MILD SPOILERS
I will say up front--for the benefit of those who have never read this blog before--that I tend to be less than enthusiastic about prequels. This is all the more the case when the subject of the prequel in question is a figure like Bond. Double-o-seven is very much a Gary Stu figure (if at times quite an unusual one), and it strikes me that such figures ought not to have too much past about them, or too much inner life, with the rebooted film series only confirming me in the impression.
There is, too, the fact that there just does not seem much for a Casino Royale prequel, about Bond becoming a double-o, to do. In Fleming's universe no one becoming a double-o is a neophyte. He is already a veteran when he starts in the section. And of course, the Bond of the novels, even as a veteran, was no omnicompetent superman. Instead he messed up time and again, and badly, often finishing his mission and staying alive simply because of some spectacularly unlikely coincidence. Thus nothing really formative, no making-of-the-superman-type stuff, can be said to happen here, just Bond being Bond, with a predictable result that, after the opening couple of chapters concerning Bond's assignment to the section I quite easily forgot that this was a prequel until some remark about Bond's preference in cigarette brands or cocktail preparation methods arises.
Hardly the makings of a memorable prequel or origin story, that. Still, if there was little hope of that from the outset the question of how well the book does as a plain and simple continuation novel remains. And the answer there is that some of it works, and some of it does not. One can say that the elements are indeed Fleming stuff, less distinctive and flamboyant than the precedents Horowitz opted to follow in Trigger-Mortis, but less worn too (Corsican gangsters and drug trafficking rather than secret rocket bases). Where its structure is concerned the book manages to feel like a Bond novel rather than a novelized Bond movie where the structure of the adventure is concerned. (For better and worse, Benson, and even Gardner, did not always do so.) And if Horowitz undeniably panders to the sensibility prevailing in 2018, he may be somewhat more circumspect in doing so (at least, by comparison, with an allegedly '50s-era Bond novel which undoes Pussy Galore's "conversion" in extremely in-Bond's-face fashion, and squeezes in a speech on gay liberation). And so in these ways it may be a more successful performance than his first. I will say, too, that his depiction of headquarters and M holds up, and if he does not quite have Fleming's eye for the little details, his travel writing is solid enough.
Still, some fairly central elements of the book are wildly implausible for a Fleming novel (like the bad blood between Bond and the CIA, even if it does not get quite as nuts as what we see in Faulks' Devil May Care), and wildly implausible period. (This is especially the case with the villain's motivation, the idea of an Establishment billionaire making his last grand act in this world the feeding of a heroin epidemic in the hopes of turning the country's attention inward at the height of the Cold War is . . . well, I cannot think of a way to express my incredulity politely.) So does it go where the smaller touches are concerned. (A lengthy anecdote involves a Soviet cruiser named Aleksander Kolchak, with a Captain Stolypin for a commanding officer. If any irony was intended, there is no sign of it, and I have to admit that it jarred.*)
And more consequential than any implausibility in the story is the sense that nothing here is really surprising or necessary. Of course, I doubt that Horowitz can be blamed for that, with the franchise in its seventh decade; with, even excluding the film novelizations (seven thus far), the spin-offs about Bond's childhood (Charlie Higson and Steve Cole have delivered nine all by themselves), the parodies that actually refer to Bond as Bond (from Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Firth's Alligator to Mabel Maney's Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy), and assorted still weirder projects (from Andrei Gulyashki's Avakoum Zakhov vs. 07 to the Miss Moneypenny Diaries), nearly forty James Bond novels in print; with the task of "making it new" so much the more difficult because the interaction of book and film encouraged the "formulaic procedural" expectation so many fans of them; likely no one can do anything with them that has not been done before, and that to the point of exhaustion.
But such things do not give publishing executives pause. Whether or not Horowitz's latest has been a moneymaker, the idea of the owners of an IP whose value has been estimated at a staggering $20 billion (the GDP of Malta) letting go of the idea of continuing Bond adventures in the medium where they began is so implausible as to guarantee that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN."
* Admiral Aleksander Kolchak, of course, commanded one of the White armies which attempted to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the civil war (1918-1921) that followed the Russian Revolution (1917)--hardly somebody Stalin's government would honor by naming a warship after him. (Incidentally, I did make a brief attempt to see if there had ever been such a vessel. Predictably, there wasn't. By the way, Ian Fleming's brother Peter actually wrote a journalistic investigation of the death of Kolchak, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. Did this escape Horowitz?) Nikolai Stolypin was a pre-Revolutionary Minister remembered principally for his brutal repressive measures (testament to which is the expression "Stolypin necktie"). Alas, not the first time Horowitz has displayed a profound ignorance of other nations' histories and cultures, to the point of confusing racist stereotypes of one country with another (as with the matter of which nationalities supposedly eat dog and so forth, in Stormbreaker).
For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
The Excesses of Critics
If you're one of those who thinks that any and everything that is ever said of any artistic work is entirely "subjective," and any one remark as good as another, and nothing can ever be overrated or underrated (let alone more rigorously and substantively evaluated); and you are utterly unshakable in that opinion; then you may as well stop reading now because nothing I will have to say will mean anything to you.
If that is not your position, then perhaps it will be worth your while to keep on reading.
Now, to begin properly:
It has long seemed to me that arts criticism tends toward the excessive in both its praise and dispraise. The good is passed off as great, the bad horrid--while the merely mediocre is often presented as great or horrid as well.
Why is that? An obvious answer is that many critics are, like many people in any and every line of work, simply not equipped to do their job well--in this case, lacking the grasp of the craft, the frame of reference, the fair-mindedness, to render a meaningful, worthwhile judgment on a given work. (There are film critics who, for example, do not understand how film works, or perhaps the particular kind of film they are writing about. There are critics who have just not seen very many movies, or at least, movies of the kind about which they are talking. There are critics who simply do not seem to care if the remarks they offer make any sense, or are at all supportable.)
Another is that being the critic for too long (which is not so long a time as one may think) leads to boredom and even burn-out. One runs out of things to say, especially when the work in front of them inspires only a "Meh." Hyperbole is one way of spicing things up; colorful insult another. The reader may find the results amusing, but as actual judgment it leaves something to be desired.
I suspect this sort of thing is exacerbated by the pressure to deliver favorable and unfavorable reviews in cases. No critic seems to want to offend the Disney conglomerate, especially when it critic-proofs its films with corporate pseudo-wokeness. (Who wants the flak that would come with giving Black Panther a less than enthusiastically celebratory review?) At the same time there are other movies they are expected to denigrate, even if they have to strain to do it--because they are less than congenial to the politics prevailing among the strata from which they hail and for which they work. (I had a sense of this looking at, for example, the reviews for the legal drama Roman J. Israel, which the critics bent over backwards to denigrate.)
All this has critics very used to talking things up and talking things down excessively. And as they are much more often called on to overpraise a movie than underpraise it, they seize on any opportunity to beat up excessively on something with impunity.
If that is not your position, then perhaps it will be worth your while to keep on reading.
Now, to begin properly:
It has long seemed to me that arts criticism tends toward the excessive in both its praise and dispraise. The good is passed off as great, the bad horrid--while the merely mediocre is often presented as great or horrid as well.
Why is that? An obvious answer is that many critics are, like many people in any and every line of work, simply not equipped to do their job well--in this case, lacking the grasp of the craft, the frame of reference, the fair-mindedness, to render a meaningful, worthwhile judgment on a given work. (There are film critics who, for example, do not understand how film works, or perhaps the particular kind of film they are writing about. There are critics who have just not seen very many movies, or at least, movies of the kind about which they are talking. There are critics who simply do not seem to care if the remarks they offer make any sense, or are at all supportable.)
Another is that being the critic for too long (which is not so long a time as one may think) leads to boredom and even burn-out. One runs out of things to say, especially when the work in front of them inspires only a "Meh." Hyperbole is one way of spicing things up; colorful insult another. The reader may find the results amusing, but as actual judgment it leaves something to be desired.
I suspect this sort of thing is exacerbated by the pressure to deliver favorable and unfavorable reviews in cases. No critic seems to want to offend the Disney conglomerate, especially when it critic-proofs its films with corporate pseudo-wokeness. (Who wants the flak that would come with giving Black Panther a less than enthusiastically celebratory review?) At the same time there are other movies they are expected to denigrate, even if they have to strain to do it--because they are less than congenial to the politics prevailing among the strata from which they hail and for which they work. (I had a sense of this looking at, for example, the reviews for the legal drama Roman J. Israel, which the critics bent over backwards to denigrate.)
All this has critics very used to talking things up and talking things down excessively. And as they are much more often called on to overpraise a movie than underpraise it, they seize on any opportunity to beat up excessively on something with impunity.
On Johnny Depp's Mortdecai
I recently caught Mortdecai on cable--and found the film a pleasant surprise. Enough of one that I found myself remembering the severity of the critical hostility to it when it came out, and speculating about why they went so over the top in bashing the movie.
I suppose a significant reason was that the movie starred Johnny Depp, over whom the entertainment press has fawned, but against whom it turned years ago, to a ludicrous degree, with one predictable result the excessive bad-mouthing of anything he appears in. (Actually watching Pirates of the Caribbean 4, or The Lone Ranger after hearing their moaning and groaning, that excess was very clear.) That fact aside, the movie was a January "dump month" release of an adaptation of which many of the critics, and their audiences, likely knew nothing (a now comparatively obscure British comic novel of the '70s). This did not invite hostility the way Johnny Depp being in it did as leave the film vulnerable, with the same going for other aspects of the movie--its simply having no lobby in the commentariat that might attack detractors on some political grounds.
I might add that the film's retro aspect, its subtle evocation of something yesteryear, its working in the style of a kind of comedy they do not make much anymore--there were comparisons with The Pink Panther, and they were totally on the mark--probably did not serve it well with the less cinematically literate critics, perhaps especially because of what may have been the most unexpectedly Pink Panther-like aspect of the film of all, Depp's performance as the titular figure, Charles Mortdecai. What Peter Sellers did with the French detective Jacques Clouseau, Depp did with his British aristocrat. I thought it worked brilliantly, and having since read the first of Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai novels, think it was entirely fitting.
But I suspect the joke went over the heads of many of those critics who thought this "strange," for reasons extending beyond cinematic illiteracy to idiot snobbery. A certain sort of American--and the kind who become film critics for upmarket review pages tend to be so inclined--seem to hear Received Pronunciation, and hear in it their social and intellectual superior, if not their Lord and Master. (This is the sort I suspect bizarrely turned the stale Heritage drivel of a Conservative peer of the House of Lords who came into the Kitchener name via marriage into a cultural phenomenon in the United States.) Seeing such a figure depicted thus was bewildering to them, and perhaps even offensive. A less stupid person, however, would not have that reaction.
