More Subtle Than Bond

[RonPrice]

In Casino Royale there are already the elements for the building of a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules, play situations and side issues. The pleasure lies in watching the trained virtuosity with which the final moment is deferred, how foregone conclusions are reconfirmed by ingenious deviations and how various trickeries make rings around the opponents. The greatest pleasure arises not from excitement but from relief. -Ron Price with thanks to Umberto Eco, "Narrative Structures in Fleming", Gender, Language and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, Glenwood Irons, editor, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992, pp. 157-182.

In the several genres of Pioneering Over Four Epochs Price describes his experience with a system, an order, a framework, a structure at once precise and vast, articulated in an aesthetic form of great beauty, but immensely various in its application from place to place and situation to situation; indeed often it appeared absurd, impossible of achievement. Some of the goals of both the system and individual life were always far off; some were achieveable, short term entities. Pleasures arose in the most surprising places, partly because of the heterogeneity of the groups, partly because of the changes in experience from decade to decade and because of the relief from the tension that so often arose from place to place. -Ron Price, Comment on Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Published Manuscript on the Internet, 2004.

Casino Royale1 came out in 1953
and James Bond has been with us
ever since. That same year saw
the beginning of the Kingdom of God
and the beginning of the ninth stage
of history for this embryonic global
community. Both build an Order,
fight for truth, justice and the rules
of the game---just a different set of rules,
a different fight, a different plan,
defeat the right and left wings
of the hosts of the world with
romance, drama, the greatest
in the world's spiritual history.

But one, thusfar, so subtle, so elusive,
so capable of a far different cinematic
description, far different than the Bonds
of yesteryear and all their ingenious
virtuosity and trickery and bold eroticism.

Ron Price
16 October 2004

1 the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming