Mantises!
In the manner of 6-year-old boys, Sam wants creepy-crawlies as pets. In the manner of parents of 6-year-old boys, it falls to me to take care of Sam’s creepy-crawlies. Currenty we are raising a half-dozen snails, a few dozen pillbugs and a 9″-inch Giant Black African Millipede.
And then there are the mantises.
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Sugar Water
For no reason whatsoever except I thought of it kind of out of nowhere, Michel Gondry’s video for Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” still one of the most startling, original and breathtaking videos ever made.
Query
Would a TV detective, generally speaking, ever listen to his or her theme song?
(We know that James Bond is intimately familiar with his theme song — he probably hums it as he makes coffee — sorry, espresso.)
I can see Steve McGarrett listening to the furious, pounding adventure theme of Hawaii Five-0, but would Jim Rockford listen to the easy-going synth-driven rock that heralds The Rockford Files? The theme to The X-Files seems to suit creepy, introverted Fox Mulder, but it seems a stretch to think that greying, wheelchair-bound Robert Ironside would hum his headache-inducing ambulance-siren theme song as he trundles about solving murders. Would Baretta be caught dead listening to the mellow sounds of Sammy Davis Jr.? Could Barnaby Jones move to the hard-charging theme that bears his name? I suppose David Addison and Maddie Hayes would listen to the ironic, fake-Cole-Porter of their theme, as their adventures are all about being fake Cole Porter, but can the same be said of Laura Holt and her partner Remington Steele? Is the solution to split the difference between characters, as they do The Streets of San Francisco, giving the older cop his jazz theme but setting it to the younger cop’s disco beat?
And what the hell did Mannix’s theme sound like? Longstreet’s? Cannon’s? Quincy’s?
I guess the question is, does Greg House listen to Massive Attack as he mulls over cases? Like many detectives, his music seems pitched at a demographic fifteen years younger than himself. When House listens to “his” music, it’s generally things like Taj Mahal singing the Rolling Stones, or Elvis Costello singing Christina Aguilara.
(Ironically, when House sits down at the piano the music he plays is always classical. Which came first, I wonder? Did he have classical lessons as a child, then take up the Rolling Stones as a teen? If so, he came to the Stones late — born in 1959, he would have started with Exile on Main Street at the earliest, and gone back to 1969’s Let it Bleed for his philosophical lodestar “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”)
Finally, I make the cover of the New Yorker
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Too bad the lady with the baby had to block so much of my name — and on the very week I was headlining at Radio City!
Star Wars Episode VII scene 1
A first try at Star Wars: Episode VII — a test reel, really, written and directed by Sam. The “test” was me showing Sam that we could do a scene between two battle droids when we, in fact, only own one.
Yes, I know it’s out of focus.
Sam and I both cracked up at this, but to be fair to Sam, when I suggested we post this on YouTube he looked skeptical and said “Mmm, let’s make it better first.”
House calls, I listen
Yesterday I broke down a typical episode of House to examine its parts. When you look at those beats (12 in an eleven-minute act!) one by one, there’s nothing outstandingly special or dramatic about them — they’re just television. There is soap and there are fake crises and dramatic standoffs and stern confrontations and passionate advocations, just like in any other show.
And yet House blazes like a, well, like a house (sorry) afire compared to every other detective show or medical drama currently on television. Why?
After watching thirty or so episodes (some more than once) I have some theories.
2. Plotting. As I say, there’s nothing extraordinary about the individual scenes on House, but the skill and innovation brought to bear on their deployment and arrangement is very extraordinary indeed. Each story is so complex and twist-ridden it’s impossible to know where the hell it’s going. Let’s look at “Sex Kills” again, which I consider a typical, not-especially vital or “special” episode of House. The A-story twists go from “man has an STD” to “man has brucellosis” to “man needs a new heart” to “he can’t have a new heart” to “where will we find a new heart” to “a overweight dying woman can give her his heart” to “what did the overweight woman die of” and the show’s only half over! Compare that to a typical A-story on CSI, where the story seems to go from “we know who the murderer is” to “well maybe we don’t know who the murderer is” to “it turns out we were right the first time, butnot for the reasons we originally thought.” The plots on House (and any screenwriter will tell you that plot is the hardest thing of all) are dizzying in their complexity and rarely, if ever, fail to ultimately satisfy.
3. Tempo. With such an elevated level of complexity, everything on House must move very quickly in order to accomodate all its plot machinations. This, as it turns out, helps everything. The acting is better when we don’t have time to dwell on an actor’s choices, the writing is better when we don’t have time to notice that it’s as riddled with cliches as any other show in the history of television, the direction is better when there’s no time for indulgence, the production design looks better when we don’t dwell on its improbabilities, the characters are more interesting when there are more of them and they don’t have enough time on screen for us to register that they aren’t that interesting. Tempo makes the “differential” scenes dazzling displays of knowledge instead of leaden exposition, the “character” scenes are welcome respites from the dense, sometime impenetrable medical jargon, the “crisis” scenes arrive with the suddenness of emergency.
