On Her Majesty’s Service [RI5]
The international role of the UK in popular culture
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 5 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to Chapter 4 here, or go on to Chapter 6 here)
This is a chapter about the specific position, role and self image of the country I lived in for the first 37 years of my life, the UK, on this question of humanitarian intervention as it appears in popular culture. In other words it looks at the questions we’ve been considering from the perspective of blighty, and from the perspective of the sort of insufferable twerps who say things like blighty. So let’s talk about perfidious Albion.
It’s an obvious point, but it’s amazing how often it is overlooked: we live in a world shaped by the legacy of empire. The only countries in the world that have never been partly, and in most cases entirely, part of a European empire at one point or another are Liberia (founded by freed American slaves who behaved much like an occupying colonial force in how they interacted with the established West African population) and the quartet of Thailand, the Koreas, and Japan — countries so steeped in surrounding empire that imperialist thought has very much drunk their milkshake. Empire shaped our borders, empire shapes our conception of what borders mean. Empire and its aftermath are the primary cause of the contours of the power relationships between the countries empire left behind. Empire looms like a shadow behind most foreign policy relationships globally, and all of the UK’s. The end of the direct phase of empire ended relatively speaking fairly recently — in the 1960s in most cases. But it would be a mistake to think of empire as history, even recent history — empire describes our world as it is now. Our every interaction with the world around us is contextualised by our imperial legacy. The UK may no longer rule our colonies, but its position in relation to them is defined by the legacy of imperial extraction.
It’s therefore interesting to observe the complete absence of Empire from much of our popular culture — although depressingly unsurprising for a country that is in as deep a denial about its colonial past as the UK. There are of course films about our imperial legacy, a whole genre of them, but they are kept locked away in a separate box (marked Gandhi (1982)) from our war films, our political films, our other history films.
When British fiction does integrate empire into its other stories — as, for example, swashbuckling films set in the 19th century can scarcely not — it does so incompletely, or with its tongue in its cheek. Flashman (1969) takes this latter approach. Sharpe (1993) deals with the problem by having only very occasional and confused references to empire and making it clear that the French were worse. The Aubrey–Maturin series of novels (1969 onwards) attempts to have its cake and eat it by having the British Empire be the institutional protagonist while simultaneously having an individual protagonist — Stephen Maturin — who is an Irish rebel and thus able to selectively espouse antiimperialist causes such as Haitian independence while still affiliating himself with the Royal Navy: the shock troops of British imperialism.
This absence of empire from much of popular culture is why the British public have no real understanding of why the rest of the world hates us. It is by far the biggest blind spot in popular depictions of the UK’s role — but it is far from the only one.
To look at how fictional depictions of the UK have changed during the period that starts about the time when Britain ceased to be a global power and continues to the present day, and to understand the angst that causes in a certain kind of British person, it’s quite revealing to look closely at the career of John le Carré.
Born David John Moore Cornwell to an intermittently distressed upper middle class English family (his father was able to pay for David to attend the elite Sherborne public school, but then got himself into insurance fraud, became a member of the Kray gang’s outer orbit, and had to declare bankruptcy) le Carré was a British Intelligence officer (both domestic and foreign) until his novels — written under that pseudonym — became so successful that he could become a full time writer. He wrote several of the greatest thrillers of all time — and since they were about being a British spy in the cold war they naturally had horribly right wing politics. Then, as a keen observer of the human condition and as a possessor of an astute political mind, he started to examine the root causes of his protagonists’ predicaments and so — over time — he moved further and further left. This was a great shame as the dissonance at the heart of having to write books where British spies are the heroes but where the politics are progressive caused him to go to piddle. Everything he’s written since about 1990 has been incredibly tedious.
In his first three novels (Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 1961–63) there is no politics as such — certainly no international relations — just the cold bloody business of murder, of spycraft, of the cold war fought as a game far removed from any idea as to what it might be about. These books aren’t just brilliant, they provide a glamor free window into that either glamorised or ignored world: the killing people apparatus of the British state. That banal and efficient world of mild mannered portly balding middle aged men who would never dream of sending an uncooked dish back to the kitchen but murdered Britain’s way into the largest empire the world has ever seen, and must now murder — and mostly actually try to avoid murdering — their way through the world that empire has left behind.
