From the album ‘Suicide’ (1977)
Look, I’m a complete sucker for literature of the spy and espionage genre, particularly John le Carré’s works in relation to the Cold War.
This applies to on screen efforts too, be it films such as ‘Spy Game’, ‘Day of The Jackal’, ‘The Lives of Others’. Television series such as ‘Spooks’ also hold a similar appeal, or better yet ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, and ‘Smiley’s People’, both faithful adaptations of le Carré’s fantastic novels, which the BBC commissioned in the late seventies and early eighties. Both series are brilliant, so have a look on the net for them, but they do pose a problem: once you see Alec Guinness nail the role of George Smiley you’ll never be convinced by anybody else’s attempt to reprise it. Even Gary Oldman, who, as per usual, gave it his best in the film version of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ released three years ago, was left with absolutely no chance of transcending the standard.
Homeland’s first season, and the subsequent messes of season’s two and three, was similarly analogous of such circumstances. Like Alec Guinness’s Smiley, season one of Homeland hit the high water mark of the genre, and as such what was to come next stood little chance of maintaining it.
The first series of Homeland was so good because its narrative found sustenance by provoking and tormenting you into considering the burning psychological concepts of identity, loyalty and place as questions, and better yet it delivered few answers when the plot had promised to.
Most shows succeed when they stick to one overriding premise and or focus. In Homeland’s case it posed these questions through a single device: was the attrition Damien Lewis (as Brody) wore so well, conveying so much with saying so little, due to the unsettling and unexplained circumstances of his return, only to find he brought alienation and disquiet to his own family’s settled dynamic, the veracious consumption and proliferation of his fame after being anointed as a hero, and the personal cost it inflicts, the impending dread of his treachery and suicidal martyrdom, or all of the above?
Eventually we were provided the answer to the question of his guilt, and it was inevitable, but the unravelling was engrossing. Like Smiley eventually succeeding in rooting out the mole in ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ the outcome was never in doubt, but the process of how we got there and the why provides the intrigue. For Homeland to truly work we had to view Brody’s journey (or reintroduction if you prefer) with the implied knowledge of his guilt. What caused Brody to become a terrorist is what made him an interesting character. We thought of all the permutations, and even now, we’re still not sure as to what percentage each of the experiences Brody went through; pre capture, in captivity and after he was rescued, contributed to his desire to reaffirm his ideological recalibration, or if he even had one at all beyond survival.
The case can be made that Homeland should’ve been a one and done show. Once Brody’s guilt was exposed its foundations became shaken. The sub-plots that simultaneously embellished doubts about Brody, and held their own interest in this narrative context as peripheral concerns, had to become central plot devices, and as such were mundane mechanisms with which to build and maintain interest. Season two saw Brody’s desperation to survive become a convenient excuse to have him lazily and unconvincingly flip flop his allegiance on the schematic whims of others, each of them became increasingly preposterous, as he offered loyalty to whoever and whatever offered him a route to salvation. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) became Brody’s chief manipulator. Carrie, a workaholic, held hostage by various personal insecurities, particularly the incessant spectre of mental imbalance, obsessed over Brody’s guilt. Eventually this morphed into a far fetched complex, where by exposing Brody she could ultimately redeem him, by using him as a double agent, and validate their burgeoning romance (I won’t start, and the less you dwell on it the better), and in doing so salvage herself and the catastrophe their lives had become.
Certain sub-plots that were intriguing and while not ignored, were marginalised to make way in an effort to sustain the Carrie and Brody dynamic. The sage like Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), and his battle to maintain the old school ethos and methods of intelligence gathering, against a CIA increasingly in the thrall of appealing to its post 9/11 provincialisms, revelling in its own hubris of its superior technological apparatuses and self made wars and that are designed to never end, deserved more focus than it received.
