and now for something completely different ...

[truepenny]

matociquala and I were talking about '60s spy shows, as we are wont to do, and the abomination that is the Tom Cruise Mission:Impossible (1996), and a couple of things cross-connected in my head.


One is her observation that the ethos of spy shows changes radically after Vietnam. The shows of the '50s and '60s constitute a very small, very self-aware genre (and I quote Bear):

It starts in the late '50's with The Avengers and Danger Man and The Saint and proceeds through Bond, The Man from UNCLE, The Girl from UNCLE, The Prisoner, I Spy, The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, etc, and pretty much dies out when Mission:Impossible goes off the air. Fifteen years at the outside. A moment in time.

After Vietnam, you get shows like Sandbaggers and The Equalizer and Alias, which are a related but different genre.

And the difference between the two genres is something that came up on papersky's journal in a radically different context. The post was about Madeline Robins, and Papersky asked, in an aside: what's the opposite of noir? Not blanche!

I was not the only person who came to the conclusion that the opposite of noir is clair.

And that is the thing that clicked for me this morning. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and its sisters are clair. You know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and that is epistemologically solid knowledge you could build the Hoover Dam on. Post-Vietnam, the television spy genre* goes very noir and develops what Bear calls a sensibility of suspicion; the world becomes morally ambiguous and "good" something that belongs in scare-quotes.

(Bear also pointed out that MacGyver is a throwback to the earlier genre.)

So the problem with the 1996 Mission:Impossible movie is that it is applying the post-Vietnam sensibility to a pre-Vietnam show. You can undermine the conventions of any genre and get away with it, but you can't do it if you don't understand what those conventions are and why they are conventions in the first place. Bear is very eloquent on this subject:

Superman does not permit bystanders to be injured, the Lone Ranger doesn't sneer at the townspeople and ride off, and Jim Phelps does not betray his country.

And if you don't understand that, you have no business writing Mission:Impossible.

---
*N.b., I am not talking about spy novels, where the example of John le Carré alone proves that noir was a happening thing well before Vietnam.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Well, and there was the really interesting thing you pointed out, that The Avengers, MfU, I Spy etc. are all *aware* of each other as well as themselves, and comment slyly on the genre as a genre.

That they *know* they're fiction.

Hmm. And the subtext of this particular Avengers ep I'm watching, which I've never seen before, is that Steed and Peel are lovers--which is *not* the normal subtext of the show.

Very interesting, that.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Patrick MacNee did say that so far as he was concerned, the subtext of that relationship was that Steed and Mrs. Peel had had one intense weekend fling some time ago, and he was kind of keen on more and she wasn't but they weren't letting it get in the way of anything else, friendship or work-related.

An awful lot of my basics on gender relations came from that show, actually. Strong equal male and female leads treating each other with respect, charm, politeness, and friendly flirtation. [ Let's not dwell on the getting tied up aspect of it here. ]

Have you seen the last Mrs. Peel episode, in which Mr. Peel is discovered to be alive after all, and has a very brief appearance also played by Patrick MacNee ?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have.

Well, the thing that twigged my notice in this one was her extreme proprietary I'm-going-to-kill-you jealousy over a Christmas card he'd recieved from a woman. Very atypical for her.

As opposed to the Steed/Gale relationship, which was *definitely* Steed trying to get into Cathy's pants. *g*

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the last Mrs. Peel episode, in which Mr. Peel is discovered to be alive after all, and has a very brief appearance also played by Patrick MacNee ?

Peter Peel wasn't so much played by Patrick MacNee, as played by the back of his head whilst wearing a bowler. We never see his face. He is sitting, ramrod straight, in a car (a Bentley) next to Mrs. Peel (I don't remember who is in the driver's seat) and never turns around. She looks at him, looks up at Steed's apartment, and smiles knowingly. Peter Peel and John Steed, separated at birth???

HOWEVER, and this will amuse youse, MacNee played a suave, bowler-wearing British secret agent code-named "S" in an episode of The Hardy Boys. In the tag, he's saying good-bye to the two cute heart-throb Hardy brothers in a crowded airport, and a woman wearing a cat-suit walks by (yes, it looks like the back of Mrs. Peel), and Agent "S" becomes very agitated. He hurriedly excuses himself from the brothers and runs after her fast-disappearing back, brandishing his brolly and calling out, "Uh! Hello? Wait, Mrs...? Uh, Mrs....? Wait!"

So, in an busy airport in California, Steed and Mrs. Peel were re-united.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

You can undermine the conventions of any genre and get away with it, but you can't do it if you don't understand what those conventions are and why they are conventions in the first place.

Amen to that. Though sometimes it can be really hard to tell; I think that something like that is probably why the otherwise excellent Superman: Red Son goes off the rails at the end. [ Premise: rather than the wheatfields of Kansas, the infant Superman's ship lands in the wheatfields of the Ukraine in the early 1930s; does lovely things with the same basic incorruptible integrity built around a totally different set of political axioms. ]

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Another modern example of "where are all the good guys?" is THE AGENCY.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I should addend to say that "The Prisoner" has more of a noir sensibility--it's a forerunner of the other genre. Which is why I don't believe that #6 is John Drake (Danger Man), because Drake is one of the Good Guys and #6 is not.

