Shaken, stirred and twisted
Re-imagining the shadow of the Orient.
MA Thesis European Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam
Bastiaan Slop 6162959
Supervisor: dr. G. Snel
Second supervisor: prof. dr. J.T. Leerssen July 2015
Table of contents
1. Introduction ……… 4.
- Demarcations ……… 5.
- The Bond franchise ……… 8.
- Hypothesis ……… 11.
2. Theoretical framework ...……… 12.
- Boundaries and Orientalism ……… 14.
- Imagining the Balkans ……… 18.
- Dracula’s contamination ……… 20.
3. Analysis ……… 23.
- From Russia with Love ……… 23.
- The World is Not Enough ……… 29.
- Casino Royale ……… 34.
- Skyfall ……… 39.
4. Comparative analysis ……… 44.
5. Conclusion ……… 49.
1.
Introduction
“The name is Bond, James Bond.” Everyone knows the good-looking, suited up British fighting machine that never misses its target – be it a long-legged blonde or a long-faced villain. A pop-culture icon of masculinity, with a notorious track record when it comes to fighting crime abroad in places that are traditionally, and in many ways, hostile to the West. These places, often exotic, are carefully selected to reflect the very real and existing contemporary geopolitical turmoil. Whereas nowadays international cyber terrorist syndicates are designated ‘Bond villains’, Communist Russia ruled the screen at the very start of the film series. Russia, (other) parts of Asia, the Middle-East: these places and regions are convincing villainous areas to the Western audience. They are the obvious choice, representing dangers in the real world.
These representations however might not always be accurate and when attaching a well-known cultural theory such as Orientalism to the matter, adding to it another dimension, they may even be contested. Scholars that chose James Bond as an object have studied it in more or less obvious areas such as gender (more), or post-colonial studies (less). Interested in the ever-existing East-West dichotomy and the
representations of ‘the Other,’ and hoping to add only a minor piece to the corpus of imagology, I have chosen to ask myself to what extent James Bond movies exoticize the Western image of the ‘European Orient’?
In this particular context, the European Orient may translate itself into the Balkan region, but boundaries are a thorny subject. Defining boundaries is by definition a daunting task, considering the different elements that claim tangible territory that needs demarcation.
This will be, after the introduction, the object of research in the first chapter. We will dive into the realm of cultural theories concerning imagery and representation, via Said’s Orientalism zooming in to Todorova’s balkanism, in order to find out what a(n) (national or regional) image is and how it is fixed. Moving on to investigating subjective variables such as expectations and reception of the audience will give a better
understanding of the different perspectives of, and subsequent influence on the image. Along the lines of these first sub questions, a close analysis of the primary sources will follow. Chapter 4 will consist of a comparative analysis of the primary sources, and thereupon in chapter 5 a conclusion.
Demarcations
Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen produced an all-encompassing and exhaustive book on image studies: Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey. (2007). ”Few scholarly works summarize the aims, methods, and achievements of their field as meticulously, succinctly and successfully as this impressive one-volume encyclopediacum ‘critical survey’ of comparative
‘Imagology’.”1 An accurate description of the Balkan boundaries in terms of geography, politics, history, culture, ethnicity, religion and economics, or a combinations of these parameters are given by Ivana Živančević-Sekeruš. She acknowledges that there are positive images, which could be used in describing the Balkans and their inhabitants (hospitality, unspoilt by civilization, close to the earth, close-knit rural communities), but certain negative images have also been fixed. She sums up: Violence, cruelty,
superstition, shiftlessness, untrustworthiness, dishonesty, misogyny, and dirtiness. According to Živančević-Sekeruš, there is a close coincidence that can be observed between the cliché image of the Balkans and European images of the Orient. ‘Such hetero-images of the Balkans and the Orient serve to create the opposite image of Europe, which accordingly becomes the repository of positive values.’2
This is true, yet there is more to it. The boundless cultural varieties of the Balkans cannot allow for it to be compared that easily to an umbrella theory such as Said’s Orientalism. Maria Todorova contributed invaluably to this discourse with her book
Imagining the Balkans (1997), in triggering arguments and debates on what she calls
‘balkanism’. The central idea of her book is that balkanism discourse creates a stereotype of the Balkans. She recognizes that the Balkans have been described as the ‘other’ of Europe and exposes a western bias in a framework building on Said’s Orientalism. Yet unlike Orientalism, Todorova argues, Balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity and not an imputed opposition.3 The Balkans is a part of Europe yet in
1 R. Weninger, Review of Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national
characters. A critical survey, Beller M. and Leerssen. Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2009), 281. 2 M. Beller and Joep Leerssen, Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national
characters. A critical survey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 107.
Western mind, she argues, the area is considered not fully European. It is neither oriental, nor European, and this perpetual state of being in between raises anxiety.
Drawing from Said’s Orientalism is the study of cross-cultural perceptions and images as expressed in literature, and other narrative genres such as theatre, opera and cinema. ‘[Imagology] studies these representations as discursive, poetical and
ideological constructs and does not pronounce on their ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’.4 In other
words, Imagology shows not how, in this case the Balkans (the represented) really is, but how it is perceived, viewed, characterised and represented by the onlooker, in this case the West. Many variables such as multiple perspectives and biases are applicable to both the ‘spected’ and the ‘spectant’. ‘In any given representation, there is a country that is represented or being looked at, and the point of the onlooker.[…] Image formation is, then, a dynamics of cultural production, transfer and exchange rather than a
straightforward reflection of social reality’.5 In their book, Beller and Leerssen expand on
this theory and other related relevant concepts and disciplines. Notions such as clichés, eurocentrism, exoticism, identity, image, perspective, prejudice, stereotype and
representation are discussed and elaborated.
In order to determinate the origins of the image of the Balkans, we will have to look into its historical roots and how the Balkans have been imagined in popular fiction. In her book Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998), Vesna Goldsworthy explores the origins of the ideas that construct Western perceptions of the ambiguous Balkans. She relies on a rich mine of images in literature and movies and demonstrates how these representations have contributed to the affected attitudes towards the Balkans. A great deal of the book is committed to the representation of the Balkans in popular fiction and shows trends in imagery parallel to the contemporary geopolitical conditions. Goldsworthy prefers to call it the historical background of problems the Balkan region faced, problems such as the regional large-scale revolt against Ottoman rule in 1878, the 1912-1913 Balkan wars and the (start) of the First World War.6 More recently, the Yugoslav wars of the 90s have contributed to the violent
4 J. Leerssen, ‘Moral Labyrinths,’ Kommunikáció, Média, Gazdaság, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2008): 33. 5 J. Leerssen, ‘Moral Labyrinths,’ Kommunikáció, Média, Gazdaság, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2008): 34.
6 V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (London: C. Hurst and Co. 2013), 48.
image of the Balkans. The very fact that these Yugoslav Wars are sometimes referred to as the ‘Balkan Wars,’ has everything to do with the Balkanic violent image that exists.
