Compromise and Conceit

Out of a lack of good sense I started watching the new Netflix show The Diplomat, which is basically about a woman called Katherine Wylder who gets appointed US ambassador to London just as an enormous shitshow of international relations swamps the post. She gets entangled in this quite complex international conspiracy while trying to negotiate her failing marriage with a man called Hal who is a former ambassador now relegated to house-husband duties, and struggling with her own feelings of inferiority in the role.

I think it’s quite poorly acted and at times poorly written, but the plot is fun and most of the British characters (not the Americans, sadly) are quite fun. The British PM is obviously intended as a slightly less on-the-nose version of Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary (Denison) is a beautiful man with a great voice and a nice delivery, and the depiction of UK parliamentary politics and the seediness of the Tory party is quite fun. Unfortunately it suffers from several flaws: all the main characters are absolutely awful, the acting and dialogue is overblown, and it suffers from that kind of weird nationalist/liberal self-aggrandisement that characterized shows like The West Wing and that godawful series about political journalists, and that has infected every hypocritical late night TV comedian and democratic operative. In this case the lack of self-awareness, the hyping of American goodness, and the ignorance of America’s past or responsibilities, is so extreme that I can’t think of anything else to say about it except that it’s fascist.

I hate to be one of those people who says all modern media is fascist, but by god when I watch shows like this I can’t help but fall into that melancholy trap. Before I explain / rant about that aspect of the show, however, some thoughts about the awfulness of the main characters.

How awful does a character have to be?

It’s interesting how far the show goes to absolutely debase the two main characters. Kate Wyler is an atrocious human being, a bully to her junior staff and a histrionic fool around her husband. She is also weirdly disgusting, or at least the show sets out to make her behavior repulsive – the way she eats, the way she makes her husband sniff her armpits and pisses in front of him, the weird way she flirts, it’s all awful. It’s particularly weird because she’s flirting with the foreign minister, Denison, who is a beautiful, splendid figure of a man who could have any woman he wants, but we’re meant to believe he somehow finds her attractive after all the grossness we’ve seen from her. It doesn’t make sense.

Beyond her physical grossness, Kate Wyler is an awful person. She loses her temper instantly with people beneath her, but knows full well to suck up to the people above her, she blows hot and cold with her peers and yells at them for perfectly reasonable mistakes or misapprehensions. She constantly changes her tone with her husband, who we’re supposed to believe she’s divorcing while she’s constantly getting him to do stuff and regularly begging to go back to him. She tells everyone she doesn’t trust him but believes every one of his lies, tries to be a strong and independent woman but is hamstrung by constantly comparing herself to him, blames him for getting people killed in Afghanistan but admires his bravery and initiative … Every episode is a constant rollercoaster ride on her irrational rages and intemperate assumptions and judgments. I think this is made worse by the actor, who seems unable to achieve any acting register between flat and screaming rage. In every scene Kate is on the verge of exploding, or is overwhelmed with sentimentalism.

Meanwhile her husband is a shifty, lying, feckless, deceitful man who respects no one, and lies to everyone to achieve what he thinks is right. He never communicates clearly, doesn’t listen, and is pursuing his ambitions individually and through his wife, who he is manipulating towards a position of higher power. Nobody with any self-respect would stay married to this shiftless little shit. Except Kate Wyler, of course, who is meant to be a picture of independent womanhood while she has allowed herself to be abused and misused by this cockhead for 12 years.

Also, Kate Wylder has a weird attitude towards femininity, a classic American woman’s double standard. She hates wearing dresses and seems to not know how to wear them or high heels comfortably – an impossibility for a female ambassador from her social background – and hates the very idea of being seen in a dress, which is demeaning to her. Until she needs to flirt with Denison, the night she’s planning to fuck him, when suddenly she can comfortably wear a sexy red gown. A classic madonna/whore complex. Thanks, Netflix, for presenting me with such a novel approach to modern femininity! Furthermore, every couple of episodes we get presented with some weird problem with her clothing – a stain on a grey suit, or needing to use a paper clip to fasten her pants even though she’s staying in a noble house with a staff of fifty, none of whom seem to have access to a sewing kit. This is awkward, makes her seem uniquely unfeminine and also entirely unsuited to the role of ambassador, and after a couple of incidents begins to seem strangely perverted on the part of the writers[1]. Why do we have to be subjected to this? It may be part of the broader sweep of establishing Kate as a highly-strung, somewhat messy person – we also see her using her knees as a writing table when she’s sitting at a table, forgetting her reading glasses before an important meeting, and constantly forgetting to carry the script of her speeches – but I think it works better to make the viewer feel gross, and to establish a strangely voyeuristic perspective on the main character.

