Modern Mythology: Secret Agent


Dom Rottman

27 January 2025


Michael Fassbender recently wasted his talents in Paramount Pictures’ The Agency, the latest variation on a classic culture industry slop offering: the spy drama. The Agency in question is of course the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency, captured with an unusually glamorous portrayal of bureaucracy and espionage iced with the finest gadgetry and weaponry available–what better beacon of freedom and power can there be? Even if the show is light on propaganda, the romance of the CIA doesn’t exactly express ideals associated with democracy. Then again, power in the western world isn’t really all that democratic to begin with. Elections are not democratic either. The Athenians did not hold elections, nor was every matter was resolved by majority vote. Sortition, selection at random, was considered the most equal and democratic way to select who would represent and have political power for the year. Elections, by contrast, were considered a feature of aristocracies, where the high born paraded themselves around with grand campaigns to woo the masses and prove to them that they were the best fit to rule. So what do our politicians, today’s aristocrats, have in common with someone like James Bond? Quite a lot, actually: Expensive suits, compelling charisma, the ability to wield extraordinary violence, and a squabble is made when whiteness is not a given. But the most important similarity is the idea that the fate of the western world rests in their hands; for every Blair there is a Bond, for every Biden there is a Bourne, the heroes on whom the world depends.

However, whether the world in which we currently live is worth saving is at this point an open question. Even when we do not face the materially evident crises we do today, it should strike us as odd that the triumphant western world constantly needs saving by the very institutions in which it vests strength, anthropomorphized in the world-historic secret agent. His1 recurrence, generating mass appeal, performs the basic function of ideological reinforcement for which the culture industry is known. There are now twenty-seven James Bond films. Young men want to be him, young women want to be with him, people order vodka martinis “shaken, not stirred,” his fashion is impeccable, and film number twenty-eight is all but guaranteed to be a blockbuster. Honor and prestige takes the image of a seductive and bloodthirsty killer whose sins are absolved by a higher, civic duty. In him we trust the secrets of the state and the world to act in our best interests. Even when the secret agent “goes rogue” against the state it is still for the sake of civil society at large and invariably ends with his ultimate redemption. Unquestioned arbiter of justice, his will and action is the standard of righteousness, keeper of the details of a greater plan unknown to ordinary citizens; “My ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

You get the picture. It is no exaggeration to call the secret agent a messianic figure, not just because he acts according to a higher will, but because he is also a human figure. He is as much like us as he is not by being the incarnation of the arcane mysteries of the state. With the end of Christendom he is the needed Christlike figure for the secular age. By extension, the magnificent murals and stained-glass windows of churches are images which today have become film, television, and video games, which we not only see but consume as our daily entertainment to restore us in mind and spirit for the workaday lives, for which we are eternally grateful to secret agents for upholding. One is tempted to say that, as usual, the ideological reproduction is needed to maintain popular faith in the mirage. The ritual of the Eucharist in modernity has been reduced to a reminder of faith that yet maintains correspondence with the reality of sacrifice and salvation. An image with mere correspondence is blasphemy because it is no substitute for material reality–but there is more at work in the daily slop of secret agent culture. Its image is its incarnation, and consumption thereof is integral to the success of the material reality it not only represents but is a part of. The cultural images of the secret agent are not just a matter of propaganda, the images are how the world-saving operations of modernity are made visible in everyday life.

