Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag arrives as a sleek spy film and becomes something much more useful: a story about trust, loyalty, intimacy, and what people owe one another when institutions become unstable. Jett and Gareth consider why this deceptively elegant entertainment feels unusually alive to its political moment.
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Oh, Gareth, oh, I'm very excited.
First, I have to ask you, though, is our OPSEC clean? Is our operational security clean? Should we be doing this in a skiff?
That is a topical reference, dear listeners, but it's also a reference to what we're talking about this week. I'm so excited to be back on The Film Talk. We're talking about what to watch this week.
I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins. The conversation never ends.
And Jett, of course, is referring there to wanting to be sure that when you're on a text message thread, you're talking to the people that you know you want to be talking to and then you're not talking to the people that you know you don't want to be
talking to. And the conversation never ends.
Of course, Jett, you are there referring to when you're on a text message thread, you want to be sure the people that you want to talk to are on it and the people that you don't want to talk to are not on it.
And we don't have that problem with the film talk because we know that everybody's here right here right now. Hello, dear listener. Thank you for joining us.
Who wants to be here and there's no illegality in us talking and recording and putting in the world and or inviting the listeners in.
Yes.
And even though everybody who wants to be here is here, we ask you, dear listener, I think there may be some people who don't yet know that they want to be here.
And you as our friends, as our loyal community, are the only people who can tell them that. So please do share the news that The Film Talk exists. It's back.
I met someone the other day who was a long-term listener in the past. Just found out that we rebooted the show a year ago. I guess that's what they call the long tail.
And so encourage, encourage, encourage. There's room for more. There's room for more.
Everybody's welcome here. Everybody's welcome.
Yes, even the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. And of course, we're bringing all those up, folks, because we're thinking about, you know, our complicated lives here in the Gulf, in American politics. See what I did there?
The Gulf of America joke. And thinking about what kind of media intersects with that or can help illuminate the time that we're in. And that leads us to Steven Soderbergh's new film, Black Bag.
Gareth, do we have a clip?
I believe. I can't be certain. We have a clip of something that may be from Steven Soderbergh and David Kemp's Black Bag.
I can feel when you're watching me.
Sorry. I like it. I understand this is not the casual dinner you prefer.
Yeah, it's an unusual group.
Data scraper, two agents and the in-house shrink.
What are we hunting this time? Severus.
And you think one of them took it?
Possibly. Hmm. It's been a while since we had a traitor to dinner.
At least knowingly.
We shouldn't be discussing this.
Yeah, probably not. I would have thought you'd start with polygraphs.
I wanted to try something more elegant first. What's on the menu?
Fun and games. Will there be a mess to clean up? With any luck.
So that is Black Bag.
And I thoroughly enjoyed this film.
And the way that I enjoy watching, I don't know, a circus acrobat trying out a new trick on a trapeze that, you know, they know a whole lot about how to use the trapeze, but they're going to do a particular kind of swirl and maybe, I don't know,
juggle some bowling pins while they're at it. Because this film, clearly for Steven Soderbergh, is a fun experiment at trying to get a little bit better at what he's already really great at doing.
That's one of the things I like the most about him is he just loves cinema and he loves learning.
I read an interview with him regarding this film saying, if you ask seasoned directors what's the most difficult kind of scene to shoot, that 90% of them will say a dinner party scene. And so what does he do in this film?
He has two dinner party scenes that are actually captivating and interesting.
And despite the fact that in some senses we've seen this before, we've seen the scene where two people who work for the same spy agency, in this case, Kate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, begin to suspect each other.
And we've seen global geopolitics play out on a very small canvas of ordinary individuals interacting with each other. Steven Soderbergh and David Kemp do this in a way that's really quite original.
One of the things that's original about it is that these people go to work. This is something you've taught me to notice in films. These people go to work in an office building.
They have a swipe card to get in. They have offices. They are doing kind of grunt work.
And that's the part that feels realistic about it.
And behind it all, it's really a film about marriage and trust and how even the most intimate relationships, no matter how long they've been together for, if those people are themselves growing, there's going to be need for the relationship to grow,
to contain the people within it. And aside from that, it takes place in a world that's recognizably like ours. There's references to things that are actually happening in our world. People who are actually trying to be dictators in our world.
And the people talk about those people the way you would imagine spies would. So nobody mentions Vladimir Putin's name. They just say, you don't just refer to him.
