Thrilling Cities, James Bond, & Ian Fleming’s literary fiction

IF YOU HAVEN’T READ Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, I reckon you probably should if you like witty, readable books. At least have a glance at a witty, readable review of it. One key passage that could do with some elaboration is this one:

Fleming was periodically weighed down by a kind of directionless, spiteful ennui, which often fired his best writing – Casino Royale, From Russia, with Love, “The Living Daylights”, “Octopussy”. Reading his novels in sequence, one is bewildered by the mood swings between, for instance, From Russia, with Love, the cynical book in which Fleming comes closest to Le Carré, and actually kills 007 at the end (obviously, it didn’t stick), and its follow-up, the dizzyingly exuberant Doctor No. Today, he’d probably be called bipolar.

It’s unsurprising, really, that Fleming in a foul mood should kill off 007. It wasn’t only his general attitude toward life that was affected by his mood swings, but also his attitude towards his most famous creation. Gleefully pulpy Bond adventures such as Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Doctor No, Goldfinger and Thunderball burst with such genretastic staples as pirate gold, disguised Nazi war criminals, Chinese evil geniuses, all-lesbian crime gangs and missing atomic weaponry. Fleming grew up reading about the exploits of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, Sapper Morton’s Bulldog Drummond, and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, and at his most carefree seemed delighted to be keeping alive that lineage.

At other times, he was rather more cynical about his place in the literary world and seemed, as with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, to view his creation as an albatross keeping him from achieving greater literary respect.

Of course, Fleming did have some heavyweight admirers in the literary world. Kingsley Amis was the most prominent, writing two books of analysis of the character, one serious and one tongue in cheek, as well as a continuation novel after Fleming’s death. Roald Dahl, too, counted himself as a fan and wrote the screen treatment for You Only Live Twice. Raymond Chandler thought Fleming a fine thriller-writer, and he should know. Anthony Burgess noted that he had read and enjoyed every one of the Bond novels.

What Fleming lacked, though, was any body of work outside of Bond on which to be judged, with the small exceptions of the children’s book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two nonfiction books: the aforementioned Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers, cobbled together from leftover research for Diamonds Are Forever. That’s not to say that the Bond books are entirely without literary merit; just view the passage below from “Octopussy” for evidence:

-it’s just that the obvious limitations of the Bond format of exotic locales, dastardly villains, daring escapades, and sex and booze and food and sex and cigarettes and sex and death don’t much reward experimentation, which is likely why most of Fleming’s occasional stabs at literary fiction are in the short-story format. “Octopussy”, excerpted above, is a slow and rather melancholy rumination on guilt and probably the peak of Fleming’s ability as a writer.

In the same collection appeared “The Living Daylights”, which returns us to somewhat more familiar territory with Bond ordered to snipe a Soviet sniper in order to aid a defection. We’re thoroughly in Le Carré territory here, and treated to such stylistic flourishes as Bond’s mental description of Berlin as “a glum, inimical city dry varnished on the Western side with a brittle veneer of gimcrack polish, rather like the chromium trim on American motor-cars”.

Earlier, Fleming had taken Bond as far away from formula as he’d ever get with “Quantum of Solace”, a stylistic and thematic homage to Somerset Maugham with Bond appearing only to listen to another character whose party he’s attending tell him a story about two other figures and their broken marriage. It’s good stuff if a little pastichey, with the only really unconvincing element being the questionable necessity of having Bond himself appear at all.

Mind you, the Bond of the short-stories spent about as much time relaxing as he did going on missions. “The Hildebrand Rarity” introduces us to a truly vile American businessman, Milton Krest, and his vessel the Wavekrest. Krest has no plan more dastardly than to use somewhat unethical fishing techniques to retrieve the rare fish of the title, but he’s a more convincing portrait of evil than a whole cartoonish parade of Draxes, Goldfingers and Blofelds. We finally end up in murder-mystery territory as Krest is found murdered with two possible suspects (we as readers are allowed to know James Bond didn’t do it) and a subversive lack of solution.

Finally, there’s one Bond novel that attempts to enter literary-fiction territory (though look out for flourishes in Casino Royale and From Russia, with Love): The Spy Who Loved Me, in which a nice yet somewhat broken Canadian girl recounts her life and sexual history for two-thirds of the novel before Bond shows up and takes care of the thugs menacing her in the present. It was released to reviews ranging from indifferent to hostile, and Fleming quickly decided he was embarassed by it, leading to a film “adaptation” that used the novel’s title and very little else. Actually it’s really not that bad (aside from one cringeworthy line extolling the merits of “semi-rape”) if one’s able to accept that it’s really not much of a Bond adventure.

Still, its reception seems to have put Fleming off from doing anything other than sticking to what he knew best, and he stuck to formula for the superb On Her Majesty’s Secret Service before the rushed You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun. One wonders how he would have fared in the literary world had he not been so afraid to experiment; the presence of Bond himself in each of these stories feels like nothing more than a crutch and they’d all be the better off simply ditching the whole pretence. But I suppose albatrosses aren’t easily got rid of.

 

Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities, & the reluctant traveller

TRAVEL WRITING STEMS from a variety of motives – to inform, to amuse, to educate, to show off or to make a bit of money. But sometimes the best travel writing comes from writers who don’t even want to be there in the first place.

That was the case for Ian Fleming in 1959, when The Sunday Times all but forced Fleming to make a several-weeks’ trip around Asia and then on to the United States via Hawaii. Despite Fleming admitting himself to be “the world’s worst sightseer”, who “had often advocated the provision of roller-skates at the doors of museums and art galleries”, the trip went ahead and resulted in a series of articles for the paper, one for each city visited; these articles were later compiled to form one of Fleming’s few non-James Bond books, Thrilling Cities.

But Bond aficionados will find much that is familiar; not only the glamour, but the seediness, the snobbery, the murky threat of violence, the constant boozing and the malaise of the novels can all be easily recognised throughout the travels recorded here. The first city visited is Hong Kong, where Fleming’s descriptions are enjoyable both for what has changed – “when the remaining forty years of our lease of the mainland territory expire, I see no reason why a reduced population should not retreat to the islands and the original territory which we hold in perpetuity” – and for what is still eminently recognisable: “the streets of Hong Kong are evidence that neon lighting need not be hideous, and the crowded Chinese ideograms in pale violet and pink and green with a plentiful use of white are entrancing not only for their colours but also because one does not know what drab messages and exhortations they spell out”. While staying in Hong Kong, Fleming also makes a jaunt to Macau, where he latches on to stories about the gold-smuggling trade, with “the internal Geiger-counter of a writer of thrillers ticking furiously”, before making his way on to Tokyo.

“I hate, small, finicky, breakable things, and I am slightly over six feet tall”, complains Fleming, who has had reservations about Japan from the beginning: “Before and during the war they had been bad enemies and many of my friends had suffered at their hands.” But in his short three days there, Fleming is won over both by his companions – Orientalised Australian Dick Hughes and Japanese “Tiger” Saito – and by the eccentricity and charm of Japanese culture. Despite feeling clumsy, awkward, and out of place, a good-humoured, “when in Rome” attitude soon overtakes him, and in a brief three days he manages to take in a meeting with Somerset Maugham, a Judo demonstration, a Japanese bath, a visit with a soothsayer, and an evening with geishas, all sake-soaked and never in violation of his anti-itinerary: “no politicians, museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies.” The judo, bath, geishas, and Maugham are uniformly delightful, but the soothsayer is rather a wash, predicting Fleming will live to eighty, return to Japan, and is about to enjoy a streak of good luck. The latter cheers him, his companions having dispensed grave warnings to him against his flight out of Tokyo: flying on Friday the 13^th is bad enough but, going Eastward to Hawaii, he will cross the dateline and experience two Friday the 13^ths in a row.

As with the soothsayer’s other predictions, the streak of good luck is nonsense. The flight gets off to a bad start, rattled by Typhoon Emma, but Fleming doesn’t mind. His devil-may-care alter ego Bond actually prefers to fly on the 13^th, he reminds us: “There are practically no passengers and it’s more comfortable and you get better service.” The comfort, the service, and the drinks see him asleep by midnight. After four hours, the voice of the captain awakes him: “There has been an explosion in number three engine and a fire […] I have no hydraulic pressure.” Luckily, this happens to be the most unflappable airline pilot in the world: “We have altered course for Wake Island where I shall carry out a no-flap landing at an unusual altitude and faster than is the custom […] I have made many three-engine landings and also many without hydraulic pressure, so – see you on the ground!”

In their own day, most of the appeal of the Bond novels and, by extension, Thrilling Cities, was aspirational; the diabolical villains and lurid exploits were just conventional story-building elements. Air travel alone was a thrilling and romantic experience, beyond the means of most, never mind staying in the best hotels, playing in the best casinos, wearing the finest suits, drinking the finest wine, eating the best caviar – the novels work as a sort of lifestyle porn, and Thrilling Cities, lacking the villains and the exploits, still works on the same level. Today, air travel, exotic places, skiing, fine dining and cocktails are no longer unobtainable for the average person, but that aspirational element remains; rather than vicariously living like an international playboy, today’s reader instead longs for a time when boarding an aeroplane was an adventure rather than a chore.

With a USAF rescue-plane and two Navy craft deployed, the captain breezily makes his landing (“To lighten the load, I am about to dump fuel, so there will be no smoking please.”) and Fleming’s en route to Honolulu, where his spirits remain high despite his failure to take to surfing, his distaste for plinking ukulele music and his dismay at hordes of elderly American tourists.

Fleming’s thriller-writer senses kick in once again in Los Angeles as he discusses the Mafia with Police Captain Hamilton, and his gambling connoisseurism in Las Vegas, providing a quick summary of how to gamble sensibly that is the level-headed antithesis of Mr. Bond’s high-stakes play. Speaking of Bond, Fleming was so wearied and miserable by the time he reached New York (via Chicago) that, as an apology for his rubbishing of the city, American readers were offered a humorous short-story about him. “007 in New York” isn’t much of a thriller but its throwaway nature is precisely what makes it enjoyable, with a rare and light-hearted ending in which Bond fails his mission – plus, there’s a recipe for “scrambled eggs James Bond”.

Fleming’s trip was so successful that, having barely finished submitting his articles, Fleming found himself being asked by the paper to make another trip. The Sunday Times had Latin America in mind, suggesting the appropriately thrilling Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Havana, but an already-weary Fleming was only willing to go as far away as Europe, making most of the trip in his own car and finding many of his destinations boring or repellent.

First on the agenda was Hamburg, where Fleming – often caricatured as an old Tory, but really more of a libertarian – briefly praises the sex industry (“normal heterosexual ‘vice’ is permitted to exist in appropriate ‘reservations’ and on condition that it remains open and light-hearted. How very different from the prudish and hypocritical manner in which we so disgracefully mismanage these things in England!”) before moving on to Berlin where he is oppressed by Modernist architecture, Cold War tensions and the spectre of Hitler.

In “The Living Daylights”, James Bond thinks of Berlin as “a glum, inimical city dry varnished on the Western side with a brittle veneer of gimcrack polish, rather like the chromium trim on American motor-cars”. If anything his creator is even harsher, but one wonders whether it’s the ghastliness of the city itself or the ghastliness of his mood that’s to blame. Fleming was periodically weighed down by a kind of directionless, spiteful ennui, which often fired his best writing – Casino Royale, From Russia, with Love, “The Living Daylights”, “Octopussy”. Reading his novels in sequence, one is bewildered by the mood swings between, for instance, From Russia, with Love, the cynical book in which Fleming comes closest to Le Carré, and actually kills 007 at the end (obviously, it didn’t stick), and its follow-up, the dizzyingly exuberant Doctor No. Today, he’d probably be called bipolar.

Even so, Fleming takes out some frustrations in a still-thrilling description of buzzing down the Autobahns, which takes up a good third of the chapter and makes the arrival to pleasant, dull Vienna rather an anti-climax, as is Geneva (“to include Geneva among the thrilling cities of Europe must seem to most people quixotic”). Italy is a bright spot: tracking down retired gangster Lucky Luciano in Naples, and Gracie Fields in Capri, before noting down an amusing bit of bother in Pompeii when a French tourist’s wife is refused entry to the Lupanar, where “childish pictures […] show you how to make love – if you were the right shape and extremely athletic”. The unimpressed Frenchman protests, “Pah! […] You think I have come a thousand miles from Paris to see that? Why, I was doing it myself when I was sixteen! […] These stupid Romans had no idea how to make love. And you mean to say you won’t let my wife see this nonsense!”. And after a discourse on how ugly and dull lava is, our author makes his way to Monte Carlo, where an amusing encounter with a sarcastic English girl and a visit to Jacques Cousteau both prove so restorative to the author’s spirits that he ends up closing the book with an incongruous “What fun it all was! What fun ‘abroad’ will always be!”

Still, travel at the best of times tends to take it out of us, but in another six weeks, six months, or a year we find ourselves looking back on our adventures with nothing but fondness, and presumably it was so for Fleming too, who probably expected to make a third trip once he’d recuperated sufficiently. Sadly, a heart attack at 56 meant that not only would there be no third trip, there’d be no more of his Bond novels either. Given how many of his experiences and impressions from Tokyo made their way directly into You Only Live Twice, it’s hard not to wonder what sort of adventures he was planning for Bond in Macau, Honolulu, or Naples. Still, the adventures recorded here provide an appropriately thrilling little volume which, if it is too dated to be of much value as a guidebook, is so of its time as to be indispensable as social history, and should be treasured and re-read as the witty, crotchety, yet always endearing record of a reluctant traveller.

Tomorrow Never Dies, Police Story 3, & a hopeless spinoff

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT that, as exciting and underrated as it is, Tomorrow Never Dies probably features a bit too much action for a Bond picture, which have always leant towards the “adventure” side of action/adventure – it’s a noticeable difference if you compare the series to such Bond competitors/derivatives as the Indiana Jones, Batman or Mission: Impossible series, or Marvel’s brand-new stab at the long-dormant “black 007” genre in Black Panther.

For a long time, though, I’d been mistakenly thinking of it as a film that’s overly keen to ape violent American films, in the manner of Licence to Kill or Quantum of Solace. After defining its own subgenre in the 60s, the series has occasionally, and rather sadly, borrowed from other genres, many of them partially derived from the Bond formula itself: blaxploitation in Live and Let Die; Kung Fu in The Man with the Golden Gun; Star Wars in Moonraker; Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and their ilk in Licence to Kill; Batman Begins in Casino Royale; Bourne in Quantum of Solace. What hadn’t struck me previously is that Tomorrow Never Dies represents the Bond series’ attempt to piggyback on Hong Kong action cinema of the sort codified by John Woo. That’s the real meaning of Bond dual-wielding a P99 and an MP5 as he mows down Carver’s henchmen, not to mention the use of pre-Matrix bullet-time showing off Wai Lin’s cartwheels and high kicks.

Wai Lin, of course, is played by the Hong Kong star Michelle Yeoh, who had already submitted an audition tape for this precise rôle with her appearance in Police Story 3: Super Cop. In that film, Yeoh plays a no-nonsense Chinese policewoman, an orthodox communist who bickers with the partner she’s assigned: Jackie Chan as a policeman from (then still-British) Hong Kong. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Yeoh plays a no-nonsense Chinese spy, an orthodox communist who bickers with the partner she’s assigned: James Bond, a spy from Britian. (An earlier draft of Tomorrow Never Dies would actually have revolved around the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, which was scrapped when a) production took too long for the issue still to be relevant, and b) the handover went very smoothly and afforded little opportunity for action set-pieces or communist-vs.-capitalist quipping.)

It isn’t only the character dynamic between Bond and Wai Lin that feels borrowed from Police Story. After about eighty minutes of standard Bond stuff, the film sends us to Asia, after which the action is nonstop for about a solid half-hour. Among the setpieces are Bond and Wai Lin rappeling down a skyscraper by clinging to an enormous and slowly-tearing poster adorning its side, and a rooftop motorcycle chase for which the pair are handcuffed to one another for the duration. The combination of eye-popping action and physical comedy comes straight from Jackie Chan, and it’s a shame that Pierce Brosnan is an actor and not a stuntman, for scenes like these work best when they’re done fully in-camera, without swapping between actors and stuntmen.

