Does It Better
I read classic newspaper comics and classic fiction. I finish reading a non-fiction book. I watch three pictures.
Eat Him by His Own Light
Headlines are grim. So I’m mostly just doing the stuff I like to do for exercise, discipline and fun: walking, running, drawing cartoons, watching movies, reading books, jotting down my thoughts about them and donating the modest proceeds to charitable causes.
I finished reading the second volume of The Complete Far Side and will shift some attention back to The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family.
Sticking to at least one chapter a day of Moby-Dick is working out. The other day I was listening to a bit of Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood, which on the soundtrack album includes a track called “Eat Him by His Own Light.” I know the movie well enough to know that that line isn’t in there but over years of listening to the album I never really thought about what it meant until I was reading that day’s chapter, “THE WHALE AS A DISH,” in which Melville writes that “mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light.” Meaning that the Pequod’s second mate Stubb, who from Melville’s descriptions I envision as Popeye, is eating a hunk of the whale he has just killed under the light of a lamp lit with oil from the same species of animal. I wonder if Jonny Greenwood was reading Moby-Dick while he was scoring There Will Be Blood, or if he was nudged in that direction by Paul Thomas Anderson. I suppose now that there are some thematic connections between the book and the film that I hadn’t considered before.
I finished Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles. A readable book that ultimately might be best paired with a more traditional Tubman biography, as Miles herself suggests when she writes that “traditional biographies (referenced throughout this book) chronicle the range of events, relationships, and historical contexts that made up this famous woman’s consequential life. The focus of my biographical take — Harriet Tubman’s eco-spiritual worldview — stems from Tubman’s baseline principles as revealed in her self-representations.”
While I didn’t get everything I wanted from Miles’s approach, I do find this sort of conceptual biography interesting. Miles cites her sources and bases everything in the historical record as presently established, but follows the facts into some zones of uncertainty, including a fascinating discursive endnote that explores whether “a beloved niece” whom Tubman rescued from Maryland was in fact Tubman’s daughter, and if so who her father was.
But beyond just exploring things we don’t or can’t know about Tubman, Miles also posits some possible answers. She writes that the “thematic focus of this book has been Tubman’s worldview — meaning her religious faith, her thoughts and ideas, her environmental consciousness, and her holistic application of these aspects in life practice.” This leads to some thought-provoking, if often deeply interrogative and highly speculative, musings about unanswerable historical considerations.
This approach clicked most effectively for me in the book’s fourth chapter, focused on Tubman’s dreams. Miles analyzes and interprets records of Tubman’s dreams (as told to others, since Tubman accomplished everything in her remarkable life without ever learning to read or write), for example of Tubman as “a dream bird” that “can rise above her surroundings and see farther than a person on foot (or a person awake) could manage.” Miles spends several paragraphs using a significant amount of historical, regional and ecological research to muse fairly convincingly about what kind of bird Tubman might have been envisioning (concluding that “the egret is most likely”). She goes on to point out that the “bird she becomes in her dreams is not therefore bound by societal rules; it is instead empowered to break free of them.”
And it was fascinating to me to have Miles situate Tubman within “the relationship between Black women prophets and their environments.” Miles explained what for me was a whole new Tubman paradigm, showing how other “Black women evangelists” can help us to understand Tubman and how this understanding “inspires the format of this book.” (The names of these evangelists were all new to me: Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Old Elizabeth and Julia A. Foote. More ideas for other books to read, since I didn’t know Tubman operated within this particular tradition.)
Miles’s approach will not suit every reader. I still feel a need to read one of the aforementioned traditional biographies just to get more of the straight story in widescreen. And Miles’s intellectual meanderings occasionally lead into some confounding or disquieting places, such as her repeated veneration of and deference to the work of Alice Walker, who is known among other things for apparently seeming to be quite antisemitic. I’ve never read Walker’s work and I take Miles at her word that Walker’s writings are significant in having helped Miles to find her unique approaches to writing about Tubman. But I can imagine that in a more traditional, narrative, just-the-facts Tubman biography there would be no particular need to make recourse to Walker’s ideas or to list her on a roster of “creative geniuses” as Miles does. Walker may indeed be such a genius; I will have to actually read her work to see if I agree. But knowing the nutjob antisemitism that characterizes some of her publicly-available views and writings, one Tubman conceptual biography that draws on Walker’s ideas is enough for this reader.
Miles’s unusual, stimulating and (sometimes) informative book is not enough on its own, and not suitable for those who aren’t open to historical writing characterized by sentences that end in question marks. But it should prove a good jumping-off point for someone like me who wants to learn about Tubman and desires to get a fuller picture of her life and significance.
