My love of James Bond films knows no end. It has been a torrid affair since sixth grade. My excitement for Skyfall‘s release in November actually overshadowed my anxiety over the presidential election. Part of my adoration for Bond films is the mix of the absurd with the awesome.
One of the most pristine examples of this absurd awesomeness is found in Goldfinger. In the pre-titles sequence, Bond accomplishes a mission in a wet suit, only to remove the suit to reveal a crisp white tuxedo underneath (while I suggest watching the whole thing, this specific scene is at 2:13):
Silly? Unrealistic? You’d think. Except that it really happened in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II:
Peter Tazelaar
Peter Tazelaar was under orders from the exiled Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, to slip into the country to extract two fellow countrymen to join the government-in-exile in Britain.
He and his fellow secret agents – Eric Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Bob Van der Stok – had often spent time at the seaside resort of Scheveningen, near The Hague, and knew that the Palace hotel there had been taken over by the Germans as a headquarters, and that every Friday night they held large and boisterous parties there.
Their plan was simple but audacious – approach Scheveningen in darkness by boat, and take Mr Tazelaar into the surf by dinghy, from where he could scramble ashore. Once there, he would strip off his wetsuit, to reveal his evening clothes underneath, to enable him to pose as a partygoer and slip past the sentries.
…[J]ust after 4.30am on November 23 1941, after several false starts, Mr Tazelaar, Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema, and another Dutchman, Chris Krediet, and Lieutenant Bob Goodfellow, disembarked from a British Motor Gun Boat into a small dinghy.
Once they neared the surf, Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Mr Tazelaar slipped off the boat and waded onto the beach. Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema then helped his comrade unzip his specially designed wetsuit to reveal his immaculate evening clothes.
Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema then poured a generous measure of Hennessy XO – Mr Tazelaar’s favourite – from a hip flask over his friend, and returned to the dinghy. Reeking of brandy, Mr Tazelaar managed to stagger convincingly past the sentries stationed around the hotel.
Think twice the next time you scoff at a Bond movie. It just might be true to life.
I’ve been a fan of Miyazaki’s work ever since I saw a butchered version of Nausicaa in school as a kid. I rediscovered the movie as an adult, and then the rest of his work. I’m excited to see his most recent film The Wind Rises, but apparently a lot of Miyazaki’s fellow Japanese aren’t as enthusiastic.
Miyazaki said this about the film:
My wife and staff would ask me, ‘Why make a story about a man who made weapons of war? And I thought they were right. But one day, I heard that Horikoshi [designer of the WWII fighter named the Zero] had once murmured, ‘All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.’ And then I knew I’d found my subject… Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan. He wasn’t thinking about weapons… Really all he desired was to make exquisite planes.
That’s why the film is unpopular with some: it casts Japanese history in a negative light as the beautiful dreams of Horikoshi are warped by militarism. Which, you know, is exactly why I’m so excited to see it. It’s good to have the right enemies, I suppose.
Note: This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found by clicking here.
“It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren’t for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn’t fight with honor… I fought to win.” –Ender’s Game
“Somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn’t do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood [them] well enough.” —Ender’s Game
Perhaps one of the most troubling things to me about the whole Ender’s Game boycott is the chill and fear it creates not only for those who, on personal, religious or ethical grounds, oppose gay marriage, but also to those who choose to work and associate with them. In these scenarios, all tainted parties are punished, even those who happen to be supportive with the gay rights movement. It’s a modern McCarthyism, creating a feeling that all people who do not pass that sociopolitical litmus test must be shunned and, if you do not shun them as well, you’re suspect as well. Thus, in the case Ender’s Game, Lionsgate, Harrison Ford, Gavin Hood, Asa Butterfield, and the rest of the cast and crew of the film would be punished by this kind of attitude, even though they have all come out staunchly in the favor of gay rights, and insist the story of Ender’s Game is a story about compassion and empathy, so has nothing to do with Card’s stance on gay marriage.