Wai Lin was apparently one of the series’ more popular Bond Girls, though I always found Yeoh a little stiff and awkward here compared to some of the wonderful performances she’s given in Chinese and HK films. Still, a spinoff was originally intended for her character who, of several Bond Girls set up as female counterparts to Bond (The Spy Who Loved Me‘s XXX, Die Another Day‘s Jinx) is the most convincing. Yeoh was already used to such spinoffs, having starred in one of her own featuring her character from Police Story 3: Super Cop. That spin-off was confusingly marketed in various territories as Supercop, Supercop 2, Police Story 3 Part 2, Supercop, Police Story IV, Project S or Once a Cop. I wonder whether the producers would even have started thinking about spinoffs if the Police Story series hadn’t gone there first.

And I wonder if the Police Story series first came to their attention with the wide release of Police Story 4: First Strike, aka Jackie Chan’s First Strike. It takes the series away from Hong Kong cop action in favour of a globetrotting plot obviously intended to launch Chan’s character as a Hong Kong alternative to Bond, and was seen by plenty of international audiences previously ignorant of the series. Once again, Bond was borrowing from its own imitators.

As for the Wai Lin spinoff, it never materialised, and the producers turned their hopes to Jinx in Die Another Day, envisioning a “Winter Olympics” scenario in which her films and Bond’s would alternate. After the rough reception given Halle Berry not only in Die Another Day but also X-Men, Swordfish and (especially) Catwoman, the spinoff idea was once again abandoned, and I have to wonder: does anyone really want or need to see Bond without Bond? If they do, they already have a rich array of alternatives from which to choose.

The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, & the impression of agelessness

HERE’S A NICE bit of character description from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: “The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars.” It works on a few levels: it surrounds the character of Elrond with the same aura of ageless beauty and mystery shared by so many of Middle-Earth’s legendary inhabitants (Gandalf, Galadriel, Treebeard, et cetera); it plays nicely with themes of dusk, night, gathering darkness, and the light of hope shining through, that crop up everywhere in the rest of the book; and, in a way, it works as a metaphor for Tolkien’s writing itself, “ageless” and “written [with] the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful”.

I always surprise myself by remembering just how young The Lord of the Rings really is, so successfully does it create the idea of itself as an ancient myth, an archetype. It also feels like the birth of the fantasy genre, probably just because its high-fantasy descendants have dominated the market in the 60-odd years since its publication from 1954-55.

Nevertheless, there was much fantasy before it, and it bears remembering. Three great pulpy strands predate it by half a century: the heroic fantasy of Robert E. Howard, the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft, and the planetary romance of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the last of which would, of course, inspire the later (but still earlier) Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, and older yet are the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Those are only the major subgenres of pulp fantasy writing, and there’s plenty more outside of pulp fiction that it still feels odd to remember came first.

The entire Golden Age of Science Fiction, for instance, had come and gone. So had many important works of the New Wave of Science Fiction, such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, and Isaac Asimov’s entire Empire and Foundation trilogies. Ayn Rand, the rum old bugger, had already published We the Living, Anthem, and The Fountainhead, and was probably hard at work on Atlas Shrugged.

James Bond had already had three literary adventures and his first film (albeit a telefilm) by the time LotR‘s publication had finished. Rock ‘n’ roll, if we date it from the appearance of Elvis’ “That’s All Right” single, was ten days old when the first volume appeared, and Godzilla would be born between the publications of the first and second volumes. Kong was already an old-timer from over twenty years ago, but American monster movies were getting hot again, with The Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Them! already released, and It Came from Beneath the Sea shortly to follow.

Superheroes had already dominated comic books for a decade, fallen out of favour, and would in a couple of years be making a comeback. Batman was old hat when The Lord of the Rings came out.

And Tolkien wasn’t the first popular scholar to revive interest in hero-myths, either. That would be Joseph Campbell with his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949. And Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis was on his fifth Narnia book.

So how does it manage to convince us all of its age? Well, it draws a lot on some legitmately ancient, pre-Christian literature and mythology which, even if it remains obscure to most to this day, surely triggers some reflex in our Jungian collective unconscious. Surely. Also, it consciously avoids reflecting the attitudes, concerns, or even language of its contemporary time, and could just as easily fit in amongst the novels of the 1920s or even 1860s. Perhaps more so: Tolkien doesn’t write like Graham Greene or Iris Murdoch, and he certainly doesn’t write like Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck.

He must have seen a lot of himself in his characters, an old-fashioned anchor in a sea of modernism. I bet he’d be pleased with the impression of timelessness his books created, not that he was the first to do so; it gives me pause to think that the King James Bible is younger than most Shakespeare, while most of the Scottish, Irish, and English folk ballads are no older than the 18th century (and sometimes significantly younger).

Licence Revoked, Licence to Kill, & bad Bond luck

IN MY LAST BLOG POST, I was chatting about how the 16th Bond film, Licence Revoked, suffered an undignified and expensive last-minute name change to Licence to Kill. That wasn’t the only thing going wrong behind the scenes on one of the least inspired, least successful entries in what is, for the most part, a reliable series.

To begin with Timothy Dalton, who had made his début in 1987’s The Living Daylights, was certainly the 007 with the rottenest luck. First approached by the producers in 1969 to replace Connery for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Dalton’s conscience or sense of purism wouldn’t allow him to accept the part, believing himself to be too young. In 1981, however, he was all set to take over in For Your Eyes Only; a condition of accepting the rôle was that the script take Bond in a darker, more gritty direction that took more cues from the Fleming novels and short stories. In the end, Dalton didn’t end up appearing in that film either, but the script intended for him supplied Moore with one of his best, and certainly his darkest, outings as Bond. By the time Dalton was finally ready, in 1987, the tables were turned, and The Living Daylights sees him awkwardly making his way through a script intended for Moore. The resultant high-camp doesn’t sit well with the character Dalton is playing, and the picture is largely confused and forgettable, with a few honourable bright spots. GoldenEye, an exceptionally sharp scipt written especially for Dalton, would eventually star Pierce Brosnan, and in the meantime Dalton was lumped with the only script written for him that he would ever actually appear in, something called Licence Revoked.

In many ways, it was to be the tentative first modern Bond, in the sense that many series mainstays were either gone or on their way out. The early entries are magnificent pictures due to their good fortune in having a wonderful production team behind them. It was time to prove that the formula could outlast its creators: it was the first film not to bear a title from Fleming, and the last for some time to use any Fleming elements in its script. It was the last to star Timothy Dalton. It was the last written by Richard Maibaum. It was the last directed by John Glen. It was the last with titles by Maurice Binder. It’s the last to depict Bond as a smoker, and the last in which the original version of Felix Leiter appears. It’s the last outing for second Moneypenny Caroline Bliss, and second M Robert Brown; it will be the last appearance of a Male M until 2012’s Skyfall. It was the last Bond production by Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, though he would be retained on GoldenEye as a consultant producer. Harry Saltzman and Peter R. Hunt had long since left the series, and it was the first film following John Barry’s departure. It was also the first to feature a photographic, rather than a painted, poster; would receive a novelisation, just like all of Brosnan’s entries, and unlike most of the previous pictures; and it was the first to subject Bond’s masculinity to scrutiny, something that has been retained in all eight subsequent films.

You have to admire Dalton, for his devotion to the Bond literature, his willingness to put artistic integrity before commerciality, and the fact that he’s a damned fine actor, not to mention that his overlooked status in the franchise makes him automatically sympathetic. But I’ve always found that Sean Connery’s ability to play high charm with a threat of violence that may explode from under the surface at any moment to more authentically capture the character of Bond than does Dalton’s portrayal, which is a perpetually ticked-off but ultimately not very dangerous type of rogue. The Licence Revoked script picks up on the worst aspects of that characterisation, stripping out even the tenderness that makes up for the many flaws of The Living Daylights.  Here, Bond is as totally cold as he ever got, going up against a bunch of drug-dealing lowlives responsible for various acts of rape, torture and murder, including putting his friend Felix Leiter in a coma. Naturally, Bond goes into a full-on white rage, murdering his way through a script full of such horrors as shark feeding frenzies, maggot tanks, viscerally exploding heads, bad guys burnt alive, crooked televangelists and huge clouds of cocaine dust. He even attacks his old friend M, going rogue without a Licence to Kill (it’s never explained why he escapes prosecution for going on a murder-spree, nor what strings could possibly have been pulled to see him reinstated by the time of GoldenEye).

