Communications and Culture

Transcription

1 Communications and Culture Communications has been defined as the conveying or exchanging of information and ideas. This wide definition is taken as the starting-point for this series of books, which are not bound by conventional academic divisions. The series aims to document or analyse a broad range of cultural forms and ideas. It encompasses works from areas as esoteric as linguistics and as exoteric as television. The language of communication may be the written work or the moving picture, the static icon or the living gesture. These means of communicating can at their best blossom into and form an essential part of the other mysterious concept, culture. There is no sharp or intended split in the series between communication and culture. On one definition, culture refers to the organisation of experience shared by members of a community, a process which includes the standards and values for judging or perceiving, for predicting and acting. In this sense, creative communication can make for a better and livelier culture. The series reaches towards the widest possible audience. Some of the works concern themselves with activities as general as play and games; others offer a narrower focus, such as the ways of understanding the visual image. It is hoped that some moves in the transformation of the artful and the scientific can be achieved, and that both can begin to be understood by a wider and more comprehending community. Some of these books are written by practitionersbroadcasters, journalists and artists; others come from critics, scholars, scientists and historians. The series has an ancient and laudable, though perhaps untenable, aim ~ an aim as old as the Greeks and as new as holography: it aspires to help heal the split between cultures, between the practitioners and the thinkers, between science and art, between the academy and life. PAUL WALTON

2 COMMUNICATIONS AND CULTURE Executive Editors stuart HALL, PAUL WALTON Published Tony Bennett and Janet W oollacott BOND AND BEYOND: THE POLITICAL CAREER OF A POPULAR HERO Victor Burgin ( ed.) THINKING PHOTOGRAPHY Victor Burgin THE END OF ART.THEORY: CRITICISM AND POSTMODERNITY Ian Chambers URBAN RHYTHMS: POP MUSIC AND POPULAR CULTURE Erving Goffman GENDER ADVERTISEMENTS Stephen Heath QUESTIONS OF CINEMA Herbert Marcuse THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION: TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF MARXIST AESTHETICS Anthony Smith THE POLITICS OF INFORMATION: PROBLEMS OF POLICY IN MODERN MEDIA John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado 'DOCTOR WHo': THE UNFOLDING TEXT Janet Wolff THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF ART Forthcoming Jerry Booth and Peter Lewis RADio: MEANINGS AND AUDIENCES Philip Corrigan culture AND CONTROL Andrew Davies OTHER THEATRES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ALTERNATIVE AND EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE IN BRITAIN Stuart Hall REPRODUCING IDEOLOGIES Dick Hebdige THE MEANING OF SUBCULTURES Clarie Johnston FEMINISM AND CINEMA John Tagg THE BURDEN OF REPRODUCTION

3 Bond and Beyond The Political Career of a Popular Hero Tony Bennett and Janet W oollacott M MACMILLAN EDUCATION

4 Tony Bennett and janet Woollacott 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1987 Published by MACMILLAN EDUCATION LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bennett, Tony Bond and beyond: the political career of a popular hero.-(communications and culture) I. Fleming, Ian, J~J96~Characters- James Bond 2. Bond, James (Fictitious character) 3. Popular culture I. Title II. Woollacott, Janet I II. Series 306'.I PR6056.L4Z/ ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the United Kingdom we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England.

5 One of the most characteristic attitudes of the popular public towards its literature is this: the writer's name and personality do not matter, but the personality of the protagonist does. When they have entered into the intellectual life of the people, the heroes of popular literature are separated from their 'literary' origin and acquire the validity of historical figures. ANTONIO GRAMSCI

6 Contents Acknowledgements lx Introduction 1 1 The Bond Phenomenon 11 Bond as a popular hero 13 A sign of the times 17 2 The Moments of Bond 22 A political hero for the middle classes 24 A hero of modernisation 29 Bond as ritual 37 A mobile signifier 42 3 Reading Bond 44 The texts of Bond 46 The relations between the 'texts of Bond' 53 Texts and their readings 59 Plotted pleasures and the pleasures of culture and knowledge 69 Questions of genre and inter-textuality 76 Analysing the Bond phenomenon 90 4 Bonded Ideologies 93 Narrative and ideology in the imperialist spythriller 95 Bond and England 99 Bond and 'the girl' 114 Adventures of the phallus 127 Situating the analysis 141

