So my wife and I are streaming Skyfall—which, to our mutual surprise, was her idea not mine–and M is explaining to her jury of clueless politicos why they shouldn’t gut her antiquated, Cold War, killer spy agency. Why, in other words, does the 21st century still needs good ole 007? I’m no Judi Dench (or Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, or John Logan, the screenwriters), but the argument goes something like this:
Shadows are bad.
Shadows are everywhere.
Only a man of the shadows can fight the shadows.
So this is a job for Bond, James Bond.
And I thought: Haven’t I heard this before? Not in defense of the CIA—which, British accented or not, that’s all 007 is. No, it’s an older argument, older than the Cold War. This is gunslinger logic.
Let me call Westerns scholar Richard Slotkin to the microphone. He knows a few things about shadows too:
“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”
Yep. James is a cowboy. He packs a Walther PPK instead of a revolver, and rides a Bentley, not a stallion, but even in Daniel Craig’s metrosexually tight suit and tie, he’s the same as any badass sheriff policing his corner of oblivion.
The weird thing though—London’s not exactly a frontier burgh. In terms of imperial domains, it’s the flat dab middle. Not Dodge, but the Metropole. What Superman fans call Metropolis.
So what’s all this shadowy borderland talk? How can James, or any contemporary urban hero, draw superpowers from a mythically wild West?
I recently stumbled onto an answer in Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics. (Which I checked out of my library after tracking down a citation in Alex Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution, the tome one of the economists in my book club has us reading. I wanted Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel but got vetoed. Maybe next month.) Turchin is an historian and ecologist, which doesn’t really explain all of his mathematical formulas and wave charts, but I think I pretty much follow the gist of his “Metaethnic Frontier Theory.”
My ridiculously simplistic version: empires need frontiers. It’s where group solidarity comes from. Why, as Turchin shows, do empires consistently rise from frontier regions, and very rarely from non-frontiers? Because Metropolis is a den of in-fighting, a spreadsheet of special interest groups vying for attention. Border towns don’t have such luxury. They’ve got all those swarthy aliens swarming right outside their fort gates. The shadows keep everyone in line.
“Internally divisive issues,” explains Turchin, “will eventually destroy the asabiya”—that’s academic speak for ‘collective action’—“of the large group, unless it is ‘disciplined’ by an external threat.”
Thus Ms. Dench’s shadows-are-everywhere speech. If you want your group to stay a group, you have to scare them. That’s easy when they’re camped at the edge of the abyss, but for these big city types, you got to drag the shadows right up to their condo doorsteps.
That’s how you keep an agency funded or, for Hollywood, your franchise breathing. 007 is an obsolete Cold Warrior, but product name recognition trumps the collapse of Soviet communism. Superman shouldn’t have made it past Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. He sold comics because he embodied the collectivism of a nation scared shitless by the Axis threat. Like any gunslinger or shadow-fighting shadow man, his powers are alien, a product of a scifi frontier. Remove the threat and he’s just some guy in tights and a cape.
When Ian Fleming published his first Bond novel in 1953, comic book superheroes were all but extinct. When Sean Connery debuted in the first Bond film in 1962, superheroes were back and atomic-powered. Although gunslingers seem extinct at the moment, shadow Men of Steel are still flying and homicide-licensed agents keep sipping their dark martinis.
I would never accuse the U.S. entertainment industry of anything but dividend-driven capitalism, but they’re still producing a form of red, white and blue propaganda. They want our money, and the best way to get it is to keep reinventing not our heroes but the threats that keep our heroes kicking. Hollywood’s main products are bite-sized shadows imported from our psychological borderlands. Our heroes have to scare us before they can soothe us.
But there’s a another byproduct too. Turchin’s group cohesion. Stream Skyfall or skim this month’s Action Comics, and you’re going to feel just a tiny bit more, well, American. Empires collapse when their centers splinter. That’s bad for business. In a nation of special interests, buying movie tickets is one of our few collective actions. For good and bad, James and Clark keep the metrosexual masses not just entertained but disciplined.
I feel like this is an insight you could have retained from your days reading old man Derrida. Also, this article dovetails with the recent article about whether or not superhero movies will survive the war on terror.
Whoops. Whenever someone writes about their “wife” on here I assume that it’s Noah. I guess he’s my paradigmatic example of “old white family man on HU”. Sorry to presume you’ve read Jacques, Chris.
Nice one, Owen.
Chris– a great meditation. It makes me wonder if cowboys aren’t really the origin points though– were they in turn drawn from colonialism? Because its not like James Bond is always bopping around London. He’s bopping around exotic, Orientalist backdrops, the Wild West of the British empire.