In season two we were introduced to the grisly dark artistry of Dar Adal, who embodies a simplistic mainstream notion of a glamorously clandestine CIA ruthlessness which appeals to its detractors and sympathisers alike. Adal’s a real wise old geezer, replete with a magnificent condescending eyebrow. He’s someone who you desperately want to root against, but you can’t help admiring him for being so conniving. You marvel at his ability to manipulate his right hand man and protégé Peter Quinn and to influence Saul’s thinking into aligning with his vision of what constitutes ‘operational effectiveness’. Then there were those two tech geeks, potentially interesting characters both, relegated into existing solely as sporadic, and as such, misguided comedic interludes.
The ending to season one was much discussed, and derided as a cop out by some. At the time I couldn’t blame the writers and its showrunner for deciding to keep Brody alive. If you’re a new show, killing off your central character after one season isn’t usually synonymous with getting it renewed. In the short term oriented world of television, having to hedge your bets can often lead to creative compromises. If Homeland had been commissioned with the intent of it being a one off series Brody may have found a way to get the suicide vest to work again. However, and with the benefit of hindsight, each outcome would only work well with one eventuality. If Brody died, the show could’ve continued afresh, as it’s trying to do now, two seasons later. If he lived, it had to end there and then. In the aftermath, with Brody surviving, what would happen to Brody and Carrie and what would occur between them, or not, would’ve belonged firmly in the realm of the believable. Sadly, art that’s subject to the medium that is television is entirely beholden to cynicism. For most shows their ability to make money and continue to do so for as long as possible is usually their primary function.
Hey, I shouldn’t be too critical of Homeland becoming rudderless. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m heading; with this blog, with writing, with work (given what I do using the term ‘career’ seems fucking laughable), or even when I’m at the shops. At times the future, even the immediate future, which involves simple tasks or decisions such as taking the skin lotion off the shelf and putting it in the basket, can seem nebulous and completely unfathomable. Yet I have the intrinsic belief that in some way every thing I do is worthwhile.
And that, more than any other reason, is why Homeland is still around. Suckers like me keep watching, because, well, in my case I’m fan of the genre, but because it was once good, and so we reserve the right to believe it could be again, just as I keep writing in the hope that I’ll get better at it. This perseverance combined with the cynicism of the TV business, has, in a perverse way, granted Homeland the opportunity to reach rehabilitation through recalibration.
Which brings us to Homeland’s fourth season; with Brody now disposed of, and the main setting now moving to Pakistan, the show essentially can start over by using its residual attributes. The question is, will it?
The early signs vacillate between iffy and promising. The spectre of Brody clearly still dogs Carrie, whom the show now orbits. She feels incapable of raising his daughter or is simply too self absorbed to, and by exposing Brody it provided her the opportunity to love a man she could not, only for it to ultimately doom him. Early in season four, we see Carrie afforded the opportunity to reprise her Brody complex. She gives the order to bomb a compound where a high ranking terrorist is believed to be residing, based upon a non-vetted intelligence source providing intel to the CIA’s Islamabad station chief. Part of the collateral damage is the deaths of a young Pakistani medical student’s family, Aayan Ibrahim, who appropriately for the purposes of intrigue, is related to the terrorist who was targeted.
Aayan becomes a central player in the ensuing mess, as what follows is the CIA station chief’s public murder as recompense for the bombing, after his source hangs him out to dry with duff info and someone blows his cover. There are accusations of Pakistani government involvement in orchestrating his death; meanwhile Aayan, just like Brody, becomes an unwilling heroic public figure in the media’s glare, but in this instance as an avatar for resentment against callous forms of American interventionism.
Part of what made season two and three so weak, aside from the implausibility, was how predictable it all was. Four episodes into season four thankfully I have no clue what’s going on, who the CIA’s source is/was, or what motivations Aayan has, is he like Brody? Is he not what he seems? What is motivating Carrie? Is involving Aayan in the search for the CIA source, with the intention of helping him escape Pakistan, about atoning for Brody, or is Carrie cynically using him as a form of collateral to validate her judgment and therefore validate her ascending into a position of greater authority? This is a refreshing change for the show which originally relied on Brody’s implied guilt, and then the investment of the audience in the characters in the aftermath of its confirmation, to sit through the silly shenanigans of season two and three. Right now there are a number of permissible directions this season can go in, and that’s a healthier place than this show’s been in for a while.