Strangely, even though the show hurtles at an exceptional pace (try watching House back-to-back with Monk — the latter will feel like it’s wearing lead boots in comparison) it never feels rushed. This I’m putting down to —
4. Production design, “background” and camera movement. On top of the speed of the dialogue, the sheer busyness of the show is impressive. Characters are always doing something, and not in the Law & Order sense of “the mechanic can’t stop working on the car in order to talk to a pair of homicide detectives investigating the murder of his best friend.” The hospital of House is a busy, busy place (and filled with all those glass walls so we can see exactly how busy it is) and the characters are constantly hurrying through it on their way to somewhere else. Which makes it that much more ironic and amusing that House himself is constantly found goofing off, watching medical dramas on TV or playing video games. TV shows have had impressive worlds created before, but they always seem artificial and arch, like CSI, which seems to take place in a permanent midnight where no room is well lit. The sunniness of the hospital of House somehow helps sell its darkness. The intense, unbelievable stories (and their intense, unbelievable protagonist) are all happening in an extremely pleasant, well-lit, well-appointed, well-maintained environment. No one on House has the problems with the world House does — he’s a splinter sticking out from an otherwise smooth plank.
5. Stance. By centering the show around the indelible House, the show’s creators present a philosophical outlook that never preaches, never offers solutions and never provides reconciliations. House is never going to be happy, but then he’s not trying to be happy. That keeps him mysterious, unreachable and fascinating. The fact that his brilliance is matched by the desperate ordinariness of his preoccupations — monster trucks, medical dramas, hookers, etc — makes him recognizable, and his pain makes him human. Somehow the parts all add up and provide us with a character we can’t stop watching. As a medical drama/detective show, House is exemplary and exhilirating, but it’s the shows underlying view of humanity, both compassionate and disgusted, that keeps us watching.
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notes that the medical stuff on House is as implausible and fantastic as I have always suspected it is. And yet it presents its, shall we say, “heightened reality” lightly (and swiftly), not with grim determination or dark seriousness. House doesn’t have time to sell us on his fantastical diagnoses, he’s got someplace to limp off to. She also notes that too much medical work on House is done by doctors, and yet I am consistenly impressed at the number of personnel on display on the show — there are surgeons and nurses and all manner of interns and students and clerks cluttering up the hallways and when the show calls for someone with specialized knowledge, they, often as not, show up, as in “Sex Kills” where one staff member is shown (she gets her own close-up) preparing to shut off the overweight woman’s breathing apparatus and another is shown to be in charge of organ donations and there are two teams of anonymous surgeons to do the heart transplants. Personnel shows up and trundles off with an impressive regularity on House, indicating that all House has to do is wish it and the personnel will appear to make it so, which I guess is the exact opposite of the care I’ve received in hospitals, where the MRIs are given by MRI technicians, not doctors, and certainly not teams of doctors. On the other hand, in terms of caregiving, Princeton-Plainsboro is a fantasyland on the level of Narnia — when a patient checks into House’s hospital with baffling, contridictory symptoms, heaven and earth are moved to discover the truth. When I check into St. Vincent’s in New York with some unexplained tingling in my limbs, the staff is hurried, incompetent and inefficient, discharges me without diagnosis, refuses to return my phone calls and charges me $17,000.
House rules
I’ve been watching a lot of detective shows lately, and nothing comes close to House. In the future I will try to specify why this show, while containing all the formula, devices and cliches of every detective show and every medical drama manages to be more than the sum of its parts. But for now I’d like to analyze a single episode to parse the dense, intricate twists and turns that make it electrifying television.
I could have chosen any episode at random but I was taken by the extra-twisty structure of an episode from Season 2, “Sex Kills.”
PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE: A young woman, Amy, plays bridge with her father and a group of her father’s friends. She is clearly out of place and uncomfortable in this company, in this activity. Many glances and innuendoes flutter through the air.
Amy suddenly feels ill, says she’s nauseous. Is she pregnant? Is she pregnant by one of the elderly men at the bridge game? Is she pregnant by her elderly father, played by the only “name star” in the episode, WKRP‘s Howard Hesseman? Amy gets up to use the bathroom. Her father stops her. He’s concerned. He knows something. He grabs her arm.
Then, out of nowhere, he freezes and the camera goes into his eye and we see something go blooey inside his brain. He’s having a stroke or a seizure or something. Ha! The show’s not even two minutes old and already we have TWIST #1. The patient of the week isn’t young Amy, it’s her elderly father!
Now then — the show just teased us with the possibility of a young woman pregnant by her own father, then pulled the rug out from under us. That means that whatever is wrong with the father is more shocking, more disturbing, more interesting than him impregnating his daughter.
ACT 1
1. The father is admitted to the hospital. He has had an “absence seizure” and has also complained about having acid reflux for years.
2. The weekly “differential diagnosis” scene: Foreman says the father has all the symptoms of testicular cancer. House says that that can’t be right because everyone is wearing the wrong shoes and goes on to clarify: if Foreman thinks the father has testicular cancer merely because he has all the symptoms of testicular cancer, then there’s no reason to be having this meeting and the team would all be out bowling. Rather, House believes that the father has a micro-abcess in his brain. “When guys have brain/crotch problems, it’s usually the result of using one too much and the other too little.” The shift from testicular cancer to micro-abcess would be an act-break twist in another show, here it goes by in a heartbeat and is never mentioned again.
3. The “personal” story of the week: House believes that his friend Wilson is having an affair with someone on the hospital staff. He’s been acting strangely (at least strangely to House’s Holmesian-level deductive mind), not spending enough time at home, buying foreign chocolates. (“Norwegian chocolates! Frankly, if you buy that stuff the terrorists win,” grouses House.)
