Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation

So why is the new Mission: Impossible subtitled Rogue Nation? The evil Syndicate is not a nation but a covert operation of disenchanted international recruits. The white hat IMF is not a nation but a secret American undercover unit independent of the CIA and every other acronym this side of the SPCA. 

Then who’s the “rogue nation”?

Here’s a hint: the film’s coproducers include an Arabic and a Chinese company. It assumes a global perspective.

The rogue nation is America. It continues its longstanding mythology of valuing the outlaw.

American westerns and gangster films typically pretend to honour community values, the restraints that civilization places on its member citizens. But that’s only lip service. America’s heart is in the outlands, where individuals place themselves above the law in order to get things done that the law won’t allow. So even if the IMF is a rogue unit its fictional existence attests to America’s willingness to break the law for the communal good. 

That also defines America’s less violent popular genres. In comedies and musicals the explicit value is the team, the community, but the ultimate respect is for the individual that transcends it. The comedians are valued for breaking conventions — hello brothers Marx — and the musical ultimately vaporizes not the chorus line but the star who rises out of it.

America pretends to rule by law but its secret passion is for the rogue, the rugged individualist who breaks the law — to do good. Civilization can’t survive without the outlaw’s service, as we see in The Man Shot Liberty Valance. That’s who America has its cake of civilization but iced with the outlaw thrill.

That’s Shane, the gunslinger who rides into town, saves the town from the evil corporate ranchers, then conveniently rides into the mountains to die — in the very last frame, almost subliminally — so that the town, the good rancher’s vulnerable wife and role-model needing Joey, don’t have to live with him. Clint Eastwood remade Shane with a grittier realism in Pale Rider — same mystique. The two films stand together like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

In that spirit James Bond is famously licensed to kill. Tom Cruise’s Ethan is licensed to kill, disappear, command limitless technology and resources, and do whatever he wants. He’s strictly a filmic creation, so he lives through a concert hall scene out of Hitchcock and in Casablanca, etc., engages with a mysterious heroine named Ilsa (out of Casablanca). He’s a film hero about film, about his nation’s mythology, not about any literal reality. 

Ethan’s engagement with the villain Lane begins and ends with smoke-filled glass boxes. Ethan is trapped in the first, Lane in the second. The neat symmetry gives a sense of structure to the overall chaos. So do the three most dramatic set pieces, where Ethan clings to a flying plane, survives several breakneck land chases and comes back from an underwater death. To round out the elements, a motorcycle chase ends up with several motorcycles afire. This is epic stuff.

In that sense the film is a celebration of American popular culture. That’s why the narrative absorbs classical European culture, setting an extended scene around a Vienna opera production of Turandot. The theme recurs in the later soundtrack. Pop culture, you see, is itself a rogue, daring to stand up against and include — to transcend — the best of its European forbears.