Furthermore, Goldsworthy dedicates a dozen pages to the Paris-Istanbul passenger train service Orient Express, which proved to be a popular narrative in the 1930’s. ‘In an age when travel through the Balkans ceased to be a pastime of the lonely Byronic hero and came to be experienced by numerous wealthy and not necessarily adventurous tourists, the Orient Express linked the Romantic imaginings of a journey to the ‘mysterious East’ with the opulence of the industrialised West, by moving a ‘Western’ setting (a sort of tinned Occident) into the turbulent and potentially hostile
surroundings of south-eastern Europe.’7 The train, including its departure, destination
and its travellers, has always been an object of interest in the field of cultural studies. It strikes me that Goldsworthy is not the only one attributing great credit to Byron, as Joep Leerssen too refers to the ‘Byronic hero in literature’ many times in his 2008 article ‘Moral Labyrinths: On an emerging image of Europe.’ Being an authority in the field of imagology, he addresses the topic of Europe’s subjective identity, through analysing the film Casablanca. Convincingly, he argues that ‘Europe […] presents, in modern representations, a combination of civilized refinement and a fraught history, a combination of suave civility and long-lost innocence, that Machiavellian sense that behind every Michelangelo lurks a Borgia, behind every Sissi a Dracula, behind every Louvre a Dachau.’8 This ingrained suspicion might partly account for Western fear of the other.
I have also closely studied and incorporated an article by Klaus Dodds. He contributed a lot to the discourse on the geopolitical and post-imperial significance of James Bond films. In ‘Licensed to Stereotype: Popular Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism’, he shortly touches upon Bond’s reflection on the nature of Turkey and the Turkish people and discusses 007’s attitude towards the Balkans. He argues that it is shaped by ‘a plethora of stereotypes relating to the region’s apparent reputation for backwardness, atavism and tribal violence.’9 Mainly, Dodds explores the geopolitical and 7 V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania (London: C. Hurst and Co. 2013), 133.
8 J. Leerssen, ‘Moral Labyrinths,’ Kommunikáció, Média, Gazdaság, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2008): 51.
9 K. Dodds, ‘Licensed to Stereotype: Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism,’ Geopolitics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2003): 135.
post-imperial significance of Bond, by drawing From Russia with Love and The World is Not Enough, arguing that these productions contest Britain’s post-1945 decline in international influence.10 He points out the coping mechanism that Bond films are in respect to Britain’s post-colonial downfall. He concludes that ‘it is quite striking how existing cultural and historical commentary on […] films such as From Russia With Love neglect to focus on how places such as Turkey are represented.’11 Dodds thus scratches the surface of ideas on imagining the Balkans but chooses to stay focused on Britain’s geopolitical position, rather than the representation of the Balkans as an object of study.
Up to this point, I could not find any other material that even slightly links James Bond movies to the representation of the Balkans, or any other country or region, other than England’s obsessive post-colonial self-image. This will be my contribution to the corpus of the discourse on the imagination of the Balkans.My research is based on analysing James Bond films and relevant literature. Four James Bond films possess the quality of being (partially) enacted in the Balkans, or contain villains originating from the Balkans. In order to correctly analyse them, I have selected literature in which film narratology is the central subject. Peter Verstraten’s Film Narratology (2009) is an introduction to popular film and the way in which it is studied, critically approaching “different narrative effects that are produced through mise en scène, cinematography, and editing.”12 Already mentioned yet evermore important will be Leerssen’s article ‘Moral Labyrinths,’ to provide me much needed guidance in terms of structure and other practicalities such as the importance of the idea of a labyrinth and stylistic approaches.
The Bond franchise
The James Bond film franchise started out in 1962 with the release of Dr. No. When Spectre will be released in the fall of 2015, 53 years later, Eon Productions will have produced the 24th film. Only 4 of these films have plots which takes Bond to the Balkans, 10 K. Dodds, ‘Licensed to Stereotype: Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism,’ Geopolitics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2003): 125.
11 ibid., 149.
namely From Russia with Love (1963), The World is Not Enough (1999), Casino Royale (2006) and Skyfall (2012). Balkan villains have appeared as Renard in the 1999 release and as Le Chiffre in the 2006 release. Villains play a specific iconic role in the franchise. Most of them are specifically type casted as European lunatics and play or have played in similar roles outside the Bond franchise. Christopher Walken had portrayed the
homicidal and borderline lunatic brother of Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, before starring as Max Zorin in A View to a Kill (1985). In Batman Returns (1992) seven years later, he played the millionaire industrialist villain Max Shreck. Mads
Mikkelsen, Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, portrayed the classic villain character Rochefort in The Three Musketeers (2011) and is anno 2015 starring as dr. Hannibal Lecter in the TV series Hannibal. Christopher Waltz will be playing the role of villain Franz Oberhauser in Spectre, after having portrayed the Oscar winning role of ‘The Jew Hunter’ Hans Landa in Inglorious Bastards (2009). These are all actors who in their career have predominantly played ambiguous roles on the edge of moral consciousness.
The James Bond series is one of the longest running film franchises, with a continuity and rich diversity in main actors, directors, writers, composers, productions designers and others. Most of the films were produced at Pinewood Studios in London, yet many films feature exotic locations that were shot on location.13 Not entirely
surprising is the fact that the franchise ranks 3rd on the list of the highest grossing film series, behind Harry Potter and Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a combined gross of over 5000 million euros to date.14 The popularity of the franchise has multiple reasons. Iconic villains, characters and ‘Bond-girls’, iconic gadgets, iconic locations, iconic opening credits scene, iconic quotes and iconic James Bond main actors, make the series iconic an sich. James Bond is viewed a timeless pop culture hero, embodying the sense of freedom and power with a blend of particular Britishness.
Eon has embraced hi-tech from the outset and throughout the series, and
manages to balance the continuous narrative between being a constant character and a character of its time. This mix of tradition and modernity is a key factor in the success of the franchise. Bond does not fail to adjust to the time period of his films, evolving to meet
13 Large parts of Balkan scenery in From Russia with Love, including the Gypsy camp and parts of Istanbul, were shot at Pinewood Studios. See M. Beswick, D. Bianchi, D. Broccoli, S. Cain, S. Connery, P. Hunt, J. Stears, N. Wanstall (2000). Inside "From Russia with Love" (DVD). MGM Home Entertainment. 14 Numbers are adjusted to inflation. Nash Information Services. Retrieved from http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/James-Bond (accessed June 20, 2015)
the expectations of audiences. Few characters, perhaps none, have withstood the
passage of time as well as Bond has.15 The iconic status the franchise has achieved gives it a certain authority on the perspectives it propagates relating to geopolitical anxieties and stereotypes.
In terms of biased national image production, the Mexican government fully appreciates the influence a Bond movie potentially has on its viewers. Spectre, the 26th film in the series, has its opening scene in the capital of Mexico, Mexico City. Allegedly, the government struck a 20 million euro deal with the producers in order to portray a favourable image of Mexico. The deal includes a leading role for the Mexican actress Stephanie Sigman, an antagonist explicitly of non-Mexican roots, a cage-fighting scene replaced by Day of the Dead festivities and some “flattering shots of the country’s ‘modern’ skyline.”16
Product placement is a recurring phenomenon since PanAm and Smirnoff appeared in Dr No (1962).17 Yet news of a government displaying itself in a Bond movie has never been published before. This hints either at solid contracts concerning deal discreteness in the past, or governments blind to the possibilities of such deals. In any case, Mexico has a rich history and culture but desperately seeks good publicity due to persistent reports of drug-related crimes and government corruption in the past decade. What better way to show Western viewers, potential tourists, the Mexican modernity and prosperity in one of the most popular movie franchises of all time? Possibly, the Mexican government drew conclusions from exotic scenes in previous Bond movies, in which image construction was solely based upon biased viewers expectations. To producers, such a restraining deal could be risky as the outcome could interfere with viewers’ expectations, while meeting those expectations is key to a successful film franchise. Changing a winning team could have negative consequences.
