Chaotic times call for superheroes over spies
Where now there are superheroes, once there were secret agents.
In the '60s, secret agents were the kings (and, occasionally, queens) of popular culture, reigning over both big screen and small. There was no more fantastic a four than, say, Sean Connery's James Bond, Robert Vaughn's Napoleon Solo ("The Man From U.N.C.L.E."), Diana Rigg's Emma Peel ("The Avengers"), and Michael Caine's Harry Palmer ("The Ipcress File" and subsequent films). Rock stars may have been the, well, rock stars for young people back then. But secret agents were the rock stars for all people: hip, glamorous, up to the minute.
How times have changed. Superheroes aren't so much a summer-movie genre as a summer-movie industry. We've already had "Iron Man" and "The Incredible Hulk." Next month brings "The Dark Knight," featuring Batman, and "Hellboy II." There's even a superhero who doesn't come from a comic book, "Hancock," which opens on Wednesday. The only movie secret agent this summer is a joke, literally: Steve Carell's Maxwell Smart, in "Get Smart."
The funny thing is, Bond and most of his brethren are actually little different from comic book characters (007's Aston-Martin is simply a Batmobile suitable for valet parking). Beneath the veneer of shaken-not-stirred sophistication, Ian Fleming's hero is every bit as cartoony as any DC or Marvel character - if not more so. In any comparison of Fleming and Marvel guru Stan Lee, the smart money's on Lee as regards intellectual acuity and psychological depth. For better or worse, the culture was as yet unwilling four decades ago to acknowledge the authority of the comic book.
During the secret agents' heyday, there was a Batman series during prime time. Significantly, it was on ABC, the lowest-rated (and perpetually most desperate) of the networks. Instead of the brooding, Wagnerian figure presented in Tim Burton's 1989 film and its many spawn, the Caped Crusader got played for laughs - very broad laughs - right down to superimposing words like "kapow" and "bam" over the screen. Even as Susan Sontag was reflecting in Partisan Review on the meaning of camp, millions of Americans were seeing it in action ("pow"!) in prime time.
The ubiquity of each cultural type reflects its cultural times. The secret agent was the Cold War protagonist par excellence, a complex moral agent in the blunt geopolitical struggle between capitalism and communism. Superheroes, with their all-powerful abilities, are able to leap complexities with a single bound - an increasingly welcome talent in an age of terrorism where enemies are at once everywhere and nowhere.
Maxwell Smart faced KAOS on TV. As we face chaos in the real world, the appeal of the superhero using his all-powerfulness to embody good and stave off evil extends far beyond the box office. Yet the very anxiety such an age breeds affects even the superhero. Witness the Hulk's rage, Batman's self-doubt, Hancock's boorishness.
The secret agent has never entirely gone away. Bond, the father of them all, very much remains with us. His next outing, "Quantum of Solace," is scheduled for November release. Tom Cruise had his three "Mission: Impossible" remakes. "Alias" ran for five seasons on ABC. NBC's "Chuck" is a poor nerd's "Get Smart." And the "Austin Powers" movies did their jokiest to embalm the secret-agent genre once and for all. (What they succeeded in embalming, we can now see, was Mike Myers's career.)
So secret agents are still out there, and not just as reruns or remakes. But they're the exception rather than the rule. The most potent onscreen spy of recent vintage, Matt Damon's Jason Bourne, underscores the shift. The three "Bourne" pictures aren't actually spy movies; they're paranoid thrillers, a very different entertainment animal.
The '60s were awash in secret agentry. "Dr. No," the first Bond film, kicked off a craze that would include the Matt Helm series, featuring Dean Martin; the "Our Man Flint" films, with James Coburn; the Palmer series; and such one-offs as "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" and "A Dandy in Aspic."
On television there were both British imports ("The Avengers," "Secret Agent") and such homegrown shows as "I Spy," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," and "The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.," as well as "Mission: Impossible" and "Get Smart" (parody always being the surest sign of cultural surfeit).
Onscreen spying didn't begin with Bond, of course. Such archetypal figures as Mata Hari (far more impressive in fiction than real life) and John Buchan's Richard Hannay preceded him. And the greatest secret agent movie of them all may be Fritz Lang's 1928 silent, "Spies."
Bond had one great advantage over his predecessors, though, and it was an advantage all the films and series that made up the '60s secret agent craze fed off: the Cold War. The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union created a black-and-white moral calculus that made the secret agent into a kind of updated cowboy: the lone figure defending civilization against evil. It's a straight line from westerns (which were pretty much everywhere in the '50s) to secret agent movies and television shows. Simply think of secret agents as cowboys who conceal their weapons and substitute sports cars for horses. One man's tin star was another's license to kill, and the term "red menace" could have multiple meanings.
The two genres actually merged in the CBS series "The Wild, Wild West" (whose dwarfish villain, Dr. Miguelito Loveless, inspired Mini Me of the second and third "Austin Powers" movies).
The very simplicity of the genre's framework allowed for a wondrous complexity within it. Anyone who's tried to keep track of the goings-on in one of John le Carre's Smiley novels can appreciate this. Over time, though, the us-against-them dynamic of the secret agent narrative began to evolve into the unsettling us-against-us universe of the paranoid thriller. It's not the KGB or SMERSH that's out to get Jason Bourne, it's the CIA.
Nothing better encapsulates the journey secret agentry has taken from stalwart then to anxious now than the difference between the original "Manchurian Candidate," from 1962, and the 2004 remake. In the former, it's the Communists who've brainwashed the hero. In the latter, it's a
The darkness of the paranoid thriller helped usher in the superhero craze. There had been superhero movies before, most notably the several iterations of "Superman" starring Christopher Reeve. But it was the Burton "Batman" that began the superhero juggernaut that keeps rolling along.
Batman reminds us, though, that just as the secret agent is cousin to the cowboy, so the superhero in many ways is merely a supersized secret agent: his identity concealed; his gadgetry displayed (or even made part of his body, as with Iron Man); his enemies just as grotesque, and often thickly accented, as any Soviet agent. Eventually, there are sure to be superhero secret agents. Call them cape-and-dagger movies. ("Marvel: Impossible"? Sub-Mariner in "The Wild, Wild Wet"?) Mike Myers may already be at his word processor, at work on "Austin Superpowers."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
