I CAN KICK JAMES BOND’S ass.
I mean, I can totally kick his ass.
According to the SMERSH file referred to in Fleming’s novel From Russia With Love, Bond (the book Bond, natch) is six feet tall and 167 pounds. Bond is scrawny. Like . . . Adrien Brody scrawny. Like . . . scrawny as the pretentious “collage artist” who sulks at the end of the bar on Goth Night, hunched over his Midori that he pretends is absinthe because it’s sort of the right color, and who goes on about how much cooler Lacuna Coil was “before they sold out” as he absently wonders if he should have more detail added to his coi fish tattoo. No wonder Bond loves that Beretta that Major Boothroyd (both the real person and the character Fleming named after him) dismissively called “a lady’s gun” in Dr. No (both the book and the film): Bond’s skinny little Hilary Duff-y wrists can probably only handle the trigger weight of a Beretta.
I’m an inch and a half shorter than Bond and weigh two hundred pounds. I’m pretty sure I can kick Bond’s ass.
Yeah, that SMERSH file also mentions that Bond is good at boxing, knife throwing, and knows a few judo holds. “He looks like a nasty customer,” says one Commie SMERSH pinko official, looking at Bond’s file photo. But if you dig through the novels, you’ll find references to Bond smoking sixty cigarettes a day. On average. In Casino Royale, Bond smoked seventy cigarettes in one day. Get your brain around that. Let’s take a typical day for Bond. Over the course of maybe fifteen waking hours, that’s four coffin nails Bond sucks down every hour. And no smokes with diapers for Mr. Bond. No, siree. Which means that’s one unfiltered gasper of specially blended Turkish tobacco (Bond hates Virginia blends, unless he’s featured in the film version of Moonraker, with its multiple Marlboro product placements) every fifteen minutes. Let’s say it takes, I dunno, five minutes to smoke a cigarette. That leaves only forty minutes out of each hour that Bond doesn’t have tarry clouds of carcinogens in his chest. Each day Bond has, for 300 minutes—about the running time of a typical Peter Jackson Director’s Cut—breath-bags full of poison.
Shall we review? Bond is six feet tall, with a build like Kate Moss. Or maybe Beck, if we’re being generous. And he inhales so much freakin’ mouth smog, it’s a wonder that Quarrel didn’t have to add nicotine to Bond’s scuba tank mix in Live and Let Die (the book, that is) when Bond did that underwater assault/infiltration against Mr. Big on the Isle of Surprise. I don’t think it would take much for any reasonably healthy guy to beat up Bond without breaking a sweat. Or, for that matter, any reasonably healthy member of the Tri-Delts without breaking a Revlon’s-Sun-Goddess-Pink-lacquered nail. Blofeld, or somebody, during his “Gloating-At-The-Start-Of-The-Third-Act” speech should really say: “I could shoot you right now, Mr. Bond! But no! There’s a better way! I’m gonna drag you behind the tetherball court and take your lunch money!”
So . . . if I think old “Wheezy” Bond is such a pushover, why is James Bond—the book Bond—such a pivotal icon of my personal pop culture mythology, right up there with Batman and Godzilla? For the record, kiddies . . . yeah, I’m one of those Fleming “The-Books-Are-Way-Better-Than-The-Movies” snobs, even though I do enjoy the movies a lot. For me, what makes a Bond movie good is how well it keeps true to the spirit of Fleming’s books, to say nothing of the plots. From Russia With Love is a pretty phenomenal movie that follows the spirit and the plot of a phenomenal novel (despite the sort of clumsy device of having SPECTRE, not SMERSH, pulling the strings behind the conspiracy to humiliate and destroy Bond). Think about it . . . any novel that JFK loved, especially one that makes deadly and ironic use of his girlfriend Marilyn Monroe’s mouth—a mouth that he kissed, fer chrissakes!—has got to be pretty freakin’ good, huh? And it’s pretty amazing that the film could tap the book’s power and spirit. That keeping-true-to-Fleming’s-spirit requires a certain infusion of depth, and I know there’s some fancy-schmancy reader of New York trendoid trust-funder literature (read: “pastiche parading as postmodern”) out there rolling his/her eyes through a fog of patchouli as he/she tsk!s over his/her vanilla soy foam vegan decaf latte at the thought of a Bond narrative having depth. To you, I say—read Casino Royale, and if you find that it’s not one of the most exquisitely bleak expressions of post-WWII moral isolation, on a par with the best of Chandler, well . . . just light up another clove cigarette and wait for the next book to come out from a Bennington grad, Poopsie.
