On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Ernst Stavros Blofeld and James Bond do not recognize each other. I wonder why?
WHO IS JAMES BOND? Well, funny story, one that does not need to be recounted here. Suffice to say, James Bond is young again, which counts for something. He’s dapper, classy, amused and amusing, can still fight fiercely and kill without remorse. Because the year is 1969, he’s even now anti-authoritarian, going “off the res” to get the bad guy. Because the year is 1969, he is also deeper and more complex than before. It’s bad enough for poor George Lazenby that he had to follow Connery, who owned the part from the first shot of him in Dr. No, but Lazenby also need to reinvent Bond as a thinking, feeling, loving human being. He’s not unlikeable as Bond, but let’s face it, he’s not good enough to make us forget the man he refers to as “the other fella.”
we have all the time in the world — 2 hours and 20 minutes, to be precise
You Only Live Twice
A middle-aged James Bond caught between the visions of two evil geniuses — Ernst Stavros Blofeld and Sir Ken Adam.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? If this was the first James Bond movie you ever saw, you would be correct in assuming that Bond is a middle-aged fantasy, a balding, vain, stocky, aging Englishman (although his Scottish accent begins to assert itself here) who, in spite of falling apart physically, can still pilot a toy helicopter, jump onto a pile of empty cardboard boxes and, occasionally, bed beautiful women, although it’s never as much of a done deal as it has been in the past. It’s only been two years since Thunderball, but Bond has gained at least twenty pounds — not enough to shudder in horror, but enough that he needs a double for his wetsuit-scene. His toupee starts out bad and turns dramatically worse before the movie’s over.
In spite of carrying the burden of an entire generation’s fantasies of manhood, Bond is sprightly here again after moping his way through Thunderball. He’s clearly middle-aged now, but he’s not raging against the dying of the light — there’s something like acceptance and grace in his behavior. Women pass him by as often as they give in to him in You Only Live Twice, and that seems perfectly okay with him — as though he’d just as soon get some sleep.
With Bond’s arc of “middle-aged guy getting used to Japanese culture,” You Only Live Twice resembles nothing less than Lost in Translation, but with car chases and helicopter fights. With his two bad wigs, his expanding belly and his slowly collapsing face, the middle-aged Bond is starting to feel less like a sex symbol and more like a dirty old man. It makes perfect sense that Connery would want to stop doing these movies at this point. However, it’s also worth noting that, for a moment in Act II, the narrative slows down, Bond gets married, and just for a bit, You Only Live Twice starts to take on a different dimension, something a little more character-driven, subtle and, well, something more like a “real movie.”
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? We finally meet SPECTRE #1, Ernst Stavros Blofeld (he uses all three names, as apparently Ernst Blofeld is a common name throughout the world and he doesn’t want anyone to mix him up with Ernst Blofeld the conceptual artist, Ernst Blofeld the Prime Minister of Turkey, Ernst Blofeld the champion racecar driver or Ernst Blofeld the comedian). Blofeld’s ambition has returned — he wants nothing less than to spark a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. He’s going to accomplish this by — I’m sorry, what now?
Let me get this straight. Blofeld wants to spark a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. He’s going to do this by sending a series of rockets up into space and “kidnapping” both American and Soviet spacecraft, returning them to his secret underground lair, where the American and Soviet astronauts will be held in a detention cell, until — um — until the world is destroyed. And then SPECTRE can take over.
Um, okay. Ernst? May I call you Ernst? No? Sorry. Mr. Blofeld.
Mr. Blofeld, this plan — I — I — why? You’ve got a secret underground rocket base, and that’s a good thing. You want to take over the world, and that’s a good thing. I, I just, I have to ask you — please, take your hand away from that button please, for a moment — I have to ask you, is this the best plan? If you don’t mind, I have some suggestions.
1. Your space technology is far in advance of anything the US or the USSR currently has. Why not take up a career in aeronautics? McDonnell-Dougles and Hughes Aircraft rule the world in ways you cannot possibly imagine. You, your lesser numbers, and your cat could all be very happy in such a world, and you could get that awful scar fixed.
