BATTLE OF THE GIRL BOSS FRANCHISES

 It's difficult to tell when "girl bosses" have negatively affected an ESTABLISHED franchise. Even if an audience does not like a given female character, they may still like the franchise enough to support it. But if the audience does NOT support a previously profitable franchise, it's also difficult to prove that the presence of a bad female character was the reason.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY was an unquestionable box office bomb. I liked it much better than the much more profitable entry in the series, CRYSTAL SKULL, so I have to ask, "why did audiences not want to see it?"

Long before the film hit theaters, there were podcasts bagging on Indiana's co-star Helena Shaw being a "girl boss." So many people may have stayed away from DIAL with the negative sense that Disney wanted to "replace" Indiana with a younger female hero. BUT-- the same negative opinions also swarmed around 2021's NO TIME TO DIE, in which it was rumored that Bond was going to be replaced by a female 007-- and TIME was not a flop. In both cases audiences had reason to believe that the respective films were going to be the last hurrahs for both the Craig Bond and the Ford Indiana, but they supported one and not the other.

I also personally think that Helena Shaw was a better character than her detractors claimed, even after they saw the movie. Certainly she's more three-dimensional than Nomi, the new 007. I think both female characters were being floated by their studios as POSSIBLE new feature-characters, but neither is so overbearing as to beat the original character into the ground, as the early podcasters feared. Those podcasters MIGHT have overreacted, though it's important to state that such neutralization DOES happen when an old franchise character's on the way out and a new one's on the way in.

So we can't in the end say that DIAL failed because of a girl boss. Her presence might not have HELPED, that's the most one can say. Given that some complaints were made that DIAL was depressing because Ford looked his age, I find an alternative theory more believable: TIME succeeded because it allowed Bond to go out looking good, DIAL flopped because it didn't allow Jones to look unfailingly great from start to finish.

HOWEVER, all of that applies to ESTABLISHED franchises, and I think Disney has flopped with many of its NEW girl boss franchises. Take THE MARVELS (please). There's no reason to see that film except to celebrate the girl boss rhetoric, but it was so bad, even the people who want more girl bosses didn't go see it, and it was a tremendous bomb. So IMO one can blame the "girl boss" theme for "going broke" only when there's no other contributing factor.

CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS PT. 2

 

I ended Part 1 on this observation: that even though it was possible for raconteurs to use the name of a famous literary character for any number of secondary doppelgangers, the mere use of the name did not confer a prior status or charisma upon a doppelganger that shared no points of continuity with the original. Thus, a few dozen Dracula-doppelgangers may register as either strong or weak template deviations of the Stoker creation—but “Dracula, Superhero” did not. The latter would be a “total template deviation,” in that he has no gradations of “strong” or “weak” points of continuity.

A similar “total deviation” appears in the case of impostors who assume a familiar guise for some clandestine motive. A few months before Marvel Comics revived the 1940s hero Captain America, Stan Lee had a criminal impostor, the Acrobat, assume the guise of the WII hero in order to deceive the Human Torch. The Acrobat was a total deviation because he clearly shared no continuity with any previous version of the star-spangled adventurer. 

Once a continuity was forged between the forties and sixties version of the character, a “retcon” had to be devised to explain away a previous fifties-era iteration of both Captain American and his sidekick Bucky. Those characters then became demonstrably separate from the original iterations.

The clandestine motive may even remain hidden only from the doppelganger. In the amusing script for issue #4 of THE JOKER, an actor playing Sherlock Holmes suffers amnesia, and becomes convinced that he is Holmes. He then assumes the Holmes persona in order to track down and defeat the Clown Prince, though neither the Joker nor any reader of the comic thinks that the actor is the real thing.

Cycling back in the other direction, it’s possible to have a valid template derivation even without using a famous name, by invoking only images or tropes familiar to an audience. A major plotline of the first LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN sequence includes a turf war in 1890s London between perennial Holmes-foe Moriarty and a mysterious figure called “the Doctor.” Moore used both images and verbal tropes to imply that the Doctor was Fu Manchu, but he never named the character since Fu Manchu is still trademarked, unlike all the public-domain characters in the LEAGUE franchise. 

Similarly, Moore may not have been sure as to whether the prose-and-film character Bulldog Drummond was free and clear. Thus when a version of the character appears in BLACK DOSSIER, Moore changed the doppelganger’s given name from the “Hugh” of the original prose books to “Hugo.” Ironically, the prose character is barely known to modern audiences, having been eclipsed by cinema’s heavily glamorized “strong template deviation,” but Moore’s “Hugo” bears more resemblance to the rude, brutish character in the original prose series.

However, also in DOSSIER we find a “total template deviation” of a different nature: the spoof. The story also includes “Jimmy,” an easily recognizable parody of James Bond, but Jimmy has no significant points of commonality with the Bond of either prose or films. Moore created Jimmy to mock what he deemed the unlikable aspects of James Bond, but he lays it on so thick that the reader no longer believes that there exists any continuity between the two agents, any more than one could believe that “Bats-Man,” a spoof of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, had anything in common with any version of Batman.

Some points of continuity may exist when the doppelgangers are not merely impostors, but re-creations of the originals that invoke specific memories in those that observe them. In the story “Santa Claus in Wonderland,” Santa never actually meets any denizen of that Lewis Carroll domain; he merely dreams his encounters with Alice, the Mad Hatter et al. But these dream-figures maintain at least a weak continuity with the originals, because Santa imagines that they are like the characters in the books (which for the most part, they are).

However, in SCOOBY DOO 2, the teen detectives and their Great Dane encounter doppelgangers who are artificially concocted versions of ”spooks” who were all originally just costumed human beings. As entertaining as it is to see the Scooby Gang attacked by a “legion of doom” that seems made up of their old enemies, these artificial menaces no more share identity with their originals than a Hulk-robot does with the Incredible Hulk.

One more "total deviation" will suffice for the time being: the type openly based on some familiar characters but who are meant to be entirely separate characters. The four main characters of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS do not claim to be identical in any way with their 1950s SF-movie models, who are, going left from right, the Fly, the Fifty-Foot Woman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Blob. Because they don't share any continuity with their models, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

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.

