1.
Everyone dies in "Red" except for Sally, but then, as Sally reminds Paul Moses at 1:10:4, a few hours before he decides not to kill her, she doesn't work at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
2.
Everyone who works in Langley dies in "Red", because Langley is the High Capital of Hell, the source of absolute, irredeemable evil. In the Revenge Tragedy that is Mr Ellis and Mr Hamner's graphic novel, it's Langley and not Milton's Pandaemonium that sits at the centre of the utterly corrupted and fundamentally corrupting netherworld, and anyone who works there is by the very fact of their presence on-site a creature of the beast, since they wouldn't be there if they weren't already corrupt to their marrow, and that goes for the canteen staff, presumably, as much as the Deputy Director and his spooks. And when the assassin Paul Moses announces to the venal and doomed Director Beesley at the tale's climax that he's already "killed everyone in this building (3:16:1)", it's as much a marker of their irredeemable sins as his.
3.
Nobody but Sally, the stranger to Langley, survives "Red", but the decision of Paul Moses not to kill her hardly marks him out as a noble if tarnished warrior on an unlikely pilgrimage to redemption, as a worrying number of folks seem to believe. Surely we're not so blinded by Mr Ellis's deliberate placement of Moses into the space traditionally occupied by the role of the protagonist that we've mistaken the assassin for the hero? After all, the key fact is not that Moses spares Sally, but that he fully intended to kill her and had to check and control his own utterly self-interested intentions. For as Sally clutches a pink satchel to herself, as if it might protect her from the killer before her, Moses carefully removes a gun and so obviously intends at that moment to murder this woman who has never been anything but kind to him (2:19:1).
That Moses tells himself "No." and turns away from his intended victim isn't a mark of any great degree of kindness, and it's no great badge of a developing measure of decency either. If it were, he'd have evolved some more significant degree of self-awareness by the conclusion of "Red"'. Instead, despite an excess of self-pity which might be mistaken for genuine contrition, he's still, at his own end, after all that's happened, blaming others for his own corruption;
"... all I do when I'm out in the world is kill. It's what my country taught me." (3:21:1)
In truth, rather than having escaped Langley and its myths, rather than having seen through the rhetoric of the powers than be and that have been, Moses is still beholden to the Imperialist fables of America's past even in the seconds just before his own - apparent - death;
"The things this country's men have turned into make me sick (3:16:2)." he says, as if America has somehow become corrupted within his own lifetime, as if there really had once been an American dream which he might have decently served by murdering the many men and woman he has.
4.
If Moses were the hero of this tale, and if Moses had grasped the truth of the situation he's waded through, he'd have understood that there is no ideology, no patriotic myth or national virtue, that excuses an inhumane act committed under the cloak of the Nation's supposed commission and entirely hidden from the public's view and democracy's oversight.
But Moses doesn't understand that. To him, the problem with today's Agency is that Beesley and his political masters are so self-interested that they can't even remember the moral code of the American Dream. And to Moses, the evidence of the fatal collapse of that base level of American decency seems to be founded in Beesely's revocation of Moses's supposed right, earned through decades of vile service, to be left alone.
As if a man might murder for the nation to such a degree that murder itself would become a thing of the past, as if assassination would be retired as a tool when that man decided to hide himself away;
"All I asked for when I retired was to be left alone, to try and find a way to live with myself. I promised my silence and my retirement, and you promised me peace. (2:11:1)" Moses tells Deputy Director Kane, as if his own victims hadn't wanted to be similarly "left alone", as if those he murdered hadn't been promised peace by the American Government and its constant proclamations that the Home Of The Free would never engage in covert and despicable activities.
Moses wants the very hiding space that he denied his victims. He's not the mythic Cincinnatus, happy to be home on the farm having saved the state, pleased to have laid down his executive powers once the day's been saved. Moses is a brute traumatised by the brutalities of his own actions, and though we might pity anyone who's undergoing a guilty conscience and PTSD, as Moses is shown suffering at 1:6:4, it's not as if he's taken any steps we're told of to make the world any better for his presence following his leave from the Agency. He's not turned on his masters, or revealed their secrets, or offered himself up for judgement.
He's hid away in great luxury, and bemoans the fact that "children" now know much of what he and comrades did, as if the barbarism and the stupidities that he and his cronies practised deserved the patriotic respect of anonymity. (2:17:4)
5.
What kind of world would Moses reinstate if he could? What would this man's America be? One where "men" are "the way we used to recognize men (3:14:2)", where assassins can "stand up to knowledge of themselves" and still murder their victims as Moses and his fellows did? One where killer spooks could be "just ... left alone (3:18:3 & 2:11:1)" upon retirement? An America where, for all of of Moses's belief that he and his fellows "took (their) decisions as men, with full knowledge of what they entailed (2:17:2)", the consequences of their actions should be spared them?
