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#1 Dr. Tynan

Dr. Tynan

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 03:28 AM

http://www.indiana.e...ond/papers.html

This is an article I found on the net. I have not ready any of it myself, thought you all MAY like to read it.
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PANEL ONE: Exotic Locales

Vivian Halloran
“Bond in Paradise: The Caribbean as a Site of Danger and Boredom in Fleming’s Prose and Fiction"

In the paper, “The Caribbean as a Site of Danger and Boredom in Fleming’s Prose and Fiction,” I examine how Ian Fleming characterizes the Caribbean in Live and Let Die, Moonraker,Dr. No, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy as either a site of exotic danger awaiting the super spy or, alternatively, as a sunny destination of professional exile and stagnation where Bond is sent to keep him from participating in more dangerous, and therefore rewarding, assignments. The doubleness of the Caribbean in Fleming’s Bond novels resonates with another leitmotif of spy fiction—the double agent—and thus colors the entire basin region as a foil for Bond.

My discussion of Fleming’s depiction of the Caribbean as threatening locale both to Bond’s life and his career prospects is grounded in a reading of Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica, where the British writer assumes the role of midwife in bringing Jamaica to the world’s attention. As self-appointed spokesperson for and mediator of Jamaica’s “image, Fleming inscribes Jamaica specifically, but also, by association, the whole Caribbean basin as an exotic, rural space worth learning about but not as dangerous or moving to his prospective reader as the urban spaces included in his more provocatively titled anthology, Thrilling Cities. Thus, in considering both the novels and the travel books together, I look at the promising role that urban space plays as a source of order, futuristic technology and international danger while the rural description of the Caribbean islands is associated most often with the colonial legacy of agrarian production.

Dan Mills
“Japan, James Bond, and Orientalism"

About half way through the film version of You Only Live Twice James Bond undergoes surgery to make his eyes appear like those of an Asian. He cuts and dies his hair(piece) to look like that of an Asian, and he shaves his chest to complete the transformation. This all takes place merely to facilitate Bond’s marriage to a Japanese spy to act as a cover. This metamorphosis of a son of imperial England exhibits the ultimate failure in the colonial endeavor, a failure that results in the submission of the typically dominant James Bond to a characteristically non-submissive Japanese wife. At the final battle scene Bond even accepts assistance from Tiger Tanaka’s “modern Ninjas.”

Edward Said defines his idea of Orientalism thus: it is “a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.” It is against this tradition that Ian Fleming wished to stand in his writing You Only Live Twice. Through an application of Said’s theory to a close reading of the book and film, I will demonstrate Fleming’s subversive attitude against the very imperialism James Bond represents in his battles with foreign (at times Russian/communist) and maniacal mastermind villains.

Clyde Willman III
“The Kennedys, Fleming, and Cuba: Transference and Fantasy in Foreign Policy"

RFK biographer Evan Thomas notes that both John and Robert Kennedy “shared a fascination with secret operations and spy stories" (119). Their mutual interest in the James Bond novels extended to Ian Fleming himself. In March 1960, JFK invited Fleming through a mutual friend to his Georgetown home. During dinner, JFK solicited Fleming’s views on how to topple Fidel Castro. Fleming “described how he would use ‘ridicule’ to force Castro out of office. Since the Cubans cared only about money, religion, and sex… fake dollar bills should be dropped on the island to destabilize the currency, as well as leaflets declaring Castro to be impotent" (Hersh 174). Hearing of this conversation, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA in 1960, tried to speak with Fleming the next morning about these “interesting ideas" of how to deal with Castro, but Fleming had already left Washington (Hersh 174). The Church Committee later revealed that the CIA had been plotting similarly ludicrous plans to overthrow the Cuban dictator from 1960 to 1965, including poisoned cigars and exploding seashells (Thomas 153).

This paper will explore the underlying fantasy frame of JFK’s Cuban foreign policy, a view shaped in part by the exploits of Fleming’s Bond. For the Kennedys, with his intelligence experience in World War II and his familiarity with the Caribbean, Fleming represented “the subject supposed to know" (Žižek 185). In this act of transference, Fleming presumably possessed knowledge inaccessible to the brothers, namely the way to overthrow Castro through covert means. More importantly, the fantasy figure of James Bond shaped the expectations of the Kennedys regarding the CIA’s covert activities in Cuba, even after the fiasco of the CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion on April 19, 1961. The establishment of Operation Mongoose, a secret program of sabotage and harassment of Cuba, shortly after this debacle demonstrated how firmly entrenched the Bondian fantasy frame was in Camelot.

Ironically, JFK’s favorite Bond novel, From Russia, With Love, may have also provided Lee Harvey Oswald with a viable fantasy scenario with which to frame his own ambitions. Donovan “Red" Grant offered a model of the assassin he may have become, and JFK was the offering to Castro that he believed would grant him access to Cuba.



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PANEL TWO: Fleming and the Negotiation of Culture

Charles Helfenstein
“Translating Fleming to Film, the work of Richard Maibaum"

Ian Fleming always knew the cinematic potential of his fictional creation, James Bond. Early sales of the film rights to Casino Royale and Moonraker confirmed that Hollywood wanted 007. After a few false starts, the production team of Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman put together a James Bond film package that United Artists agreed to finance. A key member of this team was screenwriter Richard Maibaum, whose work spanned 13 James Bond films.

Maibaum was a constant in a series that at first relied heavily on Fleming's work, but later included little more than character names and titles for adaptations.

The paper will focus on 3 key areas:

1) The adaptations themselves, including what sections from Fleming's novels were kept, what sections were dropped, and how Maibaum altered plot points to make the Fleming stories more cinematic.

2) How Maibaum tailored the stories to the strengths of each actor who followed Sean Connery, including action for George Lazenby, humor for Roger Moore, and grittiness for Timothy Dalton.

3) How the times affected 007: while Fleming's tales of espionage translated easily to a 60s audience, the same could not be said for the cinema goers in the late 80s. Here the paper will discuss what changes Maibaum made that turned Fleming's 1950s cold war spy into the cinematic superhero of the 60s, a jet setting playboy in the 70s, and a disillusioned action hero of the 80s.

The paper will rely on published sources as well as Maibaum's personal papers, correspondence, and screenplays based at the Univeristy of Iowa.