The depth of great Bond narratives, in film and in print—a depth comparable to that of the aforementioned Raymond Chandler’s Phil Marlowe stories—is based upon Bond’s personal sense of duty and honor (and it speaks volumes that Fleming and Chandler were pals). The world of Fleming’s Cold War, rather like Chandler’s Los Angeles, is a rotten and amoral place, as existentially alienating as anything Camus imagined. Chandler’s Los Angeles can be thought of as a character in the Marlowe stories, maybe as a sort of moral inversion—a doppelganger—of Marlowe himself. Maybe, not to belabor the homophonic point, you could say that Los Angeles is as much Marlowe’s doppelganger as Mr. Kurtz was that of Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness. I’d argue that only a world as morally alienating as Fleming’s vision of the Cold War could allow for the incredible sense of existential danger that Fleming infused into the climaxes of his novels, to the point that even sensible readers can keep the window of disbelief open for some of Fleming’s more absurd conceits, such as Dr. No having a captive giant squid handy as an implement of torture and murder.
Fleming’s Cold War, as a character lurking in the background, as malignant and aware a motivating force as Blofeld himself was in the novel Thunderball, is Bond’s doppelganger. It’s a shitty world in which great and wonderful guys like former circus strongman and raw-food aficionado Kerim Bey can survive a bomb blast only to die like a bitch at the hands of Red Grant, women like Mrs. Krest can be flogged with a stingray tail, and girls like Tiffany Case can be gang raped as teenagers. It’s a world in which your best pal can be fed to the sharks by Live and Let Die’s Mr. Big, or be incinerated by Dr. No’s mechanical “dragon.” It’s a world in which a girl like Vesper Lynd . . . well . . . let’s not talk about Vesper, shall we? Or for that matter, the late Mrs. Tracy Bond?
The Cold War is Bond’s deadly “other,” and it manifests itself as the inverse of those virtues that define Bond’s moral universe. Moonraker’s Hugo Drax is a pus-filled rotter, and his rottenness isn’t so much defined by the fact that he’s building a rocket that will kill hundreds of thousands, but by the fact that he (Shudder!) cheats at cards at the Blades Club, grinning and braying through his crooked ogre’s teeth—one of the most tasteless displays at the venerable Club until Madonna showed up there in fencing gear. Goldfinger cheats at cards and golf, and it’s hugely telling that the centerpiece of the novel Goldfinger isn’t some dorky chase scene like the ones that stop the film Diamonds Are Forever dead (c’mon . . . a freakin’ Moon Buggy chase through the Nevada desert?), but the psychological warfare waged between Bond and Goldfinger on the greens. The central moment of Diamonds the novel is when Bond witnesses the cruelty of the smugglers as they rough up innocent bystanders at Acme Mud and Sulphur. Yeah, these guys, the Spangled Mob, are dirty rotten crooks, but Bond truly wants to stop them because they’re bullies.
The depth of Bond, of both the character and the narratives centered around that character, lies in the fact that Bond, to crib from Hamlet, is to his own self true, a quality he shares with Marlowe. This is not a quality that makes him irresistible to women, one of the most defining aspects of the filmic Bond and one that has proven to be such a gleeful object of parody in the Austin Powers movies. It’s a quality that makes Bond’s ideals and codes of ethics irresistible to him. Let me give you an example of this in the context of a body of Bond work that I’m really not crazy about, but that was so cool for a guy with a paradigm of Bond fandom like mine that it’s worth mentioning here, because it gleams so dramatically against a background of general mediocrity. Roger Moore is my least favorite Bond.1 But after the bloated excesses of the film version of Moonraker, it was a joy in For Your Eyes Only to see Moore play a Bond with the kind of haunted depth I describe above. This may be the reason that Leonard Maltin saw fit to write of For Your Eyes Only: “No other James Bond film has provoked so much debate among 007 fans. . . .” I’m one of those Bond fans who thought it was brilliant and satisfying to see Moore as Bond kick that murdering bastard Locque over a cliff after Locque killed MI6 agent Ferarra and Countess Lisl (played by the now-late wife of Pierce Brosnan, Cassandra Harris). The last killer with no dialogue we’d had in a Bond film up to that point had been the utterly cartoonish Jaws, who became a good guy when the plot of Moonraker necessitated it. In For Your Eyes Only, the silent killer was a truly ruthless prick who seemed to enjoy his work.
