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[COLUMN] The Agency, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Black Doves, Citadel, The Day of the Jackal and the Post-Ideological Spy Show | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-12-15 15:00:13 +0000 UTC
Note: This piece contains spoilers to the most recently released episodes of The Day of the Jackal and The Agency, as well as broad conceptual spoilers for Black Doves and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. So, if you want to watch any of those shows completely blind, feel free to bookmark and come back. The Agency and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are both very good.
The spy genre has made something of a comeback in recent months. Over the past couple of months, Amazon has launched the first season Citadel: Honey Bunny, Peacock has premiered The Day of the Jackal, Netflix has debuted Black Doves and Paramount+ is streaming The Agency. These are all glitzy, starry affairs: The Day of Jackal stars Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, Black Doves stars Keira Knightley and Ben Wishaw, and The Agency features Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere.
These shows have also been massively successful for the services. Despite their relatively recent premieres, Peacock and Paramount+ have already announced second seasons for both The Day of the Jackal and The Agency. Although streaming ratings are opaque and abstract, and impossible to verify, it seems like Black Doves is performing very well on Netflix. Despite a very heavy regional emphasis on India, Honey Bunny premiered as the number one series on Prime Video worldwide.
It is an interesting synchronicity, all the more notable for its success. Viewers are clearly responding to something in these streaming shows, whether the old-fashioned star power or simply the familiar thrills of the classic espionage template. It is interesting to wonder if the public and the studios are drawn to the genre by global events. Russia is once against positioned as an existential threat to Europe and America. There are debates about the role of foreign interference in American elections.
More broadly, the geopolitical climate feels particularly unstable recently, with renewed anxieties about the potential for nuclear warfare. In January 2023, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at a mere 90 seconds to midnight, signifying that the world was closer to apocalypse than ever before. One of the defining events of the first Trump Presidency was a very public inquiry into whether his campaign had colluded with Russian operatives.
For years, political scientist Francis Fukuyama has been gently walking back his argument that the end of the Cold War marked “the end of history.” The idea was that, with the defeat of communism, liberal democracy had vanquished all potential challengers. The results of the most recent American Presidential Election seem to mark the death knell of that theory, with Fukuyama himself conceding that Trump’s election marked “a major threat to classical liberalism itself.”
As such, it makes sense that pop culture would return to the familiar genre archetypes of the Cold War, stories about spies and undercover operatives navigating complex and shifting geopolitical frameworks. However, there is something very interesting uniting these shows, beyond their star wattage and their genre conventions. These are all spy shows about marriage and interpersonal relationships as much as they are engaged with diplomacy and foreign policy.
To be fair, the spy genre has always been fascinated by the tension between the personal and the political, the way that the profession asks operatives to compartmentalize their private lives in service of the national interest. The Spy Who Loved Me is about a romance between James Bond (Roger Moore) and Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), but a lot of the tension derives from the fact that they serve two very different governments.
This mode of spy story is still relatively popular. For six seasons, The Americans focused on undercover operatives Mischa (Matthew Rhys) and Nadezhda (Keri Russell), two KGB spies operating in Washington, caught between their allegiance to each other or their nation. However, that show, which wrapped up in 2018 was pointedly a period piece, one that demonstrated a clear “ambivalence toward any kind of particular ideology, including nationalism.”
In contrast, this recent wave of shows owes more to Doug Liman’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith than it does to the director’s earlier revolutionary espionage thriller, The Bourne Identity. It is oddly appropriate that this year also finally saw the launch of Amazon’s reboot of Mr. & Mrs. Smith as an anthology series. The first season starred Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, while the second season has been confirmed to star Anora breakout Mark Eydelshteyn.
Of these shows, the one that adheres most strongly to that classic tension between state and self is The Agency, which is saturated with topical references to the War in Ukraine, the Iranian nuclear program and civil war in the Sudan. The series is even set in April 2023 so that real life never undermines the plot. The show follows a CIA operative in London, named Brandon (Fassbender) who continues an undercover affair with Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith) after returning from a mission.
The central theme of The Agency is that this conflict inevitably results in severe psychological damage. “This isn’t national security,” Brandon assures his supervisor, Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright). “It’s personal.” Henry responds, “This is the Agency. Nothing is personal!” Returning home after years undercover, Brandon tries to heal his relationship with his daughter, Poppy (India Fowler). As she explains, “Let’s face it: there’s national secrets and there’s who the fuck your dad is.”
