The Sympathizer
Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2017–2022years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- What a great article! I'll need a couple rereadings to understand it better, but I did appreciate the section about spectacle and about how cinema is tied to war. Another film that exemplifies that line of thought is Beau Travail. The characters prepare for war in a ritualistic frenzy, throwing themselves into each other in lavish choreography, dancing in the water and in the club. Michel Subor says it well when he notes that a good soldier is taught elegance in and under their uniforms. And the ending, well let's just say the ending demonstrates this spectacle well.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention though the crucial failure of Apocalypse Now, which is the crucial failure of many American war films. It reduces the enemy to this faceless, incoherent savage. The Vietnamese are never given a say in this story. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen goes over this point. Yes, yes, Coppola is a fantastic director (The Conversation is an especially good masterpiece), but he nonetheless cannot seem to stray away from the genre of American soldiers feeling guilty about murdering savages. Contrast this to a war film like La Grande Illusion, where Renoir explicitly notes that the French nobility have more in common with the German nobility, their enemies, than with the French common folk, their comrades. But of course, the German nobility are the German nobility, and not the "savages" of Vietnam.
- >The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui. This gorgeous graphic novel is a deeply personal memoir that explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee. The author’s family fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to her own child, she decides to learn more about her parents’ experiences growing up in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers.
>Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis in Milwaukee. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. He gave me a better sense of what it is like to be poor in this country than anything else I have read.
>Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard. Izzard’s personal story is fascinating: he survived a difficult childhood and worked relentlessly to overcome his lack of natural talent and become an international star. If you’re a huge fan of him like I am, you’ll love this book. His written voice is very similar to his stage voice, and I found myself laughing out loud several times while reading it.
>The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Most of the books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen about the Vietnam War focused on the American perspective. Nguyen’s award-winning novel offers much-needed insight into what it was like to be Vietnamese and caught between both sides. Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is a gripping story about a double agent and the trouble he gets himself into.
>Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil. Smil is one of my favorite authors, and this is his masterpiece. He lays out how our need for energy has shaped human history—from the era of donkey-powered mills to today’s quest for renewable energy. It’s not the easiest book to read, but at the end you’ll feel smarter and better informed about how energy innovation alters the course of civilizations.