Ian M. Borton
“Intertext and James Bond: The Man with the Golden Gun and Capitalism/Anti-Socıalısm"

My paper concerns the intertextual elements of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun. My research focuses on the textual interplay and adaptation between Fleming’s novel and the final Saltzman/Broccoli film. The main crux of the paper details how the intertextual and cultural elements pit Bond against socıalıst and communist ideology and identify him as a defender of capitalism.

My analysis of the film and novel texts does not concern fidelity, but attention to culturally significant elements. I discuss the role of the K.G.B. in both texts and how their presence cues socially constructed reactions. As film and novel have strikingly different plots, the K.G.B. remains one of the few elements that appear in both.

In the novel and film, I examine how the texts place Bond (for the majority of his time) in parts of the world with unique political situations. Jamaica was stuck politically between the conflicting interests of the United States and Cuba. Likewise (in the film), British ownership, Chinese communism and the American interest in the East politically blocked Hong Kong.

I briefly consider how Fleming chose to write about drugs and their relation to American politics and USSR interests. Concerning the film, I write about the oil embargo following the Yom Kippur skirmish and how the solar cell was more than a simple film McGuffin. Next I investigate the sinking of the liner, HMS Queen Victoria in Hong Kong harbor.

This research bears directly on Fleming’s writings, the films adapted from them, and the cultural and political ideology of the author. It provides a close reading that has hitherto been absent in this much-overlooked work.

Alexis K. Albion
“What Does James Bond Say About Us?: The Global Historical Moment of a Sixties Cultural Icon"

"Every civilization has the hero it deserves," wrote Pravda reporter Yurii Zhukov in 1965. And so, for the greater part of the 1960s, the world deserved a British secret agent named James Bond, who regularly saved Western civilization from blackmail, pestilence or utter destruction.

Certainly by 1965, the transformation of Bond from a popular British fiction hero into a globally renowned icon was widely acknowledged in the East and West. And Zhukov was just one of many commentators around the world who recognized that the contemporary, popular fascination with James Bond was not just a marketing triumph but an historical moment. Despite his post-war origins, the cinematic Bond of the Sixties was perceived as a distinctly contemporary figure, a reflection of the political, social and moral cultures that celebrated him. Whether they saw him as champion of the free world or bourgeois imperialist, critics from New York to Moscow and from London to Tokyo asked the same question to try to understand the extraordinary success of this new cult hero or villain: what does James Bond say about us?

This paper looks at how a number of commentators around the globe tried to answer this question in the 1960s. Analyzing reviews, articles and essays about James Bond and his widespread popularity written in North America, Europe, the Soviet Union and Asia, this study explores how critics responded to the figure of Bond internationally on three levels: as a national figure, (a reflection of ŒBritishness1); as a political and economic symbol of the West; and as a global icon, reflecting universal values and appeal. This paper ultimately argues that we can best understand the cult of James Bond that emerged in the Sixties as a global historical moment, a moment when, either by comparison or contrast, critics around the world recognized facets of their own societies and cultures through the persona of a fictional British secret agent.



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PANEL THREE: Fleming and Bond, Then and Now

Edward Comentale
“Ian Fleming, Corporate England, and the Ruins of Modernism"

It has, of course, become somewhat commonplace to argue that Fleming's work mediates concerns over England's declining role in the post-war world. It is my contention, however, that the novels, insofar as they serve to counter painfully obvious signs of decline, also work to justify the increasingly corporate structure of the nation. In other words, Fleming's work cannot be read apart from what Harold Perkin calls "the rise of the professional society." Despite its racy content, this work gives expression to the demands and contradictions of a specifically professional society and its hero, James Bond, is less a hero of consumer culture than he is a hero of the corporation. More precisely, I want to argue that this fiction - in its plotting, characterizations, and economical, realist style - depicts corporatism as a flexibly resistant medium, capable of avoiding the extremes of excess and efficiency, democracy and fascism, and perhaps most importantly, unrestrained free trade and socıalıst revolution. In other words, it adopts a specifically corporatist stance in its attempt to negotiate the pressures of a post-war world, but thus finds itself both expressive and responsive to the conflicted energies of modernity at large. Fleming's work, though, also explores corporate society in its more subtle manifestations, as it revises notions of nationhood, subjectivity, property, and literary form. Most importantly, it investigates the beliefs and values of this society as they remain caught between the humanistic ideals of the modernist project and a certain post-humanistic outlook that seems an inevitable corollary to life under late capital. As I hope to show here, this ambivalence is central to the experience of corporate life and helps to explain its psychic constitution and material persistence. Ultimately, the corporate network appears as neither modern or postmodern, but totemic in a Freudian sense, and in this forces us to reconceive the comfortable narratives by which we have come to understand the subject and subjective pleasure as well as the theories by which we have come to value certain types of community and communal belonging.

Judith Roof
“Living the James Bond Lifestyle"

The figure of James Bond has come to represent a nostalgia for an efficacious law. Emerging at the intersection of issues about patriarchy, masculinity, potency, and commodity culture, Bond provides the fantasy answer to anxieties about order through the provision of an efficacious style. Style substitutes for what law can no longer do. This style, however, is not simply the behavior or appearance of Fleming’s character or the filmic renditions of Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, or Pierce Brosnan. Rather, as the locus of potent style, the Bond figure combines the secret agent man-about-town with the mobster and the movie star. In other words, Bond has become Connery, the Godfather, and Frank Sinatra. This fantasy of style as potency, which despite technological updating (an updating which is itself a part of the fantasy of potency), still conveys a feeling of the 1960s, the point just before the imagined loss of patriarchal power. Bond, then, has become a vector for selling the illusion of a nostalgic mastery linked to style and purveyed through cars, computers, phones, self-help tapes, and computer games by reference to a 60s style which promises continued individual fortitude in a culture of increasingly dissipated and concealed power.

