Saturday, Oct 6, 2012 03:50 PM EDT
From the Bourne films to "24" and the odious
"Taken 2," Hollywood is struggling with spooks in the Patriot Act era
By Andrew O'Hehir
Liam Neeson in "Taken 2"
Luc
Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept
and offensive “Taken 2” don’t seem to have gotten the memo from Jason
Bourne: Americans don’t think our spooks are good guys anymore. Okay, I
realize the situation is a bit more complex than that. I don’t want to
wander into the “people like me” fallacy: Everyone in my parents’
neighborhood in 1972 voted for George McGovern, so he must have won
easily, right? But I do think it’s true that in recent years — and
arguably a good deal longer than that — movies and TV shows about spies
have reflected our increasingly bad conscience about the hidden world of
America’s global secret police. That’s just as true, or almost as true,
for overtly right-wing products like the odious but addictive “24,”
with its ludicrous litany of ticking-bomb scenarios and torture
justifications, as it is for bleeding-heart, pseudo-sophisticated fare
like the “Bourne” franchise.
Like almost everything else about
American politics and culture, this goes back to the Cold War. Indeed,
when Dick Cheney urged us, in the days after 9/11, to join him on the
Dark Side of the Force – okay, he didn’t say “the Force,” but he didn’t
have to — he was only reasserting a postwar order that had been
temporarily thrown into chaos after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A
Manichaean and roughly symmetrical worldview, in which your opponent is
seen as infinitely evil and infinitely devious, is extremely useful if
your goal is subverting constitutional governance and replacing it with a
permanent, hidden shadow-state that stands outside electoral politics.
Is that overly paranoid? Well, I don’t know. But if I’d told you a few
years ago that we would one day see a Democratic president claim the
right to sentence any civilian to death, anywhere in the world, on
secret evidence and with no pretense of judicial process, that might
have sounded pretty crazy too.
Art and culture, including popular
entertainment, is often where a society’s doubts about itself can be
most freely expressed, and from its very beginnings the spy thriller has
often presented espionage as, at best, a morally dubious affair. Even
in a prewar classic like Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” while the main
character’s decency is never in question, the sense that the spy
bureaucracy is a semi-competent, half-sinister organism eager to blame
its mistakes on others is a main plot driver. Pretty much every movie
about a real or de facto agent on the run, who’s been framed for some
murder or treachery he didn’t commit, is descended from that one, right
up to and including “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” “Salt” and
the Bourne series.
Indeed,
outside of the Bond franchise and its various imitators, it’s not all
that easy to come up with spy movies, even from the height of the Cold
War, that present the world of espionage and counterespionage in
straightforward or idealistic terms. Certainly John Frankenheimer’s “The
Manchurian Candidate,” from 1962, is the most effective piece of Red
Scare propaganda ever applied to celluloid. But along with its
ultra-conspiratorial view of the dastardly Commies – who have not merely
brainwashed and trained an assassin, but implanted a Joe McCarthy-type
anti-Communist politician as a triple-secret agent — that film paints a
scabrous, misanthropic and satirical portrait of American society as a
zone of nutbars and sheeple, barely worth saving from the incoming red
tide.
A year after that movie was released, of course, John F.
Kennedy was killed, and the official explanation involves a weird guy
with ties both to the loony left and the loony right, whose shadowy
history included a visit to the Soviet Union. I’ve never felt personally
persuaded by the theories that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, or by
Soviet and/or Cuban intelligence – for one thing, they can’t both be
true, unless you’re going nuclear with your paranoia – but they’ve never
gone away. All the unanswered questions surrounding the JFK
assassination only strengthened our sense that there was an entire world
that lay below the surface of the one we could see, and that nothing
about it was salutary.
All the social division of the 1960s around
the Vietnam War and America’s role in the world made the spy thriller
seem increasingly problematic, and except for the Bond series – which
simply ignored all real-life current events – they often sought refuge
in the reassuring past of World War II. A virus of existential doubt
began to spread through the genre, perhaps beginning with Martin Ritt’s
outstanding 1965 adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came in From
the Cold.” Starring Richard Burton in one of his least showboaty screen
performances, as a burned-out British agent sent into East Germany as a
fake defector, the film (and the book) are arguably closer in tone to
Albert Camus than to Ian Fleming. Even more mundane British spy fare of
those years, like the trio of Len Deighton adaptations starring Michael
Caine (“The Ipcress File,” “Funeral in Berlin” and “Billion Dollar
Brain”), drank deep from the same well of exhaustion and cynicism.
