Spies like us.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

Until very recent films like "Mission: Impossible," spy thrillers looked something like the war movies during and immediately following World War II. Since the 1980s, though, they seemed to be a recruiting tool, or at least a way of bolstering U.S. morale as it confronted first the dying Soviet bear, then a variety of "evil others" on the international scene, most particularly terrorists of various stripes whose ideology and ambitions never were very well-defined.

The movies based on Tom Clancy's books are representative. Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan, is the perfect neoconservative yuppie, keeping Americans safe from all manner of predators in a tough-minded, jaundiced way that includes just the right amount of high adventure - one part James Bond, one part John Le Carre, one part Organization Man. While Ryan is not afraid to face down a venal president or two, it always is clear that the CIA, or at least the guys like Ryan within it, are on our side.

Post-Vietnam paranoia

In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, Hollywood offered motion pictures like "Three Days of the Condor" that alerted us to the growing clandestine state, the Invisible Government that helped deceive us on war policy and presidential intrigues. Films such as "The Parallax View" suggested governments within governments, and above all the notion that all bets are off for democracy in the wake of the growth of secret spy agencies. These movies were the currency of the Church Committee era in the Senate, when the nation learned of the CIA's mind-control experiments, wire-tapping, assassination plots, and coup-fomenting. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that conspiracies were "highly probable" in the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., slayings, made the cinematic CIA virtually synonymous with institutional evil.

All of that changed with Reagan-era flag-waving and William Casey's attempt to restore the CIA to its Cold War grandeur. The Sylvester Stallone/Arnold Schwarzenegger/Chuck Norris vehicles, with their commandos wreaking all sorts of vengeance against the Third World, laid the foundation for the slicker, post-Soviet films that affirmed the rightful place of the intelligence agencies in the corporatized New World Order.

Something new is in the air, however. Brian DePalma's send-up of the 1960s TV hit "Mission: Impossible" takes us back to the 1970s in its sense of the CIA as a hall of highly deceptive mirrors; more important, the...