Telling Lies About Tolstoy's War and Peace

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

"It is very difficult to tell the truth," Leo Tolstoy remarks in War and Peace. He wrote these words in reference to Nikolai Rostov's recounting of his experiences at the Battle of Schongrabern. However, what he said of war can probably be said about anything else in life, not the least of them our experiences reading literature, including that very book. War and Peace, which has so much to say about the lie, is one of the most lied-about books, thirty-one percent admitting to having lied about reading it in a poll by Britain's National Year of Reading Organization. (Only George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four beat it out for the #1 spot.)

I suspect, too, that the book is not only much more often mentioned than read, but that like other fiction bearing the label of Great Literature it is also much more often praised than actually enjoyed--just as one would expect from a book that is read by those who actually do read it just for the "bragging rights" (as many reviewers admit on Amazon).

Why do so few books compare with War and Peace in that respect?

Why All The Fuss? Is It Really All That Hard?
Certainly Tolstoy is not difficult in the way of Joyce, or even Dickens; his writing is usually perfectly straightforward, enough so that doctrinaire advocates of "Show don't tell" can have a field day criticizing it.

Of course, War and Peace is also a notoriously long book, running to some 1,400 pages in many an edition. However, it is not all that much longer than Les Miserables, another roughly contemporaneous nineteenth century national epic set in Napoleon's shadow by a comparably acclaimed author, but which does not seem to have quite the same cachet (perhaps because most people who hear the name think of the musical?).1

Where this book really trumps the competition in the prestige stakes is the combination of that length with an extraordinary density, War and Peace presenting us with a cast of some "five hundred characters"--whose names at times seem contrived to confuse the reader. One can easily feel themselves adrift in a sea of Counts and Countesses, Princes and Princesses, Annas and Nicholais, and worse than adrift if their attention slips sufficiently to let them mistake Karagina for Kuragina, Orlov-Denisov for just plain Denisov--all the more so as the few dozen central characters are intricately interconnected with one another, as we follow their five families through no less than three wars, culminating in Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

That there is no overarching plot to unite all this action does not help (as Tolstoy owned in Russian Archive in 1868, he did not conceive of it as a novel exactly), the very shapelessness of this "mass of life" making it difficult for the reader to get a handle on it.2

The result is that while I have been accustomed to setting aside a book, and then months later coming back to it and pretty much picking up where I left off with little or no difficulty, with War and Peace I found myself forced to go back to the beginning again, and then repeat the process when I set the book aside yet again (once, after I got a third of the way in), so that it was only years later, after finding the time and energy and will to commit to reading it straight through without that kind of break, that I got all the way to the end.

One might add, too, that Tolstoy's themes are large and ambitious ones of the kind long since grown unfashionable--free will and determinism, history and History, the realities of war, mortality, happiness, the aims of life--and that Tolstoy frequently moves from dramatizing them to directly lecturing the reader about them. Indeed, taken together his remarks about the subject of war alone add up to a treatise comparable to that famously offered up by Clausewitz (who actually puts in a brief and unflattering appearance on the eve of Borodino), while the book's second epilogue eschews storytelling entirely for another treatise-in-itself on the problem of reconciling free will and determinism.

On the whole these shifts struck me as less jarring than what we see in other authors of the time, much shorter and far less digressive than those we see in Les Miserables, for instance, but still frequent and occasionally repetitive, and likely to be something of a trial for readers unaccustomed to nineteenth century novels, or to ideas like Tolstoy's. (Given that Tolstoy's ideas about a great many social and political matters--reflective as they are of an aristocratic, agrarian, mystical view of life, influenced by Joseph de Maistre and Slavophilism--come off as deeply anti-rational, anti-modern, and flatly reactionary, not merely by the standard of our time, but his own as well, just about any twenty-first century reader will likely have trouble wrapping their minds around them, never mind really engaging with them.3)

In short, the book's combination of populousness, plotlessness and sprawl, its wide range of concerns and its frequently digressive treatment of them, make great demands on the reader's concentration, patience and readiness to grapple with Big Ideas (and Unconventional Ideas at that). Problematically for those likely to read this novel in English, it also takes for granted the reader's familiarity with the military and political history of the Napoleonic era not as an English-speaker tends to recall it (Nelson, Wellington, the Nile, Trafalgar, Spain, Waterloo), but rather as a Russian would (Alexander and Kutuzov the principal opponents of Napoleon, Austerlitz, Tilsit, Smolensk, Borodino, Moscow, Berezina, central events of the narrative).

The result is that War and Peace's reputation as a "difficult" book is not totally unjustified. Far from it.

Okay, But How Is It?
Still, difficulty is not the sole reason for its prestige. There is, too, the fact that this is one of that small group of novels regularly acclaimed the Greatest of All Time.

It is probably impossible to debate such superlatives in a rigorous way, but one can (and should) try to get beyond the glowing platitudes of the fawning and the cries of boredom of the detractors--each, opaque and meaningless to the truly discerning reader--and actually discuss War and Peace as a work of fiction.

As it happened, one of the reasons why I failed to make much progress on my first few tries was that it was easy to set the book aside during those early portions in which my recourses to the character list at the front of the volume were frequent. The succession of scenes of the polite society of the uppermost of the upper classes seemed monotonous, and disappointing, this "national" epic apparently excluding ninety-nine percent of the nation.

Of course, one eventually gets the exposition out of the way, becomes able to tell the principals apart, gets a little more variety in their scenes, but even after that point (as is usual in epics) one finds some threads more interesting than others, leaving them impatient to get back to them, all the more so because of the slow stretches. It did not help that this is not one of those works that can be counted on to cut quickly back and forth across their various storylines (one result of which was that the Rostov family-centered Book Seven was rather a slog for me).

It also does not help that while the novel has its fair share of intrigue, it is still a far cry from the soap opera it might have been. Indeed, Tolstoy pointedly marginalizes the sensational and scandalous in favor of those characters offering positive demonstrations of his ideas. The result is that he consistently gives the reader the opposite of what people typically look for from their entertainment--the soul-conflicts of Maria Bolkonskaya rather than the affairs of Helene Bezukhova, Andrei Bolkonski's career of public-minded integrity rather than the shameless self-advancement of Boris Drubteskoy, Pierre Bezukhov's search for a meaningful life rather than the colorful picaresque that Dolokhov's story would have been if it were fully fleshed out (or even Bezukhov's own wilder times). Those other parts of the story are increasingly mentioned in passing rather than depicted as one proceeds through the novel, and eventually fall by the wayside, along with the stories of no fewer than two of his five principal families, the Kuragins and Drubetskoys (which may be justifiable from the standpoint of Tolstoy's purposes, but is certainly problematic from those of symmetry and completeness, to say nothing of interest).

Unsurprisingly, Tolstoy's depiction of such things as the relations between masters and serfs seems sanitized--a charge to which Tolstoy himself responded in the aforementioned Russian Archive essay, not altogether persuasively. (It would have been one thing for him to leave the rougher edges of such relationships as an acknowledged part of the background, another to exclude them as completely as he seems to do.) Say what one will, this is not a story of life from the bottom up, and from the standpoint of art as well as entertainment I regretted that Tolstoy did not have Dostoyevsky's appreciation of human weakness--or his familiarity with the lower levels of society in which dwell "les miserables"--which did much to make his books more intense experiences. (I regretted, too, that he did not share Dostoyevsky's interest in life beyond the country estate, in the developing urban world.)

Additionally, the book loses what momentum it has well before the end, dragging in the anti-climactic Book Fifteen, and never recovering its earlier vigor. Indeed, the second epilogue summing up Tolstoy's view of history not only repeats the ideas he expressed earlier, but does so much less concisely, so that it seems unnecessarily roundabout and wordy.

And of course, it has to be admitted that for all his emphasis on conveying his ideas to the reader, Tolstoy can be a frustratingly inconsistent thinker. There is more of the Romantic in the work of the "Great Realist" than one might expect, which is particularly pointed in his shifting from the ironic view of battlefield heroism he offers in his portrait of Schongrabern, and the adventures and misadventures of Nikolai Rostov in general, to an exaltation of the fighting spirit of the Russian army in its defense of its homeland, and the celebration of Kutuzov and Dokhturov as underappreciated heroes. His eagerness to demonstrate his ideas at times gets the better of his arguments, skewing his depiction of characters and events--the strain quite evident when he uses the same deterministic theory of history to condemn Napoleon, and at the same time excuse Czar Alexander all his failings and failures.

