In a latest scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we solely know because the Captain (performed by Hoa Xuande) sits outdoors a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the person he’s planning to kill. His goal is a former senior army 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 the event you totally decide to this land, you change into totally American. However in case you don’t, you’re only a wandering ghost residing between two worlds ceaselessly.”
Tailored from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–successful novel, The Sympathizer follows a protagonist who appears perennially trapped on this between. The Captain is a North Vietnamese secret-police agent embedded excessive up within the Southern Vietnamese army. As a biracial, half-French man, the Captain is without delay strikingly seen in public and but socially invisible; he’s been, as he says early within the first episode, “cursed to see each situation from either side.” However what vexes him much more is the belief 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 sequence, 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 that means, describing a spy—a job that hinges on being imperceptible—and likewise a disembodied presence that’s neither lifeless nor alive.
The Captain narrates his imperfectly detailed reminiscences, which span a long time 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 the earth—his finest associates and “blood brothers” Man and Bon—have been on totally different sides of the battle: 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 battle. 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 “typically, 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 consider we’d permit [her] to be with somebody of your form?” 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 known as assimilation and prone 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 a lot 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 project 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 sequence 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 advisor 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 in opposition to 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 mentioned that hauntings are inextricable from tales about battle and the trauma it leaves behind. He has additionally famous that Vietnamese tradition is filled 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 stuffed with flowers, pervade the present’s world, together with within the Captain’s dwelling and within the Basic’s workplace. Later within the sequence, literal ghosts additionally take form: Main Oanh and one other particular person the Captain murders continuously reappear to taunt him and provide unsolicited opinions.
Because the sequence progresses, the Captain turns into increasingly numb, stymied by the belief that neither communism nor capitalism—nor both of the 2 international locations, or racial identities, or finest associates he’s torn between—will make him entire. The Sympathizer drives dwelling the salient level that social invisibility has a approach of hollowing somebody till they’re unrecognizable, even to themselves. It gestures towards a haunting fact: To face for every little thing is akin to standing for nothing.
