As the theme of global terrorism continued to dominate crime stories in Hollywood, eventually the Other was called to duty by the early 2010s, including those Americans who differ from the white male norm by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and/or sexual orientation . Many of these new globocops were often perceived outside US borders as Americans first, their “difference” minimized despite its persistence back home. Such an apparent embrace of diversity also helps to justify America’s claims to world stewardship and reaffirm its commitment to what Roosevelt once dubbed a new American race . This chapter investigates how far the ethic or gendered Other can go in embodying rogue agents in the same environment that nurtured last chapter’s Jack Bauer or Eldon Perry .
Vin Diesel: The Multicultural Globocop
Vin Diesel had been singled out in the early 2000s as part of “a nascent constellation of stars whose melting-pot backgrounds and features seem to [be] resonating deeply with young moviegoers of all colors. Hollywood has seen the future of the action hero , and it’s multiethnic.”1 Diesel, who insists on cloaking his racial-ethnic makeup, has enough “color” to be perceived as a racial Other, while being white enough to make him acceptable as an American action hero . Latino marketing specialist Santiago Pozo proclaimed in 2002, “In the past, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were the face of America … Today it’s The Rock or Vin Diesel.”2 Diesel describes himself as “multicultural ,”3 and his insistence on ambiguity (even calling his production company One Race), has not stopped others from obsessing over his identity, some suggesting he is black as well as Italian, perhaps even Latino.4 Diesel’s refusal to define himself also irritates many minority communities that wish to claim him as one of their own.5 Kobena Mercer warns that attempts to transform former racial and ethnic identities into some politically amorphous blend does little to disturb existing hierarchies of identity that continue to produce “othering .”6 Like Garcia , Diesel has also portrayed nearly as many Italian American characters as those deemed “brown,” enabling whiteness to compromise without being wholly supplanted. Before making XXX , Diesel had played an Italian American soldier in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and another Italian American character, Dominic Toretto , in the mega-hit, The Fast and the Furious (2001).7
Diesel took his turn as the American-outlaw-turned-crimefighting-hero, Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), in the hit 2002 film, XXX , which expanded his star power and earning him (and his character) inclusion in this book.8 The film tells the story of Cage ’s entrée into government service, having first earned international fame as an action sports outlaw , and now deemed the ideal candidate to stop a Prague-based terrorist group plotting a global attack. G-man Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson ) first “recruits” Cage by blackmailing him with a prison sentence for stealing a car belonging to a right-wing politician.9 After Cage passes a series of tests to verify his intelligence and moral character, he successfully infiltrates a band of former Russian soldiers by posing as an American importer of stolen cars (they traffic in). The terrorists call themselves “Anarchy 99,” referring to the year they deserted their army’s losing battle in Chechnya. Using Prague as a base, they intend to launch a fierce biological weapon to set off a global war, counting on each nation-state to blame each other and bring about mutually assured destruction. The group has tricked a group of Russian scientists into developing the weapon—a binary nerve agent called “Silent Night” for the ability to kill millions of people silently and bloodlessly. Gibbons , having already lost three agents, believes Cage ’s inherent lawlessness is better suited to best such an unpredictable foe. As Gibbons puts it, deploy one of America’s “best and … brightest … from the bottom of the barrel.”10
Since Cage is not a trained agent, with shooting experience limited to video games, he must master a cache of lethal weapons, and his ability and audacity to shoot a perfect “splatter” dart at a Czech cop is what convinces Anarchy 99’s leader that he can be trusted. But Cage also demonstrates a degree of restraint to avoid needlessly killing, prompting one reviewer to note that although Cage is presented as a “brute,” he also has “no urge to kill” until after he appropriately shifts “from nihilist to patriot.”11 Like rogues before him, if the end goals are deemed noble, any means—legal or otherwise—are justified . Once Cage witnesses the biological weapon used on the very scientists who perfected it, he is properly horrified and becomes a killing machine, transforming from a social outcast to the nation’s (and the world’s) defender.