At the start of season four Saul occupies a strange position, disillusioned with the CIA’s direction, he’s now defected to the private sector, an even more cynical entity whose existence relies entirely on conflict. Now desperate to get back into a position of power Saul reminds me of paradoxical dilemma Leamas grapples with throughout ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’. Saul considers the morass of futile outlooks that motivates the actions on both sides of the divide. He sees that neither a strict interventionist and isolationist stance works in fighting terrorism, ideology or ideologues. But like Leamas he doesn’t like the faith and detachment from nuance his industry now requires, yet Saul believes in the mission’s necessity, despite being cognisant of its inherent immorality and futility possessing a solution.
Homeland has been accused of being Islamophobic, and it is, intentionally, by assuming the culture of its subject. Saul’s unease towards a conviction form of intelligence that Carrie seems to now be assuming, reveals a central tenet of what it and many facets of Western culture are predicated upon; a myopic faith that action based on a system of values and beliefs, equally as atavistic as those they’re attempting to replace, is culturally transposable and desirable. It’s the kind of assumption that informs the drivel on those ghastly American-style twenty four hour news channels, ridden with hysterical opining doublespeak in a vain attempt to mask their pious xenophobia, it’s an attitude that invariably occupies a similar terrain to the rhetoric and absolutism of extremism it claims to fight.
While I’m optimistic, given the last two seasons I also retain a large dose of scepticism towards this show recovering. Most worryingly we have Quinn nominally assuming Carrie’s role to her Brody. Clearly drained from killing in the name of, Quinn’s trying to save Carrie from being fully assimilated into the agency’s doctrine. However, it was difficult not to roll your eyes when Quinn’s suspected motivation for doing this was that he ‘has feelings for her’. That such a device was needed to keep Quinn’s character relevant is a sad legacy of how shallow and predictable this show had become.
Despite these flaws I keep watching Homeland, difference is, while le Carré’s work is guaranteed to reveal something new with each re-approach, I’m left hoping that Homeland will intrigue the way it once used to, and given its constituent pieces, probably should do again.
From the album ‘Nite Flights’ (1978)
From the album ‘Thriller’ (1982)
Ten Of Hearts
When I saw the Ten of Hearts lying on the top step of my doorstep I should’ve been suspicious. The card was placed meticulously with the intent of perfect asymmetry. Live in the city, particularly the city, and you’ll see and become indifferent to all the kinds of litter there can be; from the generic and easily disposed kind, to the rarer oddities. But even I was struck by a solitary playing card; one of fifty-two, on its own, with no sign of any other nearby. As usual I was in a rush, so I didn’t dwell on it.
So the connection wasn’t made, until now, as I lay here; my extremities asphyxiated by a coldness that’s both disquieting and melodic, my head numbing with a deflating and shrinking sensation coming from the inside out, and my chest attempting to convulse out the sharp metallic intruder that was repetitively, but finally, plunged into causing it all.
You often imagine the end arriving at an age where pre-emptive thoughts of death’s inevitability provided a resigned acceptance. Provided lucidity was in play, at that moment I could think back to the version of myself that was best. Only now do I realise the cruel and pitiful folly of such an immediate notion, as the blood draining from my mouth into my eyes blinds me into focusing on how reliant I’d become on the gluttony of hedonism. I embraced a horde without charm or wit, gave a dying man his insanity and watched, with the sanguinity of impassiveness, the world slowly eschew the theory and evidence of its harrowing predilection for chaotic immorality. I needed to be a woman, a man, a woman again, all within minutes of each other, when in reality I was another carcinoma consciously inciting delivery of altruism’s decay, whose truth only the tyrants and despots of purest aspiration could use constructively. This was my chosen path, and I can have no complaints that it ends in this way.
