A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War

A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War

Friday, December 24, 2021 - 1:10pm
Author: 
Ben Cohen

Abstract

The American imagination of the Vietnam War is produced in part by personal experiences, oral histories, media representations, school lessons, and monuments. Yet popular art—and film, specifically—has had an outsized impact on the American understanding of the war. In his Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen challenges the dominant cinematic histories of the conflict. Through two of the most popular and acclaimed American films about the war, Apocalypse Now and Platoon, I explain how these cinematic portrayals of the Vietnam War center a protagonist’s crisis of American idealism, exclude nuanced depictions of the Vietnamese, and project American landscapes onto Vietnamese geography. Next, I illustrate how Nguyen subverts these stereotypes in The Sympathizer by focusing on a half-Vietnamese protagonist who faces a crisis of communist idealism, naming the injustice of excluding the Vietnamese from war films, and retaining the projection of an American landscape in order to emphasize the protagonist’s conflicted Vietnamese identity. I then lay out the stakes of these competing artistic representations. Using Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, I detail how art has the capacity to imprint images and create memories in the minds of a large public. Finally, I discuss how The Sympathizer has the potential to create prosthetic memories that reshape the current American imagination of the Vietnam War, producing what Christina Schwenkel calls a ‘recombinant history.’    


Keywords

American Idealism (as it relates to the Vietnam War): The understanding that America’s war in Vietnam is both morally pure in both motivation and on-the-ground practice. War as a humane, civilizing mission.

Landscape Trope: The superimposition of American landscapes on Southeast Asian landscapes and the decontextualization of Southeast Asian landscapes common to American movies about the Vietnam War.

American public consciousness/memory: The American people’s dominant yet complex understanding of the Vietnam War, as constituted by experience, memory, and narrative. Large focus on American political motives and soldier experience in and returning from combat

Prosthetic Memories: Memories produced from engagement with fiction, coined by Alison Landsberg

Recombinant Histories: complex fabrics of historical understanding that incorporate transnational memories and challenge dominant historical narratives, coined by Christina Schwenkel


VIET THANH NGUYEN: The basic reality of the Vietnam War that Americans can’t get around is that it was, in many ways, a really bad war. And so Hollywood has at least acknowledged that much. But the way that it has contained the meaning of that war is to make Americans the stars of this drama and relegate the Vietnamese to the margins, even though in reality, the Vietnamese paid the heaviest price. And that is one of the ways by which cultural power, soft power, prepares Americans to do the same things over again, that now as we confront the same parallels and analogous situations in the Middle East, the irony is that, you know, it’s mostly people from these other countries that are dying.

But Americans are preoccupied with their own experiences. That’s an exact replication of the mindset that got us into Vietnam and that has now allowed Americans to remember the Vietnam War in a certain way that makes it an America war.

TERRY GROSS: Do you see your novel “The Sympathizer” in part as an answer to that, as an alternative way of seeing the war, a way of seeing it through Vietnamese eyes as opposed to through American eyes?

NGUYEN: You know, absolutely. It’s my revenge on Francis Ford Coppola.

(As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air)1

The American public has long been obsessed with the Vietnam War. This can be seen in the popularity and acclaim of novels such as The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and the more recent Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. Yet film has been the central cultural force in the American reimagination of the war, producing hundreds of millions of dollars in box office returns.2 Hollywood began with The Green Berets in 1968 and continued with The Deer Hunter in the 1970s and Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and a host of other acclaimed films in the 1980s and beyond. Looming over these films is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, which is frequently mentioned as one of the greatest movies of all time.3 When my father told me at age fifteen that we were going to watch it together, it felt like I had gained special access to a sacred artifact and an understanding of the reality of the Vietnam War.

