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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9736703" data-attributes="member: 78087">I really have to disagree about You Only Live Twice - Bond and Dahl’s approach to Japanese culture (veering somewhere between exoticism and imperialist Japanophilia without much in between), Bond somehow passing as a Japanese fisherman, general sexism etc were really quite jarring to me when I saw it first as a kid 40 years ago and remain so now. It’s one of the worst Bond films in that regard, and communicates more of Fleming’s appalling assumptions and prejudices than most films. It’s worth noting that I’m Korean-English and was at that point working out what my ethnicity meant in the UK at the time (racism, mostly). It did really help out the Japanese film industry and has some great action scenes, though.The Dahl-Bond overlap is very interesting because Dahl was pretty firmly wedded to the ideals of post-war English heroic masculinity which were very culturally prevalent at the time (see also: Prince Philip and his mentorship by Louis Mountbatten) and which was probably most iconised by Bond. With that comes a whole pile of racism, sexism, homophobia, imperial nostalgia, and toxic masculinity. In Dahl’s writing it’s of course more notable in his non-children books (Tales of the Unexpected etc) but there are quite a few bits in his children’s books, for instance Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny the Champion of the World, both of which do a magnificently destructive job of setting standards for fathers which are unrealistically unachievable and quite unlike Dahl’s own haphazard and dismissive approach to parenting.(I think Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Fantastic Mr Fox does quite a good and thoughtful job of deconstructing and reconstructing the heroic fatherhood myth in the book. When Mrs Fox says wearily, “I love you but I should never have married you,” she’s spot on.)</blockquote>

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