The playboy and James Bond

Author(s):  
Claire Hines

This is the first book to focus on James Bond’s relationship to the playboy ideal through the sixties and beyond. Examining aspects of the Bond phenomenon and the playboy lifestyle, it considers how ideas of gender and consumption were manipulated to construct and reflect a powerful male fantasy in the post-war era. This analysis of the close association and relations between the emerging cultural icons of James Bond and the playboy is particularly concerned with Sean Connery’s definitive Bond as he was promoted and used by the media. By exploring the connections that developed between Bond and Playboy magazine within a historical framework, the book offers new insights into these related phenomena and their enduring legacy in popular culture.

Author(s):  
Claire Hines

This chapter begins by recognising the apparent coincidence that both James Bond and Playboy magazine first entered popular culture in 1953. It goes on to make the case that this can in fact be explained with reference to the publishing industry, certain influences on the lives and imaginations of creators Ian Fleming and Hugh Hefner, and the social and cultural climate of the post-war era. The strong coincidence of Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, and Hefner’s Playboy being published in the same year, though on opposite sides of the Atlantic, appears less accidental when understood within the wider context of the 1950s, as do the changes that were made to the pre-existing literary formulas of the spy thriller and the men’s magazine. Looking at the post-war contexts of Britain and America, the chapter demonstrates that the early Bond novels and Playboy negotiated aspects of the changing social and cultural circumstances in similar ways, creating a playboy lifestyle fantasy that celebrated independence from the traditional breadwinner ideal.


2020 ◽  

The release of No Time To Die in 2020 heralds the arrival of the twenty-fifth installment in the James Bond film series. Since the release of Dr. No in 1962, the cinematic James Bond has expedited the transformation of Ian Fleming's literary creation into an icon of western popular culture that has captivated audiences across the globe by transcending barriers of ideology, nation, empire, gender, race, ethnicity, and generation. The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 untangles the seemingly perpetual allure of the Bond phenomenon by looking at the non-canonical texts and contexts that encompass the cultural life of James Bond. Chronicling the evolution of the British secret agent over half a century of political, social, and cultural permutations, the fifteen chapters examine the Bond-brand beyond the film series and across media platforms while understanding these ancillary texts and contexts as sites of negotiation with the Eon franchise.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Parker

This article is concerned with the representation of one particular form of work within popular culture during a particular period, in order to understand just how much representations of work have altered over the past half century. I discuss the James Bond phenomenon and the ways in which it has been understood by cultural theorists. I then look at what the novels suggest about understandings of work and organizations in Britain in the 1950s before comparing that period to later Bonds. The latter operation necessarily involves thinking through the ways in which an understanding of historical context is crucial to thinking through the production and consumption of any text, whether about work and organizations, or any other topic. The article concludes with some thoughts on the impossibility of the Bond novels being written now, when the organization and its executives are assumed to be agents in generalized conspiracies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter K. Jonason ◽  
Gregory D. Webster ◽  
David P. Schmitt ◽  
Norman P. Li ◽  
Laura Crysel

The Dark Triad of personality is composed of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Despite the common belief that these traits are undesirable, the media is awash with characters that embody the Dark Triad. Characters like Gregory House, M.D., Batman (a.k.a. the Dark Knight), and James Bond all embody these traits and are some of the most popular media franchises today. As entertaining as these characters are, they provide us with a window into the dark side of human nature. Instead of treating the dark side of human nature as inherently maladaptive, we provide an alternative view that, despite their costs, traits like these can confer reproductive and survival benefits for the individual. In so doing, we review the research on the Dark Triad traits and provide a theoretical account for how these traits can confer some positive benefits. To facilitate comprehension, we provide examples taken from the media to show how evolutionary psychology and popular culture intersect.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2098596
Author(s):  
Anna Cristina Pertierra

Since the late 1980s, Filipino entertainment television has assumed and maintained a dominance in national popular culture, which expanded in the digital era. The media landscape into which digital technologies were launched in the Philippines was largely set in the wake of the 1986 popular movement and change of government referred to as the EDSA revolution: television stations that had been sequestered under martial law were turned over to family-dominated commercial enterprises, and entertainment media proliferated. Building upon the long development of entertainment industries in the Philippines, new social media encounters with entertainment content generate expanded and engaged publics whose formation continues to operate upon a foundation of televisual media. This article considers the particular role that entertainment media plays in the formation of publics in which comedic, melodramatic and celebrity-led content generates networks of followers, users and viewers whose loyalty produces various forms of capital, including in notable cases political capital.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110285
Author(s):  
Tim Snelson ◽  
William R. Macauley

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.


Author(s):  
Lies Wesseling

This article probes the extent to which literary history and cultural history may mutuallyilluminate each other, without neglecting the poetic dimension of literary works. Thispoetic dimension is embedded within the genre repertoires that shape the production andreception of literary works. One should therefore take into close account that the literaryrepresentation of social conflict is always deflected by the prism of genre conventions.Focusing on the case study of the Dutch Gothic novel, I argue that Gothic tales provide aspecific take on the post-war modernization of the Netherlands. As such, they make avaluable contribution to historical debates about the periodization of the sixties andseventies, not in spite of, but because of their specific poetic properties. Thus, it is verywell possible to bring literary works to bear upon the discussion of historical issueswithout either infringing upon the relative autonomy of the literary system or neglectingthe specific expertise of literary studies as a discipline in its own rights.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
J. FALLETTA ◽  
S. WOODCOCK

Recent years have seen a large increase in the popularity of Texas hold ’em poker. It is now the most commonly played variant of the game, both in casinos and through online platforms. In this paper, we present a simulation study for games of Texas hold ’em with between two and 23 players. From these simulations, we estimate the probabilities of each player having been dealt the winning hand. These probabilities are calculated conditional on both partial information (that is, the player only having knowledge of his/her cards) and also on fuller information (that is, the true probabilities of each player winning given knowledge of the cards dealt to each player). Where possible, our estimates are compared to exact analytic results and are shown to have converged to three significant figures.With these results, we assess the poker strategies described in two recent pieces of popular culture. In comparing the ideas expressed in Taylor Swift’s song, New Romantics, and the betting patterns employed by James Bond in the 2006 film, Casino Royale, we conclude that Ms Swift demonstrates a greater understanding of the true probabilities of winning a game of Texas hold ’em poker.


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