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NEW ESSAY: The Madness of King Ernst I in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice (1964)
Dragonpol
https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
You Only Live Twice (1964) is certainly one of Ian Fleming’s most brilliantly bizarre and offbeat pieces of work from a James Bond oeuvre which was by that stage already rich with originality (cf. 'Quantum of Solace' [1960] and The Spy Who Loved Me [1962]). The novel incorporates travelogue, references to Japanese culture, lists of deadly flora and fauna, a revenge tale, the beginnings of serial killer fiction and fine Gothic horror as well as being the unfolding story of a dystopia on a Huxleyesque scale. Fleming was sadly literally dying from the admirable ailment “having lived too much” (in reality a bad heart) at the time he was writing this novel and so the fascination with the theme of death throughout really rings true from a man already all too aware of his own mortality. No world domination plot here (cf. the film version) but instead a private estate run by a veritable mad hatter called Dr Guntram Shatterhand who of course turns out to be none other than Bond’s arch-enemy and the murderer of his bride Tracy Bond in OHMSS. The Ernst Stavro Blofeld of You Only Live Twice is a different animal to what went before and here he can be seen as a veritable mad king (called King Ernst I most likely) and a lunatic ready for the asylum. Blofeld shouts in German much like the ranting and raving Adolf Hitler in the Führerbunker near the end of World War II when the war was all but lost and he seems equally as much out of touch with reality. We are told of "that lunatic Hitlerian scream" from Blofeld in the Garden of Death at one point in the novel for instance. One reads of Nazis escaping to Argentina and Spain at the war’s end but perhaps a few escaped to Japan too? It may be that that was what Fleming was pointing at – that there was diverse Nazi evil being spread throughout other third countries as a result of such post-war Nazi SS resettlement organisations as Odessa or Spinne.
It is notable that Blofeld’s plan here is not to hijack a Vulcan bomber and its deadly nuclear cargo for a grand ransom (Thunderball) or to use biological weapons against the UK (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but merely to induce the notoriously suicide-prone native Japanese population to kill themselves in ever more eccentric fashion in a “garden of delights” populated by highly poisonous flora and fauna, snakes and fumaroles. This garden is the locale where Blofeld goes utterly insane and indeed it is a veritable anti-Eden where the Fall of Man is all too evident. It is as if the imaginative horrors of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale or a novel by the Marquis de Sade have somehow come to life in the early 1960s with a little Swinging Sixties hocus-pocus thrown in for good measure. Blofeld does his rounds of the garden in a full suit of armour as does his companion Bunt and Fleming seems to be making the point that Blofeld is trying to be a legitimate samurai warrior with all of the code of honour that implies though we the reader see he is woefully inadequate in this role and that he is a mere gaijin and definite bounder. Blofeld and Bunt even plan to eventually sell up from Japan and then take their “death show” on the road in other locations around the world such is their ultimate depravity and inhumanity.
In You Only Live Twice there is no world domination master plan but in its stead there was just the mad king Blofeld lobbing off people's heads with a samurai sword, years before the serial killer fiction craze of the 1990s that Blofeld's plan to maximise Japanese suicides in his Garden of Death is akin to. In this sense Blofeld can be seen as a forerunner to that other madman in a Castle of Death, the serial killer ex-actor David Dragonpol in John Gardner’s Never Send Flowers (1993). Indeed, there are many interesting connections between both Bond novels. Like Dragonpol with his assassination targets, Blofeld attracts the suicidal Japanese seemingly for his own sick enjoyment and the delectation of the squat and grotesque Irma Bunt also. Bunt has the type of wardress face often associated with a Nazi death camp guard and as she is German and of the right age that could well have been her occupation. Of course, Fleming’s novel is as far away from the dire Roald Dahl-scripted 1967 film version as it is possible to get, but one can only hope that it will someday be filmed as a new chapter in Bond villainy where evil is seen to have had no point than glorying in evil itself. That seems a good theme for a Bond film that could sit along with the Bond film villains Karl Stromberg and Hugo Drax (of the films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker respectively) who were not interested in money or extortion but rather in creating new worlds in their own inherently evil image, just as it could be said Blofeld did originally in his Garden of Death in Japan. Ian Fleming's other villainous creation Dr Julius No was of course also an influence on Stromberg and Drax. Blofeld has seemingly single-handedly turned the Godly garden and the Englishman’s dwelling place of a summer day into a dark and grotesque “Disneyland of Death”. In opposition to this perversion of the sacredness of the garden is the fact that the English county of Kent is known as "The Garden of England" (cf. The Garden of Eden?) and this was of course on the side of the angels and was a haunt of Ian Fleming's and was where the majority of his third novel Moonraker (1955) was set with a duplicitous Nazi called Sir Hugo Drax is based with his answer to Britain's defence, the “Moonraker” rocket. This was done in much the same way as Stromberg wanted his underwater civilisation at the expense of the rest of the world or Drax wanted his new Super Race of perfect physical specimens to repopulate the Earth after its annihilation in a Hitlerian holocaust of his own creation.
