How to Avoid the Perennial Mistakes of Would-Be World Conquerors
IF ALL MY YEARS of watching Bond movies have taught me anything, it’s how not to take over the world.
Sure, fellows like Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Blofeld have hatched some truly brilliant schemes (except for that weird bit about hypnotizing pretty girls into loving chickens, or whatever), and you certainly can’t accuse them of not trying hard enough. But no matter how close they come to succeeding, it seems the same, predictable slip-ups doom them to failure every time.
Sometimes I think I could make good money offering seminars to would-be world conquerors, if only they were the sort to listen to advice. Sadly, their typical response to constructive criticism is to hurl someone into an acid bath. But let’s suppose for a moment you’re an aspiring evil genius yourself, and that you’re willing to take an objective look at what things worked for your predecessors and where you might outdo them. What sort of lessons might be learned from what’s gone before?
First, we know that to be a great Bond villain, you’ve got to think big. Common acts of evil like forgery, embezzlement, and telemarketing are fine for beginners, but Bond’s foes are a more ambitious lot; they aim to break into Fort Knox, snatch space capsules from their orbits, unleash Omega viruses, and maneuver the superpowers into nuclear war. As Auric Goldfinger put it, “Man has climbed Mt. Everest . . . gone to the bottom of the ocean. He has fired rockets to the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor . . . except crime!” Every great Bond villain believes the museum of human wickedness still lacks its one defining masterpiece, and he wants to be the one to paint it. Your first step toward joining the ranks of these van Goghs of villainy, then, is to devise a malevolent magnum opus of your own.
Of course, in order to do the job right, you’ll need access to a vast personal fortune. Seriously, if you think skiing and golf are expensive hobbies, try taking over the world. All those orbiting death rays, submarines, nerve gases, and hydrofoils don’t come cheap, you know. And that’s not even counting the overhead costs associated with feeding your crocodiles and pythons, outfitting your troops in colorful jumpsuits, and keeping fuel in your fleet of helicopters. Naturally, as much of your inventory as possible should be emblazoned with a spiffy logo, so you can expect to pay big bucks for an evil graphic designer, too. And people being what they are, as soon as one of your henchmen gets a pair of poison-toed shoes or a razor-brimmed hat, everyone’s going to want one.
Then there’s the enormous expense of building (let alone heating and lighting) a high-tech headquarters under the sea, in space, or in a hollowed-out volcano. Granted, having a spiffy secret base is one of the coolest perks of being an evil genius, but take care you don’t let it consume your entire operating budget. All too often, it starts with you thinking, “Maybe I’ll put that old, empty supertanker to good use,” and the next thing you know you’ve got a work environment so huge it takes a multimillion-dollar monorail system to get from the conference room to the cafeteria. At least decorating isn’t a major expense; just stick with traditional stainless steel for everything. If you need to add a bit of visual interest here and there, consider some mood-enhancing designer accents, like maybe a shark tank or piranha pool.
The one thing you definitely do not want to do is install a self-destruct button. I understand the temptation; if things go awry, you want to be able to cover your tracks and leave no evidence behind. Let’s face it, though; these things are just a bad idea. Besides the obvious risk of 007 finding the blasted gizmo and turning it against you, having a self-destruct button sends the wrong message to your loyal minions. It shows that somewhere in the back of your mind, you can actually imagine your schemes in ruins and yourself on the run. With that kind of defeatist attitude, you’re never going to take over the world.
Once construction’s begun on your evil lair, you’ll need to assemble a top-drawer team of second bananas, yes-men, and flunkies. Here we can learn some vital lessons from the mistakes of past Bond villains.
| ASK DR. YES |
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Dear Dr. Yes,
I get such a pleasure from killing men. I like to crush them between my thighs, slowly crushing the life out of them, squeezing and squeezing as they beg for mercy, their pathetic feeble scratchings against my all-powerful thighs. . . . Sorry, I lost myself in the moment for a minute there.
Here’s the thing: I think I might be a little too into it. At least that’s what my boyfriend kept saying, until I crushed him to death. Now I’m crushing three or four men to death a day and my thighs are getting disproportionately developed relative to my arms. Can you suggest any exercises that can help me develop my arms as well? I’d hate to get out of balance.
The Georgian Flower
Dear Flower,
You might try crushing a man or two to death with your elbows once in a while. Variety, after all, is the key to maintaining a healthy and satisfying sex life.
In the meantime, my boss, Jeffery Mindow (1137 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA), can be a real jerk to work for, but deep down he is a nice guy, I’m quite sure. I think you’d really like him. I’d very much like to see you two kids get together. He could be the one!
No need to thank me.
Sincerely,
Dr. Yes
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First and foremost, do not hire the hot chick. You know what I mean; every Bond villain surrounds himself with one or two hulking henchmen, a dozen to a hundred hired killers, and one lone female, invariably gorgeous and always the weak link in the chain.
Hey, I’m as human as the next guy; I understand the appeal of a pretty face, especially when your other employees are a pack of broken-nosed thugs. But the cold, hard truth is that it’s just not worth jeopardizing your one shot at global domination to watch some cutie sashay around the fortress in a miniskirt.
You might tell yourself she has strategic value; she can seduce that womanizing 007 and lure him to his doom. Trust me, it never works. In From Russia With Love, SPECTRE recruits blonde bombshell Tatiana Romanova to seduce Bond and set him up for the kill; instead she falls for him and turns on her handlers. In You Only Live Twice, a helplessly bound Bond faces torture from SPECTRE’s ravishing redhead Helga Brandt and her nasty collection of surgical instruments. She uses them only to cut Bond loose for a bout of lovemaking. In Live and Let Die, Kananga’s inner circle consists of a fat killer, a hook-handed hoodlum, a possibly immortal zombie lord, and, of course, Solitaire, a sexy female fortune-teller. (Which of these things does not belong?) Naturally she’s seduced by 007 and disaster follows. Most famously, Pussy Galore—a professional criminal on the verge of pulling off the biggest heist of her career—is completely reformed by one roll in the hay with James Bond and sells out her partner-in-crime Goldfinger, literally on the doorstep of Fort Knox.
To be fair, not every bad girl is swayed by a tryst with James Bond. Fiona in Thunderball and Elektra in The World Is Not Enough have their fun with the super-spy and remain happily on the side of evil. Until they’re shot to death, that is. Fatima Blush of Never Say Never Again emerges from her dalliance with 007 as gleefully rotten as ever . . . until she explodes.
On the whole, however, hiring a female agent tends to open you up to more risks than you’ll want to take on. And really, why bother if she’ll be the only woman in the entire organization, anyway? Or were you planning to outfit the volcano fortress with a ladies’ room and separate shower facilities just for her? When you’re already guilty of nuclear blackmail, genocide, and missile toppling, the last thing you should care about is complaints from the Equal Employment Opportunity crowd. But if for some reason you feel you simply must hire a woman, then for pity’s sake at least don’t tempt fate with a name like “Pussy Galore.”
While we’re on the subject of personnel, one area Bond villains could really stand to work on is employee relations. In an average week, an evil genius will yell at his lackeys at least a dozen times and, if he’s really cranky, kill one or two for good measure. Even on a good day, a bad guy’s hirelings are transporting deadly tarantulas, operating atomic reactors dressed in “protective” suits made of plastic wrap, and acting as human shields for the boss when the authorities come crashing through the roof. Frankly, it’s a wonder anyone still answers a classified ad for “Evil Underling.”
Of course, diabolical masterminds make for difficult bosses in general, but the top men at SPECTRE really take the cake. Maybe when “Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion” are part of the company name, maintaining a feel-good work environment is a bit much to ask, but this outfit seems to go out of its way to dump on its workers. In Thunderball, for example, a loyal henchman for SPECTRE’s No. 2 man Emilio Largo bravely battles Bond and they both fall into a pool. Largo shows his gratitude by trapping friend and foe alike underwater and sending in the hungry sharks. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, SPECTRE chief Ernst Stavro Blofeld starts an avalanche to crush 007, utterly unconcerned that in the process he’s entombing several of his own troops. Far from being isolated incidents, these episodes are treated as a typical day at the office. Suffice it to say, the gift shop at SPECTRE headquarters probably did not sell a lot of “World’s Greatest Boss” coffee mugs.
I submit you’ll automatically be one step ahead of the evil geniuses who’ve gone before if only you treat your underlings with a bit more respect. Granted, flunkies can be exasperating at times, but try to remember they’re as committed to evil as you are, and they only want to keep you happy. In what other field would you find someone willing to climb around on the outside of a moving plane just because you told them to? Cut them a little slack.
At the very least you should try to restrain yourself from killing your minions before Bond even gets a crack at them. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to run a tight ship, but it’s just possible that electrocuting your junior executives during staff meetings isn’t the ideal way to boost company morale. The next time you’re about to have a hapless lackey exterminated for reporting Bond’s latest escape, stop and think about the effect on the rest of your workforce. Can you imagine the talk at the water cooler? “Hey, I haven’t seen Schmidt in a while. Whatever happened to that guy?” “Oh, he gave the boss some bad news and got dropped out of the airship.” That kind of medieval management style may remind the wage slaves who’s boss, but it doesn’t exactly foster esprit de corps.
