Review: DoubleShot, by Raymond Benson

New York: Putnam, 2000, pp. 272.

As if conscious of having deviated too much from the usual pattern of the Bond adventures in High Time to Kill, DoubleShot hews more closely to Fleming's novels--actually appearing assembled from parts taken from several of them. As with Casino Royale the book is rather nonlinear, opening in media res--at a climactic moment, in fact--and then flashes back to trace the development of the situation. In that opening we see a Bond apparently brainwashed by the enemy to strike a blow against his country, as in the opening of The Man With the Golden Gun; and then it cuts to the bad guys' plotting revenge on Bond and Britain in the course of pursuing larger goals, like From Russia With Love. Afterward it cuts back to Bond coping with the loss of a woman with whom he had been personally involved, a result of the blackmail directed against her--a touch of Casino Royale again, but more than a touch of You Only Live Twice (Benson referencing the events of that book in case we missed it, and even writing in James Molony--old Sir Miles Messervy's psychiatrist friend).

There is, too, a Fleming-like emphasis on Bond's being a long-battered soldier of the secret wars--if with a new spin. That Bond has taken so many blows to the head (the most recent in the oxygen-deprived conditions atop Kangchenjunga in High Time) is a crucial plot point. As a result, Bond is suffering from blackouts, and perhaps worse than that--which not only leads to Bond pulled from the field, but to his being on the wrong side of his own Service once more. It might be added that in contrast with the movie-like action of previous Benson novels, there is an emphasis on grounded fight scenes rather than high-tech equipment, protracted vehicular chases and big explosions.

The result is that the earlier chapters often feel more like a psychological thriller, but it is back to the accustomed international intrigue well before the midpoint--and Benson does not wholly eschew the cinematic touches. Bond is again on the run from the Service--and his involvement with twin CIA agents Heidi and Hedy Taunt (the womens' characterizations, the type of comedy their initial meeting entailed, and of course, where it all leads up) is the sort of thing fans of the Roger Moore movies are prepared to enjoy and which their detractors hate. There is, too, something not often associated with Bond, namely a rather political plot: the villain, Domingo Espada, means to take over Spain as a Franco-like dictator, with his movement to recover Gibraltar from Britain a major move in the game.

The result is a mix of the derivative, and of the awkward. While I am more favorably disposed than many to the Moore era, the fact remains that we are ultimately expected to take the Taunt twins seriously in a way the Moore era would have, and Benson does not succeed in getting us to do so (though I don't think anyone else would have either). Additionally the rather political scenario mixes poorly with the usual hand-waving regarding supervillain motivations and the matching of means to end. More development was required to make the premise credible, and the book not only suffers from the weakness of this element, but gave the impression of a missed opportunity.

Still, DoubleShot has its strengths. The unlikely combination of old and new elements somehow geled better in the reading experience than it had a right to do, as a result of which it was not just a brisker read than the preceding book (bogged down as it was by its chronicle of Bond and company stop-and-going up a mountain), but a smoother one--the tale undeniably hokey, but manages to be fun.

Review: High Time to Kill, by Raymond Benson

New York: Putnam, 1999, pp. 304.

Raymond Benson's High Time to Kill, his third James Bond novel (film novelizations apart), is also the first in a trilogy depicting a multi-volume war between 007 and the international criminal organization known as "the Union."

That war opens with a murder at a dinner party Bond attends, and only narrowly misses stopping, then gets seriously underway when Union agents steal the data from a secret British government technical breakthrough relevant to the development of hypersonic aircraft, "Skin 17." Bond is assigned to recover the microfilm containing the key information, setting in motion an international chase that leads to the plane carrying the Union agent with the goods crashing atop Mount Kangchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world. To enable Bond to continue the pursuit M assigns him to join the mountain-climbing expedition ostensibly going to recover the bodies, as other nations (the Russians, the Chinese) send teams of their own, and a Union agent on Bond's own team contrives to beat him to the punch . . .

As might be expected given that High Time is a Bond novel, it reads rather like a Pierce Brosnan-era film--not least in its opening which gets Bond into an early action sequence that also hints at the stuff of the later plot, its gadget-packed car chase heavy on late '90s digital technology (for better or worse), and Bond's generally less stoic and more flamboyant demeanor (more on which later). There is also considerable use of Fleming's material, including Benson's by this point familiar incorporation of minor Fleming characters into the storyline (the Governor of the Bahamas--now ex-Governor, of course--from "Quantum of Solace" and the shooting range Instructor from Moonraker).

However, less expectedly Benson evokes very strong parallels between the events of this novel, and Fleming's earlier works. The parallel one might suspect between the Union and SPECTRE is played up rather than down, Benson making it explicit when he has Bond himself think that what he saw of the Union recalled to him his battles with SPECTRE early in the novel, while the Union's boss makes a very Blofeld-like initial appearance. (Le Gerant, like Ernst Stavro before him, heads up a meeting of the Union's senior chiefs at which he metes out deadly and exemplary summary punishment of a traitor to the organization.) A key relationship in the story also contains a good deal of Casino Royale . . .

