#jim phelps evil polycule

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

always struck me as a particularly chosen detail that Ethan's mom and his uncle, his father's brother specifically, are grouped together for the "drug bust"--it suggests closeness and support between them, which is understandable and practical, but not a typical detail for a background family plot. tentatively i think it's fair to say it's intentionally evoking hamlet. mother & father's brother. For mi1, a movie about killing a false father, trying to save the mother and losing her in the process, it makes sense as a reference point. And it backs up the strong feeling I've always had that thematically & metaphorically, although probably not literally, Jim killed Ethan's father in order to replace him.

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

not totally satisfied with my novel on MI1 Ethan and gender I want to put it a different way for a second. MI1 Ethan embodies the tropes of a noir detective, an ingenue, a femme fatale, and a final girl, among others. He’s his father’s son and his mother’s daughter—he’s also his mother’s husband and his father’s wife—his mother is seducing him on his father’s orders. He tracks down the woman who has all the power he doesn’t and offers her sex just so she’ll give him the chance to set a trap. I don’t know what kind of gender that is but fuck it sure is

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

oh do you guys even understand how i feel about this shot

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

sheepdog/lamb/wolf is the new fuck marry kill. for your categorization: ethan jim claire

thank you so very much for this ask i love it so dearly. i got it last night it made my night and i typed up about three paragraphs and then lost them. but my night was still made

you know me well enough to know what you're getting into re: detailed rants in response to simple questions

anyway my thoughts are these.

with ethanjimclaire you kind of have two dynamics in play at all times. One is the playacted dynamic that ethan is aware of, that claire and jim actively feed into in order to manipulate him. In that dynamic, Jim is the sheepdog, Claire is the lamb, Ethan is the wolf. Jim is a protector, where Ethan is the corrupt predator outsider--a wolf in sheepdog's clothing, maybe. And Claire is the object of desire. (This is in itself an oversimplification but we'll stick with it for now.)

In the other dynamic, the one lurking underneath all their interactions, Ethan is the lamb, I'd argue Jim is the wolf, and Claire is the sheepdog. This is also an oversimplification. Jim and Claire both are....both. They feel a responsibility and care for Ethan that is reflected in their actions. They're also both wolves, wanting to beat Ethan, outsmart him, overpower him. The distinction in my mind that solidifies Jim as more wolf and Claire as more sheepdog is that Jim's fantasy for defeating Ethan ends with him dead. Claire's fantasy for defeating Ethan ends with him protected, fooled, and owned.

There's something motherly in the way Claire treats Ethan...it works as an interesting contrast to the way she consciously positions herself as vulnerable. Those two poles (Claire on the floor below Ethan reaching out; Claire standing above Ethan making plans) form the main body of the Claire/Ethan dynamic. Claire doesn't want to eat Ethan because she's reliant on the feeling of power that comes from being able to manipulate and manage him. And she's reliant on the fantasy of being saved by him. I could talk about this more but it would end up spiraling into a whole other discussion because honestly the Claire/Ethan dynamic is one of the most fascinating parts of MI1.

As the movie goes on and more information is revealed, these two dynamics, the playacted one and the hidden one, end up colliding and interacting in interesting ways. Jim being the wolf and Claire being the pretend-lamb* brings Ethan into the role of sheepdog, chasing Jim down to kill him out of an emotion that feels more like duty than rage.

There's more I could say about this because of course there is. I do nothing but talk about and think about these three...but i want to thank you again for this ask.

Thoughts on ilsaethanbenji? i have my own opinions but im interested to hear yours.

*interestingly, once claire dies, she becomes actually a lamb for the first time--in her role as victim, and because her death reveals how much danger she was in all along, which neither she nor ethan were aware of.