Stephen Watt
“007 and 9-11, Spectres and Structures of Feeling"

Given the re-emergence of what might be characterized as Cold War paranoia and such largely forgotten phenomena as bomb shelters, now newly renovated with plastic sheeting and duct tape, one footnote this past April to the conflict with Iraq seemed hardly surprising. As reported by the Associated Press, British soldiers conducted operations named after characters from Ian Fleming’s novels--“Operation James," most notably, in memory of “a No. 1 Brit and hero," as one military expert put it-and concentrated their efforts on targets bearing such code names as Goldfinger and Blofeld, after two infamous opponents of Fleming’s intrepid protagonist. Although self-styled military “analysts" disagreed on the motivation for and effects of such allusions, again their appearance seemed scarcely exceptional. Just two months earlier, U.S. News and World Report published an issue with the title “Spy Stories" emblazoned on the cover and featured an essay on Fleming entitled “To Be A Spook." And while nothing in the U.S. News essay adduced connections between Fleming, the Cold War, and the present conflict, the magazine concluded with an opinion piece by editor-in chief Mortimer Zuckerman which announced “Midnight for Baghdad"and adverted obliquely to 9-11 in endorsing a pre-emptive strike against terrorism: “We have been kicked once," he observed. “We will not be kicked again-and we will not let the Security Council whistle in the dark." Why conclude a special volume on espionage and “spy stories," many of which concerned activities during World War Two and the Cold War, with invective against Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda? More particularly, how might we understand the re-surfacing of Ian Fleming, James Bond, and 007's arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the deserts of Iraq?

Both questions generate a host of facile answers: our seeming need for a hero to save the day, for example, or our collective tendency to employ history as melodrama, with good guys, inordinately bad guys, and a heroine in distress (what contemporary figure might play this last role isn’t clear unless Laura Bush or Lynne Cheney is suddenly abducted ). If, as Zuckerman emphasizes, some terrorist groups are eager to poison us with ricin and others are poised to annihilate us with nuclear weapons, then we need brave men and women who possess the wherewithal to stop them. What sorts of men and women would these be? And how might we fairly (or unfairly) represent the adversaries they must defeat? Recall that it was precisely this matter- the representation of the 9/11 suicide bombers-that landed Susan Sontag in such political hot water when she infamously declared in The New Yorker that whatever else might be said about the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, they were not “cowardly" strikes at “‘humanity’ or ‘the free world.’" The term “cowardly," she argued in reference to the campaign of U.S. bombing of Iraq after the Gulf War, might be “more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves" in furthering their cause. Representation, then, is a crucial issue in drawing parallels between the Cold War Fleming describes and the war on global terrorism today.

So, too, I believe, is feeling. That is to say, for the first time in nearly half a century Americans recently were advised to fortify their homes against potentially devastating attacks from our enemies. And even the bemused retractions of an embarrassed Secretary of Homeland Security, who attempted to laugh away the issue as overly alarmist, could not quite dispel the anxiety caused by the recommendation. Closer to my home, my twelve-year-old son, reacting to the news story about runs on duct tape and plastic at urban hardware stores, confided that he was “afraid." For the first time in his life-and the second in mine since the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was his age-children and many other Americans were told by their government to prepare themselves for an assault on their homes by our country’s enemies. How has this anxiety affected what Raymond Williams famously described as our “structure of feeling"? Rather like the persistence of the death-instinct in Freud’s writing, the term “structure of feeling" appears and is re-defined in Williams’s writing from such earlier works as Drama from Ibsen to Eliot and Modern Tragedy (1966) through Marxism and Literature (1977). Crucial to my use of the term is Williams’s insistence that this term encompasses a “particular quality of social experience and relationship" that is “historically distinct from other particular qualities." Endeavoring to provide “a sense of a generation or of a period" (Marxism and Literature 131), it speaks profoundly about our shared sense of the present. Importantly, the term encompasses more than personal responses or issues: here, Williams emphasizes social experiences that are both fluid enough to be describable as a process yet, because they also contain “specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension" (132), fixed enough to possess a structure.

In this paper, I hope to describe a structure of feeling composed both of present fears and residues of the Cold War about which Ian Fleming was prescient in understanding. In particular, they concern his characterization of SPECTRE and its founder Ernst Stavro Blofeld through a trilogy of Fleming’s most accomplished novels: Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice. The film versions of these novels are, in most cases, not pertinent to my discussion, although several shots from and scenic features in Thunderball might help us understand analogies between SPECTRE and both the structure and psychical affect of contemporary terrorist cells. Throughout, I also want to underscore the importance of reading the novels in the order they were written by Fleming, constituting both a kind of trilogy and revenge drama. The spectre of SPECTRE, in other words, is crucial in unpacking a contemporary structure of feeling which contains significant elements of the Cold War within it, however transformed by contemporary events.



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PANEL FOUR: Bond and Commodity Culture

Aaron D. Jaffe
“The (Brand) Name's Bond: Trademark Effects, Product Placement, and Brand Loyalty in Ian Fleming's 007"

A well-known nibble of James Bond ephemerata: the secret agent's ubiquitous marker--a name caught in a continuous circuit of re-presentation ("The name's Bond, James Bond")--is first a found object, lifted from the spine of a book on Fleming's bookshelf, one Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond. It was, Fleming said, "suitably dull and anonymous." However improbably, Fleming's "James Bond"--like Orwell's "Winston Smith," that other civil servant and cipher of the cold war imaginary--is selected for blandness and impersonality, for a requisite lack of associative feedback in psychic interiors. If an experience of the bookshelf as a repository of named commodities is partly responsible for the entrance of "James Bond" into the mid-century world system, perhaps it's not too surprising to find much of the appeal of Fleming's best sellers keyed to their exaggerated presentation of named goods, Kingsley Amis's so-called Fleming Effect. Beyond Bond's Universal Exports, his drink recipes ("[t]hree measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet"), his Bentley, and his Beretta, Bond's is a world fully dominated by brand loyalties: watches; cigarettes (villains smoke French brands); deodorant (villains don't use it), razor blades, perfume, cologne, and other toiletries. This embarrassment of commodities is often held to be Fleming's stylistic innovation, a reality effect that offsets his novels' otherwise empyreal quota of sex, snobbery, and sadism (in Paul Johnson's phrase), while simultaneously supplying a suitably precarious screen for Bond's subjective interiors or lack thereof. The latest paroxysms about the collusion of advertising and content in Die Another Day are wholly oblivious to Bond's stakes in the invention of tabla rasa as branding machine par excellence.

My paper examines the role of brand names and products placement in the cultural logic of Ian Fleming's Bond and the context of mid-century advertising. Primarily, my interest is Bond's literary articulation--in particular, From Russia, With Love, but also touching on Casino Royale, Goldfinger, and the Bond vignettes published in Ian Fleming's Thrilling Cities ("007 in New York," especially), focusing on the centrality of brands in Bond's down time ... post-coitus, post-gambling, in the bathroom, in the hotel bar, in the airport lounge, in transit. I argue that Bond's figuration is best understood as neither the epitome of the cosmopolitan epicure nor the pre-figuration of the brand man; rather "James Bond" is--that is he becomes in the course of his employment--the apotheosis of a commodity incarnate only in its world (of/as) presentation. Advertising and content in collusion? A rhetoric of advertising structures the very content of the characteristic Bond event-and thus the conflict compulsively repeated in his conspicuous "failure" as secret agent, Bond's reputation always preceding him.