They just refer to him as The Frick.
The Frick.
And this is not a spoiler, because if you've seen the poster or known anything about the film, there's a lovely bit of... What would you call it, Jett, if it's stunt casting, but it's actually worthwhile as opposed to throw away?
Well, there's like three pieces of stunt casting, which is lovely, right? Because Soderbergh's not getting... They're not tapping him on the shoulder.
Amazon's not tapping him on the shoulder and saying, you are a guy now for Bond, right? Bond has been sold to Amazon.
Here's a couple hundred million.
Here's 200 million. Soderbergh's like, I'm not gonna get that tap, right? Not gonna get that call, but instead I'll make my own, right?
And so it has Bond. It's got Pierce Brosnan, right? He's James Bond.
It's got Moneypenny. It's got Damien Harris played Moneypenny. It's got Michael Fassbender, the great, the best James Bond we've never had who played basically James Bond in that X-Men 60s film.
And he was fantastic. And you realize... Days of future past.
I don't know. They all kind of blur, except the scene said in the 60s with Fassbender, you go, oh my God, he's wearing a turtleneck. He looks great.
He could play James Bond. So it is a smart, intelligent take on the Bond franchise at one level. It's a lot of things.
As you say, it's a romance. It's a romance.
Sure. And you actually get the sense that the Pierce Brosnan character, it fulfills the kind of role within the organization that he's working for, that a James Bond would be given as a pre-retirement gig. And they're all having fun.
I'm having fun watching it. Last thing I'll say about it is I realized toward the end, this is actually very similar. 30, what are we, 36 years.
Yeah, you're going to say it?
You're going to say the exact same thought I had, aren't you? Yeah, it's, it's, it's sexualized.
In some senses, it's a remake of sexualized videotape.
It's sexualized. And I watched it and I was thinking, oh my goodness, is this his last movie? Because this, in the coldness of it, in the inner relationships and the recordings of people, the recordings, oh my goodness, it's sexualized in videotape.
And, and, and no, it's not his last film because he's got three that are coming out next week.
And he's probably already made at least one.
Yes, we started recording this.
So I like it, but I like about the, you know, the, the, the fluid. I mean, he doesn't actually get compared to Clint Eastwood, but he works as fast as Clint Eastwood does. So fast.
And, and, you know, he, he, he, he uses pseudonyms to, to joke about the fact that he's the editor of his movies and he's the cinematographer of his movies and uses his parents' names as, as the pseudonyms for that.
And I just had a lot of fun watching this.
I actually had this sense of, it's one of those ones that these days, because of the greatness of the best US American television, and not just in the US, it's all around the world, that this could just as easily have shown up as an HBO made for TV
film. But I was glad to see it in a theatre. And despite what I said the other week, it was a theatre which had curtains. It was a theatre with curtains.
There is one in Asheville, North Carolina. But for some reason, the curtains are behind the screen. So they don't actually know...
How do you know they're there?
They're behind the screen.
They're at the edges. The screen comes out in front of them, and then there's back curtains behind that. So at least there's something there that has the hint, the frisson of...
Makes it theatrical.
A frisson of drapes.
I think that was one of John Schlesinger's early films, a frisson of drapes.
That sounds terrible.
So yeah, it was fun, but I'm looking forward to what you have to say about it, because I'm imagining, Jett, you're going to go deeper.
Well, you know, I try to. I'm not saying your analysis is shallow. Well, you brought up some interesting points that I'm going to address.
I'm throwing out my old notes. I wrote a couple of little scribblings while I was watching the movie. I like that you talked about, you know, it is the story of a marriage.
And this is a deeply romantic film, and you can see the spy craft as a metaphor for relationships, right? Because in the spy world, you never really know who the traitor is, who's the real mole.
It's like a metaphor for a relationship, right, dear listeners? Can you ever really know anyone? Does that person really love me, or is it just a show, a game, a mask, with eyes wide shut thing for something they can get?
And so if we see this in the context of the romance, the film works so well, and it's deeply romantic when we find out some information at the end of the picture.
But you brought something, talking about Soderbergh, just now, Gareth, because we're recording this in the context of this absurd ridiculous story about what's happening in American politics where folks were using a non-governmental authorized
application, they're using an off-the-shelf thing you can download to iOS and your iPhone to communicate war plans, and they accidentally invited the editor-in-chief of a magazine. And the thing is, that's a ridiculous story, and it's in such
contrast to the professionalism in Black Bag, where they actually mentioned, like, do we go to a SCIF, which is a secure rule, are we, are communication secure? They're professionals, whereas, and apparently in real life, they're not.