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

I feel like you’re the only other person in the world who is as intrigued by the ethan/claire/jim dynamic as I am. It drives me crazy! I love that ethan, who is portrayed as a pretty flawless guy (he just cares TOO much) in the later movies gets this like crazy quirk of being in love with his father figure/boss’s wife and I love that you’re not always sure how much is manipulation and how much is genuine every time they interact. Severely underrated. Anyway loved the fic!

anon i am so so glad that you loved the fic and i am so glad to hear from another person fascinated by the ethan/claire/jim fuckery. (incidentally being a fellow ethan/claire/jim interested individual entitles you automatically to friend status should you so desire)

your ask touches on some things and it's giving me the urge to rant so please forgive me cause im probably about to get very off topic. I just love your point about the way that ethan (who is so steadfastly heroic in later movies!) starts out with this massive, like, to lean into the MI1 religious imagery, sin. And that sin isn't resolved in any satisfactory way--both of the people involved die, and no one is left alive who even knows what really happened, and this makes me feel rabid to think about. (Luther saw the cheek kiss, but has no context for it, and I feel strongly that Ethan has never told him anything else about that. I really think Ethan never breathes a word to anyone about Jim, Claire or Max. Kittridge is probably the closest to being able to infer some of the details, he knows Ethan loved Jim, he knows about Max's "entrapment," but he's too much of a self-absorbed bureaucrat to give a shit.)

But back to the point about the sin. For my money, Ethan's sin is the heart of MI1. The movie tells us that Ethan's sin is being in love with Claire--but in a queer reading of the movie, it's easy to read into Ethan's interactions with Claire and Jim and infer that his real sin is being in love with both of them, a sin that Jim will never openly acknowledge, but that all three of them are aware of to some degree. Ethan's sin is also portrayed as being...not actually his fault. He doesn't participate in any of Claire's "seduction moments," although from his expression after the cheek kiss IMO you can see that he has strong feelings about them. Ethan's sin is something that is done to him, and regardless of whether or not he wants it, regardless of whether initiates or even participates, he is corrupted by the experience. He's only (to some degree) cleansed by the death of claire, jim and krieger, the only people who knew about what happened.

(one of the reasons I drew from gawain and the green knight in the end of the fic is because--beyond the parallels of jim as the lord going hunting in the woods, claire as the lady going hunting for gawain, ethan as the knight just trying to make it out alive--that's a story that deals heavily in impossible moral tests and loss of agency. And Gawain emerges from it 'fey-touched', fundamentally changed despite the fact that most of what happened to him was unwanted and unavoidable. That's how i feel about ethan at the end of MI1)

It's important to note briefly that I actually don't think of the Claire/Jim/Ethan thing as his only sin in the movie. It's the only one that's remarked on directly, but the whole thing with Max feels like it's presented too similarly to ignore. It's another situation of power differences and emotional and sexual manipulation where Ethan is put in an impossible position and emerges morally corrupted (by the rules of the movie), but victorious.

In a lot of ways, I feel like the sin itself almost serves less as an indictment of Ethan and more as a worldbuilding device. MI1 establishes the world of the IMF really vividly without showing us hardly anything about it! we don't even know what the IMF is really, it doesn't have a headquarters, we don't get to know any other teams outside of the one that dies in the beginning, but the movie renders the world of the IMF through Ethan's relationship with Claire and Jim. I've talked before about the "sea of lies." The thing that made me love MI1 so much in the first place was the specific feeling that is so beautifully evoked, of gradually realizing that everyone you have ever loved wants to use you. That's the IMF! That's spywork, baby! Ethan doesn't realize it in the beginning, but he sure figures it out by the end. it's impossible for ethan to make it out of MI1 without becoming part of the corrupt world of the IMF, the real IMF that Claire and Jim and Kittridge are in, not the fantasy of the team in the opening. (to go back to the green knight metaphor--he has to take the sash in order to live--and even though that means compromising his morals, he's blameless. Corrupt, forever, but blameless.)

despite that--ethan is not the IMF. He believes in Claire. He believes in Luther. He avoids killing. he has an honor code that he sticks to even as he gets deeper and deeper into the sea of lies. that's what makes him the guy we see in the rest of the franchise, that at arguably his most vulnerable point, his most corrupt point, he believed in the people he loved and tried not to hurt anyone. The point of the sin, to me, is that Ethan is forced into the deep end of the murkiest grey moral waters and held underneath, and in the process he sacrifices moral purity for moral integrity and makes it out alive. and the movie doesn't hate him for it. He's a hero.

lots of thoughts for this ask lmfao thank you very much anon for indulging me. and thank you for reading the fic. i am so glad you liked it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

(Same anon) the craziest part about the jim/ethan/claire Sin Motif for me is that it’s not just a sin, it’s one on the Ten Commandments (thou shall not covet) a fact that Jim literally throws back in Ethan’s face right before he kills Claire. Like it’s one of the Big Ones and to your point I think it is the most morally gray Ethan ever gets on a personal level. Like in the future we see him struggle with big decisions with huge moral ramifications on a worldwide scale, but I don’t think we can get there without baby Ethan having to navigate the worlds most toxic throuple.

