Of Mary Sue and Gary Stu

The term "Mary Sue" (and its male counterpart, "Gary Stu") typically refers to idealized characters that seem to function principally as wish-fulfillment fantasies, implying one-dimensionality, and a narrowed range of dramatic possibility.1 It is also generally regarded as pejorative, and the proclamation of a character as a Sue or a Stu widely taken for an attack.

Still, Sues and Stus are pervasive in fiction, across the media spectrum. After all, a writer putting a version of themselves, but better, to paper is likely to be well inside Sue/Stu territory. The same goes for a writer creating an idealized figure with which they hope to make their reader identify in such a way. A writer setting out to create a character which is a role model, a "positive counterstereotype," or anything else of the kind has to be very careful indeed if they don't want to cross that line.

One may go so far as to say that the Sue/Stu is a default mode for fiction, so standard in some stories that we barely notice their Sue-ness. After all, what does the average television show offer? Attractive people saying polished, scripted things, usually while wearing nice clothes and sitting in handsomely furnished rooms. The world of the TV professional--the doctors and lawyers who give the impression virtually no other kind of work exists--tends to be a fantasy of competence and glamour, with most of the ethical rough edges rubbed off. The TV physician or surgeon is always brilliant, and always deeply concerned with the care of the patient; the worst that can be said of them is that they're cranky or eccentric, like John Becker (Becker) or Perry Cox (Scrubs) or Gregory House (House), and even that crankiness is often presented as part of their excellence--for instance, in their demanding the best from their subordinates, or their willingness to buck the system to save a life. From the deadpan Law & Order to the strutting, speechifying (and surprisingly musical) inanities of David E. Kelley-produced dramedies like Boston Legal, the TV attorney is little different, and usually better dressed, their well-cut suits rather more becoming than surgeon's scrubs.

It's not a real doctor or lawyer viewers are seeing, but the fantasy version of what they do and how they live--and it may well be that some write their Mary Sues and Gary Stus defensively, to forestall the "minority pressure" (to use Ray Bradbury's term) that would descend on them if an influential group (such as doctors and lawyers happen to be) were to be offended by a more realistic depiction.

Leave aside the upper middle-class vision of life predominant in TV drama for a moment, and consider the action hero instead. Most of these have been the author's Gary Stu. Robert Howard had Conan, Ian Fleming had James Bond, Clive Cussler had Dirk Pitt, and Tom Clancy had Jack Ryan and Mr. Clark. Ex-Navy SEAL Richard Marcinko was his own Gary Stu, picking up where his autobiography left off with a series of action-adventure novels--and even a first-person shooter--in which Richard Marcinko himself is the star. Such characters are smarter, stronger, tougher, braver and generally better than ordinary people because they have to be; they wouldn't survive what their authors put them through otherwise. (It takes a cartoon character to make it in a cartoon world.) Very often they have ridiculously large portfolios of skills, because it's the only way the writer can keep them at the center of the plot, moving it along, rather than having to cede the spotlight to other characters.

In fact, outright geniuses in all fields are a dime a dozen, and their intellectual feats--the lightning-fast hacks of computer systems they've never seen before; the immediate improvisation of effective on-the-spot solutions to world-ending crises; the overnight, single-handed creation of futuristic inventions that in real life defy the scientific-industrial complexes of the most powerful countries on Earth--bear about as much relationship to the capabilities and accomplishments of real-life geniuses as the physical feats of comic book superheroes do to those of the greatest athletes. (I suspect few appreciate the latter, though. Unbelievable as it may seem, the idiocies of Eureka's scripts reflect a widespread view of how scientific R & D actually goes, and there are actual working engineers who lament their employers will never give them the chance to be Reed Richards.)

In short, Mary Sues and Gary Stus do have their weaknesses, especially when judged by a standard of realism and character drama, but they certainly have their uses and their places, which is why writers write them, and why so many readers gravitate to them (or at least, stories featuring them). Unfortunately, writers don't always recognize those uses and places, and make a botch of things by placing them in an inappropriate context--or simply by writing the character badly.

The truth is that a good Sue/Stu is just as tough to write as a more realistic character, and perhaps even tougher. It's not easy to make such characters likable, let alone relatable. It's not easy to sustain suspense when the hero's unbeatable and indestructible. And all too often, the execution ends up lacking subtlety, or nuance. The writer pushes things too far. We end up with a character who is not just a talented winner, but someone who is talented at everything, always right, always gets the last word, always one-ups everyone else, always gets away with everything, is always being fawned over for their abilities and general wonderfulness--and it's quite a feat to keep this from getting wearisome in a hurry, one that exceeds the skill of many an author. In other cases they make the character a surrogate for their nastier impulses. We end up with a braggart, a jerk, a bully or worse, and so we sympathize, and empathize, with the people who have to put up with them instead of our ostensible protagonist.

Nonetheless, even in the best of cases, the plain and simple truth where fantasy is concerned is that we don't all have the same fantasies. Quite the contrary, others' fantasies very often touch our insecurities, our bitter memories of rejection or failure, our deepest, pettiest resentments and antipathies; we can experience someone else's wish-fulfillment as an assault on our own wishes, and even our own being (and it must be admitted, a Sue or Stu is sometimes conceived as exactly that, the wishes to be fulfilled by them not pleasant for others, or the Other). And at the same time, we can be irrationally offended when someone criticizes our favorite Sues and Stus.

In principle, there's no reason why one can't enjoy their own Sues and Stus, recognize the right of others to the same, and still be annoyed by particular fantasy characters, still call characters what they are, and respond appropriately to genuinely pernicious Sues and Stus. Alas, the elevation of gut feelings to moral principles by identity politics, and all the irrationality and hypocrisy and viciousness that go with this has made the unavoidable wrangling about Mary Sues and Gary Stus far more bitter than it has to be, so that in many a situation one hesitates even to verbalize the identification. (Call it the "politics of personal fantasy.") It's yet another way in which real life is unkind to fantasy--and unalloyed fantasy, a thing one shares at their own risk.

1. The 1974 short story "A Trekkie's Tale" (available here), actually a parody of the tendency in fan fiction about Star Trek, is the source of the term.

Fantastique Unfettered #1, Winter 2010

Reviewed By Nader Elhefnawy

Originally published at The Future Fire Reviews, March 24, 2011

M-Brane Press, the publisher of M-Brane SF science fiction magazine, launched a fantasy counterpart to that publication last year, Fantastique Unfettered. Fantastique Unfettered (or FU), under the editorship of Brandon H. Bell, has as its stated purpose the "publication of well-written, compellingly readable, original stories of fantasist fiction," both short fiction and poetry, which is "unfettered by tradition copyright," so that all its content carries a CC-BY-SA "Creative Commons" license.

The authors appearing in the premier, Winter 2010 issue of the publication (which has eleven short stories and three poems in its 140 pages) offer a wide range of approaches and settings. Perhaps exemplary in this respect is the story to which the issue's cover art is devoted, Michael J. Shell's "The Death of a Soybean," which presents an off-the-wall, alternate version of the Manhattan Project and World War II. More a uchronia than an alternate history, "Soybean" surreally scrambles the events of our timeline rather than exploring a counterfactual scenario, with Robert J. Oppenheimer just a Los Alamos security guard who happens to be eccentrically preoccupied with an idea called "nuclear fission," and a femme fatale lady physicist with the unlikely name of Maladi scheming, seducing and killing her way to fame, fortune and a place in scientific history.

Offering a nightmare complement to Shell’s noirish dream is Kaolin Fire's "The Aetheric God," in which a young technician named Asher who spends his days building steam-men for his employer, "Chief Technician" Father Isaiah. He spends his nights hiding in the cathedral’s library-desperately burying himself in its books to try and quiet "the voice of God within his head" calling for Asher's mutilation and destruction, a crisis that soon enough moves out of his head and into the physical world. Going in a sharply different direction from either is Alan Frackelton's "A Blessing From the Blind Boy," the story of a disgruntled gaucho named Juan Hernandez who burglarizes the mansion of his ruthless landowner employer somewhere (and somewhen) in twentieth century Latin America, putting Hernandez's young son Ramon in the center of a cycle of revenge, loss and longing. In a lighter, more fanciful vein, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz's "Breaking the Spell" (a reprint from Philippine Speculative Fiction 4) has for its protagonist a little girl who becomes fascinated with the miniature world her father keeps under a bell jar. While her father's fairy tales never ring true for her (she is "determined not to kiss a prince"), entry into that little world becomes the object of her own fairy tale quest.

However, in contrast with such exoticism, the issue favors contemporary contexts, and compared with the world-changing (and rather nihilistic) events of Shell's story, or the intense confrontation with the supernatural of Fire's, subtler uses of speculative elements inside quieter, more personal stories. The descriptor that came to mind when I read Frank Ard's story of a love triangle between a man, mer-man and woman "Small Fish in the Deep Blue" is "slipstream." Others incorporate surreal intrusions into what might otherwise be a realist narrative, like in Mary J. Daley's "The Book of Barnyard Souls," in which a young farm girl named Kalee receives nightly visits from the souls of deceased animals, Natania Barron's "Without a Light," in which a sixth-grade teacher in a small town starts an affair with a mysterious colleague, Elizabeth Creith's "Five Oak Leaves," where a man encounters a young changeling girl living on the street. In Anna Manthiram's "Boris," a meditation via fortune cookie-like clothing tags on the titular character’s involvements with various women; Christopher Green's "Holding Hands," in which a Vietnam veteran encounters a girl he left behind at thirteen many years later in his wife’s ballet studio; or Michael J. Deluca's "The Driftwood Chair," in which a man roams the beach trying to cope with the loss of a love; it is possible to blink and miss the speculative touch.

By and large the sensibility is ‘literary,’ and the quality is high (the two, of course, not always the same thing), virtually all the stories assembled here working, though to different degrees and in different ways. "Death of a Soybean" succeeds on the strength of its pacing and strangeness, Fire’s "The Aetheric God" on the nightmarish force of the telling. The poems offer similar grandiosity, particularly Bruce Boston's rich, dark, chaotic "The Time Traveler Leaves History Behind" and Alexandra Seidel's glittering "In Babel." Daley’s touching "Barnyard Souls" is the most emotionally resonant story in the volume, though the pieces by Frackleton, Creith and Green also succeed on this level.

That combination of quality and variety means that Fantastique Unfettered #1 offers something for many different tastes, in what seems to me a very promising start for the new publication.

This review is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, (c) Nader Elhefnawy. You are free to republish this review anywhere you like, so long as you give attribution to the author and to The Future Fire and keep this license text intact in any copy.

