saddestrobots OP , 3 days ago

i feel like post-war Vietnam is never allowed to be a real place

and i don't think that's a decision that comes from authorial malice, or even to punish the protagonist for his attachments

it's supposed to be this surreal purgatory kind of thing (albeit, i would say, in a kind of kafka-ish way)

but in the end Vietnam is just reduced to a phantasm, in the full Judith-Butler sense of the word

frustrating!

saddestrobots OP , 3 days ago

to be clear, i'm not looking for a rosy propagandistic picture of Vietnam — the show takes a big giant dump on America, France, South Vietnam, &c., too

but this is feels like a Vietnamese-American story in the sense that the story of Vietnam as a country just kinda ends on April 30 1975

saddestrobots OP , 3 days ago

the ending also serves up several pseudo-breakthroughs, moments where something repressed or forgotten comes out and then just… doesn't go anywhere

that's certainly intentional but i Do Not Care For It

combined with the surrealism it feels like just faffing around

in the end you're left with the Captain as an alienated meandering writer-figure while Man is the only character who actually finds any part of himself (the scene in the box, then the scene on the boat)

saddestrobots OP , 3 days ago

to me, the story's strongest thematic throughline is that all this writerly introspection is close to worthless

the Captain is just as alienated and wrapped up in PTSD at the end as he was in the beginning

there's nothing wrong with that conclusion but i feel like there are better ways for them to really say it

Mezentine , 3 days ago

@saddestrobots Have you read the novel? I think the ending is more effective in the book, the "Nothing is more important than independence and freedom" hit for me in the text, and Vietnam being kind of an un-place works better when, because its a novel, you can just...not describe it, and leave everything uncomfortably vague.

I was really really enjoying the show but I think it whiffs slightly in the last episode specifically because of the issues with portraying post war North Vietnam. I also wasn't looking for propaganda or anything, but because we do have to actually see it with our eyeballs and spend more time there, its unreality feels less deliberate and more like a product of limited perspective

Mezentine , 3 days ago

@saddestrobots I was blown away by Hoa Xuande throughout the whole show though. A real "where the fuck did this guy come from?" performance. The Captain as a character and the levels of duplicity he inhabits towards other people, towards the audience and fundamentally towards himself is not something I thought they'd be able to capture, and I think he did an incredible job, including the moments where he starts to break down and something like real emotional earnestness starts to break through and the resulting disorientation that produces within him.

Mezentine , 3 days ago

@saddestrobots "the ending also serves up several pseudo-breakthroughs, moments where something repressed or forgotten comes out and then just… doesn't go anywhere"

If there's one thing I think they really sort of missed maybe almost by accident its that in the novel I think they successfully keep gesturing at the idea that Captain is carrying something with him that he can't quite look directly at, whereas in the show I don't know that we really get a sense that he's been repressing something this whole time

saddestrobots OP , 3 days ago

@Mezentine
good points all around

Hoa Xuande's acting is definitely 100x more compelling than the narrator v.o.