QUICK SEXUAL CONQUEST POST

I responded thusly to this KID post on CRIVENS regarding the scene of sexual conquest in the 1964 GOLDFINGER:

I tend to think that the "sexual conquest" scene in the movie is like many you saw throughout the history of sound cinema, and maybe silent as well (Rudolf Valentino anyone). The woman resists not because she's unwilling to have sex, but as a challenge to the man, defying him, as it were, to make herself seem more enticing. One can go back and forth on whether this trope is based on anything in real life-- but even if everyone agreed that it's pure fantasy, it's been grabbing both male and female audiences for decades. Check out 1942's BLACK SWAN. Power kisses Maureen O'Hara, and belts her when she bites him. Toxic masculinity, right? Well, despite his violence he keeps trying to conquer her with charm-- to which she responds, at least once, by cracking his head with a rock. She only relents when he acts heroically to save her and foil the villains.
Obviously it's a little different with Pussy Galore, even if her lesbianism in the film is less overt than in the book. I could be wrong, but I don't think the book has a scene in which Bond wakes up and beholds Pussy-- who is, incidentally, smiling coquettishly at him, rather than scorning him as a filthy breeder. In the book Pussy's not too interested in Bond until she switches sides to save herself some jail time, and at the very end she claims she turned lesbian because her uncle raped her and so she never knew what a "real man" was like. That tidbit probably didn't influence the movie, which is more in the line of sexual conquest fantasies from books and movies-- which is something the filmmakers knew would sell the movie better.

THE WOKE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

The title puns on the James Bond movie "The World is Not Enough," the third of the Pierce Brosnan films-- which seems appropriate to me, since this was the first time the Bond films really became politicized, and subjected to what we now call the "woke" opinions of ultrafeminism.

I noted this screed by MCU producer Kevin Feige in a Debate Politics post:

So, the notion of representation onscreen, in front of and behind the camera, somebody asked me once, so is Black Panther a one-off? I said, no, it’s not a one-off. This is the future. This is the way the world is, and the way, certainly, our studio’s going to be run going forward, because it brings about better stories. The more diverse the group of people making the movie is, the better the stories.

And I wrote:

OK, so all you need to do to make better stories is to make the characters more diverse? It has nothing to do with thinking out the characters in greater detail, right? Like why Black Panther is so torn up by learning of his uncle's death, when the people watching the movie have no reason to believe there was any particular tie between T'Challa and the uncle?Yeah, that's not the way good storytelling works.

Though  the post didn't generate a lot of debate, one guy seemed to think that the Panther's crisis of  confidence didn't come about not because of the death of his uncle, who committed treason by becoming "radicalized" and trying to sell Wakandan super-weapons to terrorist groups sponsoring Black Liberation. Rather, the poster thought the Panther's crisis evolved because the uncle's kid was left behind in America, rather than being taken to Wakanda-- which led to said kid growing up to become the murderous Erik Killmonger, who challenges the Panther for the Wakandan throne. Now the main scene that sets up T'Challa crisis of confidence is one that takes place shortly after Killmonger has issued his challenge, with the Panther confessing his doubts to his mother. His first words on the subject are as follows:

He killed  his own brother and left a child behind with nothing. What kind of king-- what kind of man does this?

So in this section, the killing of the uncle and the orphaning of T'Challa's cousin are on an equal plane. But the future Killmonger is not mentioned again as an object of pity. After the mother says that her late husband was not "perfect," T'Challa goes back to talking about the uncle:

[My father] didn't even give [my uncle] a proper burial. My uncle N'Jobu betrayed us, but my father, he may have created something even worse.

Presumably T'Challa means Killmonger, though the villain shares the same goal as his late father: to put Wakandan super-weapons into the hands of radicals. Killmonger is only different in scope, since he implies that he has terrorist cells all over the world, ready to liberate black people from bondage-- though the nature of that bondage is never spelled out, except with reference to the status of black people in the United States. The mother then reinforces her condemnation of her husband's actions by telling T'Challa: "You can't let your father's mistakes define who you are"-- at which the scene shifts to other concerns.

The strange thing about this scene is that a few scenes previous we've seen a flashback in which one of T'Challa's courtiers, Zuri, reveals that he was present when the father killed N'Jobu, and that he did so to keep N'Jobu from killing Zuri. T'Challa is horrified by the revelation, but like his mother in the later scene, he doesn't seem to think protecting old Zuri's life holds much importance beside the killing of Uncle N'Jobu. Given that no one forces N'Jobu to attack Zuri-- and that T'Challa is quite aware that N'Jobu has betrayed his nation-- there seems to be no real reason as to why the uncle's death rates as such an enormity.

T'Challa's speech with his mother suggests that he may have felt young Killmonger should've been brought back to Wakanda, though he doesn't precisely say so at that point. I rather wonder whether the child, given his vengeful tendencies, would have simply forgiven and forgotten his father's death even if he'd had the benefit of a Wakandan upbringing, but the film doesn't address this possibility.

This raises for me the likelihood that although the real "mistake" of T'Challa's father is that of fratricide, the specific fate of Young Killmonger is less significant than what Killmonger symbolizes: the exile of Black Africans to the land of white devils, specifically because people of their own race sold them for profit. I say "symbolizes" because not once in the film does anyone address the fact that Black Africans made a lot of money selling off the people of neighboring tribes. Yet, if there's  any real-world counterpart to Wakanda's fantasy-land of endless wealth, it might well be the empires of such nations as Mali, Ghana, and Songhai, which made themselves rich catering to the Atlantic Slave Trade.

NULL-MYTHS: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2012)

Hmm, it's been almost a full year since I did a "null-myth" entry. I can't believe that I've been reading only good comics since then, so it must just be that I' haven't found any that were worth writing about.

I had to debate whether or not KINGSMAN (originally called just SECRET SERVICE) had enough mythic content to fall into the "near myth" group. It was an okay read, compared to earlier Mark Millar works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN, two brain-dead exercises in superhero ultraviolence. Millar has written a lot of superhero works I have not read, so it's quite possible he's written something better than these two bore-fests. Yet I get the impression that, whereas many British writers sought to expand what superhero comics could do by bringing in aspects of the real world, Millar merely used realism as a method of degrading iconic characters, whether he used the actual characters (Wolverine in LOGAN) or approximations (various DC Comics villains in WANTED). KINGSMAN is no exception, since the project began as a pitch to Marvel Comics, in which eternal superspy Nick Fury took a young spy under his wing.