More surprising still is the mid-point turn in the course of the story, from typical Bondian globetrotting heroics to the Kangchenjunga expedition. The insertion of Bond into a group in this manner, his having to be a Team Player (rather than his being attached to a team) is much less Bond movie or Fleming novel than it is John Gardner. The same goes for the emphasis on that team battling the elements in a cold and remote place--as Gardner had it do in his own third book, Icebreaker.1

The mix of elements struck me as problematic. The Union's effectively being SPECTRE II, and the evocation of Vesper Lynd in Bond's central romance ended up weak repetitions of past adventures, rather than resonant echoes of them--and they made an unsatisfactory fit with the newer material. The industrial espionage that is the chase after the vaguely described Skin 17 is a questionable choice of opening battle for Bond to fight with these successors to Blofeld and company. And time and again, the mix of screen Bond with book Bond proves problematic, with the Fleming evocation highlighting this. As in Moonraker, Bond has a scene on the SIS shooting range with the Instructor, a man extremely grudging in his praise who would never let Bond know he is the best shot in the Service--but where Fleming's Bond showed no need for such validation from the man, professionally concerning himself only with his proper business on the range, Benson's Bond, in rather undignified fashion, tries to force him to admit that his performance was in fact pretty good, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

However, perhaps the biggest problem of all is the awkwardness of the fit of the Kangchenjunga episode with the stuff of Bond's adventures. Making the ultra-individualistic Bond--this Bond who wouldn't even let the Instructor's stinginess with praise slide--over into a functional, effective member of a larger team is far from easy. And while the ultra-urbane Bond is an outdoorsman and a sportsman, competent on the slopes and in tropical waters, something seems lost when he doesn't return from them to his fast car to drive to his luxury hotel to enjoy a fine meal at the end of the day. Immersed in a group, doing right by it, especially without the familiar Bondian props, the Team Player in the Wilderness is reduced to a cipher, as Gardner unintentionally demonstrated time and again in the various novels where he pursued such an approach.

High Time to Kill did not change my mind about this--and unlike in some of Gardner's efforts (Win, Lose or Die notably) the adventure element did not really compensate for this break with the accustomed pattern of the adventures. After all, the climb dominating the second half of the book is rather a glaring plot hole. That a helicopter could have been used to reach the site and recover the microfilm almost immediately is not even mentioned, though in fact the Aerospatiale Lama helicopter developed specifically to meet the requirements of the Indian and Nepalese militaries for helicopters suited for high-altitude operations in the Himalayas, would have been up to the job and not at all difficult to come by. (And its appearance would certainly have been more logical than the use the Union made of a Hind helicopter earlier in the story.)

Additionally, there is the drawn-out, repetitive, stop-and-go nature of high-altitude climbing, to which the book is all too faithful--the team ascending partway, then establishing a Base Camp and acclimatizing before starting the next phase of the climb. This does not help foster a sense of urgency, or flow, instead setting us up for a sequence of disconnected incidents--alas, not very interesting incidents. The rivals to Bond's team are not much of a presence in the book, mentioned more than seen, save in one confrontation that plays more like a prank (not least, on account of its scatological element) than anything else, and the reader easily forgets they are out there for much of the rest of the narrative.

Meanwhile, Benson derives little suspense from Bond's relations with the other members of his own team. This is partly a matter of Bond not getting to be Bond here--but partly also of the characterization of his rival and eventual foe on the team, Roland Marquis. Even while the reader knows that he is a traitor intent on nasty business from the start, he seems more dangerous for his oafishness than his treacherousness, the principal worry for a significant part of the narrative that his stupid one-upsmanship and showing-off (amplified by the altitude sickness to which they are subject) will get them into some kind of trouble—-as when he starts shooting cans and bottles on ground their Sherpa porters consider sacred.

Indeed, it all makes for an at best passable first half, followed by a weak second half. Things pick up somewhat in the characters' final approach to the peak and the microfilm, at which point they get to finally start making their real moves--but these are far from enough to save the adventure. In the end this leaves High Time working as neither a Bond tale of the more grounded type (as DoubleShot does), nor as an over-the-top, blockbuster-movie-crammed-between-covers (at which Never Dream of Dying is far more effective). In fact, it strikes me as the least satisfying of the novels he penned for the series--and it does not surprise me that Benson's subsequent books took different courses.

1. Some of these elements cropped up in many a subsequent Gardner novel--among them Role of Honor, where Bond wound up working a programmer in a video game company (how un-Bondian is that?!); and Win, Lose or Die, where Bond was in the Royal Navy and in charge of a superpower conference's security aboard the HMS Invincible.

For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.

The James Bond Films and the R-Rating

In the 1960s the Bond films virtually invented the action movie as we know it. In the decade that followed, however, they lost their earlier, cutting-edge place.

This was in part a matter of new trends, 1970s audiences going for crime-themed, urban action at one end, and science fiction spectaculars at the other, but this was by no means all of it. There was, too, a sense of the Bond films as softer stuff, a function of their getting more parodic and gimmicky, but also of action movies in general getting harder-edged at the same time. Apart from the spectaculars of Lucas and Spielberg, big action was nearly synonymous with the R-rating through the '70s and '80s--the years of Dirty Harry and Death Wish, of Rambo and Schwarzenegger, of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard--while the Bond movies kept the violence, the sex and the language PG.