I suppose a significant reason was that the movie starred Johnny Depp, over whom the entertainment press has fawned, but against whom it turned years ago, to a ludicrous degree, with one predictable result the excessive bad-mouthing of anything he appears in. (Actually watching Pirates of the Caribbean 4, or The Lone Ranger after hearing their moaning and groaning, that excess was very clear.) That fact aside, the movie was a January "dump month" release of an adaptation of which many of the critics, and their audiences, likely knew nothing (a now comparatively obscure British comic novel of the '70s). This did not invite hostility the way Johnny Depp being in it did as leave the film vulnerable, with the same going for other aspects of the movie--its simply having no lobby in the commentariat that might attack detractors on some political grounds.
I might add that the film's retro aspect, its subtle evocation of something yesteryear, its working in the style of a kind of comedy they do not make much anymore--there were comparisons with The Pink Panther, and they were totally on the mark--probably did not serve it well with the less cinematically literate critics, perhaps especially because of what may have been the most unexpectedly Pink Panther-like aspect of the film of all, Depp's performance as the titular figure, Charles Mortdecai. What Peter Sellers did with the French detective Jacques Clouseau, Depp did with his British aristocrat. I thought it worked brilliantly, and having since read the first of Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai novels, think it was entirely fitting.
But I suspect the joke went over the heads of many of those critics who thought this "strange," for reasons extending beyond cinematic illiteracy to idiot snobbery. A certain sort of American--and the kind who become film critics for upmarket review pages tend to be so inclined--seem to hear Received Pronunciation, and hear in it their social and intellectual superior, if not their Lord and Master. (This is the sort I suspect bizarrely turned the stale Heritage drivel of a Conservative peer of the House of Lords who came into the Kitchener name via marriage into a cultural phenomenon in the United States.) Seeing such a figure depicted thus was bewildering to them, and perhaps even offensive. A less stupid person, however, would not have that reaction.
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
How Did Robert Ludlum Become a Mega-Seller?
This changed in the 1970s, however, with that decade and the next seeing two American authors of spy fiction enter that uppermost rank of really commercially successful authors, the Flemings and le Carrès and Forsyths, namely Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy.
It strikes me that, in contrast with Fleming (whose sales went through the roof when Bond became a screen hit in the early '60s), or le Carrè (whose career it appears was helped greatly by Martin Ritt's film version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold shortly after the book hit the market), or Forsyth (whose first novel Fred Zinnemann turned into another commercial success and instant classic), or the later Clancy (whose early Jack Ryan novels John McTiernan and Philip Noyce turned into major hits in a critical period for his career, while shortly after Clancy exploded in the world of video gaming with Rainbow Six), Ludlum did not get a significant boost out of cinematic or other multimedia success during his commercial peak in print. (There were two major feature films based on his work in the '80s, as it happened, helmed by legendary thriller directors--Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend, and John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant--but both were commercial and critical flops, while the TV versions of his work, like the 1988 Richard Chamberlain-Jaclyn Smith miniseries version of The Bourne Identity, could do only so much for him.)
And where his writing was concerned he managed to be less accessible than most pop-oriented writers (the way Forsyth and Clancy were, with their transparent prose and straightforward storytelling), without winning critical plaudits (the way le Carrè did), and not wholly without reason. The convoluted plots, and the manner in which he sometimes withheld information, could make his stories hard to follow without their being particularly accomplished artistically. Indeed, Ludlum's prose has been much derided as overdone and melodramatic.
1. The market for American spy fiction was opening up. In the '60s Americans became really big consumers of spy fiction for the first time. They consumed mainly imports--Fleming, le Carrè--but it did suggest opportunity for local product, and Ludlum came out in '71, virtually the first of that crop of Americans to make names for themselves here (James Grady, Charles McCarry, Trevanian).
2. At the start of the decade Frederick Forsyth established the fashion for "super-thrillers"--novels twice as long as had been usual for spy stories and the like--with The Day of the Jackal. As it happened, Ludlum was inclined to big books from the first, and the books went on getting bigger as the decade proceeded. (Looking at those '70s-era novels it seems that most of the competition was behind the curve that way.)
3. Where content was concerned Ludlum was relatively in tune with the times, politically and aesthetically. Suspicion of the security state and of corporate power, international terrorism, and World War II nostalgia were all big in the '70s. Indeed, he did not hesitate to be blatantly topical, writing prominent recent and present day figures into his plots. (In 1977's The Chancellor Manuscript he spun a tale about the then-recent death of J. Edgar Hoover, while the plot of 1980's The Bourne Identity centered on the hunt for Carlos the Jackal.) He also handled the political material in a manner palatable to the broader public. (He was, after all, a centrist in a way that would be less fashionable in the '80s, but hardly as dangerous to one's career as, for example, was the case for Trevanian.)
In short, his early arrival on the scene with distinctly American, rather large, and from the standpoint of theme and style, topical and fashionable, novels, were plenty to give him a shot at the big time, so to speak, and it proved more than enough.
Thoughts on the Upcoming Film Version of Without Remorse
I remember I was a relative newcomer to the techno-thriller genre when Tom Clancy's Without Remorse (1993) hit the stores.
Still, by that point I had already developed certain preferences. It seemed to me that Clancy was more interesting when he was writing wide-view portraits of geopolitical maneuverings involving submarines and space systems (like in, say, The Cardinal of the Kremlin) than when he was writing character-centered stuff where the "heavy artillery" is something carried in the hand (as in Patriot Games). And while this was long before I had grown cynical about prequels, especially the kind devoted to the "making of" some action hero (action heroes are wish-fulfillment figures, after all, and where their past is concerned less tends to be more), I still was not all that interested in a story of Clark's youth. Or intrigued by the associated decision to drop the genre's accustomed present-day emphasis to go back in time a couple of decades to the "last months of the Vietnam War" setting that seemed to me less appealing imaginatively than a contemporary scenario, the more so as, in the early '90s, the Vietnam theme seemed overfamiliar, even stale, as far as this sort of tale went.
I gave the book a chance, though. And it was more or less what I expected. It confirmed me in my impression that Clancy's always bloat-inclined novels bloated more severely and obviously when he was writing these more personal, smaller-scale stories than when he was writing the global scenarios, which at least had more threads to cut back and forth among, and material for interesting info-dumps, and bigger action. It confirmed me in my sense, too, that Clancy was prone to be generic when working outside the rather narrow specialty for which he is best known (as writers usually are). Still, it had its interesting bits, among them the way it worked as a sort of homage to the paramilitary fiction genre already in swift decline circa 1993, not least because of its combination of that genre's principal themes, even obsessions in one tale--the '70s fixation on special forces-trained vigilantes going to war with the Mafia on the streets of America, and the '80s fashion for stories about special forces raid into Southeast Asia to rescue Americans taken prisoner by Communist forces during the Vietnam War.
For the most part, though, I have not given the book much thought since, and was surprised to learn that Hollywood plans to have a Without Remorse movie out in September 2020.
This was, in part, because I thought Hollywood had cooled on silver screen adaptations of the Ryanverse. After all, there had already been two reboots which imagined a young Jack getting his start, first with Ben Affleck back in the 2002 The Sum of All Fears, and then Chris Pine in the Kenneth Branagh-helmed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the latter backed by only a modest budget and given a modest dump-month-of-January release that led to a modest gross of the kind that does not have the Suits rushing to finance a sequel--which unsurprisingly meant that the other Clancy-based film projects were stuck in development hell the last time I checked, Without Remorse specifically included. Meanwhile the franchise seemed to be doing all right on the small screen with the Amazon Prime series now in its second season, so that I figured this would be the industry's emphasis for the time being.
But of course, that was an underestimation of its insane vehemence in exploiting any and every IP, especially anything action-y to do with the '80s, abiding by their preferred version of the old adage "If the millionth time you don't succeed, reboot, reboot, reboot again." We've just had Rambo 5 and Terminator 6, even though nobody asked for them, and Top Gun 2 is coming our way next summer, despite the extremely questionable timing for such a movie, as Scott Mendelson pointed out just a short time ago, if the film simply serves up more of the original in "a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise," it will "be both thin gruel and morally irresponsible considering the times we live in," but if it seriously examines what "overseas engagement" has meant in the decades since that original's release, it would probably offend "the very fans who have wanted this flick for 30 years."
Given the prevailing logic, more Ryanverse seems like a comparatively easy decision next to that.
For the time being not much seems to be available on the project. The word is that there has been filming in Berlin, but that may not signify much about the plot. (After all, these days film shooting locations are determined by the chase after government subsidy, and the German government has long been remarked for generosity here.)
Still, if the prior rebooting of Ryan is anything to go by, and there seems good reason to think it is, the makers of the film will have to set aside that homage-to-paramilitary-action-adventure aspect because it simply does not lend itself well to updating. (What real equivalents have there been to '70s Mafia-fighting and '80s MIA-hunting? None, because the genre sputtered out afterward.) Which makes me wonder what they will replace it with. Perhaps they have a concept. But then again perhaps not. After all, not having an interesting angle on the material never stopped a Hollywood producer from flogging an old IP one more time.
All the same, I expect I will be getting in another two cents on the matter over the course of the year.
For the most part, though, I have not given the book much thought since, and was surprised to learn that Hollywood plans to have a Without Remorse movie out in September 2020.
This was, in part, because I thought Hollywood had cooled on silver screen adaptations of the Ryanverse. After all, there had already been two reboots which imagined a young Jack getting his start, first with Ben Affleck back in the 2002 The Sum of All Fears, and then Chris Pine in the Kenneth Branagh-helmed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the latter backed by only a modest budget and given a modest dump-month-of-January release that led to a modest gross of the kind that does not have the Suits rushing to finance a sequel--which unsurprisingly meant that the other Clancy-based film projects were stuck in development hell the last time I checked, Without Remorse specifically included. Meanwhile the franchise seemed to be doing all right on the small screen with the Amazon Prime series now in its second season, so that I figured this would be the industry's emphasis for the time being.
But of course, that was an underestimation of its insane vehemence in exploiting any and every IP, especially anything action-y to do with the '80s, abiding by their preferred version of the old adage "If the millionth time you don't succeed, reboot, reboot, reboot again." We've just had Rambo 5 and Terminator 6, even though nobody asked for them, and Top Gun 2 is coming our way next summer, despite the extremely questionable timing for such a movie, as Scott Mendelson pointed out just a short time ago, if the film simply serves up more of the original in "a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise," it will "be both thin gruel and morally irresponsible considering the times we live in," but if it seriously examines what "overseas engagement" has meant in the decades since that original's release, it would probably offend "the very fans who have wanted this flick for 30 years."
