Daniel Craig has played both Ian Fleming's James Bond and Stieg Larsson's Mikael Blomkvist but would not be suitable for the role of Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry - who needs two actors, for before and after his bioculp. Doctor Who "regenerates" because s/he changes actors whereas Flandry would have to change actors because of his biosculp.
Two Flandry-Blomkvist Comparisons
(i) Swedish TV cleverly adapted Larsson's Millennium Trilogy to TV episode lengths by changing and simplifying the story. The plot remained recognizably a version of the original story, although with almost every detail altered, and the characters were authentic with the actors well-chosen. I would want Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization to become a screen series, and sometimes a serial, of unlimited length so that it would not have to be either changed or simplified in any respect.
(ii) Blomkvist shares, and even surpasses, Bond's and Flandry's promiscuity and does not understand that this causes suffering for some of the women concerned. (Flandry expresses his failure to understand women at the end of A Circus Of Hells.)
Of these three characters, I find Blomkvist the most likable, admirable and even enviable although a major moral blind spot is his unawareness of the consequences of his actions for his sexual partners.
6 comments:
Paul:
In a commentary about his novel Starliner, David Drake mentioned:
"My viewpoint character is a young man who likes women and who—because he doesn’t understand women at all—treats them the way he’d like to be treated himself. By so doing he wrecks lives with complete innocence.
"I only mention this because occasionally I’m accused of being ignorant of the negative side of characters I’ve drawn as so job-focused that they take personal relationships at face value—and trivial. (Ritter in Northworld: Vengeance has a similar attitude.) No, I’m quite aware of what I’m saying, as surely as I am when I describe reconnaissance by fire—shooting into a clump of trees that might hold a sniper; or an old woman digging roots, of course."
Kaor, Paul!
I don't know if you ever saw the Ace Books illustrated edition of A STONE IN HEAVEN, but I thought the artist's depiction of what Dominic Flandry looked like to be very well done, faithful to the descriptions we see of Flandry in the stories. And the same was true of the other characters, most esp. the aging Chives.
As for Flandry's sexual promiscuity, I think it's only fair to point out he never made promises about any kind of long term commitments, even tho, with some, such as Aline Chang-Lei, he arguably should have. The Lady Aline was one of the wiser women Flandry knew, despite falling in love with him, she did not try to hold on to Flandry when he did not feel the same way about her.
Sean
Sean,
I have that edition of A STONE IN HEAVEN and agree. Imagine a comic strip or animation.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Or a straight out manga of A STONE IN HEAVEN! Or of some of the other Flandry stories. Or honest filmed versions of the van Rijn and Flandry tales.
Sean
Incidentally, "reconnaissance by fire" was a term used to me by the father of a friend of mine when I was a teenager, a WWII veteran (Canadian, armored-car commander, fought in NW Europe in 1944-45.)
I asked what it meant, and he replied shooting the hell out of Belgian farmhouses; if there were Germans inside, they'd shoot back. I asked what would happen if it was just Belgian famers, and he replied: "Oh, then they just died. Better them than us, sonny, better them than us."
I have never met a combat veteran who doesn't laugh at that one and nod.
Incidentally, if you want a sketch of the inherent differences between male and female attitudes towards sexuality, look at the way gay people conduct their lives.
This is more accurate than looking at individuals because it represents a bunch of collective decisions, rather than a single person, who may be atypical.
Each represents what men or woman would do if the rules of the sexual game weren't set by a shifting set of bargains with the opposite sex, which is true even in very male-dominated cultures. And it's informative to examine how those shifting bargains shift as the balance of power between the sexes changes.
It's also useful to look at conventional het porn, which is overwhelmingly oriented towards males, and then examine what women who like visual erotica watch if they get to pick.
Basically, T.S. Elliot was right when he said: Higamous hogamous, woman monogamous; higamous hagamous, man is polygamous.
Not completely so in either case, of course, but in broad overall outlines. Men, especially younger men, on the whole like anonymous sex with strangers a -lot- more than most women do. Conversely, women are more relationship-oriented. Again, these aren't absolute distinctions, but they do represent very different bell-curve distributions.
The foundations in evolutionary psychology are, I would think, obvious. Note that recent DNA research has demonstrated that reproductive success varies -much- more between males than it does between females -- that individual males can achieve proportions of descendants that no woman can, and that this happens often enough to be clearly visible in the genetic record.
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