Brian Doan
“A Spy In The House of Love: Bond, Sinatra and Cold War Cool"

He sits at the baccarat table clad in tuxedo, cufflinks sparkling as he nonchalantly deals cards, the cigarette (above all, the cigarette) dangling from his lips, the very definition of fetish. His heavily lidded eyes have a bored look, his hair is greased back, he exudes a kind of existential charisma. He is, of course, Bond, James Bond, as played by Sean Connery, and this is our introduction to the character, in 1962's Dr. No.

It could be argued, though, that we already "know" the character, not just through the Ian Fleming novels but because Bond, as portrayed by Connery in the first five Cubby Broccoli-Harry Saltzman productions, acts a repository of masculine identity during the Cold War. Bond makes his debut in 1953, the same year that Hugh Hefner begins publishing Playboy. The Bond novels will be serialized in the magazine, and the Playboy code of masculine cool-- the martinis, the concern with appearance and style, the objectification of women, the air of "cosmopolitan glamour"-- is also Bond's code. In 1953, another character makes his debut-- the reborn Frank Sinatra, whose career rises from the ashes with his portrayal of Maggio in From Here To Eternity, for which he wins the Academy Award. After years in the commercial doghouse, Sinatra has his swagger back, and his image of cool-- cocked-back fedora, trenchcoat over the shoulder, Jack Daniels in hand-- becomes one to which millions of suburban men aspire in the 1950s.

By the time Bond makes his big-screened debut in 1962, the image of the witty, hard-drinking, gambling sex symbol is so ingrained in the consciousness of middle America that crafting Bond for the screen almost becomes a kind of automatic writing-- just fill in the missing pieces. And the biggest piece is Connery, whose core of toughness gives Bond an air that makes the stylistic link with the Rat Pack link explicit; in retrospect, the economically driven decision of the producers to bypass first choice Cary Grant seems inevitable-- Grant's more relaxed, screwball cool had by the early sixties been displaced by something earthier, tougher, and more class-driven, and the mix of the snobbish Bond persona and Connery's harsher cool made for something combustible.

What I'd like to explore in this paper are some of these issues of Cold War masculine cool. But rather than a straightforward, linear approach to argument--one which might foreground my theoretical apparatus, lay out my historical background, then move into the text proper-- I'd like to move in a more associative manner, not ignoring any of the issues above, but coming at them more obliquely. The example of the photo mentioned above is one possible route, every tiny element of the mise-en-scene acting as an activator of anecdotes, connections, remappings of cinematic and historical space. "If I examine myself today, I realize that I have always wanted to conduct research in the form of spectacle," Jean-Luc Godard once stated. Utilizing both the ABC method laid out by Roland Barthes and the experimental, anecdotal form used by W.G. Sebald, I hope to research the "secret history" of that most spectacle-driven series, the James Bond films. If Bond is, as I've posited, a repository of cool, what might a closer examination of its various parts tell us about the films, film in general, and the myths of masculine cool that still surround us?

Craig Owens
"The Bond Market: James Bond and the Subject of Consumption"

Vodka-colorless, flavorless, odorless, and distilled from a variety of sources-becomes, in this paper, an analogy for James Bond himself, especially as he is figured in film and the popular press. For in cocktails, vodka provides a blank to be filled in, “accessorized,” by such accoutrements as olives; onions; lemons; cranberry, lime, and orange juices; Worcestershire sauce; a stalk of celery; and vermouth. Vodka is not just a liquor to be consumed: It also consumes. Moreover, because it always mystifies its origins-the grain or starch from which it is distilled as well as the place of its production-vodka allows itself to be coded by various, and often contradictory cultural discourses.

Likewise, Bond himself emerges as a blank to be filled in by the objects he accrues: explosive pens, detonating watches, speed-boats, and exotic women. Furthermore, because “Bond” is a creation of a series of authors, screenwriters, and writing teams, and because he, unaging over four decades, can be played by actors of widely varying backgrounds-Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English-Bond loses any claim to “authenticity,” to the cultural, temporal, or national origins that might pin him down and suggest a stable identity.

I want to argue, then, that the figure of James Bond marks the emergence of the consuming male, the anonymous bourgeois man of moderate means who conceives of himself no longer as a particularity, but as an empty site of potential subjectivity realized only in the act of accruing and consuming things. The serialization of Bond novels in Playboy and the rise in popularity of such gentleman’s magazines as Dude and later Gentlemen’s Quarterly and Esquire responds to and fuels this late mid-century shift in popular conceptions of middle-class masculinity. No longer is masculinity unmarked, unadorned, and inherent: It has become a marked, commodified, exteriorized gender performance by men who not only consume, but are also self-consumed.

I do not wish, of course, to propose that masculinity has ever been anything but a cultural construction. That is, I want to avoid the suggestion that in the pre-Bond days, there ever really was such a thing as authentic, inherent, organic masculinity. Instead, my argument is that Bond, as the consumable consuming man, indexes a reconception in masculinity that foregrounds the consumption, construction, and performance of gender codes. More important, in fact, is that the act of consumption, construction, and performance itself becomes the code of post-Bond masculinity. Bond shows us the shift from performed masculinity to performative masculinity.



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PANEL FIVE: Fleming and the Revolution of the Subject

Dennis Allen
“’Alimentary, My Dear Leiter’: Homosexual Panic and Anal Fantasy in Diamonds Are Forever“

From the early scene in which Bond dispatches several imitation Blofelds by drowning them in cloacal mud to the paralleling of the diamond-smuggling pipeline with the alimentary canal to the repeated jeopardies in which Bond is buried alive (“in the bowels of the earth" as it were), Diamonds are Forever (1971) is quite possibly the most anally obsessed of the 007 films. Not entirely coincidentally, it is the first to introduce a pair of gay lovers (Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd) as part of its array of villains. This paper will examine the relation between the film’s anal fixation and the anxieties signaled by the gay characters in order to articulate the underlying phantasmatic structure of the world of the Bond films.

