Warning: Spoilers ahead!
Q: What’s worse than a movie Muslim?
A: A silver screen Slav. Vaguely Russophile, ambiguously vampiric, generically post-Soviet. Impossible to racially profile. Terrifying.
As an assassin named Lia, Nargis Fakhri brings a gorgeous dangerousness to her role in Spy, this weekend’s top box office hit. Pretty much only that, though. You’d think a Hollywood action-comedy could make more use of her, but she’s half-Czech and half-Pakistani, which pretty much means she’s at the bad end of both worlds.
Deny it all you want to, Eastern Europeanness is all but mandatory for Bond villains, real or aspirational. Long before East versus West, there was Eastern Europe against Western; swarthy Mediterraneans dragging down flaxen Nordics, even presently present with industrious Germany condescending to a Greece heading for the Grexit.
Thanks for democracy but what have you done for us recently?
Even the adjectives are ominous: Oriental. Balkan. Byzantine. Why explain what makes someone your enemy when you can just point to geography?
Melissa McCarthy in Spy (20th Century Fox).
Sure, Spy is about an everyday woman—Melissa McCarthy as the tragicomic Susan Cooper—in a feel-good, world-hopping, butt-kicking romp. Are you just what you look like? No! What if you’re not tall, fit, and narrowly sexy? Who cares! Do nice gals finish behind even nice guys? Nice gals aren’t always nice! Why are Pakistanis so good-looking? God knows! Why don’t European police departments seem more prepared for the numerous car chases we bring to their urban cores? ECB policy!
Most heretically: Can you be friends with our nemeses? Uh-oh. Spy is much more than irreverent slapstick flick; it’s edgy in its honesty, valuing sororal loyalty to the point of political infidelity. In an age when there is no higher value than being open-minded, comedy might be the most politically subversive means to any end. Cartoons are blasphemy, comics are pundits. And don’t let any of this suggest to you, for one moment, that you won’t enjoy watching a genuinely hilarious, goofy, and tender movie.
As for the plot itself, it’s simple. McCarthy’s CIA analyst Susan Cooper is bureaucratic wallpaper given an opportunity to come to life… and does she snatch it. For years, Cooper’s been the insecure and dowdy second fiddle, working as the phone operator for suave CIA superagent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), guiding him past every danger even as he is oblivious to her obvious affections.
You and I know there’s no way roles aren’t eventually going to be reversed. Because the world is changing, and because we watched the trailer. (It popped up before 50 Shades of Grey, aka “Shari’ah in the Bedroom.”) When Fine is killed at the hands of the dastardly, and Bulgarian, Rayna Boyanov (played by a fantastic Rose Byrne), the CIA doesn’t just lose a great agent. Because Boyanov has the identities of all other CIA agents, which means no one can stop her. Or, rather, almost no one.
Enter Susan Cooper, the only human being—in the WORLD—who can track down a network of criminals intent on setting off a bomb in New York City. At least the threat isn’t implausible: New York’s the greatest city in the world, and Chicagoans need to stop trying. (As consolation prize, you can have the world’s number 2 pizza.) Of course, we don’t know if Cooper can do it. Cooper doesn’t think she can. But her boss believes the deskbound analyst has the potential to become a kickass field agent.
Women empowering women. (Also, apparently, no other U.S. operative has the necessary skills to pull this off. Literally, there are three other CIA agents, all male and all compromised, and no one else who would have any immediate experience. Probably the cost of spying on repressed Muslim teenagers wondering which masjid Nargis Fakhri prays at has bankrupted our nation and opened the door to the rise of China.)
Cooper’s mission is to track Boyanov, but not intercept her, which of course she will. In reliably but also surprisingly amusing ways.
Spy isn’t just about a woman who can do everything a man can. It’s not merely about the humdrum Cooper rising to do what stunningly attractive physical specimens, masculine and feminine, believe is entirely their preserve. Though that, too. Take, for example, Nargis Fakhri, a.k.a. Lia the very pleasantly unpredictable eye candy, an assassin with no backstory. Does she need one?
We know she’s bad, because she looks—you know, physically, outwardly—TSA suspicious. (TSA rhymes with NSA.) She’s got that Muslimy vibe, which is key to the redacted casting call: “You have to look like someone who’s liable to be pulled aside for a random screening.” “Non-Hispanic Brown.” “Did I use swarthy?” That and her tendency to survive grievous knife wounds while flipping around frantically.
Maybe Lia’s yet another irrelevant Easterner whose motives never matter, whose first (and only) language is force. Fakhri is not the only Bollywood bombshell to land in Hollywood; this fall, on ABC, Indian actress and model Priyanka Chopra will be starring in Quantico, which doesn’t just boldly star an Indian actress playing a, um, white protagonist alongside a cast which includes a woman in a headscarf—butthey’re all FBI agents. Good guys.
Spy‘s Lia is a bad guy, and gets brushed off altogether—with cookery and farce—because Spy challenges some stereotypes even as it bolsters others. The comely never take center stage, except to get pushed off it, shot, stabbed, kicked or otherwise womanhandled away from the spotlight by the ambitious, hardworking, and congenitally overlooked. We know Jude Law can save America from evil. But someone who looks like Melissa McCarthy can too.
Though in the course of finding herself and saving us, Cooper flips our pat little view of the world. In Spy, are two types of bad guys: Shadowy terrorists who want to purchase a nuclear weapon, and the intermediaries who are trying to procure it for them. The former never register. But the latter dazzle, especially Rose Byrne’s Rayna Boyanov. Cooper and Rayna are only superficially different; their telling each other to buzz off is the movie’s sappiest moment by far, a recognition that they have more in common than they want to know. They’re women in a man’s world, making it their own world, and having a wonderful time on the way. But should they be?
Boyanov is cruelly honest, and fetching for it: She knows what she wants and says what she thinks—which is what we’re thinking—though we lack the courage (or liquid assets) to. Cooper discovers her inner strength, and is freed by it. Boyanov is wealthy, and can afford to be herself. Susan’s and Rayna’s budding loyalty to each other comes worryingly, treasonously close to overruling our patriotic certainties, our geographic support network. In an America that is permanently at war, and yet banishes that war to robots and surveillance and conversations we’d rather not (and so don’t) have, is it any wonder we can imagine CIA agents being just like us? The question we should ask is one every movie studio already has an answer to: Who are Americans ready to cheer for?
The man who wants to use the nuke? Of course not. He’s Chechen, apparently (though not really) Slavic AND Islamic… a.k.a. the worst possible thing in the universe. But Balkan Rayna, who wants to sell it to him, doesn’t seem purely vile—she’s stupendously vile. Not larger than her life. Just larger than most of our lives. I’m not asking for a Muslim heroine. Quantico appears to have that covered. (Sic.) Just someone not so evil that you can, maybe, fall a little bit in love with her, or wonder what it would be like to hang out with her—or at least give her a few lines to go along with the backflips and knife swipes.
Watch Spy. After all, the Susan Coopers of the world are watching you. Take someone along. Preferably your worst enemy.
Spy is rated (R) for treasonous liberal revisionism. Good guys only kill bad guys, but bad guys mostly only kill bad guys, which makes it hard to know who’s with us and who’s against us.