The Bond films adapted to some extent, in Licence to Kill in fact producing an R-rated film, which was trimmed just enough to get the PG-13 under which it was released (you can check out a comparison of the two versions here), and generally stuck with that rating as the series continued through the '90s--while the genre as a whole went PG-13, the R-rated films largely exiting the market. (Indeed, the last real R-rated action megahit was none other than The Matrix, way back in 1999.1)

In hindsight it seems that this may have had its impact on the reboot. The disappearance of R-rated competition made Bond's moving in a less flamboyant, more brutal direction seem more plausible because in the current market, PG-13 was as "dark and gritty" as a movie needed to get to merit the label.

1. The Expendables franchise, by contrast, has been a success on a much smaller scale, and anyway, sold on nostalgia.

Rethinking Jupiter Ascending

That the Wachowski siblings' Jupiter Ascending would get anything but a brutal reception was a long shot.

After all, it has long been fashionable to bash these particular filmmakers. Disappointment with the Matrix sequels (some of it reasonable, some of it not), the predictable reaction to a Hollywood version of Speed Racer, the reception of Cloud Atlas did anything but assure a warm welcome for the movie.

That Jupiter Ascending is a space opera did anything but help--the genre being notoriously high-risk. Star Wars may have become a Marvel-style movie machine, with Episode VII a $2 billion grosser and the prospects for Rogue One looking bright--but audiences are much less likely to go for them than films with a milder science fiction touch (like superheroes), and the negative response to the great majority that don't win them over is often wildly exaggerated. Perhaps the only non-Star Wars, non-Trek film to score an undisputed success of this type has been 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy--the beneficiary of a summer of weak competition, the Marvel brand name, and even its own slightness and overfamiliarity. Anything "weirder" or more ambitious--and this was indeed the case with Jupiter--is that much more likely to suffer for being so (as Jupiter did).

All the same, this is far from the full explanation for the hostility. The film too obviously repeated much that was in the Matrix trilogy. Once again, an ordinary person of our time--perhaps even less than ordinary--experiences unusual goings-on culminating in a meeting with a mystery man who makes very clear to them that, unbeknownst to all of us we are really being farmed by an exploitative, monstrous power for its own sustenance; and that they may be the key to humanity's salvation from this fate. Chases and fights ensue, culminating in the hero's choosing to undertake a mission of rescue in which they confront and defeat an enemy, achieve a partial victory, and then after contemplating its meaning, soar into the sky above a modern metropolis in what seems a sure prelude to further adventures.

All this is not to deny that there were differences. The handling of the material is bolder in respects--particularly the political themes. It is easy to mistake The Matrix for just another Frankenstein complex story about out-of-control AI (especially if one just focuses on the first film). However, that this is a case of humans exploiting other humans through a brutal, hierarchical system of high-technology and elaborate deception, with a tiny, hyper-privileged, colossally cynical and arrogant and utterly repugnant elite at the top literally stealing the lives of those at the bottom is unmistakable in Jupiter. The movie also manages to not look like a pale imitation of The Matrix, satisfactorily trading cyberpunk imagery for the space operatic kind. And of course, there is much difference in the plot structure--as our heroine Jupiter successively confronts each of the Abrasax siblings in turn.

However, the sharper political edge likely did not endear it to many a critic and viewer (likely biasing many the other way, many of whom responded in predictably disingenuous, passive aggressive fashion by getting overcritical); the science fiction imagery, while suitably lavish, and more original than that of so many more successful films (Man of Steel, for example, the opening scenes of which looked as overfamiliar as they did ornate), comes across as less distinctive, sharp or fresh than the first Matrix film's visuals; and the comparative novelty of the plot structure (where a wedding is disrupted by the guy who yells "I object!" long before the closing scene), which I found appealing, may have been off-putting to those more strictly insistent on action-movie formula. The result was, once again, that a genre film that was rather more competently assembled and with a good deal more on its mind than most (and not without its charm) was subjected to an exaggerated and unfortunate hostility.

On Rewatching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I and II (1990, 1992)

What I said about G.I. Joe recently applies to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well, even though I recall watching more of the series (the time slot was more convenient, among things), and having become more fond of it: my memories were faint and few, little more than what we know from the theme song of the original cartoon (perhaps the only piece of writing by Chuck Lorre for which I can claim any real fondness), and the fact that Shredder (voiced by Will Smith's Uncle Phil!) added the word "cretin" to my budding vocabulary.

I didn't finish the original TMNT series. (Frankly, I doubt I saw anything after season three.) My interest more generally had lapsed enough that I only caught the third of the live-action films on a commercial channel years after its 1994 release. And I haven't given much thought to the franchise since--entirely missing the 2003 revival (an interesting article about which you can find here, by the way), and running across only a little of the current small-screen incarnation on Nickelodeon. I haven't bothered to see the 2007 animated film, or the Michael Bay cinematic revival.

Still, when Syfy Channel recently ran the first two films in the old trilogy, I left them on.

Two things about the films jumped right out at me.

One is that the turtle suits had a charm that the new CGI turtles (well, what I've seen of them in the commercials for the newer movies) simply don't have. I certainly don't regard myself as a CGI-basher (I've been more favorably disposed toward the technology's use from the Star Wars prequels forward than most), but Dial H for Houston's description of them as looking "like The Hulk’s hobo bastard children" strikes me as essentially on the mark.

