should you choose to accept it

i love mission impossible and i'm making it everyone's problem

edit because it slipped my mind: a huge thank you to my friend and phd holder in misson: impossible, tanya campcowboy, for graciously lending me her ear and expertise to peer review this before it hit the net. endless love!

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Good evening, Agent Hunt. The last Mission: Impossible movie was released into theatres worldwide over a month ago. Since then, there’s been an overwhelming wave of appreciation for your stunt work – which, for all intents and purposes, also functions as a record of your close brushes with death – alongside your ability to sacrifice yourself for the good of others. Now that these films have drawn to a close, the question is, what else is there left to lose? What extremity will be enough; and of course, what will ever be ‘enough’ for you? Lucky for you, we have an answer. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to endure unspeakable amounts of pain before a live audience, over and over again, because we told you to. As always, should you, or any member of your team be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds. Good luck.

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The Mission: Impossible films are a series like no other because, i think, they utilise a paradigm of suffering and pain that you don’t get much these days. obviously, they’ve also got some really incredible crowd-pleasing stunts by certified insane and intensely committed actor Tom Cruise (whose dedication to the form, i could say, coalesces perfectly with what the Mission movies are doing, but i digress), but i still think the films put forth something a lot of us have forgotten how to do, which is: to suffer, or be extremely uncomfortable, on behalf of others, for no reward whatsoever. in fact, if you’re lucky, you’ll only have to rip off a chunk of your life, instead of annihilating it completely.

this kind of suffering is, in the field, known as ‘premodern suffering’. it’s the kind of pain you take like a saint. modern pain and suffering don’t quite have the same ring to it; we’ve gotten much more closed-in, much more protective of our pain, in our depictions of it. culturally, we’ve got no shortage of lone (anti?)-heroes who just can’t make good. a recent example, for me, is the character of Rustin Cohle from series 1 of HBO’s True Detective. Cohle’s character is constantly in pain – mental, spiritual, physical – and you can see it ripping him up from the inside. it’s obviously a slightly different genre than the Mission movies, so you and him never receive the catharsis of salvation, but he’s just always there, taking it, alone¹. you can see him going on like that, forever, a sinewy ghost at the edge of your vision always being flayed alive. he’s a much more modern saint, i think, constricted by genre television which demands a beautiful man to torture on a weekly basis, but nonetheless he manages to keep his mystical undercurrent because of the acceptance with which he meets his pain.

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Mission: Impossible, i’d argue, happens the other way around. it looks, for all intents and purposes, like a bunch of empty genre action movies featuring Tom Cruise and friends, but underneath all the showy stunts and the cool gadgets is a relationship to pain that is just as ever-present and unquestioning. the movies themselves make this pretty obvious. the very first film, directed by Brian de Palma back in 1996, for instance, features a convoluted plotline with the book of Job at its centre. a quick google search will tell you that 30 years later, people are still confused about what the inclusion of the biblical verse Job 3:14 means in the grand of scheme of impossible missions. like, i really cannot emphasise enough how many forums there are, filled with people analysing this whole thing line-by-line. i have to admire their dedication because i’m also sitting here writing about Mission: Impossible and saintly pain, but i don’t think it requires that much of a magnifying glass. that movie, to summarise, sees the book of Job being used to underline 2 things: 1) Ethan having to avoid pursuit by the IMF, the very institution that supposedly ‘saved’ him from a worse fate, and 2) the emergence of a traitor from within said institution. considering that the book of Job revolves around how you’re expected to endure the worst kinds of agony as an expression of faith in the divine institution of god, i think that its use as a centrepiece in the movie where the institution begins dissolving and torturing its own disciples is less than incidental.

this sets the tone for the rest of the movies. despite the fact all mission briefings come from the IMF, more often than not, Ethan Hunt and gang end up being pursued by the very institution that put them out to be sacrificed. again, this is made evident from the get-go; the language of these briefings, for all they’ve been parodied and quoted, is so strange and arresting. watching these back, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it” stood out to me; at first, it made me laugh, because it felt so out of left field, like they were a bunch of freelancers who could decide whether or not they wanted to do something. what hangs over this directive, implicitly, though, is the fact that the choice has already been made – it’s roger ebert’s ‘critical velocity’. You are going to do it.

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seeing as how this line has become paramount to the films, i’d say Job’s essential here in how we might read this acceptance and endurance of pain. in his book Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul, Ariel Glucklich puts forth several different models of pain. The Mission movies, for their insane demands on the body and their fundamentally american existence, fall into two of these categories. on the surface, they are:

• Military suffering: Pain through which the enemy is vanquished in the battle for salvation – taking after the imitatio christi, of which humiliation and discipline are critical, and pain is the weapon in this battle, and

• Athletic suffering: Pain that is actively chosen and endured, for the individual to eventually emerge triumphant

however, the reason that these movies work the way they do is that these modes of suffering are cast through that premodern pain paradigm. they happen on behalf of others; in the last movie, we get the compassionate refrain, ‘for those we never meet’. of course, there are other suffering martyrs of contemporary American media who also operate from the shadows, but none the way Ethan Hunt does. Sam and Dean Winchester sprung to mind almost immediately, but their suffering is still fairly contemporary and individualistic. while they do a thankless job for others, they never make much of a secret of how miserable they are, how much they want out, or how much they wish they could escape their narrative and do something else.

Ethan Hunt does not try to escape his narrative. he puts up a little bit of a struggle in MI3, when he marries Julia (Michelle Monaghan) and tries to have a life, but pays dearly for it as she becomes an enormous liability to him, a point of weakness exploited for the climax of the movie. For the story to continue, he must never see her again. He can catch wisps of her, torturous glimpses through a crowd or in an unexpected encounter, but never for more than a couple of seconds.

for all of their permutations, i think these movies have never lost sight of what they’re about: forces acting on the body. whether it’s the institution of IMF, or being made subject to g-force or life-threatening depths of underwater pressure, it’s always about how much one can take, for how long, and always on behalf of others. in the last film, just as he’s about to be tortured alongside his fellow agent, Ethan advises, “Just keep telling yourself, it’s only pain.” the scene, as usual, ends in an exchange of blood and blows, but i think it’s an incredibly telling (throwaway!) line that pulls together the entire franchise, and lets us understand, just for a second, how all this can be endured. Ethan Hunt takes his pain like a saint.

1. "Contemporary patients think of pain as profoundly isolating and as entirely their own.” (28) ‘Religious Ways of Hurting’ in Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul, by Ariel Glucklich.