truepenny | and now for something completely different ... (Reply)

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.

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*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.