In promotional interviews, XXX director Rob Cohen , who also directed Diesel in The Fast and the Furious, explained how Cage represented America’s favorite type of reluctant hero —“not a patriot” at first but convinced in time of his country’s need for him. When first approached by Gibbons for such a dangerous mission, Cage initially balks, noting, “Look at me. Do I look like a fan of law enforcement?”12 But Gibbons presses on, explaining to Cage (whom he describes to others as “dangerous … and uncivilized”) that “this is your chance to pay back your Uncle Sam for all the wonderful freedoms you enjoy.”13 Having a black G-man be the one to remind Cage of their unified mission—and how it is the cost to maintain “freedom”—helps perpetuate the myth of a united (or post-racial) America, one no longer obsessed with race when faced with global terror and away from home. Given the film’s timing, within a year of the events of September 11, Cohen also asserted, “The spy adventure movie is aligning correctly with the zeitgeist of our time,” with Cohen predicting that such “intelligence agents” and heroes like Cage “will become more important” in the future.14
Female Spies as Globocops
White female crimefighters , too, were soon called to duty, especially as spies and agents to help combat global terrorism. Like Diesel , their gendered difference becomes somewhat minimized when dispatched across US borders , where they can be clearly marked as Americans with the chance to perform the nation and represent its security interests abroad. Although such roles discussed below indicate a measure of forward progress and an expansion of the scope and depth of female representations , their effectiveness is again contained by several familiar limitations, including the need to be physically attractive and to remain overly concerned with issues related to the private versus the public sphere.
Television, in particular, was generally first to embrace the appeal of “secret agent women,” offering Alias (2001–2006), the hit television show on ABC that made Jennifer Garner a star for her portrayal of Sydney Bristow ,15 a graduate student recruited by SD-6—a criminal operation that defected from the CIA. After the group kills her fiancé, she seeks revenge by going to work for the CIA, which is targeting SD-6 but also employing her father; a further wrinkle is her mother as a long-time KGB operative. Besides revenge being more a motivating factor than patriotic duty, several reviewers also offered his or her own iteration of the show as “action escapism.” In the first episode, Brostow is disguised in a red wig and being tortured and interrogated by Chinese operatives, leading Slate’s June Thomas to ask: “Danger, deception, foreign travel—what’s not to love?”16
A later television offering, this time for the USA Network, is Covert Affairs (2010–2014), featuring CIA operative Annie Walker (Piper Perabo ), who works for the clandestine Domestic Protection Division and poses as a curator and researcher for the Smithsonian. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post credited the series for its “conscientious effort to portray the tricks of the intelligence trade with greater verisimilitude than … the cartoon-like 24.”17 The greater emphasis, though, is on its lead character’s attractiveness, whose appeal is as much rooted in her stellar wardrobe and Louboutin heels as her crimefighting skills.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Action Films
Director Kathryn Bigelow created a much more significant female CIA operative in the Oscar-nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty (2012), but she had already earned respect for earlier actions films, including Point Break (1991) with Patrick Swayze , K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) with Harrison Ford, and The Hurt Locker (2010) with Jeremy Renner . The latter film showcased the harrowing work of an elite bomb squad during the Iraq War that earned Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, with Bigelow the first female in Hollywood history to do so. Her resume also included an earlier portrait of a female cop in the 1991 film, Blue Steel , putting the director’s gender and that of her protagonist in the spotlight for its further disturbance of the male-heavy genre on both sides of the camera.
Blue Steel is about rookie cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis ), who, on her first patrol, kills a man holding up a grocery store. Commodities trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver ) witnesses the shooting while taking cover on the floor, where he also finds the thief’s weapon that he keeps for himself. Since no weapon is found at the scene, Turner is suspended for using excessive force against an unarmed man. The psychotic Hunt , who hears troubling inner voices, uses the thief’s gun to kill random targets, with police finding bullet casings at crime scenes etched with Turner’s name, thereafter enlisting her as “bait” to catch the killer. Meanwhile, an unsuspecting Turner meets Hunt , who begins romancing her, until he incriminates himself during an intimate embrace, sparking the first of many attempts by her to arrest him—all failing for a lack of evidence and her word compromised by having dated him. After killing Turner’s best friend and shooting her lover, he also rapes Turner, who then methodically tracks and kills him in a violent, western-style shoot-out.
Bigelow includes interrogations of Turner’s relationships with men as a steady source of betrayal: an abusive father, a boss who doubts her fitness as a cop, a detective assigned to her (given the literal surname of Mann) who fails to protect her, and her intimate tormenter who stalks her using a Dirty Harry-style Magnum. The film’s opening credits and several scenes fetishize Turner’s gun and blue uniform—both traditional symbols of masculine authority. Yet, Bigelow ’s film disappointed some scholars looking to a female director to create more of what Christine Gledhill terms a feminist universe.18 They questioned Turner’s violence against Hunt , which ultimately invited comparisons to the Dirty Harry model of male behavior.19 Bigelow concedes that Blue Steel was meant to be a cross between Fatal Attraction and Dirty Harry ,20 with several mainstream critics noting the homage, dubbing Turner a “female Dirty Harry.”21 As discussed in Chap. 5, such expectations engage a type of essentialism that limits the range of female behaviors, especially within crime film s. My criticism is not with Turner’s use of violence, but her motives, seeking revenge more than justice. Hunt is dangerous but appreciably different from Callahan ’s Scorpio, who kills at random and selects targets from among the same social outcasts whom Callahan is dispatched to protect, however reluctantly. Hunt , on the other hand, is isolated from social cause or cultural excuse, which by extension, strips Turner of her moral license and mythological cover. By ignoring the thin blue line separating rogue from vigilante , and opting to stress the latter, Bigelow forfeits her character’s sense of higher purpose. No doubt, as discussed earlier, this line is often drawn on shifting sands, but there is usually a space dusted off for the white male rogue to find firm enough ground to take a stand, turning private darkness into public light.
