Licence to Kill
WHO IS JAMES BOND? Bond here is presented on a more human scale than ever before. He’s got friends, he goes to weddings, he hangs out, makes mistakes (sometimes big mistakes). He changes his mind about things, weighs alternatives, learns lessons. He is, apparently, now best friends with Felix Leiter, played for the first time by a returning actor, David Hedison. It’s nice to see Felix played by the same actor as in Live and Let Die, as it gives the character a history he quite baldly has never had before, but it begs the question of who James Bond is then. If Felix is the Felix of Live and Let Die, why is Bond clearly not the Bond of Live and Let Die?
The Living Daylights
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is 40-ish again, which is a good thing. He’s not nearly as “cute” as he used to be — he hardly ever arches his eyebrows or pulls silly exasperated faces any more. When he goes in to kiss a girl, his face now stays put. He’s driven, professional, a little pissed off. He doesn’t take guff from nobody and seems less amused by his world-saving work than ever. This is not all good — there’s something missing from a no-nonsense, professional government assassin. If your Queen pays you to travel the world and kill people and you can’t get any joy out of it, what’s the point?
Spider-Man 3
I get that some alien goo from outer space, apropos of nothing, lands mere feet away from the protagonist. I get it.
I get that an escaped convict, the man who killed the protagonist’s uncle, stumbles into an open-air particle-accelerator thing, and that he thus gets the ability to commune with and manipulate sand. I totally buy it. I get that a bump on the head is guaranteed to give another antagonist amnesia just when the protagonist most needs it to happen. I get that in a city of eight million people, the protagonist and another antagonist just happen to be in the same church bell-tower at the same time, so that alien goo can drip from one to the other. I get all that.
What I don’t get is the career of Mary Jane Watson.
A View to a Kill
“Okay — pant, pant — let me get my breath — gasp — “
WHO IS JAMES BOND? A very, very old man — older than M, it seems. M at least carries his age with more dignity (which is, admittedly, more than I can say for Moneypenny). Bond is saved only by his rug, which at least is more professional than anything Sean Connery ever came up with. When Bond jumps onto a snowboard, climbs up a flaming elevator shaft, clings to a flying metal object, dangles from a blimp or jumps on a horse, the schism between “actor” to “stuntman” could not be more apparent. I only wish that a similar trick could be pulled when Bond gets into bed with 30-year-old women. In order to deflect attention away from the crinkly skin now covering his entire face, Roger Moore smiles a lot and, when he’s not smiling, pulls looks of bug-eyed surprise. It’s scary.
Octopussy
WHO IS JAMES BOND? I think the only thing you need to know about James Bond is that he’s the protagonist of a movie called Octopussy.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? General Orlov wants to start a conventional war between the USSR and Eastern Europe. To do this, he intends to set off a nuclear bomb on an American Air Force base in West Germany. He believes the detonation of a nuclear bomb on an American Air Force base will be seen as an accident and will therefore cause, presto! nuclear disarmament. And then the USSR can invade a helpless Eastern Europe. Can’t miss!
General Orlov is played in a Kubrickian fashion by Kubrickian actor Steven Berkoff. Which is fitting, as Orlov recalls no one so much as General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. And that is probably the last time you will ever see anyone use the word “Kubrickian” in a discussion of Octopussy.
Now, it turns out that Orlov is not the “A Villain” in Octopussy. That honor belongs to Kamal Khan, played by Louis Jourdan. I have told you the “B Villain”‘s plot instead of the “A Villain”‘s plot because, frankly, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the “A Villain”‘s plot is. Khan knows Orlov somehow and is connected to him via a smuggling operation (Orlov is smuggling priceless artifacts out of the USSR in order to, I think, finance his nuclear-bomb scheme. But we see in Act III that Orlov’s got both his bomb and his priceless artifacts, so what did he sell to whom and why, and what does it have to do with his bomb plot?)
