Movie Doubes

The CIA Edition
You never get your ducks to line up this nicely. Well, hardly ever anyway. Watched two films in a row at he cinemas featuring the CIA as the centre-piece setting.

'Burn After Reading' and 'Body of Lies' are both high in star power and marquee directors taking on the rather difficult topic of espionage. 'Body of Lies' directed by Ridley Scott moves headlong into the all-serious terrain of tracking down terrorists in the middle east. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a modern day American Lawrence of Arabia who goes almost native in trying to ferret out the enemies of the USA. Russell Crow plays the CIA analyst who guides him deeper into trouble, if not betrays him to the worst enemies through excessive abstraction and detachment. It's an action packed film with very grey moral areas explored in a frenzied, confused manner.

'Burn After Reading' is a Coen Brothers vehicle that explores the messy lives of people living in Washington DC, which naturally (rather than tangentially) intersects with the day-to-day business of the CIA and surveillance. It's a very black comedy that revolves around the idea of known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. In this film, the CIA fail to learn anything of value because all the action we see on the screen is inscrutable to the CIA in terms of national importance - it's not but it's deeply personally important to all the players involved.

The CIA On Screen

The more recent incarnations of the CIA on screen have not been positive. This is most probably a reflection of the Bush year policies which have left the American public apopleptic in a kind of ethical aphasia. What can you say about the failures of intelligence that led to things like 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq? Films such as 'The Good Shepherd' have sought to shed light on the organisational culture of the CIA while films such as 'Rendition' have sought to highlight the issue of torture as subcontracted out by the CIA to other nations.

In any case, movie-land seems to have decided that the CIA is fair game. This is possibly a reaction to the 1990s where the FBI seemed to be fair game in films such as 'Silence of the Lambs' and the endless (interminable) 'X-files' franchise of TV shows and movies. I guess the perennial villain has moved on from the inscrutable serial killer in the American landscape to the inscrutable terrorist in the middle eastern landscape.

The CIA we see on 'BoL' is every bit as Machiavellian and self-serving as the previous films have portrayed, but it paints its picture boldly as if to say, if you do enough bad things for the state, then the state looks the other way. One has to decide to abandon everyday morality to root for these characters who are working at the extremity of state control. They're all in the zone where Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep lived in 'A Few Good Men', and we'd better be up to handling this truth or we're just munchkins. Terrible things are done to people in the name of intelligence, including torture and framing an innocent man who gets killed by the bad guys. There's something incredibly ironic going on with 'BoL' where the tactics of the CIA men are almost indistinguishable from those of the Terrorists. It's only that the terrorists explode a bombs in public spaces killing ordinary people that keeps them a little more morally culpable than the CIA, but it's really not by that much more.

In turn, with 'BAR', the Coen Brothers do not spare the rod as they depict the CIA as a sort of club of white guys who all went to Ivy League universities and are in most part, snarky, petty bureaucrats with too much time and not enough vision or imagination. The way Langley appears in this film is as a series of cold, echoing interiors punctuated by air-conditioned quiet rooms where people hold meetings over seemingly trivial details, far away from the maddening crowd. The very orderliness and quietness of the Langley office seems to incapacitate the intelligence apparatus from getting real. Instead, the world appears to them as trivial reports spoken i such rooms. In 'BoL' such trivia is the vital source of clues - in 'BAR', it becomes the cypher of confusion. One can't help but think that Intelligence is the industrialisation of the game 'Chinese Whispers'.

In either case I can't imagine the actual workers at CIA would take kindly to either film. Not that I care because what they do for a living should be just as subject to critique as the next job.

Surveillance As A Way of Life

The Coen brothers have been poking fun at various parts of the USA for their cultural mores in succession. 'O Brother Where Art Thou' lampooned the South; 'Fargo' poked fun at the Mid-West; 'The Big Lebowski' dismantled LA pretensions; 'No Country for Old Men' ripped into Texan mores; and now we have a film about Washington DC. They've been very good and 'BAR' does not disappoint.

The people in Washington DC, if this film is to be believed, are incredibly savvy about surveillance and espionage, but they have no common sense. Harry, played by George Clooney used to be in 'Personal protection' but now works for the State Department. He is acutely aware that somebody is following him and his assumption is that it is an espionage organ. When he finally manages to confront one of his tails,he finds out it is a man from a detective agency hired to get divorce proceedings details against him.

