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You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert) is often regarded as a silly film. I describe it in my book1 as “an assemblage of pieces; some excellent, some not; strung loosely together.” It has long seemed to me to be a delightful but fundamentally incoherent movie. A recent revisit has changed that opinion. I am lucky to live near the Lafayette Theater2 in Suffern, New York, one of the few remaining movie palaces in the United States. The Lafayette has a program of classics in addition to first run movies, and recently I saw You Only Live Twice on its enormous screen. During the film, it struck me that YOLT is, at its core, about the voyeurism of spying. It has an obvious, consistent, repeated motif of cameras, film, and media, and is concerned with perception. Within the course of the movie, every major character is seen filming, being filmed, or both, and every major scene has visible recording equipment of some kind, or talk about the media in some way. This motif is connected to the plot element addressed in the title: James Bond is “killed” because his enemies plague him. M says, “Well now that you're dead, perhaps some of your old friends will pay a little less attention to you for a while. Give you more elbow room.” A real spy needs elbow room, and he needs secrecy, but Bond has neither. He is that bizarre oxymoron, a “famous spy.” In Ian Fleming's novel Diamonds Are Forever, Bond, posting as Peter Franks, has the following conversation with Tiffany Case: By the time of the 1971 film of that novel, Tiffany Case is horrified that “Peter Franks” has killed the famous James Bond. Between the two extremes falls You Only Live Twice. Bond is a famous spy, but his fame is perceived accurately as a problem, and MI6 attempts to solve it by faking Bond's death. The fake death, though, is the opening volley in a curious game of who's watching whom, and all of it is reflected in images of the media: film, newspapers, recordings, and photography. Certainly one of the subjects of this cinematic conversation about voyeurism is the audience: Much of the adventure and much of the display is played directly to the fourth wall. Time and again, when we ask “Who is watching that?” the answer is: Us. Time and again, when we ask, “Who is filming that?” the answer is, “The filmmakers, for the audience's benefit.” On the one hand, it's sloppy film-making, but on the other, it's a sophisticated understanding of voyeurism as a two-handed game. A spy is a voyeur, but the watcher requires the watched. A voyeur must either have an unwilling victim, or a willing exhibitionist. Alfred Hitchcock -- long understood to be an influence on the Bond films -- realized that a film audience is also a voyeur, and the film itself is an exhibitionist. Hitchcock's film Rear Window directly addresses that subject. Hitchcock also knew that perfect logic didn't matter in film-making, he coined the term “icebox scene” to refer to a question or inconsistency that strikes you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox. If the film works while you're watching it, it works. My attempt here is to take the movie You Only Live Twice very seriously, and to explore its motif of voyeurism through the audience and through the media. I know full well that the film makers didn't necessarily intend all or, perhaps, any of these incidents to seem thematic. The beauty of art is that it often surpasses the artist's intentions. Once you look at it, voyeurism in YOLT is virtually another character. Sequence by sequence, scene by scene, it makes its presence known. As we closely analyze YOLT, let's look for three interwoven motifs: Voyeurism as evidenced by surveillance, surveillance equipment, and omnipresent media, the necessity of observing reality and the interplay of fakery and fake spying with reality (all being observed), and the presence of real secrecy and real spying, which is not observed. That last is subtle, but it is present, and it underlies and supports all the artificiality.
The moment that YOLT opens, we are introduced to surveillance equipment before we are introduced to any characters. We start by seeing the NASA Jupiter 16 shot, and immediately we see an array of monitors as well as a radar dish. From here, we go to the meeting of the USSR, USA, and UK delegates, all of whom talk about “tracking stations.” So, before we've even gotten to Bond, we have governments talking about the act of spying, and how they all know, observe, and record one another's secrets, and we see the equipment by which this is accomplished. The next scene is Bond's “death.” This scene has, for a very long time, driven me crazy. If we allow it to wash over us, it's exciting, visually gripping, sexy, bizarre, compelling: It's just a great piece of film. But, at the “icebox,” it's a tangled web of confusion. Is Ling an enemy or not? If she's an enemy, then the “killers” (shooting blanks) are MI6, and they are putting on a show for Ling's benefit, allowing a double-agent to go free (at least temporarily) in order to fake Bond's death. But Moneypenny's later mention of Ling didn't indicate a plot against her. If she's not an enemy, then who is the show for? If no one sees that Bond is dead but agents and allies in on the charade, why play dead at all? The story could simply have been planted. The obvious answer is that the audience, the fourth wall, is the whole point of this bit of play acting. The charade is about charade, the point is that a spy is putting on a show for an audience. (Editor's note -- this idea is accentuated when someone comments "At least he died on the job," and the Hong Kong policeman looks directly at the audience as he intones "He would have wanted it that way.")