I am not the only one who was introduced to the Vietnam War through popular media. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vietnamese-born and America-raised, grew up reading American war novels and watching war films.4 Apocalypse Now made a particularly strong impression on him: “I was probably about 10. And I think that was the first indication, also, that I had that there was something called this war and that this was how Americans saw this war as one that had divided them. And that was my first glimmering that there was something like a civil war happening in the American soul and that we as Vietnamese people were caught up in that.”5 Nguyen identifies this film with a larger American imagination of the war that centers American morality. He continues, recalling his rage during the scene where American soldiers massacre a boat full of Vietnamese citizens.6 At that moment, he understood that “this was our [Vietnamese] place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective and that, eventually, I would have to do something about that.”7

Knowing the cultural importance and impact of American-made Vietnam War media, Nguyen sets out to challenge these exclusionary recreations of history through his novel, The Sympathizer. My goal in this paper is to determine key themes of this Vietnam War genre, identify how Nguyen subverts these themes, and generously imagine how The Sympathizer might not only resist these cinematic understandings but help reconstitute the American public consciousness of the Vietnam War. The comparison between a novel and films is an imperfect one; they have different audiences, lengths, and forms. Yet Nguyen wrote The Sympathizer not to challenge Tim O’Brien but to exact “revenge on Francis Ford Coppola” (NPR).8 I try to honor Nguyen’s intentions by pairing these incongruous artforms, first in media analysis and later in discussions of memory and public consciousness.

“We Fought Ourselves”

Many of the most popular films about the Vietnam War deal with themes and tropes that center an American drama. Christina Schwenkel writes that

These cultural productions sell particular memories and ideological perspectives of the war that are largely devoid of any substantive examination or representation of Vietnamese people, culture, or history and are often steeped in Orientalist and anticommunist imagery. Although there are some exceptions to this, the underlying American ideologies of democracy, freedom, individualism, and moral goodness often remain unchallenged. Moreover, these commodities construct the war primarily as a tragedy for U.S. veterans, families, and society and overlook its devastating and long-term consequences for Vietnam….9

Through an analysis of Platoon and Apocalypse Now, I will develop Schwenkel’s description of these tropes—the idealistic American protagonist, the lack of Vietnamese representation, and the projection of an American landscape onto Vietnam— to demonstrate how these films facilitate an American moral drama.

Central to these American Vietnam War movies is a focus on the moral crisis of the American protagonist. It is easiest to see this in Platoon, where the young Charles Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is “initiated into manhood through the ordeal of battle” and has oppositional role models in Sergeant Barnes and Elias.10 Elias cares about his men and abhors gratuitous violence, whereas Barnes is a ruthless killer. When Barnes, who says, “I am reality,” kills the idealistic and humane Elias, Taylor fills Barnes’ role, avenging Elias only by murdering the brutal sergeant. This climax paints the war as the collapse of American ideals: the war is not morally just but rather violent and cruel, and American soldiers are not pillars of democracy but rather savage killers. Vietnam is the mere backdrop for this drama. While the protagonist of Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard, is a more seasoned soldier, he too encounters what John Hellmann describes as “revelatory scenes of the depravity of his society in the course of his journey.”11 These scenes propel Willard on a quest to rediscover America’s ostensibly pure purpose in war. He does find it, albeit in the form of the monstrous Colonel Kurtz: “Kurtz represents that idealism and finally the horrific self-awareness of its hollowness.”12 Kurtz understands the war and its actors as corrupt and inhumane, but instead of challenging and changing it on moral grounds, he forms a cult and extols violence. Just as in Platoon, “Willard’s quest, as that of a hero figure of a central American mythic formula, becomes an investigation of not just corrupted American reality but of the American view of its ideal self.”13 In killing Kurtz, Willard merely confirms America’s violent realities. Despite these critical tones regarding the Vietnam War, the war is a mere device to prompt larger questions about American morals. The specific historical and structural conditions of the Vietnam War itself are never morally investigated.

