James Bond vs. Today's Hollywood Spies: Where are the Heroes and Bad Guys?

A series of posts by Big Hollywood contributor Leo Grin on Ian Fleming and James Bond prompts the question. Where are the villains and heroes of today? When we have real life villains such as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova and Umalat Magomedov, the curios absence of villains even remotely resembling the real-life jihadists afflicting the West, Russia, and China is pathetic. Even worse is the matching lack of real heroes. Only throwing off the PC blinders (and catering to a female-dominated PC dogma crowd) can popular culture both regain relevance and provide useful models for boys and men.


Leo Grin's post on how Ian Fleming created James Bond out of an homage to his father who died when he was a child, in World War One, and various men with whom he served in Naval Intelligence during World War Two, prompts the question. Who were the villains, and what was the nature of the hero? What was James Bond really about?

Look at the video below, of various Bond exploits set to the tune of Barry Gray's 007 music:



What is going on? An intrepid secret agent, infiltrates the enemy, and with the aid of gadgets galore causes havoc and escapes, as the Americans come in and blast the enemy apart.

This was not limited to James Bond, either. The clip from UFO (circa 1970) shows the British again fighting the Germans, only this time the Germans are aliens:



Even the Avengers fought WWII all over again:



Note the similarities, jazzy, brassy, opening score. Not much electric guitar (that's American). Various heroes, by turns brash or ruthless, with unconventional allies (often women), using the very latest gadgets to turn the tables and defeat a vastly overpowering enemy. One with more men, or better technology, always more resources and certainly more viciousness, defeated by the very odd-ball, weird, idiosyncratic and very English/British sort of "smallness," with roots in Victorian culture, and celebration of eccentricities. Older, dignified men whose authority is respected, send Steed, or Bond, or John Drake out on dangerous missions with only weird gadgets and beautiful women to accompany their fists and determination. Col Ed Stryker, of course ,runs a modern-day RAF against the Alien Luftwaffe. Even as late as 1970, the end of World War Two was only 25 years distant. Closer in time than the start of the Reagan Administration is to us today.

The national myth of Britain was that even though the Empire was lost after World War Two, by the exhausting effort, the bravery and sacrifice of tough and daring secret agents empowered by the most oddball but devious gadgets, concocted by eccentric geniuses, along with the help of the Americans, had won the day. Saving Western Civilization. From both the Nazi and Soviet tyranny. This is why Bond constantly outwits his enemies with ingenious, World War Two-like gadgets such as cars that convert to submarines, auto-gyros, miniature jets, knives popping out of attache cases, and so on. All while maintaining the composure of a proper English gentlemen.

Then there is John Steed, equally as polished. Fighting all sorts of "home front" enemies. If you prefer, there is also Patrick McGoohan, more clipped and cerebral, and very mocking and ironic, from "Danger Man":



There's even Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in the Ipcress File:



[There is a bit of the opening sequence on Youtube, as well, it cuts off right before the whole point -- after Palmer finds the jewelry left behind in the bed by his paramour, he also finds his gun and secretes it in his waistband. A wordless opener that tells the viewer all he needs to know about Palmer.]

The British Spy heroes might be total gentlemen (Bond, Steed), or cockneys (Palmer), or something in-between (McGoohan's John Drake), but regardless they were very, very British. In Palmer's case, too stubborn, insubordinate, and eccentric to be brain-washed by the Soviet agents.

And not only were the heroes, indeed very recognizable, "National Myth" heroes from World War Two revisited, the music itself was very similar, very British, as Grin notes here, always an element of jazz, lots of brass, a natural evolution from the beloved British military marching bands (itself a feature in the Ipcress File in one key scene).

Not only the heroes came from World War Two. The villains did as well. Particularly for the Bond villains, real organizations were used. SMERSH really existed. The sort of stateless, rootless, vaguely Central European, German, or Baltic villains such as Auric Goldfinger, or the German/Chinese Dr. No, or the classic Ernst Stavros Blofeld, all could have come out of the various hangers on to the Third Reich in Europe or elsewhere.

If Britain's spy heroes were re-fighting World War Two, at a time when most people well-remembered the fight, the villains were all of a type. Vaguely Nazis or allied with them, very little was needed to explain how the villains were evil, and needed to be fought. Needed a hero to oppose them.

