The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

Was this why, watching Gettysburg for the first time, Sony sympathized with the Confederacy? With the butternut- and grey-clad men who were, like the “Vietnamese,” dying in hundreds, mowed down in scene after scene by cannon and musket fire, their uniforms, like the Vietcong’s, made mostly from civilian clothes worn to rags, their bodies turned, it seemed, to laundry? And yet, unlike the “Vietnamese” in The Green Berets, the faces of Confederate soldiers in Gettysburg are clear, the camera lingering on their agonized expressions, casting their human deaths as felt losses, full of pathos. The illusion was made possible by the very fact that the “Vietcong” bodies were captured in passing, transient, blurring themselves toward death—and not, like Robert E. Lee or Joshua Chamberlain in Gettysburg, zoomed in and fixed to a distinguishable lived life.