Fortunately, a lot of the more level headed members of the liberal community see the implications of such actions. Juliet Lapados at the New York Times, even though she hardly agrees with Card’s more extreme views, called out this sort of action:
Generally, boycotts are used to pressure companies or governments to end objectionable activities; consider the boycott of Chick-fil-A to protest the chain’s financial support of antigay organizations. What Geeks Out has in mind is closer to blacklisting. The group wants to “send a clear and serious message to Card and those that do business with his brand of antigay activism — whatever he’s selling, we’re not buying.” This isn’t about stopping the dissemination of antigay sentiments; it’s about isolating Mr. Card and shaming his business partners, thus cutting into their profits.
My wife and I were trying to decide what to watch on NetFlix the other night and we somehow ended up watching Titanic: a film that was pretty good the first couple times (at least according to audiences and the Academy), but has worsened with each viewing.
But one scene in particular stood out to me with this viewing (no, not that scene). Recall as the young Rose (Kate Winslet) asked Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber) about the number of lifeboats, Andrews answered that there were only enough boats for about half the passengers. The reason? The deck would look too cluttered. This reminded me of a Wall Street Journal article from last year that was written for the 100th anniversary of Titanic’s sinking. The author, Australian columnist Chris Berg, explains that
the Titanic was fully compliant with all marine laws. The British Board of Trade required all vessels above 10,000 metric tonnes (11,023 U.S. tons) to carry 16 lifeboats. The White Star Line ensured that the Titanic exceeded the requirements by four boats. But the ship was 46,328 tonnes. The Board of Trade hadn’t updated its regulations for nearly 20 years.
Why no regulatory updates?
It had been 40 years since the last serious loss of life at sea, when 562 people died on the Atlantic in 1873. By the 20th century, all ships were much safer. Moreover, the passage of time changed what regulators and shipowners saw as the purpose of lifeboats. Lifeboats were not designed to keep all the ship and crew afloat while the vessel sank. They were simply to ferry them to nearby rescue ships…Had Titanic sunk more slowly, it would have been surrounded by the Frankfurt, the Mount Temple, the Birma, the Virginian, the Olympic, the Baltic and the first on the scene, the Carpathia. The North Atlantic was a busy stretch of sea. Or, had the Californian (within visual range of the unfolding tragedy) responded to distress calls, the lifeboats would have been adequate for the purpose they were intended—to ferry passengers to safety.
Yet, Cameron’s fictionalized account of the tragedy supposedly brought on by greed and aesthetics “hinges on a crucial conversation between Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the shipyard where Titanic was built, and his customer Bruce Ismay, head of White Star Line, in 1910.” Carlisle proposed 48 ships, but Ismay and others rejected “on the grounds of expense.” But as Berg demonstrates, this too is untrue:
In the Board of Trade’s post-accident inquiry, Carlisle was very clear as to why White Star declined to install extra lifeboats: The firm wanted to see whether regulators required it. As Carlisle told the inquiry, “I was authorized then to go ahead and get out full plans and designs, so that if the Board of Trade did call upon us to fit anything more we would have no extra trouble or extra expense.” So the issue was not cost, per se, or aesthetics, but whether the regulator felt it necessary to increase the lifeboat requirements for White Star’s new, larger, class of ship. This undercuts the convenient morality tale about safety being sacrificed for commercial success that sneaks into most accounts of the Titanic disaster.
Nobody in the industry questioned the judgment of the Board of Trade. This was no longer the industry’s responsibility, but the board’s. The “private risk management” of business had evolved into mere “regulatory compliance.” As Berg notes,
This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws. And regulated entities tend to comply with the specifics of the regulations, not with the goal of the regulations themselves.
While many things went wrong in the case of the RMS Titanic, when it comes to the number of lifeboats, Berg gets it right: “British regulators assumed responsibility for lifeboat numbers and then botched that responsibility.”
