by Viet Thanh Nguyen at Zeteo: This is a tale of two spectacles.
The first one has unfolded with horrific images of the dead, wounded, and dismembered from Gaza, recorded mostly by Palestinian journalists and civilians. Those images have shared space on my news and social media feeds with the second spectacle, an American one ranging from partisan politics to celebrity gossip to the latest television or movie blockbuster. Alternating between these two dramas, the international and the domestic, on a daily, even hourly, basis has been unnerving. That distress, which I share with many, lends urgent meaning to the phrase, “You can’t look away.”
One function of a spectacle is to be so compelling that viewers are distracted from other events happening at their peripheral vision. The spectacle works by keeping our eyes fixed on it, from the historical power struggle depicted in the Emmy-winning FX series, ‘Shogun,’ to the actual political drama of the US presidential race. The unease we may feel watching a television series, hooked as we are on questions of who will die and who will triumph, is contained by our awareness that it is fiction. The discomfort of watching the American electoral melodrama has added bite, knowing that who Americans elect will have real-world consequences. Politicians, parties, states, PACs, and movements, all knowingly manipulate the narratives of their own spectacles. Entertainment and deadly stakes merge.
Watching Israel’s war on Gaza, or Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, or the preceding televised Israeli invasions of Gaza, is to realize that as awful as war and massacre are, they also add up to a spectacle. The effects on viewers can be ambiguous. An unfortunate status that Viet Nam shares with Palestine is that the war in Viet Nam was both an actual war and a spectacle for global viewership. “Palestine is this generation’s Vietnam War,” activist Hatem Abudayyeh said as he prepared to bring antiwar protest to the Democratic convention in Chicago. While the wars in Viet Nam and Palestine are not the same, there are parallels – from massive protests to the way the visual images of the wars are received.
Although I was thrilled to see my novel adapted … the news from Gaza blunted my happiness.
As one of the characters from my novel The Sympathizer, which is about the consequences of the war in Viet Nam, said, “The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that – they also took great pleasure in it.” The complications of watching and making spectacles, as well as being a part of them, were driven home even further for me recently because The Sympathizer itself became an HBO television series that debuted in April, even as the death toll in Gaza reached at least 34,622. Although I was thrilled to see my novel adapted, especially by the director Park Chan-wook, the news from Gaza blunted my happiness. Seeing the spectacles unfold side by side – my personal one, about the horrors of a past war, and the political one, about the horrors of a present war –reminded me of a question I sometimes think about: how did the rest of the world outside of Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia experience the war being fought, and as it became the first televised, living room war?
That media-saturated war left the world with indelible moving and still images, from the monk Thich Quang Duc immolating himself to the girl Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked after being burnt by napalm to the piles of dead in a trench who were among the 504 civilians massacred by American soldiers at My Lai.
But while those images catapulted Viet Nam from a country into a war, another spectacle took place simultaneously, as the photographer Tod Papageorge shows in American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam. In contrast to the stereotypical memories of that era – hippies, counterculture, antiwar protests – Papageorge’s photos document American crowds watching football and baseball games, having fun. The implication is clear: many, perhaps most, Americans went about their lives not thinking about the war, a task aided by the spectacle of sports.
What, then, to make of a television show such as ‘The Sympathizer,’ in an age of renewed war where the United States again plays a key participant?
Turning the Machinery Against Itself
The show presented a spectacle, with famous actors (Robert Downey, Jr., Sandra Oh), a talented Vietnamese cast (Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan, Duy Nguyễn, Toan Le, Kieu Chinh, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên), and an enormous budget (although not as much as a single F-35, the premiere fighter jet of the United States military). But even if a spectacle entertains, its power to shape a common sense of public opinion should not be underestimated. The spectacle-as-entertainment has long been deployed to justify Israel’s war on Gaza and occupation of Palestine.
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