The Pink Smoke podcast
Ep. 146 Little Drummer Girl
The Pink Smoke welcomes back fan favorite John Arminio for a companion episode to our epic 100 Years of Spy Movies two-parter from last year to discuss the 2018 mini-series The Little Drummer Girl, starring Florence Pugh and Michael Shannon, directed by Park Chan-wook. Adapted from the 1983 novel by John le Carré, it is like most of the famed author's work a taut and intricate web of postwar intrigue and espionage. Set in 1979, it follows the recruitment of an English actress by a seasoned Mossad spymaster to infiltrate a Palestinian bomb-maker's network in order to prevent a potential terrorist attack on London.
John himself has recruited his father, Captain Tom Arminio USN Retired, to join host John Cribbs in crossing into the treacherous world of le Carré where morality, identity and personal values are routinely compromised. They discuss the relevance of this 40-year-old story, the culpability of those who choose not to take sides in international conflicts, and the fate of characters who suffer moral injury: having perpetrated, failed to prevent, or witnessed events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs. They also make fun of Diane Keaton's haircut from the little-loved 1984 film adaptation.
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Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"
- Duration:
- 1h 31m
- Broadcast on:
- 30 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[music] Welcome to the Pink Smoke Podcast. The podcast that germinated from the website thepinksmook.com co-founded by Christopher Funderberg and myself, John Cribbs. We try to talk about interesting things, and we hope people would be interested in hearing us talk about interesting things. That's kind of the whole goal. And today is definitely not an exception. Today we got Captain Tom or Minio, US Navy retired with us. Welcome, sir. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. Been too long. It's been three years since we talked about mutinies at sea on screen together. That's right. That was very enjoyable. It was. It was a really great conversation, so I'm very glad that we enticed you back, and you brought a guest today. Do you want to introduce your guest? The special guest is my oldest son, John, who is the expert on all things movies. I'm humbled. Thank you so much for having me. I'm John. For a sense, John and I have talked so much about James Bond, and then of course we did that epic, like two-part, like seven-hour spy movie podcasts. I was thinking a lot about spies in movies and miniseries and books, and there were just so much and little drummer girl that I kind of didn't even want to talk about it on that those podcasts, because there's just so much to dig into. And so I was very glad to have you, Dad, talk about it with us, so I'm really excited for this conversation. Yeah. Yeah, great. Now, was that a potential nominee for the spy series of podcasts? Yes, but when we're talking about 30 other spy movies, it seems like it would get lost in between other La Carre adaptations and various other miniseries and movies. Well, it's funny that you should say that. We should specify that we're mainly going to be talking today about the 2018 miniseries directed by a Park Chan wook. When I sent you guys a giant list of spy movies for our hundred years worth of espionage thrillers, little drummer girl that Diane Keaton filmed, the George Roy Hill film from 1984 was on the list, but I feel like all three of us ignored it. None of us seemed interested in it all, and a huge thing for me doing that episode was I really had not read any John La Carre. I had not seen any of the adaptations other than "Take Your Taylor Soldier Spy," the British, the BBC series, so getting to watch the spy who came in from the cold and a most wanted man, and some of the other ones that we talked about really woke me up to like, "Oh, I'm really missing out on a really important figure in literature here." And so, it was just dove right in from that point on, and I thought, "Oh, I guess a little drummer girl is one of the lesser ones. We didn't even consider it." It felt like we did. It was just a blip in this big list. I wasn't even aware of the miniseries at that point. It was huge for me to do that episode and to watch these movies and to fall in love with some of them. Since then, of course, the era of Morris documentary on La Carre has come out, which is terrific. The posthumous documentary, since he passed away, David Cornwell, aka John La Carre. And reading some of his books, especially "Perfect Spy," which is one that gets talked up a lot in the documentary, I could just say La Carre is a lot, you know, it's a lot. Any one of his books, I mean, a paragraph can seem like an entire chapter. There are so many ideas, there are so many characters coming in and out. It's almost daunting, you know. It's a huge challenge, but it's so rich, and there's so much to take away from it. So that was a huge thing, you know, that was a huge takeaway from me from that episode, so that you guys would bring this miniseries to my attention. I'm really appreciated, and I'm really excited to talk about it. Nice. I mean, like, reading "Little Drummer Girl," like this is actually the first La Carre that I've read. It really does demand a lot from the reader, like not just in the topics of, like, international diplomacy and counterintelligence and terrorism, but just of keeping track of the characters and motivations, because every major character goes by at least three names, and the merging and melding of all these identities is really up for the reader to decide as to, like, when they're pretending to be this person, and when they're actually are this person, and when are they pretending to go over to the other side, are they on the other side, and do they come back by the end? And so it leaves so much of the legwork up for the reader that it really is like one of the most challenging books I've read, not because of, like, the language or the length, but just, it requires you to interrogate the character so much on your own. Yeah, it's a hard book to just skim through. Yeah. Impossible. Impossible. Yeah. You'll miss so much. You really have to pay attention. I remember my dad, John's grandfather was a voracious reader, and he loved thrillers. He loved Raymond Chandler. I remember reading Seven Days in May, and then he also had Spy who came in from the cold, and so that was my first time reading John the Carrey. And then at that age, at my age back then, just kind of forgot about him. But then the ticker-tailer-soldier Spy mini-series came out, and that was just wonderful, and then Smiley's people, and then more recently Night Manager, so I've gotten back into reading more John the Carrey. And I guess this book specifically, Little Drummer Girl, kind of comes right after Smiley's people, chronologically, and, you know, his releases, and that's a kind of significant one in that. It kind of wraps things up in that Carla. The big enemy gets defeated in that book, and so it kind of opened up like a new sort of, like, where do we go from here? And, of course, look, Harry's big thing. It was the Cold War, the moral failures of Western intelligence agencies and the themes that, you know, that kind of whole thing brings up. And in the '80s, we're nearing the end of, you know, the Berlin Wall comes down at the end, and everything is going to be completely different. He's got to kind of find new hunting grounds at that point, I think. Not a huge deal as the Little Drummer Girl is comparatively, I think, among a lot of Lakeri scholars, I think it really marks a change in what he's doing. As you were saying, I mean, you can't sleep on it. There is so much to take in, and so much is significant, makes it very hard for adaptation, I would say. It's very, very difficult to, like, get all of this in to either, whether it's a two-hour film or a six-hour mini-series, there was a lot of ground to cover. I'll just say Park Chan Wook, who, of course, is a Korean filmmaker doing this mini-series is amazing. He has an incredible job. He really understands not just the nuances of the story and the ambiguities that John had mentioned. Really pinpoint the small moments that make it really incredible, and I wish I had made just a list of all these little moments as I was watching it, the one that kind of just stuck with me, or just like the car locks, when they're kind of jettin' around and everyone has their own agenda on the road. Just these car locks going on and off, kind of changing motivations, changing like characters attitudes towards each other just immediately gave me a sense of, like, he really understands this source material, and he was like the right pick to do this. Have you guys seen a lot of Park Chan Wook before? What's your relationship with him? I have, and he's obviously like a towering talent as far as technical filmmaking goes, but sometimes I do have trouble, like, connecting with his movies emotionally. The handmaiden is so gorgeous and with Old Boy. I feel like I'm just sort of like in his clockwork mechanism of plotting, and so sometimes it's just like not as engaging as I want it to be, but what was the thriller he made last year or the year before? decision to leave. Yes, I really like that one quite a bit, but this, I think, this might be my favorite thing he's ever done, like his character development is so precise, and I'm able to empathize with each one of these characters, even when they're burying their own emotions, beneath layers and layers of spycraft. The way he uses montage to cover bits and pieces of the book that I are like interior within these characters, the way he transitions from interior struggles to conversation, just the way certain events are gently shuffled around to flow in it so that the series can proceed in an episodic manner is just like a real masterful adaptation of a very complex story. He's a filmmaker who I really underestimated for a long time. I think if, I mean, Old