This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond“ series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor, Matthew Freeman, completed his PhD in the department in 2015.

Screen capture from the James Bond 007: From Russia With Love video game of 2005.

A couple of years ago, Jonathan Nolan, co-screenwriter of the popular Dark Knight (2005-2012) movies and brother of acclaimed Hollywood director Christopher Nolan, spoke candidly about the process of writing a real ending to the Nolan Batman saga. “It’s the right way to tell a story, to blow the whole thing up,” Nolan insisted. “It’s better than trying to spin the thing out indefinitely like the Bond franchise. They’ve successfully pulled it off with Bond, but at certain costs. I think with almost every other franchise it’s a mistake to try and keep those plates spinning. You want stakes.” Nolan here reflects on the process of telling serialized stories and the problem of constructing narratives with meaningful character arcs and payoffs in a world where movie stars are signed up for multiple sequels and franchise-filmmaking is the order of the day.

Nolan’s postulation got me thinking. In this age of Hollywood franchises and transmedia storytelling, where story progression, character development and narrative coherence across multiple films and peripheral media extensions have become a logical means of sustaining audience engagement in a crowded marketplace, to what extent is James Bond–one of the oldest, most enduring and most popular of all media franchises, one that spans books, movies and video games–something of an anomaly? After all, while Marvel et al. now build coherent universes for their pool of characters to roam, in the Bond movies actors change faces, story threads are dropped from one film to another, and the death of characters more often than not goes unnoticed in the hearts of heroes. And that’s not even to consider Bond in other media besides film, in works whose own narratives contradict, stray and repeat old ground as often they narrate new adventures. Don’t the Bond franchise’s constant contradictions and straying repetitions directly oppose the common ideology of how media franchises are typically built in the 21^st century? For according to Henry Jenkins, “everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry [is] designed with the single idea of transmedia in mind.”[1] Transmedia, of course, speaks about the sort of narrative coherence, story progression and expansive character development I mention above.

How, then, has this noted loss of narrative coherence, story progression and character development across the Bond franchise affected how audiences engage with it? Is transmedia even a possibility for a franchise as contradictory, longstanding, episodic and fundamentally un-serialized as Bond? This is a property that celebrated its 50^th anniversary, at least cinematically, fairly recently–and did so in style with 2012’s Skyfall, a film that earned more money than any Bond movie previously and will be followed by this year’s Spectre. Inevitably, spin-off video games preceded Skyfall, as they have done for years. But do the various Bond films and accompanying video games actually unfold in the same storyworld–and do fans even require them to do so? Are the video games consumed as coherent extensions of the Bond films or rather as distinct versions of some alternate Bond universe? And if the latter, is James Bond a minor anomaly in today’s transmedia landscape–and what might all of this tell us about the nature of media franchises?

Daniel Craig as Bond in advertising for 2012’s Skyfall

I explore such questions in a chapter in Claire Hines’s upcoming collection Fan Phenomena: James Bond, and it might well be that a franchise like James Bond doesn’t actually engage with popular strategies of transmedia storytelling at all. Instead, we might say that Bond makes use of a fixed temporality that engages fans across multiple media via strategies based around nostalgia and retroactive continuities.

Nostalgia is hinted implicitly even in the titles of some Bond video games. The USP of 2012’s 007 Legends was that, as one review put it, the game “trades in nostalgia, and does so in spades.” Perhaps a more explicit example of how nostalgia works in Bond video games to encourage fan engagement despite the lack of so-called transmedia storytelling can be found in 2005’s James Bond 007: From Russia With Love. Here, the game was billed as “the first game to let you play as Sean Connery’s 007.” Released at a time when the Internet was filled with fans’ bewilderment about Daniel Craig’s casting in Casino Royale (2006), James Bond 007: From Russia With Love worked to pacify fans by returning them to a safer memory of the Bond of the past. “Starring a beautifully-realised digital double of Connery circa 1963,” Empire wrote, James Bond 007: From Russia With Love featured every major set-piece from that 1963 film, allowing players to extend their engagement in the Bond storyworld across media precisely by curtailing the storyworld’s extension: the audience’s engagement in the present was driven by a return to the past.

This mark of nostalgia says something about the audience for Bond in the 21^st century. A game like James Bond 007: From Russia With Love might be seen to embody Bond fans’ almost perpetual desire to keep Bond in the past. In other words, is part of this character’s appeal the fact that he doesn’t actually change, or age, or progress, or remember, or look ahead? Living Bond as a site of nostalgia–either via rereading old books, re-watching old movies or reliving old memories via video games–has provided Bond producers’ with a seemingly endless means to capture audiences’ engagement across media. By keeping Bond in the past, forever unchanged and untainted, fans too can return to that world over and over again.