Film Selections: Three More Bond Pictures
I’ve established a beachhead in the Roger Moore era of the James Bond film franchise, having watched the first three of his outings.
The Moore era sees Bond evolving from a pulpy spy-novel character into a Seventies lifestyle brand. Moore’s Bond is fairer-haired, less menacing, no less handsome (mileage may vary) and taller (or he at least looks taller, since I know Connery and Lazenby were both tall men; it may be just that Moore is leaner, which gives an impression of being taller). His suits are no less fancy but are definitely indicative of the strange and garish styles of his decade. Moore’s Bond smokes cigars instead of cigarettes.
And he is wryer, quippier and less threatening. It takes until the third film before he is able to approach the bottled menace and two-fisted swagger that Connery evinced.
The SPECTRE storylines have been resolved and are apparently not an overarching part of Moore’s run.
While we’re now onto the third actor playing Bond, the roles of M, Q and Moneypenny are still populated by Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn and Lois Maxwell respectively.
The films are a mixed bag so far, though the third of them has become an instant favorite and rocketed into the upper echelon of all Bond pictures I’ve seen.
Live and Let Die, directed by Guy Hamilton, 1973. I had wildly mixed feelings about this film. It has some very good components and some real garbage. I feel like a recurrent motif in my Bond criticism is going to be assessing the balance between coolness and silliness, and Moore’s first two Bond pictures push them both so far out that they threaten to rend the movies asunder.
Live and Let Die inaugurates the Moore era with one of the best Bond songs, Paul McCartney’s strange “Live and Let Die” theme. I was further enthused from the credits to see that McCartney’s old collaborator George Martin did the score for this movie, which incorporates McCartney’s tune as a leitmotif.
The film finds Bond traveling to the USA to find out who is serially killing MI6 operatives, leading him to infiltrate criminal syndicates in communities of color, one in Harlem, one in the French Quarter and one on a fictional Caribbean island nation called San Monique. The latter is run by a ruthless dictator played by an interestingly-cast young Yaphet Kotto as the story’s primary antagonist. Kotto’s smug and vicious villain uses African occult methods, including the counsel of a gorgeous clairvoyant henchwoman played by Jane Seymour. The film is populated by a wide host of lesser personae including a female CIA operative, an array of henchmen with the franchise’s usual character gimmicks (such as a mechanical hook for an arm) and yet another actor I’ve never heard of playing yet another version of Felix Leiter.
One of these characters in particular represents most of what I disliked about this film. Someone named Clifton James plays a sweaty Louisiana sheriff named J.W. Pepper with whom Bond becomes entangled in a ludicrous and too-long slapstick car-and-speedboat chase through a bayou. Pepper is meant to be comic relief and a contrast to Bond’s suavity. But the screechy character and Clifton’s histrionic acting suck up so much valuable time in the back nine of this film that I was thoroughly demoralized before even arriving at the denouement (which itself is ridden with components of near-equal goofiness). The tonal lurch into kooky cartoon humor, and the Pepper character in all respects, are severe mistakes that hobble an already zig-zaggingly discordant film. An interesting artifact but ultimately an unsatisfying first showing for the Roger Moore era.
The Man with the Golden Gun, directed by Guy Hamilton, 1974. Another from director Hamilton that strikes a similar tone. Ultimately it’s of slightly higher quality than Live and Let Die. The most distinctive aspect is that the villain in this one is arguably cooler and more appealing than Bond.
Good idea for a story, if told in an ungainly way: a legendary and feared hitman named Scaramanga, played ably by the great actor Christopher Lee, uses custom golden bullets and an artisanal golden gun. He wishes to test himself by trying to assassinate Bond, while Bond affirms to neutralize him first. This takes Bond to Beirut, Macau, Hong Kong, Thailand and into Chinese territorial waters. I dig the premise of a killer who is equal to Bond in skill going after 007 for pride and glory. This is also my first time seeing the young Lee in a film after decades of admiring his late-career work in The Lord of the Rings pictures.
Varying levels of silliness: Scaramanga’s butler/henchman Nick Nack, played by Hervé Villechaize (the character is a little person for reasons not entirely clear to me; I guess it’s trying for cheap laughs?); Bond’s ditzy and bumbling fellow agent Goodnight, played by the pretty but thespianly unimpressive Britt Ekland; Scaramanga’s car that turns into a physics-defying aircraft; and, most unforgivably, the return of J.W. Pepper, into whom Bond runs by sheer coincidence in Thailand and who joins Bond for an absolutely ludicrous car chase.
