Who were the bad guys in '90s Dad Thrillers?
PLUS: One of my favorite websites
Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s newsletter:
An empirical look at the identity, affiliation, and occupation of the bad guys in ‘90s Dad Thrillers; and
a sad tribute to a website I admire, Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease.
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Who are the bad guys in ‘90s Dad Thrillers?
This tweet was recently brought to my attention:
As longtime readers know, this is an area of deep scholarly interest to me, mostly because I was the ages of 5 to 15 during the time period in question and my earliest understandings of geopolitics were determined by movies like The Saint and Goldeneye. In a previous newsletter I attempted to list and taxonomize a broad collection of these movies, generally competently made Hollywood fare with a pretense toward political sophistication, which I called “Dad Thrillers”:
Part of what makes these movies historically interesting to me, besides my own narcissism, is the way in which they are patently grappling with the question implied by the OP: Who are the bad guys now? The Cold War is over; the economy is booming; the sense of social and civic decay that accompanied deindustrialization could be repressed and shoved to the side. Especially in international thrillers, screenwriters seemed to be throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick: The Air Force One bad guys are … Kazakh … Stalinist … irrendentists? The Jackal features an IRA terrorist and his ETA lover joining forces with the CIA to stop a former KGB asset from assassinating an American politician at the behest of the Azeri Mafia? Sure! It’s all very *spins large bingo cage*.
To address this question empirically I took my movie list and cut out everything before 1992 and after 2000, and then sorted the bad guys in each movie into broad categories. Then, to better get at OP’s specific question, at least with respect to movies, which is what I have the data I narrowed the initial field to 27 movies that I think could reasonably be described as “Tom Clancylike thrillers,” mostly due to strong military, intelligence, and/or geopolitical themes and plots, and re-assessed.
Bad guys in all Dad Thrillers, by occupation and affiliation
Bad guys in Clancy-ish Dad Thrillers, by occupation and affiliation
The data only give us a partial picture of the bad-guy situation, since many movies could be said to overlap--e.g., Air Force One and Goldeneye feature both Renegade ex-Soviet Powers and Rogue/Embittered Agents of the State. (I generally assigned the movie to whichever bad guy was played by the most prominent actor and/or was the antagonist in the Climactic Fist Fight.)
Nevertheless, the bad guys in Clancy-ish Dad Thrillers could be said to fit into four broad categories:
Rogue/Embittered Agents of the State, by which I mean spies and soldiers who radicalize or betray their former employers due to politics, neglect, greed or psychopathy (e.g. Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege or Jon Malkovich in In the Line of Fire, among many others).
Deep State Conspirators, by which I mean shadowy bureaucrats within the intelligence or military apparatus, working to maintain power or enrich themselves (e.g. Jon Voight and company in Enemy of the State or the president in Clear and Present Danger).
Terrorists of various kinds. This is a funny category because almost as a rule the terrorists are either freelance and non-ideological (e.g. Bruce Payne in Passenger 57) or Irish (e.g. Jonathan Pryce in Ronin). Presumably this is at least in part about the fact that it’s easier to buy, e.g., Brad Pitt as an IRA terrorist than as an al Qaeda terrorist. The only Muslim terrorists on the list are the Chechens in Executive Decision and the Crimson Jihad in True Lies.
Renegade ex-Soviet powers, by which I mean military officers, oligarchs, militias, and politicians from ex-Soviet states, including Russia. In almost every case, these guys have or are trying to get nukes (e.g. Air Force One and The Peacemaker).
I suppose this is not that surprising, as breakdowns go--a mix of boomer paranoia and anti-government resentment mixed with an end-of-history fear of rogue non-state actors. For the sake of reference, the villains in actual Clancy novels written between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/111: Japan; Iran; eco-terrorists (!); China2; and then, in what feels like an admission of defeat just before 9/11 reinvigorated him, the Soviet Union, in a flashback novel set in the early 1980s.
A Tribute to Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease
Our cat, Goose, died this week at the age of Probably About 14. She was a wonderful companion, a lazy lounger and greedy eater, cautious but generous with her affection, and mostly very patient with our son, if only because he often had food somewhere on the hands he’d reach out to her. She was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease a bit more than four years ago, and I feel very happy to have gotten to spend this much time with her.
I don’t usually like to write about personal-life events in this newsletter because I think boundaries are healthy when you are a content-producing solopreneur, and I want to respect the privacy of the people in my life, even my cat. But I wanted to mention Goose and her passing because it’s taken up a fair amount of psychic space in my mind this week, and because I want to pay public tribute to a website I have visited frequently over the last few years and which I think represents among the best of the web, or at least the best of what the web once promised: Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease.
If you have a cat with CKD, you are probably already aware of Tanya’s, which is the best single repository of information and advice about feline kidney disease and its various pharmaceutical and medical treatments. If you don’t have a cat with CKD, I still recommend Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide as an example of a perfect website: A simple, straightforward, quick-loading, ad-free, information-dense page with a sensible and intuitive layout and structure, and a clear purpose and voice. Helen, the woman who runs the page--Tanya was the name of her cat--writes with clarity and detail, combining thorough research and personal experience (as well as the personal experience of correspondents) to answer just about any question you have about feline CKD, from the theoretical to the practical, often complete with photos. It is both enormously helpful and utterly charming.
It is, to put it another way, exactly the kind of resource you would hope to come across if you were anxiously Googling symptoms or diagnoses or medications. I recently read Amanda Hess’ excellent, funny memoir of pregnancy, Second Life (pre-order here; I might get an affiliate cut), and appreciated the way she writes about the internet’s role in both fomenting and assuaging anxiety, especially around medicine, the way your searches become “a map of anxieties,” the results “a dense underbrush” of content, by turns confusing, distressing, relieving: Your compulsive Googling is often a way to pull the slot-machine arm again to see which feeling you might get, to scratch the itch of anxiety. Many websites that rank high on Google are designed less to meet the actual needs of the anxious Googler than they are to convert that anxiety into attention (or sometimes a sale). Tanya’s, in contrast to most of what you get online, is generally relieving, if not in content than in tone and presentation, but more than anything it is genuinely helpful. Once you’re reading it, you aren’t likely to keep bouncing back to your Google search to pick at the scab.
To be clear, worrying about your baby is very different than worrying about your senior cat (I know: I’ve worried about both, sometimes at the same time!), and there is no website that can assuage an anxiety that exists outside and prior to reality. But the world would be a better place if there were more Tanya’s-type sites for human conditions and illnesses--“third spaces,” to borrow a phrase, that are the product of neither for-profit SEO operations nor indecipherable expert-academic institutions. I don’t know that I have much faith in the viability of the open and largely amateur web anymore. But I’m glad that people like Helen are still out there, making it a little bit easier to figure out the best way to care for your cat.
Not including the psychotically reactionary prequel novel Without Remorse, in which John Clark tortures drug dealers to death in 1970s Baltimore.
Interestingly, though maybe not surprisingly, only one of the movies I’ve cataloging here, features China, and not even as a villain (Tomorrow Never Dies, whose villain is Jonathan Pryce playing Rupert Murdoch in a battle-yacht).
I remember my friend was very into this kind of adventure/intrigue movie, and after the 7th or 8th he saw that year, he commented "I can't believe how widespread and powerful the Chechen mob is."
Having grown up in Dublin, Ireland, it was always bizarre watching how the IRA were portrayed in Hollywood movies. Since Tom Clancy and many of his readers were conservative Irish-Americans, this led to a schizophrenic approach-- the "good" IRA were faithful Catholics, while the "bad" IRA were ruthless Marxists. Neither category matched the reality.