Dieselpunk Manifesto: Art Deco, Bond and the Cool Curve pt 4.

Send in the Spies...

In previous posts I’ve argued that the Art Deco movement was part of a process that saw the cultural authority of the upper classes shift to middle class producers. These middle class producers would dictate taste for the vast majority of society in the Post-War middle class consumer-nirvana. In this way the Art Deco movement not only illustrates the changing of the guard but, for many, embodies a set of ideals and qualities associated with a completely different era and way of thinking. An era with its own symbols and cultural practises that provoke this very different ideology.

To frame it in a controversial light – the previous era was the last era of elitist culture. To frame it in another ‘less provocative’ light – the previous era was the last era of meaningful class and style.

A previous era of cool...

So in the face of this new rise of middle class cultural practise – complete with its new youth-driven cultural movements – there were many who resisted what was happening across society. Although the changes were new and exciting they were also troublesome and potentially dangerous. In the face of this cultural chaos, people needed a new breed of heroes to make sense of it all.

One of those new heroes arrived in 1962. Mister Bond, James Bond...

James Bond wasn’t the first spy to make it to screen. Far from it. The spy genre had been percolating away in the background of Hollywood for decades with plenty of World War 2 war films and Detective pulp stories segueing neatly into and out of the genre. This was often built on a healthy diet of popular pulp characters, especially in Britain where characters like The Saint and Bond himself proliferated. But none of these had the cultural clout of the film version of the MI6 agent with an obsession for mixing his martinis just so.

The Saint in New York, a 1938 film and series that proceeded Bond.

The genesis of the Bond series was however boosted by the British penchant for spy television series. Being an English-speaking market located so close to the Cold War hub of central Europe probably helped, and saw the creation of several series that while successful, weren’t break out hits in a global sense, lacking the market clout of an American audience. Two of the most famous were The Avengers and Danger Man, two series that while attracting a decent local audience and slowly filtering out to become cult classics across Europe and other markets, didn’t really take off because they didn’t attract enough American attention. They were, however, good examples of the unique British spin on the gentleman spy that would provide the unique pattern by which Bond would capture the world.

The Real Avengers.

But in 1962 James Bond swaggered onto cinema screens in the break out hit Dr No and the spy genre would never be the same again. A dashing gentleman spy like those who had gone before him, Bond also added a wry sense of humour and more than a few lashings of adventure, sex appeal and cheeky bombast to create what would become the archetypal spy movie.

The character quickly grew into a phenomena, not only spawning an endless run of sequels but also its own genre as film, television and pulp producers started churning out spy fare for the hungry masses who couldn’t get enough. By the mid 1960s not only did Bond have several sequels but television shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Saint and Mission: Impossible were springing up everywhere while shows like The Avengers and Danger Man were called back for encores. A mark of the health of the genre was that not only did these new shows gain their own rabid mainstream fan bases but other characters and stories sprung up to try and refute the stereotypes put forward by the Bond films, examples such as the Flint series of films. Flattery doesn’t always come in the form of a copycat, a jealous backlash often works just as well.

And like vampire/werewolf stories today, the stories kept proliferating.

Popular genres often have a half life by which writers use up every possible scrap of storytelling available to a genre, exhaust the supply, then move on to the ‘next big thing’ in a storm of parody. The appearance of these parody versions often marks the end of a genres ‘Golden Age’ as writers no longer take the genre seriously. The few genres that escape this process become meta-genres that become so vast and portable that they often show up across a range of other genre stories whenever they can be useful, watering down the genre tropes to their bare essence. A good example of this would be the action or adventure ‘genres’ which are so broad you usually need another adjective to define a movie, such as ‘it’s a sci-fi action/adventure movie’ or ‘it’s a spy action/adventure movie’.

Not really taking the spy genre seriously...

It could be argued that the spy genre well and truly reached this phase with the popular spoof series Get Smart, which parodied the genre mercilessly as the genre died down at the end of the 60s. In its brief but influential heyday the spy genre had held audiences in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic, providing a hero that audiences wanted to see over and over again in many different guises. This new hero saved the (Western) world from vast government-based conspiracies launched by foreign powers, while enjoying the thrills and spills of action and adventure that went with the urbane and global jetsetting of the ‘spy lifestyle’. It was classy, it was cool, and it provoked a Euro-centric style that refuted current youth lifestyle trends for the upper class refinement and sensibility that was once the height of fashion. But the rise of Get Smart signalled that the spy genre was becoming just another television genre and much of the steam had been used up, the genre drifting back into obscurity or blending with other genres, such as the spy/heist combination of the long running Mission: Impossible. The genre was there in the background but not the dominant force of storytelling it once was.