Anyway, Khan is a fabulously wealthy ex-prince or something who lives in Delhi and helps Orlov smuggle his priceless artifacts out of the USSR. He does this with the assistance of Octopussy, a similarly fabulously wealthy woman who has a private island where she supports an army of beautiful young smugglers who are also circus performers. You can tell how dedicated they are to their work because they wear their circus costumes every day. Octopussy, as one might imagine, has an extremely high self image, as one must in order to carry around a name like “Octopussy.” Especially when one learns that she got this nickname from, gulp, her father. Octopussy is played by Maud Adams, who looks great since being shot dead in The Man With the Golden Gun.
Um, so Octopussy is a smuggler who runs a gigantic, hugely profitable smuggling operation out of her circus. Because you know, if you’re smuggling priceless artifacts, the last thing you want to do is attract attention to yourself, and people generally flee in terror from a circus. (The plot begins with a circus clown being beaten and stabbed to death in the midst of a German forest, and all I could think is “Man, I’ve dreamed this a thousand times.”)
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? The nicest thing I think I can say about Octopussy is that it evokes fond memories of Moonraker. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that Moonraker is freaking North by Northwest compared to Octopussy. I can’t say I really blame the screenwriters — who would bring their “a-game” to a movie called Octopussy?
For the third or fourth time, Bond is hired to check into a smuggling ring. Why? Because the clown we see murdered in the opening is a 00 agent, and is found clutching a stolen Faberge egg. It is discovered that a number of stolen Russian artifacts have been showing up at auction houses and this is somehow the business of the British Secret Service.
Now then: the 00 clown is found dead in Germany, murdered by a pair of circus performers, so it’s reasonable to suspect that the 00 agent was undercover in a circus (as opposed to just happening to be dressed as a clown), and I can’t imagine that there were any other circuses in town besides Octopussy’s, and one doesn’t readily forget a circus named Octopussy’s Circus, and yet it takes James Bond, World’s Greatest Detective, over an hour to trace the bad-guy scheme to Octopussy and longer still to realize that she has a circus that is somehow central to this plot.
No, first he goes to an auction for this stolen Faberge egg, where he meets this Khan fellow, who’s buying the stolen egg, then follows this Khan fellow to Delhi, then falls into Khan’s clutches. Only then can he escape Khan, make the connection from Khan to Octopussy, from Octopussy to Octopussy’s circus, and from Octopussy’s circus to General Orlov and his nuclear bomb plot. Phew!
But then we’re not done! No, after defusing the bomb and saving the world, Bond must then go after Khan, because, um, because —
— well —
because —
— because otherwise he might get away with — um —
— well, like I say, I never figured out what Khan was getting out of all this. He’s not helping Orlov for money, he’s not helping Orlov for political gain, he’s not helping Orlov in order to spend time with Octopussy, he’s, he’s —
— well anyway. Screenwriters take note: One villain with one goal is ideal. One villain with two goals is weaker. Two villains with one goal is okay, but two villains with two goals is weak. Two villians, one with a goal and one without, weakest of all.
WOMEN? Roger Moore is okay in my book until he starts putting the moves on the ladies; then he just screams skeeviness. In Octopussy there is a stick-insect femme fatale and Octopussy herself. Neither seduction is remotely believable.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Remember how Goldfinger took time out from his evil scheme to destroy the world in order to hustle some gin rummy in Miami? This is even less cool than that: Khan takes time out from his ill-defined scheme to do whatever the fuck he’s doing in order to hustle backgammon in Delhi. Backgammon! A backgammon hustler! What’s next, shuffleboard? And don’t get me started on the tiger hunt.
He also makes a common Bond-villain choice, one that makes no sense to me. Once he knows Bond is onto him, he hires two competing teams of assassins to kill him. Now, I’m no supervillain, but it seems to me you hire one team of assassins to kill a guy, and if they fail you might have a second team standing by, but why would you send both teams out at the same time?
For that matter, how many different people would a guy have to kill in a week that he has two separate teams of assassins on his payroll?