Given the prevailing logic, more Ryanverse seems like a comparatively easy decision next to that.
For the time being not much seems to be available on the project. The word is that there has been filming in Berlin, but that may not signify much about the plot. (After all, these days film shooting locations are determined by the chase after government subsidy, and the German government has long been remarked for generosity here.)
Still, if the prior rebooting of Ryan is anything to go by, and there seems good reason to think it is, the makers of the film will have to set aside that homage-to-paramilitary-action-adventure aspect because it simply does not lend itself well to updating. (What real equivalents have there been to '70s Mafia-fighting and '80s MIA-hunting? None, because the genre sputtered out afterward.) Which makes me wonder what they will replace it with. Perhaps they have a concept. But then again perhaps not. After all, not having an interesting angle on the material never stopped a Hollywood producer from flogging an old IP one more time.
All the same, I expect I will be getting in another two cents on the matter over the course of the year.
Monday, February 24, 2020
Review: Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, by Ernest Mandel
Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 152.
Ernest Mandel, whom I was surprised to see writing about crime fiction (as a scholar he is known in the main for his work in economic theory and political economy), promises in the subtitle of his book a specifically social history of the genre to which he here turns his attention.
He delivers on that promise, detailing what now seems the familiar "main line" of the crime story while explaining its development in terms of changes in social life. As Mandel tells it, the genre's beginning in early modern times with the criminal as a hero, oft a romanticized one, such as we see in picaresque fiction like Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, expressed a sense of revolt on the part of the bourgeoisie (among other groups) against the feudal order of the day.
That changed as the feudal order declined and fell. The result was that by the nineteenth century there was less tendency to romanticize the criminal. There was, however, still a measure of sympathy, sufficient that the crime story was presented not as a mere tale of individual villainy, but as a social criticism--as in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. As Mandel explains it, in an era where people were locked up for debt bourgeois anti-statism didn't just mean an unwillingness to pay their share of the tax burden, but a genuine suspicion of state police power and military establishments as well; while the comfortable and even the conservative had not yet become Panglossian about capitalism. (Balzac was a conservative "legitimist"--a monarchist who favored the rule of the traditional Bourbon house--but reading Pere Goriot one can see a robust, critical social understanding that made him Karl Marx's favorite novelist, and which two centuries later Thomas Piketty found it worthwhile to cite in his formidable analysis, Capital for the Twenty-First Century.)
Of course, the nineteenth century was the time when the bourgeoisie, as they grew richer, more powerful, more established, with society increasingly remade in their image and organized around their needs, made a Great Leap Rightward, from revolutionary to conservative and even reactionary. And crime fiction reflected that shift, the social criticism falling away, and the genre's sympathies instead increasingly with those who upheld an order they took ever more for granted as right and good--the detective who uncovers and punishes crime--while the criminal was demonized. (One might say that Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean switched places, certainly by the time that Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene.)
The crime story was touched, too, by the rise of organization, bigness, professionalism--on both sides of the law. The police became bureaucratized, their vast, scientific machinery, with its files and forensics, routinely grinding out the truth in "procedural" fashion. At the same time crime became larger-scale and more sophisticated, an illicit equivalent of the Big Business so evident and powerful elsewhere, which itself increasingly partook of the illicit: "Legitimate business," seeing laissez-faire replaced by an increasingly high-tax, high-regulation state, increasingly broke the law as a matter of course; as in an age of international conflict and domestic unrest, of formally and permanently institutionalized spy and counterspy, the state's activities in turn became criminal in character; with each associating with, aligning itself with, corrupting, the others, all as organized crime reinvested its profits in legal endeavors and illegally bought politicians, and as business and government in their turn looked to crime for special services.
Lone detectives, lone heroes, were increasingly out of their depth in all this. The cops no longer needed the services of a Holmes, his genius superfluous, while anyway he could hardly be pictured taking on an Al Capone. Indeed, as the corruption of business and government proceeded, such an enemy became too big even for such as Red Harvest's Continental Op--big enough for the local corruption of Personville ("Poisonville"), Montana (after setting the gangsters on each other, he advised Old Wilson to send in the National Guard), but not what seemed an increasingly rotten global system (the Governor's cleanness in the matter a thing that could no longer be assumed). In the fiction of the '70s, by which point this sense of a corrupt system had come to be something close to conventional wisdom, the prevailing note was a cynicism that inclined writers to a different sort of hero, and a different sort of ending--heroes who were disaffected, but able to do only so much about the situation that left them so. Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) seems a notable example. Its protagonist Nicolai Hel may be the most skilled assassin on Earth, but even he cannot rid the world of the oil syndicate's conspiracy. The best he can do is exact a personal revenge on his enemies, and restore his little bit of peace in the world--a purely individual revolt that in Mandel's view is all rather "petty-bourgeois" and necessarily negative in contrast with genuine political, social change. Thus the genre seems to have hit a dead end.
Having published his analysis in 1984 Mandel's tracing of the history ends there. And one can only wonder what he would have made of the development of this still quite salable genre three decades since. But as it stands it is a formidable and, I think, extremely useful, analysis. Shorter and less comprehensive in its survey of the material than, for instance, Julian Symons' Bloody Murder, it is far more rigorous in tracing the genre's evolution, to say nothing of presenting a picture of the social factors shaping it. It is interesting, too, for having a somewhat more international perspective than works like Symons (the Belgian Mandel casually referencing a good deal of French, German and other continental work English-language readers are unlikely to have even heard of, but which adds to the strength of his historical analysis). The result seems to me indispensable for anyone looking for the big picture of the history of this important genre.
Ernest Mandel, whom I was surprised to see writing about crime fiction (as a scholar he is known in the main for his work in economic theory and political economy), promises in the subtitle of his book a specifically social history of the genre to which he here turns his attention.
He delivers on that promise, detailing what now seems the familiar "main line" of the crime story while explaining its development in terms of changes in social life. As Mandel tells it, the genre's beginning in early modern times with the criminal as a hero, oft a romanticized one, such as we see in picaresque fiction like Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, expressed a sense of revolt on the part of the bourgeoisie (among other groups) against the feudal order of the day.
That changed as the feudal order declined and fell. The result was that by the nineteenth century there was less tendency to romanticize the criminal. There was, however, still a measure of sympathy, sufficient that the crime story was presented not as a mere tale of individual villainy, but as a social criticism--as in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. As Mandel explains it, in an era where people were locked up for debt bourgeois anti-statism didn't just mean an unwillingness to pay their share of the tax burden, but a genuine suspicion of state police power and military establishments as well; while the comfortable and even the conservative had not yet become Panglossian about capitalism. (Balzac was a conservative "legitimist"--a monarchist who favored the rule of the traditional Bourbon house--but reading Pere Goriot one can see a robust, critical social understanding that made him Karl Marx's favorite novelist, and which two centuries later Thomas Piketty found it worthwhile to cite in his formidable analysis, Capital for the Twenty-First Century.)
Of course, the nineteenth century was the time when the bourgeoisie, as they grew richer, more powerful, more established, with society increasingly remade in their image and organized around their needs, made a Great Leap Rightward, from revolutionary to conservative and even reactionary. And crime fiction reflected that shift, the social criticism falling away, and the genre's sympathies instead increasingly with those who upheld an order they took ever more for granted as right and good--the detective who uncovers and punishes crime--while the criminal was demonized. (One might say that Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean switched places, certainly by the time that Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene.)
The crime story was touched, too, by the rise of organization, bigness, professionalism--on both sides of the law. The police became bureaucratized, their vast, scientific machinery, with its files and forensics, routinely grinding out the truth in "procedural" fashion. At the same time crime became larger-scale and more sophisticated, an illicit equivalent of the Big Business so evident and powerful elsewhere, which itself increasingly partook of the illicit: "Legitimate business," seeing laissez-faire replaced by an increasingly high-tax, high-regulation state, increasingly broke the law as a matter of course; as in an age of international conflict and domestic unrest, of formally and permanently institutionalized spy and counterspy, the state's activities in turn became criminal in character; with each associating with, aligning itself with, corrupting, the others, all as organized crime reinvested its profits in legal endeavors and illegally bought politicians, and as business and government in their turn looked to crime for special services.
Lone detectives, lone heroes, were increasingly out of their depth in all this. The cops no longer needed the services of a Holmes, his genius superfluous, while anyway he could hardly be pictured taking on an Al Capone. Indeed, as the corruption of business and government proceeded, such an enemy became too big even for such as Red Harvest's Continental Op--big enough for the local corruption of Personville ("Poisonville"), Montana (after setting the gangsters on each other, he advised Old Wilson to send in the National Guard), but not what seemed an increasingly rotten global system (the Governor's cleanness in the matter a thing that could no longer be assumed). In the fiction of the '70s, by which point this sense of a corrupt system had come to be something close to conventional wisdom, the prevailing note was a cynicism that inclined writers to a different sort of hero, and a different sort of ending--heroes who were disaffected, but able to do only so much about the situation that left them so. Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) seems a notable example. Its protagonist Nicolai Hel may be the most skilled assassin on Earth, but even he cannot rid the world of the oil syndicate's conspiracy. The best he can do is exact a personal revenge on his enemies, and restore his little bit of peace in the world--a purely individual revolt that in Mandel's view is all rather "petty-bourgeois" and necessarily negative in contrast with genuine political, social change. Thus the genre seems to have hit a dead end.
Having published his analysis in 1984 Mandel's tracing of the history ends there. And one can only wonder what he would have made of the development of this still quite salable genre three decades since. But as it stands it is a formidable and, I think, extremely useful, analysis. Shorter and less comprehensive in its survey of the material than, for instance, Julian Symons' Bloody Murder, it is far more rigorous in tracing the genre's evolution, to say nothing of presenting a picture of the social factors shaping it. It is interesting, too, for having a somewhat more international perspective than works like Symons (the Belgian Mandel casually referencing a good deal of French, German and other continental work English-language readers are unlikely to have even heard of, but which adds to the strength of his historical analysis). The result seems to me indispensable for anyone looking for the big picture of the history of this important genre.
