The Smiley Factor

The Smiley Factor Author(s): Mark Fisher Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 65, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 37-42 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2011.65.2.37 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

talking point THE SMILEY FACTOR MARK FISHER IS DISAPPOINTED BY TOMAS ALFREDSON’S TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY What is the allure of George Smiley? Why does Smiley beguile even left-wing viewers who, on the face of it, might be expected to see him as at one point in John le Carré’s 1974 novel he describes himself: “the very archetype of a flabby Western liberal”? The enigma of Smiley’s appeal is one of many specters that haunts Tomas Alfredson’s movie adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The ghost that most insistently refuses to be exorcised is the 1979 BBC TV version, rightly remembered as one of the greatest ever British television series. Re-adapting a novel after so accomplished a version is risky, especially when you have a mere two hours to play with, as opposed to the series’ more unhurried five. Pace—and pacing, as in moving around restively while waiting—were central to the coiling tension of the TV series, which caught the crab-like convolutions and slowly interlocking rhythms of le Carré’s narrative exceptionally well. The limitations of television production actually benefited the sense of expansiveness. Sets and action were minimal; the drama was often about faces, and about Alec Guinness’s face in particular, which could suggest a lifetime of regret with the slightest wince. Guinness’s performance was a masterclass in concision and nuance—not words one would always associate with Gary Oldman, cast (emphatically against type) as Smiley in the new Tinker Tailor. When a novel creates as rich a mythworld as le Carré’s does, no single adaptation will ever completely exhaust it. There is always the possibility of uncovering hitherto underexplored angles and for those of us who are fans of the novel, a strong new version would have had the benefit of liberating the book (and Smiley) from the Guinness portrayal—a prospect that might explain some of le Carré’s enthusiasm for the film. Le Carré has said he felt that Guinness took Smiley from him, making him unable to write the character anymore. When it was announced that this was Alfredson’s next directing project after the success of Let the Right One In, hopes for something special were justifiably high. His brilliant reworking of vampire fiction had a sense of melancholy, Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2, pps 37–42, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2011.65.2.37 violent lives lived in secret that could have carried over most effectively to the closed-world intrigues of British spying. It is thus all the more disappointing that this new Tinker Tailor fails to compellingly reimagine the story, and central to its failure is the film’s inability to make Smiley alluring. In the novel le Carré reckoned with the sensational exposures that had both traumatized and titillated British society in the 1960s when Soviet double agents Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby were revealed to be operating right at the heart of the intelligence establishment. The book begins when Smiley is called out of retirement to search for a deep-cover mole—it was in fact le Carré who popularized this term—in the Secret Intelligence Service (otherwise known as MI6). Tinker Tailor follows Smiley’s circuitous pursuit and exposure of the traitor, who is ultimately revealed to be Smiley’s friend and rival Bill Haydon—one of many men to have affairs with Smiley’s semi-estranged wife, Ann. The narrative is suffused with what Paul Gilroy has called “postcolonial melancholia” (Postcolonial Melancholia, Columbia University Press, 2006). Smiley, Haydon, and their contemporaries—notably Jim Prideaux, the former head of the “scalphunters” section, shot in the bungled operation that ultimately leads to the mole being uncovered, and Connie Sachs, the head of intelligence, dismissed when she comes uncomfortably close to the truth—have watched all the expectations born of imperial privilege slowly disappearing. “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone, all taken away,” Sachs laments (Pan Books, 1979, 102). Postcolonial melancholia is fed more by hostility toward the U.S. than it is by fear of the Soviets—Haydon and Smiley’s boss, the irascible Control, are united in their loathing of Americans. When Control is maneuvered out of his position by the ambitious (and very pro-U.S.) Percy Alleline, this seems to consolidate the sense of irreversible decline which hangs over the novel. England’s glory lies in the past; the future is American. In the novel and its sequels, it is clear that Smiley’s victory is temporary; his world is on the brink of disappearing. Smiley brings to mind English archetypes both ancient and modern. What is the perpetually cuckolded Smiley, returning to save his ailing kingdom, if not a Cold War King FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 37