Not only are these films centered on an American drama, they neglect to represent the Vietnamese. In The Hollywood War Machine, Carl Boggs quotes David Desser, who writes, “virtually all Vietnam-related films share one overriding motif: ‘a focus on us, on what the war did to us, on how we entered Vietnam with either good or bad intentions, but never on Vietnam as historical site, never on the Vietnamese as genuine subjects, as people with a culture, a heritage, a political agenda, even a cultural and political confusion all their own.’”14 In Apocalypse Now, the Vietnamese soldiers and citizens get almost no screen time, and they are portrayed as primitive masses who adore the American Kurtz. Furthermore, Coppola didn’t even employ Vietnamese actors: “Filmed in the Philippines, director Francis Ford Coppola used the Ifugao Indians, a native Filipino tribe, for the parts of his Vietnamese Montagnards of Colonel Kurtz’s personal army. None of the Vietnamese parts are credited.”15 The Vietnamese in Platoon suffer a similar depiction. Boggs explains that, “As for the Vietnamese, once again they remain invisible aside from a dramatic scene where villagers are brutalized and killed by GIs. Here the Vietnamese are shown only as hapless victims when in reality they were collective agents in a successful fight for national liberation.”16 As Charles Taylor mentions in a voice-over in Platoon, “We fought ourselves.” The existence of the Vietnamese people is irrelevant to the movies’ storylines and production.

Directors also project American scenes onto Vietnamese landscapes and neglect Vietnamese landmarks to construct an American setting in Vietnam. In Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola strives to cover the landscape with American symbols: “The river journey in Apocalypse Now is full of allusions to southern California… with the major episodes of this trip through Vietnam centering around the surfing, rock music, go-go dancing, and drug taking associated with the west coast culture of the time.”17 Coppola himself admits that “the jungle will look psychedelic, fluorescent blues, yellows, and greens. I mean the war is essentially a Los Angeles export, like acid rock.”18 In superimposing an American landscape onto Vietnam, the historical context of the film is erased and projections of the American psyche cover the screen. America is inescapable, even when looking at the ostensible Vietnamese landscape. While Platoon’s director Oliver Stone is less overt in his repurposing of the Vietnamese landscape, he notably excludes landmarks, architecture, and cultural references that would clearly situate the film within Vietnam.19 In doing so, Stone has license to use “the Vietnam jungle as a setting to depict uniquely American conflicts and tragedies—young men becoming battlefield mature, the struggle around military tactics, survival in an alien, hostile milieu—all tied in some way to the fabric of domestic culture at a time of rapid change.”20 In these films, the exclusion of identifying physical features and superimposition of American scenes onto the Vietnamese landscape eradicate traces of Vietnamese people and the historical context of the Vietnam War, permitting the directors to focus on the de-contextualized internal moral struggle of the American soldier.   

Crisis Subverted

A critical consumer of Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and the legion of lesser American media about the Vietnam War, Viet Thanh Nguyen sets out to subvert the dominant American portrayal of an exclusively American moral drama by writing a half-Vietnamese protagonist faced with a communist moral crisis, naming and condemning the exclusion of the Vietnamese from war films, and altering the “projected American landscape trope” to highlight moral fissures in the protagonist’s Vietnamese identity.

The Sympathizer begins with the evacuation of a South Vietnamese general (“The General”) and his team, including the half-Vietnamese, half-white narrator, “The Captain.” Yet The Captain is in fact a North Vietnamese double agent feeding information to his boss and friend, Man. Evacuated and subsequently resettled in Los Angeles, The Captain must execute several grisly missions for The General, which throw him into moral turmoil, ultimately leading to his participation in a covert mission back in Vietnam. The mission fails, and The Captain’s North Vietnamese captors include his friend, Man.21

As a spy, The Captain is already situated in a moral bind that evokes the protagonists of Apocalypse Now and Platoon; his communist ideals are continuously challenged and eroded through his murders of innocent Vietnamese soldiers and citizens suspected of communist sympathies. Much like Charles Taylor and Captain Willard, the conclusion of Nguyen’s story finds The Captain’s ideals corrupted. Only this time, the values are antithetical to those of the American war drama. When the narrator is captured by the North Vietnamese, the man in charge of the prison camp, The Commandant, tells him that his “confession is full of moral weakness, individual selfishness, and Christian superstition…. You are a communist only in name. In practice, you are a bourgeois intellectual.”22 His action and inaction also find him morally corrupt. His years of service to the communist regime, of devotion to communist ideals, and of constant personal imperilment, have been contaminated by the very society he was trying to defeat.

