The Midwinter of Our Discontent
It's SPY vs. AI in Billion Dollar Brain - Ken Russell's surreal anti-spy thriller
Hey hamlets, starting now on ESH, we’ll be comin’ atcha with monthly reviews! I reckon most times it’ll be a review of a new release, with the occasional write-up on a notable retro joint. To kick things off we’re actually gonna go ahead with the latter type if you’ll indulge me. Cheers
Motivational patterns are going to be similar among all espionage agents. That is to say: there will be certain types of motivation that are similar despite differing schools or opposed aims.
-Frank Herbert, Dune
Both Britain and America were societies that had been built on empire and conquest, through violence and the exercise of power, but neither of them had ever faced up to this, and instead they had both built dreamlike myths about their exceptionalism to shield and protect themselves. But in both cases, those myths were rooted in fear.
-Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head
It was the Harry Palmer joint that jumped the shark. A swinging '60s spy flick in which Michael Caine infiltrates an AI-powered private intelligence network led by a Texan Nazi oil tycoon who’s trying to start World War III. Today, the absurd, accidental prescience of Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain speaks for itself.
…Hello. Agent. Your mission: save the world with a wink and a smile… and a £300… make that £200 raise for your trouble…confirm…
What does it mean to save the world when the world as you knew it is already over?
So crooked, they had to put you in intelligence.
A far cry from the silver-screen spies of WWII, James Bond and his slew of Cold War superspy imitators emerged as a self-aggrandizing mid-century colonialist fantasy of the Western intelligence community (just as real MI6 agents were defecting to the USSR in droves). While MI6 and the CIA were busy exporting fascism abroad to maintain the dream world of the imperial centers, the spy movie erupted with a cold, brash new breed of singular mercenary hero to swoop in, clean up the mess on screen, and keep the geopolitical status quo alive for another day.
With the Cold War spy stuff, you tend to get those talky espionage capers of John le Carré on one end of the spectrum and the globetrotting superspy fantasies of Ian Fleming on the other. A side project of Bond producer Harry Saltzman, 1965’s The Ipcress File—based on the novel by Len Deighton and starring Michael Caine as MI5 agent Harry Palmer—shows Saltzman and crew moving back into Le Carré territory. Both Ipcress and its immediate sequel, Funeral in Berlin, are solid, grounded espionage thrillers, though not without that relentless sense of style pervading the shadowy deeds of all your favorite big-screen assassins.
By 1967, the spy genre had become one big groovy blown-out self-parody. Sean Connery exited the 007 role (only to return twice in the next two decades) but not before infiltrating a giant volcano lair and facing off against a bald, scarred, Dr. Evil-lookin-ass Donald Pleasence in You Only Live Twice. Dean Martin sipped, hiccuped, and grinned his way through a blur of Matt Helm movies (complimentary), and Columbia Pictures put out a full-blown bad-acid-trip of a Bond-themed comedy in Casino Royale (I recently caught the latter on Tubi for the first time in ages — nothing short of astounding that Mike Myers was able to cull a coherent landmark comedy in Austin Powers from such a bloated mess — still, peak wallpaper movie and a stoney must-watch for the real heads).
Enter Billion Dollar Brain, the third Harry Palmer film and director Ken Russell’s (The Devils, Altered States) first and only job for hire. By all accounts, Russell made the film strictly under the duress of a studio contract, leading to what’s often considered a half-assed, haphazard end product that left the budding Palmer series for dead (though Caine would return to the role in the mid-‘90s in a pair of made-for-TV thrillers).
"We never quite realized we had a lunatic genius on our hands," recalled Caine. "He was the least ideal man to do a thriller. What he has is this passion to make thundering great messes."
But it’s Russell’s passion (however tempered) and lush but cynical directorial flair that makes Billion Dollar Brain an accidental masterpiece of an anti-spy flick. What might have been a taught, middle-brow thriller in less visionary hands becomes a Dali-esque portrait of the “thundering great mess” that was and is the Western imperial dream.
Why don’t you stop pretending to be a detective and get yourself a decent job?
From Billion Dollar Brain's first moments, we’re awash in Adam West-Batman levels of mid-century pop-culture signifiers and Lichtensteinian visual excess. Harry Palmer has left MI5 and gone into the P.I. business, keeps a grubby office adorned with Detective Comics, open file cabinets of adultery photos, half-empty boxes of cornflakes, a toy magnifying glass, and a single gum-soled shoe on the floor. Palmer’s old boss from MI5 is there to offer him his old job back for an extra £300 a year. He’s immediately outbid, however, by a mysterious computerized voice on the phone who hires Palmer to pick up a container of supervirus-infected eggs and transport them to Helsinki.
