452 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

[Mr Sausage]

As you say, they are all clearly there at the level of verbal narrative. If the ironies were also being expressed visually, the movie's structure of meaning would become thuddingly overdetermined, with every meaning given at least one expression more than necessary. As usual for the genre, the movie is already overdetermined enough at the level of plot so that the viewer isn't lost amidst the twists and turns. Adding another layer of explanation for those same things would make for a soggy, bloated, top-heavy film with little apparent trust in its audience given that it thinks it needs to encode every meaning twice on two different planes of expression

The movie could be more visual and less verbal, I guess, but that's not the best choice for a narrative with so many potentially confusing twists, plus it would be inefficient. Complex ironies are carried more easily in words than in images.

[ando]

Well, don't the greatest cinematographers convey complexity with the simplest of means? Don't the greatest artists do that? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to point out what the film isn't but (to my mind) where it shines best or says something about the human condition in the clearest manner while maintaining (and even re-enforcing) the narrative - what distinguishes it from the thousands of other espionage flicks.

[Mr Sausage]

Well, don't the greatest cinematographers convey complexity with the simplest of means? Don't the greatest artists do that?

Sure. Except when they don't.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to point out what the isn't but (to my mind) where it shines best or says something about the human condition in the clearest manner while maintaining (and even re-enforcing) the narrative - what distinguishes it from the thousands of other espionage flicks.

Not entirely sure what you're getting at.

[ando]

(Sorry, left out the word film.) I'm simply attempting to get at the visual play that distinguishes Spy from other espionage thrillers of the period.

[matrixschmatrix]

Honestly, I've seen a fair number of espionage thrillers from the period, and pretty much everything distinguishes Spy from them- the realism, the utter cynicism about spying as an occupation, the depressing texture of the spy's life, the moral ambivalence between East and West- other films like it would come along later, but this is an extremely distinctive one, particularly in the height of the Bond boom.

[ando]

Agreed. My point is that, aside from the dialogue and individual performances, the manner in which the film unfolds (or proceeds) on a visual level is what sets it apart - even from contemporary spy thrillers. Visually, it conveys the aforementioned themes in ways that the dialogue, for example, cannot. When they're effective they'e fairly unforgettable. But what I think is effective someone else may regard as routine. Or just the opposite.

I still don't dig, for instance, the fade between the Pussycat Club and Nan's apartment, other than it being Leamus' chick transition. When Leamus leaves the club, followed by (Robert Hardy) just as the rather coldly received strip act concludes we get a strange, cubist like portrait of the dancer in the reflecting mirror which fades into Nan, seated, facing the opposite direction preparing tea:





Is this supposed to reflect Leamus' personal view of two types of women - or are the two images two sides of the same woman? Are these the two types of women most available to men living this lifestyle? Is Leamus'view of women (the chopped image) ultimately schizophrenic - or is he drawn to schizo women? The only other women in the film are the dominatrix comrade at the tribunal, the uptight head librarian and the matronly Italian at the grocery store - none of whom are available to Leamus. Transitions in this film (or any other) are hardly happenstance so what are we to make of this rather strange fade? If it's just Leamus looking for a woman why is it done this way?

[warren oates]

Having both reread the novel and rewatched the film in the last week, I'm struck by how faithful the adaptation is, "almost too faithful" Le Carre laments in the supplements before admitting that his perspective might be less than objective, because he's always trying to rewrite his old books. It's hard for me to think of another bestselling popular thriller that was transferred to the screen with such fidelity. Or one that, having been crafted so precisely, with such inherent dramatic and cinematic qualities fully present in the novel, deserved it. Maybe Silence of the Lambs?

Unlike some others above, I don't have a problem with the verbal excesses of the film. Frankly, that's one of the aspects that interests me the most about Le Carre's work in general and the way it translates to film and television. Every time I see one of his better adaptations, like this one or the BBC's Tinker, Tailor or the recent theatrical version of the same I feel like I'm witnessing some kind of incredible magic trick. Because I'm entertained in the most visceral and etymological sense (entertain, from French entretenir, based on Latin inter 'among' + tenere 'to hold'). And yet what I'm watching isn't super spies duking it out on top of landmarks but essentially just people walking in and out of rooms and talking almost nonstop. The most mundane things we all do every day.

What makes it all so dramatic? Part of it is the contrast between the ordinary everyday settings and the huge looming secrets and narrative stakes, of course. Which is something that screenwriters as different as Billy Ray and Vince Gilligan grasp intuitively, how a character leading a double life creates instant dramatic irony. And The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, like any good spy story, is full of such characters, with an almost exponential potential for complications among their competing agendas.

