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 Wednesday
COUGH COUGH
As a good ex-working class ex-socialist anarchist elitist, I absolutely adored the re-run of TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY [just finished on BBC4].
You know how people sigh 'Ah, they dont make 'em like that any more!'? Well, for once, here, the cliche has a basis in real fact and detail. In this case, the SMOKING. Boy, there was a lot of smoking! There was a scene in the final episode last night, when all the shocked members of the Circus are sat around a briefing table, and they are all smoking. (Special mention for Terrence Rigby's Roy Bland, who literally smoked for England.) But this was not just random smoking, or smoking for the sake of smoking. (You know, stylish neo noir type smoking where you just know the actor had a smoking double, or rinsed out their mouth with Perrier between puffs.) This smoking was concerted, purposive, revelatory. Each cloud of smoke was a psychological portrait in miniature. Here a knobbly pipe, there an American import brand or an unfiltered Czech number ... but maybe best of all, Smiley's own occasional dandified wave of a slim white ciggy in the air around his halo-like silver hair. The only person who (I think) didn't smoke was the old 'Control', and that was because he was aready dying - lung cancer, most probably, by the look of him. The cloud hanging over the Cold War wasnt nuclear, it was unfiltered tobacco; makes you wonder if maybe the Berlin Wall didnt collapse due to secondary smoke damage...
(Did old school shrinks used to smoke when they saw their analysands? Freud and Lacan both were big cigar men. Or rather, Freud's were big; Lacan smoked those little knobbly bent tar-black Italian jobbies, like an imperious Mafioso. I won't belabour the parallels between spying and shrinkage - a la Roeg's Bad Timing - but patience, and listening, and the patient uncovering of motive... well...)
TINKER's plot even hinged, at one crucial point, on the brand of cigarettes smoked by the Russian ringmaster 'Karla', and the engraved lighter lent to him by George Smiley. I wonder if old school spies actually used to get training courses in how to smoke and drink? Smoking and drinking - or rather offering cigarettes and sharing drinks, getting drunk and sharing secrets - were part of the Game. (A bit like old style journalism, too - and there was a brief but vivid and telling scene in Tinker set in the old Fleet Street of fuzzy 3 o clock memory.)
Smoking is a way of measuring out time spent waiting; plus, it maybe half wraps you in desultory street corner anonymity; booze is a way to forget what it is you are waiing for, and half suspect will never turn up. (Or at least that's the conventional wisdom - booze as purposeful forgetting. I actually think it's a way to remember, badly, or to enjoy - differently, painfully - the trauma of memory, but that's another topic.) When Jim Prideaux, unembarrassed, started to glug vodka from the neck of the bottle (!), you knew that (if he wasn't deliberately putting on a show, giving a performance: Agent Going Going Gone To Seed, harmless old fool, lost in penitent tears and Smirnoff oblivion) he was as un-healed INSIDE as he was in the scarred flesh: that some wound persisted within and would inevitably have its high noon say.
There were some great cameo performances here, too, anchored in different styles of drinking, different modes of smoking. Truly, lost arts. And, truly, it gives the lie to the PC myth that such details are mere excisable irrelevances, mere historical 'detail' that can be clipped out with no loss to the Real Drama: cigarettes and alcohol here were not just social dressing, like kipper ties or dirty raincoats, they were variegated markers of hubris, melancholy, spoiled dreams.
Waiting, and listening.
Waiting, and listening, and remembering.
Waiting, and listening, and remembering - more or less baldly ad hoc, or only the tiniest bit better than the Other Side's other chap. (Waiting for the doppleganger Man.) Waiting, and listening, and drinking, and trying to manoeuvre other people into your version of a future, which is never really any kind of future proper, because futures are entirely unpredictable (which is also why they are hated by conspiracy nuts.), whereas your's is more like future memory in waiting you have tailored to fit whoever youre currently talking to.
A future as drearily, comfortingly, caustically inevitable as the next cigarette.
You can sleep with your best friends wife, you can betray him up to torture and soiled shaking ignnominy in some gulag oubliette, you can sell your country out for a lie you told yourself one hungover morning 40 years ago ... but only a real shit would refuse a chap a last or consoling cigarette. That is the gesture that truly unites, across the gulf of "ideology".
(One of the most chillingly memorable scenes in Tinker is where Karla actually refuses this complicity: he takes George's cigs and lighter, to smoke later, alone, but refuses to do so with or in front of George: I refuse your proffered reflection. It was like a circuit breaker, a flag going up, a refusal of convention, as with that inevitable scene following 5 nights of torture when the Master offers the Slave not just a light, but the light of reason in whispered parenthesis: "This is so silly, because, when it comes down to it, we are alike, you and I..." And perhaps this "alikeness" is the true object of Service/Literary nostalgia, now that the Other chap is no longer merely Left or Right, Commie or Capitalist, but right off the mirrored board... : the new enemy isnt a reflection via negativa, but a True Believer, a bloody apostate from the hinged and monochrome game of disappointment, deferral, the next drink, the clink of ice cubes, the creak of mattress springs, the abyssal swirl of cigarette smoke up to the ancient ceiling....
Can't talk to these new chaps, dont you know. Nothing to discuss. No breathing room. (No smoking room.) They've already tried everything we have to offer, and found it wanting. Other side is offering Paradise, now! Thats game over. We've only ever been able to offer a better version of Purgatory: waiting. Waiting, and smoking, and ...