7 Vlll Contents 5 The Transformations of James Bond 143 Beginnings 146 Plot changes 154 Character and performance 158 Bond: spectacle, irony and narrative The Bond Films: 'Determination' and 'Production' 174 'The Bondian' as a production ideology 177 'Conditions of production' versus 'hierarchy of determinations' 184 Adjusting Bond 190 Ideology and production processes Pleasure and the Bond Films 204 The pursuit of a 'mass' audience 205 Male and female pleasures 211 Codes of romance Figures of Bond 231 Textual shifters 235 Bond and culture 250 Texts in history Never Again? 270 Postscript: A Licence to Kill 285 Notes and Riferences 296 Index 310

8 Acknowledgements This book owes a good deal to colleagues at the Open University, particularly those associated with the Mass Communication and Society and Popular Culture course teams who helped to shape the early stages of this work in many and varied ways. We are particularly grateful to our BBC colleagues, Michael Philps, Victor Lockwood and Noella Smith with whom our first work on the Bond movies began. We are also grateful to the staff and students of those institutions at which draft chapters of this study were presented. Their comments proved invaluable in helping us to see our way more clearly through the problems we were addressing. In particular, we would like to thank Terry Hawkes and Catherine Belsey at University College, Cardiff, Tom Lewis of Iowa University, John Frow at Murdoch University and Noel King at the South Australian College of Advanced Education. Our special thanks, too, to Stuart Hall for his detailed and helpful comments on the manuscript. We could not have written the book without the help and support of our respective partners, Sue and Tim, whom we thank for their understanding and tolerance- especially over the cost of the telephone calls between Brisbane and New York to co-ordinate the writing of it. We wish we could find it in us to thank the American and Australian postal services for not losing more than 10 per cent of our correspondence, but it would stick in the throat somehow. However, we are grateful to the School of Humanities at Griffith University for financial assistance in preparing the book, and to Pan Books and Granada Publishing for their permission to reproduce the covers for Moonraker; Diamonds lx

9 X Acknowledgements are Forever and Colonel Sun. Pan Books also assisted us greatly in supplying detailed figures for the sales of the Bond novels in Britain. We also owe a very particular debt to Ian Campbell, whose Ian Fleming: A Catalogue of a Collection proved an invaluable research tool. More than that, had he not very generously allowed us to consult the rich hoard of Bondiana he has accumulated over the years, many parts of this book would not have been possible. The authors and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: W. H. Allen & Co. for extract from Sean Connery: His Life and Films by Michael Feenay Callan; Jonathan Cape Ltd for extracts from The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis; Constable Publishers for extract from Clubland Heroes by Richard Usborne; Glidrose Productions Ltd, copyright holders, for extracts from Ian Fleming's James Bond novels with permission from Jonathan Cape Ltd for extracts from From Russia With Love, Moonraker, Dr No, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man with the Golden Gun, Casino Royale, Live and Let Die and Goldfinger; Macmillan Publishing Company for extracts from Moonraker, Live and Let Die, Goldfinger, Dr No and From Russia With Love; New American Library for extracts from The Man with the Golden Gun, You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service; Viking Penguin Inc. for extracts from Thunderball; and Gildrose Publications Ltd for extracts from Casino Royale; Stephen Heath for extract from The Sexual Fix, Macmillan Press; Indiana University Press for extracts from The Role of the Reader by Umberto Eco; IPC Magazines Ltd for an extract from 'Glamour Girls in Bondage', Woman's Own, 30 June 1979; Murray Pollinger and Watkins/ Loomis Agency on behalf of Roald Dahl for '007's Oriental Eyefuls', Playboy, June Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright-holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. Our thanks, finally, to Eon Productions for confirming our analysis of the nature of the copyright it holds in the Bond image. Our request for permission to use some stills from the Bond films and some publicity posters as illustrations was refused; their 'corporate attitude' to our project, we were

10 Acknowledgements Xl told, was 'entirely negative'. A starker demonstration of the contradiction between the public nature of the image and its private ownership could hardly be asked for. TONY BENNETT JANETWOOLLACOTT