My takeaway on Bond is that he's way more interesting as a flawed protagonist, much in the same way Fleming himself was. Through the movies, he became symbolic and idolized in a way that I don't think Fleming intended.
The Casino Royale movie reboot was pretty great IMHO. The direction Bond is going now is pretty hit and miss. I'm guessing every few decades we'll need to tear down the mythology and start over with something better grounded in reality, and give a reminder of how imperfect Bond can be.
When was James bond perfect? He gets caught, betrayed, tortured, outsmarted in many movies before Casino Royale. He is deeply flawed as well.
I actually think James Bond doesn't work in a realistic setting. It just becomes a random action movie like what we've seen during the Craig's Era.
I just finished a full rewtch of the 25 movies and it's crazy how enjoyable the "old" ones were compared to the reboot. I remember my wife telling me during Quantum of Solace "I guess now it's more Jason Bourne than James Bond".
How did you feel about Skyfall? I'm not a big Bond (or even action movie) fan and I didn't like Quantum of Solace, but Skyfall is one of my favorite films just on cinematography alone. I certainly don't find it to be just a random action movie (or if it is, I need to find which action movies are that visually stunning!)
Skyfall was great in that it grounded the relationships that Bond had with M. I believe he/she is just as interesting a character as Bond is... but never fully developed. I always thought if John Le Carré was writing Bond the focus would be on M, and might even make for a better book. Skyfall been the only recent movie that has added something meaningful to the Bond persona IMHO.
I suppose I have to agree with you. "Movie Bond" is entertaining on its own, and deserves a fan base... especially for their scripted set action pieces. The actual espionage, intrigue, and interpersonal motivations are barely there though. It's just Bond fighting some incredibly implausible supervillain with some kind of stylish deformity... there's a girl involved, and Bond will usually have a go... rinse and repeat through a dozen movies. You know what? It's a formula that works, and I'm not going to be a hater.
I think "perfect" refers more to his character and morals rather than intelligence or material success. In the older films he's sort of portrayed as something for men to aspire to. In the newer films his womanising, alcoholism and lived traumas are brought to the fore.
the mythologized bond of the older films worked much better in the cold war. Jason Bourne films are a natural product of the changing public perception of spies in the post 9/11 era. I think the grittier Craig reimagining was inevitable as 'good v evil' bond narratives had only become more outlandish and irrelevant as the 2000s rolled on.
As England was fighting for its life against the Nazis, the British government sent its most charming spies — including Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Noel Coward and David Ogilvy — to America to blackmail, bully and cajol the U.S. into the war effort.
I've found that about 30 minute interviews work about right for me. When I'm recording them, I may go as short as about 15 and as long as about 45. But 20-30 always feels like the sweet spot.
What I've noticed listening to a lot of lectures over the past few years are typically breaks at roughly: 90s, 5m, 10m, that 20--30m spot, 45--60m, 90m, and very occasionally a longer session, though I'd argue that 2h is about the maximum which can be sustained in a single session.
The shortest are just teasers, often commercial broadcast. They're not informative but more advisory, and really only advertisements for some additional content, which is the medium's strength.[1]
A 4--10m segment is a brief introduction to a topic, beginning with about the span of a noncommercial broadcast, and including the typical length of a quick YouTube video. You can actually cover quite a bit of the basics of a topic, or mesh together a number of topics into once related thread.
At 20m you're hitting one of the natural spans of human focus and the point at which attention starts to wander without some form of internal break or diversion. Longer presentations are often a fusion of 2--3 15--20 minute segments. I note that many well-structured podcasts aim for about this mark ("History of Philosophy" by Peter Adamson comes to mind.) If you're aiming to fill a 30 minute timeslot, 20--25m allows a bit of additional padding on either side for other filler as well.
Lecture presentations tend to run variously about 20, 30, 45, 50, or a full 60 minutes. Typically there's a Q&A session, and in an academic context, an introduction which I've timed many times at very nearly precisely 6 minutes. The meat of the lecture tends to run about 40-50 minutes, and again, that's a reasonably good intermediate introduction to many topics.[2] And of course, this falls squarely into standard one-hour scheduling blocks utilised by broadcasters and in scheduled event venues.
Most longer lectures I encounter tend to still limit the actual principle presentation to ~50-60m, with a longer Q&A. London School of Economics lecture series comes to mind.
Longer single-session lectures are almost always poorly-tailored and should have been split, edited, or both. I've found a few exceptions. Thorstein Chlupp can in fact talk quite informatively about net-zero residential design and construction in Alaska for upwards of two hours,[3] and Joseph Tainter's "Collapse" talk runs ... about 70 minutes, not terribly long, but over the 1h mark, without feeling thin.[4]
A well-prepared author seems generally to have a 1, 4, 10, 20, and ~50 minute versions of their talk. As I've often stalked speakers over various presentations, I've noticed cut points, transitions, and additional material usage practices.