Zero Dark Thirty
At the time of its release, Bigelow ’s Zero Dark Thirty represented one of the first major Hollywood productions by a male or female director to tackle the story of Osama bin Laden ’s demise. It is told from the perspective of a CIA operative known only as Maya (Jessica Chastain ), whose dogged pursuit of a lead—who turns out to be bin Laden ’s courier—is what enables the agency to finally locate bin Laden ’s post 9/11 hide out; once found, bin Laden is assassinated there by Special Forces . Recruited by the CIA right out of high school, Maya spent the next 12 years obsessing over bin Laden .
CIA analyst, Maya (Jessica Chastain), who relentlessly pursues Osama bin Laden by any means necessary. Screenshot from the 2012 official trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, Sony Pictures
Maya is shown working tirelessly, reviewing tapes of other interrogations at other black sites , and showing little interest in any creature comforts outside of minimal sleep and food. After Maya meets up with the CIA chief for Camp Chapman in Afghanistan, only identified in the film as Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), their lunch is interrupted by an explosion that rips through the Marriott restaurant, leaving them both shaken but all the more determined to get bin Laden . In earlier encounters, Maya deferred to Jessica’s rank and experience, but eventually challenged her “pre-9/11” thinking about al Qaeda behavior, which Maya pointed out was better suited to the Cold War than the War on Terror . Jessica later gets killed after she and her crew trust a Jordanian doctor willing to cooperate for a large sum of money. Although vetted by the Jordanians, once the informant arrives at a “neutral” site, he detonates a suicide vest that kills Jessica and several others.22 When al Qaeda takes credit for the bombing and subsequent attacks, agents face mounting pressure to make progress, also triggering Maya to push harder for her theory about Abu Ahmad as the key to finding bin Laden —stop him and the attacks stop.
Eventually Maya secures enough evidence of Ahmad ’s “tradecraft” to be invited to a meeting with the CIA director (James Gandolfini ), who remains nameless in the film. Maya is told to sit along the wall while others at the conference table debate how best to move forward with her intelligence. When the director asks for specifics on the compound, and Maya speaks up, he asks who she is. “I’m the motherfucker that found this place, sir,” surprising everyone with her audacious answer. Once the mission is a go, she preps the Navy SEALs , although one asks why she is so sure when previous intelligence proved so disastrously wrong. “Quite frankly, I didn’t even want to use you guys,” she blurts out. “But people didn’t believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb, so they’re using you guys as canaries … [and] if bin Laden isn’t there, you can sneak away and no one will be the wiser.” She adds, after a pause, “But bin Laden is there and you’re going to kill him for me.”23 The final part of the film depicts their arduous and dangerous mission to breach the compound to kill bin Laden , who is brought back in a body bag so Maya can confirm his identity. In the final scene, she boards a military transport on which she is the only passenger. Out of relief or sadness or simple fatigue—and perhaps faced with having to find a new purpose—she quietly sheds a few tears.
Maya: A Portrait of American Obsession
In reviews of the film , few found Maya’s tearful exhaustion rooted in her tireless service to the nation, instead viewing her emotion through the lens of gender. Yet, she may be the very personification of an America that finally caught the terrorist behind 9/11, but which hardly ended the War on Terror —some might argue, merely serving as another recruiting tool for those who thought the United States had gone rogue. As one reviewer wrote, the “uncritical embrace of assassination as a tool of statecraft should have passed entirely unremarked in the brouhaha surrounding [the film] tells us a good deal about the new normal in an era of secret kill-lists and escalating drone strikes .”24 Although perhaps implausible and impractical, officials never considered bringing bin Laden to trial, whether in a US court or before an international tribunal, as was done with Milošević for his “crimes against humanity” in Kosovo.
When Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (with an Oscar for writing The Hurt Locker ) reportedly had the screenplay reviewed by the CIA, the only changes the agency requested were scenes in which Maya participates in waterboarding and the use of dogs during interrogations.25 In general the film was found to be historically accurate except for “unknowable, intimate moments” that such dramatizations include, Bigelow explains.26 She wrote in the published shooting script that she had hoped the film would “spark a conversation about the shadowy lives of those in the intelligence community, the price they’ve paid for their work, and the murky deeds that were done over this dark decade in the name of national security.”27 Those “deeds” refer to the CIA’s program of enhanced interrogations—or use of torture—discussed in the previous chapter.
