Who's your Asian friend, Mastermind?
Sep. 26th, 2007 08:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHisae and I have been playing Mastermind a lot recently; there's a copy of the game in Olive, a Spanish-style restaurant near our house in Neukolln. Hisae loves games and puzzles; a Sudoku wizard, she picked up the rules of Mastermind very quickly and tends to guess the solution in fewer rows than I do (I still win at chess most of the time, though).
The Mastermind packaging hasn't changed since I used to play the game at boarding school, aged 13. (I spent more time using the board itself as graphic design than playing by the rules; I was fascinated by the problem of using the small grid of slotted dots as a kind of low-res matrix drawing system.) Looking at the box cover now, it strikes me that this -- along with images of John and Yoko -- must have been one of my first visual exposures to the idea of the mixed-race couple configuration I would later spend so much time in: the white male and East Asian female.
The Mastermind cover is a powerful -- and quite strange -- one. A middle-aged bearded man, rather well-dressed, with large cufflinks, sits behind a shiny jade table, flanked by a much younger East Asian woman in a white dress, throwing sex-as-power curves with her hips. The man connotes power by resting his fingertips against each other in the "cathedral gesture", which seems to say "I am immeasurably rich and have a vast organisation behind me, an organisation which has spun the conspiracy in which you now find yourself enmeshed. Over to you, Mr Bond."
The imagery is certainly Flemingesque: the man is in the Bond tradition of evil masterminds like Goldfinger and Dr No. Never mind that, in the context, his "power" is restricted to keeping the order of four plastic beads secret from you (wisely, the company has left the image of the game itself off the cover; to see the little plastic pieces on the black jade table would be comically bathetic). The Asian woman may or may not be his lover, but she's certainly in the "beautiful assistant" tradition which Fleming seems to have borrowed from the stage shows of theatrical magicians.
Actually, if you take a headcount of the Asian women in the Bond films, they tend to appear at Bond's side rather than flanking the "evil mastermind". There's Japanese Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi), who saves Bond's life in "You Only Live Twice". Aki's smutty double entendre quote ("I think I will enjoy very much serving under you") is the perfect summation of the post-war relationship between Japan and the West. Like client state Japan, Aki's greatest enemies are Asian ones; she dies in Bond's bed, poisoned by a ninja assassin. Also in "You Only Live Twice" we get Kissy Suzuki (played by Mie Hama), the first girl Bond marries. Kissy is a clam diver and secret agent. Much later, in 1997's "Tomorrow Never Dies" Michelle Yeoh plays Wai Lin, Bond's opposite number in the People's Republic of China's version of MI6.
Since Asian women tend to appear in the Bond films at the side of the good rather than bad guys, perhaps we need to re-construe the Mastermind cover. Rather than an evil mastermind with a wicked plan for the world, the man on the box is a puzzlemeister who's been to the far east to study Chinese puzzles. He's "fiendish" only in his love of the "fiendishly difficult". This makes more sense; now his "finger cathedral" gesture means "I've got a really tough challenge for you" rather than "I plan to dominate the world from inside a hollowed-out volcano".
I like to think the white-dressed Asian woman is there to trigger a Freudian "pleasure principle" motivation for playing what might otherwise appear a somewhat dry and mathematical game, though. Not only does she represent the "Chinese" puzzle itself, her body is also the physical reward for the cerebral feat of cracking the code. The puzzlemeister has had her, I'm sure of it.
I must have filed the image of this mixed-race couple away in my teen brain alongside the image of John and Yoko. In both cases, an Oriental-Asian partner was the reward for great achievements in music or mathematics; evidence that nerdy skills could lead to surprisingly sensual gratification. A far eastern end, perhaps, to Western body-mind dualism.
The Mastermind packaging hasn't changed since I used to play the game at boarding school, aged 13. (I spent more time using the board itself as graphic design than playing by the rules; I was fascinated by the problem of using the small grid of slotted dots as a kind of low-res matrix drawing system.) Looking at the box cover now, it strikes me that this -- along with images of John and Yoko -- must have been one of my first visual exposures to the idea of the mixed-race couple configuration I would later spend so much time in: the white male and East Asian female.The Mastermind cover is a powerful -- and quite strange -- one. A middle-aged bearded man, rather well-dressed, with large cufflinks, sits behind a shiny jade table, flanked by a much younger East Asian woman in a white dress, throwing sex-as-power curves with her hips. The man connotes power by resting his fingertips against each other in the "cathedral gesture", which seems to say "I am immeasurably rich and have a vast organisation behind me, an organisation which has spun the conspiracy in which you now find yourself enmeshed. Over to you, Mr Bond."
The imagery is certainly Flemingesque: the man is in the Bond tradition of evil masterminds like Goldfinger and Dr No. Never mind that, in the context, his "power" is restricted to keeping the order of four plastic beads secret from you (wisely, the company has left the image of the game itself off the cover; to see the little plastic pieces on the black jade table would be comically bathetic). The Asian woman may or may not be his lover, but she's certainly in the "beautiful assistant" tradition which Fleming seems to have borrowed from the stage shows of theatrical magicians.
Actually, if you take a headcount of the Asian women in the Bond films, they tend to appear at Bond's side rather than flanking the "evil mastermind". There's Japanese Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi), who saves Bond's life in "You Only Live Twice". Aki's smutty double entendre quote ("I think I will enjoy very much serving under you") is the perfect summation of the post-war relationship between Japan and the West. Like client state Japan, Aki's greatest enemies are Asian ones; she dies in Bond's bed, poisoned by a ninja assassin. Also in "You Only Live Twice" we get Kissy Suzuki (played by Mie Hama), the first girl Bond marries. Kissy is a clam diver and secret agent. Much later, in 1997's "Tomorrow Never Dies" Michelle Yeoh plays Wai Lin, Bond's opposite number in the People's Republic of China's version of MI6.Since Asian women tend to appear in the Bond films at the side of the good rather than bad guys, perhaps we need to re-construe the Mastermind cover. Rather than an evil mastermind with a wicked plan for the world, the man on the box is a puzzlemeister who's been to the far east to study Chinese puzzles. He's "fiendish" only in his love of the "fiendishly difficult". This makes more sense; now his "finger cathedral" gesture means "I've got a really tough challenge for you" rather than "I plan to dominate the world from inside a hollowed-out volcano".
I like to think the white-dressed Asian woman is there to trigger a Freudian "pleasure principle" motivation for playing what might otherwise appear a somewhat dry and mathematical game, though. Not only does she represent the "Chinese" puzzle itself, her body is also the physical reward for the cerebral feat of cracking the code. The puzzlemeister has had her, I'm sure of it. I must have filed the image of this mixed-race couple away in my teen brain alongside the image of John and Yoko. In both cases, an Oriental-Asian partner was the reward for great achievements in music or mathematics; evidence that nerdy skills could lead to surprisingly sensual gratification. A far eastern end, perhaps, to Western body-mind dualism.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 10:54 am (UTC)I'm intrigued by your theory that Mastermind masterminded hyperrealism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperrealism_(painting))!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-27 11:39 am (UTC)