4. The B-story: a teenage boy in the clinic wants House to prescribe to him a high dose of Depo-Provera, which, we learn, will chemically castrate the boy. Why does the boy want this? He cannot stop himself from having sex with cows. House believes that the young man has been put up to this by his frat buddies and writes a fake prescription for him to show his friends.
5. Foreman tells the father that they think he has a sexually transmitted disease. The father says he hasn’t been sexually active, he broke up with his wife (who is Amy’s mother) months ago. I’m not sure how we got from “micro-abcess” to “STD” but then I’m not sure what a “micro-abcess” is in the first place.
6. Foreman reports to House with the father’s answer and House scoffs at him. The father’s lying, everyone has sex. He shouts across a crowded lobby to Wilson:
HOUSE: Wilson! How long can you go without sex?
WILSON: How long can you go without annoying people?
7. With Amy out of the room, House confronts the father:
HOUSE: I hear you’d rather die than admit you had sex.
FATHER: I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell my daughter.
HOUSE: Right, because she’s, what, 22?
FATHER: I, I slept with her mom.
HOUSE: She probably knows that happened already.
The father explains the breakup he had with his wife and how they got back together for a one-night stand following a cheese festival.
FATHER: I assume you’ve been in love.
HOUSE: Is that the one that makes your pants feel funny?
Now then: the cheese becomes important later; note how skillfully the writer hid his clue amid two sure-fire comic exchanges so we wouldn’t notice it. I’m going to count “Father gets STD from ex-wife, who he isn’t supposed to be seeing” as TWIST #2.
Amy comes into the room as House isgiving the father a shot and asks what’s going on. The father admits to his daughter that he’s got an STD but he lies about where he got it from and House covers for him. The tension is somewhat released by this transmission of information, but then the father suddenly starts coughing blood as we go to commercial. (Diseases on House must contain at least three shocking, sudden, unpredictable, life-threatening symptoms, one for the end of every act break.)
ACT 2
1. So, it’s not an STD after all. TWIST #2 has barely settled and already we’re onto TWIST #3 as the mystery starts all over again. The gang hold a second differential diagnosis, and we get a healthy chunk of the rapid-fire, Apollo 13-level of jargon: “It’s a flash pulmonary edema, we’ve taken a liter of fluid off but the problem wasn’t with his lungs, it was with his heart — there are vegetations obstructing his mitral valve.” I nod sagely as though I have any idea what Dr. Cameron just said because, well, because Dr. Cameron said it and I like looking at her face and keep hoping she’ll say more. “A disease that attacks the brain, heart and testicles,” muses House, “I think Byron wrote about that.”
2. House confronts the father again. This time he’s asking about the cheese from the cheese festival. He feeds the father some cheese laced with bacteria and the father says he recognizes the taste from the cheese he ate the night he slept with his ex-wife. House explains that the bacteria is around all the time but mostly our stomachs combat it. Because the father was taking antacids for his acid reflux (aha! and you thought the acid reflux was a red herring!) the stomach acids could not neutralize this cheese’s bacteria and the father has come down with a sheep-cheese disease, brucellosis, TWIST #4.
3. As the father gets treated that night, House hangs out with Wilson, accusing him again of having an affair.
4. The treatment on the father does not go as expected. His heart stops beating and they must use the defibrillator on him — and it’s only Scene 4!
5. Meanwhile, House and Wilson continue their conversation about Wilson’s supposed infidelity. Wilson is growing tired of this hectoring and we in our homes wonder how long Wilson has been friends with this pushy, thorny pest that he puts up with this kind of interrogation.
6. The gang confer and explain the heart attack. It was brucellosis, but they got to it too late. A piece of vegetation broke off in the father’s main artery and caused an infarction (again, I’m going to pretend I know what that is). The father now needs a heart transplant — once he’s got that, he’ll be a healthy man and be ready to go home. Ordinarily, the gang on House makes two wrong diagnoses before they hit on the right one, which would ordinarily count as a twist in and of itself, but wait.
7. House goes to the heart-transplant committee and argues for his patient’s case. The committee says the man is too old, and House responds with sarcasm and character assassination, which doesn’t help his case any, and the committee turns him down.
8. Foreman breaks the bad news to Amy and her father.
9. House comes up with a scheme: get the files on everyone who’s died in the hospital recently — maybe someone whose heart is deemed “not viable” will die and they’ll be able to use the heart for Amy’s father.
10. Return to B-story: the “Boy Who Loved Cows” has returned, saying that he tried to have sex with a cow and was kicked in the ankle by his beloved. House, in no mood to listen to this kid, believes him even less this time and threatens him with a series of painful, humiliating tests. The kid takes the dare, toHouse’s surprise.
11. House and Cameron discuss everyone who’s died in the hospital today. One of the deceased is a baby, prompting House to gripe “Babies are useless, they’ve got hearts the size of ping-pong balls.” There is one hope: an overweight woman in a car accident is currently in the ICU and doesn’t look good. House crosses his fingers and hopes she dies.
12. And the act isn’t over yet! House goes to the ICU as the woman in the car accident lies dying on the operating table. The woman’s husband is understandably distraught as House gently but insistently probes him about her medical condition, which included a slight fever and stomach pains, none of which seems very important now that she’s dying from a crushed skull. The fever and stomach pains turn out to be important later, and this time the writer skillfully places the clues inside an incredibly high-stakes scene, where the woman is dying, the husband is distraught, he thinks House is his wife’s doctor, House does not dissuade him, and in the middle of it, a woman comes up to the husband to assure him that his wife’s organs are going to be treated with the utmost respect. The husband becomes apoplectic; this is the first he’s heard that his wife has died. This is a bad situation indeed.