A Bond script is a plastic thing, though, and surely a series of rewrites could have salvaged Licence Revoked, were it not for the unfortunate timing of the 1989 Writers’ Strike. Director John Glen was on his fifth Bond outing by this point; a former second-unit director, he made efficient, satisfying and cheap Bond pictures with none of the grandiosity of Guy Hamilton, the cool of Terence Young, or the humour of Lewis Gilbert. One of those directors might have found some hidden inner charm or flair that would give Licence to Kill an identity. Glen’s approach is workmanlike and drab, doing nothing to compensate for the lack of an engaging script.

Another sorely felt loss to the Bond formula was sex, vetoed due to AIDs. The Living Daylights reformed Bond; he’s a chaste, yet deeply romantic and tender figure. It’s one of only a handful containing a convincing romance, along with From Russia with Love, The World is Not Enough and Casino Royale. Licence to Kill doesn’t lack sex; depicted or implied sexual violence is commonplace, but its already unlikeable protagonist is made more inhuman yet by his seeming sexlessness. There are women for him in the picture, two of them in fact, but the bizarre culmination of their flirtation is that he pushes both of them into a pool, like some kind of sensually asexual psychopath able only to get his jollies through humiliation. It should be noted that he blows off Felix Leiter, the friend that all this revenge was supposedly in aid of, to do this. Not to fuck either girl, or even both at once, but to push them into a pool while a fish winks at the audience. Even the cringing nature of Moore’s romance with young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Tanya Roberts in A View to a Kill is preferable.

Something else A View to a Kill had that Licence lacks is a great theme song. “Licence to Kill” is probably the worst of the lot, histrionic, synthetic and ultimately forgettable.

Floundering to find a market and making do without classic elements and without writers able to write around that absence, the producers looked to American audiences to secure a future for Licence Revoked. The change of title was made to court American audiences, who apparently found the existing one comical, it being a phrase commonly used by the DMV, a favourite fallback target of American humour. Changing the title at this point, however, with much promotional material already printed, cost the producers not just in cash but also in marketing momentum.

The issue may not necessarily have been in changing the title partway through production, but in gearing up the marketing machine before a sensible title was settled on. There’s something dark and enticing to my ears about the Licence Revoked title, but at least Licence to Kill more clearly connects with the Bond brand. That brand was less in evidence given other tweaks to the established formula also presumably tailored to please American audiences; Licence to Kill plays out as an American action film of the 80s, an influence underlined by the hiring of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard composer Michael Kamen. There’s an anonymity to Licence to Kill‘s violent revenge fantasy, as if it could just as well be Dirty Harry, or Death Wish, or any number of similarly mean-spirited, hard-boiled flicks. It’s that approach which earned Licence to Kill a 15 certificate, further hurting its commercial potential though adequately warning kids away from the amped-up violence* of a series already more adult-oriented than its legions of kid fans would lead you to believe. The Sunday Times‘ Ian Johnstone was put off, finding that the film had eradicated “any traces of the gentleman spy” envisaged by Fleming; Bond here is “remarkably close both in deed and action to the eponymous hero of the Batman film”.

He makes an apt comparison. Either Jaws or Star Wars is usually cited as the birth of the Summer blockbuster, but in truth it’s not a phenomenon that arrived fully-formed, as evidenced by the conflicting citations of two different pictures from different Summers. Batman was huge in an unprecedented way, not a word-of-mouth success like Jaws or Star Wars but a marketing juggernaut, impossible to avoid even months in advance of the release date. You can see why Licence to Kill chose to borrow elements of its approach. But going up against it in the box-office is a decision that smacks of hubris. In fact 1989’s whole Summer season was a brutal gauntlet, with action audiences pulled in different directions not just by Batman, but also Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade**, Lethal Weapon 2 and Ghostbusters II, all of them not just better films than Licence to Kill but also healthier representatives of their respective franchise.

All told, you can’t fault audiences in 1989 for not connecting with Licence to Kill. It failed both at bringing Bond convincingly up to date and at paying tribute to the series’ well-loved roots, both tasks managed seemingly effortlessly in GoldenEye . Of course, that film would have its own painful birth, after six years of legal and financial stresses and the loss of Tim Dalton, who would even express an interest in Kevin McClory’s Warhead 2000 A.D.. Still, Bond was saved, and would never find himself in any trouble again…until Quantum of Solace appeared, an underwhelming Bond which fails to connect with the classic formula due to a rushed production schedule, a name that audiences hated, a writers’ strike, and a sad desperation to piggyback on popular action tropes. It even lacked a proper romance for Bond, and its failure meant we wouldn’t see another outing for four whole years, leaving its successor the difficult task of reinvigorating the franchise all over again. If only the producers had had an example to learn from, there…

*Milton Krest’s horrible death scene certainly lingered with me as a child, as did Benicio del Toro’s jeering rapist: “We gave her a niiiiice honeymoon!”

**Complete with meta-Bonding Sir Sean Connery

Quantum of Solace, Licence to Kill, & what’s in a name

WHO’S GOING TO BE the next actor to play James Bond? Well, fingers crossed Daniel Craig will sign on to do one final picture: it would mean that his run matches the original five of Sir Sean Connery, and would allow the producers to finish the arc that has run through his pictures since 2006’s Casino Royale, resolving the cliffhanger ending of Spectre and leaving things open for a relatively fresh start with 007 Number Seven. Sadly, Craig’s unlikely to sign up for another, having claimed he’d rather “slit [his] wrists”. So if not him, then who? The big four names being tossed around are Aidan Turner, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston, and Idris Elba, presented there in descending order of how good a choice I think they are. Incidentally, here’s that popular shot from Poldark of Turner sans shirt, getting some scything in and unknowingly auditioning for the Bond part:

Well, that’s all well and good. But what are they going to call Bond 25, I wonder-? Most likely, they’ll come up with an original title, probably something one-word and mysterious, like Skyfall or Spectre. Hey, how about naming the movie Risico, in that case?

“Risico” was one of the short stories featured in Ian Fleming’s collection For Your Eyes Only. But how can that be? When the 16th Bond film was still in production, the producers made an announcement: they had exhausted the pool of Fleming titles, and the new picture would have an original name, Licence Revoked. The title was a probable reference to John Gardner’s continuation Bond novel Licence Renewed, but it later became Licence to Kill, following its original title’s poor testing with US audiences (the title change came at great cost to the producers, just one of the many factors in the disaster of Licence to Kill‘s production). But the producers were telling blatant fibs! Fleming wrote twelve Bond novels; eleven of those twelve formed the first eleven Eon Productions pictures, though filmed out of order compared with their source material. Even referring to the novels as source material is slightly misleading; as the series continues, the films diverge more and more from the novels whose titles they borrow. Dr. No, From Russia with Love*, Goldfinger, Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provide basically straightforward adaptations of their source novels, while You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun take the basic plots of the novels simply as templates, playing out in a grander, more comedic style with a number of original story additions. The film supposedly based on The Spy Who Loved Me, the one novel Fleming was embarrassed by, instead uses an original story, albeit one that borrows elements of You Only Live Twice, and was sufficiently different from the novel whose title it uses that screenwriter Christopher Wood was allowed to pen a novelisation entitled James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me. Its follow-up, Moonraker, used the villain name, but little else, from its novel; millionaire British philanthropist and secret Nazi Sir Hugo Drax became American entrepeneur and secret eugenicist Hugo Drax; once again, the original plot was novelised by Christopher Wood, and once again, past Bond films were a partial inspiration, Drax’s scheme and motivation being a space version of the underwater vision of The Spy Who Loved Me‘s Karl Stromberg.