Would that world be any different from the one in which Moses had been "a very quiet, loyal monster ... (2:10:6)"?
For Moses says not a thing in "Red" that indicates that the world he's murdered his way across would be any better for his existence if he survives, and, in truth, his beliefs promise that, sooner or later, somebody else will suffer at his hand. He's psychologically locked into a fantasy of patriotism, nostalgia and denial, his psyche protected by techniques of neutralisation which constantly shift the blame onto others, onto new men and fate and duty and the changing nation, and he never once says;
"I am a beast. I chose to kill. I did nothing to challenge the secret state I'd served so bloody-handedly even when I left it. I was happy to take its money and live in seclusion and luxury in return for my service. My CIA was as corrupt as yours is, if not worse. I don't deserve to live."
Instead, Moses's final passing is preceded by two key statements. First, he announces rather piously that Beesley's wife and children are "quite safe" (3:17:1), as if somehow Moses is a better man than he might be expected to be for not having killed a few more innocent souls. (He's very keen to inform Sally that "I would never touch children, you understand.(2:15:3)", the age-old criminal's plea that they too have morals, as if not killing children is a matter to be proud of rather than a shameful business to have ever considered as an option in the first place.) And, secondly, he bemoans the loss of the better America he at least in part believes that he served in good faith;
"My country is gone." (3:21:1)
But there never was a country worth serving that would make such demands upon its citizens as Paul Moses's "America" did.
6.
Paul Moses wasn't just only following orders. He believed so much in the cause that those orders weren't evils forced upon him. They were virtuous acts of self-sacrifice, and when he recalls them with regret, it's as if he and his own pain is the issue at stake, rather than the fact of the murder of his victims and all the incalculable suffering which that caused;
"I live with everything I did. After a while .... it was important that I suffered too ... (2:16:1)"
Even his remorse is a self-indulgence.
7.
It's of course no accident that "Red" begins with a sunrise over Langley that turns the sky the colour of blood. It's not simply that this foreshadows the murders that will soon occur, or that it signifies all the terror that's originated with Langley's walls. It's also showing that Langley exists under a different sky to us, in a terrible world that co-exists with ours, but which needn't be visited by anyone who knows of the difference between there, with its red skies, and everywhere else.
But the simple fact of its existence is a terrible temptation. Even Sally wishes that she'd "had a job at the Agency (1:10:4)" , just as Moses the assassin once had, though of course she's no idea of what his occupation was. "You saw the world, I see a plotted plant I can't keep alive.(1:10:4)" she says, not realising that a mundane desk-job is no marker of a wasted life when compared to the soul-staining sins of commission that a thrilling career at Langley would have inspired.
8.
When Moses shoots Kane in Langley, he describes him to the despicable Beesely as "a man. The way we used to recognise men, I mean. Resourceful. Quick-thinking, Prepared to gamble his life if he believes it'll get the right result.(3:14:2)"
But Kane finally reveals himself to be as callous and manipulative as Beesley is, as the man who set all this slaughter into motion as part of an immoral curiosity to "just .. see what would happen. (3:20:1)" And though Moses kills Kane for this, he never seems to grasp that there never was a holy America in which men like Kane, or even men unlike him, were good and honourable servants of the state even as they ruined lives both within and without America's borders. Kane was, yes, indeed a man who was "prepared to gamble his life", but that meant he was prepared to gamble the life of Moses too.
Yet Moses goes to his death believing his country has been betrayed by men unworthy of it, rather than understanding that his very concept of what a "man" is inevitably leads to the bloodbaths detailed, and implied, in "Red".
And because of that, Moses never grasps that he had no country as such worth serving in the fashion of killers in the first place, for surely the America he murdered so many for wasn't America?
It was a spook's America, perhaps, but it wasn't America.
Or, at least, it was only one America amongst so many others.
9.
Warren Ellis once described James Bond as being an expression of what Alan Ginsberg had labelled "bleak male energy". Agent 007, according to Mr Ellis, is;
"... England's blunt instrument of international assault - the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it's bloody well told."
It's a quote that returned to me when belatedly reading "Red", because it's impossible not to see Paul Moses, the book's central character, as anything other than in part a retired James Bond, albeit a Bond that's been in the service of the President of the Union rather than the Queen of the Commonwealth. After all, Bond is a ghostly presence in so much of the work of Mr Ellis that it's no surprise to find something of him in "Red" too.