Still, despite all that, and the fact that I found Tolstoy's writing here less technically or dramatically impressive than in, for instance, his later The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he still frequently displays the eye for detail and the insight into human beings that made that work so impressive. His historical vision also struck me as sufficiently powerful and provocative for its interest to transcend his prejudices. The result is that even his most pious creations have their share of nuance, and his minor characters are at least as vividly drawn (helped, I suppose, by Tolstoy's permitting them to be much more colorful). In fact, for all my difficulties following the book in those early attempts to read it, many of his characters still made impressions strong enough that I remembered a trait or a line of dialogue months or years afterward, even when I had forgotten the characters' names--the streak of hooliganism that made the absent-minded, idealistic Pierre participate in tying a police officer to a bear's back and setting him floating down the river, for example.

As it is with his characters, so is it with his scenes, even the sluggish early chapters containing their share of bits that stick in the memory: the pathetic coquetry of the fading Anna Drubetskaya as she lobbies for an army appointment for her son Boris; the combination of detachment and awkwardness, sombreness and conniving, in Pierre's meeting with his dying father as their relatives fight over the will (where, for the record, he "shows" rather than "tells" in particularly effective fashion); Nikolai Bolkonski's bullying of Maria over a math lesson. Time and again, Tolstoy finds the few crucial words needed to bring his chosen material to life--while often managing to be immensely quotable. (One of my favorite such turns of phrase: "it always happens in contests of cunning that a stupid person gets the better of cleverer ones.")

Additionally, if Tolstoy frequently resorts to lecturing, it ought to be admitted that he is an engaging lecturer, and that he never relies on lecturing alone, time and again dramatizing his ideas very effectively. This is especially the case in the war scenes, which at their best (as with Nikolai Rostov's experiences in the war of 1805, or his cavalry charge in the 1812 campaign) make up the most impressive portrait of the fog of war and the muddle of the battlefield that I have ever encountered in fiction. Much the same can be said of the book's closely linked denunciation of the Great Man theory of history and public affairs (as in the scenes where Bagration, Kutuzov and Napoleon command, or Andrei leaves the imperial staff in disgust), which, even if it overreaches, now seems to have been far ahead of its time, and reminds us of how limited and old-fashioned popular historiography remains in ours.

And so while there were times when the book was easy to put down, there were also long stretches when I didn't want to put it down, enough of them that it was not so very long as might be imagined before I made it all the way to end, and afterward considered the book well worth my while.

Though I admit that I probably would not have thought so if I had encountered it at the same age Charlie Brown did in his long-ago New Year's special.

1. Incidentally, I am using the 2001 Wordsworth Classics edition of the Maude translation for this discussion of the book.
2. I refer to Tolstoy's "Some Words About War and Peace," which is printed at the back of the 2001 edition mentioned above.
3. This is evident in such matters as the trajectories of Pierre Bezukhov (transformed from a cosmopolitan, Westernized liberal intellectual into a passive, ascetic figure like Platon Karataev), and Natasha Rostova (satisfied in the limitation of her concerns to her husband and children, the "woman question" explicitly dismissed).
Those accustomed to Tolstoy the moralist, Tolstoy the dissident, Tolstoy the pacifist and anarchist, should note that he is not much in evidence here. For the most part that is a later Tolstoy, who condemned his own earlier work, War and Peace included.

The Pursuit of Literary Perfection

No literary work is ever perfect, and one need not retreat into fuzzy talk about human fallibility to understand why. The truth is that writing involves endless compromises between different goods on the writer's part. Do they, for instance, go for poetic language in this scene, or write as plainly as possible, so as to be sure of being understood? Do they devote this chapter to developing that particular character--or do they concentrate on moving the story forward?

And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Indeed, we commonly judge works by the kinds of compromises writers tend to make. An author who chooses style and ideas (especially the style and ideas fashionable at the moment) over accessibility and entertainment value is dubbed "literary"; one who chooses the opposite is likely to be labeled, or dismissed, as a mere "genre" writer.

All of this reflects the reality that even the most able and versatile author will generally not be able to do everything at once, not in a single passage, not at the level of a whole book. Some imperative will go unfulfilled, some standard unmet, some taste unsatisfied.

It should be remembered, too, that few writers can do everything that we look to writers to do well, even if given the chance, because every talent has its limitations, if not of ability, then at least of interest. Some authors excel at action, but are incapable of writing dialogue that does not hurt the ear. Others write beautiful prose, but cannot plot to save their lives.

Then there is the Sisyphean nature of the editorial process. Any one adjustment in a manuscript (eliminating a minor character, shifting a scene earlier or later in the story, etc.), especially the kind of tightly written manuscript to which we are supposed to aspire, calls forth related adjustments throughout the same text--making for layer after layer after layer of edits. Then it all has to be proofread, a process which will likely lead to still more edits.

And of course, one can always go back for one more round of polishing, making the process potentially endless. If everyone did that, of course, nothing would ever get finished, and there are plenty of reasons why writers do not do so, besides deadlines and the limits of human endurance. Just as in any other activity, patterns of diminishing returns can set in here. Even negative returns are a danger--the process, past a certain point not merely a waste of time, but likely to leave the book worse off as an obsessive writer goes back and undoes what may not have been perfect, but was nonetheless worthwhile.

And no one knows this better than the writer themselves, having pored over their books so much longer and so much more intensely than anyone else ever will, more conscious of the compromises and the editorial scar tissue than any mere reader is ever likely to be--and if they have any self-respect as an artist, harsher on themselves than any (fair-minded) critic.

The result is a love-hate relationship between authors and their work, memorably described by Winston Churchill. A book, he wrote, is at first

a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

Alas, very few writers are actually in a position to get that kind of closure. Mostly they just collect form rejection letters, after which the would-be books continue to lurk in the drawers of their desks and files in their computers like the monsters in a child's closet, awaiting their chance to tyrannize again.

Tell, Don't Show

"Show, don't tell" is perhaps the most clichéd piece of writerly advice.

It may also be the most useless.

Yes, showing has its virtues, the most obvious of which is that dramatization can have a powerful effect on the reader. To give an obvious example, we are much less likely to be impressed by a writer's description of one of their characters as "intelligent" than by their actually demonstrating that character's intelligence within the story.

But in practice, fiction just about never adheres to this "ideal." Rather than "Show don't tell" it is always a matter of "Show and tell," because showing, like telling, has its limitations, requiring one to resort to the other, less celebrated method.

Chuck Wendig's comparison of the two modes nicely "shows" us the difference between the one and the other:

Telling is explanation. It is definition. It is text. It says, This is that.

Showing is revelation and illustration. It is subtext. It asks, Is this that?

Telling walks ahead of you. It pulls you along.

Showing is the shadow behind. It urges you forward.

Telling invokes. Showing evokes.

Of course, revelation and illustration and subtext and evocation trades the quick, sure way of telling the story for a lengthier process, less certain to convey the same information to the reader, who has to work harder to understand what they are reading because of the inferences they must draw from fragmentary images. It means writing which, all other things being equal, is slow and ambiguous and difficult--hardly things we associate with reading pleasure. Indeed, far from achieving that heightened dramatic effect, if the showing bores or confuses or overtaxes the reader, don't count on them to get the point, or care even if they do get it.

And of course, a writer's scrupulously abiding by this rule affects their choice of content in ways that are not always for the better. For instance, an adherence to a simple-mindedly literal understanding of "show don't tell" is apt to push us out of the character's heads, leave us looking in at them from the outside--and in all likelihood, not get to know them as well as we might if we had more direct insight into their inner life. In fact, as Joshua Henkin remarks, they might spend their time describing couches instead.

Naturally, good telling can be a lot more effective than bad showing, as well as considerably easier to achieve. Which seems to be exactly the point. The advice about what makes for "good writing," by and large, reflects capital "L" literary standards, much more than it does what people actually look for in the books they really read.

And capital L literature places a very high stress on conspicuous technical accomplishment. Showing is esteemed precisely because it is hard--and because its downsides are looked at differently. If it is slow that does not matter very much to the Guardians of Good Taste. The emphasis on the perceived outsides of things and all the pitfalls the unavoidable ambiguity creates for observers, is a good in itself--the author's minding his lowly place and not presuming to tell us how things really are because what the hell does he know anyway--is respectably "postmodern," while also not offending against the "discomfort with emotion and sincerity" that Henkin correctly identifies as part of this sensibility. And if the reader has to work that much more, and possibly get less for it--well, the prevailing Literary sensibility is defined by exactly those who enjoy textual puzzles for their own sake.

