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THE LONELY SPY:

[ Emphasis in red type by Abyssum ]

The latest entry in the James Bond franchise, Spectre, is out today – its reviews are middling, around 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. Daniel Craig has made four Bond movies, two of them good, one of them terrible, and this is likely to be his last. He’s brought an enjoyable degree of brooding physicality to the role. But he seems to be alone in being the one man on earth who despises the role he inhabits – describing Bond in interviews as a sad, lonely drunk misogynist, a throwback to a bygone sexist era of Cold War spies and intrigue, an antique that ought to be set in the corner and left to gather dust.

Craig isn’t wrong – as a creation, Bond connects because he is a product of Ian Fleming’s daydreams, and those dreams are not necessarily the same as those of modern men. But it’s also a very limited perspective. Craig seems to think of Bond as nothing more than a humorless version of Sterling Archer – the cad-bro with a Walther, a five o’clock shadow, and a pitcher of martinis called on by the powers at be to sober up and dash off to Monaco to save the world and bed the girl, and not necessarily in that order. But there’s a greater depth to the character that emerges if you read the Fleming novels – the sad charm of the superhero’s lament – that speaks to the idea of loss that comes with the responsibilities of any figure who stands between country and chaos.

Joshua London writes on the Fleming effect today. http://vlt.tc/266z  “Fleming offers stories that are at once hardnosed and fantastical. There is driving narrative, sharp action, and lucid, occasionally lyrical, prose. And perhaps most memorably, there is Fleming’s impeccable, yet idiosyncratic, attention to the small details that helps create a sense of verisimilitude and authenticity. Even when the same silly villainous excesses associated with the films appear in the novels, the setting has made them seem plausible.

“Kingsley Amis admiringly dubbed this “the Fleming effect,” and explains it as “the imaginative use of information, whereby the pervading fantastic nature of Bond’s world, as well as the temporary, local, fantastic elements in the story, are bolted down in some sort of reality, or at least counter-balanced.” As Umberto Eco explains, Fleming “takes time to convey the familiar with photographic accuracy” so that the reader’s “credulity is solicited, blandished, directed to the region of possible and desirable things.” This, in turn, enables Fleming to pull off his sleight of hand: “for the rest, so far as the unlikely is concerned, a few pages suffice and an implicit wink of the eye.” …

“What’s more, despite the now otherworldly nature of our immediate past, Fleming’s books are not quite as dated as one might expect. While clearly of their period, Fleming’s creation is not without some foresight. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote in his introduction to the Penguin edition of one of the Bond books: “The staying power of the books… is… partly and paradoxically attributable to their departure from standard Cold War imagery…By some latent intuition, Fleming was able to peer beyond the Cold War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate the emerging milieu of the Colombian cartels, Osama bin Laden and, indeed, the Russian Mafia, as well as the nightmarish idea that some such fanatical freelance megalomaniac would eventually collar some weapons-grade plutonium.”

Rob Tracinski argues that what Bond is, or ought to be, is someone separated from the modern trend toward lauding the anti-hero. http://vlt.tc/2675  “A British agent running around the world acting as an executioner may not be exactly legal and might not even be the best policy for a spy. But this is art, not life. The purpose is to show Bond’s decisiveness, his willingness to take a life without remorse in the cause of queen and country. After all, when you’ve got a job to do you’ve got to do it well. You’ve got to give the other fellow hell. Yet while Bond is ruthless, he is not a contemporary “anti-hero” in the “Sopranos”/”Mad Men”/”Breaking Bad” tradition. He may have a license to kill, but he kills people who need killing, and it doesn’t really keep him up at night. He’s not tormented or conflicted — or at least, he’s not supposed to be.”

Of course, we’re dealing with superheroes here – Bond is as close to behaving like an actual spy as your average local police officer is to being Batman, his white tuxedo spycraft as ludicrous as a cape. But the underlying lessons are still there: that there is nobility in service to your country; that courage in the face of astounding odds is a virtue; and that regardless of the personal cost, the forces in the world who profit from chaos and destruction will have to go through someone first. These are all encouraging thoughts in an age of instability, and for all its defects as a film franchise, it is still something that makes this throwback matter.