Inside The Sympathizer's Scathingly Funny Takedown of Vietnam War Movies

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Up in the Santa Clarita mountains, as Viet Thanh Nguyen toured the set of The Sympathizer's fourth episode, "Give Us Some Good Lines," he found himself feeling the way he had when he wrote the novel on which the series is based. This standalone installment of the HBO adaptation, set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, focused on the making of The Hamlet, a fictional gritty film modeled after '70s classics like Apocalypse Now. "It's a funny, satirical section of the novel, but the tragedy comes in because all the stuff that Hollywood is making in the movie actually references real tragedy," the author says.

He saw an entire decimated village recreated, the production design emphasizing downed helicopters and bloody casualties. "I had to take a second look before I realized they were mannequins lying in the pond, in the rice paddies," Nguyen says. "There were body parts that had been manufactured lying around as well. Again, that was a little funny and disconcerting—all at the same time."

It's a stark visual representation of what The Sympathizer accomplishes as a whole, upending the Western lens of the war in a darkly comic way. The show follows The Captain (Hoa Xuande), a Vietnamese refugee who's landed in Los Angeles and is playing the role of double agent—ostensibly working under a South Vietnamese general, but secretly reporting back to the communist regime in Hanoi—and observes his incredulity at all versions of the American perspective. In Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Captain eventually goes to the Philippines to work as a Vietnamese consultant on production for The Hamlet, where he notices how the very people the film supposedly intends to honor are being marginalized. (The series version relocates the production to just outside of LA.)

"I grew up watching most of the major movies that Hollywood made about the Vietnam War—in the '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s—and they impacted me mostly negatively," Nguyen says. "I realized that many of them were good-to-great works of art, but works of art in which the Vietnamese of all kinds were erased or effaced or silenced or violated." He calls this section of The Sympathizer his "revenge"—one as scathingly comic as it is painfully sad.

The Captain manages to secretly embed pro-communist messaging into The Hamlet's dialogue, since nobody on set, least of all the director (known as "The Auteur," played by Robert Downey Jr. in one of several roles), speaks Vietnamese. We can laugh at that playful deception. But when The Captain is horrifically injured on set near the episode's end? Not so much.

"It's funny. We had Vietnamese consultants—cultural consultants, dialogue consultants, language consultants—on our [show], and I'm combining all of those different roles into this one role that I had to replicate on this faux set," says Xuande, who is Vietnamese Australian. "You feel like every time the media or Hollywood turns their attention to a part of the conflict, only one perspective is ever seen or drawn upon."

That's what leads to The Sympathizer's dark final-act turn in its portrait of The Hamlet. "By the time you reach the end of the novel, hopefully it's clear to the reader that everything that happens in the filmmaking segment foreshadows what happens at the end [of The Sympathizer]," Nguyen says. "The Hollywood segment is actually pivotal in terms of connecting the first half to the second half—and the second half of the novel and the second half of the TV series get a lot more tragic."

John Cho and David Duchovny.