Spy vs. Spy (vs. Spy)

Errol Morris is but a pawn in John Le Carré's game

Hi, there.

I wrote the below post two weeks back, in what now feels like another decade. While my piece touches on geopolitics, the conflicts it deals with are more historical and internal than anything in the news right now.

For those, I’ll keep this short and current. I share Ezra Klein’s ghastly sense of deja vu, as if we’re witnessing a light-speed replay of the period in the U.S. between the September 11 attacks and the Middle East invasions, only in days instead of months — as events unfolded to create, as Klein says, “a permission structure in American politics to do incredibly stupid and brutal things.” But that’s an American perspective. I appreciated the closer-to-the-ground perspective I got from this conversation between +972 editor Amjad Iraqi, human rights lawyer Michael Sfard and LRB editor Adam Shatz.

That’s all I got for now, but we’ll be living through this together, and, I pray, talking more than fighting.

Ok, back to my dumb piece….

There’s a certain habit of speech that’s crept into the chattering class lately, and if you’ll permit me, I’d like to take a moment to note and pointlessly condemn it.

The habit, or tic, is to insert a question-inflected “right” into a longer discursive utterance. You drop a few of these pseudo-queries — “right?” — into your unbroken stream of conversation, without pausing for a response, simply to give a sense that you’re checking in with your interlocutor, right, making sure they’re still with you, right, and that you’re stating the obvious as you lead them to the real substance of your, right, inquiry.

Functionally, this may be nothing but a place holder — a smarter-sounding alternative to “um,” “er,” or, “like,” — and it exerts a pleasing affect": collegial, flattering, a bit conspiratorial. This, despite its implicit rhetorical function as a close cousin to petitio principii — a logical fallacy that also goes by the (widely misused) phrase “begging the question.” So that if there’s anything the slightest bit contentious about any of the assumptions that I’m nudging you to sign off on with my friendly little “right?,” that word suddenly feels less like a placeholder and more like the very mildest kind of micro-aggression. A nano-aggression, maybe.

Right?

Forgive me: paranoid, microscopic probing of conversational undercurrents is a common side effect of seeing recent Errol Morris films, the latest of which I caught at the New York Film Festival’s premiere of the The Pigeon Tunnel at Alice Tully Hall. Morris’ genteel, well-buffed portrait of the life and work of novelist John Le Carré goes down like a Bombay gin martini, smooth and tangy, but may leave you uneasy about the perils of conversational seductions like the one it puts onscreen.

In its framing and style, The Pigeon Tunnel comes on like a late-career meeting between two major craftsmen of narrative and deception: the towering novelist of espionage and political intrigue, David Cornwell (who published as Le Carré), and the auteur of epistemological inquiry, Errol Morris, whose dramatic cinematography, high-end musical scores, lush dramatizations, soul-penetrating closeups — plus the career-making home-run of freeing a wrongly convicted man with 1988’s Thin Blue Line — make him, at 75, a documentarian with his own luxury brand: whimsically curious, deeply researched, exquisitely made, and calibrated to a vaguely liberal-democratic morality. And though Cornwell died three years ago, at 89, I left Lincoln Center with the distinct sense that it was he, and not Morris, who ran this operation.

The film instantly drops you into a cool, luxurious sensory bath tuned to the polished, wintry, Oxford-adjacent world of its subject’s most famous Cold War novels like Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, which, like the Le Carré breakthrough, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, presented the intelligence agent as a kind of anti-James Bond: flawed, cerebral, sedentary, tortured by various internal demons. Morris places the playful yet saturnine author against a towering wall of books whose planes are interrupted and refracted by artfully placed mirrors — get it? We soon learn that the fictive world of Le Carré, like the troubled childhood of David Cornwell, is a hall of mirrors: con games, legerdemain, manipulations, double agents. Cornwell opens with a clear statement of this film’s brief: It shall be a collaboration between two interrogators.

But it’s instantly clear that this is no game of equals, that someone as amazingly adept at self-presentation as Cornwell has nothing to fear from his eager, well-funded interlocutor from Massachusetts. Cornwell begins by taking measure of Morris’s presence in earlier films: “Sometimes you’re a spectral figure,” he says. “Sometimes you’re God, and sometimes you’re present.” He likens this early, rapport-building banter to the kind he used to practice at the start of an interrogation of a source or asset. “It’s the bondingreal or artificial — that opens the door,” says Cornwell. At which point, the door flings open into a lustrous, meticulously-crafted cinematic treatment of Le Carré’s work and life.

The film is a feast, opening with a haunting image that provides the title for this film and for Le Carré’s 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, which Cornwell tells us was also the working title of nearly every novel he wrote. The image comes from a memory from Cornwell’s childhood as son of Ronnie Cornwell, an infamous serial conman with pretentions to English nobility. Morris pulls out all the stops to depict the primal scene in which young David sees his father entertaining a mark with the genteel English sport of pigeon shooting. As the two tweedy men ready themselves with their shotguns, the birds cluster together in the darkness of a hidden tunnel before a gate gets thrown and they make a mad, unknowing sprint across the shooter’s sight lines, the slow or unlucky ones blasted apart by buckshot.

As a writerly conceit, the pigeon tunnel is an obvious banger: a mordant perversion of the birth canal, the university, and a host of other institutions that launch new arrivals into a rigged game with unknown rules and mortal stakes— with the added grace note of incorporating slang for “dupe” or “patsy.” This much is pure Le Carré. It’s Morris who decides to literalize things for us by cutting from the formative bird-shooting gallery to the legs of a supine young woman wracked in the agony of labor. This is one of a few minor clinkers in this gorgeous movie, which brings the cast, locations, and production values of an entire feature-length Cold War thriller to bear on his signature dramatizations, along with previous film adaptations of Le Carré novels.

The Pigeon Tunnel locates the novelist’s origin story in Berlin, where the newly-minted secret service operative was posted just before the erection of the Berlin Wall. Newsreel footage and Hollywood films enable a poetic cross-cutting between fact and Le Carré’s fiction: from a female escapee from East Berlin dangling from a fire escape before she falls from sight, and nearly the same composition from the climax of 1965’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, when Claire Bloom’s doomed asset Nan dangles from the grip of Richard Burton’s Wall-straddling spy, before she’s shot and, like the newsreel blonde, plunges to the pavement.

As narrated by Cornwell, the Berlin posting left our young intelligence operative disenchanted before he’d begun. First, when he noted high-ranking Nazis in the upper tiers of German government. Then, when the erection of the Berlin Wall made him see that “both sides were inventing the enemy that they needed.” Around here, childhood trauma blends with vocational crisis to make betrayal the animating theme of Le Carre’s psychologically penetrating fiction, one almost too-perfectly personified by arch-traitor Kim Philby, real-life model for Bill Haydon, the charming British spymaster and incalculably destructive Soviet mole at the center of Le Carré’s twice-adapted masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Cornwell colors his psychoanalysis of Philby with the same shades he used for his father Ronnie. To Philby, betrayal was a vice: He was “addicted to betrayal,” Cornwell explains, he sought the “joy of self-imposed schizophrenia,” a vice that lends the traitor a feeling of being “at the center of the world.”

As brilliant in conversation as he is in print, Cornwell often seems a few steps ahead of Morris, raising a wintry eyebrow to Morris lobs like “You strike me as an exquisite poet of self hatred.” (“That sounds about right.”) If the film is a game of wits, the stakes couldn’t be lower for Cornwell. The Pigeon Tunnel does nothing to Le Carré’s legacy that Cornwell himself hasn’t done, either in the  near-roman-a-clef A Perfect Spy, or in the carefully managed memoir from which this film takes its name.

But in its air of chummy collegiality, The Pigeon Tunnel also doesn’t do much for the legacy of Morris, whose description of Cornwell as “collaborator” presumably also applies to previous subjects like Donald Rumsfeld, Steve Bannon, and Elizabeth Holmes. The consequences of which made me wonder whether wonder whether Morris intentionally sought the safer harbor of an eighty-something literary figure with a very stable public image.

In 2021, Errol Morris made an unintended appearance in Alex Gibney’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary The Inventor, which includes clips of him giving the now-imprisoned fraud behind Theranos the Errol Morris treatment: lambent, intimate close-ups of the blond wunderkind who looks unblinkingly into Morris’ patented interrotron as she spins yet another Boomer like a top. If Documentary Now hadn’t already parodied Errol Morris, this would more than serve.

But since they were ultimately works for hire, these ads were less of a bummer than his 2018 film American Dharma, which I struggle to defend against the criticism of “platforming” the man who propelled the most prolific and highest-profile liar of our time to the US presidency. Going deeply into the fantasies, beliefs, and worldview of this apparent Goebbels, Morris’s sympathetic approach was fundamentally ill-suited to someone who scorns the idea of non-fiction, documentary, or any truth-telling media.

“Reality did not exist in my childhood,” Cornwell tells us. “Performance did.” Later, he shares what he calls a common late-career discovery of intelligence agents, that “the inmost room is bare,” and the only secrets at the core of everything are the futility and self-delusions of the secret keepers. This statement may be true, but it’s also a characteristically brilliant deflection of further probing. One that Morris, characteristically, seems inclined to honor. As their time together winds down, he asks Cornwell what he thinks viewers of this autumnal portrait are hoping to see: “Do they want you to break down and sob?” “I can do that,” Cornwell offers. “I can also do bird songs.”

No one should expect an all-but-commissioned film like this to offer a soul-penetrating vision of the man who provided three-quarters of its narrative, and whose two sons are co-producers. But with its implicit contention that there’s no there there, Pigeon Tunnel sits oddly alongside Morris’s 2017 Netflix miniseries WORMWO0D, which comes to the exact opposite conclusion. WORMWO0D follows government scientist Frank Olson, who, after work on the CIA’s brain altering experiments with Project MKUltra died in a suspicious fall from a high window of a New York City hotel. Using extensive interviews with Olsen’s adult son, that series rendered unforgettably vivid dramatizations of the elder Olson’s manipulation by his colleagues, and his very likely murder at their hands. And by giving reporter Seymour Hersh an opportunity to verbally confirm something he couldn’t do in print without burning a source — that this was indeed state-sanctioned murder — WORMWOOD deserves greater recognition as one of the most important documentaries of last decade.