Boy is obviously like a huge film, right? It's definitely like a big calling card in world cinema really made his career, but it's also the kind of film that gets lumped in, I feel like with just a certain kind of extreme cinema that can make a little standoffish, like I've never been a huge fan of Old Boy necessarily. Certainly when people, someone's like, "It's the best movie ever made." I'm like, give me a break, man, come on, you know, I kind of lash out against that, but I always forget when he did Old Boy and sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and those kind of films that all kind of felt like these kind of weird, violent movies. I had forgotten he had done this film JSA, Joint Security Area in the year 2000, which is set on the DMZ, right, specifically about the relationship of North and South Korean soldiers, which is not exactly the same situation we're talking about with Israel and Palestine, but has very tense, very complicated political implications, obviously, and I thought he handled that material extremely well. So it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that he would do a film like this, that he would be interested in these kind of politics going all the way back, you know, 25 years ago, he was interested in these kind of politics. And then certainly when Handmaiden came out and decision to leave, it was my favorite movie of the year. I loved decision to leave. I thought it wasn't incredible. It was the kind of thing where it's like, "Oh, he's not just going to be doing these kind of movies, these movies like Old Boy, his entire career, he's going to move on and he's going to show us like he has got skills and he is going to bring them like, he can bring them to any kind of story that he wants to tell. So I should not have been surprised at all that, you know, he would be a good fit for this material." Let's just dive in. Let me just kind of go with the story real quick. This is about Charlie, a young English actor who is somewhat unconventionally recruited by Martin Kurtz, who is a seasoned Mossad spy master, to infiltrate bomb maker Khalil's tightly controlled network. That's kind of just the very bare bolts of this thing. But obviously it's a six hour mini series. It's a super long book. There's a lot more characters involved. There's a lot of things that happen. What about the story kind of grabs you the most? Is it the intrigue? Is it the drama? Like what about it kind of works best for you? The first thing that struck me from the mini series was, and the book as well, is why did this spy agency, this intelligence agency recruit this woman to try to infiltrate a terrorist network? I mean, what was their thinking? Why did they even begin to think that it would succeed? While I questioned it and thought it maybe it was a little unrealistic, it also grabbed me. So it kind of sucked me in like, okay, what are they professionally in terms of spycraft? Why are they picking this actress to do this? That was really my first thought about the character. It's a great premise. And it's very unconventional in terms of just this main character kind of not being in charge for her own destiny for the most part, you know, really being manipulated by all these different factions in the book. Getting an actor seems like to be an infiltrator or a double agent seems both like totally obvious. Well, why didn't we think of that before, but also completely absurd. But yeah, yeah, the way that the man in charge Kurtz is able to like unravel his own plan for her and why he chose her because, you know, all right, well, they were observing these other Palestinian terrorists who were making sort of propaganda inroads into England. So she was this woman that he had made contact with. And so like, you know, you're following Kurtz's trail of breadcrumbs to Charlie. And then him finding her again and making contact and like manipulating her and taking advantage of her like unfocused rage and like unharvested talent. And that is part of what is so engrossing about Le Corre's work is just getting at the nebulous morality of these characters who are doing such a good job defeating terrorists and, you know, Soviet agents would have you, but are just enacting methods of outright cruelty and in some cases murder. So it's a case of self destruction, a disassembling of your own identity in order to be the security apparatus for the state. And that's why, you know, the mainly mainly it got he has to continually separate himself from this work and only be brought back in by Kurtz every so often because he has to remove himself from this like dehumanizing operation. Yeah. And at one point, Kurtz tells Charlie, there's no more cut, you know, a director's direction cut and, you know, let's reset and start to start the scene again. There is none of that. So how long as I'm watching Charlie and as I'm watching her character develop, how long can she mentally keep up this pretense? I mean, it's just mentally and physically draining. Yeah. And part of the moral ambiguity of it is at one point, Kurtz just says if she goes over to the other side, it doesn't matter because they know that she's their own plant. If she becomes a terrorist, if she's indoctrinated by the other side, it kind of doesn't matter to them because they have eyes on her anyway. So the fact that they're willing to feed Charlie to terrorists in order to take advantage of her position just signals the sort of moral holiness of what they're doing and that dynamic is fascinating. I don't know how much we want to get into the book and some of the details versus the mini series, but part of the backstory on the intelligence agency who shall not be named, I guess, you know, yeah, they never say Masada the book, at least I don't think so. That's right. They don't. Yeah. They say it in the mini series because I was trying to remember that. No, no. Good. John and I talked about that. I mean, they never say, but it's, I mean, it's the elephant in the room. In part of the research into Charlie's background, they go and talk to her agent. It was quillie. Is that his name? John? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they spent a lot of time with him on a pretense of being movie producers. They're doing, they're doing their homework, trying to get to know her before they actually take the deep dive. That's the question that gets asked, right, for most of the book, are who are you? And eventually becomes who am I, right? There's this big thing about the fiction. This world stage that she's now entered that is where real, real life and real alliances get completely blurred. I love how both the book and the mini series open with this kind of stage set with this door opening and this young woman that she's, she's revealed to be a Swiss woman delivering the suitcase, right, to this, this is Israeli labor secretary, yeah, yeah, politician, which is a bomb, right? And then going off with her boyfriend, who was, you know, set her up to do this, who's going to be revealed, you know, to be one of the main players in this. And just immediately how that sets the stage for what we're coming to expect because Charlie's going to take that role. I mean, they're basically going to take this idea recruiting this woman and doing the same thing. Something interesting that Park does in the mini series, which you wouldn't get from reading the book, I don't think, is when the target looks over at the car as they're leaving right before the bomb goes off, she's like thrilled. She's like smiling and laughing at him. She's almost, you know, enjoying, you know, this thing that she's done, this act that she has been a part of, which is really interesting to me. This player who's been recruited and, you know, who knows what her background is, I mean, the ideas that she's just infatuated now with Michelle and with his, you know, his politics and his worldview, she's having fun. Charlie going out in there and having this idea of like, this is the ultimate role. This is something where, you know, I'm going out there and it's not, you know, there are no cuts. You know, there's, there's, there's no way to stop it. It's just like, it's going to become my life. She has the similar kind of thrill of this being an adventure that you can go upon and as an actor, really kind of understanding that she has a role to play that's actually going to be significant and important. But the more she sees these people and realizes that like everybody is an actor, everybody is, you know, is on the stage together and it's just getting overcrowded. Things are getting, you know, just more and more complicated and as they do, she kind of goes through that kind of moral deterioration that a caring hero goes through. A lot of improv on her part. Yeah. Like living your life in an improv scene. Yeah. Talk about long form improv. You know, because it's so fascinating, you know, when she does infiltrate the terrorist cell, the theater becomes her being like this, like martyrs widow. But then the terrorists themselves play of the, the fiction of, you know, the idol of the martyr. They start, you know, screen printing t-shirts with his, his face on them and, and use his image and his name as motivation when in reality, he was murdered by a Ford intelligence service to be like bait and, and to establish a cover story for Charlie and for the fact that they were interrogating him. So it just layers and layers of theater. I mean, one of the motifs of the series in the book is that terror is theater. The motivations for terrorism are not to explode the bomb, but, you know, the consequences afterwards and the fear it's going to go into create. I love the improvs that she does. I love her decision to buy the bootleg liquor right before going through the Yugoslavia and border as a way of, you know, throwing them off from her carrying the explosives in the car. What credentials could she possibly have going into this that would make her a good spy. And the answer is just like what you said, the, well, spying is, is theater. It's, you