KINGSMAN is definitely improved by not taking place in the Marvel Universe, and by being centered in Millar's own country, which also happens to be the birthplace of Ian Flemijng's quintessential superspy. Millar, working alongside artist (and fellow Brit) Dave Gibbons, certainly brings a vraisemblance to this James Bond pastiche. The "older man" figure, Jack London, is a former working-class Brit who's been a covert superspy for decades. His sister still lives on welfare with her grown son and a succession of bad bed-mates, so one day London decides that he'll become a tutelary figure to young wastrel-in-training Gary "Eggsy" Unwin. The dramatic exchanges between the knowing elder and the impulsive youth are at least competent, and occasionally Millar and Gibbons touch on sociological themes about British society, though none of these get as much development as Fleming put into his least interesting Fleming novels.

To be sure, KINGSMAN isn't trying to emulate the Bond books, only the Bond movies. Fleming gave his villains assorted exotic gimmicks, but only in the films did Bond have access to similar doodads. In the TPB collection I read, an interview with Gibbons includes a passage wherein the artist scoffs at the "invisible car" seen in one of the Pierce Brosnan flicks. But KINGSMAN is lousy with crazy devices, such as the "laser penknife" with which Gary wins his climactic battle with a villain-henchman named Gazelle because-- well, he has two metal legs that look like those of a gazelle.

But if there's one thing that renders any potential meaning in KINGSMAN inert and inconsummate, it's Millar's handling of his villain. Even many of the Bond-villains invented for the movies prove fit to stand alongside the classic Fleming-fiends. But what does Millar come up with? Well, it's none other than-- James Arnold, Super-Fanboy. Arnold-- who's given one of the blandest villain-names of all time-- is a nerdy genius who decides to play God (or maybe Thanos) by eliminating most of the world's populace. However, because he's a nerd, he gives away his plans in part by trying to kidnap a lot of the celebrities from SF-films, such as Mark Hamill and Ridley Scott. Perhaps Millar and Gibbons thought they were putting across some devastating satire of fan-culture. Frankly, it seems more like a desperate attempt to keep away from the political content found in many of the Bond films, simplified though this content was in comparison to the Fleming books.

There are two sequels I've not read, but I'm not getting my hopes up, based on the mild pleasures of SECRET SERVICE.


ADDENDUM: I did read KINGSMAN THE RED DIAMOND and found it no better than the previous GN, though it's not written by creator Millar and so isn't nearly as bloodthirsty. This one's sole virtue is pitting Eggsy against Kwaito, a tough intelligence-agent from Africa, who is fairly charming despite the great improbability that any current country in Africa could come up with a world-class intelligence organization.

RACIAL NON-POLITICS IN FLEMING'S "LIVE AND LET DIE," PART 3

To paraphrase Kanye West, did Ian Fleming care about black people?

If one depends entirely on a reading of 1954's LIVE AND LET DIE, the only answer one can surmise is that he didn't particularly care about the sociopolitical struggles for the cause of "Negro emanicipation" (as Mister Big calls it).  Yet even that observation is qualified by the fact that LIVE is intended primarily as an escapist thriller.  Such a work, as I've argued in my other two Fleming essays, is not defined by its realistic political content.

When 007 first arrives in America to seek out contacts for his mission, he reflects upon the fact that all the American authorities will know him, so that he must sacrifice his spy's anonymity, making Bond feel "like a Negro whose shadow has been stolen by the witch-doctor."  This reflection foregrounds Fleming's need to convince his readers that the majority of black people are inherently superstitious, the better to make Mister Big's voodoo empire seem somewhat probable.  Given the amount of research Fleming did on contemporaneous American culture, I think it very unlikely that he seriously believed that most American blacks were regular practitioners of voodoo rituals, or even conversant with the basic concepts of the Haitian religion.  It's more believable that Fleming simply posited this misinformation as a "one gimme," by which he could unify Mister Big's spy network through a religious ideology.

Further, black characters are not the only ones who believe in voodoo.  The Caucasian Solitaire believes in her own psychic talents, and though the novel doesn't provide irrefutable proof of their reality, once or twice she does seem on target.  Even Bond, though not a believer, does not scoff at the immense persuasiveness of the religion-- and more, he does so without the usual recriminations.  Voodoo is exotic and fearsome, but Fleming doesn't characterize it as a creation of a "savage race," as so many pulp fiction works had done.

Admittedly Bond is not particularly sensitive to the marginalization of black people in America, though to be fair Bond tends not to be sensitive to anyone's suffering unless he witnesses it personally.  Still, a modern reader may take Bond's silence for agreement when he listens to two cops in Chapter 4 discuss what might be done about Mister Big.  One cop wants to "take [Big] down to the Tombs and give him the works."  The other denies this possibility, not out of any ethical objections but because he thinks Mister Big's influence is so pronounced that his mistreatment could bring about another race riot like the ones "in '35 and '43."

But here too, Fleming's main concern is probably to establish a level of verisimilitude appropriate to an action-thriller.  If the reader should question why local American cops can't rein in Mister Big themselves, this sequence provides the answer, and shows why a heroic outsider is needed-- one who ends up conquering the villain not on American soil, but in the vicinity of the British possession Jamaica. 

On a side-note, I find it interesting that Fleming relates in such casual fashion the idea that the New York cops routinely resort to inquisitorial torture, whether of blacks or any other suspects.  There's a slight possibility that Fleming might have read James Baldwin's GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, in which one of the minor black characters is subjected to such police brutality despite being completely innocent.  The timing is rather close-- MOUNTAIN's publication date is 1953, while that of LIVE is 1954.  Still, I don't think it's entirely coincidental that when Bond and Solitaire flee New York on a train bound for Florida, their porter is named "Baldwin."

Bond himself makes no untoward remarks about black people, American or otherwise, aside from those dealing with superstition, which as noted are rooted in the author's story necessities.  Responding to M's imputation that Big is the first black supercriminal, Bond says that it's his impression black Americans are "pretty law-abiding chaps on the whole."  When he and Leiter are captured in New York, he naturally fights the gangsters ferociously-- indeed, 007's hard-hitting escape from Big's goons is the hero's first spectacular action-exploit, given that he doesn't acquit himself all that well in CASINO ROYALE.  Yet Bond resorts to no racial calumnies.  The first American edition did eliminate one use of the n-word, though it appeared in the form of a place-name, not an epithet as such.  If 007 is not particularly sympathetic to the plight of black people, he doesn't practice racism himself.