At any rate, more nuanced advice, which would give us some notion as to when to show and when to tell, like just about everything else having to do with writing, cannot be crammed into a concise, pithy-sounding, one size-fits-all formula. (Henkin, indeed, remarks that "show, don’t tell" is a "mantra between a lazy student and a lazy teacher.")

There is simply no substitute for a well-honed sense of judgment, fitting the mode of storytelling to the specific purpose at hand, one more reason why acquiring the craft can be such a lengthy and difficult process. Nonetheless, the non-exhaustive guidelines given in this post at FimFiction seem a good start. At the very least, tell, don't show, if "your narrator has a distinctive voice," if "your audience doesn't care," if "you want a scene to move fast," or if "you are making an important point or giving information that a reader needs to have absolutely clear for their understanding of the story."

To show rather than tell at such times is to show too much.

Hollywood and the East Asian Box Office, 2013

The top movie at the Japanese box office this year was the final Hayao Miyazaki movie, The Wind Rises.

Of the top ten, eight were Japanese productions, with just two American imports making the list--Disney's Monsters' University at #2, Ted at #4. And the top twenty included only four more American films--Wreck-It Ralph at #13, Gravity #17, Iron Man 3 #18, Despicable Me 2 #19.

In short, the trends of the past decade have continued, with Hollywood doing less business in Japan, and its list of successes more eclectic.1 The action and science fiction spectacles that normally top the American and world box offices in particular do less well here than elsewhere.2

As Japan has gone, so have other East Asian countries. Where seven of the top ten movies in South Korea in 2007 were American releases (and ten of the top twenty), in 2013 Hollywood accounted for just one of the top ten earners, Iron Man 3, which made only the third spot; and only four American films appeared among the top twenty (the other big imports being World War Z, Gravity and Thor: The Dark World).3

This pattern was evident in China as well. Much as the entertainment press trumpets every release in that market, the fact remains that where in 2007 six of the top ten movies there were American imports, this could be said of only two of the top ten in 2013 (Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim), with the rest all Chinese productions, including the movie that was far and away the biggest hit, Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, which took in $196 million.4

Simply put, China has now developed the kind of domestic market that can support (relatively) big-budget, high-concept films like Journey, which means that lucrative as the Chinese market can be, it is also much more competitive. In fairness, Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim by themselves earned more than those six biggest American movies of 2007 combined--but their take still represented a smaller slice of a pie. It has just been the case that that pie was growing very fast, much faster than Hollywood's share of it has fallen. That seems unlikely to go on forever, with China's rate of economic growth slowing, while Chinese film production catches up to the foreign competition in resources and versatility. This suggests that Hollywood's fortunes in China will, over the longer run (and perhaps not even the very long run) suffer as they did in Japan and Korea, boding poorly for its current heavy reliance on a rising stream of revenue from this part of the world.5

1. Together the two American films in the top ten this past year took in $134 million; the five films in the top twenty, $208 million. By contrast, nine of the top ten movies in 2002 were American (fully accounting for the top six spots, one might add), while of the top twenty, sixteen were American. The highest-earning film that year, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, took in $142 million all by itself, the top five just under $430 million. The American movies in the top ten collectively made $570 million, those in the top twenty a total of $706 million. This works out to Hollywood making just a fraction of what it formerly did in this hugely important market, even without the adjustment of the figures for inflation, which would leave the drop in its earnings looking considerably sharper than that.
2. One minor bright spot in 2013: A Good Day to Die Hard took the #22 spot (compared with the #52 position in the United States). Still, this last installment in the series hardly set the Japanese box office on fire, taking in just $22 million--as compared with $32 million for Live Free or Die Hard, and an astonishing $81 million for Die Hard With a Vengeance way back in 1995 ($123 million in today's terms, more than any movie made in Japan since 2011).
3. The six American movies that made the top ten in South Korea back in 2007 took in over $200 million, more than three times as much as the $65 million Iron Man 3 made there last year.
4. It should be noted that the performance does not look quite as bad if one looks at the top twenty rather than the top ten, eleven of the top twenty earners in Chinese theaters being American in 2013. Still, the fact that so many of the biggest American hits were crowded out of the top slots cannot be ignored.
5. The six biggest American films in the Chinese market in 2007 accounted for about $112 million of the $199 million grossed by that year's top ten--about 56 percent of the total. By contrast, Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim earned $224 million out of some $1.081 billion earned by the top ten moneymakers, slightly less than 21 percent, rather a sharp drop in their share. The drop is less steep when one looks at the top twenty, but still quite clear, American film's share of their gross falling from 54 to 46 percent of the total.

The American Box Office, 2013: Three Observations

The title of this post says it all--these are just three observations I had about the American box office this past year.

1. Hollywood Has Overestimated Nostalgia For The '80s Action Film--But Not The Nostalgia For The Essence Of Those Films.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone flopped separately (in Last Stand and Bullet to the Head) before going on to flop together (in Escape Plan). The same went for A Good Day to Die Hard, the critically and commercially weakest performer in the series, and one might add, the Bruce Willis starrer Red 2. Only lower budgets, and the surprising strength of overseas earnings (reaching up to 80 percent of the total gross), made the difference between financial loss and modest success in the best of cases.1

Interestingly, this has happened as something of the spirit of the paramilitary films of that era resurged in recent years, most obviously in a string of recent hits prominently featuring the U.S. Navy SEALs in action abroad--like Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty, Captain Phillips and Lone Survivor--a stark contrast with Hollywood's previous ambivalent, often critical movies about terrorism and the Middle East (Syriana, Lions for Lambs, Green Zone, etc.).2 Something of this same spirit is evident, too, in the success of Olympus Has Fallen (one of two "Die Hard in the White House" movies this past year), the G.I. Joe movies (based on the kiddie version of '80s action film), and the Iron Man film series, the protagonist of which, more than most comic book heroes, plays the Lone American Warrior fighting the Foreign Enemy.

This is unsurprising given the parallels between the present and the post-Vietnam era, when the U.S. also suffered frustration in overseas military operations, increased economic pain and sharpened anxieties about national decline, and rightist populism ran strong. Hollywood's continuing to produce more films of this type, and audiences' continuing to attend them, will be equally unsurprising.

2. Marvel's Gamble on The Avengers Continued to Pay Off at Theaters.
Marvel's establishment of three superhero franchises (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America) as a basis for launching The Avengers payed off big in 2012 with the biggest hit at the American and world box offices since Avatar. However, its direct earnings are not the only measure of its influence, the film's success apparently having succeeded in boosting the performance of the associated superhero franchises. While Iron Man 2 left a bad taste in the mouths of even confirmed fans, Iron Man 3 made a staggering $400 million in the United States, helped by enthusiasm for the 2012 film. Thor: The Dark World similarly saw a marked improvement on the gross of the first film, taking in over $200 million, a more than 30 percent rise.3

One can expect that Captain America: Winter Soldier, due out this April, will also get a helpful bump. Even were that not to be the case, it would still be safe to say that the complex of Avengers-connected films represent the largest ever commercial success for the superhero film genre, which (financially, if in no other way) is still going from strength to strength over a decade after the first X-Men film, with no end in sight.

3. Hardcore Science Fiction (and Fantasy) Remains a Risky Proposition.
We are constantly told that science fiction is king of the box office. And of course, films about superheroes (Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Thor: The Dark World, Wolverine), family-friendly animated comedic fantasies (Despicable Me 2, Monsters University, Frozen, The Croods), zombies (World War Z), the continued mining of beloved older cinematic phenomena (Oz the Great and Powerful, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) and a certain post-apocalyptic young adult adventure drama (Catching Fire) indisputably remained at the very top in 2013.

Nonetheless, the boosters forget an important corollary to the rule, namely that the requisite big budgets and the fickleness of audiences toward the genre has consistently made hardcore science fiction falling outside these categories--thoroughly futuristic movies, space-set movies--a high-risk endeavor for would-be filmmakers. This past year was no exception to the rule, the responses to Oblivion, After Earth, Pacific Rim, Elysium, the third Riddick film and Ender's Game were on the whole underwhelming, while the response to Star Trek: Into Darkness was likewise something of a disappointment by the standards of blockbuster sequels.4

Additionally, while those other genres were less intensively mined this year, the same has been the case with movies like the fairy tale-based Jack the Giant Slayer, the historical fantasy 47 Ronin, and the Western The Lone Ranger (the biggest flop of the year), which underlined the hesitation of American audiences to follow Hollywood to other eras and faraway lands.