Sunday, February 16, 2020
PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY
We are all familiar with the idea of the action hero as a latterday avenger with a gun—Dirty Harry, Chuck Norris' screen heroes, Rambo. Yet, how did the idea of such heroes emerge in the first place? Why did it explode as it did in the 1970s and, still more, the 1980s, defining the Hollywood action films of that decade? And why did it fall out of fashion?
PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY examines all these questions, and much more, as it traces the rise of paramilitary action heroes in the tensions and fears underlying the civil image of the nineteenth century, through the stresses of the world wars and the Cold War, to the emergence by the 1960s of commandos fighting undeclared wars on the streets of urban America—and the evolution of that image in the half century since.
Available in paperback and Kindle formats at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today!
PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY examines all these questions, and much more, as it traces the rise of paramilitary action heroes in the tensions and fears underlying the civil image of the nineteenth century, through the stresses of the world wars and the Cold War, to the emergence by the 1960s of commandos fighting undeclared wars on the streets of urban America—and the evolution of that image in the half century since.
Available in paperback and Kindle formats at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today!
Monday, January 27, 2020
Are We Seeing Trolls Where They Aren't?
It is widely recognized that, from the standpoint of how people treat each other, the Internet is a good deal worse than real life, which is none too great these days. (Those adhering to the smug, stupid "Nothing ever changes" sort of irony might dismiss that, but it seems impossible that a global civilization facing multiple, systemic crises all ar ibce is not somehow a little nastier because of it.)
Because our manner of interfacing with others through the Internet seems to encourage reacting rather than thinking.
Because we are dealing with strangers all the time--and often strangers whose faces we never see, and voices we never hear, who are just a handle above a comment.
Because the Internet allows people who are deep down pure vileness a round-the-clock opportunity to abuse others with complete impunity, and they make the most of it.
Because after being brutalized by the same vermin, other people who are not pure vileness get nastier themselves.
A signal example is people's attitude toward disagreement online.
In ordinary, offline, real life inflicting totally unsolicited disagreement on a complete stranger in highly public fashion would ordinarily be considered a severe breach of etiquette, if not civility.
This does not necessarily mean that this is completely out of the question, no matter what the circumstances. But it does mean that at an absolute minimum we should display some circumspection about doing it. We should be sure that we are right and they are wrong, at the very least. (Alas, too many of those who go around "correcting" others fail to realize that to correct someone else they actually have to be correct themselves--and that they fail that test MISERABLY.) We should be sure that the wrong on their part merits the breach on our part. (Even if they are clearly wrong and we are clearly correct this is not always the case.) And we should display some caution in our approach, making the correction no more unpleasant than it has to be. (Rather than, for instance, jumping down other people's throats, giving full vent to their nastiness at any and every opportunity like the complete and utter assholes they are.)
How much of that do you see?
A lot less than there should be.
Because our manner of interfacing with others through the Internet seems to encourage reacting rather than thinking.
Because we are dealing with strangers all the time--and often strangers whose faces we never see, and voices we never hear, who are just a handle above a comment.
Because the Internet allows people who are deep down pure vileness a round-the-clock opportunity to abuse others with complete impunity, and they make the most of it.
Because after being brutalized by the same vermin, other people who are not pure vileness get nastier themselves.
A signal example is people's attitude toward disagreement online.
In ordinary, offline, real life inflicting totally unsolicited disagreement on a complete stranger in highly public fashion would ordinarily be considered a severe breach of etiquette, if not civility.
This does not necessarily mean that this is completely out of the question, no matter what the circumstances. But it does mean that at an absolute minimum we should display some circumspection about doing it. We should be sure that we are right and they are wrong, at the very least. (Alas, too many of those who go around "correcting" others fail to realize that to correct someone else they actually have to be correct themselves--and that they fail that test MISERABLY.) We should be sure that the wrong on their part merits the breach on our part. (Even if they are clearly wrong and we are clearly correct this is not always the case.) And we should display some caution in our approach, making the correction no more unpleasant than it has to be. (Rather than, for instance, jumping down other people's throats, giving full vent to their nastiness at any and every opportunity like the complete and utter assholes they are.)
How much of that do you see?
A lot less than there should be.
There is No Such Thing as Respectful Disagreement
Can there be such a thing as respectful disagreement?
Well, let's consider what that word "respect" means. We can boil it down to two possible definitions.
1. Deference.
2. Esteem.
Obviously you can't disagree with someone and defer to them at the same time. To defer is to accept their judgment. So according to that definition of respect, no, one cannot disagree respectfully.
Still, that leaves the possibility of respectful disagreement when we are using ths second definition, "esteem." Still, let us consider what disagreement entails.
To disagree is to say to someone "You are wrong."
And to do that is invariably to call into question their intelligence, their judgment, their training, their experience, their knowledge and skill; to criticize them and make them feel "less than"--not least, less than the speaker, who is claiming to know more than they. The questioning, the criticism, the claim to knowing better may be very slight. And it may occur when we are engaged in dialogue with someone we ordinarily esteem (and to whom we might even usually defer). But esteem it is not. You may disagree with someone you respect, but the disagreement itself is not respectful.
That brings us to another point, which I think Carl Sagan summed up nicely in his last book, the justly classic The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:
But there is still the matter of basic human consideration. Of not going out of our way to be nasty.
I suspect that were there more consideration, people would be less insistent in their demands for respect, reasonable and unreasonable.
Well, let's consider what that word "respect" means. We can boil it down to two possible definitions.
1. Deference.
2. Esteem.
Obviously you can't disagree with someone and defer to them at the same time. To defer is to accept their judgment. So according to that definition of respect, no, one cannot disagree respectfully.
Still, that leaves the possibility of respectful disagreement when we are using ths second definition, "esteem." Still, let us consider what disagreement entails.
To disagree is to say to someone "You are wrong."
And to do that is invariably to call into question their intelligence, their judgment, their training, their experience, their knowledge and skill; to criticize them and make them feel "less than"--not least, less than the speaker, who is claiming to know more than they. The questioning, the criticism, the claim to knowing better may be very slight. And it may occur when we are engaged in dialogue with someone we ordinarily esteem (and to whom we might even usually defer). But esteem it is not. You may disagree with someone you respect, but the disagreement itself is not respectful.
That brings us to another point, which I think Carl Sagan summed up nicely in his last book, the justly classic The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:
Arguments from authority carry little weight--authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.No one in a scientific argument--for that matter, no one engaged in serious discussion premised on logical appraisal of the real world--has any right to demand deference. Facts and logic come ahead of anything and everything else.
But there is still the matter of basic human consideration. Of not going out of our way to be nasty.
I suspect that were there more consideration, people would be less insistent in their demands for respect, reasonable and unreasonable.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
On Action Hero Prequels
The pop culture of our time appears to be dominated by relentless, shameless exploitation of a small set of rather tired IPs--mainly because this is what is most conducive to the short-term profit of those in the media industry, regardless of what audiences may actually want. And part of that is the way that we have become deluged with prequels, not least prequels about action heroes.
"But don't you wonder how those heroes came to be what they are?" those selling the prequels will ask leadingly, as if we could not deny it.
I, for one, do deny it.
I don't read an action-adventure novel, or watch an action movie, and wonder "How did the hero become who they are?"
In fact, I'd rather not know.
Perhaps this is just a matter of my talking as a member of a video game-playing generation, but it seems to me that where ordinarily fleshing a character out fully makes them more "real" to us, enabling us to care about them, action heroes (save for those in the more pointedly artistic efforts where the story really is more than just an excuse for a bunch of action scenes and we actually do care about it), tend to be vehicles for the fantasies of the writer and reader--a sort of print, textual "avatar," lending itself to a different sort of audience identification than the dramatic one we learn about in Literature 101, with the fact the more significant because we are not there to get entangled in their personal drama, but rather to thrill vicariously to the external action. (To extend the metaphor, someone else may be pushing the buttons on the controller, but we are there with them nonetheless as they jump off the cliff to escape pursuers or drive the car or do any of that other stuff.)
The more we know about the figure, the more character-like and the less avatar-like they become, which may well increase the dramatic interest, but in the process make the action less engaging. Whatever one may say of the superiority of character drama to set pieces, an action film becomes something else when we care more about the characters than the action. (That Ian Fleming never bothered much about Bond's past until he had to write an obituary for him in the character's eleventh adventure seems to me testament to this reality.)
Prequels raise these issues in especially pointed form, because they are all about knowing more about the character, while bringing still more troubles in their train. Certainly looking at a superheroic figure, and looking back at them when they were not superheroic, when they were ordinary or even awkward naifs whom we see just starting to learn to do what they do, is the opposite of the entertainment their adventures give us--and tends to diminish them in this way as well.
And that is even where the writer succeeds in pulling off the whole conventional characterization thing. A great many writers who happen to be great action-adventure storytellers do not do this kind of thing particularly well--and arguably cannot, and not simply because even accomplished writers are apt to do some things well and other things not so well. This is also because, in writing, as in so much else of life, "less is more." The writer of fiction, after all, is not documenting reality, just giving us the illusion that they are. The writer cannot really "know" everything there is to know about their subject, however much hack teachers of writing may insist otherwise--and carefully retailing the absolute best of what they know, while maintaining strategic silences over what they do not know, where prequels have them doing the opposite, gabbing along and usually giving themselves away again and again, at the expense of those illusions.
Because of the law of diminishing returns, again operative in writing just as it is operative elsewhere. The odds are that the writer has told us the most interesting part of the story already--and anything else they tell us will be less interesting.
Because superheroics (and I would count even, for example, Mack Bolan's being a "perfect" sniper as a sort of superhero ability) mix uneasily, if at all, with the real world in which really three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood characters are rooted. (Indeed, while it may not be fashionable to favor DC over Marvel these days, it does seem to me that there is something to be said for Superman's living in Metropolis, and not New York.)
And because, when they are doing this years, or even decades, after the character first came along, not only will the material be that much less fresh, but consistency the less likely. Even if it was the same original writer doing the job, they are probably not the same person, thinking the same things, that they did when starting out. And when we have, oh, another writer who never even met them just doing a job decades or generations later, the resemblance is apt to prove very superficial indeed.
In fact, I remember how for a patch I was enthusiastically reading my way through Robert Howard and had finished his whole output of Conan the Barbarian tales. I found that L. Sprague de Camp wrote some Conan stories and looked them up. As soon as I found out that he went back to Conan's teenage years I lost absolutely all interest. For all I know de Camp may have written excellent continuations. But the angle he pursued is just that unappealing to me.
Thus has it been for me ever since.
"But don't you wonder how those heroes came to be what they are?" those selling the prequels will ask leadingly, as if we could not deny it.