ACT 3
1. The gang need to get the overweight woman’s file. If her heart is deemed “not viable,” they need to know why. House hacks into her file to find out what she was sick with — Foreman says she had Hepatitis C. And slowly the reality sinks in, this is TWIST #5: the show isn’t even about Amy’s father any more. Like Die Another Day, “Sex Kills” is going to change villains halfway through, just as they changed protagonists halfway through the pre-title sequence. The show is no longer “what is wrong with Amy’s father,” that was just a warm-up, the show is “what was wrong with the overweight woman when she crashed her car?” The fact that Howard Hesseman, the nominal “guest star,” vanishes half-way through the episode almost qualifies as a twist all by itself.
2. In the ICU, the tearful husband prepares to pull the plug on his clinically-dead wife. House strides in and turns the machines back on. The husband is furious.
3. House and the husband go to Cuddy. House argues for using the wife’s “not-viable” heart for Amy’s father, the husband has had enough of House and his shenanigans and says that he’s going to take his wife off life support.
4. The husband runs into Amy in the hallway. Amy, knowing nothing of what’s just happened, thanks the husband for giving her father his wife’s heart. The husband, put on the spot, tells Amy that he’s not giving her the heart. House comes along and says:
HOUSE: Hey listen, you take your wife off life-support and I’ll have forgotten about this in two weeks. Gail here on the other hand —
AMY: Amy.
HOUSE: Whatever.
He tells the angry, churning husband not to be angry with Amy but to take it out on him instead. The husband takes House at his word and swiftly knees him in the chest, knocking him to the ground, then tells Amy he’ll let her have the heart.
5. Someone (Chase?) tells Amy’s father that if the dead woman’s heart is not viable, he has perhaps three days to live (one of the best features of House is the relentless use of ticking clocks, sometimes more than one in a single episode).
6. So, now that that’s settled, how do you diagnose a dead woman? What did she die of? Chase suggests a gall-bladder infection.
7. The team performs an MRI on the dead woman as the husband begins to soften on House: “He must be brilliant; if you’re that big of a jerk you’re either unemployed or brilliant” he muses.
8. The dead woman does not have a gall-bladder infection — she has a mass. I’m going to go ahead and call this TWIST #6, although the decision for the husband to give his wife’s heart to Amy’s father is probably TWIST #6. So to be safe we should call this TWIST #7.
9. And the Boy Who Loved Cows is back for his third and final scene. House still doesn’t believe his story about the cows and the boy finally reveals the truth. He has a step-mother who is barely older than himself and who parades around the house in a bikini — or less, as TWIST #8 comes home to roost. The boy is horrified by his sexual attraction to his step-mother and the viewer is satisfied by the inversion of the situation hinted at in the pre-title sequence. House doesn’t see the crisis in being attracted to one’s step-mother, it hardly seems to count, it’s not the boy’s real mother after all, but he’s essentially a pragmatist at heart, not a moralist, and he gives the young man the drug he needs.
10. House needles Wilson about his personal life again and Wilson blows up at him, questioning House’s friendship. House does not take kindly to Wilson’s attack and turns it back at him.
11. The treatment on the dead woman (for a gall-bladder infection) is not working and her condition worsens. House gives up, but now the husband is the one who won’t let her die. In TWIST #9, the gang stare slack-jawed as the husbands demands that they find out what was wrong with her and give her heart to Amy’s father — it’s the only way her death will mean anything.
ACT 4
1. The gang confer over the dead woman. What to do? Should we operate? House grimaces: “She’s a fridge with the power out — we start poking around inside the vegetable goes bad.” Then, noticing the husband standing nearby, “No offense.”
2. House and the husband go to the husband’s house and poke around (a standard scene on episodes of House, usually done without the patient’s permission). House asks the husband if his wife kept anything from him and the husband insists that she had no secrets. When House turns up diet pills and hair coloring, neither of which the husband knew about, the husband sadly shakes his head and muses that “you never really know anyone.” This becomes an important moment later but there’s no way to predict why.
3. Amy’s father is dying as the tension rises.
4. House and the husband come back to the hospital. Cameron comes from the dead woman’s workplace, where she’s found Polaroid photos of naked teenage boys. House isn’t interested — “teenage boys aren’t toxic” he says (as my wife snorts “They aren’t?”).
5. House guesses that perhaps the dead woman had gonorhrea, that she got perhaps from sex with teenage boys? (conceptually linking the boy from the B story to the dead woman from the A story.) The gonorhrea caused her fever and stomach pains, which made her crash her car, which killed her, which made her heart available for Amy’s father.
6. Cameron tests the dead woman for gonorhrea, does not tell the husband she’s doing so (mirroring the Act 1 scene of House discussing the STD with Amy’s father while Amy is out of the room).
7. The dead woman tests positive for gonorhrea as Amy’s father goes into a coma. House orders two ORs for the heart transplant; Cameron objects, saying that the dead woman’s still has gonorhrea in her system. “And tomorrow, it’s going to be in his system,” House says of Amy’s father, noting that it’s better to be alive with gonorhrea than dead without it. Which is as pragmatic and moral a lesson as this episode has to offer humanity.
8. The dead woman’s body is rushed to the OR and House, in a minor TWIST #10, lies to the husband about what was wrong with his dead wife.