Review: The Sound of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir, by Toby Young

Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2006, pp. 274.

Toby Young's second memoir (the first of course being How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) starts off after Toby's first book has got into print. It happens to catch the eye of a Hollywood producer who offers him a crack at adapting a biography about a self-destructive '70s-era record producer into a screenplay for a movie he wants to make. (The producer, identified to the reader only as the anonymous "Mr. Hollywood," is operating on the theory that if Toby succeeded in making himself seem likable in How to Lose Friends, then he ought to be able to do the same with the life story of the man in the biography.) Meanwhile a different set of producers comes around to talk about making his first book into a movie. Once again, he's in America going after the Big Time, albeit on the West coast rather than the East.

It would be a mistake to approach this book as Toby's Big Hollywood Adventure, however. No Hands Clapping is really a chronicle of his life after the events of the previous book, with his screenwriting experiences just the connecting thread running through the narrative. Along with the work's comparative looseness, it doesn't help that the freshness of the reader's first encounter with him is gone, or that he's lost some of his edge.

Toby still has ambitions, but the fire's not as hot as when he hopped across the Atlantic to work for Graydon Carter. The tensions and conflicts that did so much to make his first book interesting to me--the contrast between his intelligence and education and his starstruck hunger for glamour, his frustrated lust for the good life, the clash between his rather shallow goals and his parents' accomplishments and values--are far less evident here, having largely run their course the last time around. Toby's settling down at the end of the last book is a significant part of that, and as might be guessed, his life as a whipped (but mostly content) boyfriend, husband and father coping with domestic and mid-life crises is rather less entertaining than his earlier laddishness. He's still quite good at "losing friends and alienating people," but it starts to feel like a role he's enjoying.

The result is that this all seems more like an anticlimax to the history that made him an "icon of defeat" rather than a fully satisfactory follow-up. Still, I found chunks of the book almost as funny as How to Lose Friends, and while perhaps less insightful than the previous volume of his memoirs, it is still peppered with memorable observations by Young and the other "characters" in his story. Many of the best relate to his newfound domesticity, and as might be expected, also to the unbelievably bloated, shambling workings of what he learns to call "The Business" of film and television (admittedly, an even more overexposed subject than the glossy, Conde Nast-style magazine). One of my favorites among those he relates is the way it takes only thirty seconds for the aspirants who make it to stardom to move from the view that it's all a "crapshoot" to believing that it's "talent" and talent alone that put them at the top of the heap--a reminder that, contrary to the conventional wisdom of a society which chooses to see economic history as nothing but Horatio Alger stories and Edisonades, one's level of success tends to be inversely correlated with their understanding of how the System they inhabit really works.

However, the most provocative aspect of the book is unintended, namely what it suggests about our rhetoric of failure. Toby had chances of a kind others can scarcely dream of, thanks to his father's prominence, his familial and personal connections, and some astonishing strokes of luck, like those phone calls which started his adventures in both New York and Hollywood. (You can't be "fired from virtually every paper on Fleet Street" without being hired by them first, after all.)

By contrast, most of those who chase dreams of stardom and come to think of themselves as failures never had anything like those chances. Instead they waited for breaks that never came, their failure definable in negative terms as a lack of success that frequently is more reflective of the way the odds work against anyone, and the closed-off character of the businesses they try to enter, rather than their having been given a proper chance and blown it, as Young did again and again. This made his failures genuine failures in a way that theirs were not, while ironically putting him in a position to make a business out of telling the story of his woes that has given him something not unlike the stardom he sought in the first place, a far cozier and rosier position than is enjoyed by most of those who would call themselves "successful."

Alas, I suspect few readers will really appreciate that distinction, without which this story would not have been possible.

I suspect the author of No Hands Clapping doesn't appreciate it either.

Returning to Sahara: The Dirk Pitt Novels On Screen

Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series has had an exceptionally unfortunate history on the big screen, each of the two attempts to film one of his novels--1980's Raise the Titanic and 2005's Sahara--ending up a notoriously expensive critical and commercial flop.1 Raise the Titanic has been blamed for killing ITC Entertainment, while Sahara resulted in a loss of over a hundred million dollars for the producer, as well as a spectacular legal battle that, as far as I can tell, has continued to this day.2 The latter is strongly connected with the more active role Cussler got as part of the terms on which the movie was made, and which he claimed the producers never honored.

Looking back it seems that there was never any question of the script closely following the book. Sahara's images of a Third World country where everyone is either a villain or an anonymous victim, its scenes in which Africans turn cannibal and attack foreign tourists, in which Pitt threatens to bury a Malian antagonist with bacon in his mouth, its climax in which a handful of Western heroes hole up in an old colonial fort and fight off a siege by vastly more numerous native soldiers they kill by the hundred, before their rescue by the cavalry (literally, a U.S. Army cavalry unit)--one doesn't have to be trained in post-linguistic turn literary theory or more than ordinarily given to approaching popular fiction as "cultural text" to see that these elements could have been problematic for a twenty-first century audience (a point highlighted by the film's producers when discussing Cussler's input on the scripts).3

The plotline about a United Nations commando team reflected the anticipations in the early '90s that the United Nations would be a more powerful, independent entity after the Cold War's close, which have long since become passé. The heavy weaponry on the Calliope probably seemed a bit over the top, like the pre-reboot James Bond--and perhaps a bit pricier than the producers wanted to go--much like the siege at the end (an idea that had already been used quite heavily in movies during those years, as with the Lord of the Rings and Matrix series, though frankly it would have made for a good set piece). Ditto for the plotline about the end of Abraham Lincoln's life (the principal bit of historical-archaeological interest the novel had).

All that makes it seem an unlikely candidate for an adaptation, but all this is the sort of thing that only seems obvious when one has actually read the material. The more casual glance that likely decided the issue simply noted that the Dirk Pitt novels were a bestselling series of globe-trotting action thrillers, a natural enough object of Hollywood's interest, especially with the surprising success of the Jason Bourne series--the film versions of which also jettisoned most of the stuff of the books--apparently encouraging the tendency to seize on such work.4 And there certainly were some reasons to think the Pitt novels would be worth a shot. The fast-paced plots and rapid-fire action of Cussler's novels are very cinematic in feel. The element of historical mystery that is a prominent feature of the series probably looked like a significant plus at the time. (After all, these were the years when Dan Brown became a full-blown pop cultural phenomenon, and the National Treasure films became the biggest success of Nicholas Cage's career.) And Sahara, which certainly had these two traits going for it, likely seemed easier to adapt than some of Cussler's other books. Its plot is a bit more grounded than lost continent tales like Atlantis Found (2000), for instance. It doesn't require nearly so much updating as the apartheid-era Vixen 03 (1978) or Cold War intrigues like Deep Six (1984) and Cyclops (1986). And for all the political difficulties mentioned above (perhaps more obvious when one starts thinking seriously about the conversion from page to screen), adapting it remained less awkward than Night Probe (1981), with its plot about the United States struggling with Britain for possession of Canada, or the Sinophobia and xenophobia-laden storyline of Flood Tide (1998).

And so it seemed like a good idea at the time--just as bad ideas usually do when people get it into their heads to act on them.

1. Those who have not seen the film might want to check out a fair review of it at the Den of Geek, written retrospectively just last year.
2. The film has in fact been taken as an object lesson in Hollywood's mismanagement of large budgets--the production budget doubling from $80 to $160 million (in part, because of script problems), and the distribution costs coming to a preposterous $81 million more. The Los Angeles Times published a special report on the matter including exceptionally detailed figures for expenses (specifying everything from the $102,884 spent on walkie-talkies, to the $48,893 Matthew McConaughey's personal chef received in compensation--more than Rainn Wilson got for playing Rudi Gunn--to bribes to various Moroccan officials).
3. Alas, such elements are common throughout Cussler's work, perhaps more so than in most thriller fiction--as with the Japanaphobia of Dragon (1990) or the treatment of immigrants as instruments of a Chinese plot for the conquest of America in Flood Tide (1998)--but his books still seem like a font of citizen-of-the-world cosmopolitanism next to the writings of John Ringo, Thomas Kratman and a good many others who have come to prominence in the past decade. Say what you will, this is certainly not a case of "now we know better."
4. The Bourne Identity (2002) dropped the plotline about 1970s-era international terrorism and the hunt for Carlos the Jackal--both long passé by that point, with that era's groups all but vanished and Carlos himself sitting in a French prison. (Since the third book, The Bourne Ultimatum, was "round two" for the Bourne-Carlos fight, the 2007 film also used a plot developed from scratch.) The element of jet set sophistication, and the edgier aspects of Jason and Marie's relationship (like his kidnapping her at gunpoint) were similarly dropped. The result, in my view anyway, was pretty thin stuff since the writers didn't really bother to replace what they removed.

Reflections on the Dirk Pitt Series

I first encountered Clive Cussler circa 1993 through Sahara, which was then his latest novel. I went right through it and subsequently tracked down every other novel Cussler published before it, then went on to follow his career closely for a good many years afterward. I enjoyed virtually all of his books, a good many of the earlier ones nearly as much as Sahara (especially 1986's Cyclops and 1988's Treasure).

With their big, exciting plots encompassing wild historical theories and high-stakes geopolitical games, their abundance of gimmicks (like cool high-tech toys), their plenitude of over-the-top, cinematic action, their unflappable James Bondian protagonist and colorful James Bondian villains, and their sense of humor, I found Cussler's novels a lot of fun--and also, a model for the kind of story I was then aspiring to write. (Matthew Reilly would be an even closer fit in many respects, but he hadn't even published his first book yet.)

The inelegant, often cliché-ridden prose, the one-dimensional characters--these things only started mattering to me later on, by which time the author's tendency to repeat himself to diminishing returns would have been enough to reduce my interest, even at a less discriminating point in my history as a reader. Of course, this may have been inevitable. As of the time of this writing, Dirk Pitt's adventures have been in print for thirty-seven years, and despite the use of a rather large bag of tricks, Cussler's hero's aged enough that Pitt's grown-up kids now get in on the action. Far from letting go gracefully, or at least taking a break every now and then, Cussler kept the books coming, despite his declining enthusiasm for them (Cussler himself confessing to boredom with his creation in at least one interview).