At that point, with no more novel titles to use (Casino Royale was legally unavailable to the producers, thanks to the 1954 television film and 1967 spoof versions), the producers turned to short stories, first fancying “For Your Eyes Only”, then “Octopussy”, “From a View to a Kill”**, and “The Living Daylights”. In fact, the end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me announce the next film as For Your Eyes Only, showing the producers intended to turn to short story titles before even exhausting the novel titles available to them (the success of Star Wars caused them to embrace the science-fiction-sounding Moonraker title, though the novel itself contains no space-travel elements). These short stories predictably proved difficult to stretch to feature length, and the films at this point became cannibalistic hybrids: For Your Eyes Only draws part of its plot from “For Your Eyes Only”, but also looks to “Risico”, From Russia with Love, and one unused sequence from the Live and Let Die novel. An updated version of the short story “Octopussy”‘s events, updating WWII to the Korean War, forms the backstory of Octopussy, being told in brief by the title character, and takes an auction scene from “The Property of a Lady” and its broad plot from Goldfinger. A View to a Kill takes from its short story only the setting of Paris, before moving on to a plot that once again draws on Goldfinger, with some original elements. The Living Daylights similarly adapts its short story for one scene in a mostly original plot.

But the producers still had literary content left to mine, in spite of their public fibbing. Licence to Kill re-uses elements from the Live and Let Die film and novel as well as The Man with the Golden Gun novel alongside elements from the short story “The Hildebrand Rarity”. Licence to Kill thus bears the same degree of similarity to that short story as FYEO, Octopussy, AVtaK and TLD do to their respective short story titles, so why isn’t it entitled The Hildebrand Rarity? The likely answer is that what was meant was that they had run out of story titles that sounded good. “Risico”‘s title comes from a phonetically-rendered pronunciation of “risk”; “The Property of a Lady” would have worked for Sir Roger Moore but not for Timothy Dalton’s harder-edged interpretation of the character; “The Hildebrand Rarity” sounds more like Sherlock Holmes than James Bond; “007 in New York” is deeply underwhelming; and “Quantum of Solace” is basically word salad.

About that. GoldenEye takes its name from Fleming’s Jamaica house and uses an original plot (with some elements of the villain drawing on the Moonraker novel); Tomorrow Never Dies was a garbled version of the in-story newspaper slogan, “Tomorrow never lies”, and used a wholly original plot; The World is Not Enough is Bond’s family motto from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and uses yet another original plot (though aspects of the finale draw on Kingsley Amis’ continuation novel Colonel Sun). Finally, Die Another Day‘s title is a fragment from a Housman poem, and draws mostly from the previously unused plot of the novel Moonraker, plus re-used elements of the Diamonds Are Forever film, and brief references to the novels The Man with the Golden Gun and Colonel Sun.

Then in 2006 came Casino Royale, the first Bond to bear a novel’s title since 1979’s Moonraker (and the first mostly straightforward adaptation of a novel since 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). Having recovered the rights to adapt the famous first Bond novel, the producers opted to reboot the franchise entirely, discovering in the process a reverence for the Fleming source material that had been missing from the series for some time. In trying to craft a followup, the producers opted to continue with the Fleming loyalty, picking as a title Quantum of Solace, taken from an atypical short story which homaged Somserset Maugham and in which Bond was barely a character. Of course, the Quantum of Solace movie opted not to adapt that story, and instead went for something mostly original; though its very last scene does present a sort of adaptation of “007 in New York”, the bulk of its plot grows out of the last act of the Casino Royale movie (and also bears an unfortunate resemblance to Licence to Kill). Daniel Craig, for his part, claimed that the film reflected the same themes as the short story, but to date “Quantum of Solace” remains the only one of Fleming’s novels or stories not to have any part of its plot worked into a film.

The use of Quantum of Solace as a title was well-meant, but as soon as it was announced there came an enormous backlash from casual fans who were unaware that blame for the (admittedly horrendous) title lay with Fleming, not Eon. I believe that, had it not been for that backlash, Bond 23, which became Skyfall, would likely have been entitled Property of a Lady. I also believe, given the increasing concessions to the style of Roger Moore’s era evidenced in Skyfall and Spectre, that it would have been a wholly appropriate title. It’s certainly the most Bond-y feeling title of the remaining unused ones, but my hopes are high for a Bond film entitled Risico, after which, we’ll see about Property of a Lady and The Hildebrand Rarity. We’re unlikely to ever see a Bond picture entitled 007 in New York. But how about a fun little “007 in New York” short? It could be released on YouTube to build hype for the next movie, shown in cinemas before an appropriate feature, released as a DVD extra, or made to tie into a major television event, like the 2012 Olympics’ “Happy and Glorious” Bond short.

So, what’s in a name? Well, nothing really. I understand the producers’ eagerness to use a cool-sounding Bond title, and that that desire trumps a sort of historical completionism. In the meantime, little bits of innuendo towards the stories are creeping in, meaningless throwaway references such as Casino Royale‘s character of Solange, named for one in “007 in New York”, or the presence, in Spectre, of a “Hildebrand Antiques and Rarities” as well as a repurposed Hans Oberhauser (“Octopussy”), all of which are all well and good, but add up to very little.

Still, I’ll be going to see Bond 25 no matter what title it gets saddled with, and I note at this point that I disliked the generic Skyfall title even more than the outlandish Quantum of Solace one. Anyway, nothing will stop me from hoping.

*This was the first Bond to slightly adapt a title, losing the comma from the novel’s title of From Russia, with Love.

**The short story is entitled “From a View to a Kill”; the film simply A View to a Kill. This decision was obviously made after the film was in the planning stage, as the end credits of Octopussy announce the next film’s title as From a View to a Kill, becoming the second instance of the end credits making a mistake regarding the next film’s title. After A View to a Kill announced The Living Daylights, this practice was dropped entirely; otherwise, The Living Daylights would have mistakenly announced Licence Renewed, GoldenEye would have mistakenly announced Tomorrow Never Lies, The World is Not Enough might have mistakenly announced Beyond the Ice and, if I’m correct, Quantum of Solace would have mistakenly announced Property of a Lady.

Republicans, Democrats, & the Presidents of fiction

WITH Donald Trump having achieved a surprise victory in last night’s US election, the Republican Party – which had partially disowned Trump in anticipation of a historic loss – will now face a minor existential crisis as conservatives decide whether or not to embrace the Trump brand of populism. It could even come to be seen as a turning point in the history of the Grand Ole Party.

Meanwhile in fictionland, they never state which party candidates belong to. The British satirical sitcom The New Statesman was elaborate about it in its first episode, in which anti-hero Alan B’stard, wearing a white rosette that doesn’t match up to any real-life British party, beats both his Labour & Conservative rivals for his seat in the House of Commons. It’s obvious to viewers that B’stard is a Tory, much as it’s obvious that the government in The Thick of It is a Labour one. But if you never say it by name, you have reasonable deniability in case of a libel suit. Additionally, as we’ll see below, American fictional Presidents are more likely to crop up in action films than political satires, & it is important that viewers respect the dignity traditionally associated with that high office, regardless of polarising political affiliations. Well, nuts to that! Let’s try to place some fictional Presidents on the political spectrum.

President Thomas J. Whitmore  (Bill Pullman), Independence Day

President Whitmore’s immediate reaction to alien invasion is nuclear retaliation, a move that backfires spectacularly. If his gung-ho attitude weren’t enough to mark him as a Republican, there is also his celebrated speech, in which he unashamedly equates the USA with the world. Republican.

President James Marshall (Harrison Ford), Air Force One

Here’s an easy one. James Marshall is a clear Republican, something which becomes only clearer if you remember Harrison Ford playing Jack Ryan in the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games & Clear and Present Danger. In Clancy’s super-conservative novels, super-conservative Ryan eventually becomes President, & it’s hard not to see Air Force One as an unofficial entry in the Jack Ryan series of films. Republican.

President Tom Beck (Morgan Freeman), Deep Impact

The real-life Freeman is a prominent black conservative, but that might be neither here nor there. President Beck is presumably the first black President, which suggests the Democratic Party; the film was made while Obama was an obscure Senator, but there were other prominent black Democrats, such as Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. Sadly for President Beck, his most significant act as President is to gather the best-&-brightest to wait out the impending meteor collision in safety, abandoning the rest of the population without even bothering to alert them of the danger. It’s possible on the one hand to see that as a reflection of laissez-faire Republican attitudes, but equally it could be chalked up to the leftist elitism Democrats are constantly accused of by their opponents. Probable Democrat.