The idea of moving a story backwards rather than forwards may contradict today’s more conventionally transmedial franchises. Yet when encouraging Bond fans to cross multiple media, the Bond franchise gets even messier when one drills down. Indeed, over the years Bond video games have made use of retroactive continuities to engage audiences across media. Essentially, retroactive continuities–or retcons for short–refer to the deliberate changing of previously established narrative facts. Retcons are common in comics, which comprise long histories of many series that continue over many editions, and so sooner or later the makeup of the story must be radically reshaped to attract new audiences.

Screen capture from 2012’s 007 Legends video game.

The Bond video games have been reshaping the narrative makeup of the films for years, seemingly as a way to attract fans across media. Take 2012’s 007 Legends as a case in point. This game was praised by Empire not only for the way it allowed fans not only to revisit Bond’s past, but also to experience a mixed-up version of that past: “For the most part the efforts to effectively reboot the major story beats of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Licence to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker through the eyes of current 007, Daniel Craig, are admirably effective.” This was a game that distorted ideas of nostalgia by allowing fans to relive their old memories of Bond adventures in very different ways, effectively altering the legacy as story beats of Bond’s past unfolded in new and alternative ways.

While an example like 007 Legends shows just how effective incoherence and inconsistency can be when encouraging fans to migrate from one source of media to the next, the game indeed highlights the Bond franchise’s anomalous status in today’s transmedia entertainment landscape. Whereas games like 2003’s Enter the Matrix thrived on the way it expanded the Matrix story across movies and games in strikingly coherent ways–with the subplots of the films carefully woven into plot threads of the game–Bond’s use of retcons in video games works on the basis of historical revisionism and contradiction alone.

Bond’s entrapment as a source of nostalgia may indeed carve him a rare niche in today’s entertainment industry, one where the prospect of re-engaging with a so-called “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” offers a unique contrast to today’s more intricately transmedial communities that involve coherent world-building.

Bond has garnered an enduring popularity across multiple media not in spite of but because of the character’s adherence to the past. Bond thereby serves as a lens through which to study models of transmedia franchising at a time when other popular heroes constantly move forward.

[1] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 104.

1) The Simpsons are going to… cable! FXX, the recent comedy-focused spin-off of Fox-owned FX network has claimed the first cable rights to The Simpsons in a massive, $750 million dollar deal (though this could rise as new seasons are produced) that includes over 530 episodes (and counting). This is the biggest off-network deal in television history, adding another record to the long-running series. Perhaps even more intriguing is the deal’s inclusion for online streaming on the soon-available FXNOW mobile app as well as via video-on-demand. More details on the deal and scheduling are sure to emerge before the syndication begins next August.

2) An even bigger deal may be soon on the horizon as Time Warner Cable appears to be on the market with interest from both Comcast and Charter. First, the Wall Street Journal reported Charter Communications Inc. was nearing an agreement to raise funds for the purchase, a move that falls in line with Liberty Media’s John Malone’s (which owns 27% of Charter) recent pushes for cable consolidation. If that wasn’t enough, CNBC reports Comcast is also interested in a deal for Time Warner Cable, a move supported by their shareholders. This officially makes Time Warner Cable the belle of the ball, as TWC stock jumped to a 52-week high amid the purchase chatter. The FCC hasn’t said anything yet because of course not. But one has to wonder what role they’ll play.

3) Speaking of those guys, the FCC, under newly-appointed chairman Tom Wheeler, has voted to raise the cap on how much foreign entities can own of broadcast stations, both radio and television. Currently, there is a 25% cap on how much foreign companies can invest, a level current commissioners are described as outdated.

4) A new study out of (the) Ohio State University and Annenberg Public Policy Center has found the level of gun violence in PG-13 films is now greater than R-rated films. The study looked at 945 films from 1950 to 2012, noting an overall increase in gun violence and a marked increase in PG-13 rated films since that rating’s inception. The authors call for new restrictions from the MPAA as related to gun violence, particular in those lower rated films.

5) Two of the most iconic pop culture figures of the last 50 years, Superman and James Bond, have now had long-standing copyright lawsuits settled. First, Warner Bros. won an appeal case against the estates of Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, ending a copyright claim filed back in 2003 and giving them complete control. Next, MGM & Danjaq have now acquired all copyrights for James Bond after settling with the estate of Kevin McClory, who opened the case 50 years ago after claiming he proposed the idea for making a Bond film to creator Ian Fleming.

