The Sympathizer 🇻🇳

🎵 The song for this post is The Seed, by The Roots (feat. Cody ChesnuTT). 🎵

I read ~10 novels on my Asia trip. Here are my notes and reactions on The Sympathizer. I'm currently reading its follow-up, The Committed.

As with other write-ups like this, I'll start with some high-level "islands" that came up most strongly, and at the bottom I'll do a spoilertacular assorted rapid-fire notes. Reminder that I try to write these to be interesting even if you haven't read the source. Previous write-ups:

• The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
• BioShock, the 2007 game by Irrational Games.
• BioShock 2 (where I talk about sequels, generally).

For The Sympathizer, my "islands" are on horny art, political anger and what's underneath it, and Leaving Impressions vs. Being Adaptable.

Horny art

One of my favorite articles of all time is Everyone is beautiful and nobody is horny. It comes from the idea that physiques on TV and movies are more exaggeratedly hot than they've ever been, and yet there's way less sex in the media than there used to be. The MCU is the biggest movie franchise of my life, everyone has exquisite bodies, but have you ever seen a Marvel character kiss, or even want to?

There are, I think, a lot of reasons for this. Off the top of my head:

Lots of (important, justified) commentary on representation. For a while the need to inject horniness into art meant that you had women there just to be kissed or "won" at the end. We started including a lot more women in media, especially in leading roles, and the cultural norms don't really demand that women "win the guy" in the same way that patriarchal norms have guys needing to "win the girl."

(Other side effects of this: the Strong Female Character, who was still skinny and hot but also punched a guy early in the movie, so she was Strong. Joss Whedon made a career of making incredibly horny art that pretended it was progressive (and surprise! he sucks)).

Besides questions of representation, we were also having a reckoning around sexual desire, generally. The word "problematic" entered our lexicons. "Binders full of women" was a moment. "Me too" was another. Even once the representation was there, it was a culturally safer choice to remove sex altogether, and mass-market entertainment is the game of safe choices.

Also? Besides the thematic and cultural safety, it's also safer on craft. It's not hard to write or film a decent sex scene, but it is hard to write a great one, and disastrous if you fuck it up. Take a look at Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction awards, or the pool scene from Showgirls (I'd embed it, but it's surprisingly hard to find now? If someone finds it, please link me. It's really of another dimension).

International markets. A movie makes a lot of its money overseas, and many censors would rather people have smooth, covered-at-all-times crotches who's only purpose is to connect legs to a body. A really funny example of this: in Attack on Titan, the giant Titans already have no genatalia and nobody in that story fucks, but Malaysian censors still covered them up in the manga.

The great horniness re-mapping. Also to blame? The Internet. Before, if you wanted to feel titillation, you had to go to shady, out-of-the-way, culturally-shamed sources (things like porno mags, strip clubs, or adult movie theaters where there'd be a bunch of other dudes jacking off in the room with you). So most people got titillated another way: the latent cultural environment. Like, look at this movie trailer:

We don't really make comedies like this anymore, because their audience is gone. One of the things this trailer advertises is "you will be titillated! There will be hot chicks in this, and they'll act suggestively!" That's why movies like Eurotrip or American Pie sold their DVDs with an "Unrated edition": the promise of light titilation. Nobody went into Eurotrip or Still Waiting hoping to see real sex, but those movies were promising to feed a (usually male) hunger belonging to a large part of the market. Usually with cleavage, or maybe a nipple.

By the late aughts? That latent horniness was less necessary because an enterprising person could purchase a computer for their home, log into the Internet, and see tits, tons of them, on-demand. This last decade? You can get it on your phone. People build "goon caves" now. Even the most open deviant of the 90's couldn't dream of a media center they could build in their home, for not much money, with multiple screens that that continuously stream an infinite amount of hardcore porn, with the express purpose to spend all day getting off.

That's obviously not the typical case, but regardless: I think these Internet-enabled "horny sinks" removed the great cultural hunger that made horniness present in other media, even when it wasn't strictly necessary.

All this to say: horny art is gone, and I hate it! To be clear, I'm glad we stopped making movies like Still Waiting; please, let's have some taste. And I'm obviously grateful for all the advances we've made on representation, movements like #MeToo, and ensuring male sexual desire does way less harm to people. We've still got a long way to go.

But in regards to art-making, I think we've gone too far the other way: there is no sex or sexual desire in movies, and its got all sorts of shitty downstream effects. I've been at literal orgies that felt less horny and alive than chaperoned dances in Middle School. I think sex and sexual desire are prime forces of humans, culture, and history, and trying to build art where it gets systematically eliminated feels like taking antibiotics to kill your gut flora just because you've got something against the idea of bacteria.

That said.

