your teeth, now boom! OJ. That’s life.]

I want to come back to the idea of “ideology” that I mentioned in part 1. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a pioneer of this way of thinking of ideology, defines ideology as “the experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing.” Ideologies are dangerous, because they eliminate our need to think critically about our actions and beliefs, but they are also unavoidable.

Nguyen presents and dismantles several popular ideologies throughout The Sympathizer: French Colonialism, North Vietnamese Communism, Western Liberalism, Catholicism, US Exceptionalism (or “Disneyland ideology” as he calls it), South Vietnamese nationalistic democracy, consumerism. He points out the hypocrisies in all these ideologies. The fact of the matter is, avoiding hypocrisy in your thinking is nearly impossible. The best option, really, is to be aware of your hypocrisy.

Take, for instance, the ideology of an empiricist, someone who only believes what science can prove, or that they can directly observe with their senses. Obviously, this person would be an atheist; there is no way to prove the existence of a higher power. Sounds like a reasonable enough philosophy, but think for a second about the assumptions it is making. For starters, it assumes that the observable world is real, structured, and governed by logic & causation. It assumes that everything in the universe follows a discoverable lawfulness. This in itself is a philisophical assumption about the nature of reality that is, in itself, empirically unverifiable. Or, as David Hume pointed out, the assumption that there is continuity to the universe, where science can study individual examples of phenomena and derive general conclusions from them. [source: Episode 197 from Philosophize this]

American opposition to the Vietnam War grew as the war dragged on, but initially Americans were on board. We ate up the anti-communist rhetoric shoved down our throats in the 50s, and did not reach the conclusion that it was a mistake until well after two years into our deployment of troops. By that time, it was too late. I watched some of the PBS documentary about the Vietnam War—I did not finish because I didn’t like its forgiving tone—but they interviewed several US Veterans of the war. The widespread belief was that our government would never get us involved in a war for the wrong reasons; soldiers trusted our leaders, hated the communists, bought so deeply into the imperialist and/or US exceptionalist ideology that they were willing to commit atrocities for it.

Speaking of atrocities, how about our complicity in Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip? Polls show https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-u-s-role-in-the-israel-hamas-war/ that 55% of Americans disapprove of our involvement. That leaves 45% who either approve (36%) or have no opinion (9%). The US invasion of Iraq shows a similar trend. This just goes to show that there is a contingency of Americans who, no matter how much evidence of atrocity, will go with whatever the government says.

We live in one and the same world that is more and more interconnected, but nonetheless deeply divided. People then put up self-protective walls to react to this. Capitalism says human rights violations in Syria and Saudi Arabia are okay, because they need their oil, and warlords ruling the Congo, because we need Colton/minerals for our computers. . .

The second reaction is global capitalism, with a human face. Socially responsible corporate figures like Bill Gates or George Soros passionately support LGBT rights, advocate charities. But even in its extreme form, opening up borders to refugees and treating them like one of us, they only provide a symptomatic treatment. The solution is not for the rich Western countries to receive all immigrants, but somehow to try and change the situation which creates massive waves of immigration. And we are complicit in this.

- Slavoj Zizek

Okay, but if you’re watching and saying, hey, I don’t buy into in all this global capitalist bullshit. I live my life authentically, I reject capitalism completely. Well, by doing this, you are turning to another ideology—anticapitalism. This is where this idea ties back into The Sympathizer. Because, yes, in theory, it is not so bad to be an anticapitalist. In fact, I would call myself one. But you know who else was anticapitalist? Joseph Stalin. Ho Chi Minh. Kim Jong-Un. All the North Vietnamese comrades who tortured and killed for the sake of the revolution. If you buy too deeply into anticapitalism without critical thought, you’ll end up like Man, licked by the napalm of conformity.

The commandant in The Sympathizer replies to the narrator when he says he’s anti-American. “The anti-American includes the American. Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. (p. 319)” This statement holds true for anti-capitalism as well

Zizek goes a step further and says that even those people who think they see the world through eyes unclouded by ideology, who take off the ideological glasses that distort our vision, even they are prone to ideology. To see the world’s truth, you must put on the ideological glasses.

The only way to see that we are being manipulated and propagandized is to recognize the US Army’s fancy weapons and uniforms in the films we see, and understand that means they signed off on this portrayal of them. The only way to see that we are being manipulated to consume through clever design and marketing is to recognize the subliminal messaging and blatant brand placement in the media we consume. The only way to understand how politicians play off our emotions and conditioning to view the other side of the aisle as the enemy is to learn to recognize the tricks they use.

So, none of this is to say you can’t have an ideology. Ideology is unavoidable, anyways. But you have a responsibility to be aware of the hypocrisies and dangers in the beliefs you choose to follow.

“In such times of urgency when we know we have to act, but don’t know how to act, thinking is needed. Maybe we should turn around a little bit. In our new century, we should say that maybe we tried all too fast to change the world. The time has come to step back to interpret it.”

— Slavoj Zizek

Thinking for yourself is hard. It takes brainpower and willpower, and it’s undoubtedly easier to fall back on an ideology that gives you an easy answer for everything. Even in this video essay, I’m pulling heavily from Zizek and Nguyen to illustrate a point; you could say I am using them to think for me. And by the way, this choice is not meant to imply that Nguyen would agree with everything Zizek says; I think, in fact, they would disagree strongly on many ideas. But the central idea in The Sympathizer, I believe, aligns nicely with Zizek’s idea that we live in a world of ideology, where you almost have to pick an ideology to ally yourself with.

So, in true Viet Thanh Nguyen and Slavoj Zizek fashion, I will end this video with a few questions to think about. why do you believe what you believe? Which ideological beliefs do you hold, and what contradictions are inherent in these beliefs? What social structures and norms have shaped your identity?