How Jack Ryan Captured Hollywood

In the final season of the big-budget Jack Ryan, a Prime Video series that ended its four-season run last month, our hero fights the evil convergence of bioweapons-wielding terrorists and global drug pushers and a corrupt U.S. senator in league with this dark web. Ryan and his team only prevail—saving our country from mass slaughter—by resorting to torture, murder, civilian-endangering firefights, and the wanton use of advanced military weaponry, which is lovingly depicted. (Happiness is a warm gun, if you’re a self-confident CIA rogue.)

Yes, “we broke protocol” and employed “any force necessary” to stop the threat of annihilation, Ryan proudly tells the crooked senator, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. Throughout the series, Ryan defies the committee’s oversight, and at the end he’s shown to be right. Ryan exposes the senator’s treason and treachery! The spy was right all along!

American democracy is seen as weak and broken in drama after drama. Only the lawless Jack Ryans can save it.

Jack Ryan is played by a white actor—John Krasinski, who for me never overcomes the wisecracking geniality of his role on The Office. (That all-American persona makes him even more disturbing as a CIA action hero.) But season four also features a Latino man as president (Jordi Mollá), a black woman as CIA director (Betty Gabriel), a black man as her deputy (Wendell Pierce), and a Latino man as Ryan’s hitman sidekick (Michael Peña).

Special Ops: Lioness, a new series on Paramount+, is even more diverse. Zoe Saldana leads a female-heavy CIA commando team that kicks ass like the guys.

These “entertainments” play like CIA recruiting tools, propaganda that says this is not your grandfather’s spy agency. We come in different colors, some of us identify as women. But we’re all Americans. And that’s cool.

We might drone people, and sure, sometimes even our own people, or kind of innocent people. Fuck. That’s not good. But usually it’s bad actors, evil people who had it coming.

Variety critic Alison Herman accused Lioness of weaponizing “women’s liberation in service of the military-industrial complex.”

And that’s what these shows do. They provide new window dressing for the American empire, they update the rationale for U.S. imperialism. We’re not just spreading democracy; we’re protecting women’s rights.

Which brings me to my own encounter with Hollywood. After Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, my bestselling book about Robert F. Kennedy’s private search for the truth about the assassination of his brother President John F. Kennedy, was published in 2007, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone told me, “Hollywood will never make your book.”

It seems he was right. Top studios and producers have repeatedly optioned Brothers and its 2015 bestselling “sequel,” The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. But no Hollywood filmmakers have been bold or committed enough to make movies or TV series out of my books, which illuminate the dark side of U.S. power in the 20^th Century.

The CIA vowed that JFK, Stone’s 1991 dramatic blockbuster about the Kennedy assassination, would never be repeated, opening an office in Los Angeles to vet and even write scripts and “assist” cooperative filmmakers. And the spy agency has been largely successful. In the nearly 32 years since JFK was released, only a handful of movies–– including Kill the Messenger, A Most Wanted Man, and The Report––have portrayed the CIA in a sinister light. Meanwhile, a steady flood of movies like The Recruit, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, have presented the spy agency more flatteringly, while TV franchises like Jack Ryan and Special Ops: Lioness display CIA shoot-and-blow-‘em-up heroics with patriotic fervor.

The message behind these CIA-friendly films and TV shows is blatant: we live in a dangerous world—only ruthless, clandestine tactics can protect us.

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