Spy Stories and The Gray Area
What is really going on in espionage fiction and why do we love the books and movies so much?
It’s the early ‘60s and the world is black-and-white. Checkpoint Charlie is the most famous intersection in the world — an armed-to-insanity threshold between East and West Berlin, and a symbolic portal between the competing superpowers of the day. A wall, the wall, extends outward from this point in roughly northerly and southerly radials, reinforced here and there with sharpshooters and minefields. But in this, the throat of the checkpoint, where the wall and a fence ringed with barbed wire gives way to Friedrichstraße, the checkpoint is merely a whitewashed clapboard kiosk winged with manual barrier arms, looking a lot like the guard shack at a golf course.
Tonight, on the Western side of the wall, a well-weathered field agent of the British secret services awaits the arrival of a defector bringing information in exchange for sanctuary. Hang dog and a little haggard from past travails, the steely-willed agent in his Mac stares out the window as he has every night for weeks, fending off the cold with a splash or twelve of scotch in his porcelain mug of coffee. And he waits. Endlessly he waits. Maddeningly, he waits. Maybe tonight’s the night. Maybe his “joe,” the defector, will show up, his information will prove to be worthy (“gold,” rather than “chicken feed”), and the agent will log a tiny, infinitesimal-unto-insignificance victory in the intelligence war between the Allies and the Soviets. Or maybe the joe won’t show. Again.
Just as he is about to give up and head home for the night, the agent looks up to see his man making a break for it, cycling across the border, if you can imagine, in a fit of lunacy. As you might expect, considering the range of machine guns and the reaction times of armed guards, the defector makes it only about halfway into the no man’s land around the kiosk, neither out of one country, nor properly into another, before he is riddled with automatic gunfire and left to die in the street.
So opens Martin Ritt’s 1965 adaptation of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, one of the great early cold war espionage movies, and a kind of standard-bearer for the modern genre of spy movies. Right at the top, we get all of the hopelessness of the struggle and we see the metaphorical division of states, with East Berlin and the Soviet Bloc established as a frigid and sooty underworld. Our pockmarked Orpheus, here, the emissary tasked with travels to and fro across the boundary, born to go to hell and back for Queen and country, is Alec Leamas, played by Richard Burton with all the brutality and elegance we now know to expect from le Carré’s world. And the Orpheus invocation (Leamas will latter make the same journey between worlds and fatefully look back at his Eurydice) is no accident. Spies—at least in this sort of spy movie—are solitary martyrs to their cause, referred to as often as the tips of the spear as they are called expendable. They are the true believers, even if they are too world-weary to proselytize, or, indeed, to make the kinds of pyrrhic compromises their masters do in the name of some pragmatism and tone-deaf foreign policy. It is the agent on the ground, of course, who truly understands the human cost of intelligence, while the mandarins, sitting comfortably in their plush offices in London or Langley, refer to it as a commodity (“product,” in le Carré lingo, with all the capitalist currents implied).
At the other end of the spy spectrum, not exactly in opposition, like a foe across a wall, but more like another side of the same coin, is the satire. Guy Ritchie’s ‘60s-set adaptation of the long running TV show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., for example, also opens at Checkpoint Charlie. But from the first frame, U.N.C.L.E. throws out any thought of moral complexity or interiority. This isn’t so much spoof (or not just spoof) as another, complimentary subgenre of the spy story, one with its own spoof baked in[1]. The Berlin wall here is no heavy metaphor but a saddle horse in a gymnastic set piece. Philosophical and socioeconomic considerations don’t come into it. Political affiliations are, if anything, worn like team uniforms, easily swapped (save for those bearing the Swastikas, those will never wear off and are, as in movies everywhere, shorthand for baddies). Characterization, in Richie’s movie and others of the kind, is the coloring-in of established sketches. It occurs to me that this is a kind of pop art, making something thrilling and deeply superficial out of other works, everything in quotation marks, referencing another source, and another before it: in U.N.C.L.E, for example, Henry Cavill’s CIA agent Napoleon Solo is a deadpan cornball somewhere on the scale between the man in the gray flannel suit and Sterling Archer; the gritty cobblestones and noir lighting of U.N.C.L.E.’s Berlin aren’t so much indicative of a real city so much as they are of our filmic imagination of one—the cinematic spy city descended from Carol Reed’s Vienna in The Third Man. And, if the Rome where U.N.C.L.E. is largely set feels like a backlot, it’s only because the film doesn’t borrow enough from the filmic precedents set there (the film’s heroine Alicia Vikander never has occasion, for example, to wade into the Trevi fountain, here, alas).
Umberto Eco once described this sort of narrative shorthand, specifically of the characterization in the James Bond books, as, “cynically building an effective narrative apparatus.” Ian Fleming was often and rightly criticized for his reductive characterization of anyone not WASP English, for example, but, in Eco’s reading, Fleming “never shows more than a cautious, middle-class chauvinism. Thus arises the suspicion that our author does not characterize his creations in such a manner as a result of an ideological opinion but purely for rhetorical purposes… To do so, he decides to rely upon the most secure and universal principles, and puts into play precisely those archetypal elements that have proved successful in fairy tales.”
