November 2008

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007: Man of the Left

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above

"Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above," said Noam Chomsky last week. "They come out of struggles from below. And the answer to what's next depends on people like you. Nobody else can answer it."

In Haiti and Bolivia, Chomsky went on to say, popular movement swept unlikely presidents to power in recent decades, and they didn't stop there.

I've already posted my opinion that Obama voters should step up their game rather than relax, and won't belabor the point. But I bring up Chomsky's speech because Haiti and Bolivia both figure heavily in the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. And Bond comes down on the side of the political left.

Maybe you have to have loved secret agent 007 and hated what his real-life counterparts do in the world for as long as I have to appreciate the explosiveness of a people's Bond. I went to the film last week after coming across Juan Cole's brilliant essay about it, and walked out exhilarated.

Cole's right, but that doesn't entirely explain the exhilaration. Bond and Bond girls are wrapped up in my childhood sexual awakening: I saw 1979's Moonraker when I was 9. The same year, I saw The War at Home, the documentary about Vietnam War-era protest, and my political adolescence kept pace. Cognitive dissonance isn't the term: In my imagination, cool violence in the name of Western empire is inexplicably sexy, while nonviolence for the people just can't compete.

Bond is sexy for reasons that predate him by millennia: The British intelligence agent is an erotic archetype because sex for its own sake, isolated from love or overwhelming it, is the definition of hot. Righteous killing requires strength and cool detachment, in theory, traits that are masculinity incarnate.

The books used Bond's allure as a way into their author's worldview. Thumb back to 007's debut, in Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale, and you find a work of almost intoxicated focus about steeling one's self for the Cold War. Fleming's fetishism in sensual and consumer detail is almost Story of O-like, and as vivid from the famous opening line: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning." Much as O passes through the contortions of mental resistance to what she will become, Bond questions his nature and the rightness of his purpose:

"[T]his country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date. Today we are fighting communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of conservatism we have today would have been damn near called communism, and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts."

Bond says these things to Rene Mathis, his trusted friend in the French Deuxieme Bureau, while sitting in bed recovering from torture to his genitals inflicted by a Communist spy. Mathis tells Bond to get himself a family:

"Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles."

[Mathis] laughed. "But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine."

Bond ignores that last bit of advice, and pays dearly for his lapse of moral certitude. He pays with chunks of his heart, chunks he later decides he's better off without. Coming to his senses, he sees the "Russian machine" as a clear expansionist threat in the last pages: "For them it was always safer to advance than to retreat."

The last line of the book carries the thud of finality: "The bitch is dead now." And Bond's callous misogyny is no accident: Softness on communism coincides in dear James with softness in general, with femininity, and 007 comes to regard this two-way door as one to be shut and bolted forever.



You don't have to be psychotic

You don't have to be psychotic, which Bond surely is, to find an ideal in Fleming's hysteria: Anyone getting up in the morning and dressing for work might enjoy thinking of himself or herself as ruthless or sleek. Bond is the eros of efficiency. And there's nothing in the 20 Bond-series films before 2006's Casino Royale, not even the one where he gets married, to suggest that there's anything wanting in this outlook.

Fleming's Bond, who went to doctors to receive shock therapy, became a harmless, gentlemanly sensualist in the film series, and you can mark our social progress by the subtle shift in Bond's charms from playful condescension to mutual utilitarianism. By 1995's GoldenEye, Bond had a stern female boss (Judi Dench), with whom he now has increasing sexual chemistry, and was enduring barbs about his status as a Cold War relic.

But 2006's Casino Royale is the first true anti-Bond in the series. And to understand Quantum of Solace, take a second look at its superior prequel. The movie Casino Royale pointedly includes the "bitch is dead" line from the book, yet extends a fourth act to undermine it. It's both the most Fleming Bond and the most anti-Fleming one, breaking from all previous continuity to start over, and for once get inside Bond's head. But it's a different head: Director Martin Campbell (who did GoldenEye), working from a script by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who wrote 1991's Let Him Have It), and a revised version by Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima), seems to understand Fleming for the first time, the better to utterly subvert him. Love in Casino Royale isn't a softening, but a hardening (puns with Bond are inevitable). It's a gamble with higher stakes than any mere playboy, emphasis on boy, would risk.

Bond isn't just a man now, but a working-class man. The Fleming Bond's obsession with the finer things has become modern Bond's amusement at the props and costumes of rich people. Did the filmmakers read Alexander Cockburn in 1987 before casting Daniel Craig in the role?

