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I think he was cracking a joke.
True, but you're forgetting what Mathis tells Bond after LeChiffre's defeat:
Bond later acknowledges this:
Bond honors this promise--everyone he kills in the books after CR is a black target. Fleming himself quickly grew uncomfortable with the idea of Bond as a cold-blooded killer and began giving Bond doubts about this, as seen in FRWL, FYEO, TMWTGG, and TLD. In the latter Bond even refuses to kill Trigger, who definitely is a black target, because she's a beautiful woman.
Half-right maybe. Roger does capture Bond's suave, humane, charming side quite well, but he doesn't look like Fleming's description of Bond and it's nearly impossible to imagine him in a vicious fight with Red Grant or a giant squid.
I'm a little sceptical about that. The scripts that led to the novel of Thunderball already contained a Fiona prototype in Fatima Blush (whose name was reused in NSNA), and the film of Dr. No already had a femme fatale character in Ms. Taro. And femme fatales were hardly new to movies by that point. Fiona was not a terribly original character, and while she was well-played, I'd gladly have traded her for a Domino who had more of the fire Fleming gave her--a quality the screenwriters gave to Fiona instead. One of the problems with the film of TB is that suffers from bloat--too many characters, too many sideplots, too many needless complications. A lean, tight thriller--like the one Fleming wrote--is crying to be let out of this fat monster of film.
@Revelator, just going off what I've researched and read elsewhere about the writing of TB leading off of GF's criticisms regarding the Pussy and Fiona connection.
I don't get the point you were making about femme fatales. Yeah, Taro was one (I mentioned this in my analysis above too) and obviously that character archetype is one of the most prominent in storytelling, but I don't see how that detracts from Fiona being a Flemingesque character, which is the whole point of this thread.
I could easily imagine Fleming creating a character like her, who was like a Klebb, but wrapped up inside a beautiful exterior to flip that expectation. Bond would be shocked at her beauty and the horror of her manipulations, and feel mixed in reaction to her and partially enchanted to his own detriment. Fiona is also just a solidly written and presented female character, something that Fleming was again very good at, making women more than just scene dressing and allowing them to become deep characters in their own right regardless of where they fell on the moral line. This was a man after all who used Tiffany to tell a very progressive and haunting story of abuse and a woman's search to reach normalcy in her life after rape. He was more than capable of going anywhere and crafting all kinds of feminine characters.
I can't, because Fleming wasn't interested in femme fatales. If he was, they would have popped up in the 14 Bond books he wrote. None did: The only possible exception is Trigger in TLD, but she's also a shadowy character in a short story who makes no actual contact with Bond before their distant confrontation (and Vesper doesn't count, since she's more tragic than evil). The major female villains in Fleming's books--Rosa Klebb, Irma Bundt--are ugly hags. In his world a beautiful woman can never be truly evil--even if she seems to be on the villain's side, like Pussy Galore or Domino, she ultimately joins Bond because he is irresistible. That's part of the fantasy of the books--there is no such thing as a woman who can reject Bond for the cause of evil (Tilly rejects Bond for Pussy, but she lacks the first requirement of a femme fatale--sexual interest in the hero). So Fiona is actually one of the most un-Flemingian characters ever put on film. And because the femme fatale is a generic movie characterization in existence since the 1940s, it doesn't have much to with Fleming in the first place. After they lapsed into formulaic parody, the Bond films repeatedly flogged a Madonna-Whore cliche: Bond dallied with a sexy bad girl, who ultimately had to be killed off, but was rewarded by the end with a pallid, morally spotless good girl. Thunderball was responsible for cementing this cliche, which has very little to do with Fleming, whose female characters could be on the side of good without being bland, and whose books didn't rely on femme fatales.
Yeah, we don't seem to agree on this one at all, and I simply don't up end at the same conclusion as you do from what you've responded with.
