Espionage has become the genre of our time. The archetypal thrill of seeing what you’re not supposed to see and knowing what you’re not supposed to know seems to be supercharged in this post-post-cold war world.
Smartphones and social media have enhanced the palette of deceptive techniques, and the toys of Q-branch, so novel and exotic to us children of the 60s, are now the common paraphernalia of modern life. Trackers, cameras, encryption, maps, drones, and the like are now the normal apparatus for modern living, a Q-branch in your pocket. How you use it is up to you. Social media stalking and harassment have become commonplace, remote camera apps give people a five-eyes view of bedrooms and boardrooms, and there have been some apocalyptic events where mass texts are blasted out to a network of crooks by the hundreds, in overwhelming numbers to smash-and-grab whole blocks of luxury shops in minutes, before the beat cops can call in support. The espionage genre is ready-made, a paved pathway in storytelling that emerged from the early days of strawberry-sized microphones soldered into land-line phone receivers, cameras hidden behind thick two-way mirrors and draped black velvet, reel-to-reel recorders hidden in a large bible (director’s cut), and microfilm in canisters on the way to the darkroom in the watch pocket of a tweed waistcoat. I got a chance to see Roman Polanski’s J’Accuse, about the 19th century Dreyfus affair, and his depiction of the surveillance systems in Third Empire Paris depicts a system that was already mature, with remote photography equipment pulling stills at street corners, and whole rooms full of desks at which sat numerous agents of the huge bureaucracy, tediously and routinely piecing together thousands of letters that had been torn to pieces to discover their contents. So there has always been espionage, and the best efforts of the civilized arts have been recruited to get one up on one’s enemies. Codes and encryption have also been a part of the effort, as one of the main functions of language- abstracted speech which doesn’t contain clues as to its meaning for the uninitiated. I remember visiting the Sultan’s Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, and one room in particular struck my imagination. Among the apartments and stalls of concubines and wives was a marble room whose four walls ran with waterfalls being caught in a pool below, to create a loud random pattern of white noise in which the Sultan could exchange confidences in a whisper that could not be overheard, early randomized encryption. In an information age, lies and secrets become more potent than physical coercion, since it’s all about controlling the information. The story that is constructed in the imagination of an audience is extremely strong, and can only be undone with another, more compelling story, which is why, in newsman parlance, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The lies can’t be unseen or unheard, only substituted. Crisis and conflict attract the eye and ear like nothing else, so in a society that is so dependent on information, it quickly evolves into a permanent crisis mode, with the needle pinned perpetually on “Emergency!” That would be fine if real emergencies dominated the system, but in reality, since 90+ percent of news is press releases with an agenda, fake outrage runs the show, which stimulates the desire for finding out secrets. The “Curiosity gap” has entered the parlance, and language itself becomes distorted to meet the new demands. TV, by which we mean increasingly the streaming services, have made their investments in this blue-chip genre this season. There are a number of shows which have doubled down on the double dealing. The Agency on Showtime and Paramount plus, Slow Horses on Apple TV, Netflix’s The Diplomat, and The Day of the Jackal on Peacock all draw from this life spring of narrative form. Slick government offices full of high-tech equipment, dialog delivered over the ubiquitous earpieces, bureaucratic screw-ups of high-stakes operations, requiring maneuvers to ditch the seamless surveillance – it’s all very much like modern life for those of us that aren’t spies. I often wonder if there will come a time when the convention is so similar to day-to-day life that it will no longer be a genre, and that even romance novels will incorporate the surveillance espionage tropes, without the need for a metaphorical MI6 to provide a plot framework. Spouses tracking each other’s whereabouts, tiny cameras planted everywhere for live surveillance, VPN cloaking and crypto-finance are everyday features of a younger and younger version of human. Perhaps that’s why the genre doesn’t seem to die. The iconic James Bond franchise has proved to be perennial, first with the Connery cold war edition, to the groovy 70s Roger Moore installments, to Pierce Brosnan’s hair gel in the 90s, and eventually the jacked Daniel Craig cycle that we just emerged from. There is no longer any novelty in finding out secrets; they’ve discovered that the excitement is in the analog experience. Today’s movie spook needs to be a free-runner, not a wine expert with an encyclopedic knowledge of fine sherries. So many of the skills of the spy, once rare and exotic, have become commonplace. Gadgetry is normal now, surveillance and misrepresentation is mere practicality. What remains is the overall theme of deception. The ultimate goal, unchanged for all of civilization, is substituting one version of reality for another. Perhaps the effect is that fraud has become a normal necessity. Misrepresentation is increasingly the fabric of communication. Human interaction gone cold, a cold that there’s no coming in from.
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