Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” and also Castration and Emasculation?

How best to talk about Ian Fleming’s , published in 1953, in a way that is interesting? I say this, because, while listening to Dan Stevens attempt to present this book in audio form as a thrilling action romp, it made a five hour commute my wife and I took from Houston to Fort Worth more dull than it already was. Casino Royale is a slow, monotonous, awkward, cringe-inducing slog for managing to confuse the reader in its most hectic moments, and missing out on poignance when in slow moments. At first glance, the novel is steeped in the Red Scare, in a post-war counterintelligence push to beat the Russians before they beat us, and James Bond’s beginning has him beat at his own game: seduction and subterfuge.

The movie adaptation for my generation’s Bond in 2006 starring Daniel Craig improves upon the original work in every conceivable way. More time is given to pacing the poker tournament (replacing baccarat) and thus providing more context, and therefore more weight. Eva Green’s Vesper has far more agency, is much less willing to accept Bond’s egotistic misogyny, and her subsequent betrayal for the final set piece in Venice is beautiful and tragic. The car chase leading to a brutal torture scene is destructive in ways only Hollywood can deliver. And the obfuscations to Bond’s poker playing are far more intense and believable.

Reading the book was so bizarre that, and this can happen sometimes for capital “R” readers, I ended up finding things in it I believe I was not supposed to. I mean, I doubt that Ian Fleming wanted to get across terrifying feelings of castration or emasculation in his novel. Yet that is what I felt. Not only does this occur in the style of writing, in the word choice, but the plot and conflicts seem to point to a secret agent who is attempting, above all else, to keep his manhood.

Mathis made a sarcastic grimace and switched back to the Rome
programme.
‘You and your Jamaica,’ he said, and sat down again on the bed.
Bond frowned at him. ‘Well, it’s no good crying over spilt milk,’ he said.

pg. 19

‘That’s all right,’ said Bond comfortingly. ‘It’s no good crying over spilt
milk. It’s all over now and thank heavens they let you alone.’

pg. 101

I’d like to try and be brisk about all this. Because Ian Fleming’s novel is not even worth a misreading. It is plagued with clichés, poor elements of cultural masculinity, and shoddy penmanship, that should not be praised today. Like, I suppose, George Lucas, we can credit Fleming for the idea. But there are also exist deeper authors and directors, like John Le Carré or Stanley Kubrick, who should be credited for bringing sophistication and an articulate hand to these adventurous asides.

The first thing I noticed while listening was how sexualized in word choice some of the more unsexual moments of the book. In particular, we should pay attention to the opening moments of the card game:

With the same economy of movements the thick slab of cards which the
croupier had placed on the table squarely between his blunt relaxed hands.
Then, as the croupier fitted the six packs with one swift exact motion into
the metal and wooden shoe, Le Chiffre said something quietly to him.
‘Messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits. Un banco de cinq cent mille,’ and
as the Greek at Number 1 tapped the table in front of his fat pile of
hundred-mille plaques, ‘Le banco est fait.’ Le Chiffre crouched over the shoe. He gave it a short deliberate slap to
settle the cards, the first of which showed its semicircular pale pink tongue
through the slanting aluminium mouth of the shoe. Then, with a thick white
fore-finger he pressed gently on the pink tongue and slipped out the first
card six inches or a foot towards the Greek on his right hand. Then he
slipped out a card for himself, then another for the Greek, then one more for
himself. He sat immobile, not touching his own cards. He looked at the Greek’s face.
With his flat wooden spatula, like a long bricklayer’s trowel, the croupier
delicately lifted up the Greek’s two cards and dropped them with a quick
movement an extra few inches to the right so that they lay just before the
Greek’s pale hairy hands which lay inert like two watchful pink crabs on the
table. The two pink crabs scuttled out together and the Greek gathered the cards
into his wide left hand and cautiously bent his head so that he could see, in
the shadow made by his cupped hand, the value of the bottom of the two
cards. Then he slowly inserted the forefinger of his right hand and slipped
the bottom card slightly sideways so that the value of the top card was also
just perceptible. His face was quite impassive. He flattened out his left hand on the table and
then withdrew it, leaving the two pink cards face down before him, their secret unrevealed. [Emphasis Mine]

pg. 47 and 48

This is foreplay.

We should not spend too much time on this if we do not want to. It’s overly done writing. What is really going on in this scene? They’re playing cards. The amount of time spent on these motions is way too much for what is going on. But now we have all these wonderful phrases to work with, which produced an incredibly uninspired-yet-still-nonetheless-erotic response in me. Clearly the cards I had played all my life had no comparison to what Bond could do with his hands.

This was the moment where I realized I had to take the novel under my control and read it on my terms. So I thought back to the incredibly sexist account of when Bond heard word that he would be overseen by a female representative from the Secret Service: the “girl” from headquarters.

Bond sat at the window and gathered his thoughts. Nothing that Mathis had
told him was reassuring. He was completely blown and under really
professional surveillance. An attempt might be made to put him away
before he had a chance to pit himself against Le Chiffre at the tables. The
Russians had no stupid prejudices about murder. And then there was this
pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in
the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the
emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and
take care of them.
‘Bitch,’ said Bond’ and then remembering the Muntzes, he said ‘bitch’ again more loudly and walked out of the room.

pg. 20

Handled more eloquently in the 2006 movie adaptation, Vesper Lynd also arrives as a vagina dentata, thwarting Bond’s masculinity by refusing more funds and keeping a tight lid on Bond’s hot temper. Later in the film, Vesper is caught in a position where her femininity holds no authority, caught in the middle of a brutal stairway fight with debt collectors going after Le Chiffre. Her vulnerability reveals itself soaking wet in a shower. Bond, rather than rebuff Vesper’s “hurt feelings”, instead makes the best move. He doesn’t turn the shower off, he turns up the hot water. By doing so, he acknowledges her trauma and promises to stay with her in the manner she saw fit. Bond wins her over not by his masculinity, but by nurturing.

