Citizen-Spy

74 Parody and the Limits of Agency
ridiculous notion. Or, to put it another way, the television spy of the 1960s is less
the subject of a narrative of nationalism and increasingly is subjected to the will
of the state. The contradictory discourses that undergird the 1950s spy programs’
construction of the spy as a national agent begin to unravel in the programs
that followed, confounding the possibility that the spy show might unproblematically
define the ideal citizen.
In many ways, the 1950s television spy narratives manifest what Daniel
O’Hara calls the fascistic imagination—both by constructing an idealized masculine
figure on whom rest the hopes and fears of the nation, and also by containing
any expressions of cultural, racial, or gender difference within those narratives.
2 These fantasies of absolute control, though, also bore traces of their own
impossibility. The harried father/undercover agent in I Led 3 Lives is little more
than a pawn, his sense of agency a fleeting, desperate myth; the man called “X” is
nameless, invisible; the putative authority figure operating “behind closed doors”
(the real agent, Admiral Zacharias) is but a place-holder, insufficient to the demands
of the national narrative; and Mel Hunter has simply withered away.
Part of what makes espionage narratives particularly revealing historical
texts is this central tension, the possibility that the spy’s status as a national
subject teeters on the edge of a “representational debacle.” Spy shows are more
than icons of nationalistic prowess; they are also sources of intrigue and curiosity
precisely because they reveal the limits of that prowess. Spy narratives’ myth
of agency demands an unlikely and unstable reduction of state power to the
figure of the individual agent. Thus while TV espionage narratives are often
overdetermined, marked by the heavy-handed and unquestioning authority of
the state, they are also shot through with “multiple misrecognitions” and unstable
conflations—the representational logic that reduces the national to the
individual collapses into self-referentiality and parody. 3
This collapse is the product of a number of influences, and can’t be simply
explained as the more or less inevitable formal and ideological devolution of a
genre. It’s very difficult even to characterize spy programs as a genre proper;
sporadic and inconsistent, these programs appeared in fits and spurts that were
more closely linked to shifting cultural and political conditions than to a linear
process of refinement, revision, and decay. The film genre criticism that emerged
in the 1970s and 1980s—influenced by a blend of structuralist anthropology
and Marxist cultural criticism—took as its principal object the iconic genres of