This theme of personal tension simmers through the other shows. The inciting incident of Black Doves is the murder of Jason Davies (Andrew Koji), who was having an affair with “Black Dove” operative Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), whose cover consists of her marriage to Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), the Secretary of State for Defense. Mr. & Mrs. Smith follows two strangers (Glover and Erskine) hired to roleplay as a married couple as part of their cover.
What is interesting about Black Doves and Mr. & Mrs. Smith is that they are explicitly post-ideology espionage stories. The characters do not work for any national spy agency. They do not serve any individual state. “We're a capitalist organization, not an ideological one,” explains Reed (Sarah Lancashire) when recruiting Helen into the organization. Helen replies, “Well, capitalism is an ideology.” She is, of course, correct, but it underscores that this is not a traditional spy story.
To be fair, this has been the trajectory of the spy genre for the past couple of decades. One of the central tensions within the Bourne franchise was the tension between public service and the private sector. One of the inciting incidents for the film franchise is Ward Abbott’s (Brian Cox) conspiracy with Russian oligarch Yuri Gretkov (Karel Roden) to steal $20m from the CIA. Jason Bourne focuses on a social media CEO, Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), bankrolled by the CIA.
Amazon’s Citadel is nakedly capitalistic. The original series was famously the second-most expensive series ever produced, behind Amazon’s The Rings of Power. However, the audience was invited to “shop the look”, to purchase the characters’ wardrobes and belongings. In some ways, this was just the inevitable culmination of the way that Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond books as a sort of lifestyle guide, referencing brands and status markers. In some ways, this is just the logical endpoint of the Cold War spy narrative. These were agents of capitalism, after all.
While The Day of the Jackal does feature MI6 operative Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch), the plot is much less political than either the source novel or earlier adaptations. In the original book and the first feature film, the eponymous assassin (Edward Fox) was hired to kill Charles De Gaulle. In The Jackal, an adaptation very clearly framed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the assassin (Bruce Willis) conspires to execute the First Lady of the United States (Tess Harper).
In this television adaptation, the mysterious contract killer (Redmayne) has been hired by wealthy financier Timothy Winthrop (Charles Dance) to take out social media billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), who is threatening to expose the vast and insidious tendrils of capitalism. However, even this plot feels like a distraction. The Day of the Jackal is much more interested in its lead characters’ marriages: the Jackal’s to Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and Pullman’s to Paul (Sule Rimi).
Indeed, the big sequel hook at the end of the season focuses on the dissolution of the Jackal’s marriage, as Nuria realizes who she has been married to. She takes their son, Carlitos (Adony and Saul Barajas), and absconds. In his last line of the season, after Zina Jansone (Eleanor Matsuura) proposes that they team up to take down Winthrop after he double-crosses them, the Jackal warns his new partner, “There's someone I gotta find first.”
It is interesting to wonder where what is driving this wave of spy shows about the intersection of capitalism and family, with less of an emphasis on ideology and nationalism. It might be seen as part of a larger wave of heightened interrogations of the institution of marriage, a companion to the wave of last year’s big awards contenders about the dangers of intimacy and marriage. Still, it is strange that this anxiety is finding expression so specifically through the tried-and-tested spy thriller.
This lack of interest in narratives of nationalism and patriotism might reflect a broader cultural cynicism. Polling suggests that American pride in national identity has fallen dramatically over the past decade. This trend is particularly pronounced among younger Americans. A YouGov poll from June 2022 suggested that half of Americans believe that the nation is becoming less patriotic. At the same time, polling suggests that younger Americans are increasingly skeptical of capitalism.
This might explain why so many of these shows focus on private operations operating at a level previously reserved for official government agencies. This trend emerges in the wake of massive documented corruption by the Trump administration, with the Trump family blurring the lines between public and private sectors. It’s very telling that Trump’s cabinet is stuffed with billionaires and his Department of Government Efficiency is run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
It's an interesting albeit cynical trend, this wave of spy shows for the post-ideological and the post-patriotic age. They reflect an era where it increasingly feels like the viewing public has lost faith in the nationalist underpinnings of the spy genre. In the end, it often feels like all these characters have is each other – and even that is far from assured.
Comments
Darren Mooney
Well, without getting too much into the plot of "The Agency", China is a major player in one of those three on-going geopolitical crises, and the one that is most central to the show's leading character.
Joseph
What I most notice most about modern spy/espionage media is that almost all of it refuses to acknowledge that China is the only peer adversary the US is really contending with. With every passing year, plots about Russians or generic middle eastern baddies feel more pase. The spy genre was birthed out of great power conflicts and it is currently ignoring the world's actual only great power conflict.
