Showing posts with label skyfall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skyfall. Show all posts

21 Apr 2020

Last Rat Standing (Darwin and Bond in the Age of Coronavirus)

New York City rat (photo by Christopher Sadowski) 
and Javier Badem as Raoul Silva in Skyfall (2012)


There's a lovely scene in the Bond film Skyfall in which the villain, Raoul Silva, played by brilliant Spanish actor Javier Badem, tells the story of his grandmother's solution to the problem of rats when they infest the tiny island on which she lives:

"They'd come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off an island, hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait. The rats would come for the coconut and they would fall into the drum. And after a month, you've trapped all the rats. But what did you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it. And they begin to get hungry. Then one by one, they start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what - do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees. Only now, they don't eat coconut anymore. Now they only eat rat. You have changed their nature."

I thought of this when I read about the plight of rats in NYC (and elsewhere) during the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to the so-called lockdown, many of their favourite feeding places - such as the bins at the back of restaurants - are no longer viable options, forcing these resilient rodents to resort to desperate measures. Not only are they fighting one another for food, but some have turned cannibalistic and are devouring their own kind.

The fact is, the threat of starvation makes rats - like people - behave in extremely different ways; they effectively change their nature, as Sr. Silva would say.

I suppose, in the end, this will give them an evolutionary kick up the arse and result in a future breed of stronger, more aggressive, more resourceful rats (survival of the fittest being the popular name for the mechanism of natural selection we can witness at work here).    


Notes

Skyfall (2012), dir. Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig (as James Bond) and Javier Bardem (as Raoul Silva): click here to watch the scene I mention above.


31 Jan 2018

Yellow Fever (Notes on the Politics of Asian Girl Fetish)

Bérénice Lim Marloe as Sévérine 

There's something about Asian girls. They're cute. They're smart. 
They have a kind of thing going on.


A friend asked who was my favourite Bond Girl ...

When I replied it was the character Sévérine, portrayed by the beautiful French actress Bérénice Marloe in the 2012 film Skyfall, she smiled and said that this exposed my Asian Girl Fetish (Marloe's father is of Cambodian and Chinese descent) and that this in turn indicated I had politically suspect views and subscribed to a number of pernicious racial and sexual stereotypes.

This may or may not be true, but it kind of made me wish I'd answered differently - although if, for example, I'd named Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), couldn't this be said to reveal my Nordic Girl Fetish and indicate subscription to an equal number of stereotypes, perhaps even more pernicious and politically suspect in character ...?          

However, happy to play along, I asked what she meant. And she explained that many men who identify as members of the so-called alt-right have a particular penchant for dating women of SE Asian origin, despite their fantasies of white supremacy and purity of blood.

Not surprisingly, this topic has caused heated debate on various white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites and demonstrates to many commentators that there's an amusing level of erotico-ideological confusion within the alt-right world. But, as Audrea Lim points out, there is, actually, no real contradiction in this Asian fetish when one realises how it arises at the intersection of two popular racial myths:

"First is the idea of the 'model minority,' in which Asian-Americans are painted as all hard-working, high-achieving and sufficiently well-behaved to assimilate. If Asians are the model minority [...] then perhaps that opens the door to acceptance from white supremacists.
      The second myth is that of the subservient, hypersexual Asian woman."

For many misogynysts, across the political spectrum, the sad fact is that most white women are - thanks to feminism - simply too much trouble; i.e., too unwilling to serve and to pleasure their menfolk. Asian girls, in contrast, are so much more amenable - and - whisper it - far more uninhibited in the bedroom. This idea - deeply ingrained within the pornographic imagination - has its roots in America's post-war experiences in the bars and brothels of Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

Thus it is that the alt-right Asian fetish combines these ideas and "highlights a tension within the project of white supremacism as America grows more diverse [...] The new, ugly truth? Maintaining white power may require some compromises on white purity".

May require, indeed, sleeping with the enemy ...


See: Audrea Lim, 'The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish', New York Times (Jan 6, 2018): click here to read online.