by Luis M. Garcia-Mainar
CineAction
Stieg Larsson's successful Millenium novels (2005, 2006, 2007) have become a major phenomenon in contemporary globalized culture by combining criminal inquiry with complex accounts of personal life and realism. In doing so they increas-ingly rely on motifs borrowed from the tradition of the spy narrative as Lisbeth Salander finally faces her father, Zalachenko. In a similar vein, and despite its topical issue, Doug Liman's Fair Game (2010) tells the true story of CIA agent Valerie Plame by placing as much emphasis on her political role as on her ability to reconcile spy work with the demands of her family. In the last decade, the proliferation of these combined views of espionage, personal life and realism in such popular texts suggests their relevance to contemporary culture, and in a way that transcends the borders of, at least, Western countries. This paper discusses The Good Shepherd (2006), Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) and L'affaire Farewell (Farewell, 2009), three spy films produced in three different countries, as representative of a recent tendency of the genre characterized by this return to a realism that, already a trademark of the genre, is now inflected by contemporary concerns. Although the paper's main interest will be theatrically-released films, it will also refer to television because the 1980s BBC series based on John le Carre's novels contributed significantly to establishing the conventions of the realist spy narrative, and in the last decade the genre has flourished on the small screen.
The spy film genre moved through the 1970s and 1980s towards an increasing relevance of action and suspense, as proved by the films based on Frederick Forsyth's novels The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Odessa File (1974), The Dogs of War (1980) and The Fourth Protocol (1987), a tendency that would become even stronger in the 1990s and 2000s. 1990 saw the release of the first film adaptation of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan saga, The Hunt for Red October, soon followed by Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). They initiated a cycle of action spy thrillers that would include the Mission Impossible series (1996, 2000, 2006) and, more recently, the Bourne films based on Robert Ludlum's novels (2002, 2004, 2007). In the 2000s the Bond franchise swayed towards action heroics with Daniel Craig, as did such films as Spy Games (2001) and The Tailor of Panama (2001). More recently, Body of Lies (2008), Traitor (2008), Taken (2008) and Salt (2010) have followed the same line.
Against this background stands out a less popular cycle of spy television series produced in the last decade. CBS's The Agency (2001-2003), ABC's Threat Matrix (2003-2004) and TNT's The Grid (2004) offered realism and topicality by placing secret agents in the new context of terrorism, but they achieved none of the success of the more fantasy-based Alias (ABC, 2001-2006), 24 (Fox, 2001-2010), Burn Notice (USA Network, 2007--present) or the miniseries The Company (TNT, 2007). As Wesley Britton comments, these examples prove that today the fantasies popularized by 007 have a stronger place in audiovisual culture than the realistic spy stories more usually found in literature. (1)
It is in this context that I would like to place three topical spy films which resemble those realistic television shows but were more popular than them. The Good Shepherd (2006) obtained close to $100 million worldwide, a modest success replicated in the same year by a film that was to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and earned about $77 million world-wide, the German Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). Later would appear L'affaire Farewell (Farewell, 2009), a French film that lacked the commercial impact of the other two but enjoyed a long career on the film festival circuit. It is my hypothesis that these three films achieved this relative success because they touched on issues that were relevant to audiences, and they did so by departing from contemporary main-stream, action-oriented, representations of spy life. At the same time, they have remained far from the box-office success of films that opted for the action spy formula in recent years. In 2006 Casino Royale grossed $594 million worldwide, reaching number four on the yearly box-office list, while Mission Impossible III obtained $397 million and reached number eight. In 2007 The Bourne Ultimatum was number seven, earning $442 million worldwide, and in 2008 Quantum of Solace grossed $586 million, reaching number nine. Taken, in 2009, obtained $226 million to become number twenty, and by the end of 201 0 Salt had grossed $293 million and stood at number twen ty-one. (2) In comparison, and like their television counterparts, The Good Shepherd, Das Leben der Anderen and L'affaire Farewell didn't do so well because they partially failed to provide the experience relished by audiences. This article will analyse these films tin an attempt to throw light on some of the reasons why they may have been assigned this place as culturally relevant but at the same time marginal products.
