[PULP ART IDEA MILL #2: Bonding It Up]

Since I mentioned working my way through the Bond novels in this post—and since I've started this new, largely visual series as a repository of ideas for other projects and posts—I thought I'd post what I've found to be my favorite reprint covers of the series, put out a few years ago by Penguin. The thing that's most left its mark on me while reading the books is how different they are from the majority of the film adaptations. How much more textured, more varied. And how much more of a clearly damaged, even self-doubting character Bond is. (The moment in the films that most captures this is perhaps Craig's bottomless-chair torture sequence in CASINO ROYALE, a scene whose brutality [esp. brutality against, as the book puts it, his "manhood"] is reproduced pretty much 1-to-1 in the film.) 

Also, having just finished MOONRAKER, I've realized that every book I've read so far includes extended, palpably detailed passages that involve Bond either being horribly tortured by his captors, or being forced to abuse and torture himself in order to pass a test, slip a trap, or succeed in foiling the villain's world-domination plan. It feels almost pathological, deep in the DNA, the way that the books insist on Bond being subjected to such sadistic violence; and so often at his own hand, as a requirement of his assignment. Violence that regularly threatens his integrity, his ability to function, on every level (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual). 

Whenever I hit one of these passages, I think of this passage, from a review of John Hyams' mind-melting UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (emphasis added):

"It’s also—like all of the movie’s action scenes—absolutely brutal. In terms of violence, DAY OF RECKONING crosses the line from blood-splatters-and-bone-cracks gore into outright body horror; Adkins might be the first action hero to get his fingers chopped off with an axe during a fight scene—a PSYCHO-style violation of the unspoken genre rule that action heroes can never endure an injury that a bandage or a sling couldn’t fix (as if to make the PSYCHO connection even more tangible, this rule violation occurs in a motel bathroom half an hour into the film)."

It feels as though Bond's character is repeatedly (and in sometimes jaw-dropping ways) being punished for his free-sex, free-agent, free-wheeling worldview (one that he insists onto the world itself, by using his missions as an excuse to project his wants, his personal and professional will). Six or seven books into the Bond series, I look forward to continuing through the originals, and eventually writing something lengthy about them (and this deep vein of [sometimes self-directed] hyper-violence against the international playboy spy who has been so often played to the point of camp in the films themselves).

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2015