How the creators of HBO’s ‘The Sympathizer’ explore the ‘American War’ through a Vietnamese lens

When Park Chan-wook read “The Sympathizer” for the first time, maybe six or seven years ago, he felt like he was watching fireworks explode in the night. Books Viet Thanh Nguyen tackles Vietnam War’s aftermath in ‘The Sympathizer’ Much of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, “The Sympathizer”, takes place in the bland stucco flatlands of Los Angeles between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the staging and aftermath of a failed counterrevolution by members of the displaced anti-communist Vietnamese diaspora several years later. Co-creator and director Park Chan-wook on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the premiere of “The Sympathizer.” “Believe it or not, I’m a director who puts significant importance in humor when I go about making a movie, because I believe — when the humor is combined with tragedy or violence — it actually makes it even more powerful,” Park said through his interpreter, the filmmaker Jaehuen Chung. Of the Vietnam War — which is referred to in Vietnam, as the show points out, as the “American War” — “it’s saying, ‘Well, just remember that there’s another side,’” McKellar, the series co-showrunner, said. “If part of the point of the TV series is that wars don’t end simply because we say they do, that they continue,” Nguyen said, “then in fact, all the contradictions of American history that have driven Americans from settler colonization to the Vietnam War, have driven us onwards to support Israel in its war on Gaza as well.” The series artfully translates pages and pages of tortured interior monologue in a way that’s deeply compelling onscreen.