9. Another staple of House, a grisly, realistic operating-room scene, involving none of the main characters, just like in a real hospital.
10. Cameron watches the operation with the dead woman’s husband. As soon as it becomes apparent that Amy’s father will live, Cameron starts to tell the husband that his wife had gonorhrea. The husband cuts her off, telling her, in TWIST #12, that he gave her gonorhrea, that he was the one who strayed in their marriage (the Polaroids of the naked teenage boys were a red herring! Curse you, Polaroids of Naked Teenage Boys!), who lied, who gave her the disease that ultimately killed her, without her ever knowing she had it.
11. Amy’s father is all better. And who comes to visit him? His ex-wife, who wants to get back together with him. And we remember that this all started because we thought Amy’s father had gotten an STD from this woman, but no, it wasn’t the sex or the cheating that caused Amy’s father’s problem, it was the brucellosis in the cheese. In minor TWIST #13, Amy tells her father that he must wear a condom if he has sex with her mother, since he now has the dead woman’s gonorhrea.
12. That night, House, alone in his house (no hookers tonight, ironically), listens to a recording of what sounds like an ancient bluesman singing “Honky Tonk Women” (another staple of House — recordings I cannot identify but want desperately to own). The doorbell rings — it’s Wilson. House was right — he is having marriage problems. But, as per the theme of the episode, in the FINAL TWIST, we learn that Wilson is not the one fooling around — his wife is. He has walked out on her and come to House’s, um, house, to sleep on the couch. House, often mistaken, never wrong, shrugs and asks “Want a beer?”
Next, I will try to examine the tumult, hue and cry of this show and determine why it works when other shows of equal quality do not.
Die Another Day
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is having a really bad day. He’s been captured by the North Koreans after trying to sell them some “conflict diamonds” in a sting operation, and he has been treated — gasp — the way a captured spy is generally treated in these circumstances. That is, he’s been tortured and interrogated and thrown in a filthy cell, instead of being handcuffed to a nuclear bomb or dropped into a shark tank or strapped to a laser table (that comes later). This has pissed him off. The torture and confinement is probably bad enough, but to add insult to injury, when he is released by the North Koreans he looks almost exactly like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, drawing one of the most unfair invited comparisons in the history of filmmaking.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? You’d never guess, but the bad guy has, unbelievably, a big space laser. After Diamonds Are Forever, after Goldeneye, after Austin freaking Powers, the bad guy has a big space laser. This time, he’s a Richard-Branson-esque capitalist who is really a believed-dead North Korean Army officer who’s gotten some kind of face transplant or mind-meld or something. He promotes the big space-laser as a “second sun” (ironically, he is, himself, a “second son” of a North Korean general) and calls it Icarus. So apparently he either has a keen sense of irony or else he believes everyone on the planet is a complete idiot.
Anyhoo, Mr. Diamond Merchant Who’s Really A Presumed Dead North Korean Army Officer builds a giant space laser so that he can blow up the DMZ at the border of North and South Korea, allowing North Korea to invade South Korea. If it wants to — I can’t remember if they even mention that in the movie.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? Bond, as I say, is captured by the North Koreans, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured. He’s let out, kicked out of MI6, and goes looking for this Xao fellow, a North Korean guy who happened to be standing nearby when a suitcase full of diamonds exploded. He tails Xao to Cuba and meets Jinx, who’s apparently some kind of American girl spy or something. He and Jinx try to get Xao, but he gets away.
Then, like in A View to a Kill, the plot completely changes halfway through the movie. Unlike A View to a Kill, the second half of the movie turns out to have something to do with the first half. This guy Gustav Graves shows up and he’s got a big space laser. Bond doesn’t like him because he deals in conflict diamonds, so he goes to the guy’s fencing club and challenges him to a duel. The duel ends up taking over the entire club (and destroys Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy,” which, I’ll bet you didn’t know, hangs in a private fencing club in London).
Bond then pursues Graves to this place with a lot of ice, where Graves is showing off his big space laser. Bond has come with MI6 agent Miranda Frost. Jinx is there too. Bond is certain Graves is connected to Xao somehow. What he learns is that Graves is actually Xao’s brother, believed dead but actually having a face transplant or something and calling himself a British diamond merchant now.
Anyway, Bond finds this out (or Jinx does, I think) and Xao shows up and chases Bond across the ice. Graves turns on his big space laser and melts a giant piece of ice, forcing Bond to surf, which he actually does twice in this movie. And at a certain point your mind just snaps, because there are no two activities more incongruous than surfing and big explosive action thrillers (Point Break notwithstanding).
Oh, and Miranda Frost turns out to be a bad guy.
Bond and Jinx team up to stop Graves from blowing up the DMZ in a big action set-piece featuring a sword fight between two women on a plummeting, flaming 747.
WOMEN? Jinx, the good girl, is played by Halle Berry. Miranda Frost, the bad girl, is played by Rosamund Pike. Guess which one is memorable?
Halle Berry won an Oscar while working on Die Another Day but she still ends up having to be rescued by Bond, not once but twice.
Madonna, in addition to singing the title song, shows up as a fencing instructor. It’s almost like the 1967 Casino Royale, with stars big and small showing up to do their cameos.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Gustav Graves isn’t cool at all. He’s a sneering, obvious bore. Having a literally fake face is no excuse. Xao is slightly more cool as the Second Villain, but I have to wonder about the diamonds imbedded in his face. Did his doctor, when operating on him, say “I have bad news for you, you will lose all your hair, all your skin pigment, and your irises, and worst of all, it is impossible to remove the diamonds imbedded in your skin”? Or was it more like this:
DOCTOR: Those diamonds imbedded in your face look painful. I’ll have to operate.