Before The Pigeon Tunnel played at Alice Tully Hall, with composer Philip Glass in the audience, Errol Morris came out for some brief remarks: gray blazer, white button-down shirt, khaki pants, blue boat shoes. Blinking in the lights, he gave the impression of a lumpy and aged Michael Cera. Thanking NYFF for their early support in hosting his breakthrough, 1978’s Gates of Heaven, he recalled an early slight by someone who’d come up to him after a screening and said his film would’ve been better if it were cut in half. To which, Morris delighted in telling us, he said: “I feel the same way about you.”

After the end credits, he sat for a brief Q&A with an NYFF presenter, calling the Cornwell-described Soviet practice of “enforced forgetting” something “Ron DeSantis would like.” He entertained Cornwell’s assertion that there’s an objective truth that stands apart from the subjective truth perceived by individuals. He also said that when someone once asked him what the difference was between documentary and drama, he’d said “two zeroes.” He then moved to open the floor to questions from the audience, calling on a woman halfway back in the 1,000-seat concert hall. She’d had the sense that Cornwell was steering away from a certain topic near the end of the film and asked Morris if he’d felt that way too, that Cornwell was holding something back. This question was not well received.

“This is the craziest kind of question,” Morris began.“Forgive me if this sounds insulting,” he continued. “Because it is.” He went on to explain that his films aren’t interrogations but conversations, and said that, even in Thin Blue Line he was just a schmo asking other schmo’s questions. “It’s not an interrogation,” he insisted. “Because it isn’t. It never is.”

Thus endeth the Q&A.

Errol Morris (left) might prefer you were cut in half.

Errol Morris may not have a hardball in his pitching arsenal, but he sure had no problem nailing one lone woman in a crowded theater. Part of the reason I want to stand up for her, aside from dismay at causeless bullying, having read pretty much every John Le Carré book including the recent collection of private letters, I found myself wondering the same thing she did. Near the end of The Pigeon Tunnel, as the film pulls back into summary mode, Cornwell alludes to sex and other topics that a gentleman knows are beyond the scope. The guy is so damned cool that I’d be inclined to agree with him, if the actual betrayals — of the women in Cornwell’s life — weren’t such glaring absences in this purported investigation of betrayal in family, life, and art.

It’s a shame too, since a larger sense of betrayal is so widely and deeply felt right now. In a persuasive piece in The New Republic, Ana Marie Cox places this feeling at the center of our shared, collective trauma. “In the past seven years, the country has sustained significant, repeated damage to its institutions,” she writes, listing “the courts, elections, law enforcement,” among successive blows that fell upon bruises, and “are especially deep because we have come to understand every single one of them as a betrayal: It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The government was supposed to work. The planet shouldn’t turn on us. We are a democracy with an orderly and peaceful transition of power. Children should not be shot at school.” Instead, we’re all in the pigeon tunnel.

Near the end of the film, Cornwell says “My job is to make credible tales out of the worlds I have visited. Or that have visited me.” Some might say the same of documentary filmmaking, but it’s crucially a different job. Morris is arguably the biggest influence on today’s younger, stylish, less accuracy-bound documentarians, whose works feature wildly varying ratios of the two components of the genre “creative non-fiction,” which gave me a creepy feeling as I watched this film. A feeling that I wasn’t hearing an interview, but dialogue.

As someone who writes non-fiction, I know that prevaricating, misattributing, condensing, and lying are somewhere between sins and tools of the trade. My Kim Philbys include Stephen Glass,James Frey, Jayson Blair, and a few who haven’t been exposed. And I’d like to decommission Mike Daisy, Hasan Mihaj, and other purveyors of “emotional truth.” And as stylish as it is, The Thin Blue Line was a triumph of reporting as much as cinema. But I have no idea if Errol Morris feels that way today.

The Pigeon Tunnel is a seductive film that I’m eager to watch again, partially to marvel at the smoothest, most cogent and fluent 89-year-old I’ve ever seen. But I also want to tell its director that, if he gives any interviewer worth their salt an answer like the one he gave the audience member in Alice Tully Hall, they’re not going to blush and fade into the woodwork. They’re going to know they hit a nerve and push you harder.

It’s a truism that fact does not equal truth, but there’s still a difference between fiction and non-fiction. Today, the space between non-fiction and lying is an active battlefield, a power vacuum flooded daily with opportunists, grifters, propagandists, and other entrepreneurial sleeveens. I can't fault Morris if he wants to step out of this arena. If he really feels that the only difference between a doc and a drama is two zeros, best to leave nonfiction to the diehards.