More significantly I was struck by how little bombast there was in the films--either at the level of plot or spectacle. There was no question of the world or even the city really being at stake. (In the first film Shredder's manipulating disaffected youths into committing petty street crime; in the second, he doesn't even have that much of a plan to advance himself on the road to power.) And what can be said of the plot can be said of the action--the fight choreography clean and simple (clearly predating the Jackie Chan-style frenzies of punches, kicks and blocks that became standard for Hollywood in the mid-'90s), and the scale of the battles limited, no city blocks (or cities!) getting wrecked.

I suppose that watching it back at the time of release TMNT was less flashy than my ideal Turtles movie would have been--but seeing it more recently, after the more spectacular, over-the-top approach has become so commonplace and so shopworn, the difference was actually refreshing.

It helped, too, that the moviemakers didn't take any of it too seriously, especially when making the lighter, funnier second film. (Everyone who has seen the climactic fight scene at the waterfront nightclub where a certain rapper was performing a certain song knows exactly what I mean.)

The Singularity Hits Hollywood: Transcendence and Chappie

Wally Pfister's Transcendence (2014) is a Frankenstein story--one that hews so closely to the plotline of Mary Shelley's book that there would have been some grounds for passing it off as a remake. The movie actually uses as a framing device the scientist who created the monster recounting the central course of events from after the disaster--a course which began with horror at the untimely death of someone close to him, and a desperate attempt to reverse it that initially seemed benign, but produced an intelligence that proved violent, and produced fear for the fate of the world.

If Transcendence treaded the familiar "Frankenstein complex" path--and did so in fairly solemn fashion--Neil Blomkamp's Chappie (2015) went in the direction of that great critic of the Frankenstein complex, Isaac Asimov. The story also revolves around the creation of an artificial intelligence--but one unconnected with the taboo about the line between life and death--and the result is no monster. Instead Chappie is a child--albeit a misunderstood child--just beginning to learn about the world, who inspires maternal feelings in the woman in whose care he winds up (just as in Asimov's "Lenny"). While saying very much more would mean more spoilers than I care to present in this post, consciousness uploading is not something monstrous here, but the happy ending to the tale.

I, for one, much preferred Chappie--in part because Asimov's outlook appeals to me much more than Shelley's, but also because the film itself is simply more intelligent and more entertaining. Those who follow AI research to any degree, or simply read a lot of science fiction about the subject, would be hard-pressed to point to a live-action Hollywood movie that is as open-minded about the subject, or as idea-packed in its treatment of it. And the truth is that the titular robot is a very engaging creation, whose misadventures manage to be thought-provoking, funny, and at times touching.

In fact, while less well received by the critics, I frankly preferred it to Blomkamp's prior films. Watching the Academy Award for Best Picture nominee District 9 and Elysium I got the impression that I was in each case watching two different films welded together. The first seemed to be the film Blomkamp really wanted to make--a film with big ideas and some human drama--which he attached to the second, an action movie that he made simply to give the project a chance in today's market, but which just didn't have the same inventiveness or vitality, as if Blomkap was only going through obligatory motions. In Chappie the science fiction drama and the action movie flowed together much more smoothly.

Still, different as their approaches were I couldn't help being struck by what Transcendence and Chappie also had in common in their being major, commercial Hollywood films dealing not just with the theme of artificial intelligence (counting these, and Her, and others, I think we haven't seen so much film about this since the '80s), but specifically the transhumanist and posthumanist possibilities the technology opens up (e.g. mind uploading), and that in the terms of contemporary discussion. Transcendence derives its title from Dr. Will Caster's preferred alternative term to "Singularity" (explicitly referenced in the movie), and while it ends up walking a very familiar path, the details reflect an attentiveness to the concept of an "intelligence explosion." And Chappie breaks with popular sf's usual horror story attitude in taking a more benign view of the possibility.

Does this suggestion that ideas about AI, intelligence explosion, Singularity, posthumanism and the rest are enjoying a greater popular currency say anything about the actual likelihood of these developments? The history of previous cinematic fascinations with technology would suggest this is unlikely. Certainly the '80s-era rush of AI-themed movies that gave us The Terminator (1984), Weird Science (1985) and Short Circuit (1986) was no proof that a breakthrough in strong AI (as was expected by some at the time) was imminent--and indeed it was not. (The history of efforts to produce a fifth generation computer at the time is today an obscure footnote.) But at the same time watching these films I was struck by their far greater sophistication in their treatment of their subject than the films of the '80s--perhaps hinting at our generally having a better handle on the issue. And that might be indicative of our moving in such a direction.

Of G.I. Joe and James Bond

Watching 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I was, of course, struck by the ways in which the film was derivative of the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me--in its undersea fortress and stolen missile scheme, and to some extent, even its tossing in an affair between Duke and Baroness.

While noting this in my book (shameless plug time) James Bond's Evolution, I didn't give the matter all that much thought. As is the case with most of the other cartoons of the 1980s I haven't seen since, I remembered little more than opening credits sequences and theme songs, a few character designs and quirks, the essential pattern of the public service announcements ("Knowing is half the battle!"), at most a small shred of a scene or two.

