THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.

Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 

I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 

And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."

THE READING RHEUM: GOLDFINGER (1959)

 

Years ago, when I reviewed most of the James Bond movies for my NUM blog, I reread all of the books to compare whatever content they held in common with the films. I don’t plan to blog reviews of all of the books, but I decided to do so for GOLDFINGER, given that it’s arguably the most iconic of the Bond novels.

As others have observed, the seventh book in the series continued to build on Fleming’s penchant for larger-than-life villains, as seen in the previous DOCTOR NO and the future books involving SPECTRE mastermind Blofeld. To be sure, Mister Big, Hugo Drax and Rosa Klebb are similarly outsized, particularly Drax, who plotted to drop an explosive missile on London. But Fleming did start making slightly greater use of quasi-SF technology in both DOCTOR NO and GOLDFINGER: a jamming device in the first and a miniature atom bomb in the latter. That said, GOLDFINGER is not really “science fiction” despite the small A-bomb that the villain wishes to use to crack Fort Knox. The 1964 movie seems more in the SF-vein when its script substitutes a big laser for the bomb. The GOLDFINGER film also presented audiences with their first sight of a “spy car” outfitted with outlandish devices, whereas in the book Bond’s only special weapons are a pair of folding knives hidden in his shoe-soles. Between the knives, the A-bomb and Goldfinger’s insane plot to rob the U.S. gold depository, the novel is, like most of Fleming’s Bond books, purely uncanny in phenomenality.

The movie-depiction of Goldfinger’s super-villainy is so persuasive that it’s fascinating to note that none of the book’s villainy tropes appear in the first half. Fleming spends almost a hundred pages establishing the fragmentary background of Auric Goldfinger, a short man with seemingly mismatched body parts (perhaps reflecting a multi-ethnic background, as official record says he’s Latvian though his name suggests European Jew). All of the things viewers cherish in the movie—the “golden girl” murder of Tilly Masterson, Oddjob and his fatal bowler hat, Pussy Galore and the robbing of Fort Knox—are confined to the book’s second half. Early on, the only bizarre thing about the villain—reputedly the richest man in England—is that he has a special affection for gold that goes beyond simply smuggling it for profit. One suspects, though Fleming does not admit, that Goldfinger may have assumed one or both of his official names as emblems of his gold-fascination. Fleming doesn’t really create a psychology for Goldfinger beyond an unconvincing short man’s inferiority complex. However, Bond is a more rounded character despite the problematic aspects of his prejudices.

Though many critics of Bond overstate the case regarding the character’s racism and sexism, GOLDFINGER provides considerable grist for both mills. To some extent the villain with the Jewish-sounding name is not so much a stereotype of Jewry as he is that of a gauche non-British foreigner. Nonetheless, I accept the trenchant argument of Jacqueline Friedman in IAN FLEMING’S INCREDIBLE CREATION that social myths about Jewishness inform the character. Friedman observes that even if readers don’t believe the myth of the money-hungry Jew, the robbing of Fort Knox will still seem persuasive on an emotional level (“Doesn’t every Jew want all the money in the world?”) Far less subliminal is Fleming’s portrait of the villain’s Korean henchmen, largely represented by Oddjob, who dines on cats as delicacies and can barely speak due to a cleft palate. Oddjob appears in the wake of Fleming’s Doctor No—an urbane and intellectual super-fiend loosely modeled on Rohmer’s Fu Manchu (though clearly no match for the real thing). But Koreans had no major myths in the European consciousness, and so Oddjob seems no more than a rationalized ogre. There is one moment in which Bond attempts to respond to the Korean servant in human terms, though. In one scene, Goldfinger orders Oddjob to demonstrate his mastery of karate for Bond’s benefit by smashing up furniture. Bond is honestly amazed by such incredible skill, and the agent puts out his hand to shake, in order to salute the Korean’s mastery. Goldfinger warns his henchman to mind his strength as the two shake hands, implying that Oddjob is nothing more than a conscienceless brute who would enjoy maiming victims for amusement. It’s only after incidents like this that Bond makes a statement about the animal-like nature of all Koreans.