2. Why are you “kidnapping” the American and Soviet spacecraft? What does that do? You’re trying to start a nuclear war — start a fucking nuclear war! Are you telling me you can design, finance and build a private space program, complete with spacecraft-eating technology, but you can’t just drop a bomb on Washington? Why are you “kidnapping” spacecraft? Blow them out of the fucking sky! What, do you have a soft spot for astronauts?!
3. The “Monday Morning” question: do you know for sure that kidnapping spacecraft will lead to nuclear war? What if it does not? What happens then? Have you thought about that?
4. “Nuclear War” is a little risky — it tends to spread. Have you though about that? Let’s say you kill, oh, ten percent of the world’s population — three hundred million people or so. How do you know that you won’t be one of them? And let’s say you survive the nuclear war — how do you know that people will turn to SPECTRE to lead the post-nuclear world? What if they put two and two together and figure out that you’re actually the one who killed everybody? Do you think they’ll let you rule the world then?
Remember Auric Goldfinger? He had a plan. He’d thought it through. You, you’re a, you know what you are? You’re a movie villain. You know what a Movie Villain is? A Movie Villain is the guy who thinks the story’s over when he gets what he wants. And there’s a freeze-frame and a fade-out and it says “The End.” But in real life, Mr. Blofeld, the story goes on. You know who a Movie Villian is? George W. Bush is a Movie Villain. His “Mission Accomplished” speech on the aircraft carrier was his “The End” moment. But you know what, Mr. Blofeld? The story kept going on, and now look where he is.
Don’t be a George W. Bush, Mr. Blofeld. Don’t be a Movie Villain. Think, Mr. Blofeld. You’re a super genius, you should be perfectly comfortable doing so. Please, for your own good, for the good of SPECTRE and for the world.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? A good balance is struck here between detective work, heroic acts, defending himself and screwing women. The movie starts out as a real nuts-and-bolts detective story and gradually, even gracefully, builds into a surreal, gonzo, sci-fi/action spectacular.
HELPFUL ANIMALS: This Bond has a longer view of life, it seems, than his earlier selves — he knows when he needs to act alone and he knows when he needs help. Helpful animals are numerous in You Only Live Twice, and for the first time they are compelling in their own right. First there’s Tiger Tanaka, who is the head of some kind of Japanese good-guy spy team, then there are not one but two capable, comely Japanese spy-girls who Bond gets to know better, then there is a whole army of ninjas — and as soon as someone says “ninjas,” the pulse of the whole movie picks up. Ninjas! They explode out of the screen, a whole new (to Bond) cool world of flying bodies, wild stunts and anarchic possibilities. There’s a scene in Act II where Bond is shown around the Ninja Academy, and you can actually watch as Bond becomes obsolete before your eyes, standing there haplessly watching the future of action films unfold before him, looking suddenly pathetically square, in a pink shirt no less.
A NOTE ON Q: for the first (and I’m afraid, only) time, imho, the relationship between Bond and Q is exactly right. Q’s not showing up and foisting his toys on Bond as Bond stands there looking bored; Bond needs something specific (a gadget-laden helicopter), demands it from Q, and is professional and even bossy with him when Q delivers. I can’t tell you how much more I enjoy this version of Bond’s relationship with Q. Q is always, for some reason, this stern father figure (or perhaps uncle-figure), this stick-up-his-arse fuddy-duddy who’s always giving Bond toys but forbidding him to play with them, and it makes no sense. As I discussed earlier regarding From Russia With Love, spy toys aren’t created in a vacuum, they are invented because agents need them. When Q shows up and piles a bunch of crap on Bond, Bond is then obligated to use that crap, whether he wants to or not, and the narrative always shows the burden of that expectation — oh, we can’t go home yet, we haven’t used the exploding talcum powder. It’s so much more logical and satisfying that Bond would encounter a situation, requisition the items he needs to navigate the situation, then deal with Q as an equal instead of as a whining, wrist-slapping authority figure.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? For the first two acts of You Only Live Twice, Blofeld is still “that guy with the cat in his lap.” There are so many shots of the cat while Blofeld is talking that I began to suspect that the cat is actually SPECTRE #1, a feline criminal genius and a ventriloquist to boot. Come to think of it, when I consider the flaws in Blofeld’s plan, perhaps I’m not giving him enough credit. It’s an awe-inspiring plan, for a cat.