The only thing was, by the 1960s the British intelligence services were not an example of that chilling efficiency. The rot that is the British class system in general and the British private school system in particular had set in, and the intelligence apparatus had fallen foul of that very British curse: posh idiots who are good at blagging.[1] In his first three books le Carré described British intelligence the way he thought it could be, and the way he wanted people to think it was. In his fourth — The Looking Glass War (1965) — he couldn’t resist describing things the way they actually were.
It is a terrifying tale of the real consequences of incompetence and hubris as applied to questions of life and death. Ostensibly it is set in a neglected and unloved sub agency of a sub agency that had no business running agents at all and so does not possess the polish and expertise of M16, but various spies have said it actually depicts the MI6 of that era with greater accuracy than any other work of fiction. I cannot speak to that, but what it does perfectly capture is the way a certain class of British decisionmaker goes about a project they have no competence to go about — and the terrible consequences that result.
Le Carré’s next few books were deeper affairs (A Small Town in Germany, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: 1968–1974) and were scarcely about spying at all. In one case this is literally true; in the others the stories are set in the world of spies but the questions they consider are those of relationships,[2] of betrayal in its various forms, of the past, and of politics. They display a cynical romanticism where everything is important but nothing matters: it’s hopeless but we must try, dear. It showcases some of the alienation that I can believe many of the key decisionmakers of the late 20th century felt towards the question of who should be killed and why — most breathtakingly when the antagonist of Tinker Tailor explains that he sees the decision over which side to back in the cold war as a largely aesthetic choice.
Whenever the British government does something truly astoundingly stupid, I find it helps to understand it if one imagines the decision made by the gormless git Avery from the Looking Glass War and not prevented by the world-weary and exhausted group of Tinker Tailor era George Smileys whose job that would usually be.
In his next two books (The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People :1977–79) le Carré starts to wrestle with the political question of “is the UK good?” more directly. His initial attempt is bewildered and confusing: the Honourable Schoolboy raises all sorts of interesting questions about imperial legacies, the private school system, romance, the war in Vietnam, the nature of management, and the UK’s relationship with the US — it has no idea how to answer them and the book is a hideous mess. His second attempt is irate and exasperated: in Smiley’s People a Labour government is elected with all sorts of modern ideas about killing people being bad, and blunders about dangerously in an attempt to do things better — it is a conceited book, written by someone who didn’t like that their world view was being challenged, precisely because the challenge had clearly got under his skin, and indeed one started to see his world view change shortly afterwards.
Thereafter he goes further and deeper and ever more guiltily into this question of moral ambiguity, initially quite entertainingly (The Little Drummer Girl (1983), A Perfect Spy (1986), The Russia House (1989)) but soon descending into sanctimonious drivel which would only get more sanctimonious as the years went by (oh hello, The Constant Gardener! (2001)).
At this point le Carré stops telling us anything interesting because he has too much shame; to continue the story we need a protagonist with no shame.
We’ve been expecting you Mr Bond.
James Bond was the creation of the aristocratic author Ian Fleming. Fleming was himself an intelligence officer, naval intelligence specifically, during WW2 when intelligence was more of a boys-own affair. But his novels aren’t really about spycraft so much as about being an aristocratic playboy.[3]
The consequences of having an aristocratic hero, as pointed out by Umberto Eco in a seminal essay in 1966, is that you cannot insert a class analysis into your books or your hero becomes too unlikable. But when your antagonist is literally communism it’s quite hard to avoid class. Eco suggests Fleming swerves this issue by making the choice — like Haydon’s — an aesthetic one, and in a way that becomes uncomfortably racial. James Bond’s true nemesis is ugly foreigners.
The James Bond film franchise the books spawned is one of the most successful in cinematic history, and so we can learn a lot about how Britain sees its enemies by what flavour of ugly foreigners we have chosen to show on screen.
Throughout the cold war, the enemy was of course Communism: the SPECTRE[4] that haunted Europe. Within this there is still room to explore other mid-Atlantic neuroses: organised crime, megalomaniacal tycoons, the rise of China (Goldfinger 1964), drug addiction and banana republics (Live and Let Die 1973, Licence to Kill 1989), psychopaths (The Man with the Golden Gun 1974), anarchists (The Spy Who Loved Me 1977), and long lost Nazis (Moonraker 1979).
Things get more interesting when the USSR disappears, and screenwriters have to create new adversaries for a character they themselves admit in 1995’s Goldeneye was “a relic of the Cold War.”
In Goldeneye the enemy is still Russia. But not Communism but western fears around the monsters we created to defeat it, and the risks that some of the morally questionable actions we took to do so might come back to bite us. This was actually quite astute: while when Russia did reemerge as an adversary it did so in a very different way, the last couple of decades have nevertheless revealed quite a few Alec Trevelyans, although their catchphrase has tended to be “allāhu akbar” rather than “for England, James”.[5]
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) tried to have its cake and eat it, by making its enemy “bits of the Chinese Government”. That way it could play on western Sinophobia, heightened since Goldfinger by China’s rapid rise and everyone else’s wane, while at the same time including a Chinese accomplice to Bond [6] to sell the film to a Chinese audience. It pulled off this trick in the classic Bond style, by introducing a proxy in the form of a megalomaniacal tycoon.[7]
The proxy is then used to make a different point: maybe right-wing hawkish media moguls have too much power? This bit is not subtle: it both borrows and directly references the story of how William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow journalism” manufactured the Spanish American conflict: “you provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war.” For the second film running, Bond would find itself remarkably prescient: this time pre-empting the role the media would play in facilitating and deepening the war on terror.[8]
The war on terror, rogue states and the axis of evil loom large over the next two productions: The World Is Not Enough (1999 — terrorists) and Die Another Day (2002 — North Korea[9]). Even before 9/11 you can see the narrative relaxing into the fact it had a new baddie, and therefore didn’t need to resort to introspection and self-critique. And what a convenient baddie too! Self-evidently terrible people whose politics are that they don’t accept our world view — the logical corollary of that is that our world view is righteous and unimpeachable.
These films also took place on a smaller scale. Bond was now not so much warrior as a policeman; now all the great battles had been fought and won anyone else still holding out was just a common crook.
In 2006 the current creativity allergic phase of late-stage capitalism caught up with Bond. New stories are risky: what if people don’t like them? Better to just endlessly reboot and remake. So since that year’s Casino Royale the adversary has once again being SPECTRE: that lazily written stand in for depoliticised evil — an enemy that means nothing and thus alienates no one and can be sold in all markets.
Once again, there were times for diversions into other neuroses and qualms along the way: pseudo-Marxist Latin American Generals (Quantum of Solace 2008) and the Chinese again (Skyfall 2012). Perhaps most interestingly, the series also flirts with its discomfort about the security state itself, and the vague sense — post Butler Review — that our intelligence services don’t always have our best interests at heart. The idea of our historical mistakes might come back to bite us recurs in Skyfall and in Spectre(2015)[10] we are confronted with the suggestion of an authoritarian trans-Atlantic deep state that is undermining freedom and democracy in the name of national security.
Much as with the portrayal of the yellow media in Tomorrow, I don’t think this makes these films particularly subversive. Rather it demonstrates that these concerns had reached a point in the public discourse where they couldn’t be ignored, and it was the role of popular culture therefore to provide reassurance. This it does by suggesting that incorruptible public servants — naturally white, male, expensively educated — are on hand to use tools such as surveillance and datamining insofar as it is in the public interest, but will shut it down before it goes too far. They can be relied upon to rein in any rogue authoritarian elements that might somehow have briefly slipped in to positions of authority.[11]
The idea that this authoritarianism might be systematic, might indeed be the point of our security institutions, and that our long track record of historical “mistakes” might be a feature of our system and not a bug, is expressly negated by such films.
Here then, is how Britain sees itself. And here is what it doesn’t see. Resolute and enthusiastic in the face of an obvious adversary; neurotic and conflicted the rest of the time (most of the time). Vaguely aware of, and slightly discomfited by, their own complicity in the current state of affairs, but with no systematic analysis of the reasons for this or the structures that perpetuate it. We may have done bad things, but we are a good thing.