Indeed, Cussler stepped up production sharply--through a turn to literary sharecropping on a massive scale.1 Where action thriller writers are concerned, only Tom Clancy compares with Cussler's prolific involvement in "co-authored" books to which his principal contribution seems to be his brand name. This includes not only every Dirk Pitt novel to follow 2001's Valhalla Rising (the byline of which is shared with his son Dirk), but the NUMA File series cowritten with Paul Kemprecos, the Oregon Files novels written with Craig Dirgo and Jack DuBrul, the Isaac Bell novels (cowritten with Justin Scott from the second book on) and the Fargo Adventures written with Grant Blackwood (who also "co-authored" Clancy's latest, Dead or Alive)--some twenty-five novels in five series, a considerable output even before counting his foray into nonfiction (like the two-book Sea Hunters series, also cowritten with Dirgo).2 At this point co-authored books account not only for virtually all of Cussler's output in the past decade, but for a majority of the books he has published in his four decade career (27 of 46 books of all sorts).3

That others keep on buying the books, being disappointed, complaining online and then buying the next book, again and again and again (enough to keep Cussler on the bestseller lists), astonishes me. Rather than nostalgia, I find the whole phenomenon a depressing sign of the times.

NOTES
1. From the 1970s through the first half of the 1990s, Cussler published roughly one novel every two years (twelve from 1973 to 1994), where now two to three new books appear bearing the Cussler name annually, a staggering 400 percent rise in production.
2. As might be expected, I found the 1999 Numa Files novel Serpent--the first of the coauthored novels--lackluster, and while I still read Atlantis Found (2000) and Valhalla Rising, 2003's Trojan Odyssey was simply unreadable, and haven't bothered to return to the Cussler brand since.
3. The release of two more co-authored books (the Oregon Files novel The Jungle, the Fargo Adventure The Kingdom) has already been announced for this year, further increasing their share of the total (to 29 of 48). This should be considered a low estimate, however, given that not all "co-authored" books are announced as such.

Why I Can't Stand The Big Bang Theory

Last summer I watched a handful of episodes of The Big Bang Theory all the way through, then gave up on the show entirely, not just irritated by what I watched, but astonished by the show's success (at the time, anyway).

I might as well start with the characters. As anyone who has seen an episode knows, the four scientists at the heart of the story--Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and Rajesh Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar)--are not just stereotypes, but very, very annoying. Of course, characters with annoying quirks can be engaging. Monk's titular character Adrian Monk is a perfect example of this, his combination of strengths and weaknesses making him compelling and endowing him with a genuine humanity, as well as affording the writers abundant inspiration for comedic material. Jim Parson's Emmy-nominated Sheldon, by contrast, never does anything more than grate, and the same goes for his friends (to varying degrees).

Of course, this is fairly standard. Treatments of "geeks" in American film and television tend to feel like they were written by the kinds of people who beat up geeks when they were growing up (if they ever did grow up). They are caricatures, and generally not good ones. Good caricature begins with an apprehension of reality, while pop culture depictions of everyone from the gifted child to the veteran scientist are caricatures of caricatures tending toward the grotesque. At the same time, the casting has often left me with the impression that the roles exist mainly to provide work to well-connected but awkward, uncharismatic (and frankly, unattractive) actors.

Big Bang is no exception to the pattern, either in the writing or the acting, all too predictably reusing, recycling and running right into the ground all the hoariest geek stereotypes and clichés--stuff that was tired in seventh grade--starting with the field of study all four of the scientists have in common, physics. After all, the greenest Hollywood hack knows that if you want to overawe an unsophisticated viewer, just throw in the word "physicist," preferably with the prefix "astro" or the word "quantum" in front of it. The average viewer may not be able to explain exactly what physics deals with, believe that the Theory of Relativity is a moral stance and think Albert Einstein's scientific contribution was his personal invention of the atomic bomb, but they realize that physics is "hard," especially because it "has math in it," and are therefore intimidated by anyone who can deal with it, so that where sheer intellectual one-upsmanship is considered, everything else is regarded as second-rate.1

Of course, pandering to widely held stupidities has never been an obstacle to popular success, and certainly there's always been an audience happy to laugh at nerds. (Remember, this show laughs at them, not "with" them.) Intellectuals like scientists may be an "elite" of sorts, but when push comes to shove, they are a rather powerless group, making them easy marks for everyone from comedians to demagogues. (As Morris Berman asked in his brilliant essay The Twilight of American Culture, "Can you imagine, in this country, a TV program along the lines of Cheers that ridiculed wealth instead of intelligence?") With anti-intellectualism running particularly hot in the last decade (as it usually does when national politics takes such turns), it may be no surprise that CBS scored a hit with a show founded on this kind of humor. And while I've never been a particular fan of Chuck Lorre's work (Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men), there does seem to be a sizable audience which clearly enjoys it.

This being the case, what really surprises me is the critical acclaim the show enjoys, and in particular the enthusiasm from the proudly self-described geeks one would expect to see right through it, to recognize that it isn't the smart or geek-friendly viewing it has been taken for. I suppose that part of it may be that instead of being relegated to supporting roles, the geeks are the core of the cast this time, and like members of a marginalized minority group they're simply excited to see such a representation of themselves on screen, even when it's an unkind one. Part of it, too, seems to be that the show's writers are relatively literate when it comes to both the science and the pop culture (indeed, I imagine many a joke goes over the average viewer's head), which is rare enough that some will regard it as an oasis of relatively intelligent viewing for that reason alone.

I say relatively. For nuanced geek-culture comedy I generally find myself having to look accross the ocean--to Britain for Spaced, or better still, to Japan for manga and anime like Genshiken (the first series, at any rate; I didn't much care for the second) or Welcome to the N.H.K. ("masterpiece" is the word that comes to my mind). As it happens, they largely dispense with the scientists, but that's partly the point: there is geek culture outside physics and computer science (as club president Madarame explains about himself and his cohorts "We're not techie otaku . . ."), and anyway, The Big Bang Theory, despite its title, isn't really about physics or physicists, even to the modest extent that the crime show Numb3rs is about mathematics and mathematicians. And these other shows are much, much better stuff than anything we're likely to get out of American network television.

NOTES
1. There seems to be a widespread and deep-rooted view that there is a hierarchy of intellectual endeavor, with the physical sciences (of which physics is queen) and related engineering specialties (especially those including the words "rocket," "nuclear" or "computer") on top, ahead of the life sciences (though the word "neuro" has a cachet comparable to "astro" and "quantum" in physics; "molecular" is good too), the life sciences ahead of the social ones, and the humanities at the bottom, a view that the show routinely acknowledges (and if anything, reinforces, whether intentionally or unintentionally). A noteworthy example: in the episode "The Bad Fish Paradigm," Sheldon insists to Penny that a former girlfriend of Leonard's who possessed a Ph.d in French Literature is not a "brainiac" because "for one thing she was French, and for another it was literature."

Review: Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy, by Michael Moorcock

Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain, Inc., 2004, pp. 206.

I first encountered Michael Moorcock's classic study of epic fantasy many years ago, when I had only a faint idea that he is a Big Name in speculative fiction (picked up mainly from my readings in Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree), and not much idea as to why. I'd tried to read some of his Jerry Cornelius stories, which didn't work for me. (I wasn't a fan of the cut-up technique, and still am not.) At the same time, I'd read relatively little fantasy, and had some hope the book would help me get a handle on the bigger picture. I didn't find it very useful to that end, and didn't do much more than skim it before setting it aside.

The fact that I didn't find the book of much interest then doesn't say anything about its worth, but it does say a great deal about its conception, as I realized when rereading it later on. It was never intended as an introduction to the genre, the kind of thing someone in a hurry would read to get a clear image of the field. Moorcock does not offer a history of the genre, or a survey, though there is plenty of history, and quite a bit of breadth in the examination. Nor is the book unified by an overarching argument or concern. Instead Moorcock is sounding off on a selection of themes in a collection of chapter-long essays covering, respectively, the genre's origins (chapter one); the use of landscape in epic fantasy fiction (chapter two); the depiction of heroes and heroines (chapter three); the presence of wit and humor, and the lack thereof (chapter four); the escapist aspect of much of the genre, as well as the political implications of this kind of writing (chapter five, which is essentially a reprint of his essay "Epic Pooh," also the chapter's title); and finally, the evolution of the genre's expressions across the media spectrum (chapter six, "Excursions and Developments").

As might be expected, the breadth and depth of Moorcock's reading and range of reference is staggering. While enriching these discussions, it can also be a bit of an obstacle after the first chapter, since he makes little effort to meet a less prolific reader halfway in the later parts of the discussion. As China Mieville acknowledges in the introduction to the new edition,

Reading Michael Moorcock's history of literary fantasy is like walking an immense, brilliantly stocked library, through which you don't know the way, following a librarian who walks briskly, nodding and pointing at various books as he goes.
"Very interesting that one," he says, and "Ah, some good things in there," and you're desperate to stop and examine the volumes . . . but your custodian walks too quickly, and you can only stare back at them as you run to keep up (11).

The result is that Wizardry & Wild Romance is best approached as a polemic (or a collection of polemics) addressed by one expert to other experts. It is never impenetrable in the way that academic literary criticism so often can be--Moorcock's writing is far too lucid for that--but as Mieville notes, the fleetness with which it moves among a great many items can be frustrating.

Readers should also keep in mind that this study was first drafted in the 1970s, and even the latest edition strongly reflects that. Despite some revisions to the main text, there are no references to any fantasy fiction actually written after 1985. (A reader hoping to see something about Robert Jordan or J.K. Rowling, for instance, will come away disappointed.) At the same time, many of the authors he references are relatively obscure now. (In fact, I had never heard of most of those writers he praises most until I picked up this book.) Additionally, the moment colors his outlook in significant ways. As historian Nick Tiratsoo notes, this was a period of hysteria in Britain about the "respectable classes losing control," with much hyperbole about labor militancy, uppity young people with "common accents," and other sorts of things I first gleaned in reruns of Are You Being Served? and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin a very long time ago--and Moorcock's opposition to that kind of reactionary thinking is strongly present, be it in his suspicion of rural nostalgia and escapism, or other sorts of "comfort food for the comfortable."1 (Indeed, he can be particularly harsh regarding the impulses and attitudes he sees under the surface of the wishes the genre so often speaks to--especially those for a "simpler" world in which a young man armed with gritty determination and cold steel can win himself an empire, or our heroes venture off to kill villains we are not even meant to try and understand in order to restore an "idyllic" status quo.)

Still, even at its most dated and partisan the book succeeds in both entertaining and informing. Wizardry offers plenty of bits of fascinating background. It points the reader to a great many authors, many of whom they would be unlikely to encounter elsewhere, and Moorcock's eye for their strengths and weaknesses, quirks and accomplishments, is uncommonly sharp. The book is also packed with insights well worth reading even three decades on, from his views on the transient appeal of so many particular works of fantastic literature, to the role a well-crafted landscape can play, to the underappreciation and frequent misunderstanding of comedy's place in the genre. (Even the political commentary is still relevant, given that the conservative resurgence of the 1970s pretty much set the world on the political course it has followed these last several decades.)

