Spy: The Exhibit at
the Discovery Times Square Exposition
Espionage, insist the advertisements, posters, lead-ups, and
docents at and about Spy: The Exhibit (currently
running at the Discovery Expo in Times Square at 226 West 44th Street), is not what it seems in the
movies. In this business, say they,
there are few if any tuxedo-adorned Brits with incredible marksmanship who
order their drinks shaken, not stirred.
There is instead a range of spy between excited engineers developing
remote-controlled catfish and raging maniacs who spear Trotsky through the
skull with an ice axe. The key, it
seems, is to find the difference, and apply the correct saboteur to the correct
sabotage.
Spy is earnest in its interest and
loyalty to the American intelligence system—in fact, it appears to be almost a
fanboy’s idolization of it—but somehow overzealous. The exhibit, perhaps in an attempt to come
off as “family-friendly,” strips the artifacts of some but not all of their punch,
and lays them out with the same complexity with which they’d be presented to
the family cat. What is of interest
here, or so it is to be believed what with the priorities the exhibition has
established, are the artifacts themselves, and there are a lot of them.
Spy
spans two floors, packed floor to ceiling with every stray item that may
have fallen out of a spy’s back pocket in the last fifty years, and spy cameras
stuffed in everything from smoke alarms to matchboxes. Careful attention is paid to every major
development of intelligence in recent history; most of which took place during
the Cold War. The Cuban missile crisis
and Oleg Penkovsky, the man who stopped it, are covered, as well as the
chillingly recent discovery of the Russian Illegals, spies left over from the
Cold War effort in American cities including New York and its suburbs who went
undiscovered until 2010. By then, they’d
already started families and created American lives. This, truly, is a modern representation of
the impact of international espionage.
Many of the artifacts that appear,
especially on the lower level of the exhibition, are genuinely
interesting. The inquisitive visitor may
find a piece of Hitler’s stationery on which an OSS member has scrawled a
triumphant message to his then three-year-old son. A piece of the Berlin Wall and the last flag
to fly atop it rest victoriously against the wall. There are full vehicles used during World War
II, including collapsible motorbikes used by British paratroopers and the
so-called Sleeping Beauty, a mechanical longboat that traveled just below the
water, with only the helmsman’s head emerging.
There are even recorded memories of real spies scattered between
displays, as if to remind us that the stories we are watching play out are more
real than we could possibly imagine.
And that’s the goal of the exhibit,
unless I’m mistaken. The researchers who
built it and the agents who consulted for it want, nay, need us to understand
how difficult it is keeping us safe every day, in more ways than one. They need us to see how hard they work, the
amount of danger they put themselves in, that they’re not just sepia-tone
photos in a cutesy “For Your Eyes Only” photo on the wall (which, at the
exhibit, they are). It seems an easy
goal to achieve, but somehow, Spy just
misses its aim. The exhibit, hard though
it may try, just isn’t interesting enough.
When some piece of technology or history appeared I found intriguing, it
surprised me. The visitor to a museum
should feel that elation at learning throughout. One should still head to the Expo if only for
these few moments of recognition, but in simple terms, Spy: The Exhibit is good—not great.
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