It may be argued that Fleming was hedging his bets: crafting a novel that might appeal equally to bigots, who wanted to believe in a black uprising, and liberals, who wanted to imagine black people as fully capable in any walk of life-- be it medicine, science, or crime (though Mister Big insists that he is an "artist," not a mere criminal).  There's probably some truth in this.  However, even if Bond evinces no "white guilt" over the history of slavery, he's fully capable of understanding racial loyalty and the burdens of history.

In Chapter 20, Bond imagines how Captain Morgan might have arranged the burial-site for his treasure by commanding a group of black slaves to dig a cave, after which Morgan then killed all the slaves to keep his secret.  Then he thinks upon what might have happened when a modern black Jamaican discovered the treasure:

The Shark Bay fisherman who suddenly disappeared six months before must have one day found it rolled away by a storrn or by the tidal wave following a hurricane. Then he had found the treasure and had known he would need help to dispose of it. A white man would cheat him. Better go to the great negro gangster in Harlem and make the best terms he could. The gold belonged to the black men who had died to hide it. It should go back to the black men.

The disappearance of the treasure-finder may suggest that "the great negro gangster in Harlem" may have rewarded the fisherman with death, but the principle of race-loyalty remains important both in LIVE AND LET DIE and in other Fleming works. 

So to come back to the original question I posed, though I speculate that Fleming cared nothing about the sociopolitical success of black people-- for him, loyalty to his own race would have taken pride of place-- he felt that one ought to be able to care about "people of color" as much as anyone, on a one-on-one basis.  I haven't touched on Bond's friendly relationship with Quarrel, the black Cayman Islander who trains him in snorkeling and whose life Bond saves, for one might argue that this is a friendship of convenience.

However, to reach outside this novel briefly-- two or three years later, during which time Fleming wrote his fourth Bond book, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER-- Bond again showed that he could relate to suffering on a one-on-one basis.  In that novel Bond, visiting a spa, is forced to stand helplessly by while two armed thugs punish a disobedient jockey by pouring hot mud in the man's eyes.  Yet Bond is strangely less moved by the white jockey's sufferings than the pistol-whipping injury one thug commits upon a spa-attendant-- an attendant who happens to be old, fat, and-- black.

RACIAL NON-POLITICS IN FLEMING'S "LIVE AND LET DIE," PART 2

At the end of Part 1 I wrote:

I assert that even though LIVE AND LET DIE does incarnate some genuine political content-- which would be its only defining content to a Marxist-- what we have here is a hero looking for a dragon to slay, one who reminds him of earlier dragons who wounded him and then disappeared. At base one should view this as a manifestation of an archetypal, rather than a political, unconscious. 

To be sure, there are no explicit mentions of dragons in LIVE AND LET DIE.  However, Mister Big, in addition to being foregrounded as a major nemesis for Bond—one who announces his advent to the reader by personally overseeing the first assassination attempt on the British agent— can be read as the mythic incarnation of a dragon. European dragon-myths usually picture dragons as either guarding vast treasures or requiring maidens to be sacrificed to them. Mister Big fulfills both roles.

I’ve mentioned earlier that Mister Big’s scheme is a more romanticized version of Le Chiffre’s mundane paymaster-duties.  Thanks to Mister Big's ties to the Caribbean, the villain has gained access to the fabulous treasure of Captain Morgan, which Big smuggles into America through working-class proxies.

This dragon, in fact, has both a treasure and a maiden.  After the failure of the assassination attempt—largely an attempt to scare Bond off—Bond and his FBI ally Felix Leiter are abducted by Big’s goons.  While Leiter is sequestered elsewhere, Bond meets not only Mister Big, but also Solitaire, Big's “psychic reader.”  Mister Big believes in her powers, though the novel never decisively shows more than circumstantial evidence of Solitaire’s psychic abilities.  As soon as Bond and Solitaire meet, electricity passes between them.  Mister Big senses the attraction, and punishes both of them.  First Big lashes Solitaire across the shoulders with a small whip.  Then he orders his goon Tee Hee to break Bond’s little finger.

Solitaire’s punishment carries a minor vibe of the black slave turning the tables on a former white master (Solitaire’s family were Caribbean colonials).  Bond’s injury is more complex.  First, the injury to a finger can be interpreted as an injury to the phallus, which certainly applies to the specific situation, where Bond is caught desiring another man’s possession.  It’s also interesting that the prior novel CASINO ROYALE dealt with the explicit torture of Bond’s genitals—though purely as an act of torture, not having anything to do with any sexual transgression.  As noted in Part 1, nowhere in LIVE does Bond recall either his torture by Le Chiffre or his betrayal by Vesper Lynd.  However, as if to substitute for these painful memories, he does obsess about the injury a SMERSH agent dealt to his hand.  Now, as if in mimicry, this Haitian-born SMERSH servant also visits violence on one of Bond’s hands.  Later, when Solitaire escapes Big and joins Bond on a train, there’s explicit mention of Bond’s inability to “perform” with the virgin girl due to his injured hand.

In contrast to Le Chiffre, who is just a cog in the Communist machine, Mister Big-- who becomes known to all by this cognomen because his three initials fortuitiously spell out "big"--is the heart of a formidable spy network.  This network is comprised of dozens-- perhaps hundreds-- of lower-class black workers who make excellent spies because of what Ralph Ellison might call their "invisibility." Fleming also stresses Big's imposing size and endows him with the uncanny-trope I've called "freakish flesh," because Big is repeatedly described as having "grey-black flesh" and a "football-shaped" head.  Big is repeatedly seen as a world-beater: one British agent remarks that he's glad the Americans are stuck with him.  

I've called Big a "supervillain" earlier, though this has nothing to do with the sort of super-science gimmicks one sees in the Bond movies.  Neither Big nor Bond display much in the way of gimmicks here-- Bond uses steel-toed shoes once or twice, while Big has a desk with a gun built into it.  Big’s claim to supervillain-hood is his ability to convince Negroes from New York to Jamaica that he Big is the voodoo god of death, Baron Samedi.  This also renders him an "uncanny" figure in terms of my trope “phantasmal figurations.”  Big also professes a quasi-Nietzschean philosophy, to make it clear that though he speaks of “black emancipation” once, he’s actually a “wolf”out to shear as many “sheep” as possible, regardless of their color.

