“I can’t see all the corners, but I can tell the shape,” Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) hisses at her boss Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan). “And this is all yours.” They’re in a restaurant. He’s just ordered an illegal dish, the kind of meal that involves an elaborately prepared live animal gasping on a plate. She’s standing close enough that if she wanted to, she could slip a knife into his ribs without anyone else seeing. She isn’t angry about the meal he ordered. That serves as a useful piece of leverage, the kind of information that could cost him his job if she told the right people. She’s angry about an operation he’s ordered. They work in national intelligence—the glamorous cloak-and-dagger kind, the kind where impossibly beautiful secret agents play chess with each others’ lives and hearts as well as foreign policy. Above Kathryn’s head, a light fixture glows, its shape fuzzy and indistinct.
All the lights in Black Bag (directed, shot, and edited by Steven Soderbergh, written by David Koepp) are fuzzy. Little glowing murmurs scattered across each scene, lending a tenderness to intimate moments, rendering deep shadows darker. Even the fluorescent lights in the intelligence office, which would be harsh under the lens of any other cinematographer, are faintly blurry, lending the space a sense of unease. The intelligence community runs on information. Facts are cold and hard; theories and conjecture are softer, more malleable. Easier to bend to suit one’s purposes. The lighting in Black Bag reflects the certainty—or lack thereof—that its characters feel. It’s impossible to know everything; in every scene, the lights cast a gentle glow, their shapes indistinct. The more fraught the operation, the less certain the operatives, the less defined the lights.
Black Bag is a study of the notion of trust. Who gives it, who earns it, how it can be assured in a world where everyone is always lying to each other. It’s especially keen on exploring trust in romantic relationships. Kathryn is married to George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), who works for the same intelligence agency, and the couple are legendary in the community for their work. They’re also considered unusual for their devotion to each other; George’s handler Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) calls their relationship “flagrant monogamy.” He tells George he wishes it weren’t “so easy…to cheat.” At this, George raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t like liars, a category of people he groups with cheaters.
George and Kathryn’s colleagues find faithfulness to be an alien concept; the pair’s commitment to each other makes everyone else in their professional lives more than a little nervous. To be a secret agent is to live a life that is built on lies. If everyone in the business knows for certain that you won’t betray your spouse, that makes you vulnerable to manipulation. It also goes against agency ethos, in which work is an excuse to get away with the things you don’t want other people to know about. Everyone at the agency has a shorthand they use when they don’t want to discuss something: “black bag,” meaning ‘I can’t talk to you about this because it’s classified.’ Late night at the office? “Black bag.” Suspicious absence in the middle of the day? “Black bag.” It could be a legitimate reason. It’s also an easy cover for running around. Cheating on your partner? “Black bag.” In a business where information is everything and everyone has endless resources, private lives are a luxury and affairs are both an outlet and a form of currency.
This being the world of intelligence, all social interactions must be approached sideways, with a smile followed by a knife in the back. Everyone at the agency has resources, motive, and the excuse to get away with literal murder should they choose to do so. Theoretically, they’re all on the same side; in reality, everyone has their own secrets. When George is tasked with finding a mole in the agency, Kathryn is on the list of primary suspects because she has the means, motive, and skill, same as everybody else on the list. Soderbergh and Koepp play coy about how much Kathryn knows, and Blanchett holds her face like a sphinx: lips tight, eyes alert, a lion waiting to pounce.
The other suspects are also, conveniently, couples. Freddie (Tom Burke) is an older agent whom George had recently passed up for a promotion in favor of the younger James (Regé-Jean Page). Freddie’s sleeping with Clarissa (Marisa Abela), an analyst with a fearlessly flirty streak, while James is seeing Zoe (Naomie Harris), the agency’s in-house psychologist. Here, Koepp and Soderbergh triangulate what the typical work romance at the agency is like: a veneer of satisfaction underlined by mistrust. George and Kathryn invite the other suspects to dinner at their place. George doesn’t say why, but he warns her to avoid the chana masala. It’s been dosed with a truth serum, the better to lift everyone else’s inhibitions and get someone to slip up. Interpersonal tensions rise as the guests become increasingly intoxicated.
All six size each other up as they sit around the table, the camera hugging the corners, watching them from low angles. The dim lights on the table are so fuzzy they might as well be incorporeal, deep shadows filling the jewel-toned corners of the room. In another crowd, the party would be cozy; here, the unknown is a threat. The lighting betrays the fact that there’s hidden knowledge and unknown motives around the table. Light for the presence of intelligence, but indistinct. They can’t see the corners but they can tell the shape, and the shape is dangerous. Kathryn watches George’s face for cues as if the two were simply playing bridge; George watches the group from behind his thick-rimmed glasses, saying very little except to prod the conversation first one way, then another. The lights glow indistinctly. He’s looking for secrets.