Finally, the other big problem with Kate Wyler is that she is a bully. She sucks up to people above her, like the British PM and Foreign Secretary and the US Vice President, and punches down at her staff and other weaker people. She yells and bristles and snaps at her underlings, doesn’t let them finish sentences, and overrides their suggestions to her own detriment. In the presence of her underlings she always believes she knows better, but in the presence of the VP, for example, she instantly accepts every correction no matter how stupid, and she is deferential to the PM and Foreign Secretary, who she also stupidly decides is “a very good man”. She has a similar deference to her husband, who through most of their relationship has been her superior and who she believes is the “most intelligent man” she has ever met (spoiler: He’s a fucking idiot, but a good liar), and who she consistently trusts and makes schemes with despite her clear knowledge that he’s a liar and a selfish prick. It takes her five minutes of vicious and unnecessary scolding by the VP to decide that this stupid, evil woman is a truly amazing and superior person, only to discover five minutes later that the VP is neck deep in the evil scheme that nearly killed her husband and colleagues. In contrast, and as an absolutely perfect representation of what a dickhead she is, early in season 3 – after she has been attacked for her bad hair by the VP – she is assigned a decoy, a woman who looks vaguely like her and walks around everywhere with her. She very quickly starts insulting this woman’s hair, offering to buy her a hairbrush as some kind of cheap joke. This woman’s sole purpose, her entire job, is to die in Kate’s place, but because she’s lower on the pecking order Kate thinks it’s alright to insult her appearance. She’s a classic bully, easily cowed by people with power and quick to attack people over whom she has power. And like all bullies, she deserves everything that’s coming to her. Someone should tell her what happened to Indira Gandhi after she insulted her bodyguards.

This is the couple that are meant to carry us through this show! It’s yet another example of the modern trend among so many TV shows and movies of presenting us with main characters with whom we either have nothing in common (see e.g. Succession) or who are genuinely awful, despicable people (see e.g. The Punisher).

Fortunately this show has a cool mystery plot running through it, a large part of which is driven by the misjudgements and chaotic decision-making of the main two characters, so I can put up with them (for now) in order to see where the plot takes me. But on top of that, this show is steeped in the fascism of modern American empire, and so it is appropriate, given how impossible it is to avoid the fascist gloss, that the two main characters defending the interests of empire are despicable people. They should be! But let’s talk about that fascism.

The liberal gloss on horror

The plot at the center of this show concerns a secret scheme within two governments to provoke some kind of confrontation between the UK and Iran, by way of Russian proxies, which goes horribly wrong and requires Kate and Hal to work very hard to prevent a major war. This plot and the histories of these two characters means that the last thirty years of American misdeeds loom large in the background of the story, and the involvement of the UK means that the entire thing happens in the context of the “special relationship” between the UK and the USA. This means that the story writers have to grapple with the legacy of US violence back as far as the second Iraq war. They do this by presenting the USA as a force for good that occasionally made some genuine mistakes, and the “special relationship” as largely one between peer nations. What this essentially requires them to do is throw a gloss of liberalism over three decades of some of the most violent, destructive behavior since world war 2.

An early conversation between the UK and US representatives about a decision to bomb some Russian mercenaries in Libya is instructive. In this conversation we learn that the Russian mercenaries have been invited to Libya by the Libyans to help them fight bandits and jihadists. With no effort made to discuss why “the Libyan Government” needs help with jihadists, the conversation proceeds to mention that “the Libyan Government” has repeatedly asked the US to help them with these jihadists, but the US has refused. From there our heroes decide that therefore it’s a good thing that the UK is going to bomb the Russian mercenaries, since it will help “the Libyans” with their “Russian problem.”

What’s weird about this? I put “the Libyan government” in quotes because there are currently two Libyan governments, one supported by the UN and one not, because the country was bombed to rubble by the USA, UK and France in 2011, for no reason, and in the chaos that followed the country has been reduced to ruin. This is the origin of the jihadist problem! Which the US, in this show, repeatedly refused to help the Libyan government solve. So now they’re going to “help” the Libyans with their “Russian problem” by bombing the mercs that are helping the Libyans deal with the jihadists the US created.

All of this is presented to us, the viewers, as if it were simply the natural law of the earth that Libya should have a jihadist problem and the US should decline to help. No context or backdrop at all, just a set of facts of nature. Similalry, we are regularly reminded that the Iranians are “crazy” and hate America, but nobody at any point ever tries to reason out why or to explore this craziness at all, even after the Iranian ambassador mentions that US sanctions are ruining the Iranian economy. Similarly, the Russians are “crazy” – they might nuke you or they might do nothing, says Hal. It’s simply impossible to conceive of any country except the UK or the USA having reasons for what they do, or motives of their own, or objectives other than getting in the main characters’ way.

It is very difficult for me now to watch these shows, after decades of my adult life have passed watching the USA do one awful thing after another, and to see the terrible things that have been done suffused into the backdrop in just such a way as to make all the consequences of those terrible actions seem like natural laws or facts of nature. In shows like this the main characters are the key agents of this grasping, violent, consistently criminal power, this clique of gangsters at the heart of the international order. They’re soldiers or special forces or diplomats or politicians constantly negotiating a dangerous world where the actions and motives of enemy states don’t make sense and the threats and risks that they have to negotiate come out of nowhere, are just flat and empty historical facts without rhyme or reason. This is necessary for narrative reasons – no one wants to spend two episodes explaining why everyone hates the main characters! – but it’s also very convenient for the American Exceptionalists who write this trash. They can foreground the importance of America as “leader of the free world” (they actually use this phrase, can you even?) and the challenges it faces in maintaining the “rules-based order” (which they long since turned into might makes right), and absorb all the underpinnings of this shitshow that their nation created into just a wallpaper of carnage and ruin. And we, as the viewers, get inured to this increasingly violent world, forced to accept the main characters’ dangerous opponents and the compromises they have to make to deal with this “adversity” the same way we accept predators and bad weather in a wildlife documentary. Look at the brave cheetah facing off with the hyenas in the rain! Nothing we can do about the laws of nature, is there?

It is also made very obvious to the discerning viewer at a certain point that this whitewashing of America’s misdeeds, the careful elision of all its historical crimes, and the representation of the “special relationship” as a union of approximate equals, is deliberate. The purposive nature of this process is made clear to us in the episode of (I think) Season 2 where the Americans and British are going to do some sly negotiations on the sidelines of a major dinner to celebrate “The Dreadnought Deal”, which one American laughs is still referred to as “the stab in the back” by the French. Why are the French angry about this deal, and why is it a bit tricky to hold meetings at this dinner? Because “The Dreadnought Deal” was an arrangement where the Australian government had agreed to buy French submarines but then suddenly of its own volition inexplicably changed its mind and “decided” to buy British submarines. This is a thinly veiled reference to the AUKUS deal, in which Australia’s most pathetic PM in a long run of pathetic PMs backed out of a practical, reliable agreement with the French to buy actual submarines, and allowed our country to be bullied into signing a ludicrously overpriced deal with the Americans to buy submarines that the USA has no capacity to make and will never deliver, and that we couldn’t operate anyway even if we got them. It was a stab in the back for not just the French, but for the Aussie taxpayer too! But in this story, it is carefully reimagined so that the USA is an innocent, independent observer of a slightly inexplicable sovereign decision by those reckless Aussies.

Fuck off!

And as America sinks into fascism, so all the symbolism and rhetoric of their degenerating political order gets recast as neutral backdrop against which the show’s main characters have to do dark deeds and cut sinister deals and make bad compromises. The security theatre, in which Kate is hustled from room to room and building to building by nameless men in suits, where she is assigned a low-level decoy girl whose sole job is to die on command, where snipers and heavily armed police merge quietly into the backdrop of the regal buildings she inhabits – this increasingly violent and militarized performance becomes as natural to the viewer as the sandstone of the diplomatic residence. The particular jargon of American militarism – of “assets” and “operators” and being “read-in” and “clearances” – becomes normalized along with the constant suspicion of the security state, its background checks and threats of violence. When one character, Stuart, begins to doubt his role as an agent of the imperial power, his former girlfriend Park, a CIA agent, warns him about all the terrible things that will happen to him if he resigns in protest, of how his life will be ruined, as if they were events as natural and as inevitable as December frost, even though she, as a senior representative of that power, would be responsible for doing them to him. And then she immediately asks him to come back to her, having just threatened to wreck his life as easily as you or I would talk about squashing a bug. This cruel, violent, paranoid calculus becomes the ordinary substrate of the story, a world of imperialistic fascism that suffuses the show and impels us, the viewers, to accept and ignore it.