Oppose them in a way that was totally opposite. Where the villains ruled by intimidation, fear, and ruthless killing of their subordinates and allies, the heroes willingly accepted orders from the older, fatherly men who sent them out to dangerous missions. Never questioning the rightfulness of being sent to stop the villain. Where the villains have weird, and repellent subordinates with fairly murderous characteristics, the hero's allies are usually beautiful women, and a gadgeteer providing all sorts of things giving him a critical edge. Of course, even the music makes that point, being jazzy and orchestral, the opposite of Teutonic Wagnerian Gotterdammerung, and different from American rock.

No one at the time, needed to know why James Bond had to stop Ernst Stavros Blofeld, or Auric Goldfinger, or Dr. No. They were Nazis, thinly disguised, or Soviet assassins, or both. Enemies that needed stopping.

Now, we have bland and boring, angsty heroes who reject responsibility (the Matt Damon Bourne series), numerous bad guy assassins (the Crank series) implausibly cast as heroes, or low level gangsters forced into some semblance of duty and responsibility (the Transporter Series). Even TV cannot experiment with any meaning to the heroes or depth and evil of the villains. NBC's "My Own Worst Enemy" was its own worst enemy, finding a quickly deserved cancellation, as audiences did not find the premise (a real spy creates a split personality ordinary man to have the ultimate cover) compelling enough. The hero was no hero, and the villains colorless PC bad guys. So too with "24's" Jack Bauer, hand-cuffed by the PC nature of the star demanding a more politically correct approach to villains (again the ultimate villains being boring, politically safe White guys in corporate boardrooms). Or "La Femme Nikita," or "Alias," or NBC's "Chuck," all with endless, soapy love triangles out of "Twilight" and the enemy defined as their own bosses or intelligence services. Endless and meaningless conspiracies, as society cannot define enemies abroad and without, and so must look for culturally safe ones within.

South Park shows there is a market for non-PC conformist humor, and indeed content. That market is mostly male, as women make up the customer base for PC Dogma. Refusing to look real enemies, real villains, and real threats square on, because it would threaten the whole PC agenda. Require a real sorting out of heroes and villains.

Culture is in creative crisis when it cannot even deal, even in disguised mode, with real threats. Due entirely to a blind adherence, religiously, to PC dogma.

TV and movies don't have to depict Muslim Jihadis straightforwardly as the enemy. Ernst Stavros Blofeld and Dr. No worked for SPECTRE, a fictional alliance of crime organizations and bosses, but the real enemy was the amalgamation of rootless, stateless criminals and assassins who helped first the Nazis, and then the Soviets, depending on who was winning. SPECTRE was not the bad guys, really. It was World War Two all over again. Indeed, the very stateless/rootless nature of the bad guys, who believe in nothing but power, was always contrasted by the very rooted in British eccentricity nature of the heroes.

Anyone could figure that a 30 year old jihadi like Magomedev, who apparently met then 16 year old Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova in an online chat room, and semi-abducted her, married her, and then left her a widow at age 17, is the true picture of a villain. The photo of Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, blank face brandishing what looks like a Makarov, while Magomedev holds a Stechin pistol and and visibly controls her (neither by the way adhering to trigger discipline) is both chilling and evil. Pretty much everyone can figure that her path, and that of her evil husband, is one that should be stopped. Child marriage, likely forcible, the hijab and covering, brandishing weapons Crips/Bloods style, and blowing up innocent Muscovite commuters is something anyone can oppose. It is the ultimate enemy of safe, middle class life the way that the Nazis and Soviets and Japanese were in WWII.

World War Two, Nazis, Soviets, and their various collaborators, are too distant. The end of WWII was 65 years ago. It simply does not have emotional force, any more. Moreover, Western society faces new challenges. That of Jihad, of Islam, of people who figure if they kill enough Muscovites, or New Yorkers, or Beijingers, or Londoners, everyone will submit. Surrender. So that the surviving killers can rule, and for those who don't, well the killing is the point in the first place. Against these real villains, the phony PC villains of corporate executives, the "White Guys in Suits" do not cut it. White guys in corporate boardrooms are subject to massive PC, lawyers everywhere, and don't blow up subways.

All creative people need to do is be … creative. Don't call it jihad, and don't call the bad guys Muslims. Call them something else. Just have lots of covering for women, beards for men, fanatic prayers, suicide bombings, and terrorism.

After all, spy shows are cheap. ITV, not known for its big budgets, had many of them for years. Any quick look at the early Avengers or Danger Man or the Saint will not find massive budgets or highly professional stunts. Men like the action and adventure, and it is quite possible that female audiences hungering for something different than pouty, hunky metrosexuals would find the latter day equivalents to say, Patrick McGoohan, or Roger Moore, or Patrick McNee far more appealing than the glittery gay vampires of "Vampire Diaries" or the rich boy metrosexuals of "Gossip Girl."