As to it not being his fault, I do find it interesting to compare the beginning of the movie, where Ethan cups her face while she wakes up and it’s very obvious he has feelings for her (the only part where he actively shows his feelings for her unprompted) vs the rest of the movie which is her making moves at him while he reacts fairly passively, even before he knows Jim is alive, which is SO fascinating to me, especially because that first scene is the only one where the audience doesn’t know she’s married so it’s the only one free of Jim’s presence. I’m sorry it just really is the worlds most toxic throuple because any time two of them interact you can tell the existence of the third is the elephant in the room. Something I think you’ll really get a kick out of is that the track that plays when Claire and Ethan have their hand kiss moment after Ethan meets with Jim is named “love theme?” and that the same track plays (though quieter) when Jim and Ethan are talking, specifically starting when Jim talks about Claire. So who’s love theme(?) is it? And the answer is it’s all of theirs. I love Brian DePalma that crazy psychosexual freak

WAIT YOURE KIDDING OH MY GOD WAIT

oh my god

ok that information is everything to me i feel amazed. and a little in love with brian depalma

ugh ok anon thank you for writing this i hope you don't mind another rant i can feel it coming on. i have endless thoughts about these three i guess and every time someone pokes me with brilliant ideas like these^^^ they come spilling out

first of all i love your point about ethan being the most physically affectionate with Claire before the audience knows she's married to Jim. on a narrative level that makes sense but also in narrative it makes sense too? because in the whole movie that's probably the time when the omnipresent "Jim ghost" is the least pressing and painful. To get a bit into the weeds with Jim theorizing I think it's easy to imagine that part of the benefit of Jim being away all the time (beyond making it possible to conduct deals with Max and plan intricate murders) is that Jim being distant makes Claire's job of seducing Ethan way easier. It's obvious in the initial scene with the team that Claire and Ethan have bonded more in Jim's absence--'that sludge you made in Kiev' and claire's dry little 'thank you' gets me every time--part of this is that when Jim is away, the guilt of whatever is happening between Ethan and Claire is less pressing and immediate, it makes it easier for Ethan to be in denial about the reality of the situation. Part of this is also that with Jim gone, Claire acts as a proxy-Jim, a source of indirect connection to a Jim who is distant and untouchable.

One of the ideas that I was attempting to set up in the pre-Prague fic was this idea of uneasy peace that becomes comfortable through exposure--a big question of MI1 to me is how the hell do you get to that place where your dead(?) father figure's wife comes up to you, kisses you on the cheek, moves as if to kiss your lips and then backs away. and you react with--emotional pain, confusion, but not surprise. It really seems like he's used to it. And I think that the tightrope walk of The Sin is probably something Ethan has been walking for a long time when we meet him in MI1, and he's probably done a lot of mental work trying to convince himself that he's not going to fall over the edge.

the "thou shalt not covet" line made me lose my entire shit when i first watched the movie and still does every single fucking time i see it. but i have a really hard time being able to place exactly why it gets to me so much. part of it I think is The Sin being voiced. that scene between ethan jim and claire in the climax is so completely electric because it takes something unspeakable, that has been unspoken and unspeakable for probably the better part of Ethan's time in the IMF, and then speaks it in the most crude and cruel way possible. "tasted the goods." "thou shalt not covet." I love the one-two punch of those lines because they lay out Jim's moral perspective in a really brutal way. They basically really quickly establish Jim's obsession with--to go back to something I talked about in my last rant to you, anon--purity, religious purity that has nothing to do with genuine love and care, everything to do with superiority and power and control.

When Jim talks about Ethan's love for Claire, it's not as a personal betrayal (you're in love with my wife!) but as an abstract recognition of Sin. It's distant! It's paternal! He's scolding Ethan! And this comes literally seconds after he admits to the seduction plot. Which is fascinating in itself. It doesn't matter whether Ethan coveting Claire happened organically--he was vulnerable to it. He fell in the trap, and to Jim that signifies religious weakness. I've talked before about how Jim sees Ethan as similar to Claire, and I think this might be a good example of that. Jim points out this weakness in Ethan to convey the idea of, you can never be a hero, you can never win, because you are corrupt and sinful and vulnerable. It feels...almost gendered ngl?

