These past few years there was talk of bringing Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian back to the screen--but then there always is (live-action and animation, film and television, etc., etc.), with nothing much usually coming of it. So it seems to have gone with the latest plans for a TV series.
It may be just as well, since I doubt that anything they are likely to make would be very satisfying to fans of the franchise--with the 2011 film exemplary. I recall looking forward to it more than I usually did to revisitations of such material because I had recently read my way through the entirety of Howard, and in the process found out just how much John Milius' film differed from it. The stuff about Conan's childhood and upbringing, the rambling about "will" recycled from Milius' Apocalypse Now script (Why does no one ever notice this?), the use of Thulsa Doom (a Kull the Conqueror character rather than a Conan the Barbarian one), the whiff of '70s/'80s action movie formula I was later to discuss in my book on paramilitary action-adventure--made clear to me that, much as I liked the 1982 movie, and have tended to groan at the thought of new takes on old classics, there actually was room for such a take here.*
Alas, the makers of the later film decided to remake the 1982 movie rather than go back to Howard and do something with that, and the result fell pretty flat.
Taken as a simple action movie I remember it working well enough. Still, I didn't care to see more of Conan's childhood. (Indeed, I don't usually care to see action heroes "before you knew them," with this going especially for Conan, to the point that even though after finishing the Howard originals I was eager to read more, knowing that L. Sprague de Camp's tales turned in exactly that direction made me lose all interest in them. And they spent a quarter of the movie on exactly that.) Meanwhile, the vigor, the barbaric splendor, the epic feel that were for all the departures from the original true to Howard (and characteristically Milius) were gone, leaving something much more generic, much less memorable (with, I think, those who think the replacement of the "tangible aesthetic . . . and practical effects" right about this costing the film something).
So does it often go with remakes, which in eliding aspects of the old fail to come up with anything as compelling--the attainment of contemporaneity coming at the price of distinction, underlining the artistic pointlessness and commercial crassness that are hallmarks of the all too common enterprise. And certainly to go by what we have heard of recent remake attempts, it is hard to imagine material less likely to survive contemporary handling than Conan.
* Ironically, 1997's Kull the Conqueror actually used more of the Conan material, drawing heavily on the plot of the one novel Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon--to its benefit, though I would not credit it with doing that book justice. (I have said it before many a time but will say it again--for all their flaws the pulp adventures of old were way, way more satisfying reads than today's bloated pop fiction.)
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin, Masters of the Novelized Wargame
In learning that Tom Clancy, while getting the byline on the cover, had a cowriter in wargame designer Larry Bond, one may wonder which of them had the greater hand in producing what is for many the definitive techno-thriller of its kind Given how no later Clancy novel hewed so much in the direction of a "novelized wargame" one may suspect that it was more Larry Bond's book than Clancy's--and the impression is for me confirmed by the three novels Larry Bond did write afterward in which he did get the byline (while a cowriter of his own got the "junior partner" treatment, Patrick Larkin). These are, of course, 1989's Red Phoenix, 1991's Vortex, and 1993's Cauldron.
Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.
Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.
Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.
The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.
It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.
Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.
Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.
Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.
Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.
Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.
The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.
It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.
Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.
Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.
The Decline and Fall of the Gag Comedy Film
What ever happened to the gag comedy? It seems to me that the genre had a golden age in the '70s, evident in such hits as the Mel Brooks and ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) had in that period (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!). Both remained productive even after, of course (Brooks at least having cult hits with History of the World, Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987), ZAZ bigger films like The Naked Gun), while others got in on the action, like Carl Reiner with The Man With Two Brains (1983), and Keenan Ivory Wayans in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988).
Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."
What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.
As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?
One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.
NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."
Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."
What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.
As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?
One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.
NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."
The Rise of the Gag Comedy Film
It seems to me that the gag-based comedy film (the comedy that rather than using gags was a showcase for gags), like the action film (the film that rather than including action is, likewise, a showcase for action), emerged in the '60s, and began to become a Hollywood staple in the '70s, with a similar logic at work in both--a post-television elevation of image over conventional narrative in more fragmentary work, with an onslaught of momentary shocks prevailing over the traditional pleasures of storytelling, to the point of such storytelling being merely a connecting thread between one shock and the next. In the action movie those shocks were intended to thrill, in the gag-based comedy to keep the audience in stitches. Still, the similarity was such that, reading the remarks of reviewers of the old Bond movies so critical to the emergence of both genres, critics just encountering the action movie thought they were looking at some sort of gag comedy (with the view of From Russia, With Love, a relatively serious Bond film, taken at the time for some kind of parody of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, in spite of the Bond novel having come first).
Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.
It seems notable that, just as the befuddlement of those critics looking at the first Bond films, and the slowness of Hollywood to assimilate Bondian filmmaking (Star Wars was the breakthrough here, fifteen years after Dr. No, and just as the Suits failed to understand Bond they failed to understand Star Wars initially--simply thinking SPACE! where in the '60s they had thought SPIES!), it took onlookers some time to get used to gag comedy, if perhaps less. The pre-middlebrow Woody Allen was important here (scripting Feldman's earlier What's New, Pussycat? and making films like What's Up, Tiger Lily?), and Mel Brooks and ZAZ (the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team) more deeply and enduringly associated with it--the former hitting an early career peak with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the latter with Airplane! (while the spirit of such comedy was so pervasive that the Salkinds' Superman, to go by the legends surrounding the script, would seem to have nearly gone in this direction).*
Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.
* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.
Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.
It seems notable that, just as the befuddlement of those critics looking at the first Bond films, and the slowness of Hollywood to assimilate Bondian filmmaking (Star Wars was the breakthrough here, fifteen years after Dr. No, and just as the Suits failed to understand Bond they failed to understand Star Wars initially--simply thinking SPACE! where in the '60s they had thought SPIES!), it took onlookers some time to get used to gag comedy, if perhaps less. The pre-middlebrow Woody Allen was important here (scripting Feldman's earlier What's New, Pussycat? and making films like What's Up, Tiger Lily?), and Mel Brooks and ZAZ (the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team) more deeply and enduringly associated with it--the former hitting an early career peak with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the latter with Airplane! (while the spirit of such comedy was so pervasive that the Salkinds' Superman, to go by the legends surrounding the script, would seem to have nearly gone in this direction).*
Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.
* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.
The Scientist in Balzac's Human Comedy: David Sechard in Lost Illusions
As I remarked not too long ago Balzac was an admirer of scientists and inventors, and a supporter of technological progress--with this, in fact, making him more critical rather than less of a money-dominated society, as we see in Lost Illusions. In Part III, "The Sufferings of Inventors," printer David Sechard, in an era where the demand for printed matter, and the material on which it is to be printed, are exploding, pursues the development of a new technique of paper-making.
Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.
In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.
Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.
In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.
The "Cynical" Balzac
Balzac is, like pretty much every author who has dared to say a critical word about the social order, routinely charged with the crime of "cynicism"; while like pretty much every author against whom the charge is made undeserving of the charge.
Balzac was absolutely scathing in his criticism of a world where there was "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" But it was the cynicism of that world that he condemned, in part because of all those things that he happened to value--not least, human connections and human virtues. The way modern society corrupted and destroyed all that--cynically--was what he exposed and attacked, with the result that if the genteel folk of the salons regarded him as a monster, those fed up with the official lies and the hypocrisy have ever since found in his honesty, and his feeling, a breath of fresh air.
And that— was what seemed "cynical" to "respectable" opinion that did not like attention being called to such realities, of which it was defensive then and remains defensive now, such that he is less read today than he might be if he had their approval.
Indeed, it says everything that Henry James, at best an epigone of French realists like Balzac who willfully abandoned all that was best in them--indeed, while personally laying against Balzac the charge that he lacked a moral sense--became the god of Anglo-American letters.
Balzac was absolutely scathing in his criticism of a world where there was "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" But it was the cynicism of that world that he condemned, in part because of all those things that he happened to value--not least, human connections and human virtues. The way modern society corrupted and destroyed all that--cynically--was what he exposed and attacked, with the result that if the genteel folk of the salons regarded him as a monster, those fed up with the official lies and the hypocrisy have ever since found in his honesty, and his feeling, a breath of fresh air.
And that— was what seemed "cynical" to "respectable" opinion that did not like attention being called to such realities, of which it was defensive then and remains defensive now, such that he is less read today than he might be if he had their approval.
Indeed, it says everything that Henry James, at best an epigone of French realists like Balzac who willfully abandoned all that was best in them--indeed, while personally laying against Balzac the charge that he lacked a moral sense--became the god of Anglo-American letters.
Of Money and Obsession: Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans
Emile Zola, in explaining his conception of the "experimental novel" (he meant "experimental" not in the sense of unreadable avant garde prose, but the novel as quasi-scientific thought-experiment based on scientific knowledge of objective reality), referred to Balzac as the "father" of the form, specifically citing his book Cousin Bette as a model of such experimental rigor in its treatment of the theme of adultery.
Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.
Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.
"The Rectification of Names" and George Carlin
The Analects of Confucius contain an interesting dialogue on the "rectification of names" as a priority in administration, on the grounds that language must be "in accordance with the truth of things" for the sake of carrying on "affairs . . . to success"--so much so that "the superior man requires . . . that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."
Alas, in this day and age it can seem as if, in this culture as in probably every other, language is nothing but a collection of evasions and obfuscations, by and large for the most unvirtuous purposes--a refusal to acquiesce in which makes one an incomprehensible eccentric at best to most of the others they will meet.
George Carlin refused to acquiesce in that manner. And in that, I think, one could regard him as a "superior man" who did far more the sake of contemporary culture than just about all the literati of the mainstream today put together.
Alas, in this day and age it can seem as if, in this culture as in probably every other, language is nothing but a collection of evasions and obfuscations, by and large for the most unvirtuous purposes--a refusal to acquiesce in which makes one an incomprehensible eccentric at best to most of the others they will meet.
George Carlin refused to acquiesce in that manner. And in that, I think, one could regard him as a "superior man" who did far more the sake of contemporary culture than just about all the literati of the mainstream today put together.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the State of the World Today
I came relatively late to the minor pop cultural phenomenon that was Mystery Science Theater 3000 (henceforth, just MST3K for brevity's sake), catching its last three seasons on what was then still the Sci-Fi Channel.
It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.
At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."
I think of that line a lot.
Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.
We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.
It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.
At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."
I think of that line a lot.
Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.
We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.
What is All the "Cringe" Comedy Really About?
One of the more oft-used words to describe the kind of comedy we have tended to see on twenty-first century TV has been "cringe." Associated with shows like The Office, watching it we will see Michael Scott say something terribly offensive, and appall everyone around them, while being completely oblivious to what he did--with a good time had by, if not all, at least those who like this kind of comedy.
Why has this kind of comedy become so popular in this period?
One possibility that occurs to me is that this is a matter of twenty-first century class politics. These days it seems that "punching down" in comedy is treated as daring, even heroic. ("Look how edgy I'm being!" they say as they beat up on an oppressed group. "I'm a free speech hero!")
Especially given the prevailing attitude toward class, punching down at people who seem awkward by the "upper middle class" (to use Michael Lind's term, "overclass") standards that are thought of as society's standards--who are so much more likely to be from lower class backgrounds as to make this a form of mockery of the less affluent--is fair game.
And we see it the more insofar as comedy these days so rarely punches up.
Why has this kind of comedy become so popular in this period?
One possibility that occurs to me is that this is a matter of twenty-first century class politics. These days it seems that "punching down" in comedy is treated as daring, even heroic. ("Look how edgy I'm being!" they say as they beat up on an oppressed group. "I'm a free speech hero!")
Especially given the prevailing attitude toward class, punching down at people who seem awkward by the "upper middle class" (to use Michael Lind's term, "overclass") standards that are thought of as society's standards--who are so much more likely to be from lower class backgrounds as to make this a form of mockery of the less affluent--is fair game.
And we see it the more insofar as comedy these days so rarely punches up.
Are People Really Self-Publishing Millions of Books Each Year?
Recently I was surprised to read that the number of "new" books self-published annually was in the millions.
Why?
My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.
Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.
It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)
Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.
Why?
My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.
Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.
It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)
Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.
Do They Really Publish a Million Books a Year?
Recently I have seen it estimated that, excluding self-published titles, between 500,000 and 1 million new titles are published in the U.S. each and every year.
I have tried digging into the figure but do not know how it was arrived at--and strongly suspect that it is misleading.
After all, when you collect statistics you have to define your terms clearly, and I have seen no such definition in connection with these figures. My guess is that they refer to any published item distributed in a discrete unit, excluding periodicals--which could easily include many things we do not think of as books, especially if commercial distribution is not required for inclusion in the category, such as pamphlets handed out by political or religious organizations. Even when we define the term "book" more exclusively there is the question of how we define "new." Does a barely touched "new" edition of an older book count--like a reissue of a classic with a couple of pages of "foreword?"
One can go on and on like this, but I think this makes the point--those things most of us think of when we hear the word "book," in length and formatting and manner of presentation to the public (and certainly expectation that they will find a new audience), and certainly "new book," actually hitting the market in any given year, probably number a good deal less than that. Certainly the number of, for example, new, first-edition novels published annually through the traditional channels would seem far fewer--and we do well to remember that when attempting to consider the shape of the market.