But it’s the beasts of the sea, not the land, with which Big is most frequently associated.  Joseph Fontenrose's 1959 myth-study PYTHON exhaustively catalogues many instances in which dragon-like beings are associated with both the sea and with death.  With the exception of one specific Fleming-metaphor—which I’ll address shortly—there’s no way to determine whether or not Fleming made any conscious identification between the dragonish actions of his villain—both hoarding a treasure and guarding a maiden—and said villain’s closeness to the sea.

Most of those associations seem rooted in mundane realities.  Big’s treasure is a pirate treasure, originally culled by pirates from their raids on ocean-going ships.  In order to smuggle the illegal tender into the United States, Big builds up a business that engages in the shipping of rare fish—including some fish so poisonous that customs officials will not examine them closely.  When Bond and Leiter seek out Big’s concern, Leiter is caught alone and is fed to a shark in a tank—a grisly fate omitted from the film of LIVE AND LET DIE but recycled for a later Bond-film, LICENSE TO KILL.  Leiter survives the ordeal, but his suffering intensifies Bond's desire to bring Big down, far beyond the agent's comparatively mild and nearly business-like wish to discomfit SMERSH.  Bond investigates the Florida worm-and-bait factory Big uses for his smuggling activities and wins a literal shootout with the very henchman who maimed Leiter.  Bond makes sure that the biter gets bit by feeding the henchman to a shark in a tank, possibly the same one that tore up Leiter.

Later 007 pursues Big to Jamaica, and the agent takes a prolonged period to train himself in the ways of snorkeling with the help of a black Jamaican ally named Quarrel.  Bond’s underwater training allows him to plant a time bomb aboard Mister Big’s boat, but he himself is taken prisoner.  Big, having also re-captured the traitorous Solitaire, wishes to execute 007 and the woman together. But instead of performing the sort of voodoo sacrifice a reader might expect-- especially given how much detail Fleming devotes to this exotic religion-- Big decides that the best way to kill his enemies is to drag them to death behind his boat.  Thus the local sharks and barracuda-- creatures who have become emblems of Big's voodoo rites-- will finish them off.  However, before Bond and Solitaire meet their end as fish-food, 007's time bomb destroys the boat, freeing the heroine and his lady.  Big survives the explosion but meets the demise he meant for his nemesis; the figurative dragon of the sea is devoured by the real monsters of the vasty deep.

I mentioned one interesting metaphor that suggests that Fleming had some knowledge, conscious or not, of his mythic material.  The same concern that deals in rare fish also deals in supplies of “worms and bait,” and the business’ name is “Ouroboros.” Bond provides the only definition given of the name: he calls Ouroboros as “the Great Worm of mythology.”  Presumably Fleming felt he had to say “worm” rather than the dragon’s ancestor the snake, given that he was dealing with a worm-and-bait factory.

In point of fact, though, most references I've seen speak of Ouroboros not as a worm, but as a snake-- or a dragon!-- with its tail in its mouth, like so:

Fleming takes this mythic wordplay even further, for the name of the henchman who manages the worm-and-bait factory-- as well as the one who almost kills Leiter and duels with Bond-- is "the Robber," which Bond and Leiter realize is merely a distortion of the name "Ouroboros."

Fleming doesn't devote much detail to any of Mister Big's colorfully named henchmen.  The henchman called "Whisper," who functions in the novel as a communications expert, has his whispery voice explained as the result of having lost a lung to tuberculosis, but aside from that he gets no more biographical background than the aforementioned Tee Hee.  Therefore it's not unusual that Fleming doesn't give the reader any biographical background on "the Robber," and allows the agents' explanation of his nickname to go unchallenged. 

Still, I'd argue that in mythic terms the Robber is to Mister Big as one of Vishnu's avatars is to Vishnu: a lesser expression of the main 'deity." Though the Robber is an expert marksman, he goes out of his way to punish Leiter by consigning him to the teeth of a sea-beast, just as Big tries to execute Bond and Solitaire by feeding them to the Jamaican sea-life.  Both men, having used or tried to use ocean-creatures for their executioners, are later devoured by the same creatures. 

And finally, they would both seem to be products of racial admixture. The Robber is the only Big-henchman not explicitly identified as Negro, though Fleming doesn't supply the same racial breakdown on him that the author does with the main villain.  However, the Robber's skin-color is described as “yellowish-beige.” Perhaps Fleming only meant that the character was "sallow."  However, in a novel so strongly about race, it's equally possible that Fleming meant the Rober to be a “high yellow,” meaning either a light-skinned Negro or a hybrid.  It's possible that this detail was inserted purely for verisimilitude, for in 1954 Fleming may have believed, correctly or not, that a person of color could not have overseen the operation of a major concern like Big's warehouse-- unless that person of color were able to “pass” as white so as to avoid raising the eyebrows of local white authorities.  It's also interesting that both characters are described as mixes of colors: "yellowish-beige" for the Robber, "grey-black" for Mister Big.

  

        In Part 3 I'll discuss in part those aspects of Fleming's novel that some might see, rightly or wrongly, as entirely political, though even here, I intend to show that things are not always what they seem.

RACIAL NON-POLITICS IN FLEMING'S "LIVE AND LET DIE," PART 1

In 1953's CASINO ROYALE the "non-politics" analyzed here dealt with the conflicts between protagonist James Bond and the double agent Vesper Lynd.

The second novel in the series, 1954's LIVE AND LET DIE, has its sexual aspects, but the emphasis is clearly on the matter of race/ethnicity.  Clearly conflicts between ethnic groups have been some of the most politicized-- if not the most-- in human history.  Can one find a "non-political" aspect to this novel?

