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[Bond, James]

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Michelle Disler

November 2011

Jeremy Benson

I have not yet seen it, myself, but I hear in the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, Agent 007 may or may not cry. According to eonline.com, a tearful James Bond is a sin against the Ten Commandments of the James Bond franchise. When asked, Daniel Craig (the sixth official Bond, for those still counting) defended his character’s face-water: “He doesn’t cry, he’s sweating.” What’s funny is that in author Ian Fleming’s original dozen novels, the character Bond is found crying or sobbing about five times. His “heart lifts” a further six times; he’s rescued by a girl four times. I know this not because I’ve painstakingly read through all the books, but because Michelle Disler has—and has compiled her findings in the form of poems in [Bond, James]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography.

I have not yet seen it, myself, but I hear in the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, Agent 007 may or may not cry. According to eonline.com, a tearful James Bond is a sin against the Ten Commandments of the James Bond franchise. When asked, Daniel Craig (the sixth official Bond, for those still counting) defended his character’s face-water: “He doesn’t cry, he’s sweating.” What’s funny is that in author Ian Fleming’s original dozen novels, the character Bond is found crying or sobbing about five times. His “heart lifts” a further six times; he’s rescued by a girl four times. I know this not because I’ve painstakingly read through all the books, but because Michelle Disler has—and has compiled her findings in the form of poems in [Bond, James]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography.

The book is very much like walking into a garage in which someone has obsessively disassembled an automobile—an Aston-Martin, perhaps—and has meticulously weighed, labeled, indexed, cataloged and cross-referenced each part and its purpose. They’ve sketched out how the parts could be reassembled in different patterns, replaced with alternate parts, removed completely, and still get the car to drive. Disler deconstructs Ian Fleming’s spy novels and short stories, word by word, gun by gun, villain by villain, and returns with the lowest common denominators, often a literal formula behind Agent 007’s conquests and adventures: “q=death threats (hot, deadly) s, w/q = bubbling mud bath (hot, deadly) x, n / q = lips for kissing (hot, deadly) a, z.”

In “Approximate Number of Times [Bond, James],” Disler’s first act is to boil Bond down to all his clichés and absurdities, found in each display of masculinity and of humanity referenced in the novels:

. . . sleeps the “shallow sleep of ghosts and demons and screams” 1; proposes to needle villain 2; proposes 2; needles villain 8; is needled by villain [6?];…shoves gun into trouser waistband 9; says breakfast is favorite meal 3; contemplates animal beauty [taut breasts, etc.] of girl [89?]; is annoyed villain isn’t more worried about him 1; cries, sobs [5?] . . .

Later, in “anatomy,” Disler copies verbatim each instance James Bond smokes—meaning, yes, almost four pages of “James Bond lit a cigarette,” and then, “James Bond lit another cigarette.”

The result of Disler’s dissection is, in one word, hilarious. She’s helped a little by Fleming’s Britishisms, cartoonishly foreign to an American’s ear and well-aged over the last six decades; but mostly, like a caricaturist on a boardwalk, the humor is in the exploded view of what we could already see so clearly. Of course [Bond, James] hits upon all the usual burrs of 007’s personality: his penchant for drink, his ignored-if-not-praised chauvinism, his Freudian love of guns, and the fine line between the political hatred for and the sexual tension with his villains.

But Disler’s condensation also enlarges the traits of Bond that the franchise has dropped (and I guess has only recently picked up again, if you concede Skyfall’s tears). Did you know he took amphetamines up to five times? He is full of doubt and questions, at least many more than any Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan would have you believe.

Still, what is interesting and amusing is how quickly the entire Bond franchise—except for GoldenEye 007 for the N64’s Multiplayer function—flattens and folds, and all it takes (at most) is for Michelle Disler to point it out.

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