Catfish

Catfish are part of the elaborate realism of The Hamlet’s recreated Vietnamese hamlet, where they swim in a pond directly beneath the outhouse and are expected to feed on what falls from it. For The unnamed narrator, the fish are not an exotic production detail: they recall a childhood he does not wish to romanticize, and their use on set reveals how cinematic authenticity can be built from unequal treatment of Vietnamese extras.

The Pond Beneath the Outhouse

The production designer, Harry, shows The unnamed narrator a complete hamlet set, including an outhouse raised on a platform above a fishpond. The improvised toilet paper is a stack of banana leaves and old newsprint. Looking through the round opening in the toilet seat, they can see the pond’s calm surface; Harry points out that it is stocked with whiskered catfish closely related to those found in the Mekong River delta. He presents the arrangement as ingenious, and says there is a feeding frenzy when someone uses the toilet.

The fish are thus not merely background decoration. The set makes them part of a functioning system: the elevated latrine looks down into their pond, and the production intends human waste to become their food. The apparent ingenuity of the arrangement depends on treating the fish, and the people assigned to use the latrine, as components of a designed environment.

A Memory Without Nostalgia

The sight recalls to The unnamed narrator the splintery toilet seats of his childhood and the catfish that jockeyed for position beneath him when he used the outhouse. The memory makes the staged detail credible, but it does not make the past appealing. He feels neither sentimental about village life nor admiration for the set’s supposed environmental consciousness. He remembers the material discomfort of the arrangement, including the possibility of being bitten by a malarial mosquito while using an outdoor toilet.

His comparison of toilet paper sharpens the distance between that remembered life and the comforts he now prefers. In his account, paper used in the West for bodily cleanliness represents a luxury unavailable to much of the rest of the world, where even paper for blowing one’s nose is not taken for granted. He admits that longing for soft paper and a smooth porcelain seat makes him an Occidentalist. The catfish consequently connect the film’s claim to authenticity with a personal refusal to turn hardship into an idealized picture of rural life.

Who Must Use the Set

Harry plans to have Vietnamese extras use the outhouse so that the catfish can be fed, while the crew will use chemical toilets on dry land. The unnamed narrator is invited to be the first to use the latrine, but declines and softens the refusal with a joke. His response marks a distinction between the set’s performance of local conditions and the crew’s access to cleaner facilities.

That distinction belongs to a wider production hierarchy. The unnamed narrator’s work includes organizing extras, whose roles range from civilians to soldiers and National Liberation Front guerrillas. They are paid a dollar a day; when nobody wants to play guerrillas, Violet agrees to double the wages for those roles. The fishpond episode makes the hierarchy concrete in a small, practical arrangement: the crew’s sanitation is separated from the latrine intended for the Vietnamese extras, whose bodies are also needed to complete the set’s imitation of local life.

Authenticity as a Production Device

The catfish help make the hamlet feel materially convincing, but the scene unsettles any simple equation between realism and respect. The set reproduces a toilet the narrator recognizes from childhood, yet its planned use turns that memory into a resource for the film. What Harry admires as resourcefulness is, for The unnamed narrator, inseparable from discomfort and from the extras’ unequal position on set.

The fish therefore sit at the intersection of lived memory, cinematic construction, and labor. Their pond supports a detail designed to look authentic, while the separate chemical toilets expose who is expected to inhabit that authenticity and who can step outside it. In the episode, the catfish make the film’s manufactured village tangible—and reveal the human arrangement beneath its appearance.