There was something a bit common... in all this insistence on the very best, as though Bond knew that in the end he was, as the elegant Dr No put it in [Richard] Maibaum's line in the movie, "nothing but a stupid policeman," on hire to the ruling class. Hence the great scene in From Russia With Love, when the class imposter Bond, played by a working-class boy from Edinburgh with a Scots burr in his voice, comes up against the other class impostor and psychopath Red Grant, played by Robert Shaw. "Red wine with fish," says [Sean] Connery, "I should have known." "I may take red wine with fish," Shaw hisses viciously, "But you're the one on your knees now."

Now, when a bartender asks Bond if he prefers his vodka martini shaken or stirred, Daniel Craig's 007 responds, "Do I look like I give a damn?"

This revisionism extends to a new physicality in the parkour-chase opening, empathy for the Third World that Bond always chases through, and a sobered treatment of international relations and law, not to mention fresh verve and texture in the filmmaking itself--who knew Campbell and company had it in them? Even the music dispenses with the Bond theme, John Barry's cherished surf-guitar riff, though there's at least one Bond-theme moment: 007's clean return to the poker table after a near-deadly attempt to keep him away, his smirk showing the pleasure of rivalry for its own sake. Craig's boyish glint registers the kind of liftoff usually achieved, in previous films, with outrageous action.

Bond films had always been about themselves, with each kink of the formula since 1964's Goldfinger replaying against audience expectations--the fetishism of Fleming turned into an international in-joke. Producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman kept the franchise in-house (at EON Productions at Pinewood Studios in England), passing Bond along as a family business to Broccoli's daughter, Barbara, and stepson Michael G. Wilson. Despite corporate concentration above (United Artists folding into MGM folding into Sony, and Pinewood into Shepperton), Bond remained a reliable product: No Bond film is all that much worse than another, though classics and embarrassments emerge. Product sameness offered Casino Royale an opportunity: The film isn't just revisionism, but a comedy of revisionism. It renounces each touchstone with a wink and a checklist.

And nothing in Casino Royale departs more dramatically from previous Bonds than its central love story. There's a lot of humor in the banter here between equals, but also a serious critique of Bondism: Where love and mission come into conflict here, the film sides with love. And Bond rises to the occasion of tenderness. Craig's 007 is a quiet rebuke of how Bond hollowed out the male ideal in the years when many American and British men were taking up the true mission of the Cold War: to repress hope in the Third World.

Not that Bond was ever political in the movies: 007 saved himself for escapist posterity with humor and by staying out of the conflicts people actually worried about. So Fleming's war on the International Communist Conspiracy was abandoned in favor of detente-era missions against private third parties, presaging the War on Terror. As Dr. Evil-style super-villains fell away, Bond stuck with consensus bogies of the post-Cold War era: drug kings, North Koreans, post-Soviet strongmen.



The real 007s, meanwhile, went underground

The real 007s, meanwhile, went underground: John F. Kennedy, who counted 1957's From Russian With Love among his Top Ten favorite books, launched his war on Cuba, including Bond-like attempts at assassination by cigar, in secret. By the time many of these crimes were made public in the 1975 Church Committee hearings, Fleming's worldview was in retreat. Bond kept returning unscathed by reality, and 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me (with Roger Moore relaxing into his handsomeness a bit), is one of the more memorably fun throwaways in the series, particularly the ski-chase opening. Yet Bond had already been eclipsed by anti-spies such as Warren Beatty in 1974's The Parallax View and Robert Redford in 1975's Three Days of the Condor, 007s for an era of CIA defectors.

Quantum of Solace owes a particular debt to The Bourne Identity, less the 1980 Robert Ludlum anti-spy novel than the 2002 film directed by Doug Liman, which dispenses with the book's conceit that Jason Bourne is innocent. Matt Damon's Bourne is a U.S. government assassin whose mind has been wiped clean by amnesia--a deeply evocative premise for Americans. One day he wakes up with only his muscle-memory intact. He's forgotten his mission, his employer, even his name. Without a past, he discovers that he is a conscientious person, albeit one with the apparent ability to kill people with his bare hands.

Bourne has lost his memory as a result of an incident in which he was unwilling to cross the line into utter depravity. In other words, he was already at least human enough that he put heart above mission. And fate rewards his choice, where it punished the 1953 Bond. Bourne gains his innocence. And he meets and falls in love with a woman with whom he has little in common besides the fact that she's obviously a good person. For Jason, that's enough.