In Homographesis, Lee Edelman has demonstrated that the existence of homosexuality generates anxiety about the wholeness of both the individual male (in the fear of anal penetration but also of the unconscious) and of masculinity itself (since it suggests that not all men are “really" men). Thus Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd appear in a film that raises, in order to exorcize, the possibility of the instability of male identity: one of the central plot devices of the film is Blofeld’s “cloning" of himself. Even more significantly, Wint and Kidd help us to uncover the structuring principle of the Bond universe. Evident in the film’s familiar use of motivated names (most notably, the mortician Mortal Slumber) and the by now formulaic appearance of precisely the right high tech gadget at exactly the right moment, this principle is less paranoiac (since it does not primarily insist on a hidden meaning) than anal-retentive, the fantasy that the world is subject to an (implicitly masculine) order.

Jaime Hovey
“Lesbian Bondage"

What happens when stylized gender tries to get real? And what does it mean that this “real" is represented as something outside of style, or more accurately, inside of it? One of the most striking things about James Bond movies has been the way they have always been about gender, and the theatricality and menacing display of stylized gender comportment. Indeed, the most notable feature of Bond films has been the way they have mapped shifting gender roles in the wake of the women’s movement. The films have struggled to remain sexy even as the exaggerated misogyny and gender polarities of the early films have muted and mutated. A man’s man whose sadistic misogyny in the early films mirrored the self-contained masculinity of the fifties and early sixties, Bond has become a woman’s man whose ironic self-presentation in the more comic later films continues to suggest deep cultural misgivings about the correlation of machismo with heroism. The powerful and untrustworthy femmes of the early sixties have become boyish pals in the new century. The fact that Bond’s sexuality has grown less hostile, if no more friendly, to women in the fifty years since his creation by Ian Fleming would suggest that women-especially lesbians-would find him more palatable in his kinder, gentler form than ever they did Sean Connery’s suavely brutal phallicism. The proliferation of gadgets, the ever more autonomous and physically dexterous girls, and the casting of the innocuously-coiffed Pierce Brosnan in the title role in more recent Bond films has completed James’s transformation from murderously efficient prick to stylishly accessorized dildo, and should by rights, make for greater appeal to women-especially feminists and lesbians-than ever before.

But this is not the case. Old, mean, nasty Bond remains much more interesting-and much sexier-than his more recent, politically-correct incarnations. Why is this? Why is the barely-controlled brutality of a Sean Connery, the icy gallantry of a Roger Moore, and the bitchy duplicitousness of Pussy Galore, so much more appealing than the innocuous androgyny of Bond and his girls in more recent 007 films? Why would Bond get less appealing to lesbians the more politically correct he becomes? If-as Judith Halberstam and others have argued-Austin Powers’s toned-down, liminal masculinity appeals to the drag king coterie in queer culture, why is it that James Bond, the model for the Austin Powers parody, doesn’t? This paper will look at gender in early James Bond films, trace the attempt in Die Another Day to offer viewers a “real" lesbian object of desire, and analyze the larger cultural implications of insisting on the fiction of “real" gender. Patrick O'Donnell
“Special Agency: The Cyborg-Aristocrat in the 007 Films"

The 007 films commenced in 1962 with Dr. No, and have continued to the present with the release of Die Another Day in 2002. Over this 40-year period, Bonds have come and gone, but collectively, the twenty 007 films--some based on Fleming's novels, others constructed, as it were, from scratch--can be viewed as tracing variations in the nature of agents and agencies across the Cold War and putatively post-Cold War era. For the purposes of this presentation, I wish to focus on the first five 007 films (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice--all starring Sean Connery, three of the five directed by Terence Young) to assess how the films represent a schizophrenic form of Cold War agency which is both a form of an emerging cybernetic posthumanism, and what might be termed humanism's last gasp in the figure of the playboy-aristocrat. Bond, in these films, is both a prostheses and a playboy, a Deleuzian war machine mutating from the animal to the cybernetic, and at the same time, a sex machine whose "individuality" is at once bolstered and sundered by gadgetry and sexual conquests. I will explore these contradictions within the larger terms of an American Cold War culture that negotiates between the nostalgic formation of "the Playboy mystique" (at his height in 1962-63, when the first 007 films were released, and when Hugh Hefner was on trial for obscenity charges related to the publication of a Playboy pictorial entitled "The Nudest Jayne Mansfield") and the mystique of technology as the offering a future for agency.




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PANEL SIX: Bond and Popular Culture

Cynthia Walker
“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: Ian Fleming’s Other Spy"

Twenty minutes into The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983), retired U.N.C.L.E. agent Napoleon Solo finds himself the reluctant rescuer of a Russian ballerina. Racing through Las Vegas with three cars of KBG agents in hot pursuit, Solo is defenseless, with no secret agent gadgets - not even a gun - to aid his escape. Suddenly, a silver Aston Marton DBV with the not-so-subtle license plate “JB" shows up and enters the fray. The driver, a handsome man in a dinner jacket, is played by George Lazenby, who also portrayed James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). Lazenby’s “JB" character takes out one of the pursuing cars with a missile and another with an oil slick, while Solo causes the crash of a third. And as the bad guys rage impotently from the sidelines, JB waves, and Solo responds with a grateful salute, thus acknowledging a debt that extends far beyond saving him in a simple car chase.

Whenever The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) is cited, chronicled, or even mentioned in passing, inevitably the series is described as television's version of James Bond. When books that focus on Bond contain a section on the “Bond Phenomenon" or the “Spy Craze" of the 1960's, U.N.C.L.E. is always featured prominently.

There is good reason for this. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was the first successful attempt to translate the popular James Bond formula to the small screen for American television. An adaptation of Casino Royale for the drama series, Climax (1954), which featured an Americanized “Jimmy Bond," was uninspired to say the least. During the 1950s, Ian Fleming himself was involved in at least two more attempts to create a Bondian spy series, but both failed to move beyond pilot stage. Eventually, after these disappointing experiences, Fleming abandoned television and sold the screen rights to producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli to make the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962).

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. succeeded because it took Fleming’s “sex, snobbery, and sadism" formula for romantic spy thrillers, domesticated it, and wedded it to elements found in more traditional television series of the time period. The earliest episodes of U.N.C.L.E.’s first season has Napoleon Solo recruiting farm girls, school teachers, and even children to help on his missions - the sort of folks one might find in a drama or situation comedy. In the pilot episode, for example, Solo enlists the aid of a so-called "ordinary housewife", a PTA member and mother of two played by Pat Crowley, to help him trap an evil industrialist who had once been the housewife's college sweetheart. The effect is as if James Bond had appeared in an episode of Leave It to Beaver, dragging away June Cleaver to aid him.

