Richard Madden and the Systems of the World

Richard Madden in Citadel, with Prianka Chopra Jonas

Watching Amazon Studios’ recent over-the-top spyfest Citadel, I couldn’t help wondering why the MC, Kyle Conroy, looked suspiciously familiar. Oh, yeah, because he’s played by Scottish actor Richard Madden, who attracted global attention in 2018 when the ITV/BBC thriller Bodyguard became an international streaming sensation. Though Madden plays Conroy with an American accent, both stories feature Madden as a war-scarred veteran dragged back into somebody else’s war.

These two vehicles play very differently. Bodyguard is a conventional British police drama: gritty, unsentimental, and character-driven. Citadel is campy and overblown, despite its largely serious tone; it resembles the unintentionally silly James Bond films that murdered Pierce Brosnan’s take on the character, and prompted the series reboot with Daniel Craig. Bodyguard is often visually murky, with jarring handheld camera work, versus Citadel’s oversaturated colors and elaborate sound design.

Importantly, Bodyguard features real-world politics. Madden’s character, Police Sergeant David Budd, fought in Afghanistan, and now works for London’s Metropolitan Police. He’s assigned to protect the Home Secretary, a powerful office within Britain’s Cabinet. Early episodes contrast Budd’s PTSD scars with Secretary Julia Montague’s strict authoritarianism; after an abrupt tonal shift, later episodes pit the Met’s civilian Counter Terrorism Command against MI5’s militarized Security Service.

Citadel features two fictional intelligence agencies. Both the titular Citadel, of which Madden’s Conroy discovers he’s a deep-cover agent, and the enigmatic Manticore believe themselves heroic. Citadel hunts and bags potential terrorists, while Manticore hunts Citadel, which it believes has grown corrupt. Both agencies have elaborate technology, an army of agents, bottomless funds, and global reach, despite being non-state actors. Who, we wonder, bankrolls these feuding Illuminati groups?

What these series share, besides Richard Madden, is a prior assumption that massive, shadowy systems control our lives. David Budd must investigate crimes which could destabilize British government, fighting an enemy that can make evidence vanish from locked rooms and air-gapped computers. Kyle Conroy (dba Mason Kane) must unlock secrets which two quasi-legal agencies want buried, many of which involve himself. Both men ask: am I sure I’m representing the good guys?

From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, multiple mass-media properties asked whether our lives are falsified. The Matrix, Dark City, and Star Trek’s later holodeck episodes spotlighted the idea that “reality” is only what we accept as reality, and powerful people can deceive our senses to condition our acceptance. Citadel and Bodyguard signify a shift away from reality itself, onto the people who control our ability to perceive reality.

Richard Madden in Bodyguard, with Keeley Hawes

We live, both series imply, beneath powerful structures that speak in our names, and make moral decisions for us, but which we don’t control. Nobody elected the Citadel, and while Secretary Montague was elected MP, she achieved her executive position through intra-party horse-trading. Violence, strategic deception, and force of law compel us to accept these unelected power structures, because we can do nothing about them except join opposite-number violent organizations.

Perhaps these themes are unsurprising. As we’ve acknowledged systemic concerns like “structural racism” or disaster capitalism, we increasingly understand how little individual control ordinary people have. Politics, economics, and war aren’t gods we can petition in temples; they’re forces, like hurricanes, that destroy everything they encounter. Doing right in politics or economics changes nothing, because we’re individuated and lonely, and the forces are systemic, impersonal, and huge.

Bodyguard and Citadel drew my attention because of Richard Madden, demonstrating how essentially powerless Madden’s characters are, despite their shared dedication to law and justice. But once aware of these themes, I started seeing them everywhere. Heart of Stone, a Netflix showcase for Gal Gadot, features a similar non-state intelligence agency that pervades everything, yet is so elusive that even MI6 can’t root it out.

The recent Equalizer movies with Denzel Washington, Netflix’s The Grey Man with Ryan Reynolds, and the Mission Impossible movies mostly don’t impute non-state actors with the kind of reach (and finances) only available to governments. However, they frequently feature government corruption, incestuous relationships between money and power, and people who profit unfairly from the status quo. These malefactors oppress our heroes, who often go rogue to root out corruption.

However, these heroes are equally defined by what they can’t do as what they can. There’s no Chosen One, no Neo or Luke Skywalker to establish a just world. Rachel Stone, Ethan Hunt, Robert McCall, and Richard Madden might remove corrupt operators, but they can’t dismantle unjust systems. They (and therefore we) can only reset broken systems to the status quo ante. Reality now exists, but reality is historically unfree.