Once he shows up, Donald Pleasance does not disappoint as Blofeld. His scar is icky, he pulls off the SPECTRE uniform, he’s clearly insane: 1 point for appearance. 1 point for the piranha tank. 10 points for the jaw-dropping, Ken Adam-designed volcano stronghold. Even with his childishly retarded plan, Blofeld is a bad guy second only at this point to Goldfinger.
QUESTION: Bond is sent to Japan to find this volcano stronghold. He is put in touch with Tiger Tanaka, who is a great deal of help. There is some kind of bullshit ticking clock installed in Act II that requires Bond to be fully trained as a ninja, and married, and convincing as a Japanese man (yeah, right) before he can go blow shit up. Here’s the question: why does James Bond have to do this? Any one of the ninjas we see training looks already qualified enough to handle the task, why wait for Bond to become Japanese?
DON’T BOTHER ME WITH YOUR TECHNICAL MUMBO-JUMBO: During the stupefying climax of You Only Live Twice, Bond is required to blow up the spacecraft-gobbling rocketship before it gobbles up another spacecraft. How will he do it? Well, as it happens, Blofeld has thoughtfully devised a remote-control self-destruct mechanism for just that purpose. What is the name of this mechanism? “The Exploder Button.” With tech-heavy jargon like that, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Blofeld also owns a laser called a “Bright-Light Thing.”
FAVORITE MOMENT: There’s another moment in the climax, before Bond gets to the Exploder Button, he and Blofeld and a million bad guys are standing around in Blofeld’s control center when an explosion goes off. All the humans are fine, but Blofeld’s normally cool-as-a-cucumber cat, quite naturally, freaks out like you wouldn’t believe. Blofeld must forcefully restrain the cat, its eyes bulging in abject fear, to keep it from leaping, terrified, from his arms. This little bit of business is notable to me because, if the actor playing Blofeld is holding onto the cat that hard in this take, that means there was at least one take earlier where the actor was not able to restrain the cat from leaping, terrified, from his arms. That means that the production staff knew that the cat was in dire straits during this shot, and did nothing about it, except for advising the actor to hold on tighter. Now, You Only Live Twice is a gargantuan production, and even the most brilliant production manager can’t think of everything, but Sweet Hopping Jesus, the actor’s back is already turned to the camera, give him a fucking prop cat.
NOTES: It’s hard not to think about the career of Ken Adam during this movie, because he clearly owns the picture. In fact, a darker plan than even Blofeld’s starts to form in my mind — all this is happening because of Ken Adam. I mean, face it, he’s the one element that all these different people share. He designs enormous volcano strongholds for SPECTRE, and he designs the offices of the Japanese industrialist working for Blofeld, and he designs the private train of Tiger Tanaka, and he designs the opera-house-sized makeup room for Bond’s Japanese transformation, and he designs the Russian space center! He’s everywhere, every room has the same tilted ceilings, the same hard, bold lines, the same creamy, mid-sixties palette, the same invisible, recessed lighting — what kind of security clearance does this guy have? Didn’t anyone notice — hey! SPECTRE’S volcano stronghold looks just like the Russian space center! (and Dr. No’s underground lair, and Goldfinger’s house in Kentucky, and SPECTRE’s boardroom) All of this unpleasantness could have been easily avoided if they had just sent Bond after Ken Adam! When you consider that Adam also designed the War Room in Dr. Strangelove, it’s a wonder the world ever made it out of the 60s alive — the man was obviously a dangerous double-agent, contracting for both sides! Blofeld’s plan even starts to take on a cold kind of logic when you remove Blofeld and insert Ken Adam: Ha ha! The Americans and Russians will blow each other up, and then they will hire ME to rebuild everything — I’M THE ONLY CONTRACTOR THEY KNOW! HA HA HA HA HA!
