Jack Ryan, shadow plunderer
by digby
Tom Clancy has always been a Hollywood-style conservative, which is to say less conservative than virtually anyone else who calls himself a conservative, but a conservative nonetheless. It does not surprise me that he would have been part of this nearly unwatchable film, Jack Ryan: ShadowRecruit that I suffered through last evening.
This review from RH Reality Check explains why, despite its utter tediousness as a drama, it's still somewhat interesting for its politics:
As the story goes, Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) is a covert CIA financial analyst who uncovers a Russian terror plot to blow up Wall Street and destroy the U.S. economy in order to send the nation instantly into a second great depression. Members of the Russian terror cell are activated in church, when the Russian Orthodox priest reads: “He has torn down the strongholds of the daughter Judah. He has brought her kingdom and its princes down to the ground in dishonor” (Lamentations 2:2).
The Bible-activation-code turns biblical grief over the (past) conquest of Judah by Babylon into a filmic prophecy about the imminent future. The Bible’s ever-ready protagonist-villain pair—Judah and Babylon—triggers that long-imagined connection between the chosen people and the United States. Wall Street becomes a potential holy victim, and Russia, in a call-back to actual Cold War apocalyptic discourses, implicitly becomes Babylon. Meanwhile, the second great depression remains a future—not ongoing—occurrence.
The film shifts attention away from the lack of accountability for the 2008 crash and the increasing disparity that followed. Compare, for instance, JPMorgan’s reward to Jamie Dimon of $20 million in 2013 with Barack Obama’s 2014 aspiration to raise the minimum wage to just $10.10/hour ($21,000 a year, working full time with no vacation). Instead of facing this disparity and Wall Street’s role in economic hardship, Jack Ryan imagines economic threats coming from outside the nation.
Put another way: while real world corporate control and the accumulation of profit impedes our national ability to care for citizens, the film suggests the stock market must be protected lest it become one more tool of other nations’ hateful terrorist attempts to damage U.S. citizens. It imagines a world of discrete and autonomous nations, even as it celebrates the marketplace of transnational global capital.
If biblically fetishizing and exonerating Wall Street is a chief outcome, the film’s sexual politics also help fictively prop up national defenses in the face of transnational market threats and to absolve the military industrial complex. The film works to reimagine the CIA as husband-protector of the nation.
They do disavow water-boarding, so there's that.
Let's just say that Hollywood Studios are all run by guys who went to the same schools as those who went to work on Wall Street. And Hollywood executives all live and die by stock prices too. So it's not surprising that they would find a way to make Wall Street the patriotic saviors of America.
Luckily nobody's buying it. The movie's a big bomb. Which gives me a little bit of hope that our society is not completely without intelligence or integrity. (On the other hand, the big hit is the Legos movie about a pre-school age children's game...)
* Sorry about the mix-up with the name of the film earlier. Two different films, both viewed last night. I had intended to write a review of both and ended up copying and pasting in error. Sorry about that ...
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