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imomusAs a kid I played -- innocently, guiltily -- in the shadow of the Cold War propaganda of the Bond films. I guided a model Aston Martin DB6 around the carpet and enjoyed pushing the button that activated the deadly weapons that this car, alone amongst my toy cars, possessed. I watched the films, in which the British secret agent quipped and killed his way to inevitable victory over eccentric totalitarians with foreign accents and plans for world domination. It all seemed like innocent fun.
It was only later, as my political and ethical sympathies evolved, that I began to feel the Bond franchise might be infused with toxic values. Not just the values inscribed into the Bond themes and songs -- "he's got a license to kill", "you've got to give the other fellow hell", "live and let die" -- but the stuff I started hearing about Ian Fleming himself. That he was a right-wing xenophobe who talked about "niggers" in his books, or stereotyped Koreans as "the cruelest people on earth", who boasted that he'd killed a man while working for naval intelligence, and claimed to be one of the key figures in the creation of the CIA. It was even annoying that he'd named his villain Auric Goldfinger after the Jewish, Marxist architect Ernő Goldfinger, creator of the Modernist Trellick Tower and architect of the offices of the Daily Worker newspaper and the British Communist Party HQ. And yet every time a new Bond film came out the lifestyle press spouted reams of stuff about how suits and guns and dry martini and British males who killed foreigners were sexy again.
This week a new piece of back story to the Bond saga emerged. A BBC Radio 4 documentary called M is for Maxwell Knight looked into the background of the man on whom Fleming based the character of spymaster M. Some pretty unsavory details emerged; Knight "believed that socialism, and its attack upon the British Empire and commerce, constituted an existential threat to the British way of life and British government". And so Knight joined the British Fascisti Party.
Christopher Andrew, who's writing the official history of MI5, pops up to explain this one: "At the time the only fascists who were around were Italian fascists. And there were a lot of traditional conservatives and right wing radicals who thought that the best thing that had ever happened to Italy was Benito Mussolini coming along and getting the trains to run on time. So we shouldn't confuse the British Fascisti, or the British Fascists, of the mid- and late 1920s with the British Union of Fascists of the late 1930s, still less the further-right Right Club, and still less with the Nazi party." It was at this time that Knight, who'd become the Fascisti's Director of Intelligence, started working for British government intelligence, concentrating mostly on infiltrating left wing organisations. He encouraged fellow Fascisti members to join the Communist Party of Great Britain as spies.
Knight was close with Oswald Mosley and William Joyce, who became Lord Haw Haw when he moved to Berlin to make English-language broadcasts on behalf of the Nazis. Heather Joyce, Lord Haw Haw's daughter, remembers a visit Knight made to her father in the 1930s. "I did see him twice when he was in his uniform, and looking very handsome and impressive. They undid their belts, because they were going to eat, you see, and they sat over in the corner and everybody got up and... gave the fascist salute." Just as I, as a child, was playing with James Bond toys, so Heather and her sister were walking around in black shirts made for them by their parents.
Now, one line of thinking we could legitimately follow when we learn this stuff is that the beloved M from James Bond is an extremely right wing figure, that Fleming's slurs on communist architects and Knight's infiltration of communist organisations come from the same basic worldview, and that the Bond franchise to this day -- including all those style mag features on the sexiness of Anglo-Saxons in suits carrying guns -- has reactionary attitudes deep in its DNA. But Christopher Andrew draws a very different lesson: "British intelligence became world class because it was better at using eccentric and unconventional talents," he says, successfully turning "being a fascist" into "just being terribly British and charming", an argument which clearly cuts both ways and smears a lot of charming British eccentrics with some nasty slime. Andrew has an equally British explanation for Knight's later metamorphosis into a TV presenter of animal programmes on the BBC: "He had an unusual set of social skills," he tells us. "By unusual, I mean that he got on just as well with animals as with human beings. So what he's recognised as is a wonderful British eccentric with a wonderful ability for getting humans and animals to do what he wants them to do."
A sinister totalitarian organisation is seeking world domination. It's us, the British.
It was only later, as my political and ethical sympathies evolved, that I began to feel the Bond franchise might be infused with toxic values. Not just the values inscribed into the Bond themes and songs -- "he's got a license to kill", "you've got to give the other fellow hell", "live and let die" -- but the stuff I started hearing about Ian Fleming himself. That he was a right-wing xenophobe who talked about "niggers" in his books, or stereotyped Koreans as "the cruelest people on earth", who boasted that he'd killed a man while working for naval intelligence, and claimed to be one of the key figures in the creation of the CIA. It was even annoying that he'd named his villain Auric Goldfinger after the Jewish, Marxist architect Ernő Goldfinger, creator of the Modernist Trellick Tower and architect of the offices of the Daily Worker newspaper and the British Communist Party HQ. And yet every time a new Bond film came out the lifestyle press spouted reams of stuff about how suits and guns and dry martini and British males who killed foreigners were sexy again.
This week a new piece of back story to the Bond saga emerged. A BBC Radio 4 documentary called M is for Maxwell Knight looked into the background of the man on whom Fleming based the character of spymaster M. Some pretty unsavory details emerged; Knight "believed that socialism, and its attack upon the British Empire and commerce, constituted an existential threat to the British way of life and British government". And so Knight joined the British Fascisti Party.