Unlike Bauer ’s exaggerated and often contrived techniques, Zero Dark Thirty recreates—however sanitized—most methods detailed in the Senate’s so-called torture report, with Stanton subjecting detainees to force feedings, sleep deprivation, confinement in a small box (with insects inside), contorted stress positions, and being led around chained to a dog collar.28 Once Stanton is back in Washington , sporting a suit and tie, he shows no lingering effects from having “interrogated” more than a hundred detainees; it defies the conclusions of many studies that report how psychologically and emotionally damaging the experience can be for those who administer torture.29
While some viewed the film as a harsh critique of America’s obsession to get bin Laden by any means necessary, others found it too apolitical, even complicit in glorifying the mission—the scenes of torture later eclipsed by Navy SEALs risking their lives.30 Sen. Diane Feinstein , the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (responsible for the 2014 report about CIA interrogations), publicly criticized the film’s inference that bin Laden was found with information gleaned through torture.31 Marouf A. Hasian offers what he deems a postcolonial interpretation, asserting that merely deconstructing the film’s depiction of torture misses its underlying “military orientalist ideology .”32 Maya, dubbed by The Economist as America’s “Joan of Arc,”33 is a composite character but who represents dozens of men and women involved in the CIA’s interrogation program, with “her dedication to her job … emblematic of exceptional American willpower and abilities,”34 Hasian asserts. In keeping with Edward Said’s concept of orientalism ,35 Maya learns just enough about Middle Eastern cultures to weaponize such knowledge as another tool of war. The detainees she engages remain one-dimensional villains with few reasons for their radicalization—mere objects of scorn from places too irrational or backward to investigate further—a frame similarly used in 24 and continued in Homeland below.
Manohla Dargis suggests the audience must participate in the art of “filling in the blanks, managing narrative complexity and confronting their complicity.”36 It is that “filling in” process that is most revelatory—the nation’s mission and its links to American exceptionalism is what gets filled in, allowing both conservative and liberal reads of the specifics, but summarily, it is about the ends justifying the means. One can argue about whether the means (torture) is justified , but that misses the larger point about the need to interrogate what “ends” the nation is achieving. Other criticism leveled at Bigelow , similar to that discussed above with Blue Steel , focuses on her failure to present a more “feminist ” perspective, or an exploration of how a female could “soften the tactics of war and investigation [and] to lend controversy a feminine morality.”37 Another reviewer also thought a female protagonist should have helped to “humanize” the subject matter, disappointed that Maya is presented as a “creature of destiny rather than human being.”38
Maya is thinly developed as a character, representing a type of empty signifier open to various interpretations. On the one hand, she is a symbol of female empowerment as a lead character who holds her own, demonstrating the same steely resolve and obsession as her male counterparts. On the other hand, Maya is framed as a failure for not presenting an innate sense of nurture or “difference” to contest such macho methodology . The former is problematic given that Bigelow has earned a reputation for making successful action films that are purposely ambiguous about gender. The latter dismisses Maya as a female crimefighter who fails to soften the nation’s attitudes about torture. As noted in Chap. 5 about the agency of female characters, Bigelow ’s female heroes are capable of matching the skills and motivations—however flawed—that exist in their workplaces and the larger national and cultural environments that produce them.
What is progressive is Bigelow ’s choice to depict a female protagonist who becomes acculturated within a CIA that betrayed its own apolitical charter, becoming tethered to the Bush administration’s aggressive agenda—with dire consequences for the agency and for the nation it serves.39 One can quibble with the film’s lack of political backbone, if Olive Stone -like didacticism is desired, but it seems narrow-minded to hold Bigelow responsible for producing a primarily feminist view of police, military and spy agencies, when it remains unclear such a consensus can or does exist.
Carrie Mathison: Protecting the Homeland
Like Bauer and Maya , Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes ) of Homeland, which premiered in 2011 on Showtime, is a brilliant but flawed CIA agent who persistently pursues her hunches despite disbelieving bosses and institutional obstacles—just another adrenaline junky and tireless patriot. Mathison’s “difference” as an attractive white female and epitome of the female standard-bearer is similar to that of Diesel’s Cage and Maya , in that once abroad, especially in the Middle East, she is clearly coded as American, with her blond hair barely covered by a hijab and occasionally contrasting with other females in full burkas.