15
16 J. Crone (2015, March 14) Is this the biggest product placement ever? James Bond producers strike £14m deal with Mexican government for flattering shots of the country, the villain not being from Mexico...and a Mexican Bond girl. MailOnline. The Daily Mail. Retrieved from
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2994629/Is-biggest-product-placement-James-Bond- producers-strike-13m-deal-Mexican-government-flattering-shots-country-villain-not-Mexico-Mexican-Bond-girl.html (accessed June 21, 2015)
17 S.Felix, L. Stampler (2012, October 21). The Evolution Of James Bond Movie Product Placement.
Business Insider. Retrieved from
Hypothesis:
I believe that Western European audience image construction of the Balkans is for the greater part based on media and movies concerning the region. Bond is the fictional, distorting and subjectivizing mirror reflecting contemporary geopolitical turmoil, and for each movie the context will thus be different. Subsequently, the Balkans will be exoticized through a different lens in every film. In From Russia with Love (1963), Istanbul is an archetypical ‘in between’ city dealing with both the West and the Soviets during the Cold War. It is also the starting point of a journey (by train) through the Balkans, passing Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, to Paris, which will reveal prejudices reflecting both stereotypes born out of the Balkans historical past and the geopolitical variables. The World is Not Enough pays attention to international terrorists and global oil disputes. In Casino Royale (2006), the location of the casino is set in Montenegro but the film was never shot there. Instead, the set was in the Czech Republic, which in itself is
generalizing.18 Skyfall seems to address cyber terrorism and the ancient conflict of tradition versus modernity. We will have to look into the ‘how and why’ of the
multifaceted evolution Bond has gone through in its 53 years of life on the big screen. Following Said, through Bakic-Hayden and Todorova, I suspect a shift from classic Orientalizing scenes like the Gypsy scene from From Russia with Love, to less exoticizing and refined Balkanizing images. Bond movies are highly melodramatic, in terms of a binary ‘good-bad’ thinking. Westerners associate themselves with Bond, thus
consequently placing the Balkan figure, representing the bad guy -or vice versa- on the other side, reinforcing the stereotype. I hope to find parallels between examples given in the theoretical framework and the Bond movies. For instance, many fictional stories in Inventing Ruritania are situated in a fictional setting that have similarities with the real Balkans.
18 Internet Movie Database (IMDB), authoritative website on films.
2.
Theoretical framework
Few places on earth take pride in having acquired more than just a single definition, which, aside from their most common one, designates their being. Names of cities may change when the political structure of an area is reshaped, as has been the case for many Indian cities following the end of the British imperial period.19 Newly declared states emerge after successful separatist movements as happened in the 1993 break-up of Czechoslovakia, and they disappear, as the Soviet-Union showed us some years before. Sometimes we only need to add a word in order to place the area referred to in another, specific category, like ‘Fortress’ Europe. On a less political level, places have popular ‘names to go by’, like The United States once were ‘golden islands.’20 Such names may spring from image construction. The Balkans is such a place, with several names that have been coined to point to the region.
In ancient times, the region was referred to as Haemus, a name that was used deep into the Ottoman era.21 According to Inalcik, a leading Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans were the first to use the term Balkan in Rumelia, freely translated as ‘mountains.’22 The word Balkan is of a mixed Persian and Turkish
etymology, deriving from the word mud (balk) with the Turkish diminutive suffix –an.23 During the period of diminution of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan states appeared and the name was extended to the entire peninsula. Many Studies on the Balkans take the Balkan Peninsula as the limit of the examined area. Most of its borders seem
undisputable, because, as every other peninsula, it is surrounded by water from three sides: the Black Sea to the east, the Adriatic Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. The core is usually taken to mean Albania, Bulgaria, and the countries of the
19 C. Beam (2006, July 12). Mumbai? What about Bombay? Slate. Retrieved from
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2006/07/mumbai_what_about_bombay.htm l (accessed 2015, Februari 20)
20 M. Beller and J. Leerssen, Imagology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 90.
21 Ibid., 104.
22 Ibid., 103.
former Yugoslavia. Sometimes the idea includes Romania, Greece, the Western part of Turkey (Anatolia), Moldavia and Cyprus.24
A popular contemporary notion amongst scholars nowadays is that the Balkans
represents a bridge between Europe and Asia.25 This is not only due to its geographical qualities, there are more factors taken in the equation. From ancient times on, there have always been a great variety of peoples who’ve managed to survive in the cover of the mountains. Thracians, Hellenes, Celts, Bulgars, Serbs, Romanians, Greeks, Turks and Albanians, to name a few.26 It is diversity that marks the Balkans. The notion of a bridge implies a passing from one end to the other. It defines a clear-cut distinction between two sides; and it is the bridge that makes it possible to get from one end to the other, in order to overcome the divide. It simplifies. On the other hand, it also is prone to
‘othering’, because a bridge makes everything undesired (Turkish, Islamic, Oriental) look as foreign influence, as coming from the other side.27
In fact, the Balkan bridge does not simplify. In this case, from a Western
perspective, it means a passing from West to East, and it is a bridge that rather muddies boundaries than designates them. Furthermore, to my mind, it might be disrespectful to view the area as a bridge. It implies the two sides are more important than the bridge itself. The bridge may be seen as just a tool to get from one side to the other. The Balkan area might also be seen as a transcultural knot. The strands making up the knot
represent religions, politics and ideologies, scripts and empires, held together firmly by the fixing quality of time. Each of these strands, like a regular rope, is made of
intertwined individual strings in a symbiotic relationship consisting of multiple partners. The language string might consist of spaces to the west of Serbia (Croatia, Slovenia), where they would not be using the Latin script if they didn’t have a Catholic
24 M. Beller and J. Leerssen, Imagology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 105.
25 M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press 1997), 16.
26 M. Beller and J. Leerssen, Imagology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 104.
27 A. Vezenkov, ‘History against Geography: Should we always think of the Balkans as part of Europe?’ published in: MacLachlan, A., Torsen, I. (Eds.): IWM Junior Visiting Fellows‘ Conferences, Vol. 21 (2006). Retrieved from http://www.ef.huji.ac.il/publications/Ottoman%20Legacies/Alexander
tradition. Its partner, consisting of (former) Orthodox countries like Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Macedonia, use Cyrillic.28
Boundaries and Orientalism
So what defines the boundaries of the Balkan? Might it be the imagined geographical space that refers to (or consists of) the sum of all Balkan national stereotypes? In any case, the Balkans is not an area that can be defined along political geographical lines. We have to keep in mind the strands that make up the Balkan knot, including history as its cohesive factor. These strands do not adhere to politics. To address this issue, a key question is whether the Balkans is seen as a part of Europe or not. In terms of
boundaries we might ask where Europe, as an entity, ends and Asia starts. As far back as supranational Europe goes, it has its roots in the Middle Ages when Europe was defined by religion: Christendom.29 Due to the Great Schism in 1054, Western Christian Europe was officially divided but some 500 years before that, the Balkan Peninsula was already subject to Orthodox Byzantine rule.30 East-West relations in the period between the 5th and 11th century can be described as on of growing estrangement.31 The Byzantine Empire lasted until 1453 when Mehmet II conquered Constantinople and the entire Balkan Peninsula came under Islamic Ottoman rule.32
Ottoman expansionism never reached further than Hungary, which from the 12th century onwards has always been the final frontier for Eastern foreign rulers and is thus perceived as a core European country.33 With the Serbian Revolution (1804-1815) as curtain raiser, the Ottoman rule in its Western parts steadily weakened until the fall of 28 The Editors of Encyclopædia Brittanica. Balkans: Schism of 1054. Encyclopædia Brittanica Online. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans/Christendom (accessed 2015, June 24)
29 J.Bennet and W. Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York: McGraw-Hill 2006), 16.
30 Ibid., 73.
31 Danforth., L. (2006). Christianity: Christendom. Encyclopædia Brittanica Online. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans/Christendom
32 J.Bennet and W. Hollister, Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill 2006), 322.
the Ottoman Empire in 1923.34 My point here is this: until 1923, the Balkan Peninsula has always seen either non-Western Christian or, for the last half century, Islamic rule, and, following Said’s theory of Orientalism, is thus considered Oriental. The umbrella theory concerning the image of the Orient is described by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), and is our starting point to the process of unravelling the mysteries of biased image construction.
