Amazon's flashy thriller Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan has eight episodes, stars John Krasinski, and is the third-best work in the Ryan universe (first is, of course, Patriot Games, and second is The Hunt for Red October). As with the other Ryans, Krasinski's character is a nerdy CIA analyst; but unlike the best Ryan, performed expertly by Harrison ("it was a movie") Ford in Patriot Games, he is at home at the desk and out on the field (Ford's Ryan clearly prefers the former). But in Amazon's version, Ryan's empire is structurally inconsistent for two reasons. One: its form of executive power is clearly continuous with the Obama era (which itself was continuous with, not a break from, other presidential eras), but its mood exposes the discontinuity presently inflicted by the messy, amateurish, post-facts Trump era.
(SPOILER ALERT) The part that is continuous with Obama has two sides. One is the American president of its fictional world, President Pickett (Michael Gaston). Two is how it portrays Islamic Fundamentalism and, as a consequence, Islam as a world religion. With the former, we have an American leader who is not like Trump in three distinct ways. One, he served in Vietnam, and so he is much more like John Kerry or John McCain than Trump, who famously dodged the draft five times ("Cadet Bone Spurs"). Two, he has a close friendship with a liberal do-gooder, Dr. Daniel Nadler (Matt McCoy). Three, he still believes in the advice of experts (something that should make them joyful, but it doesn't—more about that later). Meaning, his decisions appear to be based on the world that is (and this is, of course, in relation to American interests), but not the world in his speeches or in his head, which, again, is clearly not the case with the current president (build the wall to stop rapists).
As for Islamic fundamentalism, the TV show attempts to give the main villain, Mousa Bin Suleiman (excellent Palestinian actor Ali Suliman), something of a background. Mousa's hardships began when, as boy, his family's home in Beirut was destroyed by American planes sold to Israel. He and his brother became orphans who eventually ended up in Paris, where, as an adult, Mousa tried his best to become a banker but found his career blocked and eventually destroyed by French snobbery and racism.
When Mousa's pot-smoking young brother Ali (Haaz Sleiman), was sussed by French cops, Mousa ended up in a scuffle with them that landed him in prison. It's here Mousa was radicalized and transformed into a super-terrorist. He later radicalized his brother. There are many holes in this development; the brothers were poor, and so not at all like Osama bin Laden, on whom they are clearly based. Bin Laden was the son of a billionaire and so had the means to organize and orchestrate complicated terror plans. Mousa is a failed banker, yet he somehow runs a globally connected terror network that makes bin Laden's operation look like a bunch of shepherd's with sticks.
Nevertheless, the terrorists have a background, and one, Mousa, even has a wife and three kids who behave like all other kids in the world: play video games, watch too much TV, don't like chores. Mousa's wife, Hanin Ali (Dina Shihabi),
and kids are ones who open the show's door to a world that rarely makes the headlines. It's the place most Muslims inhabit. It's them doing the kinds of things that most humans do, which is not much: arrive, live, gossip, and die. One of the Muslims in the show is dealing with ordinary shit—-a collapsed marriage—and happens to be Jack Ryan's black boss, James Greer (Wendell Pierce). He is in a complicated situation. When not killing Islamic radicals, he's defending the religion against the rampant Islamophobia in the intelligence community. Indeed, Greer's faith is more of a problem than his race.
That said, the show does make several attempts not to make Muslims the other. One of the clearest such attempts is the plot line of a show within a show. Or, a show that could easily have been its own TV series or even movie, like Good Kill. It concerns a white American drone pilot, John Magaro (Victor Polizzi), who, from a base in Las Vegas, kills the wrong Muslim guy in Syria because of bad American intelligence. This man absorbs the sins of empire and eventually pays for them with the only thing Americans can offer for their sins: hard cash.
As you can see, this (Jack Ryan's president and representations of radical and normal Islam) is completely disconnected with the mode and program of the real person currently in the White House. But Trump is not out of the picture. His influence is expressed in two ways. One, corruption; two, melancholy.
The first is seen in the opening episode, "Pilot." The super-rich father of the show's love interest, Dr. Cathy Mueller (Australian rapper Abbie Cornish), invites Ryan to a fancy party at his place because he wants to obtain information about the White House's deal with North Korea. How is it going? Has he seen or heard anything at the State Department? The father has some scheme with South Koreans. If he knows a thing or two about North Korea before everyone else does, he can place him and his partners in a position that will make them a lot of money. But Ryan refuses to give any information. Cathy Mueller's father leaves him with a vexed huff. He thinks Ryan is not up with the times. This is Trump's America: raw, open, and unapologetic corruption. Ryan stands alone with a sad face and a beer in his hand. He wants to make the world a better place, but what can he do when, on one side, you have Trump and greedy CEOs; and on the other, arms dealers, black marketeers, and sex traffickers—the only sorts the CIA can trust and work with. There is just one mood for such a fallen world: melancholy. That was certainly not an Obama era mood (hope); nor a Bush era one (compassionate conservatism). Indeed, the highest figure in Ryan's department, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations Nathan Singer (Timothy Hutton), has an office wall covered with fond photos of George W. Bush. Those were the happy times. Experts had secure positions at the CIA and State Department. Experts contributed to policies and tough decisions. These are not those times. If you can't work, you are depressed; if you can, you are melancholy.
Lastly, this Jack Ryan is an economist by training. But tellingly, the people he meets want advice about how to make quick bucks on Wall Street and don't give a hoot about the state of macroeconomics. It is here I can make a connection with my posts on The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (they are collected and explained here). It is in Patrick N. Allitt's ninth lecture, "Napoleon Challenges the Empire," and concerns two things about the father of economics, Adam Smith. One is a line in book four of Smith's Wealth of Nations that pretty much sums up mainstream economics from its birth in the First Britain Empire (anything after the American Revolution is the Second British Empire) to the decline of the American Empire in the 21st century: "The sneaking arts of... tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire." Ryan is exposed to this fact of his profession not only by his love interest's father but also the leader of a black ops unit who, upon learning Ryan is an economist, wants advice on stocks and the market.
The second thing Allitt points out is that for Smith, an economist was not about figuring out poverty, but understanding wealth (hence the full title of his 1776 book: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations). Judging from a brief conversation Ryan has with a French intelligence officer in Paris about the dark side of American global power, we must conclude that at some point in the past, Ryan realized that Smith's understanding of the function of the economics profession has not at all changed, even in the late stages of his own empire. It's still only about the wealth of a country. Not its poor. Not its real needs. Not its democracy. (Amazon's Jack Ryan, it must be noted, shares a similar past with the worst Jack Ryan, Shadow Recruit's—but this will concern another post.)
Ryan once worked on Wall Street. He apparently left that line of work in disgust. It's revealing that as a soldier and CIA analyst, he is often exposed to harsh poverty, but he has no idea of its causes.