Similar to my disclaimer for 24, rather than recap the details of every season’s plot twists and sprawling cast of characters, below is a general outline of the show’s main trajectories that enable an examination of Mathison’s fit along the continuum of female crimefighters ,40 especially those deemed to be rogue. She also is examined as a fellow counterterrorism agent alongside Bauer and Maya —all dealing with the unfolding and enduring War on Terror .
The first season of Homeland quickly introduces Mathison as a study in exaggerated contradictions. As her creators explain, they imagined her as both “unbalanced and confident at the same time.”41 Her extremes quickly unfold as she becomes suspicious of a decorated Marine, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis ), who recently returned home after eight years in an al Qaeda prison. To Mathison’s trained eye, she perceives enough clues to believe Brody to be a potential terrorist who came home a sleeper enemy agent. Although ultimately correct about Brody , she is unable to convince her CIA bosses, who fire her for her obsessive, even pathological tracking of Brody and harassment of his family. After Brody successfully runs for Congress, he vows to carry out acts of terror for his former captor, Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban ).
In season two, Mathison becomes involved in a sexual relationship with Brody and convinces him to flip on Nazir . Brody , though, becomes complicit in the vice president’s death and suspected of a bomb that explodes at the vice president’s funeral, killing hundreds—the latter act not of his doing. Mathison, convinced of his innocence, smuggles him out of the country, vowing to clear his name.
In season three, she convinces her former mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin ), now the CIA director, to offer Brody a chance at redemption by having him seek political asylum in Iran in order to assassinate a key general. When the mission falters, Berenson assumes Brody betrayed them and orders him killed. Near the close of season three, Mathison, now pregnant by Brody , and still believing him to be a hero (he killed the general after all) is convinced the CIA is coming to extract them both; instead Brody is arrested by the Iranians and she watches him hang before fleeing the country.
Season four finds Mathison as the CIA station chief in Afghanistan, where she orders a drone strike on a Taliban leader who survives; she later recruits his nephew as an asset to track down the leader. In season five she leaves the CIA for a post as the security chief for an NGO in Berlin, but which ensnares her in battles with ISIS, Hezbollah , and fallout from drone strikes from the previous season. Similar to 24’s formula, the season also includes a sinister homegrown enemy in the form of Allison Carr (Miranda Otto ), a Russian double-agent but also the CIA station chief in Berlin.
Seasons six and seven explore the political fallout from a newly elected president who, after facing two assassination attempts, grows paranoid, becoming suspicious of her own intelligence community and reacting with a frightening abuse of executive authority that sparks a constitutional crisis. Also included in both latter seasons is a look at the effects of “fake news ” on exacerbating an already divided country, and which threaten to ignite a homegrown rebellion by extremists.
Spy Games: Sex, Motherhood, and Mental Illness
Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), securing the homeland as a fearless but reckless CIA operative at work in the Middle East. Homeland on Showtime. Screenshot from Hulu
Unlike Bauer , though, Mathison is never given the benefit of the doubt about her motives; she bears the burden of proof to make clear her actions are on behalf of national security. Although she is not the first female character to be depicted on screen as a “hot mess,”43 she is given the added burden of a mental illness—a bi-polar condition first blamed for her wild accusations about Brody . Berenson , among others, routinely dismisses her Rainman-like observations as irrational, manic ramblings. In the first season, her erratic behavior puts her CIA career in jeopardy, enough for her to attempt suicide that she herself aborts. Worse yet, it is implied that her fabled skills and mastery of CIA tradecraft are linked to her condition, with Mathison frequently refusing treatment, believing that during a manic phase she has heightened powers of observation.