Thunderball
Largo: I demand $100 million dollars. Bond: Ah shit, now what.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? For the purposes of Thunderball, this is the $64,000 question. Bond has undergone a personality change. For three movies he attacked his job with the same mischievious, adventurous spirit. There was a glint in his eye and a spring in his step. If he got pissy it was because some innocent person (usually a bird) was dragging him down while he was trying to do his job. Once the job was over, he went back to existing in what he considers man’s natural state: drinking, smoking and screwing on an indefinite timetable. But something has changed in Thunderball: Bond starts the movie grumpy and out of sorts, and never comes out of his mood. He can still charm the birds and he can still play Baccarat, but he doesn’t seem to get any joy out of it any more. In Dr. No, he postpones his trip to Jamaica to have sex with Sylvia the Lady Gambler; in Thunderball he interrupts his massaging of his nurse companion with a mink glove in order to go investigate a mysterious delivery in a spa. Work used to take a distant second to pleasure in Bond’s world, now it seems like he can’t pass up the women fast enough to get back to work, even inventing work if he has to to get the ladies off his back.
Goldfinger
Bond contemplates necrophilia while Goldfinger says hello to his grandmother back home.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? One of the chief joys of Goldfinger is the bad-guy plot. Goldfinger’s scheme is logical, surprising and utterly horrifying and evil. Goldfinger trades in gold, but instead of robbing Fort Knox he plans to set off a “dirty bomb” inside it, killing tens of thousands of people, making America’s gold worthless and his own ten times more valuable. On his way to achieving this goal, he’s willing to kill just about anybody he feels like, even his own financiers and allies.
WOMEN? Four: a fiery Latina before the titles, good-sport “Dink”(!) in Miami, poor doomed Jill Masterson in the hotel, and then the more challenging Pussy Galore. In general, the sexual politics in Goldfinger are more complicated than in the previous two movies. Not all women simply jump into bed with Bond any more — some are femmes fatale, some are easy pickings, some aren’t interested in sex at all (and don’t get it), and some are classy, independent thinkers who must be, um, persuaded.
FRIENDLY ANIMAL Felix Leiter is back, but has been re-cast as older and frumpier (don’t tell me they couldn’t “get” Jack Lord). But it’s still the same Felix Leiter, Bond even refers to their Jamaica adventure. Maybe the past few years have been tough on the CIA, what with the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of Kennedy and all.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Goldfinger is a riveting and fascinating character, played with startling realism by Gert Frobe. He’s not a moustache-twirling bad guy, he’s a disgusting slob with a dyspeptic grimace, but an extremely wealthy and powerful one, which makes all the difference in the world. Speaking of Cold War villains, he reminds me of no less a personage than Col Tom Parker. Goldfinger is so evil, the Italian mobsters assembled at his home in Kentucky come off like a bunch of yahoos and cheeseheads (and this is back when the Italian mafia was a true force to be reckoned with). How cool is Goldfinger? He’s responsible for not one but two urban legends about ways to die: the “getting painted to death” legend and the “getting sucked out of an airplane window” legend, both of which, we now know, are total hogwash. How sick is Goldfinger? He has a prison cell in the basement of his Ken Adam-designed house and not one but two peepholes into the bathroom of his private jet. He gets -1 point for hustling gin games in Miami Beach, 1 point for ultra-cool henchman Oddjob, 1 point for living in a Ken Adam set, 1 point for killing a woman by painting her gold (you can’t tell me that’s Oddjob’s job) and 100 points for his brilliant, devious plan.
NOTES: This is the first Bond movie to offer the pre-title sequence. Let’s run through this one: Bond swims through the ocean to a dock with a fake gull taped to his head. He climbs over a wall to a field of oil tanks. He goes to a specific tank, throws a secret switch and goes inside. The inside of the oil tank is someone’s secret living quarters (designed by Ken Adam — he was everywhere in the 60s). This person’s secret living quarters are lush, spacious and well-appointed. In addition to the swank furnishings, there is a pile of red oil drums marked “NITRO.” Because hey, you never know when you need a pile of gigantic oil drums filled with nitro. Bond plants a bomb in the nitro, escapes from the secret living quarters, sheds his wetsuit to reveal a white dinner jacket, then goes to hang out in a local bar while the oil field explodes and the town’s economy evaporates. Later, he goes to visit a local exotic dancer, who, it turns out, doesn’t appreciate him bombing the hell out of her town, and before you know it he’s got to kill a guy. Just a day’s work for our pilot-raping super-spy.
