The Gray Man and how the CIA took over Hollywood

The Russo Brothers , who’ve directed Marvel money-churners like Captain America: Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame, know how to shoot super-kinetic, large-scale action scenes—we knew this much already. Look at the opening fight sequence in Winter Soldier, a spicy blend of spy-movie freneticism and martial arts precision. Or the battle royale that caps off Endgame, for that matter. This is why people were excited about the duo’s latest action thriller, The Gray Man , which released on Netflix on July 22.

The Gray Man stars Ryan Gosling as ‘Sierra Six’ a convicted murderer who accepts the CIA’s ( Central Intelligence Agency ) offer to become a black-ops assassin on their payroll. The film’s setup is fairly simple: during a routine overseas operation, Sierra Six discovers that Denny Carmichael (Rege Jean-Page), a rising star in the CIA, has been sanctioning off-the-books, illegal operations and orchestrating elaborate cover-ups to hide his corruption. Soon, Sierra Six becomes a hunted man, as Carmichael enlists the ruthless, sadistic mercenary Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, cast against type and having a lot of fun) to eliminate the threat. Hansen unleashes basically every international assassin he knows against Sierra, including the enigmatic Avik San/Lone Wolf (played by Tamil superstar Dhanush).

The Gray Man, sadly, has a rather generic and middling screenplay, because of which we never really invest in Sierra Six emotionally, even when he’s, say, risking his life to save a colleague’s daughter. Yes, some of the action scenes are competently mounted and both Evans and Dhanush seem to be having a good time (the former’s line, “Hello my sexy Tamil friend” has already become meme gold). But audiences expected more from the Russo Brothers, for obvious reasons.

The film is, however, a textbook example of the way Hollywood uses CIA narratives to push a subtly pro-military message—Sierra Six and Denny Carmichael’s story is supposed to tell us that the CIA is not fundamentally corrupt, merely spoiled by a few eggs. And even there, the Good Agent is cleaning up the mess created by the Bad Agents. It’s an old narrative switcheroo, one designed to deflect institutional criticism with individual exceptionalism. And in this gambit, The Gray Man is hardly alone. Ever since the late 1980s, at least, the CIA has been a big part of Hollywood action movies (the Jason Bourne movies, the Jack Ryan movies and now TV show, Jack Bauer in 24, Homeland; the list is endless) and in the 21st century, a lot of these movies were made with the active, ongoing help of the real-life CIA.

A history of violence

The CIA’s history of media manipulation and Hollywood interventions actually goes back to the 1970s, but the modern era truly began in the 1990s, when the agency officially appointed one of its officers, Chase Brandon, on Hollywood duty, so to speak—his brief was to improve the image of American intelligence officers in popular media. Through the 1990s, the super-patriotic Tom Clancy character Jack Ryan became the centrepiece of these propaganda efforts.

Between 1990 and 1994, superstar Harrison Ford portrayed Jack Ryan in a trilogy of films: The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). The overarching theme, of course, had to do with American exceptionalism—Jack Ryan is the only one who can save the day, and is therefore exempted from the regular rules of military engagement. Also, the movies paint a picture of America being constantly under attack by a never-ending array of malicious and unambiguously evil enemies. This allows American military and intelligence officers the moral license to, say, inflict heavy collateral damage, or torture people for “the greater good”.

In the 2000s, Ben Affleck played a younger Jack Ryan in the film The Sum of All Fears, while his then-wife Jennifer Garner starred in the espionage series Alias, where she plays a conscientious CIA super-spy. John Krasinski currently plays Jack Ryan in an Amazon Prime Video series that has finished two seasons, with a third season on the way soon. The mid-2000s were also dominated by Paul Greengrass’s Bourne trilogy of CIA thrillers, starring Matt Damon as amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne, who uncovers a trail of corruption in the agency. Like with The Gray Man, the Bourne films use the good agent/bad agent fallacy to deflect criticism of the CIA.

In his book Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, journalist Nick Schou details the history of the CIA’s interventions in Hollywood. Here’s what the book has to say about the super-popular TV show 24 (2001-2010), where Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Bauer, an intelligent and driven CIA officer who frequently uses torture and the threat of harming a suspect’s family members to extract information—again and again, said information proves to be vital to the capture of dangerous terrorists. In the post 9/11 media landscape, the show became a major talking point around the efficacy and morality of torture.

“Before Homeland, Alex Gansa worked as a writer on the seventh and eighth seasons of the Fox television show 24, the series that sparked a fiery debate over the way that it justified torture as a tool to fight terrorism. It’s difficult to conceive of a more blatantly manipulative TV show than 24 in the post-9/11 era, with its constant siege of ruthless enemies, countdown clock imagery, and pulse-pounding soundtrack, all serving to ratchet up the American people’s anxiety level and our willingness to accept extreme security measures in the name of public safety.”

In one of the most damning segments from the book, Schou describes a June 2011 meeting between then-CIA director Leon Panetta and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was then writing the script for the Kathryn Bigelow movie Zero Dark Thirty, about the capture of Osama Bin Laden, one of the most infamous terrorists of all time.

“According to a report by the Defense Department’s inspector general, the then-CIA Director Leon Panetta seemed to have stardust in his eyes over the prospect of a Hollywood version of the search for bin Laden. The CIA chief hoped that Al Pacino would play him in the movie. (The role went instead to the Sopranos star James Gandolfini.) Panetta allowed Boal to attend a June 2011 meeting at Langley that was closed to the press and attended by all the major players in the operation. The CIA chief also gave Boal names of people whose role in the mission was still secret, and shared other classified information with the filmmakers.”

Panetta comes across as a star-struck fanboy here — certainly not what the agency had in mind when they set about improving their image in popular media. But the passage is revelatory in terms of the leeway that the CIA gave Hollywood writers and directors. The CIA understands the value of Hollywood as a propaganda ally; having the right two or three Hollywood creators on your side is probably worth more than controlling a dozen newspapers or TV channels.

Sierra Six: A Tom Clancy character by proxy?

The Gray Man is based on Mark Greaney’s 2009 novel of the same name, the first one to feature the Sierra Six character. Greaney has since written over a dozen CIA thrillers featuring Sierra Six and clearly, the Russo Brothers and Netflix will be hoping that they can create a film franchise to match.

Greaney, of course, is best known for his Jack Ryan collaborations with Tom Clancy himself, towards the end of the latter’s career, when he was ailing. Clancy died in 2013, but not before Greaney had written three Jack Ryan novels based on plot outlines supplied by Clancy. After his demise, Clancy’s famous character was taken forward by Greaney for a further four novels.

In many ways, Sierra Six feels like a Tom Clancy character; the influences are not exactly subtle. Like Jack Ryan, Sierra Six is a somewhat taciturn man who opens up emotionally through the course of a long-winded series. Like Jack Ryan, he is totally invested in clearing up not only his own reputation, but also in “doing the right thing”, generally speaking. In other words, he is a modern-day version of the John Wayne stereotype: the conscientious, laconic all-American hero who lets his guns do the talking, more often than not.

And while Clancy stories aren’t exactly subtle, they do fit the political climate of 2022, it has to be said. America is losing faith in its public institutions but the military (and by extension, the CIA as well) remains the final frontier, the one thing that all of its citizens are expected to support whole-heartedly. In such a scenario, Netflix and the Russo Brothers should feel cautiously optimistic; American audiences have proven, time and again, that their appetite for CIA thrillers remains boundless. Despite a somewhat underwhelming first outing, my feeling is that we’re going to see a lot more of Sierra Six in the years ahead.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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