In other words, there is no point in promoting world-saving heroism if no one actually sees it. The Department of Defense isn’t throwing millions of dollars at studios just to make themselves look good (although it certainly helps), it is a necessary expense to tell the world “yes, we actually are saving and serving you in extraordinary ways.” Conceptually, this isn’t anything new; it’s little different than an old warlord boasting about his deeds and conquests to his peers or subjects: such stories are almost certainly embellished, and someone so rich and powerful is bound to have blood on his hands, spoils to show, and victims to give testimony. But if nobody knows about them, who cares? That these stories today are not only embellished but outlandishly ahistorical is a necessary paradox of expressing informational power: everybody needs to know about it, but the facts themselves–scandalous or mundane–need to be kept a secret. It doesn’t matter if the state has anything to hide or not; the very fact that things must be left unknown is central to its power. This consequence is a happy accident for the culture industry, for it provides such extraordinary ideological license that any schlock they come up with will be taken as true, or will at least set conspiracy as the bar for truth. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, for instance, has enraptured the American imagination for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come. It could have been the Mafia, the Soviets, or–most tantalizing of all–an inside job. The CIA of the cold war has spawned as many heroic secret agents as it has cartoon villains, but both send the same message: the Company is not to be messed with. A good, patriotic citizen might balk at the fact that his countrymen would spin extraordinary tales in substitution for a plausible, straightforward explanation, as if it was less about the truth and more about discrediting the government. But a good patriotic citizen would also believe that his country performs nothing less than the extraordinary every day. The fact that no one will really know what happened to Kennedy because, on the one hand, there’s no way to verify conspiracies, and on the other, no one will believe any official story anyway, is an example of the irony of the informational power the CIA and similar organizations wield. Conspiracy is the vacuum which insulates the state’s power at the level of information, and its outer shell is made of good old-fashioned lead.


When conspiracy becomes not only expected, but accepted, a strange contingent of rationalists comes forth to whine and bemoan the death of thinking and enlightenment, usually to spin off their own nihilistic “post-truth” scent of snake oil. To be sure, there is something unsettling about how, in some cases, the truth doesn’t matter when it comes to power. Fortunately for the enlightened mind, however, the force of mythmaking is vulnerable to consciousness. But it’s not because truth and reality have unfolded rationally, as if consumers all of a sudden were able to think their way out of power. It’s because the story told about reality, fact or fiction, has simply become unpleasant. The faculty of taste, not reason, is dangerous to the present order.

The culture industry succeeds when its products, filled with appropriate ideological content, convince us of their correspondence with reality, the good life, and the proximity of the two. As reality and the good life pull apart from each other, the culture industry’s successes become greater and greater feats. When reality starts to look quite different from the good life, to the point that the two seem at odds, these feats become olympic. Failure to produce gold becomes a more dire prospect because the culture industry cannot afford to keep goodness far away from the reality of which it is itself a part. The secret agent is a recurring figure because of the Atlantean task he faces on the screen and in our imagination: to hold together righteousness and justice, the present order, and the conditions of his existence.

But the culture industry, tenacious as ever, is not one to put all of its eggs in one basket. It has enlisted the help of the superhero, a figure from whom the secret agent is a caped crusader away. Their storied history is a thread worth tracing in its own right. But it is worth noting that superheroes fall short of secret agents in one particular way: the conditions of their existence are categorically unreal, and exist only in our imagination. Consequently, at the level of myth, they are not beholden to the demands of material reality, for they need not necessarily uphold an order which does not produce them. That superheroes frequently act outside the law, then, is not so surprising, but it should give us pause, not because their lawbreaking is unethical or unjustified, but because, on the contrary, it ultimately is justified. At the end of the day, the superhero brings together justice and the present order, which, on its own, by its own material conditions, could not even produce a state-sanctioned secret agent to hold itself together. The only figure able to pull together ideals of a just, good life and an imagined reality is someone who does not–cannot–exist.

In other words, the work of uniting goodness, reality, and the conditions of possibility–in a word, history–has become a task shared between the secret agent and the superhero. But as superheroes continue to pull off feats which are not possible in the real world, they struggle to hide the fact that their very existence is not possible. Consequently, the image of reality which features them begins to quickly lose currency. The good life becomes unrealistic. Real life remains unappealing, and media can no longer distort it while remaining sincere. As the clock ticks ever closer to midnight, the charming spell of culture which weaves together the good life and reality wears out. Unveiled is a bare, unforgiving reality with which the culture industry and its consumers must grapple. So: Is the world worth saving?