Wow, The Sympathizer is terribly, uncomfortably horny! A ton of my notes are "Jesus Christ dude, way to make it weird." Every woman shows up and through the lens of this first-person narrator, it's like "did you care how fuckable she was? No? Well, I'll tell you, in excruciating detail." If you can find this kind of thing entertaining, it often is. But even me, I was like "shut up and talk about something else, please 🙏." I always say "I'd rather tell an artist to pull back rather than have to push them forward, begging them to take more risks." Well, congrats! Pull back!!

In his defense, there are places he uses it to great narrative effect. The first time it made me nearly throw the book across the room, he follows it up with :

Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene [reminder, this takes place during the Vietnam War]. Masturbation, even [under the circumstance of the book, won't ruin it]? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word "murder" made us mumble as much as the word "masturbation."

and I was like "wow, I walked into that." But as a dude who loves looking at a fucked up little psyche or two, I was still wishing he'd cool it a bit.

Political anger, perpetual losers, bitterness, self-awareness

Regarding angry political posts on social media, I think we get cause and effect wrong. The common idea is that there are bad things in the world, we're sad when we see it, then we post the sad thing to amplify the awareness of the bad thing that made us sad. Really, I think we should flip the first two steps: a person has a sadness inside of them independent of world events, some part of them feels validated by seeing the sad/anger-inducing things online, and it serves that inner sadness and their external sense of justice to post on social media about it.

When I talked about why I fell in love with theatre, I said it gave me a safe way to have my feelings. In real life, I was afraid of letting myself get too angry, or ambitious, or to give love, or to receive it. But holding a script, with the words already written by someone else, with everyone wanting me to have my feelings in front of them as honestly as possible, I could finally let myself feel them. I told myself it was for art, which was exactly what I needed to come out of my shell. I called the feeling I got "having a purpose," but really, it was a psychic relief. The phrase I used was "putting a respirator on someone who tried their hardest not to breathe."

I think a lot of performed political anger serves as a way for its amplifiers to safely express their anger, loneliness, and misery. It's their psyches begging for a way to let it out, and for the pain to be validated. Obsessing over the news and the horrors of the planet has the advantage of being inarguable: shit really is fucked up! And if you've got a great brain, being angry is very defensible, to yourself and others. But really, I think at least some of the time, part of the person sharing wants to be mad and lash out, and this is the least objectionable way to do it.

When this hit me personally: one day I was scrolling Twitter, getting mad again that a particular rich dipshit said something hurtful that any idiot with an ounce of empathy for others would know better than to feel, let alone say. I kept thinking about this one guy and how, from memory, I could list a dozen of their idiot statements and transgressions. And failures! Many, many predictions were wrong! They said things which cost them hundreds of millions of dollars and decimated communities, and people still took this asshole seriously! Didn't any of it matter?

But then I realized: I'm in my apartment spending my free time getting mad at a guy who isn't here with me. I know this guy's entire biography and he's never, ever going to think of me. My anger about how he's moving the world in a bad direction, but what direction have I moved the world in at all? Who's the real idiot here? And what would happen if I just let him be an asshole, and I moved on with my life? Is getting mad like this doing anything to stop him?

Do I have ideas of what the world should look like? Of course. Have I moved it in that direction? Enough for anyone to be mad that I'm just out there, embodying and enabling those ideals, the way I was mad at him? I wondered if literally anyone I could name or imagine is out there, mad as hell in their rooms, at me existing and thriving? And the answer was: probably not. I had only one life, and I was spending it doing this.

I posted, but I never, myself, organized. I donated, but I didn't follow through on what happened to those donations. I wasn't strategically looking at outcomes: if I was really invested in taking down this dipshit, why wasn't I plotting and orchestrating his downfall, even if it took years? No, I posted. I stopped once the feelings got out. It was a wake-up call that I needed to live my own damn life, and stop anesthetizing with rage about the outside world.

(disclaimer that I hope is obvious: I'm still mad as hell about a bajillion things, and obviously the tragedies of the world are real. If we're on good terms, just talk to me for three minutes and I'll be talking like this again. And I don't mean to diminish anyone doing great work to make the world a better place, and using posting as a way to mobilize people towards it. But I've spent so much of my life Getting Mad Online and I don't think it did much other than make me pissed, so I'm a lot more mindful now when I do it)

Back to Sympathizer. The protagonist justifies every miserable situation he puts himself in for Greater Politics. He puts himself in multiple unwinnable situations with an unwinnable macro-situation. In The Committed, he mentions (and other people mention to him!) that many Vietnamese immigrants go on to become successful doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and build great lives there; he then chooses a path where he's got few skills, likely to be brutalized, and has no future. Like political posting, I think the unwinnable situations allow him to feel externally the pain he feels internally (how often does he cry out for Momma when his life gets most wretched? How he's tortured by the memories of ghosts?). His situation is unwinnable, but it allows him to betray people who live without the pain he carries, that he feels powerless to solve. How often does he say "I'm wretched, miserable, lonely, and sad?" All the time! But how often does he say "I'm doing all this because I'm unfulfilled and miserable"? Never! His justification, at least in Sympathizer, is politics. "My pain is for the revolution."

