The Quiet American (2002)
Movie rating: 7/10
The best endorsement of The Quiet American, directed by Philip Noyce and based on Graham Greene’s 1955 novel of the same name, came from distributor Miramax when it delayed the film’s release for a year after the September 11 attacks due to its alleged “unpatriotic” message. Given the unhinged nationalism, jingoism and xenophobia that prevailed in the United States after 9/11 (two words: “freedom fries”), that can’t help but come off as a compliment.
Released in 2002, the film is actually the second cinematic adaptation of Greene’s novel. Set against the backdrop of the First Indochina War, the picture takes place in Vietnam, then known as French Indochina, in 1952. It follows the relationship between two men: middle-aged British journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) and young American Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who tells Fowler at their first meeting in Saigon that he is in the country as an aid worker. A love triangle develops as Pyle falls in love with Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress, Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen). With the French imperialists losing their colonial war against the Viet Minh, Pyle’s presence highlights the growing interest of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam.
This movie’s biggest problem is the central love triangle. Put simply, Phuong is not an interesting character. This isn’t the fault of Hai Yen, who is fine in the role, but rather the way Phuong is written. There’s nothing about her that seems to justify the intensity of attraction both men feel for her. She’s pretty and she’s a good dancer; that’s about it. Phuong wants Fowler to divorce his wife so he’ll marry her. But Fowler’s wife, who lives in London, refuses to grant his request for one due to her Catholic beliefs. Shortly after Pyle meets Fowler, they go out to a club where Pyle dances with Phuong, has a short exchange, and immediately falls in love with her.
The love triangle also makes the alleged friendship between Fowler and Pyle a little hard to believe. Pyle comes to Fowler’s apartment and tells Phuong he’s in love with her right in front of her older boyfriend. It strains credulity that Fowler would continue to associate with a man who proclaimed his love for Fowler’s girlfriend right in front of him. The performances of Caine and Fraser go a long way towards helping us accept this, and the friendship does gain a bit more credibility after they travel through the country and experience the terrors of war together.
The most interesting aspects of the movie are its politics and attitude to journalism. Fowler, as a correspondent for The Times of London, represents the lingering presence of old-school European imperialism in Vietnam. He tells Pyle during their first meeting that as a reporter, he views himself as an impartial observer:
Thomas Fowler: I have never thought of myself as a correspondent, just a reporter. I offer no point of view, I take no action, I don't get involved. I just report what I see.
Alden Pyle: But you must have an opinion.
Thomas Fowler: Even an opinion is a form of action.
Pyle, meanwhile, represents the dominant power and influence of U.S. imperialism after World War II. When he meets Fowler, Pyle is reading a book called The Dangers to Democracy. Plot summaries of The Quiet American describe Pyle as an “idealist”. I suppose if you buy into what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky described as the Cold War-era national religion of “anticommunism”, you could call him that. Pyle speaks passionately about the need to contain “communism” and defend “democracy”—the latter meaning capitalism and fealty to U.S. imperialist interests. He calls for a “third force” between French colonialism and the “Communists” in Vietnam. Fowler reacts to Pyle’s defence of “liberty” with skepticism:
Thomas Fowler: Liberty is a western word. How do you define it for the Vietnamese?
Alden Pyle: The freedom to choose.
Thomas Fowler: OK, you give them that, they vote and they elect Ho Chi Minh.
Pretty much all bourgeois media depicts Marxism and “communism” in the most negative terms and as identical to Stalinism. That’s still more or less the case in The Quiet American, at least in the beginning. But it’s around the one-hour mark that the movie takes a twist and we begin to see the murderous barbarism through which all forms of imperialism, including the U.S. variety, seek to impose their will abroad in order to control markets and resources.
Spoilers follow.
Fowler begins to suspect his American friend is not what he claims to be when a Vietnamese military leader, General Thé (Quang Hai), based on real-life general Trinh Minh Thé, begins to present himself as leader of a “third force”. Thé also appears well-armed and well-financed.
When a terrorist bombing takes place in Saigon, Fowler sees Pyle—who claimed to only know two words of Vietnamese, “beer” and “haircut”—speaking fluent Vietnamese and ordering a photographer to take pictures of the casualties. He comes to realize Pyle is a CIA agent who helped orchestrate the bombing, which could then be blamed on “the Communists” to fuel popular outrage and support for more U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Here is the “unpatriotic” content that compelled Miramax to delay the movie’s release for a year after 9/11: telling the truth about the bloody role of U.S. imperialism. The CIA’s record of supporting terrorism, military coups, assassinations, torture, massacres, and atrocities around the world is estimated to have caused up to 6 million deaths. Yet that truth is rarely acknowledged in popular media, which prefer to lionize CIA agents as heroes of the United States.