In the episode, “Super Powers,” Mathison purposely skips her medications to think more clearly, which one observer notes, “danced too closely to the implication that Carrie is such a good spy because of her bipolar disorder .”44 Danes has said in interviews that she considers her character a “superhero ,” also explaining how she and the show’s creators thoroughly researched Carrie’s illness.45 While many mental health experts applaud such a rare depiction of a character who tries to “own” the illness rather than succumb to its limitations, they also criticize the depiction of its exaggerated highs and lows—not to mention the suggested causality with her reputed brilliance or its role as her “kryptonite.”46
Bi-polar dramas aside, many reviewers share the view that it is “hard to overstate the seismic impact” the show had on the TV industry following its first season, winning the Emmy for Best Drama Series (Danes later wins Emmys as Best Actress in 2012 and 2013). Shortly after its premier, the series reportedly became the new “obsession,” even counting President Obama among its fans.47 One reviewer describes Mathison as among several recent anti-heroes (e.g., The Good Wife ) who surpass the Cagney & Lacey-era storytelling that often reduced female characters to their work struggles in historically male industries.48 In Homeland , though, being “female” resurrects several old clichés. In the series premier, Mathison is shown trying to seduce Berenson to get what she wants along with trying (or having) sex with a string of potential CIA assets, “constantly riding a knife’s edge where her gender could be used to disparage her or push her into seemingly unstable behavior.”49
When Mathison leaves the CIA in season five (like Bauer a fact that does little to stop her sense of duty or access to government tools), a tweet was sent out by the CIA, noting, “Good Riddance, Carrie Mathison. The real women of the C.I.A. are fed up with the sodden, sexualized reel women” portrayed on screen. Columnist Maureen Dowd reported that the agency “sisterhood” was fed up with Hollywood’s female spies “who guzzle alcohol as they bed hop and drone drop, acting crazed and emotional, sleeping with terrorists and seducing assets,” especially as depicted by Mathison.50 Whitney Kassel , a foreign policy analyst, called Mathison a “misogynist,” along with chastising her for “willing to sleep around with anyone and everyone to succeed.”51
No doubt Mathison’s reliance on seduction trivializes the difficulty actual female agents face, but that could be said of any screen crimefighter who uses sex as a tool of the trade—if one exempts the British James Bond , who draws few complaints from MI6 agents about his bed-hopping in service to his country.52 While hundreds of Hollywood cops, spies and federal agents frequently resort to torture, along with contempt for oversight committees and international laws—making most actual crimefighters look impotent by comparison—it seems inexcusably sexist to isolate Mathison’s promiscuity as a matter of bigger concern. The fact that journalists sought out actual female agents to do the complaining smacks of a manufactured cat fight rather than a serious warning about the dangers of Hollywood imagery to spies—regardless of gender.
As Amy B. Zegart noted in her research on “spytainment ,” with so little information actually available about intelligence operations, fake ones in entertainment media have a disproportionate amount of influence, with “cadets at West Point to senators on the Intelligence Committee to Supreme Court Justices … referencing fake spies to formulate and implement real intelligence policies.”53 Moreover, Hollywood spies often engage in criminal behavior or are linked to agencies with unlimited budgets, either scenario capable of affecting policymakers along with eroding public trust—outcomes that could profoundly impact national security.54
Showtime and other pay cable networks, less restricted than broadcast television beholden to FCC standards,55 have created several series that include provocative female characters easily described as “anti-heroines,” including the lead in Nurse Jackie or Claire Underwood in House of Cards . One reviewer describes both as “competent and reckless, women who were brazenly sexual and refused to apologize for being so, women who lived by their own rules, even if such behavior occasionally caused harm to themselves or people close to them.”56 As discussed in Chap. 5, such characters have earned the right to be bombastically deviant and surpass the strict boundaries of the Madonna-whore binary; and in that respect, Mathison stands alone among female crimefighters .
If critics and fans alike were disapproving of Mathison’s manipulative sexuality, they were downright apoplectic over her depiction of pregnancy and motherhood. In one controversial scene, while bathing her daughter Franny, it is clear for a moment Mathison considers drowning her baby but pulls back in time, leaving her horrified by her own capacity for harm. Outrage from viewers and critics was palpable, as one reviewer warned, “it doesn’t get much darker than a woman who’s devoid of motherly love.”57
Other scenes show her without any sense of nurture—a betrayal of a preeminent quality baked into every female crimefighter before her. Although fascinating to see the limitations of her pregnant body clash with her dedication to duty (similar to Marge Gunderson in Fargo ), once her daughter is born, Mathison is faced with two solutions: one she chooses and the other is chosen for her. In seasons four onward, she frequently chooses to leave Franny with her sister; by season seven she is forced to give up custody to her sister, having to settle for visitation rights. In between, she had discovered her nurturing side, which makes the resolution all the more tragic. In the season three finale, when Mathison is still grappling with her unexpected pregnancy, she tells Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend ), her semi-love interest and government assassin (who seems more sensitive than she is), “I can’t be a mother. Because of me. Because of my job. Because of my … problems.”58 After CIA Director Andrew Lockhart (Tracy Letts ) tells her she is being “recalled” back to Langley, then half-heartedly adds, “you’ll get to spend time with your kid.”59 It seems an insincere afterthought that aptly captures what happens to many professional women who temporarily choose to be stay-at-home moms only to find their once promising careers permanently jettisoned.