In short, unless they have a really compelling reason to do so (like a solid connection to one of those rare properties that has previously proven a strong exception to this rule, or the light touch of a Disney cartoon), U.S. moviegoers strongly prefer to find their adventure in the contemporary world, and particularly in contemporary America--with just a little science fiction or fantasy tossed in.

1. Escape Plan did much better overseas, particularly in China, where it grossed a solid $40 million (as compared with the $25 million it picked up in the States), raising the global take to $130 million--quite acceptable because of the film's $50 million budget. The fifth Die Hard movie also managed a $300 million global gross, again tolerable in light of its $92 million budget.
2. While the Navy SEALs have long been well known to the American public, such intense interest in the unit may be unprecedented in recent American history--a thing analogous, perhaps, to the British cult of the SAS John Newsinger analyzed in Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture.
3. And of course, each film saw a comparable boost overseas. Iron Man 3 made $1.2 billion globally, about twice what its predecessors did, and not much less than The Avengers; while the second Thor film took in over $630 million worldwide, a 40 percent improvement over the first film's performance.
4. Of course, Pacific Rim and Star Trek 2 were saved by strong foreign grosses. Meanwhile Gravity, the sole unqualified success among this lot, was the least like a Big Summer Blockbuster in concept and style, and also the least likely to provide a basis for replicable success.

Unintentionally Writing An Alternate Timeline

In his 2003 Trojan Odyssey Clive Cussler makes reference to Rudi Gunn fighting in "the conflict to rid the [Persian Gulf] of Saddam Hussein"--but as it happened, Hussein was no longer around in this universe. Treasure, set fifteen years earlier (in 1991), referred to the "assassination of President Saddam Husayn."

The same novel also makes two (unfavorable) references to President Bill Clinton. However, as the Dirk Pitt novels, with their succession of fictional presidents, ran from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, it is not at all clear when Clinton would have been President in Pitt's universe.

Of course, the reader of novels like these, while likely to be aware of the discrepancies, does not pay them much mind; they are simply not essential to the story. Nonetheless, they do point to a routine problem of the techno-thriller, and particularly the sort of techno-thriller based on politico-military crisis--its use of topical plots based on current events, which make them date rather quickly. The problem quickly gets compounded by the tendency of successful techno-thrillers to turn into series', and in the process, also depictions of an alternate universe. Because the writers strive to remain topical, they attempt to reconcile their other timeline with our own--typically with awkward results.

Take, for instance, the Jack Ryan novels. These have seen the U.S. and Soviet Union develop effective, laser-based strategic defense systems (The Cardinal of the Kremlin); the nuclear bombing of Denver and the establishment of a Middle Eastern peace which sees the Vatican's Swiss Guards policing Jerusalem (The Sum of All Fears); and the dismantling of the ballistic missile forces of the United States and Soviet Union, following which the U.S. fought a war with Japan that ended with an aerial attack that destroyed the Capitol, and many of the country's leading political figures (Debt of Honor). One might add that in the books Saddam Hussein was assassinated by an Iranian agent, and Iraq (and Turkmenistan) subsequently absorbed by an expansionist Iran, which also subjected the United States to an Ebola-based plague (Executive Orders), and China has also fought a war with Russia that ended with Russia's entry into NATO, following which China began a transition to democracy (The Bear and the Dragon).

After The Bear and the Dragon Clancy went back in time with a story about the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, Red Rabbit (a homage of sorts to Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal), but then rejoined contemporary events with The Teeth of the Tiger, and the subsequent "co-authored" works, Dead or Alive, Locked On and Threat Vector. These books, in contrast with the events of Executive Orders, assume the Middle East peace of The Sum of All Fears unraveled, that the War on Terror and the subsequent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq happened as they did in our own time, while China is again an antagonist in Threat Vector. Much of this (particularly the incorporation of the 2003- Iraq war) strains credulity, but even the less implausible alterations to fit our timeline simply throw out what came before--diminishing the integrity of the whole.

Nonetheless, troublesome as the discrepancies, and the attempts to paper over them, happen to be, one should not overestimate the problem for fans. In contrast with other, harder types of science fiction, the techno-thriller is not about world-building.

Still, they are a reminder of the fact that bestselling series have a way of dragging on too long. And taking such a set of stories together I do find myself wondering if fans of these types of books do not compare these timelines with our own, and what they think of the differences: that interstate and especially great power relations have been less belligerent in real life than in these novels, while the wars the United States has fought have been more protracted, messy affairs, rarely ending in the tidy ways these books tend to picture.

At the very least, this would all seem to support I.F. Clarke's criticism of such "invasion stories" as having promoted an aggressive view of foreign and defense policy, and an understanding of war as a simpler thing than it has ever been, let alone what it is now.

The Summer 2013 Movie Season: Other Takes

I got in my two cents on the summer of 2013 earlier than most last month, but wondered how other observers' takes compared, noticing in particular Scott Foundas' round-up of professional critics' views over at Variety, a recap by CNN's Todd Leopold, and a more genre-oriented take from io9's Charlie Jane Anders.

Reading these pieces I realized that I forgot all about RIPD (a huge flop, of course), and The Purge (a success on a more modest scale, if mainly due to a strong opening weekend, after which the movie faded fast)--not insignificant omissions, though they don't change the picture much.

Of course, different observers tallied things differently. I do think it's fair of io9's Charlie Jane Anders to count Pacific Rim among the summer's winners. The movie's North American performance has been only lukewarm, breaching the $100 million mark domestically only near the end of its run. However, it did much better overseas, earning more than that in China alone (it's already up to $110 million there, making it the year's fourth-biggest hit in that market), which helped raise the global gross to nearly $400 million.

By contrast, Anders' numbering Smurfs 2 among the winners struck me as a stretch, as the sequel made less than half original did globally, while Kick-Ass 2 likewise deserves its place in the flop list given its revenue to date (even if the low budget means it did not have to be a big moneymaker).

Still, that doesn't change things all that much either, and in the end it all seems a rehash of the usual--dismayed notes about the prevalence of sequels and "big, dumb" blockbusters and sequels to big, dumb blockbusters (already well established by the '80s, if more dominant than ever); about the robustness of the appetite of foreign markets for Hollywood's brand of spectacle, even as American audiences display a fickleness toward it (the tendency of which to periodically recur is almost as old, and again, more dominant than ever).

Todd Leopold, however, does make an interesting point in his remark about the increasing repetitiveness of the brand of spectacle we are seeing--the same sights (the White House, New York City) blown up again and again and again:

. . . there's only so much destruction audiences can watch before it all starts to blend together. "Man of Steel" destroyed New York -- OK, Metropolis -- yet again, right down to the fancy filigree on the sides of its skyscrapers. "Star Trek" ripped up San Francisco. "World War Z," "Pacific Rim," "After Earth," "Elysium" -- all featured massive, dystopian chaos.

"I think that this is a big problem with the whole summer and with the tentpoles that were made for this summer," says [producer Lynda] Obst. "There was a sense that we've seen it all before . . . They all seem to mirror the same sensibility."

It strikes me that this sort of action film may be approaching a technical plateau as Hollywood bombast bumps up against the limits of human nervous systems, and of filmmakers' creativity.1 It often seems that one simply cannot go bigger, faster, flashier or more intense to any effect worth achieving, while the inventiveness of the application may be running into diminishing returns. And that has significant implications for an industry which has always been organized around the sale of high-concept spectacle, but which has become more reliant on this than ever before for its financial viability.

On Mad Men's Paul Kinsey

Paul Kinsey is Sterling-Cooper's resident liberal intellectual, considerably to the left of his mostly Republican colleagues in his politics--making favorable reference to Karl Marx, participating in voter registration drives in the South.

Kinsey generally comes off as a prat, which seems unexceptional with this crowd, but it's notable that his prattishness is distinguished by its pretentiousness, down to the beard-and-pipe image he assumes in the course of the series. It is also the case that much of what he says and does is intended to impress women, while he uses the women he is with to impress his male acquaintances. (That he blew his chances with Joan because he couldn't shut up about their relationship pretty much says it all.) It's notable, too, that he got left behind when the main cast decided to strike off on their own and start a new agency.

In that he comes off as yet another anti-intellectual, anti-liberal caricature, and a reminder that Mad Men would not be so lavishly praised were its outlook not so deeply conventional.