Even when I didn't agree with the author's argument, or his feeling--after all these years I'm still more sympathetic to escapism and comfort food than he is, rather less enthusiastic about Modernist and Postmodernist approaches to literature, and think what people tend to call "grown-up" fiction is overrated, to name but a few points--I always understood the reasoning behind them. Indeed, it all made me wish Moorcock had penned a proper follow-up. Naturally, anyone with a serious intellectual curiosity about the genre, or simply looking to broaden their sense of what epic fantasy is and can be, should make a place for it in their reading list--though those brand new to the field might put off getting to it until they've acquired more familiarity with the subject.

NOTES
1. Interestingly, Tiratsoo noted that those dismayed by the decade's trends frequently expressed those feelings in a nostalgia for the eighteenth century; imaginative flight to romanticized, pre-industrial, rural spaces; and less pleasantly, "retribution," violent and otherwise--with obvious implications for the ways in which fantasy fiction was being received. Nick Taratsoo, "'You've Never Had It So Bad': Britain in the 1970s." In Taratsoo, ed., From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain Since 1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), pp. 187-188. Those looking for a bit of quick background about both the genuine difficulties and overblown alarmism of the period can check out this article from the September 30, 1974 issue of Time magazine, melodramatically titled "Will Democracy Survive?"

"Was 2010 the Worst Year for Movies Ever?"

Continuing in the vein of "2010 in review," Moviefone's Gary Susman offers his take on the year's films, and it is far from celebratory. Of course, measured in dollars and cents, this wasn't a bad year at all for Hollywood, which took in over $10 billion in the North American market. Still, the figures reflect rising ticket prices and the high take of 2009's Avatar, which actually pulled in most of its money in the early months of 2010. This compensated for a rather long string of disappointments. They were especially concentrated (and commented upon) in the early part of the summer season, but after that the flops never stopped coming.

Looking for an explanation, Susman points to the plethora of reboots, remakes and sequels; "warmed-over" '80s nostalgia; stalled star vehicles; failed new franchises; and the rush after 3-D movie experiences.

Of course, except for 3-D, none of this may seem to represent a significant change from the norm in recent decades. Stars have never been bulletproof, just about always enduring flops as well as appearing in hits, and at any rate, most of the talk about actors' bankability confuses correlation with causation. Nor is the crashing and burning of a would-be franchise a new development; that problem too would seem to be as old as the idea of a film series. Indeed, these points hardly seem to be worth discussing. Besides, reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels and the like have been mainstays of the box office ever since there was a box office. (In 1983, for instance, eight of the top twenty movies fell into this category.1) And before warmed-over '80s nostalgia, there was warmed-over '50s, '60s and '70s nostalgia. (Remember the #1 hit of 1985, Back to the Future, and the career trajectory of Oliver Stone in that decade? The big-screen spin-offs of shows like The Fugitive, The Flintstones and Mission: Impossible, the return of John Travolta and Pam Grier to starring roles, the comeback of the martial arts movie in the '90s?)

Still, an objective look at the numbers does show an increased propensity for retreads through the last decade. In the 1980s and 1990s, the average was closer to three to four of the top twenty grossers in a given year (3.9 for the years 1980-1989 and 3.7 for 1990-1999, respectively). From 2000 to 2009 the average was twice that high, seven to eight (7.5) of each year's top twenty commonly falling into that category. By my count, six of the top ten and nine of the top twenty movies of 2010 are retreads (while the category accounts for at least twenty-one out of the top one hundred).2

Additionally, as heavily as the 1990s mined the 1970s, the last few years may have worked the '80s still more aggressively, as the propensity for retreads suggests. (Where Travolta made his comeback in new movies with little relation to his earlier screen image, Stallone paved the way for his by reviving his '80s-era franchises-Rocky and Rambo-with himself in the starring role, and finally The Expendables, an "homage" to exactly the kind of action movie Rambo epitomized. And certainly the '90s had no equivalent to the success of The Transformers franchise.)

In short, while these approaches are far from now, Hollywood has relied on them even more heavily than before.

That said, after a string of flops like this year had, it's traditional for observers to predict big changes in how Hollywood will do things-changes that will see the Suits concede creative freedom to the Artists-and Susman is true to that tradition. Still, the pipeline movies must pass through is a long one, and even if the system were to do a one hundred and eighty degree turn today in its green-lighting of new projects, it would be 2013 before a full year's slate of movies might look substantially different. Besides, the truth is that, with inflated expectations the norm (even a $400 million global gross is "low" enough to stall or even kill a franchise), disappointment is a way of life, and it takes more than a few bumps in the road to shift the characteristic operational style of the bloated, bureaucratized studios. The causes of the preoccupation with retreads, spin-offs and the like have very deep roots, not least in

the ever-bigger gamble involved in gigantic and still-growing budgets, shortening theatrical runs, ever-more fickle attendance at theaters, and the ever-louder pop cultural cacophony which a project needs to get above to be seen or heard, something easier to do with an already-established IP.

It would also be a very great mistake to underrate the intrinsic appeal of "high concept" for a company run the way the studios are, or of the added control over the creative process that comes with assigning someone to work on a studio-owned IP, compared with the challenges involved in dealing with a new artist bearing a new concept. Likewise, it would be a mistake to overlook Hollywood's global orientation, which helps drive its present tendencies. The mid-budget dramas and comedies which Susman sees renewed studio interest in tend not to travel so well abroad as the glossy, spectacle-heavy blockbusters that remain Hollywood's strength, and the foreign grosses on those make a lot of difference. (Even a mediocre performer like Prince of Persia nearly quadruples its income with the help of those receipts, bumping its $90 million take in the U.S. to a $335 million global total--which leaves a sequel highly unlikely, but is certainly enough to make the nine figures laid out for the budget tolerable, especially when DVD sales, broadcast rights and the like are added in later. By contrast, the ballyhooed The Social Network did little more than match its domestic earnings.)

My guess is that the Suits are far more likely to dig in their heels and push the product they are most comfortable with all the harder, the critics be damned. Accordingly, it seems far more likely to me that there will be a convergence between (somewhat) chastened expectations and some lucky strike that will renew Hollywood's always incredible self-satisfaction . . . until the next run of disappointments, the inevitable talk of the studios changing their way and the repetition of the whole stupid pattern all over again.

In short, if there's going to be change, it will probably be in the direction of still more retreads. Bet on more nostalgia, too, though my guess is that the passion for the '80s will give way to one for the '90s any year now.

Remembering the '90s far better than I do the '80s, I'm already aghast at the thought.

NOTES
1. In 1983, Return of the Jedi was #1, the Bond movies Octopussy #6 and Never Say Never Again #14, the Dirty Harry movie Sudden Impact #7, the Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive #8, Superman III #12, Jaws 3-D #15, the remade Scarface # 16, and Psycho II #20. The data used in this article all comes from the yearly listings of the Box Office Mojo web site.
2. The count goes even higher if one include in this count the remakes of films made overseas like Edge of Darkness, Death at a Funeral and Dinner for Schmucks, as well as the new versions of previously filmed stories like Alice in Wonderland and Robin Hood.

Review: Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel, by Gary Shteyngart

New York: Random House, 2010, pp. 334.

The protagonist of Gary Shteyngart's bestselling novel Super Sad True Love Story is Leonard Abramov, the Queens-born son of Jewish Russian immigrants from what was then Leningrad. At this point in his life, Lenny is middle-aged, unhandsome, awkward, neurotic and hopelessly out of tune with the times. Only his possession of a relatively good job (he's a Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator for the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, essentially a salesman hawking life extension to rich customers), and his friendships with a few somewhat more favored people, save him from being written off as a total loser.

At the start of the novel Lenny is winding up an unprofitable year in Europe and beginning a romance with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman he meets in Rome, a recent college graduate being prodded toward law school by her immigrant parents. Eunice is confused and at times floundering, and her sense of their relationship is irreconcilable with that of an older lover desperately trying to retain a tenuous hold on her affections.

And making their relationship more tenuous still, external obstacles to their being happy together, going far beyond the usual, very quickly start to loom large: their relationship unfolds in a near-future United States which, under the leadership of the Bipartisan Party (and the de facto dictatorship of neoconservative Defense Secretary Rubinstein), is fighting a war in Venezuela and on the verge of economic collapse. Indeed, the situation is already so severe that even the near-annihilation of civil liberties fails to stop a mounting tide of internal disorder.

These are not the most original of characters, and their relationship may not be the most original of situations. There is much about them that will annoy a good many readers by the end of the story (especially if the reader has ever had to deal with people like them). Yet, they both rang true for me, and held my interest throughout.

Additionally, and more surprisingly, I was genuinely impressed with the world-building, which was extensive, innovative, often zany and smoothly integrated into the narrative. As might be expected from the premise it contained much satirical caricature, but at the same time seemed eerily, depressingly plausible in its essentials. At its best it reads like Bruce Sterling's writing about the near future, but with his Davos Man libertarian-conservatism replaced by a critical take from the left.

Moreover, Shteyngart successfully interweaves the big picture with the personal tale of Lenny and Eunice, Big Events impinging on their all-too-familiar Little Story in ways large and small, at many points making what could easily have been cliché (not least, the treatment of the immigrant experience) something worthwhile. Especially significant, the book uncannily captures the voice of the consumerist, texting-addicted young adult who can't get through a conversation without repeatedly saying "Whatever" (and can't get through a book, period) in Eunice. The generation gap between her cohort and their elders (sometimes, their elders by only a slender margin) is a difference of epochs, the dividing line between the eras of Johannes Guttenberg and Steve Jobs.

Shteyngart shows as well as tells this in his switches back and forth between Abramov's viewpoint, related in entries in an old-fashioned diary, and Eunice's exchanges of text messages with her family and friends, as well as in their exchanges with each other. Lenny's old-fashioned bookishness is constantly a source of embarrassment and anxiety between the two, and at times, even a wall. In one of the book's more memorable scenes, Lenny tries to read to her out of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to share a book that meant a great deal to him with her, and the experience turns out to be, well, unbearable.

Fortunately, Shteyngart's novel never is. Despite its switches of viewpoint, its stylistic experimentation, its density with concept and allusion, it is hugely readable, and a quick read as well as a satisfying one. In fact, while I've often felt that the genre's opinion leaders are too quick to embrace well-established "mainstream" authors who try their hand at science fiction, I would be disappointed to not see Super Sad True Love Story get some recognition at awards time next year.

