What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
> Philistine pragmatism takes over in Fleming’s novels. They tend to be indiscriminate, to combine elements of all sorts of sensationalism — political action and thriller, science fiction and advertising brochure, a fashion magazine and nudist film… This, briefly, is the secret of the genre, of popularity in its modern shape. Still, had it not been for the screen, Bond would have been lost among all the other spy characters out there. A nobody. It was the film industry that made him a myth.
Firstly, unlike most other (and in some cases better) writers of espionage and sabotage fiction of the time, he set his stories in the Cold War rather than WWII.
Secondly, he cast Bond as an adroit womanizer. That term alone signals that we are talking about a different era.
Fleming also indulged his audience’s fascination with the lifestyles of the wealthy, though the Bond of his novels exhibited a certain prissiness that the movie makers wisely dropped.
Finally, that ‘license to kill’ nonsense was pure theater, but effective.
Isn’t that term sort of sexist in that it suggests women lack agency?
I recently watched "Live and let Die", and indeed it is in there. You do not have to look far. It is a common Bond method of seduction.
Isn’t that term kind of handist in that suggests lefties lack womanization?
"[The books] serve as a looking glass into life in the 50s and 60s. The Bond series was a form of escapism for red-blooded British men still living under rationing until 1954. In a world where the average reader has probably never left smoggy England except for war service and is still living off of Spam and brown bread while puttering around in a used Morris, James Bond gets to travel to exotic locations from sea to shining sea, eating all the local cuisine that the audience may have never even heard of and driving rare sports cars in breakneck chases."
I always thought that was an interesting take. It might explain why a set of books that were not widely regarded as the most well written, with multiple pages dedicated simply to how certain drinks or food in a certain region are made and taste, took off precisely for the same reasons that it might be classically regarded as "bad".
So the most unrealistic things about James Bond were that his and his opponents' gimcracks worked, and that he succeeded at anything.
Actual spycraft is really mostly about extortion.
Come on. It's what the propaganda branch of CPSU Central Committee thought worth publishing. Which has about zero bearing on what actual Russians thought.
(Not to mention there wasn't much to think of, since obviously the movies were never run in the USSR back then).
So what the average Russian thought was along the lines 'okay, another front page full of usual bullshit, another front page useful as toilet paper'.
It's just more of the same nowadays, but worldwide.
If only we could go back to such simpler times.
What people learned in between 1963-ish to 1985-ish there is that mass media shovels shit wholesale, and so cannot be taken at face value under any circuimstances and that if you style yourself as a connoseiur of shit, you're free to join the field of kremlinology.
This approach is sorely lacking nowadays.
What is one example of something the NYTs reported, that has since been proven false but hasn't been retracted? (Not Iraq was examples, that was reporting on false intelligence not NYT providing the false info).
That’s a pretty amazing get out of jail free card.
There are many more related articles… The NYT has, to my knowledge, never avoided correcting fact-based inaccuracies or misreporting.
My attempt to get out in front of that common but misguided response failed, apparently.
I guess i'll ask again, has the NYT ever published something false they have refused to correct once proven wrong?
To their credit, they did report UN investigator Hans Blix's well-supported conclusion that there were no WMDs. On page 18.
The NYT's preference for GWB in both elections was always front and center, and shameless. That the right wing imagined NYT was against them tells a lot about them.
No, the stuff Judith Miller was actively involved in manufacturing (and whose publication was controversial inside the paper even at the time) and laundering sources for (e.g., claiming propaganda she received from the Iraqi National Congress was intelligence gained by the military unit she was embedded in) was not merely “reporting on false intelligence”, though that's how Miller repeatedly tried to spin it after it destroyed her career as a credible journalist.
Maybe, but that's not what I said (the only group I said anything about her cooperating with non-overtly is the I.N.C.)
She was definitely manufacturing and laundering pro-war propaganda, and she was fired when that became clear. And it certainly served the Bush Administration’s purposes. And the I.N.C. certainly was working hand-in-hand with the Administration on some things. But was Miller working with the Administration, or just on her own agenda that happened to align with theirs? Not for me to say.
- Common joke across the former Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the wall and the reopening of information access.
Soviet Propaganda didn't need to lie about the west - they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact. Good Propaganda does this even to this day. When the Russians hack both the RNC and the DNC, but only leak the Democratic National Convention secret files to WikiLeaks, it's the same thing.
> they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact.
https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/54002/how-to-eff...
However, examples abound of international news agencies presenting cherry-picked facts to disparage Israel in international news.