Only a Bond who is haunted, who like Marlowe has an evil opposite in the form of the monstrously bleak world he inhabits, could off Locque and make the act satisfying for both Bond and the audience. At the end of the aforementioned movie version of Moonraker, Moore’s Bond pumps Drax full of cyanide and blasts him out of an airlock, quipping: “Take a giant step back for mankind.” That’s a stunningly horrible death, but it didn’t shock anybody the way that Moore’s kicking Locque over that cliff did. That’s because there was no depth to Moonraker. It was an expression of the Banal Bond, who operates only on a surface level—who doesn’t exist in a world of dark existential cruelty but a world of shiny buttons and gadgets. Hell, in Moore’s first foray into Bond-om, he shoved compressed air down Kananga’s throat until the man burst, albeit cartoonishly. Just how many bullets did Moore pump into Karl Stromberg’s chest at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me? Was it the violence of Locque’s death that freaked out some Bond fans, or was it the context? A context in keeping with Fleming’s dark and deadly vision of the world?
And I wanna point out that by “banal,” I don’t mean in the strict dictionary definition of “dull and ordinary.” Such a use of the term would be . . . well . . . banal. In this context, I mean a much more dynamic (if such a modifier can be applied) idea. The banality I speak of is an aggressive and active vapidity that has the implication of making culture itself hollow and unsatisfying as a really stale and waxy Chocolate Easter Bunny. Yeah, that initial biting off of the ears might be fun, but once you hit where that bunny brain oughta be, it tastes really bad and makes your teeth hurt. In this post–Hannah Arendt world, in which she had famously described the captured Nazi Eichmann in terms of “the banality of evil,” the word “banal” has gone far beyond being just a thesaurus entry for “boring” or “workaday”; the implication can, in certain discourses, refer to a certain eroding kind of absence.2
So there’s Banal Bond, and then there’s Book Bond, to whom he stands opposite. And in my humble but unimpeachable opinion, movie incarnations of Bond avoid banality when the good folks at EON Productions allow the qualities of the Book Bond to shine through: his non-campy patriotism (expressed through his actions, not Union Jack parachutes), his loyalty to his friends, his sense of justice, and his perseverance. Let’s consider his perseverance for a moment in the novel Moonraker. No quips could be made while Bond willfully put his own face in an open fire source to save Gala Brand, only to be ditched by her and left alone on a park bench like Jethro Tull’s Aqualung.
And what are the qualities that define the Banal Bond? What is the sociocultural context of that banality? When Bond is banal, the banality is the same as that of The Flintstones and The Jetsons.
| ASK DR. YES |
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Dear Dr. Yes, James Bond slept with my sister and now she’s dead, covered in a layer of gold. I tried to kill her murderer, unsuccessfully? I met Bond and he didn’t even try to sleep with me. I mean, what’s that about? I’m at least as hot as my sister. Anyway, here’s my question. I estimate there’s about 100 ounces of gold covering my sister, with a market value of over $30,000. Any suggestions as to how to get this gold off? I’ll be damned if I’m burying it with her. Sincerely, The Good-looking Sister
Dear Good-looking, How callous can you be? Has it ever occurred to you that James was still heartbroken over the death of your sister? It sometimes takes him days to get over it when a lover dies due to thoughtless actions on his part. Plus, you aren’t all that good-looking, frankly. Regarding your poor sister, I know just what to do. The exact same thing happened to an aunt of mine. Ship the body to me and I’ll take care of everything. Sincerely, Dr. Yes |
Yes, go back and reread that last sentence.
Yes, I really did say that.
I bet you’re saying right now: “Boy! Mike must be smoking somethin’ really good! I wished he’d share!”
But think about it, Padawan. What was the main thread of humor throughout both The Flintstones and The Jetsons? What was its historical context? In postwar consumerist society, there was an explosion of commodities infiltrating homes. This was a life-changing trend, as Betty Friedan mentioned in The Feminine Mystique: “The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother.”
This didn’t create so much culture shock, as, perhaps, consumer shock. The humor of The Flintstones, with its primitive animal-powered appliances, and of The Jetsons, with its absurdly high-tech fetishization of convenience (to the point of living rooms having moving sidewalks), is a hyperbolizing of the changes that gadgets wrought upon daily life.
This Western, postwar consumerist fetishization and hyperbolizing of gadgetry is shifted from the realm of Levittown living rooms to the realm of Cold War not-so-realpolitik in the Bond films. Yeah, Le Chiffre’s tricked-out car was a kind of gadget in the novel Casino Royale, but it was a deadly gadget that just about any really good machinist could rig up. It doesn’t rate on the same gadget-y scale as, say, Bond’s amphibious Lotus in the movie The Spy Who Loved Me. That Lotus (welcomely blown to scrap in For Your Eyes Only) and his freakin’ amphibious gondola in Moonraker (and I thought Diamond’s Moon Buggy was a buzzkill), as gadgets, push the same cultural buttons as do the gadgets of The Flintstones and The Jetsons (though, on The Flintstones, a true amphibian would be the motivating force behind the gadget/commodity/appliance). Bond’s gondola, Wilma’s mastodon-nosed dishwasher, and the Jetson’s treadmill dogwalker all occupy the same cultural niche of banality. There’s a reason why Bond-ian gadgets could be featured in the flick A Man Called Flintstone, if you think about it.
Bond’s strength as a character, in the novels and in the best of the films, transcends his scrawny, cancer-lunged physical presence, with its dainty Julia Roberts-y wrists that so favor the trigger pull of a totally girly Beretta. His strength as a character transcends that banalizing influence, gadget fetishization, and hyperbole. What makes Bond a brilliant, driving cultural force is his opposition to his doppelganger and his “other”: the gravitas he gains as the exact inversion of the rotten world of the Cold War, either as that Cold War world exists in fact, or in his own perceptions.
These strengths have been given their best expression to date in the performances of Timothy Dalton as Bond. Yes, I’m putting into a larger sociocultural context what is essentially the assertion of a girlfriend-less fanboy, typed out with orange Dorito-stained fingertips on an Internet message board between sips of flat, room-temperature Jolt Cola: “Dude! Dalton . . . like . . . totally RAWKS!” But acting, like writing, painting, or any other art form, is influenced by, and can be a comment upon, sociocultural forces and contexts. More than any other actor (as of this writing Daniel Craig is still filming Casino Royale), Dalton, while playing an iconic role, had the skill and talent to integrate the qualities of the Book Bond into the screen persona of Bond, in a manner that nearly erased all traces of the Banal Bond. Dalton’s Bond, at the historic moment of the late 1980s when The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1989) were released, tapped then-current sociocultural trends in a way that allowed the spirit of Fleming’s Cold War-hardened Bond of thirty years previous to be recontextualized in a world in which the Cold War was ending. By being true to the Bond defined by conflict with the Soviets, Dalton’s interpretation of Bond allowed the character to survive as a vibrant cultural force after the fall of the Soviet Union. Dalton’s Bond is a man defined by his own integrity, which in turn is defined as the inverse of the morally rotten world of the Cold War. Dalton’s Bond is so thoroughly and perfectly defined by that “other” that his Bond, haunted by that doppelganger, functions in a non-Cold War narrative as no banal Bond possibly could. Dalton’s Bond is so thoroughly an echo of the Book Bond, so thoroughly defined by the soul-killingly bleak Cold War world articulated by Fleming, that his Bond can function without the “training wheels” of a strictly Cold War narrative and setting, rather like how Fleming’s Bond can function in the novel The Spy Who Loved Me without the “training wheels” of a Cold War conflict (even though the backstory deals with Bond’s hunting SPECTRE agents in North America).3
An elegant expression of this can be found in the non-Cold War Licence to Kill, in which Dalton’s Bond whacks a henchman of Milton Krest, who has killed Bond’s friend, Sharkey (who, for all intents and purposes, is an iteration of Quarrel, following the film series’ Quarrel of Dr. No and Quarrel, Jr., of Live and Let Die). As the henchman pulls up Sharkey’s boat along Krest’s, he delights in telling Krest, as Sharkey is strung up alongside the sharks he had been catching as a cover while helping Bond infiltrate Krest’s operation, Sharkey’s name. Bond avenges his friend. It’s personal as he kills the henchman with a spear-gun, saying coldly: “Compliments of Sharkey!” It’s a violent and brutal act that is appropriate and right in a violent and brutal world. Dalton’s Bond uses violence and he means it. The violence itself has meaning, rather like the moment in which Moore’s Bond kicked Locque over the cliff, because the act is that of a man haunted by his doppelganger, the rotten world of the Cold War that Fleming articulated.