Reflections on Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is exactly the kind of hit that makes me suspicious - a book showered with acclaim by critics who are none too clear about the reasons for that acclaim, an apparent pop cultural phenomenon which does not fit the accustomed pattern, nor appear to have broken that pattern by fulfilling some undiscovered niche.1 The success of Larsson's books seemed all the more remarkable given that the U.S. is such a weak market for translations (or even for stories about other lands), and there has certainly been nothing to indicate a special openness to Swedish imports in particular - neither an upsurge of interest in Swedish culture as such, nor a sudden preoccupation with Sweden in foreign affairs.

Naturally, I looked into the issue, reading a few reviews. Every so often someone mentions the interest of Lisbeth Salander-Watson to protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's Holmes, as many a critic has put it (though frankly I think it's the other way around). However, she she struck me as a bag of clichés-the pierced, tattooed rebel-punk hacker (which decade is this?), the brilliant detective whose symptoms of autism are the basis of their talent as well as their weakness (meet Gil Grissom, Temperance Brennan, Adrian Monk, and that's just on television), the Bohemian freelance investigator (I did say she was Holmes to Blomkvist's Watson, didn't I?).

Eventually, I gave in and read the first book (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) for myself in the hopes of answering that question.

The book certainly had its limits, from a commercial perspective. The book's marketed as a thriller, but while there's certainly a "story of detection," involving dark deeds and an element of danger, the Millennium Trilogy's first installment is no adrenaline novel. The investigation's very slow to get going, the very skeptical hero expecting to find nothing for over a hundred pages after taking the job, and sure enough, not getting a handle on even the first clue until the mid-point of the 465 page narrative. The story's short on action, too. (Blomkvist doesn't even get shot at until after page three hundred.) When he's unmasked, the killer is no Hannibal Lecter, rather a stock figure as banal as his crimes are hideous, his personal share of the family's very heavy baggage as ugly and awful as one might expect given the circumstances, but hardly anything readers of the genre would not have seen before - something that can be said of just about anything else in the story.

Admittedly Larsson shows some innovation, and reasonable skill, in tying the pursuit of the serial killer with a sweeping family history and a financial crime story, one developed with a fair bit of sophistication (though I felt there was an element of wish-fulfillment in the conclusion). In a few instances, there seemed to be touches many a reader likely finds compelling in a retro way. The element of dynastic epic we get here, the protagonist who bed-hops adroitly and guiltlessly - this is stuff we got a lot more of in the '70s. (Indeed, Daniel Craig will probably bed more women in this film franchise than he did as 007.) Perhaps reflecting Larsson's own experiences, there is an edge to the predicaments and compromises Blomkvist faces as a journalist. Salander also turned out to be a more engaging creation than I expected. Many authors can't resist the temptation to turn a character like this one into a Mary Sue (as with the aforementioned, extremely tiresome Temperance Brennan), but Salander's combination of strengths and vulnerabilities, the marks left by her condition and society's incomprehension of it, make her more complex and interesting than that, the novel's characterization of her both sharp and sensitive. (Most of the time, anyway. There is a point late in the book when Salander's bag of tricks suddenly seems implausibly large.) The treatment of Salander's hacking is also a cut above the commonplace depictions of the activity as a black nerd-magic useful for moving the plot over and around any obstacle. Finally, while Larsson's is not the most visceral or swiftly paced writing, the narrative flows smoothly enough. Put another way, he knows how to keep readers turning the pages.

Where marketing the book in the U.S. is concerned, the element of financial crime may be a bit more intriguing to the general readership amid an economic crisis which has seen plenty of it, and as Charles McGrath noted in a lengthy article in the New York Times, that the books introduce American readers to

a Sweden that is vastly different from the bleak, repressed, guilt-ridden images we see in Ingmar Bergman movies and from the design-loving Socialist paradise we imagine whenever we visit Ikea . . . [which is instead] a country that turns out to be a lot like our own.

The fact that so much of the story seems familiar, particularly what is unpleasant in the story, may be exactly the point. There's probably no small amount of Schadenfreude in that, given the way attitudes toward Europe echo the country's own culture wars (awfully ironic given Larsson's own politics), but this moves product all the same.

Still, the book's strengths, exoticisms and timing notwithstanding, I can't help but feel that the heights the book has attained in the United States (and worldwide) represent a triumph of marketing more than anything else. Ultimately, the book is a bestseller because it is a bestseller (as it was in Europe before reaching the U.S.). In any event, the situation reverts to normal when one considers that Hollywood is going for a remake rather than a theatrical release of the Swedish films already made out of the books, despite this rather low-key material's questionable appropriateness to a high-concept production. Indeed, the questionable stylistic fit of the flashy David Fincher to Larsson's writing (so that I actually wonder if he hasn't been brought in specifically to add an element of flash); Daniel Craig's uncertain record in selling major releases outside the Bond franchise; Hollywood's well-known profligacy with budgets and the grosses studios are forced to expect to justify that profligacy (which make even a $400 million take a potentially franchise-ending disappointment in many cases); and the tendency toward diminishing returns on sequels and remakes (keep in mind that much of the intended audience will have seen the Swedish film versions first); make this an unlikely franchise.

1. Patrick Anderson of the Washington Post does better than most, but likewise fell short of answering my questions.

On the New York Times Bestseller List . . .

On last Sunday's New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, Jonathan Franzen, Nicholas Sparks and Stieg Larsson are all on top, but mystery writer Janet Evanovich's urban fantasy Wicked Appetite is at #6, while Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Fall (book two of their Strain cycle) is at #8. There are, however, quite a few other authors using milder speculative elements in their fiction, Ted Bell's Warlord and Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood's Lost Empire being at #13 and #14 respectively. If one stretches the definition of speculative fiction that much more, there's also Sara Gruen's story of missing bonobos who turn up on a reality show, Ape House, currently at #15.

The list of speculative-themed works lengthens considerably when one looks at the extended NYT list, where paranormal romance is evident, with Sherilyn Kenyon's No Mercy at #16 and Christine Feehan's Dark Peril at #32; still more urban fantasy from mystery writers who started out as "mundanes," with Charlaine Harris's Dead in the Family at #23; epic fantasy in Terry Brooks's Bearer of the Black Staff and Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, at #25 and #29; more idiosyncratic, slipstream-ish work like William Gibson's "post-science fiction" novel Zero History at #17 and W. Bruce Cameron's story told from a dog's point of view, A Dog's Purpose, at #28; and finally, S.M. Stirling's latest entry in his "Emberverse" post-apocalyptic military adventure series, The High King of Montival at #31.

Once again, it's validation for the arguments that fantasy, the paranormal and what might be termed "slipstream" are more popular than science fiction more narrowly defined; that books and authors incorporating just a little of the stuff into their stories (e.g., contemporary urban fantasy) have an easier time reaching big audiences than work which uses more fully speculative contexts (like epic fantasy or space opera); and that the big names, by and large, remain old names (including quite a few 1970s-vintage names), both those which are more (Brooks, Gibson, Stirling) or less (Cussler, Evanovich) closely associated with science fiction and fantasy.

Give the Superheroes a Rest?

Alan Stanley Blair recently penned a piece at Airlock Alpha on the boom in movies (and television) based on superhero comics titled "Enough With The Comic Books Already!: Comic Book Adaptations are Ruining Movie Theaters and Network Lineups"--which pretty much says it all about his position on the phenomenon.1

That boom, generally regarded as having begun in 2000, has already been more sustained, prolific, robust and qualitatively impressive than just about any other (like cyber-themed movies, or space-themed movies, or historical epics, or film versions of fantasy novels) I can think of in recent decades, with Bryan Singer's X-Men movies (2000, 2003), Sam Raimi's first two Spiderman movies (2002 and 2004) and Christopher Nolan's Batman movies (2005 and 2008) generally seen as leading the way.2 Even the movies regarded as comparative disappointments, like Mark Steven Johnson's Daredevil (2003) or Ang Lee's Hulk (2003), still frequently did big business (each breaking the $100 million mark at the North American box office), and reflected the newly sophisticated approach to the material. In their eagerness to capitalize on the trend the studios have gone far beyond the list of D.C. and Marvel's most venerable characters, and even newer classics like Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (2006) and Watchmen (2009), to pursue projects based on "B-grade" superheroes like Marvel's The Punisher (2004) and Ghost Rider (2006). And of course, there are original movies using similar elements, mostly parodies like The Incredibles (2004), Sky High (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Zoom (2006), Super Capers (2009), Kick-Ass (2010), and the new Super (2010), though the blockbuster Hancock (2008) played its material fairly straight.3

After a decade the films are still attracting audiences and making money. The more profitable franchises are still chugging along with new movies in the pipeline, and the franchises that have disappointed are frequently continuing in their own way too, the studios apparently reluctant to give up on any such property. While there was little potential for a Daredevil sequel, Warner Brothers nonetheless produced a more modestly budgeted spin-off, Elektra (2005). In other cases they quickly proceeded to reboots of their misfires, like the 2003 Hulk and 2004 Punisher films-brand new, unconnected Hulk and Punisher films promptly appearing in 2008. The Incredible Hulk was a comparative success, but Punisher: War Zone flopped even worse than the first film, and may get rebooted a second time. Even more surprising, given that Spiderman 3 (2007) was still a huge commercial success, that franchise too is going back to the drawing board--as is the case with the next Superman film after the ambivalent reception of 2006's Superman Returns. Meanwhile, whole new series are being prepped for launch.

As things stand, Captain America and Green Lantern and Thor are already well on their way to the big screen. Other movies, like the long-delayed Wonder Woman film, are being developed. Some of these may never get out of "development hell," but others will no doubt make it to the screen. In all likelihood some of them will make big money, some will at least be fun, and a few may even offer more substantial entertainment than that. However, it seems unlikely they can revolutionize the genre at this point, and I suppose that freshness and thrill have both faded. I've certainly enjoyed the boom--but like Mr. Blair I think the time has come to back off and give the superheroes a rest for a while.

