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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
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The New Crusade:
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March 24--March
30, 2002
50 Years of James Bond...
By Alexander Cockburn
Continued from
50 Years of James Bond
The titular villains in the Bond books
are always grotesques. Le Chiffre, in Casino Royale, set the
tone, weighing in at 252 pounds at a height of 5'8", with
his 'small, rather feminine mouth', small hairy hands, small
feet, small ears 'with large lobes, indicating some Jewish blood',
'soft and even' voice and white showing all round the iris of
each eye, 'large sexual appetites' and 'flagellant' tastes. This,
in admittedly baroque form, was our old friend the Father Figure,
as evinced in the scene where Le Chiffre goes to work on Bond's
balls with the carpet beater and promises to chop them off with
a carving knife.
Fleming inaugurates the torture scene
thus: '"My dear boy"--Le Chiffre spoke like a father--"the
game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by
mischance into a game for grown-ups, and you have already found
it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to
play games with adults, and it was very foolish of your nanny
in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket.'"
But when Bond, manhood spared by the Russian executioner who
dispatches Le Chiffre, recovers in hospital and then prepares--with
Vesper Lynd's help--to check that all physical systems are in
working order, he discovers that she too is a villain.
This is less surprising when we realise
that Bond's women are often men, thinly disguised. This is progress
from Buchan and Drummond where they were often horses. Vesper
is introduced with the news that 'her eyes were wide apart and
deep blue and they gazed candidly back at Bond with a touch of
ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would
like to shatter, roughly. Her skin was lightly suntanned and
bore no trace of make-up except on her mouth which was wide and
sensual. ... the general impression of restraint in her appearance
and movements was carried even to her fingernails, which wer
unpainted and cut short.
Of course there was dutiful mention of
Vesper's "fine" breasts but Fleming does not seem to
have been too interested in them. Four years later in From Russia
With Love, Fleming scurries past Tatiana Romanova's breasts with
a mumbled "faultless" before assuming a hotly didactic
tone on the matter of her ass: "A purist would have disapproved
of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that
it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round
at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a
man's. A year later, after publication of Dr No Noel Coward wrote
to Fleming, saying that he was slightly shocked by the lascivious
announcement that Honeychile's bottom was like a boy's. "I
know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded
nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking
of?"
Fleming didn't address the point in his
response, but there is an answer in one of his notebooks from
the thirties, a period when he looked, in one description, like
someone who had walked out of the pages of The Romantic Agony:
'Some women respond to the whip, some to the kiss. Most of them
like a mixture of both, but none of them answer to the mind alone,
to the intellectual demand, unless they are men dressed as women_
For Bond there were father figures lurking behind every shrub
none more imposing than old M, with his damnably blue eyes, whom
Bond tries kill in an Oedipal spasm at the start of OHMS. But
here too we find that ambiguity discovered by the very fat policeman
when he slipped his hand up Savage's skirt. Fleming's father
was killed in the war when he was a boy. The dominant figure
in lan's life was his formidable mother Mrs Val. Like Holmes
and Moriarty locked together over the Reichenbach Falls, motherand
son maintained vigorous psychic combat until they died within
two months of each other in l964, MrsVal going first in July.
Fleming often called hiss mother M.
Always this terrible confusion! The real
'M' in the war was the head of MI5, a man called Maxwell Knight.
He was loved by his secretary, Joan Miller. She died in 1984
but her daughter fought, over the desperate efforts of MI5 to
suppress them, to publish her memoirs, which are now available
in Ireland. There is a poignant passage in which Miller describes
the object of her doomed love: "As I sat there watching
this avowed opponent of homosexuality mince across the lawn,
a number of things became clear to me. His tastes obviously inclined
him in the direction of what, in a phrase not then current, is
known as "rough trade". It was plain that he'd taken
himself that time, to the cinema tea room, instead of spending
the afternoon with his wife in Oxford, in the hope of effecting
a suitably scrubby pick up."
If Bond's women were men in the books,
in the movies they are fish, starting with Honeychile who comes
up out of the sea in Dr No in one of the most successful associations
of woman with water since Botticelli stood Venus up on a clamshell.
In the movies Bond is often to be found down in cold water or
up in the snow. The problem for Maibaum and for the various directors
was no doubt to find scenery to match or compensate for the distraught
psychic landscapes of the books. They found the answer where
Jules Verne so often did, in the soothingly amoral underworld
of the sea. It didn't always work. The underwater sequences in
Thunderbolt are numbingly slow. But at their best, in the explicitly
Verne-like Spy Who Loved Me with Curt Jurgens' Atlantis on its
tarantula legs, or in the lesbian fantasy, Octopussy, the movies
do take on the surreal texture of a Max Ernst painting.
They also lightened everything up. The
only time Bond really behaves like a licensed killer is at the
start of Dr No, when he studies the renegade Strangeway's empty
gun, says 'You've had your six' and then kills him in cold blood.