Again, why does Bond actually have to be in the body bag? The film treats us to a second look at the binoculars, and a second look at the headline. Observation is the point, and underneath all the fakery, there has to be something real. Just as with Bond's fake death, Bond's fake burial requires the presence of a real spy. His real body had to be “killed” and “buried.” Now begins the presence of real secrecy. In Jungian psychology, water and bodies of water represent the unconscious mind and secrecy. The “depths” of our psyches are invisible to us, they are “beneath the surface,” in “murky waters.” We will notice that true secrecy in YOLT is always signaled by being underwater or underground, and nothing underwater is filmed. Blofeld's base is effectively hidden, because it is both underground and underwater; the fake lake camouflage is effective until Bond actually touches it. The scuba divers retrieve Bond when he's out of sight and underwater. This is a real secret; the observer on the shore doesn't see it, and for a while Bond is truly believed to be dead. Now Bond meets with M, and M talks about “elbow room.” Here they have created a new secret, but immediately return to the subject of voyeurism: Bond: “Any reconnaissance?” Bond also burns the piece of paper with the address at which he's to make contact with Henderson. Note that both the secret and the voyeurism in this scene are useless: Photography turned up nothing, and Henderson's address is compromised and Henderson killed. At the end of this scene, Bond leaves underwater. His departure is truly secret;his enemies don't know he's in Japan. In Japan, Bond meets Aki watching a sporting event;a public spectacle with a large audience.
A few minutes later, Bond chases Aki to Tanaka. Tanaka's office has video monitors that show Bond everything we've just seen: The chase and the “rabbit hole.” In addition, Tanaka already knows that Bond is “dead.” Tanaka's underground stronghold is absolutely safe (remember, Naturally, then, the first thing that Bond requests of Tanaka relates to photography: He asks him to enlarge a negative. Soon, they are looking at the photograph of the Ning-Po, observing it so closely that they enlarge a microdot of information. The movie seems to be telling us that film and photography can and must be observed at a minute level. The next day, Bond arrives to see Osato, giving a pseudonym. (Bond used pseudonyms in 10 of 22 movies, not counting Casino Royale, in which he was assigned a name but refused to use it.) Osato's assistant spies on Bond from a camera; the video is at his desk. Bond observes the camera observing him. Osato the uses an X-ray, at his desk, to take a different kind of picture, finding Bond's gun as he does so. The image that Osato captures is shown to us repeatedly. Osato instructs his henchmen to kill Bond, but Aki helps Bond escape. Now the video equipment in her car, that Bond lingered over, is brought into play. We see Tiger's face in the car via video phone when Aki asks for the “usual reception.” Via an impossible vidoe, we see the helicopter dropping the car, then the pool in the water the car leaves in its wake, and then Tiger again. Again remember, this is a major sequence in the movie, shown entirely via video. Next, we learn that the photograph of the Ning-Po was analyzed and a specific coastline discerned, reinforcing the idea that the medium is effective for spying. The next major sequence is Little Nelly, and we can see a camera on Bond's helmet throughout the scene. Next is the Russian space shot--more radar and monitors. The space module is captured by Blofeld, and the Americans say “Moscow radio's already saying that we did it,”--this is, again, knowledge gained from media. Then we see video in the Pentagon, and video communication from NASA. The Americans say: “Forget Japan.” They are relying on the fake spying of media, but the real secret is underground and underwater, and cannot be photographed. At last we get our first look in Blofeld's base, and as soon as we see Osato and Brandt, we see a bunch of video monitors, even before we see Blofeld's cat and know who the villain is. Now comes a crucial scene in regard to media and spying and secrecy.
Bond created a fake death, directly addressing the voyeurism of his world. That death fooled Osato and Brandt so well that even photographic evidence that he is alive didn't convince them of it. The media worked blinded them to real spying, blinded them to their own Tiger, too, is concerned with true spying; he has ninjas. When Bond questions what ninjas are, Tiger says “The art of concealment and surprise, Bond-san.” Soon, though, Bond tells Tiger he sounds “like a commercial,” indicating he's corrupted by media. Sure enough, the ninja camp (neither underground nor underwater) is infiltrated. By contrast, Blofeld has a cave in the water with poison gas, which Bond says is “to keep visitors away.” Here we are again: Underground, underwater, and concealed. Voyeurism is both the business and the enemy of the spy. Our video experience is hardly over. We see more video monitors at NASA for the third, launch, then Houston calls Washington on video monitors, and then there's more video at NASA, and then we're back to a bank of monitors in the volcano lair. Blofeld may reject the media, but he's a part of all this voyeurism and replication of imagery. He spots Bond's mistake with his air conditioner via monitor, and Tiger's invading ninjas are also spotted that way. Finally, Blofeld addresses the issue directly: “The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It's the last program you're likely to see.” Then there's the famous, and ridiculous, moment of watching the SPECTRE rocket almost swallow the American rocket on the monitors: What could possibly film it? What third ship is in space with a camera? There are even multiple camera angles. But the point is our voyeurism and our absorption in media and experiences filtered through media. Back at the U.S. monitors, there's all this stock footage of war on the US monitors; where would they get that? I mean, why would they see pictures of the planes taking off? I haven't examined any other Bond movie for this motif, but I doubt there's any that's as media-saturated as YOLT. I believe this movie is truly grappling with the notions of observation, media, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and concealment. It adds up to a rich visual experience in a great Bond film. © 2011 Deborah Lipp |
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