Still, more recently running into reruns of the old mid-'80s Sunbow-produced series (to go by what I see on fan sites, still the canonical, "real" Joe to most), I have had occasion to think again about the influences and resemblances, above and beyond the broad way in which the Bond film series was a model for later action-adventure (cinematic pacing and structure, the subject matter, scaling, photography and editing of action sequences) in general--and which seems less surprising the more I learn about the series' history.1

Larry Hama's creation of G.I. Joe is, after all, an outgrowth of an attempt to spin off Marvel's Nick Fury--Marvel's answer to the '60s era spy craze James Bond did so much to explode (however much the conception diverged in later years). And it shows in the similarity of the conception. Like James Bond, Joe takes a popular genre of globe-trotting action-adventure devoted to an over-the-top version of intelligence, covert operations and low-intensity warfare in the contemporary "real world" (as it was the '80s, paramilitary/techno-thriller action rather than spies) and turns down its usual political charge to the end of appealing to the widest possible audience. A certain amount of flag-waving remained part of the package, G.I. Joe highlighting its heroes' nationality, the subtitle in the Sunbow-Dic era "A Real American Hero," appearing on the screen as the main cast stands pumping its fists in front of a giant American flag at the end of the opening titles. However, as in the early movies about 007 the G.I. Joe series eschewed overt demonization of other governments and countries, in large part by centering the adventures on an imaginary villain carefully crafted to be acceptable as a villain to all--again, in much the same fashion as the early Bond films.

Just like the SPECTRE of the early films (which replaced the Soviet Union's SMERSH in Dr. No), Cobra is an international criminal organization with an agenda of pure and naked power-seeking, even the pretension of a higher cause or ideology absent. As the means by which it pursued this goal frequently called for the physical destruction of a large part of the world Cobra, like many a Bond villain, was a threat not just to a narrow "national interest," but the whole planet, with both superpowers pointedly included, and in cases, forced to cooperate (the Joes working with their Soviet counterparts in the October Guard on more than one occasion).

One might add that Cobra, like SPECTRE, is led by a villain whose face is kept carefully hidden (Cobra Commander), and whose organization, apart from his colorful senior staff (metal-faced Destro, the bad Bond girl-ish Baroness) and a few similarly colorful henchmen (the mercenary Zartan and his Dreadnoks), rests atop a foundation of vast numbers of faceless foot soldiers whose principal role is that of inexplicably willing cannon fodder. And of course, Cobra also shares the Bond villains' penchant for elaborate fortress-bases (at times, under the sea or in space), and for the wacky in their high-tech schemes for world domination.

That same imperative of toning things down also led G.I. Joe, like the later installments of the Bond films, to replace bloody violence with over-the-top gadgetry. (The Joes and Cobras fire laser bolts instead of bullets from their guns--and in the second season the Joes are apt to be firing them not at other people, but androids.)

Indeed, it is worth remembering that a conspicuously James Bondian agent "guest stars" in a Sunbow series episode, specifically "Matthew Burke" in the allusively titled "The Spy Who Rooked Me," which mixes up with the Joes a tuxedo-wearing British superspy who first appears outside a Vegas nightclub, subsequently drives a gadget-packed car (complete with ejector seat) and, while having to keep it G-rated, still manages to put enough moves on Lady Jaye to get (Our Man?) Flint jealous. In the end Burke/Bond does not come off so favorably as he might, but still accomplishes his mission handily, in the process getting the better of his allies as well as his enemies--so that in the end, it still seems fair to call the episode an homage to a crucial predecessor.

Why We Describe Less

A while back I happened on a blog post (regrettably, I haven't been able to track it down again) which raised the matter of authors' describing less than they used to, and asking its readers why this may now be the fashion.

One reason, clearly, is the swapping of the third-person omniscient narrator who sees and describes everything for us reliably for a host of narrow and fallible little subjectivities, and their limited perception of what there is to see, think, feel.

However, there is too the reality that we live in an age of visual media which has driven home to us just how difficult it is for the written word to compete with the camera as a way of conveying images in all their vibrancy, immediacy, texture, grandeur--leaving many of us less inclined to try, and perhaps with less sense that there is a need to try. (Whatever it is, you've probably seen it on TV before, and so it seems it is enough to evoke that.)

Perhaps more importantly, film and television have accelerated the pace of storytelling, too much so to allow any room for thick description--confronted with which we are apt to get impatient to move on.

And of course, many have made a virtue of describing less (one thinks of the enduring cult of Hemingway), while more generally the trend of recent decades has been toward easier-to-read, less demanding books of smaller words connected together in shorter sentences, compiled together in shorter paragraphs in littler chapters (even as books of doorstop size became more than ever the standards).

Have we lost something precious in all this? Certainly there are those who have put subjectivity, evocativeness, briskness, minimalism, accessibility to good use. Still, at their best there was something to be said for the lusher descriptiveness of the nineteenth century novels. Take, for example, Peter Washington's appraisal of Balzac as

a writer whose delight in appearances encompasses every mode from the interior decorator's passion for glitzy surfaces to the philosopher's interest in the hidden depths behind them . . . He has an extraordinary grasp on the materiality of the world, the sensuous quality of objects. All his books are filled with things . . . [and] Everything has its place in a complete vision of life at a particular time and place.

