ABSTRACT
Neither our sample movies nor those from beyond our sample suggest many unambiguous trends in the half-century of analysis. A few strong contrasts separate the 1960s and 2000s, but not all the indices move in a straight line in the intervening decades. Comparing the 1960s with the 2000s, we conclude that the CIA’s presence in the 1960s was very low-key. We also found later instances of the “disappearing” of the CIA that we consider were likely strategic, perhaps politically, maybe a response to the need for global marketing. The relative invisibility of the CIA in the 1960s probably had more do with political culture and popular consciousness of the period. There was a disproportionately strong presence of British intelligence in the 1960s. This diminished over time, but has not totally disappeared (and not only because of Bond). What references to the CIA there were in the 1960s were reasonably favorable. In all the later decades we continued to find positive representations of the CIA that were suggestive of a politicization of the genre for propaganda or related purposes. Some of these representations were positive characterizations of the agents, and/or of the institution and/or the USA/US foreign policy. We also encountered movies in each of these later decades where individual CIA agents and/or the institution of the CIA were depicted unfavorably. A common pattern was for the main CIA protagonists to be represented favorably, while the villains included (often) more senior CIA figures; alternatively, favorably represented agents were pitted against an unhelpful, corrupt, or insensitive bureaucracy, whether or not that bureaucracy was the primary or only a secondary villain. Critiques of the USA or of US foreign policy were less common, but we found some. The relevance and sharpness of critique was often blunted by US-centeredness and/or agency-centeredness. It is extremely rare to find narratives in any genre that foreground non-US or non Anglo-American perspectives as to what counts as modern, normal, interesting, and right. Generally only Americans or their screen peers (often English) get to criticize the CIA. The scope for critique is blunted in the context of narratives that focus principally on intra-agency politics, rivalry, and common criminality. Such films rarely engage insightfully with the broader political contexts of agency work and its significance in international relations, for example, or with its troubling implications for the health of democracy.
