The Great Debate

The new icon of Hollywood is not a celebrity or a movie franchise — it’s the CIA. In 2012, the year’s most award-winning and popular “quality” films  – Argo, Zero Dark Thirty  – as well as 2012′s best television show (Homeland) were all about The Agency, usually bathed in quite a positive light. Why have the upper reaches of the entertainment business started to love the CIA, after years of offering more troubling images on screen?

One answer is that it has been a decade since the invasion of Iraq, and it would seem that the Iraq War itself (Abu Ghraib, civilian deaths, trillions of dollars) has sullied the image of the U.S. military. It has apparently become so tainted that Hollywood believes it can no longer assume officers are gentlemen. Military pilots no longer serve audience desire for moral clarity, as in the age of Top Gun — today, the star performers of the Air Force are pilotless drones, for one thing. And generally there are fewer soldiers and veterans on screen than after other recent wars; no equivalent of Jon Voight in a wheelchair in the Vietnam film Coming Home or World War Two’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which starred an actual double-amputee veteran.

Instead, today’s films have all-knowing agents, who tap, bug and lie with impunity yet somehow always wind up heroes. In Argo, it’s CIA operative Tony Mendez, smuggling American embassy workers out of Iran after the revolution. In Zero Dark Thirty, it’s a CIA employee who successfully hunts down Osama. If we throw MI6 into the mix in Skyfall, it’s a more realistic James Bond saving the agency itself from a plausible threat.

Venerating the CIA and secret agencies in the movies makes for lively, sensational cinema and TV, and seems consistent with their enlarged role in our military policy, through the massive increase in drones. But this glorification of spies is problematic. For one thing, it’s out of step with public opinion. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center study, 53 percent of the public are “very concerned” that drone strikes may endanger civilian lives. And on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, 53 percent of the population considers the war a mistake, according to a Gallup poll.

The new Hollywood CIA love fest not only flattens that public dissent. These shows and films are also celebrating people whose actions are usually clandestine. That means Hollywood has now become another front that supports opacity and secrecy. It smiles at the moral ambiguity that is inherently part of any undercover work. Spies played by Ben Affleck, Jessica Chastain and Daniel Craig are presented as the only people we can turn to for national protection. And we mustn’t forget the only woman who can save the free world in the show Homeland, played by mad-eyed, cry-faced Claire Danes. (The excellent new FX show The Americans takes a different but related position: Noah Emmerich plays a counterintelligence agent  for the FBI who in the Cold War early ’80s has the decency to try to save the beautiful Russian mole he is sleeping with.) Celebrities thanked those in the service in their awards speeches this year, as if traders in secrets are great humanitarians as well. This reveals a troubling amnesia about all the things the CIA has gotten wrong.

It is not a national election year, but the “red state versus blue state” wars continue. Texas Governor Rick Perry’s recent foray into California, to lure away businesses and jobs, signals more than a rivalry between these two mega-states. The Texas-California competition represents the political, economic and cultural differences driving American politics today – and for the foreseeable future.

Texas and California are robust political and economic competitors. We don’t know which will be the template for the future. As California emerges from its economic and fiscal doldrums and some of Texas’ vulnerabilities become evident, it is now far from certain that Texas will emerge the victor.

California is a global hub for trade, tourism, culture and the manufacture of ideas and intellectual property. From high tech and biotech to entertainment, travel and logistics, the state’s brand transcends national boundaries. The Golden State tops the nation in agriculture. It also sets the pace on green energy development, which could lead to a dramatic increase in the state’s energy production.

Everyone in America knows that we live in times of gridlock. We despair of anything really getting done, as we bump from one budgetary crisis to another. Nothing seems to work, and our expectations have plummeted. But there is a place where, against the odds, people seem to accomplish exactly what they desire – a place where no obstacle is insuperable. That place is Hollywood.

Not Hollywood as a physical location but the Hollywood of the imagination. If you look at this year’s Oscar contenders for Best Picture, you will find that – as disparate as their subjects are – many of them share a thematic bond. These films are about efficacy. They are about the ability of people, and even institutions, to get things done – whether it is smuggling diplomats out of revolutionary Iran, or killing Osama bin Laden, or wreaking vengeance on a powerful plantation owner and slaveholder in the antebellum South, or toppling the French monarchy, or at least setting the process in motion.

Americans have become accustomed to inertia. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, pro-gun folks and anti-gun folks, pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-immigration and anti-immigration – everyone seems to be engaged in a standoff.