Today’s trope is absentee parenting, or rather we’re focusing on the victims of it, who have willingly destroyed themselves, and are now seeking the clemency of pluralist absolution so they can continue to do so with a residual modicum of self assurance. One of our ghastliest writers, a diseased discipline of heat magazine red top journalese and journalism, albeit with a trenchant streak, Eddy – which he recently changed to two D’s, to represent his favourite cup size – was at it again. He and his cohort gang were now firmly ennobled by editorial changes imposed on me from above and informed by the surrounding atavistic zeitgeist. I now dreaded our editorial meetings, as they exchanged the kind of ideas and intellect that belonged in a Paul Dacre-esque wet dream from the early eighties. Barely had we sat down and Eddy had already seized the silence.
‘We need to find a way, I mean, shit, no, wot, yeah, thanks, no, ta, see ya. Sorry bout that, Yeah, right yeah, I was saying, gotta find a title that’ll encourage ‘em to see crap parents the same way as benefit claimants. Yeah?’
Katy, my new producer, my third in two years, slowly jotted down a note and nodded her head indifferently. I replied with the implied knowledge, that even a show like ours, needs to diversify,
‘Edd, this isn’t about benefits, scroungers, or whatever they’re called. And we’ve done too much of that recently.
Katy looked even more unenthused now, no doubt realising that’s something she should’ve said. Eddy, however, was bright eyed in his insistence,
‘Yeah, yeah, I gettit, gettit. But, people like watching them, dint they? Politicians, like that bald fella, keep cracking on about it and people listen, just give’em what they want’
‘How about “British parenting – all it’s cracked up to be?” piped up Corner Chris, so dubbed because that’s where he always sat.
‘Oh yeah, brings the drugs thing into it and all, dun it?’ ‘Dem junkies are box office.’ There was some muted laughter lead by ringleader Ed, or, sorry, Edd, that tailed off into a nervous silence as they recognised mine. But I couldn’t think of a topic title that didn’t belong to the safe and mundane, the two things a show like ours couldn’t afford to be. We’re a show that appeals to a growing enclave within bourgeois culture, populated by snide simpletons of intellectual abdication, or those who allow themselves to become inescapably domiciled. The sort of people who have never been encouraged to, or wanted to construct an independent thought of their own. We are the comforting means of quarantine; by placing droll proles on screen we enable these people to believe they’re less ignorant than my contestants because of their material affluence. Combine this with the reverential apathy of their superiors, like me, and it gives people like Eddy free reign to decide what they should believe.
‘How about – “Bad parenting put me on benefits”?’
‘Well they are on benefits’ Kat confirmed, rather eagerly, after a moment’s pause she continued, ‘Perhaps we should change ‘me’ to ‘them’, okay? She addressed Eddy rather than me, the cunt. Everyone agreed before Katy’s eyes last sought my approval. And so it would be granted by a sulking smile, that would be interpreted as a wince by a more adroit and personable mind. Chalk up another one for Eddy. He first came to my attention when he provided the tagline “Fat, and we’re fucking fine with that”. By then the energy to vehemently protest against such a pointless vulgarity had long since passed me by, as I realised the cultural malaise was a wave I alone couldn’t rebuff. ‘Fucking’ was removed, or rather the initial compromise of ‘*’ was suggested by Eddy to replace all the characters after the ‘f’. Eventually sanity, namely of the pre-watershed variety supported by my then editor Gary, who has moved on to better things, prevailed and the word was removed long before it sent to and then okayed from above. This was four years previous, when, after an autumn ratings dip, we once again turned to our old faithful – demeaning fat people. Or to be more specific, parents, who were American fat, making their children even fatter than them and Americans. Such an absence of self respect, ambition and hope never fails to elicit a gawking vindictiveness. I can be vulgar, but descending to a level where Katie Hopkins, and the like, dwells, just to vindicate their existence, made even me recoil, or it used to. I insisted they, and I use ‘they’, as they are of a different species, be treated without such obvious disdain, condescending pity, yes, fine, they deserved it. Later, on my drive home, I saw them gorging their faces in the McDonalds half a mile away from the studio, only two hours after we’d finished shooting. The multiple forms and layers of hypocrisy attached to this scenario sank me, and it was the day any vestige of constructivism in tabloid media, or my place in fomenting it within it, was finally crushed.
