007, is he for real?

Saw the new bond flick over the weekend, I give it an 8 out of 10. Really want to read the books now, found this article that sheds some light on the differences between the character we have come to love on the big screen and the character as orginally penned by Fleming. very interesting...

Will the real James Bond please stand up?
27 November 2006
By DAN KAUFMAN
Sydney Morning Herald

It's hard to imagine Sean Connery's James Bond stripped naked, tied to a bottomless cane chair and genitally tortured until convinced he's impotent, although some feminists might wish he had been. Yet this happens in Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale.

It's just one of many situations Bond finds himself in that would never have appeared on screen until, perhaps, the newest Bond movie is released next month.

The popularity of the suave secret agent of the films has obscured the darker, flawed and altogether more human Bond of the books. There are no glib wisecracks, no high-tech gadgets to pull him out of scrapes (he even bemoans this in From Russia With Love); he often screws up his missions, resulting in brutal torture at the hands of his enemies, and when he drags himself back to the office he is berated by his boss.

Even the girls sometimes reject him: in Moonraker he watches, crestfallen, as the girl whose life he saved walks off with another man, while in From Russia with Love we're told that Tiffany Case, his love affair from the previous book, has left him after a painful break-up.

The latest Bond movie is Casino Royale and the filmmakers assure us it will be more faithful to the novel than previous films have been. The gadgets are gone, Bond is slightly less superhuman and the excruciating genital torture scene is supposed to be enacted. But fans of the books shouldn't get too excited; judging from the trailers, it seems that yet again Fleming's introspective civil servant has been discarded for a swaggering action hero.

This is, however, to be expected. After all, had Fleming's deeply misogynistic, racist and occasionally impotent Bond been accurately portrayed on film in the first place, he would never have become a pop culture hero.

"Every civilisation has the hero it deserves," Yuri Zhukov once wrote in the Soviet newspaper Pravda and, though he was criticising Bond's capitalistic vices, the quote still comes to mind when thinking about the transformation Bond had to undergo to appeal to cinema audiences.

Fleming had intended the books to be a form of escapism, self-deprecatingly referring to them as "pillow fantasies of the bang-bang kiss-kiss variety" (his wife, incidentally, referred to them snidely as "Ian's pornography"), but he still made sure Bond was realistic enough to be accessible to readers.

The filmmakers thought differently and decided audiences wanted their action heroes to be flawless and uncomplicated, so they turned Bond into an indestructible sex machine who utters bon mots after casually dispatching villains.

"If Bond didn't win and get the girl, why watch?" says Steven Reschly, who teaches a film and history course called "James Bond and the 20th Century" at Truman State University in Missouri. "It's important to realise the movies are fantasies and as such require perfection."

One of the cinematic Bond's key qualities, for example, is his undying confidence, a trait most cinemagoers would love to have. It doesn't matter if Bond is about to be castrated by a laser or is chatting up a girl, he never doubts his abilities and his ego is always unchecked. This has not changed in the new film, with Daniel Craig's Bond even admitting to having a "fantastically formed arse", a statement that would have made Fleming's almost painfully humble Bond cringe.

As befits most cinematic action heroes, Craig's Bond also has no qualms about killing. Yet in the novels, Bond agonises to the point where, in Goldfinger, he decides to drown his guilt by getting so drunk he "would have to be carried to bed by whatever tart he picked up".

Toby Miller, professor of cultural studies and cultural policy at New York University and the author of an essay called James Bond's Penis (published in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader), says the literary Bond's self-contemplation would have detracted from the visual spectacle that became the hallmark of Bond films. "Cinema of the action kind necessitates movement rather than reflection," he says. "Figures in film can become important without being heroic - think of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas - but not in high-octane Hollywood adventure."

Stephen Watt, one of the editors of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, agrees. "While a number of film icons and heroes in the '60s and '70s were deeply flawed - I think of Paul Newman as Hud and Fast Eddie in The Hustler - they usually appeared in more serious films," he says. "An unrealistic Bond became an icon; Hud and Fast Eddie never did."

The first Bond films were released in the '60s and, as James Chapman notes in Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, the character of Bond changed to reflect the social and political conditions of that time. The conservative civil servant of the novels, written in the '50s, would have seemed old-fashioned to moviegoers and the rebellious, cavalier, camp and extraordinarily promiscuous Bond of the films became a poster boy for the swinging '60s. "James Bond has developed into the biggest mass-cult hero of the decade," Time magazine proclaimed.