The case for Bondian sexism doesn’t stem this time from any sexual conquests with bizarre names like “Plenty O’Toole.” The hero has a consensual hookup with the villain’s aide Tilly Masterson and doesn’t find out for several chapters that Goldfinger has murdered her. The source for this information is Tilly’s vengeful sister Jill, but if the male reader was expecting Bond to score again with a second sister, Fleming blocks his hero’s conquest by making Jill a lesbian. Through the protagonist’s thoughts, Fleming offers his scornful opinion of homosexuality by deeming it “confused,” though the author may have introduced this element in part to spoof Bond’s lady-killing image. Jill is far more taken by Goldfinger’s lady crook ally Pussy Galore, though the two women never really cross paths and Jill dies in a foolish attempt to appeal to Pussy’s protection. I presume that later generations of lesbians have duly scorned Fleming’s psychologizing, particularly his analysis that the only reason Pussy turns lavender is because in her youth she was raped by her uncle. Pussy surrenders to Bond’s charms in the end, but the circumstances aren’t as clear a “win” for the forces of heterosexuality as they are in the 1964 movie. At the book’s conclusion, it seems evident that Pussy aids Bond against Goldfinger and Oddjob largely to save herself and to get in good with the law, so her comment to Bond that she likes him because “I never met a man before” may not be the whole truth. In any case, Fleming is never less than truthful in stating that hetero men may consider lesbians a challenge, and by putting that challenge into dramatic form, the author managed to make Pussy one of the most mythic lesbians in fiction, even as Goldfinger is one of the most mythic villains.

THE TWO FACES OF PUSSY GALORE

In the course of reviewing two 1960s superspy-films on my movie-blog, I've mounted an argument as to how *mythicity* can be discerned in works that may or may not be "politically correct" by a given social consensus.  I'm excerpting here just the section dealing with my chosen examples of mythicity: the representations of the character Pussy Galore in both the original 1959 novel by Ian Fleming and in the 1964 movie (scripted by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn).  I wanted to transport this section here in case I decide to build on it in future.

_______________

The symbolic discourse of the [Matt] Helm films, though, is more dubious. Though I’ve said the films embody the “swinger” cultural fantasy, saying that doesn’t give one any means by which to judge the *mythicity* of these spy-fantasies. As mentioned elsewhere, a narrative has high mythicity in relation to the complexity of its symbolic discourse, quite apart from its value as pure entertainment.

So what if the entertainment is politically incorrect? The Helm films, like many superspy narratives— particularly the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, the main source of the subgenre—constantly put hot women on display, though not as explicitly as the infamous PLAYBOY spreads. At the same time, the superspy genre wasn’t entirely devoted to the humiliation of women, and it spawned not a few characters—Emma Peel, Modesty Blaise—who became icons of feminine (and sometimes feminist) rebellion.

As it happens, one of Ian Fleming’s characters, Pussy Galore of the 1959 Bond novel GOLDFINGER, has become one of the mythic touchstones of both the novel series and the film adaptations of the Fleming books. And this mythicity remains strong despite the fact that her creator depicts her in rather demeaning terms, while her film-adapters depict her in more empowering (and for this time, more politically correct) terms. The coyly-named Miss Galore, then, offers a paradigm for showing mythicity in spite of the creator or adapter’s political orientation.

In Fleming’s book, Galore—a lesbian henchwoman of the titular villain Goldfinger-- symbolizes all of Fleming’s conservative—even primitive—opinions on the nature of lesbianism. By the book’s conclusion Bond wins Pussy over for Team Hetero, though there's some intimation that she joins him against Goldfinger as a way of reducing her sentence. That said, in her prose appearance Pussy’s mythicity rates as “fair” given that Fleming makes her the vehicle of his sociological beliefs in a relatively thoughtful manner, no matter what one thinks of said beliefs.

In contrast, the Pussy Galore of the 1963 film GOLDFINGER barely references the lesbian nature of the book-version, though there are a few lines to indicate that Pussy resists Bond’s suavity because she plays for another team. This Pussy is portrayed on screen by actress Honor Blackman, who prior to the 1964 film had essayed a heroic female spy-type on the AVENGERS teleseries. Possibly in deference to fans who expected Blackman to play another such character, film-Pussy defends herself against Bond’s advances with judo-skills. Bond still manages to convert her to his team, this time with a forceful persuasion that some would consider rape. In the end she still joins him against Goldfinger, however, with a little less implication that she did it to save herself some years in prison.

Therefore, when I evaluate the way the Matt Helm films stack in comparison in terms of either demeaning or empowering archetypes of femininity, they stand or fail not in terms of political correctness, but according to the “Pussy test.”