I saw the movie "the Good Shepherd" the other day, and I wanted to pose a couple of questions about it since I didn't understand a good deal of it and certainly didn't grasp all of the motifs. Please forgive me if you find this diary inappropriate to the forum.
Questions:
- What did the two defectors have to do with the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, if anything? I didn't grasp the connection between those two elements of the plot.
- Was the CIA Director, Phillip Allen, implicated in the manipulation of the Bay of Pigs, the two defectors, or neither? Was he simply corrupt? My understanding was that Edward Wilson suspected Allen of being responsible for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, only to be shocked that it was his own son. Is that a correct read?
- How, exactly, was Arch Cummings responsible for the two defectors? And what was the first defector meant to accomplish?
- Are we meant to believe that the fact that Wilson did not open his father's suicide note until after his own family life was destroyed doomed him to repeat his own father's mistakes precisely because he was so obsessed with keeping secrets, including his own father's?
- Did the movie, in fact, have a quasi-happy ending in that the son was prevented from marrying the woman who would have been as much an impediment to him as his mother was to his father? That his son is lucky his own child was not born?
- Why did the English teacher/master spy have to be killed simply for being a homosexual with "democratic" tastes? It's never said that he revealed information to his lovers, unless the teacher's last conversation with Wilson is meant to argue that "Those upper-crust snobs are going to claim I am a traitor and have me killed simply because I had sex with the wrong people." Also, why did he tie Wilson's shoe and say "now we all need to tie our shoes" or whatever? In any case, killing off your valuable intelligence agent for having sex seems a bit of an over-reaction.