In America, everything is possible, even Mission Impossible. Especially Mission Impossible.
The theme music proclaims it. Bursting out of a high tremolo like a fuse burning fast, the opening trombone-heavy groove is jaunty yet resolute. Its syncopated rhythm tussles with the 5/4 meter, an uneven count that had become a hip thing since Dave Brubeck’s Take Five had risen to near the top of the charts a few years before in 1959. A Pentagon musicologist could well hear the bass line as a brilliant evocation of an “asymmetric threat” long before the phrase had been concocted by military theorists.
Above propulsive brass ostinato, stealthy flutes and oboes arc quickly down across the three notes of a minor triad. The figure lands on a long-held note (a D) and stays there for the remaining four of the five beats in the bar as if clinging to a narrow ledge.
These first two notes of the woodwind figure are also obstinate (that is, ostinato-like). On the next downbeat, which comes halfway through bass cycle, they are repeated, but this time the third note is slightly farther away, a half-stop lower than the first time round. This jump traverses the so-called tritone (here, G to D-flat) deemed an infernal interval by European music theorists going back a millennium. This tenacious tritone could not be more harmonically precarious. A third pass through the pattern precipitates a leap across a span wider by still one more half-step to a C, as if our hero has ventured to the very lip of the ledge. Then the whole orchestra, the winds and brass joined by strings and percussion, then take up the opening vamp, before the three-note figure is flipped upside down—a frequent posture demanded by impossible missions.
The angular, high-octane minor groove is both ominous and exhilarating. Danger delights the dauntless. Maybe the latest threat can be defused. But if that effort fails and the thing blows, the detonation will be ridden skyward to even greater heights of heroism. The theme revels in risk while seemingly indifferent to reward, even though it knows there will be a payoff, a big one.
Strange as it may seem, the famous theme was written by an American who was not even a US citizen. What’s the answer to this riddle and Trumpian nightmare?
Lalo Schifrin was born in Argentina. He had come to the U.S. in 1959 after Dizzy Gillespie heard him play at a house party in Buenos Aires while the jazz trumpeter was touring with his band for the US State Department. Gillespie refused to participate in governmental briefings because he didn’t want to be seen to condone (North) American racist policies. Conspiracists might still theorize that Gillespie recruited Schifrin to join the military-entertainment complex. The North American was so impressed with the young South American’s arrangements that he invited Schifrin to return to New York and join his big band. The Argentinian’s soundtracks for Bullitt, Mannix, the Dirty Harry series, and The Eagle Has Landed followed across the 1960s and 70s along with many other works.
Schifrin became a US citizen in 1969, two years after composing the theme for the Mission Impossible tv show.
More than half-a-century on, the title of the latest epic big screen episode of Mission Impossible, according to Cruise, the last that he’ll appear in, strikes what skeptics fear is a deceitful promise: The Final Reckoning.
Up there on the big screen where Cruise wants you to see his bloated blockbuster and tells cinemagoers so in a pre-recorded personal announcements just before the film rolls when shown in theaters, the Watchdog of Democracy is under constant threat, dangers also shared by Schifrin’s brash fanfare.
Yet in spite of the frenetic pace of the action, Mission Impossible 7, Part 2 can begin to feel like a forever war. Mission creep sets in early. I was going to say mission creep sets in early and his name is Tom Cruise, but that would be cheap, a lot cheaper than the $400 million budget of the current installment, not to mention the $6.2 billion price tag of the USS George H. W. Bush—and that figure is in 2006 dollars. Schifrin took his chunk of the military-entertainment complex money too. He is estimated to have reaped $10 million in royalites from his theme music for Mission Impossible.
It is from that colossal aircraft carrier’s flight deck that Cruise is transported by an Osprey CV-22 tilt-prop helicopter ($90 million per “unit” with the entire program estimated to have run up costs between $30 and $40 billion) out over Arctic waters then dives down among the giant phallic missiles of a sunken Russian submarine lying at the bottom of the Bering Sea. The Osprey is a notoriously expensive and deadly flying machine hatched in the 1980s; the total cost of the project is approaching, perhaps even surpassing, $100 billion. Cruise and the Mission Impossible brand ceaselessly extoll their star’s skill and bravery in doing his own stunts. Getting into the Osprey was more dangerous than jumping from it.
In this upside down world of impossible possibilities and possible impossibilities, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it on one of his more lucid days, these expenses are all for the cause of (North) American righteousness and robust family entertainment.
The Department of Defense’s own website gleefully quotes a line from the movie in which an incredulous Secretary of Defense (Holt McCallany) confronts the President (Angela Bassett): “You gave him an aircraft carrier?”
Call it product placement. It’s unclear how much, if anything, Paramount paid to take aircraft carriers and copters out for multi-million dollar spins, but the director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, Admiral Bill Houston who commanded Naval Submarine Forces when the film’s production agreement was made — lauded the movie’s focus on accuracy: “The movie does a great job showcasing how our U.S. Navy powers maritime dominance and delivers peace through strength for our nation … [It] accurately highlights the dedication and resolve our … commanders and crew bring to the fight every day.”
Money buys lots of death toys, but it doesn’t buy happiness.
In addition to dangling from planes and trains, Cruise does a lot of running. He’s not running from enemy perils, but toward them. One also suspects that he’s running from himself. The breathless sprints of the soundtrack spur on the sense that this is a flight from feeling.
Cruise’s three failed campaigns that span the three-decade film series mirror the winning percentage of the US in its last three wars. Wedded bliss proved an impossible mission for the top impossible missionary.
As Hunt, Cruise loves his team of operatives, but platonically. Lacking romantic potency on screen, he’s become an asexual James Bond reduced to asexual knight errantry. Even the obstinate sensuality of Schifrin’s vamp can’t fire up Ethan Hunt’s libido.
Composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey try their best to give Cruise’s character emotional depth and desires by delivering yearning orchestral sonorities, the occasional wistful oboe strain, and periodic and sustained bursts of energy. But when things go slack, Schifrin’s score provides the shot to the Cruise bare bicep and brief-clad buttocks, both brandished frequently over the latest movie’s three hours.
Though he’s garnered a handful of Academy Award nominations over his four decades as a movie star, Cruise sheds critical praise as handily his Mission Impossible character Ethan Hunt does bullets. One of the required scenes in each of the movies involves a gag inherited from the tv show when members of Hunt’s IMF (not the International Monetary Fund, but Impossible Missions Force) infiltrate some tense situation disguised as the bad guys and then, after having secured their objective and needing to let those rescued know that they are in fact the good guys, they rip off their masks to reveal the face of Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt.
Here’s betting that when Sir Benedict Cumberbatch does Hamlet streamed from the flightdeck of the biggest and most expensive carrier to date— say, the USS Gerald Ford whose price tag is a Cruise-worthy, blockbusting $15 billion—he’ll start into “To be or not to be” … then rip off his mask to reveal that that the Prince of Denmark is actually being played by … Tom Cruise!
Some may hope that Donald Trump will soon pull away his orange visage to reveal that same well-preserved Hollywood face of … Ethan Hunt.
No, America’s mask has been ripped off long ago. When Tom’s glory, his looks, his box office firepower, and the American Empire itself are long gone and long forgotten, Schifrin’s M.I. theme music will still be going full throttle, its endless possibilities ready to blare and bully from the sound delivery systems of another Empire eager to spur on its clandestine knights of fantasy and folly and to delight its unmasked masses.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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