Black Bag

Don’t try to figure out Black Bag. There is an answer, but you are likely to find yourself doing a lot of reticulated thinking in your attempt to parse out "the truth." Look at the palette Soderberg is using: drugs, a polygraph test (which one character manipulates  with her anal sphincter), fishing and the principle of loosening the line a bit before the catch, a dinner game and a chilling first scene in which one of the players delivers a stigmata by angrily sticking a knife into the other's hand. It's a crucifixion in what is described as "an amoral universe." Are you trying to get me or am I trying to get you?--is one locution. It’s truth or dare, fake news in the portrait of George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchette) as a pair of married British spies. When the wife says she will kill for her husband you somehow believe her, but what about him? At first it's not clear. The actual hard espionage is naturally tied to Russia but the program at the heart of the plot, Severus, aimed at causing meltdowns, is curiously anachronistic. Moreover the expensive digs the agents occupy, replete with the latest in culinary and dress apparel are anomalous. Aren't spies civil servants? DOGE would be letting them go. Black Bag is the perfect movie in the age of gaslighting--where the standard of truth is insistence. Is there a there, there, but where? 

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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