I, for one, do deny it.
I don't read an action-adventure novel, or watch an action movie, and wonder "How did the hero become who they are?"
In fact, I'd rather not know.
The more we know about the figure, the more character-like and the less avatar-like they become, which may well increase the dramatic interest, but in the process make the action less engaging. Whatever one may say of the superiority of character drama to set pieces, an action film becomes something else when we care more about the characters than the action. (That Ian Fleming never bothered much about Bond's past until he had to write an obituary for him in the character's eleventh adventure seems to me testament to this reality.)
Prequels raise these issues in especially pointed form, because they are all about knowing more about the character, while bringing still more troubles in their train. Certainly looking at a superheroic figure, and looking back at them when they were not superheroic, when they were ordinary or even awkward naifs whom we see just starting to learn to do what they do, is the opposite of the entertainment their adventures give us--and tends to diminish them in this way as well.
And that is even where the writer succeeds in pulling off the whole conventional characterization thing. A great many writers who happen to be great action-adventure storytellers do not do this kind of thing particularly well--and arguably cannot, and not simply because even accomplished writers are apt to do some things well and other things not so well. This is also because, in writing, as in so much else of life, "less is more." The writer of fiction, after all, is not documenting reality, just giving us the illusion that they are. The writer cannot really "know" everything there is to know about their subject, however much hack teachers of writing may insist otherwise--and carefully retailing the absolute best of what they know, while maintaining strategic silences over what they do not know, where prequels have them doing the opposite, gabbing along and usually giving themselves away again and again, at the expense of those illusions.
Because of the law of diminishing returns, again operative in writing just as it is operative elsewhere. The odds are that the writer has told us the most interesting part of the story already--and anything else they tell us will be less interesting.
Because superheroics (and I would count even, for example, Mack Bolan's being a "perfect" sniper as a sort of superhero ability) mix uneasily, if at all, with the real world in which really three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood characters are rooted. (Indeed, while it may not be fashionable to favor DC over Marvel these days, it does seem to me that there is something to be said for Superman's living in Metropolis, and not New York.)
And because, when they are doing this years, or even decades, after the character first came along, not only will the material be that much less fresh, but consistency the less likely. Even if it was the same original writer doing the job, they are probably not the same person, thinking the same things, that they did when starting out. And when we have, oh, another writer who never even met them just doing a job decades or generations later, the resemblance is apt to prove very superficial indeed.
In fact, I remember how for a patch I was enthusiastically reading my way through Robert Howard and had finished his whole output of Conan the Barbarian tales. I found that L. Sprague de Camp wrote some Conan stories and looked them up. As soon as I found out that he went back to Conan's teenage years I lost absolutely all interest. For all I know de Camp may have written excellent continuations. But the angle he pursued is just that unappealing to me.
Thus has it been for me ever since.
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
The Spectre Behind Us
As word trickles through the entertainment press about what the world can expect of "Bond 25," a glance back at Bond 24 seems appropriate.
When the movie, coming on the heels of the highest grossing Bond film of the series' history, finally hit theaters the common complaint was that Spectre was rather a generic Bond movie, a charge for which there are ample grounds, not least in the action scenes and their settings. The opening sequence, a chase through a costume-packed Latin American festival (Mexico City's celebration of the Day of the Dead), recalled the Junkanoo in Thunderball, and still more, the Carnival in Moonraker. The car chase in Rome had Bond using the gadgets in his Aston Martin to escape pursuers after he glimpsed a meeting he was not supposed to see, at one point making use of an ejector seat--all of which was very Goldfinger (with yet another touch of Thunderball). During this he was being pursued by a giant of a killer who uses metal-plated portions of his body for murder, just like Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me--who, again as in that film, comes after Bond and Bond girl on a train rolling through a desert in the north of the African continent. The airplane-car chase in Austria evoked, variously, Live and Let Die and A View to a Kill in its use of a vehicle that comes apart, as well as many a ski chase (some of which also happened in Austria, like the one in, again, The Spy Who Loved Me).
The derivativeness extended to this film's immediate predecessor, Skyfall--Bond once again pitted against an enemy with British intelligence in his sights, and Bond himself in his sights, because Bond was the "favored brother," which leads to the climax being back in Britain, complete with a pursuit in London. There was also something of Quantum of Solace in the danger being within the Establishment. Alas, I was not an admirer of the family dynamic aspect of Skyfall, and I did not think it was executed any better this time, Bond's connection with Blofeld thinly sketched, unsatisfying--and unnecessary, as if "drama in the family" had simply become another box the producers felt that they had to tick, while the big reveal of the villain was just as flat as Silva's appearance in the last movie. And the way it all goes down in the end struck me as generic, in this case in an action-movies-in-general way. Had the last confrontation been in Los Angeles rather than London, I would have expected to see Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer's names on the screen at the start of the credits. Or maybe Joel Silver's. And it was, alas, not the first time this could have been said of a Bond film. (A principal criticism of 1989's Licence to Kill was its looking and feeling so much like a regular '80s American action film, and what happened in it when someone makes the "big mistake" of killing the hero's "favorite second cousin.")
I was somewhat more intrigued by the mass surveillance element. Still, the use of the theme seemed less daring and serious than the resource politics in Quantum where the supervillains were the same people many regard as the supervillains in real life. Moreover, I remember watching Quantum, and then Skyfall, and being struck by the film's backing off from that critical touch, which made the attempt to retcon the four films into a single narrative all the more problematic.
The result is still, on the whole, a watchable action film, at points more than watchable. Sheer scale and visceral staging elevated the Day of the Dead chase above the level of a mere repeat, while there was here and there an entertaining twist, in cases sufficient for the generous to call it homage rather than rip-off. All the same, it takes more than merely "watchable" to justify a $350 million entry in a half-century old series. Which brings me back to the first impression the world had of the film, by way of the "Sony hack of 2014." I suppose nothing since quite compares with that brief opening of a window on the cynicism and mediocrity of those who call the shots in Hollywood, reflected in the executives' panic at their own perceptions of the blandness of the film they had backed. ("There needs to be some kind of a twist rather than a series of watery chases with guns"; "the 'meanwhile' action for bond is simply fighting henchmen in many overblown and familiar sequences--helicopter, elevator shaft, netting." They said it before anyone else could.)
The final product testifies to their limitations in trying to clean up the mess they made. ("No, James Bond, I am your brother"--for the second underwhelming time in a row--may have been the best they could do.) And that, in turn, testifies to the greatest lameness of all--the PR hacks posing as journalists, the bowing-and-scraping business class-worshiping conformists, who would have the public in awe of Suits like these as "the smartest guys in the room," richly deserving of their seven, eight, nine figure compensation packages.
The derivativeness extended to this film's immediate predecessor, Skyfall--Bond once again pitted against an enemy with British intelligence in his sights, and Bond himself in his sights, because Bond was the "favored brother," which leads to the climax being back in Britain, complete with a pursuit in London. There was also something of Quantum of Solace in the danger being within the Establishment. Alas, I was not an admirer of the family dynamic aspect of Skyfall, and I did not think it was executed any better this time, Bond's connection with Blofeld thinly sketched, unsatisfying--and unnecessary, as if "drama in the family" had simply become another box the producers felt that they had to tick, while the big reveal of the villain was just as flat as Silva's appearance in the last movie. And the way it all goes down in the end struck me as generic, in this case in an action-movies-in-general way. Had the last confrontation been in Los Angeles rather than London, I would have expected to see Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer's names on the screen at the start of the credits. Or maybe Joel Silver's. And it was, alas, not the first time this could have been said of a Bond film. (A principal criticism of 1989's Licence to Kill was its looking and feeling so much like a regular '80s American action film, and what happened in it when someone makes the "big mistake" of killing the hero's "favorite second cousin.")
The result is still, on the whole, a watchable action film, at points more than watchable. Sheer scale and visceral staging elevated the Day of the Dead chase above the level of a mere repeat, while there was here and there an entertaining twist, in cases sufficient for the generous to call it homage rather than rip-off. All the same, it takes more than merely "watchable" to justify a $350 million entry in a half-century old series. Which brings me back to the first impression the world had of the film, by way of the "Sony hack of 2014." I suppose nothing since quite compares with that brief opening of a window on the cynicism and mediocrity of those who call the shots in Hollywood, reflected in the executives' panic at their own perceptions of the blandness of the film they had backed. ("There needs to be some kind of a twist rather than a series of watery chases with guns"; "the 'meanwhile' action for bond is simply fighting henchmen in many overblown and familiar sequences--helicopter, elevator shaft, netting." They said it before anyone else could.)
The final product testifies to their limitations in trying to clean up the mess they made. ("No, James Bond, I am your brother"--for the second underwhelming time in a row--may have been the best they could do.) And that, in turn, testifies to the greatest lameness of all--the PR hacks posing as journalists, the bowing-and-scraping business class-worshiping conformists, who would have the public in awe of Suits like these as "the smartest guys in the room," richly deserving of their seven, eight, nine figure compensation packages.
Monday, September 9, 2019
Just Out: What is Neoliberalism?
What is neoliberalism? How does it stand in relation to the rest of the liberal tradition? Were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (and the Democratic Party more generally) neoliberals, as many of their critics charge? And what has neoliberalism meant for the world?
Nader Elhefnawy's What is Neoliberalism? addresses, and answers, all of these questions—so critical to making sense of the world this past half century, and of currents events now.
Get your copy today.
Nader Elhefnawy's What is Neoliberalism? addresses, and answers, all of these questions—so critical to making sense of the world this past half century, and of currents events now.
Get your copy today.
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Just Out: Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century
Back in 2004 I published "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security" in the journal International Security. (The journal is paywalled, but you can access a copy on my blog, here.)
The argument, which built on Joseph Tainter's thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, boiled down to its absolute basics, was that modern civilization was getting more complex, by and large in ways that were offering less and less benefit, leaving it more strained and more vulnerable to disruption, all as the costs of protecting it kept going up.
This sounds abstract, but there were fairly concrete ways in which this was the case. The ever-rising volume of trade, travel, communication, information production and processing show our society's increasing complexity. The profound slowdown in economic growth in recent decades, the routinization of colossal deficits, the explosion of debt, testify to a society whose resources are badly strained. And of course, the "tight coupling" of our contemporary systems, the preference for leanness in the name of "efficiency" (at the expense of resiliency) also suggested rising vulnerability. This was evident, too, in the standard deemed necessary for protection--with the old idea of nuclear deterrence giving way to an obsession with not deterring but neutralizing the abilities of "irrational" actors, which entailed such things as preventive wars and missile defense. Meanwhile, way below that threat level there was the burgeoning expenditure on law enforcement, emergency services, private security.
