Movie Doubles - 'Bridge of Spies' & 'Pawn Sacrifice'

Cold War Nostalgia




Today's Movie Double is from two movies on Fetch TV, back-to-back, about how the Cold War was engaged. 'Bridge of Spies' is about how significant spies were exchanged, as all parties pretended there was no quid pro quo when it was all about a quid pro quo; and 'Pawn Sacrifice' is about Bobby Fischer's epic win over Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. Both films feature a tremendous amount of ambient paranoia about the communist Russians and weave their stories through the tacit embrace of the paranoia of that era.

Both are true stories - though the usual caveat is that they're true-stories-loosely-based-on-fact. The looseness of the 'loosely' hangs pretty loose with both films, but they make for good entertainment.

Steven Spielberg seems hell-bent on recreating the images of his youth through his film about the late 1950s and easy 1960s. Front and centre to the story is the threat of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war. To avoid the war, the participants must step back just a little bit from their ideological rhetoric, and as it turns out the main character played by Tom Hanks gets to walk that distance the longest because he's a man of American Principle. It's actually quite ra-ra about America, even though the CIA agents that help him seem to want to negotiate for part of that principle.

Edward Zwick's film by contrast seems to delve deeper into the paranoia infecting the mind of the protagonist Bobby Fischer, who plays off against the Russian cheese master in a surrogate confrontation in the Cold War.  If War is diplomacy through other means, then it stands to reason that under Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, Chess is War through other means. In a very unnatural way, the paranoia of the US government becomes the paranoia of the intensely unhealthy mind. It's hard to say for sure whether Bobby Fischer would become the kind of paranoiac he became had he lived in another time. Perhaps it is the contention of the film that Bobby Fischer too was a figure rooted in his era when at least a little bit of paranoia was healthy trait.

America As Inept Underdogs

In both films, American engagement with the Russians seems to come from a position of relative innocence and amateurish engagement with the problem. In order to negotiate the exchange of spies, the Americans send in a civilian lawyer with plausible deniability of its own involvement. The Russians are happy to engage with James Donovan at the state level, accepting his negotiation with the tacit knowledge that they reindexed dealing with the US Government.

Similarly, there is a sense in 'Pawn Sacrifice' where the American chess fraternity is amateurish and disorganised compared to the state-sponsored prestige teams from Russia. Thus it falls to Bobby Fischer to try and beat these Russian chess masters, as an individual. It is evident that the US Government has tremendous interest in Fischer doing well, but it cloaks itself in the same plausible deniability it bestows upon James Donovan.

One imagines this positioning of America as a kind of naive underdog suits the narrative for both films where the seemingly ordinary guy manages to secure the right deal, or the ingenious individual triumphs over the collective that is the Soviet Republic. It's a bit cheesy because it understates the actual power America exercised during the Mid-Twentieth Century.

It is also questionable if Bobby Fischer's win over the world champion would have been such a seminal moment had the grand master at the time been from India or Africa. Without the context where the prestige of the state is on the line, the conflict in the story would have weighed less to the world. The drama was heightened exactly because the oppose number Boris Spassky came from Russia.Yet in an evenly matched contest of state power that was the Cold War who can reasonably claim America was the underdog?

Their Paranoia Is Our Paranoia And Vice Versa

The sense of pervasive paranoia of the 50s and 60s is essentially the backdrop to both films. Looking back on the era, it is easy to imagine that the Americans looking at how the Russians finished off the Germans in brutal fashion decided the Russians were truly frightening. Equally, had the Russians looked closely at how the Americans finished off the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, then they equally would have had cause fro alarm. That mutual suspicion would have played out equally through the post-World War II era as both sides developed their nuclear arsenal and had to ponder the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.

The public that surrounds James Donovan in 'Bridge of Spies' is palpably scared. The children are scared of nuclear war, the adults are scared of communism. Even being the lawyer to represent a Russian spy is enough to elicit the violent response of the mob. It's not that far from the terrain of Atticus Finch in 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. It is easily conceivable that somebody growing up in this climate of fear ends up with the paranoid thinking that sees conspiracy everywhere. It's natural to to be paranoid when the state exercises paranoia as default option - and so the Bobby Fischer we see in 'Pawn Sacrifice' is a prisoner of his own fears.

The real Fisher seems to have been a fan of Hitler and more of a self-loathing Jewish person. It's hard to come at how somebody turns into that as well as one of the greatest chess masters ever, but then there's nothing to say these things are mutually exclusive or that Fischer saw any problem with it. The film is, if anything, a little light on the questionable ideas that informed the personality of Bobby Fischer. In any case, "paranoid nutcase" seems to have been the best description of Fischer, and that part seems eminently the product of the era in which he came to maturity; The unintended consequence of the Cold War as propaganda management where a citizen was driven nuts by the ramifications of the Cold War.

The Better Self

The logic of the Cold War is pretty unforgiving, and the courting dance of spies negotiating for their respective states has something of a zero-sum game about them. Each and every escalation in threats of violence is reciprocated with an equivalent or higher threat of violence. The incremental shift upwards is like an endless game of poker with the chips forever being mounted up as the players 'raise", but never being able to "call" because of Mutually Assured Destruction. To "win" in this scenario means the same as losing, so the necessary enterprise is to prolong the game rather than rush to its conclusion.

In this context, Tom Hanks' James Donovan makes a point of appealing to people's better selves. Whether it be an anti-communist judge or the Supreme Court or the CIA or the Russian KGB counterparts, he is constantly appealing to people to make a better judgment, to behave in light of their better selves. He is persuasive, although it might be Spielberg's deft hand at manipulating the audience into thinking that Donovan is a deft hand. (Speaking from personal experience, you're unlikely to be able to appeal to your horrible boss that way). Nonetheless the story of 'Bridge of Spies' depends upon the fact that even the hardened negotiators of the KGB and East German Stasi are willing to be their better selves to make the deal stick.

Of course a similar moment appears in 'Pawn Sacrifice' where Bobby Fischer's lawyer friend Paul appeals to Bobby to be his better self. This being Bobby Fischer, his better self turns out to be a single-minded but singularly brilliant chess player and nothing else. It's a bit sad that that is the entirety of Bobby Fischer's better self, but it may also be an indictment of the Cold War that produced such a warped individual. As we're shown in glimpses, it's not as if Boris Spassky is any less crazy as a result of his chess career undertaken in the shadow of the Soviet state.

The Anti-Climactic Climax

The funny thing about both these films is that the climax is so subtle it's almost non-existent. The big moment in 'Bridge of Spies' consists of three people crossing a couple of bridges on foot. The big moment in 'Pawn Sacrifice' is a chess move that convinces Spassky he has lost the game, prompting him to get up and applaud Bobby Fischer. As cinematic moments go, it's a far cry from the world of comic book movies that dominates the box office these days, where you know the climax is going on because buildings explode and cars flip and the sound track roars with orchestral music at a crescendo. There's none of that in either of these films. I don't know if this subtlety is the new riposte to an American cinema mainstream where the content has gone completely juvenile and stunted - but it was certainly refreshing to see, in both these films.

In the olden days it used to be Spielberg making the kiddie content and earning himself critical scorn. Times have sure changed when Spielberg is the elder statesman serving up content for the adult table.