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Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics Of 007 buy bestselling books in print, audio books |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Academic Conference or Hunting Lodge for Smart Weirdos? |
| James Bond is one of the few pop culture references that writer (and portrayer of Riff Raff) Richard O'Brien didn't throw into his masterpiece, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (At least I don't remember any.) But there's a line in Rocky Horror that applies to the book Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007.
In Rocky Horror, the "sweet transvestite" and mad scientist Frank N. Furter shows innocent young Janet Weiss his Charles Atlas-like creation, Rocky. Janet touches Rocky's firm oiled flesh but says she doesn't like a man with too many muscles. "I DIDN'T MAKE HIM FOR YOU!!!" Frank answers. This book was written for academics, not for me. It's a collection of papers written for an academic conference at Indiana University in 2003. The first half of the book especially is full of the jargony prose that academics use too often. Or, as the introduction states, "This grouping of essays explores Fleming's work as it responds to post-World War II transformations - - theoretical or otherwise - - of subjectivity and intersubjective relations." (My spellchecker doesn't even want to call "intersubjective" a word, but it flagged "jargony" too and I like that one.) The acknowledgments page thanks the "faculty and graduate students" who attended the conference - - didn't they even let undergraduate students past security? I imagine some freshman with one of Q's hi-tech iris-scanning gizmos sneaking in, just like Bond. Again quoting the introduction, "In fact, the secret service and academia are linked by this mode: the success of both depends on an ability to cross and confound rigid oppositions, . . ." Come on, guys. I had a Man from UNCLE camera-gun too, when I was ten, but I don't still shoot THRUSH agents with it. But the second half of the book (the essays tying the Bond books and movies to their moment in history) is more interesting. How Bond went from British pulp hero to transatlantic (in other words American) superspy-savior. How Bond (who we always think of as very modern, whatever decade he's in) is really a conservative reaction against the "angry young men" of fifties Britain ("Shoot Back in Anger"). What are the literary and real-life connections between JFK, RFK, Fleming, Bond, and Castro? (And who among those are real people, who are fictional characters, and who are both?) If you liked Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, and J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, you'll find enough in this book to make it worth reading several of the essays. It's definitely worth the Amazon paperback price. |
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