Apart from the rape thing (and Bond’s stated abhorrence of the Beatles), this is by far the best script in the series up to this point. It’s like the filmmakers have finally found their voice or hit their stride or something. It’s a real detective story with plenty of twists and surprises, actual clue-sorting and legwork, and Bond interacts with the bad guy from the very beginning. Oddjob is still killer stuff 43 years later, brutal and implacable, although I can’t for the life of me figure out how his hat works. I get that it’s got some kind of razor-sharp blade in, but I can’t figure out how he could possibly throw it hard enough to cut a cable or behead a statue (or a lady sharpshooter).
I understand why Goldfinger needs a big laser, but I can’t understand why it needs a coiled blue neon light on it.
I note that the air squadron is called Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, and I wonder if perhaps, on some level, the name Monty Python is meant as a kind of reply to Pussy Galore.
I also note that Bond (or, rather, a Bond-rehabilitated Pussy) alerts the CIA to Goldfinger’s plot, and wonder if Fort Knox actually falls within the CIA’s jurisdiction. Would Kentucky not be the FBI’s territory? I also wonder what, exactly, the CIA would do with a warning from a woman named Pussy Galore, when they couldn’t bring themselves to respond to a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike Within US.”
From Russia With Love
Tania: woman. Rosa Klebb: mm, not so much.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? The bad guy is the mysterious, faceless, cat-laden “Number 1,” leader of SPECTRE. SPECTRE, the super-criminal think-tank, as in Dr. No, wants to rule the world. To do that, it is imperative that he gets his hands on a special decoder thingy. We come to understand a good deal more about SPECTRE, its organization, its training methods and its structural politics in the movie. However, what Number 1’s “Monday Morning” plan is remains undiscussed. Is he prepared to rule the world once he gets it? What are his plans for health care, security, taxation?
WOMEN? Four. The first is the ladygambler from Dr. No, who has now acquired a name (it’s “Sylvia,” for those keeping score), then Bond scores a two-for-one deal with a pair of Gypsy women (the women are deadly enemies until exposed to Bond and his culturally advanced, egalitarian genitals), and finally Tania, to whom Bond remains loyal for the remainder of the movie.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Nowhere near as cool as Dr. No. He’s got a yacht, a cat and some fish. Yawn. However, he’s got two of the best “second villains” ever — Robert Shaw, who is incandescent in this movie, and Lotte Lenya as the aforementioned Rosa Klebb. Robert Shaw comes with a watch-wire garrot thing (which later shows up on the wrist of John Lithgow in Blow Out), Lotte Lenya comes with a pair of deadly shoes. These guys make a great pair — Shaw is the proverbial brick shithouse, unstoppable and cunning, yet also utterly believable, and Lenya is tiny but a cruel, stone-hearted monster — and also utterly believable. To make a measure of how good Shaw is in this movie, watch it and try to even imagine him, ten years later, as the Irish gangster Doyle Lonnigan in The Sting, much less twelve years later as the crusty seadog Quint in Jaws. And yet all of those performances are highly stylized, not naturalistic at all — he’s practicing a kind of heightened naturalism, his choices specific yet cartoonish. Lenya, on the other hand, knows she’s no physical match for Bond — the cowardice on her face in the scene at the end when she sneaks into the hotel room disguised as a maid is great — but you know that she’s so cold that her heart (or other body parts) could never be melted by Bond’s fiery western genitals. Rosa is there as the anti-Tania, the “bad” woman, her soul locked behind an emotional Iron Curtain.