It was an honest mistake.
Chris wrote the piece about superhero film too! Which is no doubt why it connects….
And Kailyn, that’s a great point about Bond and imperial peripheries. Sort of interesting in light of Skyfall, which is set in London — sort of emphasizing the way the war on terror has shifted the imaginative zone of conflict from centers pacifying periphery to periphery threatening center.
It’s time for some culture studies mad-libs:
“THE WIZARD OF OZ shouldn’t have made it past Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. THE WIZARD OF OZ sold because it embodied the collectivism of a nation scared shitless by the Axis threat. Like COWBOY STORIES, THE WIZARD OF OZ’s powers are alien, a product of a American frontier. Remove the threat and it’s just a book about some girl walking along a road.”
Play along and make your own!
Owen, I have no objection with being mistaken for Noah. (Should I?)
Kailyn, yes! The Virginian (the original western vigilante) was published just after the turn of the century, so after any actual frontier had closed, which made it ready for mythology. I’d say superheroes followed in the gunslinger’s redemptively violent footsteps.
Er… James Bond isn’t CIA, you guys.
I don’t know the exact details but I’d imagine he’s MI5 or MI6.
The ‘I’ does stand for Information, so you can have a point for that.
Haven’t secret agents always been this way, shadowy conspiratorial defenders against shadowy conspiratorial threats? In Joseph Conrad’s day it was anarchists trying to blow up Greenwich Observatory, now it’s religious anti-capitalists or somesuch.
Joseph Conrad? Oh, he’s basically Ernest Hemingway.
Wrote a book that’s just like Apocalypse Now, except it’s set in Cornwall.
Oh, The ‘I’ in CIA isn’t for Information is it.
Deduct one point from both of us.
There’s definitely some imperial narratives at work in the Wizard of Oz. Great white savior travels to the hinterland, natives treat him as a god. Not that hard to parse….
I have no problem with doing a reading of Wizard of Oz, but I have a problem with making cultural claims as to why Wizard of Oz or Superman is popular.
Like, apparently Superman is solely explained by American imperialism, and not the fact that kids like to show off athletic abilities or men enjoy watching people punch people or kids wish they could fly. I don’t know how else to parse Chris’s hyperbolic statements like “Superman shouldn’t have made it past Dresden”
I read a blogger ranting about cultural studies once who wrote:
“There’s a whole discipline called Cultural Studies based on the idea that “successful movies and books satisfy the unspoken, subconscious needs of the American people, and that’s why we flock to see them. So if we can ‘analyze’ the films and books, we can reveal the secrets of American society’s subconscious.” In other words, they take a film that became wildly popular, and then explain why it HAD to be popular. Yeah, that’s a fuckin’ intellectual challenge right there. “No really, this film couldn’t have failed. I stake my reputation on that! I would be very surprised if even one of these people made like a real scientist and predicted what movie will be huge in the future! ” ”
It seemed a pretty damning argument to me, but your mileage may vary.
First of all, nobody is saying anything like “solely explained”. But Superhero comics were superpopular during WWII, and they deliberately piggbacked/took advantage of patriotic themes. To claim that that wasn’t part of their appeal seems like more of a stretch than acknowledging it, it seems like.
Second…Chris was being deliberately hyperbolic and tongue in cheek with the Dresden quip. So…maybe you misread him or are overreacting a little?
Could be I misread him, sure.
I do get a bit flip at times, so if there’s miscommunication, at least half of it is my fault. As Noah summed up aptly already, a cultural studies reading of any pop culture text is just one in a very wide range of worthwhile (and hopefully fun) angles of analysis. Imperialism is just one piece of the delicious Superman pie.
First off, the writer notes that Bond is not CIA but CIA-like. Refer to the “British accented or not” aside in the text above.
As for the supposedly damning critique of cultural studies, it would be damning if the description of cultural studies was anything more than a caricature. It’s about as insightful as saying “there’s this discipline called philosophy, and it’s all about making simple things complicated.” Sure, it’s not exactly incorrect, but it’s a gross oversimplification. A quick trip to Wikipedia reveals as much.
I think we’re talking about the same sentence:
“Not in defense of the CIA—which, British accented or not, that’s all 007 is.”
all 007 is.
My thinking was that this is in the context of James Bond being like a cowboy or a superhero, as if Britain didn’t have its own insidious tradition of imperial hegemony to draw from. By bringing up MI6, I was alluding to a body that has its own identity and history of covert ops. Substituting everything about 007 with a US equivalent just seems a little unnecessary, he’s a spy, an intelligence agent, the CIA aren’t the only ones.
