Film as Belief: "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold"
I have a rather tawdry little secret. Or at least something that in today's day and age seems to count as a tawdry little secret.
I find the American national sport to be dull, moronic, and appalling.
It's filled with thugs who give Neanderthals a bad name, with dimwits who couldn't find their way off a low-walled patio, with posturing would-be Napoleons whose courage cannot evaporate in the face of danger because it never existed in the first place, with craven quislings who desire nothing more than to be famous and powerful but lack the humanity to do anything with that fame and power but destroy.
If you've begun to suspect (or hope) that I'm not talking here about football, or baseball, or NASCAR, or bowling, or speed walking, or any other athletic contest, you're right.
I'm talking about politics, the national sport that's threatening to eat us alive.
I loathe our politics, and this despite the fact that political science was one of my majors in college and I spent nine months writing a senior thesis on historical arguments over the expansion of suffrage in America, happily locked away in my carrel on the second floor of the Sawyer Library with the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers and Gordon Wood and Dred Scott and Eric Foner and Frederick Douglass and Thomas Wilson Dorr's rebellion in Rhode Island and all the rest of it.
But what was once fascinating and deeply important now seems to have devolved into little more than a sporting contest. Two sides maneuver to defeat the other, two fanbases savagely congratulate themselves on their virtues, and winning – often defined simply as preventing the hated other team from winning – is the goal.
It all reminds me of some thoughts put down a handful of decades ago by W.H. Auden:
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
Armies lined up, urged on by overlords hovering above them in the void, marching forward mindlessly to grief. And perhaps most significantly, enduring their beliefs.
Maybe my reaction to the current state of affairs has to do with changes in me: youthful enthusiasm often grows exhausted by the passage of years. Or maybe it has to do with something along the lines of the degradation of discourse, or with the fact that some time in the past thirty years people started figuring out that there was big money to be made in politics, profit in polarization, earnings in outrage, so an entire ecosystem of cable news and websites and podcasts and commenters sprang up that didn't mind turning politics into sport as long as it lined their pockets.
Whatever the cause, it seems to me clear that a great number of Americans would be furious with the suggestion that their obsession amounts to little more than sport, or with the suggestion that politics – actual politics, the art of governing, a set of beliefs about how people ought to live together who cannot do otherwise – is about something other than winning or losing.
But I think it is. And the longer I've thought about it, the more it has occurred to me that my politics – for I have politics, even if they don't really seem like politics by the standards of the politics of our day – are the politics espoused by certain strands of art and artists.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is based on a novel of the same name by the British novelist John le Carre, published in 1963. The film followed two years later, directed by American Martin Ritt.
Le Carre was a master at plot, and as in all of his best works the story here is both byzantine and limpid, confusing until it's not. Alec Leamas (an extraordinary Richard Burton) is a British spy in Berlin. At the opening of the film, he's recalled to London in disgrace after a failed operation, and his superiors (in the form of le Carre’s fascinating and recurrent character George Smiley) let it be known that he's being forced into retirement. In reality, though, the disgrace and retirement is only a charade, put on to fool the East Germans.
Leamas begins drinking heavily and takes a job at a local library, where he meets Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), an idealistic young member of the British Communist Party. The two fall in love, although Leamas continues his apparent descent into squalor. Eventually, he's recruited by the East German intelligence services, who believe that he's embittered enough to defect and will have valuable information for them.
Thus the trap is sprung. Leamas's goal, given to him by his superiors, is to feed the East Germans fake information that will make it seem as though one of their most notoriously brutal and capable officers, an ex-Nazi named Mundt (Peter van Eyck), is actually working for the British. With this information in hand, Mundt's subordinate, an ideologically earnest communist Jew named Fiedler (Oskar Werner), will be able to depose Mundt and take over himself. And with Mundt out of the way, British operations in Berlin will have a much easier time of things.
Leamas pretends to defect, and spends long hours talking to Fiedler – whom he comes to grudgingly respect – in which he carefully leads Fiedler into the suspicion that Mundt is a traitor. Eventually, the East Germans put Mundt on trial. Fiedler presents the evidence he has gleaned from Leamas, and it seems certain that Mundt will be convicted. But at the last second, Mundt's lawyer brings in Nan – who has been grabbed while in Berlin on a cultural exchange program – and through her innocuous testimony it becomes clear to the East Germans that Leamas is still working for the British and the whole thing is a setup.
Fiedler is arrested and presumably executed. Leamas and Nan are also arrested. But that night, Mundt appears at Leamas's cell and sets him free. The truth is that Mundt – violent, merciless, and a former Nazi – really is a double agent working for the British. Fiedler suspected as much, and so the whole operation – Leamas's fake defection, and then Nan's innocent discrediting of him – was set up to get rid of Fiedler and maintain Mundt's position.
Leamas and Nan are driven to the Berlin Wall and told to climb over. But the East German informant who drives them there – working on British orders – shoots Nan as she tries to climb. She cannot be allowed to live, now that she knows the truth about Mundt. Leamas's superior in the agency is on the other side of the wall, and calls out to Leamas to climb over…but instead he climbs back down to join the dying Nan, and is killed himself.