I have tried digging into the figure but do not know how it was arrived at--and strongly suspect that it is misleading.
After all, when you collect statistics you have to define your terms clearly, and I have seen no such definition in connection with these figures. My guess is that they refer to any published item distributed in a discrete unit, excluding periodicals--which could easily include many things we do not think of as books, especially if commercial distribution is not required for inclusion in the category, such as pamphlets handed out by political or religious organizations. Even when we define the term "book" more exclusively there is the question of how we define "new." Does a barely touched "new" edition of an older book count--like a reissue of a classic with a couple of pages of "foreword?"
One can go on and on like this, but I think this makes the point--those things most of us think of when we hear the word "book," in length and formatting and manner of presentation to the public (and certainly expectation that they will find a new audience), and certainly "new book," actually hitting the market in any given year, probably number a good deal less than that. Certainly the number of, for example, new, first-edition novels published annually through the traditional channels would seem far fewer--and we do well to remember that when attempting to consider the shape of the market.
Quentin Tarantino's Recent Thoughts on the Bond Series
Quentin Tarantino name has come up before in relation to the Bond films.
Back in the '90s he actually aspired to make a film adaptation of Casino Royale.
That ship sailed a very long time ago--as the Casino Royale that actually kicked off the reboot made clear. But he did recently discuss the Bond film series in the Deadline interview from a little while back, during which he suggested that EON go back to the books and actually adapt the books.
The idea has the virtue that, in contrast with most remakes, which bring nothing new to the table, those movies would be genuinely different from what was made before, and from anything out there today.
However, "different" does not mean an audience would necessarily exist for them.
Let us, for the moment, not belabor the well-known, much-chewed over matter of the social sentiments of the books. We all know how absolutely intolerable they would be to respectable opinion--and the fact that, while the more overt racism may be removable without damaging anything essential, the gender politics could not be altered without making a mockery of any pretense to faithfulness. The idea has at least three other strikes against it:
1. Filmed as they are the novels would be period pieces--a tough sell to American audiences these days. (Indeed, I recently remarked the anomalousness of Indiana Jones as a popular success given this trait of theirs--and counted it as one of the factors working against that film's box office success.)
2. The narrative structure of the books--which are less the stuff of action movies than "slow burn" thrillers unlikely to be very exciting to today's readers. (Indeed, as Raymond Benson's stuff makes clear even readers of Bond novels expect something different these days, never mind viewers of Bond films.)
3. Much of what made the books interesting to readers when they came out is simply not going to reach today's audience. What was glamorous by the standard of '50s Britain is less impressive today in an era in which working people may be struggling to keep themselves in modest shelter and adequate food, but the level of luxury presented by pop cultural fantasy has exploded right along with the fortunes of the richest. Meanwhile the agonies over the place of Britain and its elite in the world that seems to have been so bound up with the books' reception are also unlikely to resonate with a wide audience (and none at all outside Britain).
There therefore seems no question of any such thing being blockbuster material--while the kind of mid-range movie such productions could have been is simply not getting made anymore, certainly not for theatrical release, while streaming is becoming ever more penurious. One might imagine as an alternative the adventures of James Bond being adapted as a TV series--with, perhaps, a few novels squeezed into a particular season. (I could see, for instance, Casino Royale through From Russia with Love as a season, ending with the cliffhanger of Bond's poisoning; Dr. No and Goldfinger and the For Your Eyes Only short story sequence the basis of a season two; and the books between Thunderball and The Man with the Golden Gun as the basis for one long arc, maybe wrapping up the sequence with another two seasons.) Yet I am doubtful that very many would be persuaded to stick with Bond through it all (again, period pieces are tough sells, and even if I rejected belaboring them there are those politics), while I have seen little evidence of either Everything Or Nothing productions, or Amazon, being up for it, making it much more a provocative notion than a serious proposition.
Back in the '90s he actually aspired to make a film adaptation of Casino Royale.
That ship sailed a very long time ago--as the Casino Royale that actually kicked off the reboot made clear. But he did recently discuss the Bond film series in the Deadline interview from a little while back, during which he suggested that EON go back to the books and actually adapt the books.
The idea has the virtue that, in contrast with most remakes, which bring nothing new to the table, those movies would be genuinely different from what was made before, and from anything out there today.
However, "different" does not mean an audience would necessarily exist for them.