Then there's the whole aspect that Jim's evidence for Ethan falling for the seduction, his evidence of Ethan's sinful weakness, is actually just the two facts that a) Claire doesn't want Ethan to die, and b) Ethan wants to believe that Claire is innocent. Which are both symptoms not of the fucked up seduction thing but of...love. Genuine care, even in the sea of lies. Jim's perspective then becomes some sort of awful merging of two ideas: first, 'love is a weakness and a moral impurity that destabilizes your ability to be powerful and superior and a hero'. second, 'there is no genuine love and care, it's all manipulative, covetous, lustful and sinful.' which is. A Lot. and again very indicative of Jim's worldview and the worldview that he's imposed on Claire for years, and Ethan more indirectly for years.

not sure if im making sense here.

anyway this is getting long i do genuinely have more thoughts but they're not totally connected so I think I might put them in another post. thank you so so much for this ask anon i am in your debt

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

just had a very interesting conversation with my sister about homme versus femme fatale. i keep trying to figure out which role Ethan fills in MI1, cause I keep calling him a femme fatale but I don't want to misrepresent the text. turns out i am not misrepresenting the text! the key difference from what i can tell is power dynamics. a male seducer usually has power over a female victim--a male victim usually has power over a female seducer. Also in terms of the kind of seduction...essentially, the homme versus femme fatale is based on the idea of "all men want sex; sex is dangerous/undesirable for women." With both the homme fatale and the femme fatale being a male fantasy. The homme fatale therefore is a figure who is powerful and sexy enough to break down the woman's reservations/purity/fear of danger, and so has to work to actively seduce a victim; the femme fatale is passive, a figure who is broken enough to not care as she offers herself to someone already willing and wanting sex. Therefore! Ethan/Max is basically a complete gender inversion of the femme fatale trope. Where Ethan sits and looks pretty and helpless, ensnaring Max, who already wants sex. (incidentally it's interesting to me that the character of Max was originally supposed to be male.) Meanwhile the dynamics of Claire/Ethan are complicated by the fact that Ethan...even though he obviously cares about her, it's difficult to tell if he wants sex from Claire at all. And regardless of whether he wants it, he resists it a lot, making Claire's job more active than a typical femme fatale role. Their power dynamics are complicated, too. I definitely would never say Claire is more powerful than Ethan. But it's not cut and dry.

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Songs My Mother Taught Me, Ch. 1

“Violin up,” said Jim, and Ethan raised it to his shoulder. Jim moved around him in a slow, appraising circle, and paused where Ethan couldn’t see. They were in the living room, all warm red walls and thick patterned rugs, a grand piano in one corner with its lid open like a mouth. Ethan was barefoot. From behind him, Jim’s hands found the points of Ethan’s hipbones, feather-light. 

As a teenager, Ethan comes to Virginia to live with Professor Jim Phelps and his young wife, Claire, and train to become the best violinist in the world.

aka first installment of the classical music AU!!

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

thinking about Claire and Ethan’s dynamic from Claire’s POV is sooooo fucked! He’s her best friend. After Prague he becomes completely incomprehensible to her and gets worse and worse until she loses him completely and then she dies. She feels responsible for him even though they’re the same age. She knows he’s going to die and it’ll be her fault! But she thinks she can stop it. He loves her abusive husband more than he loves her. He sleeps with Max and she knows it. She seduces him for two years and in the end both of them hate it but she doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t stop her. Can you Imagine!!!!

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Sorry I was not ready to navigate the reply function on my phone more than I had to, and this was getting long. So, yes!! Yes exactly, Jim being the one to recruit Ethan is only my personal headcanon in the end but it's a thing that makes complete narrative sense to me with respect to Dead Reckoning and MI1. In some ways it is another lever to control Ethan and another specific reason why he takes the loss of the team (and Jim, in the beginning) so hard. Not just like, as a guy he was in love with, but also the man who saved him! Jim not being afraid to use that, being flattered by it and INTO it, and that just fuels the psychosexual pyre the three of them lit and climbed into. AND Jim as Ethan's ethical minder is so inspired, especially re: the point Anon made about Sin! Again tying Dead Reckoning back in: Jim as the recruiter now shows Ethan the ropes, how to be a Good Guy (trademark pending), how to navigate away from crime (and implied, Sin)...while trapping him in this quagmire? Amazing, especially seeing Ethan's progress being his own ethical minder as the movies go on (absolute trust in the institution -> trust in his team -> also trust in himself, playing a similar guiding role in Dead Reckoning). Anon's right, after cutting his teeth on THAT mess, he's set on solving moral quandaries (although crucially he still cannot quite let go of the people he loves).