As is often the case with a piece of published research, it was a starting point for me rather than an end to a line of speculation, in particular the first aspect of it--the way society was getting more complex but stagnant and strained, as declining growth and rising deficits and debt suggested. One result was a more thoroughly worked out and heavily updated version of the argument in 2008 which I was releasing just as the mortgage crisis demonstrated the stagnation and frailty of the globalized, financialized, twenty-first century economy, with the paper. (You can find it here on my blog, a PDF version here at SSRN.)
Still, that was not the end of it. I returned to the same theme later, and more recently produced three papers, also published through SSRN--one offering a yet more thorough and more up-to-date version of that argument in early 2018; an accompanying piece which probed deeply into the multiple available data sets regarding post-World War II growth in Gross World Product; and finally one which endeavored to relate our economic stresses to the sharp deterioration of the "liberal international order" that respectable mainstream talking heads remark so much but do so little to help anyone understand.
My new book, Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century, brings this later research together in a single, convenient volume, in both Kindle and paperback editions, available at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today.
The argument, which built on Joseph Tainter's thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, boiled down to its absolute basics, was that modern civilization was getting more complex, by and large in ways that were offering less and less benefit, leaving it more strained and more vulnerable to disruption, all as the costs of protecting it kept going up.
This sounds abstract, but there were fairly concrete ways in which this was the case. The ever-rising volume of trade, travel, communication, information production and processing show our society's increasing complexity. The profound slowdown in economic growth in recent decades, the routinization of colossal deficits, the explosion of debt, testify to a society whose resources are badly strained. And of course, the "tight coupling" of our contemporary systems, the preference for leanness in the name of "efficiency" (at the expense of resiliency) also suggested rising vulnerability. This was evident, too, in the standard deemed necessary for protection--with the old idea of nuclear deterrence giving way to an obsession with not deterring but neutralizing the abilities of "irrational" actors, which entailed such things as preventive wars and missile defense. Meanwhile, way below that threat level there was the burgeoning expenditure on law enforcement, emergency services, private security.
As is often the case with a piece of published research, it was a starting point for me rather than an end to a line of speculation, in particular the first aspect of it--the way society was getting more complex but stagnant and strained, as declining growth and rising deficits and debt suggested. One result was a more thoroughly worked out and heavily updated version of the argument in 2008 which I was releasing just as the mortgage crisis demonstrated the stagnation and frailty of the globalized, financialized, twenty-first century economy, with the paper. (You can find it here on my blog, a PDF version here at SSRN.)
Still, that was not the end of it. I returned to the same theme later, and more recently produced three papers, also published through SSRN--one offering a yet more thorough and more up-to-date version of that argument in early 2018; an accompanying piece which probed deeply into the multiple available data sets regarding post-World War II growth in Gross World Product; and finally one which endeavored to relate our economic stresses to the sharp deterioration of the "liberal international order" that respectable mainstream talking heads remark so much but do so little to help anyone understand.
My new book, Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century, brings this later research together in a single, convenient volume, in both Kindle and paperback editions, available at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today.
Monday, September 2, 2019
The Politics of Fight Club
What seems like a thousand years ago, I was gulled by the hype into reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.
I ultimately found it incoherent and frustrating and dismissed it, eventually deciding that it was yet another piece of postmodernism in the worst sense of that term--shallow, muddled, pushing lots of buttons but not actually saying anything, which was a common enough experience back then, when I still paid attention to such things as "independent film." And I was annoyed by how unlike so many pop cultural "phenomena" Fight Club didn't seem to go away--how year after year, decade after decade, people kept on talking about it, getting excited about it.
In hindsight, it seems something much more insidious. Tyler Durden and company's smugly willful irrationality and anti-rationality, their exultation in violent action for its own sake, their contempt for egalitarianism (from here we get the current, unfortunate usage of "snowflake"), their leader-worship, their fascination with the idea of an all-male pseudo-community intent on mayhem . . . they seems to pretty much cover any laundry list of traits of fascism one cares to name.
Of course, defining an ideology simply by a list of traits is not entirely satisfying. And so I find myself thinking of characterizations of fascism which attempt to get at its essence, with two such attempts standing out in my memory. One is of fascism as a politics that organizes people around self-expression, around theatrical display rather than self-interest. (Think of the Nazis serving up the spectacle of the Nuremberg rallies instead of making good on their promises of a higher living standard for the German people.) The other is that fascism is a combination of rebellious feeling with reactionary thinking. The book's principals fit on both counts, of course--because self-expression rather than self-interest is what is at issue for them, because their rebellious feeling is combined with that worship of inegalitarianism, anti-humanism, violence, leader-cult and the rest that by any reasonable measure is reactionary.
Of course, having established that Tyler Durden and company are a pack of fascists, one is left with the question of what to make of the book itself. To depict a thing is not necessarily to advocate that thing--and like any other postmodernist Palahniuk surrounds his work with such a freight of irony that one can never be sure what he really thinks about anything, or even if he has any awareness of what he is presenting. (Given the intellectual shallowness on display, one cannot take that much self-awareness for granted.) However, whatever his intent, the attraction of what he presented for a certain demographic makes it clear that it did appeal specifically because of its fascism. Looking back it appears that this should have received more, and more critical attention--our cultural commentators fallen asleep on the job again.
I ultimately found it incoherent and frustrating and dismissed it, eventually deciding that it was yet another piece of postmodernism in the worst sense of that term--shallow, muddled, pushing lots of buttons but not actually saying anything, which was a common enough experience back then, when I still paid attention to such things as "independent film." And I was annoyed by how unlike so many pop cultural "phenomena" Fight Club didn't seem to go away--how year after year, decade after decade, people kept on talking about it, getting excited about it.
In hindsight, it seems something much more insidious. Tyler Durden and company's smugly willful irrationality and anti-rationality, their exultation in violent action for its own sake, their contempt for egalitarianism (from here we get the current, unfortunate usage of "snowflake"), their leader-worship, their fascination with the idea of an all-male pseudo-community intent on mayhem . . . they seems to pretty much cover any laundry list of traits of fascism one cares to name.
Of course, defining an ideology simply by a list of traits is not entirely satisfying. And so I find myself thinking of characterizations of fascism which attempt to get at its essence, with two such attempts standing out in my memory. One is of fascism as a politics that organizes people around self-expression, around theatrical display rather than self-interest. (Think of the Nazis serving up the spectacle of the Nuremberg rallies instead of making good on their promises of a higher living standard for the German people.) The other is that fascism is a combination of rebellious feeling with reactionary thinking. The book's principals fit on both counts, of course--because self-expression rather than self-interest is what is at issue for them, because their rebellious feeling is combined with that worship of inegalitarianism, anti-humanism, violence, leader-cult and the rest that by any reasonable measure is reactionary.
Of course, having established that Tyler Durden and company are a pack of fascists, one is left with the question of what to make of the book itself. To depict a thing is not necessarily to advocate that thing--and like any other postmodernist Palahniuk surrounds his work with such a freight of irony that one can never be sure what he really thinks about anything, or even if he has any awareness of what he is presenting. (Given the intellectual shallowness on display, one cannot take that much self-awareness for granted.) However, whatever his intent, the attraction of what he presented for a certain demographic makes it clear that it did appeal specifically because of its fascism. Looking back it appears that this should have received more, and more critical attention--our cultural commentators fallen asleep on the job again.
Sunday, September 1, 2019
The Secrets of Tom Clancy's Success
This essay is a development of two prior posts, "The Secrets of Tom Clancy's Success: The Boom Years" (August 22, 2019), and "The Secrets of Tom Clancy's Success: Surviving the Bust" (August 28, 2019)
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In writing The Military Techno-thriller: A History I was primarily interested in the big picture of how the genre emerged and developed. When I discussed individual works I was more concerned with whether they were original or influential than with, for example, whether I found them more or less entertaining, or what I thought of the literary craftsmanship they displayed. Still, I certainly had my opinions about these matters when I first encountered the techno-thriller not long after its '80s-era heyday, and which did not change much when I revisited these works for my research--while recently reading Fuldapocalypse Fiction's characteristically incisive and entertaining anniversary review of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears had me thinking about that writer in particular.
As I have noted before, Clancy was far and away the biggest name in the field in the '80s (indeed, the highest-selling American novelist of the '80s, in any field). However, was he the best? I must admit I did not think so at the time. I thought others excelled him in various ways--and indeed, most of the ways that mattered to me then. Dale Brown struck me as the best at pure summer blockbuster-type action, while along with Brown, Stephen Coonts was stronger at mixing action and technology (in flying sequences, at least). Larry Bond was the one to turn to for grand-scale scenarios, intricately conceived and depicted, and briskly paced. And Ralph Peters was the most accomplished at such objects of conventional literary craftsmanship as prose and characterization. (For that matter, I cannot think of any Clancy adventure I enjoyed quite as much as I did Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid.)
All that being the case, one might wonder why Clancy came to eclipse the others with readers as he did. I see three significant factors working in his favor in the '80s, with one more coming along in the '90s.
1. Getting There First, and Not Just the First Time, But Again and Again
One point in Clancy's favor, certainly, was that as far as those names are concerned, he was first--which mattered all the more given the brief window of opportunity the genre's writers wound up having to make a really big name for themselves (the boom peaking in '89 according to my reading of the bestseller lists, and turning to bust afterward fast). Clancy's debut, The Hunt for Red October, arrived scarcely before the deep freeze of the Second Cold War began to give way to another thaw--the end of 1984, mere months before Mikhail Gorbachev became Premier of the Soviet Union, and not quite five years before the Berlin Wall was to fall.
The book managed 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, on which it rose as high as the #2 slot, firmly established him as a Name in the field, and making it easy for him to get follow-ups into print while those other writers were still looking at the emergent market, still shopping around manuscripts. (Dale Brown's first book, notably, was Silver Tower, but it didn't sell the first time around and he was told "Why not do a flying story?"--which had his debut coming only in 1987 with The Flight of the Old Dog, and Silver Tower not hitting the market until the year after that.)
As far as having that inside track went, it mattered that Clancy made the most of it, producing new novels almost annually at this stage. The result was that he had five novels complete before that event, whereas Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown were to have three, and Larry Bond only his first as a headliner (Red Phoenix), and Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters just their first efforts (with Brown's book only his first to get the New York Times' list, and Peters not making it at all, which may be of ambiguous meaning with regard to sales, but certainly clear implications when it comes to the publicity a place on the list offers).