GADGETS? A handful. Bond gets a briefcase full of crap from Q. Sniper rifle, exploding talcum powder, hidden knife, 50 gold sovereigns — all standard issue, we’re told. Which leads me to ask: standard issue, pursuant to what? These new gadgets seem to take Bond by surprise, as though it would have never occurred to him to need anything as obvious and vital as exploding talcum powder. And yet why is Q dreaming up all this stuff? Here’s what I’m saying: ideas come from somewhere. Q’s not out in the field, he’s in his lab at Q division. Agents are in the field. Obviously, agents must be coming back from missions complaining about a crucial lack of exploding talcum powder.
Q. How was the mission, 006?
006. Oh, it was all right — tell you what, though — I really could have used some exploding talcum powder.
Q. You know, you’re the third agent to mention that this week. Hang it all, that’s it — from now on, all agents shall carry exploding talcum powder in their briefcases at all times. We cannot afford the endangerment of any more agents.
006. What briefcases?
Q. W-why, your, you know, your briefcase — don’t you carry a briefcase?
006. No one ever gave me a briefcase.
Q. No br — ! All right. All right. That tears it. God damn it, we’re sending agents out there naked! I’m issuing a memo — all agents shall have a standard issue briefcase with exploding talcum powder.
006. And a hidden knife.
Q. Yes, yes — hidden knife, good —
006. And a sniper rifle —
Q. Well yes of course a sniper rifle —
006. And fifty gold sovereigns.
Q. Now how the devil am I going to get fiftygold sovereigns into a — never mind, I’ll figure it out.
006. And —
Q. Out! Out! I need to think.
NOTES: One movie into the series and already Bond is getting a little mannered, a little self-conscious. He cannot kill anyone without adding a witty bon mot, and his seductive powers are already leaning toward camp. He carries more than the weight of the western world on his shoulders, he carries the weight of his own reputation. He’s James Bond, he must act like James Bond.
Narratively, a whole different ball game from Dr. No. Apart from taking its sweet time getting started, we spend a whole lot more time examining the motives and machinations of the bad guys. My favorite bit is Rosa Klebb flying from Number 1’s yacht to SPECTRE Island, where all the top SPECTRE bad-guys are trained. She is escorted through a training field, filled with men running and shooting and killing and karate-chopping, until she comes to Robert Shaw sunbathing. Shaw snaps to attention, Klebb punches him in the gut, says “he’ll do,” then turns around and leaves. Doesn’t stay for lunch, doesn’t want to see anyone else, doesn’t have any papers or requistions to fill out — she spends an afternoon and god knows how much money flying to SPECTRE Island just to punch Robert Shaw in the gut. Now that’s a bad guy.
Dr. No
Dr. No shows off his collar, Honey Ryder shows off her shells — which will get more of Bond’s rapt attention?
WHO IS JAMES BOND? He’s a gambler. He smokes. He drinks (but not to excess). He’s charming, mischievous and occasionally bossy (when dealing with civilians). Straights bore the pants off him. He has sex with nameless women, while his boss’s secretary pines for him. He knows the rules of Chemin de Fer, he knows how to kick and punch, he knows judo, he knows how to wear a suit, he knows how to spot an assassin and how to burglar-proof his hotel room, he knows how to lose a tail, he knows his wine (he would never use a bottle of Dom Perrignon ’55 as a weapon, even against a madman bent on world conquest).
Bond, James Bond
As the world rushes out to luxuriate in the warm, churning waters Casino Royale ($40 million gross, almost enough to beat the dancing penguins), I find myself feeling like a Jew at Christmas. There is a celebration going on all around and I can’t quite figure out what it has to do with me.
For some reason I’ve never “gotten” James Bond. I’ve tried, I really have.
Maybe I’m the wrong age. I remember seeing Goldfinger on TV when I was a kid, and enjoying it because my brothers and father liked it, and I liked the assassin with the killer hat and the fact that the bomb that Bond is chained to is shut off at 007 seconds. But the first one I saw in the theaters was Moonraker when I was 17, and that put me off Bond until Goldeneye. Bond just always seemed to be part of someone else’s mythology.
(Sensing a lack in my understanding of my cultural heritage, a few years ago I sat down to watch all of them, including the ridiculous ’67 Casino Royale and ’83’s Never Say Never Again. I also started in on the books, but got through only three of them before giving up.)
