Review of the series The Sympathizer

Park Chan-wook, the director of the cult film Oldboy, has directed The Sympathizer, a spy miniseries about the end of the Vietnam War and the tragicomic post-reflections based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Marvel star Robert Downey Jr. played three (all minor and all satirical) roles in the show: a redheaded CIA agent, a bald university professor of Orientalism, and a crazy gonzo filmmaker.

The protagonist of this story, which takes place in 1975, first in Saigon, which is about to fall, and then in America, where the pro-American South Vietnamese fled after the Vietcong’s victory, is a mestizo with Asian features, yellow skin, but bright gray-green eyes, a child of the French colonization of Vietnam. He studied at an American university, learned English thoroughly, absorbed Western pop culture through movies and music records, but became a sympathizer of the communist revolution and became an undercover Vietcong spy, allegedly working for the Americans and a pro-American Vietnamese general, while writing coded reports to his communist mentors.

South Korean master Park Chan-wook has worked on Western television before: he produced the post-apocalyptic series Snowpiercer and directed the spy miniseries The Little Drummer Girl based on the novel by John Le Carré for British TV. It is very important, both right and symbolic that American television showed Viet Tan Nguyen’s film through the eyes of an Asian director who balances between Eastern and Western cultures. It seems that this is perhaps the first time in the entire history of cinema about the Vietnam War (Vietnam for Americans, America for Vietnamese), starting with The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, that the viewer has been able to see the war through the eyes of a different, non-American party.

Eyes, by the way, have a special metaphorical meaning here. Not only because the gray-green color of the Vietnamese protagonist’s eyes is a poetic quintessence of irresistible and inevitable Western-Eastern assimilation. Australian actor of Vietnamese descent Hoa Xuande, who plays the central role, actually has brown eyes and therefore wears gray-green lenses in the film. Similarly, Downey Jr. is also brown-eyed in real life, so he wears blue lenses when playing the cereal maker. A lens is the simplest optical element, while a movie camera lens is a more complex optical system. Park Chan-wook, being a visionary, passes all this history through the lens of cinema, both literally and figuratively; through a filter of magic and deception, hinting that almost all of our history (the history that humanity knows) is history passed through the prism of cinema, in particular, the Vietnam War is history passed through the prism of Hollywood.

Therefore, the epigraph “All wars are fought twice: first on the battlefield, and then in memory” is mentally rephrased by the director and the audience as follows: “All wars are fought three times: first on the battlefield, then in memory, and then on the movie screen.”

The idea that almost all non-Americans (Mexicans, Africans, Vietnamese…, Ukrainians…) have that “America is a dream” is also born exclusively of cinema. “Look, a real American desert. You love westerns,” the hero says to his friend in Arkansas or Oklahoma to cheer him up after he loses his wife and baby in a runway bombing while fleeing Saigon (yes, the mockery of The Sympathizer covers the same “face” that is terrified by the harsh realism of war). However, it turns out that there is a huge gap between a dream and a dream story or even a caricature of a dream.

Almost all of the characters here are caricatures to one degree or another. The caricatured, self-righteous South Vietnamese general who walks into an Arkansas diner with cockroaches in his dress uniform, where South Vietnamese refugees (“Asgardians” who were forced to leave Asgard) are unhappily eating pasta and beans (their disgusted look at the beans, which are reminiscent of the traditional Japanese dish natto, is a metaphorical disgusted look at the Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II). And it is clear that the native Vietnamese cockroaches never bothered any of these people in the Arkansas cafeteria, but the American cockroach unceremoniously destroyed their “American dream.”

A caricatured CIA operative who, being red-haired and blue-eyed, pseudo-liberally boasts that he is one-sixteenth black (and it is impossible not to recall that in the comedy Thunder in the Tropics, which parodied Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, from Apocalypse Now to the equally titled Platoon, Downey Jr. played an Oscar-winning actor who underwent plastic surgery to change his skin pigmentation to play a black sergeant). A caricatured university professor of Orientalism (and ostentatious Orientalism) who compares himself to an egg: white on the outside, yellow on the inside.

The star of the Killing Eve series, Sandra Oh, plays a Japanese-American woman who doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t feel anything Japanese about herself, but again caricatures a geisha in a kimono and sushi chopsticks in her hair, bringing a tray of rolls to the guests of a university party (the actress herself is a Canadian of South Korean descent).

Does cinema reflect history or does it write it according to its own script? Does it reflect the culture of peoples or does it shape it? In the very first scene, the poster of the French erotic film Emmanuelle with Sylvia Christel in a Saigon cinema is replaced by a poster of the American action movie Death Wish with Charles Bronson, which is, of course, a metaphor for how the French colonists in Vietnam were replaced by the American “allies”. At the same time, instead of a movie, a completely different performance is shown in the theater: a Vietnamese communist is interrogated and tortured in front of the auditorium with the screen off. So it’s not cinema that reflects reality, but reality that turns into cinema.

In this looking-glass, in this room of laughter and a room of fear at the same time, the only one who is not caricatured is the protagonist, the nameless Captain, who, although he has a caricatured childhood trauma about squid dishes (because as a child he ejaculated into a squid carcass, which his mother then cooked and ate), is dramatically reflecting on the duality of his nature and the duality of our bipolar universe in general.