A visual history of the CIA
Saw The Good Shepherd yesterday. I found it utterly absurd. Spoilers below the fold.
read more!
I was slightly troubled by issues of historical accuracy and verisimilitude, which I could have forgiven in service of a good story. But the central story was so bad it actually made me want to laugh out loud. The original trouble was tied to the British intelligence narrative. I very much doubt that the security services were offing their own agents for sleeping around with working class boys and spilling secrets. Sleeping around with working class boys and spilling secrets is a grand national tradition; if it weren't, the Cambridge spy ring would never have got off the ground. I suppose it was meant to be symbolic—we learned our dirty counter-intelligence tricks from the British, and watching them push one of their own agents into the river was a way of demonstrating this. It still seemed overly murky to me. There is plenty to criticize about secret agencies without veering into the wildly implausible. But the real problem with the film was the ridiculous father-son story. Oh yes, I'm quite sure the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco because an anguished faultily-loved son overheard the wrong word while coming out of the shower. And said son would never figure out that the gorgeous foreign woman he has an affair with in an exotic locale is a Russian agent. Right.
I thought the best part was the evocation of the self-importance and kitsch elements of WASP culture. The film missed its main point badly enough, however, that I couldn't work up too much interest in this.
read more!
I was slightly troubled by issues of historical accuracy and verisimilitude, which I could have forgiven in service of a good story. But the central story was so bad it actually made me want to laugh out loud. The original trouble was tied to the British intelligence narrative. I very much doubt that the security services were offing their own agents for sleeping around with working class boys and spilling secrets. Sleeping around with working class boys and spilling secrets is a grand national tradition; if it weren't, the Cambridge spy ring would never have got off the ground. I suppose it was meant to be symbolic—we learned our dirty counter-intelligence tricks from the British, and watching them push one of their own agents into the river was a way of demonstrating this. It still seemed overly murky to me. There is plenty to criticize about secret agencies without veering into the wildly implausible. But the real problem with the film was the ridiculous father-son story. Oh yes, I'm quite sure the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco because an anguished faultily-loved son overheard the wrong word while coming out of the shower. And said son would never figure out that the gorgeous foreign woman he has an affair with in an exotic locale is a Russian agent. Right.
I thought the best part was the evocation of the self-importance and kitsch elements of WASP culture. The film missed its main point badly enough, however, that I couldn't work up too much interest in this.
posted by fortuna at 1:48 PM
6 Comments:
MY had the same positive take on the WASP depiction. I haven't seen it, although the world it seems to describe is as exotic, if not more, to me as it is to you. While I technically qualify as a WASP, Mayflower descendant, and all that, I come from what Joan Didion has somebody somewhere call "..the kind of family that doesn't drink at weddings." When I was young, hearing what were taken to be WASP mores described used to confuse me.
It seems like "WASP" denotes, at least to New Yorkers (and presumably other Northeastern urbanites), a particular type of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the kind that was once wealthy and powerful, went to Ivy League schools and dominated certain parts of the US government but has now fallen in influence, being displaced in most of those roles by Jews, Catholics and others. Tad Friend's recent New Yorker piece about his mother has a lot about this. Southerners, Midwesterners, and Canadians, even though mostly of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent, aren't included under this definition. My dad comes from that background, and all this "WASP" stuff is just as foreign to him as it is to IDP.
The term WASP was coined to describe a particular class of people.
I'm thinking I'll skip this movie . . .
I thought the character development was well done but that there was no payoff. If you're going to spend that much time getting us to care about the characters, do more with them. Also, Angelina Jolie was distractingly miscast.
I remember seeing some amusing feminist photograph, with a title like "behind closed door in corridors of male privilege" showing a man caught sleeping in the back of a conference room, slack and snoring. The movie had a similar quality, relishing certain silly details of WASP ritual. And by that I do mean eastern establishment.
And yeah, Becks, I was somewhat interested in the father-son relationship, until it became all too clear that the entire plot was going to pivot around it.
Post a Comment
<< Home