One avenue is suggested by the continuity between CASINO and LIVE.  To recount the relevant aspects of the first novel:

Bond is sent to undermine the operations of the Frenchman Le Chiffre, whose expensive casino is a cover for his activities as a paymaster for Soviet spies.  Bond knows that Le Chiffre has been skimming from his masters, so 007 works to undermine the gambler's status further by outgambling the Frenchman at the casino tables.  To recover the money Le Chiffre and his men capture Bond and torture him, in particular by battering his genitals.   Bond is accidentally saved by an agent of SMERSH, who arrives and kills the paymaster and his men.  The assassin has no orders to kill Bond but because he knows Bond is a spy for the other side, he uses a knife to carve a letter into Bond's hand, a Cyrillic letter that identifies Bond as a spy. During Bond's recovery the agent worries about losing the ability to make love, but his (apparent) ally Vesper helps him recover that ability.  However, she commits suicide and reveals in a letter that she was a double agent for the other side, leaving Bond emasculated in an emotive rather than a physical sense.

LIVE AND LET DIE mentions neither Le Chiffre's attack on Bond's body nor Vesper's blow to his heart.  However, as if serving as a displacement for these deeper assaults, the early part of the novel does dwell more than a little on the lesser humiliation of "the mark of the spy" inflicted by the anonymous SMERSH killer.  Despite the fact that the killer's intervention saved Bond's life, Bond nurses a grievance against SMERSH, even though plastic surgery has covered over the identifying mark on Bond's hand.  He hopes M will put him on a "trail of revenge."

Bond's next case does oppose him to the interests of the Soviets, at least. To an extent Fleming recycles one aspect of CASINO. Le Chiffre was responsible for distributing money to Soviet agents, and, on a minor note, Le Chiffre also fomented Communist influence in French unions.  Both of these elements become far more important in LIVE.  Bond's opponent "Mister Big" controls a majority of the Negro workers in New York, making him far more of a player in regard to undermining the loyalties of the American underclass-- not that Fleming aspires to any deep analysis of the sociopolitical aspects of the conflict, of course.  In addition to controlling a secret network of subservient minions, Mister Big is also helping funnel money to the Soviet cause by illegally selling gold coins-- acquired from the treasure of the pirate Morgan-- which activity puts Bond on the villain's trail, due to Mister Big's location in the British possession Jamaica.

A Marxist analysis of LIVE AND LET DIE would certainly find fertile ground here.  Fleming barely acknowledges the history of social injustices to black culture, either in America or elsewhere, and instead seizes upon the risible notion that Mister Big maintains power over his acolytes by pretending to be the voodoo death-god Baron Samedi.  I've frequently mocked the extreme oversimplications of many Marxist analyses, but I can hardly deny that in LIVE AND LET DIE Fleming is clearly resorting to the common trope of the "superstitious natives who don't know what's good for them."  In jungle-thrillers ignorant savages are often manipulated by fake witch-doctors.  Mister Big is certainly in that tradition, holding sway over hundreds of minions by pretending to be a voodoo deity-- though with the added fillip of doing so for the furtherance of Communism.

Yet, apart from Fleming's absurd notion of African-Americans of the period being enthralled by voodoo sorcery, Mister Big is a good deal better developed than many white characters, particularly the quickly forgotten Le Chiffre.  If one disincludes the many villains of the aforementioned jungle thrillers, Mister Big may be literature's first "black supervillain," depending on how one defines the term.  His dossier does reveal that he was born in Haiti and is "half Negro and half French," but Fleming does not assert the racial myth seen in many pulp stories, in which "half breed" villains are assumed to possess greater organizational skills because of their "white blood."  Instead, Bond's superior M makes this statement:

"And the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all professions-scientists, doctors, writers. It's about time they turned out a great criminal."

Some modern critics might find the statement condescending.  In contrast I regard it as proof that Fleming, however much he subscribed to some racial myths, saw no reason why the condition of being a "Negro" should keep one from being a "genius," even a genius of crime.

I'll deal more fully with Mister Big's character in Part 2.  But in addition to pointing out that he is a "credit to any race" given the largeness of his criminal ambition, it should be noted that Bond shows no animus to black people or their culture in this novel.  One might argue that Fleming was simply being cautious, aware of the potential controversy of his topic.  Nevertheless, Bond's opposition to Mister Big is based neither in race nor in the politics of Big's Communist masters.  First and foremost, Bond wants a shot at Mister Big as a way of pursuing the aforementioned revenge-trail.
Near the end of Chapter 2, Bond says:

"I like to meet [Mr. Big]... I'd like to meet any member of SMERSH."

I assert that even though LIVE AND LET DIE does incarnate some genuine political content-- which would be its only defining content to a Marxist-- what we have here is a hero looking for a dragon to slay, one who reminds him of earlier dragons who wounded him and then disappeared.  At base one should view this as a manifestation of an archetypal, rather than a political, unconscious. 

SEXUAL NON-POLITICS IN FLEMING'S "CASINO ROYALE"

In RACIAL NON-POLITICS IN DJANGO UNLEASHED, I emphasized the need to evaluate art outside the bounds of "political" considerations, be they on the side of "liberation" or "oppression." Of course I've been stumping for this sort of non-politicized thinking since I started this blog, and one of my most frequent targets has been ultraliberal Alan Moore.  In STALKING THE SYMBOLIC SNIPE I took issue with his condemnation of Ian Fleming's James Bond in this offhand comment:

“…we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond’s psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women.”

While I conceded that James Bond's creator was something of a chauvinist, I cited four or five examples that did not support Moore's rash claim.  However, as I occasionally reread the Fleming Bond novels for the purpose of comparing them to the film adaptations, I finally decided to reread the first in the series, 1953's CASINO ROYALE.  Surely even Alan Moore, no matter how little he thinks of Fleming, would concede that whatever "psychological makeup" appears in Bond would come forth in full force in the novel of the hero's "birth."

The plot of CASINO ROYALE, as many have observed, is much more naturalistic than one beheld in the 1960s films.  There are no gimmicks of any kind in the novel, aside from a reference to some anonymous character killing himself by devouring a poisonous coat-button.  The villain Le Chiffre has nothing unusual about him: he's simply the paymaster for a Soviet spy-organization.  Because British intelligence determines that he's dipped into the Soviet till for his own expenditures, Bond is sent to LeChiffre's casino in Royale-es-Eaux in order to "break" the paymaster's bank and thus disrupt the entire operation. Bond is unfortunately saddled with a female agent, Vesper Lynd, and his internal thoughts make quite clear that he sees women as a liability in the espionage game.