You seem to think that just because Fleming didn't write a female character that fits your expectation, or that the stories didn't rely on femme fatales (again something I question the relevancy of), then that 100% rules out his ability to write one ever. I was simply saying that I could see Fiona, or a woman like her, in a novel of Fleming's that would be a slight distortion from the ugly evil of a Klebb, an opponent to Bond hiding in a beautiful shell. Fleming always talked about how hard it was to keep things fresh, and that would've been a way to make the formula of the novels less formulaic.
If the man was here we could ask him his thoughts on femme fatales, but I won't speak for a dead man or pretend that I knew what he felt about an archetypal figure of fiction.
(And I would definitely say that argument could be made for Vesper fitting that mold, if doing so inadvertently and on behest of others)
Flemingesque, to me, implies a character, scene or style that feels like Fleming would've or could've written it. It doesn't have to be things he did write, as we are indeed speaking about original content here that feels like Fleming could've originated it in one of his stories, and not things he actually did write. If he wrote a character exactly like Fiona I wouldn't be posting my thoughts here, would I?
My statement was more a response to speaking for the man, when none of us are Fleming himself. Which is why I don't say flat out, "This is what Fleming would've done exactly" when I make my thoughts known, though I sometimes see people slipping into that.
All this thread is for is for elements and scenes that we think give off a Flemingesque vibe isn't it? I don't think any of us would presume to speak for dear old Ian with the possible exception of @Revelator.
He didn't write that he thinks that Fleming wasn't able to write one, he said that he thinks Fleming wasn't interested to write about that kind of woman. And since he really didn't in any of his books it's a fair and very reasonable assumption.
But that's the point. He didn't write about women like that. If because he wasn't able to or he didn't care for them actually doesn't even matter in this context.
You are also adamant about thinking that Fleming created Bond as a dramatic figure, when nothing could be further from the truth ( the depressed and melancholic 007 actually only came to light when Fleming presumably got the bad news from his doctor). The fact alone that there is no mentioning of Vesper and the reasons for his hate for Smersh in LALD and how easy he uses the word love in connection with Solitaire speaks volumes about Flemings intentions.
And I again repeat that a good debate could be had about Vesper having notes of a femme fatale, but that seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
I'm adamant about that because I believe it quite strongly to be true. First off all, a depressed or melancholic character aren't the limits of a dramatic character, but overall, Bond's role in the stories is very much leaned towards a more dimensional and dramatic presentation than a blank slate character of his day.
If Fleming didn't want Bond to fill dramatic shoes or show a range of dramatic human emotion he wouldn't paint so many existential questions and plights off of him. He wouldn't have written a whole chapter about Bond lying in a hospital bed dissecting the meaning of morality, nor would he have made Bond wonder where the soul goes or have him pondering his life purpose, past and choices at random on airplane rides as he wonders what his past self would think of the man he'd become. He wouldn't do this, nor would he share that the spy's dutiful motivations are bound to a boyhood story of a kid on a burning deck, or finish a novel with Bond being left alone by a woman he liked to ponder the loneliness of his work and the silhouette he walks as, and he certainly wouldn't have had the premise of a book spark from Bond being so distraught and dulled by the "soft life" of his regular existence that he'd do anything to face death in the field again.
These examples are all from the early books, mind, so it's not as if Fleming just made Bond dramatic all of a sudden. The books have a lot of meat to them, not only in motif and how Fleming crafted images and ideas/themes that he called back to later on in each narrative (and often across many), they're also full of damn well drawn characters. And a lot of that is on the back of Bond, who is portrayed as a very deep and dramatic character, because he wonders about his choices, his life, his soul and faces hell and many evils that bring him into contact with some serious situations and some dark thoughts as a result.