know, it's acting. So of course she would be good at it. There's an interesting change, the mini series really downplay something from the book, which is Charlie's strong leftist leanings, right, when she goes to the meeting that Michelle is addressing everyone about Palestine and its troubles. She's very moved by it in the book. And she's like, you know, very fervently an advocate of that cause. It's interesting that they downplay in the mini series, a little bit to kind of make her more of a blank slate where she is kind of more in the middle for someone like me who is largely apolitical and constantly ashamed of it, you know, finding myself in the middle and not wanting to lean one way or another. This is the perfect book to like just really make me embarrassed about that kind of thing to have a character like Charlie, who is a blank slate in a lot of ways, who likes to believe and again, more so in the mini series, I think even than in the book, wants to believe that she's morally good because she has no cause one way or another and that she can actually be an effective player in this because she could potentially hate or love any of the players at any given time, depending on what the scene is, what the motivation for her might be. That's obviously a pretty huge theme to throw at people, whether in 1983 or in 2024. I think in 1980, you know, the idea of Milton leftism, I think was a much different beast than it is now because, you know, in Europe, certainly you had like Italian police stations being blown up by like the Red Brigade or what hadn't. But I think, you know, I have a podcast where we talk about leftist politics in movies, but I think the book gets at so much of what like enrages me about the left. Like it just like infused with like such incompetent ninnies, right? Like they're supposed to be the backboat fighting against fascism and, you know, they're people who like, oh, the big revolutionary act is like to have a three way and some dumpy apartment, right? Like it's embarrassing. So the other thing that's got to play up more in the book, I think, you know, her promiscuity than it is in the miniseries, but yeah, it's definitely there for sure. Yeah. And but I think even that is part of the fact that she is such a blank slate and part of why she's able to be recruited by by Kurt and Gotti is that she's just, you know, so desperate for an identity and they purport to give one to her only to manipulate her into giving her the identity that they developed for her anyway. Another kind of caricature of certain like extreme left people is the guy that she meets in the camp. Right. Arthur Halloran, this is his name. Yeah. The guy who's just kind of clearly nuts and seems to be more desperate to be accepted and to like accept a cause and kind of make that his personality. Which if you see, you know, anyone who has any kind of like really any ideal who has like a very specific stance on something and like is in any field, not just in politics, but you kind of see that sort of like you feel bad for someone who wants to be accepted so much that like doesn't have any kind of like actual skin in the game, just wants to kind of be involved and is willing to just kind of do anything to please, you know, other people who are, you know, he who he wants to impress. There's a little bit of like a characterization there, I think, of that guy in stable America in the Palestinian camp. He's clearly lost. Right guy. Yeah. I mean, he's been there for what did they say three years? I think and he he's losing it and that he hasn't, I don't think the Palestinians trust them because they haven't used him on a mission of any kind. He's just he's just in the camp and he's that's where he's going to stay. And so yeah, he's he's obviously he's having a breakdown. Yeah. And you have some of the cruters recruiters and trainers talk about how like, are you here because you want to bloke the world? You know, we don't want those kind of people here and referring to some of the other Western collaborators as scum, but necessary scum. And so, you know, part of Charlie's job is to convince them that she's not there to just blow up the world and she's not these kind of reprehensible hangers on that she actually has motivation, which, you know, is part of the difficulty of her role that she doesn't have motivation at all, but she has like created within herself. It actually makes me feel so bad for the character Helga, right? Yes. Yes. I was thinking of her and she's playing a relatively important role out in the field. And so they're using her for some pretty significant events, yet they still think of her as Western scum. So, another big difference, this is actually the movie, the '84 movie I'm talking about here, the casting of Diane Keaton. The kind of blows, I mean, she's wrong for lots of reasons. The main problem though is that she's American. To make this character American instead of British and to take away that really fantastic line, you're the same English who gave away my country, it's a whole different story. I mean, you know, again, this might be something that's more relevant today. But at the time, to have her, this blank slate who wants to say, I have nothing to do with any of this, coming from England that established the state of Israel, you know, that's where everything came from, even though they were able to take a step away from it and not be involved in a major way after that. The consequences of that are super significant to this story and having her be British is pretty big. And it makes series even changes the location of the ultimate act, the bombing to London, as opposed to in Munich, I think is what they do in the book. Yeah. And I think they do a great job of explaining why Charlie is such great bait for the terrorist group because a British-born citizen committing terrorist acts for the state of Palestine is like a propaganda coup. So even if she gets captured or killed, it's like, well, look at this, you know, moral wound we have given to the, you know, enfeebled British Empire. Hugely significant, huge. I don't know if the casting of Diane Keaton might have specifically come from the fact that one of the templates for the character was Janet Lee Stevens, who was a human rights advocate, who had actually taken Liquere around to some of the camps, some of the Palestinian refugee camps and other places. She was nicknamed the Little Drummer Girl by the Palestinians because of for a completely different reason, because she obviously would be her drum for the cause of the Palestinians, who was ultimately killed in a bombing on the embassy, the American embassy in Beirut. And then the movie is dedicated to her. So I don't know if that because she's American, that might have had some kind of, you know, made a difference in why they decided to put her in there, but she's too old. She's not right for the part. Her haircut is, oh my God, terrible. And let me throw this out to you. Joseph is how Charlie knows, is the name that Charlie knows Gotti under, right? And so she calls him Jose in the miniseries. In the movie, Diane Keaton pronounces it, "jose." Am I missing something? Was it supposed to be "jose" all along that it really threw me off like she's calling him "jose"? The movie to me is just so forgettable. Like it just so bland and unimpactful and just defangs a story entirely. And I think it's a real emblematic showcase of the art of adaptation of how one can just totally be dead in the water and another can just excel at everything it does. It definitely has that feeling of like rushing the story. It feels like everything is very just moving along as quick as they can. It's not helped by Klaus Kinsky, you know, rushing all his lines because of his English. It doesn't help that they decided to cast the character of an Israeli Holocaust survivor who watched his mother being led to her death with someone who served in the weirmacht. Okay, but there are a lot of problems with the movie, obviously. The George Roy Hill in general is like it's a weird choice. I love George Roy Hill, I love Slapshot, I love Butch Cassidy, he's made some great movies, but he should be directing The Great Waldo Pepper, not a little John LeCarré adaptation of it. And you know, Charlie calls Gotti Joseph because of his coat of many colors. And so it's such a bit of like incisive characterization on the part of Charlie to just so nail Gotti even when he's undercover that he is, he's cloaked with different identities. And that is just one of the many, you know, bits of color that you lose in the '84 movie. Yeah, and when Charlie and her fellow actors are at the cafe in Greece and Gotti is reluctant to tell them his name or give them any name, she comes up with this name Joseph kind of right on the spot. So she's very perceptive. You kind of get that sense from her and her character that she's a thinker and she's a perceptive person. You kind of get the impression or that that is part of her character that this acting troupe sort of like revolves around her that like people just enjoy and get energy from being in her orbit. And that's part of the attraction for Kurt's and Gotti in the first place towards Charlie. Let's talk about for me anyway, as the most fascinating character of the novel, Martin Kurtz, right, such a, you know, enigmatic character, obviously seasoned, spymaster. He's kind of got this juggling act that he's trying to kind of accomplish, which is to kind of keep his own operation from being shut down while at the same time kind of holding back the mounting outcry for a military solution. He's kind of makes trying to keep himself relevant within this world stage, right, that he's willing to do something as extreme as, you know, recruiting this completely untested British actress to his cause. Needless to say, for me, anyway, Michael Shannon, phenomenal, phenomenal in the miniseries. I think he's one of, if not the best actor in films these days, I feel like his eyes change size behind those sick glasses. I mean, he's just his face