[COLUMN] In The Sympathizer, the Immigrant Writer Becomes an Editor | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains discussion of key plot points from The Sympathizer, which wrapped up last night on HBO. It’s very good. Check it out.

The Sympathizer wrapped up on HBO last we, the prestige television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel.

Like the book, the series is a fascinating study of the immigrant experience, following a lead character known only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande). The Captain served as a spy for the Americans during the Vietnam War, but was actually a double-agent for the Viet Cong. During the fall of Saigon, the Captain flees to America with the General (Toan Le), the former head of the South Vietnamese Secret Police, who is attempting to construct a government-in-exile.

Part of what makes The Sympathizer so compelling is that it operates in a variety of different modes. Like the book from which it is adapted, the show is a romance, a war story, a spy thriller, a social commentary, and a study of American popular culture. However, it can also be situated within the broad canon of “the immigrant novel”, one of the formative and archetypal American literary genres. These are the stories of outsiders who come to America and make a new life for themselves.

“The immigrant writer” and “the immigrant novel” have a long and rich history in American popular consciousness, and the mode of writing encompasses everything from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. The protagonists of these sorts of stories generally embark on a journey of reconciling their previous identities with their new home. In some ways, it is an embodiment of the American Dream, the idea that everybody is the author of their own story.

Viet objects to this classification of his book. “Many reviews of The Sympathizer called it an ‘immigrant novel’,” he acknowledged. “And if you want to irritate me, tell me that. If you’re perceived as a foreigner in this country— Asian or Latino, for example—you’re often perceived as an immigrant writer even though this is a terrible classification for many reasons.” In contrast, Viet insists upon the classification of “refugee writer”, reflecting his own experiences as a refugee to America.

Viet explains his discomfort with the traditional mode of the immigrant mythology. “In the context of the United States, where the immigrant narrative is very strong, that idea of settling in the United States inevitably affirms this American mythology of the American Dream,” he argues, contending that “the very existence of the immigrant story itself—the immigrant novel that we’re reading—is evidence of the success of the immigrant story and the American Dream.”

This is a very important qualifier when framing The Sympathizer in the context of other stories about foreign arrivals to the United States. The Sympathizer is not a narrative of integration or assimilation. The lead character does not become even more himself by virtue of his journey to the United States. Quite the contrary, his identity fractures and fragments as he attempts to navigate the complicated facets of his ever-shifting self. The Captain doesn’t have a name, because he doesn’t have an identity.

The Sympathizer seems to openly mock the idea of the immigrant narrative. The show’s framing device focuses on the lead character’s return to Vietnam. Captured during an ill-fated military expedition into the country, the Captain has been sent to a re-education camp where he has been forced to write his life story for the consideration of his interrogator (Tien Pham). He writes the story out longhand, as a way of asserting his true allegiance to his new homeland.

In some ways, these sequences play as a grim parody of Viet’s observation about the propagandist function of the immigrant narrative, a writer tasked with constructing a story in the hopes of flattering his presumed audience through the validation of their ideals. Indeed, the interrogator often feels more like a critic than a military officer. He is guiding and shaping the confession as a literary work rather than as any legal document.

“Endings are hard, aren’t they?” he asks as the narrative approaches its denouement. He challenges some of the bolder creative choices, inquiring, “Were the ghosts there as literary symbols or as genuine superstitious indulgences?” He is very conscious of the text’s presumed audience, suggesting revisions. “Why did you include this scene?” he challenges. “You make us seem like violent brutes. Remove this entire section.” He even chides the author for pretentious affectations.

However, while The Sympathizer offers a decidedly cynical take on the idea of “the immigrant author”, it is much more fascinated with the notion of the immigrant as editor. The show returns time and again to the concept of revision and framing, of the way that the truth can be altered and concealed not through direct lies or even through omission, but through the manipulation of the facts that are presented.

This is evident even within the show’s storytelling. The Captain constantly stops and re-starts his narration, literally rewinding the footage to reveal some previously-concealed detail or to explain some possible internal contradiction. It often seems like the Captain is having difficulty keeping the details straight in his head. “Wait,” he assures the audience at one point, as he realizes that he hasn’t properly set up the next chapter of his narrative. “I was distracted. I skipped a whole section.”

