The Sympathizer’s best dual identity trick was its last

The sympathizer is full of twists – and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a show (based on a book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the end of the Vietnam War to his life as a refugee in America as he works to ensure Viet Cong victory. All the while, the show grapples with themes of self and identity, as filtered through The Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the variety of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).

In the final episode, we finally get to read the Captain’s current story in a re-education camp in Vietnam, run by the shadowy commissioner, who demands that the Captain’s story be written out in great detail. It’s no surprise that the Commissioner’s real name is another figure defined more by his title than himself – would be another surprise in the plot. But like any revelation of true identity in The sympathizerit’s more of a twist of the knife than anything else.

(Ed. remark: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The sympathizer. This post also contains some mentions of sexual assault.)

In the series finale, the captain finds out that the commissioner is in fact his friend Mẫn, now scarred by napalm attacks during the fall of Saigon. Even worse, this old friend/prison camp supervisor is still I’m going to torture him for information.

It’s a hard way for the captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn – alone in an office and richly decorated, leading the bright future for Vietnam – were wrong. Throughout the show, the captain’s reflections were a neat framework and something he saw mostly as a formality, the only thing standing between him and the bright future of communist Vietnam he had fought so hard for. Now staring him in the face is the cold reality of what his struggle has culminated in. It’s all in accordance with the way The sympathizer has used the Captain’s imaginative visions as ghost images of his subjective (and distorted) point of view.

“The ghosts really relate to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande told Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is really about trying to survive, trying to fight his way out, trying to never be discovered, and of course guarding the line between his loyalties.”

In that light, his vision with Mẫn is not so different from his visions about Sonny or the Major; they are all, as Xuande puts it, an expression of “the trauma he has been hiding from.” It’s a surprising way for the captain to realize that his actions were more about finding the means to survive than following his communist ideals or fighting for a better Vietnam.

“When they come back to haunt him and remind him of the things he neglected in his memory, it’s a reminder to him that everything he believes and thought he did for the cause may not actually be right.”

This is an idea that The sympathizer underlines the captain’s character again and again: nothing about his life is simple or neat, and none of it went as he planned. Even though he appears to confess to Sonny or carry out the general’s orders to kill him, the captain acts for his own reasons, rather than merely “the case.”

Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO

Such corruption of idealistic impulses is something Mẫn also knows all too well, seemingly disillusioned by the state of the country as he goes about his business. He is, as his dual character names show, a different person now, much tougher than he was as a spy under American imperialism. But (much like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures), Duy Nguyễn wanted to make sure you could see the connective tissue between each version of Mẫn.

“To develop this character, I really had to dig deep: what is Mẫn? How does he talk? How does he move? How does he act towards his friend, or does he act alone with just the captain?’ says Nguyễn. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very quiet; he must be precise. And he’s intellectual, so he has to stand tall. The way he talks is clear – so those are the parts I keep.

“(In episode 7) he’s so damaged, but he still wants to stay present in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw the last time.

That is crucial; all of episode 7 – and the gist of it The sympathizer‘s last turn – comes down to how Mẫn’s turn plays. He is the one person, the crucial vector point around which the Captain’s story is suddenly pulled back, bringing out his bluffs and all his perspective gaps. Like the captain, he explores dualities: a person and a rank; loyal to the cause, yet wary; a ghost of the past and a vision of the brave new, broken and corrupt world. After filtering much of the story – and with it the war, its aftershocks and all the complexities therein – through the captain’s identity, Mẫn is the only one who can match and break the noise of the captain’s story. told himself.

And the truth is at the same time infinitely more complex and much simpler than he was willing to believe. Through his torture, the captain finally reconciles with some of the worst things he did before the war, going all the way back to one of the show’s earliest scenes (which we now know was actually the rape of a fellow communist agent ). He has to accept who he is and where he comes from. And he must accept that nothing about his trauma and suffering has necessarily fixed his nation. All that hardship might have only brought more pain – or worse, indifference to pain. As the sexually abused communist agent tells him, after all her years in the war and the camp, “nothing can disappoint her now.”

Ultimately, it is Mẫn who frees the captain (and Bon) from the camp, back on a boat bound for the old US of A. It makes him a study in conflict once again; after so many years of loving (and trying to hate) that place, it might be his salvation after all. As the captain looks back on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts – clearer than ever.