And this reminds me of Soderbergh's other, one of his other great realistic works, Contagion, which was about this virus and how the government and people respond.
And the thing is, Contagion's always been held up, like, this is so realistic, even during the pandemic, like, wow, he got so many things right.
The one thing he didn't is the one thing that never occurred to anybody, and that is the government would be so idiotic, they wouldn't want to respond. They would tell people to eat horse paste or drink bleach.
And that's the same thing that's happening in American politics now. So Black Bag looks realistic, except we realize these people are, well, how should I put it?
Before we talked about current American politics on the show, Gareth, I think I said the people that elected Trump were a coalition of the ignorant and the cruel. And I'm going to add one more word here.
And I think you might guess, Gareth, you're listening to the clip I'm going to play.
It's my favorite comedy line of all time, from Mel Brooks, Blazing Saddles, Seen Wilder talking to new sheriff in town, who is disappointed at the terrible racism he's encountered. Let's listen in.
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land, the common clay of the New West. Morons.
So there you have it, folks, morons.
So in some sense, for me, Black Bag Gareth is comfort food, because it's like watching Contagion where you have government folks, people who work in the government, who are tasked with protecting us, whether it be in Contagion, people at the Centers
for Disease Control or in Black Bag, British intelligence that are actually apparently competent and there to help. Sure, they kill each other, but that happens. For me, the film, like you, it was so much fun. What?
I'm talking, I'm doing a monologue like the classic Gareth Higgins monologue.
It's a delight, Gareth, because you sit back while you're paying attention, because you have to really pay attention to figure out what's going on, and it's a ride that you enjoy, you savor the moments trying to figure out who's playing who, and what
are the plans within plans, and it absolutely works in every level. So I loved it. Does that make sense? Is that like in the old days, they would give it stars or triangles or something?
It's 12 triangles, 12 triangles up, Gareth.
I think there's a couple of things that are really worth commenting on about this Signal Gate, as they call it.
First is my understanding is that the people behind Signal wanted to create an encrypted app, but it wasn't for the purpose of an authoritarian government to discuss this kind of stuff. The second thing is really serious point.
You already made this to me, and I think you texted me about this. That it's one thing that these war plans were disclosed to a journalist. And that's, I mean, I can't even think of the word for it.
But there should be at least as much concern about the fact that they were talking about murdering civilians in order to achieve a military end. And that the theology underpinning JD Vance saying, I'm going to pray for victory for our wars.
Again, no disrespect to people who choose to serve in the military, although obviously, I'd rather people be involved in peacekeeping actions.
But there's literally a part in that series of texts that should have chilled people to the bone, which is that the vice president of the United States responded excellent when he read that a building had collapsed, in which what they referred to as
the Houthi Missile Guy had gone to visit his girlfriend. Now, I get war is cruel. And I get, you know, like we've had many conversations about the theory of just war and, you know, transcending that with a conscious form of creative nonviolence.
And at the risk of diminishing all of this, if you look at Black Bag, because we're here to talk about movies and their meaning in the world, right?
If you look at Black Bag, there's chilling stuff in it because there are some people who get killed in Black Bag and it's dealt with cursor early, cursor early, cursor early, cursor early.
Well, you could say it's it's flippant because in the context of a romantic semi-comedy.
True, but I mean it's dealt with that in the way that one imagines people who work in that field have to deal with it.
Yes. The idea is because these people are all, they're even referred to, they're all sick and twisted. Everybody who's working there, their emotional lives are denuded and stretched so thin and wrapped that they're twisted people.
Sure.
So did you ever see Rob Reiner's film of Aaron Sorkin's script The American President?
Years ago, that's the one with Kirk Douglas' son, right?
Kirk Douglas' son, Michael.
And Warren Beatty's wife.
You're a man, a man always with the dignity. Annette Benning and Michael Douglas.
Was it before The West Wing?
It was before The West Wing. It was kind of a trial. It was kind of like a fizzy borderlines comedy with some depth to it.
There's a scene in that where they're in this, I guess, the situation room and they are planning to bomb or fire a missile on a strategic target in whatever country. I imagine they made up the name for the country.
That's what they always did in the West Wing was they invented the names of countries.