NOTES
1. There has been far less effort to bring superheroes to the small screen, and much less success in the attempts (no doubt because the spectacle that is a large part of the appeal of the movies cannot be replicated within television's constraints, especially as the vileness that is reality TV threatens to swallow up everything else). Still, there are some noteworthy efforts, in particular Heroes (2006-2010), especially during its highly praised and widely watched first season (since which time interest withered until the show was canceled without a fuss earlier this year), and Smallville (2001-), which never commanded the kind of audience Heroes had or approached the pop cultural impact that show enjoyed at its height, but which is now entering into its tenth season. Still, some interest continues with the series' The Cape and No Ordinary Family premiering this year.
2. It should be remembered that the films of the 2000s could also be seen as a continuation of the wave that Tim Burton's Batman got started, which included such successes as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Dick Tracy (1990), The Crow (1992), Men in Black (1997) and Blade (1998), and all their associated sequels--one which never stopped, even if it was on the whole less productive or successful than the rush of the 2000s.
3. Movies based on comics and graphic novels not featuring superheroes have been rather rarer, though a couple of notable commercial successes came out of Frank Miller's work, namely Sin City (2005) and 300 (2007). There was also Alan Moore's From Hell (2001), the Alien vs. Predator franchise (2004 and 2007), and even some more "highbrow" fare like Road to Perdition (2002), American Splendor (2003) and A History of Violence (2005).

The End of James Bond?

Collected in The Forgotten James Bond.

Back in April the producers of the James Bond film series announced that the next film is on indefinite hold due to the studio's financial troubles.

At the very least, this means a much longer wait before the next film in the series. Where "Bond 23" would have come out this year if the series continued with its accustomed regularity, it now seems the earliest possible release date is 2012, four years after Quantum of Solace.

Of course, the series has survived longer pauses than that. It's worth remembering, too, that Quantum was a success (unlike the comparative flops from which the series successfully bounced back in the late '70s and mid-'90s). And Daniel Craig is at an early enough point in his tenure in the role that additional films would remain a possibility even if the movie was launched years after that date. Besides, it sometimes seems as if the series is unstoppable, as if it has been around for far too many years through too much change for its end to actually be conceivable.

Still, it wouldn't be the first time that a profitable film series wound up in development hell, and it's anything but certain MGM will get its house in order soon. A much longer delay would complicate matters considerably. Particular cast and staff might no longer be available, and much has already been made of Craig's signing on with another projected series, the planned Hollywood film version of Stieg Larsson's trilogy of Millennium novels (the first film in which seems likely to hit screens before Bond 23). With the passing of time the pressure to shake things up again would mount, and even if the series has pulled it off successfully a number of times in the past, it's by no means certain that the series' producers would manage it again, while the cost of a misstep, like a poorly timed theatrical release, or a poorly thought-out publicity campaign (both of which have happened before in series history) could mean another longer-than-usual pause after that film. Reflecting what has been on many minds, the cover story of the August 6 issue of Entertainment Weekly asked nothing less than "Is James Bond dead?"

Perhaps the venerable series has indeed come to an end.

To be honest, I don't know how to feel about that.

The Long Decline
The criticism has commonly gone that the James Bond film series's true glory days were in the '60s (four decades ago now), and that since then the films have been carried by new actors, new gadgets, new settings, new gimmicks, new songs from trendy new recording artists, and of course, bigger and better action sequences and special effects in ever-slicker productions, all as the core story elements--and indeed, a few particularly successful variants on the well-known formula (expositions of which you can find here and here)--are endlessly recycled. Consider, for instance, how much of Lewis Gilbert's You Only Live Twice (1967) returned in 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me (another story in which the bad guys planned to bait and bleed the superpowers into a nuclear war to pave the way for a new order on Earth). In 1979's Moonraker, the alliance between Bond and a female secret agent from the Soviet Union (Anya Amasova) in the 1977 film was redone with American agent Holly Goodhead, while the madman, his fortress, his ambitions and even the theft from the British government that got Bond on his case in the first place, were reoriented or relocated from the sea to space. The same concept would return in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, with Bond teamed up with Chinese operative Wai Lin to thwart an attempt to start a war between the UK and the People's Republic. And so on and so forth. (Even particular novelties were being recycled, like the gadget-filled cars, yesteryear's Aston Martin giving way to a Lotus, then a new Aston Martin, and after that a BMW roadster . . .)1

Unsurprisingly, where the series once set the pace for much of pop culture, so that old franchises like Tarzan and Bulldog Drummond were redefined in its image during the late '60s, the Bond films were increasingly the imitators, going to unprecedented lengths to follow the trends set by others.2 Live and Let Die (1973) seized on blaxploitation, The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) on the international success of the martial arts movie, The Spy Who Loved Me on the splash made by Jaws, Moonraker on the post-Star Wars wave of space-themed movies.

There was, too, a pursuit of topicality in ways the series had once eschewed. The controversy over the use of tactical nuclear weapons to offset a perceived Soviet superiority in conventional forces in Europe found its way into the plot of 1983's Octopussy, the war in Afghanistan into 1987's The Living Daylights, while the "war on drugs" was the basis for 1989's Licence to Kill, and the Internet and post-Soviet Russia were at the core of the story in 1995's Goldeneye. (By contrast, the story goes that an early script for The Spy Who Loved Me had an alliance of real-world terrorists storming S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s headquarters and liquidating its leaders was rejected as too political.3)

Of course, the pursuit of trendiness and topicality has its limits within such a well-defined framework as the Bond films, and there's little arguing that the spy game lost much of its "mojo" with the end of the Cold War, that true "golden age of spying."4 By that point Britain's place in world affairs was far more ambiguous than it had been in the late '40s when it was being eclipsed by the U.S. and Soviet Union. After all, despite its decline from its earlier imperial-hegemonic status, Britain had still weighed more heavily in the scales as an independent actor at the time when Bond first arrived on the pop cultural scene.5 Even after Britain became a "normal country," the Cold War conflict and NATO gave British policy a clear global thrust. Such convenient delineations have since vanished.

Things have changed in other ways as well. In the early Cold War intelligence was already an affair of large organizations and high technology--signals intercepts, reconnaissance aircraft carrying sophisticated cameras, code-breaking computers. The fact hadn't yet eaten very far into the lone spy's romantic aura, but half a century on the reality has moved much further in this direction, and popular perception has caught up with it. The trend has made it that much harder to gloss over the fact that the British government couldn't then, and can even less so now, afford the very biggest and best in this area, the way Fleming did in From Russia With Love (1957), where the excellence of British spies, in spite of the meagerness of their resources, was all by itself enough to win a grudging respect from the chiefs of SMERSH, who speculated that "the Public School and University tradition. The love of adventure . . . the myth of Scotland Yard, of Sherlock Holmes, of the Secret Service" made up for SIS's material shortcomings.6

The cachet of being a British secret agent is not immune to such developments, and the villains with their schemes for "taking over the world" have likewise come to seem like yesterday's men. I often find myself thinking of how Number Two berated Dr. Evil at the end of the first Austin Powers film (1997), uttering a line that transcended lightweight parody to become meaningful commentary on where we've been going these last many decades: "[Y]ou, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don't even realize that there is no world anymore! There's just corporations!"

Charles Stross also put it quite nicely in the afterword to his "Laundry Files" novel The Jennifer Morgue, observing that if there is such a thing as a "perfect criminal," it is the kind of criminal whose crimes are "so huge they go unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all" because they have been a step ahead of the law, or powerful enough to get away with what they do--and in the process, "perceptions of real-world heroism and villainy have fundamentally changed in ways that . . . affect the cachet of being a British secret agent."

At the same time, there's hardly any point to denying that the iconic status of the Bond films is strongly connected with their representing "the ultimate male fantasy" of prowess, sophistication and independence inside a world of luxury and pleasure (culinary, alcoholic, sexual, etc.), mobility, cool toys and decisive, triumphant action. There may have been a dark side to it all, which the series acknowledged every now and then, but neither flinched from nor wallowed in, something that has been changing for a very long time now. The makers of the films seemed increasingly uncomfortable with Bond's lifestyle--the smoking, the drinking, and even more so, the bed-hopping and interactions with women more generally. The producers in fact made an increasing effort to present the newer Bond girls as a match for Bond, or even more than a match, one-upping him or bailing him out with increasing frequency, or otherwise taking him down a peg. (Just compare the relationship between Bond and Anya, or Bond and Holly, back in the '70s, and the interaction between Bond and Pam Bouvier or Wai Lin, for instance--or May Day for that matter.) When Brosnan became James Bond, he got for his new boss a woman who constantly upbraided him for being an un-p.c. anachronism. (This was quite a different thing from watching Sean Connery or Robert Moore get a rise out of uptight old Bernard Lee with his antics, and one I found much less entertaining.) The dry martinis were non-negotiable for the time being, but Brosnan's Bond finally put away the cigarettes.

If the films were still presenting "the ultimate male fantasy," then they were doing it with a heavier and heavier freight of irony, and maybe even guilt too. Meanwhile the version of hedonism Bond represented--black tie in the Old World casino, Savile Row-tailored suits and all the rest--came to seem old-fashioned. That Bond became increasingly identified with older actors--a fifty-three year old Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again (1983), a fifty-eight year old Roger Moore in A View to a Kill (1985)--didn't help, and neither did the accumulation of so many moments when he seemed out of touch with the young. Think of Bond making a crack in Goldfinger about listening to the Beatles with earmuffs (ironically, Paul McCartney delivered one of the series' more memorable songs with Live and Let Die nine years later) or his awkwardness with young Bibi Dahl in 1981's For Your Eyes Only, bits played for laughs, but there they were nonetheless.8 On top of everything else the glamour of the jet age is dead, the excitement with which airline travel was once imbued now associated with mundane errands, hassle and even personal indignity rather than novelty and glamour as flying not only became more familiar, but as the service becomes lousier (and in the last decade, security much more intrusive), and the romance of faraway places has diminished considerably.9

As a result the things that made the character and the films engaging, appealing and even distinctive (a few trademark trappings, like the gun-barrel opening sequence or the catchy theme music aside) were fading away, even as the whole was becoming less fresh over time--the franchise now only one series of action movies among many, and not the one pushing the genre's envelope either. Even before the end of the 1960s Sergio Leone and Peter Yates and Sam Peckinpah left their own deep footprints in the action genre, and since then it has been other filmmakers, other writers, producers and directors--Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer, Luc Besson and John Woo, Richard Donner and John McTiernan, James Cameron and the Wachowski brothers, among others--who have redefined the action movie and the cinematic blockbuster.10 Actors in other roles, too, have redefined the big-screen action hero, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Lee and Bruce Willis, Michelle Yeoh and Angelina Jolie--to name just a few.11

Consequently, while the Bond films continued to deliver a good many memorable bits, nothing in the later movies ever became as iconic as the extras on that first Aston Martin (the ejection seat, the Ben-Hur blades), Odd Job's hat, the scene in which Goldfinger almost cut Bond in half with a laser, Ernst Stavro Blofeld's bald head and white Persian cat, or S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s base inside a volcano. Certainly no action sequence out of the later Bond films was nearly so likely to be referenced, imitated or parodied as Indiana Jones' run through the South American temple at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), or the balletic violence of Neo and Trinity in The Matrix (1999). (Equally, while there was continual improvement in the special effects, Thunderball received the series's first and last Academy Award in that category.)

