The Sympathizer is stuffed with twists and turns — and why wouldn’t it’s? It’s a present (based mostly on a e-book of the identical identify by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the top of the Vietnam Conflict to life as a refugee in America as he works to safe the Viet Cong’s victory. All of the whereas, the present wrestles with themes of self and identification, as filtered by way of The Captain (Hoa Xuande), mentioned double agent; his Vietnamese neighborhood in Nineteen Seventies Los Angeles; and the number of white males he works for (all performed by Robert Downey Jr.).
Within the remaining episode, we lastly meet up with The Captain’s present-day story in a reeducation camp in Vietnam, led by the shadowy Commissar, who’s been demanding the Captain’s story be written out in exacting element. It’s no shock that the true identify of the Commissar — one other determine outlined by his title greater than himself — can be one other shock within the plot. However, like all unveiling of true identification in The Sympathizer, it’s extra a twist of the knife than anything.
[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The Sympathizer. This post also has some mentions of sexual assault.]
Picture: Hopper Stone/HBO
Within the remaining episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in actual fact his good friend Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes in the course of the fall of Saigon. Worse but, this outdated good friend/jail camp supervisor continues to be going to torture him for data.
It’s a troublesome means for the Captain to search out out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an workplace and extremely adorned, main the brilliant future for Vietnam — weren’t correct. All through the present, the Captain’s reflections had been a neat framing machine and one thing he noticed as principally a formality, the one factor standing between him and the brilliant way forward for Communist Vietnam he had fought so onerous for. Now, staring him within the face, is the chilly actuality of what his wrestle has culminated in. It’s all consistent with the best way The Sympathizer has been utilizing the Captain’s imaginative visions as specters of his subjective (and warped) viewpoint.
“The ghosts actually pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande advised Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is admittedly about attempting to outlive, attempting to weave his means out, and attempting to by no means be came upon, and, clearly, toeing the road between his allegiances.”
In that mild, his imaginative and prescient with Mẫn isn’t all that completely different from his visions of Sonny or the Main; they’re all, as Xuande places it, an expression of “the trauma that he’s been hiding from.” They’re a startling means for the Captain to comprehend that his actions have been extra about discovering any means to outlive than about following his communist beliefs, or preventing for a greater Vietnam.
“After they come again to hang-out and remind him concerning the very issues he’s been neglecting in his reminiscence, it’s a reminder for him that every little thing that he believes and thought he was doing for the trigger won’t truly be proper.”
That is an concept that The Sympathizer underlines many times with the Captain’s character: Nothing about his life is easy or neat, and none of it went the best way he deliberate. At the same time as he appears to admit to Sonny or perform the final’s orders to kill him, the Captain is performing for his personal causes, somewhat than purely “the trigger.”
Picture: Hopper Stone/HBO
Such corruption of idealistic impulses is one thing Mẫn additionally is aware of all too properly, seemingly disillusioned with the state of the nation on the identical time he does his job. He’s, as his twin character names communicate to, a unique particular person now, a lot tougher than he was as a spy below American imperialism. However (very like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn needed to ensure you might see the connective tissue between each model of Mẫn.
“To develop this character, I needed to actually dig deep: What’s Mẫn? How does he discuss? How does he transfer? How does he act round his good friend, or does he act alone with simply the Captain?” Nguyễn says. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very nonetheless; he must be exact. And he’s mental, so he has to remain upright. The way in which he talks is obvious — so these are the components I hold.
“[In episode 7], he’s so broken, however he nonetheless needs to maintain the presence in entrance of his mates. He simply needs to attempt to be the identical particular person his good friend noticed the final time.”
Which is essential; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s remaining flip — comes all the way down to how Mẫn’s flip performs. He’s the one particular person, the essential vector level, round which the Captain’s story will get all of a sudden jerked again, calling his bluffs and calling out all his perspective gaps. Just like the Captain, he’s a examine of dualities: an individual and a rank; loyal to the trigger, but cautious; a ghost from the previous and a imaginative and prescient of the courageous new fractured and corrupted world. After filtering a lot of the narrative — and, with it, the warfare, its aftershocks, and all of the complexities contained inside these — by way of the Captain’s identification, Mẫn is the one one who can match and lower by way of the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.
And the reality is without delay infinitely extra advanced and much easier than he was ready to consider. Via his torture, the Captain lastly reconciles with among the worst issues he did for the warfare, going all the best way again to one of many earliest scenes of the present (that we now know was truly the rape of a fellow Communist agent). He has to just accept who he’s and the place he comes from. And he has to just accept that nothing about his trauma and struggling has essentially mounted his nation. All that hardship would possibly’ve simply borne extra ache — or, worse, indifference to ache. Because the sexually assaulted Communist agent tells him, in any case her years within the warfare and the camp, “nothing can disappoint” her now.
Ultimately, it’s Mẫn who will get the Captain (and Bon) freed from the camp, again on a ship headed for the ol’ U.S. of A. It as soon as once more makes him a examine in battle; after so a few years of loving (and attempting to hate) that place, it could be his salvation in any case. Because the Captain appears to be like again on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — extra clearly than ever.