Christopher Andrew, who's writing the official history of MI5, pops up to explain this one: "At the time the only fascists who were around were Italian fascists. And there were a lot of traditional conservatives and right wing radicals who thought that the best thing that had ever happened to Italy was Benito Mussolini coming along and getting the trains to run on time. So we shouldn't confuse the British Fascisti, or the British Fascists, of the mid- and late 1920s with the British Union of Fascists of the late 1930s, still less the further-right Right Club, and still less with the Nazi party." It was at this time that Knight, who'd become the Fascisti's Director of Intelligence, started working for British government intelligence, concentrating mostly on infiltrating left wing organisations. He encouraged fellow Fascisti members to join the Communist Party of Great Britain as spies.
Knight was close with Oswald Mosley and William Joyce, who became Lord Haw Haw when he moved to Berlin to make English-language broadcasts on behalf of the Nazis. Heather Joyce, Lord Haw Haw's daughter, remembers a visit Knight made to her father in the 1930s. "I did see him twice when he was in his uniform, and looking very handsome and impressive. They undid their belts, because they were going to eat, you see, and they sat over in the corner and everybody got up and... gave the fascist salute." Just as I, as a child, was playing with James Bond toys, so Heather and her sister were walking around in black shirts made for them by their parents.Now, one line of thinking we could legitimately follow when we learn this stuff is that the beloved M from James Bond is an extremely right wing figure, that Fleming's slurs on communist architects and Knight's infiltration of communist organisations come from the same basic worldview, and that the Bond franchise to this day -- including all those style mag features on the sexiness of Anglo-Saxons in suits carrying guns -- has reactionary attitudes deep in its DNA. But Christopher Andrew draws a very different lesson: "British intelligence became world class because it was better at using eccentric and unconventional talents," he says, successfully turning "being a fascist" into "just being terribly British and charming", an argument which clearly cuts both ways and smears a lot of charming British eccentrics with some nasty slime. Andrew has an equally British explanation for Knight's later metamorphosis into a TV presenter of animal programmes on the BBC: "He had an unusual set of social skills," he tells us. "By unusual, I mean that he got on just as well with animals as with human beings. So what he's recognised as is a wonderful British eccentric with a wonderful ability for getting humans and animals to do what he wants them to do."
A sinister totalitarian organisation is seeking world domination. It's us, the British.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 02:17 pm (UTC)Well, I don't, because I mention the Daily Worker, the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Marxist architect Goldfinger in this entry. Or is that the extreme left?
Metonymy is a double-edged sword. Christopher Andrew seeks to exonerate Maxwell Knight's early fascism by linking him to the paradigm of the "wonderful English eccentric". But that also forges a semantic link between Englishness, wonderfulness, and fascism. In the same way, saying that Bond is reactionary, and Bond is a paradigm of Britishness, forges a link between what's British and what's reactionary. I'd rather hear people saying "Of course, Bond is not a very English figure."
But that's a bit like the problem I came up against last year, when it looked as if Obama might lose. "Put it this way," I wrote (http://imomus.livejournal.com/400901.html), "when I think of the parallel world in which McCain and Palin win, it doesn't seem far-fetched or alien. In fact, it's a world which shares the values a lot of Americans have right now. It's who they are. It's the malady, the one they know, the one they like."
That entry was called Punks and mavericks, fuck off forever! (http://imomus.livejournal.com/400901.html) But the thing is that nobody ever fucks off. They just go underground while they're out of power, and plot their return. It may be that the Obama who smiles on abortion and makes gentle overtures to Iran is not representing "the real America", he's just in power. In the same way, the communists and socialists have never represented "the real Britain", certainly not "the real England". They've occasionally been in power, but usually out of it.
I'd like to marginalize James Bond and make him un-metonymic, but I don't expect to succeed. I expect he'll always sum up a stereotypical Englishness better than an image of just about any leftwinger can. The best we can do is suggest that his kind of Englishness might be extremely dubious when looked at more closely. But can we say "A right wing killing machine like Bond shouldn't be allowed to dress in elegant Saville Row clothes, he brings them into disrepute!" But if you look at the history of Saville Row, it's a place that made all sorts of colonial suits with secret pockets for pistols. It's not incommensurate with what Bond is and does. And the chain of associations all the way down the line tends to be the same, until you reach the limits of England. The parallel world in which James Bond is England is not, unfortunately, a very far-fetched one.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 02:22 pm (UTC)Actually, I have to add a big caveat: in its dreams. Because, as we all know, London is now Reykjavic-on-Thames. M will be offering Bond a couple of twigs and an elastic band in the next film.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 03:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 03:35 pm (UTC)Also note that Bond is not, in fact, English (in the books at least). He's half Scottish (went to Fettes), and half Swiss.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 07:23 pm (UTC)As a fictional emblem, I don't mind the sadism or sexism, or even the personal fascism but it should reveal the dehumanisation of the business he is in, rather than being his triumph. He should come out of every tale a self-hating wreck, banging his head against the wall, rather than stripping an offish bit of totty.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-29 05:06 pm (UTC)