It’s disgusting. And it’s weird that as the US slides down its blood-slicked slope into fascism, dragging the entire “rules-based order” with it, these otherwise-intelligent, well-educated writers and dramatists insist on continuing to tell us these stories, from these perspectives. There is another story that could be told here, of an ordinary partner of one of the sailors who dies in episode 1, trying to uncover the truth of the events that led up to his death and slowly untangling an international conspiracy of the worst kind, maybe finding allies on both sides of the Atlantic who are willing to use his or her quest for justice as a tool in their own political games. This story could unfold over several seasons with the same shenanigans, and the same plots, even some of the same characters, being exposed from outside. The same fascist backdrop would be there but now it would obviously, clearly be wrong, a twisted world order that is alien and unfamiliar to the ordinary soldier’s spouse trying to uncover the truth. None of this fascism would be taken for granted in that story.

Which is why that story wasn’t written, and we got dragged into this one instead.

The self-defeating feminism of angry spies

I guess, though, if you were watching your country slide into fascism, it might make you angry and kind of desperate, which is the primary attitude of Kate Wyler during much of this show. She is constantly angry and flying off on weird rages, jumping to conclusions and demanding action on her assumptions – which repeatedly are revealed to be wrong, including in the absolute banger reveal at the end of season 3 – and getting people killed as a result. It’s not just her, though – almost every woman in the show is mean, cynical and impossible to deal with. Consider:

• Grace Penn, the VP, makes a clear point of being directly, unpleasantly rude to Kate Wyler the first time she meets her, and almost never tries to politely ask people to do things. Plus, of course, she’s up to her neck in a terrible, murderous conspiracy
• Eedra Park, the CIA station chief in London, is incredibly cold towards her “boyfriend”, Stuart, uncompromising on every decision she makes, completely unwilling to discuss her feelings in or out of work, largely lacking in respect for other people’s privacy, and incredibly mean to her ex (the honeytrap thing is devastatingly nasty, not to mention cheerfully telling him how his life will be wrecked by people like her if he shows a shred of conscience)
• Billie Appiah, the Whitehouse Chief of Staff, lies to everyone including people very close to her, is a manipulative and cold-hearted fiend, and never shows any kindness to anyone

In contrast, men like Stuart, Foreign Secretary Denison, and the weird pointless MI6 spy who turns up out of nowhere in season 3 are, broadly, soft-spoken, well-mannered, polite, kind and engaged. They pay attention to others’ feelings, try not to be mean when asking people to do things they don’t want to do, express their feelings towards the women around them in heartfelt, meaningful language, and generally behave like good colleagues.

This show was written by a woman, about a group of powerful women, but the behavior of those women is more like Selling Sunset than Downton Abbey, that’s for sure. Is it the screenwriters’ and directors’ view of working women, that they’re the perfect stereotype of shrill harridans? Do they think screaming and yelling and making unhinged demands that get people killed, threatening and entrapping your ex partners, and being cold and mean to everyone, is model behavior for women at work? Why don’t they expect the same reckless and psychopathic behavior of men? Is there no other model for how powerful women should behave? Because after three seasons of this, it certainly seems to me like Debora Cahn (the writer) hates women, and admires and loves men.

Television should do better than this

I really, really wish that script writers and directors would try a little harder than this. They’re paid a lot of money to do this stuff, they work in complex teams with lots of feedback from multiple colleagues and the actors themselves. How do they manage to give birth to these awful characters? How do they sustain them through the process of all the writing and directing and acing, and still think to themselves that what they’re producing is a worthy meditation on the human condition, on women at work, on marital relations, or on global politics? Do they see it at some point but think oh well, there’s too much invested in this now, let’s just keep spitting out this corrosive poisonous trash?

Or do they agree with it all? Does Debora Cahn actually really think that Kate Wyler is a model of the only way for powerful women to behave? Is she impressed by US security theatre, all those men in dark suits hustling stern-faced officials from room to room while they whisper into their comm links and the female officials body-shame the women who’re paid to die in their stead? Does she really think that these conversations in these blood-soaked halls of power are enlightening and inspiring, that the US has done nothing wrong and it really does make sense for these people to do these things? And is that the viewing appetite of the US public now?

I would hope not, but this possibility is why, when I watch shows like this, I think of the blithe dismissal of modern media as “all fascist now”, and I think, you know what. Yes, it’s all fascist now.

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fn1: And if you think I’m exaggerating the possibility that the writers are just gross, wait until the moment late in season 3 where you are subjected to a completely irrelevant, absolutely repulsive, and entirely gratuitous ten second vision of Prime Minister Trowbridge, fully clothed, viscerally fucking his fully-clothed wife while she stares expressionlessly at the ceiling and says “More vigorously”. My god, I may never recover from that. Finally, someone to rival David Lynch for pointless grotesquerie.