XAO: Are you crazy? With a gimmick like this I’m sure to make Lead Villain for sure!
WEATHER ANOMALIES: The sun shines in Cuba, giving everything a golden, summery glow. It does not shine, however, in North Korea, where everything is dingy and gray. Which I guess means that Communism is not, in and of itself, capable of extinguishing the sun. All of this explains why Graves is interested in creating a sun of his own — he didn’t get any of it in North Korea.
NOTES: I watched this movie with actor/blogger James
in attendance, so forgive me ifI’m not getting everything in the plot right. It was weird to watch this, the 20th Bond movie, after watching the other 19 in a row, and watching no other movies in between, with a comparative Bond neophyte. He kept vocally protesting the movie’s detachment, artificiality and dramatic inertia, all things that moviegoers generally overlook when watching Bond movies. Here I was appreciating the lighting and the relatively complex plotting, and Urbaniak is trying to compare it to a real movie. Which, at the end of the day, it is not. (As a kind of palette cleanser, we watched the opening of Citizen Kane — as head-snapping juxtaposition of artistic realities as I think is possible on a movie screen.)
A note (sorry) on music: During the action-packed climax, Urbaniak made note of the Carmina Burana knockoff playing on the score. I noticed it too, and noticed another Carmina Burana knockoff playing under the climax of Pirates this weekend. And I realized that Carmina Burana has, somehow, in the past 20 years or so, become a staple of a certain kind of film scoring. How did that come to be? Dr. No gets by with “Three Blind Mice” but Die Another Day must bring in Carl Orff. But whenever there’s some kind of high-stakes action sequence now, here comes the furiously chanting choirs again. How did film scores become showcases for 20th-century classical music? In fifty years will people watch movies like Die Another Day and Pirates and think “Wow, those Early 21st-centuryers sure loved their imitation Orff!”
I don’t remember noticing all the gadgets when the movie came out, but they sure stick out now. They’re all over the place. I didn’t mind the invisible car when it showed up in 2002 but it bothered me now. Who knows, maybe in ten years everyone will have invisible cars and we’ll watch Die Another Day and chuckle at how outdated and clumsy Bond’s Vanquish is.
I also remember enjoying Cleese’s performance as Q in the theater, but it seems just as dreary and unfunny now as any late Cleese performance.
It never occurred to me before, but there’s a scene in the beginning where the North Koreans find a photo of Bond and he’s a dead ringer for Peter Jennings. And suddenly the career of Peter Jennings became 100% more interesting.
Xao, as I say, chases Bond across the ice in his Jaguar. Like Bond’s car, Xao’s is outfitted with rocket-launchers and machine guns and so forth. Now, I can see why Bond’s car has all that stuff (or, to be honest, I can’t see why it has all that stuff, but I’ve grown accustomed to the tradition of it) but I can’t for the life of me understand why Xao feels he needs to have a chaingun and rocket launchers in his Jaguar. And the whole sequence falls apart for me there. I don’t know why that’s the breaking point for me in a movie that includes a big space laser, a hotel made out of ice and Madonna as a fencing instructor, but here we are.
Bond sneaks into the bad guy’s arctic lab, a glass dome that is, of course, made up of hexagons. Nothing futuristic was ever accomplished without hexagons. Hugo Drax knew that.
Bond and Jinx sneak into the bad guy’s airfield using — what? I’m sorry, they use what to breach the airfield’s security system? Wirecutters? To cut through a chain link fence? Does Bond’s watch no longer have a miniature buzz saw on it?
In the explosive climax, Bond and Jinx bail out of a crashing 747 by climbing into a helicopter in the plane’s cargo bay and starting it up as it plummets toward earth. I could be wrong, but I’m not entirely sure it is possible to do that.
There is a valedictory aspect to Die Another Day, a kind of summing-up. Lots of in-jokes, clever references and navel-gazing. Or maybe I’m confusing “valedictory” with “not having any original ideas.” The problem with the Brosnan Bonds is that they feel the constant burden of The Bond Movies, that they’re part of a tradition, that they have something to live up to. In Die Another Day the whole construction, the whole hall of mirrors, finally collapses like, well, like an ice-hotel under the beam of a big space laser.
Who is Bond?
writes:
“I think what’s most fascinating about Bond is the fact that he’s a self-righteous, stone-cold killer. Where Zorro is more of a rebellion, in all reality, Bond is an antagonist. He’s stopping the action started by these insidious Moriarty-esque characters, because he believes that his country is so absolutely right. Harry Palmer was more of an indentured servant than a true-believer, but James Bond believes in his country so much that he’s willing to kill its supposed enemies that are always biting at its heels. I guess that’s respectable. A man so confident in his beliefs that he can command such charisma, sexuality, and judgement with such little effort.
“About the rights thing, Holmes, Dracula, and Zorro have persisted due to its rise as popular folklore, while Bond was quickly dumped out as a character in the books, then quickly packaged as a product. He’s a capitalist creation for people to profit on rather than to merely retell stories about. Bond is no dime store novel, he’s more a mutli-billion dollar piggy bank than a spy thriller to its rights-holders.”