Skyfall: A Critical View

(This review essay first appeared on this blog in four parts. Part One appeared on September 4. 2013, Part Two appeared on September 6, Part Three on September 9 and Part Four on September 11, prior to their consolidation in this single post.)

Collected in The Forgotten James Bond.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

It was recently announced that Sam Mendes would be returning to the James Bond series to direct its next, as yet unnamed film ("Bond 24"). This will make him the first to direct two Bond films back to back since John Glen back in the '80s.1

This is, of course, a reflection of the commercial success of Skyfall, which far exceeded every expectation. Indeed, when it was first announced that Sam Mendes would be helming Bond 23, there were cracks on the web about how he would give us Bond and a female agent going undercover in suburbia and bickering endlessly. In some ways, though, this film is just as incongruous as if he really did pattern a Bond movie after American Beauty.

Sources and Inspirations
When I first saw M writing Bond's obituary in the trailer after Bond's apparent death, my thoughts went straight to You Only Live Twice--the book, not the film. Yet watching the movie I was struck by how much of it seemed to have been lifted from earlier Bond films, and not the storied '60s-era Bond films whose recycling thoughtful Bond fans have long taken for granted (like You Only Live Twice, and Goldfinger), but the less celebrated Pierce Brosnan Bonds.

We see a mission go bad in the pre-titles action sequence, and Bond end up out of touch and apparently lost to the Service for an extended period, which concludes when a scruffy, damaged 007 finally returns to a suspicious agency, and an utterly unapologetic, unsympathetic M who nonetheless sends him straight back out into the field--just like Die Another Day. That mission has him up against a villain who stages a bombing inside MI 6 headquarters as the opening act in a revenge campaign directed against the head of the agency, for her betrayal of them when they were in her charge, specifically their abandonment to captivity and torture by bad guys--just like in The World Is Not Enough (which also took us to Istanbul).2

The enemy (Javier Bardem's Silva) is a blond, physically scarred former British intelligence operative not of British ethnicity who was left to the enemy by his mission-minded employers, and pretty much left for dead, but has since survived, and turned renegade and criminal. His identity is only revealed well into the movie, when, after his people have captured Bond and the woman he is with and taken them to an isolated, rubble-filled site full of broken statuary, he comes to meet him face to face and confront him with his past before doing them in. Then that enemy uses computer wizardry in a plan to attack the city of London in general and the most sensitive of British government sites in particular, the sheer modernity of which technique points up what many are thinking--that Bond is an old dog who has had his day, that the kind of work at which he excels is outdated.

Just like in Goldeneye.

There were, too, apparent borrowings from other, older Bond films, interestingly some of the series' least popular, both at the time of release and in the years since. The idea of presenting a dark "twin" to Bond who has a Spanish name, lurks on a Southeast Asian island and tests his shooting skills against 007 in a deadly contest, recalls The Man With the Golden Gun's Francisco Scaramanga. (It is worth remembering, too, that in the book by that name Bond had also just "come back from the dead," and gone after the villain to redeem himself in the eyes of the Service--and his own eyes as well.) The idea of casting a bleached-blond Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner as a villain in a computer-themed plot harkens back to A View to a Kill. The one new gadget Bond is offered is a personalized firearm with a biometric scanner, which saves his life when a villain gets a hold of it and turns it on him--just like in Licence to Kill.

And much of what the filmmakers did not lift from those Bond films, they got out of other movies--and again, not exactly the old classics one expects them to steal from, but relatively recent hits. The tale centers on a stolen computer list of undercover operatives whom the enemy is threatening to expose--just as in the plot of the first Mission: Impossible (which also had Ethan Hunt fighting a treacherous former colleague).3

The villain is not just gratuitously sadistic, and of freakish appearance and manner, but a Jungian "shadow" figure who challenges and even threatens to upset the hero's perception of himself. Halfway through the film the good guys have him in custody after a too-easy capture--and then, because it was all part of his inhumanly brilliant plan to be captured, has contrived it so that he simply walks out of his cell to create havoc through the movie's second half.

Just like the Joker in The Dark Knight.

Thrown into the mix are a number of other elements familiar from recent thrillers, like the new Q--one of the screen's more tiresome clichès, the tech wizard--a scrawny, bespectacled and exceedingly smug young man who spews techno-babble as he works the nerd-magic he constantly oversells.4 And the heavier accent on bureaucratic politics, which goes all the way to M sitting through a hearing in Parliament. And in general a heightened consciousness of the contemporary world's sheer media saturation, with Bond watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and Silva's use of YouTube to blow the covers of British agents working undercover.

However, we also get a finale which inverts the usual pattern. Instead of Bond going after the villains, he is fleeing from them. Instead of the final confrontation happening in their lair, it happens instead at his childhood home. Instead of a flashily futuristic fortress packed with high technology, the setting of this battle is a run-down old Scottish manor, where the gimmickry is of a decidedly old-fashioned kind--the means of escape a priest-hole dating back to the Reformation.5

One can see it all as a mix of the overly derivative with content that may feel like it does not belong in a Bond movie at all.

Very well, one might say to that, but does it work?

A Bit of Entertainment?
Uncertain as the mix of elements that went into Skyfall sound, the film does have its strengths. For the most part the pacing is good, the action competent and brisk and peppered with interesting bits--the use of the digger on the train, the dazzling stylization of the fight with Patrice (Ola Rapace) in the skyscraper. Shanghai looks stunning, Skyfall capitalizing on the city's ultramodernity more fully than any of the many, many others shot in it in recent years, so that the scenes set in it feel even more like the stuff of futuristic thrillers than the actual futuristic thrillers shot there.

It also has its fair share of humor (something sadly lacking from Quantum of Solace), and even an occasional flash of wit. Much of this is rooted in a fairly well-developed conception of the contrast between the series' traditional analog technology ("We don't do that anymore"), and analog heroics, and the digital age. Much as purists complain that the more gadget-packing installments in the series reduced Bond to a button-pushing automaton, he has never been so circumscribed by technology as he is in this film, a pattern that reaches its peak in his pursuit of Silva through the London Tube--which is exactly the point, and makes an appropriate contrast with the last battle. And while a comparatively minor matter, I thought that the theme song and title sequence the best we've had since at least Goldeneye, and certainly more likely to please traditionalists than most recent efforts.

Nonetheless, the pacing falters a bit in the overlong last third. And while the action contains plenty of good bits, I felt that a highly touted "fiftieth anniversary" film like this one, commemorating a series which created the action movie as we know it, needed more than that. Perhaps it could not revolutionize the genre the way the films of the early '60s did, but at the least it could deliver some stunt that would stick in the mind as exceptionally audacious--like Bond's skiing off a cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me.6 There was no such thing here.

At the same time the relatively grounded feel of the film makes the lapses in logic that much more conspicuous--like the appearance of British helicopters out of nowhere over Silva's hideout, or Silva's little crew's so thoroughly paralyzing the British security state that Bond's only recourse is to spirit M to rural Scotland to make his stand, or the nostalgic but nonsensical inclusion of the Aston Martin DB 5 from Goldfinger.

More importantly, suspense was generally lacking throughout. Drama and intensity were lacking too, what little we get supplied only by the actors--in the main, Bèrènice Marlohe, whose presence in the film as Severine is much too brief. There is no sense of build-up to a great revelation when, for the first time, Silva actually appears for the first time in the middle of the film, and his arrival is actually rather unmemorable.

The result is that his late appearance simply squandered the chance to develop this figure, though the broader conception of him is also flawed, in part by the problematic influence of Nolan's Joker. The figure in Nolan's movie was presented to us as a Jungian shadow archetype, an idea given human form (I thought, rather a brilliant one), not a flesh-and-blood human being--two quite different objects not easily reconciled, and neither of which was achieved here. And so in the end this comparative small-fry among Bond villains (unlike Alec Trevelyan, his revenge plan's not tied not tied to a suitably spectacular object like robbing the bank of England) succeeds in being eccentric and repellent, but not interesting enough or menacing enough to stand out in the series' now rather crowded rogue's gallery--let alone the tragic figure the writers seem to have intended him to be.

Meanwhile, the rapport between Bond (Daniel Craig) and Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) is a far cry from that between Sean Connery and Lois Maxwell. What goes on between Bond and Severine is arguably rather worse, his seduction of a woman victimized by the sex trade--by following her into the shower just after they've met, no less--appearing casually predatory, and the sort of thing more likely to discredit than reassert the series' traditional handling of his sexuality, with Silva's murder of her after Bond promised to protect her making it look that much worse. (The Freudian implications of his poor marksmanship, the scenes with Silva, the idea of Bond as a man with mommy issues--more on which later--do not help either.) Indeed, the filmmakers remain deeply, even perversely sex-negative in their depiction of the screen's most famous womanizer, continuing to treat Bond's kiss as the kiss of death, so that once again every woman he beds in his adventures dies, and for the third time in a row he concludes a movie womanless.7

However, the film may be most problematic where it is most ambitious.

