(1983) As 007'S Lesson in Adaptation Studies Traditi
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Accepted manuscript version of: Schwanebeck, Wieland. “License to Replicate: Never Say Never Again (1983) as 007’s Lesson in Adaptation Studies.” James Bond Uncovered, edited by Jeremy Strong, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 163–84. Wieland Schwanebeck (Dresden) Licence to Replicate: Never Say Never Again (1983) as 007’s Lesson in Adaptation Studies Traditionally, the James Bond franchise existed outside the jurisdiction of adaptation studies, where the prestige of canonical literature frequently continues to overshadow the merits of film, especially popular blockbuster cinema. Though no-one working in adaptation studies would voice this attitude, the prevalent opinion still seems to be that cinema, as a ‘hot medium’ (Marshall McLuhan), “requires a less active response from the viewer” (Gjelsvik 256). Some go so far as to speak of a general “bias in favour of literature as both a privileged […] and an aesthetically sanctified field”, which may account for adaptation studies’s reputation as “fundamentally conservative” (Leitch 2008: 64f.) More recently, they have widened their focus and have gradually become more inclusive, investigating ‘lowbrow’ fiction and transmedial processes.1 Admittedly, this new inclusiveness entails certain dangers for the objects of their studies. Leaving popular franchises like James Bond out of adaptation studies certainly smacked of elitism and disdain, but it allowed them to retain a notable advantage which films that we more commonly perceive as literary adaptations don’t enjoy: they were treated as films in their own right, not as secondary (inter-)texts which come with the alleged flaw of owing their very existence to literary forerunners. Thomas Leitch argues that adaptation scholars tend to view films as carrying “the single function of replicating (or, worse, failing to replicate)” a given source text, and that they often treat an adaptation as “an intertext designed to be looked through, like a window on the source text.” (2007: 17) The Bond films may have been subjected to all kinds of critical attacks (most notably with regard to their sexism and their misogyny, their exoticism and neo-colonialist politics, or their near-fascist contempt for the 1 value of human life), but they usually don’t come under fire for somehow ‘falling short’ of the literary merits of Ian Fleming. After all, the latter’s qualities as a writer are debatable; right from the beginning, Bond scholarship was taken with the structural and formulaic aspects of the Bond novels more than with their stylistic qualities or their psychology.2 Even Fleming’s admirers occasionally sound somewhat tongue-in-cheek when singing the author’s praises: Kingsley Amis’s Bond Dossier famously introduces Bond as “the man who is only a silhouette” (11), which characterises his abilities as a spy as much as it does the character’s lack of substance. The prestige traditionally bestowed upon literary texts arguably puts certain restraints on studying film adaptations. As a consequence, one may well assume that the Bond films don’t have much to gain from being viewed as adaptations, just because they are (or rather: used to be) based on a series of novels which have long been eclipsed by the success of the films. However, the Bond films deserve a place within adaptation studies, even though this should not lead us up the blind alley of assessing how ‘close’ or ‘faithful’ the films are to Fleming’s novels.3 What I propose instead here follows recent forays into the ‘adaptation industry’ (e.g. the work of Simone Murray) in order to clarify how the Bond series continues to invoke Ian Fleming as its point of origin, and how this process is complicated both by the franchise’s necessary emphasis on continuous renewal (exemplified by an obsession with uncanny doppelgangers, death and resurrection in Sean Connery’s Bond films), and by legal wrangles behind the scenes. I will conclude with a case study of Never Say Never Again (1983), a kind of ‘bastard child’ of the Bond franchise whose existence problematises the series’ official adaptation policy. 1. James Bond’s Adaptation History 2 Though my analysis will neither adopt the tools nor the rhetoric of fidelity criticism in order to assess the Bond series, it does make sense to briefly look into the franchise’s adaptation policy and to take note of its overall tendency to emancipate itself from Fleming’s source texts ever since the Eon series’ inception in 1962. While the Bond series is usually classified in terms of decades (‘the 1960s’, ‘the 1970s’), of actors (‘the Roger Moore years’, ‘the era of Pierce Brosnan’), or of contemporary geopolitical developments (‘the Cold War era’, ‘the post-9/11 world’), it makes sense to roughly distinguish between three periods when it comes to Bond’s adaptation history. (I) 1962-1973: For about the first decade, the films tended to respect the plots of Ian Fleming’s novels. It has been argued that, starting with Goldfinger (1964), the producers abandoned quite a few of the key elements of Fleming’s