There's a great deal that could be said about the merits of the film – the direction by Ritt and cinematography by Oswald Morris are masterful, Burton gives a phenomenal performance, and the whole serves as a fascinating window into the Cold War – but for the moment I'm concerned with its politics.
As in so much of the cinema of the time, the backdrop here is the confrontation between democracy and communism, the so-called West and East.
And these are not treated interchangeably: early on, Leamas's superior notes that the British intelligence services are handicapped in a way that their communist foes are not, because they feel the need to observe certain protocols of human decency. Life under communist rule – as evidenced by the trial at the end, which is held totalitarian-style, in secrecy, in front of a tribunal whose judgements cannot be appealed – is given a different flavor than life in Britain, which is presented as perhaps a bit squalid, but more fundamentally free.
This opposition is given an added edge by the ideological commitments of Leamas and Nan. She's a believer in the cause, who thinks that only through the most noble principles of communism can society ever realize any kind of peaceful existence. He's a believer in realpolitik, who tells her of the atrocities he's seen while working in East Berlin, and who has little patience for what he sees as her naivete.
The movie, in other words, accepts that there are real, concrete differences in people's worldviews, as well as in the way that governments govern. And these are differences with consequences. People die or do not die, are more or less free, depending on where they live.
And yet the movie, as does a great deal of le Carre's work, as well as a great deal of the art produced during the 20th Century, also suggests that there is a more fundamental politics at play. This is the politics of humanity and scale.
It's a politics that emerges from a sense of absurdity, or contradiction, or dismay at the heart of the film.
Maybe the best place to begin untangling this is with the movie's contention that, regardless of their professed ideologies, the methods of espionage and war pursued by the two sides, East and West, are uncomfortably close to one another. Leamas believes, at the start of the film, in the realpolitik I've described above. It's a dirty job, but it's in service of something important: fighting against totalitarian regimes. Through the course of the film, though, he comes to realize just how dirty it is.
The British support the monstrosity of the ex-Nazi Mundt because he's useful to them. And it makes no difference that Fiedler really believes he is working for the betterment of humanity – as opposed to Mundt, who we sense has no moral values at all – because he's a threat to British operations. So he must be killed. And when Nan, who is a civilian used as a tool by the British, finds out that Mundt is a double agent the British have no compunctions about ordering her death.
It's important here, I think, to note exactly what kind of cynicism is in play. The film does not fall into a kind of moral equivalency: the cynicism is not of the kind that implies there's no difference between totalitarian and democratic regimes and values.
What the film is cynical about is the nature of large human systems. Any large-scale human enterprise that is engaged in what it sees as a vital conflict, the film seems to say, will necessarily be blind to, if not perpetuate, the suffering of the individuals under its sway. When the system wants an end, individuals become the means.
Leamas, Nan, and Fiedler are all trying to do what they see as the right thing. But their beliefs, when writ large and used as the foundation for action by the ponderous machinery of the largest forces in their lives, become monstrous. And the result is that all three are eaten up by the machinery they have believed in.
Over and against this cynicism about large-scale human organizations chasing their ideological ends, the film presents a different, smaller kind of politics: that of the intimate, the human.
Leamas and Fiedler respect each other as experts in their craft, and in the course of their conversations they engage in actual discussions of belief. They might not be described as friends, but the film suggests that they are not such implacable enemies as they both might have initially suspected. And Leamas and Nan love each other. Her love is strong enough that she doesn't care about their difference in beliefs; his is strong enough that when she's murdered by the British at the end he chooses to die by her side rather than return to the employ of the forces that killed her.
This is precisely the kind of politics suggested by the Auden poem ("The Shield of Achilles") I quoted above. The "voice without a face" that "Proved by statistics that some cause was just" is always and necessarily a destructive force in the world. Large bodies – be they governments, corporations, churches, or anything else – that are motivated by the righteousness of their own ideology will always be pernicious.
This is because it is precisely their righteousness that urges them to search for conflict, for without conflict they have no way to define themselves.
Conflict, in this view, is all-consuming and self-perpetuating. The righteous are not righteous if they have no unrighteous to set themselves against. Communists need capitalists to get themselves worked up about how virtuous they are, and vice versa. Democrats need to think that Republicans are the spawns of Satan, and Republicans need to think that Democrats are the disciples of Beelzebub, for if the other side is not evil, than what is it that makes their side just?
And beneath all of this, it is the ordinary people, and their regular human emotions, that are ground down into nothing.
So how, exactly, is this a politics? It is not, as I've noted, a politics that says there are no differences between whatever sides exist in the various conflicts around us. But it is a politics that urges extreme caution with regard to the machinations of those larger forces that claim our allegiance. It believes that the strongest and most vital forces are those that are the most intimately human – love, friendship, conversation, compassion – and that we must be vigilant about the way that our own institutions weaponize these forces in a way that threatens to destroy us in the name of their pursuits.
It's a politics that believes human connection is more important that team allegiance. And that's a politics I can get behind.
Enjoy this piece? If you’d like to read more of my work, my dystopic noir novel “The Committers” is now available in paperback and e-book format here. Read the first chapter for free here.
You can subscribe to “Thoughts Mostly About Film” for free to receive a new short essay on film in your inbox every week. And if you'd like to support my work, don’t forget to share this piece with anyone who might be interested!