Over and over, Bourne tosses away the guns he takes from his attackers. He keeps starting from scratch without violence, a riff that reaches its apex during the classic U.S. embassy sequence. Jason Bourne is the United States every few years, forgetting what we've done, and to whom, awaking once again amazed at our own power to do harm, rattled that anyone would wish harm on us, and yet somehow expecting it. We are edgy and plagued by nightmares, but believe we can use our power to put things right.

Compared to Bourne, even the new emo Bond is a stupid policeman. But then, Bourne loses focus as he beds his good woman like a good Bond, without any hint of curiosity about whether this, too, is programmed muscle memory. Action and revenge propel a final act and two sequels, where The Bourne Identity began with so much more.

In a similar way, Quantum of Solace reminds us of what happened in Casino Royale without exactly reminding us of why it matters. The emotional thread is there for you to notice now and understand on DVD, when you'll want to watch that amazing motorcycle stunt again. There's been carping about Quantum's plot leaps, humorlessness, incomprehensible action, and even the title (from an Ian Fleming short story). But it easily tracks and entertains better than most Bonds, from the scaffolding fight to that short trench coat on Gemma Arterton. If director Marc Forster loses Bond in his Bond film (a mild disaster compared to Monster's Ball), at least there's a character to lose.



Quantum of Solace is the first Bond to doubt his place in the world

Quantum of Solace is the first Bond to doubt his place in the world, as he did in Ian Fleming's book Casino Royale. Bond goes rogue, goes native, goes off the reservation, and goes off the deep end because he wants the bad guys worse than his bosses do. Like Bourne, he's moved by love, then revenge. And yet the lapse this time isn't his, but his bosses': Her Majesty's secret service has been compromised by economic interest, and so have Bond's old allies, the Americans.

In one key scene, the bad guy (Mathieu Amalric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) boasts of usurping democracy in Haiti for U.S. corporations, who wanted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide out because he raised the minimum wage to a dollar. In another scene, Bond dresses down CIA bro Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright, who once played Martin Luther King) for helping the North carve up Latin America in the name of coke and anticommunism. Look who's talking, says Felix, one policeman to another.

The story, hatched by Bond producer Michael G. Wilson (with a script by the Casino Royale team and Joshua Zetumer), has Bond joining forces with the villain's lover, played by Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko, the first Bond girl from the former Soviet Union. As Juan Cole writes,

Kurylenko, who grew up in a poor family headed by her mother, plays a Bolivian girl whose family was destroyed (and her mother and sister raped) by the haughty General Medrano. She is so organically a figure of the left that no distinction can be made between her private quest for vengeance on Medrano and the salvation of the pro-peasantry government of Bolivia.

The premise and players would be pleasure enough without the surprise gift of real-life condemnation from a Russian communist group (calling Kurylenko a traitor) and the more banal dismissal of a National Review provoked to run the following amazing sentence: "[T]he idea--and it is a hoary one--that the CIA is in the business of creating evil, right-wing dictatorships in Latin America is just laughable." (The link is my addition.)

The Bond theme now plays for Bolivians fighting against the privatization of water. It plays for Haiti, New Orleans's badly abused cousin. It plays for Latin America, where people don't laugh about U.S.-backed coups.

Most telling of all, Quantum of Solace treats the subject of rape without the playful overtones of Goldfinger or the erotic ones of 1989's License to Kill. The movie doesn't just crash the corporate-military party: It stands against violence in general, turning what Harry Saltzman called "sadism for the family" on its head. So when Bond turns death-machine at a performance of Tosca, there's no glee, and he soon learns that a British undercover was among his targets. When the big revenge scenes come, the movie doesn't revel in them, and the characters feel just as empty afterward.

So let the movie sell guns to people who'd buy them anyway. This is the first Bond to suggest that there's not much use for them.


Coda:



A classic scene from the 1966 Bond parody Our Man Flint.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 26, 2008 4:50 PM | Comments (2)

 

Don't celebrate, organize

This year a former City Pages writer won an Oscar and a former community organizer from the South Side of Chicago got elected President. In the months in between, I've seen far-flung friends and family playing a larger role in public life. I met half my neighbors face to face, and saw people who wouldn't have considered themselves "political" ten years ago getting involved. A few days ago, the phenomenally unpopular sitting president went on television to defend capitalism itself, something I'd never thought he'd need to do.