“Now is the winter of our discontent.” Our AI-powered spy game kicks off in earnest when the lovely and mysterious agent Anya (Françoise Dorléac) whispers the code phrase and whisks Harry off to their local base of operations, complete with a sauna and all the finer things a decadent gentleman agent of the West requires. Harry’s old CIA buddy Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden) is also a new hire, enjoying the new era of privatized, computer-automated spycraft to the fullest. As Harry tells veteran Russian spy Colonel Stok later on, “In [the West], the historic mission of the proletariat consists almost entirely of momentary interest.”
Little do they know, Harry, Leo, and Anya have all been hired by “the Brain” to set the stage for their own extinction. “Harry, meet the boss,” Leo revels in the sterility and ease with which they receive orders from a little voice box in an empty, echoing attic. “Just a little toy, but it puts the MI5 and the CIA back into the stone age. It passes the information onto its big brother, and out come the orders.”
“Cuts out thinking,” Harry replies with an ill-amused smirk. Leo’s enthusiasm comes back to bite him in the next scene when he receives orders to snipe an enemy combatant and finds Anya standing at the other end of his scope. Like shooting redundant employees in a barrel. Or getting them to shoot each other first. Kinda like all these circular job listings I keep seeing for copywriter roles at AI companies. Come work for us! Provide the inputs for your own robot replacement!
Into the 21st Century, son. This is how wars are going to be fought and life is going to be lived.
So who is the Big Brother of this GPT intelligence op? MI5 re-enlists Harry to fuck around and find out—play double-agent at his new post to get to the big bad. His next assignment from the Brain, across the Latvian border to assist a feeble group of anti-Communist rebels, is intended to be a fatal one (and almost is — one of the most Ken Russell shots in the movie is of Harry, bloody and discarded, emerging from a military shower filled to the brim with disposable rebel corpses). Colonel Stok manages to get Harry out of the USSR alive, but not without a sage word of warning:
“Listen to me English, get out of this organization. They are a bunch of nutcases and criminals. They think the people walking in the street out there are dreaming of the moment when they can become capitalist serfs again. They think we all lie awake dreaming of going to America. They think they can distribute pamphlets and gold, and a vast monarchist army will materialize overnight. This is what I call a fantastic dream.”
Turns out this whole Spy-vs-AI game was sponsored by Big Oil. Harry and Leo find our big bad, General Midwinter (Ed Begley), a militant American Nazi oil baron about a half-century ahead of his time, at his oil-field lair in Texas. From deep inside the enormous click-clacking heart of his Billion Dollar Brain — a two-bit excuse for a supercomputer every bit as dumb and dangerous as the authoritarian moron at its controls — Midwinter raves of his plan to unleash a supervirus and trigger nuclear conflict under the auspices of “overthrowing communism.”
No wonder the Western world rejected Billion Dollar Brain upon release. You know all these silly old-world superspy heroics you've been deluding yourselves with? The film seems to ask as Midwinter circles the camera in an endless, mad 360-degree spin. What if the real global threat is the Nazi-backed capitalist in your own backyard?
With a little help from Anya and the KGB, Harry manages to foil Midwinter’s attack on the Latvian border and open fascism is put on ice. For a time.
“He was a very stupid man,” Colonel Stok tells Harry as they stand over Midwinter’s Baltic grave. “A patriot of course, very brave. During a war, such men earn medals, win victories. We are proud of them. But at such a time as now, they are a little bit stupid.”
Where are we going, General?
Into the 21st Century, son. Where Western civilization has been replaced by a deteriorating grid of clueless spies and horny automatons — the Billion Dollar Brain Trust of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, and a whole cabal of authoritarian broligarch dweebs. Private intelligence companies like Palantir have out-deep-stated the deep state by sheer volume of data mined, and every citizen is a freelance agent doomed to sow the seeds of their own redundancy.
It’s gonna take a helluva lot more to save the world than a wink and a smile and an AI-prompt.
You can stream Billion Dollar Brain on Prime Video or PlutoTV.
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I’ve been saying this ever since I worked on Wired in the mid 1990s. A drop dead utterly misunderstood classic. The novel also astounding.