becomes so compelling in any given situation wherein he's improvising himself or when he is trying to convince, you know, some of his allies that he needs more time or more help or needs to change the location of the operation. Everything he's doing is, you know, somehow completely tense and hurried, but completely at ease and calm at the same time, it's this amazing kind of dichotomy that I really enjoy. Yeah, I think he was wonderful. I think Florence Pugh is great, but yeah, he kind of stole the show, powerful, but his character is a bit, I don't know if understated is the right character, right characterization of that, but he's very patient. He rarely loses his temper. Like John, like you said, even under the most tense circumstances, yeah, he's a very thoughtful, he's a manipulator. Yeah. He is a he's a man. And you have to question his morals, how he's going about doing all these, you know, manipulating these chess pieces on the board. Yeah, he Michael Shannon did a great job with that character. Really, really good. The scene where he removes Michelle slash Salim from the isolation and shows him he's the magician revealing his tricks. He's, you know, he's showing him the backstage, he's giving them, you know, showing them all the players and who they actually are and all the things they've done to deceive him as a way to get him, you know, to give them what they want is just like there's so many levels of manipulation to that scene. In that scene, he gets a critical piece of information that they're going to Salzburg. Well, maybe not, because they never use the same location twice. So they were, they were deceived previously. Yeah. So he's not just looking for information about specific dates and times of names, but he's looking for information into how their operation works and their patterns, which is, you know, because he has foresight, he's planning his next steps. And, you know, one of his colleagues refers to him as a dreamer for his fancy fanciful idea of not, you know, using direct military strikes. And he says, no, I'm an artist. This many series was made, you know, like eight years before the pigeon tunnel, but that's one of the last lines in the pigeon tunnel where John Le Correis is kind of ludicrously, I think, saying that he has no interior life except when he's writing, I'm an artist. It's just so fascinating that these two characters, these two gram manipulators, like there was a little bit of autobiography for Le Correis in Kurtz. And that's just one of the like fascinating things about his work is the little bits of the author that you find in his stories, you know, a perfect spy indeed. Yeah. Sprinkled all throughout. And I love that Charlie's, when she initially during her interview, her audition for Kurtz. And she makes up this whole big backstory about her father being a con artist. That's Le Correis story, you know, like that's what we like learned in the pigeon tunnel is that he just has this very problematic relationship with his father and the way that he lived to give that to his character here. This is great. It's, you know, it's the, it's the author giving her the authorship to make it fiction, to make his real life fiction. I wonder Elle Morris wanted to make a documentary about this guy. Oh, yeah. Perfect. Perfect fit. Yeah. Let's just jump over to the Palestinian side real quick, just kind of as a way of entering it. How do you guys feel about the even handedness of the novel and of the mini series? Did you think that both sides got a pretty fair shake? Do you think there was a good guy or a bad guy like, you know, do you think he did a good job kind of balancing everything out? One thing John and I talked about briefly, very briefly, as we were both reading the book, you know, I dog-eared several pages in here in the book of things that are applicable today. I mean, as early as page eight about the Israelis bombing Palestinian refugee camps in terms of even handedness. I don't know if that's answering your question, but I think Le Correis is talking about the British legacy in the Middle East, how that's influenced, impacted geopolitics in 2024. So going on 80 years, you know, at one point, Gotti says, you know, because that whole team is trying to prevent the Israelis from just, you know, sending these blunt force, the airstrikes and the Palestinian camps, and he says, God, he says, they're just waiting for big enough bombs so they can move in and blow them all up. And then Caleo would have won and then, like, look where we are now. And one of the best bits of characterization that I think I've ever read is early in the novel when it's describing Kurtz and his, you know, origin story as a child in the concentration camp and him going from concentration camp to an allied survivor's camp to, like, waiting on a ship to go wherever home would be for him and being handed a gun and like the last line of the paragraph is that and that's a day that Kurtz's war began. And you know, recently I've read a couple really profound graphic novels by a cartoonist named Josako who spent a lot of time in Palestine and in Gaza in the 90s and early 2000s and that life of going from camp to camp and have your parents and family taken away from you and having someone you look up to give you a gun and saying this is the only way you're going to achieve freedom because you're starving. Like that's the story of the Palestinians and especially Palestinian children, whether like Harry meant it or not, Kurtz's story is being echoed in Palestine and that's what makes the current war and the last 80 years of that region so tragic. And I think one of the great strengths of the book is that it doesn't take sides. It's displaying the horror and the tragedy of the situation, you know, as he's sort of really not the litany of sins that have been perpetrated against the Palestinians, he then describes like one strategy, this one fighter used to assassinate a police officer because he knew this police officer was a family man, you like as he's come out of his house for work, he rolls a children's ball in front of him knowing that a guy with small children will lean down to pick up this ball and then shoots him in the head. And so like that, the horror of that act, you know, takes you aback, you know, it forces you to conclude that the morality in this conflict is not something you can just grab on to and take a position on. You know, this is about the legacy of colonialism and the hopelessness of terrorism and the geopolitical situation all around the world. It's all those things in the story about, you know, this small team of intelligence agents recruiting this one actor, it's just an extraordinarily complicated situation. I mean, that's why it hasn't been resolved to date is because how complicated it is. And I don't think the three of us are going to solve it right now. That was my intention by the end of the podcast. We had this wrapped up for good, yeah, that story about the ball is just, you know, perfect envelope era, a kind of example of, you know, how terrifying it is that to be reprehensible, you have to be somebody who can recognize humanism, you know, use it against them. The conflict, you know, I mean, I had my own dad, my cribs, once again, watched this mini series so I could talk to him about it. And he remembered, you know, the time of the Gulf War, the desert storm, whatever it's referred to these days, being in Jordan. And, but even then there were thousands and thousands of displaced people that he would see in Gaza, in the Western bank, homeless and, you know, and hopeless. And it's just terrifying that it's been all these decades later and like this problem is just not going away. The solutions are always what they are in this, prevent terrorism and, and, and assassinate people, whatever needs to happen, you know, to prevent things, but never to actually solve anything. There were notable terrorist terrorist attacks in the 90s. So in 96, the Kobar Towers in Saudi Arabia was bombed 98. The embassy is in Dara Salaam and Nairobi were attacked, they're bombed 93 was the first attempt to take down the World Trade Center, Ramsey Yusef, who later was implicated in 9/11, drove a truck full of explosives under the parking lot in the World Trade Center. So some pretty notable terrorist attacks going on in the in the 90s. And you know, one of the refrains of the book is that the Palestinians say that they've been treated and the Palestine itself has been treated like a land without a people for a people without a land. So the implication that the Palestinians have always been like squatters on on this this sacred patch of earth and, you know, for the rest of the world to just decide that they don't belong there and that it's it's another people's country now, you know, just feels so arbitrary and unfair, especially when it, you know, displaces so many millions of people and results in so much violence. We also get glimpses of how betrayed a lot of these Palestinians feel because some of these Palestinian fighters talk about, or show their own bullet wounds from Jordanians or Earth Syrians or Egyptians because a lot of the results of the wars they talk about like 67 or 73 part of those piece of cords was that like the Jordanians or the Egyptians or the Syrians would keep the Palestinians where they were that they couldn't move as part of refugees and so that feeling of betrayal by your fellow Arabs was another motivating factor for, you know, these desperate Palestinians and it also is another example of like hooray expecting a lot from his readership to know and remember these political movements from the middle of the 20th century. Yeah. Well, my dad said exactly was nobody wants the Palestinians. Yeah. Right. And that's kind of adds to the tragedy and the complicated nature of the conflict is that we're talking about two victimized races here, right, two victimized peoples displaced peoples, you know, even in this book, I think Kurtz with his Holocaust victim background and having got to be this conflicted soldier of so many years contrasting that with Khalil and Saleem and Fatma and all the other Palestinian warriors. We understand that like there are scars on every single character in this story. Just as there are scars, you know, on every single person involved in this conflict makes it even harder to take a moral position on it's like, well, who deserves to not be a victim anymore? You know, who's the one that needs to be saved? And look, right? Even accuses people who want easy answers, you know, because Charlie keeps saying, oh, I just want peace. I just want peace. Okay. Great. How are you going to get that? And so, you know, that is part of like the American viewpoint a lot of times, like, oh, why can't they just get along? It's like, well, it's the John Green sticks, man, it's why can you just stop shooting each other? You guys can be a break. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, like at the core of it, you do feel that like, you know, this is a land sacred to every one of the Abrahamic faiths. Can't we just not murder people on it? You know, there's generations or millennia of conflict that has, you know, been perpetrated there and then you can't just turn it off, unfortunately. Yeah. So John, going back to your comment about two victimized peoples, one scene kind of came to mind when you said that was when they get Salim out of the cell and he's drugged up and he's naked on the bed. So Charlie can see him and see his genitals and see all the scars and everything in his birthmark. Then after that, she's, she's pretty pissed off and she's pissed off at God. She's pissed off at Kurtz. And she's having an argument with God and she says, oh, so you're the victim one day and the tyrant the next, you know, she's saying, oh, you want to have it both ways. And then God, he says to her, oh, you're an actress one day and a moralist, the next. Yeah. None of these characters get off easy. No, no. From a literary standpoint, in the book, that scene is written in so like, interestingly to me because he, like how he describes Salim's drugged out, like, naked body in very like lustful language. It's like the way you would describe a naked man in a romance novel. But the context of it is horrifying. And I think, you know, because of the way they're using Salim's body, you know, for their own purposes and their own manipulation, it just makes it so, you know, horrifying. And, you know, because Charlie recognizes that Salim is a beautiful man. They're cataloging his scars so they can remember his body before they blow it up. She really does tend to follow him up with everybody in this book and, and in the second half of the story, she's, you know, she's able to infiltrate the Palestinian camp and, you know, learn this taught how to make a bomb. Tom, can I ask you, just from your personal experience, what specific kind of anti terrorists that's that you take place in my experience with terrorism in the, in the. And the Navy goes back 24 years, I guess, going on 24 years. So I'm, I'm, yeah. So everybody that's listening, you know, my, my time with working with Intel, the Intel community in anti terrorism and force protections a little bit dated, but so in October of 2000, the USS Cole was attacked in the port of Eden in Yemen. At that time, I was on the Navy staff in the Pentagon and I was an aviator. And for some reason, I got put in charge of this Navy's anti terrorism and force protection task force to try to address some core issues to try to help ships and units in transit and to try to address some of their vulnerabilities. So as an aviator, I'm doing this anti terrorism, force protection stuff when we got Navy seals right down the hall in the Pentagon, you know, that could have, you know, the experts on this stuff. But anyway, that's, that's besides the point. Yeah. So, so that was my exposure to how terrorists operate. They look for seams and vulnerabilities that they do have a planning cycle. I mean, it's called a terrorist attack and operational planning cycle. Some of the, I was thinking about as we're, as I was watching the mini series, I was thinking about some of these things. So they do a preliminary target selection. They do some initial surveillance, then a final target selection, free attack surveillance, then more, more thorough planning, they rehearse the practice, then they do the execution of the attack and then escape and exploit the attack. So that's their, that's their planning cycle. Now there's lots of other steps and details within each one of those bigger, bigger categories, but that's, that's basically how they do. And so for the call, when the call was attacked, it was en route was on deployment. It was en route and they stopped in Aiden, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan. Everybody became familiar with improvised explosive device. Well, Al Qaeda used an improvised explosive device to attack the coal. It was just a harbor boat. It wasn't necessarily a roadside bomb or a car. It was a, a harbor boat. The attackers dressed up as harbor employees with their uniforms on, they didn't come barreling into the side of the ship at full speed. They were just lolly gagging around the ship, waving, hi, hi, they pulled up. Next to the ship. And that's when they detonated the explosive. So those intelligence and operational seams and vulnerabilities, they were watching how the US units transit these various countries. They actually tried to attack another ship previous to this, but they had too much explosives in the ship in their, in their launch and it sank. But it wasn't, it wasn't discovered until the coal investigation. So so they regrouped, they figured they corrected their mistakes and they, they came back and did it again. Yeah. And from your experience, what was, what was the biggest lesson from that? What was the biggest vulnerability, the most like kind of open area? Yeah, we addressed on this, this task force in the Pentagon. So it, in order to talk about this, kind of have to understand how the military chain of command works, people may know the chief and naval operations or the chief of staff of the army or the commandant of the Marine Corps, chief of staff of the air force. Those four star officers have a statutory duty to organize, train and equip forces for the four star officers that are in charge of units in an area of responsibility. So while they have all these heads of the services in Washington, D.C., you have other officers like the central command, the European command, the southern command. Those are the war fighters. So the chief of naval operations is providing submarines, aircraft carriers, surferships, aircraft for those war fighting officers. So those are the big picture things. So for us in the Pentagon, we really couldn't tell like you, you will do this. We have to, it has to be a mutually supportive effort in order to come up with some of these ideas and concepts for forces to use overseas on deployment. So yeah, so operational risk assessment, operational risk management was a big thing. Just a cultural change, a sea change, not no pun intended, but a cultural change in outlook and attitude towards anti-terrorism and force protection. So to be more proactive, not be so defensive, resources was a big thing. Port security, the Navy really didn't have a robust port security element. So we took some lessons from the Coast Guard because that's their bailiwick and had a construct and formulate and develop a port security unit. You know, what does that mean? Where do we need them? We got involved with the State Department because the State Department does a lot of work with host nation. So for, in this example, Yemen would be the host nation. So when we do port visits, we have host nation support and that's what it's called. So what responsibilities and obligations does the host nation have to support our units as they're transiting their country? Detailing the attack on the coal specifically, one of the things I thought about the climax of this story. What a dumb plan to just hand somebody a suitcase and then say, "Oh, you know, wrong suitcase. I got to switch it with you." Seems like so many things could go wrong, but just hearing you describe guys in a boat waving that sailors just going out there and then boom, the bomb, those stuff, that's a dumb plan too and most attacks like these are dumb plans that have no business succeeding. Because the coal had 50 caliber machine guns in port that were manned, but having a harbor boat with two guys waving at them is not a threat. So what's the hostile and so when you talk about rules of engagement, you have to determine what the hostile intent is. So having two guys in a harbor boat with harbor uniforms on waving at them, driving just a couple knots in their boat, not speeding towards them, there's no hostile intent there. Just getting into the nitty gritty of IED tactics and suicide bombers, that dependence on appearing non-hostile is something that the United States, like Army Marines obviously had to deal with in Vietnam that led to a lot of real ugliness and war crimes and what a lot of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had to deal with. So the determination of what is a hostile is something that we're still struggling with and something that both this miniseries and the attack on the coal demonstrates. But Dad, you talked about relationships with host countries and that I think is another bit in both the miniseries and the book that is explored in a really interesting way with the Israeli intelligence team operating inside of both Germany and England and not telling those governments the whole story or just blatantly lying to them. And we get the king of asshole British officials to Charles dance, surprise Charles dance, I love it. Was not prepared for that. If nothing else, you get to hear Charles dance say, I bet you're chuffed to the bollocks with yourselves. Yeah, we just we just watched the imitation game and for our family movie night. And yeah, he's he's an asshole in that one too. He's