Khan also wears the classic “Dr. No” Nehru jacket, but let’s face it, Khan is no No.
FAVORITE MOMENT: Bond stumbles out of the woods, looking for a ride to the circus. A bunch of kids in a sports car come by and slow down, waving for him to get into the car. As he approaches, they laugh and speed off. The image of the aging James Bond being literally left behind by a bunch of laughing teenagers is heartbreaking and the truest moment in the movie.
NOTES: To say the least, a major step backwards for James Bond after For Your Eyes Only. It suffers from a nonsensical plot, an interminable Act II, and a motiveless villain. It contains both a fight scene ended by a fortuitous crocodile and a thug with a circular-saw yo-yo. The last half-hour of the movie, everything past the point where Bond is required to dress up as a clown to save the world, is just one jaw-dropping travesty after another. The big climactic set-piece involves a team of circus performers storming the bad-guy’s fortress in their circus costumes, including a team of women in leather bikinis toting tranquilizer guns.
No wait, I almost forgot, before Bond dresses up as a clown he must dress up as a gorilla.
For some reason, the title song is not titled “Octopussy.” Rather, Rita Coolidge sings a soft-rock number called “All Time High.” To sing as song titled “All Time High” for a movie titled Octopussy strikes me as either the definition of hubris or the epitome of faith.
CONTEST! I invite my readers to come up with a title more childishly offensive and stupid than Octopussy. It must involve (a) a pun, (b) a Latin word for a number, and (c) a vulgar name for genitalia (male or female will do). I’ll start: Septemember. (I had another involving the word “Prime” but it was too disgusting even for this journal.)
Bond midterm
What James Bond looks like, according to Ian Fleming ca 1950s, and according to current Bond theory.
Work commitments currently have conspired to put my Bond viewing on hold while I watch some car-race movies (currently on my stack, The Great Race, The Gumball Rally and Cannonball). But while ye faithful wait (with bated breath, no doubt) for my penetrating (ahem) analysis of Octopussy and beyond, I’d like to open up a discussion on what exactly is the appeal of this character.
We know who Batman is. Batman is millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, whose parents were killed by a mugger outside a movie theater in Gotham City. At that moment, Bruce Wayne lost his identity and became a crime-fighting spirit of vengeance. Bruce Wayne is forever haunted by the deaths of his parents, and so puts on a scary costume and goes out every night on an impossible quest to rid Gotham City of crime. We know that Spider-Man is bespectacled-loser Peter Parker, we know that Luke Skywalker is a restless teenager aching to get off his crummy backwater planet, we know that Charlie Brown pines for the little red-haired girl who will never know he’s alive.
But what do we know about James Bond? In spite of having 21 movies made about him, he remains maddeningly elusive as a person. I was shocked to learn, in the new Casino Royale, that he’s an orphan, brought up as a ward of the state. That explains a lot, especially the glee evident in Daniel Craig’s demeanor at getting to live a life of luxurious splendor far beyond the station he was born to. But mostly in the movies Bond has no past to speak of, just a casually-worn knowledge of every subject in the universe, mostly-excellent taste in clothes, a life of drunken leisure and a desire to screw beautiful women.
(I was about to add his love of gadgets, but Bond has no love of gadgets — a car, a gun, a super-magnetic watch, they’re all just tools, things useful for getting the job done. Q has a love of gadgets, Bond couldn’t care less. If he can kill a guy with a coat-hanger, he will — he doesn’t need Q’s fancy crap, in spite of how often it comes in handy. And the car will inevitably be destroyed during a chase in some bad-guy’s warehouse. You don’t see James Bond worrying about his paint job.)