And I know McGoohan thought they were the same character, but he was heavy into the actor-crack by the time they were doing The Prisoner, so I disregard it. *g*

[scott-wells.livejournal.com]

I've never heard mention that McGoohan ever came out and said the two were the same. In fact, he's been terribly close-lipped about it. The biggest point in favor of the two being the same is from internal clues, some of which are tenuous at best; such as both Drake and #6 used the alias Schmidt at some point, or that one of the actors playing one of #6 superiors was played by someone who played one of Drake's.

And I'd contest the idea that #6 is NOT one of the 'good guys'. Here is a man who remains loyal even after he becomes disillusioned, refusing to even discuss why he resigned with individuals whose loyalties he is uncertain off. He is a man who more than once championed the 'underdogs' in the Village, and yet who remained true to himself. It was that attitude in fact that often kept him imprisoned. He would trust the wrong person, and they would betray him.

I don't think that 'The Prisoner' can really fall into either category really. It almost defies classification....

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

I think of No. 6 not merely as one of the good guys, but as one of the most noble, steadfast, courageous men in the face of adversity I've ever (fictionally) seen. Mind you, I believe he was aware of the concept of "gray areas", but I don't think that makes him one of the bad guys, or even a gray character. Just smart.

I always got the feeling that Drake (or *was* it Drake?) resigned over the Seltzman affair, which was his protest at the idea of his own government doing body-switching experiments using human subjects. "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling" was a very sci-fi ep in which another man played No. 6, which they had to do because McGoohan had to be off-set finishing up a movie... was it Ice Station Zebra? In which I always thought he was playing John Drake yet again. ;)

McGoohan, a friend of Peter Falk's, also plays a version of John Drake who's gone bad in an episode of Columbo.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

(Bear also pointed out that MacGyver is a throwback to the earlier genre.)

In some ways, I agree. In others, less so -- I would have said that MacGyver wasn't part of the spy genre at all, but tangled with spies/intrigue as part of the encyclopedia of adventure events. He was just as likely to get trapped in a nuclear power plant during an earthquake (and stop a meltdown via the judicious use of chocolate!) as he was to get arrested by mustachioed South American dictators.

So, the spy-stuff was clair because the spy stuff was a method for inserting the lead into an adventure, not because of any inherent clairness of the state of the world.

For clair spy stuff these days, look no further than JAG. (Perma-guest-star Steven Culp spent some time on that show, being a despicable CIA agent, but his despicableness wasn't the sort that could shake your faith in The Government What Does Good Things.) Needless to say, it's a show with an aging and strongly Republican demographic.

As a data point, would either of you rate The Prisoner as a television turning point? Certainly, its opening credits, from the very first episode, establish "the government is a pile of evil ninnies in three-piece suits, who will betray you" without even the need for words. Much of the rest of the show isn't really spy-oriented, but I think we're to understand that Number 6 is ex-MI-something.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Aha! My own question answered in the time lag. Thanks.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Well, MacGyver is as "spy" oriented as The Avengers or The Man from UNCLE, both of which are far more about wacky law enforcement than actual *espionage.*

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

More accurately, MacGyver started out as a kind of poor man's James Bond - he worked for an agency (freelance!) and, in early seasons, was found doing spy-type things.

Then it evidently dawned on the show creators that MacGyver didn't have to be a spy - that where he more comfortably belonged was in the less-definable genre where Allingham's Campion and Charteris's Templar live - and MacGyver moved from working freelance from an unspecified government agency to working freelance for the Phoenix Foundation, which was an undefined yet broadly funded NPO for do-gooders.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Please pardon the driveby, but I was wondering if you would be interested in writing something for Reflection's Edge, the 'zine I'm currently developing? There is more information , concerning both paid and unpaid opportunities. I've read you for some time, and always greatly enjoyed your thoughtfulness.

(Please feel free to pass the information on, as well. :) (http://www.livejournal.com/users/valancy/179891.html)

[valancy.livejournal.com]

My, wasn't that a nice little lack of end tag. LOL the link was supposed to read "here." (stop.)

here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/valancy/179891.html).

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

Jim Phelps does not betray his country.

This was precisely my problem with that movie. Otherwise, I thought it was pretty routine stuff.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I might like the "clair" ones then. I'll have to try.

I dunno. I get impatient when the knowledge of who is good and bad is *too* clear. I mean, I think most people think they're the good guys, and I like to see that reflected in fiction. I don't want cackling conscious villains and square jawed heroes who never cut corners or cross lines and can always be trusted without safeguards.

But that sensibility of suspicion (great phrase) is why I don't much care for noir or for spy stuff as a genre. (I like Angel, but it's in spite of the noir, not because of it.) Because I adore moral ambiguity, real temptations and values clashes and hard choices.

