Who Were the Bad Guys in the 90s Dad Thrillers?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s newsletter:

An empirical look at the identities, affiliations and pursuits of the villains in the 90s Dad Thrillers; and
a sad tribute to a website I admire: Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease.

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This tweet was recently brought to my attention:

As loyal readers know, this is an area of deep scholarly interest for me, especially since I was between the ages of 5 and 15 during the period in question and my earliest understanding of geopolitics was informed by films like The Holy And Goldeye. In an earlier newsletter I have attempted to list and taxonomize a broad collection of these films, generally skillfully made Hollywood films with a pretense of political sophistication, which I called “Dad Thrillers”:

’90s Dad Thrillers: A List

What makes these films historically interesting to me, besides my own narcissism, is the way they clearly grapple with the question implied in the OP: Who Are the bad guys now? The Cold War is over; the economy is booming; the sense of social and societal decay that came with deindustrialization could be suppressed and pushed aside. Especially in international thrillers, screenwriters seemed to be throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick: The Air Force One bad guys are… Kazakhs… Stalinists… irredentists? The Jackal An IRA terrorist and his ETA lover working with the CIA to stop a former KGB agent from assassinating an American politician on behalf of the Azerbaijani mafia? Sure! It’s all very *spins large bingo cage*.

To answer this question empirically, I took my movie list and removed everything from before 1992 and after 2000, then sorted the villains in each movie into broad categories. Then to better address OP’s specific question, at least in regards to moviesthat’s what I have. I narrowed the original field down to 27 films that I think could reasonably be described as “Tom Clancy-esque thrillers,” primarily because of strong military, intelligence, and/or geopolitical themes and plots, and re-evaluated them.

The data only gives us a partial picture of the villain situation, as you could say that many films overlap, for example: Air Force One And Goldeye features both renegade ex-Soviet powers And Villainous/bitter agents of the state. (I usually awarded the film to the villain played by the most prominent actor and/or was the antagonist in the climactic fistfight.)

Still, we can say that the villains in Clancy-esque Dad Thrillers can be divided into four broad categories:

Villainous/bitter agents of the stateby which I mean spies and soldiers who radicalize or betray their former employers because of politics, neglect, greed, or psychopathy (for example, Tommy Lee Jones in Under siege or Jon Malkovich in In the firing lineand much more).
Deep State Conspiratorsby which I mean shady bureaucrats within the intelligence community or military apparatus who work to maintain power or enrich themselves (e.g. Jon Voight and co. in Enemy of the state or the president in Clear and present danger).
Terrorists of various kinds. This is a funny category because the terrorists are almost always freelance and non-ideological (e.g. Bruce Payne in Passenger 57) or Irish (e.g. Jonathan Pryce in Ronin). This is probably at least partly because it is easier to buy, say, Brad Pitt as an IRA terrorist than as an al-Qaeda terrorist. The only Muslim terrorists on the list are the Chechens in Executive decision and the Crimson Jihad in True lies.
Renegade former Soviet powersby which I mean military officers, oligarchs, militias and politicians of ex-Soviet states, including Russia. In almost all cases these guys have nuclear weapons or are trying to get them (e.g. Air Force One And The Peacemaker).

I guess this isn’t all that surprising, when you’re talking breakdowns: a mix of boomer paranoia and anti-government resentment, mixed with a fear of the end of history for non-state villains. For reference: the villains in actual Clancy novels written between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11: Japan; Iran; eco-terrorists (!); China; and then, in what felt like an admission of defeat just before 9/11, the Soviet Union was revived in a flashback novel set in the early 1980s.

Our cat, Goose, died this week at the age of Probably About 14. She was a wonderful companion, a lazy loafer and a voracious eater, gentle but generous with her affection, and generally very patient with our son, if only because he often had food lying around in the hands he held out to her. She was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease a little over four years ago, and I am so glad I got to spend so much time with her.

Normally I don’t like to write about personal events in this newsletter, because I think boundaries are healthy when you’re a content-producing solopreneur, and I want to respect the privacy of the people in my life, even my cat. But I wanted to mention Goose and her passing because it’s taken up quite a bit of mental space in my head this week, and because I want to publicly honor a website I’ve visited regularly over the past few years that I think is one of the best on the web, or at least the best of what the web ever promised: Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Chronic Kidney Disease in Cats.

If you have a cat with CKD, you are probably already aware of Tanya’s, the best repository of information and advice on feline kidney disease and the various pharmaceutical and medical treatments. If you don’t have a cat with CKD, I still recommend Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide as an example of a perfect website: a simple, clear, fast-loading, ad-free, informative page with a sensible and intuitive layout and structure, and a clear purpose and voice. Helen, the woman who runs the page – Tanya was her cat’s name – writes with clarity and detail, combining thorough research and personal experience (as well as the personal experience of contributors) to answer just about any question you might have about feline CKD, from the theoretical to the practical, often complete with photographs. It is both enormously helpful and downright charming.

It is, to put it another way, exactly the kind of resource you hope to find when you Google anxiety symptoms, diagnoses, or medications. I recently read Amanda Hess’ excellent, funny pregnancy memoir, Second life (pre-order here; I might get an affiliate discount), and appreciated the way she writes about the role of the Internet in fueling and reducing anxiety, particularly around medications, the way your searches become a “map of fears,” the results a “dense underlay” of content alternately confusing, disturbing, and enlightening: your compulsive Googling is often a way to pull the slot machine arm again to see what feeling you might get, to satiate the itch of anxiety. Many of the sites that rank highly on Google are designed less to meet the real needs of the anxious Googler than to convert that anxiety into attention (or sometimes a sale). Tanya’s, unlike most of what you get online, is generally enlightening, if not in content then in tone and presentation, but more than anything it is sincere helpfulOnce you’ve read it, you’re unlikely to find yourself going back to your Google search again and again to pick at the scabs.

To be clear: Worrying about your baby is very different from worrying about your old cat (I know: I’ve worried about both, sometimes at the same time!), and there’s no website that can alleviate an anxiety that exists outside and before reality. But the world would be a better place if there were more Tanya-like sites for human ailments and diseases—”third spaces,” to borrow a phrase, that are neither the product of profit-making SEO operations nor of indecipherable expert academic institutions. I’m not sure I have much faith in the viability of the open and largely amateurish Web anymore. But I’m glad that people like Helen are still around, making it a little easier to figure out how to best care for your cat.