This gave Clancy a greater opportunity to build an audience, which, again, he seems to have made the most of, not least by consistently being ahead of the competition with regard to the treatment of other major ideas. The team writing under the name John Hackett had already produced a work about a hypothetical U.S.-Soviet World War III in Europe way back in the '70s--but as of 1986 the work was eight years old, and anyway, it was written as a future history rather than a novel. The result was that Red Storm Rising looked relatively fresh in taking on that theme, with Harold Coyle and Ralph Peters only managing to follow later (in 1987 and 1989, respectively). When writing a novel pitting the hero of his original book against terrorists, Clancy had Patriot Games (1987) out before Coonts could publish Final Flight (1988); and when mixing up techno-thriller tech with old-fashioned espionage, The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988) out before Coonts' The Minotaur (1989). Clancy was in the lead with regard to the drug war as well, getting Clear and Present Danger into print in 1989 (literally on the list as American soldiers parachuted into Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges, which may not have been unhelpful), while Dale Brown's Hammerheads and Stephen Coonts' similarly drug war-themed Under Siege only hit the market the next year (1990), when everyone else was doing it.1
Each and every time, he had the book out first, which can only have helped his interest.
2. And Now for Something Completely Different . . .
Along with being the first on the scene, and putting out four more books in five years that, time and again, preceded the genre's other major writers to market with some salable theme, Clancy time and again varied the type of story he told. Someone perhaps disinclined to read a novelized war game like Red Storm Rising might have been ready to give Patriot Games (where he "cut back on the military detail to write a story focused on people . . . a personal tale of love and revenge") a chance--while much of the audience disappointed in the smaller-scale, much less tech- and action-packed Patriot Games would have been ready to give him another chance with Cardinal of the Kremlin, especially when they heard about its Strategic Defense Initiative theme. And so on and so forth. No one else shifted tacks to anything like that degree within that space of time, or had a chance to do so, and I suspect that this rather risky course, which might have been the more bearable because Clancy had such a large audience from the first, paid off as well.
3. Writing For a General Audience
Besides his being first, getting the novels out quickly in those early days, and varying the product, it seems notable that, compared with the scenarios of Brown or Harrison, Clancy's were, if not exactly plausible by real-world standards, then at least believable by the standards of this kind of thriller. Dale Brown's Silver Tower had the U.S. putting a massive battle station armed with a super-laser into space by 1992, and its becoming the key American asset in the war that broke out with the Soviets when they invaded Iran. By contrast in Cardinal of the Kremlin the laser-based component of strategic defense remains very much a work in progress. This disparity was even clearer in the drug war novels. Clancy's version of a more thoroughly militarized conflict had American commandos waging a secret war against the cartels on the ground (and a fighter plane occasionally shooting down a drug smuggler's aircraft). Brown had the country deploying high-tech oil rig-type offshore bases for patrolling tilt-rotor aircraft, which had the cartels striking back with MiGs and Mirages and Kitchen anti-ship missiles leading to dogfights in the air--all while serving up a great deal of comic book-ishness in Megafortresses, mind-controlled super-fighters (in Day of the Cheetah), and the like. And the technical detailing of this vast machinery, the intricacy of the colossal action sequences, could become very considerable indeed, rather more so than in anything Clancy wrote.
I enjoyed the extravagances of Brown's books. But I think they were too much that way for most readers (people who complain about the technical detail in a Clancy novel will probably never enjoy one of Brown's), the body of readers really up for these sorts of literary pleasures just a fraction of the proportion Clancy was able to get as a following.
It may also be that one of the features of Clancy's writing that a great many readers (myself included) have been less than happy with served him well here--not least, Clancy's tendency to lengthy exposition and rising action before the story really got going, heavy on detail not just about the workings of submarines but Jack Ryan's domestic cares. The slow build-ups, the abundance of the detailing, for all their shortcomings, may have lent the narrative a verisimilitude and a heft that it would not have had if he just rushed to the good part (or at least, the illusion of verisimilitude and heft that sheer slowness and mass can bring). Additionally, if I never took real interest in Ryan as a character, others seem to have been more responsive to him that way, especially that vast body of less-attached readers that Clancy managed to reach but which Brown did not.
All of these advantages stood Clancy in good stead into the '90s, particularly his readiness to vary his work, and his groundedness and accessibility, which may have been especially important as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War made "big war" scenarios harder to think up, and generally less credible or interesting to readers--along with the fact that having so many readers in the first place, he could lose a good many and still be near the top. (The '90s saw Clancy not just remain a bestseller, but any new Jack Ryan novel taking the #2 spot on Publisher's Weekly's list of the year's biggest seller, and Clancy's overall output still making him one of the top five sellers of the decade.)
4. A Multimedia Boost
Significant as all this was, it might be added that Clancy's '80s-era success earned him a better opportunity than any of his rivals at multimedia success in the early part of the decade, which turned out to be serendipitously timed from the standpoint of his career. It is worth noting that Clancy's Clear and Present Danger had been at or near the top of the bestseller list for half a year when The Hunt for Red October hit theaters, with still a ways to go if the success of the prior Jack Ryan adventure was anything to go by. This by no means guaranteed the movie's success with filmgoers, but it doubtless helped it to become a $100 million blockbuster in a time when those could be counted on two hands with fingers left over, just trailing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and edging out the much-hyped Total Recall and Die Hard 2.2 Clancy's success in one area also boosted his success in another, as Red October's becoming a hit led to two more Jack Ryan movies (both also hits) in the next four years, with the film version of Clear and Present Danger still playing when Clancy's third book of the '90s, Debt of Honor, hit the market, just in time to benefit from both the movie's being in theaters, and from the Japanaphobia fad scarcely before Japanese stagnation and American boom made it seem passe. (By contrast Stephen Coonts, far less fortunate in this regard, was to see Flight of the Intruder flop in January 1991, ending any hope of a Jake Grafton film franchise, eliminating what could have been a significant prop to his sales as interest in techno-thrillers eroded. It seems worth noting, too, that Coonts' next techno-thriller, also Japan-themed--Fortunes of War--coming along as it did in 1998, arrived after the fashion had run its course.)
There was not to be another Jack Ryan movie until 2002, a gap that could not have helped--but the bigger fashion for techno-thriller movies may have lent him some support, with the success of Air Force One (the fifth highest-grossing movie of 1997) perhaps especially notable. After Harrison Ford's playing Jack Ryan twice, and Jack Ryan having become President in the books (at the end of Debt of Honor), seeing Harrison Ford as President of the United States fighting Russian terrorists on Air Force One one could have been forgiven for thinking Air Force One was another Jack Ryan movie--and indeed, I would be surprised if it did not provide some benefit to his sales, which were getting plenty of help from elsewhere. If inactive on film, the "Clancy brand" extended to "co-authored" paperbacks with the Op-Center franchise (just one of many such series' to soon bear his name, well before Coonts or Dale Brown were to have their own out), and from there to television (with a miniseries in 1995), and increasingly to video gaming too, with the signal moment the translation of his 1998 bestseller Rainbow Six into a first-person shooter video game--which had the advantage of coming at a time when video gaming was reaching an increasingly adult market, and at the same time, most of the big names in that genre were still science fiction titles (like Doom) or World War II titles (like Medal of Honor). Rainbow Six proved popular indeed, and while I do not think anyone has bothered to do a proper survey, I suspect that at least a few gamers were tempted by them to the books.
Thus the Clancy name remained a force to be reckoned with in the '90s.
Of course, looking back over this, one might be struck by how much sheer happenstance there was in these events--to the extent that they made all that much difference, about which, again, I can only speculate here. The book deal Clancy made that got his book out first was an unusual one--Red October accepted by the first publisher he hit, without an agent, even though the publisher in question (the Naval Institute Press) did not do fiction at the time. Had he been forced to follow a more typical course, Red October might have only got out years later, and things been very different as a result. Even without that, that the Cold War's end would happen when it did, making his lead over his rivals the more significant, was obviously not something that could have been planned. And getting the film adaptation of that book out just as his latest novel was becoming its decade's biggest seller was also far beyond his control. Even where those things he could control are concerned, it is far from clear just how much of it actually involved calculation on his part, like the style of plotting he adopted, or the changes of course with regard to Jack Ryan's adventures, especially in those critical early days.
Considering that I find myself remembering Patrick Anderson's 1988 New York Times Magazine article on Clancy, in which he remarked Clancy's insistence on "dumb luck" as a factor in his personal success. Given all that I have raised here his success seems far from inexplicable. Yet, that the pieces fell into place for him when they did, as they did, and went on doing so long after '88, turning a bestselling novelist into a major multimedia brand still going strong with new Jack Ryan novels and co-authored paperbacks, with new video games and a TV series on Netflix and perhaps more films on the way, can seem to mean that he had far, far more dumb luck coming his way than he had seen or knew back then.
1. In November and December 1989 Clear and Present Danger had five straight weeks on the #4 rung of the New York Times' bestseller list. On the December 31, 1989 list, covering the week after the invasion, this book with 18 weeks on the list already behind it rose to #3, where it stayed for three weeks before rising another notch to #2 (January 21, 1990). Given the ambiguity of bestseller list rankings one cannot make too much of it, but the timing of the rise when the book had been on its way down is suggestive nonetheless.
2. There were just nine $100 million movies in 1989 and 1990, eight in 1991. By contrast 2018 had 34 movies making that much or more.
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As I have noted before, Clancy was far and away the biggest name in the field in the '80s (indeed, the highest-selling American novelist of the '80s, in any field). However, was he the best? I must admit I did not think so at the time. I thought others excelled him in various ways--and indeed, most of the ways that mattered to me then. Dale Brown struck me as the best at pure summer blockbuster-type action, while along with Brown, Stephen Coonts was stronger at mixing action and technology (in flying sequences, at least). Larry Bond was the one to turn to for grand-scale scenarios, intricately conceived and depicted, and briskly paced. And Ralph Peters was the most accomplished at such objects of conventional literary craftsmanship as prose and characterization. (For that matter, I cannot think of any Clancy adventure I enjoyed quite as much as I did Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid.)
All that being the case, one might wonder why Clancy came to eclipse the others with readers as he did. I see three significant factors working in his favor in the '80s, with one more coming along in the '90s.