In the novel, Vesper falls apart the second she meets Bond, plying him with compliments until the very end, when she bites Bond by revealing in a melodramatic suicide note her double agent status. Bond’s sexual escapades destroyed both him and her, proving that Vesper’s castration of Bond was by proxy.

Well, it was not too late. Here was a target for him, right to hand. He would
take on SMERSH and hunt it down. Without SMERSH, without this cold
weapon of death and revenge, the MWD would be just another bunch of
civil servant spies, no better and no worse than any of the western services.
SMERSH was the spur. Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and
without any question, you will be hunted down and killed.
It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For
them it was always safer to advance than to retreat. Advance against the
enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray, and the bullet
would never miss

pg. 123

All in the final act of the novel, Bond’s torture of his private parts (occurring both in the movie and the film), has him with his battered manhood in recovery, waiting for the delicious sexual act that will have Vesper submitting to his every will. The temptation in these scenes is way too hot and way too drawn out and takes up so much unnecessary time in an already short novel. But to have his physical parts beaten as well as to be duped, duped by the methods that he would use as a spy, is to fail on both counts of his line of duty.

The movie plays more deeply into this idea of duping and being duped. Earlier in the film he takes up with a luxurious Indian woman who winds up dead along the coast of his hotel room, likely because she informed Bond on the actions of her husband. When it turns out that Bond fell for the same trick, his bitter response, “The bitch is dead,” leaves M. (played by Judi Dench) unmoored. We are no longer dealing with a masculine authority, but some kind of eunuch MI6 tool of destruction, nothing more than an extension of the harsh arm of government power. Perhaps it is Bond’s curse to reach and never achieve a sense of sexual satisfaction. While Quantum of Solace followed up during a writer’s strike, the film’s outbursts of stoic violence both by Bond and his compatriot Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) capitalize on a (mostly) sexless destructive craze.

Perhaps he gets his rocks off at the workplace?

There is a strange scene in the middle of the baccarat tournament where one such player arrives with a cane that turns out to be a gun (of course). Bond is threatened by this man in front of everyone, and while Bond comments on the strangeness of being held up while playing in the tournament and while in front of all the spectators, no one seems to be aware that it is happening. Bond, rather than do as the man wishes, decides to stop the man using a very awkward turn of phrase from Fleming:

Bond decided. It was a chance. He carefully moved his hands to the edge of
the table, gripped it, edged his buttocks right back, feeling the sharp gunsight grind into his coccyx.
‘Sept.’
The chef de partie turned to Le Chiffre with his eyebrows lifted, waiting for
the banker’s nod that he was ready to play.

Suddenly Bond heaved backwards with all his strength. His momentum
tipped the cross-bar of the chair-back down so quickly that it cracked across
the malacca tube and wrenched it from the gunman’s hand before he could
pull the trigger. Bond went head-over-heels on to the ground amongst the spectators’ feet, his legs in the air. The back of the chair splintered with a sharp crack. There were cries of dismay. The spectators cringed away and then, reassured, clustered back. Hands helped him to his feet and brushed him down. The huissier bustled up with the chef de partie. At all costs a scandal must be
avoided. Bond held on to the brass rail. He looked confused and embarrassed. He brushed his hands across his forehead.

pg. 57

For decades, not getting fucked remains a top priority for masculinity. Men should be doing the fucking. Having the malacca tube, long and hardy as it is, pinned against his back, with Bond bending over to shock the assailant, is plenty enough erotic material.

Chapter 17, titled “My Dear Boy” is the torture scene, made even more unsettling by Le Chiffre’s insistence on belittling Bond like a child, fondling him with the carpet beater like a molester.

‘You see, dear boy?’ He smiled a soft, fat smile. ‘Is the position quite clear
now?’…

pg. 78

‘My dear boy,’ Le Chiffre spoke like a father, ‘the game of Red Indians is
over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups and you have already found it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to play games with adults and it was very foolish of your nanny in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket. Very foolish indeed and most unfortunate for you.’

Though I do not necessarily adhere closely to psychoanalysis, this reeks of it. All the father talk and the literal destruction of Bond’s balls, in physical ways restructuring the story, and changing the conflict to suit Le Chiffre’s failure at baccarat, should leave the reader believing me at this blog post’s end.

Ian Fleming’s novel is, in my opinion, not quite appalling bad. But it cannot hold a candle to works by Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler. There are moments when an astute reader is embarrassed by what the author reveals in themselves rather than in their work. I cannot imagine that Fleming intended to have Bond play out many of the postwar fears beyond Communism that he had in his own psyche. Yet having finished the work I cannot help but feel that his interpretation of women, in conjunction with the roles and responsibility of the action spy, led me to believe that Fleming was a deeply insecure man, hostile to any sort of burgeoning progressivism. Having just explored the Wikipedia page for Fleming, and the critiques by his contemporaries, I can see that I was not alone in these realizations.

It begs the question of if the Bond property could ever have hoped for a fuller, more palatable Bond for his environs. Clearly, ever since he appeared on the big screen, all attempts have been made to modernize the MI6 agent. Who knows what Bond means to anyone anymore, removed as far as he is from the embarrassing source material. In the case of Bond, we can forgive ourselves for not looking too closely at his birth.

Orphaned both literally and culturally then.

Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on May 11, 2021.