It's near impossible to miss this stuff if you're looking for it, as the novels are ripe with it. But just this week you did seem to think that Bond 100% always loved being a 00, so maybe a marathon reread of the books is in order for you. ;)
Don't see what that has to do with Bond not being a dramatic character. That choice on Fleming's part could be seen as any number of things, as well. Personally, I think it's how Bond would actually act in that situation following what transpired in the first book. By the end of Casino he's built up SMERSH-and by extension, Vesper-as enemy No. 1, and vows to attack the group with all he has. It's only until later that he softens on Vesper and makes a voyage each year to her grave, so at this point in the series, literally just months after Vesper's betrayal, of course Bond isn't going to mention her. He's written her off and hates the memory of her for what she did to him and her service, so to him she might as well have never existed. It's why Fleming has Bond finish the book with "The bitch is dead now," to show readers how the spy has placed Vesper in a part of his mind he doesn't want to inspect, to move on. It's an obvious and pretty natural human reaction to facing a traumatic and/or painful revelation; you repress what you don't want to think about, and that's what Bond does. Simple as that.
I'm not recalling any time that Bond professes his mad love to Solitaire, but again, Bond is a heart on his sleeve kind of chap and he finds in the woman someone he wants to get close to, for her mystery and her sympathetic and troubled nature. After facing heartbreak with Vesper, Bond would be in a place to block out the memory of the last girl by absorbing his mind in another, to lather those wounds in something to heal them up. And we see that Solitaire was a fling, albeit a fling he cared for, as he's onto the Moonraker job just weeks after Live & Let Die ends. Vesper put him into that mode, of constantly moving on before getting too attached, and that's yet another aspect that makes Bond a dramatic character. What he faces in the first book changes everything from that point on, not only in his relation to women for a great deal of time (Tiffany entices him, but that falls through as they always do) but also in his choice to vilifying SMERSH to give his life purpose. Bond creates the machine that is himself and a "black target" he can always rub out, because the alternative was languishing in a pitiful ball feeling sorry for himself.
No, you're right...that's not dramatic at all.
Vesper doesn't fit the slightest the definition of a femme fatale. She is much more of an adoring groupie in the novel. The very fact alone, that she commits suicide in the end because she can't deal with the implications of her doing tells us she has nothing in common with a femme fatale.
The hospital scene btw is Fleming trying to convey to his leftist friends how important the role of a Secret Service is for a free society against those evil forces that they considered class and freedom fighters.
Also, I wasn't talking about mad love for solitaire. Just love. The kind of love he seems to develop for just about every woman the crosses his path in the novels. Hardly emotional hardened or weary.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not implying that you're wrong on every single account of your abilities. But I really, really believe that you tend to see you way too much in things.
But then it's probably worth noting that those more "serious" relationships are also the ones that end badly/out of his control? Maybe if his relationship with Vesper, Gala and even Tracy had been allowed to carry on they wouldn't have been different to any other Bond girl and we would have had another Tiffany/Pussy scenario, because he did seem to have genuine feelings for all of them in the books. That's actually really interesting to think about @nosolace.
You seem to rely on evasive language that hides the speciousness of your argument. In case you've forgotten, the name of this thread is "Very Flemingesque Elements in the Bond Films." For something to be very Flemingesque it needs to be characteristic of Fleming, which means it would have some kind of presence in his writing. Femme fatales do not appear in the Bond books, therefore they are not characteristic of Fleming and therefore not Flemingesque. Now, you could easily say they were Chandleresque, because they occur and reoccur throughout Chandler's work, but you can't make that argument with Fleming. Fiona wasn't an extension of Fleming's familiar female hag villains--she was generic character already familiar from countless Hollywood films who was imported into the Bond films to give Bond more women to dally with. Nor can you change goalposts by claiming Fleming might have written a character like Fiona if he'd lived because he wanted some novelty. By that logic, Fleming could just as well have given Bond a sex change operation or had M turn out to be traitor, or made his next villain Bond's resentful foster brother. All possible--none plausible.
As I wrote earlier, Vesper doesn't count, since she's more tragic than evil. And being evil is the first requirement of a femme fatale. What's Fiona's tragic story? Ah yes, she doesn't have one. Femme fatales usually don't.