There was now a crushing sound, caused by a commotion, frantic and imbalanced, the best I could tell, around me. There was shouting, screaming, none of it from me; paralysed by the pain and the fear of it increasing. Someone was talking to me, loudly, or they were very close, possibly both, but I couldn’t decipher exactly what. It was replaced by a heavy thud married with unified shouts, and then there was nothing.
There was nothing to be said as I entered the cafeteria. I had the acting chops to fool the fools, but not most of my own staff. It was coming, and I had to act like I had no clue it was my birthday, never mind that a surprise party was in the offing. Hideous bloody things they are. Rosey, my runner turned assistant, the change in title was superficial, but the change of pay not, relented when put under the pressurised questioning I subject my on air subjects to. She reminds me of myself twenty years ago, wilfully idealistic enough to relinquish it, with that beautifully unblemished skin she sensibly hasn’t defaced with sun-bedding or those garishly hideous tattoos that are now in vogue. She was taut in all the right places without any effort required to maintain it as so, the cow. Rosey had also yet to be fully immersed and immured by the vagaries and realities of the industry. She had started on that path, observing, remembering and therefore becoming immune to plenty, but she hadn’t been fully corrupted by having to make decisions that produce ghastly outcomes. In declaring her admiration for me, after only three glasses of wine, she revealed herself as a feminist. That’ll need to change to meet her ambitions, as mine did.
The cake was impressively sculpted and included filling made using the finest dark chocolate, so producing genuine surprise came effortlessly as I expected something cheap and garish that would ultimately reside with the seagulls, pigeons and rats. Privately I had hoped for a cheap cake, getting under ten stone for the first time in five years, and sticking it to the Twiteratti trolls in the process, I was in little mood to eat. Nobody celebrates turning forty-five, especially when they have to blow out forty-five candles, but everyone else loves to see you do it, especially when they’re younger. It’s a fleeting opportunity to make their relative youth count for something, a delusional moment where they can achieve parity with someone like me. Some of today’s guests were milling around the cafeteria. They always stood out, even when they sit in their group, willingly adhering to provincialism, of the tired, distressed, pallid and gray. If they mingle the disparity becomes striking, they make even the less glamorous members of my staff, with their meagre and derisory forms of largess, look colourfully enriched. After I’d finally blown out the candles Nina declared that she had procured a large kitchen knife for the purpose of cutting the cake, it was the only kind on the premises that would ‘get the job done’, apparently. After half-heartedly searching for it, she declared it has gone missing, or more likely she misplaced it, so we had to make do with a normal table knife, and the cake’s structure suffered upon segmentation.
It’s the strangest thing, but I turn on the television every weekday morning and watch my own show. Nobody else knows and I always say, when asked, that I haven’t watched an episode in years. In this media age maintaining secrets, however minor, that belong to you, and you alone, is an achievement. But it’s not. Exposure and adulation initially bread vainglory, and confidence, and a contrarian shameful reluctance to admit to flaws of any kind. So much of what constitutes you retreats within, after a while this separation solidifies, and eventually normalcy asserts its recalibration over this change. You happily become two different people. But this compartmentalisation is over now. Tomorrow, there will be no show, and so I won’t be able to watch it, not that it would air, at least not on television anyway. It had happened only one time before, ten years ago, when one of my guests, without prompting, slashed her own throat in front of a studio audience of over three hundred. We were on hiatus for five months, and the production company and network combined to hand out millions in compensation to those in attendance who were ‘traumatised’ and even more to her family to make it go away for good. This was when my popularity was at its height. I was seen an asset to be protected and so I survived, even if, in some quarters, I was heavily criticised by the right-on clique, who are just as intolerant as those they relentlessly persecute, for my unsympathetic, badgering line of questioning. Business truly is the art of cynicism, when a product is distressed or in difficulty it gets renamed or reformatted, but many others connected with the show perished as a result of the episode. It was described as a real life Howard Beal moment, and reality being just as strange as fiction, upon return, my ratings spiked. However, it didn’t last.
