Plasma Pool

In November and December of 2008, Darren Franich and Eric Freeman engaged in a ridiculously long email exchange about virtually everything related to Quantum of Solace and the James Bond franchise as a whole. That conversation is now reproduced here.

This back-and-forth is part of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” series. To view all “Point-Hyperpoint” entries, visit this page. To read all “Point-Hyperpoint” posts on James Bond, please click here.

DARREN

November 18 | 2:02 PM

The creation of Quantum — a secret, shadowy organization that has infiltrated everything and everywhere, secretly plans to rule the world by bankrupting it, and may have assassinated John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Benazir Bhutto — is a tremendous step backwards for the Bond series. Pierce Brosnan’s Bond films never found a good villain, meandering from former Soviets to the media, from insane shipping heiresses to transracial Koreans. Rather than pit Bond against a unified, crazed, post-Soviet, post-ideological villain, as in the Brosnan films, Casino Royale got the Daniel Craig era started on the right foot by refreshingly portraying the Bad Guy as a motley assortment of terrorists, arms dealers, corrupt government contacts, and extortionists. True, the Casino Royale villains are somewhat flat, but they’re believable in their short-sighted, occasionally thuggish but incredibly powerful way, their very thuggishness making their ability to run circles around the British government all the more believable.

Now, though, we’ve got a return to hyper-paranoid, even kooky conspiracy theorizing that has been compared to the Sean Connery and Roger Moore Bonds, but is actually much more in line with The X-Files or even This Island Earth. I’m sure the addition of a shadowy anti-Bond consortium was meant in good faith, to give the Craig Bonds more continuity, but it’s actually kind of a bummer to consider that Daniel Craig, easily the best Bond ever, will now be wasted on nonsensical plots which will magically converge at the one-hour mark when it becomes clear that it was those evil Quantum guys all along!

The Haiti segment of Quantum of Solace is probably the most amateurish sequence in any $200+ million movie ever, even worse than the Pirates movies and Spider-Man 3. The scene on the docks—in which the villain talks about himself for 15 minutes without remotely illuminating who he is or what he’s doing—plays like a high-school production of Much Ado About Nothing, with someone (in this case Bond) hovering on stage right, hiding behind a bush and somehow overhearing every word of a whispered conversation fifty feet away.

Quantum of Solace’s opera sequence, on the other hand, was probably the best scene of any movie in 2008. I think this may be because director Marc Forster envisions Quantum less as a cabal of smoking men in windowless rooms and more as a vast array of powerful people who are essentially uninterested in doing anything illegal but are just interested enough in making money that, by combining, they become the most powerful force on earth. Basically, they’re the world’s first open-source conspiracy, kind of like the secret anti-Scientology group Anonymous (or, more literally, like that program you can download that grants five percent of your computer’s operating power to SETI’s star-mapping project). This actually makes Quantum weirdly up-to-date, since although we don’t really believe in totally mad genius villains anymore, we do believe in slightly evil but mostly just corrupt rich people with zero national loyalty or moral integrity. The decision to make the villain a proponent of green technology—his name is even Greene, to ensure we don’t miss the point—a field that today is already inextricably tied up with both technological advancement and systems of a global scale, is also kind of genius.

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ERIC

November 21 | 7:48 PM

I share your distaste for the Brosnan-era villains, Darren — aside from Xenia Onatopp and Alec Trevelyan from Goldeneye, whom I will rep to the grave — but I don’t think that the Quantum development is any sort of a step backward. The problem with the Brosnan era was that the classic World Domination Villain (WDV) didn’t have any sort of connection to the non-Bond world. Sure, loose nukes are a threat, but the figure of the WDV worked much better during the Cold War, when there was an actual antagonistic superpower that was believed to be capable of taking over the world. The plots from this area were still ridiculous, of course — remember Moonraker, when Hugo Drax tries to create a master race in space? — but these threats could at least connect to some kind of overarching fear of a legitimate enemy.

The villains in the Brosnan era are awful outside of Goldeneye’s Trevelyan and Onatopp, but even they succeed as characters more than as villains — Trevelyan has a genuine emotional connection to Bond and Onatopp perfectly mixes batshit insanity and unfettered hotness. The other Brosnan villains are uniformly terrible. Jonathan Pryce’s character in Tomorrow Never Dies runs a media empire and wants to wreak havoc so he’ll get exclusive stories, as if one media outlet could possibly dominate coverage in 1997. Robert Carlyle’s character in The World Is Not Enough wants to blow shit up, or something; somehow he’s supposed to be an interesting character because he can’t feel pain and got Sophie Marceau to succumb to Stockholm syndrome. And Die Another Day, of course, tries desperately to make North Korea into a real threat to the Western world, but even that ridiculously stupid movie realizes that the lead villain needs to be turned into a white guy to become rich and powerful. Oh, and for some reason the transracialization process makes it so that he can’t sleep. Again, there are only two good villains in the Brosnan-era crop — the rest are half-baked characters and/or failed WDVs.

It’s not surprising to me that they couldn’t produce many interesting characters in an action movie—the shocking thing is that they had to resort to trying at all. Media barons and fake-British North Koreans just don’t make the most imposing bad guys in the world, and movies of this type need easily digestible villains that are still related to some kind of legitimate threat. Otherwise, you’re stuck with a high-rent action movie, which is usually entertaining but not especially worthy of study or sustained thought.

When looked at individually, the new Bond villains are pretty stupid: Le Chiffre is a mere arms trader who cries blood tears (i.e. the villain equivalent of an office drone with asthma, except Le Chiffre also has asthma!!!) and Dominic Greene surreptitiously buys up water supplies so he can blackmail rogue governments into agreeing to unfair utilities contracts. If these guys had popped up in the Brosnan era, we would have laughed at them and popularized the Agent Cody Banks franchise to fill our spy movie needs.

But the new Bond villains make sense in these new movies. In part, that’s because the last two Bonds have been less interested in high-concept gadgetry, which dials down the teenage-fantasy factor (only slightly, of course) and allows the plots to be less fanciful. At the same time, though, the fact of the matter is that the world is really scary right now as it is, and you don’t especially need an army of nuclear weapons to tap into people’s fears. The villains in Quantum of Solace are corporate bigwigs and politicians, who have been screwing people over left and right in recent memory. I’m obviously describing the world in fairly reductive terms, but that’s appropriate when we’re talking about a series that, at its best, has always played on widespread, stereotypical, identifiable fears.

Quantum’s villains are appropriate for a time when these long-tapped specific fears—say, fear of nuclear destruction—are no longer serious, communally felt threats. Quantum offers, as past villains could not, a focal point at which to localize not just specific fears, but the source of a consuming paranoia. As Frederic Jameson argues in “Totality as Conspiracy,” the conspiracy plot device, and the paranoia resulting from it, is actually comforting, because it provides a framework for making sense of a world that does not initially appear to make sense. In the last two Bond films, the villains are working towards the same goal — make money — but there’s no common ideological or moral ground to tie them together.

Quantum provides that linking structure. Without it, the villains would not work well enough as individuals to reach the aggregate threat level we’ve come to expect from a Bond movie. But as you say, the true innovation of Quantum is that it’s disjointed and casual in practice. If we judge by the film’s opera scene, these conspirators really are just a bunch of rich dudes trying to improve their earning potential—it’s almost like a hobby. These men are so powerful — and therefore scary — that maintaining their conspiracy is almost effortless.