_______
Well now: is Bond self-righteous? He’s certainly smug, and he does move with a certain license (so to speak). But I don’t know if I’d call him self-righteous. It always feels more like he’s got a job to do. I sit down and try to figure out how to make a hit movie out of a board game, Bond puts on a tux and blows shit up. When the job is done he goes home — or rather, he goes on vacation, usually in a boat, definitely someplace warm, always with a (new) girl on his arm (or under his pelvis).
The comparison with Zorro is instructive because we don’t need to know anything about the history of California to root for Zorro. All we need to know is that he’s a rich man pretending to be a blackguard in order to defend the peasants against the military regime that’s taken over the region (Robin Hood was a nobleman who had had his title taken away, Zorro kept his title but put on a mask to disguise himself — both were fighting for the rights of the peasants against a cruel, wrongfully empowered, dictator).
So let’s remove Bond from the Cold War, Kruschchev, Kennedy, Cuba, Castro, all those hard K’s, and examine who he is personally. Bond is a half-formed manchild, an eternal adolescent, good with tools, good with destruction, bad with forming long-lasting relationships. In the books he drinks too much and smokes too much and pays the price for it, in the movies Bond would never drink to excess and would certainly never have a hangover and hasn’t had a smoke since Roger Moore retired.
What does Bond want? What is his primary objective? It’s not to serve his Queen and country, although George Lazenby makes a gesture toward that in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s not to please M, although Bond does respect M and does follow his orders, more or less. (M, we could say, is Bond’s father figure. Bond does what he’s told because he’s a good boy, but he’s going to get the job done his way. This is, I think, why Q becomes an important character — Q is the father-figure whom Bond can disobey. To M, Bond is all “Yes, sir, right away sir,” but to Q he’s rude and dismissive and rebellious. And it drives Q crazy. M may purse his lips at Bond’s indiscretions, but underneath he wishes he were in Bond’s place, young enough to still have sex in a spaceship after blowing up a villains orbiting headquarters.)
(Does that make Moneypenny Bond’s mother? The sexual tension between them says no, and yet what would Freud say? Why can’t Moneypenny feel both maternal and lustful toward Bond? Isn’t Bond’s devotionto his work part respect for M [father] and lust for Moneypenny [mother]? Or is Moneypenny “family,” a sister or cousin, always flirting, never consummating, because to consummate would be the end of everything? [Casting Judi Dench as M makes the parental aspect of the character clearer than ever — M for “mother,” no doubt, with still plenty of sexual tension between her and Bond.])
(Samantha Bond’s Moneypenny is, for my money, the best of the bunch, because I really believe in the attraction between her and Bond. I feel like Bond travels the world screwing women who don’t matter to him but at the end of his adventure he always comes back to Moneypenny. Christmas Jones is the woman you date, Moneypenny is the woman you marry. Or does Moneypenny symbolize home itself, the home Bond “loves” but also is happy leaving at the drop of a hat [just like the overgrown teenage boy he is]? And is that why Bond is always introduced tossing his hat into Moneypenny’s office?)
Forget the Queen, forget England. None of that makes any difference to Bond. He doesn’t believe his country is right; he never gives a moment’s thought to his country at all (and when he’s being played by a Scot, an Irishman or an Australian, who can blame him?). Politics is all a show to Bond, just symptoms of an eternal power struggles, left and right, capitalist and communist, they’re all meaningless, flags of convenience, in and of themselves. Most of the villains he fights don’t impact England directly anyway, and when they do (as in Goldeneye) the audience says “He’s going to blow up England? What kind of lame supervillain sets his sights on blowing up England?” When someone says to Bond that he’s doing something for Queen and country, they’re teasing him, calling him a momma’s boy.
The attacks in Bond’s world are, narratively speaking, attacks not on Queen and country but upon Bond’s family of M, Moneypenny and Q (again, made explicit in the ambitious but tangled TWINE). M provides authority, Moneypenny provides the “home fires,” the warm bosom waiting, ever waiting for the hero’s return, Q provides the tools that every handsome prince needs to go forth and slay dragons. To continue the medieval spin, M is the aging Arthur, Moneypenny is Guinivere, Q is Merlin. That would make Bond, hm, Lancelot I guess, or maybe Percival, going forth to seek the grail.
I think this is why Bond can’t be 60 years old — he has to be believable as an adolescent boy (which is what Fleming said he was) — rebellious, sex-mad, perpetually eager to experience life, fast on his feet, a good improvisor. He honors his parents and will always come home, but he might also take off with the car/boat/hovercraft/yacht/spaceship/submarine and use it to pick up girls when he’s done running his parents’ errands.
Bond is certainly a capitalist creation, a consumerist creation more precisely (Bond doesn’t make a very good capitalist, but he makes a wonderful consumer), but I think it’s a mistake to believe that he holds no intrinsic value. If he were valueless as an idea he would have faded away long ago.
What is Bond?
As the sun begins to set on our analysis of Things Bond, I am again forced to ask myself the key question: What is Bond?
To begin with, how to quantify this phenomenon? If it’s a mere formula, what does that formula consist of?
It’s not the Cold War, or else Bond wouldn’t have survived the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a franchise, a “brand” if you will, dating back to when my father was a young man. Few other things (say, the ’65 Thunderbird) have retained the same appeal over the years. And yet with a few exceptions, the early Bond films do not feel dated. The best ones hold up just fine, feel timeless at the same time as they transport us to another time. One has to remind oneself about the Cold War aspect of the Bond movies — they work perfectly well outside of the history that produced them.