The U.S. President (Billy Bob Thornton), Love Actually

Love Actually does the irritating dance around the name of a politician (“The President”, “The Prime Minister”, “The Prince of Wales”), so I don’t have the pleasure of typing out of one the astonishingly white-bread names given to almost every other President listed here. Love Actually was released in 2003, a time when anti-American sentiment was high in Britain, & Billy Bob Thornton’s character seems to combine the worst elements of Bill Clinton & George W. Bush. Still, despite the way he leers at a Downing Street intern, the political context makes it clear that what’s really being criticised here are the key doctrines of the Bush era: the War on Terror, & the Special Relationship. Hugh Grant’s Tony Blair stand-in of a PM, David, gives the speech many Brits must have been dying to hear from the real-life Blair. Republican.

President George Sears (John Cygan), Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

George Sears, better known as Solidus Snake, had a busy history, training child sodiers in the Liberian Civil War, being appointed to the Presidency by a shadowy organisation known as the Patriots, sponsoring the development of the super-weapon Metal Gear REX, & masterminding the Shadow Moses terrorist incident before leaving office under a cloud of disgrace, all while covering up the fact of being a clone of the legendary soldier Big Boss. Solidus then goes on to become the head of the rogue anti-terror unit Dead Cell under the guise of his brother Solid Snake, hijacking REX’s successor Arsenal Gear, and finally being killed in a swordfight with his adoptive child soldier son, dying in a prototype power suit before the statue of George Washington outside Federal Hall, wielding two katanas & draped in the US flag, which makes the post-Presidential career of e.g. Jimmy Carter look like underachieving. His position as the 43rd President of the United States, his military background, his appearance, & even his first name are suggestive of George W. Bush. But his hardcore libertarian rhetoric is a far cry from the moderate conservatism of Bush; in fact, with his obsessive invocations of the Founding Fathers – he named his group the Sons of Liberty – Sears is the original Tea Partier. Just look at his flag:

Republican.

President James Johnson (Paul Lukather), Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

President James Johnson resembles Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in looks, accent, demeanour (note the crotch-grabbing incident), & name. He also pledged in 2008 to close down Guantanamo Bay, a pledge also made by real-life Democrat Obama. Yet something’s fishy here: George Sears is stated to have been removed from office after the Shadow Moses fiasco. In real life, such a removal would have led to Sears’ replacement by his VP, which might mean Johnson is a Republican (there’s no way Sears is a Democrat), except Johnson mentions that his path to the Presidency was being the insignificant son of a Senator before being selected by the Patriots. So chalk this one up to ignorance of the American system on the part of the writers. Democrat.

President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), Olympus Has Fallen

Asher’s all-American square jaw plus his handy approach to ass-kicking suggests a Republican, and his tough approach to North Korea inspires the dastardly plot that results in him being held hostage in the White House. Also, it’s difficult to get Eckhart’s portrayal of Harvey Dent out of your mind; unlike President Sawyer, we’re privy to very little of Asher’s key policies, but Dent’s tough-on-crime, lax-on-civil-rights approach had him widely compared to a Bush-era conservative. Probable Republican.

President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx), White House Down

This one’s even easier. Young, black, hip, & full of promise, James Sawyer is clearly intended to evoke Barack Obama. The film evidences the hopeful mood that abounded at the start of Obama’s presidency – see the Doctor Who serial The End of Time for a particularly quaint example – although, peculiarly, Sawyer is said to be the 46th POTUS, suggesting that he succeeded Obama, rather than being his fictional equivalent. It also leaves space for another President to have preceded him – Benjamin Asher, perhaps? Regardless, Sawyer is said to have pursued dove-like policies in the Middle East after a failed Bush-like incursion into Iran, & his inexperience with firearms – which he soon gets over – suggests gun control is on his agenda, also. Democrat.

President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews), Idiocracy

President Camacho is black, like the Democrats Tom Beck & James Sawyer, & his Hispanic name suggests a continuation of ongoing demographic trends – Hillary Clinton’s Presidential hopes hinged on getting out the Latino vote. His vision of a united America isn’t dissimilar from those of Obama or Hillary Clinton, albeit heavily watered-down to the point of meaninglessness. But his brand of gun-toting super-patriotism smacks of the Republicans, & entertainers from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Donald Trump have flocked to the party (Camacho is an ex-porn star). Of course, he’s the President of the future, & both parties have current issues in defining their voter base. Who knows what changed between then & now? A perfect compromise of Republican & Democrat.

Hideo Nakata, Takashi Shimizu, & the Golden Age of J-Horror

I might not have mentioned, but I was recently at FrightFest, which is always the highlight of the year for me. We’d been promised a mysterious new Adam Wingard picture entitled The Woods, which was set to be the very latest thing in scaring audiences’ pants off. Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t really The Woods at all, but rather a new sequel to The Blair Witch Project. At the same time, it turned out we weren’t really getting to see it at all, but THEN it turned out that instead we were getting Sadako vs. Kayako, i.e. The Ring vs. The Grudge. For me, that was a good result – I’d been eagerly awaiting Sadako vs. Kayako since its announcement, & nothing could dampen that enthusiasm.

As it turned out, the picture was only OK, offering a few interesting ideas but undermining itself with tongue-in-cheek humour & never really reaching the nightmare pitch achieved in the best of its predecessors (Ringu, Ju-On: The Curse, Ju-On: The Grudge, The Ring). Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. Those films all came out within a remarkably short period of time – a Golden Age for what was called J-Horror.

J-Horror is not simply any horror that comes out of Japan, but in order to qualify it does have to be Japanese. The films from J-Horror’s Golden Age favoured vengeful spirits, usually girls in white dresses with stringy black hair. The approach to horror, while often incorporating a hefty dose of surrealism, was subtle too, usually avoiding gore, or even any specific depictions of harm, in favour of maddeningly relentless pursuits. They were also heavily reliant on intelligent use of the frame, hiding characters in background shadows or just out of shot. Naturally, this meant the films required talented directors making them work, which is exactly what they got: Hideo Nakata helmed Ringu, Ringu 2 & The Ring Two, leaving other, less talented directors to follow him on pictures such as Ringu‘s discredited sequel Rasen, the surprisingly effective prequel film Ringu 0: Birthday, & the tacky, CGI-filled later revivals Sadako 3D & Sadako 2 3D. Hideo Nakata’s relationship to Ju-On is similar; the series had its origins in the shorts “Katasumi” & “4444444444” released in the anthology Gakkô no kaidan G. Nakata expanded around them with Ju-On: The Curse & Ju-On: The Curse 2, before giving the series its first reboot with Ju-On: The Grudge, which earned its own sequel in Ju-On: The Grudge 2. Following the success of Ringu‘s even better US remake The Ring, lavishly staged by later Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski, Ju-On: The Grudge received a similar US treatment, yet again directed by Shimizu, who would also stay on for The Grudge 2 before abandoning both the Japanese & American iterations of his franchise. The Grudge 3 went straight to home video, but the American series continues to hold out hope, with a reboot reportedly in the works. In Japan, the series never quite fell out of fashion, & the spin-off films Ju-On: White Ghost, which was pretty good, & Ju-On: Black Ghost, which was less so, marked the series’ tenth anniversary before yet another reboot in Ju-On: The Beginning of the End, whose sequel was Ju-On: The Final Curse. Sadako vs. Kayako, for those who are interested, reboots both series yet again in order to incorporate some minor changes to the mythos.

The US pictures coming out at this time that weren’t remakes of Japanese pictures ended up looking like they might as well be, while the cinemas of China & Korea both responded to the horror waves coming from Japan. A neighbouring, yet different, genre enjoying a little Golden Age of its own at the same time was Asian extreme, best represented by Korean Park Chan-Wook & Japanese Takashi Miike, while the tactics of J-horror fed into, & from, other media, such as the horror manga of Junji Ito, the novels of Kōji Suzuki, or the many survival horror videogames released in the same period.