1979 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. © 1979 BBC. DVD: 2 Entertain Video (U.K.). Arthur? Yet this is Arthur done in the style of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, whose famous self-characterization as “an attendant lord” applies all too acutely to le Carré’s character as well: “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, 1969, 16). While in some respects a pathologically self-blinding figure, Smiley shares some of Prufrock’s self-consciousness; when, in a scene that is powerfully played out in both the BBC and the film version, Smiley recalls his one face-to-face encounter with his counterpart, the Soviet spy chief Karla, he calls himself a “fool.” Crucially, however, he adds that he would rather be his kind of fool than Karla’s. When Smiley recounts the meeting with Karla to his younger protégé Peter Guillam, he reproaches himself for having talked too much on that memorable occasion in an Indian jail cell. Karla wins the encounter by never speaking, by becoming the blank screen that Smiley cannot on this occasion become—which makes it all the easier for Smiley to fall into the trap of projecting his own anxieties and preoccupations onto the impassive Karla. In the novel, Smiley affects to disdain the psychoanalytic language of “projection” but, tellingly, he cannot resist using this language to describe himself; appropriately, for in the normal run of things Smiley’s art consists in cultivating a particular kind of silence—not the mere absence of chatter, but the authoritative, probing silence of the psychoanalyst. The face can’t give anything away, yet at the same time it has to invite confidence. Those who don’t want to talk must be drawn 38 into confiding. And isn’t that a large part of Smiley’s appeal to those of us from a more adolescent, more compulsively loquacious time: his grownup capacity to engender respect, and to quietly solicit our need for his approval? Speaking after a London critics’ screening of Tinker Tailor in September, Oldman said that, by contrast with the Guinness version, no one would want to hug his Smiley. Yet the suggestion that we would want to hug Guinness’s Smiley is absurd. Surely what we find ourselves craving from Smiley is a word, a gesture, the merest hint of approbation. But it is a mistake to see the avuncular seductions of Guinness’s performance as if they were in opposition to the ruthlessness which Oldman claims to draw out in his rendition of Smiley, for Smiley’s merciless, unblinking hunting down of his prey depends upon this very capacity to draw people out. Oldman’s reading of Smiley’s blankness is far less sophisticated than Guinness’s. Le Carré’s Smiley is famously corpulent; Oldman’s is angular, stiff, dyspeptic. We can’t imagine ever wanting to confide in him. Oldman’s Smiley is simply an inexpressive mask: forbidding, impassive, unyielding. It is as if Oldman is giving us his shallow reading of his grandparents’ generation: aloof, distanced, bottled-up. They kept it all inside; they didn’t know how to have a good time. For Oldman, Smiley’s restraint plays as repression and a certain malicious self-satisfaction—his silence is a simple lack of demonstrativeness, or a merely inverted demonstrativeness. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today, le Carré himself identified Oldman’s performance of repression as one of the highlights of this new version. “You couldn’t really imagine Alec [Guinness] having a sex life,” he said. “You couldn’t imagine a kiss on the screen with Alec, not one that you wi nter 2011 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Photos: Jack English. © 2010 StudioCanal SA. believed in. Whereas Oldman has quite obviously a male sexuality that he represses, like all his other feelings, in this story. Oldman is a Smiley waiting patiently to explode. I think the air of frustration, of solitude that he is able to convey is something that really does take me back to a novel I wrote 37 years ago” (www.radiotimes.com/news/2011-09-14/le-carr-oldmanbrings-sexuality-to-george-smiley). Sadly, this remark suggests less a new way of seeing Smiley than a certain coarsening of understanding brought about, no doubt, by the dissemination of a therapeutic wisdom which insists that the truth of a character is to be found in their (narrowly defined) sexuality. To say that Smiley is waiting patiently to explode is a very curious take on a character defined rather by a lack of heat. When Oldman shouts at Haydon “what are you then, Bill?” at the climax of the film, this is an abandonment of emotional decorum quite out of keeping with Smiley’s character, for whom the English ruling-class habit of transposing aggression into the chill of superficially polite discourse comes as second nature. Anger is one of the emotions that the Smiley of the novel feels at the moment of Haydon’s exposure, yet it is not the dominant one: Smiley “saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose vision and vanities all were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water. Thus Smiley felt not only disgust; but, despite all that the moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting” (297). Thus, the note of triumphalism with which the film ends—Smiley gloriously restored to his place of honor in MI6—strikes another false note. The Smiley in Alfredson’s film is a figure who is far less queer than the Smiley of the novel or the television