great at being an asshole. Yeah, if you need somebody to if you need an Englishman to look down on you in a uniform, get Charles dance. I wonder what he's like in real life. Probably exceedingly charming. I'm sure he's lovely. I'm sure he's lovely. That same day, I started watching the miniseries to Martin Kessler and I had talked about alien three. So I was having a real Charles dance. Yeah. My only proximity to actual terrorism was as an infant when we were lived in West Germany was in the 80s. When bought a mine half the RAF, you know, we're still very much active. And there's actually a bomb. They set off two blocks down from our house at the officers club. And that came up when I was talking to my dad because I had asked him, you know, why Germany? Why is it always such a significant thing that all these events happen in Germany in a lot of these espionage stories? This one opens in, you know, but God is Berg and, you know, obviously it has the scene in Munich at the end. And there's your answer right there, right? I mean, Andreas Bader and Ocric Meinhoff were to the prisoners that were demanded to be released by the Black September members during the Munich Olympics. Hostile situation. I mean, it's all, it all ties in. And there's the scene, of course, where Gody takes Charlie to look at the memorial to those killed in the Olympic hostage situation. It really all kind of spreads from there, right? Everything from post World War II, it all goes back to the things that were happening there in that central kind of, that centrally located country. That is one of the things that Lacare brings to his work, the recognition of the intricate connectedness of world events that go from, you know, World War II to the age of the war on terror. And the fact that he's able to bring that perspective from the spike he came in from the cold, you know, through Smiley's people to this book, to the night manager, to a most wanted man, and still continually to like reveal new things about these different conflicts and the way intelligent agencies, you know, prosecute, you know, their mission. It makes me wish real intelligence agencies had this much like perspective and patience and intelligence. You know, maybe we would have prevented some terrorist acts, but instead it seems like as intelligence agencies and as militaries and as countries, we're always like fixing our mistakes from the last war. And it's so difficult for us to like look ahead both to prevent terrorist actions tactically, but also diplomatically so that there isn't motivation for terrorists in the first place. So yes. And so going back to the coal, they did all their pre deployment training. Everything was fine. I mean, you, you can't as a unit, whether it's, you know, for me, it was my squadron, or it's a ship or submarine, you can't go on deployment until you pass all these readiness, operational readiness hurdles, and they did that. All their training was complete satisfactory. But for some reason, there was this gap in intelligence sharing and it was exploited. And so that was one of the lessons learned was that the intelligence community, the U.S. intelligence community is ginormous. But sometimes they don't like to share intelligence, you know, with the person right next door. And so that was one of the lessons learned is that the intelligence community has to be better about sharing operational tactical intelligence with the unit commander. Yeah. And Kurt's in this book and the series does not share information with the people sitting next to him, let alone in other countries or intelligence agencies. Yeah. I think that's what makes Kurt such an intriguing figure than you're always going to just try and get his motivations yourself, the amazing, amazingly intuitive shot by Park in the miniseries where he's standing on the bridge, the overpass over the highway, looking out as the sun is setting, right? And then we get that double shot later after they stage the accident that kills Slim. That is just such an intuitive thing to show that shot is so memorable right away, but we don't know how it's going to pay off. And then when it does, we realize he was there setting that stage. He was there already deciding how it was going to happen, you know, all the logical kind of things that he had to take into consideration. He was putting the players in line. He was manipulating it. The biggest change for me from novelton miniseries, and I was shocked, was having Kurt's right before the climax. And I guess the idea of assassinating or kidnapping a little and saying, "Let's just keep her in there. Let's just keep her in the game. We'll have someone there and like, you know, she'll be right at his side as he ascends." That is not from the book, you know, he's always a lot more single-minded in the book. So again, what an interesting and weird direction to take that character at the last bit to have this impulsive thought of, what if we just keep it going? You kind of appreciate that on the one hand, he's having like really creative thoughts. I'm like, "Hey, rather than this easy fix of just killing everybody, let's keep it going. Let's see what we can do with it. We might even get like a bigger fish." That kind of thinking is shocking to me in someone in his position, who, you know, you would think was only interested in clearing things up and doing the job and pleasing his supervisors and his allies. I thought that that was such an interesting decision to change that. It reminds me of the position that Kim Filby had in MI6, it's sort of like Kurt is trying to insert his own version of Kim Filby into the Palestinian terrorist organization. And if anybody's unfamiliar, Kim Filby was a very high-placed Soviet agent within MI6 who operated for years and years and years. And that, like, I believe new personally. And yeah, yeah. So I could definitely understand that change and why Kurt's might be motivated to do something like that. And I think that also speaks to, you know, what is the end goal for these intelligence agencies? Like, is the goal to make us safer? Is it to gather intelligence, you know, to kill your targets and exterminate the threat? Exactly. Yeah. When your mission is always changing, it is so nebulous when these organizations are so enormous and operate on secrecy, you know, sometimes it's hard to remember why you started in the first place. I want to ask the two of you. I noticed that John LeCarré was not part of the screenplay for this, but he was one of the executive producers. So do you know why he does not write the screenplay? And did he, did he write any other screenplays for any of his other books? Do you know? Off the top of my head, I don't think he adapted any of his books for the screen. I think he's probably just too busy making books, very prolific guy. He must have some involvement with the '84 movie because he has a cameo in it. So I don't know if he was a consultant on it. Yeah, so back to this ending, such a famous prolific writer like him, what do you think his perception or his opinion was of the changed little twist to the ending? He's pretty guarded with his personal opinions on a lot of things, but I'm guessing that he's satisfied with his books and that they're going to remain on the books. And the people, if big movies do, is want to write them a check to it, adapt it, he'll take that check and sign. It's such a great change, not only because of, you know, it's surprising versus change, but it gives an extra emotional motivation to Gotti, you know, for wanting to protect Charlie. Alexander Scarskard has this, playing Gotti has this very great reaction to it, which is like he has just condemned this woman to torment, eternal torment. And his motivation for disobeying orders and going in to shoot him really seems to come from that exact moment where he sees that like Kurtz is so, so focused on, you know, keeping it going, not winning, not, you know, not succeeding necessarily, but just keeping it going, keeping his unit functioning the way that they're supposed to, having one operation up to another and involving this innocent woman in this who's already so deep into it, it suddenly becomes unacceptable for him. He's not a soldier anymore, you know, he's going to go with his emotion rather than with his soldier instinct. And he's going to go in and say, no, that's not happening. You know, I'm not going to let you do that. So that makes or even more compelling kind of emotional climax in the book. Yeah. I think part of that is seeded earlier in the mini series where Kurtz is like, you know, there's a reason why I brought you back in because you have something so rare and that's doubt. Yeah. And I thought that was a great moment. And I think so many of the ones. Yeah. And I think Scarsgard is an actor that can really play that sort of like enigmatic doubt really well where you can tell that something is sort of simmering and like working now out itself under the surface and we get to see that kind of explode in very key moments. Yes. And John, you know, earlier you were talking about, you know, if I can get on my cinematic high horse here and just about like certain shots that like stick in your mind. That was a visual title, the podcast, by the way, cinematic high horse. But you know, part of my problem with streaming series in general is that at least now like they're so un-cinematic, right? Like, there's so many series that I see people are big fans of like, there's no cinematic moments. There's no specific episode that stands out. It's all just sort of like a cream of wheat of a singular tone for eight episodes or whatever. And so it just seems like it's a 300 minute episode that has no distinguishing features. Whereas this, like every episode feels unique, you know, you go from Greece to England to this terrifying interrogation room to Palestine. You get beautiful shots of the landscape. You get different perspective from different characters and it feels cinematic. You feel like you've been on a journey. And I'm so thankful that we have a filmmaker