Grad School Was Never This Fun

The Sympathizer is studded with repeating images. There’s a grimacing asymmetrical smiley-face logo, an egg rolling across a table, a French candy wrapper, a bottle of Coke, a flickering movie projection light. They return again and again, punctuation marks and anchors within the Captain’s (Hoa Xuande) story, adapted by Park Chan-wook from the Pulitzer-winning 2015 Viet Thahn Nguyen novel. A double agent for the North Vietnamese secret police, the Captain is embedded with a South Vietnamese general (Toan Le) when Saigon falls and the People’s Army forces him to flee to the United States. Nameless, and with loyalties perpetually pulling in multiple directions, the Captain is haunted by these remembered images, which Park presents as intrusive visuals suddenly cutting into a scene. The triggers for specific memories are laden with new significance each time they reappear, often culminating in unlocking a scene from the Captain’s life. All of this is written, then rewritten, into the Captain’s long handwritten confession, his only pastime as captive inside a Vietnamese reeducation camp.

If all of this sounds like a vaguely familiar set of ideas from a senior seminar on theories of imperialism, here’s some good and occasionally tiresome news: The Sympathizer is that exactly. Yes, its seven episodes offer an impressive lead turn for Xuande and a lovely opportunity for Park to exercise his series-length directing skills for the first time since AMC’s 2018 The Little Drummer Girl adaptation. But it’s also, inescapably, a graceful, darkly funny narrativization of Postcolonialism 101, bursting with embodied representations of doubled identities, memories rewritten and reshaped when perspectives change, an unreliable narrator, an echoing and excoriation of orientalist tropes, a perpetual problematizing of the self versus the other, and an acknowledgment of the seductive power of American cultural hegemony accompanied by deep anger at American militarism. To The Sympathizer’s credit, it is generally adept at building these ideas into a fiction that tracks in terms of character and emotion. But sometimes the mask falls and the syllabus reveals itself. The signifier collapses onto the signified. In other words: The story isn’t enough cover for all the stuff the story is supposed to be about.

On the surface, The Sympathizer is a mix of spy story and picaresque. The Captain’s identity is complex: a communist agent undercover in South Vietnam, the son of a Vietnamese mother and an unknown French father, a young radical whose obvious fondness for American culture is at odds with his sworn avowal of anti-American politics. But in the U.S., he finds that, rather than gathering intelligence and receiving revolutionary orders from his handler in Vietnam, he’s merely a side character in other people’s stories. He becomes a mascot figure at his university’s Asian-studies department, trotted out at parties as a fascinating mixture of East and West; embarks on an affair with his boss, a department secretary played by Sandra Oh; and tries to to prop up his friend Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), who is traumatized by his own escape from Vietnam. The Captain is constantly trying to negotiate his position as a double agent who risks losing his sense of purpose and, in moments of desperation and fear, makes what he feels are necessary, violent, and tormenting decisions.

Although The Sympathizer is built like a spy thriller, with endless wells of tension and immense gravity at all the violence and pain, the series is full of black humor. The Captain moves from event to event, each circumstance more awkward than the last, unable to stop himself from fixating on the deep, absurd ironies inherent in his life. Park’s direction is key to the show’s tone, taking the license of the Captain’s confessions to give the camera his sardonic point of view. Its eye zooms in on notable gestures and slyly swings around to take note of some funny detail or expression; when a new person walks into the frame, the camera sometimes turns in their direction like a visual exclamation point. The world is full of texture and tactility; candy crunches ominously in characters’ mouths, and even when the setting is a glamorous nightclub or Hollywood home, it’s never too implausibly clean. Each time that image of a hard-boiled egg rolling across a table returns, every flake of shell is palpable. There’s a distinct sense of doom before you even know why.

All that intensive attention to the physical world is crucial in making palatable the heady abstractions underneath. There are metaphorical mirrors everywhere, and The Sympathizer is unabashedly direct about calling out their deeper meanings. The pinnacle comes midway through the series, when the Captain joins a Francis Ford Coppola pastiche as Vietnamese cultural consultant on a movie called The Hamlet, a clear Apocalypse Now analogue. The whole film-within-a-film device, as a takeoff of a film already adapting a classic colonialist text, invites — begs for, really — careful academic close reads and intensive meticulous examination. (Proposed title: “Apocalypses Then and Now: Hamlet, The Hamlet, and Narratives of the Self in HBO’s The Sympathizer.”) That is not necessarily a detraction. That grotesque smiley face superimposed on a real face, the image of the yellow yolk inside a white egg — they’re all part of a neatly organized thematic structure, but they’re also full of feeling.

The lecture can’t always synthesize with the TV format, however, especially near the end, as too many pieces fall into place with puzzlelike neatness. The disconnect is most egregious and distracting in the use of Robert Downey Jr., who pops up throughout the series playing every major white character: the CIA agent who gets the Captain and the General out of Vietnam; the director of The Hamlet; a congressman; and, most unfortunately, the fey Orientalist Asian-studies professor who objectifies his area of expertise. As an inversion of the stereotypical approach to Asian characters in film and television, the conceit tracks with the show’s conceptual underpinnings: All white men on The Sympathizer are roughly interchangeable with slightly altered characteristics and otherwise unimportant sameness, a system of connected symbols rather than individual people. But Robert Downey Jr. just can’t fade into an indistinct, interchangeable white dude. He is always, stubbornly, Robert Downey Jr. — sometimes with hair, sometimes in a kimono. A more deft treatment of his celebrity image could’ve become part of the show’s theoretical framework, another layer of meaning lacquered onto its many mirroring surfaces. As it is, his appearances muddle the apparent goal. His first character is the CIA agent, which means that when he comes back as the unbearable professor, there’s no way to tell for certain whether he’s two characters or the same guy undercover. It’s distracting, and worse, so much of the show’s sense of humor is about the way American stories center whiteness. Robert Downey Jr. showing up over and over in roles designed to be largely interchangeable contradicts that aim.

But even when The Sympathizer falls apart, the show’s failures are almost as fun as the triumphs — they have meat to them. They’re the result of someone making a choice. The series is at its best when Park’s visuals and narrative devices clearly articulate everything going on under the story’s hood. It’s rare an essay prompt feels this fun.