But I don't like that weird world where we've gone past that to a place where no one ever trusts or is ever trustworthy, only the extremist crazies have ideals or loyalties, and intrigue seems to be a value for its own sake. I think most people basically *are* good people, according to their lights, or at least they're trying to be, and most good versus evil stories are really about which value system prevails.

Which is not to say that they're all equally right, just to say that there's a difference between that and people who've given up on the whole idea of good even as an aspiration so long ago that they've all but forgotten it, if they ever knew. That's what I tend to see in noir spy stuff. They all seem so defeated to me, and no one more so than the victors.

I don't recognize any of those people, and the idea that either a) everybody's like that, and I'm too deluded to notice or b) I and everyone I know is living in a fool's paradise while our lives are controlled by people like that behind the scenes is too nightmarish and nauseating for me to get past.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

I get impatient when the knowledge of who is good and bad is *too* clear. I mean, I think most people think they're the good guys, and I like to see that reflected in fiction. I don't want cackling conscious villains and square jawed heroes who never cut corners or cross lines and can always be trusted without safeguards.

Jumping in on this via matociquala's LJ, I think that this is one reason why The Man from UNCLE works, despite its winking self-awareness and eventual degeneration into the camp ghetto that was mid-sixties TV. The good guys don't hesitate to do slightly shady things in order to achieve their goals. They do cut a few corners and they can't always be trusted, yet they remain unquestionably good guys.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

FWIW, the original expressions of the noir sensibility were far more about running afoul of confusion, temptation, bad planning, etc. And, always afoul, and usually not in ways that can be fixed, but the whole point originally was taking nice guys or quasi-nice guys and tracking their descent into a warped world of wrongness and confusion. (The classic of this type would be The Killers from 1944.) So, for "hard choices and ambiguity", that would be a good bet.

Eventually, films noirs took the nice guy protagonist and made him start out less and less nice (see: Kiss Me Deadly, 1955), habituated to a crazier and crazier world. Then the cycle kind of imploded, as there stopped being a bottom limit to propriety and insanity in the real world.

Written spy noir (Le Carre, etc.) took the cynical route instead of the crazy route, and TV spy noir seems eventually to have caught on to that style. In the long run, cyncicism is a lot easier to sustain, especially in episodic format, than craziness.

But I don't think the original kind of noir can ever really come back: it was predicated on a kind of social restriction and wilful social ignorance that no longer exists.

[franzeska]

Didn't MacGyver spawn a bunch of other series about guys working for mysterious organizations? It's all growing a bit dim, but I remember watching something called Cobra and a few other shows that bore a strong resemblance to it. I was very fond of crime show reruns as a kid, and the more spy oriented stuff was usually on the same channels. Which reminds me that I have some Magnum P.I. DVDs calling me...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

?

I thought COBRA was the sworn enemy of G.I. Joe.

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

No disagreement that the style changed, but I'm not sure that the implication that Vietnam was the trigger stands up, given that many of the series you cite are British. Britain didn't take part in Vietnam and therefore there's no ongoing sense of trauma concerning the Vietnam War etc.

It is possible, of course, that because the style in America changed as a result of Vietnam the British caught on to this and followed the prevailing fashion. Whether that might be the case I suppose must depend on which series came first and I can't remember which did. Although I'm pretty certain that 'Sandbaggers' predates 'Equaliser' and it most definitely predates 'Alias'.

Incidentally, Edward Woodwood played a very noirish character in a British TV series called 'Callum' (I think, my mother used to adore it but I was too young to appreciate it) well before he was the Equaliser.

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

Replying to my own past to say it was 'Callan', not 'Callum'. One of Britain's most dangerous spies. *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Argh!
::beats head gently against desk in admission of guilt::

Mea culpa. Because you are, of course, perfectly right.

I don't know enough about recent British history to make anything resembling a useful answer, but the thing I was using "Vietnam" as a shorthand for (dunno about matociquala, mind, this is just me) is the sense of betrayal engendered in ordinary Americans by the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate. The people leading the country were venal warmongering liars (which, of course, they had been all along, with a few notable exceptions--and god knows they still are) and the media was not objective and reliable, but a seething ferment of spin and greed, with the occasional muckracker thrown in for spice. We couldn't trust our leaders and we couldn't trust our information, and now we knew it.

I'm a child of the 80s. You can tell by the cynicism.

In any event, Vietnam itself, that messy, pointless, ugly war, wasn't really the signified I was trying to point to with the signifier "Vietnam." (Yeah, I know, only me and the lurkers who support me in email and the telepathic aliens could possibly have known that. *g* ) Does my better explanation make it any less Americanocentric, or should I just give up and beat my head on the desk some more?

Also, thank you very much for pointing out the glaring and egregious flaw in the historical portion of my argument.

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

This is a terrific page of discussion, like a good conversation at a good party. ;) I want to send people over here to read it! I hope my sieve of a memory can retain the concept of the "clair" character, it's a really solid idea.

And, HELL YEAH, Jim Phelps does not betray his country, ever! I was glad someone blew that spoiler for me, because I hate to think of the ruckus I'd have caused in the theater if I saw the movie. I literally avoided seeing the movie because of that one thing!