Striving For More
While a movie like Skyfall is about crowd-pleasing first and foremost, it is worth remembering that the Bond series has a longstanding hardcore following, and that Skyfall was made and marketed as a celebration of Bond's fiftieth anniversary on the screen. And the film does strive to mark that by asserting Bond's identity and place in the second decade of the twenty-first century, proving that he is still vigorous and relevant, while at the same time deepening the figure for us. To make this a story about Bond proving himself to the doubters, the writers go a step further than Goldeneye in knocking him down so that he can stage a comeback.8

Strongly connected with that struggle to "come back" is the incorporation of a measure of the personal drama we are more accustomed to seeing in movie festival prize winners and critical darlings than action-oriented blockbusters. The writers sought to create between Bond, M and Silva a family of sorts, with M as a mother figure to the two men, and Bond and Silva as brothers (so that Bond finds himself coming home again, confronting a "sibling," protecting a "parent," and then saying goodbye to them for the final time). This is all underlined by the fact that Bond's retreat to his family's titular estate is an occasion on which we are told more than ever before about his original, biological family in his half-century on-screen, and the one time when we see him confront that painful aspect of his past--so that he might be said to struggle with two different sets of familial baggage as a part of his return to form.

Analog Heroics in a Digital Age
When it comes to knocking Bond down, well, the writers certainly achieve that. His time away from the Service and thought dead is not a period of rejuvenation which sees Bond return home back in form, but an exhausted, aging man's letting himself go. Bond, the "best shot in the service," sees his skills with a gun go to pot, a mark of his generally flagging physical prowess. Additionally, not only does he fail the Service's tests at headquarters, but he is easily captured by Silva's henchmen, and then bested in a shooting match with said enemy, with the result that Severine loses her life, after Bond's promise of protection.

Bond likewise fails to keep the enemy's attack from reaching Britain. Not only does Silva bomb MI 6, but Bond's capture of him is really just Silva duping Bond, after which Silva is running wild and free in Britain, attacking Britain's intelligence headquarters and shooting up Parliament, with the British security state thrown into chaos by his cyber-wizardry. (Certainly no prior Bond film has set so much of its action on British soil.)

However, despite the impression one may get of a man and a world restored from the concluding scenes in which Bond surveys London from a rooftop in that way so many superheroes look down upon the cities they defend (in a suitably impressive shot simultaneously taking in Big Ben and Parliament and other architectural icons of Britishness); returns to an office like we haven't seen since at least The Living Daylights (wood and leather, a Miss Moneypenny in the anteroom, a military man in charge); and then faces us through the closing shot through a gun barrel that had been conspicuously missing from the film's opening; the truth is that Bond never actually makes that comeback. Instead of Bond's defeating Silva in the modern world, he retreats to the past--literally, to a bucolic space left behind in the march of technology--to make his stand.

I found the effect jarring. Bond may be a sportsman who loves skiing and diving, but he has always been an urban creature, not a country gentleman. Additionally, the heavy stress on Bond as a figure with aristocratic roots contradicts the less genteel approach seen in Casino Royale (in which he was someone who had no one to teach him how to properly dress), and to an extent, earlier conceptions of the character. As Jeremy Black noted, the appeal of the film version of Bond was, in part, a matter of his conveying a sense of "class" not too clearly or closely connected with money and birth--while in print, he was still a half-foreign exotic who looked out of place at Blades and felt silly being offered a knighthood, replying to the offer that he is, and always will feel at home as, a Scottish peasant. And staging the showdown this way struck me as taking that gap between analog Bond and digital Silva too far--so much so that rather than anything really Bondian, it comes off as a weird hybridization of the sniveling reactionary sentiment of an Evelyn Waugh with the antics of survivalist-commando figures like Rambo, or Predator's Alan Schaefer.9

Moreover, this course of action only half-succeeds. Bond manages to kill Silva with a thrown knife--rather than redeeming himself as a shootist (which would have been all the better since making that difficult shot would have brought a nice symmetry to the film, given how the opening train sequence ended).10 And M still ends up dead as a result of the wounds her attacker gave her, considerable damage to the Service on her watch done--which is to say that Silva has attained his object, even if it was at the cost of his life. (Strictly speaking, the bad guy actually won this time!) And anyway, the estate gets blown up, along with the Aston Martin Bond used to reach it.

All this being the case, he proves himself not the master of the world he once was, going anywhere and everywhere and always coming out on top (in spite of frequently being up against superior technology), but only a tenuous master of his family's grounds, on which he has at any rate turned his back.

After this shaky performance against this movie's forgettable baddie, even in combination with the two down-to-earth predecessors with which we can connect it, this Bond has yet to truly impress us as the larger-than-life figure he has traditionally been on screen.11 He does not even impress us as a man able to deal with the twenty-first century. Instead we have a worn-out, young-old civil servant continuing to come into the office--ostensibly for Queen and Country, but at least as much because he is just too restless to stick by his "still hearth," the only aspect of the film's evocation of Tennyson's "Ulysses" that works here.12

One Really, Really Dysfunctional Pseudo-Family
Just as problematic as the "comeback story" is the familial dynamic the writers strove to create among Bond, M and Silva. Judi Dench's M never struck me as being a parental figure to Bond, however--unlike the character in the book, or her predecessors on the screen. The old Ms sent Bond out on assignments from which they knew he might never come back, but we never doubted that there was loyalty between Bond and the head of the Service. M would at times be displeased by some thing Bond did--but it was like a parent's getting mad at a favorite child. By contrast, one would be hard-pressed to prove that Dench's M ever saw Bond as anything but the "blunt instrument" she calls him in Casino Royale, or that she ever had any compunctions about using him and throwing him away the way she has so many people over the years--in the previous films, or this one. (Her order to Eve to take the shot that wounds Bond pretty much says it all.)

And we all know how things went between her and Silva.

That pretty much makes her "Mother" only in the same sense as Mother in Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow series (while being even less convincingly maternal). At the same time, we never see any sign that Bond looked to this highly unlikely individual to be a maternal figure to him.

With the idea of a shared parent gone, there is that much less reason to think of Bond and Silva as brothers, with the issues that brothers have--like a sibling rivalry for parental affection or approval, or a sense that one brother got what was rightfully the other's. And of course, the two men had no preexisting relationship, and no reason to have any such feeling about each other (the way Bond did about Goldeneye's Trevelyan), with the aforementioned thinness of Silva's character doing that much more to limit such possibilities. Naturally the set-up doesn't work intellectually, or emotionally.

At the same time it is far from clear that Bond's return to Skyfall is cathartic, or in any other way a resolution of this other second set of issues; the development of the idea is simply too thin for that.13 When Bond remarks "I always hated this place" while blowing up his estate, it comes off as just another of the cracks that often accompany the mayhem he deals out. And because all we get are glimpses of Bond's childhood and the issues he has carried forward from it, the juxtaposition of that baggage with his more recent "family" trials (Bond holding M as she dies, in the chapel in this same place where he had to deal with his mother and father's death) is a contrast between highly underdeveloped images--which were probably not really all that interesting anyway.14

Naturally this too cannot provide the sense of renewal and preparation to face the future. At any rate, it is not at all clear what that preparation would be for, the film, like other post-Cold War Bonds, failing to insert Bond and his activities into some larger political context (a few perfunctory and inadequate references to terrorism aside). M's speech in Parliament justifying the kind of work Bond does proves hugely ironic, given that far from making the world safe from vaguely described external menaces, this film has been all about cleaning up the mess she made pursuing objects the script does not bother about. While the film's attitude is, of course, essentially celebratory of intelligence services like hers rather than critical, one can come away seeing the excesses of intelligence services and security states as the source of much of the evil Bond combats--precisely what those most critical of the real-world counterparts of figures like M and Bond would say.15

Bond at Fifty
Taken altogether, the whole package, far from proving Bond's relevance to the doubters, inadvertently reminds us of how backward-looking and anachronistic--and simply confused--the series has become, just as was the case with the previous "anniversary" Bond scripted by Purvis and Wade, Die Another Day. (That one, of course, marked the series' fortieth anniversary, and was the twentieth Everything Or Nothing Productions Bond film--two anniversaries in one.) The result is an equally underwhelming anniversary event.

