Thanks, cp. I was very influenced by Tony Bennett's and Janet Woollacott's 1987 book, 'Bond and Beyond', in the Communications and Culture series published by Palgrave. I read this when it first came out, and at that time its analysis of AVTAK seemed relevant and challenging. It's basically from there that I've filched my points about May Day's role in the 'ideological structure' of AVTAK. This book is marred by the sort of turgid academic jargon which at the time blighted most studies of 'the mass media', but it's worth perusing if you can get hold of a copy. (James Chapman's style in the more recent book that you mention is more accessible by comparison.)
In the 1987 tome, there's an interesting chapter looking at patterns in the sales of paperbacks of the Fleming titles, and how these had been impacted by different Bond film releases. Bennett and Woollacott analysed the shifting effect of the film releases on sales of the Fleming novels as a whole - compared with sales of each individual book in the particular year that the Bond film using the same title was released. The conclusion was that, during the sixties, each new Bond film drove up significantly the sales of *all* of Fleming's Bond novels, as a set; whereas, by the early seventies, the effect of a new Bond film on sales of Fleming was significant *only* in the case of the particular novel bequeathing its title to that film.
So it follows that, across both decades combined, there would have been many more thousands of readings of Fleming with Sean Connery in people's imaginations than with Roger Moore's image in mind: this would have been true even of 'Live and Let Die' and 'The Man With The Golden Gun' as read paperbacks - and even if the calculation takes into account the 1973 and 1974 reissues of these titles, spiking new waves of consumption as 'movie tie-in' editions with images of Roger Moore on the front covers. That analysis of changing patterns and volumes of consumption of the books during the 60s and into the 70s adds a whole new perspective on the once fashionable debate about whether, in popular imagination, Connery was and remained the 'real' James Bond. (The situation became more complicated in the mid to late 70s when the release of two Bond movies, TSWLM and MR, tied in with the publication of original novels by Christopher Wood, temporarily suspending reissues of Fleming's books of the same name. As 'books-of-the-films' the two new Bond novels by Wood, reworking his own screenplays, featured a 'Fleming-ised' iteration of Moore's Bond only. The imaginative 'life' of Wood's novels was circumscribed and anchored by the specific movies with which they tied in, TSWLM and MR, and their life span was limited by the period of
those particular movies' distribution and exhibition.)
Before Bennett's and Woollacott's book came along, Stuart Hall and Richard Dyer had put together an Open University teaching kit, including audio cassettes, about the production of TSWLM specifically, and about that film's "ideological effects". Some of this was about the idealisation of technology in TSWLM, and its consumerist fantasy of complete closure of the gap between intention and technological operation. There was also stuff in it about the limitations of Anya's role, rebutting publicity claims that Anya represented a new kind of Bond woman, an equal with Bond. I read, and listened, my way through these OU resources in about 1983/84. Hall's research involved gaining access to key personnel at Eon, and recording interviews about the making of TSWLM. (Very interesting stuff - at a point well before there were such things as DVD Bonus Feature interviews and commentaries with production teams!) I guess that Eon hadn't properly realised that Hall's academic team would be coming from a Marxist, critical perspective - again, an approach typical of studies of 'the mass media' at the time. Indeed, Eon may have considered itself 'stung' by the end result, an explicit criticism of TSWLM's "ideological structure". I'm sure Eon will have kept a weather eye on academic publications about their movies ever since.
Before that, cultural theorist Umberto Eco had written an article about narrative structure in Ian Fleming. Eco had argued that the Bond novels exemplified a Manichean ideology, configuring the world as a series of binary oppositions based on good vs evil - including East vs West, programming vs spontaneity, etc. It's tempting to think that Zorin's line in AVTAK when he brags about his own capacity for "intuitive improvisation" is a sly in-joke at the expense of Eco, who had argued that it was this very quality which always enabled Bond to better the villain.
More recent studies of popular television and film have sometimes taken a look at fandom as a phenomenon; and some academics now write with their 'fan hats' on, too. I think that can be very interesting.
Last edited by Shady Tree (21st May 2020 16:11)
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 50 years.
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