I don’t have much to add to this (unusual for me I know) so I’m just going to post it here and say. YEAH. YEAH. GOD

(For context these thoughts are emerging from this conversation, below)

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

He didn’t sleep much that night. When he did he dreamed about Jim: they were in a bathroom somewhere, and Ethan was putting on makeup in the mirror while Jim watched. At first they were joking and Jim was smiling at him, but then Jim took Ethan by the shoulders and held him firmly. Ethan said, Jim, what are you doing. Jim looked him in the eyes. What did Claire give you? he said. Years before Prague, Ethan and Claire go undercover.

Aka the pre-Prague fic! Featuring: integration of DR1 lore, wedding rings, cheek touches, and Catholic guilt!

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

making incomprehensible sounds. "is it possible it's even worse than the sludge you made in that barn in kiev?" "thank you." "hey, take it easy on my wife's coffee, will you?" "oh, we missed you in kiev, jim." "missed you, too, ethan." they're all in love!!!!!!!

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Claire’s place in Ethan’s mind is so interesting to me cause I really believe after her death he does his best to slot her into the same old place of “someone I loved who I wasn’t able to save.” So he wouldn’t have to reckon with the ways she used him and fucked him up. Part of a broader discussion in my mind about the ways that Ethan’s instinct to protect Claire makes him consistently see her as innocent/incapable of hurting him even as the evidence grows that she’s not (see: “who sent you for me” as a way of treating her as a threat-by-proxy rather than a threat on her own.) This is why I really think it would have been fucked up /pos if Claire had survived the movie because she is one of the first examples of Ethan not being able to process hurt against himself as real hurt. And her being alive might force him to come face to face with the reality of what happened—that she hurt him and she used him and she was a victim—and I think in a lot of ways it would reframe the way he thinks about people and their agency and his desire to save them.

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Me: *reblogs all your mi:1 posts* guess what I watched last night

Thank you for being (what looks like) the only other fucker on this website that sees the Ethan x Max possiblity and the Jim x Claire x Ethan situation

So, what do you think Ethan's response would be to finding out Max is dead? (once the fallout situation has been dealt with and he can breath)

hello hello and thank you for this ask i love it dearly. I feel like there's this inherent connection between ethan/jim/claire and ethan/max, you can't really have one without the other. anyway I did tell myself I was going to wait to answer this until after i see the max portion of MI1 tonight but i started thinking about it and then i started writing out my ideas and here we are with a rant. below are just a whole lot of thoughts and ideas, some more relevant than others--for the actual answer of your question, you can just scroll until you get to the part that says "OK NOW WE’VE GOT ALL THAT OUT OF THE WAY. I CAN ACTUALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTION NOW."

You're not actually asking for my ethanmax treatise but i'm going to give it anyway just cause your ask got me thinking about it and i feel like writing about it. so here goes.

ETHANMAX TREATISE

Ethan/max is complicated. you're dealing with a lot of subtle facets when you try to understand them. here are some parts that interest me, im sure there are aspects im missing.

Factors at play in ethanmax—

-The acting choices. These characters, as has been commented on before by others, look like they want to eat each other. That’s significant lol. To add a complication to this, I would argue there’s a subtle edge and nervousness to Ethan when they interact, a sharpness to his acting, although that’s a personal interpretation. I’m looking at the finger-stimming behind his back (out of max’s view) in the initial scene, and also the kinda frozen, too-big smile he gives her in response to “it’s like a warm blanket” in the car scene.