Nonetheless, the film went on not just to break the billion-dollar barrier (still a considerable feat), not just to become the second-biggest hit of the year at the global box office (as no Bond film has done since Moonraker, as far as I can tell), but to outgross the series' previous best performer, Thunderball, in inflation-adjusted terms.

Skyfall also won critical adulation of a kind the series has not seen in a very long time, reflected in the film's profile at that year's Oscar ceremony. Skyfall's five nominations were only in the technical and musical categories to which action movies are normally confined--but many an observer used the word "snub" in response to the fact, while even the nominations that it did get were a reflection of the high esteem in which the movie was held. (And of course, many other awards committees were far more generous, including the British Academy, which gave it the BAFTA for "Outstanding British Film" that year.16)

Yet, big as Skyfall was, we didn't see much sign of '60s-style Bond mania, the film's success hardly reflective of that sort of cultural phenomenon. Rather I suppose it was a function of the film's strengths outweighing its weaknesses for most of the theater-going audience (I won't deny that, hollow as it is, it is often fun in a turn-off-your-brain way), and the kind of publicity that one can only partially buy.

Bond Twenty-Four will benefit from the goodwill shown Skyfall, but it will not have the same advantage, and so it will to a greater extent have to succeed on its own merits. Alas, I suspect that the adulation lavished on this film will leave the creative team complacent.

NOTES
1. John Glen actually helmed five movies in a row--For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985), The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1995).
2. Indeed, given that Skyfall screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade were the team behind The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day, one would not be unjustified in suspecting that they were simply reusing their own ideas from earlier writing sessions.
3. Mission: Impossible, of course, did copy its most famous sequence (the break-in at the CIA) from an old classic, 1964's Topkapi, based on Eric Ambler's novel The Light of Day. That was a much more sophisticated bit of theft, as demonstrated by the fact that "everybody" who now steals it thinks they are only stealing it from Mission: Impossible.
4. In fairness, though, we at least didn't have to hear him rant against the Star Wars prequels.
5. I'm sure much of the audience saw this wondered just what a priest-hole, and for that matter, the Reformation, was.
6. I refer here to the way the early films incorporated set pieces into their stories and the scale on which they staged them, their use of new editing techniques (e.g. quick-cut), and their presentation of action scenes of types we had never seen before (the underwater fights, the ski chases, etc.).
7. Of course, Bond does have sex with a woman who doesn't die early in the film, but it is worth noting that this is during his period off-the-grid when one might say that James Bond isn't even trying to be James Bond, just a drunken jackass impressing other drunken jackasses in a bar. And at any rate, including her in the figures still gives him a lousy average.
8. In fact, the closest precedent for this was, again, You Only Live Twice, where Bond went to pieces after Blofeld's murder of his wife in the preceding novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service--though in general, the Bond of the novels tended to decay after going for too long between missions.
9. Predator in particular seems worth mentioning here, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's protagonist pointedly reverts to the primitive to fight an enemy that is nothing less than an alien from a civilization so advanced that it can use interstellar travel for hunting expeditions--which is not too far from how the film treats the distance between him and Silva.
10. Another plausible reading of this scene is that, when faced with a shot like the one M had Eve take back in Istanbul, Bond simply decided to resolve the situation in another way--perhaps reflecting the difference between M's attitude toward him, and his attitude toward her (or at least, her office). And indeed it may be that the writers intended this. If that was the case, their failure to develop the dynamic between these three characters not only deprived the scene of the power it should have had, but left its meaning much more ambiguous.
11. After all, the epic struggles of the classic films--Bond's battles against SPECTRE and Blofeld and Goldfinger and others of their ilk, which did make him seem larger than life in just this way--have been discarded in the reboot. Since then we have seen a green double-o fight a relatively minor battle against Le Chiffre, and then take up a struggle against the Quantum organization which could have become epic, but which the series aborted after the unfavorable reaction to Quantum of Solace.
12. Bond's rebooted record, after all, hardly seems to merit the intense romanticism of the poem given its substance and brevity (no Odysseus, he), while the image of Bond as an aged king heading out on a final journey ("We are not now of that strength") is problematic, given the heavy emphasis on Daniel Craig's Bond as younger and more contemporary than his predecessors.
13. We are not even told the circumstances of his parents' deaths, though we may infer that it was a result of the mountain-climbing accident mentioned in Fleming's You Only Live Twice, and referenced by Trevelyan in Goldeneye.
14. I remember losing all interest in L. Sprague de Camp's Conan the Barbarian stories when I realized he meant to plumb the character's childhood and adolescence. When a character becomes iconic as a Gary Stu, the best thing to do is often to accept him as one and leave it at that.
15. Of course, one can argue that this was all just an exercise in postmodern irony. But that's just the problem: you can say that about almost anything where the pieces don't quite fit. One could, alternatively, say that this has been a subversion of the Bond series from within (Bond deliberately being presented as ridiculous and perverse and all the rest), and in fairness, I've occasionally wondered if that wasn't happening before--as when reading John Gardner Bond novels like Licence Renewed (1981)--but that's a subject for another time.
16. Javier Bardem and Judi Dench were also nominated for BAFTAs for their performances, while being similarly recognized by (among others) the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards, the London Film Critics Circle Awards, and the Satellite Awards, the last of which awarded Bardem the prize in that category.

Do Our Science Fiction Movies Hate Science?

Yes, according to an essay Ryan Britt published in The Awl last month. In his thoughtful piece, with which I mostly agree, he discusses the distinction between the super-abundance of science fiction we get in Hollywood blockbusters, and the "serious" science fiction film we much less frequently get from that source--namely that the latter

derives its story and aesthetic from a concept that does not yet, as we know it, exist—aliens, robots, spaceships, time-travel—and the rest of the movie examines the repercussions of that science fiction idea. Serious science fiction . . . has people or society at its center. And this may sound axiomatic, but the serious science fiction film takes its concept seriously.

Britt is less clear on the defining characteristics of the Hollywood science fiction we tend to get, but it's not hard to get what he's talking about: films that have no real interest in such concepts, except as a basis for spectacle and action and terror. Naturally he has no problem coming up with excellent examples of each, with perhaps the most striking the difference between the first Star Trek film back in 1979, and J.J. Abrams' recent Star Trek: Into Darkness:

The original Star Trek: The Motion Picture . . . has at its center a basic science fiction conceit, which the movie in turn, takes seriously: How would an artificially created creature of extreme intelligence and power cope with the idea that it was created by hopelessly flawed organic creatures? You might call this film slow, boring, or even worse; pretentious, but in almost every single way, it is the most serious science fiction film of any of the big screen Star Treks. This summer’s Star Trek Into Darkness, in comparison, is mostly people punching each other.

Nonetheless, as he notes, the line can get blurry, and the pervasiveness of "un-serious" science fiction has changed the face of the serious films, with the result that (as with the recent Elysium), "serious SF movies are often just as violent as their dumb cousins—and can be frighteningly anti-science," with the result that there is "an anti-technology knee-jerk tendency in nearly all Hollywood SF."

All true, and quite well-stated by Britt. And a much needed corrective to genre boosters who look out at popular culture and misread it as demonstrating that science fiction has conquered the world. It is much more accurate to say that the situation has been exactly the reverse, that the world as we know it--the world which sees only broken promises and terrible blowback in the Future but does not dare to seriously ask why, let alone what is to be done; the world with its stupid Frankenstein complexes and lowest common denominator standards--has instead conquered science fiction. And that is a thing to be regretted.

Whitewashing the Past: On the Manga and Animè Front

In Japan, the conflict over history and militarism has extended into the world of manga and animè, with Hayao Miyazaki recently drawing fire for his recent public remarks on the subject, and for his most recent feature film, The Wind Rises, which deals with the subject of the World War II era.

Less publicized, but perhaps even more telling, is the fight over the classic manga, Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa's autobiographical story of growing up in Hiroshima during and after the city's destruction by an atom bomb (which was made into a noted movie in 1983). Long controversial because of its uncompromising depiction of the bomb's dropping, and its references to atrocities by Japanese military forces during the war, the education board in the city of Matsue decided to pull it from the libraries of primary and junior high schools on the grounds that the atrocities mentioned in the story "did not take place"--a decision equivalent to pulling a World War II novel because it shows atrocities by the German army on the grounds that no such thing took place.