You could read these novels with the lens of a Vince Gilligan show (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul): "Why does someone 'break bad?' Why do they break the law?" What made this character choose to be a spy who eats shit for decades, then his choices in The Committed? There's a rational reason, but there's also a simple, emotional one: the man hates himself. He believes he can't or shouldn't have a better life (apropos of nothing: he was raised Catholic). When people call him a bastard, he feels it because he believes it. The sadness is internal, like it is for so many of us.

Record players vs. record scratchers

Most of us know how a record player works: a record has grooves in it, a needle reads the grooves, and produces the sounds it reads on a megaphone. Did you know that very old records were recorded with the same equipment, just with the current in the other direction? In the 20's, a giant horn is pointed at a band who plays really loudly, and a needle on the other end would carve grooves into a block of wax. The blocks only held about 3 minutes of sound, which is incidentally why most pop songs are 3-5 minutes long: musical tastes accommodated what the technology allowed. I think it's a profound point that every speaker can also be used as a microphone, and every microphone can be a tiny, shitty speaker.

In life, I find there are two general modes of operating (and most people will pick one they live in more comfortably): record players, who skillfully read the grooves of a situation, don't alter it, and work around them; and record scratchers, who impose their will on the world, and change it by carving the wax of reality. The latter are sometimes called "natural leaders," other times, "assholes." Record players think before they act, and are keenly aware of how others will react, and strategize around that knowledge. Record scratchers don't care what anyone else thinks, they just do, and the world will deal.

This shows up in a lot of other ways: Enneagram 8's and 3's tend to be scratchers; 2's, 6's, and 5's tend to be players. "Ask" vs. "tell" culture frameworks tap into this too.

Male characters in fiction tend to be record scratchers: they set the action, they have clear motivations, and much of the fun is watching the world change to their whims. Every Ayn Rand protagonist and action movie star is some power fantasy of record scratchers. You rarely win battles by letting the other side set the pieces and then dancing around them, and there's something satisfying about seeing the Kool-Aid Man bust through a wall instead of calmly opening a door. But many of us live our lives the other way. In many households and societies, the way to survive is to read the temperature. Being a tall poppy gets you cut.

There was a period in the early aughts where indie movies had a lot of male "record player" characters: they were the male lead opposite the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Her spontaneity and agency was always to make up for a dude who was brooding and deep and sensitive who carried a notebook and never combed his hair and still dressed more like a boy than a man (think Joel in Eternal Sunshine, or Zach Braff's character in Garden State). If you couldn't tell: I always hated these guys, but probably because they reminded me of my own impotence. In real life, nobody likes the brooding loner, including and especially the brooding loner.

The Sympathizer is interesting because the protagonist is very heavily a record player, with major differences from the movie representations I mentioned above:

• It's not a White Guy with no real problems, this is a PoC whose existential issues feel way more interesting than "I'm a sad White boy," which then gets immediately solved by a hot woman with blue hair appearing.

• Unlike in the movies, we can get a sense of his cursed and tortured interiority through the narration. Watching Zach Braff mope around for a few hours required me to stretch too much to feel like he had any real problems worth caring about, the Sympathizer protag is frequently being tortured, or a witness to it, with witty observations along the way.

• There are stakes! It's the Cold War, after all. His "blood brother" relationships with Bon and Man mean he's always at risk of losing the most important people to him.

I like to ask "who is getting especially seen by the core structure of this book?," then making a cute name for it. I've mentioned "competence porn" a few times on this blog: stories usually written by and for women, about women who have to navigate hot-headed and careless Powerful Men Who Are Angry, which I imagine hits a dopamine center for women who are pressured by patriarchy to be world-class record players, frequently dealing with guys who can't handle their emotions. I wrote about "nerd junk food," where people who consider themselves nerdy geniuses get to imagine they'll take over the world and get the girl and the people who shoved them into lockers will pay, all because they were smarter and better than the unwashed masses.

I think The Sympathizer is something like that for record players. It speaks to depressed, horny, record-player guys who are bitter about the lack of justice in the world; who put undue burdens on themselves that assure failure, but that makes them feel more noble about what they're doing, and makes that failure more righteous when it happens. This in turn lets them experience the stinging pain of it to match an internal sadness; who live in their heads and are extremely clever and cutting in their analyses of people and systems, but that does little to relieve them of pain, or empower themselves towards any real strategic end.

Anyway, I loved this book. If you do too, please consider therapy.

I've got a bunch of other "clusters" I'd love to write about, but this post is long enough, I may save them for a write-up of The Committed.

More scattered, spoiler-tacular passages with notes