Although not generally known at the time, Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond, was involved in the earliest stages of U.N.C.L.E.'s development. In October, 1962, soon after Dr. No’s successful opening in the U.K., the powerful Ashley-Steiner Inc. agency arranged a meeting between producer Norman Felton and Fleming. Felton, noted for programs like Dr. Kildare and The Eleventh Hour, had expressed an interest in doing an action/adventure series and pitched the idea of a mysterious man who undertook difficult international assignments for the United Nations. Felton and Fleming spent three days together in New York City, exchanging and comparing ideas. Pressure from Eon Productions and his own ill health soon forced Fleming to bow out of U.N.C.L.E, and his ultimate contribution was the name of the lead character, Napoleon Solo, and a few notes famously scribbled on the blank pages of a Western Union Telegram. Eon eventually filed a lawsuit because “Solo" was also the name of a minor gangster character in Goldfinger. After the suit was settled, Felton was careful to refrain from publicizing Fleming's early involvement and continued to remind both NBC and MGM to do the same. There was also a deliberate effort by Felton and series developer Sam Rolfe who succeeded Fleming to make the characters, plots and other details in U.N.C.L.E. different enough from Bond to eliminate any future trouble with Eon Productions.

Nevertheless, despite all these difficulties, Fleming introduced a particular sensibility to the mix, a sensibility much different from Felton’s, who had previously produced semi-realistic programs centering on the moral conflicts of professionals. Fleming wrote in the colorful, imaginative tradition of eighteenth century romantic adventure, and this influence remained, even after the author left the project. Because of a number of factors, including the success of the Bond films, the legal problems with Eon, and the expectations of the NBC network, it was this sensibility that Felton and others involved in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were forced to take into account, either through accommodation or deliberate rejection.

This paper, then, will explore the actual and thematic connections between Fleming’s work with James Bond and its most successful offspring at the time, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Utilizing recent research in the Norman Felton Collection archived at the University of Iowa Library, the paper will also describe and discuss the legal complications and personal creative interchange that contributed to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. being less of a pale imitation of Bond than a unique response or answer to Bond in its own right.

Mark Best
"The Superspy in a Superhero World: Marvel Comics' Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD and 'American' Masculinity"

When capitalizing on the popularity of the spy genre in the mid-1960s, Marvel Comics attempted to create a specifically American version of James Bond by inflecting the Bond persona along the lines of "tough guy," working class masculinity. This paper examines how Marvel utilized the comics medium to magnify the spectacle of action and technology of the Bond films while minimizing the autonomy and heterosexual freedom associated with Bond, in favor of male homosociality. One-eyed, cigar-chomping veteran Colonel Nick Fury became the head of SHIELD, an international counter-espionage organization, set in the Cold War context of Marvel's increasingly popular superhero universe otherwise dominated by characters such as Spider-Man and the Hulk. The paper will look at readers' letters to the comic books' editors comparing Fury and Bond, as well as recurrent narrative references to Bond as a fictitious character, to show how Marvel threw such differences into relief. Fury's role as the hero of a simultaneously published comic book set during the Second World War further emphasized the male homosociality and camaraderie for Marvel's predominantly adolescent, male audience. However, in the late 1960s the introduction of monogamous heterosexuality, bureaucratic conflict, and, most notably, psychedelic, pop, and op art imagery into the SHIELD stories worked to draw Nick Fury closer to the sophistication associated with the Bond persona while attempting to maintain the distinction between Fury's tough "American" masculinity and that of the British gentleman spy.

James B. South
“’All that James Bond stuff:’ The Appropriation of Bond in Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

In this paper, I explore the uses to which James Bond has been put in the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Throughout its seven seasons, the show has consistently made reference to the Bond canon, whether as an opportunity for witty dialogue (which movie actor was the better Bond?) or for important plot points. Accordingly, Bond features as a consistent reference point for the show and sometimes as an explicit text. In addition, two notable substantial Bond references are worth considering. First, and most substantially, the Season Four story arc about a secret government agency, clearly modeled on the 60s spy genre. Indeed, one episode script had the working title “Secret Agent Guy." At the same time, it was revealed that a segment of this government agency was itself engaged in a covert operation. At this point, the main spy character faces issues structurally similar to many of those faced by Bond. Second, the stand-alone episode, “Superstar," features a regular secondary character who becomes for this one episode the major character. Again, there are constant references to Bond throughout.

I note the many ways that the show appropriates Bond for its uses, and assess the functional role those uses have within the context of the show. In this way, I shed light on how Bond has become iconic for a genre with which he is usually not identified, namely, supernatural fantasy.



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PANEL SEVEN: Fleming and the Cold War

Brian Patton
“Shoot Back at Anger: Moonraker and the Moment of the ‘Angry Young Man’"

My paper arises from the coincidence of Moonraker’s publication (1955) and the emergence of that familiar type in British writing of the 1950s: the so-called “Angry Young Man." This figure recognized in such disparate works as Hurry on Down (1953), Lucky Jim (1954), Look Back in Anger (1956), and Room at the Top (1957) seemed a manifestation of the zeitgeist, a product of the newly created welfare state negotiating the changing cultural landscape of post-imperial Britain. I do not seek Bond’s membership in this less-than-exclusive club; however, this same landscape did produce him, and we can glimpse in Moonraker (the only one of Fleming’s tales set entirely in England) some of the social uncertainties and anxieties regarding the state of the British class system that gave rise to the “angry young man."

Bearing several features common to these other works (the paternal figure who embodies an older, stable social order, for instance, and the exclusive club, a remnant of that order), Moonraker appears to address the issue of social mobility via a simple contrast between the boorish Drax, who buys his way into the Victorian elegance of Blades, and the gentlemanly Bond, who negotiates that world with a gracious ease but the contrast is deceptive: Bond is not in fact a member of this club, and his gentlemanly nature is defined in large part through a habit of conspicuous consumption that suggests a kinship not only with the despised Drax, but with a young “Angry" like Braine’s Joe Lampton, who measures his social advancement in crassly material terms. What constitutes a gentleman, even in Fleming’s England, is not quite as obvious as one might expect.

