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FinancialeExpress.com: Bond with the best.
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FinancialeExpress.com
Bond with the best
Gadgets, stunts, weapons, locales apart, it is the character of Bond that makes the films live on SANDIPAN DEB Sunday, November 12, 2006
Casino Royale releases this Friday, the 21st “official” James Bond film (23rd in reality), featuring the new (6th) Bond: Daniel Craig. The most successful film series ever is in its 44th year now, and has earned more than $3.8 billion so far purely from box office receipts, video and music income and so on not included. The films have been watched by more than 1.5 billion people. For all we know, Bond films will keep getting made till the world ends, or as long as movies last. What is it about this character? Of course, the action has always been extraordinary, the locales spectacular, the weapons stylishly absurd, and the women alluring. Computer technology and rising budgets (from $1 million for Dr No to $142 million for Die Another Day) has impossibly scaled up the stunts and the destruction. But none of these factors fully explains the series’ astonishing popularity. The only core reason can be the character of Bond himself.
I don’t think anyone today reads the 14 Bond books that Ian Fleming wrote. The writing is pedestrian, the dialogue stilted, and often, the story doesn’t move fast enough. The literary Bond (if the word “literary” can be used at all in this context) is not even an attractive character, and it seems Fleming had no intention of making him such.
He has no inner life, except for a rare occasion in Goldfinger, where he mused that “as a secret agent who held the rare Double-O prefix—the licence to kill in the Secret Service—it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon. If it happened, it happened. Regret was unprofessional—worse, it was a death-watch beetle in the soul.”
The most interesting aspects of the novels to me, in fact, are the imaginative titles, the villains’ and heroines’ names, and some really exotic information that Fleming obsessively hunted out and used. Look at these: Auric Goldfinger, Francisco Scaramanga, Dr Julius No, Hugo Drax. Or Honeychile Rider, Mary Goodnight, Kissy Suzuki, Gala Brand. When Bond is poisoned by Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love, the poison is tetrodotoxin, which is obtained from the sex organs of the Japanese fish fugu.
I am sure many learned treatises have been written on Bond the man; he must have been scrutinised and dissected by every sort of academic, from cultural theorist to feminist historian, anthropologist to semiotician. I am also sure that all of them would have reached the same conclusion: Bond is attractive because he is dangerous, amoral about women (which makes him a role model for men and that impossible hence infinitely desirable catch for women), he’s task- focused yet indolent, and he kills. Perhaps someone also read the frequent release of bullets from Bond’s Walther PPK as an ejaculation metaphor.
The crucial and defining difference between the literary Bond and the cinema Bond is sense of humour. Astonishingly, the literary Bond has none, while the film Bond’s wry observations are at the very heart of the Bond films .
I have a simpler theory and a larger question. First, the question. Why do Bond films seem like some eternal franchise when the books have vanished from the shelves two decades ago? Let’s face it, Bond gets studied in academia because of the films, not the books. So here’s my theory about what makes Bond more attractive than all other film series heroes, from Sherlock Holmes to Luke Skywalker, from Tarzan to Jason Bourne.
The film Bond is the same man as the paper Bond, though obviously better looking. But the key, crucial and defining difference between the literary Bond and the cinema Bond is sense of humour. Astonishingly, the literary Bond has none, while the film Bond’s wry observations are at the very heart of the Bond films, especially the ones he makes after sending someone to his Maker.
In Thunderball, he shoots a man with a spear gun, and deadpans: “I think he got the point.” In The Spy Who Loved Me, a motorcycle henchman goes off a cliff in a cloud of feathers. “All those feathers and he still can’t fly,” Bond shrugs. In Live And Let Die, Bond throws a killer out of the window, but the man’s prosthetic remains stuck in the window. “Just being disarming, darling,” Bond tells his girl.
This low-humour bent has been maintained through all the movies, though in the two movies starring the dour Shakespearean actor Timothy Dalton, one could fail to notice the laughs. It’s his deadpan one-liners that make Bond so cool, so macho, and in a way so absurd that it’s very comfortable dealing with him.
At his core, he’s just a clown who knows he’s a clown and doesn’t take himself seriously. He is laughing at himself and his coolness as much as we are. That’s what, I think, makes Bond different from all the others. He will never be mythic, but he will always be loved and enjoyed.
Trouble is, in all the promotional material of Casino Royale, Daniel Craig looks like he’s never smiled in his life.
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