Chapter 5 #3
I also questioned: If I’d been born decades earlier, would I have made the same compromises as Fleming?
Maybe, but then I thought about Daniel, and how he’d navigated an identically prejudiced landscape without losing his self-respect.
And Reggie had been kicked out of the military, but he’d fought his way back, on his own terms. The Tuxedo Society was a secret that I was increasingly glad to be in on.
And Fleming might become an asset if pushed hard enough, and if Timothy promised him a soiled, autographed pair of flip-flops.
I have to confide something about my IMDb kink.
Technically, I swear by small subtitled films about Norwegian farmers battling a cruel winter during an 1810 cholera outbreak, or a documentary about the history of electric fans.
I love these works, but, fine, when I’m watching a wordless portrait of a depressed Scottish postmaster cooking his haggis, my brain yowls for an action movie.
I’ve devoured a backlog of Japanese martial arts specialties, where the fights and the glares are amazing, and the lead is most often a grittily vengeful detective battling a yakuza kingpin, culminating in multiple heads getting sliced off and bouncing right toward the camera.
I’m up for anything Mad Max related, and of course I’m a Bond freak.
Maybe instead of terms like Gen Z and Boomers, people should identify as Connerys or Brosnans.
I’m a Daniel Craig baby (I’d caught up on his first installments online), and although Daniel’s retired, he was a dream Bond: unruffled, unbearably sexy, and at home in a tux or an abbreviated powder-blue swimsuit, as he rose glistening from the surf.
I’m pretty sure Daniel Craig being tortured naked in Casino Royale made me gay, and the scene may also explain the Tuxedo Society’s hold over me.
But Bond has to be English, with his clipped diction and penchant for extra-dry martinis and Aston Martins, both savored after chasing brutes across a Moroccan construction site on foot and leading a speedboat pursuit along an Amsterdam canal.
My action fetish more fully blooms in America.
I’m good with superhero movies, especially the murkier Batmans—although after a while it’s hard to remember which highly paid actor is under the mask—and I’ll always be there for Uma Thurman in a yellow tracksuit raising a folded steel samurai sword.
But my go-to favorites are most often the Mission: Impossible and Bourne franchises, and fine, they both star straight-ahead cisgender white guys, but I forgive them, because Tom Cruise and Matt Damon manage what I’ve always thought of as the greatest possible acting challenges: they must, at least a little, pretend to understand the nonsensical twists of the movies they’re in; spit out only a very few terse, manly lines of dialogue; and wallop truckloads of stunt people, while dangling from skyscrapers and bridges, and all without laughing.
Anyone can believe in the plangent undercurrents of Chekhov or Albee, but only Tom and Matt can catapult from one warehouse roof to the next, often in Milan or Tokyo, after having been shot in the shoulder only seconds earlier, and without asking the director, “Wait, tell me again—why am I hang gliding off this pyramid onto an oil truck that’s on fire? What’s my motivation?”
I relish tackling a twenty-page monologue, alone onstage, as I relive my birth, but there’s an equally strong part of me that pines to face off with a lineup of heavily armed, glowering henchmen while muttering, “Let’s party.
” I’m also a shameless fan of that scene where Tom, Matt, Jason Statham, Keanu, or Bruce Willis gets machine-gunned, but each guy yanks the bullet out of his arm with his teeth and sews himself up with whatever’s at hand, maybe fishing line or dental floss, using a rusty nail as a needle.
These bruised and bleeding men never run into an emergency room pleading for opioids, which is what I would do.
As for video games, almost everyone I’ve ever met, including my father, is addicted, but sitting at a screen while clutching a console reminds me of the pandemic, when I moved back into my childhood bedroom out on Long Island and lived on Zoom and Skittles.
Decimating goblins with chainsaws is fun, but the human element is at a digital remove.
I’m not claiming that Tom and Matt are real people, or that since Tom’s hit sixty I’m not worried about his knees, but I’m helpless whenever a movie star enters a deluxe express train roaring through the Swiss Alps and gets attacked by someone nicknamed “the Annihilator,” and they end up bounding after each other from atop one railroad car after another, just as the whole screeching, smokestack-puffing murderfest plunges into a mountainside tunnel.
While I technically got that there was a difference between fictional, guilty-pleasure crime fighting and whatever Reggie had planned, the line was getting blurred.
But there was dried blood on my Coxley Blossoms apron, and I filched a hand-calligraphied menu from the Constitutional Committee kitchen.