Halfway through the novel, Bond seems to be proven right.  After Bond wins a fortune from LeChiffre's casino, Vesper apparently falls for a ruse and is captured by LeChiffre's men.  One might expect that, given the thoughts he's expressed up to that point, James Bond would simply leave Vesper to her fate.  Instead, betraying a Galahad-like mentality, he drives after the abductors and crashes his car into theirs.  The ploy fails: the paymaster and his men take both Bond and Vesper to a secluded hideout.  Bond is tortured for the location of his winnings.  He bravely holds out, but the only thing that saves him is the Soviets have been investigating LeChiffre's thefts.  A SMERSH agent kills LeChiffre and his men, sparing Bond simply because the assassin has no orders to execute anyone else.  Bond and Vesper are later rescued by Bond's allies.

At this point one might think that Bond's polemic against female agents has been justified.  During the weeks following his recovery from his tortures, however, Bond softens toward Vesper, and even tells her that a male agent might have fallen for the same trick.  They become intimate and fall in love, though Vesper seems antsy about any future commitment.  Bond considers for the first time taking the marital plunge.

However, Vesper's appearance as a helpless "damsel in distress" is revealed as a deceit; she's working for  SMERSH, who insert her into Bond's mission in order to betray him at a critical time, which she does.  However, because she has fallen in love with him, and knows that SMERSH will blow her cover in due time, Vesper commits suicide.  She leaves behind a suicide note explaining her true role.  In reaction to both her betrayal and her death, Bond re-dedicates himself to his mission against evil, and seems to dismiss Vesper's importance in his life as he speaks the final words of the novel, "The bitch is dead now."

Now, the question becomes: does this scenario prove Moore's contention, that Bond displays an "utter hatred and contempt for women?"  Certainly devotees of Political Correctness would not appreciate his comments early in the novel, to the effect that women muck up the profession with their tendency toward emotionality.  Yet this attitude does not seem to evolve so much from Bond as an individual as from Bond as a male in a male profession.  We know next to nothing about Bond's personal history; in this novel, Bond is defined by his devotion to his job-- and in that sense, his chauvinistic attitude denotes a standard male resistance to feminine intrusion, rather than something unique to Bond's own "psychological makeup."     

But the denouement is telling in that Bond's chauvinism is not supported by the narrative.  Not only does he risk his life to rescue her, he falls in love with her as a result of her long association with him during his recovery.  Fleming even remarks, speaking narrator-fashion, that tough men like Bond have a penchant to fall into the opposing mode of sentimentality.

One aspect of Bond's chauvinism is validated: in Vesper's suicide note she reveals that SMERSH was able to control her because they had her lover confined in a Soviet prison, and made her cooperation the price of keeping him alive.  Thus, in a sense she is governed by her emotions, though not in the way Bond means when he makes that observation.  Vesper's emotions also cause her to fall in love with Bond for his genuine heroic qualities, so that she both forsakes her condemned lover and her own life under the thumb of SMERSH.  Her suicide, while convenient from the standpoint of keeping Bond devoted to his crusade, also denotes a strength of character not unlike that of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.

And what of the last words of the novel?  A political consciousness would see this as support for Moore's contention.  I would argue, rather, that Bond's words are an attempt to distance himself from the painful reality that the woman he loved was both an enemy spy and the lover of another man, not to mention the reality of her death.  Again, Political Correctness cannot read between the lines; cannot grant that a man might speak ill of women as a group as a way of shielding himself from such pain..  But it should be obvious that the things James Bond says are not always covalent with the things his creator means.

STALKING THE SYMBOLIC SNIPE

In a recent issue of my comics-apa, the question arose: can one fairly make symbolic interpretations of a work when there’s no evidence that the creator of the work intentionally structured the work to reflect that symbolism?

On one hand, any answer one gives must take into account the centrality of symbolic action to the experience of fiction.  The human mind has the ability to associate the nature of a fictional character—that is, whether he represents “goodness,” “badness,” or something in between-- with the reader’s concerns, so that the reader can identify (whether in a mood of sympathy or antipathy) with that character.  Without this ability, fiction holds no meaning.  It might be tempting to dispense with any symbolic associations that are not explicitly called up by an author’s text.  But direct allegory, while to some degree present in all fiction, is not the way most authors express themselves.  Perhaps the reason so many critics must hunt literary meanings is because authors have evolved so many ways to camoflague their symbolic themes and motifs.

On the other hand, everyone has seen examples of critics who can be fairly accused of “snipe-hunting”—with the modification that in such cases, it’s the critic who creates his own Monster of Deep Meaning and proceeds to hunt it anywhere and everywhere.  The first semi-thoughtful critiques of the comics-medium boiled down to snipe-hunts, where the critics found in comics symbols of immoral modernity and psychosexual perversion.

One approach, possibly designed to circumvent the problem, takes a relativist tack.  One of my apa-members described having seen a poet who, upon meeting a reader who subjected the poet to a long and earnest critique of his Real Meaning, responded to that reader, “If you see that there, then I meant for it to be there.”  The poet may have spoken this way to avoid a conflict, or he may have been of the honest opinion that there are no untrue responses to a given work.

I would frame the problem differently: there can be untrue responses, but they may spring from true causes.

In the same apa-issue that continued this mini-debate about symbol-hunting, another member cited the opinion of writer Alan Moore on the best-known character of another author: Ian Fleming’s James Bond.  Quoting from an introduction to Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Moore said:

“…we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond’s psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women.”

Years later, Moore would produce a satirical version of Bond for BLACK DOSSIER, a chapter of his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN series, in which Moore’s Bond-doppelganger was in every way a rotter, an abuser of women, etc.

Moore’s second commentary on what he thought of James Bond, since it takes the form of fiction, cannot be deemed criticism as such.  His first comment can, although it’s extremely weak criticism. 

Nowhere in the introduction does Moore cite examples of the “utter hatred and contempt for women” he finds in the Bond books, nor is he clear as to whether Fleming presented his misogyny overtly or covertly.  I *suspect,* however, that at the time of the comment Moore knew that Fleming, though predominantly an author of “male” fiction, did have female readers.  Thus Moore would be most likely to claim that Fleming’s female readers did not pick up on the misogyny of either author or character because it was hidden, though not from the discernment of a dedicated snipe-hunter like Alan Moore.

