The Elektra King Hair Complex

Now it can be told: My favorite Bond girl is Sophie Marceau in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH.

Man, it's her hair. I love her hair in this film, beyond words. After seeing it in the theater back in 1999, I almost broke up with my girlfriend because I knew I could never love any woman other than Marceau's delectably evil oil baroness, Elektra King. My real-life girl's hair was too curly; it made me sneeze at night in spoon position. This is what comes from years of falling in love with the backs of girls' heads instead of paying attention in class.

World is Not Enough was the film that came out after Tomorrow Never Dies, which used to be one of my favorites. Last night I re-watched Never and I find it has lost a lot of shimmer through the discerning lens of 2008. For one thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe--the one who always dies early--as the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Modern Bride magazine is sexy, where all the beautiful hair is hidden behind gossamer white veils or pulled back into sharp buns, or in her case cut to shoulder length in a moussed-up tussle. Michelle Yeoh makes up for the damage as the second babe, but she's an action star, not a buxom love machine; when she rubs noses with Pierce Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup.


Upping the party boy ante in Never is the way-too-perfume ad-like set design: lots of 90s blue neon, and then there's Calvin Kleinesche henchmen, played by Gotz Otto. With his posh nightclub bouncer physique and attire, Otto's actually the prettiest young thing in the cast. Sigh, when Pryce orders him around it's in the same insinuating tones older rich gay men use with their Smithers-esque proteges in gay films. It's a marked step up from the raging homophobia in Diamonds Are Forever, but this is James Bond and they're the bad guys; when Bond bashes these queer-eyed characters to death, we're supposed to cheer.

Back in the late 1990s, the whole chillbient-loungecore ennui trip hop aesthetic was only beginning its downtempo slide into ecstasy-warped history. I had been right in the thick of it and thought Never was just marvelous. Of course you couldn't find loads of better Michelle Yeoh action films on DVD back then... or DVDs at all for that matter. Now it's strange to see Tomorrow Never Dies appearing so dated. It's like coming home for Christmas to find your mom rocking out to the Sneaker Pimps. Then Casino Royale showed us what we'd been missing spending decades with a Roger Moore smirk keeping real life at arm's length. It seems we'd been giving away our gritty maturity by the bucketful since back in 1971, when Sean Connery first endured the strident yammering of Jill St. John in Diamonds. We'd been losing our way and taking the abuse of our backseat driver spouses until we emerged eunuchs in the flames of Tomorrow Never Dies, the first Bond film shot entirely inside a product placement-enriched Vogue spread. Not only were all the designer hotel products lovingly displayed (and presumably available for purchase while on board the aircraft) but we  were supposed to believe that OUR Bond would actually get misty-eyed with regret over losing a flagrantly materialistic trollop like Hatcher. I've nothing against her as an actress in general, but her thing is that hyper-intense TV drama acting, not the vacantly larger than life archetyping of Bond.

Thus we see the sad result of our collective capitulation to the ever-shifting desires of third wave feminism: even Bond believes he should apologize for being a man. What Never needs more than Michelle Yeoh is Camille Paglia. Yeoh's got the high kicks, but Paglia could have trounced Jonathan Pryce's media pundit with a single trenchant pop culture essay.

Which brings me to Sophie Marceau, sweet... sweet Sophie. She's got the sense of nymphonic entitlement we ned for a Bond girl, down pat. When Marceau lounges in gold-trimmed Middle Eastern richness, she not only fits the Vogue fantasia mold, she transcends it. Being French surely helps; she acts like she grew up in this sort of stuff, as opposed to Hatcher who looks like she'll start stealing the designer shot glasses as soon as Bond steps into the bathroom.

Representing the Americans in World is the much more age-inappropriate Denise Richards as an atomic physicist, one of the best pieces of stunt casting in the history of cinema. One look at her marching around the abandoned Russian missile silo in sexy khaki shorts and all your worries slip away. Richard's not a great actress but she doesn't need to be, maybe even shouldn't be. Like all the best Bond beauties she acts from her hips, sexual in her every gesture, the archetypal transcendental, slightly-blank, uber-babe.


Next up in the series would be Halle Berry in Die Another Day, one of my least favorite of all Bond performances (I'm not even going to post a pic of her!). When are audiences going to wise up to this little tyro? She's hot, she can act... sometimes, but she's got no "presence." She's a wisp with a little mouse voice. Granted it's not always easy to mouth the immature dialogue of Bond films, but Berry seems uncomfortable and nervous every step of the way. She's like the girl who accepts the invitation to the Playboy mansion just to stand alone in the corner by the shelves, sneering in contempt at the Hef's collection of X-rated figurines. And let's not even mention her 'hair' - which is nonexistent. Far better is Rosamund Pike as the tricky British double agent Miranda Frost. I always root for Miranda in Die's climactic cat fight. But she never wins.

