Espionage infiltrates screens large and small
Espionage infiltrates screens large and small
05:27 PM CDT on Friday, August 10, 2007
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/spies_0813glGLWKND.1ff09d6.html
By CHRIS VOGNAR / Movie Critic
The following is for your eyes only.
Spying and intelligence activities have been all over the headlines the last few years. Between the leaked identity of Valerie Plame, the disclosure of secret government surveillance programs and faulty intelligence from Iraq, we've learned more than we ever thought we'd know about such a secretive business.
Meanwhile, on screens big and small, we've seen a surge of spook activity set in the past and present. Even the Cold War tales seem to reflect current events and crises.
"Make no mistake: Western civilization is under attack," warns an intelligence honcho in The Company, the epic story of the CIA's early years that started August 5 and airs at 7 next Sunday on TNT. "There are no textbooks in spying. You make it up as you go along."
That was then. And this is now, from the blockbuster The Bourne Ultimatum. A concerned CIA operative played by Joan Allen challenges her superior (David Strathairn) over a carte blanche spy-and-destroy program that can be used against U.S. citizens:
"You start down this path, where does it end?"
"It ends when we've won."
More than ever the CIA and other spying and intelligence organizations are depicted as the bad guys. Or, as Michael G. Baker puts it, "The CIA guy is shown as dodgy or less than ethical, and it's fair game to show the whole intelligence community that way."
Mr. Baker has a unique vantage point. He was a CIA covert field operations officer for 15 years before entering the private sector. He's also a consultant and story and script adviser for the BBC series Spooks (titled MI5 in the U.S., the series airs Tuesday nights on BBC America and is available on DVD).
"There are more congressional hearings and commissions and reports now," Mr. Baker says by phone. "There's more transparency about the process. That shows up in movies, the skepticism over the nature of intelligence and the motivations and intentions of the intelligence services."
There's also more moral ambiguity and fewer traditional villains. For instance, the fourth season of MI5 follows British intelligence officers as they track a terrorist organization, Shining Dawn, as it plants bombs all over London. But the terrorists aren't Islamic, or Communist. They're merely misanthropic. And their leader, whom they want freed from extradition to the States, is American.
In other recent spy movies the threat comes from within the intelligence community. The Bourne Ultimatum, for instance, finds evil in power-hungry CIA operatives. Breach, which came out earlier this year, tells the story of rogue FBI agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), who sold secrets to the Russians in what turned out to be the biggest security breach in U.S. history.
TNT
Michael Keaton in TNT's The Company, the story of the CIA Both Breach and last year's stellar The Good Shepherd – which covers roughly the same historical ground as The Company – spring from the cradle of the modern spy yarn: the Cold War. But they also echo arguments and issues that revolve around the current war on terror.
"The Cold War was fought under a constant mystery," says the spymaster himself, John le Carré, on the DVD of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. "How much can we do in defense of a free and decent society and remain a free and decent society that is worth defending?"
That has an eerily familiar ring to it, partially due to current events but also because so many themes of the spy genre – loyalty, deceit, duty, identity – are so timeless and universal. So while The Good Shepherd is about the formative years of the CIA, it's also about the human price the spy pays for his job. So is The Lives of Others, the Oscar-winning drama about a Stasi surveillance expert assigned to spy on a playwright and his actress wife. Lives, out on DVD Aug. 21, has the luxury of expanding the spying theme into the general public: In Communist East Germany, you were expected and required to spy on your friends and neighbors.
But a topical spy movie isn't necessarily a realistic spy movie. Mr. Baker, the former CIA officer, is a big fan of The Bourne Ultimatum. Which doesn't mean he'd ever use it as a how-to video.
"If you're overseas somewhere and you've got a pack of local police chasing you over rooftops and cars blowing up and people are shooting at you, then you've seriously screwed up," Mr. Baker says. "Your whole purpose is to operate without being on anybody's radar."
Whereas a movie's purpose is to get on as many radars as possible. Judging from the current slate of TV programs, movies and DVDs, that mission is more than accomplished.
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