It’s not Sean Connery, because Bond has survived many different casting hurdles, including Connery’s two returns to the role. And each Bond has been different, yet somehow still the same.
Is it the character himelf? If so, what about him? Is it the clothes, the consumerist aspect, the ability to score with women even when one has crinkly neck-skin? Is it the license to kill, the gadgets, the ability to negotiate a complex world with sang-froid? Do men look up to government assassins? Do women?
It’s not love of England, is it? Queen and country?
Is it partly that we know so little about him, he’s a blank slate, we can put ourselves in his place? Then why was the new, character-rich Casino Royale such a hit?
It’s not the direction; all the major “Bond Directors” have both superlative and substandard Bonds on their resumes. One doesn’t scan the opening titles to see whether it’s Guy Hamilton or John Glen on this one. And yet imagine how an Indiana Jones movie would be received if it was not directed by Steven Spielberg. If you have trouble imagining that, think back to how Jurassic Park III was received.
Is it the producers? All the “off-Brand” Bond movies have met with dismal posterity.
Let’s try to think of another character who has survived this many incarnations, from original novels to 21 movies to new novels and now video games. Sherlock Holmes? Dracula? Frankenstein’s monster? Bugs Bunny? Mickey Mouse? And yet, none of those fit either. “Dracula” isn’t a character you care about — or is it that Dracula wasn’t guided through the production process as skillfully as Bond, he had his brand diluted through too many unlicensed product, and superseded by “vampires” in general? Can you imagine Bond being replaced in the public imagination by “spies” in general?
Come to think of it, this goes back to the Cold War question. Because Bond not only exists outside of the history that produced him, he exists outside of the genre that produced him. One would not watch a Bond movie on a double feature with, say, The Bourne Identity or Gorky Park or Three Days of the Condor. He’s his own thing; part spy, part detective, part superhero, part action star, part sex-machine.
But what, if anything, makes a Bond movie a Bond movie? What must a Bond movie be or else it is not a Bond movie?
If the villain does not have a gigantic headquarters, is it still Bond? I can count only one Bond movie that does not climax in a humongous, over-appointed room, and that is The World is Not Enough.
Must the villain capture Bond (and preferably the girl) at the end of Act II, leading to a protracted, silly, woefully inefficient murder attempt? Why is this plot-point still tolerated, decades after being pointed out as silly?
We have found that the Bond movies gather many different genre disciplines, both in design and narrative. Some emphasize detective skills (sometimes laughably) some emphasize action (almost always skillfully) some emphasize revenge, or suspense, or even romance. There seems to be no set narrative template for a Bond movie. They instead seem to have a dozen or so narrative strategies that get shuffled and re-shuffled at will, making each adventure seem fresh while actually being recycled. But you could say the same thing about Star Wars.
Must the villain have a grand, slightly fantastic scheme to take over the world? He does not in For Your Eyes Only, the movie probably least-remembered of the entire series, in spite of being skillfully written and directed, and featuring Roger Moore’s best performance. If the villain were realistic, or if the villain were presented in a different way, would it still be Bond? Could you switch the antagonists of, say, Goldfinger and The Bourne Identity?
Come to think of it, look at this: many of our greatly-loved espionage thrillers have had terribly pessimistic, anti-authoritarian stances, where the bad guy turns out to be the protagonist’s boss. Can you imagine a Bond thriller where the government itself turns out to be the bad guy? And yet it begs the question, what country does Bond live in, if the people with all the money and power never use it for evil ends? How is it that the Bond movies could imagine Dr. Kananga, a prime minister who is also a drug pusher, but not imagine a monster on the scale of Margaret Thatcher, who gets playfully lampooned in, I think, A View to a Kill (or is it For Your Eyes Only)?
Must the women be disposable, replaceable and meaningless? Could the brand survive a genuine love story? Must the brand have any love story at all? How many government assassins take time out to seduce every woman who crosses their paths on their ways to saving the world? What would happen if Bond were married, or even had the same girlfriend two movies in a row?
Must Bond be flawless? What if he screwed up now and then, if only for the purposes of suspense? He’s so goddamn capable, always has the answers, always knows how to get out of a jam. And if he can’t get out of a jam, knows someone who will come and get him.
Must Bond have gadgets, fast cars, action set-pieces? If Bond never left the office for the length of a movie, would we still watch him? That sounds ridiculous, and yet there are plenty of suspenseful thrillers that get by without action set-pieces. All the President’s Men is one of the most nail-bitingly suspenseful movies ever made, and it’s 2 1/2 hours of men talking on phones. And we already know how the story ends.
Is it, as one writer put it, that the world changes, but Bond doesn’t? Is that his appeal, that he is always one step removed from the world he (and we) move in, casting a jaded eye at the turmoil and contortions of whatever time it is, knowing that, whatever the details, human villainy always comes down to sex and power and greed? (Key line in Dr. No: Bond sighs and says “The same old dream, world domination,” as if there were nothing more predictable and boring than a gigantic organization of supercriminals with limitless resources at their disposal.)
Who, if anyone, can relate to Bond? He’s a lower-class thug who’s somehow gotten into the ruling-class world. There’s a kind of Esquire “Man at his Best” quality about him: he’s just as comfortable garroting a bad-guy as he is wearing a tux. And what man is comfortable wearing a tux?