Mathison does no better than Bauer and the majority of male crimefighters when it comes to having lasting relationships or dependable lovers. Besides Berenson as both her mentor and exploiter, her psychiatrist sister, Maggie (Amy Hargreaves ) is her enabler (monitoring her sister’s various experiments with medications), but also her disciplinarian, to little effect. The closest Mathison comes to a soul mate is Quinn —a Black Ops agent with a soft-spot for Mathison that leads him to perilously put her ahead of his job. As one reviewer notes, “Quinn is the assassin with the heart of gold, his superhuman powers of shadowy Warcraft undercut by boyish and very selectively applied notions of right or wrong.”60 His moral compass, despite killing on orders, pointedly seems the most developed in the series. In one episode, Mathison , using intelligence from the station chief in Pakistan, orders a drone that Quinn says “feels different,”61 and turns out to be at a wedding, at which many innocents are killed as “collateral damage.”62 She dismisses the wedding claim as Taliban propaganda, asserting, “We’re bullet proof on this … nobody is going to go in and verify … deep in tribal territories.”63 Her worry about covering the agency more than fretting about dead civilians alarms Quinn .
In season three it is Quinn who reminds her that a baby is a gift; he also cautions her against taking advantage of the vulnerable nephew of the Taliban leader the drone strike was meant to kill. She ignores his advice and seduces the virginal Afghani college student, Aayan Ibrahim (Suraj Sharma ), the drone strike ’s only survivor and whom she promises to help escape Pakistan (a lie she tells him posing as a journalist). Instead, she uses him to locate his uncle, who ruthlessly kills his nephew, an act she witnesses via live satellite. She then orders a drone strike to kill the uncle, but which would also kill Berenson , who had been taken prisoner. It is an order Quinn and others disobey, while Mathison argues that Berenson would want this outcome—an assumption Berenson later confirms, preferring to kill a high-value target than be used by a terrorist as a human shield.
One reviewer concluded that Mathison’s “defiantly unmaternal coldness” is a way to make her “more like one of the boys.”64 But this misses the larger point that America’s dependency on rogue crimefighters (male or female) who often live outside normal society—as well as beyond the control of their state-sanctioned institutions—may reveal a larger flaw in American thinking. Just as Bauer ’s homegrown enemies are often more dangerous than jihadists, Homeland delves into the inner workings of the intelligence communities and the politicians who try to use them, especially in the protracted War on Terror ; unlike Maya , who represents a “mission accomplished,” Carrie represents the debunking of any such conclusion. “Her ambiguity forces us to question our mission and doubt our method and suggests that we are a long way off from resolute accomplishment,”65 notes Irene Shih . If Zero Dark Thirty hints at pro-torture and post-torture approaches linked to the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, Homeland suggests it is not so clear-cut, with drone strikes during the Obama era not without dire and lasting consequences.
Homeland’s Muslim Problem
Homeland also garnered considerable criticism about its reliance on Muslim-as-terrorist stereotypes. Laila Al-Arian , who acknowledges a similar problem with 24, points to Homeland ’s Brody as “insidiously Islamaphobic.” The show suggests Brody has been brainwashed by a dangerous and extreme ideology . Once back home, he is shown practicing his new faith, which is depicted as deviant and “dangerous.” His wife talks of his “crazy” faith and throws his Koran to the floor, reducing a sacred text the equivalent to “nothing more or less than terrorism.” The series suggests he can be a Muslim or an American, but not both. Al-Arian also notes that the series cements the idea of a one-size-fits-all Muslim identity hell bent on representing an amorphous threat as imprecise as the unspecified end goals of the War on Terror . It seems more an “orientalist nightmare” with Sunni extremist al Qaeda and Shia Hezbollah joining forces when in actuality they intensely distrust each other and unlikely to form any such cooperative.
Homeland’s creators, who wrote and produced many episodes of 24, remember similar criticism of an episode of 24 in which a Muslim family in Los Angeles turns out to be a sleeper cell, leaving the impression that American suburbia is rife with terrorists. Howard Gordon , former 24 writer and co-creator of Homeland (with executive producer, Alex Gansa ), says he regrets the above storyline, especially after seeing the network’s advertising on a billboard with the tagline: “They could be next door.” Although the writers and producers were not party to the promotional campaign, he says they “quickly put an end to it and realized how potentially incendiary such associations could be.”66 In an attempt to show “good” Muslims , an imam is included in a later episode to remind a prisoner that the bomb he refuses to locate will kill millions of people and “the Koran clearly forbids the killing of innocents”; the imam is there to insist that the detainee is “twisting the words of the prophet.”67
Homeland creators go a step further and hire a frequent critic of the show, Ramzi Kassem , also a Muslim attorney, who figures as consultant to the show, he could “limit the damage.”68 Kaseem noted, for better or worse, “[T]he show matters [as] decision makers watch the show. People of all stripes get their information about security issues, about Muslims , about the Middle East, from the show. It’s a hugely influential show.”69 Series co-creator Gordon admitted he had “the dawning sense that there’s a responsibility not to just traffic in these not-helpful stereotypes ,” but then, at the same time, “you have the conundrum that the show is about counterterrorism,” with such characters inevitably included.70
To perhaps make good on Homeland ’s “crisis of conscience,”71 a young American Muslim named Sekou (J. Mallory McCree ) was added to season six. As Mathison explains to him, “this whole country went stupid crazy after 9/11 and nobody knows that better than I do.”72 Sekou , though, tests the limits of free speech, posting videos that denounce the American government and praise jihadists.73 Sekou is then blown up in episode four while working in a delivery van rigged to do so by government traitors to either “justify dubious ongoing investigations into suspected radicals, or to frighten the president-elect sufficiently to deter her from pursuing reforms within the CIA.”74 The net effect of introducing a more fully developed Muslim family, shown being hounded by the government, is then negated by making Sekou a mouthpiece for anti-American rhetoric and then punishing him for it.
