HBO’s The Sympathizer saved its best dual identity trick for last

The Sympathizer is filled with twists and turns — and why wouldn’t or not 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 Warfare 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 The Captain (Hoa Xuande), stated 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 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 identify of the Commissar — one other determine outlined by his title greater than himself — can 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.]

Picture: Hopper Stone/HBO

Within the ultimate episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in truth his pal Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes through the fall of Saigon. Worse but, this outdated pal/jail camp supervisor is nonetheless going to torture him for data.

It’s a tricky means for the Captain to seek 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 had been a neat framing gadget 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 arduous 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 actually pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande advised Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is admittedly about making an attempt to outlive, making an attempt to weave his means 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 means for the Captain to understand that his actions have been extra about discovering any means to outlive than about following his communist beliefs, or combating for a greater Vietnam.

“Once 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 part that he believes and thought he was doing for the trigger may not really 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 overall’s orders to kill him, the Captain is appearing 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 converse to, a special individual now, a lot tougher than he was as a spy beneath American imperialism. However (very similar to Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn wished 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 pal, 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 evident — so these are the elements I maintain.

“[In episode 7], he’s so broken, however he nonetheless desires to maintain the presence in entrance of his mates. He simply desires to attempt to be the identical individual his pal noticed the final time.”

Which is essential; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s ultimate flip — comes all the way down to how Mẫn’s flip performs. He’s the one individual, 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 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 the Captain’s id, Mẫn is the one one who can match and reduce by 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 imagine. By means of his torture, the Captain lastly reconciles with a few of the worst issues he did for the struggle, going all the best way 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 struggle 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 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 appears again on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — extra clearly than ever.