The country has changed. And the shift is one of expectations, a sense of possibility, and--what's the word I'm looking for?--hope. "None of us truly dared to believe that we would see it happen in our lifetime," writes Irma McClaurin about the election of our first African American president--or, as the woman videotaping at Howard on election night put it, "This is unbelievable!" Obama supporters danced in the streets of Minneapolis, while in Madison, Wisconsin, warm weather left half the city's windows open to hear the roar at the announcement. Multiply those scenes by the blue and dark purple across the map below, and imagine the combined tear-flow, text-message data, and joyful-cry decibels.

Yet even before Brian Williams announced, "There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation," I'd begun to take Barack Obama at his word that this election was about us rather than him. Not just those who sacrificed so that something like this might happen, as John McCain movingly acknowledged, or those who made Obama's campaign itself a kind of movement ("All of this happened because of you," he wrote volunteers that night). And not just McCain voters, for whom Sarah Palin represents progress against the double standard and a point from which there's no going back.

The purple nation above behaved for once as if we lived in a democracy. And I have to admit, I'd begun to lose heart. The apparent effects of global warming, the destruction of New Orleans, and the corporatization of nearly everything left me shell-shocked, wondering how these threats could pass into fact in my lifetime without any accompanying change in the country's political pitch. The trauma of 9/11 and the rapid defeat of the Taliban left me doubting my feelings about empire. I opposed the Iraq war, but with less vigor than I should have. I lost faith with the American left, who turned out to be right.

I teach in schools, advocate in my writing, keep up, and vote, but that's not quite the same thing as believing that humanity can save itself. I opened up an Erich Fromm book in high school, and socialist humanism has been my starting point ever since. Yet I only truly believe in rock and roll.

Obama is a rock and roll culmination, though he looks more like a rude boy or somebody on the cover of a Blue Note record. He'll be the first president to know who Jay-Z is, or count The Wire as his favorite television show (favorite character: Omar, the gay ghetto folk hero who robs drug dealers). Obama's blackness is natural and assumed in a modern way, as with so many kids from "mixed" families, something the Rhymesayers can understand. And his identity isn't just an idea or political bullshit about narratives: Being black affects how he speaks to us and how he thinks about politics. You can wonder idly if Obama takes The Wire to heart on education, the drug war, or counterinsurgency (he may yet become the Lyndon Johnson of Afghanistan). But it's reassuring to observe that he could teach The Wire's characters a thing or two about gamesmanship, overnight learning, and leading by talking.

Obama is a winner, and he calculated long ago that he would not win on New Orleans, despite fate serving up the issue on a silver platter. Nor would he win on justice for the Palestinians (leaving others to counter the shameful smear of Rashid Khalidi or point out that there's nothing wrong with being Arab or Muslim). Obama further decided he would not win by taking on Wall Street or big insurance, and that nothing good could come of revisiting the issue of the Vietnam War, though most Americans still believe it was morally wrong, not just a mistake. He has selected Rahm Emanuel, a rejectionist on Israel who pushed through NAFTA under Bill Clinton, for his chief of staff (more here). Yet I find it significant that Obama has also decided he won't insult us.

"I will be your president too," he said to those who didn't vote for him. And there's ample reason to believe Obama will persuade. (He was the Denzel Washington to McCain's Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide, below.) But I also know that in Washington, compromise can be a euphemism for splitting the difference between power and the powerless, money and those without, the wisdom of pod people and good sense.

The only way to tip the balance is organization, as Obama knows. His finest moment in the campaign came when he answered Wolf Blitzer's inane debate question about why the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, if he were alive, would endorse Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or Barack Obama:

"Well, I don't think Dr. King would endorse any of us. I think what he would call upon the American people to do is to hold us accountable, and this goes to the core differences, I think, in this campaign.

"I believe change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. Dr. King understood that.

"It was those women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus, union workers who are willing to take on violence and intimidation to get the right to organize. It was women who decided, 'I'm as smart as my husband. I'd better get the right to vote.'

"Them arguing, mobilizing, agitating, and ultimately forcing elected officials to be accountable, I think that's the key.

"So that has been a hallmark of my career, transparency and accountability, getting the American people involved. That's how we're going to bring about change. That's why I want to be president of the United States, to respect the power of the American people to bring about change."

