Is Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor Even Filmable Today?

Even in the 1980s, when Clancy was the bestselling writer in the country Hollywood was skeptical about the salability of a film based on the material given the problems of translating it to the screen, and the changing political context. This was not wholly without reason. In spite of Clancy's insistence that he has a "very visual style," what he offers are information-heavy, mostly "tell don't show" thrillers that leave much of their interest behind in any attempt at conversion into a series of images per the literary ideal of Gustave Flaubert. (When it comes to the technology, we just get the big external effects, not the subtleties, with screen-based storytelling. Someone pushes a button, something explodes--we don't know much else. Alas, much of the interest of a Tom Clancy novel lies in its enabling us to understand the "much else.") The narratives also tend to be sprawling in such a way as to guarantee massive paring down into a two-hour film which keeps the protagonist mostly on screen. Moreover, the Cold War in which his books were rooted drew to a close far faster than mainstream observers imagined, with The Hunt for Red October--the rights to which were actually purchased in 1984 when the book was still in galley form, before it hit print, before its run as a bestseller--appearing on screen only in February 1990, with the Berlin Wall down and the Warsaw Pact passing out of existence (compelling the filmmakers' to casually backdate events to November 1984).

As it happened, the movie, if not necessarily translating everything that drew readers to Clancy's novels (given the above, I doubt any popular movie can), still worked well enough as a thriller to be a box office hit, and spawn two big-screen sequels in a mere four years' time. However, it is notable that after moving from Red October to its prequel Patriot Games, the producers then overleaped the next book in the sequence, the Cold War-rooted The Cardinal of the Kremlin, to seize on the more topical Clear and Present Danger--and then when trying with Cardinal afterward failed to make it work.

It was a reminder then that the scenarios with which Clancy worked--quite naturally, given the "ripped from the headlines" or "tomorrow's headline today" interest of the techno-thriller genre--tends to date fast, with 2023 seeing not only the Cold War dated, but the "post-Cold War" too, to which Debt of Honor most certainly belonged. Here, the corpse of the Soviet Union was barely cold, and Japan was looking like possibly America's next geopolitical rival, the more in as so many national loyalties were in flux, with the tale seeing the U.S. and Japan fight a war as the U.S. Navy gets in a confrontation with the fleet of an India that, like China, is secretly aligned with it. I might add that rather than this being a one-novel premise it was the start of a three-book arc that saw the U.S. confront, and defeat, the three Asian powers, as well as an expansionist Iran-Iraq, all which climaxed with a NATO-China battle in 2000's The Bear and the Dragon that ultimately saw the West embrace Russia as a fellow NATO member and (as is usually the case in this kind of World War III fantasy) the enemy regime collapse, putting another nail in the coffin of Communism and locking in the era of cheerfully globalizing unipolarity so taken for granted then as the only foreseeable future.

Today mainstream opinion, however, far from fearing what Japan might do there is more concern about what it might not do--the American press hailing Japanese rearmament for the sake of contributing to the balance of the U.S.-led alliance, while India is aligned with the U.S. against China rather than the other way around (to the point that it had the benefit of American satellite imagery in real-time in the latest Indo-Chinese border clash, which are "a thing" again), all as Russia, and China, are discussed together in such terms that one would think Nixon had never made his proverbial trip. (Oh, and by the way that Iran-Iraq combination occurred in Clancy's book because Iran had a deep-cover agent in Saddam Hussein's circle who killed him, opening the way for the union of the two countries, in stark contrast with the events of our own timeline.)

Indeed, at this point, as history repeats itself in the form of a farce that could nonetheless end as tragedy, I suspect that amid the current "neo-Cold War" mood The Cardinal of the Kremlin scenario that looked so dated in the '90s now actually looks less dated than the later Debt of Honor does. And as if all that were not enough, there is the book's big twist, namely the circumstances which see Jack Ryan--National Security Adviser at the book's start--catapulted to the Presidency by the tale's last page. At the time they were received as silly thriller stuff but they can now appear redolent with echoes of twenty-first century American traumas (a vengeful foreigner hijacking an airliner and using it to attack Washington D.C., an attack on the Capitol during the rituals of presidential succession) in a manner that will very easily rub everyone the wrong way if treated as just "silly thriller stuff."

But cut that out and you will have very little left--and Hollywood knows it, which is why Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and the Jack Ryan TV series used brand-new scenarios rather than anything Clancy wrote, while Without Remorse was profoundly changed (the story brought up fifty years, with the organized crime and Vietnam POW themes abandoned in favor of Syria, Russia and a Beltway conspiracy). In all this I am reminded of the prolific adaptation of another writer--Ian Fleming. While the '60s-era Bond films, if far from perfectly faithful to the source material, at least incorporated a good deal of it, by the time of 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me there was nearly nothing left of Fleming's novels but the title when they hit the screen. So is it likely to go with any Debt of Honor movie that does happen, any agonizing over how they will "update" the plot pointless.