The last episode of TINKER focussed in bleak, limping anti-crescendo all the previous episodes' suspended, clammy, spectral movement and counterpoint. Betrayal, you couldnt help but think, was the human God that came through in the breach, in the absence of any ideological God that worked. Betrayal didnt let anyone down. Everyone got their own special lick of betrayal, at the end. (Even if, as with Control, it was your own body that betrayed you.) The episode ended in a double echo - Prideaux and the old friend who betrayed him; and Smiley and the spectral Anne. (I dont know if it was deliberate, but there seemed to be an echo set up between the wily feminine nomens of "Anne" and "Karla", made concrete by - what else? - the cigarette lighter, which turns out to have terrific sub-textual resonance. Another easily missed detail: the traitor, "Gerald the Mole", is double in another sense: he sleeps, guiltlessly, with both boys and girls.)
Betrayal is something that these characters both understand, inherently, as brual fact, but cannot process, completely, as emotional truth. I think this is probably the third time I've seen this Le Carre adaptation - and like some of the best popular art, it has had a different flavour at each different point in my life. It ages with you. Each (re)view reveals more about you, as much as it. (I can actually remember vividly the last time I saw the last episode. I was drinking whisky, alone, on New Years Eve. There was a telephone call. I ... but that's another story; more Greene than Le Carre, as it happens...)
I suspect that the rhapsodic unveiling of Anne, post climactic coda, literally right at the end, outdoors, away from London - away from the smoke of the Smoke - is meant to signal a return to 'normality', to Life lived without fear, to womanly warm blood and Anne's "truer" reading of men and men's silly games of betrayal and duplicity and sneak. But last night I suddenly thought: she's an idiot. She doesnt get any of it any clearer or better at all. Especially Smiley (her ex husband), who she quite possibly mis reads entirely...
Maybe there's a lesson there - although whether it applies, outside the confines of a certain public school and Oxbridge educated man of a certain generation, a now dead or dying breed, gone like smoke ...
... BUT: there might be a whole subtext developed here on different modes of education, on how the Russians were taught to 'interpret' texts, and what texts, and by whom, and ditto the English. Formalists vs Leavisites, say. The weakness of the English, ultimately being NOT - as the silly feather headed Anne thinks - that they are "puzzled by Life", that they are joyless tacticians or technicians, interested only in the echo of the trace of the secret motive, as dry and concentrated as a double martini (barely even stirred, never mind shaken), unable to jump in to or embrace Life, all those cliches... but actually very nearly the opposite.
The flaw in the English 'Circus', is that they continue to read everyone by their own light, which is, in fact, all too fatally human. They can't go over to any dry, scientific formalism or structuralism or Marxism; they can't even believe that the other side really believes in all that nonsense.
Surely we're all human in the end, old boy ... And therefore they can only conceive of compromised human motives, never truly ideological ones. Humanism is the cigarette everyone ultimately shares - that is the hope that is, hopelessly, clung on to. Down to the last phlegmy breath.
You can see that in the tears starting to form in Jim Prideaux's eyes in his final scene: returned to 'normal' life and job, but still haunted, still wracked. The flaw is not, as the cliche goes, that all these all too proper chaps can only live life at one or two removes - no. Rather, the all too English "flaw" is that there is this persistent, stubborn, ineradicable haunting belief, somewhere in the back of the mind or the depths of the heart, in, as Greene put it, the Human Factor. They refuse to give in entirely to ideology - the unhealthy transgression being that they continue to read the Other Side by this measure too. They would prefer human weakness to ideological strength - a strange sort of nostalgia, but at least it is identifiably human. At least you can sit down and have a few night cap drinks with it, and know that it will share its last cigarette with you ...
+ + + +
Somehow, I doubt there will come a time, 20 years down the line, when I will be sitting watching a repeat of SPOOKS with tears running down my cheeks. That show's running jumping Clinique-faced "agents" wouldnt know what to do with a cigarette. They'd be frightened they might get sued by some secreatary for secondary smoke inhalation. They are avatars of Zizeks low tar, decaffeinated, fat free new world: agents without ideology. No smoke in your "I", no ideological mirror stage.
The well tailored tinkers of Le Carre's 'Circus' appeared to have no 'home life' whatsoever. Smiley's London flat was the nearest we got to any such thing, and that was haunted by the absence of the fragrant Anne, now elsewhere. (Indeed, the repetition across episodes, in different tones of voice and insinuendo, of the word "Anne", turned it into something like a code word for "elsewhere" or what was or might have been.)
It was, in its own way, a remarkably UN-sentimental piece of television, undeviating, monotone, but depthlessly rich. (At times it felt something like a Noel Coward script, being played by a Pinter cast; or, maybe, vice versa.)
The old Game of spying was all about memory; in the new world, nothing ever disappears, so you will never be able to forget anything long enough to have the pleasure of trying to foggily remember it, later on. Like the programme SPOOKS itself - everything is much "better", more professional, higher tech, seamless, well paced, well spun and advertised, higher production values, probaly more accesible and less (cough cough) "elitist"; fitter, clearer, cleaner faced and cleaner lunged, but ... rather facile and emptily flash. A world of stylists and spin masters, who wouldnt know a pithy Classical reference if it knocked over their bottle of Armani scent. (Theyd just GOOGLE the Classical reference - and get the fact of it, but not the pith. A bit like the Middle East, really.)
And aaah but now, the cruellest paradox of this throwaway world, is that nothing is throwaway: with hi tech surveillance and the ineradicable trace work of emails, life has become one long permanent record.
Worse still - there's nowhere left to smoke.
posted by Ian 9/06/2006 07:00:00 AM
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THE PILL BOX 
