For decolonizing the U.S. cultural empire: The Sympathizer—
novel into tv series

by Mike Budd

The seven-part television series The Sympathizer[1] [open endnotes in new window] premiered on HBO on April 14, 2024 to good reviews, with The New York Times praising it as “not just a good story,” but also “a sharp piece of film criticism” for its satire of Vietnam war movies and Hollywood (and U.S.) racism.[2] Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen and created by co-showrunners Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave) and Don McKellar, the series, like its source novel, centers on a Captain in South Vietnamese military intelligence who is also a spy for the Communist North Vietnamese. Framed by the Captain’s repeatedly revised voice-over narration written in a postwar North Vietnamese reeducation camp, the story follows mostly Vietnamese characters through the fall of Saigon in 1975 to their resettlement as refugees in Los Angeles in the late seventies, the making of a Hollywood film about the war, and the Captain’s return to Southeast Asia and the narrative’s frame.[3]

Visual essay of the TV series,
part one

1-2. First image, The Sympathizer. During a period when U.S. audiences are becoming more accepting of subtitles and languages other than English, the main title of The Sympathizer appears first in Vietnamese, then translated into English. The title sequence includes images of film sprocket holes and mechanical title change and sounds of a film projector, introducing conventionally self-reflexive stylistic elements to denote the historical period and genre. Even before the narrative begins, the discursive perspective has shifted away from the expected, conventional Hollywood “Vietnam War” story to a Vietnamese-centered story about the “American War” and its devastating consequences for Vietnamese, including death and the cataclysm of refugee status.

3. After an explanatory intertitle, this title introduces the theme of memory:

“All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” —quotation from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 memoir, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, p. 4.

4. The Captain is writing and rewriting his confession in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp at the beginning of Episode 1, “Death Wish,” where the constant command from his guards is, “Start again.” This leads to repeated revisions in his voiceover narration, which is also a forced confession by someone who believes himself to be a good Communist. This forced confession, constantly rewritten, produces complications and potential unreliability, with conflicts between the Captain’s narration and what viewers experience within the narrative or already know. By the end of the series, viewers may better understand the traumas and deeply conflicted inner life of the Captain, and perhaps sympathize along with the Sympathizer. Compositions and camera movement emphasize the order and rigidity of camp life for prisoners.

5. An establishing shot of reeducation camp in Episode 7, “Endings are hard, aren’t they?” provides crucial context for rereading the Captain’s voiceover narration that has helped to unify the whole series. This and other later episodes may invite or force us to retrospectively rethink our initial assumptions about the conditions under which the Captain’s voiceover narration was produced, since most viewers usually accept the veracity of reliable characters as narrators.  Stylized, spectacular settings include long stairs to Commissar’s quarters, from which he addresses prisoners, “educatees.” Brutal, oppressive settings and actions are shown, including torture, resulting from wartime and postwar conditions among the Communist North Vietnamese. These compare to the torture scene early in Episode 1 where the cynical South Vietnamese intelligence officers seem to enjoy brutalizing the Communist spy.