Nakata & Shimizu made some other excellent horrors; Nakata delivered his masterpiece in Dark Water, which also had a US remake, while Nakata delivered the Junji Ito adaptation Tomie: Rebirth, the Lovecraftian Marebito, The Shock Labyrinth, & Tormented. But other directors were active, too; if you want to easily keep track of them, why not try the J-Horror Theater imprint? It gathered six of J-Horror’s leading talents to deliver one picture each; Nakata & Shimizu pitched in with Kaidan & Reincarnation respectively, while the other pictures were Infection (from Masayuki Ochiai of Parasite Eve, Saimin, Shutter, & Kotodama – Spiritual Curse before taking over for Shimizu on the Ju-On franchise); Premonition (from Tsuruta Norio of Ringu 0: Birthday & Kakashi, which was based on a Junji Ito manga); Retribution (from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best-known for Pulse); & finally Kyōfu (from Ringu screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi). The J-Horror Theater series had mostly died off by its later entries, however, as had the brief, incredibly terrifying success of the genre. Sometimes all it takes to create a Golden Age is one or two great talents. Or maybe there was just something in the water in the late-90s.

Green Day, The Offspring, & the politics of pop-punk

HERE’S the brand-new song from Green Day, “Bang Bang”, an almost-timely exploration of the death-&-fame cult of mass shootings. Its unannounced release, coupled with the news that a new album is due in October, is explosive news for those who were only tided over by the new blink-182 album. They needn’t worry; with a new Sum 41 album due on the same release date as Green Day’s, pop-punk Christmas will assuredly come early.

&, in case you’re wondering, it’s definitely pop-punk we’re talking about. “Bang Bang” occupies a No Man’s Land between triumphant & routine, but what it is not is a continuation of the emo-friendly direction the band took from American Idiot onwards. Punk, of course, has moved in waves through its life like any other genre, & it’s only natural that, 20 years on from the heyday of pop-punk, pop-punk should once again be the dominant punk subgenre. The whole movement began, as any music fan knows*, with artsy New Yorkers like The Patti Smith Group, The New York Dolls, Blondie, Television, the Talking Heads, & the Ramones, only the last of which are really identifiably punk; it took subsequent waves in London & Manchester to produce the classic punk sound of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned & The Buzzcocks. That scene, like a punk rock tune, burned out almost as soon as it had begun, & was replaced within two years by artier sounds such as post-punk, new wave, synthpop, & ska. But almost as quickly as the white rage of punk was dying in the UK, US hardcore bands like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys & Minor Threat were arriving to carry the (now-burning-even-insanely-more-incandescently) torch, & while the UK never really bothered keeping the scene alive, hardcore (including subgenres, such as straight edge & the first wave of emo) ruled Stateside for close to 15 years. In that context, Green Day’s Dookie album – not their début, though it might as well have been – represented something truly unique, in that it went back to the British sound that no-one had bothered copying in ages, poppified it by about 20-30%, & added relatable lyrics that moved deftly from fratboy gross-out humour to suburban malaise for maximum appeal. Purists may have, & still may, turn up their noses, but in terms of influence Dookie makes it into any punk Top Ten of albums, & within a few years of its release, every US punk group that mattered had either formed in Dookie‘s wake, or had switched sound to capitalise.

This analysis finds me as objective as it’s possible to be when discussing something as inherently subjective as cultural trends. I’m not biased by nostalgia because, in truth, I’m a relatively new Green Day fan. I was aware of “Basket Case” & “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”, though few others, through MTV2 growing up in the early 00s, bought the American Idiot album & quickly tired of it after heavy rotation, then for ten years almost never thought about them. It wasn’t until, as an anniversary present, I got my girlfriend tickets to the American Idiot stage musical last year, that I was forced to re-evaluate the band, finding fragments of the entire album sticking in my head weeks & months after the performance. I’m an admirer of any composer who knows their way around a pop hook, & Green Day might pip The Beatles for the top spot of catchiest band of all time. So I found myself re-purchasing American Idiot, which I’d misplaced in the intervening decade, & while I was at it buying Insomniac, Nimrod (their best, tune-for-tune), & Warning, the three post-Dookie albums which, put together, form a relatively rare string of records which find a band at their peak in terms of musicianship, songwriting ability, & commercial appeal at once.

I’d missed all this because, during the eight heady years when pop-punk bands ruled the earth, I was an Offspring fan. I was a huge fan, looking back on it: I had all their albums; knew all the words to every song; read their sleevenotes; could name each band member (I no longer can!); I called them my favourite band; & I sincerely believed that they would always be my favourite band. In retrospect, they’re not even my favourite of the 90s pop-punk bands. Green Day beat them in terms of tunesmanship, lyrics, vocals, musicianship, punk attitude, & rad album covers**. Additionally, having switched to a pop-punk sound following the success of Dookie makes The Offspring seem like followers rather than setters of trends, the .5 in a 1.5-horse race. After Green Day’s second time around changing the mainstream face of punk with American Idiot, The Offspring belatedly followed with Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace. Even when playing in Green Day’s shadow, however, The Offspring’s sound was reliant on a thick, quasi-metal guitar crunch courtesy of various indifferent (over)producers, which I tend to find less appealing than Green Day’s authentically thin, wiry, fuzzy punk sound courtesy of Rob Cavallo.

It stands to reason, though, that the two dominant bands of the 90s scene should differ in this way. While Green Day’s biggest influences, from their riffs to their subject matter to Billie Joe Armstrong’s almost mockney whine, were British groups like The Damned & Sex Pistols (& as of American Idiot, The Who), The Offspring played in a characteristically American, characteristically Californian sound that they owed to Black Flag, Dead Kennedys & Bad Religion. The obviousness of these influences is diluted a little on The Offspring’s later albums due to a timely, Dookie-informed switch to pop-punk, but on their first two releases (with songs like “Kill The President” & “L.A.P.D.” respectively), it can be seen plainly, & the metallic guitars about which I complained in the paragraph above are all part of that. Similarly, when words fail Green Day lyricist Armstrong, his fallbacks are Beatlesy “yeah”s and “hey”s, whereas Holland prefers the “woah-ohs” of the Ramones.

Perhaps related to their British vs. American key influences is a distinctly different philosophical approach. While the scatological humour of Green Day would provide blink-182 & Sum 41 with their sole raison d’être, the band were never apolitical in the way that their imitators were. But there’s a touch of unconventiality of topic to songs like “King for a Day” (transvestism), “Welcome to Paradise” (slum living & missing one’s mother) or “Having a Blast” (being a suicide bomber; perhaps a dry-run for “Bang Bang”) that, coupled with their leavening moments of humour, can make them easy to overlook as political songs. By the time the band performed “Warning” (a warning against, well, warnings) it was hard to tell what they meant & what was classic, British-style sarcasm, & it was sad to see that, by the time of the otherwise accomplished American Idiot, the band’s message had degenerated into standard punk insurrection against a barely-understood but assuredly no-good political machine made up of Bush, 7-Eleven, the military-industrial complex, rednecks, mass media, & one’s parents. It was left-wing music, something Billie Joe Armstrong, an endorser of Bernie Sanders for President, would, I assume, happily affirm.

The Offspring, meanwhile, forged their own path with what is recognisably, though never explicitly, that most unheard-of-in-punk of all political philosophies: libertarianism. Educated, good-natured frontman Dexter Holland never once exhorts us to smash the system, extolling instead a philosophy of privacy, decency &, above all, self-determination. Alright, I earlier cited songs such as “Kill the President” &”L.A.P.D.” as proof of their hardcore lineage. But strip away the fashionable rage, & the key lyric of “Kill The President” is not “Kill the president”, but “A leader’s not the center of democracy”; “L.A.P.D.”, meanwhile, opens with, “When cops are taking care of business, I can understand/But the L.A. story’s gone way out of hand”, functioning like a disclaimer to inform unwary listeners that, even with the early, edgy Offspring, it’s not really an anti-police anthem in the tradition of “Police & Thieves” (Junior Murvin/The Clash), “Hate the Police” (The Dicks) or “Fascist Pig” (Suicidal Tendencies).

