Casino Royale

[petronia]

Erin and I went to see this last Monday. When the credits rolled she said, "That was a good movie!" and I said, "Yes!" followed by "Hmm," and then I took a week to incubate an essay. XD;

When the film opened the papers made a brouhaha over the fact that Daniel Craig was the first blond James Bond. I didn't think anything of it going in I mean Sean Connery already gave us the first receding-hairline James Bond, bless his sexy soul, and that was an eon ago, and thus was surprised when it made a difference. It took me pretty much the whole movie to pin down the difference, though, and what I got in the end was this:

You know the bromide about how BL always pairs one blond guy and one dark-haired guy because the contrast makes for good visuals?

...It doesn't always apply, but averaged out it applies about as well to Bondverse as it does to BL. James Bond isn't BL (OKAY, I CAN HEAR THE PEANUT GALLERY, THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS HERE GUYS) but the universe operates in an analogously heightened fashion. Historically Bond is a tall, dark, handsome guy. Thus the following categories of people are allowed (though not required) to be blond:

• Archvillains
• Henchmen
• Babes
• Assorted (the CIA, the rest of MI6)

Villains can also be silver-haired, bald, or sport ominous widow's peaks (in fact this is preferred); babes can of course come in any colouring (though for balance there ought to be some contrast among them); and so forth. However. Blond in Bondverse is Goldfinger. It's Tatiana the Russian spy. At a stretch, it's Sean Bean. Germans, Russians, other East Europeans, some Americans for pure compare-and-contrast.

And now?

Out of the previous categories Daniel Craig most resembles a Henchman (which he is, of the British Crown): he's got that physical menace thing down. He runs, he leaps, he growls, he kills people with his bare hands... The Shadow of Brosnan's Bond is a skeevy, over-slick sociopath (whom Brosnan himself played to good effect in other films), but human. One can hit him and make him bleed but one can't strip him bare for torture and show it because the squeamishness level would buckle Bondverse's contract with the audience - they get away with it with Craig's Bond, barely. The Shadow of Craig's Bond is an animal. I'm not quite sure even now if I think he's good looking, but one pays attention, certainly. And part of it is because he's the only blond in the room.[1] Bond is and no one else gets to be anymore, or rather there's an influx of players who never were blond the way Germans and Russians can be: African, Greek, Latino or Arab to purposeful ambiguity. Or if not evil - African-American. Or just plain brunette, for compare-and-contrast.

It's a more accurate depiction of the world, percentage wise, though Bondverse mirrors the headlines of popular imagination. So is no one else blond because Bond is, or is Bond blond because no one else is, and that represents something? Which is chicken, which egg?


[1] Apart from Le Chiffre's arm candy - who being a Babe, everyone in the movie and the audience knows she's there to be blonde and on display. Apart from everything else it may signify, blond(e)ness is an automatic +5pt objectification in most of the known world, which is another reason they can strip Daniel Craig naked and tie him to a chair.


...I'm sort of lacking in sleep and will have to read this over at some point to see if it makes sense. XD; I guess the corollary here is, blond vs. dark isn't just a question of visuals in BL either, it has semiotic significance in that hair colour is part of the construct of expectations for a manga personality (even if the dark hair of a seme from a wealthy samurai family signifies differently from the dark hair of a spunky street kid uke), but I have to figure everyone knows this already and a bromide is just that.

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

dude! this is really interesting: I hadn't much considered the blond thing because, um, I barely even noticed Craig was blond - I knew it was some sort of point people had been making but he wasn't some sandy-haired Englishman but a dark dirty blond, so. In fact-- I was really hyped that Felix Leiter was there, since I really like him from the books (which I know much better than the films), and I've always thought of a dark-brownhaired Bond to a sandy ratlike Leiter (which is the BL contrast thing, I suppose, but without the BL), but of course they evaded running into that by making Leiter black.

I think Bond needs the brute physicality of Craig brings to the part? Since my sense of the character is in great part from the novels, and Fleming really takes pains to emphasise that Bond is a 'cold, ruthless killer' (prob exact words!), that he's an animal trained to kill for queen and country, that he's an arriviste, that he gets into scraps and gets out of them by getting lucky - you can put these together and get some suave fight-fuck-wear-tux robot, but I think if you want to have him human you need to have him be more hands-on, reeling from punches and clawing back. And doesn't 'getting 00 rank by killing two' thing at the beginning seems awfully old-fashioned: only two?