Contrast with the constant barrage against Israel, I was just recently berated by an American for the USS Liberty incident - from 1967 I believe. They echo each other these sins to paint my nation in a poor light constantly.
our nation
All the propaganda in the world, both that directed towards Israelis and that directed to the international community (I read the news in three to five languages daily), won't change what I've personally seen.
PCP: The only drug that everything the government tells you about it is true.
Cocaine: It makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some, too!
Q: What did the Dead Head say when he ran out of marijuana?
A: Hey, this music sucks!
Q: Why did the Hippie go to Santa Cruz?
A: He heard there weren't any jobs there.
- "Russia took a good second place while the Americans came second last!" (i.e. Americans won)
- "In America there are huge differences between people, in Russia everyone is equally poor!"
Can't say if this is Western propaganda or not but this is what was joked about across the border.
That said I have Finnish friends and I like Finnish people and their attitude.
Student: "Capitalism is exploitation of man by man."
Teacher: "... and socialism?"
Student: "Socialism is exactly the opposite."
Substitute "America" for "now" and "Russia" for "USSR", and you'll still hear this sentiment to this day. At least I do.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI
[1] https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/so-what-happens-when-you...
[2] https://www.nknews.org/2013/02/truth-lies-and-propaganda-the...
This is simply false. Soviet news was an official and pure propaganda. For example, Cuban missile crisis was totally ignored by the Soviet media. While the world was balancing at the brink of nuclear war the Soviet population was blissfully ignorant. Another good examples of how Soviet propaganda lied were coverage of Prague Spring in 1968 and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979--1988.
Source: lived there, remember those lies.
>(Not to mention there wasn't much to think of, since obviously the movies were never run in the USSR back then).
In USSR that phenomenon was known as "I haven't read it, but i condemn it" ("Не читал, но осуждаю") as a good Soviet citizen would of course never want to read/watch <insert whatever decadent/rotten product of the "West pop-culture" or USSR dissidents/etc.> (thus making the actual availability a moot issue) while of course a good Soviet citizen can't feel anything but condemnation to such a product. While it originates as used seriously by total Party suckers, it was used by most people with a double meaning of a satirical sum-it-all-up of the USSR ideological approach to culture, and in many cases the satire was going beyond culture as like Bond movies a lot of things weren't available in USSR - like "i haven't experienced the rotten luxury of the West cars/etc., but i condemn that luxury".
The whole circus of "Supreme Soviet" was itself a propaganda item ran from Старая площадь.
The concept of "toilet paper" didn't exist back than in the USSR. First toilet paper factory was built seven years later.
Nomenklatura ([1]) and some other smaller classes had access to western press and were often allowed to travel to the "capitalist countries". Even at home, they had access to special stores for foreigners and elite paying a special currency that regular Soviet citizens didn't have ([2]) to purchase Western goods. They watched Bond movies and wanted to read reviews as well.
That said, all of my relatives were regulars. I don't miss USSR.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryozka_(Russian_retail_store...
There isn't even an en wikipedia article about it, while it had a order or two of magnitude larger turnover than Beryozka shops and "распределители".
I so do not miss this all, but it seems to come back right now most anywhere.
(that said, фарцовка was less prevalent in smaller cities than Moscow / Leningrad)
In Cuba, if you aren't good enough to become a taxi driver (and maybe get a tip in US dollars from a foreigner) your next best bet is to clean hotel rooms. Then for those who failed at both, it's to become a doctor. Fascinating societies.
(And tangentially, no Bond villain ever devised a death-machine as scary as the the pipe in which the kid Augustus got stuck.)
In the films, the USSR is Bond's opponent only in For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the silent backer in Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, but Auric Goldfinger and SPECTRE are the real enemies, and Thunderball establishes that SPECTRE is willing to work for anyone (including Western powers). Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, General Orlov in Octopussy, and Gustav Graves in Die Another Day are explicitly rogue agents.
I've seen a few clips, and they look like if Marvel fired all their writers and cut their budgets by 80%. I tend not to like the writing of any Chinese movies I've seen though, which I guess is to be expected. Different culture, different emphasis, different ideas of realism.
The challenge I have with Chinese films (especially high fantasy) is that it feels like I have missed something along the way and can't follow the plot. This is regardless of the translation quality, and regardless of how closely I am paying attention.
I suspect it is the case that as a viewer you are assumed to be well versed in Chinese fairy tales, mythology or history. Certainly this is the case in lots of Western films.