When Fowler confronts Pyle about backing the terrorist bombing and asks if it bothers him, he responds, “What I saw made me disgusted. But it if keeps out the Communists, it’s necessary.” This scene reminded me of a classic line by Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle: “Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people. But what’s worse, I think, is they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” In the Cold War context, any crime by U.S. imperialism is said to be justified in the fight against “communism”—much as any crime was later justified by the fight against Islamic terrorism, or more recently against imperialist rivals such as Russia and China.
In his anger at the bombing, Fowler realizes he can no longer remain a neutral observer. It turns out that Fowler’s assistant Hinh (Tzi Ma) is allied with Communist forces. Hinh delivers my favourite line in the movie: “Sooner or later, Mr. Fowler, one has to take sides, if one is to remain human.” It’s a retort to the pseudo-objectivity of journalists who, like Fowler, claim that they are “unbiased” and must remain neutral in all matters, never take action, or state their opinion. In truth, everyone is biased. That especially includes journalists who fancy themselves “objective” or “neutral”.
The best journalists, like the best historians, are those who acknowledge their own bias while carefully examining every aspect of a phenomenon, its development and contradictions, to gain as objective a view of reality as possible. Leon Trotsky made this point in a 1938 article on the Chinese Revolution:
In the eyes of a philistine a revolutionary point of view is virtually equivalent to an absence of scientific objectivity. We think just the opposite: only a revolutionist – provided, of course, that he is equipped with the scientific method – is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution. Apprehending thought in general is not contemplative, but active. The element of will is indispensable for penetrating the secrets of nature and society. Just as a surgeon, on whose scalpel a human life depends, distinguishes with extreme care between the various tissues of an organism, so a revolutionist, if he has a serious attitude toward his task, is obliged with strict conscientiousness to analyse the structure of society, its functions and reflexes.
A more recent article by Khawer Khan reiterates these ideas specifically with reference to journalists and the media. Khan refers to Louis Althusser’s concept of the “Ideological State Apparatus”, which holds that institutions such as the media in their current form reinforce the ideology of capitalism:
To extend this theory to a media worker, any time a journalist attempts to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class in the media, the authority of “professionalism” and “objectivity” comes into play and “constitute” the journalist’s effort as “activism” or “subjective.” In other words, if you tell the story from the point of view of the ruling class, you are “objective,” but if you take another view, you are “subjective” and an “activist.”
Another thinker Khan cites is Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who believed that capitalist society maintained control over workers not just through coercive means, but through the use of culture:
Gramsci argued that through presenting bourgeois cultural values as neutral, the ruling class presents its interests as the interests of the general public and their values as “common sense” values. In other words, since bourgeois ideas are well-developed and well-promoted, all classes in society are encouraged to accept these ideas at face value. So for example, when workers—including journalists—champion “free markets,” they do so against their own interests because of the “hegemony” of the alien, ruling class.
In The Quiet American, Fowler offers a good example of how the pseudo-objectivity of journalists in the bourgeois press, such as The Times, conceals adherence to the views of the ruling class. For example, in suggesting that Pyle’s idealism about “liberty” is naive, Fowler says that if you give the masses in Vietnam the freedom to choose their own leaders, “they vote and they elect Ho Chi Minh.” Whatever your opinions on Ho Chi Minh, it’s clear Fowler is framing this as a bad thing. And in 1952, for the ruling class of imperialist nations such as Britain, France, and the United States, support for any left-wing or national liberation movement that threatened their profits was certainly a bad thing.
It reminds me of the wave of commentary we saw in the bourgeois media after Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of populism on both left and right when bourgeois opinion-makers warned about the supposed dangers of “too much” democracy. All politics in the last analysis reflect class interests. The capitalist class tolerates democracy only so long as it gives them the results they want. When that fails to happen—if the masses, for example, “vote for Ho Chi Minh”—then democracy is thrown out the window and the ruling class will resort to any means to protect their interests, from dictatorship to mass murder, as we see with the terrorist bombing in The Quiet American.
Fowler at some level seems to recognize this after the bombing, and realizes he must pick a side. Indeed, as Hinh suggests, sooner or later we must take sides to remain human. What would we say to someone who professed to be “neutral” about evils such as slavery or genocide? There’s a reason one of the most popular labour songs is called “Which Side Are You On?” In the wake of the bombing, Fowler decides he is not on the same side as Pyle. He silently agrees to allow Hinh’s Communist allies to take Pyle captive during a scheduled dinner between the two. But when Pyle tries to flee, Hinh stabs the CIA agent, killing him. The movie ends with newspaper headlines that show the deepening involvement of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam that led to direct military involvement and a near pre-revolutionary situation in the United States at the height of the antiwar movement.
While the love triangle at the heart of The Quiet American is unconvincing, good performances by Caine and Fraser and the story’s rare willingness to address the atrocities of U.S. imperialism make this film worth a watch.