Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Action philosophy: The absurd laws of the Bond films – THE WORLD

In the beginning of the new Bond film explodes a building. It is a magnificent building in Mexico City, probably protected monument – an explosion must be worthwhile in terms of form and content. Inside the house is an important representative of evil keeps on, the one already through the window on his white suit recognizes, but especially the fact that Bond missed him when he opened from an adjacent roof with the sniper rifle fire. Double zero agent may have a license to kill, but that killing senior villains with the first shot is aware of the British Secret Service Academy does not teach.

All henchmen of the suit on the other hand go in the hail of bullets dutifully to the ground, thereby demonstrating their lack of importance for the progress of the action and at the same time save Bonds honor. The purely symbolic value of their perforation is thus underlined that this would not have been necessary, as well as the explosive device, with which the organization wanted to blow up an entire stadium in the air is, unerringly by a ricochet caught (including failure to meet high explosive materials is not included in the curriculum of MI6).

So the detonation brings the entire city block to collapse under a mushroom-like cloud of dust he slumps down. The is only ornament. Because the dead makes the collapse nothing more, and for the evil in the white suit he is even a veritable godsend. After all, he belongs to that character class that has the right unhurt crawl out from under the collapsed building complexes and then to knock the dust from his clothes.



license to survive explosions

Bond acts not surprised, he probably has already factored in his missed shot. After all, he takes the law of survival of explosions in this movie even twice to complete. Presumably grasping this special it would be even: you give him an opportunity to comply with those even more important rule that possible not to kill villains above the extras rank by firearm or explosive, but by appropriate long chase followed by a duel from a flying helicopter or moving train are to fling.

Photo : © 2015 Sony Pictures Releasing GmbH Guess who immediately falls off the train: Daniel Craig in “Spectre”

So, these were only the first few minutes of” Spectre “, which starts on Thursday. A relish zerdehnte description of all details of the film would be similar for any Bond fan mental torture, those torments that await the hero in the classical dramaturgy always at the headquarters of evil (in fact, in “Spectre” for a change, the brain of the agent object that ordeal ). A slow, is engulfing in every drape of filmmaking viewing kills the power from, it destroys the illusion – and sharpens the same time the sense of the strange inner logic of each fiction that has nothing to do with the rules of the reality, even though the effects have so

appear realistic.

This perspective is the opposite of the breathless, tense attention of the cinema spectator who carried away by the pace of the action film, conjuring up entangle themselves into the action, a strange contrast to the “relaxation of attitudes” in the audience, as in 1975, described the French philosopher Roland Barthes in a wonderful essay, “How many viewers slide in the cinema in her chair as a bed, with the jackets or legs on the seat in front of them? “

philosophy of the suburban theaters

Roland Barthes, a lovers of idleness and the suburban theaters could, in the perspective of the mass audience empathize like no other master thinkers of the last century. He was really at home in everyday mythology, which he analyzed in his sparkling essays of “steak and fries” on “Romans in the film” to the “new Citroën” or the “face of Garbo”. But at the same time Barthes whole generations of readers – or should one say: fans? – Taught to abandon the attitude of naive, always very concentrated on the action and the viewer’s attention instead be sent to the individual characters that make up films, novels, advertising posters and even cars. These characters studied Barthes with a magnifying glass, as if it were hieroglyphic an enigmatic, distant civilization.

Photo: Sony Pictures Releasing; Getty Images; Mounting WamS You Only Live Twice: Roland Barthes (1915-1980), in “Spectre” mounted

If you look at the world as an infinitely branched text, everything invites equally to with meaning. In his 1965 essay published “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” Barthes treated the James Bond film “Goldfinger” and his novel with the same care and appreciation as otherwise the works of Balzac or Flaubert. The seemingly banal remark in the Ian Fleming novel that “James Bond a fifty year old man saw”, signaled for the watchful eye at the same time “emergence of a threat and forced to identify”.

When Bond in his office” lifts one of four listeners “, refers the numeral” on the high technical level of the bureaucracy. ” And if Bond orders a whiskey while waiting at the airport, “so has this whiskey as an indication polysemic value” – which indeed so complicated sounds like a lab report from Bonds legendary quartermaster Q, but ultimately means nothing other than that the whiskey of the agent (neither stirred shaken) transmits a high-proof meaning mixture in himself by the same time refers to “modernity, wealth, leisure”.

why evil does not send invitation?

experienced moviegoers like those findings seem trivial. You do not need a master’s degree in comparative Kultursemiologie to know that James Bond makes the mistake in each film, to keep an opponent hastily left for dead, and turning to the terrified attendant, during Knochenbrecher already twitching with his foot.

Conversely makes indeed every villain the mistake to think for Bond a cumbersome and error-prone method of execution, rather than the guest immediately after entering the headquarters of one (or the security equal to several ) agents shoot allow. The latter would be the easier, as Bond, basically unarmed enters the seat of evil, where you always eagerly awaited him – even though he had to pave the way there spanning a multiple continents scavenger hunt by force, over the bodies of many to meet him swift killer away. On the more logical and much cheaper idea Bond the invitation to torture, including first-class air ticket (plus one) to be sent by post, but comes, much is revealed, and Christoph Waltz in “Spectre” not.

But Roland Barthes was not about the woodcut-like elements that make up any story from the earliest folktales. “In one narration,” he writes in his Bond-essay, “happens from the real point of view, literally: nothing happens, is only the language, the adventure of language, their arrival is celebrated without ceasing..”

As this celebration looks, can also be seen in “Spectre” again: There is a grammar of the explosions, an empire of corpses and fragments of a language of bats. It is, in a word, an ingenious Barthes movie.

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