This collapse of idealism culminates in The Captain’s confrontation with Man, his mentor and paragon of communist virtue. After torturing him, Man grabs The Captain’s limp hand and presses a gun to it, begging The Captain to shoot him in the head. Much like Captain Willard sees the hollowness of the American ideal in Colonel Kurtz before killing him, The Captain is faced with a similar reality as he presses a gun to Man. The idealism embodied in his friend cannot withstand the realities of war. This substitution of American for North Vietnamese idealism maintains the familiar cinematic form of internal character conflict, therefore rendering it digestible to the American reader. Yet the inner conflict does not belong to a white American but a half-Vietnamese, communist spy. The preservation of the form with vastly different content allows Nguyen to effectively communicate a subversive moral narrative that centers a Vietnamese fighter.

The second way in which Nguyen challenges the American cultural narrative of the Vietnam War is through naming the racist and solipsistic practice of excluding Vietnamese voices and actors from films. The middle portion of the novel centers around The Captain’s role as an “authenticity advisor” to a film about the Vietnam War called “The Hamlet.” A barely-veiled fictionalization of Apocalypse Now, Nguyen depicts the director as brilliant but utterly uninterested in accurately and compassionately portraying Vietnamese actors and characters. The Captain successfully lobbies for more Vietnamese actors, but they are used only as nameless soldiers, rapists, and hysterical villagers. The Captain thus enables stereotypes, as opposed to challenging them. He notes that the film is “a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say.”23 Later, Nguyen is even more explicit: “We cannot represent ourselves. Hollywood represents us.”24 By calling out dominant casting and scripting practices and illustrating the inhumanity of these directorial choices in action, Nguyen problematizes the industry standard of blithe neglect of Vietnamese representation in Vietnam War films. The racism of the Vietnamese roles is abhorrent to the modern reader, and the obvious connection to Apocalypse Now and similar films puts these dominant reimaginings of the war under renewed scrutiny.

Nguyen also takes the Hollywood trope of projecting Los Angeles onto Vietnam and refocuses it on the Vietnamese protagonist. When The Captain goes back to Vietnam on a covert mission, he brings his Los Angelean demons—two men he has killed unjustly—with him. They remind him of his morally dubious actions as a spy while in California, as well as the idealized communist training of his school days (his second victim is a former classmate and fellow Marxist). They keep watch with him at night, and they later float around him as he is tortured. Their presence evokes the scenes of their death, both of which bring the reader and The Captain back to Los Angeles. Vietnam is an almost incidental landscape.

Yet this recreation of the war film “landscape” trope occurs within vastly different narrative circumstances. The guilt these American demons demand of The Captain is inextricably tied to his position as a North Vietnamese spy. Their murders force the question that the narrator has tried to ignore: is the very real inhumanity of murdering innocents and even allies justified by the maintenance of North Vietnamese communist rule? Are his ideals possible in his material and political situation as a spy? What other damning memories has he forgotten to preserve his idealism? These moral questions provide a window into the crises and tensions of a Vietnamese experience of the war, which is almost never provided in American media. The recreation of this “landscape” trope provides the American reader a familiar entry point into a narrative that then flips the script: the familiar moral crisis and plotline centers a Vietnamese communist.

Nguyen’s subversions of American cinematic archetypes and tropes serve two purposes: offer a complex historical and moral narrative of Vietnamese participation in the war to an English-speaking readership, as well as force readers to question the centrality of other Vietnam War media in their own minds. But novels are often read solely for entertainment. How exactly can The Sympathizer force a reconsideration of these dominant American understandings of history?  

Public Memories, New Histories

The interplay between The Sympathizer and Vietnam War media does not just exist within literary and film studies but within public consciousness. America’s understanding and memory of the Vietnam War pulls from diverse sources, many of which are degrees removed from the actual experience of the conflict. In Recombinant Histories, Christina Schwenkel describes the public memory of an event as “constituted and forged through the intertwining of oral narrations, lived experiences, state representations, popular culture, and the global mass media, thus dissolving the boundaries between individual, historically reconstructed, and culturally produced memories (Sturken 1997).”25 Public consciousness regarding the Vietnam War is no exception, with combat experience and live news coverage mixing in with governmental propaganda, family stories, school lessons, and pop culture representations.