When Chad, played by Brad Pitt, finds dates and numbers on a file on a CD-R, he doesn't think it is somebody's banking account details - he immediately leaps to the conclusion it is espionage material. His first plan is to track down who the disc might belong to, and then try to organise an exchange. His partner in crime Linda, played by Frances McDormand is equally savvy about espionage, if a little out-dated. When the American 'agent' fails to play ball, her immediate reaction is to drive to the Russian embassy in the hopes of securing a sale there.

The point, is, these are not the thoughts people would ordinarily have, given the evidence. The whys and wherefores of the story are totally distorted by the heightened assumptions about espionage. Maybe it is true, and that the very proximity of Langley in Virginia makes people in Washington DC assume the most espionage-ridden paranoiac scenarios in their lives. It's hard to tell from Sydney.

Both films feature satellite surveillance images. It is how the film begins and ends in 'BAR', giving the impression that what we are seeing, is one big surveillance recording that we are watching. It's not necessarily true, but what the beginning and the ending shots signify is pretty simple. The signified blinks at us more surprised.

Satellite surveillance is also how the centre stays in touch with field agents in 'BoL'. There have been a whole bunch of movies depicting this process, from 'Enemy of the State' (directed by Ridley's brother Tony) to 'Patriot Games' directed by Phil Noyce back in the 1990s when the CIA didn't look so vulnerable. When Phil Noyce did it, it seemed it was a device to send the violence peripheral to the story, so that the characters got detached from the violence. In Ridley Scott's version, it seems the CIA handlers in Langley are far more emotionally engaged in the process as if they are playing one big PS3 shoot'em up game, but with real people.

It was Hitchcok who showed us that there was a fine line between surveillance and voyeurism in 'Rear Window', but cinema in the 2000s has hit the point where voyeurism is a legitimate state tool. It's kind of creepy we've come this far in this direction so fast. That is to say, for a business filled with death, there seems to be a lot of libido invested in to it by the characters of both films. Espionage is in a sense how love is made and how ordinary people get fucked up.

In any case, with both films, the surveillance is not the point. They are both trying to explain how it is that the CIA has a vast apparatus for surveillance and still can't seem to get their man Osama bin Laden. Why is this so? If one were to believe the 'BoL' version, it is because they rely too heavily on technological solutions when in fact it needs very messy, untidy, difficult human solutions -all of which requires patience and silence and proper watching. The film tacitly implies that the Americans have lost the ability to wait out an opponent, and instead wants to solve it all with one big machine that solves problems through Satellites and airplanes and high tech toys.
If one were to believe the 'BAR' version, it's because the world they are practicing their surveillance upon moves too quickly and is so complicated that the men doing the surveillance cannot draw proper conclusions from what they are seeing. The ending is gut-busting ly hilarious, but when reflected upon, it's a chilling insight.

Of course a third answer would be that they just don't want to find bin Laden alive because of what he might say in the lime light of the world media. Neither film states this, but after watching both, you start to consider this as a real possibility. I mean, the CIA can't be this dumb, right? There must be a better reason!

Directors Revisiting Their Old Films

If you do enough stuff, you find you do some things over and over again in your work. Sometimes it's intentional, other times, it's not. Each time it surfaces, you say to yourself "Oh dear". I've played similar passages in my guitar breaks, and I've even shot the same spiral staircase in 2 different films. You don't want to do it, but sometimes, the options narrow down to one and it's where you've been before. Most of the time it happens because you run out of time and you just revert to something you know will work, but when a big time Hollywood film director does it, you have to ask,"What' going on here?"
It's the moment you've inadvertently established a signature moment of your own work.

Without a doubt, Ridley Scott's most important film is 'Blade Runner'. Ever since that film, we've seen him re-do moments from that film. For instance, in 'Black Rain' Michael Douglas finds evidence in a bathtub, much like Harrison Ford's Deckard does in a hotel room. In 'Gladiator', the deep structure of the family is recycled from Blade Runner: A father with two sons - one good, one bad, one spiritual, one by biology, - and a daughter. In 'BoL', it is Leo DiCaprio's character getting two fingers broken by the villain which references Roy Batty breaking Deckard's fingers in the climactic confrontation in 'BR'.

It was a little awkward watching the moment because I instantly knew there would be two, after the first hammer strike. I don't know why he couldn't have thought of something else, but perhaps it is a signature moment he wanted to insert as a nudge and a wink to us 'BR' fans. We still love your work, Ridley.

