Villainy

[bcholmes]

There's this moment, early in Quantum of Solace, when we meet the main villain of the film, Dominic Greene. Bond first observes him in Haiti, where he watches Greene hook up with an ousted Bolivian general. The general wants Greene's mysterious organization to help install him as president of Bolivia.

Greene, commenting on the power of his organization, says, "Look what we did to this country (Haiti). The people elect a former priest who raises the minimum wage from 38 cents to a dollar a day. It's not much, but it's enough to make the people who make T-shirts and running shoes very nervous." He goes on to suggest that his group destabilized the Haitian government, driving the priest out of power.

The interesting part of all of this is that it's all (in my opinion) true. Aristide was a former priest elected by the poor, and his policy of raising the minimum wage is one of the things that's pointed to as the reason why he was forced out (it's certainly the thing that Andy Apaid -- whose company makes T-shirts, among other things -- has talked about to explain why Aristide was a problem). The only part that's fictionalized is that there isn't a shady, secret organization that's unknown to the world intelligence agencies. It's the U.S., Canada, and France.

Later, throughout the film various intelligence agency characters talk about whether or not their countries should be working with Greene. One of my favourite bits of dialog occurs between two CIA agents:

Felix Leiter: You know who Greene is and you want to put us in bed with him.
Gregg Beam: Yeah, you're right. We should just deal with nice people.

And a lot of the plot seems to hinge on whether or not Bond can prove that Greene can't be trusted, or if Greene's shady dealings will sully the legitimate interests of the U.K. Bond wins, of course.

There's interesting stuff in post-colonial theory about how, during the colonial period, fiction helped to make the case for colonialism. Adventure stories were filled with white adventurers going to other countries, bringing civilization and order to the scary natives. As repugnant as that process is, it at least seemed to recognize that there was a need to make and win an ideological argument with the general public that what those nations were doing was right.

I think that neo-colonialism and modern imperialism succeeds, not by making an ideological argument. But rather by just not saying anything about what it's doing. Today's populace is too busy watching American Idol to give a shit about what we're doing in any other country.

I think that Quantum of Solace is an interesting example of taking the actual activities of our government and using them as the activities of the bad guys. And there doesn't seem to be any sort of social commentary going on there, at all. It's just... hey, we're good guys. We would never do any of this. So, this kind of thing must be used to illustrate movie villainy.

Comments

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

That is a really good point. The water stuff in Bolivia had some seeds of truth too, and the same pattern -- or a similar one, with a figure of evil forcing the government to allow water monopoly and high prices for water & artificial shortage. When in reality it was like... the World Bank and Bechtel and the usual neoliberal "chicago boys" economists who want everything privatized. The situation became insanely awful and it was mass protests and people on strike who won the day, not a colonial rescuer. I thought it was at least clear that the Bond filmmakers sympathized with the people but they do so by making them invisible and replacing them with a hero. (And that the battles they picked were interesting in themselves - ie villain also not a madman with a nuclear bomb...)