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I've been watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Technically it's rewatching, as it turns out, I saw it when it was new, but didn't remember it by name. This isn't surprising as my parents were Alec Guinness fans who loved British dramas and spy things. You might wonder what a small child made of such a thing. Not much. It wasn't all that much to my taste back then, though I did retain a very clear memory of my shock at the events in Czechoslovakia during the first episode, and the way it upended James bond inspired genre expectations. i was in no position to appreciate the subtly of the acting in general, and the masterful way Alec Guiness swims like a fish through social interactions displaying a variety of subtle reactions that may or may not be what the character is actually feeling depending on the scene, all painted in soft shades of grey. I was definitely not old enough to appreciate the surface calm of the secret debriefing in which a man talks about his extensive torture in quiet, understated tones, his voice only breaking once, and all the dark and terrible emotional undercurrents some of which are displayed in the use of stillness and motion, all of which are beautifully underplayed in exactly the way that feels real. The very attempt to phrase things to show the characters trying to distance themselves from the intensity making the scene that more real and intense for the viewer. This is how the really terrible things in the world are spoken of by those who experienced them, not with the weeping drama of American television, but with understatement and careful distance to keep from breaking. This is E.B. White talking about the death of his daughter's pig in clinical terms while grieving for the daughter and Thucydides casually mentioning that he too caught the plague of Athens at the end of his harrowing account. I love the quiet, methodicalness of the investigation, and the nuance in the acting. It is a thing of another time, but still it speaks to me in ways I need to analyze privately.
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