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Notes:
1. To a first approximation, broadcast media offer infinitely expandable audience but strictly limited depth, whilst print is precisely the opposite. This means that the comparative strengths of each are in providing widespread awareness vs. providing in-depth exploration. Digital somewhat straddles this distinction.
2. A poorly-prepared speaker or interviewer is almost always starting to pad and tap-dance heavily by this point.
>At 20m you're hitting one of the natural spans of human focus and the point at which attention starts to wander without some form of internal break or diversion. Longer presentations are often a fusion of 2--3 15--20 minute segments.
Yeah. Even if things are thematically linked or parts of a longer story, pretty much any well-produced NPR/"NPR-style" podcast is broken down into segments as you say.
While there are certainly in-depth sessions that benefit from being 60-90 minutes, for most of the talks I give, I'll almost always pick a 20-30 minute option (which many conferences have these days) over a 45-60 minute one. Which, especially with pre-taped sessions, is increasingly an option. (It does get more logistically complicated with an in-person session because of the logistics involved going from room to room.)
Lightning talks (5-10min) I generally care less for. As you suggest, they're more a teaser than actual talk.
- This Thing You Did Know of Has Changed in This Way. (Status report.)
- This Thing You Did Know of Can Do Soemthing. (Very quick demo.)
The venue --- a meeting or conference, in which an audience has been assembled, but in which time/space are also limited, operates on audience inertia. Similar in ways to lead-in / follow-on audiences for broadcast programming, opening / warm-up acts in live performance, or pre-feature advertisements at cinemas (remember cinemas?). It takes time for an audience gathered to dissipate, or for an anticipated audience to appear.
(Not really anything to do with the original topic, just me noodling on elements / attributes of various media forms and their characteristics.)
But if you do happen to know that there's a lighting session and that the talks obviously do or don't fall into these categories, you might calibrate your own level of interest in the session.
I agree with that, especially the first 2 categories and especially when there's a connecting thread such as status reports about a related set of open source projects.
>It takes time for an audience gathered to dissipate, or for an anticipated audience to appear.
Shorter talks work a lot better as main stage sessions or as breakouts when there are very clear tracks that aren't likely to have a lot of audience overlap. Much as I do tend to prefer 25 minute or so sessions, I also appreciate that there's a lot of wasted time/motion if a lot of people are switching rooms every 30 minutes.
This is a rather odd and fatally incomplete essay. Its final suggestions, verging on explicit charges, of antisemitism against Fleming seem like guilt-by-association.
The criticism of the writing in the novels is not totally unfair. Although the worst of it is barely readable, at his best Fleming could spin a scene or passage with resounding skill. But his most interesting work is in his short stories, which Richler doesn’t mention. If you think you have the measure of Fleming, read the story “The Hildebrand Rarity”, which rises to the level of literature, and takes Bond to psychological places that may surprise you. Also, in stories like “007 in New York”, Fleming shows real wit and something like self-deprecation toward his own output, or at least the ability to have fun with it.
Finally, although Richler runs on quite a bit into anecdotes about Fleming’s promotion of the Bond books and their commercial fortunes, he doesn’t mention what caused the sharp turning point in their popularity, which was a comment by JFK.
"The Spy Who Loved Me" was the shortest of Fleming's works that I read. But given that, I agree with the author of the article that many of the Bond books had serious failings.
I read "Live and Let Die" and was embarrassed for Fleming for his attempt to channel Joel Chandler Harris. A case where the film bettered the book.
"Goldfinger" has the villain actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. Another case where it was better in the film.
"Diamonds Are Forever" and "Casino Royale" are the books I can say I liked the most.
I didn't read the author's charge of antisemitism as strictly guilt by association. I think Richler's argument is that the fixation on shadowy global plots threatening "good old England" both fits into a pattern of 20th century antisemitism (Russia, Germany) and provides a kind of "dog whistle" appeal to the old (antisemitic, xenophobic) aristocracy.
I agree, but that’s what I meant. Toward the end he comes right out and practically calls the books antisemitic, but his evidence is that they contain plot elements that resemble other, truly antisemitic fantasies, such as global plots to take over the world.
How would a book which knowingly and purposefully used antisemitic elements differ from one that used the same elements by accident? We can't see inside Fleming's head, so all that really matters is the books as they actually exist in the world.
Talking about nazi dogwhistling is spreading theories about a conspiracy hidden in plain sight with the goal of destroying the western order, taking over the world, and executing the genocide of several peoples.
Thus, you yourself are guilty of antisemetic dogwhistling.
I think one of the sad things about Idris Ilba not getting to be Bond is, in the hands of a nuanced writing team, they really could have used the character to dig into some of the stuff the aristocracy still has not fully self reflected over.
