Monday, March 5, 2012

Project, Group Project


So for the last few weeks, my group and I have been working on our project for our Pop Culture class. As I mentioned in a previous post, our topic is James Bond and in particular, Casino Royale. We’ve met a handful of times before class and communicated through email. We each took a separate concept involved with Bond and went in our own directions with it. I decided to look at Casino Royale, and Bond in particular, through the lens of theory, namely Saussure and Derrida. Today in class, for my part of the presentation, I’ll be discussing how Bond’s views of the world begin very structuralist but by the end of the novel, become post-structuralist.

For my contributions to the group, I helped break the novel down and analyze it as a whole. I helped divide the novel into possible chunks or areas of discussion that we could be interested in exploring. I helped in discussions with connecting and comparing the novel to the 2006 film and also brought up some interesting differences between the many iterations of Bond throughout the years. Other people in the group aided me in some areas of my own topic and I also provided feedback on theirs. During the meetings, we all contributed some ideas and feedback to each topic while also constructing the general form of our presentation as a whole. As I’m not especially proficient in power point creation, I mostly helped there by giving feedback and suggestions on the structure and aesthetics of the power point presentation that the others made. 

Bond initially has no difficulty differentiating between good and evil, hero and villain. His experience in the war, as well as all his training, has made it clear to him that the US and England are the heroes and that, at the very least, the Russians are now the villains. This is very Saussurian in that Bond knows that he and his country (and their allies) are good and since Russia is not an ally, they are clearly evil. He is able to define who the heroes are by comparing them to those who aren’t, and vice versa. However, after being tortured by Le Chiffre, Bond’s view changes dramatically. As he is recovering, he has a very interesting discussion with his French police aide, Mathis. Bond says that when he was younger it was easier to tell the difference between good and evil, but it isn’t so easy anymore. He says that somewhere, Le Chiffre was the hero and Bond was the villain and what Le Chiffre was doing was heroic. He says politics and patriotism and everything have an influence over the previous line of thinking but that he is finding it too difficult to differentiate anymore. Bond’s crisis of identity is so great that he decides to resign rather than try to solve his psychological and ideological dilemma. He finds the line not so easily drawn anymore and seems to be very much a post-structuralist. Bond now thinks in a Derridian fashion in that the terms hero and villain and good and evil don’t really have any meaning anymore because the definition is literally different for every single person and changes for them from one instant to the next, giving the concepts no true and universal truth.

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