The Sympathizer is filled with twists and turns — and why wouldn’t or not it’s? It’s a present (based mostly on a ebook of the identical identify by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the top of the Vietnam Struggle 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 id, as filtered by means 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 — could be one other shock within the plot. However, like every unveiling of true id 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.]
Within the remaining episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in actual fact his buddy Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes throughout the fall of Saigon. Worse but, this outdated buddy/jail camp supervisor is nonetheless going to torture him for data.
It’s a troublesome approach for the Captain to search out out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an workplace and extremely embellished, main the brilliant future for Vietnam — weren’t correct. All through the present, the Captain’s reflections have been a neat framing gadget 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 exhausting for. Now, staring him within the face, is the chilly actuality of what his battle has culminated in. It’s all in step with the way in which 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 actually about making an attempt to outlive, making an attempt to weave his approach out, and making an attempt to by no means be came upon, and, clearly, toeing the road between his allegiances.”
In that gentle, 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 approach for the Captain to comprehend that his actions have been extra about discovering any means to outlive than about following his communist beliefs, or combating 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 all the pieces that he believes and thought he was doing for the trigger won’t really be proper.”
That is an concept that The Sympathizer underlines time and again with the Captain’s character: Nothing about his life is simple or neat, and none of it went the way in which he deliberate. At the same time as he appears to admit to Sonny or perform the overall’s orders to kill him, the Captain is performing for his personal causes, fairly than purely “the trigger.”
Such corruption of idealistic impulses is one thing Mẫn additionally is aware of all too nicely, 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 distinct particular person now, a lot more durable than he was as a spy underneath American imperialism. However (very like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn wished to be sure 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 buddy, 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 elements I preserve.
“[In episode 7], he’s so broken, however he nonetheless needs to maintain the presence in entrance of his buddies. He simply needs to attempt to be the identical particular person his buddy noticed the final time.”
Which is essential; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s remaining flip — comes right down to how Mẫn’s flip performs. He’s the only particular person, the essential vector level, round which the Captain’s story will get out of the blue 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 conflict, its aftershocks, and all of the complexities contained inside these — by means of the Captain’s id, Mẫn is the one one who can match and minimize by means of the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.
And the reality is directly infinitely extra advanced and much easier than he was ready to consider. By way of his torture, the Captain lastly reconciles with a number of the worst issues he did for the conflict, going all the way in which again to one of many earliest scenes of the present (that we now know was really the rape of a fellow Communist agent). He has to simply accept who he’s and the place he comes from. And he has to simply accept that nothing about his trauma and struggling has essentially fastened 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 spite of everything her years within the conflict 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 making an attempt to hate) that place, it could be his salvation in spite of everything. Because the Captain seems to be again on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — extra clearly than ever.