And while empire looms everywhere in the background, it is scarcely confronted and never integrated into the analysis of our current problems. Other omissions are even more striking: any references to the Iraq war are few and far between, despite the enormous role it has played in shaping both the world we have and the enemies Britain faces. Also missing (outstanding exceptions such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) aside) is any sense of specific historical wrongs and their lasting political and symbolic legacies.
Meanwhile, the sense of how much power and influence the UK actually has is all over the shop: we feel we should still matter, we’re not quite sure why. It is a shaky foundation upon which to build a conception of agency in humanitarian affairs which presupposes near unlimited power and reach.
Notes
[1] Adam Curtis wrote an absolutely wonderful blog post about this
[2] Le Carré has a reputation for being terrible at writing about women and thus at being terrible at writing about relationships. This is unfair. Firstly, he is excellent at describing platonic and in particular working relationships. Secondly, I think he’s excellent at writing about women as they are seen, or rather as they are not seen, by a certain kind of man. A man to whom it doesn’t occur that women have inner lives at all.
And while it’s certainly the case that there are far too many stories about that kind of man, we do need some such stories because we do need to understand this kind of man, because it’s this kind of man that has most of the power in our world and commits most of its violence. We need to learn what makes them tick to defeat them — and Le Carré is a better guide to that than most.
So his books might have a very male perspective, but they are still highly perceptive when it comes to the kinds of relationship that that sort of man thinks he has. In Smiley and Ann, for example, we have one of the great underwritten love stories of all time: sparsely told in a half sentence here and there over a dozen or so books. It’s so real, so depressingly protestant, and there’s so much there and so much more not there — not least any idea at all of how Ann felt, because Smiley had never considered that either.
The issue, as with everything else le Carré wrote, is that as he became a better human being he became a worse writer, because he insisted on trying to understand his female characters — which he had no idea how to do.
[3] It occurs to me it’s probably not a coincidence that I’m telling the story of Britain’s grapple with its imperial past and post-imperial present through its spy novels. Spycraft is what you do when you have limited hard power but want to have hard power effects.
[4] In Fleming’s novels SPECTRE — an organised crime syndicate with some Nazi and some Communist links — actually have quite a small role and the main antagonist is the semi-fictional Soviet intelligence agency SMERSH. SPECTRE, a more light hearted, less political and more flexible adversary, largely replaces SMERSH in the films.
[5] This line works well in the film but has always irked me because James Bond isn’t remotely English: he’s half-Scottish and half-Swiss. So am I which is why I am irked.
[6] Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin, the best Bond girl and it’s not even close.
[7] Jonathan Pryce’s Elliot Carver, the best Bond villain and it’s not even close. Also great surname.
[8] For all that Adam Curtis has become a meme “The Power of Nightmares” is unmatched when it comes to exploring and unpicking the symbiotic relationship that exists between the hawkish right, terrorists, and the media establishment — entities that mostly despise each other and are not colluding overtly but structurally support one another because they have many of the same interests.
[9] Although watching Die Another Day with the benefit of hindsight it is impossible to think of the baddie as anyone other than Elon Musk: he’s a billionaire playboy with facial paralysis who made his money from African precious gems and then used a series of over the top media stunts to promote his environmental/private space tech companies. He also turns out to secretly be a North Korean General in deep cover with a plan to destroy the world, but are we entirely sure Musk isn’t?
I unapologetically love Die Another Day: a film in which the invisible car barely scrapes into the top ten silliest moments. At one point Bond kite surfs a tidal wave wearing sensible knitwear and does not get damp. At another point this happens:
[10] This entire plot arc, including all its moral issues, its political inference, and its suggested resolution is lifted hook, line and sinker from the slightly more fascist but otherwise near-identical film The Dark Knight (2008).
[11]The real hero of this whole plot arc is Ralph Fiennes’ Gareth Mallory, who ultimately becomes the new M. He’s a former Special Forces Lt Col who then chairs a parliamentary oversight committee on the UK’s overseas operations. This is the exact same career arc as Tom Tugendhat MP, except Tugendhat is not yet M but instead holds the newly created post of Security Minister.