Yet as the Fall of Saigon nears its fiftieth anniversary, lived experiences begin to cede ground to cultural items in the shaping of American memory about the war. Alison Landsberg argues that film is particularly well-positioned to reshape American consciousness because of its sensorial immediacy and strength. She cites pioneering film critic Siegfried Kracauer, who wrote that film “seizes the ‘human being with skin and hair,’” and that “the material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance.”26 Landsberg continues, “The cinematic experience has an individual, bodily component even while its mode of reception is collective.”27 This “individual, bodily component” is what enables movie scenes to stick in our memories. Landsberg calls these memories prosthetic: “‘Prosthetic memories’ are indeed ‘personal’ memories, as they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with the mass media’s various technologies of memory.”28 Films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon engage our senses through soundtracks, gruesome images of violence, and the constant visuality characteristic of film, all of which produce “prosthetic memories” of fictional events. A distinctive feature of these memories is that they reach diverse audiences: “because prosthetic memories are not natural, not the possession of a single individual, let alone a particular family or ethnic group, they conjure up a more public past, a past that is not at all privatised.”29 These memories are both “public” and individual, as opposed to the more limited “collective” memories of smaller communities. This public quality of cinematic memory, coupled with the popularity of Vietnam War films, suggests that film—with all of the aforementioned archetypes and tropes—has widely and deeply affected public memory of the Vietnam War.

For The Sympathizer to effectively challenge cinematic versions of the Vietnam War, novels would also need to produce prosthetic memories. Otherwise, Nguyen’s challenge is merely literary, with far lower stakes.  To discern the capacity of novels to create prosthetic memories, we must evaluate The Sympathizer on Landsberg’s four criteria of prosthetic memory: 1) Are not authentic or lived but rather artificially received from media, 2) have bodily aspects that strengthen their potency, 3) often mark a trauma, and 4) are exchangeable as commodities.30 We shall leave the second and most difficult requirement for last. Novels clearly satisfy the first requirement. The third is contingent on the work of art portraying an intense event effectively, and The Sympathizer is replete with skillful descriptions of traumatic events (murder and rape). The fourth requirement is certainly true of novels, and Nguyen’s novel has sold over a million copies worldwide.31 This leaves the second criterion. Do novels, as Kracauer says of film, “directly stimulate the material layers of the human being”?32 There is no visual or auditory narrative forcing itself upon the reader. Yet I argue that novels can elicit bodily responses similar to those in movies. Effective written descriptions can provoke lucid visuals in the minds of readers, and language has the capacity to render trauma viscerally disturbing. Perhaps the written word loses something in its lack of immediacy—the image requires imaginative labor on the part of the reader. But investing effort into visualizing descriptions can also produce crystalline images with significant staying power. A necessary ingredient for producing these lucid images is strong descriptive writing. And as the Pulitzer Prize notes on its website, The Sympathizer is “profound, startling, and beautifully crafted.”33 These qualities suggest that The Sympathizer has the potential to create prosthetic memories, which, per my earlier analysis, would contain scenes, images, and ideas that counter the prevailing cinematic narrative of the war.

These potential memories would not exist in isolation but rather within a fabric of memories that constitute public consciousness of the Vietnam War. Given the subversive status of The Sympathizer in relation to the dominant histories offered by Apocalypse Now and Platoon, these potential prosthetic memories would alter this public fabric of memory. Christina Schwenkel writes that “a recognition that projects of history are also transnational processes compels a more nuanced understanding of the global entanglements involved in the production of historical knowledge.”34 She calls these new historical knowledges ‘recombinant histories,’ which are composed of “diverse transnational memories, knowledge formations, and logics of representation.”35 Nguyen is offering readers a series of memories that bridge Vietnam and America. Recognition of his project might manifest in new productions of historical knowledge within American conceptualizations of the Vietnam War. A ‘recombinant history’ of the conflict might destabilize the dominant position of war movies in favor of a more nuanced and transnational reading of history, where the Vietnamese are central and complex actors.