Compare Dalton’s sincere killing of Krest’s henchman with the moment in Thunderball when Connery’s Bond offs a guy with a spear-gun, an act that was a joke, punctuated by the punchline, “I think he got the point!” The jokiness of Connery’s quip makes the killing morally safe, divorcing and distancing Bond’s acts of violence from the existentially bleak world of Fleming’s imagination and freeing the character of Bond from that bleak world. We in the audience are let off the hook; the joke expiates us. It’s indicative of the larger shift to banality begun in Thunderball and continued though the series’ devolution throughout the late ’60s to the mid-’80s, with respites coming in the form of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and For Your Eyes Only. This distancing from bleakness and softening of brutality makes Bond a creature of surface gloss and gadgets, a character who can’t confront brutal villains because he himself is not capable of (warranted) brutality in return.
True, Dalton had his share of quips, but they were not delivered as jokes. Toward the end of The Living Daylights, after Bond killed the not-so-subtly-named assassin Necros by cutting the laces of the boot to which Necros clung as both Bond and Necros dangled from the end of a Hercules aircraft, Dalton’s Bond mutters, “He got the boot!” But Dalton’s delivery is one of bitter irony, a comment on the arbitrary and cruel nature of the world he inhabits, and by which he is haunted.
There’s another fine moment in Licence to Kill, in which Bond stuffs an unconscious guy into an incubator drawer full of maggots, softly saying to the worms, “Bon appetit!” This is a moment of darkness too severe for any previous Bond to have pulled off with the seriousness with which Dalton does. Roger Moore, in contrast, can off Tee Hee, Kananga’s one-armed henchman, and call the encounter “disarming.” Such light-heartedness is impossible with Dalton’s Bond, which is not to say that Dalton is incapable of humor and spoof; look to his Errol Flynn parody in The Rocketeer and his turn as Bond caricature Damien Drake in Looney Tunes, Back in Action. Yet even Connery in his most lethal moments could not have pulled off the hotel room invasion of The Living Daylights, in which Dalton’s Bond terrorized General Pushkin and his mistress. The entire scene, crucial to the plot, only works if the audience is convinced of Bond’s intent, or at least his capability, of executing Pushkin, and that such a killing would have dire consequences that couldn’t be “disarmed” with a quip.
I mentioned how an artist can tap sociocultural forces in the creation of his or her work. What sociocultural forces did Dalton tap in the creation of his uniquely lethal Bond? (Which is not to say he created his Bond without the help of director John Glen and screenwriters Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum.) Let’s consider the historic context in which Dalton created his Bond, with the advantage of almost twenty years’ hindsight: the late 1980s climax of the Cold War. It’s telling that 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, made while Carter was in office but before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, was rife with the spirit of détente, with Bond teaming up with Soviet spy Major Anya Amasova to bring down Stromberg, a villain who did for supertankers and subs what SPECTRE did for spacecraft. By 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, Bond-ian détente entailed Bond smashing the McGuffin ATAC device and telling General Gogol: “That’s détente, Comrade! You don’t have it. I don’t have it.”
The solidification of Reaganite and Thatcherite political ideologies in the U.S. and the U.K., particularly after the invasions of the Falklands and Grenada, manifested themselves in popular culture in works of great maturity and vapidity. For each facile teen doomsday fantasy like War Games, there was The Day After, Threads, Special Bulletin, and Testament. With the advent of infantile bolus like Rambo, Red Scorpion (produced by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff), Red Dawn, and Rocky IV, there were also the very fine and bleak miniseries versions of John Le Carre’s Smiley’s People and A Perfect Spy.
The climax of the Cold War was reflected in these pop culture artifacts, knowingly or not on the part of their creators. The clean-cut All-American teens of Red Dawn, crushing the mighty Soviet Army with the help of deus ex machina Cheerios, and the exhausted stare of Alec Guinness’s Smiley, belong on opposite ends of the same cultural spectrum. The sociocultural trends which gave us a then-thirty-two-year-old Patrick Swayze as a teenage guerrilla and Elie Weisel and Carl Sagan talking about nuclear war after the broadcast of The Day After (to say nothing of the Ben Stein-conceived miniseries Amerika) could not help but have an impact on the premiere Cold War pop culture meta-narrative that had begun more than twenty years before with the release of Dr. No. Physical confrontation with a Cold War superman had meant Connery’s Bond fighting to the death with Red Grant (he of the red wine with fish preference) on the Orient Express. In the miasma of the 1980s, such a confrontation meant Rocky Balboa fighting Rocky IV’s Ivan Drago (he of the implied steroid use) in a Stalinist arena. After the 1983 placement of Pershing missiles in the U.K. and West Germany, and the subsequent protests from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the notion of a “secret missile base” like SPECTRE’s volcano launch pad in You Only Live Twice somehow lost its kitsch value. The world had changed, and the Bond series had to acknowledge this, eschewing vapidity, which had become really vapid, and competing on some level with the works of maturity being produced.
