Recommendations: Week of 4/3/23
Let me have men about me that are fat,/ Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights:/ Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/ He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
Shakespeare knew what possibilities the night could hold. His characters most like to cause trouble are the ones that can’t or won’t sleep. They’re restless malcontents; they’re the ones with lean and hungry looks, the ones who think too much. Helena knew, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that we needed to be taken out of our own company for while, and that sleep made sure we regularly would be. In Julius Caesar, the titular character knows he should be wary of Cassius because he looks like a man who doesn’t sleep soundly. The night is the time of conspiracy, violence, and easily believed phantasms. In spy novels (and their cinematic and/or television adaptations), we still hold this truth to be self-evident. But in these adaptations, our lean and hungry conspirators are the heroes, those who have forced themselves to stay awake while the power of the state becomes a tyrant. To sleep, under those circumstances, is to die.
The Night Agent (Netflix): There’s every reason to believe that Netflix and other cancel-happy streamers may find themselves regretting their rapid trigger finger soon, due to what seems like a rapidly approaching writers’ strike. That’s only one possible reason a thoroughly fine show like The Night Agent has already been renewed for a second season over at the ‘Flix. Other reasons could include a sudden yearning on the part of the public for square-jawed men with no clear evidence of emotion or bad wigs on Oscar-nominated actress Hong Chau. Begrudgingly, I’ll admit it’s probably because this largely inoffensive show did very decent streaming numbers. But look, we’re committed to being straight with you over here at Constructive Criticism, and although we (I) watched the whole series in three days, The Night Agent is generally kind of meh. It aspires to the audience glued to Jack Reacher/Ryan over at Amazon, but it doesn’t have the charm or morality of Jack Reacher or the John Krasinski of Jack Ryan. It follows a low-level FBI agent with a father-shaped chip on his shoulder who ends up distrusting the entire White House when he receives a mysterious call one evening from a girl running from assassins. It turns out that girl’s woes are linked to his own, and from there we’re off on an action-packed car chase through DC (probably Vancouver). It’s an easy and forgettable watch with moments of menace, flashes of fun, and buckets of boredom.
So why am I putting it on my weekly recommendations list? Because sometimes the mid-range examples of a zeitgeist are even more telling than the highs and lows. And although the two shows I’m recommending today are a few years apart, they’re both part of a strong trend: spy novels adapted into TV series that wrestle with presenting conspiracy narratives in a time of rather below average trust in authority. Could you do House of Cards after Pizzagate? After Trump at all? It’s not exactly that we’ve stopped trying to, but conspiracy theories have an odd flavor these days. It’s hard to watch The Night Agent’s characters chase after subway bombing plots and shadowy defense contractors when you know how dearly followers await those Q drops, which sound remarkably like outlandish script pitches. But these stories do continue to fascinate us, partly because we know they’re true and partly because we know they’re not.
The Night Manager (AMC): While my recommendation above is new, this is a 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same name. The Night Manager doesn’t share a ton of DNA with The Night Agent, though, as you may have guessed from my strangled intro metaphors, neither of our heroes is particularly well-rested. Manager is far more British than American in terms of its hero’s particular complexes (more Wilfred Owen than John Wayne) and its a Le Carré, which means the source material is so excellent that it’s next to impossible to produce a bland adaptation, as Agent kind of is. The Night Manager is about a British soldier named Jonathan Pine who is recruited by British secret service to spy on Richard Roper, a businessman who sells illegal arms to very bad people and is deeply in bed with the British government. Along the way he becomes infatuated with Roper’s girlfriend, seeing her as someone he must save to prove he’s done something worthwhile.
Both shows are, at their core, about tyranny. They are about learning you can’t trust your government because it’s been seduced by big money, and that sort of story isn’t going away any time soon. They’re also both about civilians (beautiful female civilians) who get caught up in the crossfire and need to be saved. The women are stand-ins, of course, because in the end the system is always going to be too big to be taken down. Undo one conspiracy, pick apart the threads of one branch of a branch of a bunch of bad actors, stop one big bad man and that’s all you’ve done, a small part and your level best. Save the girl too, and it does feel more worth it. There’s a melancholy at the heart of this genre, and a futility. In both Agent and Manager many people die before some of the bad guys are stopped, and you’re never going to really take the big ones down.
But still we beat on, boats against the current.