Unsurprisingly, the box office receipts tell the story. While Die Another Day was hailed as the series' biggest grosser to date, the adjustment of the films' earnings for inflation left it a distant fifth behind Thunderball (the $63 million earnings of which translate to $437 million in today's terms), Goldfinger ($387 million), You Only Live Twice ($211 million) and From Russia With Love ($190 million), respectively, back at the peak of the franchise's prominence.12 Certainly by the 1980s the slippage was apparent when the grosses are compared with those of other, contemporaneous hits. Yes, 1981's For Your Eyes Only and 1983's Octopussy were unambiguous successes that ended up safely among the top ten earners at the American box office in their years, #8 and #6 respectively (while Never Say Never Again made the #14 position for 1983). However, 1985's A View to A Kill only made the #13 slot (well behind Rambo II and Jewel of the Nile), The Living Daylights #19 (after Beverly Hills Cop II, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Predator and Robocop), and Licence to Kill ended up all the way down at #36 (after Tim Burton's Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, and even Tango & Cash and Black Rain).13 It took six years before the next film revived the series' fortunes (and finally scored its first $100 million hit, long after such grosses had become routine--and even requisite--for major action movies).

Still, for quite a long time I didn't give this line of argument much thought. I understood it intellectually, but as a fan I was pretty uncritical, even though I was nearly alone among my friends and acquaintances in my enthusiasm. The average adolescent's cinematic memory doesn't seem to go back more than a few months, which at the time put the Bond movies, especially the ones that made the series a household name, way, way out of the pop cultural frame of reference of most of them. It was Schwarzenegger, and Steven Seagal, and Jean-Claude Van Damme that they were more likely to talk about. All the same, the release date of Goldeneye might as well have been a national holiday for me, and I similarly looked forward to the next two films, even though neither was nearly as much of an event, or quite as satisfying an experience.

It was when I saw Die Another Day (2002) that this started to change. Despite the longer than usual three year wait after the previous film, it seemed to me that the plot was, more blatantly than in just about any of the previous movies, a sharply scaled-down version of an earlier entry, specifically Diamonds Are Forever. The stakes for which the game was being played was nothing so grand as Cold War nuclear supremacy, but the military balance on the Korean peninsula (the film's treatment of which made far too much of the strategic value of the minefields on the south side of the DMZ, as if it were propaganda on behalf of the policy). Halle Berry's emergence from the sea in Cuba was not just presented but heavily publicized as an homage to Ursula Andress's first appearance in Dr. No (1962). (But you just can't go home again.) And Bond was going rogue--yet another time. (He'd already done it a number of times, most notably when he went off to avenge Felix Leiter in License to Kill.)

It was all quite backward-looking, as if the new films were nostalgic for the old ones, even as some of the last links with the series' earlier days were being broken. (The late Desmond Llewelyn, Q for nearly forty years, had passed on, replaced by John Cleese, whose work I've always enjoyed, but still . . .) I found the attempt to write in the War on Terror (of which the North Korean stuff was a part) clumsy. I didn't like that Madonna was brought in to do the theme song (just as I hadn't cared much for any of the new songs since Goldeneye), and given a cameo to boot. And at times the film felt less like a Bond movie than a Bond-and-Jinx movie. This was, apparently, no coincidence, the producers apparently having been thinking about creating a new franchise centered on her character. (The plans never came to anything, studio enthusiasm for female-driven action movies slackening a bit after the sequels to 2000's Charlie's Angels and 2001's Lara Croft both underperformed the following summer.)

Some of the action was also marred by disappointingly poor CGI.

Despite all its flaws I found the film quite watchable--but to say it felt inessential was to put it mildly. To be fair, I don't think it was just the film. Part of it may have been my own changing tastes; my getting older, and feeling more distant from the fantasy, I suppose, a process Richard Rayner described in an article he penned for Esquire about the release of Goldeneye fifteen years ago. I read Rayner's article at the time never believing I'd end up looking at the series with anything like such detachment, but that's where I was by the time Die Another Day came along.

What was more, I found myself increasingly agreeing with those who thought the franchise had been just going through the motions, plugging new factors into an old formula for a very long time, with more or less cleverness and skill, but little innovation. In fact, I was not particularly disappointed to hear the film series wouldn't continue in the same vein.

Continue.

The End of James Bond? (Continued)

Reboot
Still, I wasn't terribly intrigued by the idea of the "reboot" that was discussed some time afterward. I'm not big on remakes in general. Additionally, the truth is that the Bond series had already been overhauled any number of times, with the departure and arrival of new stars; with the need to recover from periodic commercial disappointments like The Man With The Golden Gun and Licence to Kill; and sometimes, simply in response to a drift too far in a given direction, even when the film had been commercially successful (as with Moonraker, a big money-maker that some felt was just too bloated and silly--much like Die Another Day).

That feeling didn't change as I found out more about the project, starting with its use of Fleming's Casino Royale. I was familiar with the novel, which I knew would not be easily fleshed out into a satisfying full-length action movie. I should also admit to having a bit of loyalty to the 1967 comedic version of the book produced by Charles K. Feldman. (It doesn't have a particularly good reputation, and I didn't think it was particularly good the first time I saw it for myself, but it grew on me during repeat viewings. By the fourth time I saw it, I thought it was a work of staggering genius.14)

The efforts of the publicists didn't help. They said there would be a return to the original concept, to a more realistic, darker story--but such statements are so routine in the promotion of remakes, reboots and the like as to be nearly meaningless. Besides, while I've enjoyed grounded efforts like 1963's From Russia With Love and For Your Eyes Only, a big part of what appealed to me about the Bond movies was the extravagant, over-the-top villains, plots, sets and action sequences that were more a part of the movies than the novels that inspired them (though Fleming certainly provided a good deal of the inspiration for it), and the distance of the whole from grim political reality, retro as all this may be.

I was--and still am--irritated that terms like "dark" and "gritty" are so often taken to be terms of praise, rather than descriptors, as if no other tone is even worth attempting. (I wonder at times if we as a culture haven't become so intellectually stunted and emotionally impoverished that things actually seem that way.)

And anyway, wasn't the darker, grittier approach a big part of what turned people off the series during Timothy Dalton's tenure in its lead role?

I also had my reservations about the casting of Daniel Craig as 007. I hadn't even heard of him at the time of the announcement. After I had (and realized that I'd seen him before in movies, like the 2001 Lara Croft, during which he'd barely registered, let alone seemed Bond-like) I wondered if, far from a return to roots, the idea wasn't to go as far away from the previous image as possible, simply for the sake of being different.

Still, I think I was fair-minded as I approached the 2006 film, and it's probably best to distinguish between my take on Casino as a Bond movie, and as a movie pure and simple.

To be honest, I didn't like the idea of an origin story for 007. Part of Bond's appeal is his appearance of being a superman living in a perpetual now, while still possessing a certain amount of mystery. To see him unpolished, rough around the edges, figuring things out, even hapless and hopeless (as he was at the end of his duel of wits with Le Chiffre), is not conducive to that. (Indeed, Ian Fleming himself didn't think much about Bond's past. He only invented one to round out the obituary in You Only Live Twice (1964).)

The update of the rather thin original novel didn't impress me on the level of plot either, even given the intrinsic difficulties of the source material. The stuff about terrorism was not just muddled, but a very poor contextual substitute for the Cold War game of this particular novel, and the Bond series in general. The blandness of the villain, whose characterization consisted mainly of a bleeding eye and an inhaler, didn't help. Additionally, while the film supposedly downplayed the gadgets (Q makes no appearance), the defibrillator in the car seemed awfully convenient to me.

More importantly, not only did the series seem increasingly ironic in the presentation of Bond's adventures; it was looking apologetic and even repentant, the discomfort with Bond's self-indulgences hitting a new peak. Not only was it the case that the traditional silhouetted women were left out of the opening credits, but the casual dalliances that were a routine feature of the old films were left out too, as were the bevies of beauties that had still less of a role in the story, but certainly contributed to the atmosphere. The Bond franchise actually seems to have become prudish about such things compared even with a TV show like Burn Notice (2006-) or Chuck, while film critic Vicky Allan found plenty of reason to write of Bond's own objectification as the culmination of the lengthy "feminization" of the films. (So much for the ultimate male fantasy!)

It seemed all too telling that every woman Bond actually got involved with died--first Solange Dimitrios (after only a very brief appearance), and then Vesper Lynd, this despite the significant alterations to the source material to make Lynd's actions appear more sympathetic (since, for all the talk of returning to the original, her original conceptualization wouldn't do). Before it was the case that Bond was playing a dangerous game in which people near to him--men and women--were at risk and often died (once in a film, and to his regret). Now Bond comes out of the situation looking like either a heartless cad, an outmaneuvered half-wit, or both, as M (who comes off as the most awful nag) shakes her head over yet another addition to the pile of corpses he is quickly accumulating. (Again, so much for male fantasy.)

At this point it hardly seemed worthwhile to wonder over whether Daniel Craig was a satisfactory Bond; I wasn't sure there was much of Bond left for him to portray.

As a plain old action film, I found Casino overlong and unevenly paced. I liked the early chase sequence at the construction site in Madagascar, but didn't think that any of the set pieces that followed it were as engaging (impressive as some of them were, like the chase at Miami airport, and the finale in Venice). I didn't like that Bond spent so much time looking at cell phone displays and computer screens; I suppose the mismatch between his analog heroics and the digital age jarred for me. (I have this problem with the Silicon Valley-soaked adventures of Chuck Bartowski as well.) And what time he didn't spend in an overlengthy IT product placement, he spent at the card table in a cinematic equivalent of a Celebrity Poker tournament.

A quick check of the comments on the Internet Movie Database showed that I was hardly alone in my response; this one was pretty polarizing, some loving it, some hating it, with the latter typically loyal to the older films. (Indeed, checking out the reaction I went through page after page of comments where ratings between one star and eight--out of a possible ten--were few and far between.)