The local controversy became a national controversy when Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister Hakubun Shimomura supported the decision--unsurprisingly given the ultra-rightist and militarist leanings of a government seeking to abolish the clause in the Japanese constitution outlawing war, and whose Deputy Prime Minister, Taro Aso, has openly called for the emulation of Hitler's tactics in revising Germany's constitution during the early 1930s to that end.

The decision, of course, was met with considerable public opposition, as described by Dan Kanemitsu, and I am pleased to be able to say that the attempt at censorship has been rescinded. I am less pleased to say that the board has covered its retreat with talk of a procedural error (though it does indeed appear that the proper procedures for such a decision were flouted).

I am also less than pleased to report that Deputy Prime Minister Aso has refused to resign over his comments--which are, incidentally, very far from being the first resignation-worthy thing to have come out of the mouth of this notoriously ill-spoken politician. Instead he remain in his job and the public eye, reminding us all that even in the supposedly meritocratic modern world persons who appear unable to competently read their own language can hold the highest office in a G-7 country if they come from a sufficiently wealthy and powerful political dynasty.

And of course, this will not be the last attempt by a lunatic fringe that seems less and less fringe to try and get its public to drop inconvenient pieces of the twentieth century down the Memory Hole. Not in Japan, and not anywhere else.

Whitewashing the Past

It seems that in recent years there has been a trend toward "rehabilitating" the crimes of the twentieth century--Stalinism in Russia, or colonialism in France, or in Japan, the nation's conduct in World War II. The record of empire is being sanitized, the atrocities expunged.

One does not have to wonder long as to why this is the case. These have been years of discontent, with the economic and social stresses long building up through the age of neoliberal globalization coming to a head in 2008, resulting in unemployment and austerity not seen in the major countries in generations. With the political left moribund, this has flung the door wide open to rightist populism, weak on bread and butter issues but very vocal about cultural and symbolic issues--like having schools teach versions of history that bolster the standing of traditional elites and traditional values rather than what actually happened, talking tough on the international stage, and carrying (and using) a big stick.

And of course, the same stresses seem to have led to a greater readiness to use the military instrument--France more active again in Africa and opening up a base in the Persian Gulf, Germany unprecedentedly interventionist in such scenes as the Syrian and Malian civil wars, and China and Japan behaving more confrontationally toward one another over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. There is even fear of disorder inside the industrialized world, taken seriously enough in some quarters that earlier this year the Swiss Army conducted an exercise aimed at holding back the flow of refugees a meltdown of the eurozone might produce (while I leave it to the reader to guess at the significance of the German legal decision permitting the armed forces to use its weapons on the country's soil in a domestic emergency). This is all easier to do when the use of force and the threat of force is seen as politically legitimate, something easier to achieve with a bowdlerized version of how a nation has employed force in the past.

Charles Stross on Syria

Over at Charlie's Diary, Charles Stross has commented on the prospects of a Western intervention in Syria in a piece written prior to the surprising refusal of the British Parliament to support such action, but still relevant as this situation unfolds.

As anyone familiar with his political commentary might imagine, Stross is not in favor of "sending in the bombers," pointing to the dim prospects of its achieving a good outcome in an already deeply fractured country on grounds that appear questionable (given the uncertainty about responsibility for the August 21 chemical weapons attack), and the likelihood of its leading to "yet another colonial war in the Middle East." And as it happens, his feelings regarding the situation are much in line with those of war-weary and austerity-weary Western electorates hardly eager to go to war yet another internally divided Middle Eastern country on the basis of ambiguous WMD claims by governments they decreasingly trust--the French and American electorates included.

The Legacy of Battlestar Galactica, Ten Years On

It was in December 2003, that the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries first aired on Syfy--almost a decade ago, which makes this an obvious time to take stock.

The show's creators may indeed have been as ambitious as their fans in the press made them out to be, but to go by their actual work the ambition looks like pretension in a mediocre piece of writing that also happened to be a model of how to make a show seem better than it really is:

the cheap button-pushing that looks like intellectual, political or dramatic daring to superficial viewers; the obnoxiousness for obnoxiousness's sake on the part of the dramatis personae so often mistaken for a "courageous" willingness to present unlikable characters (while their verbal abuse of each other is praised as sharp and witty dialogue); the head games that can make a show's lapses in logic or coherence instead appear to trusting viewers like part of some intriguing mystery that will be satisfactorily solved later; the soap opera-like subplots which distract the audience from a story going nowhere by fixing their attention on such questions as who is sleeping with whom (or trying to); and the fan service that makes watchers more forgiving of the flaws that do come to their attention.

In this regard one might also note the nearly Medieval conservatism that got it branded "dark and gritty" (regarded as terms of praise, these days), and the high quality of the technical aspects of the show, from set design to visual effects to cinematography.

However, even before the story ran its course and exposed the show for the shallow thing that it was to even the most credulous viewer, there ultimately proved to be no great hunger for space opera of this sort. NBC's experiment with airing the show in network prime time was a signal failure, which foreshadowed the series' later failure to launch the long-running franchise for which Syfy obviously hoped. (Caprica barely completed two seasons, while Blood & Chrome ended up a web series instead of a TV show.)

And so far from marking some renaissance of the form on television, it not only arrived at the tail end of the TV space opera's most intense and productive period, but may have helped bring that period to an end.

The overselling of the show that led to the NBC airings likely made the networks leerier of hardcore science fiction like this (and indeed, they have tended to steer clear of it in the years since, even as their interest in genre material briefly boomed in the mid-2000s). The franchise's capture of so much of the Syfy channel's attention and resources--before its turning out to be a dead end--closed off opportunities that might have been filled by other concepts that could have gone on to greater success. And of course, the tendency to imitate it seems to have been at least a factor in the downfall of Syfy's other major science fiction franchise, Stargate (which came to an end with the BSG-inspired Stargate Universe, canceled after an anemic two season run, just as Caprica was).

This left the field to the lighter fare that, with few exceptions, has dominated the scene for the past several years, with not just the networks, but the Syfy Channel sticking with shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13 and Haven.

It would be going too far to say that this show killed off science fiction television of its type--but the show played its part in this nonetheless.

And The Worst Movie of All Time Is . . .

The RiffTrax company recently conducted a poll regarding the Worst Movie of All Time, the results of which have now appeared at Blastr. Notorious Z-grade movies like Troll 2, Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Plan 9 From Outer Space make the list (at #14, #20 and #23, respectively), as does the newer Birdemic: Shock and Terror (at #12) - exactly as one might expect given that RiffTrax was set up by the people who brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yet, most of the movies are recent, high-profile blockbusters - with the whole Twilight series taking the #1 spot, Batman and Robin at #2, Catwoman at #3 - and, well, you get the picture.

There are some indisputably awful films here. However, the prominence of big-budget, high-profile, relatively recent theatrical releases reflects the flaw in this method - the fact for a "bad" movie to be recognized, it has to be widely seen, whereas a bad movie is more likely to be unceremoniously dumped on the market, unseen and forgotten. (Indeed, I suspect even Plan 9, Manos and the rest only made the lower rungs of the list because MST3K introduced them to a whole new generation of viewers, atypical in being bad movie aficionados.)

There also seems to be a lot of pure spleen being directed at films not so bad as their harshest detractors claim. Should Spider-Man 3 really have made the #4 spot (making it worse than Plan 9)? Star Wars Episode 1 #13, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull #15, X-Men 3 #16? It strikes me that these movies are simply being denigrated for disappointing a vocal minority of their viewership - one which came to them with unrealistic expectations (most pointedly in the case of Star Wars and Indy, but yes, also in the case of X-Men). Perhaps something of the same kind also goes for the Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993 (though I know that this one has its fans among a certain age group). Bad as they were (such that I have a really hard time defending them), even Batman and Robin and Catwoman hardly seem to warrant their places so close to the top.

Other resentments would seem to be at work here as well, notably in the bestowing of two slots on Transformers 2 and 3 (#10 and #20, respectively), which I suppose to be a function not just of the fashionability of Michael Bay-bashing, but a reaction on the part of those who feel he did badly by a franchise they grew up on. I wondered for a moment if the reaction to Twilight was not similarly motivated, but it seems to me more plausible that that movie's detractors are coming from a different place, that they are simply annoyed with the phenomenon (which I think also explains High School Musical's winding up at #11).

What do you think? Are there any picks you thought unreasonable? Or for that matter, any really bad movies you thought should have made the list in their places?