series. Homosexual desire is widespread in Tinker Tailor—most notably in Prideaux’s betrayed love for the flamboyantly polysexual Haydon—but there is no suggestion that Smiley shared these passions. The Smiley of novel and series is queer in the more radical sense that a “normal” sexuality cannot be assigned to him. Smiley’s isn’t a fluid, indeterminate sexuality like, say, that of Patricia Highsmith’s creation, Tom Ripley. His perversity is renunciation itself. At the preview, Oldman referred approvingly to le Carré’s comments on Guinness’s lack of sexuality; but he also characterized Smiley as masochistic (repeatedly subjecting himself to adulterous humiliations) and sadistic (the way he pursues his prey goes far beyond professional duty). Yet the idea that Smiley is sadomasochistic quite clearly contradicts the idea that he is repressed. For sadomasochism entails enjoyment, not repression. Far from being repressed, it is clear that Smiley is driven—driven by something which will not allow him to ever recline into happy retirement any more than he could settle into the pleasures of conjugal life, were they available to him. From his earliest appearances in le Carré’s fiction—in the novels Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality—Smiley is on the edge of things. In most of the novels which feature Smiley, he rarely appears as officially a member of MI6. He is called out of retirement, or pretending to be retired; and when, after Tinker Tailor, he is not only restored to the organization but made chief, it is in a temporary caretaker capacity. One of the paradoxes of Smiley’s character is that he seems to stand for the solidity—and stolidity—ascribed FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 39

to a certain model of Englishness, yet he is himself an outsider, an interloper, a voyeur. This is the spy’s vocation, and le Carré repeatedly insists on it, nowhere more passionately than in the bitter outburst of the agent Alec Leamas at the end of The Spy who Came in from the Cold, so memorably performed by Richard Burton in the 1965 film adaptation. “What do you think spies are, moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not, they’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me,” Burton’s Leamas tells his lover, Liz, after it has been revealed that they were pawns in a complex plot hatched by Control and Smiley. It is the beyond-good-and-evil agent, the one who acts without performing complex moral calculations, the one cannot belong to the “normal” world, who allows ordinary folk to sleep easily. Yet duty is only the pretext; there is also the matter of the deep libidinal lure of this no-man’s-land for outsiders like Leamas and Smiley. Like writers, they listen and observe; like actors, they play parts. But, for spies, there are no limits to these roles; one cannot simply step out of them and return to the warm, because everything—including inner life itself, all its wounds and private shames—starts to feel like cover, a series of props. There is a revelatory passage towards the end of the second Smiley novel, first published in 1962, A Murder of Quality. At the end of novel—a strange whodunit thriller—Smiley confronts the murderer, but, as in the later confrontation with Karla, he ends up talking about himself: “And there are some of us—aren’t there?—who are nothing, who are so labile that we astound ourselves; we’re the chameleons. I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast of it ... The people like that, they can’t feel anything inside them: no pleasure or pain, no love or hate ... They have to feel that cold water. Without it, they’re nothing. The world sees them as showmen, fantasists, liars, as sensualists perhaps, not for what they are: the living dead” (Coronet, 1994, 174). There is a clear implication in this slide from first person (“some of us”) to third person (“people like that”): the Cold Warrior Smiley is himself one of the “living dead.” In psychoanalytic terms, Smiley is less a “sadomasochist” than an obsessional neurotic. (Lacan in fact argues that the question posed by the obsessional is “am I alive or am I dead?”) At the end of Smiley’s People, when Smiley has defeated Karla and has the possibility of winning Ann back, Smiley is very far from being elated. There is little sense of this in Oldman’s Smiley: his “sadomasochism” is too crude to approximate the baroque mechanisms of self-deceptions and self-torturings which govern Smiley’s psyche. Yet another false note is struck in Alfredson’s film when Smiley sees Ann being embraced 40 by Haydon at the MI6 Christmas party; he throws himself against the wall in a spasm of agony. In other respects, the party scene adds something which wasn’t there in the BBC version, a sense of the camaraderie within the department, but it is hard to imagine Smiley engaging in so public and so spontaneous display of emotion. More troublingly, to suggest that Smiley would straightforwardly feel pain when confronted with Ann’s infidelities is to betray the very idea that he is masochistic. When confronted about Ann in the novel and TV adaptation, Smiley’s preferred pose is one of weary resignation; but this conceals the secret satisfaction that he experiences in Ann playing her assigned role as impossible object. But where the masochist