All the same, the film was a big hit (not Thunderball-big, but certainly big enough to satisfy any reasonable commercial expectation), and two years later came Quantum of Solace, which was also a big hit, even if the critics were a bit less enamored of it.15 The new movie picked up right where Casino left off, but it had a good deal more zip than Casino, and an interesting bit of action here and there. It was also surprisingly loyal to the source material on a broad thematic level--one of the themes of Fleming's "Quantum of Solace" having been the corruption of foreign policy by economic interests, and the interference of major powers in the political life of Third World countries out of such motives.16

Still, while I was initially impressed by the film's political consciousness (Dominic Greene, far and away the series's most realistic villain to date, isn't the first to try to seize Bolivia's water supply), and the appearance that the series really was trying to do something different instead of just saying it was, I didn't think it would be reconcilable with the series' dynamics. Though the writing-directing team of Paul Haggis and Marc Forster was more successful in its attempt than I would have guessed (some parts of the script were perfectly on target), the need for a (relatively) happy ending that doesn't change things too much damages the effort's credibility and offers a reminder of at least one reason why it was best not to make the Bond films too relevant--the world's real problems are just not that simple, a point Fleming's original story more faithfully reflects. Simply put, you can have 007, and you can have Syriana, but you can't have the two in a single coherent package.17

It's notable, too, that the movie echoes the Dalton era at its most humorless, and that Bond and Camille Montes never even end up in bed together, an all too-telling first in series history. (Indeed, Olga Kurylenko's turn as Nika Boronina in Hitman the year before seemed more conventionally Bond girl-like.) Meanwhile Strawberry Fields fares no better than Solange Dimitrios in the last film. (This pattern, frankly, strikes me as more misogynistic than anything in the older films, and misandrous and generally misanthropic to boot. Is this a nod to theater of the absurd? Or are they taking a cue from those bad horror movies where an amorous moment is invariably followed by the monster or the killer striking again?)

A Real "Return to Roots?"
As of the end of 2008, the series was a strong financial performer, and seemed to please enough of the audience to promise to go on being that. Still, it hasn't quite found its footing creatively speaking, and the recent delays only increase the doubts about this, I suppose, because the thinking is going in the wrong direction--forward. Instead of continuing to update James Bond, maybe the thing to do is to leave him in the era from which he came; to go retro, as Mike Myers did with his parody of fiction's most famous international man of mystery in Austin Powers. Present 007 as a '60s-era agent in an era when the Cold War wasn't so cold, London was swinging, the romance of the secret agent man was a bit more vibrant, gadgets were pre-digital, and concessions to twenty-first century mores can be sidestepped in the name of "historical realism." (Mad Men did it, after all, and the show seems to be even more closely identified with the glamour of James Bond's original era than Bond himself is now. If the sitcom Community is anything to go by, it even seems Don Draper is being referenced in the way 007 used to be.)

In short, the new movie could be a lot more like the Connery-era Bonds, but with much more up-to-date FX. Call it "atompunk" or "jetpunk."18 Of course, I'm not sure how practical such a direction would actually be for a movie with a nine-figure production budget. Retro science fiction is very popular among genre fans, but really massive mainstream success has proven elusive. (As I have noted time and again, there have been plenty of steampunk-themed movies and television shows--but how many of those have been unqualified successes?19) And at last report, even the plans for a revival of the Matt Helm franchise have it going in the more serious direction of the new Bonds, and the Jason Bourne films which exploded at the box office during the last decade.

I'm not particularly enthusiastic about this idea either, but that's a whole other posting.

NOTES
1. There was even an outright remake with Never Say Never Again, an update of Thunderball for the 1980s.
2. The Bond films have continued to be imitated, referenced, and parodied well after the '60s course, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas identifying Bond as an inspiration behind Indiana Jones, with the tendency continued all the way down through 1994's True Lies, the Austin Powers (1997, 1999, 2002), Spy Kids (2001, 2002, 2003) and Cody Banks (2003, 2004) series, 2002's xXx, 2003's Johnny English, and the ongoing television series Chuck (2007-). However, it's the original '60s-era conception that those involved respond to, rather than any significant innovations since then.
3. The non-EON Bond film Never Say Never Again also followed this trend toward trendiness and topicality, adding a paramilitary touch in the opening sequence with Bond looking like an SAS commando as he participates in the rescue of an ambassador's daughter from a rebel hideout in a jungle; the playing up of the novel's early health spa sequence, more prominent here than in the 1965 film; and the involvement of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in contemporary Cold War and oil politics.
4. While the Bond films rarely featured the Soviets as Bond's primary antagonist (more often he was up against parties attempting to exploit the Cold War situation, like S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in From Russia With Live and You Only Live Twice, or Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me), and even a Russian adversary was likely to be a rogue (like General Orlov in Octopussy or Georgi Koslov in The Living Daylights), the Cold War provided a complex, rich context for espionage fiction, for which the last two decades have offered no equivalent.
5. Through the 1950s and 1960s the country retained a good many more bits and pieces of its old empire. For all of the messiness and ugliness of the decolonization process (including the debacle of Suez, and the counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya), Britain was never involved in anything that produced the same sense of crisis as France's experience in Algeria during these years--while Germany was divided, and the European Union was still nascent. (In the earlier part of that period, the European Coal and Steel Community had barely been founded.) There had also been the prospect of the Commonwealth being an independent force in world affairs, and Britain continued to be a global military player of some significance. (It was, after all, just the third country to test a nuclear bomb, and in the 1960s still possessed both an air force with hundreds of strategic bombers, and a blue-water navy complete with full-deck fleet carriers that was regarded as second only to the U.S. in its capacity for "power projection." It also remained active in "keeping the peace east of Suez," demonstrating its capacities for long-range intervention in affairs like the 1963-1966 Konfrontasi with Indonesia.)
By the 1970s this had by and large passed, and since then the tendency has increasingly been to see Britain caught between its "special relationship" with a United States commonly seen as in decline, and its half-hearted participation in an ambiguous, ambivalent European Union dominated by France and an industrially and financially predominant united Germany.
6. Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 42-43. Indeed, in Goldeneye the response was to grossly exaggerate British technical capabilities, conferring on it a network of British spy satellites advanced enough and extensive enough to provide continuous, high-res, real-time coverage of a site in northern Russia, even after one of the craft got fried by an electromagnetic pulse. In reality, Britain had no satellites of the kind.
7. Charles Stross, "Afterword: The Golden Age of Spying." In The Jennifer Morgue (New York: Ace, 2009), pp. 388-389.
8. Perhaps the most striking commentary on that generation gap was the opening scene of 2002's xXx, in which a tuxedo-wearing secret agent is killed outside a metal concert in Prague where he was all too conspicuous.
9. Part of this is the world becoming a smaller place due to changes in transport and media, and the homogenizing effects of modernization. However, there is also the discomfort with how the West has long depicted the Other and the taints of racism and imperialism in old ideas of the exotic. Paradoxically there have also been the backlashes attending wider, larger-scale immigration flows; intensified economic interaction across national boundaries, which has also meant intensified competition and friction; and the increasingly transnational character of problems like organized crime and terrorism. (In a particularly telling example, Aladdin's Baghdad became Agrabah in the Disney movie.)
10. James Cameron recently did it again with the release of his blockbuster Avatar (2009) in 3-D, which compelled
the decision to also release the next Bond film in this format.
11. Generally the redefinition went in an antithetical direction, the sophistication and the sexuality comparatively muted. This was especially the case with the blue-collar types of the '80s, brawny, smart enough to do the job but not too polished, and generally one-woman or even no-woman men--like John Rambo (actually seen in a Buddhist monastery at the start of 1988's Rambo III) and John Matrix, and Chuck Norris's James Braddock. Even in True Lies, Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker was a family man who never did more than flirt with Tia Carrere's Juno Skinner, and that only in the line of duty.
Of course, their era has since passed in its turn, Stallone's revival of the Rambo series (2008), and his newer film The Expendables (2010), are exercises in nostalgia, but the broader shift remains, quite evident in the Jason Bourne films (2002, 2004, 2007). As originally written by Robert Ludlum in the 1980 novel and its sequels (1985, 1990), Jason Bourne and Marie St. Jacques were grown-up, worldly, thirtysomething jetsetters, and they were played that way by Richard Chamberlain and Jacqueline Smith in the 1988 miniseries. Matt Damon and Franka Potente, however, come off like a couple of college kids backpacking around Europe.
12. It should be noted that these grosses were earned with much lower budgets than those invested in today's blockbusters. The first Bond film, Dr. No cost $1 million ($7 million after adjustment for inflation). Thunderall cost $5.5 million ($37 million), and You Only Live Twice--the biggest production until the late 1970s--$9.5 million ($60 million). Even Moonraker seems like a bargain today, its $30 million budget coming to about $87 million in today's dollars.
13. Admittedly, the weak performance of Licence to Kill in the American market was the exception, not the rule, the film's earnings in line with the preceding Bond films elsewhere. Additionally, defenders of the film attributed the poor U.S. gross to factors that had nothing to do with the movie's actual quality--such as a choice of title American viewers identified with standing in line at the DMV, a lackluster promotional campaign, and the exceptionally competitive summer season. However, the perception of failure was powerful enough to contribute to the long delay prior to the release of the next, quite different Bond film in 1995, and its scheduling not in the thrill ride-packed summer season, but the more open late fall period, still prestigious, but not so crowded with action movies.
14. Still, I was relieved that Quentin Tarantino would not be involved after all (and was somewhat encouraged by the selection of Martin Campbell, who'd done a good job with Goldeneye, as director, but only somewhat).
Tarantino actually owned the rights at one point, and frankly I've always regarded him as hugely overrated. A favorite line of mine in the film version of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was Sidney Young's put-down of "talentless, pretentious" director Vincent Lepak as thinking that cinema began with Quentin Tarantino. To put it mildly, I'd met many of the type.
15. Casino took in $167 million at the North American box office, a little more than the last Brosnan film in dollar figures, a little less when adjusted for inflation, which got it the #9 spot that year, after Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men 3: The Last Stand and Superman Returns (though it did somewhat better internationally, besting the two comic book-based movies to be the second-biggest action hit of the year globally).
16. The original short story mostly consists of Bond listening to a tale of marital woe, but the background to it has Bond in the Caribbean again, where he dropped thermite bombs through the ports of two cabin cruisers carrying weapons to Castro (at this point, still a rebel). Bond "hadn't wanted to do the job. If anything, his sympathies were with the rebels, but the Government had a big export program with Cuba" and the deal required the action. Fleming, "Quantum of Solace." In Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 80.
17. The limits of the film as a political critique are encapsulated in Hiram Lee's review for the World Socialist Web Site.
18. There have already been some noteworthy examples of such fiction, like Charles Stross's "Missile Gap," and Edward Morris's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The aesthetic of The Incredibles (2004) reflected such an influence.
19. Sherlock Holmes was a confirmed hit last year, but my guess is that it won't produce a broad enthusiasm for the genre to compare with earlier waves, like the rush of disaster movies seen in the '90s, or the sprawling historical or fantasy epics seen in the past decade.

Back.