Said’s assumptions have to be viewed in the framework of a centre-periphery model, wherein Europe is considered the centre, and everything east of it, the Orient, the periphery.35 Said wasn’t too much concerned about the south-eastern peninsula. To him, the Orient was made up of the Middle Eastern, Asian and North-African societies. Said’s conclusions are that Western writing about the Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak, and feminized other. In turn, Western society contrasted with their feminine other, being rational, strong and masculine. Picture the West, in its colonial past, penetrating the Orient. The need to create a difference of cultural inequality between West and East is a European psychological attribute.36 The subsequent relation between each others reinforces preconceived archetypes. They are constructed with literary texts and
historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East. These texts envision all eastern societies as fundamentally similar to one another.37
And, of course, eastern societies are fundamentally dissimilar to western societies. This discourse establishes "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Said was influenced by Antonio Gramsci, in particular by his notion of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship
34 L. Stavrianos, ‘Antecedents to the Balkan Revolutions of the Nineteenth Century,’ The Journal of Modern
History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (1957): 345.
35 T. Zarycki, ‘An Interdisciplinary Model of Centre- Periphery Relations: A Theoretical Proposition,’ Regional and Local Studies, special issue (2007): 111-112.
36 Y. Gorodnichenko and G. Roland, ‘Understanding the Individualism-Collectivism Cleavage and its Effects: Lessons from Cultural Psychology,’ invited paper at the XVIth Congress of the International Economic Association (2011): 10-11 Retrieved: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~groland/pubs/IEA %20papervf.pdf (accessed 2015, February 23)
37 A. Sethi (2007, April 16). Edward Said and the Production of Knowledge. Second Track Citizens
Thought. Retrieved from
http://faithknowledgepeace.bos.rs/essays-and-analyses/63/2013/06/18/arjun-sethi-edward-said-and-the-production-of-knowledge.html (accesed 2015, February 25)
and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power of the “Orient.”38 Furthermore, in the wake of Michel Foucault, Said pointed out the link between power and knowledge in both academic and popular understanding, specifically in respect to the European views of the Islamic world.39 The Orient was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. Yet still, the Balkans does not fit the designation of being Oriental, as the area is geographically home to the continent of Europe.
In 1992, Milica Bakić-Hayden developed the concept of nesting Orientalisms, a theory based on the ideas of Said, which gives us a hierarchy within the hierarchical concept of Orientalism. She argues that whatever is perceived as oriental, can also be the subject of another group’s oriental views. In other words, the Middle East is more east than Anatolia, and consequently is more ‘other’. Furthermore, she claims that ‘othering’ does not confine itself to the space outside the borders of Europe. Within Eastern Europe, the Balkans is perceived as most ‘eastern’ and the hierarchy continues there.40 Yet in the Balkan space, there is no dividing line; the east thinks it is west and vice versa.
On a fundamental level, this is one of the reasons why Said’s Orientalism cannot be applied to the Balkans. The Balkans is the region where different symbolic
geographies intersect. It is the meeting place of empires (Eastern and Western Roman; Ottoman and Hapsburg), scripts (Cyrillic and Latin, and into the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkish), religions (Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism), and, more recently, cold-war politics and ideologies (between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, communist-run but unorthodox, and non-aligned).41 For this research, the ideologies intersection plays a vital role, as it is a relatively modern addition to the geographical and cultural ‘otherness’ of the Balkans. Furthermore, the renegotiation of the European character of the Balkan peoples themselves is a major issue and a device in constructing the pattern of nesting Orientalisms.42
38 E. Said, Orientalism (London: the Penguin Group 1978), 7.
39 E. Said, Orientalism (London: the Penguin Group 1978), 3.
40 M. Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,’ Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (1995): 922.
41 M. Bakić-Hayden and R. Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,’ Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (1992): 4.
42 P. Biehl, A. Gramsch, A. Marciniak, (eds), Archäologien Europas/Archaeologies of Europe: Geschichte,
Methoden und Theorien / History, methods and Theories, (Münster, New York, München, Berlin: Waxmann
In his book, professor Peter Biehl cites Croat writer and philosopher Boris Buden to demonstrate the complexity of Balkan identity: ‘Europe is not only the place where we have always been, but also the goal to be achieved … It is the object of our adoration and desire, and equally the object of our disappointment and anxiety.’43 Buden argues that while the Balkans is on the European continent, Balkan people do not feel that they are part of Europe. This does not imply that they don’t want to be European, rather the opposite. The reality is that Balkan people have a strong desire to be perceived as
Europeans. Goran Stefanovski (1952) was born in Macedonia, then Yugoslavia, and later moved to England, some years after his English wife and their kids did in 1991. During the Yugoslav civil wars, he commuted several years between Macedonia and England, encountering cultural diversity. In his essay A tale from the Wild East, he tells his story, after being triggered by his friends who’ve dubbed ‘the East’ ‘not sexy anymore’. He describes a Western producer who wants to cash in on his story, telling him he’s ‘an asset now.’ Stefanovski feels himself, alongside others, being stereotyped in England, backing his statement with an anecdote about Rade Šerbedžija. Šerbedžija, now an international movie star, was a legendary actor in former Yugoslavia who played culturally
appropriate roles like Hamlet. Now he stars in Hollywood films. ‘As what? As a
suspicious, Eastern European Mafioso, an unreliable type, verging on the psychopathic. Hamlet has become a subsidiary character. The protagonist has turned into an
antagonist. Rade has become an illustration of the cliché about Eastern Europeans.’44 Stefanovski feels hurt and subverts the Western image of the East by revealing the stereotype and shaming it.
He shows himself, as a Macedonian, to be the opposite of the stereotype. He then defends Macedonia and sums up why ‘their’ story was different from the cliché, but must admit that ‘Under the veneer of Europeanism, it kept its Byzantine narrative intact.’45 The 43 'Čolović compared the Serbian attitudes towards Europe with the ones noted by Boris Buden among the Croats and states that “the conclusions are almost entirely valid for the Serbian case” (Čolović 1997, 44),’ in: P. Biehl, A. Gramsch, A. Marciniak, (eds), Archäologien Europas/Archaeologies of Europe: Geschichte,
Methoden und Theorien / History, methods and Theories, (Münster, New York, München, Berlin: Waxmann
2002), 316.
44 G. Stefanovski, ‘A Tale from the Wild East.’ In: Snel, G. (ed.), Alter Ego. Twenty Confronting Views on the
European Experience. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2004), 21-27.