One can easily see the seeds of these barking-mad characters in some of the Bond villains of the Roger Moore era Bonds in the Blofeld of You Only Live Twice. In this sense, perhaps a bit of the You Only Live Twice Blofeld has rubbed off on some of the cinematic Bond villains that came in the years after Ian Fleming’s death. One also thinks of Richard Maibaum’s original plot suggestion for The Spy Who Loved Me film to have real-world terrorists blow up the world’s oil fields with stolen nuclear submarines and watch the world burn just for the sheer hell of it. That would have been close to the Blofeld of You Only Live Twice it seems and it was sad that Maibaum’s vision for something “completely different” never made it onto the screen. The producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli ruled it out as being too overtly political for the James Bond film series, although he did like the idea. Of course sections of the recent Skyfall was based at least in part on events near the end of You Only Live Twice where Bond is shot in the head and loses his memory, and for the Fleming enthusiast that was surely a great thing to behold and it gives one hope that more of this criminally neglected novel will make its way on to the cinema screen.
It is notable that Blofeld’s plan here is not to hijack a Vulcan bomber and its deadly nuclear cargo for a grand ransom (Thunderball) or to use biological weapons against the UK (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but merely to induce the notoriously suicide-prone native Japanese population to kill themselves in ever more eccentric fashion in a “garden of delights” populated by highly poisonous flora and fauna, snakes and fumaroles. This garden is the locale where Blofeld goes utterly insane and indeed it is a veritable anti-Eden where the Fall of Man is all too evident. It is as if the imaginative horrors of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale or a novel by the Marquis de Sade have somehow come to life in the early 1960s with a little Swinging Sixties hocus-pocus thrown in for good measure. Blofeld does his rounds of the garden in a full suit of armour as does his companion Bunt and Fleming seems to be making the point that Blofeld is trying to be a legitimate samurai warrior with all of the code of honour that implies though we the reader see he is woefully inadequate in this role and that he is a mere gaijin and definite bounder. Blofeld and Bunt even plan to eventually sell up from Japan and then take their “death show” on the road in other locations around the world such is their ultimate depravity and inhumanity.
In You Only Live Twice there is no world domination master plan but in its stead there was just the mad king Blofeld lobbing off people's heads with a samurai sword, years before the serial killer fiction craze of the 1990s that Blofeld's plan to maximise Japanese suicides in his Garden of Death is akin to. In this sense Blofeld can be seen as a forerunner to that other madman in a Castle of Death, the serial killer ex-actor David Dragonpol in John Gardner’s Never Send Flowers (1993). Indeed, there are many interesting connections between both Bond novels. Like Dragonpol with his assassination targets, Blofeld attracts the suicidal Japanese seemingly for his own sick enjoyment and the delectation of the squat and grotesque Irma Bunt also. Bunt has the type of wardress face often associated with a Nazi death camp guard and as she is German and of the right age that could well have been her occupation. Of course, Fleming’s novel is as far away from the dire Roald Dahl-scripted 1967 film version as it is possible to get, but one can only hope that it will someday be filmed as a new chapter in Bond villainy where evil is seen to have had no point than glorying in evil itself. That seems a good theme for a Bond film that could sit along with the Bond film villains Karl Stromberg and Hugo Drax (of the films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker respectively) who were not interested in money or extortion but rather in creating new worlds in their own inherently evil image, just as it could be said Blofeld did originally in his Garden of Death in Japan. Ian Fleming's other villainous creation Dr Julius No was of course also an influence on Stromberg and Drax. Blofeld has seemingly single-handedly turned the Godly garden and the Englishman’s dwelling place of a summer day into a dark and grotesque “Disneyland of Death”. In opposition to this perversion of the sacredness of the garden is the fact that the English county of Kent is known as "The Garden of England" (cf. The Garden of Eden?) and this was of course on the side of the angels and was a haunt of Ian Fleming's and was where the majority of his third novel Moonraker (1955) was set with a duplicitous Nazi called Sir Hugo Drax is based with his answer to Britain's defence, the “Moonraker” rocket. This was done in much the same way as Stromberg wanted his underwater civilisation at the expense of the rest of the world or Drax wanted his new Super Race of perfect physical specimens to repopulate the Earth after its annihilation in a Hitlerian holocaust of his own creation.