In case it isn’t evident from my calling Moore a “snipe-hunter,” I do deem Moore’s critique of Fleming to be a case of an untrue response to the symbolism present in the Fleming Bond-books.  That response does however spring from true causes, both within the fiction being critiqued and within the critiquer.

Ian Fleming was, in essence, what critics today would call a “masculinist.”  Many authors have written fiction aimed at a predominantly male audience without being masculinists. Bond’s multiple conquests of beautiful women were a staple device in popular men’s fiction.  Fleming is often attacked for this trope, but that in itself does not make him excessively masculinist.  Moore’s animus for Fleming may have originated from Bond making sexist remarks that were typical for men of that period.  Some of these remarks mock women, or show confusion about women.  But do they connote “utter hatred and contempt for women,” or are they attempts to capture the real way men of the period spoke? 

Based on my own readings of the Bond books, I do consider Fleming an arch-conservative who had little empathy for anyone outside of his own bailiwick.  That lack of empathy for women, however, does not translate into “hatred and contempt.”  A woman-hater might pretend to defend women from attacks in order to bed them, but Bond does not bed Tiffy in “Man with the Golden Gun” after villain Scaramanga kills her pet birds; instead, he gives her money to buy new birds and never sees her again.  One can’t imagine Moore’s phony Bond sparing the life of the female assassin in “The Living Daylights” out of a knightly reluctance to kill a woman.  Despite Fleming’s masculinist tendencies, the Bond books are replete with powerful or imposing women, ranging from villainesses like Rosa Klebb and Irma Bunt to heroines like Domino Vitale and Tracy Draco—possibly one reason Fleming has sustained a female readership.

The other “true cause” results from the critiquer’s own biases and priorities, which are inevitably present in all readers.  The most desirable relationship between reader and work is one I call “projected reciprocity,” in which the reader faithfully absorbs everything the author says, whether direct or indirect, and projects it upon the “viewscreen” of his own priorities, to gauge in what ways he agrees and/or disagrees with the author’s world.

However, when the reader rushes to judgment as I believe Alan Moore did, what one gets is “pure projection.”  Here the reader is “set off” by whatever offends him and recognizes no ambivalences.  A reader like Moore may have “true” cause for his animus against, say, real-world misogyny, but he’s aimed his ire at the wrong target.

Whenever I attempt to “read” the latent symbolism of a work—by which I mean, whatever the author has not made literal and manifest—I frame it as a philosophical proposition, for which I can offer proofs drawn from my own experience of “projected reciprocity.”  Because so much symbolism is covert—sometimes hidden even from the author—the propositions of a symbol-hunter are not so much “X symbolism is there” but rather “X symbolism could be there, if it can be justified by some chain of associations.”  But even these justifications must be mediated by a reader’s subjective reaction to the work.  So it’s understandable that for many, even the most articulate search for covert symbolism may seem no better than an Alan Moore snipe-hunt.     

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.”

SUFFRAGE FOR SUFFERING

In this essay I've discussed some recent attempts to claim that the James Bond mythos, as a mythos directed at a male audience, either needed to be fixed in deference to feminist priorities or used as a rhetorical device for those priorities. As that essay suggested I do think, unlike the WAPster feminists, that such a male genre-product as the Ian Fleming Bond series can possess its own integrity, however politically incorrect, and I also stated that I believed that there was, prior to any feminist tinkering with the franchise, a healthy female following for the series.

I didn't have space, though, to enlarge on the reason why that following might exist. In short, it's because Fleming could and did sometimes write female characters with whom some female readers might identity with and feel empowered by. By way of expansion on this theme, here's a segment from my review of the 1965 THUNDERBALL film, in which I compare Fleming's depiction of his character Domino to the film's version.

The film’s largest deficit may be its handling of the romantic relationship of Bond and Domino Vitali, who begins as Largo’s mistress but who turns against the villain when Bond reveals that Largo had Domino’s brother killed. (In book and movie, Largo never knows of a connection between his mistress and the murdered man; clearly the writers’ god “Coincidence” reigns supreme here.)

No one should mistake Ian Fleming for a feminist. He wrote “blood and thunder” pulp fiction to an audience dominated by men, and often reflected the more sexist attitudes of his time. Nevertheless, his female characters are on occasion quite formidable, and the book makes clear that Domino is not merely a “kept woman,” but a Venus who gives her favors as she pleases. For instance, in the book she pretends that she needs Bond’s aid when she steps on the spines of a sea-creature, and later tells him that she could have helped herself, but feigned helplessness so that he would seduce her. This revelation doesn’t appear in the movie, and actress Claudine Auger isn’t able to convey Domino’s Italian fire on her own talents.

Further, while in both works Domino does revenge herself on Largo by shooting him with a harpoon, thereby saving Bond’s life, film-Domino is not nearly as formidable as print-Domino. In the book Largo tortures Domino when he learns she’s helping Bond, and though the torture isn’t depicted in detail on the page, the method— applying alternating heat (a cigar) and cold (ice cubes) to the skin-- is described prior to the act. However, in the film Largo is interrupted before the torture can begin, possibly in deference to sensitive mainstream audiences. Moreover, after print-Domino is tortured, she frees herself from her prison and despite her burn-wounds swims a considerable distance to the site where Bond is on the verge of being choked to death by Largo, and then kills Largo. Film-Domino doesn’t even get loose from her ropes without help. Certainly Felix Leiter would never say of this character: “I swear I’ll never call a girl a ‘frail’ again --not an Italian girl, anyway!”

Clearly, the reason I think it appropriate to "vote" in favor of female suffering in certain given works is that, as seen here, it can make a character more heroic, as opposed to the WAPster belief that it must render the female character a "victim." The Domino Vitali of the Fleming book, who isn't even any sort of professional, courageously resists torture and then goes through an ordeal to gain vengeance on her tormentor. The suffering here, then, is heroic.

But if Terence Young's THUNDERBALL had faithfully recreated the Fleming scenario, there can be little doubt that it would have been criticized, even in 1965, for excessive violence toward the female of the species. Because the violence was pruned, Domino lost her heroic stature and became just another "Bond girl" that few filmgoers even remember very well.

Sometimes the representation of suffering is not the problem.

Sometimes the lack of it has far more pernicious effects.