The show itself explores the importance of the edit. In Los Angeles, the Captain spends time on the set of The Hamlet, a Vietnam War movie made by visionary auteur Niko Damianos (Robert Downey Jr.), who bears no small resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola working on Apocalypse Now. Much like the production of Apocalypse Now, the shoot for The Hamlet is chaotic. It is a movie that Damianos will have to effectively unlock in the edit.

Damianos cannot promise what will make it into the film. “I get where you’re coming from, but it’s undermined by the sacred mystery of the editing process,” he tells the Captain. “I’m telling you, one day you love a shot and you throw it in. Next day, it doesn’t work, you rip it out. Nobody knows what will be in the final cut, not even me.” He elaborates, “You see, editing isn’t about clarifying the story or hammering home the theme. It’s about rhythm, impulse, sex – better yet, jazz.”

The Captain almost intuitively understands this approach to storytelling. Trying to explain the process to his Vietnamese handler, Mẫn (Duy Nguyễn), the Captain suggest that it is “like you decide on something today and then… you forget it.” This isn’t just good advice for editing a narrative. It’s a very effective way of compartmentalizing the various facets of his personality, locking away his competing objectives and desires.

The Captain isn’t subjected to re-education not because his handlers think he is consciously lying. Instead, they are concerned by the negative space left by self-editing. “You speak our language like it’s been translated from English,” Mẫn accuses the Captain towards the end of the series. “You think in English now!” The interrogator explains, “We don’t think you lied in your confession. It’s what you failed to confess. We don’t accuse you of deliberate obfuscation; we need you to remember what you forgot.”

As a spy working for two masters, it makes sense the Captain’s identity is fragmented. It’s part of the novel’s conceit. “‘I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the novel begins. “Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.” This frantic editing is an attempt to reconcile these competing impulses and narratives.

Indeed, the final episode reveals that the Captain has been editing his own memories. It’s revealed that he omitted and then revised a horrific assault on a female operative (Kayli Tran) in order to downplay the sexual violence involved. Throughout the series, every prominent white man is shown to have the same face, that of Robert Downey Jr. At the show’s climax, it’s revealed that this is the face of the Captain’s father, a French priest, a detail he had repressed and revised out of his memory.

The Sympathizer leans heavily into this metaphor. The Captain communicates with Mẫn using letters sent to his “Parisien Aunt.” The content of the letter is largely irrelevant. The actual communication is a code written in invisible ink, sandwiched between the body of the correspondence. The intention is literally buried between the lines. As the Captain notes, there’s little space for detail there, but plenty of room for ambiguity. “Even Hemingway would’ve had to restrain himself.”

Obviously, The Sympathizer is an extremely heightened narrative that uses the trappings of genre fiction to explore its central themes and ideas. However, the novel and the show make an argument that the story of an immigrant is often more about what is edited than what is written. In recent years, there has been an increased understanding of the concept of “code-switching”, whereby members of a minority community will shift their language and demeanor for a presumed audience.

To survive, both as a refugee and a spy, the Captain has to be whatever the person he is talking to needs him to be. It isn’t even that he wears two faces. Instead, his personality is more like a prism, serving various competing agendas. For Damianos, he is a combative cultural consultant. For Mẫn, he is a true believer in the communist cause. For Claude (Downey), he is the perfect capitalist agent. For Professor Hammer (Downey), he is the perfect student. For the General, he is a loyal follower.

In each case, the Captain is essentially revising himself. He is erasing facets of his identity and beliefs, while amplifying others. It isn’t that these selves are fabrications. Indeed, the paradox of The Sympathizer is that these contradictory elements can all be true, if framed in the right way. The Captain doesn’t hide himself, he just carves up and portions out the various aspects of himself. When he asks Claude’s identity, the veteran spy replies, “I’m whoever I need to be, just like you.”

Intimacy is a recurring theme within The Sympathizer, but it’s frequently ambiguous. The show devotes considerable attention to the sexual relationship between the Captain and Sofia Mori (Sandra Oh), but that relationship is built upon a deeply personal confession from the Captain about his first experience masturbating. The Captain has to be genuine and authentic, emotionally naked, but also exactly what the audience wants him to be in a given moment.

It's an interesting twist on a classic literary conceit, the idea of the immigrant experience as something constructed in the edit rather than written from the heart. The Sympathizer understands that these sorts of stories are often framed and structured to support a predetermined perspective. In some ways, the true story unfolds between the lines, in the gaps left in the narrative.