Even from a young age, I could see that the Bond pictures are not dramas or even thrillers; they are pageants, as predictable and unchanging as the Passion Play. Bond is an unflappable guy who dresses well, drives cool cars, kills men, sleeps with women, blows stuff up and moves on. There is nothing at stake, no emotional involvement, no chance of development. The movies aren’t about character and they’re not even really about politics or the nature of espionage. Bond doesn’t love, hate or care about anything but, apparently, appearances. No one can ever remember the plot of a Bond movie because the plot is the least important aspect of it.
(In Goldfinger, the best-loved movie of the series, Bond wanders through the whole movie without having an iota of impact on the plot. He sneaks around, witnesses things and puts together a puzzle, stands around and watches things happen. He instigates no course of action and can’t even defuse an atom bomb when he’s chained to one — that job falls to a CIA guy who happens by at the right moment. He doesn’t even kill Oddjob; Oddjob kills himself. He can barely even take credit for offing Goldfinger himself; a stray bullet takes care of that.)
What’s important in the Bond movies is style. What does he wear, what kind of car does he drive, who are the women he sleeps with, how does he kill men and chase people and destroy property, what deformity or perversion does the bad guy have, and is it all carried off with panache?
I think Bond is purposefully not a character at all but rather a deliberately empty suit, a model in the fashion sense, designed only to wear things, to be an attractive cipher, to better sell us things. Specifically, he is designed to sell men an idea of how they are supposed to behave. In spite of most of us never having the chance or opportunity to legally kill men, sleep with superficially gorgeous women without consequence, blow stuff up or drive our cars over the speed limit, we are expected to turn to James Bond for lessons in, in, in something, I’m not sure what. Self-reliance? Charisma? Brutality? Grace under pressure?
There is, of course, an important capitalist element to the Bond pictures, and it’s not just about his brand of watch. (Woman in the new Casino Royale: Nice watch. Rolex? Bond: Omega. Woman: Beautiful.) Bond is a brand unto himself, and “the new Bond” is always a kind of barometer of western culture. If we can put together a better Bond, it seems, no matter how the political winds of the world are blowing, the capitalist machine is still operating well enough. We parade the new Bond as proudly as the Russians once paraded their rows of ICBMs on Mayday. They were advertising their militaristic might, we were (and still are) advertising our easy living, loose morals and conspicuous consumption.
There is a kind of world-wide anxiety about Bond. Every time a new actor is announced, people everywhere get very concerned about the health of the franchise. Is Bond going to be okay? Why isn’t the studio making more Bond pictures? Are they going to keep on making them? Is he still relevant? Was he ever? Is he tough enough, too tough, too funny, too male, too emasculated, too brutal, too ironic? Too blond? He seems to be really important to people, to men anyway. (Thinking of the capitalist perogative, maybe one of the reasons Bond has been so successful for so long is because the West needs to celebrate, above all, its power to be superficial, stupid and wasteful. They’re like capitalist pornography.)
In any case, each time a new one comes along I find myself getting swept up in it because I’m in the business and I keep thinking maybe there’s something there. With the new one, for instance, it has been mentioned that Bond has been reinvented in order to compete with Jason Bourne at the cineplex. I love love love the Bourne movies and so does my wife (Me: You want to leave me and marry Matt Damon, don’t you? Wife: No, not Matt Damon, Jason Bourne), so the prospect of Bond being toughened up in the Bourne sense sounded like a good idea to me.
Perhaps that’s where the seed of my disappointment in the new movie lies. This Bond is still dressed in a tux, still plays games of leisure in the playgrounds of the wealthy, still lives the high life, trading superficial quips while driving fancy cars with beautiful women, and still has a cheesy, eye-rollingly stupid title sequence. (There is some commentary this time around about how this Bond is closer to Ian Fleming’s original conception of the character, as if that meant anything, as if we were discussing freaking Hamlet here instead of a coat hanger with a gun.) We are told that this time the woman means something, but we know that’s not true, because if the woman meant something she would stick around for another movie and we know that’s not going to happen because that would be antithetical to the whole Bond thing. Bond doesn’t change, Bond can’t change. Bond doesn’t fall in love, Bond moves on, like a shark, leaving destruction and broken hearts in his path. The Bond movies keep promising thrills but keep delivering only spectacle.