like Park Chen wok who can bring that aspect to the eight episode mini series format or six episodes, sorry. Oh, he's cinema with the capital C. I mean, even just in a room, that tiny room where he positions Michael Shannon behind that arch. So like his face is obscured. What an interesting decision, you know, what a weird way to stage that scene. Every single scene I think has just an amazing element to absolutely agree. There's even the scene where Kurtz is interrogating Salim and Michael Shannon gets in the corner with him and is like speaking, like touching his cheek with his mouth and it just like got how intimidated it must be for that 20 something actor to have like Michael Shannon just infiltrate your soul in the scene, but it works so well for those characters. And then Kurtz grabs his feet. Yeah. Yeah. No one that that's how he's been tortured. Yeah. Yeah. And that just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because that had to be extraordinarily painful. Yeah. Kurtz in the book and in the series makes us sort of like not moral stand, but like professional stand against physical interrogation that it's like the last resort of thugs and idiots. Yes. He's not above sleep deprivation, isolation, mental manipulation, or in this case, hagual torture. Yeah. And not to mention drugs. Yeah. I love the liqueuré and then barked by a dap to get can take what is basically like a pretty well worn story, basically the model, Harry story, right? The woman who gets pulled in to, you know, the world of men and the world of intrigue and espionage and can make something so interesting and different with it. It actually reminded me a lot of Paul Verhoeven doing black book, you know, which is set in Holland during the war and has the female spy. And in the end has a coda set in Israel in 1956 where you get the, you get the, you're kind of put at ease thinking like, oh, her troubles are over. She's found her home. She's found peace. And then immediately the siren goes off announcing the air attack and these really soldiers are positioning themselves, you know, and it's like, it's never over. You know, it's kind of the idea. Just because you mentioned the matter, Harry Trobe, I do just want to concentrate on just how, how much work the titular character, you know, Florence Pugh has to do for this movie. Like she really goes through it. And yet because, you know, it is a bit of a cliche to have this young woman and manipulate by men and thrust into the world of men and, you know, allow men to use her body and to seduce them and manipulate them. And so for Pugh to make this character her own and be so singular and so independent and so believable, you know, I think the series hinges on on that performance. Like we have to believe her. We have to be on her side and we have to sympathize with her and, and for us to believe she's capable, but also be terrified for her because her being in between the figure like Kurtz and a figure like Kyleo is, is such an incredible balancing act. And then for her to also have to, you know, be an actress who just wants to sit around agree, a beach on Greece and play guitar. I think she does all that spectacularly. I absolutely agree with you. I usually eat when actors play actors, because they have a very specific, when they're acting within the film, they give this, you know, they give this very phony kind of performance. Like, just so you know, I'm acting acting now, you know, it's not my performance. I'm doing a performance within the performance. The only person I think who did a good job at that was John Cassavetes and Rosemary's baby where you can actually see him like preparing to go into the room with his wife when he's lying to her, you know, he actually see him like doing silly actor stuff to like get himself ready. And I think, you know, with Diane Keaton, you do see a little bit of that. You know, God bless Diane Keaton. She gave one of the best performances I think ever in a movie and looking for Mr. Goodbar, she's a great actress. She was wrong for the role and you see a lot of that kind of silly phoniness in her performance. But Florence, I agree, does not fall into that. I think it's even more of a challenge for her having to play an actor who is acting and is getting lost inside of her double performance. Not really. I'm just knowing, you know, if she's starting to believe the things that her character is supposed to believe in, not knowing where she's actually leaning, where she ends, where it begins. Who am I, right? Becomes the ultimate question. It's a very complicated thing to ask her to do as she does it marvelously. And she was pretty young, right? Wasn't she? Early twenties. Yeah. Early twenties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She did a great job with, you know, other great actors, you know, great cast formidable performance. She seems as tall as Michael Shannon sometimes and he's gigantic and she's very tiny. So yeah, really just like little moments of her like pretend trying to sing along to like a Yugoslavia and folk music in the car, like little character beats like that that and to be in a book. She she pulls off really well from the few reviews I read that she got. She got great reviews. That's one surprise. I didn't hear about this when it came out. I did. In general, I don't pay attention to a lot of TV stuff. So, but with Park involved and with, you know, the almost universal, great reviews that God, I'm really surprised I didn't hear about until it was not well publicized because I think when it first premiered, it was one of those like it premiered in England and then but was only available on like AMC plus in America and it just kind of got lost in the streaming nebula that can happen sometimes. And so I was probably just like googling spy series at some point and I was like, Park Chan, walk directed at miniseries from John the Carre like, how did I not Michael Shane is it? How did I not know this existed? But so I'm glad I discovered. Well, you think about the what do you think about the ending where everybody ends up? Do you think it's a I mean, it's a fairly ambiguous ending overall. It's somewhat hopeful, at least in terms of these characters and they're in the miniseries or breakdown after Khalil's death is not as extreme as it is either in the book or in the movie, they don't really go in, you know, obviously she's upset, but she's, you know, Diane Keaton really gets upset, I mean, really choose the scenery in the 84 film. I like your your the your description of being hopeful and a little bit leaves it leaves it up to the viewer, but I was a bit hopeful that that that Gotti and Charlie could reconcile. I don't know whether they have a long-term relationship or not, I don't think that's necessarily the question. I think it's it's how they wrestle with what happened to them. Can they live with what they did? You know, in the book talks more about Charlie's potential acting, you know, and her future on the stage and in the theater, but I feel like she can go back to it. Right, right, right. Yeah. In the miniseries, that really doesn't come into play. It's more about her, but their relationship, yeah. I think Kurtz is going to be Kurtz. Yeah. He's just going to keep marching on. Oh, you know, at one point in the series, Kurtz, you know, Gotti tells Kurtz like, why did you bring you back here? I was happy and Kurtz says, you were bored. I think it kind of depends on who do you believe was Gotti happy before he got brought back in or was he bored? And so I think if he gets bored again after six months or a year, I think he's going to be drawn right back in to if not a Kurtz operation, a different operation and, you know, lose his soul again. He wakes up dreaming about like being buried in sand. He's subsumed with conflict, like he's almost like he's addicted to it. He, you know, he fought in 56, 67, and 73. And there's this great exchange where like, like, why, why did you fight in all these wars? And he says, well, like in 56, it was to be a hero and 67 was for peace. And then a 73. And he like gets lost and just says for Israel. So it's like, like something has happened to him where he doesn't even understand why he's still fighting. And so if he can come to grips with the fact that he has no motivation to fight anymore, then I think he'll be okay with Charlie's help, he can maybe get to that place. But he, if he, if he just keeps going back to fighting, then he's not going to be okay. As I was reading the book and watching the mini series, I always thought about the two of them really love each other. And is that one of Charlie's motivation for, for getting so deep into this mission? So that's one of the things I also thought about at the very end. You know, does Charlie stay with Gody? Are they really in love? You know, what are they going to do next? Yeah. Because so much of their relationship was built on Gody building up the identity of Michelle for her fall in love with. Yes. Michelle, who is the cover name for Selim, who Charlie never met, who's like psyche. She transfers on to Khalil, who she falls in love with for a hot minute. And now she has to readjust back to be in love with Gody, who she calls Joseph. And when John the correct person on the scene, really, with the spy who came in from the cold, it was a very much like a James Bond world with the spy novel in the mid 60s. But I think the idea of, even though he might not have known or used that phrase, I think the spy who came from the cold is suffused with moral injury. And one of the reasons why dad I wanted you on here was to talk about that idea and how that concept sort of plays into the story. Very moral injury is different than post-traumatic stress. Post-traumatic stress is a diagnosed disorder in the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual that the American Psychological Association puts out. But moral injury is not, there's still not a general agreement about how mental health professionals can assess that in a clinical setting. So that's weight, that's