Besides adding Sekou , Mathison also works in season six for a non-profit organization whose express purpose is to defend victims such as Muslim Americans against unfair attacks. That plot twist enraged Limbaugh , who told his listeners that previously Mathison was “the number one warrior on the march trying to end militant Islamic terrorism … But she now … runs a center to help people understand Islam and Muslims .” He lamented that Mathison had done a “180,” concluding that “political correctness and the leftist view of this story finally permeated the writing room.”75
Mathison Performing the Nation
In the latter seasons of Homeland , with Mathison’s strengths and weaknesses now firmly established, the show’s writers had room to explore the consequences of spy culture and its interplay with politics. Like Bauer , Mathison’s enemies want her dead “for the sins of the past.”76 By the end of season seven, one reviewer suggested that “Carrie … neatly stands in for America itself—trying to atone for some of the most awful things it’s done, but sloppily, and mostly to cover its own ass.”77 As Berenson notes in season four, the nation has fought what should be a “one-year war waged 14 times in Afghanistan.”78 It is an opinion nobody at the private security company he now works for is interested in hearing, as his firm’s goal is to acquire lucrative contracts that such a prolonged conflict makes possible. As the former director of the CIA, Berenson ’s head (and perhaps his heart), though, is still invested in the long game of national security. The character also galvanized viewers who believed him to be anti-Semitic , while others claimed he proved the show’s pro-Israel sympathies.
In season five, Berenson considers defecting to Israel after the US intelligence community suspects him of passing on information to Israel, while Berenson grows suspicious of Israeli actions when a high-placed intelligence officer warns Berenson what might happen if he is no longer “a good friend of Israel.”79 By season seven, Berenson visits his estranged sister in the West Bank (there to secretly meet an asset beyond the Israeli border). It is a contentious visit in which the siblings expose their differing opinions about the Jewish settlements on disputed land. He accuses her late husband of being a “fanatic,” and says her “presence here makes peace less possible.” She counters, “I have a life here filled with faith and purpose. What do you have, Saul?”80
Gansa , the show’s co-creator, also thought seasons six and seven should include the current fallout from the existence of “fake news ” and “how people can be manipulated by it,” presenting the Brett O’Keefe character clearly modeled after the controversial radio talk show host, Alex Jones.81 More tellingly, the election of Donald Trump significantly impacted seasons six and seven, as Gansa believed the show to be “in a very unique position to comment on it.”82 President Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel ) is certainly infused with Trump -like suspicions about the intelligence community. The writers also wanted to depict how a president-elect’s ideas can change during the post-election transition, especially after receiving high-level briefings; after all, Gansa explains, Obama modulated his criticism of drone warfare during that period.83 Gansa predicts that the eighth and final season of Homeland (to premier in 2019) will abandon the Trump tie-ins and possibly return to its Israeli roots, as Homeland was first inspired by the Israeli show, Hatufim , about returning prisoners of war.84 That may also exacerbate the charges of its so-called Islamaphobia ,85 as Joseph Massad , an expert on Arab politics and history, contends that the show is already reflective of “American and Israeli fantasies.”86
As Mathison’s “difference” no doubt will continue to guide future plotlines as a daring, intuitive and deliberative spy who is also reckless, obsessive, and often amoral, Mathison may also be the ideal metaphor for the nation’s current state of mind. As a reviewer for Variety offers, “as [Carrie’s] mental condition deteriorates, so does the condition of the country.”87 Perhaps her whiplash behaviors and mood swings have not only come to replace Bauer ’s clear-eyed fanaticism. It may also present a more suitable metaphor for a nation currently cleaved by a Keane -like president—one who lays bare America’s enduring interplay of politics and popular culture, along with a reliance on facts trumped by fictions increasingly producing a Baudrillard-inspired state of an unreal hyperreal.