you watch at least an episode each day – how less and less time is given over in the series to the necessary agonizing over these sorts of difficult moral decisions. Speed of (non) thought can become a habit. Lack of attention to nuance can become a propensity not just to decisiveness but also to rude calculation, to carelessness, to sociopathic judgement. At the same time as this rather conventional philistinism, Spooks displays a gleeful, postmodern abandon in its representation of self. Set up as a drama about people who are always pretending to be other people in order to discover the truth about other people, who are also often pretending to be other people, the characters become less and less sure about their own identities, about identity itself, as well as about whom to trust. This hall-of-mirrors, multiple-personality, fractured-identity feature of the show reaches its apogee in the character of Lucas North, played by Richard Armitage. When he first appears in the show, North, arrested while on operation, has been (tortured) in a Russian prison for 8 years. He is returned to the UK as part of a swap. This is pretty generic so far. And, as we need to root for a new hero, North is a good operator: tough, resilient, and resourceful. But it begins to emerge that he is not who he says he is. He has in fact murdered another young Englishman (the real Lucas North) while working abroad in Senegal. The real Lucas North had already been selected for MI5, in which our hero seamlessly takes his place, incredible though it may seem that a security service dedicated to identifying people by ransacking and playing with identities cannot identify someone it has itself selected. But what we now have is not only an actor playing a character who plays other people, but an actor who plays a character who is playing another person playing other people. As representative realists, 4 we may be used to the idea that what we experience is not the external world, but only an image or a representation. But the spooks, the spectres, or the ghosts, seem to be mounting up in this increasingly crazed scenario. 5 The show – in its representations of the blurrings and overlappings between actors, spies and ordinary people, in its depiction of betrayal, deception and ambiguity as the common currency of social exchange – is a smorgasbord of self-referentiality, that jewel in the crown of postmodernist literary theory. Of course, committed postmodernists will relish noting that we are watching actors playing people who are acting in a drama where their job is to play a part (as well as, out of duty, their part). Further, as new actors are brought in for maternity cover, to bring fresh blood, or to allow a departing actor’s career move, those actors are very clearly try ing to prove themselves. Has their ‘performance’ been good enough to warrant a ‘run’ in the team? Has their audition for MI- 5, or ‘MI - 5’, been successful? But perhaps Spooks does display and play with these postmodern insights: the self is multiple; the common observation about some actors – that they seem not to have their own personality at all – is actually true of all of us. 6 Or, to put it another way, we delve 4 A respected colleague once asked me (rhetorically, of course): ‘Surely we are all representative realists?’ For a good introduction to John Locke and representative realism, see Dunn 2003. 5 In his book Spectres of Marx , Jacques Derrida, in his typically punning way, introduced the concept of ‘hauntology’ (which, in French, sounds very much like ontology ). Ghosts of the past, neither quite absent nor present, haunt our present. Aren’t characters on TV or film always sorts of ghost? For Derrida on spectres and screens, see 1993: 100 —1: ‘ The spectre is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects — on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition. ’ 6 Thomson 2015, mainly concentrating on the differences between Olivier and Brando, is an excellent investigation of this topic.
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