And though Ellis has declared that "... if someone asked me to write a James Bond film, you wouldn't see my arse for dust", his great fondness for 007 has never blinded him to the character's true nature, to the fact of the stone-cold conscienceless killer behind the film-star facade. Certainly, that part of Moses which seems to be something of a retired Bond in "Red" reflects Ellis's belief that;
"It's made stridently obvious that being on the OO detail of the Secret Service fucks you up .. At the conclusion of You Only Live Twice. the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma, and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesic Bond as gentle, open, devoted and almost sweet".
It's something we see in the face of Paul Moses too, as Mr Hamner most effectively and touchingly catches in his Chaykinesque fashion at 2:14:5 and 2:19:1-4, but that doesn't make Moses any more a hero than Bond. The fact that Paul Moses feels a measure of general regret, and that he might have been a better man in kinder circumstances, doesn't mean that's he's a force for good now, no matter how despicable Director Beesley and Deputy Director Kane are. Instead, Moses and all his fellow spooks and intelligence bosses and political apparatchiks are possessed and powered by an excess of that very "bleak male energy", and they're all monsters, and their world long ago passed over the event horizon of immorality, and not a single one of them can ever escape back.
Or: it's not whether these men are old-school warriors of the Star Spangled Banner or from a more pragmatically self-interested breed that tells us who the hero is here.
They're all the bad guys, and though Moses was undoubtedly "fucked up" by his service to the Agency, the myths of one version of "America" that drove his service from beginning to end undoubtedly existed in his heart and mind long before he entered the profession of killing.
It wasn't the CIA that fucked up Moses. The CIA just fucked him up some more.
*1:- all quotes in the above from http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=421
10.
Paul Moses doesn't, of course, see any promised land, let alone enter it. The only promised land he'd be able to conceive of would be one protected by General "Will Bill" Donovan and his truly masculine and decent warrior angels.
Whatever the promised land is that the death of Paul Moses precedes, "Red" tell us nothing of it.
But then, in all probability, the name "Moses" carries as little fixed and absolute meaning as that of "America" in "Red", neither word sacred in itself by the simple fact of its own existence, both so easily vulnerable to abuse, both symbols of fine sentiments and beguiling illusions corrupted by the business of human beings and their tale-telling.
11.
I wonder if there would be any more blood-red skies to be found over that part of Virginia if Mr Ellis and Mr Hamner's Langley had been raised to the ground and its foundations dug out to the last mote of concrete dust and buried far and deep away in the Atlantic?
Well, of course there would be, both in America, and in every other land with a myth of itself that declares how much more precious "we" are than "they" could ever be.
12.
That Moses doesn't kill Sally means a great deal, but it doesn't show his first step towards a moral redemption. Instead, it just shows how how random and capricious fairness and decency is in any world where these manly, just warriors slaughter their way through the affairs of history in the name of a flag. Moses doesn't spare Sally because he's learnt he's got no right to. If he'd have been learning that simple moral truth, he couldn't have massacred everyone at Langley later in the name of his own safety and his own outrage, as if every single person he slaughtered was irredeemably evil and deserving of their fate.
Moses spared Sally not because he understood that people should not be killed. Instead, he thought of of his shame of the many "women" he'd killed before, as if killing women is worse than killing men, and of his lonesome fondness for Sally, and decided that he couldn't bear that sorrow on his over-burdened conscience.
But if he'd have thought she would inform on him, or if he were being pursued more closely, or if, perhaps, he was just that little bit more cranky on that day?
No. Sally was permitted to live because of sentiment and guilt and a misplaced if benevolently-minded sexism. And if we have to rely on our noble government killers sparing us because of that unlikely confluence of chance and prejudice and weariness, then we're all in terrible trouble.
For his restraint isn't the first or the last flowering of decency. It's simply another act by a brutal, morally exhausted man playing God, and it's a mark of the brilliance of the deep structure of "Red" that the reader is carried so far along with the momentum of what appears to be a classical "man-against-the-state" thriller before coming face-to-face with the fact that there are no heroes and very, very little decency on show here at all.
Except for on the part of Sally, of course, who wasn't shot, and so survived.
I really did enjoy "Red", and though I know everyone else apart from me has long since read it, I recommend it heartily. For anyone who might perhaps be interested, there's a piece on Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch's "The Authority" in the June 2010 archives. And I'll be back in a day or two, with perhaps some more moments of unexpected horror in superhero tales, or a piece on the strange choices made in the JMS revamp of Thor beyond the problem we've already discussed, or, er, something else. I do hope you're having the most splendid of days, and that perhaps we might bump into each other over this-way at some time in the future.
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