In the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a British agent who was working as a mole for the Soviets offers an explanation for why he became a traitor: “It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one,” he says of his defection. “The West has become so ugly.”
It’s a very telling line. Next year, we are putting on an Anti-Communist Film Festival. One of the films under consideration is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman. Oldman, who we are inviting to the festival, also portrayed Churchill and has described himself as a libertarian. He also blasted political correctness - then apologized for going too far.
In Tinker Tailor, Gary Oldman plays the British secret agent George Smiley. Smiley is brought out of his retirement and tasked with rooting out a Soviet mole in the secret service. When the guilty agent is caught, he delivers the line above. That is, he became a traitor due to artistic or aesthetic reasons, believing that the West had become too “ugly.”
This, of course, is nonsense. The West, especially America, is beautiful. Yet the mole’s explanation of his traitorous acts reveals a phenomenon of modern communism -- it has become as much a lifestyle choice as any kind of coherent political worldview. Celebrities and complete students quote Marx to look cool and call anything fascist that questions their personal hygiene, fashion, or lifestyle choices. Tinker Tailor is based on the John Le Carre novel that was originally published in 1974, when this mutation of communism from a pseudo-scientific system that seems mathematical in its predictive power to one about self-validation. Hot long communist Hasan Piker is more of a brand ambassador than a serious thinker.
In his groundbreaking 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch described this change brilliantly. The old left was against war and a bureaucratic culture that separated itself from the concerns of regular people. It stood for American workers first and defended the complementary differences between men and women. It was often religious and understood the two things that Lasch said summed up his philosophy: Limits and hope. It criticized the warmongering and bureaucratic coldness of mainstream liberalism. It was a precursor to today’s populism.
The New Left that arose in the 1960s and 70s was more about lifestyles and psychology than foreign policy, common culture, and economics. Lasch argued that the human personality itself had changed over the course of the later 20th century. Americans had transformed from strong and well-adjusted people to personalities that are weak and dependent on government, corporations, radical politics, sex, and bureaucracies for a sense of meaning. “The personal crisis…now represents a political issue in its own right,” Lasch wrote, “and a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish; why the fear of growing up and aging haunts our society; why personal relations have become so brittle and precarious; and why the ‘inner life’ no longer offers any refuge from the danger around us.” Been on a college campus lately? It’s a nut house.
In Tinker Tailor the movie, director Thomas Alfredson uses a palette of colors intended to symbolize the cold, muted and ambiguous world of Britain in the 1970s. As one review put it, Alfredson crafts “crisp, exacting images out of a perfectly tuned palette of sickly yellows, browns, and toned-down blues, while muting those elements (character, action) that traditionally distinguish the spy thriller. But a more accurate way of evaluating the film’s achievement would be to say that for Alfredson the moral is contained in the aesthetic, his visual scheme no mere eye candy, but perfectly expressive of both the very proper outward behaviors of the characters (the precision of the images) and the sickening moral rot that sat at the heart of the British Secret Intelligence Service during the Cold War era (the color choices).”
Whatever “moral rot” was in the British Secret Service, it was at least rot that was the result of actions of free people making free decisions. It was not comparable to the raw evil of communism, which suppressed every freedom and carried out mass murder. It’s no secret that author John Le Carre was not a huge fan of America. As critic Dan Harper once wrote, “the West didn't win the Cold War because of Bond, a cartoon version of espionage, but because of squalid little men like Smiley, functionaries performing their miniscule duties in poorly-lit offices with bad ventilation. If [Bond creator Ian] Fleming and Le Carré had anything in common, it was their distrust of - and distaste for - the Americans. Le Carré's anti-Americanism took center stage in his work when the Cold War ended and it wasn't necessary to be anti-communist anymore.”
This is false. The Cold War was won both by quiet, secret men like George Smiley but also by brave American and British spies who sometimes did perform acts that seemed out of a James Bond novel. They sacrificed everything not to look good for their hit on MSNBC, but because they loved freedom. I look forward to hearing Gary Oldman’s take when, and if, he comes to the festival.
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