Why We Needed a Movie about John Le Carre
Errol Morris' new 2023 documentary "The Pigeon Tunnel" is an entertaining philosophical examination of the great writer, and much more
David Cornwall was not who you think he was. If you had seen him when he was alive, 1931-2020, you’d assume he was a pleasant English gentleman.
He was aware of our ignorance, of our misconceived beliefs about him and about ourselves. As a former spy and interrogator, he likely used our ignorance and our ambitions against us. In his case, to sell books.
He was one of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, somebody who merged popularity and profundity, the rarest of combos for any artist.
You know him, of course, by the pen name “John Le Carre.”
He appeared to be a pleasant English gentleman, and that’s how he certainly appears and talks in the great-documentarian Errol Morris’ new movie “The Pigeon Tunnel” (appearing on AppleTV on 10-20-2023).
Of course, he wrote about some of the most heinous acts in statecraft: double agents, betrayals of friends and colleagues, and knowingly living a lie in order to aid an ideological foe. In most societies, the penalty for those crimes is death.
I’ve admired Le Carre as one of the best genre writers I know, which makes him one of the late 20th century’s best. He penned many spy novels that use the vocation of SPY as a means to look critically at modern politics and errant beliefs about politics.
In fact, for him, a SPY is a metaphor for life itself — a serious game of deception and self-deception, of finding, concealing and revealing truths for opportunistic purposes.
Morris’ film, “The Pigeon Tunnel,” named after the working title that Le Carre gave most of his books, plays with Mr. Cornwall as an interview subject. Knowing well how to interrogate and deceive, Cornwall/Le Carre yet claims to be honest on camera.
We know, if we watch carefully, that he might not be. Because—to a master of the spy novel—who is indeed really honest? This is the same man, Morris points out, who says in the opening of his memoir that nothing in his memoir is true!
Le Carre’s take on the human self is postmodern: everybody is performing, and there’s no “center” there. There’s no central core to a human being, just as there’s no central-command room that runs nation-states and dictates their policies, despite our fantasies and hopes to the contrary that someone is in charge. Everything — your country and your inner self — is ad hoc and chaotic.
I found Le Carre to seem to be pretty honest in the film, really, about everything regarding his life and his writing. And thankfully, Morris interviewed him right before he died in 2020.
Yet, along with its heady philosophical material, there’s a deceiver’s edge to “The Pigeon’s Tunnel,” a fun kind of philosophical gamesmanship featured throughout the movie, and I admit I love this stuff.
Le Carre is the kind of thinker and writer I’d nominate to revise Machiavelli’s classic of political deception “The Prince.” He’s bad enough, he admits, to revel in the mischief of an “ends justifies the means” deception, but loyal enough to think principally about his moral purposes and the institutions he’s trying to help.
What I just described — to be a bit bad, but loyal too — is Le Carre’s characterization of the type of person that spy agencies look to recruit. Morris asks Le Carre repeatedly about why people betray other people. His answers tend toward the psychological: deceivers are “addicted to betrayal,” and the “joy of self-imposed schizophrenia is what the secret agent loves.”
Le Carre’s literary works provide a strong antidote to James-Bond ideals, still found in massive blockbuster films such as the Mission: Impossible franchise. His view of real government spycraft was far more negative: they tend to be self-centered, bumbling, error-ridden, and destructive. As a spy for the British government, he based these views on his reality.
As well, Le Carre's story partly centers around his childhood, which he, quoting Graham Greene, says is “the writer's perpetual credit-balance” for his stories. Le Carre's father, Ronnie Cornwell, is described in rather amazing terms — about a third of the documentary focuses on him — as a scammer and huckster, even trying his scammer’s tricks on Le Carre once he came into money. That included suing his son!
From what I can tell, Ronnie Cornwell sounds like he had anti-social disorder. Morris asks us to think about how much of Le Carre's fiction owes itself to his father. Le Carre’s answer: all of it.
Overall, Le Carre proves a more slippery interview than any of Morris' prior subjects, even though his dignified demeanor and classy British accent will fool most viewers of the documentary. He also repeatedly says he's being completely honest.
And yet I kept thinking, “here's the master of the spy novel, who was a spy himself, telling you and me that he's being completely honest? What kind of con is this?” We know there's some deception in this when, later, in the movie, he refuses to answer certain questions and refuses to talk about certain subjects.
Whether Le Carre is telling the truth or not is less a concern for me than the movie's potent depiction of the extreme complexity of a single human self.
Compare "The Pigeon Tunnel" to Morris' other old-man-interview films. "The Fog of War" — a documentary I think every single one of you must watch — showed Robert McNamara as a guilt-ridden man who continually dealt with the cognitive dissonance created by his actions as Secretary of War during Vietnam. By contrast, Donald Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” was just a deceptive old bastard, dishonest seemingly to the core.
Le Carre is beyond both of them, seemingly, in terms of applied wisdom.
In the movie, he’s self-aware that he might be deceived about himself, and he’s aware that you might be self-deceived about the possibility of his self-deception. The world of spycraft is the supreme microcosm of human psychology played out in a social context. We are all deceivers and deceived, playing games to try to benefit something, ourselves or a cause. Morris observes that every character in a Le-Carre novel is one of two kinds: a dupe or a string-puller. And maybe that’s those are the only kinds of people in the world.
It’s a bleak view, granted, and one I don’t fully subscribe to myself. Yet it seems, from experience, more realistic and true than most idealistic versions of humanity.
Something strange happens in this movie, where either Morris or the viewer might gain a key insight: by the end, Morris' documentary turns into a SELF-examination about Morris.
This declaration seems counter-intuitive, as all interviews such as this one seem to be about the subject interviewed, rather than the interviewer.
But no, Morris’ documentary, like Le Carre’s novels, is an artwork. And artworks are inherently explorations of the self, which is Le Carre’s own view.
Therefore, somehow, “The Pigeon Tunnel” is about Morris. Le Carre, by talking about himself, seems to be helping Morris towards this insight.
That might seem too “meta.” If it is, this might not be the movie for you.
Since I like games of deception, from Peek-a-Boo to Clue, this documentary had me riveted, as if I were in an entertaining Philosophy class about the art of writing, 20th century politics, and the real nature of human nature.
Le Carre stands as a critic of out-of-control spycraft, of intelligence agencies that seem powerful but often are incompetent and destructive. Morris’ movie takes that criticism and points it at other beliefs: at artwork, at conversation, and at the kind of person we think we are.