Six years is not enough time to tell whether or not The Sympathizer will have an effect on American public memory or what that effect will be, and Viet Thanh Nguyen knows better than to be too optimistic about the impact of his work. In his interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, he says, “You know, we write novels. And what that means is my novel, even though it won this prize, is just a book. And Hollywood produces $200 million, $500 million blockbuster epics that will totally destroy my book.”36 He may be right. Film is a different, and quite effective, medium of producing prosthetic memories that reinforce a dominant narrative about the war. His book, despite the acclaim, has a smaller and slightly different audience. The potential, however, is there. If enough American readers are engrossed by the story about a “man of two minds”37 perhaps Nguyen will get his revenge.

.  

Notes

[1]       “Author Viet Thanh Nguyen Discusses ‘The Sympathizer’ and His Escape from Vietnam.” NPR, NPR, 17 May 2016

[2]       “War, Vietnam.” IMDb, IMDb.com

[3]       “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies.” American Film Institute

[4]       “Between the Covers Viet Thanh Nguyen Interview.” Tin House, 1 Feb. 2021

[5]       NPR, “Escape from Vietnam.”

[6]       Tin House, “Between the Covers.”

[7]       NPR, “Escape from Vietnam.”

[8]       Ibid.

[9]       Schwenkel, Christina. “Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 1, 2006, p. 6.

[10]     Boggs, Carl, and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2016, p. 69.

[11]     Hellmann, John. “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.” Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, edited by Michael Ander-Egg, Temple University Press, 1991, 69.

[12]     Ibid, 70.

[13]     Ibid, 71.

[14]     Boggs and Pollard, Hollywood War Machine, 67

[15]     Pike, Sara. “Racism at the Movies: Vietnam War Films, 1968-2002.” University of Vermont, Graduate College Dissertations and Theses, 2008, p. 43.

[16]     Boggs and Pollard, Hollywood War Machine, 69.

[17]     Hellman, Hollywood Genre Film, 70.

[18]     Boggs and Pollard, Hollywood War Machine, 70.

[19]     Ibid, 68

[20]     Ibid, 69.

[21]     Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

[22]     Ibid, 306.

[23]     Ibid, 124.

[24]     Ibid, 139.

[25]     Schwenkel, Recombinant Histories, 22.

[26]     Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture.” Memory and Popular Film, Edited by Paul Grainge, 2003, pp. 148. Inside Popular Film.

[27]     Ibid, 148.

[28]     Ibid, 148-9.

[29]     Ibid, 148-9.

[30]     Ibid, 149.

[31]     Alter, Alexandra. “He Writes Unreliable Narrators Because He Is One, Too.” The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2021

[32]     Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 148.

[33]     The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press). www.pulitzer.org/winners/viet-thanh-nguyen.

[34]     Schwenkel, Recombinant Histories, 5.

[35]     Ibid, 5.

[36]     NPR, “Escape from Vietnam.”

[37]     Nguyen, The Sympathizer, 1.

Bibliography

“AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies.” American Film Institute, www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies/.

Alter, Alexandra. “He Writes Unreliable Narrators Because He Is One, Too.” The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/books/viet-thanh-nguyen-the-committed.html.

“Author Viet Thanh Nguyen Discusses ‘The Sympathizer’ and His Escape from Vietnam.” NPR, NPR, 17 May 2016, www.npr.org/2016/05/17/478384200/author-viet-thanh-nguyen-discusses-the-….

“Between the Covers Viet Thanh Nguyen Interview.” Tin House, 1 Feb. 2021, tinhouse.com/transcript/between-the-covers-viet-thanh-nguyen-interview/.

Boggs, Carl, and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2016.

Hellmann, John. “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.” Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, edited by Michael Ander-Egg, Temple University Press, 1991, pp. 56–80.

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture.” Memory and Popular Film, Edited by Paul Grainge, 2003, pp. 144–161. Inside Popular Film, doi:10.7765/9781526137531.00014.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

Pike, Sara. “Racism at the Movies: Vietnam War Films, 1968-2002.” University of Vermont, Graduate College Dissertations and Theses, 2008.

Schwenkel, Christina. “Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–30., doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.1.3.

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press). www.pulitzer.org/winners/viet-thanh-nguyen.

“War, Vietnam.” IMDb, IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/search/title/?genres=war&keywords=vietnam&sort=boxoffice_gr….

final essay term: