Anti-terrorist spy movies, the end of James Bond, and remembering my grandfather
Jack Ryan, Mission Impossible, James Bond, and my grandfather #
I’ve been thinking about the transformation of spy media into its modern incarnation, where we have the three big entities in spy media – Jack Ryan, Tom Cruise’s generic spy person in the Mission Impossible movies, and James Bond – reflect some of the underlying nastiness that governs what the pretentious would call Pax Americana.
You’ve got these three figures:
- The Jack Ryan who is the analyst type – the signals intelligence type that looks at patterns, that pulls together observations and discovers what’s going on strategically. He’s the sort of, even though he’s always associated with the CIA, he’s an NSA type in sort of spy parlance.
- The Mission Impossible people, which are the kind of the heist people, the go in there, infiltrate and get this stuff, get data out, because sometimes you just can’t surveillance yourself into the data you need.
- And James Bond, who is, from one perspective, actually quite realistic, in that he represents the US drive to use their allies and partners to do their dirty work for them. James Bond is the person that goes in and messes things up by killing everybody and gives the Americans plausible deniability.
Tese three pillars of modern espionage, who represent the sort of transition from the Cold War spies to anti-terrorist spies went from “we are fighting two equal and opposing forces, two giants fighting each other” to “now we’re monitoring a bunch of people who look like normal people and shouldn’t really be that scary”, finally to “hand-wavy, hand-wavy weapons of mass destruction, oh my god, they’re a threat, so we need to actually surveil and shoot everybody who worries us”.
Jack Ryan is interesting because it kind of started kind of in the Glasnost era, and he followed this transition quite neatly.
I actually read quite a few of the Jack Ryan books that preceded, like before 2000. My grandad was a huge fan.
And so, out of a desire to have something to talk about with my grandad, that wasn’t like historical Reykjavík architecture or a detailed history of politics in Iceland, I decided to basically read all the Jack Ryan books he owned. But instead of it being an opportunity to talk about narrative structure and storytelling with him, it turns out he was mostly interested in the authenticity of the procedures and processes there, because he worked for the Americans.
He worked in a department called J2 – Joint Staff Intelligence – and before that, he worked for OAS, and both times he was working as a researcher and translator.
So he was quite familiar with how things worked, at least from the bureaucratic, low-level perspective of espionage.
His thing was basically to enjoy how good Tom Clancy’s research was, and enjoy himself even more when Tom Clancy took some sort of literary license to deviate from established procedures.
But, I still read all the books, because at least it gave us an opportunity to talk about office bureaucracy in the US espionage era.
What’s interesting is the crisis that modern spy media is encountering as we have gone further and further into the anti-terrorist era of spy media, where it’s becoming more and more obvious that these are activities that are being used to justify horrific things.
Like the Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime is just outright CIA propaganda. They’re not even trying to be subtle about how they’re justifying the manipulative reach of US politics around the world.
The same applies with the crisis that is leading them to have to end the Mission Impossible series, because it has to either go into sci-fi – complete sci-fi, because spy media has always been sci-fi adjacent – like an alternate history era kind of sci-fi, because there is no way to portray, even the Biden era of US politics positively to the larger world.
Most of the past 16 years of US politics resists the characterization of heroism. (That isn’t to say that preceding eras of the US were heroic, but it was easier for motivated filmmakers to find ways of presenting spies as heroic during those times. I’m arguing that it’s much harder to do so today and still have a global market for these movies.)
Then you have James Bond, which sensibly in the sort of last few movies decided to turn inwards and become like an introspective look at James Bond history, both narrative and in movie history, and kind of managed to become a little bit contemplative at the end of it. It’s flawed. I mean, it’s not great cinema.
The last few movies of the Barbara Broccoli era of James Bond demonstrated a self-awareness and understanding of where we stand as a society that you don’t usually expect from big Hollywood producers. It makes sense that this was the end of it, that they couldn’t follow it up.
There’s no real way to go from there, except to reboot it as a period piece and just set it in the Cold War.
But that would undermine everything that the Broccolis and Eon productions have tried to do over the years, because they started during that era.
If you’re rebooting it, it’s going to do the Cold War again. They already did that during the actual Cold War and any attempt to do a historical Bond is implicit criticism of what they did, what her father did.
Basically asking Jeff Bezos for a humongous amount of money and then just scarpering and letting him fuck it up seems like the right thing to do.
But it kind of makes me sad, the whole state of of spy media, because it obviously reminds me of the world.
Things are so awful at the moment.
So I’m going to turn the music on and try to zen out, because this is bumming me out, to be honest.