How would you know something was Flemingesque if you couldn't establish any relation between it and Fleming's work? The early parts of this thread are full of genuinely Flemingesque examples. The centrifuge scene in Moonraker is Flemingesque because it calls to mind all the scenes of torture and physical endurance that populate the Bond novels. Sévérine's background in Skyfall is Flemingesque because it calls to mind the traumatized sexual histories shared by many of Fleming's heroines. Fiona is not Flemingesque because she doesn't call to mind any femme fatales populating Fleming's work.
I merely speak for people who respect logic and object to the remarkably dense idea that something can be Flemingesque without having any meaningful relation to what Fleming actually wrote.
Thank you @noSolaceleft. Common sense is always welcome.
And I think for us to call something Flemingesque there at least needs to be shades of that in the writing we have. If we go onto "I can imagine him writing about that" scenarios that have no basis in the actual books then we could say pretty much anything is Flemingesque.
But (gonna contradict myself here), if Elektra counts as a femme fatale I can see shades of Fleming there. More outright evil than Vesper but still has that Flemingesque sympathetic/wounded woman angle with her backstory. So if he'd written more books I could see him coming up with a character like that. But a Volpe, Onnatop type? I'm not so sure.
Exactly right.
The characteristics of a femme fatale really isn't the type we'd see in Fleming's writings. That trend started with the film's Pussy Galore and further established with Fiona Volpe.
Very powerful stuff. Except as a fellow respector of 'reason and logic' I feel it only correct to point out that, in your righteous indignation, you have managed to not read the question posed in by the OP at the top of the page properly:
Very Flemingesque elements in the Bond films (without a corresponding literary Bond reference)?
So actually matters not whether there is any evidence of Fleming writing something if someone has the opinion that its the type of thing he might have written.
The question itself does not permit for certainty merely speculation. You might not think that Fiona is in any way Flemingesque but if someone does you can disagree but you can't empirically refute it (unless you're claiming to channel Fleming's spirit?) particularly given the way the question is phrased.
Other people have stated that the opera scene in QOS is quite Flemingesque, which I don't necessarily subscribe to but I certainly see their point, but I guess that you will be going after that next since there isn't a scene set at the opera in the novels?
@noSolaceleft, I wouldn't say Bond falls for literally every main girl he comes upon, but he does care for them. Sometimes it's sexual, sometimes it's more who they are and their sympathy, but again, I fail to see how that's an argument for him not being a dramatic character (if you are even arguing that anymore). Bond is a caring guy, and he hates seeing women oppressed or controlled, so it's natural for him to lust so hard. Him not being hardened or weary has nothing to do with his dramatic capability. A hero can be deep and dramatic without being a wrist-cutter, after all.
Yes, you beat this dead horse all the time with me, @noSolaceleft. I could in turn say you see so little, but I'm not keen on repeating meaningless criticisms.
I don't think what I've said are things that aren't in the books, that you can't argue for at all. The content is there, and those arguments can easily be made (I just made some). I don't know how you don't see the content that Fleming put into the books, a lot of it being adult and existential, correlating to Bond being more than just a blank slate protagonist. Despite working in espionage fiction with a pulpy sense, Fleming injected his work with a lot of depth and craft, to make them stand out. He said as much, to make the genre writing something of a higher literary quality.
You can't read even the last pages of Moonraker and credibility get away with saying Bond wasn't a dramatic character capable of being at the heart of dramatic stories, and that's not to add in all the examples I gave beyond that.
You've made your point known, @Revelator. No need to always act with a stick up your arse when speaking with people. Now that would be dense.
Sorry, but how can something be Flemingesque if there aren't even traces or echoes of it found in his work?
If you argue argue that to say " I can see Fleming writing something like this" is enough to validate it as possible Flemingesque you elevate it to a abracadabra kind of formula.