milieu, ditching the conventions of spy fiction in favour of sheer spectacle and producing variations on a tested formula, with a number of characteristic components (including the villain, the girl, the exotic location, the MacGuffin) remaining in place (Sellers 165-170). True, the film series largely ignores Fleming’s chronology: as the rights to Casino Royale (1953) were not available, they first adapted Dr. No (1957), the sixth Bond novel, and would subsequently produce the Blofeld trilogy not in Fleming’s order. However, readers of the novels will still recognise most of the major elements and characters when watching the films. Unlike the 1964 novel, the film version of You Only Live Twice (1967) neither features a traumatised Bond nor does it end with him sustaining a head injury and suffering from amnesia, but it is still a story about Bond going after Blofeld in Japan, aided by members of the Japanese secret service and posing as a Japanese fisherman. Similarly, the film adaptation of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963/1969) retains the essence of ‘Operation Bedlam’, Blofeld’s biological warfare plans and his castle in the Alps, as well as the marriage plot;4 Live and Let Die (1954/1973), while dropping the novel’s treasure hunt and Mr. Big’s connections to SMERSH, features 3 Fleming’s main plot about Mr. Big’s Harlem associations, his interest in Voodoo and his personal fortune-teller, Solitaire. (II) 1974-1987: starting with The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), the films begin to liberate themselves more and more from the source texts. Though they retain the titles of Fleming’s novels and short stories, their plots and characters bear little to no resemblance to them. Roger Moore’s tenure as 007 has been labelled the most pronouncedly silly and campy period of 007, though the films are, in fact, just silly and outlandish in different ways than Fleming’s books: unlike its subsequent film adaptation, Fleming’s novel The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) – the most singularly ill-received book in the whole series (Chapman 2015: 16) – neither features a megalomaniac villain who plans to erase humanity in order to populate the Ocean nor a gigantic henchman named Jaws who uses steel-capped teeth to bite his victims to death, yet its homodiegetic narrative, told from the point of view of a young woman who secretly desires to be raped, is certainly no less outrageous. Up until the mid-1980s, Fleming continues to provide the kernel of the stories, and the production apparatus fleshes them out, substituting characters, adding topical elements of the day and, of course, gadgets, with the effect that readers of the novels may sometimes struggle to recognise Fleming’s material. No doubt this is partly due to the chameleon-like qualities which 007 exhibits during this period, a form of adaptability which allowed the franchise to successfully absorb cinematic trends: no sooner had George Lucas launched the modern science-fiction blockbuster (Star Wars, 1977) than Bond went into space (Moonraker, 1979),5 and when neo-colonial exoticism and global location-hopping became cinematic virtues again with the success of the Indiana Jones franchise (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), Bond conquered India (Octopussy, 1983), courtesy to a script co-written by George MacDonald Fraser, author of the popular Flashman adventure novels. The fact that Bond had, by this time, long shaken off his literary ancestor, is testified to by a small but telling alteration in the films’ credit sequences: starting with The 4 Spy Who Loved Me, the credits for the films no longer announced Sean Connery or Roger Moore ‘as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming’s ...’, but they presented the respective actor ‘as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 in ...’, thus emphasising that Fleming was the creator of Bond, but not of the story about to unfold on screen (Schwanebeck 510).6 (III) 1989 to present: Starting with Licence to Kill (1989), we are fully into the post-Fleming era. Some notable exceptions aside,7 most of the Bond films since then, while constantly referencing the Fleming canon and turning increasingly into pastiche films brimming with self-referential quotations, have been based on original scripts, many of them written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, with prominent screenwriters like Paul Haggis or John Logan making occasional guest contributions. From a legal stand-point, these ‘original’ Bond scripts still count as adaptations, even though the “franchise character” they are based on “float[s] free of any specific novelistic incarnation” (Leitch 2014b: 91). We can thus observe a movement from ‘traditional’ adaptations of best-selling novels towards what Leitch calls secondary imitations, that is, sequels to adaptations, where the entire plot develops around a character that has “the ability to generate continuing adventures.” (Leitch 2007: 120) Interestingly, the series continues to invoke Ian Fleming as its point of origin whilst liberating itself more and more from his writings.