Indeed, the shocking thing to comparing TV stars from the 1960's and 1970's, when there was still living memory of just what the sacrifice to win World War Two entailed, is just how masculine the actors appeared, versus the ones of today. McGoohan, Moore, McNee, all are far more masculine than say, Chace Crawford.

Westerns, of course, are not coming back. Ever tighter budgets, and loss of the ability to depict horsemanship and everything else means Hollywood today can't do what it did in 1957, even on TV. Private eye shows, don't seem to be coming back either, though periodic attempts to revive them have been tried. Cop shows are all procedural affairs, which as Ed Bernero points out, are made mostly for a female audience. But spy shows are cheap, and the villains of our time cry out for a creative disguise in an updated Goldfinger or Blofeld.

If Bernero is right, and he makes his living producing TV shows, so he should know what he's doing, the only issue is the largely female line executives at the Broadcast Networks, and likely, the gay executives. Disney is famous for its Princess Factory at the Disney Channel, which openly gay Rich Ross nurtured into a money-making machine. Just as well known, is the complete failure of Disney XD to draw boys. Who knew, that gay men just can't connect with the action and adventure that men and boys want?

NBC ought to be hungrier than most. Their ratings are in the toilet. All the other networks have established shows drawing younger women to hunky vampires, or Desperate Housewives, or multi-threaded soap operas. Simply offer real heroes, reflecting the odd, and unique attributes of Americana, and real villains. Variations of the jihadis who blow people up. Simply make them disguised. Snake worshippers, or black magic devotees, not the obvious Muslim jihadis. This puts CAIR off your back and still allows you to have women dressed in chadors, and guys in beards and skull caps.

This approach makes the writing simpler and easier. No angsty sub-plots, soap operas, or complex arc plotting. Just deadly and dangerous villains, who have to be stopped, and are, by unique and deeply American heroes. A focus on the action, not relationship angst and drama. Which often devolves into self-pity and maudlin sentiment. Keep it simple, and execute.

Up to a point, this is what Burn Notice on USA Network has done. Though even there, the enemies are the own intelligence service, rather than people blowing up innocent commuters. It is time for Hollywood to show some innovation. Otherwise someone else will do it for them. Sooner rather than later.
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The UK's Cultural Collapse

Once upon a time, the works of William Hogarth characterized the English people. Works such as Gin Lane were not very exaggerated depictions of the general debauched and drunken state of the English people. For a short time, the Victorian reformers succeeded in creating a middle class morality, that for a year, resisted Adolf Hitler's forces, alone. Indeed, heroes such as Nicholas Winton were not only unknown, but common. Among the RAF, the Royal Navy, the Army, and among the British people who took the worst Hitler could hurl at them, and endured.

Now, in a tragedy written across the Western World, the British have fallen to this:


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A Polish traveler took shocking pictures of his stay in Cardiff, Wales, showing just how debauched, depraved, and horrible the character of the British people have become. The links show party-goers sitting by mounds of fast food trash, transvestites, public drunks (so drunken they've fallen asleep), miserable, crying girls wearing almost nothing, general obesity among the populace, and older women dressing like younger folks instead of the dignity their age deserves. There are more pictures like this:


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The Photographer's website with more images that are shocking is here

Nor is this an isolated "bad town" (Cardiff is a major city in Wales). The OECD report lists Britain as being worst in health, lifestyles, and education among 30 industrialized nations. UK Teenage girls (as the pictures at the Photographer's website will confirm) are among the worst drunks in the world. In drinking, smoking, and teenage pregnancy, only Turkey and Mexico rated worse than the UK. Underage teenagers are more likely to get drunk than any other country, and proportions of teen-age mothers and single mother families were among the highest of all nations in the survey. This despite the UK being above OECD averages in social spending, particularly on youth and education.


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Drunken-ness is epidemic, with one third 13 and 15 year olds being drunk at least twice. This compares to 12 percent of Americans and 14 percent of French counterparts. Only 70% of English children live with both parents, which falls to 68% in Scotland and 66% in Wales. Drunkeness is particularly striking among teen-age girls, troubling as girls have a higher risk for alcoholism and drunken-ness encourages risky behavior.

Labor has responded by issuing credit cards for condoms to boys as young as 12. Police prevented neighbors and parents from rescuing children trapped in a fire — result three dead. As Mary Steyn noted in England freedom dies a little each day.