45 G. Stefanovski, ‘A Tale from the Wild East.’ In: Snel, G. (ed.), Alter Ego. Twenty Confronting Views on the
Balkans has stayed ‘the Balkans’ because Europeanism exposed Balkan identity, thus enforcing the difference. And so, the main thesis about the Balkans, one of ambiguity and hybridity, is verified. However much Balkan people, actors, want to be cast European, they will most likely play the role of the villain.
Imagining the Balkans
In her book Imagining the Balkans (1997), Maria Todorova provided a second
explanation for why we can’t apply Orientalism to the Balkans. Let’s take another look at supranational Europe and its religious history, because Europe’s period of
enlightenment is left out of the equation. During the age of reason, geographical
concepts overshadowed Christendom as a marker for a supranational Europe. It is also around this time that the entity Europe started to be identified with the continent Europe and it was the elites who saw Europe as a geographical entity distinct from Asia.46 Yet the “new” geographical entity Europe, the continent, was larger than the “old” Christian Europe. And it is here, Alexander Vezenkov argues, that the foundation for these newly “acquired” territories, seen as Europe’s periphery, is being laid. ‘This,’ he claims, ‘explains the “construction” afterwards both of Eastern Europe and of the Balkans as “incomplete European” spaces.’47
Todorova offers more reasons for why the Balkans is viewed as Europe’s
incomplete self. She too took Said’s theory as a starting point and concluded that there are three major differences between Orientalism and what she coins balkanism. First she argues that there is no historical and geographic concreteness to the Orient, as opposed to the tangible nature of the Balkans.48 The Orient is a referral to a place or space that is
46 A. Vezenkov, ‘History against Geography: Should we always think of the Balkans as part of Europe?’ published in: MacLachlan, A., Torsen, I. (Eds.): IWM Junior Visiting Fellows‘ Conferences, Vol. 21 (2006). Retrieved from http://www.ef.huji.ac.il/publications/Ottoman%20Legacies/Alexander
%20Vezenkov_History%20against%20Geography.pdf (accessed 2015, March 1)
47 A. Vezenkov, ‘History against Geography: Should we always think of the Balkans as part of Europe?’ published in: MacLachlan, A., Torsen, I. (Eds.): IWM Junior Visiting Fellows‘ Conferences, Vol. 21 (2006). Retrieved from http://www.ef.huji.ac.il/publications/Ottoman%20Legacies/Alexander
%20Vezenkov_History%20against%20Geography.pdf (accessed 2015, March 1)
backwards in time, a notion described by Johannes Fabian as a denial of coevalness in his book Time and the Other (1983). This temporal backwardness is something that is projected by the onlooker, who observes not from the periphery, but from the centre. Therefore, the perception of the Orient has been relational, depending on the normative value set and the observation point. In other words, everyone has or has had one’s own Orient.
Secondly, as I have mentioned before, she sees a historical existence stemming almost entirely from Byzantine and Ottoman rule. But apparently there is a widespread notion that the Balkans began losing their identity once they began to Europeanize.49
The Westernization of the Balkans in the 19th and 20th centuries involves a ‘spread of
rationalism, and secularization, the intensification of commercial activities and industrialization, the formation of a bourgeoisie and other new social groups in the economic and social sphere, and above all, the triumph of the bureaucratic nation-state.’50 What we really see here is an accelerated attempt to make up time on Western Europe. The combination of a Byzantine/Ottoman historical identity and the shift towards Europeanization continues to strengthen Balkan ambivalence. These first two reasons are factual.
The third, surprisingly, is based on a product of Orientalism: stereotyping in terms of gender. The Orient is depicted as feminine, and has always been a place fuelled with Western perceptions of desire, romanticism and nudity.51 Even cultural produce in the cold war paradigm still holds this surprisingly classic Oriental view. In the film Harum Scarum (1965), starring Elvis Presley, the outlet for Western male heroic desire is clearly shown. Presley, clothed in an Oriental head wrap and vest, jumps off his horse to fight the evil Arabs and free a woman held hostage. After he succeeds he bursts out in singing:
I’m gonna go where desert sun is; where the fun is;
go where the harem girls dance; go where there’s love and romance out on the burning sands,
49 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press 1997),10-14
50 Ibidem.
in some caravan.
I’ll find adventure where I can. To say the least, go East, young man. You’ll feel like the Sheik,
so rich and grand,
with dancing girls at your command. When paradise starts calling into some tent I’m crawling. I’ll make love the way I plan. Go East
and drink and feast go East, young man.52
In Harum Scarum, femininity is thus posed as marker for the Orient. Yet the Balkans is stereotyped as masculine.53 It construes the ‘marked’ category as a divergence from the norm. So in terms of gender, the masculine Balkans does look like the West.
Dracula’s contamination
In these points a trend might be detected: the Balkans becomes more ‘European’ and it scares the Western Europeans. Much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In this story, Dracula travels to England in search of Jonathan Harker’s fiancée. It symbolizes the fear of the ‘Other’, the threat of possible invasion and corruption of England.54 The fear is being contaminated by an exotic, and in this case, an exotic that comes from an ambiguous space on the European continent. The Dracula theme proved to be very influential in Western narrative perception of the Balkan ‘Other.’ By the time Francis Ford Coppola released Dracula (1992), this particular Western perception had already reached many minds. The narrative implies a conscious exoticizement of the Balkans in order to restore the demarcation between Western Europeans and its incomplete self.
52 Shohat, E., Gender in Hollywood’s Orient, Middle East Report, Vol. 20, No. 162 (1990). Retrieved from http://www.merip.org/mer/mer162/gender-hollywoods-orient (accessed 2015, March 2)
53 W. Bracewell, ‘New Men, Old Europe: Being a Man in Balkan Travel Writing,’ Journeys: The International
Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, Vol. 6, No. 1-2 (2005): 88.
More proof of this can be found in contemporary travel writing, for example Isabel Fonseca’s Bury me standing: the Gypsies and their Journey (1995), which might be best described as a crossover between a scholarly analysis and romantic writing.
Fonseca meets Antoinette, who she interviews. Antoinette is a Gypsy woman from Bulgaria whom Fonseca was introduced to, and was invited to her home. Her
relationship with Antoinette is striking for the way Fonseca reveals her Western way of imagining Gypsies. When Antoinette is described, the reader gets the feeling that she does not sound like a typical Gypsy. She is acting modern, is proud of her education, dresses in a modern way and does not want to be associated with other Gypsies. ‘I have tried to avoid stereotyping; and so did Antoinette. Sitting beside me on the patchwork rug, legs daintily tucked under to one side, Antoinette didn’t look or move like any Gypsy woman I knew or had see: she was tall, pale, and blonde, and she was exceptionally - exaggeratedly- prim and girlish.’55 Yet she is a Gypsy.
Antoinette might be seen as a downscaled model for the Balkans: a hybrid consisting of both Western and Eastern elements. Fonseca, being a Westerner, has imagined a different Gypsy when she set out on her travel. Some cultural characteristics associated with Gypsies are backwardness, primitiveness and uncivilizedness. Her expectations clearly aren’t met which causes a conflict in her mind, which in turn is projected in her writing. So, while she states that she has tried not to stereotype, she is actually doing the opposite. The Balkans, in this case projected through Antoinette, is trying hard to be Western, and Fonseca makes fun of it in order to restore contrast. In a way, Antoinette’s story parallels Stefanovski’s A tale from the Wild East in terms of Western demarcation. Like Buden described, and Stefanovski’s experience in England, Antoinette in Bulgaria faces Western fear of the “Other’ set by a prejudiced image. ‘She might have stepped from the pages of a 1950s issue of Good Housekeeping.’56 To
Fonseca’s mind, Antoinette should not even try to be 1950’s and should stay backwards. She might even be afraid of Antoinette looking a bit like Fonseca herself.