The several cycles of the post-World War II spy film have been defined by their degree of verisimilitude and moral conviction about espionage. Influenced by the March of Time newsreels, 1940s docudramas like The House on 92nd Street (1945) and 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) used actual footage and were clearly propagandistic, while 1950s films like Five Fingers (1952) began to consider espionage more ambiguously. The 1960s saw the appearance of two of the most popular forms of the genre: the Bond films, based on the Fleming novels of the 1950s, and the adaptations of John le Carre and Len Deighton. Bond inhabited a world of glamorous consumerism and moral certainty, while The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) and The Iperess File (1965) offered realism, questioning moral absolutes and the ethics of espionage. In the 1970s the political thriller replaced espionage with political intrigue and conspiracy, reflecting a mood of mistrust and fear produced by actual events in the United States. As a reaction to the centrality of this conspiracy genre, in the 1980s le Carre's novels were adapted for television in the United Kingdom, a format that allowed lengthier and more complex narratives than film. The BBC's multipart series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1980), Smiley's People (1982) and A Perfect Spy (1988) returned to the realistic accounts of spy life and its difficulties, featuring protagonists who were even more ordinary and methodical than the film version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold's Alec Leamas. (3)
The spy film shares this reliance on verisimilitude with its literary sources. It has been argued that the function of this verisimilitude is to produce simplified versions of history that reflect the fantasies of mass audiences about historical change, explained through conspiracies and the efforts to stop them. Spy stories alleviate anxieties about the individual's lack of effective agency since history is presented as the consequence of the secret agent's work. Two main versions of history would emerge from the genre, which would bear similarities to the two main cycles of the spy film mentioned above: one would see conflict between nations as inevitable, its only solution to be found in the individual, male, hero; the other would attempt to achieve greater verisimilitude by dwelling on the complexity of events and their moral ambiguity. The first trend would have its roots in the pre-1914 and World War I generation that included, among others, Erskine Childers and John Buchan, and revived in the 1950s work of Ian Fleming. The second trend, initiated in the late 1920s and 1930s by the generation of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, was refreshed in the 1960s by Len Deighton and John le Carre. (4) The heroicspy trend relies on the power of citizens to influence history whereas the realist one is far more sceptical about it, usually underscoring the power of forces above the individual.
This argument echoes cultural interpretations of spy fiction which have tended to view it as metaphor for the conflict between individual subjectivity and social organization, voicing public distrust of the distance created by the social system from the subjects that constitute it. (5) Cultural commentators have invariably noted the genre's political relevance, and it continues to be discussed as a tale of citizenship and citizens' distrust of a state that contradicts their sense of justice. (6) Spy fiction also voices social anxieties regarding work, disclosing the ways in which bureaucracy and corporate structures produce the same alienation, moral ambiguity and uncertainty experienced by secret agents. (7)
Its concerns often match those of crime narratives at large, although spy fiction has its specificities and special focus. It distinctly reflects the organized nature of social forces, exposing the mechanisms that keep individuals under control. It is concerned with morality, with the system's claim to moral righteousness or the individual's struggle with moral principles and widespread cynicism. It also contains the potential to suggest parallels between the secret agent and the ordinary citizen, both being at the same time essential to the survival of the system and reminders of its shortcomings: they embody the contradictory values of bourgeois society, the ambiguity of the law and a fantasy about the power of the individual to influence history. Furthermore, the genre exhibits a greater awareness of this physical and moral milieu than the rest of the crime genres by placing characters in situations that may expose the contradictions of societies and nations. Finally, the spy story shows, more lucidly than perhaps any other genre, the impact of a globalized world in which national borders are no obstacle to transglobal power.
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