cambridge spies

i take it that what it's partly about is that clever, stylish, feeling people can tremendously delude themselves that — bcz the dullards all round them don't "get it" — their tiny, self-affirming grouplet must be in the right

there is never enough sex on television.

in other words, it puts you at moral war with yrself for a while = good drama

i am watching it with my "theory of if" hat on, i suppose

maybe i shall post what i believe this is later — but now i am watching a repeat of "the thin blue line"

well, it is: writing-wise, it's a meeeellion miles from the alan bennett of "a question of attribution" (where the queen unmasks sly art-historian blunt) and "an englishman abroad" (where coral browne means lonely exile bachelor burgess)

but this is one of things that's good about it: becasue what it means is that the glamour of i. 20s oxbridge and ii. spies has gone totally see-through, is tawdry and forlorn and past-it and just unrecapturable

bennett's plays are about masks and anti-conventional principles and loss: they're immensely entertaining and clever and watchable and of coure funny — prunella scales as HMQ was a performance high-point

BUT what they're coy about — what bennett can't in fact decide about — is what is was like to be inside the spy heads: his blunt and his burgess are both glamorous unknowables agin the fashions or the facts of the world (ask yrself this: what's bennett's opinion of blunt's opinions about art? — it's exactly the point where that play goes totally slippery, bcz on one hand he's arguing that caring about poussin AT ALL makes him a better person, not maybe than the secret policeman or the queen, but certainly than anyone involved in the hue-and-cry to come) (which we the viewers know abt, though it's in the future for blunt in the play)

anyway in cambridge spies, we know everything: the spies are unmasked, as friends and as moscow's tools, from the start => in fact this is what we mainly see

and what we get is a bucketful of charmless disillusion: they are jeunesse d'orée trapped in lost teenage fashion, the inner lives posturing tormented self-absorption (except burgess when he's being out and outrageous — easily the only likeable aspect any of them display, except maybe mclean's american wife, who joined him in exile but later ran off with philby!!)

the appeal of philby in this series is nil: he looks like hugh grant w/o the jolliness, he's all hidden inner principle, and all he does is fuck up his friend's or family's lives

this is because "secret morality", like "secret intelligence", is a non-starter: not just an oxymoron, but an impossibility => bennett's generation (which is also le carré's, more or less) still believe in wisdom as a potentially elite formation, in art knowledge as something which travels out from the better types to the rest

eg bennett — outsider by birth, accent etc —obsessively worries at the paradoxes of this, and is very acute about them: but he belongs in a generation which is more disgusted by vulgarity — his allergy to the tabloids — than (let's say) betrayal

this series here takes the idea of cambridge buddies (polished to vapid gloss in the brideshead dealio) and the idea of the secret services, and explodes them from inside: as underpopulated, shabby, ultra-lonely, fundamentally stupid worlds, unable to speak except in cliches, unable to unfold except in cliches, their secrecy the motor of their stupidity (to put it in pop terms, everyone, whichever side they're on here, is like a teenage fan trapped forever inside their very first fandom, unable to grow away from it and respond to changing world)

the series, presumably suffering considerable budget constraint, allows 50s london and 50s ppl to be indistinguishable from 30s london and 30s ppl => as realism this is rubbish, and poor also as get-it-on-the-screen TV convention goes, where even if the action is dull we can enjoy looking at some brilliant 1946 teapot which we'd never see elsewhere => however as a tracking of the inner lives of those involved, i think it's quite acute: spies are stuck, stuck in adolescence especially, they're not bonds and they'not smileys and they're not ____________

what i'm getting at, i think, is that the meagreness of this production (made at a time when popular history is a channel 5 documentary series about THE MOST EVIL KINGS AND QUEENS IN HISTORY) gets closer to a truth about these figures and their world, the world of spies and security and secret "intelligence": certainly journalists are way too credulous about how much such matters matter (chapman pincher, a poisonous nincompoop of the first order, leads the pack here): but in resisting the journalism, old-school writers bull up the shadowy figures in other ways, struggling to project the interestingness which journalism naturally misses

i liked this bleak, sketchy, basically bad series bcz i think in its lowered expectations it got to the heart of a locked-off lameness which only burgess broke with: the last ep had one fantastic scene, so pure it was more a tableaux than any kind of drama

philby and wife is suppering with james jesus angleton and wife, in washington: philby is head of brit intelligence there, angelton his opposite number, angelton totally suspects maclean, but is not yet believed (the americans are impatient with the brits but still a little in awe of them)

burgess is living in philby's house: a total liability (a drunk, flamboyantly queer, openly marxist and anti-american) => he enters the supper scene with blood running down his face and loudly complains that cottaging rules USA are v.difft (when someone uses the urinal stall right next to his and starts up a conversation about modern theatre, it's because they're friendly and want to talk abt modern theatre!) (ie not have sex with burgess)

"what happened exactly?" asks angleton's wife, aghast

burgess grins, stands next to her, starts to take out his dick...

at which point, angleton, who may have suspicions but is in other regards a fatuous pedant and tiresome prig, grabs his wife's arm and storms out: no wonder no one ever believed his suspicions (he ended up as head of us intelligence, a paranoid obsessive mentalist...)

contra le carre, none of this story has the slightest bearing on political history: the current fuss abt "bad intelligence", did the cia/mi6/pentagon screw up, or was it politicians, is totally par for the course — secrecy fucks up knowledge totally, everything about how knowledge works is counter to how secrecy works

"A certain lady had entered Britain from Portugal, where she had been known to consort with a number of Germans, including German intelligence officers. Search of her person and effects yeilded a small diary kept mostly in the form of cryptic abbreviations. The interrogator took her through the diary, entry by entry, but she proved to be exceptionally quick witted, stoutly denying with considerable plausablity, that any of the entries referred to German acquaintances. Bloody but unbowed, her tormentor tried one last desperate throw. "May I draw your attention, Mrs ----, to your entry of such-and-such a date? It says 'spent all day sitting on my fanny.' Now, after a pregnant pause, "Who was Fanny? In what way was she yours? And why were you sitting on her?" Under the impact of this dreadful inanity, the lady broke down and confessed all."

The last time I was in Poughkeepsie I bought a bagel and some Gatorade and had a wicked hangover.

"No, I picked my nose in Brooklyn." --line from Mad's French Connection parody

The 'issues' are what made it more interesting for me. But I didn't see enough, and don't even know enough about the 'issues', to say much more.

There is a general point around here somewhere, though: that 'bad' programmes and films have any amount of 'good' 'content' going on. That's probably as true of Die Hard II as of this. (I tried to say something similar on a film critics thread: Moore on Titanic.)

To that extent, Mark S and I agree, but perhaps we're really talking about different things. I am talking about something like 'the reality effect' - transfigured as 'the content effect'.