Remember when the “G” in “G-Man” meant “good”?
There was actually a top-rated Jimmy Cagney-Ann Dvorak movie in 1935 called “G-Men,” in which Cagney played a lawyer who became a government agent so he could track down the bad guys who murdered his best friend.
In 1996, the bad guys would probably turn out to be government agents, and the “G” in “G-Man” could stand for “goon.”
“It’s part of a whole cynicism about government that started with (President) Nixon’s departure–the whole Watergate thing,” says Charles Kleinhans, Northwestern University professor of film and art history. “I think there’s this sense of deceit on a high level and in a very strong way. I see that getting translated in action films in particular.”
And this summer’s crop of movies has been an especially rough one for the U.S. government’s image.
In “Independence Day,” the only human villain is a craven, conniving White House national security adviser. And, what’s more, the U.S. is unprepared for the awesome alien invasion because the FBI and other G-Men covered up an earlier alien incursion back in the 1940s.
In “Phenomenon,” John Travolta’s sudden receipt of magical mental powers makes him a target for hardcase FBI agents.
In “The Rock,” the evil FBI has illegally locked up a British spy who has managed somehow to steal all of J. Edgar Hoover’s secret files.
In “Frighteners,” the FBI is harassing poor Michael J. Fox, who’s just an ordinary guy trying to earn a living scamming people about their houses being haunted.
In “Eraser,” Arnold Schwarzenegger battles an evil U.S. government agent who subverts the federal witness protection program in murderous ways.
In “Escape from L.A.,” government agents have injected Kurt Russell with a slow-working fatal poison as an inducement to speed up his rescue of a president’s daughter.
CIA spooks, rarely on screen as good guys, serve as the malevolent foils to Tom Cruise’s hero in “Mission: Impossible.” Cruise so enjoyed taking the spooks on in that flick that he reportedly leapt at the chance to play a journalist caught up in CIA maneuverings in a forthcoming film based on the novel by Washington Post journalist David Ignatius, tentatively titled “Secrets of the Trade.”
And now under way is the Clint Eastwood-Gene Hackman thriller “Absolute Power,” in which Hackman plays a president with a sadistic style of pitching woo who goes too far in an amorous interlude with his married mistress. When she threatens to go public, Hackman’s Secret Service protectors bump her off.
“Action movies involving the government and political thrillers are big,” said New York film producer and consultant Eric Kopeloff. “It’s the intrigue in the system they’re depicting, what goes on behind the scenes, what goes on behind the walls of the Pentagon or the CIA or the FBI.”
This does not necessarily mean that Hollywood is out to paint the entire U.S. government with the kind of villainy used to demonize the Germans and Japanese in World War II, or the Soviets at the height of the Cold War.
But the movie business does follow public perceptions. After the 1968 Chicago convention riots and the 1969 Black Panther Raid in which Fred Hampton was killed, among many similar events, a number of filmmakers began to cast law enforcement in a bad light. Watergate and the Vietnam War also prompted the same for the CIA and U.S. military brass.
More recently, public perceptions of the FBI were altered dramatically with the disastrous siege of the Branch Davidian cult at Waco, Texas, the Bureau’s tragic encounter with militia types at Ruby Ridge and the fiasco of making Atlanta Olympics bombing suspect Richard Jewell into a supposed public enemy without ever charging him.
“It’s not like they’re saying the whole government is corrupt,” said Kleinhans. “The whole idea is that there’s some deceitful person within the CIA, or there’s some very powerful person in the executive, or sometimes a senator–some person who has some kind of inner connection to things. But it’s one bad element. We can excise that, and then things will return to the way they should be.”
Furthermore, having the bad guys as government types adds complexity and tension to a film that you wouldn’t find in the movies of World War II, Kleinhans said. “It’s taken for granted that of course the good guys are going to win,” he said. “But it’s more interesting if you know that there’s something subversive within your own element.”
Inside the FBI
As for the FBI’s movie image, that has long been the province of the Bureau’s five-person Washington-based “Fugitive Publicity Office,” whose principal mission is to use the public to help capture criminals by such means as TV’s “America’s Most Wanted,” radio, wire service reports and newspaper stories.
According to Rex Tomb, a 28-year FBI veteran who has been supervisor of the office since 1987, the bureau has not launched any special publicity campaign to refurbish its image in the wake of Waco and Ruby Ridge.
But it has continued to work closely with film and television producers, book authors and even comic strip writers in achieving “authenticity” in depictions of the FBI.
“We offer them whatever assistance we can,” Tomb said. “I would say if I saw a script that was totally malicious and completely off base, we might have second thoughts about cooperation. But I have to tell you, I think the best philosophy you can have is to offer the truth.
“We recognize the enormous value of motion pictures. You can’t spend that kind of money on a project and not have an enormous impact on perception, on the way people view the agency and the way it adheres to certain procedures and attitudes.”
The FBI did not, obviously, cooperate in the making of “Phenomenon” or “Eraser.” It did wholeheartedly in the production of 1991’s “Silence of the Lambs,” which dealt with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.
Tomb found that film and “Mississippi Burning” examples of authentic portrayals of the bureau. Both, of course, cast the FBI in a favorable light.
“I have to be aware that motion pictures are out there to make money,” he said. “I have to allow literary license on the part of a screenwriter, a director, or producer. . . . We understand that. By the same token, if they have our agents portrayed as unsupervised people who are not concerned about the rights of individuals, I guess there’s not too much I can do for someone like that.”
According to public affairs officer David Christian, the much-maligned CIA does not have an office like Tomb’s. While the agency is in a position to say, “that’s not how we do it,” it is not allowed to reveal how they do do it.
But the agency does cooperate with some movie producers. With others, it emphatically does not.
As for “Mission: Impossible,” which had Cruise penetrating into the very super secret innards of CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., “we did not cooperate with that,” said Christian.
The turn to government officials as villains has in part been prompted by the end of the Cold War and the elimination of the KGB as a monolithic enemy.
“That’s a big factor,” said Kopeloff. “You can’t go to Russia anymore and say which are the bad guys. The scripts coming in now have this focus on the Middle East, or you’ll see more about terrorism, the focus shifting against Americans within your own country.”
“I for one do not see this as a threat to the Republic,” said George Stevens, veteran movie producer and co-founder of the American Film Institute.
Calling the syndrome a recurring phenomenon rather than an accelerating trend, he noted that the government (at least the Congress) was painted in a bad light as far back as Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in 1939. In “Seven Days in May” (1964), Army colonel Kirk Douglas teams up with president Frederic March to thwart a plot led by right-wing general Burt Lancaster to take over the nation and launch World War III.
`JFK’ so bad it’s OK
Stevens and Kleinhans agreed that one of the most disturbing examples of this movie genre was 1975’s “Three Days of the Condor,” in which U.S. spook Cliff Robertson engaged international hit man Max von Sydow to do a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre number on a secret analysis section hidden in a Washington, D.C. brownstone, inadvertently sparing only Robert Redford.
“That film really is scary,” said Kleinhans.
Though Tomb called it “outrageous,” neither Kleinhans nor Stevens is that disturbed by the ultimate in U.S. bad guy movies, Oliver Stone’s controversial “JFK,” which depicted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a monstrous conspiracy involving practically every government agency in Washington, plus deputy sheriffs, hospital doctors, and Lee Harvey Oswald, too.
The next major G-man-as-bad-guy movie is a thriller called “Men in Black,” scheduled for release in 1997. It’s about a band of aliens who landed here secretly decades ago and quietly infiltrated the United States government.
At a time when both political parties have made Washington the enemy, what could be more villanious than bureaucrats from outer space?