Christoph Lindner
“Why Size Matters in the Fiction of James Bond"

In their treatment of crime, conspiracy, and human agency, Ian Fleming's 007 novels adopt many of the formal and thematic pre-occupations of classic detective narrative. This paper will argue that because Fleming locates his narrative within the broader context of cold-war ideology and post-war geopolitics, his writing also marks a departure from a transatlantic tradition of detective writing. Specifically, the paper will propose that the 007 series marks a shift in the cultural understanding of crime and criminality which, following the disillusioning experience of two world wars and the dawn of the atomic age, came to include crimes against humanity. The discussion examines how this shift not only registers in the magnified scope of Fleming's 'criminal vision', but also gives rise to new ideological imperatives for the detective - a figure now reconfigured as secret agent, licensed to kill.

Ishay Landa
“James Bond: a Nietzschean for the Cold War"

The figure of James Bond is one of the most notable expressions of what I term a ‘Nietzschean heroic model’, which has become highly significant in 20th century popular culture. Bond’s ‘Nietzscheanism’ manifests itself in diverse and unexpected ways throughout Fleming’s stories, from the vitalist affirmation of war as essential to heroic life to Bond's refined culinary preferences and his unquenchable competitive drive. A major icon of popular culture, Bond is nonetheless the epitome of elitism and aristocratic disdain at post-Second World War mass-society and the ‘welfarist’ challenge to traditional class-hierarchy. To be sure, 007 faces a series of arch-villains who flaunt an unmistakable Nietzschean credo; Dr. No, Hugo Drax or Ernst Stavro Blofeld, to name the most formidable ones, are all, more or less explicitly, evil examples of the

#2 Dr. Tynan

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 03:45 AM

Oh yes, if this has been posted here before, delete this topic. :)

#3 Qwerty

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 03:49 AM

I haven't noticed, I Quicklinked this. :)

#4 Dr. Tynan

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 03:57 AM

http://www.talkingpi...ondage man.html

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Cold War spy movies came and went, but Bond out lived the genre and established an unassailable niche of its own. The Bond formula is so powerful that it can be copied and sustained by many others, like Michael Caine, James Coburn and Dean Martin who respectively starred in the Harry Palmer, Flint and Matt Helm film series. The Carry On team even joined the fray with Carry On Spying, and there was the unfortunate full-length animation film Freddie As F.R.O.7. TV series also copied Bond, for example The Man From Uncle owes a substantial debt to Bond, especially in terms of its mixture of girls and gadgets, and Get Smart like the Carry On team wrung humour out of the world of Bond. In more recent years James Cameron gave us True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Bond coping with family life.
A prime-time documentary 30 Years of James Bond (London Weekend Television, 1992, U.K. director Alasdair Macmillan, U.S.A. director, and producer Lorna Dickinson) emphasised their special effects and gadgets. It was diplomatic (blinkered) of the documentary makers to ignore the fact that Bond was really a homicidal sex maniac who was barely under the control of Her Majesty's Secret Service. No mention was made of the Cold war context of the films or how they became less realistic and more like spectacular travelogues, no mention was made of the swinging-sixties permissiveness or the role (or lack of role) of women. In a world with no Cold War but with AIDS there is the feeling that Bond's reason for existence and his behaviour are no longer appropriate.

Certainly his attitude to women doesn't bare close inspection:

Women were either helpless nubile victims to be rescued and rumped or they were hatchet-faced lesbians who hated and hunted men.
(Gordon, Jane, 'Bond Bombshells', Elle, July 1989. )
Such attitudes were toned down in the films, but the undiluted chauvinism of Ian Fleming's writings were given full reign in Playboy magazine, which serialised the Bond novels in 1964. In the same year the third film, Goldfinger, established the 'Bond Girl' as a regular feature. Roald Dahl said that when he was writing the screenplay for You Only Live Twice (1967) he was given this formula:
"you put in three girls...Girl number one is pro-Bond. She stays around roughly through the first reel of the picture. Then she is bumped off by the enemy, preferably in Bond's arms. "
Girl number two is anti-Bond and usually captures him, and he has to save himself by knocking her out with his sexual charm and power. She gets killed in an original (usually grisly) fashion mid-way through the film. The third girl will manage to survive to the end of the film.
Such misogyny did not worry Ian Fleming, but when his novels were transferred to the screen humour and irony was used to soften the impact. Roger Moore in particular shamelessly undermined the Bond mystique which, ironically alienated many viewers, as did the opinion that he was a one eyebrow actor. Nonetheless Moore was able to keep Bond alive during the 1970s and 1980s. During this period the ‘Bond Girl’ formula gave way to more assertive women, and with the arrival of Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence To Kill (1989) there was the introduction of the ‘Bond Woman’ who can challenge and equal Bond. Though this seems to be a mere tweaking of the formula, at the end of the day Bond is the central heterosexual hero who expects to be surrounded by women. Whether they love him or hate him is irrelevant, their glamour and beauty is the main reason for their inclusion. (Even with the introduction of the more politically correct Pierce Brosnan ‘his’ women are still pictured with him along with his latest cars and gadgets, suggesting that they are equally usable and disposable at his whim.)

Furthermore:

Though Bond elaborates myths of nationhood, he can only do so through racism. He dislikes men from Russia and the Balkans, is horrified by blacks and Chinese, finds the French ridiculous and the Italians are "good for nothing but wearing monogrammed shirts and spending the day smoking". He cannot help reminding the Germans about the war, and he never trusts the Irish. He is particularly patronising about Americans.
{Pascoe, David. 'Bond. ..Junk Bond', The Modern Review, Volume 1, Issue 5, Oct. -Nov. 1992.)
Some people think that these factors have killed off James Bond, but there are several projects in the pipe-line aiming to bring him back to active service. (Most of this text was written in 1992. Brosnan debuted in the 1995 Goldeneye six years after Licence to Kill, which was Dalton’s last appearance as Bond.) In the U.S.A. they want to make a big budget TV series but copyright wrangles could scupper this plan. Certainly producers cannot easily ignore such a potential source of profit even if the politics of the enterprise are rather dodgy.
Will Bond die? Should he be killed? I think he will survive to fight another day. (I was right for once!) First of all there seem to be plenty of conflicts and bad guys out there for a super hero like Bond to tackle. Indeed, films like Live And Let Die have centred on international drug dealing, so the Cold War is not essential for his survival. Old sixties TV series are back in vogue and a 'new' Bond can play on this nostalgia value.