1. Getting There First, and Not Just the First Time, But Again and Again
One point in Clancy's favor, certainly, was that as far as those names are concerned, he was first--which mattered all the more given the brief window of opportunity the genre's writers wound up having to make a really big name for themselves (the boom peaking in '89 according to my reading of the bestseller lists, and turning to bust afterward fast). Clancy's debut, The Hunt for Red October, arrived scarcely before the deep freeze of the Second Cold War began to give way to another thaw--the end of 1984, mere months before Mikhail Gorbachev became Premier of the Soviet Union, and not quite five years before the Berlin Wall was to fall.
The book managed 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, on which it rose as high as the #2 slot, firmly established him as a Name in the field, and making it easy for him to get follow-ups into print while those other writers were still looking at the emergent market, still shopping around manuscripts. (Dale Brown's first book, notably, was Silver Tower, but it didn't sell the first time around and he was told "Why not do a flying story?"--which had his debut coming only in 1987 with The Flight of the Old Dog, and Silver Tower not hitting the market until the year after that.)
As far as having that inside track went, it mattered that Clancy made the most of it, producing new novels almost annually at this stage. The result was that he had five novels complete before that event, whereas Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown were to have three, and Larry Bond only his first as a headliner (Red Phoenix), and Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters just their first efforts (with Brown's book only his first to get the New York Times' list, and Peters not making it at all, which may be of ambiguous meaning with regard to sales, but certainly clear implications when it comes to the publicity a place on the list offers).
This gave Clancy a greater opportunity to build an audience, which, again, he seems to have made the most of, not least by consistently being ahead of the competition with regard to the treatment of other major ideas. The team writing under the name John Hackett had already produced a work about a hypothetical U.S.-Soviet World War III in Europe way back in the '70s--but as of 1986 the work was eight years old, and anyway, it was written as a future history rather than a novel. The result was that Red Storm Rising looked relatively fresh in taking on that theme, with Harold Coyle and Ralph Peters only managing to follow later (in 1987 and 1989, respectively). When writing a novel pitting the hero of his original book against terrorists, Clancy had Patriot Games (1987) out before Coonts could publish Final Flight (1988); and when mixing up techno-thriller tech with old-fashioned espionage, The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988) out before Coonts' The Minotaur (1989). Clancy was in the lead with regard to the drug war as well, getting Clear and Present Danger into print in 1989 (literally on the list as American soldiers parachuted into Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges, which may not have been unhelpful), while Dale Brown's Hammerheads and Stephen Coonts' similarly drug war-themed Under Siege only hit the market the next year (1990), when everyone else was doing it.1
Each and every time, he had the book out first, which can only have helped his interest.
2. And Now for Something Completely Different . . .
Along with being the first on the scene, and putting out four more books in five years that, time and again, preceded the genre's other major writers to market with some salable theme, Clancy time and again varied the type of story he told. Someone perhaps disinclined to read a novelized war game like Red Storm Rising might have been ready to give Patriot Games (where he "cut back on the military detail to write a story focused on people . . . a personal tale of love and revenge") a chance--while much of the audience disappointed in the smaller-scale, much less tech- and action-packed Patriot Games would have been ready to give him another chance with Cardinal of the Kremlin, especially when they heard about its Strategic Defense Initiative theme. And so on and so forth. No one else shifted tacks to anything like that degree within that space of time, or had a chance to do so, and I suspect that this rather risky course, which might have been the more bearable because Clancy had such a large audience from the first, paid off as well.
3. Writing For a General Audience
Besides his being first, getting the novels out quickly in those early days, and varying the product, it seems notable that, compared with the scenarios of Brown or Harrison, Clancy's were, if not exactly plausible by real-world standards, then at least believable by the standards of this kind of thriller. Dale Brown's Silver Tower had the U.S. putting a massive battle station armed with a super-laser into space by 1992, and its becoming the key American asset in the war that broke out with the Soviets when they invaded Iran. By contrast in Cardinal of the Kremlin the laser-based component of strategic defense remains very much a work in progress. This disparity was even clearer in the drug war novels. Clancy's version of a more thoroughly militarized conflict had American commandos waging a secret war against the cartels on the ground (and a fighter plane occasionally shooting down a drug smuggler's aircraft). Brown had the country deploying high-tech oil rig-type offshore bases for patrolling tilt-rotor aircraft, which had the cartels striking back with MiGs and Mirages and Kitchen anti-ship missiles leading to dogfights in the air--all while serving up a great deal of comic book-ishness in Megafortresses, mind-controlled super-fighters (in Day of the Cheetah), and the like. And the technical detailing of this vast machinery, the intricacy of the colossal action sequences, could become very considerable indeed, rather more so than in anything Clancy wrote.
I enjoyed the extravagances of Brown's books. But I think they were too much that way for most readers (people who complain about the technical detail in a Clancy novel will probably never enjoy one of Brown's), the body of readers really up for these sorts of literary pleasures just a fraction of the proportion Clancy was able to get as a following.
It may also be that one of the features of Clancy's writing that a great many readers (myself included) have been less than happy with served him well here--not least, Clancy's tendency to lengthy exposition and rising action before the story really got going, heavy on detail not just about the workings of submarines but Jack Ryan's domestic cares. The slow build-ups, the abundance of the detailing, for all their shortcomings, may have lent the narrative a verisimilitude and a heft that it would not have had if he just rushed to the good part (or at least, the illusion of verisimilitude and heft that sheer slowness and mass can bring). Additionally, if I never took real interest in Ryan as a character, others seem to have been more responsive to him that way, especially that vast body of less-attached readers that Clancy managed to reach but which Brown did not.
All of these advantages stood Clancy in good stead into the '90s, particularly his readiness to vary his work, and his groundedness and accessibility, which may have been especially important as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War made "big war" scenarios harder to think up, and generally less credible or interesting to readers--along with the fact that having so many readers in the first place, he could lose a good many and still be near the top. (The '90s saw Clancy not just remain a bestseller, but any new Jack Ryan novel taking the #2 spot on Publisher's Weekly's list of the year's biggest seller, and Clancy's overall output still making him one of the top five sellers of the decade.)
4. A Multimedia Boost
Significant as all this was, it might be added that Clancy's '80s-era success earned him a better opportunity than any of his rivals at multimedia success in the early part of the decade, which turned out to be serendipitously timed from the standpoint of his career. It is worth noting that Clancy's Clear and Present Danger had been at or near the top of the bestseller list for half a year when The Hunt for Red October hit theaters, with still a ways to go if the success of the prior Jack Ryan adventure was anything to go by. This by no means guaranteed the movie's success with filmgoers, but it doubtless helped it to become a $100 million blockbuster in a time when those could be counted on two hands with fingers left over, just trailing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and edging out the much-hyped Total Recall and Die Hard 2.2 Clancy's success in one area also boosted his success in another, as Red October's becoming a hit led to two more Jack Ryan movies (both also hits) in the next four years, with the film version of Clear and Present Danger still playing when Clancy's third book of the '90s, Debt of Honor, hit the market, just in time to benefit from both the movie's being in theaters, and from the Japanaphobia fad scarcely before Japanese stagnation and American boom made it seem passe. (By contrast Stephen Coonts, far less fortunate in this regard, was to see Flight of the Intruder flop in January 1991, ending any hope of a Jake Grafton film franchise, eliminating what could have been a significant prop to his sales as interest in techno-thrillers eroded. It seems worth noting, too, that Coonts' next techno-thriller, also Japan-themed--Fortunes of War--coming along as it did in 1998, arrived after the fashion had run its course.)
There was not to be another Jack Ryan movie until 2002, a gap that could not have helped--but the bigger fashion for techno-thriller movies may have lent him some support, with the success of Air Force One (the fifth highest-grossing movie of 1997) perhaps especially notable. After Harrison Ford's playing Jack Ryan twice, and Jack Ryan having become President in the books (at the end of Debt of Honor), seeing Harrison Ford as President of the United States fighting Russian terrorists on Air Force One one could have been forgiven for thinking Air Force One was another Jack Ryan movie--and indeed, I would be surprised if it did not provide some benefit to his sales, which were getting plenty of help from elsewhere. If inactive on film, the "Clancy brand" extended to "co-authored" paperbacks with the Op-Center franchise (just one of many such series' to soon bear his name, well before Coonts or Dale Brown were to have their own out), and from there to television (with a miniseries in 1995), and increasingly to video gaming too, with the signal moment the translation of his 1998 bestseller Rainbow Six into a first-person shooter video game--which had the advantage of coming at a time when video gaming was reaching an increasingly adult market, and at the same time, most of the big names in that genre were still science fiction titles (like Doom) or World War II titles (like Medal of Honor). Rainbow Six proved popular indeed, and while I do not think anyone has bothered to do a proper survey, I suspect that at least a few gamers were tempted by them to the books.
Thus the Clancy name remained a force to be reckoned with in the '90s.
Of course, looking back over this, one might be struck by how much sheer happenstance there was in these events--to the extent that they made all that much difference, about which, again, I can only speculate here. The book deal Clancy made that got his book out first was an unusual one--Red October accepted by the first publisher he hit, without an agent, even though the publisher in question (the Naval Institute Press) did not do fiction at the time. Had he been forced to follow a more typical course, Red October might have only got out years later, and things been very different as a result. Even without that, that the Cold War's end would happen when it did, making his lead over his rivals the more significant, was obviously not something that could have been planned. And getting the film adaptation of that book out just as his latest novel was becoming its decade's biggest seller was also far beyond his control. Even where those things he could control are concerned, it is far from clear just how much of it actually involved calculation on his part, like the style of plotting he adopted, or the changes of course with regard to Jack Ryan's adventures, especially in those critical early days.
Considering that I find myself remembering Patrick Anderson's 1988 New York Times Magazine article on Clancy, in which he remarked Clancy's insistence on "dumb luck" as a factor in his personal success. Given all that I have raised here his success seems far from inexplicable. Yet, that the pieces fell into place for him when they did, as they did, and went on doing so long after '88, turning a bestselling novelist into a major multimedia brand still going strong with new Jack Ryan novels and co-authored paperbacks, with new video games and a TV series on Netflix and perhaps more films on the way, can seem to mean that he had far, far more dumb luck coming his way than he had seen or knew back then.
1. In November and December 1989 Clear and Present Danger had five straight weeks on the #4 rung of the New York Times' bestseller list. On the December 31, 1989 list, covering the week after the invasion, this book with 18 weeks on the list already behind it rose to #3, where it stayed for three weeks before rising another notch to #2 (January 21, 1990). Given the ambiguity of bestseller list rankings one cannot make too much of it, but the timing of the rise when the book had been on its way down is suggestive nonetheless.
2. There were just nine $100 million movies in 1989 and 1990, eight in 1991. By contrast 2018 had 34 movies making that much or more.
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