However, now I’ve looked back at the text, it seems like maybe the bit about men of shadows is meant to resonate with some quotation about the CIA, which then leads the writer into a little segue type of device. I don’t know if that’s it – I’ve never heard such a quotation – but if that was the case I could certainly read that passage the way Nate suggests.
Although, “certainly” is perhaps over-generous.
Substitute that with “possibly”.
Yeah, there’s certainly some ambiguity to the sentence, and I think your point about Britain’s distinct tradition of shadow work holds, too. It would be interesting to know if the story “Skyfall” was based on, or any of Fleming’s Bond stories, contained a speech similar to the shadows narrative offered by Dench (which might as well have been a mini explanation of how James Bond’s Cold War cosmopolitanism fits into the global war on terror.
I’d like to see a grim Judi Dench menacing/begging scene defending food stamp funding. That would be refreshing.
I think the point is that MI6 is a stand-in for the CIA in these films — a cover, if you will. I have a friend who likes to irritate Brits by pointing out that Bond films are American, popcorn-selling, action films. The fact that they have British actors playing British characters changes the nationality of neither the producers nor the culture being expressed. I think that point is related to Chris’s about Bond and the CIA.
None of the films since License To Kill have been based on Ian Fleming stories, except Casino Royale, which is a remake.
“I have a friend who likes to irritate Brits by pointing out that Bond films are American, popcorn-selling, action films.”
They may be popcorn-selling action films but they’re made by a British production company and usually a British Director. British mainstream cinema does tend to be quite easy-going, crowd-pleasing stuff – not especially “European”, as it were.
Your friend probably just has an irritating way of speaking. Plus bringing up the Beatles is trite like bringing up Hitler, no-one wants to have to do that.
There’s perhaps something here about the way that Britain, the former colonizer, is now in many ways a colonial outpost of the US. Bond’s retreat to the countryside in order to defeat the bad guy can sort of be seen as him embracing his marginal (regional) identity in order to defeat the marginal terrorist interlopers. Sort of like the old Natty Bumpo frontier cowboy trope where the civilizing white man is also the Indian. So, Bond *is* American, but he’s also a savage — and he’s a savage because he’s British.
He’s a Knight of the Realm, and a Crusader, to boot.
But yes, you’re right about Britain being annexed to US culture, you’d never guess France was only 25 miles away.
“and he’s a savage because he’s British.”
And it’s not the Lake District or Kent he retreats to, it’s his old home in Scotland, land of the Celts and Picts.
Also where the Christians retreated to in the “Dark Ages.”
Thanks, Briany. He’s actually pleasant enough and has a degree in film studies, so I probably just distorted a perfectly valid point — maybe the one you and Noah made.
I wonder if he’s make a similar crack about Bollywood. I guess the cheekiness to offensiveness ratio would be a bit too stark there.
Different history, less reciprocal.
We haven’t discussed Bollywood. I’ll have to bring that up next time I see him. I think you’re right about the ratio, though.
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Chris Gavaler says:
Let me call Westerns scholar Richard Slotkin to the microphone. He knows a few things about shadows too:
“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”
Yep. James is a cowboy. He packs a Walther PPK instead of a revolver, and rides a Bentley, not a stallion, but even in Daniel Craig’s metrosexually tight suit and tie, he’s the same as any badass sheriff policing his corner of oblivion.
…Why…do empires consistently rise from frontier regions, and very rarely from non-frontiers? Because Metropolis is a den of in-fighting, a spreadsheet of special interest groups vying for attention. Border towns don’t have such luxury. They’ve got all those swarthy aliens swarming right outside their fort gates. The shadows keep everyone in line.
———————-
Um. It’s nonsense to assert that cowboys in Westerns simply serve the function of “colonizing the border” — as if they did not actually act in a variety of roles.
I’m no “Westerns scholar,” but rather than simply protecting the frontier and its settlers from them nasty Injuns — more the function of the Cavalry and its forts — those protagonists in “oaters” could be lone gunslingers coming into a town to attack its internal corruption; peaceful farmers driven to strap on their six-gun by a thieving, encroaching cattle baron.
See http://puffin.creighton.edu/fapa/Bruce/0New%20Film%20as%20Art%20webfiles/all%20texts%20and%20articles/character_and%20movie%20types_in_weste.htm
and http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WesternCharacters
…to note the variety; how it’s usually whites rather than Indians who are the menace. That, rather than being free of internal strife because of external threats, the biggest danger is from among them.