Elsewhere self-determination comes up again & again; “Staring at the Sun” is defiant in the face of a lousy world; “All I Want”‘s classic chorus is “Leave me alone, I’m not asking a lot/I just don’t want to be controlled/That’s all I want”. “The Meaning of Life” features the lines “Open wide and they’ll shove in their meaning of life/Not for me, I’ll do it on my own”. “I Choose”, in spite of its absurdity, is nevertheless a song about choice in life, & even wackier songs such as “Don’t Pick It Up” or “Way Down the Line” advocate personal responsibility in their own way; even the pseudo-mystical “Pay the Man” gets in some anti-government paranoia, “The Man is making little bets/Playing with our lives”. The incoherency of left-wing punk rage is repeatedly skewered in Offspring tracks like “Change the World”, “Cool to Hate”, & “One Fine Day”. Meanwhile, “Walla Walla”, “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated)”, “Genocide” & “Jennifer Lost the War” are accounts of incorrigible criminality. The concerns of a song like “Neocon” could easily be Green Day’s, but the objection is still against a centralisation of power. “Why Don’t You Get A Job?” ought, at this point, to speak for itself.

You might also notice that both bands’ love songs tend to be addressed to a similar sort of selfish, fucked-up woman; where, however, a liberal would feel compassionate about her problems – might, in fact, go as far as to romanticise them, as in Green Day songs such as “She”, “Extraordinary Girl”, “She’s a Rebel”, “Whatsername”, et cetera – The Offspring’s back catalogue bulges with songs of disdain for women who are irresponsible in their private lives: “Self Esteem”, “Feelings”, “She’s Got Issues”, “Want You Bad”, “Spare Me the Details”, “Why Don’t You Get a Job?” (again!).

So then is the personal political? Not quite, but it’s long been held that there is a left/right split that is purely philosophical***; leftwing individuals tend to emphasise collective responsibilities, even in apolitical scenarios, hence the collective politics of anarchism, communism, socialism & liberalism. Rightwingers on the other hand believe in personal responsibility, hence classic conservative ideas such as the limited state & the free market which, undiluted, make up some form or other of libertarianism. Given that, Johnny Ramone aside, punk rock’s only dalliance with any form of right-wing politics consists of Nazi punks of the sort the Dead Kennedys memorably told to “Fuck Off”, you can understand why The Offspring’s libertarianism is mostly buried within lyrics that recognisably fit with punk-rock rebellion, at least until examined together. Or perhaps these dancable, fashionable, popular songs were intended mostly as apolitical &, as it is for most people, personal values create entirely unconscious biases in ways of perceiving, feeling, & expression.

O, & by the way, neither band managed to write the perfect pop-punk song. That feat was accomplished by the otherwise unremarkable Jimmy Eat World, here.

*Yes, yes, down in front, put down your hand, I see you. Of course the previous decade gave us The Sonics, The Monks, The Seeds, The Velvet Underground, the MC5, & The Stooges, but all of these groups were (with the noble exception of general weirdoes the VU) parts of regional garage-rock scenes, & that their Beatles/Stones/Dylan/Kinks knock-offs were faster, nastier & snottier than those of their contemporaries does not mean that they, together, constitute a punk scene, only that they were stepping stones. In any case The Stooges & their scion Iggy Pop seemed to mean more to the Brits than they did to the Yanks, while The Velvet Underground’s main legacy is art-rock from Bowie through R.E.M. to Belle & Sebastian. However, it may be instructive to note that, just as pop-punk was dying in the early-00s, the garage-rock revival was reaching its peak, led by The White Stripes, The Hives, & The Vines. Feel free to visualise these briefly-overlapping periods of subgenre dominance as a series of sine waves.

**Proof: The Offspring took the CD reissue of their first LP as an opportunity to replace this badassery with this…thing.

***This footnote probably requires more citations, but a friend recommended Joe Feagin, “Subordinating the Poor: Welfare and American Beliefs”, 1975, available here, & Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, available here.

Directors, parodies, & auteur theory again

I’VE POSTED BEFORE ABOUT auteur theory; in that essay I’m dismissive of it as it promotes a misconception of the truly collaborative process of filmmaking. It is, however, undeniable that certain directors are not skilled craftsmen pursuing a trade, but rather creatives with a unique voice embarking on a series of artistic statements; in short, auteurs. Further, it occured to me in conversation with a friend that an indisputable way of testing positive for auteurism might be the following: could you produce a short film incorporating all the hallmarks of that director’s style, & have it be recognisable to a mainstream audience? I think the following list includes every one of the surprisingly few directors who would pass that test although it can, of course, be added to as necessary:

Alfred Hitchcock (hallmarks: black-&-white cinematography; thriller plots; innocent blonde women being put through Hell; Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant; brutal, tongue-in-cheek violence; mistaken identity; protagonists on the run, often from an insidious conspiracy; murder; a subtle self-cameo in each film)

Quentin Tarantino (hallmarks: easy, conversational dialogue frequently incorporating pop-cultural references; borrowings from older, often obscure, genre pictures; sudden outbursts of bloody violence, often played for dark comedy; repurposed pop hits of the 60s & 70s; (over)use of the word “nigger”; larger-than-life characters; men in dark suits; use of anachronic order; selfconscious selfreferentiality; a grating self-cameo)

David Lynch (hallmarks: corny Americana; strange, cold, but likeable protagonists; the mundane treated as surreal & vice versa; this pattern; cryptic encounters with visitors from spirit worlds; coffee; neo-noir; the 1950s; the idea of doubles; strange-looking old men; beautiful young women; the existence of absolute evil; slow-motion shots of electricity or fire; ethereal, jazzy scores, usually by Angelo Badalamenti; a scene in which the protagonist watches someone sing, or lip-sync to, a haunting tune in front of red velvet curtains)

David Cronenberg (hallmarks: body horror; weird sexuality; quack psychiatry; stories in which protagonists find themselves transformed, to their own delight & the horror of the audience; clinical, objectively-shot violence; a sense of sympathy for viruses, parasites or infections)

John Woo (hallmarks: “slow-motion wirework, flocks of doves, dual handguns with infinite ammo, villains as near-identical Shadow Archetypes“)

Christopher Nolan (hallmarks: mysterious stories, often in which some element key to viewers’ understanding is only  revealed towards the end; women in refrigerators; cinematography so dark & glossy it looks like black-&-white; single-minded, obsessed heroes; a cold, staccato Hans Zimmer score)

M. Night Shyamalan (hallmarks: mystery-style films, often with a supernatural element; enormous, sometimes illogical twist endings; gorgeous colour photography; increasingly obnoxious self-cameos)

Tim Burton (hallmarks: big, black-&-white stripes; perky Goths; Johnny Depp; Helena Bonham Carter; ham acting; stories in which misunderstood outsiders are goodies & normal folk are baddies; the comedic grotesque; an obsession with trash culture; an elaborate yet repetitive Danny Elfman score)

Wes Anderson (hallmarks: sensitive, yet damaged American men; Owen & Luke Wilson; super hip folk-pop soundtracks; a style that makes a virtue of its cheapness; dips into jerky stop-motion; anything that might be described as “quirky”)

Woody Allen (hallmarks: Woody Allen as protagonist; New York as setting; charming women improbably wooed by neurotic nebbishes; witty discussions of sex, death, & Jewish identity; jazz music; Russian literature & world cinema)

Sergio Leone (hallmarks: the Western; uninterrupted long takes, especially of breathtaking American landscapes; unwashed, unshaven, morally grey characters; intense Ennio Morricone scores; musical editing with operatic cuts, including close-ups of eyes & hands reaching toward holsters; physical comedy of an often cruel kind; meaningless violence, either senselessly protracted or occuring as quick outbursts)

Martin Scorsese (hallmarks: voiceover narration; long tracking shots; epic, character-driven stories, often of crime or corruption; frequent use of montage; frequent use of montage edited to “Gimme Shelter”; Robert De Niro as star (1973-1995); Leonardo DiCaprio as star (2002-present))

Steven Spielberg (hallmarks: family-friendly films, often centred on families; frequent suburban settings; absent or inadequate fathers; unexpectedly scary scenes in non-horror films; bathing scenes in light, especially to create a sense of eeriness; a love of spectacle & wonder; a sometimes cloying sentimentality; uplifting John Williams scores)