The vividness of his settings, the solidity of the world he imagines and the characters with which he peoples it, would be difficult to imagine without all this, while as Washington also noted, "[t]he dramatic virtues of this method--its distance from mere description--becomes apparent at critical moments in the novel." The details--the difference between a wax and a tallow candle in Eugenie Grandet, for example--are neither decoration, nor mere "symbolism" of the sort on which impressionable middle school students develop neurotic fixations, but the sorts of little things that make up the life he describes.

Novels like Balzac's strike me as more fully novel-like than anything we are likely to encounter today--epic depictions of life, worlds on the page such as Modernist and postmodernist narratives, in their smugly showy fragmentariness, obliqueness and unreliability rarely even try to deliver (and still less often, succeed in doing), no matter how much admiring theorists tell us otherwise. And so while it is well that leaner styles are accepted, the achievements of writers working in that other mode ought not to be slighted.

Of Balzac and James

I read little Henry James until recently, and most of that in a hurry for a long-ago graduate course. (Indeed, "Daisy Miller" is about the only piece of his that I felt myself to know well for a long time.)

The impression I got, however, does not seem to have been different from most people's, George Moore nicely summing it up its outstanding feature in his Confessions of a Young Man--the overgenteel, cloistered, drawing room narrowness of it. A particular passage in that book sums it up so vividly that I cannot resist quoting it:

Mr James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition . . . in front of the reader nothing happens . . . human portraiture models are necessary . . . [but] the drawing room presents few accents and angles, conformity to its prejudices having worn all away . . . Is there really much to say about people who live in stately houses and eat and drink their fill every day of the year? The lady, it is true, may have a lover, but the pen finds scanty pasturage in the fact; and in James's novels the lady only considers the question on the last page, and the gentleman looks at her questioningly.

Recently reading Washington Square has only reconfirmed my impression. Indeed, after reading James' own critical writing, it has seemed to me that fully as he understood those French writers he so admired, and attentive as he was to their methods, he rejected what was best about them, what made their work so compelling--not least the interest that Honore de Balzac (hailed by James as "one of the finest of artists" in the essay he devoted to him) took in the "machinery of civilization," and the cold and critical eye he was ready to cast on it.1 Balzac's portrait of the brutal, vulgar, degrading, humiliating, painful, wasteful and ultimately hollow character of life in a society dominated by money and its pursuit (such a far cry from those who preach market values as the embodiment of efficiency, dignity and humanity!) was exactly the kind of thing from which James shrank in his work, instead glossing over the less seemly details to leave us with just those stately houses and that calm, polite twilight.

1. The essay appeared in the December 1875 edition of Galaxy--today's The Atlantic, and well worth a read by anyone interested in Balzac's body of work.

Reconsidering Fantastic Four (2015)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

By the time I saw Josh Trank's Fantastic Four I had long since had an earful of the bad press--and as is so often the case on those occasions, I found myself wondering if it was not overly criticized. At least in the more important ways the film did not strike me as conspicuously lazy and sloppy in the manner of, for example, Iron Man 2. It managed to avoid the triteness so often part of the Marvel crowd-pleasers--particularly tiresome in, for instance, the middle third of the first Thor movie. And in fact, more than many of these movies (the celebrated first Avengers movie among them), it is not a collection of action scenes strung together by the thinnest semblance of a plot (or more precisely, masses of bits of action strung together by the thinnest semblance of being action scenes, in their turn strung together by the thinnest semblance of a plot), but offers an actual story with actual characters.

As it happens, there is a lot of Trank's prior film, Chronicle, in it--bleak suburbs, gray skies, alienated kids with bad attitudes from crummy homes who mess around with powers beyond their understanding and have to deal with the consequences, all depicted in a rather grounded, low-key, small-scale way. (Reed Richards is turned from a grown-up and well-recognized scientist to a geeky high school science fair entrant, with the rest of the Four changed commensurately; while the central event in the origin story is not a space flight, but interdimensional transport to a primitive landscape, generally seen at night.) There is a bit of Watchmen, too (another film criticized far out of proportion to any actual weaknesses it had) in the conception of the heroes as damaged people exploited by the System, and specifically the military-industrial complex, covert-ops side of it, the badness of which seems to go far beyond a few "bad apples."1

As all this suggests, rather than a movie for purists, or simply a less faithful movie still attempting to be a colorful, lightweight crowd-pleaser in the familiar Marvel mold (which the previous film version of this story fit to a tee), Trank's Fantastic Four gives the impression of a movie attempting to subvert its source material, and the form more broadly--and in its earlier portions shows some promise on that level. However in the last act the movie turns much more conventional as the heroes brush aside their previously deeply felt differences to come together and battle a vengeful supervillain posing a cosmic, physics-based threat to the entire world, the day is narrowly saved, and even if we had doubts (more than doubts) about the functionaries in the dress uniforms and three-piece suits, everyone puts that behind them, while our heroes get a sweet new deal in the form of lavish facilities in Central City, and speak bad one-liners intended to get a final laugh before we cut to credits.

Alas, the final display of action and effects falls far short of what was needed to save the movie from that perspective, not helped by the fact that the scenes are so ill-lit one can barely make out much of what is going on, and that the low-key approach endures. Perhaps more importantly, the sharp turn in the narrative, expected as it may be, rings false after what came before.