Meanwhile, Judi Dench is all well and good as M, but the scenes of high level meetings and board rooms all lack the camaraderie of the old Connery days wherein fraternal English upper class types smoked cigars and knocked back tumblers of whiskey as they clued Bond in on the latest super villain. When men are alone they can deal with big issues without losing their cool, like it's all in a day's work. Once M shows up, everyone has to act serious and freaked out as she utters tired stiff upper lip oaths like "This will not stand!" What women in the workplace so often fail to grasp is the importance of underplaying.  Rosa Krebb and Dench should take each other on sometime, with chainsaws in the dead of night, in a spot chosen by a neutral third party. Then we could call all women equal!

Speaking of which, when will there be another decent Bond supervillain? The last good one was Christopher Walken in the otherwise odious A View to a Kill! And that one also had Tanya Roberts, sigh, talk about great hair... well, for the 80s.


MY OTHER BOND WRITINGS (From Film Experience and Bright Lights):
The Amnesiac Bond
Bond Rides the Moebius Strip
Olga Kurylenko's House of Pain
Miss Taro

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Acting by the Void

I've been deeply reassessing old favorites under the new light of DVD lately. Re-visiting CARNIVAL OF SOULS in the midst of a panic attack/nervous breakdown/hazy lazy Sunday evening, the swanky Criterion DVD version with the benefit of clear focus and brilliant restoration. On a big screen, it's like I am finally melting into the film, the pure Cronenberg-ian mecha-flesh union, where eyes become sex organs embedded deep into the silver screen womb of dream. Steve Shaviro should be proud of me!

If that seems florid, consider the nature of CARNIVAL OF SOULS and its place in the cult canon; left of PERSONA, right of PSYCHO and PSYCHO's British mirror-twin, CITY OF THE DEAD (AKA HORROR HOTEL). From there SOULS branches off near THE BIRDS, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and REPULSION. This area of the film family tree  has had initials carved scalpel deep in the Freudian recesses of the American fetish icon bark--the "glacial blonde" wet wood pulp just beneath as portrayed by Janet Leigh, Candace Hilligoss, Tippi Hedren, and Kim Novak. This is where I like to visit, with my copy of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae tucked neatly under my arm, to peer down in through the grates and watch as directors like Hitchcock and Herk Harvey point out the fascinating lobes and regions of my mom's brooding Viking cerebral cortex for my amazement.

In addition to being able to enjoy solid 16mm black and white cinematography to the fullest, which is pretty full, the DVD in hand gives you a sense of ownership over the experience. I have been trying to decipher what it means that I must keep spending way too much $$ as every wish I made as a 14 year old classic monster movie-obsessed child is suddenly, painfully, gratified. Back in the 1970s as a haunted 11 year-old I would fantasize about having all my favorite Bela and Boris movies at my command, being able to project them on the wall at will.

Of course, my trying to decipher the motives behind such reckless spendsmanship is akin to the searches conducted by the attractive blonde female protagonists of these films themselves. In my attempt to "own" a first-rate DVD of PSYCHO, for example, I "become" Norman Bates trying to "own" Janet Leigh, so he can display her as a stuffed trophy. I should mention my own mother is a blonde who in the era of these films' original release was a comparable icy beauty, so there you go... we the insane little boys of the audience craved to possess the silver screen mother and now we can, in a way that teens in the 1950s and 60s could only dream of. It's like nailing a bird to the wall in mid-flight, an owl with it's wings outstretched, longing to get unspooled through time and air and white light once more.

I think that by buying PSYCHO and CARNIVAL OF SOULS on DVD and watching them faithfully through the decades I harbor the forbidden, unconscious notion that I might undo the action of my original birth, via the death drive. I feel it pull me northwards, my chakras revolving in accordance with the earth as it goes round the sun like a slow, hypnotized dancer. The blondes seem to sense this first, like miner birds; they start the wheel a-spinning, betting all the money on red or black or whichever drips out first from between their beautiful alabaster thighs.

SPOILER ALERT - Candace Hilligoss's character in CARNIVAL "wakes up" into death, but so do they all, and so do we all - and we artists-- whether organist, writer, lover or dreamer--are called there first, and we go alone, and our friends and family fade to blurry behind us. We hear them asking us to come back, but the voices are faded and drenched in reverb. This is addiction and the siren's song luring your ship to the horny rocks of salt and delirium tremens and jail sentence suffering. From now on, your movie will exist with a gaping wound. Now there will be a centerpiece narrative shift.

But going back to the family and the friends calling vainly to your fading speck of light from their safe dull haven behind that veil seems worse; that life is spent, played, cashed. Any love you found still left there would just be crumb-like and fleeting. You know the only road left is the one to God, but it's so corny and such a total sacrifice of all one's coolness that you refuse to go. And so the priest suggests that you resign, and Norman's mother's chair starts to rock in agreement. But nothing is happening, and you finally know why that is, or do you, Mister Jones?

The truth is, you're living in a maze where every dead end's been gone over a hundred times and all the little treats have been eaten and there's nowhere to go but beyond. But instead of shuffling thy mortal coil like a good little organist you just hang around, drifting from town to town, department store to park to boarding house, waiting for the minotaur to set you free. You'll never know if you're even in the right maze until you finally feel his horns against your weeping eyes. Here be those horns! Own them!

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