would organise his enjoyment around this impossible object, for Smiley, the function of Ann’s unattainability is to keep her at a safe distance. His enjoyment isn’t organized around Ann—or sexuality—at all, and when she is safely unattainable she cannot trouble him. Unlike in the TV series, we never see the faces of either Ann or Karla, Smiley’s other Other, in the film. This rightly suggests that both figures are at least partially absent for Smiley, filled in with his fantasies. But what’s missing is an account of the way that Smiley fills in these fantasy screens, and any sense of discrepancy between the fantasy figures that Smiley projects and their real-life counterparts. In the film, Smiley cannot remember what Karla looked like; in the novel he gives a detailed description of his adversary. Defined externally by his struggle against Karla, Smiley’s internal struggle consists of his necessarily thwarted attempts to refuse any identification with Karla. Smiley’s attempts to distance himself from the “fanatic” Karla, his attempts to position himself outside politics itself, are the exemplary gestures of a very English ideology, which appeals to a pre- or post-political notion of “common humanity.” Yet, ironically, what Smiley and Karla have in common is their inhumanity, their exile from any sort of “normal” world of human passions. When they meet in Delhi, Smiley is baffled, frustrated but also fascinated by Karla’s refusal of the appeal, unable to fathom a commitment to an abstract ideology, especially when—in Smiley’s view—it has self-evidently failed. “The irony in le Carré’s fiction,” writes Tony Barley, “is that a sound basis for commitment is always either sought or mourned for its absence, and yet when genuine commitment appears (invariably in communism) it is treated as incomprehensible. Communism becomes fanaticism, not a strength but a weakness” (Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré, Open University Press, 1986, 95). Barley rightly argues that Smiley cannot be read as a cipher for liberal ideology because the incoherencies and impasses of his own position are never resolved. Behind the manifest content of Smiley’s entreaties wi nter 2011 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

to Karla—come and join us, give up your dead generalities, enjoy the particularities of the lived world—the latent message is that all Britain has to offer is disillusionment, the impossibility of belief. (Smiley tells Guillam that “fanaticism” will be the undoing of Karla: in fact, when Karla is defeat in Smiley’s People, it is because of his failure to be sufficiently “fanatical”.) Very little of this comes out in Alfredson’s depoliticized film, in which Smiley is simply a wronged hero who ultimately attains justice, Haydon is simply a traitor, and communism is simply an exotic period reference. The nickname for MI6, “The Circus,” in fact openly acknowledges the aberrant enjoyment available to those who have crossed into this fictional Cold World. The multivalent origin of the nickname—in addition to hinting at the way the spies play their deadly game in a spirit of mordant, laconic cynicism, it is also a near homonym of “service,” and a play on the location in the novel of MI6’s offices: Cambridge Circus, central London—tells you a great deal about the world in which Smiley operates. Much of the power of the television version derived from the way it threw us directly into this world. Guinness’s Smiley incarnated a model of BBC paternalism: he guided us through his world, but he had high expectations of us. Very little was explained—we had to pick up le Carré’s invented nomenclature (scalphunters, lamplighters) on the fly. The work slang invoked the exoticism of a rarefied form of labor, while also suggesting the routinization of espionage for those involved in it on a daily basis. It all contributed to the feeling that the Circus was a lived-in world. One of the major problems with Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor, by contrast, is that its world doesn’t feel lived-in at all. Gratifyingly, the film doesn’t talk down to audiences; just as in the TV series, we are required to orientate ourselves in the Circus’s intrigues. But the combination of Oldman’s inexpressiveness and the compression brought about by having to tell so complicated a story in such a short time, results in something that is strangely uninvolving. The film is almost entirely lacking in tension or paranoia; in the TV series, the scene where Guillam steals a file from the Circus is almost unbearably tense. In the film, the same scene plays out in a curiously distanced way. Then there is the question of period, and the film’s striving to create a sense of London in the 1970s. I was too often reminded of the BBC television drama Life on Mars, which evoked the decade with a series of clumsily placed period signifiers. As with Life on Mars, much of Alfedson’s film looks like a 1970s theme park. Rather than discreetly constituting a period background, branded goods (Trebor mints, Ajax household cleaner) are distractingly pushed to the foreground of our attention, details that we are invited to approvingly note. But where the details matter, this new Ricki Tarr Above: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. © 1979 