As the movie and series continues to prove itself wildly popular, I welcome education as to why this is so.
Some thoughts on supervillains
Let’s say Blofeld, specifically the Blofeld from You Only Live Twice.
Blofeld needs money. He’s going to build a rocket with a warhead on it and hold the world hostage.
That’s his plan.
How do you carry out this plan? Well a warhead is an expensive item. Even if you steal one it’s going to run you a pretty penny.
Then there’s the rocket. Even if you’re a genius and you know how to build a rocket yourself there’s still the staff you’ll need for labor. Rockets can’t just be slapped together, they have to work. Rockets are expensive now, they were even more expensive back then. And the labor has to be skilled labor. The parts all have to be made to precise specifications. It’s complicated. And all these people, your rocket designers and technicians and so forth all have to be paid. Why do they have to be paid? Because they’re not idiots or drug addicts, they’re skilled professionals who would otherwise be in demand elsewhere in the world. You have to pay them what they’re worth. They won’t build a rocket for you at gunpoint.
Once you’ve got your rocket, where do you launch it? It has to be a secret location. It has to be a secret location because what you’re doing is highly illegal. Where can you hide it? Blofeld came to the decision: A Dormant Volcano. He hollowed out a volcano (I’d like to have seen the bill for that engineering project) and installed his Rocket Launching stuff inside, then built a fake roof on top of his Rocket Launch Pad, making it look like the Dormant Volcano has a lake in the middle of it.
Okay. So. He has the expense of the designing and building the Rocket, designing and building the Warhead (or stealing it), hollowing out the Dormant Volcano, and designing and building the Launchpad inside the Dormant Volcano (which is, of course, in an extremely remote location, so you also have the expense of shuttling workers back and forth from the Dormant Volcano construction site and their homes in the towns surrounding the jungle).
Now then. How do you keep your Secret Launchpad safe while you plan a good date to hold the world hostage? Well, you hire a Private Army, that’s what you do. Mercenaries, I’m guessing.
Where will they all be housed? Now you have to build dormatories inside your Dormant Volcano. What will they eat? Where willthey sleep? Where will they go to the bathroom? What will they wear? Who will design and create their uniforms? Is there a cafeteria? Is there a Blofeld Company Store? (I know, there was a Simpsons episode that asked a lot of these same questions.) How do you keep your workers and mercenaries entertained during the long months of construction and preparation? Do you hire local talent for entertainment? Rent movies? Now you have to build an auditorium to entertain them in.
That all sounds like a lot, but Blofeld isn’t actually done yet. No, his Dormant Volcano is so large, he has to build a MONORAIL inside it. Because God Forbid he would have to step out of his office and make the trek from there to the launchpad on foot. No, he needs a Monorail. Could have just as easily laid some blacktop and bought an electric golf cart, but no, he needs a Monorail. Okay, so now you’ve got to design and build a Monorail inside your Dormant Volcano with the fake lake roof and the Launch Pad inside with the Rocket and the Warhead inside, and a Private Army to watch it all so that some English guy in a tuxedo doesn’t show up and ruin everything.
My question is: wouldn’t Blofeld have been better off if he had just hung onto his money and invested it wisely? It seems to me that once you make a decision to hire a Private Army, you end up having to take the world hostage not from a power-mad vision, but from necessity. Because a Private Army is too fucking expensive. All the expenses add up, and before you know it, you have to take the world hostage, just to meet your payroll.
I think if Blofeld were half as brilliant as his publicity claims, he would never had hired a Private Army to begin with and thus would never have to be in the position of needing to hold the world hostage.
This is one of the things I like about The Monarch and the other villains of The Venture Bros. They have no particular interest in World Conquest, they just want to harass scientists. I love the way they discuss it as a love affair or even a job, “Yeah, I’m arching Dr. Venture these days, but I’m looking for something else.” This is the world they live in, they don’t have the vision (or fiscal irresponsibility) to want to take over the world.