This was his message to us: that the election of Barack Obama would only be the start. That it could only be the start. Obama is not Martin Luther King, and he is not King's dream. Obama is not a moral leader, and he doesn't pretend to be one. King would have condemned the rhetoric of "taking out" bin Laden, though that kind of talk helped get Obama elected. A moral leader risks being unpopular, as King became in the last years of his life. A moral leader does not become president. He pressures the president.

That's what we need to do, in greater numbers than ever. If you've ever considered becoming politically active, now is the time to see what that might look like and feel like on a regular basis, as important an investment as that second job you might have to take to make ends meet. Only massive street demonstrations moved FDR to introduce the New Deal, while those who've spent a lifetime dismantling it don't need protests, only money. Many who took Bill Clinton's victory as an excuse to sleep remember getting NAFTA, the Telecom Act, and the exploding prison industrial complex as a result. Now we have the advantage of optimism, the internet, and sheer numbers, all despite an economic downturn.

Don't celebrate, organize.

Coda:

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 16, 2008 7:32 PM | Comments (0)

 

Charge Max Hardcore's prosecutors with obscenity

Following up on "Free Max Hardcore" below, I argue over at womensspace that by the same logic applying to this case, the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys should all be brought up on obscenity charges for showing Max Hardcore videos to a Tampa, Florida, jury:

If a prosecutor shot a juror with a gun to demonstrate how a murder took place, he’d be arrested and charged with murder. If she handed out cocaine to a jury and urged jurors to sniff, she’d be thrown out or worse. By allowing Max Hardcore videos to be shown in court, as evidence of themselves (and not of, say, a criminal act being depicted), the judge demonstrated that they are speech. They communicate, demonstrate, and illustrate. Nothing in the mechanics of offering, showing, and viewing the video in that courtroom was any different than when somebody in Florida pops a Max Hardcore DVD onto the player at home...

I also express my depression over the fact that a pro-obscenity-law element (however minor) still persists among active anti-sexists:

To me, it’s as if a small but surprisingly influential faction of the anti-war crowd had siphoned human energy into opposing pro-war films, then gloated when a pro-war director got sentenced to years in prison for making one. To me it’s worse than wrongheaded or beside the point: It’s vocally siding with the forces of repression that encourage violence in the first place.

One thing President Obama could do to reverse this hugely wasteful diversion of government energy would be to encourage the justice department to drop anything from the "Obscenity" portion of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, thus freeing up more staff and resources to prosecute child pornography. I wonder if DOJ employees wouldn't secretly rejoice at such as shift in priorities, especially after watching God-knows-how-much Max Hardcore as part of their homework.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 10, 2008 4:13 PM | Comments (0)

 

Vote on Tuesday, and bring friends

Democracy: Practice makes perfect. Find your polling place in any state at www.voteforchange.com. It's easier than even pollfinder.sos.state.mn.us for Minnesotans, and Republicans can ignore the Obama logo (though I imagine the neighbors it suggests bringing to polls are Democrats). See Mapquest for directions and Metrotransit for Minneapolis/St. Paul bus schedules and maps. If you want to vote Monday Nov. 3, use an absentee ballot in person at your county election office, which you can locate in Minnesota here. View your complete ballot in Minnesota at Startribune.com/politics (click "all of the candidates," top left), and visit the League of Women Voters Minnesota for more. Elections are Tuesday, November 4, from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Get in line by 8:00 p.m. and you should be able to vote no matter how long it takes. In Minnesota, you can register to vote the same day as the election. To register, you have three options: 1.) Bring ID with your current address (Minnesota driver’s license, MN learner’s permit, state ID card, tribal photo ID with your signature, or notice of late registration sent to you), 2.) Bring ID with old address (any of the above ID, or a tribal ID without an address, a U.S. passport, a U.S. military ID, or a MN student ID) plus a utility bill with your current address (anything due in the past 30 days, including gas, electric, waste, water, sewer, phone, TV, internet, rent statement, or current student fee statement), or 3.) Bring a person to vouch for you, someone else registered in your precinct who can swear that you live there.

In Minnesota, ex-felons can vote. You can vote in Minnesota if you are a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years old, and have lived in Minnesota for at least 20 days. Call the Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE if you have any questions about registration, voting rights, or what's happening at the polls. The line is answered in Somali, Hmong, Spanish, and English. See also the Election Protection Wiki. Hat tip to Insight News and www.voteforchange.com for the info.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 3, 2008 9:14 AM | Comments (0)

 

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