I don't think it's as illogical as you make it out to be. In suggesting things people aren't trying to argue that the Icarus lazer is the most Fleminesque thing in the franchise or that Fleming, given more time to write, would've made a Liparus into a submersible car in his later books during the 70s.
On my side, I argued that Fleming could've easily created a female character like Fiona in his later work partially because she is a beautiful woman with a dark side, and I think there's far more reason to believe Fleming may've gone down that road than there wasn't. He'd already written beautiful and double-faced women before, including those from the criminal world (Tiffany, Pussy) so who's to say he wouldn't make a female rival for Bond that combined the traits of the Bond women with a more villainous side? I don't think this is a loony thing to suggest.
(The usual suspects need not respond, I've heard your arguments and have predicted all the rest you could have on this)
None of us can be sure if Fleming would've liked any of our suggestions here, but it makes little sense to pick everything apart trying to think for a dead man on what he would write and what he wouldn't. We're all looking for echoes of what content in the movies gives off a feeling that Fleming gives us as we read the books, and we all seem to have different ideas of what kind of character Bond is, the messages of the books and just about everything else, so there's no right answer here. It's all about perception.
This is what I was speaking of when you try to speak for a dead man. None of us are Ian, we can only suggest what we think he may've written. Some are looking at things too simply, and being too narrow in their definitions of things. People could call the tech-based message of SF un-Fleming (I wouldn't), but you could argue that, if he'd been alive at this time, Fleming may've used Bond to make a statement about how spies/humans are still important in a technological world. We can't ever know for sure as Fleming never lived to see this kind of world we have now, but one could make the argument for him doing so with supporting details.
I don't think so, unless one wishes to get terrifically anal about whether "corresponding literary Bond reference" refers to an exact occurrence in the Bond books or to a general pattern. There isn't a general pattern of femme fatales in Fleming, ergo...
And how would you know it would be the type of thing he'd write if he'd never written anything like it before? ESP from beyond the grave? You can't know without evidence, whether exact or general, from what Fleming wrote. How exactly could you call something Flemingesque without some kind of reference/connection to Fleming?
A pointless quibble, since someone who claims Fiona is Flemingesque can't empirically prove it either, especially since they can't point to anything in Fleming to support their case. Instead they channel Fleming's spirit, to predict what he would have done if he'd lived, and then project their error onto anyone who calls them out.
There are no scenes set in theaters either, or even movie theaters (aside from the notorious one in TSWLM). On the other hand, the elegance of the opera scene somewhat calls to mind Blades and Fleming's other Casino and high society scenes. So while the scene might not be very Flemingesque, it does capture the elegant world of the novels. And it's an effective scene in its own right.
Yes, the books Fleming actually wrote, not the ghost volumes birthed by your imagination.
Which is pretty close to speaking for a dead man. None of us knows what Fleming would have written had he lived, and anything we say on the topic is nothing but errant speculation. Fleming's actual books are all that can speak for him. What isn't in them isn't Flemingesque.
(F**k that, that's just me. Although some times I'm not kind, always slow)
You really get worked up over one little suggestion someone makes, and that's more than a little disconcerting. This isn't the UN General Assembly and we aren't meeting over concerns for nuclear war, it's a Bond forum. By all means, get over yourself.
I would get into how a sub-group of femme fatales can fill that archetypal role while being a victim of circumstance (and go on to share how most of the famous women I can think of from film and literature are more close to that type than the 100% evil women you seem to think they must be) but I don't want to give you an aneurysm. If you blew another gasket the guilt would utterly kill me.
Yes, that's always how it goes. The ones that state their opinion and don't explode when someone calls them a fool for thinking something they do are the ones who are the real troublemakers. I call bullshit, but I respect your opinion. (See what I did there?)
I wouldn't have to respond if people minded their tongues with a greater sense of awareness in the first place, but it's the internet and everyone thinks their keyboard is gilded. If I ever take myself that bloody seriously, into my mouth a gun barrel shall go.