JFK also was influential in getting the excellent Manchurian Candidate movie made—which fell out of circulation for many years after he was killed. I can't remember if it had to do with that or not.
It's a revealing bit of contemporary criticism, but it comes across as a bit naive, as if the author somehow expected something different from an author of popular spy fiction and was disappointed. He's not wrong, he just misses the point. Of course Bond is a head case whose psychological foibles are a reflection of his creator, or at least of his era. A woke Bond would be about as interesting (and about as profitable) as a woke Batman.
And as for Fleming's predilection for writing about card games and golf games: if you can make those interesting -- and he could, and did -- you're certainly entitled to be listed among the ranks of Real Writers. That's when I realized it was time to take Stephen King seriously -- not when he wrote interesting stories about vampires or demons or aliens, but when he wrote interesting stories about baseball.
Edit: on finishing the essay, I'm being too generous to the author here. His rambling about an anti-Semitic subtext in Fleming's books has no justification, and he knows it, which is why he starts rambling about anti-Semitic subtexts in other authors' works.
> It's a revealing bit of contemporary criticism, but it comes across as a bit naive, as if the author somehow expected something different from an author of popular spy fiction and was disappointed.
Well, John le Carré had already published at least 4 popular spy novels by the time (1968) this critique of Fleming was published.
I, for one, think it's fair to expect something different when other contemporaneous authors were doing something different.
> John le Carré had already published at least 4 popular spy novels
By the time I read my tenth or twelfth le Carré, I was ready to contest the point that they were different novels. It all seemed to boil down to "It's a mistake, we don't know what we are doing, woe is us" in different locales.
They're certainly a different subgenre, but I think the larger point stands: it's possible to be a British author of spy novels in the 20th century without sublimating your fear of British decline through one-dimensional, reactionary characterization.
> The success of Bond is all the more intriguing because Ian Fleming was such an appalling writer. He had no sense of place that scratched deeper than Sunday-supplement travel articles
Bond offered escapism to the post WWII world. When casino Royale was released there was still food rationing in the UK and bomb sites littered the cities. Bond offered international travel and excitement in the same way that the Fast and Furious or Mission Impossible movies do today.
This franchise has too much childhood nostalgia for me to ever “cancel” it. It’s gonna be the blue pill for me.
That being said, it’s interesting and humble to see my internal biases. My gut instinct to all of these critical comments of the Bond movies was “these idiots are wrong”. I had to consciously tell myself “they probably have a lot of valid points but in favor of protecting childhood memories I’m not going to look into this”.
Fifty years on, the article reads to me like one writer was angry at another writer's outsized success, and went really hard at them in the cattiest possible way.
I've been thinking just days ago that ending the Bond franchise will be the number 1 target of the woke crowd (or whoever steers them). The reason is obvious: Bond is the pinnacle of "whiteness" - the character is all about excellence and superiority, all attributed to a white dude (this brazen heresy is making me feel a bit uneasy). And since the censors can't make their own PC movie that would outcompete Bond, they'll have to cancel it.
The (early) Bond franchise played with class in a way that maybe isn't obvious to US audiences. At the time, casting Connery (a working class Scot) as Bond was roughly equivalent to casting an African American in a similar role in the US. Scottish voices were not really heard on the BBC, or any mainstream UK media. The whole premise of the early films is that he is a working-class guy who polishes up better than the toffs. This has to a greater or lesser degree been the case with the subsequent Bonds (notably Brosnan), and there have been persistent rumors that Idris Elba will be the next Bond, which would be fantastic casting and completely in keeping with the aesthetic of the franchise.
Idris Elba is heavily favored on the internet as the next Bond. It’s on MGM (now Amazon) to push a more contemporary and progressive Bond. This isn’t dismissing the past “white” and stereotypical alpha male persona of Bond, but there’s plenty of room to move forward and bring Bond into the 21st century.
I've always felt Bond's success was due to Sir. Sean Connery.
I don't think it was about race at all, it was about charisma.
I even go further and say we would probally not have a Bond theatrical legacy, if it wasen't for Connery's decision to be an actor.
Oh yea, Rolex owes so much advertising dollars to the estate of Connery.
That iconic wrist shot sold millions of Oyster Subs.
I repair watches part time. There are guys who bring me their overpriced broken watch, and when we meet at the door, I would swear they were brought up watching Bond movies.
Most sub owners just want a working quality watch, but there are others that take on Connery's persona in little ways.
Kinda like the young guys who wanted to be fighter pilots after watching Top Gun, or be Bud in Urban Coyboy, or living Tony's life after watching Saturday Night Fever. Most of you are probally to young, but after Saturday Night Fever, America became disco dancers. After Urban Cowboy, Stock brokers were doing the two step, and had a slight accent overnight. It was funny. And yes--I bought a polyester shirt. And yes--I bought cowboy boots. I let it go though. I'm embarrassed even writing about it.