BBC. DVD: 2 Entertain Video (U.K.). Below: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Photo: Jack English. © 2010 StudioCanal SA. version is lacking. Eras produce certain voices, certain faces. What’s missing in Alfredson’s version is something like the grain of the 1970s. Too often, the actors seem like twentyfirst-century moisturized metrosexuals in 1970s drag—and bad drag at that. Presented with photographs of people from the 1970s, the clichéd but true observation is that people looked so much older then. But the preposterously freshfaced likes of Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Guillam) and Tom Hardy (in the role of rogue agent Ricki Tarr) aren’t nearly weathered enough to convince as 1970s secret agents. The skin, the hair are too good. The faces are without the sallow, harrowed, harried look that Michael Jayston and Hywel Bennett brought to the roles in the 1970s production; their voices unable to convey any sense of the bitter and brutalizing effects of the spy’s life. John Hurt’s Control, FI L M Q UARTERLY This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 41

Bill Haydon Above: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. © 1979 BBC. DVD: 2 Entertain Video (U.K.). Below: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Photo: Jack English. © 2010 StudioCanal SA. at least, has the right weatherbeaten complexion and cynical–playful cadences. Accents are a severe problem in the film. Oldman plays Smiley as generically posh, but at the same time he sounds like no one you’ve ever heard; at points there’s an oddly Scottish lilt to his accent. The accent of Toby Jones’s Percy Alleline, meanwhile—played as Scottish in keeping with the novel—keeps drifting southward. Kathy Burke is hopelessly miscast as Connie Sachs: she sounds like a schoolgirl playing a posh woman in the school play. The problem here isn’t just one of authenticity; it’s that the wayward accents once again undermine the sense of a lived-in world. There is too much conspicuous effort going into this 1970s simulation. Throughout, you can practically hear Gary Oldman straining to hold back the Estuary English. 42 In the BBC version, the Circus was an unprepossessing space—functional, dreary corridors leading into cramped offices. In Alfredson’s version, Control’s office looks more like something from a nightclub than what you would expect to see in MI6. One wants to escape the 1970s version, but Alfredson doesn’t give us nearly enough to do that. There is much that is different, but nothing that is strong enough to displace the television version in the memory. The casting of Colin Firth as Haydon, however, at least allows us to see the character in a different way. The face of Ian Richardson— who would go onto play the Tory grandee and Machiavel in the BBC television series House of Cards—provided a gray-eminence image of British power in the 1970s and 80s. I don’t know who it was who said that Colin Firth looks like the midway point between the current British prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg, but the observation is very astute. The face of the British Establishment no longer has the hawk-like puckishness of Richardson; it has the rumpled, casual youthfulness of Firth. One of the major problems with Alfredson’s film is that it assumes the ruling values of the neoliberal world governed by youth and consumerism (isn’t this what “American” codes for in the Smiley novels?). Richard Sennett has argued that the chronic short-termism of neoliberal culture has resulted in a “corrosion of character” (The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, W. W. Norton, 1999): a destruction of permanence, loyalty, and the capacity to plan. Isn’t Smiley’s allure tied up with the possibilities of character itself? In the 1970s, Smiley showed up all the inadequacies, squalid compromises, and subterranean brutalities of social democracy. Then, Smiley’s doubts and his failings prompted us to imagine a better world even as we struggled to resist Smiley’s blankly and perversely comforting avuncularity; now, when that better world seems if anything further away, it takes all our effort to resist the lure of nostalgia for the social-democratic world of which Smiley was both the conscience and the dirty secret. MARK FISHER is the author of Capitalist Realism? Is There No Alternative (Zero Books, 2010). ABSTRACT A review of the Tomas Alfredson film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, adapted from John le Carré’s novel and starring Gary Oldman as the British spymaster. The film is compared with the 1979 BBC TV adaptation starring Alec Guinness and the character of Smiley probed. KEYWORDS Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson, John le Carré, Cold War, Alec Guinness CREDITS Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Director: Tomas Alfredson. Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Robyn Slovo. Writers: Bridget O’Connor, Peter Straughan (from the novel by John le Carré). Cinematographer: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Editor: Dino Jonsäter. Music: Alberto Iglesias. © 2010 StudioCanal SA. U.S. distributor: Focus Features. wi nter 2011 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:50:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms