The Key to Understanding HBO’s The Sympathizer

In a latest scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we solely know because the Captain (performed by Hoa Xuande) sits exterior a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the person he’s planning to kill. His goal is a former senior navy officer, Main Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who’s beginning over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese sweet as a aspect hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the person embraces him. “It’s a brand new world right here,” Oanh tells the Captain. “In case you absolutely decide to this land, you change into absolutely American. However should you don’t, you’re only a wandering ghost residing between two worlds without end.”

Tailored from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–profitable novel, The Sympathizerfollows a protagonist who appears perennially trappedon this between. The Captain is a North Vietnamese secret-police agent embedded excessive up within the Southern Vietnamese navy. As a biracial, half-French man, the Captain is directly strikingly seen in public and but socially invisible; he’s been, as he says early within the first episode, “cursed to see each problem from each side.” However what vexes him much more is the conclusion that he makes use of his identification as an excuse to keep away from taking agency ethical stances. By circumstance and by alternative, he strikes via society as a specter.

Though The Sympathizer isn’t a literal ghost story, this can be a compelling prism to view the variation via. The collection, created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, introduces the Captain after he’s been captured by the North Vietnamese military (which he’s spying for), despatched to a reeducation camp, and caught in a room to jot down his confession. He begins by writing phrases we hear in a voice-over: “I’m a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a person of two faces,” a nod to the opening of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, whose equally unnamed narrator unpacks feeling adrift and nameless “as a result of individuals refuse to see me.” In The Sympathizer, the phrase spook takes on a twin which means, describing a spy—a job that hinges on being imperceptible—and likewise a disembodied presence that’s neither useless nor alive.

The Captain narrates his imperfectly detailed reminiscences, which span many years and transfer between Vietnam and the U.S. He jumps forwards and backwards via time, revealing a person caught as a lot between bodily and psychic worlds as between loyalties. The 2 individuals he cares most about on this planet—his greatest buddies and “blood brothers” Man and Bon—have been on completely different sides of the conflict: the previous was a higher-up in North Vietnamese management, the latter was a South Vietnamese paratrooper and murderer.

[Read: Viet Thanh Nguyen on why writing is a process of “emotional osmosis”]

However in contrast to in lots of conventional ghost tales, the Captain isn’t an omniscient determine narrating from the afterlife. He’s wrestling with competing political and cultural ideologies and with Vietnam’s legacy of colonialism and conflict. He’s a frequent topic of derision as a mixed-race man: In a single scene in Vietnam, the Captain explains that he’s lengthy endured acquaintances and others “spitting on me and calling me bastard,” dryly including that “generally, for selection, they name me bastard earlier than they spit.” Even those that the Captain believes respect him see his humanity as conditional. Within the novel, his longtime boss—recognized solely because the Basic—fires him for flirting together with his daughter: “How might you ever imagine we might enable [her] to be with somebody of your variety?” the Basic asks.

This sense of alienation is exacerbated within the U.S., the place the Captain embeds throughout the exiled South Vietnamese neighborhood. There, he and his fellow countrymen are, as he describes within the novel, “consumed by the metastasizing most cancers referred to as assimilation and vulnerable to the hypochondria of exile.” At one level within the present, a fellow émigré and journalist named Sonny (Alan Trong) tells him, “Arguably, I’m extra Vietnamese than you … biologically”—and but the Captain is thought to be being too Vietnamese by lots of these he meets within the U.S. In an particularly atrocious scene after the Captain’s arrival in Los Angeles, a former professor he connects with (Robert Downey Jr.) offers him the dehumanizing task of writing down his “Oriental and Occidental qualities” aspect by aspect. Afterward, the professor pressures the Captain to learn the record aloud to college donors at a cocktail get together.

[Read: The Vietnam War, as seen by the victors]

Not even the Captain’s Marxist proclivities can anchor him after he strikes to America, a bastion of capitalism that he is been taught to hate however secretly enjoys. Although he technically identifies as a Communist, within the collection he doesn’t come off as an lively, passionate believer. He additionally turns into concerned in American popular culture, when he is requested to be a cultural marketing consultant on an Apocalypse Now–esque movie. But the Captain is frustratingly static in these Hollywood scenes. He’s unconvincing when he implores a film director named Niko Damianos (additionally performed by Downey Jr.) to rent Vietnamese actors in talking roles. Even the way in which he pushes again towards the inclusion of an unnecessarily violent scene feels tepid; when the director fires him, the Captain walks away in detached silence.

In interviews, Nguyen has stated that hauntings are inextricable from tales about conflict and the trauma it leaves behind. He has additionally famous that Vietnamese tradition is stuffed with ghost tales, whose spirits bear each malicious and benevolent intent. The visible language of The Sympathizer takes care to level out that these hovering within the afterlife keep near the residing. Shrines to the deceased, many adorned with fruits, incense, and vases filled with flowers, pervade the present’s world, together with within the Captain’s residence and within the Basic’s workplace. Later within the collection, literal ghosts additionally take form: Main Oanh and one other individual the Captain murders consistently reappear to taunt him and provide unsolicited opinions.

Because the collection progresses, the Captain turns into increasingly more numb, stymied by the conclusion that neither communism nor capitalism—nor both of the 2 international locations, or racial identities, or greatest buddies he’s torn between—will make him complete. The Sympathizer drives residence the salient level that social invisibility has a means of hollowing somebody till they’re unrecognizable, even to themselves. It gestures towards a haunting fact: To face for every thing is akin to standing for nothing.