Pretty good example: Sorcerer and White Snake. Quite watchable (beautiful film, really), but hard to follow 100% of the time as a Westerner.
I saw Wolf Warrior 2 at the AMC cinema in Sunnyvale, California. There weren’t a lot of showtimes but the theater was packed for my showing. Chinese audio with English subtitles. Thought it was an entertaining action movie with some ridiculous propaganda set pieces a la Rambo. My mostly Chinese (maybe Taiwanese? didn’t ask) fellow audience members audibly groaned en masse at some of these, like when the hero gets a truck full of refugees past some African rebels by dramatically waving a PRC flag.
An American friend of mine saw the film a few months later on a cross-country fight, the airline had it on the inflight entertainment system. It’s also apparently on Prime Video. So such movies can be found here for those who want to see them; that’s just a pretty small group of people.
More broadly speaking, I'm concerned that their production may be consistent with the CCP's recent saber-rattling. The more evidence I see of that posture, the more I worry that my sons will die in an unnecessary war.
Looks like people were not too impressed. I haven't seen it but from the description it looks like Chinese special forces fighting drug lords who happen to be American, not really the same thing.
Interestingly, just the other day I was reading a Tom Clancy novel and thought, surely other countries must've wrote novels or made movies where the Americans loose WWIII, or whatever. I'd be interested in a recommendation. I'm really curious how others see it going down. Although maybe it's boring, i.e. Luke gets to the end of the trench, and misses...
In contrast, the hero of Wolf Warrior is athletic, confident, highly competent, and heroic (he saves civilians in the second movie).
I really enjoyed this because the absence of East Asian heroic figures has contributed to Asian men being seen as unattractive in the dating pool [0]. Career-wise, Asians are also the least likely in the US to be promoted, according to the Harvard Business Review [1]. It's also a struggle to lack Asian role models growing up.
You can't even really talk about this issue of underrepresentation in media as an Asian male without criticism. The first result when you search for issues facing Asian men today is a Slate article documenting radicalized men who have harassed Asian women ("Men's Rights Asians Think This Is Their Moment"). What those guys did is reprehensible, but if I speak about these issues in real life, I can get lumped in with them.
So, I enjoyed the movies, but don't typically talk about my enjoyment for fear of being ostracized. Anyways, Wolf Warrior is more G.I. Joe than James Bond or Rambo. He's also not fighting against American spies or representatives of the US government, but rather villains who happen to be American (and more vicious than bumbling). Also, the hero surprisingly disobeys the Chinese government several times (and ends up imprisoned, though he ultimately returns to alignment with the government in the end).
Sources:
[0] https://theconversation.com/asian-guys-stereotyped-and-exclu...
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely...
K-Pop Star Rain in Ninja Assassin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Assassin
Lee Byung-Hun as Storm Shadow in the GI Joe movies (a villian, but a damn cool one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Joe:_The_Rise_of_Cobra#Co...
John Cho in the new Star Trek films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(film)
^Just in case you want to work through a back catalog of kickass Asian dudes in blockbuster films.
I've seen both of the Wolf Warrior films as well. I was curious how they would handle the size/physical strength disparity with the presumably-former-spec-ops American mercenaries. I like the approach taken, where the Chinese protagonists overcome them with agility and dexterity.
As an American, and one who has to deal with the Chinese military as an adversary on a regular basis, I still enjoyed these movies.
I wish the Wolf Warrior movies could be a way to guide China's government to what it could be (a positive geopolitical force that can help). They're more fantasy than reality, though; I can't ever trust them as a Canadian, after they arbitrarily detained two fellow citizens (the two Michaels) [0] for over 1,000 days as part of a geopolitical game [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...
I really enjoyed the depictions of foreigners from the Chinese POV, since their clichés are still visible, even as a Western viewer.
There are many literary articles, all the writing is top notch (hard to find in the USA), not stuffy despite its Tory orientation, and has had waves of quirky topics, like recipes (referred to as “receipts” for reasons I won’t go into), an agony aunt, and even (pre internet) classified personals for a while.
It’s a small, inbred crew (Boris Johnson was editor for a while, and quite a good one) but the magazine has managed to survive for longer than The Economist, which is something.
I remember calling once about my subscription and being told there were two subscribers in Palo Alto, of which I was one. I later ran into the other in a bar (he was carrying his copy). We had little in common.
‘The Diamond Arm’/‘Бриллиантовая рука’, which was played to death on Soviet and post-Soviet TV, is in fact a clever inversion of the whole adventure genre that was popular in the 60s and 70s.