Consequently the film alienates those who like the more conventional take by being so low-key and measured and dark, who felt uncompensated by the finale; while at the same time in the film's turning much more conventional in the final act, it alienates those who had been intrigued by its doing something different and more subversive. In that I am reminded of something I thought about when watching Chronicle: the tension between the big-budget, crowd-pleasing form and the narrative aspirations of necessarily smaller-scale indie filmmaking. For better or worse Chronicle just about managed to cohere in spite of them, but it also did not have the expectations aroused by its connection with the Fantastic Four, or the obligation to turn a profit on a $120 million production budget adequate to launch a whole franchise of summer tentpoles.

1. One of the more striking aspects of this is the depiction of the changed bodies of the principals, not just the Thing, but Reed, whose stretching appears grotesque rather than zanily cartoonish.

The Twilight of the Action RPG?

Looking at today's games--I have in mind here the action RPG genre--I am struck by their breathtaking graphics, their rendering of vast, intricately detailed, elaborately interactive worlds, and the lushness of the storylines that all this enables.

Still, appealing as they are visually and conceptually, I have to admit to being one of those who feels that games have lost something in attaining this new level of artistic accomplishment.

The size and intricacy and interactiveness of their virtual worlds makes gameplay far less intuitive. The player has to endure elaborate tutorials to master the necessary physical skills. Then in embarking upon their quest I suspect that only the most hardcore players can get by without a strategy guide--genuinely book-length--in hand, playing becoming an exercise in "following the manual."1

I'll admit that I've never had much patience for tutorials of this type, and that I don't even like reading the manual for things I buy in real life. But clearly I'm not the only one who feels that way--or we wouldn't have wound up in this bizarre situation where people in developing countries toil at gold farming in postmodern cyber-sweatshops.

It all leaves me wondering if the gaming experience in this genre did not start to decline a few console generations ago, when the sophistication of the design had grown beyond its bare-bones beginnings (as with gameplay consisting mostly of seeking out random battles so one could level up), but not yet passed beyond that level of accessibility and manageability beyond which a game stops being fun. (Some time around the release of Final Fantasy 7, perhaps?)

What do you think?

1. Online few seem to admit to this kind of reliance--but they also belittle anyone who does admit to this, which leaves me doubtful.

On the First Person Point of View

Looking at popular fiction today it certainly seems that the first person point-of-view is more popular than it used to be, and one might wonder why.

Certain highbrow critics (I won't name names, but I've reviewed the work of at least one of them here, and not that long ago either) would have us believe that this is because third-person omniscient is "passé."

Such remarks say more about them than they do about fiction today--their Modernist prejudices, not least their love of unreliable narrators and ambiguity for its own sake.

It also reveals another failing of this type of critic: their utter obliviousness to and disinterest in the more practical aspects of the writing life--which seems to supply the real reasons why we are getting so much first person writing, two in particular:

1. Given the preference for "dramatic" rather than "epic" storytelling (I'm using the Goethe-Schiller terminology here), and the emphasis on being "relatable" above all, they are understandably looking to foster an intimacy that will make the reader identify with the narrator. Not a new technique, just one stressed more than it used to be.

2. The old problem of telling and showing. "Show, don't tell" remains the pat advice of those who don't actually write to those who do--and is followed much, much less often than we are led to believe, for good and obvious reasons. One is that, as compared with showing, telling is much easier to read--which is enormously important in today's market. It is also much easier to write--which matters all the more given the expectations increasingly placed on writers (low pay rates, longer books, lots of hours devoted to publicity, all without their getting to quit the day job save in a few, fortunate cases).

The result is that unless one really regards Flaubert as their Penelope (and ready to spend five days agonizing over one page in the manner of the man who gave the world Madame Bovary), setting aside all concerns but pure literary craft, they will, in spite of the conventional wisdom (truly conventional but never wise) serve up much more "tell" than "show."

But in fairness there's often a certain sleight-of-hand involved, and that's exactly what the first person point-of-view permits. Because of the pretense that we are in the narrator's head, directly listening to their voice, their telling looks a bit like showing--and most of those flogging the old "Show, don't tell" saw let them off the hook.

Review: E. Philipps Oppenheim's The Double Four

As The Double Four opens country squire Peter Ruff is summoned to Paris to meet with the mysterious old woman heading the titular organization, with which he has previously been deeply involved. At the meeting he finds the leader on her deathbed, from which she tells him that he is to be her successor--a charge he is reluctant to accept, though it is also clear that he has no choice in the matter. Afterward he is promptly set up in London as grandee Baron De Grost.

Over the course of the story we never get a comprehensive image of just what the origins, purposes and activities of the Double Four are, but it is quite clear that it was at least in part a notorious criminal organization, that it has since distanced itself from such activities, and that its primary concern is now espionage. By and large, this espionage seems to be conducted on behalf of the alliance of Britain and France, against Germany, and it is this which occupies Ruff's time--in particular, his successive battles with German agent Bernadine, the Count Von Hern.

The luxurious atmosphere, the genteel but ruthless and ultimately deadly duel between Ruff and Bernadine, are classic Oppenheim--and so are the plentiful melodrama, hokey plot twists and right-wing propaganda of yesteryear. Less familiar to me was the book's structure. A collection of short stories turned into a cut-up novel, the book is not just loose, but essentially episodic--between the first and last tales Ruff and Bernadine fighting out some issue to a conclusion, and then the book simply returning to them at the outset of the next battle. In fact, the order of several of the stories in the middle could have been rearranged without the reader's experience being compromised.