It becomes clear that Freddie and James don’t trust each other, that Zoe finds the agency’s work fascinating on an intellectual level even though she doesn’t morally agree with the agents’ tactics, and that Clarissa is star-struck by Kathryn’s work in the field and George’s ability to collect secrets and ferret out lies via polygraph. “When are you gonna poly me, George?” she asks him, the directness of the flirtation taking her by surprise along with everyone else around the table. She’s young; the agency’s work is fresh and exciting, and George and Kathryn’s collective mystique is almost as intoxicating as the dosed chana masala.
Her admiration for the older couple is equaled only by her contempt for her own partner. The party breaks up after she learns that Freddie has been cheating on her—George delivers the news, concluding with a deadpan “I don’t like liars.” Clarissa retaliates by pinning Freddie’s hand to the table with a steak knife, and Freddie, in turn, declares her assault “the most boring thing you’ve ever done”—no doubt fueled by the drugs in the food, but also likely a cover for the shock. The lights on the table emit a soft glow. The knife shines hard and sharp. Both Clarissa and Freddie’s feelings have been exposed, even if just for a moment, and both slip their masks back on immediately. He’s bored and she’s nonchalant, armor against the pain of having been seen so intimately by everyone else around them.
George is terrifying because he’s so good at finding out everyone’s secrets. Information about other people, after all, is power over them: the leverage needed to get them to do what you need them to do, the most vital commodity anyone at the agency could trade. Other people’s secrets are currency; your own are a weakness. The dynamic adds a tantalizing layer to office politics. Spies must lie for a living, which means they can’t always trust their own coworkers. George has been ordered on a mole hunt because someone at the agency has stolen something, a weapon so secret most agents don’t know of its existence. The ones who are aware only know its name, not what it can do. A convenient plot device, sure, but also a way to ensure that the focus of the movie stays where it belongs, on the topic of faithfulness. The consequences of the weapon falling out of the agency’s hands are background flavor. George and Kathryn have dealt with crises like this before. The real stakes are grounded in the well-being of their marriage.
Much of the movie’s suspense draws on our uncertainty of the couple’s status. Kathryn thinks George’s unwillingness to lie to her is “sweet,” though she has no such scruples. She’s the one out in the field more often. (A midweek trip to Zurich? “Black bag.”) He collects information and she acts on it, sometimes with violence. She’s been seeing Zoe, the in-house psychiatrist, because of the nightmares her work has left her with. The thought of having “a mess to clean up” after a confrontation is exciting for her, the most fun she’s had in years. She’s a woman of action in spite of the cost. Tension stems from the crucial question: is her marriage with George too high a price to pay for success in the field?
George, for his part, knows how to find information and use it to push buttons, preferring insinuation over physical violence. When he needs something from another agent, all he has to do is bring up the dirt he has on them, a sort of ‘you scratch my back, I’ll forget we had this conversation’ deal. He can’t trust that any of these people will act outside of their own self-interest unless they’re otherwise prompted. He speaks the language of blackmail fluently. He’s good at drawing connections, at tugging on threads that James dismisses as “suspicions, hearsay, and pillow talk”—which is to say, the kinds of insinuations and connections that make George so good at his job.
The film spends more time with him, and because we know he’s reliable, unwilling to lie, we’re inclined to believe that what he knows is something approximating the truth. When he goes fishing on a nearby lake to clear his head, the light around him very nearly loses its foggy glow. He doesn’t have to conceal anything because he’s alone and free to think. When he receives word back at the office that he might have been set up by another agent, he’s visibly shaken, the anxiety written in the lines around his eyes. No light fixtures around, just the indistinct fog of white light pouring in from the window behind him. It’s as though he feels naked and out in the open; there’s a wealth of intelligence in the wind that he wasn’t aware of.
Half of spycraft is finding out the enemy’s weaknesses in order to exploit them. The other half is convincing the enemy that you’re put together, that you’re a bigger or smaller threat than you really are. Freddie covers his weaknesses (debts and women, mostly) with bravado and by “tipp[ing] like a gangster.” Clarissa masks her own with flirtatiousness, Zoe with curiosity, James with a veneer of smooth cooperation, George with silence, Kathryn with cool. None of the other four trust each other, despite their romantic entanglements. The black bag is carte blanche to cheat, and all four assume, along with most of the agency, that anyone who can cheat will. Stieglitz orders illegal meals off-menu; Freddie sneaks around; Zoe shares confidential information when it suits her purposes. George and Kathryn are set up by separate parties in interlocking plots, with each built around the idea that their marriage is adequate leverage because it’s their perceived weakness.
Both setups fail because they assume that George and Kathryn’s relationship really is like anyone else’s, that it will buckle under pressure the moment each spouse discovers they’re in trouble. But the two trust each other implicitly, as naturally as breathing, even when they can’t speak to each other about the specifics of their work. None of the other relationships in their immediate circle are built on such a foundation. When all the covert resources in the world are at your disposal, when you approach the world as a series of rules to be twisted for your own personal gain, it warps the world around you until you can’t see anything worth trusting in anyone else. George and Kathryn have one up on the competition because they have each other. Their love and respect for each other is all the light they need to see.