If and when this sort of shorthand works, then, it is because our own biases and prejudices are being used, being counted on, in fact, to fill in the blanks. Which feels like an indictment for giving these films a pass, and probably is one. At its most benign (as in U.N.C.L.E.), the distillation of character, place, and theme, draws strength from its predecessors, like a brandy does, to make characters and worlds with more depth and complexity than they would be on their own. In the very best cases, the spoof enters into a kind of meta-dance with other works, lampooning them even as it leans on them for support. But when these rough sketches don’t work, don’t queue up greater associations, they come off as grotesqueries—Bond’s visits to Macau and Shanghai in Skyfall, say, feel like Epcot center stops on a tour of the Global Village—and “exotic” characters fall into racist cartoons. The ugliest trope of spy fiction, going all the way back through Greene to Kipling, of course, is the awful White Man’s Burdenness that hangs to everything—like, only this Oxbridge chap or Yalie blueblood can fix what the locals broke.
It was the Bond films though that first gave these stories their smirk—everything superficial, everything exterior, the first that fetishized people, places and objects, and all of it glinting with irony and awhirl with action.[2] In the universe that Fleming built, and which U.N.C.L.E. and others now occupy, luxury, beauty, power are depicted in ravishing colors, but almost always as a double-symbol for ill-gotten gains or downright evil. In a Wolf of Wall Street way, we are really meant to be repulsed by all the apparent rhapsody about the devil and his toys, but — much like the failure of The Wolf of Wall Street, the film ends up celebrating what it intents to upturn — and we are left to think, oh, what toys. Of course, half of the Bond movies are occupied with this kind of consumer fetishization. And there is a ravishing 10 second sequence in U.N.C.L.E. featuring a Riva Aquarama wooden boat that could be a commercial or fashion editorial, only its passenger, Elizabeth Debicki, is evil incarnate. There should or could be at least a bite of conscience here, but…. look at those lines! Throughout U.N.C.L.E., like in Bond films, Ritchie aims for the gasp in awe, rather than the wriggle of consternation, and we are never properly challenged by the morality behind the objects it flourishes.
Similarly, the classical hero’s trait of fluency, with firearms and physical interaction, whether in conflict or congress, is celebrated at every turn. If both types of spy stories, the straight and the screwball, are anti-intellectual, they are both devoutly enthrall with nous, the protagonist’s operational savvy in any theatre. Watch him risk life and limb without a thought for his own wellbeing. Watch him outsmart his masters who trained him for this very situation—because, see, he is the supreme, the ultimate man of instinct and action. And the theatre best suited to the display of the spy’s street smarts is not statecraft but tradecraft, the magical art of dead drops and tails and bluster—the cinematic possibilities of which are one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of the spy story in general.
Orthodox tradecraft, in le Carré lingo, is, “Moscow rules,” but, nowadays, there is little to no call for code words, let alone the kind of etiquette and slight of hand it describes. Now, the real spying is done by algorithm. Which may be reason enough for a filmmaker to look back to a time about which the history is already written (and the victors on the right side), and avoid altogether the moral freight of spying, post-Snowden, along with the need to consider if not wrestle with contemporary politics. In the supersaturated ‘60s of Ritchie’s film or BBC shows like Spy City, there are just good guys, bad guys, and really really good-looking women—caricatures and facades.
But if the satire school of spy stories is all about the surface of things, the le Carré school (which would include Len Deighton as well as Graham Greene) is about interior conflict: interior as in enclosed, discreet, with a glorious insider argot to accompany it; and interior in the form of their characters’ psychological battles, from their frequent Oedipal habit of seeing in their fatherland the king they’ll have to one day conquer (see here also Spy Game), and the similarly Oedipal habit of equating their exotic posting with a woman/nation that needs saving (most explicitly, Greene’s The Quiet American). The narrative tension in this sort of spy story is too primarily set within—within the agent, wondering whom to trust, wondering whether he is in the right; and within the company, with ideological disputes on the same side of the wall proving more dangerous than those that cross it. (Bond, on the other hand, has no neuroses; he is, as Eco describes him, “a magnificent machine.”)
After he is sold out by his “masters” in Whitehall toward the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and thoroughly disillusioned with the entire institution of espionage, Leamas lets out his great screed, “What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not!” he says to his doomed beloved, Nan Perry, or to his own conscience, or the bugs that are probably listening in. “They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”
They may not be monks, but for the le Carré cast of field agent, and in particular for Leamas, who will later sacrifice himself for Nan, weighing right and wrong is the point of the story. Spy fiction of this sort is precisely about the existentialist drama of a man finding his morality outside the system of law. Less stark, maybe, than the Western hero’s frontier, where there is no law, the spy hero’s spot is a sketchier still alleyway, a darkened place setting him in a vacuum between institutionalized systems of violence and betrayal, both of which will at some point try to murder him. In that rift between the erratically shifting plates of policy and the whimsy of his masters, the field agent has to create a personal morality, finding virtue in the chaos.