Meanwhile, Britain is evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state, with local trust officials arrested for writing in a newspaper column "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." A 14 year old schoolgirl was arrested for wanting to work with students in a group project who spoke English, as her group only spoke Urdu. A ten year old boy was arrested for calling an 11 year old boy a "Paki" and "bin Laden" during a playground argument at school.

Hate-crime police investigated Basil Brush, a puppet fox on children's television, who had made a joke about Gypsies. The BBC confessed that Brush had behaved inappropriately and assured police that the episode would be banned.

A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to "celebrate diversity", the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.

Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children.

Permissiveness as well as draconianism can be deployed to destroy socially accepted norms and values. The Royal Navy, for instance, has installed a satanist chapel in a warship to accommodate the proclivities of a satanist crew member. "What would Nelson have said?" is a British newspaper cliche about navy scandals, but in this case seems a legitimate question. Satanist paraphernalia is also supplied to prison inmates who need it.

Meanwhile, a British soccer player has been stabbed in the legs by his sister's boyfriend and associates. The West Ham Premier League player is intensive care, may have both his legs amputated, and nearly bled to death. His mother was also stabbed (the player objected to the relationship between his sister and her boyfriend, by whom she is pregnant with her second child). Appearing at the arraignment sporting a black eye, sister Cara Davenport mouthed "I love you" to Worrell Whitehurst, the accused. Another report of the incident may be found here. The father of Cara Davenport's first child is notorious armed robber Neville Knight who is serving a life sentence for robbing security vans and supermarkets, along with his latest girlfriend, who got 10 years for helping in the robberies.

One can argue that the natural state of British life is Hogarthian dissolution. Certainly French, Italian, Spanish, and German visitors who were contemporaries of Hogarth were appalled at the public drunken-ness and displays, which even to the early 18th century sensibilities of their time, was distasteful. But the Victorians were able, through much hard work and cultural messages, to generally reform British life. Sherlock Holmes stories are filled with Holmes, Watson, and other characters carrying revolvers around their persons, and life while rough and often filled with crime, was never debauched to this current level. Indeed, while 19th Century Victorian Britons held revolvers and other weapons, they were in fact used fairly infrequently, as opposed to the crime waves of today's Britain with frequent firearms-enabled robberies. Such as Knight's robberies of Astra Supermarkets.

The moral dissolution and the soft tyranny of the nanny state are one and the same. Men and Women behave abominably, in equal measure, as seen in the pictures on the Polish photographer's (Maciej Dakowitz) website, or the stories linked above. The State is unwilling to address the root cause of the bad behavior, which is a culture of corruption and dissolution. Money is not the problem, the mounds of (expensive) fast food around the drunken, often obese Cardiff revelers, and the money spent on youth, according the OECD reports, attest to poverty not being the cause of moral dissolution. Instead, to be seen as "doing something" the State issues rules that only affect the law-abiding. Only law-abiding people obey the police as the fire races through their neighbors house. A lawless society would have simply shoved aside (or shot with illegal firearms) the police and rescued their neighbors or family members. Only the lawful obey PC arrest orders for violating the PC-Multicultural "state religion." Meanwhile every sort of bad behavior is celebrated. Excused. Explained away.

The Victorians were able to win a victory (for a while) over Hogarthian England, by creation of the Middle Class. As any reader of a Sherlock Holmes story can verify, this victory was not absolute even in the height of Victorian powers, and eventually faded away into a reversion into Hogarthian England. But Middle Class men and women, focused on that Victorian invention, the Middle Class family, oriented around children, and grand-children, and solid, respectable, Middle Class achievement, was capable of great things. It was capable of producing a man like Nicolas Winton, who rescued 669 Jewish Schoolchildren in Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, and did not speak of it even to his wife for forty years. The solid, Middle Class respectability produced a nation, capable of fighting alone for a year against Adolf Hitler's War Machine, without any hope of victory, and at great cost. Withstanding the Blitz that leveled half of London and other British Cities, including destroying Coventry, and near-starvation from the Nazi U-Boats sinking British shipping. This was the true strength of a society oriented around "beta male" respectability. It was not able to excite women like Cara Davenport through thuggery, nor produce the general attitude of debauchery found in Cardiff. But when it counted, it stood against perhaps the most mighty and evil war machine for a year, alone.

Nothing is more tragic than it's disappearance from the Earth. It's loss, and that of Middle Class two-parent families, creating the hell that is Hogarthian England, once again.
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