One can easily see the seeds of these barking-mad characters in some of the Bond villains of the Roger Moore era Bonds in the Blofeld of You Only Live Twice. In this sense, perhaps a bit of the You Only Live Twice Blofeld has rubbed off on some of the cinematic Bond villains that came in the years after Ian Fleming’s death. One also thinks of Richard Maibaum’s original plot suggestion for The Spy Who Loved Me film to have real-world terrorists blow up the world’s oil fields with stolen nuclear submarines and watch the world burn just for the sheer hell of it. That would have been close to the Blofeld of You Only Live Twice it seems and it was sad that Maibaum’s vision for something “completely different” never made it onto the screen. The producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli ruled it out as being too overtly political for the James Bond film series, although he did like the idea. Of course sections of the recent Skyfall was based at least in part on events near the end of You Only Live Twice where Bond is shot in the head and loses his memory, and for the Fleming enthusiast that was surely a great thing to behold and it gives one hope that more of this criminally neglected novel will make its way on to the cinema screen.
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Comments
Great read.
The extras to the YOLT dvds spell out why the Castle of Death had to be dumped. As you know the producers searched and searched and couldn't find one. Apparently in Japan, such castles as Fleming described, never existed near water anyway.
But still, many elements of the novel were sprinkled throughout the film.
At the volcano, we do have the Garden of Death inspired piranha pool.
The Oubliette is moved from the Castle to Tanaka's HQ
The Ninja training school is intact.
The geisha girls.
And of course the Ama diving-girl scenario and village is beautifully recreated.
Not least, the film is based on location in Japan. Both book and film are very Japanese.
Dikko is included but wildly redrawn, not to mention killed.
Tiger and Kissy are much like we know from the book.
I never understood that argument about being unable to find a castle. I mean, seriously, they shot scenes in England and made us think it was Korea. Drax' estate was shot in France iirc, yet the film tells us we're in California. Surely they could have found some castle in France or Italy and made us think it was Japan!
I still to this day think that the third act of the YOLT novel could be used for a modern Bond film. Even if some of Fleming's ideas would at first seem unusable in a modern Bond film, I'm willing to hypothesize that a talented screen writer can find a way to make it work. People used to think CR was too simple a story to be told in the post DAD Bondiverse. How wrong they were...
Luckily they were able to find a hollowed-out volcano rocket base instead!
Not sure at this point they were bold enough to try and pass off other terrain as Japan.
The movie was a massive Japanese location shoot.
Still they would have had to build the interior to create a great set, much like they did for the Pinewood volcano base they ended up building.
The castle aerial scouting forays at least yielded the discovery of the volcanoes and the aerial shots we saw in the film, even if the Little Nellie battle scenes were shot in Spain.
The Blofeld from Fleming's novels is such a mixed bag for me. I think throughout his three appearance he was essentially three different characters but his appearance in YOLT always rung truest to me for the reasons you have stated.
I really am disappointed that Broccoli did not use the Maibum's script idea for TSWLM of keeping the anarchists because as you have eloquently stated in your piece they would make compelling villains. In many ways I think Christopher Nolan did something akin to this with The Joker character in 'The Dark Knight'; a villain without a true purpose. I can see this idea working very well in a future Craig film.
No, seriously. Well worth the wait. Bravo, @Dragonpol!
It would have been easy to film a real Japanese castle and use matte shots, models, and a few fake walls to make it look as it was by the sea. In any case, I'm not inclined to believe the producers' story--it sounds like a pretend-explanation for why they discarded most of the novel.
By deciding to film YOLT before OHMSS, the producers were already committed to ignoring large parts of the book. Second, there is no way they would bothered with the castle in the first place. In the wake of Thunderball, no Bond film would have settled for the villain's grand scheme being no more than a suicide garden. Something grander had to be devised, like the rock-stealing/potential WWIII scenario. I doubt if any draft of the screenplay actually called for a castle, which wouldn't have worked as a base for stealing rockets. The producers' story is therefore bunk--they never planned to seriously use a castle, though they might have scouted a few while on recce.
My apologies to Dragonpol for derailing discussion of his fine essay!
So they've got the book in hand. Off to Japan they go.
"Well, lets grab a chopter and see what the seaside has to offer up in the way of castles.
"Lo and behold, not a coastal castle to be found anywhere, but there are these massive volcanoes"....light bulb goes off in someone's head....Spectre rocket base in a volcano!!!...Genius!..."Adams, get thee to Pinewood and start building. Screw the castle, this is going to be the biggest Bond ever!!!"
"Originally planned to follow Goldfinger, and later Thunderball, the producers feared audiences might perceive similarities between the emphasis on underwater sequences in the latter film and those set on ski slopes in OHMSS. Also, the unfavorable weather conditions in Switzerland - the main locale - had made the project unfeasible."
I'd really love to hear your views on the Blofeld of the YOLT novel!
Thank you, @Mrcoggins. More new content coming to The Bondologist Blog soon after a bit of a hiatus. :)
http://www.thebondologistblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-madness-of-king-ernst-i-in-ian.html