Let us, for the moment, not belabor the well-known, much-chewed over matter of the social sentiments of the books. We all know how absolutely intolerable they would be to respectable opinion--and the fact that, while the more overt racism may be removable without damaging anything essential, the gender politics could not be altered without making a mockery of any pretense to faithfulness. The idea has at least three other strikes against it:
1. Filmed as they are the novels would be period pieces--a tough sell to American audiences these days. (Indeed, I recently remarked the anomalousness of Indiana Jones as a popular success given this trait of theirs--and counted it as one of the factors working against that film's box office success.)
2. The narrative structure of the books--which are less the stuff of action movies than "slow burn" thrillers unlikely to be very exciting to today's readers. (Indeed, as Raymond Benson's stuff makes clear even readers of Bond novels expect something different these days, never mind viewers of Bond films.)
3. Much of what made the books interesting to readers when they came out is simply not going to reach today's audience. What was glamorous by the standard of '50s Britain is less impressive today in an era in which working people may be struggling to keep themselves in modest shelter and adequate food, but the level of luxury presented by pop cultural fantasy has exploded right along with the fortunes of the richest. Meanwhile the agonies over the place of Britain and its elite in the world that seems to have been so bound up with the books' reception are also unlikely to resonate with a wide audience (and none at all outside Britain).
There therefore seems no question of any such thing being blockbuster material--while the kind of mid-range movie such productions could have been is simply not getting made anymore, certainly not for theatrical release, while streaming is becoming ever more penurious. One might imagine as an alternative the adventures of James Bond being adapted as a TV series--with, perhaps, a few novels squeezed into a particular season. (I could see, for instance, Casino Royale through From Russia with Love as a season, ending with the cliffhanger of Bond's poisoning; Dr. No and Goldfinger and the For Your Eyes Only short story sequence the basis of a season two; and the books between Thunderball and The Man with the Golden Gun as the basis for one long arc, maybe wrapping up the sequence with another two seasons.) Yet I am doubtful that very many would be persuaded to stick with Bond through it all (again, period pieces are tough sells, and even if I rejected belaboring them there are those politics), while I have seen little evidence of either Everything Or Nothing productions, or Amazon, being up for it, making it much more a provocative notion than a serious proposition.
Social Withdrawal, or Social Rejection?
When those who attend to the matter of those who have withdrawn from society write about them their tendency has been to emphasize the actions of those who have withdrawn, and identify these actions with choices they have made. They gave up on the job market. They dropped out of the "dating pool." They refused to come out of their bedroom, or their parent's basement.
I suppose this is intuitive for those who take the conventional view of things (individualistic, squeamish about the existence of society and its inequalities, not least in the area of power). But, here as in so many other areas of life, that view can be limiting and misleading--overlooking the extent to which those who act in such ways may be coping with choices others made, and in which they could not do much more than acquiesce, which may have them not so much withdrawing as accepting others' rejections. The rejection of potential employers. Rejection in "the dating market" and social life generally. Even rejection by their own families.
After all, it does not seem to be those positioned to "succeed" that take that course, but those who have the most frustration, to go by what the anecdotes and even the statistics tell us. Not the privileged kid with all the advantages who got all the breaks and is now on the "fast track to success" but the kid who never got a college degree is likely to end up playing games in their parents' basement. Not the "eligible bachelor" who walks away from dating, but those whose prospects were much less good. And not the popular kids but the victims of those vigilante enforcers of social life, bullies, who end up hikikomori.
Considering all this one can plausibly see all these persons as having been "shut out" before they became "shut-in." And that seems to me to confirm yet again the value of the sociological approach to the issue on the part of those who want to understand, and help, rather than wring hands and moralize in that way that the real-life Ron Burgundys of the mainstream media love so much.
I suppose this is intuitive for those who take the conventional view of things (individualistic, squeamish about the existence of society and its inequalities, not least in the area of power). But, here as in so many other areas of life, that view can be limiting and misleading--overlooking the extent to which those who act in such ways may be coping with choices others made, and in which they could not do much more than acquiesce, which may have them not so much withdrawing as accepting others' rejections. The rejection of potential employers. Rejection in "the dating market" and social life generally. Even rejection by their own families.
After all, it does not seem to be those positioned to "succeed" that take that course, but those who have the most frustration, to go by what the anecdotes and even the statistics tell us. Not the privileged kid with all the advantages who got all the breaks and is now on the "fast track to success" but the kid who never got a college degree is likely to end up playing games in their parents' basement. Not the "eligible bachelor" who walks away from dating, but those whose prospects were much less good. And not the popular kids but the victims of those vigilante enforcers of social life, bullies, who end up hikikomori.