But I'd argue it's also very much about all that dialogue and the way it works, about the talk itself and the fact that those charged with keeping secrets can't seem ever to shut up. For me, at their essence, the best spy stories are about a sort of constant interrogation of just what it is the story is actually about. The characters and the audience have to work like counterintelligence agents to think through all of the possible motivations and machinations of the other players, to look behind the veil of what seems to what might be in the hope that they'll ultimately discern what truly is. And the characters, at least, do this largely by talking. And by elevating their talking -- especially exposition, the dialogue that normally gets pigeonholed as the least interesting sort -- to the level of action.

And in so doing they leverage an approach to cinema storytelling that cuts against the grain of most conventional wisdom about just what it is movies should and shouldn't do: 1) Show, don't tell; 2) Hide the exposition in the midst of thrilling action set pieces. 3) Keep dialogue short and to the point.

Off the top of my head, here are a few other films that work in similar ways: All The President's Men, Primer, Reservoir Dogs, House of Games, The Social Network, and even Inception.

And here's David Bordwell with some excellent blog entries in contrarian praise of talky movies and on how Inception treats its excessive exposition as action.

[ando]

For me, at their essence, the best spy stories are about a sort of constant interrogation of just what it is the story is actually about. The characters and the audience have to work like counterintelligence agents to think through all of the possible motivations and machinations of the other players, to look behind the veil of what seems to what might be in the hope that they'll ultimately discern what truly is.

Agreed. But I don't see why the visual element is necessarily relegated to a supplemental or supporting role in discerning whatever the reality purports to be (one can argue that the ambiguous nature of who fingered Nan at the conclusion of Spy, for instance, actually makes it more intriguing).

Frankly, I only agree with the first of your three-fold explanation of what the conventional wisdom is the requirements of cinema. Other than Show, don't tell rules can pretty much be thrown out of the window when attempting to create a narrative in any film genre that an audience can follow.

Thanks for the links. Here's an interesting title I found recently that covers precisely what we're discussing here. I just downloaded the ebook but there are pdfs of the text floating about the web.

[warren oates]

Well, that book might be interesting, but I've never heard of it, I won't steal it and I'm not about to pay the exorbitant list prices for even the electronic version. A cheaper and no less authoritative take on the same sort of issues is Frederick P. Hitz's The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage.

[ando]

Yeah, the price of the Wark book is ridiculous. Thanks for the Hitz link. Do you know Wesley Britton? His offering in his spy trilogy series is Onscreen and Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage.

[warren oates]

I don't know that book either. Frankly, I came to this little intellectual hobby of mine, the study of the history espionage (and spy fiction), in a roundabout fashion that had mostly to do with randomly catching the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor about a decade ago and feeling like it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen right around the time that I started reading David Wise's excellent nonfiction accounts of the two biggest moles in American history -- Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. I didn't really read much about spying before then. But I've now got at least a hundred volumes on the subject. And the Hitz book is a pretty solid place to start.

[ando]

Wark, in Spy Fiction, Spy Films makes an interesting final assessment of the film that I agree with in part:

It was of British intelligence, wholly devoid of morality, sending trusted agents and innocents to their deaths in protection of the supremely evil Mundt, supposedly to uphold the moral principles of God and country in The Cold War. The weight of that irony made Leamus choose death with Nan rather than living on with that awful awareness, leaving them both at the foot of the wall, victims of British democracy as much as East German Communism. It was Britsh spymasters, not just German Communisms', who were morally repugnant. Alec's choice of death with Nan became the supreme protest against moral expediency of the espionage world, the affirmation of integrity and love.

I understand the message in terms of its impression on the audience but to whom, specifically (within the narrative), are the fated couple protesting which would make any kind of appeal? Mundt? Control? In other words, what is the value of this affirmation of integrity and love in that reality?

It harkens back to what Matrix was saying about the film's supremacy in nhilistic gloom, which goes beyond the question of on whose orders Claire Bloom is shot, but questions the validy of Cold War secret intelligence altogether.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think it's an existential protest, or a protest to a God that Leamus doesn't believe in- he seems like someone who doesn't have the faith in humanity even to believe that any kind of protest could have the force to change anything, but he can choose no longer to participate.

[ando]

Absolutely. Though it is just Leamus'perspective. What about Nan? Does she even get to have one? I've tried to make sense of the one scene without Leamus involving Nan, the head librarian and Leamus' replacement, where Nan request a vacation leave to (ostensibly) join Leamus in Leipzig. Is the entire scene simply exposition or background for the main narrative involving Leamus directly or is Nan's perspective a vital element of the narrative? I bet it was an insertion they made at the last minute for continuity sake for she seems to have no real agency in the unfoldment of the Mundt reinstatement plan.

[ando]

Ok, I believe I've got it- and it's a great visual tip: Nan's a plant. Smiley has already made contact with her and Mundt has (probably) made some arrangement with the East German Communist branch for "world peace and cultural amity" with which Nan is associated. In any case, she's a plant for The Circus (British Intelligence) to lure Leamus and complete their designs. The business with the lead librarian watering the plant should have been an immediate tip but for me it was a case of an obvious clue hidden in plain sight:



I love how when Nan is describing the goals of her Communist group to the head librarian she walks out of the room, cuts on a faucet, re-renters the room and proceeds to water the rather limp looking weed. Not wanting to know the particulars of Nan's activities she nonetheless aids and abets the Circus' designs for Nans undoing. I said it's the one scene in which Leamus does not appear, which now makes complete sense, for had he been there he'd have probably discerned The Circus' plans much sooner.