-Dutch angles/blocking. In her intro scene, Max is framed with a Dutch angle, while Ethan isn’t. MI1 is deeply informed by Ethan’s POV, so I always take the Dutch angles as a sign of Ethan’s perspective or mental state. Ethan not being Dutch angled suggests that his world isn’t being turned upside down the way it is in the restaurant scene with Kittridge, he’s in control of the situation. But when he looks at Max, she’s framed as imposing, unsettling (the angle suggests instability) and even maybe frightening. The blocking of characters, specifically re height, is also significant in MI1 and something I think about a lot when analyzing character dynamics. For example, Claire is often “over” Ethan, standing while he’s sitting, suggesting that she knows something he doesn’t or has power over him in some way. That’s reversed in a couple key scenes, such as the horrible patdown scene where Ethan uses masculine sexual violence against her, and the hand kiss scene where he suspects she’s lying to him. Jim, on the other hand, is tallest in any given shot, except in the scene where Jim and Claire are sitting with Ethan leaning on them from above. Suggesting that the only person who might be able to overpower/outsmart him is Ethan. Looking at Ethan’s scenes with Max—they start on the same level, but as they speak, Max is always over him, standing and circling him like a shark. If i am remembering correctly, she even sits on the edge of her desk to be over him, which is such a weird kinda striking choice, and emphasizes that idea of her as predator and Ethan as (consciously tempting) prey. It’s not fully as simple as the idea of Max being more powerful than Ethan—she is, but there’s also an intentionality there, Ethan consciously presenting himself as beneath her to make himself more appealing. What’s crucial to me, though, is that Ethan is never presented as being above her. He is manipulating and using her, but the power dynamics are always unequal between them, she still has way more agency in the situation than he does.

-Narrative parallels. Ethan’s dynamic with Max is heavily linked to the Ethan/Jim/Claire plot in a couple of different ways. First of all, Ethan/Max as a Jim/Max parallel, Ethan following in the footsteps of Jim’s betrayal of the IMF, in order to track him down. Which is tied to Ethan’s role as Jim’s successor and the one person capable of stopping him. There’s more to talk about there but it’s not super relevant (although ‘Job is not playful’ sticks in my mind forever). Also, Ethan/Max as a Claire/Ethan parallel. The two are presented similarly in some key ways, with Ethan using “Claire techniques” to pique Max’s interest, and to be honest it’s difficult to nail down what narrative purpose that parallel was intended to serve. I have a couple theories. I think Claire/Ethan parallels serve to tie the two of them together. Second, Ethan’s seduction of Max implicates him more deeply in the corruption plot of MI1. Third, comparing Ethan to Claire helps to solidify the power dynamics of the Ethan/Jim/Claire trio, with both Ethan and Claire desperately trying to “steal” or “borrow” the narrative authority and agency of an older powerful figure through sex (my personal pet Claire theory is that she meant to use Jim’s plot to get money and freedom for herself).

-Thematic significance. To speak a little more about Ethan/Max and the corruption plot of MI1…you kinda have to start with Jim. Jim occupies a very interesting role as the pseudo-hero of the movie. The ex-James Bond, the ultimate good guy, who is framed kinda as a protagonist figure in his introduction on the plane. Jim has this Christian-patriarchal thematic framework of corruption versus purity that he overlays onto MI1 (I talked about this more in my Ethan hunt corruption rant, so I’m not going to totally get into it here). A lot of that is linked to the Ethan/Jim/Claire tensions, Ethan being Jim’s protege who is more similar to his corrupt wife, both of them having a corrupt feminine skill set of emotional and sexual manipulation. Ethan starts the movie play-acting a masculine figure, then when he strips that mask we see his hidden, corrupt love for Claire—after Jim dies, he succumbs entirely to the corruption that was always inherent within him, by seducing Max. Ironically that corruption, which Jim sees as a fatal weakness, allows Ethan to uncover the truth and defeat him. (drinking game: take a sip every time i use the word corruption when talking about ethan/jim/claire/max.) What does this mean for the Ethan/Max dynamic? To me, it’s about how Ethan sees her. Max is representative of Ethan’s final loss of moral purity by Jim’s rules. Not to mention Max embodies sinfulness by Jim's rules as a powerful and sexually assertive woman. All that is a really significant part of their dynamic. Which brings me to:

-Franchise-long separation/isolation from the narrative. I honestly cannot tell if this is an intentional McQ or TC choice, although the stuff TC said about the alanna kiss (him repeating ‘I own you’ lives rent free in my head forever mr cruise are you ok no of course you’re not) suggests he’s aware of the weight of that plotline to some degree. What is fascinating to me about Ethan’s relationship with Max and the idea/specter of her in MI is that it always happens behind closed doors, without any of Ethan’s loved ones present. The exception being the one scene in DR1, which I need to watch again to fully analyze but if I remember correctly everybody involved in that scene is kinda unanimously going “wtf is going on between these two I have no context.” Examples: well, every Max/Ethan scene, including Ethan’s meeting with that one Max-associated guy in Ghost Protocol, the Alanna/Ethan kiss. (Ilsa witnesses that scene, but Ethan doesn’t know or want her to.) Anyway my point here is: Ethan seems to have this deep desire to keep the Max stuff private. There are multiple explanations for this—Max is a reminder of the worst time in his life, of MI1, which is a carefully-guarded memory anyway. Max (and Alanna by extension) is a powerful and dangerous individual who he doesn’t want his friends involved with. Max is quite simply a bad and complicated memory due to her associations with Jim and Claire, and the complicated/horrifying world of sexual manipulation, sexual violence and sexual trauma that Ethan is inducted into in MI1. But my personal favorite explanation is shame. To my mind, the narrative separation suggests that Ethan is ashamed of his history with Max. This is really interesting! Because the narrative doesn’t shame Ethan for Max. There’s no movie-inherent negative thematic stance on Ethan’s seduction of Max or anyone else, it’s presented as kinda cool and useful from what I can tell. So if Ethan hasn’t internalized shame from the movie’s morality, to my mind that means he’s internalized shame from Jim’s. Which is—not strictly relevant to the question at hand, but deeply fascinating to me in a broader discussion of McQuarrie era Ethan.

Anyway! What’s important for our discussion is that Ethan consistently fights to keep Max and all signs of his connection with her away from even his closest friends and allies. What that represents to my mind is a discomfort around their association, and a system of shame and denial around his past “dealings” (sex) with her. Meanwhile, he is unable to escape the reality of Max and the reality of their history, his history.

OK NOW WE’VE GOT ALL THAT OUT OF THE WAY. I CAN ACTUALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTION NOW.

I think Ethan takes losses hard. Max’s death would be a blow in that sense, but in some other ways it might even be a comfort? Ethan hasn’t known many people who lived to old age and (presumably) died nonviolently. That’s a fucking feat. It’s a testament to Max’s strength and power. Not only that, but her formidable legacy in the form of Alanna is a feat as well—Max is dead, but she kept her empire alive, and passed her power onto a successor. There’s grief and loss there largely in the sense of, there’s one more person who was present for the Unspeakable Time (MI1) that is no longer alive. Now the only witnesses left are Ethan, Luther and Kittridge. If circumstances were different, I think Ethan being Ethan would figure out a way to pay his respects anonymously. With the way Fallout unfolds, though, it’s too risky to admit that he and Max were ever connected at all, which I think intensifies the lack-of-closure, shoe-on-the-wrong-foot feeling that’s always present to me when Ethan and Alanna interact. To me there’s one more facet—Max is representative of this part of Ethan, this “corrupt” part of Ethan that wants narrative power and seduces people to get it, that he doesn’t allow anybody else to see. And with her death, I would argue that the last person who can understand him is gone.

On a different note—I love the idea of Max being alive in Fallout. Mostly cause Vanessa Redgrave is fucking legendary, and also it would scratch the constant itch of Ethan interacting with other “narrative elders,” other survivors. I love kittridge, but seeing Ethan interact with Max herself would be way better fucking electric. I do think Max being alive would make it very difficult to pull off Alanna’s introduction, though, so I can see why they made the choice to have her die off screen. That said, I would be FASCINATED to see Max and Alanna’s mother-daughter dynamic, especially with the way that Alanna in Fallout acts as a parallel for MI1 Ethan. I want to see some fucked up codependent shit on my screen.

Anyway these are my thoughts such as they are! I am seeing the max parts of MI1 tonight so I might change my mind about some things in which case I’ll post even more.

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Original mi1 script sets up quite a bit of friction between Ethan and Jim which is soooooo funny to me cause the second you cut all that out it immediately reads like they’re in love and also the movie works 200x better. gay people win

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Ok yeah so Jim only purposely touches ethan once and it’s to fucking elbow him in the back. This is not a surprise but it helps clarify the fucked up dynamic in my mind. He doesn’t touch Claire at all