The fact that the book does consist of so many short bits was initially a bit jarring, so much so that I was tempted to charge them with being more thinly sketched than they should have been. (Like every other reader of my generation, I suppose I've simply--for better or worse--become used to taking my spy fiction in doorstop-length doses.) Still, it was a light, quick read with a pronounced retro interest, perhaps not so satisfying as The Great Impersonation but also suffering from less of that book's weaknesses as well.

Reconsidering Fantastic Four (2005)

I remember often thinking that the 2005 Fantastic Four movie was overcriticized. It was by no means ground-breaking--but it was entertaining enough as a lightweight, colorful crowd-pleaser.

The problem seemed to be that taking that approach with a superhero film was unfashionable at that time. In that relatively early phase in the comic book superhero movie boom, the more grounded look and feel, and more thematically involved approach of Bryan Singer's original X-Men, or Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (which preceded Fantastic Four to the theater by mere weeks), was, despite the colossal success of Sam Raimi's Spiderman, proving influential.1 (Indeed, it seems to have been important in selling the concept in those days.)

The Fantastic Four did not easily lend themselves to "grounded." The team's members (a guy with a stretchy rubber body, another who has turned into a rock-creature, stil another who turns into a creature of fire, etc.) and their interpersonal dynamic (as with Johnny Storm's obnoxious sibling-like relationship with the Thing), are singly and collectively flamboyant even by Marvel standards. And the Tim Story-directed, Mark Frost and Michael France-scripted version did not try to pretend otherwise. They created a movie that was relatively faithful to the original not just in its incidents, but its look and feel--and the opinion-makers objected to exactly that. (Arguably, this sensibility had its effect on the sequel, not least its depiction of Galactus.)

Of course, things have changed in the past decade. As the studios have relied more heavily on heaping helpings of the kind of spectacle that gets viewers to fork over the 3-D and IMAX fees, a flashier look and bigger action have become more prevalent--which are at odds with that more grounded approach. (Just compare Singer's far more flamboyantly science fiction-al version of Days of Future Past with his first X-Men film.) Meanwhile, after Nolan, after the new takes on Superman (which Singer helmed in 2006, and Nolan produced in 2013), after a great deal else, the darker, heavier approach has become banal--and excited something of a backlash, one expression of which was how Ant-Man became something of a surprise hit last summer ($500 million global), and praised precisely for offering something lighter.

Ironically, just as a faithful version of the Fantastic Four became an easier sell, the 2015 film version went in the opposite direction--going more grounded, ambitious, darker, and getting hammered for it by the critics, and at the box office.

1. Some of us thought the movies went a little too grounded--not least in the handling of the Dark Phoenix saga, which was not what the purists hoped, and which may just be getting a remake because of it.

The Small-Screen Superhero Boom

Just as we have been deluged by Marvel and DC superheroes at theaters, so have we been on network TV. This past season the CW, an obvious candidate admittedly, had not just Arrow, but The Flash and DC's Legends of Tomorrow--altogether, a substantial fraction of its prime-time line-up. FOX has Gotham. ABC has Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (which was followed by Agent Carter). CBS, stereotyped as stodgier, produced Supergirl (canceled here, though it has since found a new home on CW).

Unsurprisingly the list gets a lot longer if one looks beyond the bigger-named superheroes to more obscure or original figures, and the options afforded by cable and streaming. Alongside Gotham, FOX has the Sandman spin-off Lucifer. NBC gave Heroes another shot with Heroes Reborn (even if it hasn't worked out). Syfy Channel has Wynonna Earp. Netflix is serving up Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the Playstation Network, Powers.

And of course, more children and family-oriented programming can seem to offer nothing but superheroes. Nickelodeon has The Thundermans and Henry Danger, while Disney XD has had Lab Rats and Mighty Med and now a merger of the two in Lab Rats: Elite Force, and its animated offerings have included a barrage of Marvel-based cartoons.

Today a fairly avid TV watcher, assuming their taste in superhero material (and their range of cable and streaming options) is broad enough, can fill their viewing hours with nothing but first-run superhero shows.

The reasons for the success of superheroes in this medium seems a bit less obvious than on the big screen. TV's smaller screens and smaller budgets mean that the big, flashy action that is the films' stock in trade at theaters is less of a draw. Still, the sheer popularity enjoyed by the concept would seem to have had some spillover effects, above and beyond the not unimportant direct spin-offs and tie-ins (like Agents of SHIELD). And small screen superheroes do share an advantage with the big screen variety that pays an even bigger dividend here--the format's easy accessibility in comparison with other kinds of science fiction, which are in fact less evident than they used to be (much-touted "peak TV" not having brought about some new boom in space opera, for example).

At the same time, it is worth noting the limits of the genre's success in this medium--a far cry from the consistently box office-topping performance it has had. (Not one superhero show made the Nielsen's top ten this season, after all, or even came close to it.) In short, science fiction and fantasy television remains in its relatively subordinate place in the market, far behind reality TV (Dancing With the Stars) and procedurals (NCIS, Blue Bloods) and nighttime soaps (Empire)--with the superheroes notably not counted among those rare exceptions that buck the trend to become mainstream hits (The Walking Dead).