Many Hollywood film directors grew-up watching Bond movies and are more than willing to work on such projects. In the 30 Years of James Bond documentary it was implied that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would never have got where they are today without having watched the adventures of Bond. This is an obvious simplification but their Indiana Jones trilogy was a conscious effort to recreate the excitement and thrills of Bond, and Spielberg has publicly stated that he would like to have directed a Bond movie (this explains his use of Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - see: Slade, Darren and Watson, Nigel, Supernatural Spielberg, VALIS Books, London, 1992, p.57).

It is hard to distinguish one Bond movie from another, especially since they have relied on re-treading similar storylines with different gadgets and exotic locations, yet they are good examples of exciting colourful, noisy big-screen action. They are what Chris Savage King calls trash but he asks: "What film series provided such cheap thrills using such luxurious means?" ('Kitsch kitsch, bang bang', The Modern Review, Volume 1, Issue 5, Oct. - Nov. 1992.) He thinks we are not going to see their like again but I trust that trash cannot be so easily be dumped.

If words are likely to be the ammunition required to kill off Bond then these should do it:

He is to secret agenting as Alan Whicker is to TV journalism, a sort of blue-blazered round-the-world anachronism, the ultimate hob-nobber. It is not too fanciful to regard Whicker as having modelled himself on Bond. Whilst Bond battles with Dr. No, Whicker interviews Papa Doc. In each case the status quo is preserved.

(Turner, Adrian, 'Sex, snobbery, sadism and style', Weekend Guardian, August 15-16, 1992.)
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#5 Qwerty

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 04:09 AM

I merged these two. :)

#6 Dr. Tynan

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 04:43 AM

No problem. :)

I was thinking that I had thought I'd posted the other one, but hadn't, if you get me? :)

#7 Johnboy007

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 04:43 AM

Gargantuan article in there.

The bits about Kennedy, Fleming and Castro are very interesting.

#8 Qwerty

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 05:28 AM

No problem. :)

I was thinking that I had thought I'd posted the other one, but hadn't, if you get me? :)

Yeah, I get ya. :)

Both here. :)

#9 Loomis

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 03:25 PM

So, why aren't we getting paid to spew this kind of cobblers about Bond? :)

WE'RE the frickin' experts! :)

I'm sure my "gay aspects of GOLDENEYE" posts would have gone down a storm at this gathering! :)

#10 Dr. Tynan

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 06:20 PM

http://web.mid-day.c...ugust/89961.htm

Another Article I've no idea of what this site is about either.
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In search of a new Bond
By: Cyrus Broacha
August 14, 2004
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Not since September 11, 2001 has the world been so surrounded by the threat of imminent darkness. A new issue has cropped up, uglier than anything ever seen before in the western world. In fact, uglier than a Sinead O’Connor haircut.

An issue that makes global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, ethnic genocide and Madonna’s latest album appear like walks in the park.

Obviously you know what I’m screaming about — Pierce Brosnan’s refusal to continue as James Bond. Not since 1973, when Sean Connery lost his hair to a very ordinary conditioner has the world seen such a colossal crisis.

Why did Brosnanbhai quit? The answer is not so obvious. The most acceptable one of course is he reached the compulsory retirement age for all Bonds, which is 83 years as any schoolboy who comes from a school where car parking is possible, will tell you.

There are other theories.

1. He is unable to digest a dry vodka martini shaken not stirred, a fact that Bond fans were bound to catch on to sooner than later.

2. The Spanish police, who work every alternate year, say that Pierce stormed out of the role when he found out that Ms Money Penny was really a man with long hair. (A part which the young Sean Connery had applied for when he was a lisp of a lad).

3. The French police, who work only on Tuesdays and are generally made up of rejects from the Spanish force, say that Pierce couldn’t keep up his performance.

4. Any Bond film requires him to bed an average of 34 girls. And Pierce had started underperforming after No 27. Which really meant, with a first name like Pierce, jokes started doing the rounds.

However, whatever his reasons are, our Brosnanbhai is gone and quickly, before the world ends and MTV goes 100 per cent Hindi, we need to find a Bond.

The Global Tomorrow, newspaper which works out of its Tripoli office, has mentioned the main candidates.

According to the paper, since one out of three people in the world are Indians or Chinese, the next Bond must reflect the right demography.

Of course he’ll continue to make love to women of all nationalities, in keeping with the U N Charter of 1970, Article 16, para 3.

Let’s examine the Indian candidates:

Amongst popular Indian singers the list has narrowed down to Shaan, Daler Mehndi, Kumar Sanu and Adnan Sami.

Shaan was scratched out, as his name sounded too much like the original Bond (Connery). Daler was sidelined because the insurance company handling the project was convinced he’d lose his fingers to the ceiling fan, while dancing.

Kumar Sanu was cancelled when he failed to pass the test line “My name is Bond, James Bond” correctly.

Adnan, unfortunately, missed his audition as the trains were on strike.
Next was the list of film stars who’d fit the bill.

Aamir Khan, Dharmendra, Govinda, Paresh Rawal and Parveen Babi were all considered. Aamir unfortunately didn’t make the minimum height requirement, by a foot.

Dharmendra was lost trying to find his constituency in Rajasthan. Govinda refused the role as there was no prayer sequence.

Desperately the organisers tried to cajole him with offers of an aarti and at least three pujas.

Paresh had a very good chance as he spoke both the languages Bond was fluent in perfectly (English and Gujarati). But his Paan Parag habit and his desire to spend half a day on one leg went against him.

Parveen Babi never had a strong chance, as she insisted she needed the FBI’s permission before returning to acting or at the very least the CIA’s, or if nothing else, her landlord’s — he who had two heads and a leopard’s tail.

Exasperated, the producers turned to the politicians.

George Fernandes was found to be too old.

Mayawati said she wanted the role for only six months.

Mamta Banerjee fell off her dais in her eagerness to reach the audition.

Vajpayee was too old.

Milind Deora too young.

Laloo likes his vodka with chyawan prash.

So who would get the role? Who would step into Pierce’s shoes and save the world?

The organisers had no choice — they had to go back to the original choice and agree to the original choice’s demands.

Yes the new Bond film would be shot around Navratri, it would have 14 songs in it.

So look out for the new Bond film called From Dandiya With Love starring the new James Bond. — Falguni Pathak.
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#11 Qwerty

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Posted 22 August 2004 - 06:28 PM

Another interesting one.

34?