As clichés go today’s first guest was only slightly repulsive – an unemployed twenty-five year old man ‘only’ ‘currently’ on methadone, with three children, soon to be four, by three different, squalid women, whose weathering belied their years. My guest had somehow procured a fewer number of jobs than children fathered since he dropped out of university ‘to find himself’. He blamed his insufferably selfish middle class parents for not providing the environment he needed to embrace a contented direction within the generic middle class stability he was genetically predisposed for. I blasted him for his reductive sense of entitlement that has instilled laziness, and in response he started grunting, as a sullen fourteen year old would after any kind of rejection. The segment ended with me deriding him for his own failings, and blasting his parents for being glib and soft, with the tacit approval of the baying crowd. Who said social mobility was becoming more difficult? Albeit this kind was of an unfathomable trajectory. However, I shall not be accused of lacking awareness of how things truly are; you cannot have winners without losers. Not everyone can have their own show, and when I lose mine, and I surely will, there’ll be no way back. Just ask Esther Rantzen.
The second was a nineteen year old man called Tony McVern, whose mother, a manic depressive, had committed suicide and whose father had died of alcoholism six years ago, a result, he says, of the nature of his mother’s suicide and how it occurred. He refused to go into detail over the phone, the various interviews or the pre-show briefing, too painful for him apparently. Now he was struggling, claiming he was left emotionally and physically destitute, crippled through the prism with which he now viewed the world’s repulsiveness – my more erudite summation – and how it had brought mental anguish to his parents, suffering that he, as a legacy, had now assumed. Your typical sob story really. Our researchers found little on him, according to them, he didn’t seem to exist until three years ago, and therefore some were convinced he was a hoax. If so it would make for an engrossingly grisly spectacle on set, the more reprehensible they were the better. Still, let’s be fair and consider Tony’s decline into the realm of call-centres and a perpetual litany of dead ended zero-hour contracts as asymptomatic of the political doublespeak uttered by politicians, especially when they harp on about the difficulties and realities many young people face today, the kind of people they, and I, have no intention of helping.
Tony walked on stage with a precariously gaunt gait that only belongs to the malnourished and stared at me with pessimistic intent as he sat. It was a glare that I’d only attempt to interpret if he was more attractive and his demeanour held some level of intellectual capability. He had a mediocre bone structure, exacerbated by the elongated oval latitude of his head, eyes that were too small, sunken, blackened, and so close together, that he verged on being disconcerting to look at.
The cameras rolled and I did my segment intro; the usual trite overview to dress up the tawdry narrative set to unfold, and then I turned to Tony. After some gentle buttering up, he started to open up, his button voodoo doll eyes saturating incrementally just as water engulfs the tap in a sink. He then stood up, suddenly and calmly producing a Ten of Hearts from his front jean pocket. He held it out with a stiffened arm aimed in my direction, the effort of his action so demonstrable that eventually his hand began to rattle with fear and rage. I visibly waved off the security, until they retreated, too enamoured by this developing opportunity to resurrect myself and my show through YouTube. It was my second mistake of the day, and I wouldn’t make a third. I became transfixed by the playing card and he remained silent for ten seconds or so while I studied it. It was bespoke, with a jagged lightning-esque strike running through each heart almost severing it in half. Eventually his locked jaw cracked open and his voice, high pitched, comically so, akin to that of a spoiled cat perpetually fed from the table now being offered dried catfood, offered its explanation; hearts, because his was broken; ten of them, for every year that his had been broken since. Then it fell into place. He had changed his surname, so we, and most importantly I, wouldn’t know, too arrogant to assume my culpabilities could haunt or hurt me.
He produced the kitchen knife, from what appeared to be the small of his back. He was no less than three feet away. With his card hand he grabbed me by the shoulder, still holding it, and pulled me towards him, with a strength belying his meagre frame, into the knife, already primed in position. He retracted it from my gut, and punched me with it again, this time further up, and once again, still higher. He made sure I fell backwards, and then he aligned perfectly the Ten of Hearts on my now saturated stomach.
© Niall Cullen (2014)
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