But
the year I really want to talk about is 1975, in the PTSD American
aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when spies and spying were very much
in the news. Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, held a series of committee
hearings that year that laid bare the extent of questionable or outright
illegal conduct by the FBI and CIA, ranging from widespread
surveillance of both prominent and ordinary citizens to covert attempts
to assassinate foreign leaders and overthrow hostile governments. The
Church committee was widely demonized by conservatives at the time,
especially after a CIA station chief was killed in Greece, and its work
remains controversial in the 21st century. After 9/11, some commentators
claiming that these revelations crippled U.S. intelligence gathering
over the long term and enabled the creation of al-Qaida. (Funding and
arming a bunch of loony-tunes jihadis to kill Russians in Afghanistan
had nothing to do with it, I guess.)
That year also saw two major
spy movies featuring two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, which established
a dichotomy within the genre that endures to this day. On one side we
have “Three Days of the Condor,” with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, a
fast-paced adaptation of a pulpy bestseller directed with style by
Sydney Pollack. If the fashions and mannerisms of the movie – those
sideburns! – seem positively antique, it holds up pretty well overall.
Clearly an heir to “The 39 Steps” and a direct ancestor of both the
Bourne films and Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” series, “Condor”
tells a classic man-on-the-run story, as Redford’s bookworm character is
forced to unpack a world of double-dealing, insider warfare and
government corruption. When confronted with the argument that the CIA
plays dirty because it has to, Redford’s character turns New York Times
whistle-blower.
But the antidote, for viewers who found “Condor”
unbearable liberal pantywaist propaganda, came in the virile
mountaineering-espionage adventure “The Eiger Sanction,” starring Clint
Eastwood and his impressive mid-’70s hairdo as a retired CIA assassin
turned art professor (yes, really) turned frequently shirtless freelance
patriot. There are a lot of superficial similarities between the two
films, including the general atmosphere of government coverup and
post-Vietnam blowback, but the preening machismo of “Eiger” is pretty
hard to take, as is the obvious pandering to Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry”
fan base. It was Clint’s first big Hollywood production as an
actor-director, and seemed aimed at building a franchise around his
character, a lady-killing, wisecracking Yank cognate to James Bond. But
while “Condor” was a pretty big hit, “Eiger” was middling at best, and
Eastwood dropped not just the franchise idea but the spy genre, period.
I
would be the first to agree that audiences go see spy movies for the
thrills and the action scenes, not the politics, and on that level too
“Taken 2” (which was directed by Luc Besson flunky Olivier Megaton, and
no, that’s not his original last name) is incoherent, relying on a
boom-boom-chaka-boom musical score and repeated shots of random
structures in Istanbul being destroyed by men in fast cars. A crucial
plot element in “Taken 2” involves an American teenage girl roaming
around the city chucking out live grenades to mark her
progress, rather like Hansel and Gretel with exploding breadcrumbs. As
Neeson’s defrocked CIA assassin, Bryan Mills, might say in his overly
flat Amurkin accent, it’s Istanbul, Kim — stuff gets blown up every goddamn day.
Indeed, the city’s only inhabitants appear to be scary Albanian sex
traffickers and their henchmen, ominous-looking Muslim women in
full-face hijab and weird old blind guys playing the oud. Everybody’s
too busy being threatening to go work in a bank, or buy eggs at the
supermarket.
Context matters, and the context for “Taken 2” (a
sequel to the 2008 hit in which the same Albanians kidnapped the same
teenager, that time in Paris) is a xenophobic, ugly-American worldview
inherited from “The Eiger Sanction” and, still more, from James
Cameron’s “True Lies,” pretty much the balls-out gold standard for this
kind of dumbed-down, pseudo-flag-waving thriller. I say “pseudo” because
producer Besson and director Megaton (who also made the ludicrous
drug-war thriller “Colombiana,” a movie even stupider than this one but
20 times more enjoyable) are a couple of French dudes, for
Christ’s sake, and exactly the kind of French dudes whose exaggerated
love for the very worst kinds of American movies has caused them to
stick their heads deeply up their own butts.
Stand aside, now,
because I’m droppin’ the bomb on Mr. Megaton! Luc Besson is officially
being “Taken 2” the woodshed! If these guys believe in anything about
this movie, they believe in it entirely as gesture, mannerism and style.
They may or may not be smart enough that they’re cackling up their
sleeves the whole time; it’s not impossible that “Taken 2” is a
meta-American movie, a Godardian spoof of the whole genre, an attempt to
see how stupid and insulting a motion picture can be and still be a big
hit. (See also: “True Lies.”) They believe that removing the guilt
from the spectacle of an implacable American with high-end hardware
killing every funny-accent, facial-hair-wearing foreign mofo in sight
will pay off. And, yeah, they’re probably right.
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