James Bond is “the same as any badass sheriff policing his corner of oblivion”? Have you not read any of the books, seen the movies? He’s not stuck guarding one spot, but travels throughout the world. Moreover, the threats he fights are seldom attacks upon Old Blighty (“Skyfall” was unusual in its focus), but international ones.
And, when did sheriffs in Westerns focus their efforts in “those swarthy aliens swarming right outside”? It’s in keeping the peace in their territory — usually from white outlaws, cattle rustlers — that their task lies.
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…for these big city types, you got to drag the shadows right up to their condo doorsteps.
That’s how you keep an agency funded or, for Hollywood, your franchise breathing…
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Certainly! In 1917 H.L. Mencken wrote:
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Civilization… grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury…
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Chris Gavaler says:
Superman shouldn’t have made it past Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. He sold comics because he embodied the collectivism of a nation scared shitless by the Axis threat. Like any gunslinger or shadow-fighting shadow man, his powers are alien, a product of a scifi frontier. Remove the threat and he’s just some guy in tights and a cape.
———————-
Which is why, once the Axis was beat, the character just faded away, right? “Ridiculously simplistic” is right; ’cause Superman spent most of his career (consider the countless bank robberies he was always foiling) not protecting from the Other, but from home-grown baddies.
————————
…the U.S. entertainment industry… want our money, and the best way to get it is to keep reinventing not our heroes but the threats that keep our heroes kicking. Hollywood’s main products are bite-sized shadows imported from our psychological borderlands. Our heroes have to scare us before they can soothe us.
———————–
It’s a hoary truism that the threats in SF/horror movies vary according to the fear most current in the Zeitgeist; the unleashed power of the atom producing monsters; infiltrating Reds inspiring “Invasion of the body snatchers” or Heinlein’s “The Puppet Masters”; fear of youthful rebellion depicted by a placid girl being possessed and becoming a cursing, sexual, grotesque…
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Briany Najar says:
Joseph Conrad? Oh, he’s basically Ernest Hemingway.
————————
Oy! And you probably went to college too, right?
Mike.
It was a joke.
Heart of Darkness wasn’t really set in Cornwall.
MI6=CIA -> Conrad=Hemingway.
So if someone takes umbrage at the absurdity of the comment of the black woman college student in David Denby’s “Great Books,” feministically raging against Eurocentrism: “Who says Bach is better than some African drummer?”…
…She could then say “It was a joke. Bach wasn’t composing in Africa”?
Pfft.
And in what way does Conrad remotely “= Hemingway”?
In what way? In a jokey way.
As you can see, it doesn’t make any sense as anything but a joke. But then jokes only make proper sense when appreciated as such.
Let me break it down, purely because you’re apparently skeptical.
Saying Conrad is Hemingway is like saying the MI6 is the CIA: it puts something into a US frame of reference while losing sight of qualitative differences, and also encouraging the attitude that US culture is the lingua franca that needs no “other”. Not that I’m strongly suggesting that that view is really held by anyone here, but it is a lurking component of US culture that is problematic both subjectively and objectively and should probably be acknowledged, even if only in passing.
Saying that Conrad wrote a book which resembles Apocalypse Now is akin to the saying that Bob Marley did a version of Eric Clapton’s I Shot the Sheriff (which I’ve heard several times, delivered with humourous intent). It’s just a little facetiousness – it maintains a tone of irony – and it leads to the next movement of this amazingly good bit of comedy.
Saying that Heart of Darkness is set in Cornwall is a comically exaggerated reaction to the assumption that James Bond is set in London. Cornwall and London are both well known abroad and are popular tourist destinations. Cornwall is a relatively isolated part of England, is a bit more rugged in places than many other English counties, and has a history of separatism and its own language which many Cornish people have struggled to maintain in the face of cassimilation and homogenisation (which plays into the colonial vibe, but in a very soft way). Basically, saying Cornwall is Britain’s interior equivalent to deepest, darkest Africa is very, very funny indeed.
Now, obviously none of that makes the comedy more effective, but it should demonstrate the purpose of my writing in that way. I’m not really sure what else you think I was up to.
Not “cassimilation”, but “assimilation”.
“Cassification”:
http://static.gloupe.com/storage1/userpics/8/full_size/b7af914975a2dfba605ff6969203a2c0.jpg = http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/MWZfKcYlefE/mqdefault.jpg
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Mike Hunter says:
…in what way does Conrad remotely “= Hemingway”?
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Briany Najar says:
In what way? In a jokey way.
As you can see, it doesn’t make any sense as anything but a joke. But then jokes only make proper sense when appreciated as such.
