These movies were released during a year dominated by AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared in front of a Senate panel calling for increased governmental regulation of the controversial technology, and the Biden administration launched an executive order aiming to address the associated risks.
These confounding anxieties, in real life and in the media, feed into each other. The lines between fiction and reality can start to blur.
“You’re seeing it in art forms like films and TV, or books. That’s making people more interested in these narratives. And then they’re hearing in the media, or from government sources, that there is a real risk as well,” said Julia Tatiana Bailey, an art historian and curator at the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague. “It just feeds into this paranoia.”
Spy fiction isn’t all just sociopolitical underpinnings. These movies have become blockbusters for a reason. They are global escapades — see Italy’s grandiose Amalfi Coast and the bustle of Mumbai, India, in Christopher Nolan’s 2020 spy thriller “Tenet.”
Or let your eyes feast on the visual buffet that is Daniel Craig stalking the streets of Mexico City during a Day of the Dead parade in 2015’s “Spectre” — a 4-minute scene that alone has gathered almost 4 million views on YouTube. In 1996’s “Mission: Impossible,” some of the film’s most dramatic moments are backdropped by the cobblestone streets of the Czech Republic’s Prague.
Of course, there are also the gadgets, the cars, the sex, even the outfits — all of which lends a certain erotic thrill that has become synonymous with the genre, and contributed to its wide appeal.
In the 1960s, for example, Eurospy films — a genre of movies that emerged in Europe mimicking the Bond movies — became hugely popular in South Asia, Sunya said. Newspapers would advertise these movies as “adults only,” because of their association with this type of erotic spectacle. Still, these movies became so popular that other countries began developing their own spy films, too.
The genre, then, became its own universe, existing outside of the geopolitical context with which it plays. We romanticize spies and the glamor around them, enough to ignore the political tensions and nervous questions some stories raise.
Ultimately, most Americans don’t know much about what spies are actually doing, Bailey said. We know covert activity happens because, occasionally, it’s publicly revealed. Last year, for example, China claimed a CIA spy was embedded in the Chinese military. This activity could be all around us, existing beneath our everyday lives. That mystery is what makes espionage so appealing in fiction.
“We’re getting an insight through fiction into a world that we know is there, but we just have no other access to it,” Bailey said.
Spy fiction teeters along that line of knowing and unknowing. On one hand, those stories are made-up figments of the author’s imagination. On the other hand, there are clandestine activities happening behind the scenes — and that secrecy plays into our anxieties, too.
“There’s a lot of interesting questions to ask about what’s reality, and what’s our sense of reality, and who’s controlling us,” Bailey said. “And all these questions come through spy stories as well.”
Nowadays, the life of a spy is much less glamorous than what might be presented to us on our screens, Bailey said. Think less exciting car chases, more sitting at a desk looking up data.
But the image of spies running around chasing bad guys is a fun one. In espionage fiction, there’s a clear good guy and bad guy. The work itself is courageous and risky. Our protagonists become heroes, and we are their accomplices, trying to solve the problem of the day right alongside them.
Yet spy fiction and its ongoing popularity reveal how we use these stories to understand real-life issues, Sunya said.
“The forms and stories that that takes, even if extremely imaginative or exaggerated or spectacular, end up telling us something about how we’re trying to make sense of the real world in that moment,” she said.
Sure, there are sociopolitical reasons why certain spy movies and shows are made and popularized in specific moments. The genre can also expose our fears about our world, or our increasing distrust in governmental institutions.
Still, we’ll turn to espionage fiction and all its blockbuster charm. Who, after all, can resist a good story?
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