55 Fonseca, I., Bury me standing: the Gypsies and their Journey (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 1995), 118.
56 Fonseca, I., Bury me standing: the Gypsies and their Journey (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 1995), 118.
3.
Analysis
From Russia with Love
From Russia with Love was shot and released in 1963, when the Cold War was at it highest peak. The Cuban Missile Crisis had only occurred the previous year and East-West relations were at a breaking point. Not surprisingly, in the end credits it was mentioned that ‘All characters and events in this film are fictitious, any similarity to actual events or persons living, or dead, is purely coincidental’ (1:53:52). Furthermore,
this is the only Bond movie that is almost an exact adaptation from Ian Fleming’s novel From Russia with Love (1957). For the same apparent geopolitical reasons that made the aforementioned disclaimer a necessity, SMERSH was replaced by the producers with the international crime syndicate SPECTRE.57 This was the one and only change made by Eon Productions and it symbolizes the fragility of the ideological balance that existed.
Although it is this context that we have to keep in mind when viewing and analysing this film, the fact is that the movie did mirror the major geopolitical turmoil caused by the Second World War and the Cold War. Yugoslavia, which occupied
significant portions of the Balkans, played to some extent a neutral role in both movie and Cold War politics. It had separated itself from the Soviet Union in 1948 and, under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, had started to build its own way towards a socialist republican state. He criticized both Eastern Bloc countries and NATO members and started the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, emphasizing Yugoslavia’s neutral stance.58
Turkey’s political rhetoric on the other hand was Western oriented, as it was a founding member of NATO in 1952, as well as a home to American nuclear missiles.59 Istanbul should therefore be a safe haven for 007 (Sean Connery) to travel to; a
conviction that is also stated in the briefing MI6 gives Bond (0:21:06). But the city also is romantically idealized, when Bond tells Miss Monneypenny (Lois Maxwell) that Istanbul is ‘where the moonlight on the Bosphorus is irresistible,’ a sexual connotation (0:23:38). It reminds the viewer of the, also classic Bond, opening sequence which overflows with sexual overtones and nudity. Names of actors and companies are projected in neon light over barely clothed female belly dancers and James Bond shines in masculinity.
Everything but the music feels oriental.
When the movie takes us to Istanbul, the first object that is shown is the Hagia Sofia. Throughout the movie, as many as ten shots start with a prominently shown Hagia Sophia, as if the viewer would forget they were looking at Istanbul. In general, Istanbul is cast as a shady city with many scenes at night or in the sewers underground. Shots shown during the day display a cloudy, gloomy city showing grey overtones, as if dawn is 57 SMERSH represented the KGB in Fleming’s original Bond narrative.
58 S. Suvedi, Land and Maritime Zones of Peace in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press
1996), 169–170.
59 United Nations official website. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/members/growth.shtml#1940
ever breaking, and danger is always lurking around the corner. The darkness opposed to light trick becomes apparent when, at the end in sunny and bright Venice, Bond and his girl are safe.
Shortly after Bond sets foot in Turkey, Soviet spies are tailing him in an obvious fashion. Bond casually remarks that it’s supposedly customary to have people tailing you in ‘these parts’ (0:25:59). Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendáriz), the Istanbul based MI6 liaison with a Churchill picture on his desk, argues that because they are in the Balkans, ‘the game with the Russians is played a little differently here’ (0:27:26). Keeping tabs on each other is part of the daily life of both English and Soviet spy agencies. This gives the viewer a sense of Istanbul being shady, and Kerim Bey confirms this feeling by telling Bond that he surrounds himself with his family, arguing that blood is the best security in Istanbul. Apparently, family members are the only ones to be trusted.
A bizarre interlude follows the bombing of Kerim Bey’s home, in which he takes Bond to a Gypsy camp for an evening's racy entertainment, including a girl-on-girl fight. The scene altogether has no function for the plot and has overtly oriental connotations. The Gypsy village looks like a classic gypsy camp, backward, poor, without electricity: it feels like we have travelled back in time. There is alcohol in abundance and we see exotic belly dancers performing on gypsy music. Specifically, the name of the song we hear while watching the belly dancers is ‘Misirlou’ and it stems from Ancient Greek folk songs with influences from Middle Eastern music (0:40:03). The song gained popularity
amongst Balkan audiences through Arabic, Jewish, Armenian and Turkish versions.60 But in 1963, Western people would have recognized it as the slowed down version of Dick Dales’ surf rock version, which was a huge hit in Western pop culture in 1962. The song regained popularity in the 90s, when it appeared as a leading cut in Pulp Fiction (1994).61 ‘Misirlou’ is a song well chosen to introduce the audience to Balkan music, making it feasible, thus muddying the Western – Balkan boundary.
When, amidst the catfight between the gypsy girls Vita and Zora, the Bulgarians attack and a heavy Hollywood-like battle commences.62 The Bulgarians take a special 60 B. Kornhauser, ‘Layers of Identity in the 1960s Surf Rock Icon Misirlou,’ Musicology Australia Vol. 32 No. 2 (2010): 185–20.
61 M. Wolf (2007). Dick Dale. Fender Players Club. Retrieved from
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927194652/http://www.fenderplayersclub.com/pdfs/artist_lessons /dale.pdf (accessed 2015, April 6)
position in the movie, as they are under control of the Soviets and effectively clean their dirty laundry. Kerim Bey acknowledges this and he adds that the Bulgarian villain Kirilenko ‘kills for pleasure’ (0:37:27). In fact, the Soviets and England, apart from Bond, have no direct confrontation. It is only through Bulgarians and Kerim Bey’s (thus MI6’s) gypsy friends that they indirectly clash. From another perspective, it may be said that the Bulgarians and gypsies have no apparent control over their own destiny, and that
Istanbul is a place where manipulative people and organizations act and rule.
Bond shows a total disregard for whom he attacks during the battle. He throws duelling Bulgarian opponents and gypsy friends together in the water without
eliminating the mutual enemy. He cuts tension wires from a tent so that another duelling pair gets trapped. He shows no care for the outcome of these personal duels, as long as he is not harmed. Ultimately, Bond saves the Gypsy boss’ life, an act for which he
immediately is declared family, something Westerners would not recognize. We get to see a noble James Bond who cannot bear to see two gypsy girls fight and wishes it to stop. The gypsy boss responds to Bond in saying that his heart is too soft to be a real Gypsy, implying that Gypsies are tough as opposed to soft and weak Westerners (0:47:33). Thus, Bond shows civilized manners by ordering the fight to stop and the message is that civilized people are weak. The Gypsy women are ordered to be for Bond’s taking, which they apparently are happy to do.
The next day, we see a suited up Bond, being taken care of by ‘his’ two gypsy girls, an oriental image reminding of old British colonial times. The scene also fits a classic gypsy, oriental, stereotype that their women are seductive and erotic. In reality, girls tend to marry young and many marriages are arranged. The stereotype may then originate from the way the girls dress during the courtship phase, when they are encouraged to dress provocatively.63 But sex is something that is not consumed until after marriage. It seems like the stereotypes that work well for the movie, the ones that actually exoticize, like girls dressing provocatively, are deliberately kept in. Accents that subvert this stereotype are either left out or are being twisted in such a way that they increasingly exoticize. For instance when Vita and Zora are being commanded to be Bond’s price – while they were in a catfight over a man.