Try to look at mistakes as teaching moments. An employee who’s screwed up has a real incentive to try harder next time. Kill him and he won’t learn anything. If you can’t find it in yourself to show a little compassion (you are a villain, after all), then at least try some pragmatism. For every operative you rub out, you’ll only have to recruit another one, and in today’s high-tech labor market it’s not easy finding applicants with an interest in good old-fashioned thuggery. It’s not exactly a dream job, you know, living in a hidden fortress with no sunlight for months at a time (and only one woman!), not to mention wearing those goofy jumpsuits every day (the black ones aren’t so bad, but some bosses insist on garish yellow or red . . . with berets, no less). Plus, word of mouth spreads pretty fast about a place like SPECTRE Island, where “training exercises” for new recruits include running past “teachers” trying to kill them with live ammo and flamethrowers. Good luck making that sound appealing in a recruitment brochure.
The problem with ruling by fear alone is that your workforce soon degenerates into a demoralized, surly lot who shuffle around your compound purposely avoiding eye contact with you or even each other. Soon there’s no sense of community at all. Then one day James Bond waltzes in wearing a borrowed uniform and nobody even spots him as a new face.
Speaking of uniforms, my advice is to deliberately hand-pick a support staff for your hideout based on their body types. For all security-sensitive jobs, only choose personnel who are noticeably taller, shorter, or fatter than James Bond. Because if so much as a single employee in a hundred has 007’s measurements, it’s virtually guaranteed that employee will somehow end up in a position to get hit over the head and have his uniform stolen.
If Bond does manage to infiltrate your stronghold, there’s a good chance he’ll eventually fall into your clutches. When he does, try to resist the urge to reveal to him every critical detail of the operation you just spent years of your life and millions of your dollars putting together. I know it’s hard not to gloat when a plan’s going well, but blabbing all your strategies and timetables to a captive 007 is an indulgence that will only come back to haunt you. Just remember this simple rule of thumb: if you ever catch yourself starting a sentence with a phrase like “There’s no harm in telling you, since you’ll never live to interfere” . . . simply close your mouth and walk away.
Better yet, take advantage of the opportunity to kill Bond while you can, and I don’t mean with an elaborate deathtrap, either. It’s familiar advice, but no one ever seems to learn; it’s amazing how many evildoers waste their one shot at 007 by overthinking the means of his death. For example, in Moonraker a gun-toting adversary catches Bond off guard on a private jet. The villain’s cunning plan is to fire bullets into the plane’s controls, then parachute to safety leaving 007 to plunge earthward in the crippled aircraft. Why he doesn’t just use the gun to shoot Bond dead is anyone’s guess.
Even the best villains trip up on this point. With Bond at his mercy, Goldfinger tries to bisect him with an industrial laser. Hugo Drax tries to incinerate him with rocket exhaust. Aris Kristatos drags him behind a boat over jagged coral reefs. Any one of them could have ended Bond’s interference in moments for the price of one bullet, but instead they opt for needlessly complicated and thus escapable deathtraps. Even Alec Trevelyan, whom you might expect to know better as a former 00 agent himself, passes up a chance to simply shoot the unconscious Bond in GoldenEye, instead leaving him tied up in a helicopter programmed to destroy itself with its own missiles.
My advice is to forget the fancy stuff. Just dispatch Bond quickly and with no frills at your first opportunity. At the very least, don’t waste your best food and wine by sitting him down to a sumptuous feast before his execution. For some reason, when Bond villains, from Dr. No to Scaramanga to Kamal Khan, find 007 in their custody, their reaction is not, “At last I’m rid of you . . . BANG!” but rather, “Tomorrow I’ll be rid of you, but tonight, let’s enjoy this gourmet banquet.” Come on, this is a guy whose stomach is pampered with expensive cuisine and fine spirits every day. If you really want to torture him, serve up beans and franks with a can of domestic beer.
Another simple tip that can yield big results: make sure your employees know what Bond looks like, so when he arrives with some phony name, they’ll recognize him straightaway. Of course, when a guy presents himself as, say, a “marine biologist” driving a quarter-million-dollar sports car and wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit, you’d hope it would send up a red flag right away. But by simply circulating a few fliers bearing Bond’s photo, you can take all the guesswork out of it. Just think—a few dollars spent at the local copy shop could save you millions in exploded fortresses. (Frankly, Bond-spotting should be one of the basic, primary elements of training for all new recruits. Make it one of the cardinal rules: Always lock the entrance to the secret hideout, no smoking near the stolen nukes, and if you see the guy in this photo, shoot him on sight.)
