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Grad School Was Never This Fun
Park Chan-wook’s HBO adaptation of The Sympathizer is a captivating senior seminar on postcolonial theory.
The Captain’s identity is complex: a communist agent undercover in South Vietnam, the son of a Vietnamese mother and an unknown French father, a young radical whose obvious fondness for American culture is at odds with his sworn avowal of anti-American politics. The disconnect is most egregious and distracting in the use of Robert Downey Jr., who pops up throughout the series playing every major white character: the CIA agent who gets the Captain and the General out of Vietnam; the director of The Hamlet; a congressman; and, most unfortunately, the fey Orientalist Asian-studies professor who objectifies his area of expertise. As an inversion of the stereotypical approach to Asian characters in film and television, the conceit tracks with the show’s conceptual underpinnings: All white men on The Sympathizer are roughly interchangeable with slightly altered characteristics and otherwise unimportant sameness, a system of connected symbols rather than individual people.
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