63 T. Jensen and J. Ringrose, ‘Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies,’ Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2014): 378-379.
Most of the movie is set in Istanbul, including monumental locations like the Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern and the famous Sirkeci Station. The iconic Hagia Sophia is shown to us no less than ten times, probably to make sure the viewer knows the scenes are still in Istanbul and to emphasize it’s exoticness. Most of the scenes are shot on site, but in order to qualify for British film funding, at least 70% of the movie had to have been filmed in Great Britain or the Commonwealth.64 As a result, both the Gypsy camp and the scenes on the Orient Express were set at the Pinewood studios in London. However, the scene after the theft of the Lektor decoding machine, showing the rat invested sewers, was shot in Spain as Britain did not allow filming with wild rats.65
When taking a closer look at the Hagia Sophia, it is a religious museum that symbolizes the ambiguity of the region. From the opening in 537, until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, it served as an Eastern Orthodox Cathedral, built by Emperor Justinian I. For a short period between 1204 and 1261 it was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral under the Latin Empire. After 1453, the building was converted to a mosque. Having being turned into a museum by order of Atatürk in 1934, it now holds Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Islamic relics, paintings and mosaics.66 Visually, it may be the most important building to designate the city as being Istanbul. Without it, the city, with its bazaars, Oriental architecture and other exotic cultural representations, from a Western perspective, could have been any city in the Orient.
The story continues on board the Orient Express, when it leaves Istanbul Sirkeci Station (1:07:05). Barely two minutes later we get to see countryside out of the train window, indicating the train left the city, while in reality it would take a minimum of 10 minutes to even get out of the centre of Istanbul. The scenes harbour a temporal editing device that is commonly used in most films, but proof that manipulation of time on a different level occurs when the train is traversing the heart of the Balkan area. The Orient Express takes about 8 seconds to get from Sofia to Belgrade, a journey that would take 10.5 hours in real life. From Belgrade to Zagreb in real life is 6,5 hours travelling but in the film we only get to enjoy 50 seconds of Balkan scenery – which visually is
64 A. Barnes and M. Hearn, Kiss Kiss Bang! Bang!: the Unofficial James Bond Film Companion (London:
Batsford Books 1997), 23.
65 S. Cain, From Russia with Love audio commentary. From Russia with Love, Ultimate Edition 2006, MGM Home Entertainment.
surprisingly empty. It resembles the moorlands in South West England or the Desert of Wales, which is not entirely coincidental as these scenes were filmed in Scotland. This way, the Balkans is portrayed as an area without identity. In short, in less than a minute we are transported 800 kilometres through a social and cultural emptiness.
In Zagreb, Grant, the villain who’s objective it is to assassinate Bond, kills the MI6 Balkan liaison that Bond was supposed to meet and boards the train in his place. He looks like a Westerner, therefore deceiving Bond, but he’s actually recruited in Tangier, Africa (0:12:24). Apparently Westerners need training in a corrupting environment such as the Orient. The exterior covers his intention. He poses an unrecognizable threat to Westerners, showing some similarities to Dracula. This might also reflect upon the fear of Soviets, as they too are not distinguishable by ethnic markers. Bond later realizes that he should’ve noticed that his opponent ordered red wine to go with his fish dinner, something a civilized gentleman would not do. Also, Bond wins his personal battle with Grant by playing on his greed, a feature that is usually viewed stereotypically Western.67 Non-Balkan actors play all major roles in From Russia with Love. Even Kerim Bey, the Turkish MI6 liaison based in Istanbul, is in fact the Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz. Together with Dolores del Río and María Félix, he was one of the three most well known Latin American movie stars of the 1950’s.68 Earlier in 1963, Armendáriz played the evil mastermind El Kerim, in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production Captain Sindbad.69 It can be argued that the Western audience already perceived Armendáriz as an oriental type, which suggests that he was type casted on intertextual basis. Kerim Bey’s girl however is Serbian, but her role is insignificant like most female characters in the early Bond films. Emblematically, her name is left out both in the movie and the end-credits. Furthermore, the Turkish Hasan Ceylan plays one of the nameless foreign agents, and Nusret Ataer plays Mehmet, but his name is spelled wrong in the end credits (Nushet Ataer). The rest of the cast is Western European.
67 I. Buruma and A. Margalit, Occidentalism (New York: The Penguin Press 2004), 10.
68 Biografías y Vidas: Pedro Armendáriz. La Enciclopedia Biográfica en Línea. Retrieved from: http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/a/armendariz.htm(accessed 2015, April 19)
69 Filmography of Pedro Armendáriz. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000784/ (accessed 2015, April 19)
The World is Not Enough
The nineteenth movie in the Bond series, The World Is Not Enough, was released in 1999, only a decade after the fall of the Berlin wall. However, unlike the two previous post-1989 Bond movies GoldenEye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), this particular plot does not revolve around the classic East-Western conflict. In both GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies, it is the antagonist’s aim to ultimately re-ignite the Cold-War deadlock, or preferably worse. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the nineties were turbulent years. The 1988-1990 Iran-Iraq War and the 1990-1991 Gulf-War redefined relations in the global oil market, resulting in an oil export boycott for Iraq that
intensified the hunt for new oil fields.70 As a result, huge oil fields were exploited in Central Asia, an area that was just liberated from decades of Soviet control. This triggered world powers to engage in a race for oil-stained contracts covering
infrastructure for export in and around Central Asia.71 Contemporary European-Russian border conflicts show that the production and distribution of energy is an ever more thorny subject. The sole European major oil field, in Scandinavian grounds, is not sufficient enough to supply the continent. Import from oil-rich places is, and was, unavoidable.
Slovenia in 1991 was the setting in the start of the Yugoslav Wars, which officially ended only in 2001 at the end of the insurgency in Kosovo. In-between those years, the Croatian War of Independence, the Bosnian War and the Kosovo War resulted in
casualties in high numbers and deep national scars. The atrocities of these wars were for the first time in history thoroughly documented and shown to the world.72 Global fear of terrorism on a scale that 21st century contemporaries are used to, started to emerge in the early 90s, kicking off with the 1993 World Trade bombing and several attacks on Western embassies around the world.73 Rather then focussing on Cold-War dynamics, The World Is Not Enough places emphasis on the appearance of international terrorist cells and global conflicts arising from geo-strategic oil disputes.
The opening credits sequence, traditionally reflecting the movies main themes, does not disappoint and leaves little to the imagination (0:14:18). As expected, it is semi erotic, filled with dancing girls covered in the exotic richness of oil. Similarities with the opening scene of From Russia with Love cannot be denied, although these features are far from unique in the film series. Both opening scenes have exotic aspects, yet in From Russia with Love the girls are highlighted. In The World Is Not Enough oil is, as it is virtually pump jacked out of your computer screen’s pixels, and poured out over the dancing girls.
The film also pays attention to other global trends such as feminism. The third wave of feminism started around 1990, which in 2004 in Europe and North America resulted in the achievement of several objectives such as equal pay, voting rights, equal 71 C. Von Hirschhausen and H. Engerer, ‘Energy in the Caspian Sea region in the late 1990s: the end of the boom?’ OPEC Review Vol. 23, No. 4 (1999): 275.
