Vietnam, the Movie: Part Deux

Abstract

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.