Considering all this one can plausibly see all these persons as having been "shut out" before they became "shut-in." And that seems to me to confirm yet again the value of the sociological approach to the issue on the part of those who want to understand, and help, rather than wring hands and moralize in that way that the real-life Ron Burgundys of the mainstream media love so much.
Another Take on the Cult of Celebrity
My usual first thought regarding the cult of celebrity is its foolishness--and the second, its essential backwardness, reflecting as it does a hierarchical outlook more befitting barbarians than civilized people (the more in as it is so much taken for granted). However, one alternative treatment of the theme that impressed me was David Walsh's discussion of the issue way back when Michael Jordan retired. Certainly he remarks the essentially inegalitarian character of a society where celebrity exists in such a manner. ("Excessive celebrity must be . . . a rationale for inequality and reinforces it." After all, "[t]he heaping of fame and wealth upon a single individual . . . is only possible and meaningful if the vast majority have no access to those rewards.") He noted, too, that the status of celebrities from the world of entertainment was partly a matter of the repellent, toxic quality of the public figures seen to be elsewhere. ("It was impossible for a sports star to swell" to such a "monumental size in the American popular consciousness" as Jordan did "as long as there were figures . . . respected, rightly or wrongly, for their accomplishments on behalf of society as a whole." In the era of the Clinton impeachment that was ongoing as Walsh wrote those words, he asked, "Who deserves such admiration?")
However, he also argued for the fascination with celebrity being a function of what one might (to use a different writer's famous phrase to which Walsh alludes), so many people's "leading lives of quiet desperation." The "millions" doing so,
In short, the celebrities "live the fantasy," or at least seem to be doing so, and other people find vicarious satisfaction in it, however faint or limited or tenuous--the more in as they are incessantly told that they too could be doing this, may someday be doing this. ("The media . . . encourages many young people to believe that they can escape their difficult conditions of life by following the basketball star's path. For ninety-nine point nine percent of them this is an illusion, and a bitter one.")
They may as well be the people in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where off-world drug-trippers rely on "virtual" experience of a cushier life; at playing at "being" Perky Pat (ominously, as the atmosphere warms, endangering the survival of life on Earth . . .).
All this, of course, is very sad--but sad as it is it still strikes me as staggering in its stupidity, with stupider still those who exalt people's following celebrity in this way as some sort of need, when really it is at best a way of avoiding looking at their real needs and trying to satisfy those. If we indeed live in a world where quiet desperation is the lot of the mass, after all, they ought to be looking for more than vicarious living through mediated images of people acting the part of those to whom life has given everything as they try to get on after life has given them nothing, or next to it.
However, he also argued for the fascination with celebrity being a function of what one might (to use a different writer's famous phrase to which Walsh alludes), so many people's "leading lives of quiet desperation." The "millions" doing so,
going about their daily lives without any sense of a greater purpose to their existence than the struggle to make ends meet . . . denied richness and pleasure and variety and meaning . . . turn hungrily to the media-chronicled lives of celebrities--who apparently have everything they don't . . . who are "real" while they are, to themselves, non-existent--in search of a life with content.He adds that "[t]his vicarious existence stands in for real existence, except because it is not real or substantial . . . can never fill them up, and so they are always desperate for more, something, anything to fill up the gaping hole."
In short, the celebrities "live the fantasy," or at least seem to be doing so, and other people find vicarious satisfaction in it, however faint or limited or tenuous--the more in as they are incessantly told that they too could be doing this, may someday be doing this. ("The media . . . encourages many young people to believe that they can escape their difficult conditions of life by following the basketball star's path. For ninety-nine point nine percent of them this is an illusion, and a bitter one.")
They may as well be the people in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where off-world drug-trippers rely on "virtual" experience of a cushier life; at playing at "being" Perky Pat (ominously, as the atmosphere warms, endangering the survival of life on Earth . . .).
All this, of course, is very sad--but sad as it is it still strikes me as staggering in its stupidity, with stupider still those who exalt people's following celebrity in this way as some sort of need, when really it is at best a way of avoiding looking at their real needs and trying to satisfy those. If we indeed live in a world where quiet desperation is the lot of the mass, after all, they ought to be looking for more than vicarious living through mediated images of people acting the part of those to whom life has given everything as they try to get on after life has given them nothing, or next to it.
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