"The women were supposed to want him, the men to want to be him," Miller says. "He becomes a less reflective and troubled figure and more straightforwardly heroic."

And far more virile. Fleming's Bond was certainly fond of women: both Casino Royale and the first Playboy magazine were published in 1953 and the womanising spy was often associated with the magazine. But it was the movies that really turned Bond into a playboy of almost sex-addict proportions.

In the books Bond usually sleeps with one woman a novel, the same number Fleming once noted that any handsome young chap would bed while on a trip abroad; on film he beds an array of women who simply fall into his arms, sometimes several in the same night. And unlike the books, where Bond often worries about his performance and at the end of You Only Live Twice is temporarily impotent, on screen the secret agent's mojo never goes missing.

Fleming always wanted his character to be portrayed seriously but the filmmakers decided from the start to turn the movies into comedies that spoofed the spy genre until, as Watt says, "in the Roger Moore era [they] descended into almost comic book caricature and self-parody". This offended countless fans of the books, who included the conservative literary figures Kingsley Amis (who once referred to the films as "piling outrage upon outrage") and Ayn Rand.

"Rand adored the 007 books for what she saw as their unabashed romanticism and heroic transcendence but she was appalled by the films, because they were laced with 'the sort of humour intended to undercut Bond's stature, to make him ridiculous'," Miller says.

"Any scan of the popular sociology and literary criticism of the time indicates how threatening this was to the [political] right, which drew analogies between the decline of empire and the rise of unruly personal libertarianism. In the novels, for all his supposed association with fast living, high-octane sex and a dazzling life, Bond basically runs away from sex, leaving the desiring women who surround him in a state of great anxiety."

Then again, it could have been Bond's continual threat of spanking that had the women worried. Fleming was known to have a spanking fetish and in almost every novel Bond tells a girl (usually one with a masculine and muscular derriere) that he wants to spank her.

Rape is portrayed as a fantasy in several of the books. In Casino Royale Bond wants to marry Vesper Lynd (the girl he refers to at one point as a "silly bitch") because having sex with her has "the sweet tang of rape", a line that is unlikely to make it onto the screen.

Racism is rife, too: a chapter in Live and Let Die, for example, is titled "Nigger Heaven" and describes a room in a Harlem club in which the "air was thick with smoke and the sweet, feral smell of two hundred negro bodies".

There's little doubt Fleming made Bond an idealised version of himself and many of the author's vices are revealed through his hero. Bond lost his virginity to a prostitute as a teenager (although Fleming caught gonorrhoea and, out of embarrassment, his family shipped him off to a Swiss private school) and Bond also shares his creator's love of liquor and smoking.

On average Bond binges on half a bottle of spirits and 60 to 70 cigarettes a day and, like any real man with a substance abuse problem, he's not always at his physical best. Thunderball, the ninth Bond novel, begins with Bond staring bleakly at himself in the bathroom mirror, hung over and coughing so hard from smoking that black spots swim before his eyes. M, the boss to whom Bond is always obedient and servile (unlike the movies), then orders him to go to a detox clinic. Feeling angry and helpless, Bond walks out of the office and throws a tantrum in front of Miss Moneypenny.

Unlike his fearless cinematic namesake, Bond becomes scared in almost every novel, even when flying. When his plane hits turbulence in Live and Let Die, for example, he grips his armrest until his hand hurts and swears, sweats and imagines all the horrible ways in which he can helplessly die.

So when the filmmakers say the new film will be closer to Fleming's Bond, you need to take this with a grain of salt. After all, this claim has been made before, most recently with the Timothy Dalton films. These were more realistic, though the usually unflattering character traits of Fleming's Bond that lent him some humanity were removed and audiences ended up with generic, cold and ruthless action thrillers. For all the faults in the early Connery and Moore films, at least they had their distinctive quirks, such as Bond's habitual flirting with Miss Moneypenny and taunting of Q (neither of which appears in the new movie).

While Fleming considered the early Bond films cartoonish, he wasn't overly upset by them and even slightly changed the Bond in his books as a result of their success.

Nonetheless, what makes the Bond of Fleming's books so likeable is that he was the type of man who would have despised his cinematic double. In From Russia With Love, for example, a girl tries to flatter him by saying he's like a movie star.

Bond, naturally, is horrified. "For God's sake! That's the worst insult you can pay a man!" he exclaims.