But if the agent in the field creates morality, extra legally, and in exile, his handlers and the mandarins above them are sort of akin to Nietzschean ubermenshen, defining codes for others even as they break them themselves. From Gunther Bachmann, the Hamburg station chief in le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man dangling his small fish defector, vice squad style, in hopes of catching the big kahuna, to the callous diplomats always ready to sacrifice their agents like pawns in a pick up game at the park, the real baddies in le Carré’s fiction are not the murderers and rogues on the opposing side of front line, but the “gray men,” the apparatchiks and bureaucrats who sit smugly behind closed doors. “You are wearing gray today, Barley,” the Russian whistleblower at the heart of The Russia House tells him. “My father was sent to prison by gray men. He was murdered by men who wore gray uniforms.”
At its root, the spy story asks, what is of value? Outside of the rules or laws of warring nations, in the chaotic no man’s land between, what matters? Is it a commodity, like intelligence or people, to be traded in a marketplace? Is it security, or winning, and, at what cost?
From the time I started reading, and found myself in awe at the worldliness of spy heroes (who always seem to know the layout of the museum in Amsterdam, the best route to drive a getaway car through Prague, who keep a go bag at Gare de Nord, a flat in Tangier, a lover in Buenos Aires, and know everything about everything cool and dashing, from food to gambling, politics to kung fu), and ever since I started watching spy movies, watching Michael Caine or Sean Connery running around in 60s style tailoring, or watching the baddies in brown leather trench coats), I obviously wanted to be among them, wanted to dress like them and travel like them — me, who could not be more different from an assassin or government employee, could not have fewer street smarts than anyone alive. And so I simply read them, and watched them, from my cozy couch, wondering a bit about what they mean, sure, but mostly enjoying the knotty traps of their plots and the globetrotting backdrops for their drama.
When, a few years ago, the world returned again to black and white, when the idea of nuance and gray areas, in public discourse and politics, just vanished (like, we have actual nazis again?), spy stories seemed to me all the more immediate — even, I don’t know, important? Beyond the necessary escapism, spy stories seem maybe the best place in which to consider loyalty and honor when all of our points of orientation (governments, authority, the marketplace) can very quickly shift from valuing what is right and good to what we see as quite the opposite. Or, I don’t know, maybe I just need a new leather jacket.
[1] By my utterly unscientific estimate there are at least two other variants of the spy story: the case of mistaken identity or real person roped into spying, of which both Eric Ambler and Hitchcock were very fond; and the heist spy thriller, like the Mission: Impossible movies.
[2] The Bond movies of course have of late gone a tad more sincere, perhaps drawn by the hard-A action of the Bourne films, while others, like U.N.C.L.E. and Paul Feig’s Spy have cooked out everything but the innuendo and Get Smart-style slapstick.
Some recommendations! I recognize that this format is rec-based, so here are some of those:
Classic rewatches: both versions of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, obvs. And also Smiley’s People (both Guinness series are on YouTube). I also reread all of these non stop. Ian Holm in the Game, Set, Match series from Len Deighton’s books. They are on YouTube. Ipcress File —the Michael Caine version is streaming, and there is a new version forthcoming. William Boyd adaptations are always great (and I’ll watch Matthew McFadyen sit in a chair so I love Any Human Heart), so I just watched Boyd’s Spy City — which, didn’t Dominic Cooper already make this show, when he played Ian Fleming? But I digress. The Hour with Dominic West and (greatest actor alive Ben Whishaw) is a real treat, has 60s style and espionage undertones (in the second season anyway). More to come.
It occurs to me, reading this, that we are all uncredentialled spies when it comes to ferreting out the secrets of our own stories...who the demons/saviors might be, who holds the secrets that might help us tear down the walls we've inherited and do not understand. But what I really want is some super power of intellect or cleverness that makes the whole process a lot easier. Ken would applaud all your recommendations of film and literature -- he reads and rereads them watches and re-watches. I'll share your post with him!
I think this is really great and very interesting. It seems like Mafia movies have a bad boy quality about them that people enjoy and the Wolf of Wall Street followed that model, being a Scorsese product. Where as spy movies are seen as dapper and clean cut which could come off boring to the masses that associate power with a luxurious lifestyle and criminal activities. Even though, espionage movies can be about all of that there’s just a wit to it. Personally, I love the allure of secret societies and international hidden truths that could be out there or not. I feel like there’s a fantasy there for me that’s thrilling and intellectually stimulating. Also, the menswear is impeccable and never comes off as lazy.