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Um, but there is a science to jokes, various techniques — unexpected reversals, a twisting of our expectations — they deploy for humoristic effects. Even when some bit of jocosity outrages our sensibilities (i.e., Oscar Wilde’s “Women are like gongs; they should be struck regularly”), it’s clear as crystal that humor has been achieved.
One need not put on “joke appreciation glasses,” assume the necessary mindset beforehand, to appreciate a joke. Indeed, many derive effectiveness from suddenly appearing in the midst of “serious stuff.”
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Let me break it down, purely because you’re apparently skeptical.
Saying Conrad is Hemingway is like saying the MI6 is the CIA: it puts something into a US frame of reference while losing sight of qualitative differences…
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Well, then, why not say Eric Ambler = Robert Ludlum, or John LeCarré = Tom Clancy? As with equating MI6 and the CIA, there are authors whose work is focused upon spy fiction; seen as similarly specific types of authors. Thus the comparison would make a bit of sense; be readily apparent.
(As with the Madonna = Mama Cass “Cassification.” They’re both singers; the photos chosen specifying that’s the aspect in which they are being viewed.)
Even if, unfortunately, still not being one iota funnier.
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…and also encouraging the attitude that US culture is the lingua franca that needs no “other”. Not that I’m strongly suggesting that that view is really held by anyone here, but it is a lurking component of US culture that is problematic both subjectively and objectively and should probably be acknowledged, even if only in passing.
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A sensible thing to acknowledge, even discourage; however, like the U.S. Balance of Payments, not the best brickwork to build a joke from.
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Basically, saying Cornwall is Britain’s interior equivalent to deepest, darkest Africa is very, very funny indeed.
———————————-
Hmm; is that genuinely being considered to be funny, or is its very unfunnyness’ being acclaimed as hilarity supposed to be the joke?
———————————-
Now, obviously none of that makes the comedy more effective, but it should demonstrate the purpose of my writing in that way. I’m not really sure what else you think I was up to.
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Is it that difficult to imagine “Joseph Conrad? Oh, he’s basically Ernest Hemingway” being understood as equating Conrad to Hemingway?
Ah! Humor! http://www.cracked.com/article_16548_mi-6-to-cia-5-top-secret-agencies-who-want-to-hire-you.html
Both Conrad and Hemingway were determinedly realist authors.
Hemingway was powerfully influenced by Conrad, once describing himself as Conrad’s literary heir, and declaring, in an issue of The Conrad Suplement, “from nothing else that I have ever read have I gotten what every book of Conrad has given me.”
Both authors riffed heavily on stoical, honourable male heroes who are tested by grim, visceral situations.
Obviously there are also differences, that’s the point. Link it all up. The gag relates to its context.
MH: “there is a science to jokes…”
Well, that’s just delightful.
I’ll remember to point that out to the next person who tries to make me laugh.
MH: “… there are authors whose work is focused upon spy fiction; seen as similarly specific types of authors. Thus the comparison would make a bit of sense; be readily apparent.”
I’ve mentioned the widely acknowledged familial relationship between the styles and themes of the two authors.
Originally, I first mentioned Conrad. In the paragraph before I started being award-winningly hilarious I alluded to his novel, The Secret Agent, which features an anarchist bomb-plot focussed on Greenwich Observatory. This allusion was perhaps a touch esoteric and now I realise I should have made it more explicit. Then again, I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition. (“No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”)
The Secret Agent came to mind as an example of an espionage narrative that was written before the era of cinematic blockbusters. Also, the unsecure perimeter is of a different kind to the imperial frontier discussed in the article above, both politically and topologically.
Now, onto the contested humourousness of Cornwall = Colonial Africa.
Think of Heart of Darkness, how it explores themes like savagery and imperialism. Think of the danger.
Now think of Cornwall:
A) an English county which has has its own distinct indigenous language and culture, a county of rugged nature and Celtic mystique;
B) a county of cream tea and ginger biscuits, a county of idyllic holidays on campsites and in cottages. No lions, no malaria.
Heart of Darkness set in Cornwall.
Even your scientists would recognise that transposition as a humourous one. No doubt they’d split their sides as they notated the evidence.
I don’t have a clue what those same scientists would make of that Cracked piece.
Maybe they’d pass it onto experts in the field of satire, as long as those particular boffins had managed to regain some composure after working on the notorious Conrad/Hemingway/Cornwall/Africa case.
Notes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornwall#Question_of_Cornish_national_identity
http://viewfinder.english-heritage.org.uk/search/results.aspx?index=0&mainQuery=&searchType=all&form=basic&theme=&county=CORNWALL&district=&placeName=
Also: the film Apocalypse Now is based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.