(in fact a friend I ran into last night described him as 'rugby-player bond' which is probably not quite what the makers were intending? he does have the little head and bullneck and sticky-out ears, but he's not fulfilling the posh/thick requirements too well. wrong sort of blond, after all.)

best thing about le chiffre's bird: the outfit she was wearing in the underground tanker whatsit scene toward the end, where clearly she thought 'we're going to a secret bunker for purposes of torture: must wear sexy black leather!'.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's not so much blond hair per se, when it comes down to it XD - more like, skin tone and all those lingering closeups of cold, blue eyes (very Henchman that). No one else in the movie has blue eyes either.

They take a different approach to putting Craig on-camera, altogether. Squit says "running is his best angle". I like the idea behind it (and good that they succeeded, I do enjoy this franchise XD), Brosnan represents the natural endpoint of one interpretation anyway. You can't really go darker and suaver without descending into caricature, and halfway points only invite comparison.

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

... but obviously the egg came first! making this not actually a pointless question, okayigetit. ^^;;

I guess I've derived some benefit from your timing; earlier this evening some guy was like "I got both POTC2 and Casino Royale and I'm probably going to watch them tonight" and I was thinking "Wasn't I just reading something about CR?  Wait, what was I reading?" orz

Now Dio is blond, and jojos until the pseudo-jojo were brunett!  And Johnny's hair is uh blue or something.  So Dio is a, if not unique, contrasting snowflake.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Okay, I thought it was self-evident Brandos are blond and JoJos are dark in order to provide a pleasant aesthetic contrast. XD (Jolyne's not really a brunette, though... well, she has multi-coloured hair. >_>)

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course.  I just had to bring jojo into it explicitly so the comment didn't end on "my mind is a seive, part 134536254986". >.>;;

Do you suppose jojos in the new universe may never be strictly dark-haired (and huge and tall) again until there's another paradigm shift?  Or do you suppose that, if it had occurred to araki an arc earlier, josuke might not have been a brunett either?  (I mean, joseph turned blond too. >.>;;;;)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I find trying to picture Josuke as a blond a brain-breaking enterprise. :0 And nobody had dark hair in SBR, it's not limited to the Joestar lineage. But how can prime-Jotaro not look exactly like original-Jotaro? Jotaro gives off the impression that he exists as the exact same person in every possible universe.

I'm not going to fall into the trap of attempting to predict Araki-sensei's ways. XD

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Well no, josuke wouldn't be josuke then.  And you need josuke to resemble jojos 1-3 to bring on the nostalgia.  I guess if he hadn't used part 4 to be more experimental and decided ahead of time that jojos don't all have to be hugely buff and dark-haired and male, part 4 might just not have existed. :(

[(Anonymous)]

If you want to talk about the politics of blondness, in the new Zelda game Link is an unremarkable peasant goat herder until his true powers as the Hero of Destiny are awakened. The only difference (besides the new outfit) is that before the change he's brown-haired, whereas afterwards he's blond.

It's an aristocracy thing. Princess Zelda is also blond.

In the new Bond movie, Vesper makes a point of Bond's Oxford credentials but says he wears them with "such disdain" -- he's got the outer appearance of an elite but he doesn't come by it naturally. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that the blond Bond is not really blond, he's sandy blond -- halfway between brunette and blond.

Oh yeah, and I also wanted to say that it's significant that he and Vesper have this conversation at all. In the earlier Bonds, Bond has these polished manners but they aren't explicitly linked to nobility. The audience is left to make that connection -- not hard, when Bond has the British accent Americans automatically associate with high society (funny how none of the Bonds had actual upper-crust accents). But the thing is, the ambiguity left room to fantasize.

"Every woman wants him and every man wants to be him." Wanting to be Bond is a lot harder when the perils are clearly outlined -- it's what you said about Pierce's shadow-self showing on the surface with Craig -- and also, a lot harder when you know for certain you don't have the background for it. (What's really ironic is that Craig doesn't have the background, either.)

Hm, what else. Casino Royale is so much more female-friendly than the other Bond films. The presence of a strong female character isn't the real reason, because there have been strong female characters in other Bond films. It's Craig's Bond not being so infallible, and having a dark side that's visible on screen where Vesper (and the audience) can see it -- and reach it. Some people complained about Solange but appreciated that she was there, for the contrast.