The Coen brothers also were working to rework some of their tropes. The sequence with Tilda Swinton's Dr. Cox with the Divorce lawyer is a reworking of 'Intolerable Cruelty', but inverted because the lawyer is anything but suave and Swinton is a cold fish; she's anything but pyronic unlike Catherin Zeta-Jones in 'IC'. George Clooney's endless patter about being some kind of security specialist reminds us of his excellent turn in 'O Brother' but it is somehow deformed into an unseemly obfuscation and dissembling by a serial adulterer. Frances McDormand's Linda also seem to reprise the single minded pursuit of her her character in Fargo, but this time it's inverted to being a kind of monomania about plastic surgery rather than simply finding the truth. The moment Clooney's Harry confronts the private eye tailing him echoes of a similar moment in 'The Big Lebowski'.

All of these instances don't mean much in of themselves except when viewed against the rest of their work. Perhaps the Coen Brothers are working on their own version of conceptual continuity. If so, it is admirable.

Black Comedy Is Never Understood

It's one thing to say people don't get irony; it's a whole new dimension of misunderstanding when it comes to black comedies. Some people just don't like them, saying they're misanthropic. I actually don't see what's wrong with a bit of misanthropic fiction. 'Wuthering Heights' for instance isn't exactly full of philanthropic impulses, and neither is the narrative voice undertaken by Jane Austen in her more famous novels. If there's one thing that makes me shudder, it's that tone of Jane Austen's incipient class-snobbery; so it's not like great fiction can't come out of such misanthropy. The other camp of critics just don't get it. Richard Corliss of 'Time' magazine wrote that he just doesn't see the point of the Coen brothers making 'BAR'.

To me, it's self explanatory. There are a lot of stupid people around, and should there be a confluence (or a perfect storm) such stupidity could multiply into what J.K. Simmons' character calls a 'cluster-fuck'. There's no damn mystery, and it's not that misanthropic to write about the foibles of stupid people going wrong - it's common fair in comedy except writers work hard to add lovable features to these characters. That's how sit-coms work. The characters are stupid and do stupid things, but we are sentimentally invested in them, for reasons we're not entirely sure. It's not misanthropic or cynical. In fact it would be more cynical to write 'Forrest Gump', but of course then we'd be back to the Tropic-Thunder-"don't play the full retard" discourse so we'll skip that today.

The point is, even masterful black comedy specialists such as the Coen brothers can make a film where the film critic of 'Time' Magazine just doesn't *get* it. What chance have I got when I, a total unknown to the world, go and make 'Key Psycho'?
Not even my friends get that one, but fans of black comedy roll around the floor laughing. Which is to say, there are few extreme misanthropic black comedy specialists working in fiction such as myself, because the market is a lot smaller and a lot less inspired than you would hope. I like doing them but I just can't justify continuing to do them. I am sick of this wall of misunderstanding. Nonetheless I like my coffee, comedy and US Presdient black, okay?

A Quick Note About Brad Pitt's Chad
This guy just keeps amazing me. His turn as Chad in 'BAR' is wonderfully nunanced and is a fine misture of neurosis and hyperactivity. It's charming as well as comic. In a sense his performance holds the film together. Across the two films, if I had to pick one performance that I thought was a standout, it was this one. I had to work really hard to recall Tyler Durden after this turn. The man is under-rated.

A Quick Note About George Clooney's Harry
George Clooney's performance in this film wouldn't be so ironic if he hadn't done 'Syrianna', donning a similar beard. I laughed at his stuff because ll I could think of was how serious he was in 'Syrianna' and how trivial his concerns were in 'BAR'. It's a great bit of casting that worked to subvert a star's own buggage.
Also, appearing with Tilda Swinton as his lover also echoed 'Michael Clayton' which was funny, as well as the moment he accidentally kills Bard Pitt's Chad, after all the 'Ocean's 11' movies.

A Quick Note About Leo DiCaprio
My partner says she likes watching any film where Leo DiCaprio looks tense like he's under a lot of stress. That's a lot of films. So I have seen a lot of Leo DiCaprio in the lst 5 years. He's very good but he's getting to be a little Johnny-one-note.

A Quick Note About Russell Crow
I don't know how to say this, but while he's not doing the 'full retard', he does seem to be doing the 'full fat'. He looked uncomfortably corpulent and on his way to late-Elvis-dom. A bit of a worry there. He sure didn't look much like Maximus, which makes him a great actor in part, but also, he did look like he's letting himself go.