With one exception: Bond himself.

Still going strong.

In a world where Hollywood and the television industry would move on to different headlining heroes and different genres of action/adventure storytelling the Bond series would go on to be the most successful (inflation adjusted) and longest running movie franchise of all time. And with the current box office success of the latest Bond film Skyfall, that run doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon.

So why has the Bond series not only outlasted its contemporaries but gone on to be a phenomenal cultural success? Why is Bond a staple of Hollywood action/adventure storytelling, a British gentleman spy in amongst a sea of American military hardware toting gunslingers and revenge-seeking policeman or gangsters?

The heroic competition...

Stay tuned for the final episode of Bond, Art Deco and the Cool Curve...

Dieselpunk Manifesto: Art Deco, Bond and the Cool Curve pt 3.

Depression era aspirations – the beginning of a habit.

One of the most enduring images of Depression era film is the rise of the musical, a somewhat bizarre cultural artifact trend for such a horrendous time if you only take it on face value. Musicals, in general, are considered a celebration of life. That’s what they do – take life and give it song and dance, no matter how mundane the topic actually is. So why were they so popular in the years of the Great Depression?

The easy answer is escapism and the ability to teleport into another world for a few hours. Moviegoers, through the lens of the musical, could experience the decadence and splendor of a lifestyle none in the crowd could actually attain, all for the price of admission. There they could sing and dance and indulge themselves, projecting their ideas of the high life and what it would be like up onto the silver screen. The creators of these films therefore became accomplices in shaping what it was that people aspired to.

There were many culprits responsible for the glamour-in-the-midst-of-hardship escapism of the film musical during the 1930s but perhaps the most culpable was a bloke by the name of Fred Astaire. One of the most enduring images of the era, not to mention Art Deco itself, is this bloke gliding around on the screen in top hat and coat tails, an image that was burnt into the consciousness of movie goers in the 1935 smash hit Top Hat. It wasn’t the first time Astaire would inhabit that famous persona, and certainly not the last, but the film established Astaire and his dance partner Ginger Rogers as top billing performers and created an archetype that still resonates with movie lovers today. He would glide around the screen effortlessly, she would appear to be having a ball wearing those stylish gowns, and together they not only saved RKO with some of the biggest box office hits of the decade but also helped define the era, the genre and set the bar for elegance and style.

All this deep in the Depression.

My argument in this series of posts is that the Astaire/Rogers films and others of a similar ilk created in the minds of cinema goers an idea of ‘living the high life’ that took on an aspirational life of its own. In a world where people were starting to reach for and adopt Art Deco style for themselves, it was brutishly ripped from their grasp by the stock market collapse, leaving a longing that turned into an oft sought Art Deco wonderland in the minds of cinema viewers everywhere. A world of fancy suits, ritzy places to hang out in exotic locations, glamorous women of a sparkly dress-wearing persuasion, all set to an Art Deco design palette. The sort of world the upper crust apparently existed in. And it was a set of ideas that spent the better part of two decades simmering and seeping into the collective cinema vocabulary.

But with the easing of the Depression and the rebuilding of the middle class in the late 1930s (neither projects being completed before the outbreak of World War 2) the early adopter cycle restarted with a vengeance. The march of Art Deco continued but now people weren’t content to simply add decoration to their Modernism. Technology had continued to develop in that lost half decade of consumer stasis and the most Modern thing you could do now was streamline things, a natural progression of the ever-present ‘speed lines’ of Art Deco. This streamlining craze thus marked the ‘late phase’ of the descent of Modernism from the elitist pursuit of academics just as the rise of the middle class was changing the face of consumerism for the next fifty years. Passing via the rich and fashionable young decodents, Modernism had morphed down to the upper middle class via an aspirational technology-based consumption that then reached its final stage with people streamlining everything they possibly could, including toasters, radios and other middle class objects adopted by an enthusiastic new middle class after the War.

The humble radio: an object that (technically speaking) does not require an aerodynamic profile.

 By the 1940s Art Deco was finally starting to reach middle adopters, now that it had been synthesised down into something palatable for wholesale mass consumption, but it is was also in the 1940s that Art Deco would cease to be a force in design.

By the late 1940s America and the rest of the world had changed. What had started as a gradual process of the rising middle-class became a veritable stampede with the post-War boom in America and the new popular culture it began to produce. Cultural products were no longer being produced from the top down. In a remarkable historic shift, culture was now being set by the middle class and a previously invisible cadre of leisure-lifestyle beings, the ‘teenager’. Where the upper classes previously dictated fashion, now the middle class with their casual wear and popular music were setting the cultural zeitgeist. It was new world, the affects of which cannot be understated.