72 F. Abrahams (2001). March-June 1999: An Overview. Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/kosovo/undword-03.htm (accessed 2015, April 22)
73 D. Watson (2002, February 6). The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States (testimony). The
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from
treatment in the family and the law.74 It comes as no surprise, then, that The World Is Not Enough is the first in the Bond series in which a female villainess plays the part of the main antagonist. Elektra King is the daughter of the oil-magnate Sir Robert King, whose core business mainly was oil transportation from Asia and Central Asia to Europe. When Elektra takes over the company, she plans to build an 800 mile pipeline that travels past or close to ‘the terrorists in Iraq, Iran and Syria,’ and states that the Russians will do anything to stop her (0:23:40).
With an interval of 16 Bond movies covering 36 years, MI6 and their enemies are back in the intriguing city of Istanbul. The city plays a central role in the plot and once again, Istanbul is the perfect spot for the West and its enemy to meet. Yet, this time it’s hardly a buffer zone for both West and East as the Cold War ended a decade before. A new threat has found its way to Istanbul under the command of Elektra King and her international terrorist boyfriend Victor Zokas (Robert Carlyle). Although Renard (Victor Zokas’ nickname) is introduced as a criminal with a Soviet history, his nationality is not specified. He rather is presented as an international high-tech mastermind terrorist with a taste for weapons of mass destruction. The MI6 briefing reveals that he has been operating in Moscow, North-Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Beirut, Cambodia and Bosnia – to which Bond sarcastically replies that those are ‘all the romantic vacation spots’ (0:26:37). Renard’s activities in those ‘romantic vacation spots’ are not defined. The Western viewer is considered well informed about the ‘shady’ status of those countries, and because Renard’s origins are left unclear, he can be viewed as a cosmopolitan villain.
But in fact, Victor Zokas is characterized after a Balkan archetype, as Carlyle noted in 1999. ‘I made him Bosnian and fabricated a back-story just for myself. Bosnia is a dangerous part of the world at this moment and I see Renard as a military man who has seen the horror of it all and decided to make a lot of money out of it as these mercenary guys usually do. Hence the cropped hair look I have. I found a Bosnian actor in Yellow Pages [a telephone directory] and spoke to him for about a week. I also listened to tapes of him in my spare time to get the accent absolutely right.’75 Consequently, not only 74 D. Cameron and D. Holt, Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012) Retrieved from https://books.google.nl/books?
id=oUOcr4qoUF4C&pg=PT162&lpg=PT162&dq=third+wave+feminism+cultural+strategy+holt+cameron &source=bl&ots=0InsC2PvAX&sig=hEhp6s9EZs73mFGt2g73sXUmkQc&hl=nl&sa=X&ei=IGyRVfHwL4PiU5 KPruAD&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=third%20wave%20feminism%20cultural%20strategy %20holt%20cameron&f=false (accessed 2015, May 11)
Istanbul returns for a second time to the Bond series, but the Balkans do too in a portable way.
Elektra King’s objective is to take revenge on M and to ‘reshape the world’ by blowing up Istanbul and its 8 million inhabitants. Her plan is to detonate a nuclear bomb placed on a submarine in the Bosphorus strait. If the plan succeeds, the Bosphorus and Istanbul region would become radioactively contaminated for several decades, rendering the strait unusable for oil tankers, consequently making the King oil pipeline the single channel to distribute oil from the Caspian Sea region to Europe. Istanbul is in danger; it is a place that needs to be destroyed for capitalistic commercial purposes. From a Western viewpoint, the Balkans is the weak chain in the link on which their oil supply depends. Europe’s economical health is dependent on the pipeline from the Caucasus, and it is threatened by Balkan contamination. The primal Dracula pattern, of
contamination, is thus exemplified in the film both figuratively as well as literally as the nuclear meltdown directly contaminates the European continent.
Around minute 82, Istanbul first appears and is presented to the viewer during nightfall as a gloomy and cloudy city – reminding of From Russia with Love. Right after the first shot, the Hagia Sophia is shown, the first of a total of 6 times. No actual scenes are acted out inside or near it, but its minarets clearly rise above the skyscraper-absent Istanbul skyline. Throughout the film, the skyline is hazy with reddish dust and filled with clouds. Again, danger could be lurking anywhere in the city. But this time, there are no chasing scenes around the city bazaars, sewers or other landmark buildings, the Basilica Cistern or Sirkeci Station. Furthermore, not a single Turkish person takes part in the story. It seems that Istanbul is chosen solely on account of its geographical quality.
Once, the city was a buffer zone to both East and West, yet in The World Is Not Enough, only remnants of those times remain. Parallels of the thaw in East-West relations and the fall of communism are omnipresent in the movie. A poorly protected old Soviet nuclear site might be seen as Western post-Cold War critique on neglected Russian nuclear sites. The Istanbul based Russian FSB command centre, a former KGB spy station, is a safe house for Bond and his allies. Amongst his allies is his old Soviet acquaintance Valentin Zukovsky, a morally ambiguous Russian caviar magnate and (former) criminal, introduced in GoldenEye four years before. At the FSB safe house,
Stereotype: Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism,’ Geopolitics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2003): 125-156.
Bond and his allies are betrayed by Zukovsky’s ‘head of security,’ Mister Bullion (1:40:19).
Istanbul now becomes a city where not only revenge is played out, but also a place where double crossing reveals itself amongst Bond’s allied Russian friends.
The film then takes us to Renard’s Turkey hideout, the famous Maiden’s Tower (1:40:55). Ironically, Maiden’s Tower was visible in the background in From Russia with
Love, when Bond and Tanya take a boat ride along the Bosphorus. In the film, Maiden’s Tower is situated in the centre of the Bosphorus, equally distanced from the Western as the Eastern part of Istanbul. In reality, the island is very near the Asian part of Istanbul. Like the rest of the city, it is a place loaded with history. It has its roots in the Byzantine period, when Emperor Alexius Comnenus built a wooden tower on the island in 1110. The legend goes that an emperor locked his daughter inside, after an oracle prophesied that a snake would kill her on her 18th birthday. On her 18th birthday, the emperor brought her a basket of fruit in which a snake had hid. The virgin daughter reached into the basket and got bitten, after which she died, hence the name Maiden Tower.76
The tower plays a central role in the unravelling plot. At Maiden’s Tower, Istanbul becomes a place where Bond almost dies, and also where he kills a woman he had loved in cold blood, for the first time in the series. However, it is not the first time that a woman poses a threat to 007. Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love, Blofeld’s twelve Angels of Death in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Octopussy in Octopussy (1983) and Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (1995) are some of Elektra’s most illustrious
predecessors. Yet Bond had never both loved and killed any of these ladies. While it’s ironic that he kills Elektra, reminiscent of the Whore of Babylon, specifically at Maiden’s Tower, it also symbolizes the ambiguity of the Balkan space.
All scenes in Istanbul cover just over 31 minutes. 11 of those minutes are on a submarine. Effectively, the fate of Istanbul and its 8 million inhabitants is being fought over on a tiny rock on the Bosphorus and on a submarine. While the decisive battles are being fought out at Maiden’s Tower and underneath the surface of the Bosphorus, Istanbul itself is spared any collateral damage during those fights. On the other hand, it cannot offer any help in any way, and is restricted to watch and await its destiny from the sidelines. Istanbul is a helpless city, waiting for the next disaster to hit it.
76 I. Koksal (2010). The Maiden’s Tower. Turkish Government: European Capital of Culture 2010. Retrieved from http://www.ibb.gov.tr/sites/ks/en-US/1-Places-To-Go/towers/Pages/maiden-tower.aspx (accessed 2015, May 26)
