Each Day, A Film:
January 13th 2011 (Retrospective)
I like to think about future historians; considering the way we treat our history, I like to think about how we're going to be viewed in, say, fifty to a hundred years time. Quirky, I know, but let's face it; the only thing that's going to survive the relentless media and popular culture creation apparatus we have at the moment are going to be films and maybe, just maybe, some music.
Seriously; every single minute of every single day is now recorded for historians of the future to be able to analyse the hell out of them, and this is in a way that wasn't available before, arguably, mass media.
So in 2062, or 2112, there'll be a cultural historian in a university somewhere studying the popular culture of turn-of-the-twenty-first century history.
I kind of hope he avoids Quantum of Solace.
Back in the day - on the first go on the degree merry-go-round - I was taught about semiotics, signs and signifiers. Semiotics always fascinated me, because - and I may not be getting it exactly right here, so bear with me - they were the cluster of single ideas that hand around a larger idea. So if you say Bond Film, there's a cluster of associated ideas that hang around that concept; girls, guns, martinis, villainous plots and an immaculately dressed Englishman who's here to save the world.
Quantum of Solace, by contrast, seems to be based largely around crushing, inescapable paranoia from start to finish. Thought you'd caught the bad guy? Well, yes, but he owns your staff. Think you know what the villain's up to? Well, not so much, and neither do the CIA, who are helping him. Drag a character from Casino Royale in to help you once you're disavowed by your own agency? Well, let's be honest, his getting shot and put in a dumpster before you rob his wallet - saying that he wouldn't care about what happened to his body - should not really be indicative of your best practice.
Attempts to include a quasi-Bond Girl with the name Strawberry Fields don't help, either, because mixing levity with your paranoia isn't like mixing chocolate and peanut butter.
Quantum of Solace is a very pretty, very well-made film, with great acting and set-pieces, but it's all about paranoia from start to finish; the villains have people placed at high levels within MI6, the main villain himself is aiming to control water supply, without which, well, people die; and Bond flits from paranoid set-piece to paranoid-set-piece without particularly worrying. Put it this way; the most touching moment is when he reassures Camille that he'll shoot her through the head rather than let her burn to death.
There's a website you might want to check out called Garfield Minus Garfield which is, as you might expect, exactly what it says on the tin. But watching Quantum of Solace, I was made to wonder; what if this wasn't a James Bond film? What if it was your average spy film about, for instance, an MI6 agent called John Link? Could he get away with the callous, frenetic spying that James Bond does? Would he have the same plot armour, would he get the girls, would he be all that James Bond is without the addition of the name?
Or is James Bond simply an excuse to convince us that British agents get the job done, no matter what?
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