6) A big courtroom victory for Google and fair use as a federal judge has ruled Google Books is considered fair use and “provides significant public benefits.” The case had been active for nearly 10 years, when a coalition of authors and publishers started the case in 2005. The ruling will surely move to appeal, but the precedent for fair use is powerful and will certainly have impact beyond just Google’s service.

7) From lawsuits ending to one just beginning: the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) held a conference where they announced their intention to take legal action against music lyric websites, claiming the sites profit from copyrighted works through their ad revenues. The publishers have targeted 50 websites and sent takedown notices, claiming they will not push for legal action unless the requests for heeded.

8) A new wrinkle in the enduring, critical lawsuits against network streaming startup Aereo as the National Football League and Major League Baseball have taken a side against Aereo, claiming they will move all of their games to cable if Aereo is found to be legal. This “friend of the court” filing with the Supreme Court aims to sway judges and show support for the multiple broadcasters taking Aereo to court. Barry Driller, a major investor of Aereo, doesn’t seem fazed, claiming the NFL is “just making noise.”

9) In the same week Sony released its next-generation video game console Playstation 4 with over 1 million sales, the company announced plans to cut $100 million from Sony Entertainment, making the company leaner and more focused. A large part of this will be reduced film production, a move Amy Pascal says will create “a more equitable balance between risk and reward.”

10) It probably won’t lead to Obamacare level criticism, but Barack Obama hasn’t made friends with some visual effects artists. After it was announced President Obama would visit DreamWorks Animation studio for a speech and visit with Jeffrey Katzenberg, visual effects artists at the company have planned to protest the visit due to the increased outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries.

And finally, two silly stories from a silly industry:

The Internet exploded this week when it was reported an “It’s A Wonderful Life” sequel was being planned. In a surprising twist (like in the movie!), Paramount announced it would fight any proposed sequel, claiming any project would require a license from the studio. With the film possibly dying a quick death, we will all have to ask an angel to show us a world where this sequel did, in fact, get released.

Mike “The Situation” “The Stupid Nickname” Sorrentino of Jersey Shore ‘fame’ is under federal investigation as the U.S. Attorney’s office has issued subpoenas for company records from businesses Sorrentino owns like MPS Entertainment and a clothing line. I would make a joke about this, but I don’t know enough about this ‘celebrity’ to say something witty.

In my first post in the “The Aesthetic Turn” series, I spoke of the part of “our experience of a media object [that] exists prior to and outside of language.” I asked whether we could use language to describe it without denaturing the experience itself, and I concluded we can’t, at least not directly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t describe it at all, and in this post, I’d like to suggest how to approach it obliquely, through metaphor and translation. (This post began as a “Digital Lightning” talk I gave as part of a series put on by the University of North Dakota’s Working Group on Digital Humanities. As I spoke, I played Casino Royale in the background.)

I’m a sucker for a good chase scene. I love the elegant excess of the parkour chase at the beginning of Casino Royale, where James Bond (Daniel Craig) pursues a criminal who careens off walls and catapults through improbably small windows.

I love the silly excess of the freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded, where one pursuit is layered on top of another (in cars, on top of cars, and in motorcycles on top of cars). My favorite right now is the four-deep chase-within-a-chase (and dream-within-a-dream) that marks the climax of Inception.

I want to ask a question about chase scenes that is really a question about something else. In a sense, I want to force two things together in an unlikely metaphor. What do chase scenes reveal about media and translation? I mean “translation” in a broader sense than linguistic recoding, although I mean that, too. The English word translate derives from the Latin transferre, meaning “to carry across.” It implies movement. Other languages (such as Finnish and Japanese) use words that emphasize mediation and transformation, rather than movement. Both, I think, are key: movement implies transformation as signs leave one sphere to become meaningful in another.

How do media shape the phenomenon of movement-transformation? What happens when, say, a TV show travels from one geographic or technological space to another? Few questions are more fundamental in media studies, and few have been asked as often, although we tend not to phrase questions in terms of translation. In the era of “new media” (whatever we mean by that), we frequently speak in terms of remediation: what happens when we view newer media through the habits of thought instilled by older media? This question has grown ever more urgent as media converge. What happens when a fan remixes a show, which then goes through YouTube, and then through a link on Facebook, before it gets to us? I want to shift the focus, however, from the media platforms and technologies to the “through,” the movement-transformation.