Probably not. Which is to say, not the one we’ve been watching for the past few decades (“The reason we watch TV is because it ends! If I wanted a long boring story with no point to it, I have my life!”). The capacity of the culture industry will always be to extol order in and of itself, order in abstracto, regardless of a status quo’s particular content and ideology. But although a status quo would like to remain static, it cannot do so without people eventually catching onto the charade, or at the very least, bored of it. Hence culture’s tendency to cash in on once-popular images and icons as its means of keeping up with the times: Nike works with Kaepernick, the White House Twitter account embraces Dark Brandon, Call of Duty has Squid Game skins. Perhaps one day Luigi Mangione will be selling painkillers.

Recuperation is the cultural process by which something popular from below, something subversive, is coopted into promoting the status quo. Is it ironic that the conditions for the culture industry’s health are, in part, continued efforts to critique and subvert it? Perhaps. One might say the same about the secret agent, who is in business precisely because the order and conditions which produce him are constantly in danger. A world order stuck in a cycle of constantly endangering and then rescuing itself is working exactly as intended. So when the grip gets too tight, when the powers that be become too powerful, when the lies and ideology of the culture industry about reality end up becoming actually pretty damn close to reality, when the moment finally comes that yes, they have finally gotten the population, the war prize, they might actually have their way forever, consciousness turns on the powers that be, not out of a sense of justice per se, but because people’s lives are so shit that they can’t even buy into the truth of things anymore. They can’t actually believe that psychopaths actually believe the shit that they say.

It shouldn’t strike anyone as a surprise that it takes getting hit right in the material conditions for people to “wake up,” for an unfortunate lack of a better term. But as the latest American elections show us, a disturbingly large contingent of politicians thinks that they can take research, interpretable only to trained minds, straight from the hands of bourgeois economists and scientists and scream about and insist upon the data, as if this will somehow, this time, make people suddenly feel better about how they’re being gouged on gas and groceries. True or not, by whatever measure well or poor, the abject refusal to even engage with the disconnect between the magical numbers and the lived experience of everyday Americans is a losing strategy. To be sure, the faculty of reason could use some work. And it is an unfortunate reality that it takes being hit in the face with a crappy life for minds to change, and for people to Google what tariffs are to understand them. I digress, but the extension I want to make here is that culture, the slop through which we all wade, ever rising because the culture industry simply cannot help but produce more and more and more and more and more of it, is more likely than, say, natural science, to knock down the dominoes towards “enlightenment” or what have you because culture is a part of our everyday. It’s on our phones, on our computers, on our TVs and every screen imaginable, and quite intentionally so as a bid to manipulate our free time. It is where we most often “meet” the powers that be. Consciousness, disrupted by the disconnect between what they experience and what they see and hear, does not fully believe the myths as good and/or true, and enables one to believe at the very least that the world is too far gone and that life was supposed to be better. The very last thing it needs is a secret agent Messiah.

Culture as a form of escapism is an interpretation I have always found naive. But it at least expresses a longing to leave the world behind. This impulse, needed today, must be challenged to bear consequences in the real world where escape is not possible, not because the cycle can’t be broken, but because there is nowhere to escape to. If we consider typically escapist genres such as high fantasy or space opera, with their own created conditions, created histories, that enable the realization of ideals we hold dear, this impulse sparks a creative capacity within a refusal. What must follow is a disruptive collision of worlds in a manner directly antithetical to the way the culture industry weaves together seamlessly fact and fiction, real and imaginary. A disruptive quality must be maintained not only as a counteracting force but to avoid producing a new order in turn. Myths have since time immemorial simultaneously obscured and explained reality. They are stories which never were, but always are. If mythology today has been divided into culture and natural science, the former has yet to obtain the demystifying capacity of the latter. Both still await a turn that does not dominate, but liberates.



  1. The reader will forgive me for using masculine pronouns, for the masculinity of the secret agent is integral to his mythology. ↩︎