[matrixschmatrix]

Wait, do you seriously think that? The whole tragedy of the movie is the way that a totally innocent person is destroyed, manipulated through her ideals and her affection. If she's the plant, it totally undercuts the whole ending.

[warren oates]

Yeah, I now await ando's conspiracy reading of Taxi Driver based on that one scene where Bickle's outside and Sport and Iris are alone together.

[ando]

The whole tragedy of the movie is the way that a totally innocent person is destroyed, manipulated through her ideals and her affection. If she's the plant, it totally undercuts the whole ending.

First, no, I think the film, if it has sympathy for any one character, it's Leamus, not Nan. Nan's ideals are first laughed at by Leamus and then (as I've described above) undercut by the head librarian in their scene together. I don't believe the film, at any time, is concerned for the plight of Nan. Just the opposite, in fact!

Further, it doesn't undercut the ending. The real surprise is the depths to which Leamus is being used by The Circus for their own continued existence and, indeed, dominance (as Wark points out above).

[matrixschmatrix]

The film has sympathy for Leamus, absolutely, but Leamus laughs at Nan's ideals because he's become an utterly cynical man- he has no ideals of any kind, and his laughter is specifically at Nan's belief that humanity has any real value. Nan is a character whose death is a tragedy, which is itself a step too many for Leamus, leading to his own death- yet another of the shattered man's connections had been made hollow and used against the person to whom he connected by espionage.

Seriously, saying that Nan is a plant is insane. It goes against the whole narrative, there's zero textual evidence for it, and means the ending is merely more spies dying, not a crowning, tragic murder of an innocent which finally pushes the cynical man over the edge. Obviously she's being used by Smiley and Mundt- that's why she's in East Germany, that's why Smiley visited her, that's why her apartment's lease was purchased, to make the East Germans think that Leamus is exactly what he is, a Western agent sent in ostensibly to discredit Mundt. Nan as a total naif used to further this plot makes perfect sense. Nan as an ultra deep cover agent, who is then killed off after a successful mission, does not.

[Mr Sausage]

If Nan is a plant her death makes no sense. There is no reason to kill her and not Leamus if she's explicitly working for Control, but reason for it if she's merely a civilian and therefore a potential liability.

Also, that's way too subtle for this movie, which is always explicit in its double-crosses, plots, manipulations, ect. This is not the kind of movie that lets a crucial point like Nan's true allegiances get explained only by some tiny bit of business. There is no reason to believe a movie this over-determined in terms of plot is hiding major plot details within riddles. Plus the movie gets its moral punch from Nan being innocent and idealistic (a parallel with Fiedler's idealism and the way he pays dearly for it).

It's a further ironic image. Nan's a plant in the way Leamus is a double agent: not really, but actually. It's not a plot point, it's a thematic one. Plus the movie gets its moral punch from Nan being innocent and idealistic (a parallel with Fiedler's idealism and the way he pays dearly for it).

[ando]

Both of you are making a simple fact entire too complicated. Now, what is a plant (in this context)?

informal a thing positioned secretly for discovery by another, esp in order to incriminate an innocent person

Nan is deliberately positioned to help Leamus incriminate Fiedler and reinstate Mundt in the ranks of the Communist secret intelligence. It's as simple as that. She doesn't know she a plant but that doesn't change the fact that she most certainly is one. Both Nan and the librarian, in reporting Nan's vacation plans in Leipzig to her boss (apparently a brigadier), unwittingly aid The Circus in making her the plant.

There is no reason to kill her and not Leamus if she's explicitly working for Control,

The Circus doesn't kill her, the Communists do.

Seriously, saying that Nan is a plant is insane. It goes against the whole narrative, there's zero textual evidence for it, and means the ending is merely more spies dying, not a crowning, tragic murder of an innocent which finally pushes the cynical man over the edge.

Please explain how Nan being a plant goes against the narrative. What is the narrative? Perhaps this is where we have the difference of perspective.

[Mr Sausage]

Ah. I thought you meant Nan was in on it. I always thought that she was either covertly maneuvered into the library job in order to aid the plot, or she was already there (after all, someone like her has to work somewhere) and they chose the library job for Leamus specifically because she was perfect for what they had in mind. It'd be awfully coincidental otherwise.

The Circus doesn't kill her, the Communists do.

I never claimed Circus did. See also here.

[warren oates]

...or she was already there (after all, someone like her has to work somewhere) and they chose the library job for Leamus specifically because she was perfect for what they had in mind.

You're right and this is made unequivocally clear in the novel.