Paris had little influence on the fashion choices of these gents.

 So the Diesel era was a transitional period which marked a remarkable shift in power from the upper class taste that dictated the cultural vanguard at the start of the century, only to lose their cultural authority to the middle class who from the 1940s took on the mantle of trend setters for the rest of the nation and the world. By the 1950s music no longer came from the music hall, now it came from young guitar-wielding fiends ceaselessly playing a four beat bar. Fashion innovation was no longer solely from Milan or Paris, now it was funny boy band haircuts from England or bell bottom jeans from America. Academic disciplines were now dominated by enthusiastic middle class kids pouring into these once exclusive institutions, bringing with them ideas that originated in their own lifestyle and class. Now everyone had an automobile and no one went to the opera because they could stay home and watch Gunsmoke or The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Soaking in some culture.

 But ideas don’t die, they just get reused. Although the mantle of cultural authority shifted to the middle class in the 1950s it didn’t kill off the ideas formed in the 1930s. In fact, in a world dominated by casual wear and popular music, the past with its upwardly-focussed aspirations could be quite appealing for those who were not completely sold on the idea of rock music or t-shirts worn without a shirt. Some people preferred ‘Easy Listening’ music and a well dressed man with class. In a world beset by all sorts of problems, both at home and abroad, some people were looking for a different sort of hero, one that not only embodied the old-school values that rejected all this crass nonsense that immature, ignorant people were indulging in at the time but a hero who would focus on the real dangers facing society, namely those pesky Soviets. What they wanted... was someone who drank dirty Martinis, not someone who smoked pot.

Hard to believe, but many people in the 60s didn't think people like this ^ were taking the 'Soviet problem' seriously enough.

 Did the people get what they want? Did someone step up to save the nation from both the Russians and a descent into casual wear hell? Stay tuned next post as our hero is revealed... and it might not be who you think it is...

Dieselpunk Manifesto: Bond, Art Deco and the Cool Curve pt 2.

 (The following is Art history watered down for normal people. Art history students will be offended by my generalisations. Normal people wont.)

Put on your retronautical goggles (Steampunks dial it back to its lowest setting, Dieselpunks to its highest, and you others just try to ignore the warning lights) and let us return to the turn of the century. The 20^th century that is.

Take a pair of these...

... and connect to one of these.

 Amazing things were happening at the turn of the 20^th century across Western society. A whole new set of exciting ideas was bleeding out into the way we did everything, from mundane everyday technologies that made our lives easier, to the more rarefied air surrounding Scientific and Art theory. And one leading strain of this epidemic of change we today call Modernism.

Modernism was a move by artists, designers, architects and other intellectual boffins to embrace the new century and its new ways of living by embracing a new set of ideals, especially in the fields of architecture and the emerging field of consumer design. Rejecting the past (especially the absurd Victorian need for gratuitous ornamentation) Modernist designers embraced a future of almost scientific purity, creating furniture, architecture and other cultural products where form followed function, materials were left without facade and mathematical geometry was king.

This new mode of thinking led to many astounding breakthroughs and positive changes to the way human beings lived but the triumph of Modernist thought is perhaps best summed up in the words of one of its leading lights, the architect Le Corbusier. He was one for manifestos, both artistic and architectural, and it was he who coined the term “A house is a machine for living in.”

And therein lies the rub.

You see, it’s one thing to build a house to Modernist spec, it’s another thing to create a home using the same idealist fervour, which is a dynamic that can be applied across the Modernist thought-scape. When done well Modernist architecture and design is cool, sophisticated, pure and timeless. But when it’s done badly it’s the bizarro version of ergonomics: a science devoted to seeing just how far you can contort human cultural practise via their urban environment before fell repercussions ensue. The bad version is lifeless, stark, cold and void of character – machine-like – and a good example of how an ideal can never be completely realised lest it break the fallible creatures that are inevitably at its centre – human beings.

The Cool Curve of Modernism/Art Deco.

In steps our hero – Art Deco. 

To put it in terms that would get me strangled at a university, Art Deco is ‘Modernism one step down the early adopter chain’, or in cultural trends, the ‘Cool Curve’. Now bear with me. I brought a picture with iPhones on it:

Early adopter curve, in this case focusing on technology.

 This graph is used by all sorts of people when they’re talking about the adoption of trends, whether they’re technology innovators or fashion designers, but the process is always the same. Essentially, there are people out there who have to be different. Psychologically they just can’t stand being like everyone else, or they just love the risk of being beyond the cutting edge. Out there and outrageous, they stand away from the crowd on purpose, happy to be extreme and different, wearing a four-foot lime green Mohawk when everyone else is getting a number three all over.