You might even want to hire some assassins with the specific, full-time assignment of killing Bond. If so, consider deploying them as Step One of your scheme, before you’ve done anything else to attract attention. The time to hit Bond is not when he’s already on the case, with his defenses up and a hundred secret gadgets from Q Branch tucked away, but when he’s relaxing in a casino or on a beach somewhere between assignments. Maybe you could slip some poison in his foie gras. He’ll never see it coming.
If you’re going to make killing Bond a priority, however, you really should put some serious thought into it. In From Russia With Love, SPECTRE’s ingenuous training program for assassin Red Grant involves dressing some poor guy in a rubber James Bond mask and telling Grant, “go get him.” In terms of practical skill-building, this exercise is one step up from throwing darts at Bond’s photograph. Still, even a weak plan is better than none at all. Three films later, poor old Blofeld’s reduced to simply screaming “Kill Bond . . . now!” in an apoplectic rage.
This brings up another important rule: Never lose your head. A lot of common super-villain mistakes can be avoided by simply taking a deep breath and not pushing the panic button. In You Only Live Twice, for example, Bond flies his miniature helicopter over the Japanese volcano that very efficiently conceals SPECTRE’s launch pad for a spacecraft. “Nothing here but volcanoes,” he radios back to his colleagues, completely fooled. But then comes an attacking fleet of helicopters, and Bond figures there’s something important in that volcano after all. This entire scene is more or less repeated in GoldenEye when Trevelyan shoots a missile at Bond’s plane from a base that was until then perfectly disguised beneath a Cuban lake.
In both cases, things might have turned out differently for the villains if only they’d kept their cool. James Bond is far from the canniest sleuth around, but when you make the clues this big it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to spot them.
Now, with all these guidelines drawn, you’re ready to go out and make your mark as a super-villain. Before you do, however, make sure you establish a goal that at least makes sense. Cornering the world’s gold market for yourself is a brilliant idea, for instance. Blackmailing NATO with hijacked nuclear weapons shows real moxie. However, trying to provoke the political superpowers into starting World War III may not be the greatest brainstorm you ever had.
Again in You Only Live Twice, Blofeld decides a nifty way to put SPECTRE on top is to trigger nuclear Armageddon. “When the United States and Russia have annihilated each other,” he predicts, “we shall see a new power dominating the world.” What’s unclear is just how much of a world Blofeld thinks will be left to rule after a few hundred hydrogen bombs rain down on two continents. Similarly, in Tomorrow Never Dies, Elliot Carver figures news coverage of a war between China and the U.K. could earn his media outlets higher ratings, so he elects to start one himself. Since such a war would logically boost ratings for all the rival news outlets as well, it hardly seems worth the grief.
In The Spy Who Loved Me, Karl Stromberg at least understands the ramifications of a nuclear showdown. He wants the entire surface of the Earth destroyed. That way, he can create “a new and wonderful world beneath the sea.” Even by Bond villain standards, rebooting creation would seem a tall order, but if global destruction is your cup of tea, it’s vital to find employees who share your vision. Amazingly, Stromberg seems to have signed up at least a hundred like-minded, genocidal sea-lovers, but I wouldn’t count on such good luck myself. Sooner or later one of your flunkies is bound to realize, “Wait a minute, all my friends live on the Earth!” Stromberg’s also fortunate it never occurs to his troops that repopulating the planet—under the sea or anywhere else—will be slow going for a group comprised entirely of males.
My final advice to you, then, is to think your plans through. Find the evil scheme that works for you and have fun with it. Go out there and knock ’em dead . . . literally. These helpful tips, combined with your own high intellect and low cunning, will put you well on the way to global conquest. Follow them faithfully and you’ll soon be on top of the world; ignore them and, like your predecessors, you may well find yourself hurled off the Golden Gate Bridge, sucked out an airplane window, or burst like an overinflated balloon.
Above all, be confident in your own genius and don’t let that killjoy 007 rattle you. So long as you keep your cool, there’s no reason you can’t succeed. As Dr. No once said, “The successful criminal brain is always superior. It has to be.”
Of course, James Bond dropped him into a nuclear reactor the next day, but it doesn’t do to dwell on the negative, now does it?
DAVID MOREFIELD is a video producer and freelance writer with a BS in mass communications from Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1996, he has served as an editor at Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the award-winning James Bond tribute site (www.ianfleming.org), for which he has written numerous articles on 007 and his world. David’s writings on Bond and pulp fiction have also appeared in the magazines Razor and Thriller UK. He lives with his wife and two sons in Richmond, Virginia, and is on the Web at www.davidmorefield.com.