way over my head. But their PTSD is recognized, moral injury is recognized, but not it's not in the DSM yet. So it's really, in a nutshell, it's too, from my non-medical, non-philosophical, non-counseling side or background, is you can suffer moral injury from a significant event that you participate in or witness or a family member suffers from that goes against your moral code, your moral compass, your ethics, your values. So you can, it could be an active omission, it could be an active co-mission. The other part of it is that you are betrayed by a higher authority. Basically you work for, does something and that results in your moral injury. In one of the organizations I've volunteer with in Pennsylvania in Carlisle, War Peace and Justice Project, we did an event on moral injury. And we showed the film, since this is a film podcast, we use the film Siege of Jadaville and Jamie Dornan. Based on a real situation in the Congo in 1961, it's an Irish Army unit, a company of just like 155-ish soldiers, they're there on essentially a UN peacekeeping mission, and they get involved in a five-day firefight with 3,000 rebels and mercenaries. And not one Irish soldier got killed, and they only had like a half a dozen wounded. And they killed and wounded hundreds of these rebels. Moral injury is that the UN and the Irish government did not recognize their bravery, their heroism and what they did to represent Ireland and what they did representing the United Nations because recognizing them as heroes, which they justifiably were, would have shown a failure of the UN and its effort of diplomacy to try to resolve this conflict in the Congo. So I mean, resulted in suicide, substance abuse, alcoholism, broken marriages. It was a horrible, horrible time for these Irish soldiers. So for this event, the commander of this Irish unit was an officer named Pat Quinlan and his son, Leo Quinlan, came over from Ireland to the United States and spent a week with us and did four sessions on moral injury and talked about his dad. We showed the movie, he talked about the movie. All the soldiers that saw the movie thought it was very well done. One common comment was that, yeah, the firefights were far more intense than what you showed in the movie, but they thought it was fairly well done, an event that goes against your moral code, your values, your ethics or that you'll be betrayed by higher authority. So it just makes me think of like, you know, when Richard Burton and the spy came in from the cold, you know, has to, or is told that he has to leave that woman behind or when he tries to bring it over the wall and then she shot and, you know, he just sort of watches her, her body fall or, you know, any time George Smiley, you know, betrays a friend or breaks a friendship for office politic reasons, which are actually, you know, international intelligence reasons, or, you know, when Gotti has to fall in love with Charlie in order to manipulate her to get her to become an infiltrator and has to watch her be manipulated further by Kurtz over and over again, or for these Israeli intelligence officers who have to, you know, murder Salim and Anna in order to establish Charlie's cover. And also Charlie, and her moral injury for realizing that the people who are in charge of her care are also capable of cold blood and murder and mutilating these corpses. And so just the idea of morality being slowly picked apart and losing your own debt added in your moral center, I think is part of what is so fascinating about La Carre's work and why it's so deep in and why it can be used to look at moral injury in the world of spies. Well, yeah, John, and going back to Charlie, I mean, she, as we've been talking about, she's an actor. She's an actress. She's not a murderer. She's not a killer. She's not a spy. And so when she's in the camp and Hanifer, Hatford, whatever, the guy's the American. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's responsible for his death. He comes on to her and then in order to extricate herself from the situation, she kind of tells what happened the night before. So I mean, she's essentially responsible for him getting killed. And, you know, when she's in the camp, she makes friends with Fatima, Salim sister. She makes friends with these kids who are living there, most of whom are orphans and are just kind of like communal children of the camp. And then they're all blown up by an Israeli bomb. Yeah. So I'm sure she has some PTSD from all that as well, but some moral injury too. Yeah. And just circling back to the whole idea of the world stage and the atrics of subterfuge and espionage, you're wondering throughout the whole thing, you know, how hurts and be where he is and be so good at it. How did he reach this point where he is so morally dead inside that, you know, he has no problem playing this role 24/7. You see conflict, obviously, in Gaudy, even though the whole setup is that, you know, I'm the terrorist. You're in love with me. We're a couple. And he says everything, you know, I feel this way and he's saying, you know, all these Palestinians and beliefs and ethics and he's saying it all as if it's him. You know, he's really getting into the character and then Charlie thinking, you know, she's a professional actress, but then saying that, like, this level of performance is beyond her, that she could never reach that level and, you know, have this kind of moral deadness within her. I think that one of the last lines of the book is something like, you killed me, remember I'm dead, you know? And the idea that he like accepts her even though she, whether she's alive or dead, he wants her anyway. I think that's kind of, again, going back to the body of a Hari thing. This has to be a romance at the end of the day, right? As much like real-world politics and real-world circumstances are thrown into it, it still has to be an adventure story that has a relatable romantic story at its center. And I think that any kind of hope that can be taken from it is that these two people have not been totally hollowed out inside, like so many love-carry characters have throughout his entire career and his novels. And, you know, part of the reason why I wanted to bring this topic here is because of how much I respect you, John, and how much I respect the pink smoke and how much respect I have for my dad and his perspective on everything. Recently, as we record this, you know, the Israeli army rescued for hostages from Hamas and in the process they killed 200 Palestinians. The number of civilians and that number is probably pretty high, but I haven't heard reliable numbers on that. The algebra for the Israeli military, you know, 50 Palestinians for every one Israeli, it's well within their, like, margin of error. It did seem like from this current conflict, certainly, and the fact that we can get into the thriller romance of these characters, you know, we want Charlie and Godhead to end up together. You know, we were hoping for a moral center for these Israeli, British, and Palestinian characters. Like, we're connecting with their humanity here. And so, even if there is something almost horrific about the way Kurt is able to manipulate people or the way God he is able to, like, you know, kill himself and take on someone else's identity, you know, there is still something there for us to touch and connect with as opposed to, like, the mind-numbing stories of the current conflict. And you know, that's part of why I've had trouble getting this story out of my head and why I think it continues to be so compelling. John's youngest brother, Josh, who's a counselor, a mental health professional, he was on a podcast a while ago, Moral Injury International. And really, so I'll plug for that podcast. It's really good. It's run by an ex-pat Irishman in Australia. And so that's how Josh got linked up with him in Australia. And Leo Quinlan, the son of Pat Quinlan. So they're all on the podcast. Yeah. So it's for anybody that wants a little more in-depth info, I recommend that podcast. All right, gentlemen, well, I'm so glad you guys brought this to me. I really, really, I'm so glad that I've seen this now, seen all the different iterations of it, read the book. It's just amazing again, I mean, we've said it a few times now, but to make something that is so specific to its time and place, as timeless as it is, and you know, something that's still very relevant these days, it's just amazing. And again, Lucare, you know, just do noxies, tomes out, you know, every year or so back when he was writing. It's amazing that, you know, he can have this level of fastidiousness towards the subject at the same time, you know, real accessibility to his characters, emotions, and the people involved in these conflicts. I think that's really what makes it timeless is that, you know, at the center of all these things, they're these people who are just folks, just like the rest of us, right? And they're just trying to live and do what they need to do and create, create a stage for themselves, you know, within this giant world stage and try to just kind of figure out what our parts is. And that's really the relatable thing about it. John, what's going on with you and your podcast? Anything exciting coming up around the bend? Yeah, so I coast the podcast Popcorn Escaton with my friend Scott Thoreau. A lot of topics we've talked about today, we might cover on that one, but we just released a witchcraft focus episode with Robert Eggers as the witch in Hacksen, and the next one we are recording is going to be on the Norwegian film, Escape, or Escape, and Nicholas Winey reference Valhalla Rising. So nice Middle Ages Scandinavian double feature. Very nice. Very metal, my friend. Hell yeah. Alright, you guys, well, thank you so much for being on, I appreciate the talk. I'd like to throw out a public Happy Birthday to John, his birthday was yesterday. Oh, brilliant, so much. Happy early birthday, Dan, because your birthday is in a few days. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]