After years of reciting the “dueling Bonds” sequence from The Trip, I finally realized that it’s this film Coogan and Brydon are referencing with their “Come, come, Mr. Bond; you get just as much pleasure from killing as I do” riff.
The Spy Who Loved Me, directed by Lewis Gilbert, 1977. Just skip the rest of this installment if you don’t want to read my raving about what a great Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me is. Moore and company, seemingly benefiting tremendously from the more sensible and skillful direction of Gilbert and a screenplay that amends every mistake of the previous two films, find their footing here and deliver an all-around knockout. This isn’t just the best Moore/Bond I’ve watched so far; it’s one of the best of the series up to this point, even exceeding several of the Connery era.
A spectacular cold open establishes that someone is stealing nuclear-armed submarines from Britain and the USSR and that a beautiful Soviet spy code-named XXX, played by Barbara Bach, will be assigned to the case from her side of the Iron Curtain as Bond will be from his. In a succinct and stylishly-filmed combat-on-skis sequence, Bond kills her boyfriend while evading a hit team, culminating in an absolutely great piece of stunt-design when, in one unbroken and breathtaking shot, the stuntman playing Bond skis off a steep cliff and unfurls a parachute emblazoned with a Union Jack.
We’re already off to a confident start, and then as the credit sequence kicks in I was swept away by the brilliantly bombastic Bond ballad “Nobody Does It Better,” written by Carole Bayer Sager and EGOT-winner Marvin Hamlisch and interpreted in a soaring performance by Carly Simon. I never heard this song until I sat down to watch this movie and now I’ve listened to it like fifty times in the last few days. Easily my favorite Bond song of the entire franchise up to this point.
The Spy Who Loved Me seizes and maintains this opening initiative. It has a more mature Seventies film look and makes liberal use of musical cues (even directly incorporating Maurice Jarre’s legendary score for Lawrence of Arabia when the mission takes Bond to Egypt). It also has clever stakes when Bond and XXX are forced to work together to defeat the villain, played with genuine menace by Curt Jürgens. These stakes compound when XXX realizes Bond killed her lover and resolves to kill Bond as soon as the mission is over, despite their ineluctable romantic chemistry. Between Bach being a good enough actor and Moore having settled into the character, they are actually fairly convincing as rivals who both flirt with and threaten one another.
Jürgens’s character dwells in an underwater fortress and is obsessed with all things aquatic, a theme that runs throughout the film. His main henchman is Jaws, a hulking monstrosity played by Richard Kiel who has metal teeth that can bite anything to death, even a shark. (Jaws is this film’s gimmick-bad guy and is set up to be the “last surprise villain” who comes back at the last minute after the main villain has been dispatched, but pleasantly that encounter is left unaddressed, suggesting that Jaws will return in a later film, which I’m looking forward to.)
The location-hopping takes 007 and XXX to Sardinia, where Q outfits Bond with a sports car that turns into a submarine (the aquatic theme, you see). This is perhaps only slightly more plausible than Scaramanga’s car-plane, but disbelief is more readily suspended because it’s a cooler car and because Moore and Bach have such fun bantering about inside of it.
The tension and passion between Bond and XXX intersects with a more ambitious storyline of Bond rescuing the captured submarine crews and leading them in battle against the villain’s henchmen, at which point The Spy Who Loves Me blossoms into a going-behind-enemy-lines-to-pull-off-a-near-impossible-mission movie along the lines of Where Eagles Dare. This turn expands on Bond’s capacity for violence and combat in well-edited action sequences, visually advanced by the standards of the time and with a lot of bad guys killed. There are also some solid suspense elements when Bond has to remove the detonator from a nuclear bomb without setting off the bomb itself and then trick the stolen nuclear submarines, which the villain wants to use to start a nuclear war so that he can drive humanity’s remnants into an underwater civilization, to target one another. In these sequences as in the cold open ski-stunt, Gilbert’s enthusiastic use of non-diegetic music is outclassed by his knowing when not to use it: when the stakes are highest, Gilbert lets good writing, and Moore’s improving acting, build more suspense than an unsubtle musical cue could. They are taking the material more seriously and treating the viewer with more respect in this film.
In terms of the cool/silly balance, The Spy Who Loves Me blends them like vodka and vermouth in a well-shaken martini. Better writing, better direction, better stunts, better characters and better acting. I have four Moore to go, but this picture will be hard to top. Baby, you’re the best.