It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s Bond’s lack ofstory that has allowed him to have 21 movies made about him. The Bond movies occupy a peculiar narrative universe. They’re not a continuing narrative, they’re more of an attitude and a set of values, a formula if you will. A satisfying story demands a beginning, middle and end, but James Bond just goes on and on and on. Each adventure rolls off his back, rarely is a timeline or sense of past mentioned, he starts over fresh every time he slouches into M’s office. (“What do you know about a man named Scaramanga?” asks M at the beginning of The Man With The Golden Gun and Bond shrugs and recites, for about two minutes, every detail of Scaramanga’s life, as though it were common knowledge and barely worth mentioning.) Like pornography, Bond promises satisfaction and keeps you coming back in spite of never giving you what you’re accustomed to receiving in a movie theater. Perfect popcorn movies, the Bond features always taste more-or-less great, and you always want more in spite of the fact that they never really fill you up.
After watching Goldfinger the other day I began to wonder how Bond spends his time when he’s not blowing shit up and saving the world. He doesn’t seem to search out danger and intrigue, that’s just his job. Now me, when I’m not sitting at my computer writing I’m driving around town taking care of family errands and thinking about writing. Bond doesn’t seem to have this problem. When the job is done, he’s back to what he considers man’s natural state — sleeping late, playing cards, getting drunk and screwing beautiful women, preferably in the back of a boat adrift in some warm tropical sea.
(There was an excellent Saturday Night Live episode where Steve Martin played Bond on his off-hours, where he’s trying to live the Bond life in order to impress his date, but because he’s not on billable hours he has to pinch pennies, get free food from the casino bar and worry about dirtying his white dinner jacket.)
Indiana Jones has a similar narrative strategy, we only get little scraps of his life in dribs and drabs, and yet the Indiana Jones movies feel different, perhaps because of the scale of the adventures, perhaps because of the religious nature of the artifacts he searches for, perhaps because each movie takes him on an emotional and/or philosophical journey. Things affect Indiana Jones, he’s never the same man at the end of the story as he was at the beginning, but nothing seems to affect James Bond. I get the feeling that if it wasn’t his job to save the world, he wouldn’t particularly care if the world was saved or not. When he’s taken prisoner by Dr. No, and No tells Bond about SPECTRE’s plan to rule the world, Bond snorts with amused derision “World domination, the same old dream.” He has no serious worries that Dr. No has any real ability to pull off his mad scheme (whatever the hell it is, I still haven’t figured it out), it’s just his job to stop it. Or rather, it’s just his job to get the girl and get off the island alive, and if that involves stopping No’s scheme, then so be it. There’s always this feeling when he walks into M’s office that he’d just as soon turn right back around and go back to playing cards.
Maybe Bond exists best as a state of being. He does a lot of guy things — he parasails, bungee-jumps, punches people, chases women (well okay, he doesn’t do much chasing, the birds pretty much fall out of the trees when he walks by), drives fast cars, or cars fast anyway, consumes electronics. The consumer aspect of Bond is as powerful and important, I think, as any other. It’s not for nothing that brand-names are always being tossed around in Bond movies (from Casino Royale: WOMAN: “What’s that watch you’re wearing? BOND: “Omega.” WOMAN [visibly aroused]: “Perfect”). The only reason I know the term “Walther PPK” is because that’s, you know, James Bond’s gun. He’s a kind of style-sheet — a proper gentlemen wears X clothes, drives Y car, drinks Z drink, thinks about topic A, B and sometimes C, but only when necessary to do so for Queen and Country. A man, says Bond, learns everything in the world and is capable of performing any task imaginable, so that he may then live a life of luxurious decadence.
For Your Eyes Only
James Bond hangs on and stands his ground.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is a posh elderly gent, the sort you might admire as a mysterious “cool uncle.” You can tell he’s got a past, both as a killer and as a masher, but he seems to have put all that behind him, and even though his face is now completely covered with hideous crinkly skin, he carries his age with grace and dignity. He no longer paws at the ladies and he preaches caution and wisdom as often as he kills guys and blows shit up. This is a Bond one can respect and even feel affection for, and that, following the embarrassing failed-comic spectacle Moonraker is an astonishing achievement.