My point is certain charismatic actors are the reason certain films are great.
The color of America is changing, and there will be actors that out shine some of our greats.
(I am a total movie snob. I don't think Bond movies are magic. I do think Connery, and Travolta, had huge natural star power though. All my great movies were are in black, and white. I've noticed The Last Picture Show is on tv today. If you haven't seen it you must. Peter Bogdonovich captured a certain time in Texas brilliantly. All the actors did a phenomenal job. Billy is Timothy Bottons brother in real life. Have a good weekend guys.)
I'm a huge Bond fan and would love to see Elba as Bond, but I doubt he'll be chosen simply because he is too "old".
Bond movies come out a little more slowly than other series and they'll want their next Bond to be able to do at least 3-5 movies. Starting with an actor who is almost 50 just doesn't seem to fit that schedule, unfortunately.
> And since the censors can't make their own PC movie that would outcompete Bond, they'll have to cancel it.
Like the MCU? Fast and Furious? (Hobbes and Shaw was a fantastically silly, wonderful, Bond adjacent film for what it’s worth) Nobody’s canceling anything!
> You really need to stop watching Fox News. It is poisoning your brain.
What’s the point of typing this out? When you write things like this do you think you’re going to convince anyone to change positions? Is it just to gain internet points? Imagine this as a response to your comment:
> You really need to stop watching MSNBC. It is poisoning your brain.
It’s like playing tennis.
I’m replying because this type of stuff is so tiresome. It’s hard enough to avoid on the rest of the Internet; please don’t bring it to HN.
The idea that he’s incredibly incompetent is revisionist. These movies aren’t deconstruction, and shouldn’t be. The fun is when he’s able to get out of tough situations in the spur of the moment (my favorites, like Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only show him in credible danger several times). Interestingly, this is something the Mission Impossible series did perfectly in their last movie, better than almost all Bond movies.
With that said, I really don’t think anybody is actually threatened by Bond being a white man. Like, people have lives to live.
Although one thing that is true of the movies that is lampooned in the spy parody show "Archer", is that Bond doesn't seem to understand how to be a secret agent. Secret agents shouldn't go around drawing attention to themselves the way that Bond (and his parody Sterling Archer) do. And they certainly shouldn't go around introducing themselves using their real names!
The fact that he’s known seems to be inconsistent throughout the movies. Tiffany Case apparently knew who he was but not what he looked like, but a lot of other people had to look him up after giving his real name.
He also does have a cover in some films, like St John Smythe in A View to a Kill
I mean, I wouldn’t miss it. I was a huge Bond fan my whole childhood and and young adult life. I think it gave me some really messed up ideas about the world. It took me a long time to unlearn what I had learned from the series, and I suffered in my life and relationships as a result of my beliefs.
I know it’s too valuable a franchise and Hollywood would rather reinvent it. But we can also just say goodbye to our problematic past and create new heroes or even find new figures from the past to celebrate. It is okay to let go of our attachment to these things.
I can recommend the podcast Kill James Bond! (featuring at least Philosophy Tube's Abigail Thorne) if you're at all perplexed why this monster and the mostly very mediocre movies are so glorified.
Is there any great mystery to their popularity? Surely it’s the same reason other franchises are popular - good promotion from the studio, a loyal fanbase that loves the familiar characters, and a wider audience that loves a brainless action-flick with attractive actors.
Not at all perplexed. Exotic locales, sex, violence, money, and adventure are why the movies are great.
It's a much simpler life to let oneself be entertained at times by the more trivial things. It's a choice you can make, to just enjoy the spectacle of it all.
At some point post modernist deconstruction should have logical limits, but I don’t doubt there are a lot of people that want to make sure everyone is as miserable about how Bond is a post colonial weapon of capitalism or whatever.
I like Craig's version but agree with you in general. I like the old movies for nostalgia reasons but they are not exactly high quality cinema. That's ok. They can just be fun, but I think it's a little silly to hold them up as more than they are just because they had some cultural cache half a century ago.
Brosnon is a fine actor, but I never liked his version. It was like watching a prep school dweeb act like he's a macho badass. Just never came across as particularly believable or compelling.
I hope moving forward the franchise continues the trend of getting into some more serious/substantial character development and conflicts. The Craig versions were mostly better on this point, but they could go so much further.
My takeaway on Bond is that he's way more interesting as a flawed protagonist, much in the same way Fleming himself was. Through the movies, he became symbolic and idolized in a way that I don't think Fleming intended.
The Casino Royale movie reboot was pretty great IMHO. The direction Bond is going now is pretty hit and miss. I'm guessing every few decades we'll need to tear down the mythology and start over with something better grounded in reality, and give a reminder of how imperfect Bond can be.