What happens at the point of “through”? Is there a logic to “through-ness”? Can we see everything that is happening, or are things hidden from sight? Here is my initial answer: In the process of transformation, a gap opens up between a sign before its movement and after. The original sign and its “translation”—the sign we substitute for it—do not evoke the same things. They might evoke similar things; in fact, translation as we have traditionally understood it—a form of rewriting in a different language—is premised on that appearance of equivalence. But we need to pay attention to the gap, which is a place of doubt and ambiguity. It is also a place where we can observe an experience of a media object that is prior to language. Still, our observation is oblique: how does it feel to enter this place of doubt? Does this ambiguity provoke unease? Something else?

So what does this have to do with chase scenes? I’m forcing a metaphor here, which is to say, I’m transposing a sign—chase scenes—from one context (movies) to another (translation and media). (Not for nothing does metaphor derive from the Greek μεταφέρω, meaning “to carry across.”) Through that metaphor, I’m opening a gap we experience (in part) by asking, why this weird juxtaposition? My purpose is to provoke a reaction—an “aha!” would be great, but a “what the hell” will do perfectly fine, too. The point is to use translation and metaphor to turn our attention away from the object (the chase scenes, the media platforms, the texts) toward our experience of the object. The move is admittedly quite “meta” (μετα?), but it is also potentially quite valuable, too.

This is the second post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed guest editor Kyle Conway’s inaugural post last month, you can read it here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday into the new year.

But, as a Bond lover, I feel obligated to offer an objection or two, and to attempt to counter Bordwell’s analysis with one of my own.  The point of engaging in this action-scene debate is not to argue that 1990s Bond trumps 1990s Hong Kong action.  All I aim to show is how a defense of the artistry of Bond-style action might go—to defend an aspect of Bond that critics other than Bordwell now rather hastily caricature.

The premise of Bordwell’s analysis is that the action scene he’s selected from Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) is ho-hum and unclear in terms of the action depicted.  I don’t have space to contest the first claim, but this much can be shown: the scene is perfectly clear, even efficient, in its action and storytelling.

The action appears unclear only if the scene is viewed in an acoustic vacuum.  And that is not the assumption of the filmmakers.  Sound is as much a part of their storytelling and action-sequence toolbox as cutting and staging.  Here, director Roger Spottiswoode and his sound editors, Peter Bond and Peter Baldock, use sound efficiently to replace what would have been superfluous matter on the visual track.  When the first security guard tackles Bond on the catwalk and chokes him on the edge, Bond retaliates with one slug…

… and then another.

A close-up shows that Bond is shocked that his nemesis hasn’t succumbed.

Still in the same shot, Bond winds up—we hear Brosnan’s voice ggrrmmm as he builds up strength—

…and he punches the henchman for a third time.  Cut to the guard, who, as he lets go of Bond, is sent for a spin and drops below the frame.

Bordwell seems to suggest that when this happens, we lose our bearings on the action, because we don’t see the guard fall to the floor and roll out of sight.  But we do hear him.  The smack of the guard crumbling onto the catwalk is carefully cued just as he drops below the frame.  This, combined with a shot of Bond looking down at his defeated opponent (with the second guard leaping into the scene from behind), confirms for us that henchman number one is down and out.

So, no real doubt remains about whether he’ll make a comeback.

This scene is a tidy example of efficiency of staging, editing and sound design in action cinema.  French auteur Robert Bresson once shocked cinephiles by lauding the 1981 Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, as an example of le cinématographe.  For Bresson, le cinématographe is a form of writing with the medium of film that is antithetical to the theatrical arts from which filmmakers tend to borrow, like staging.  Bresson, an advocate of stylistic restraint, argued that if cinema is to distinguish itself as a unique art form, it must govern its theatrical excesses.  One way to do this is to use the soundtrack to its full potential. He famously wrote in his 1975 book, Notes sur le cinématographe:

One does not create by adding, but by taking away.

Also:

The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive.  A locomotive’s whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.

Finally:

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it.  The ear goes more toward the within, the eye towards the outer.

Perhaps Bresson would have appreciated the visual economy on display in Roger Spottiswoode’s handling of action.  The Tomorrow Never Dies director showed only what he needed to show, and where he could, he astutely replaced the visual depiction of an action—the guard hitting the floor—with a sound effect, thus trusting that the viewer would “complete” the action in her mind.  He cleverly omitted a shot that, in retrospect, seems utterly unnecessary to create a clear sense of the ongoing action.

Not all action directors adhere to the school of thought that says that stimulating action consists of widely framed displays of virtuosic gymnastics.  For some, tight, intense framings and strategically timed sound cues are more important.

For them, less is more.