It goes without saying that Bond is the center of the Bond-ian universe. The more depth Bond has, the more depth his world has, and the less it must rely on gadgets, gloss, and shiny surface banality. I mentioned that the non-Banal Bond is defined by his doppelganger: the ugly world of Cold War brutality and moral alienation. Bond the character defines the world that we the audience inhabit while watching Bond films or reading Bond novels. Licence to Kill, the Bond film most divorced narratively from the Cold War, dealing as it does with drug trafficking free of the Soviet backing that funded Mr. Big’s in the novel Live and Let Die, is still the Bond narrative most defined by Bond’s personal code, by Bond’s “otherness” from the morally alienating Cold War. In most Bond films, Bond is moved into action by M’s orders. Licence to Kill features a Bond whose motives are entirely his own. And no other actor who has played Bond could carry a film with a narrative and a premise such as that of Licence to Kill, because no other actor has allowed his interpretation of Bond to be defined by that haunting “other” of the world of the Cold War to the extent that Dalton has. It is this definition by the “other,” the depth and the gravitas of this definition, that allows Bond to define the Bond-ian universe, much more so than Q’s handiwork.
While filming Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles said, “The drama itself dictates the kind of world in which it is going to happen.” Dalton’s Bond, haunted like no other actor’s, defined by his world like no other actor’s, creates the most compelling drama of the film series. The drama carried by Dalton’s Bond in turn infuses the Bond-ian world with a strength and realism that gives the films the kind of boot-to-the-teeth impact that Fleming’s books have. It is a Bond-ian universe defined by a mythic Cold War that is strong and compelling enough to transcend the limitations of the real Cold War, which was reaching its climax and ending as the Dalton films were produced. It’s what’s inside Bond that counts, and what’s inside is a toughness that isn’t limited by his slight frame and grotesque smoking habits. Dalton’s Bond is the truest to Fleming’s and, as such, the “character” that is the world he inhabits is the truest and most resonant. A believable world is a world in which we, as an audience, can participate, a world in which we’re not let off the hook with a quip-y punch line. Bond has a license to kill, yet Dalton’s Bond does not give us, the audience, a license to laugh off those killings. We share his Bond’s existential vision, which takes Bond out of the realm of superhero voyeurism and into the world of real conflict. In short . . . Dalton, my friends, for the true Fleming fan, totally RAWKS.
For the past fifteen years, MICHAEL MARANO’s work has appeared on the Public Radio Satellite Network program Movie Magazine International, syndicated in more than 111 markets in the U.S. and Canada. His commentary on pop culture has appeared in venues such as The Boston Phoenix, The Independent Weekly, The Weekly Dig, Science Fiction Universe, and Paste magazine. Marano’s short fiction has been published in several high-profile anthologies, including the Lambda-winning Queer Fear series, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 11, and Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories from the Edge; his first novel Dawn Song won the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards.
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1 Yes, he’s waaaaay behind Lazenby, in my book. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a righteously cool Bond movie, one of the best. See it again, if you don’t believe me. It might just be the only Bond movie to improve on the Fleming work on which it is based.
2 It’s sort of interesting in this context that Bond and M, in the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, talk about “doing a kidnap job” on Blofeld, “rather like the Israelis did with Eichmann.”
3 And yes, as a Fleming fan, it’s hard for me to defend the truly appalling 1962 novel The Spy Who Loved Me (the main plot of which concerns Bond stumbling across petty gangsters in upstate New York) as anything really worth reading beyond a curiosity piece. In terms of cultural history, it’s interesting to think of the novel’s narrator, twenty-three-year-old Vivienne Michel, as a young woman coming of age throughout the ’60s. She’s the exact same age as Mary Tyler Moore’s signature character Mary Richards (she’d be around thirty in 1970). How did Women’s Lib affect the rather flighty Vivienne, who so thoroughly fell for her rescuer? Food for thought. . . .
