Randa Abdel-Fattah

around the Vietnam War, which is not all that different from how we felt about the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, right?

And it makes sense that in its aftermath, we would also sort of have a split brain where on the one hand, we like valorize it.

And there's also a deep skepticism about like, what were we doing there?

What do we stand for as a country?

And what are our responsibilities in the aftermath?

Viet calls that re-narration the memory industry.

He argues that the way nations remember and re-narrate their pasts isn't random or coincidental.

It's intentionally curated, memorials, monuments, museums, even the key chains and mugs in the gift shop.

But all that pales in comparison to Hollywood.

It must have been an odd experience, I guess, to have absorbed these cultural reference points as an American and then to kind of all those years later go and encounter sort of the realities on the ground.

And I wonder what you feel about this memory industry, what role it played for you personally, and what kind of role it plays more generally in shaping the narratives we have about memory.

these big events that kind of affect us all as a society.

Apocalypse Now is a movie about the Vietnam War directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

It was released in 1979.

It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two.

Many consider it one of the greatest films ever made.

Viet calls it the archetype of a Hollywood fantasy.

The film demonstrates the horrors of war for sure and far from celebrates the American military.

But at the very least, American soldiers are depicted as fleshed out individual characters in the film.

Compare that to the South Vietnamese people who are barely recognized at all.