The Sympathizer’s best dual identity trick was its last one

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 title by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the tip of the Vietnam Battle 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 identity, as filtered by means of The Captain (Hoa Xuande), stated double agent; his Vietnamese group in Seventies Los Angeles; and the number of white males he works for (all performed by Robert Downey Jr.).

Within the ultimate 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 title of the Commissar — one other determine outlined by his title greater than himself — could be one other shock within the plot. However, like several unveiling of true identity 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 ultimate episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in reality his buddy Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes throughout the fall of Saigon. Worse but, this previous buddy/jail camp supervisor is nonetheless going to torture him for info.

It’s a tricky method for the Captain to search out out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an workplace and extremely adorned, main the intense future for Vietnam — weren’t correct. All through the present, the Captain’s reflections have been a neat framing machine and one thing he noticed as largely a formality, the one factor standing between him and the intense way forward for Communist Vietnam he had fought so onerous for. Now, staring him within the face, is the chilly actuality of what his battle 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) standpoint.

“The ghosts really pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande informed Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is really about trying to survive, trying to weave his way out, and trying to never be found out, and, obviously, toeing the line 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 method for the Captain to appreciate that his actions have been extra about discovering any means to outlive than about following his communist beliefs, or combating for a greater Vietnam.

“When they come back to haunt and remind him about the very things he’s been neglecting in his memory, it’s a reminder for him that everything that he believes and thought he was doing for the cause might not actually be right.”

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 best way 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 appearing for his personal causes, relatively than purely “the cause.”

Photograph: Hopper Stone/HBO

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 similar time he does his job. He’s, as his dual character names converse to, a special individual now, a lot more durable than he was as a spy below American imperialism. However (very similar to 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 had to really dig deep: What is Mẫn? How does he talk? How does he move? How does he act around his friend, or does he act alone with just 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 method he talks is obvious — so these are the components I hold.

“[In episode 7], he is so damaged, but he still wants to keep the presence in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw the last time.”

Which is essential; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s ultimate flip — comes right down to how Mẫn’s flip performs. He’s the one individual, the essential vector level, round which the Captain’s story will get abruptly jerked again, calling his bluffs and calling out all his perspective gaps. Just like the Captain, he’s a research 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 struggle, its aftershocks, and all of the complexities contained inside these — by means of the Captain’s identity, Mẫn is the one one who can match and reduce by means of the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.

And the reality is without delay infinitely extra advanced and much less complicated than he was ready to consider. Via his torture, the Captain lastly reconciles with a number of the worst issues he did for the struggle, going all the best way again to one of the earliest scenes of the present (that we now know was truly 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 mounted his nation. All that hardship may’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 struggle and the camp, “nothing can disappoint” her now.

In the long run, 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 research in battle; after so a few years of loving (and making an attempt to hate) that place, it is perhaps his salvation in spite of everything. Because the Captain seems again on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — extra clearly than ever.