Keep in mind: not all trends take hold.

Now what these people really are is fashion ‘innovators’. They’re called innovators because they’re on the leading edge of the curve, rocking out a fashion trend BEFORE it’s actually a trend. What they’re doing is too extreme for mainstream tastes and the vast majority of consumers or thinkers, so they fit square into the middle of the ‘weird’ category. But they’re innovating all the same.

This is where the early adopters arrive. Early adopters aren’t beyond the cutting edge like the innovators, but they are ahead of the rest of the pack and enjoy leading the curve. Early adopters in fashion actually inhabit the cool sweetspot – the space where they get the maximum social credit from the rest of society for their cultural choices. But they keep ahead of the public by taking what the innovators do, watering it down to an acceptable level, then taking credit for it.

A watered down mohawk. Comfortably ensconced in the Cool sweetspot.

 This process plays out a few more times (aspire, water down, adopt) as you work your way down the curve until you reach the laggards who for whatever reason are a bit slow on the uptake, probably because they don’t care. By the time laggards get a fashion product it has been watered down to its most mass markety and the innovators have long ago moved onto something completely different (probably been through several different new styles by then) and the early adopters are waiting to rip them off and start the process all over again, everyone always trying to remain one step ahead of the group behind them.

Why am I explaining the ‘Cool Curve’? Because the ideals of Modernism can be seen as the innovators who dress too extreme for the mass market, sticking to strict design rules that the rest of society just won’t accept. As amazingly different and powerful as those ideas are, they’re just too extreme for the people at the middle of the curve to take seriously. At least, not until the early adopters take those ideas, water them down a little and make them really really cool (ie extreme but acceptable).

Enter Art Deco. Art Deco took the ideas of Modernist architecture and design but baulked at taking them to the extreme. Instead, where Modernism rejected the past completely Art Deco snuck the past in the back door with its shout outs to mythic figures and iconic imagery (such as the Egyptology craze and the numerous examples of lightning-holding titans). Where Modernism rejected all ornamentation, Art Deco was into deco-ration, staying to the Modern side of things with lots of geometrical lines and shapes, but decorating things regardless. Where Modernism was about purity, Art Deco was about the speed and exhilaration of the contemporary age. Where Modernism was about facade-less material, Art Deco was about new materials made from new technology and taken to the luxurious nth degree.

Art deco, baby. Modern... but mythic.

 Art Deco was in many ways the upper crust and the rich Bright Young Things taking the purified academic theory of Modernism and giving it some fun and luxury. Watering it down enough to be fun, fast and exciting rather than stilted and serious. And, as the ‘cool version’ of Modernism, it also became the style that the growing middle class of the 1920s would aspire to. Right up to the crash of ’29.

What happened next to our intrepid Art Deco pioneers? Did the Crash of ’29 destroy the new aspirational movement? Did the adaptation of Modernist ideas revert to their obscure academic ways? Stay tuned next week post for the next episode of ‘Bond, Art Deco and the Cool Curve’!

Dieselpunk Manifesto: Bond, Art Deco and the Cool Curve pt 1.

If Dieselpunk has a national sport, that sport is debating what really is and isn’t Dieselpunk; what’s Dieselpunk proper, what’s Diesel-era inspiration (but not Dieselpunk itself) and what has nothing to do with Dieselpunk whatsoever, even if the arguer really really wants it to be. (Star Wars? Hmmmm.....)

So I’m going to stick my neck out a bit and make a declaration which may be a little controversial to some: I’m going to argue that one of the greatest bastions of all that is Dieselpunk is an MI-6 agent who likes to tell everyone his last name first – Mister Bond, James Bond.

This guy

Now this is a controversial statement for one main reason – Bond is a creation of the 60s. And there’s no one who will argue that the Diesel era stretched that far. The 60s be Atomicpunk territory in all its Cold War glory and they rightfully claim Bond as one of their own inspirations. But that’s partly where my argument lies. While Bond may be a cultural text Atomicpunks can draw their own ‘punkitude from, Bond isn’t an inspiration for Dieselpunks, he is in fact one of the first Dieselpunks himself. And it all goes back to the Art Deco movement.

Over the next few Dieselpunk Manifesto posts I’m going to put forward my thesis on the Dieselpunkitude of Bond as both an argument to back up my claim to Bonds Dieselpunk citizenship but also as an illustration of what I think is one of the most prevalent but least noted backbones of Dieselpunk: the aspirational qualities of art deco and how the transitional cultural period of the diesel era embodied it so well.

The entire article got a bit long so I'm going to break it down into individual blogs so stick around. This may get interesting...