And you know, President Michael Douglas asks for intelligence about how many people are going to be killed and insists, I think he insists that they go back to the drawing board and find a target that's going to absolutely minimize what they call
civilian casualties, which is a euphemism. We're talking about killing people. Killing people.
The state killing people.
Yeah, killing human beings in our name. And they figure out a target.
My memory is that there's a janitor who's going to be killed and that they choose that target because they believe there's only going to be one person in it because they're going to bomb it overnight.
And somebody says, sorry, the anger that I feel right now, but the way cruelty is being politically weaponized is, is. I understand. It belongs in, it belongs here.
And I don't mean to be, it's not holier than though. I think we have to give a damn. So somebody says to President Michael Douglas, after he's made the decision to do this and given the go order, that was very presidential.
And Michael Douglas says, that's the least presidential thing that I do. And it has to be done because somebody has, when you're in this job, you have to do things like that from time to time.
That the thing that concerns me the most about the signal leak is the near absence of conversation about what they, about what they were talking about doing.
They think it's the most presidential thing they can do. They're getting off on that. There's zero consideration.
So I think what the numbers are, over 50 people died, right? Yes. It was just people living their lives, children.
They, it literally doesn't seem to cross their mind at all. And actually even more terrifying than that, I would argue, when you look at the White House Twitter feed or whatever they're calling it, X, they revel in cruelty.
There's, they're getting excited. I'm gonna say getting off. It's exciting them on a kind of Wilhelm Reich, you know, Orgone machine, mass psychology of fascism way.
It's exciting them to be cruel. And that's why I use the phrase coalition of the ignorant and the cruel. It is a terrible, horrible situation, which is why a film like Black Bag is, can be seen as a form of escapism.
As we see people as broken as they are, it's also a romantic film and they're also confident and not morons.
There's a lot more we could say, but I, you know, again, I don't want to.
Part of our problem right now is the lack of the way that the the what they call the democratization of media has shattered the guardrails and the gatekeeping, which has one fantastic upside, which is that anybody can publish their thoughts and
sometimes wise people, geniuses, people of compassion, people of competency get their voices heard in ways that they never would have in the past, because frankly, of the bigotry of gatekeepers. And clearly the downside is that anybody can publish
their thoughts. And a lot of those thoughts aren't even thoughts. They're just raw gut level emotion. And, you know, it comes no surprise to you that this point about the coalition of what did you call it, the ignorant and cruel, I get that.
It's clearly also the case that a lot of people who voted for these policies did so because of their own sense of pain and their belief that this guy can save them from it.
And that's under the ignorant box. That's an ignorant bucket.
So you mean the ignorant and like, you know, ignorant can be can be spoken in a non pejorative way, which is simply, I don't know. I don't know.
Yeah, there's people they don't, yeah, not aware.
Yeah. So, you know, whatever, maybe the best thing I could say is, like, the paradox at the heart of Black Bag is it is about these ugly things. And it does remind me a bit of things in the world that I don't really want to think about.
And yes, I do want to believe there are competent people working on our behalf.
But at the bottom line, the joy of this film is the joy of observing someone in the form of Steven Soderbergh taking pleasure in not only the craft he knows how to do, but moving the ball just a little further down the line.
He's a guy who improves with every film that he makes.
In such a light touch.
I so appreciate him for that.
Yeah, it's really, I mean, I don't want to minimize the pleasure in watching his film. And especially the more you know about films, it's so much fun to see how he moves his camera. And it's full of so many little jokes, even film with jokes.
For instance, one thing that my wife will tell you, we're watching a film, and there's one thing that will make me scream and throw something at the TV, and it's something that's so prevalent.
And that is the drone shot of a car going through the woods, you're way above looking down the car. And it's used so much. It's like every murder show, right?
Every cheap indie horror film, every regular horror film.
And in the old days, if you wanted to get a shot like that, you would have to rent a helicopter, you'd have to get skilled operators, it was expensive and it would make a huge impact on the viewer, right? The opening of The Shining.
Nobody had seen anything like that before, watching this little VW stick. That was a big deal.
In the film Silver Streak, I probably mentioned this on the show before, Silver Streak has a shot where the helicopter goes, you know, getting into, zooming into Gene Wilder, to mention him again, a couple of times this week, while he's on a train.
And that was like a really big deal. Now anybody with a drone, easy peasy, it's free, practically free. So the shot is used constantly.