Maibaum gave Bond a sense of humor. The idea was to present the
cold war as a necessary, but humorous--in the case of Moore,
frivolous--ritual. Right from the start the film series stood
in marked contrast to the books in being pro detente. The only
bad Russians are renegades, part of SPECTER, intent on sowing
distrust between the great powers, as in The Spy Who Loved Me,
where Jurgens schemes to arrange mutual assured destruction of
all great powers other than his own. Maibaum says now that starting
with Dr No, 'for some reason, looking at the very, very long-range
future United Artists did not want the Russians to be out and
out villains, so we made Dr No come from SPECTER rather than
SMERSH. That was really done for reasons of motion picture distribution,
thinking that maybe some day Bond might go to Russia.'
Dr No set the high standard for Bond
villains. The best of these villains was probably Gert Frobe
in Goldfinger and Maibaum gave him one of the best lines. 'Do
you expect me to talk?' Connery grits as the laser slices towards
his crotch. 'No Mr Bond, I expect you to die.' On the whole one
feels rather sorry for the villains, cultured and bold, but thwarted
in their schemes for world conquest by so mean an intellect as
Bond's. But films don't have the juice that Fleming's cold war
fifties political stance gave the novels, which is no doubt why
the films got more and more fantastical, as sea, snow and travelogue
became substitutes for Fleming's paranoid verve. It is not surprising,
given the length of the Bond series, that the audiences now take
so much pleasure in the expected, in Bond as ritual: the pre-credit
sequence established in From Russia With Love; the encounter
with Miss Moneypenny; the throw-away lines and polished dialogue;
the gadgets produced by Q.
Ah yes, the gadgets: the briefcase with
knives and gold sovereigns, the Aston Martin DBS with ejector
seat and saw-blades in the wheel hubs ... In the mid 1960s Umberto
Eco wrote an interesting essay about Fleming in which he discussed
the author's stylistic technique. 'Fleming takes time to convey
the familiar with photographic accuracy,' Eco wrote, 'because
it is upon the familiar that he can solicit our capacity for
identification. Our credulity is solicited, blandished, directed
to the region of possible and desirable things. Here the narration
is realistic, the attention to detail intense; for the rest,
so far as the unlikely is concerned, a few pages suffice and
an implicit wink of the eye.'
Fleming, and through him, Bond, was acutely
aware of commodities, mundane objects of desire. No previous
thriller writer had ever accommodated himself to such an extent
to the psychology of acquisition, of envy, to the spiritual rhythms
of the advertising industry. The makers and marketers of Bond
movies understood this aspect of Fleming's appeal very well,
and soon the world grew used to Bond's pedantic lectures on Taittinger
and Q's proud demonstrations of the latest in British gadgetry.
The movies are full of tie-ins, from Cartier watches to vodka
to the trusty Aston Martin itself. Backdrop becomes commodified
too, as the Bond producers scour the world for fresh locations
and ministers of tourism plead for a visit.
In this matter of commodities the Bond
films have been a somewhat ironic reverie of British omnipotence.
The cycle of Bond films began just when the Labour prime minister
Harold Wilson was urging the nation to cast aside the archaic
vestments of the past and bathe itself in the 'white heat of
technology'. Things worked in Bond movies but they didn't work
in Britain and as Kingsley Amis once sadly remarked, if Bond
had really had to use his mini-submarine in combat conditions
it would have surely taken him straight to the bottom. In 1983,
just when Q gave Bond a staggering number of gadgets in Octopussy,
Britain became for the first time in its history a net importer
of industrial goods.
Noel Coward put the contrast between
fantasy and reality well. 'One of the things that still makes
me laugh whenever I read Ian's books is the contrast between
the standard of living of dear old Bond and the sort of thing
Ian used to put up with at Goldeneye. When Bond drinks his wine
it has to be properly chambre, the tournedos slightly underdone,
and so forth. But whenever I ate with Ian at Goldeneye the food
was so abominable I used to cross myself before I took a mouthful.
... I used to say, "Ian, it tastes like armpits." And
all the time you were eating there was an old lan smacking his
lips for more while his guests remembered all those delicious
meals he had put into the books.'
In that same weeklong visit to the UK
years ago I turned on Channel 4 one evening. There was my friend
Robin Blackburn, at that time editor of New Left Review, addressing
the nation on the paramount necessity of Britain becoming truly
socialist if it is to get out of its present mess. "The
social horizon," Robin said, "is still defined by institutions
which serve British capital but which are not specifically capitalist
and are not found in any other capitalist country. Our ruling
institutions are the products of oligarchy and empire. Consecrated
by time and custom they are like a dead weight on the imagination
and aspirations of the living. Britain has become a living museum
of obsolescence, whose most splendid trophy is nothing less than
the world's last ancien regime."
Under prime ministers stretching back
to Churchill, 007 has done his best, probably none better, to
put Britain's foot forward. He himself is, with the happy assistance
of United Artists, one of Britain's most successful exports.
But if Bond is a fine example of world cultural integration at
the level of kitsch, things have not always been in good shape
on the home front. What has improved strongly is the coercive
apparatus of the state. 'You're nothing but a stupid policeman,'
Dr No told Bond. If he had not had the misfortune to drown in
his own nuclear well, the doctor would have been unhappy to discover
that Bond's trade--policing the British state--has fared better
than most of the other props in the old museum. In this respect
at least, the fantasy came true.
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