I had trouble with names in this movie. Well, I have trouble with names in every movie but this one actually punishes you for not catching them. The ONE name I absolutely remembered was Mr. White's. That's because after the movie shifts from blank and white to color he's the first white man you see on screen.

What I really liked in CR (besides Craig's stony-eyed stare) was the head-on collision of past of present. XD; terrorism and free-running and cell phones are all the rage right now, but that poker game, with every stock player an ethnic caricature? That was soooo sixties.

I also thought it was charming that Le Chiffre's attempt to manipulate the stock market involved actually blowing up Skyline's new plane. And - not just any plane! The newest, shiniest, BIGGEST plane in the world. That sort of faith, that corporate stock is directly connected to visible reality, is so cute.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

ARG, that was me.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Turning blond upon gaining powerz: classic mahou shoujo semiotics!

I do feel they had specific aims w/r/t characterization in making this film and those aims were largely met, but I find them hard to encompass intellectually. Reading everyone else's reviews helps, though.

I remembered "Mr. White" because it was so WASP it stood out. XD

Past vs. present yes - it was easy to pick out what was 60s and what couldn't have been, mentality wise. it is very odd, because it's so post-9/11 and Cellphones of Tomorrow, but at the same time it's not like one can forget about the last dozen Bond films and the fact that the reset doesn't reach that far back in time, so it sort of feels like MI6 clones 007s out of a vat, at need. (Which, okay, is exactly what happens, but.)

[cis.livejournal.com]

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Aha, most of what I have to say about this movie is obvious. Continuing in that trend:

Before it didn't matter if the girl was a rocket scientist, she wasn't ever going be on equal footing with James Bond, emotionally speaking. The only "equal" Bond girl -- who was not a villain -- in previous Bond films was Michelle Yeoh in Tommorrow Never Dies, and Bond treated her like a guy or (at least) put her in a separate, non-sexual category. This movie proves that you can have equality and chemistry. Getting back to Solange, it wasn't just the contrast I appreciated, but the fact that she is not really taken in my him. She plays along because she wants to.

Which isn't to say that I didn't watch and enjoy all those other, horribly sexist Bond films. I dunno, misogyny in fiction doesn't really bother me. I liked Stranger in a Strange Land too.

[naanima.livejournal.com]

I've nothing interesting to say except read your entry and comments with much interest and the thought that I shall never be as smart as you and some of the people that comment on your lj.

... OK, I lied, I do have one thing to say; James Bond can so be BL. I have had dreams of this since I was 12, and nothing you say can dissuade me of the fact that Bond had ghei butt sex during one of his many incarnations. I just can't decide which one.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

...Years ago I discussed this with bf-at-the-time, which - well, he was the one who brought it up. XD I just remember it particularly because he was so spot-on with the formulation, he said Instead of gorgeous women, men. Everything else stays the same, nobody makes a point of it in the story.

The funny thing is with all that people lend themselves to in fandom I've never seen anyone actually try this - I haven't looked, but. XD Like you'd have to exert the self-discipline to keep Bond IC, meaning the writing challenge is really how do you construct the male version of a Bond Girl (90% of BL mangaka will find this easier to accomplish than 90% of slash writers), and you cannot let that textually become a manifesto even if the idea of the thing is manifesto enough in a RL sense. I mean, probably the inevitability of seeing the Manifesto before the Story is what kills it, if you don't write the essay the readers will. XD

OTOH astolat recently wrote an M/Bond story that was alarmingly awesome.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_mike/]

It makes a lot of sense, but at the same time I can sort of understand why it's not often done.

Tangentially, this (http://www.cbs47.tv/news/weird_news/story.aspx?content_id=7B9DBF6B-86A1-47F4-BAF0-DB8BB8D1BB90) recently got passed around the company nonsense mailing list, waggish subject line "From Russia With Man Love."

[petronia.livejournal.com]

What I'm trying to say is that to succeed you can't write it as satire/parody and you can't write it as gender studies essay either, because in either case you don't need more than a one-sentence summary to make all the point that needs to be made. You really have to do it in a purehearted and bovinely straightforward way. XD ...Too little sleep and I lose the capacity for determining whether I'm making any sense.