So in Black Bag, incredibly well shot, well blocked, meaning where the actors are and how you move the camera to convey power dynamics. At one point, it cuts to a drone shot of a car going through the woods above. And I was like, what the hell?
Soderbergh, how could you use this cliched shot? And then what happened is the shot doesn't end, the drone crashes into the car, and then we get to a reverse shot of the car exploding. And it's clearly a joke about the overuse of drone shots.
It starts out as the classical drone shot, but then it just goes and blows up. So it's an F-U to drone shot. So the film is full of fun little bits of filmic business details.
Like during one of the dinner parties at the end, the guy that should have played, Mad Max, who's so wonderful and furious, Tom Burke. Love this guy.
Tom Burke.
Tom Burke, so great. They go to sit down for dinner and he goes, wait a minute, is that a new carpet? And then you realize, oh my god, why would you have a new carpet on the table?
Because someone's going to get killed. There's a plan. It's like that wonderful moment.
Heat is not my favorite Michael Mann film. Feath has got to be number one.
But in Heat, there's a scene where someone opens up the boot, they open up a trunk of a car, and you can just tell it's not zoomed in or cropped close, that the trunk is lined with black bin liners, black plastic bag.
It's like, oh god, something's going to get shot in there. So it's full of little details like that. I'll end by saying, if you enjoy, go see Black Bag.
If you enjoy, you might like one of Soderbergh's other spy thrillers, Haywire. I don't know if you've seen Haywire, which also has a fantastic scene with Michael Fassbender as well as a spy slash killer starring Gina Carano.
Is that how you pronounce her name? Gina Carano. It's her body and physical performance, and then her voice is played by different actresses, Flores and Giacomo.
But the two combo works great.
From Sex, Lies and Videotape.
From Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the combo works great, and that's a great little fun spy thriller as well. Black Bag, go see it. Final thoughts.
I think it's a go see it.
I want to ask, we haven't talked about, we didn't discuss this, we didn't rehearse this, we haven't planned this.
No, we never planned.
Shall we tell the listener about the-
No plans within plans.
Shall we tell the listener cursory, cursory? Cursory? Cursory.
Shall we tell the listener about the surprise, the surprise revelation we had last night when the death of one of the greats was announced. Then we discovered this is a person whose career we should really dive into and then do an episode about him.
Crispin Glover's dad passed away and what? Oh, you're not talking about Crispin Glover? Bruce Glover is great.
Bruce Glover only needed to be in Diamonds Are Forever to be immortal, but Richard Chamberlain died.
Richard Chamberlain did pass.
I have, we have in our house, we have these beautiful four 1950s, 1960s Canadian movie posters, beautifully mounted and framed and they are half the width of your typical US and American movie poster and one of them is for a film with Richard
Chamberlain, a comedy hospital film. I have to acknowledge I never really took Richard Chamberlain all that seriously. I do remember watching the first mini-series iteration of Shogun when I was about eight years old.
And I remember my mum having the Thornbird novel around the house. And he was a presence. He was there, but I never really took him seriously.
And then when he died yesterday, I looked at his filmography and you looked at his filmography. And what did you notice when you looked at his filmography?
This guy, what an amazing career. And I almost want to stop here, Gareth, because I think let's do a show on Chamberlain. We could do it as a bonus episode for our Patreon and Apple paying subscribers.
And we can watch Stormbirds, Shogun, so all episodes of Dr. Kill there, the Musketeer Pictures and the great Peter Weir film The Last Wave. So we have a lot of homework.
In 2027?
It's what I'm saying.
Let's do it next week if we can.
I'm going to watch The Last Wave.
Watch The Last Wave. You can't go wrong with Peter Weir, man. Cars that ate Paris.
That's a teaser, folks. We're going to do Richard Chablin as a bonus coming up for our fine-paying subscribers. Hey, thanks for listening to us.
You know, Black Bag, go see it. There's a lot of things to watch out there, but this one is extremely relevant.
This is an entertaining, great conversation. I guess this one as quick and as fluid as a Soderbergh, as a late Soderbergh.
We can only hope.
Of course, we don't hope for a late Soderbergh. We hope that late Soderbergh will make lots more films.
Again, he's probably made two more while we've been talking. Folks, thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to see Black Bag.
It's great. I've been Jett Loe.
I've been Gareth Higgins. We'll keep talking.
About Richard Chamberlain. Next time.