Goldfinger, Steyn, and Europe: an unserious but serious exchange

When I initially posted the dialog from the James Bond movie Goldfinger to illustrate a point about Mark Steyn’s failure or refusal to suggest any way that Europe could avoid destruction, I had James Bond say, “Do you want me to say something?” and Goldfinger answering, “No, Mr. Bond, I want you to die.” I also characterized Goldfinger as “chuckling broadly” as he said it.

A reader named Mr. Anachronism wrote to correct me:

Actually, Bond sez, “Do you expect me to talk?” and then Goldfinger sez, with no little asperity, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die,” and he neither chuckles nor even titters.

Clearly, Mr. Auster, you are no classicist.

Respectfully yours,
Mr. Anachronism

LA:

Thanks for straightening me out on that. I didn’t have the screenplay at hand. My memory was pretty close, though, wasn’t it?

But how would you characterize Goldfinger’s tone? Even if he didn’t actually chuckle, there was this sadistic (and yet funny) “spin” to the way he said it that made the moment a classic, which I remembered as a chuckle, and that’s what I was trying to capture in my description. And it also made the connection between Goldfinger’ homocidal riposte and Steyn’s gleeful sadistic pronouncements that Europe is doomed.

I went ahead and changed the dialog as the correspondent had indicated, also changing the description of Goldfinger to “with sadistic asperity,” and wrote to him again:

In fact, I think “with sadistic asperity” works better than “chuckling broadly” in both capturing the movie scene and in drawing the parallel with Steyn, because his evident Schadenfreude at Europe’s demise is inseparable from sadism.

Mr. Anachronism replied:

Yes, but I don’t think it’s an exact match because Herr Goldfinger was neither insouciant nor nonchalant and Steyn is almost pathologically these things, while perhaps sharing in his Schadenfreude. Steyn’s attitude toward the Mussulmanisation of Europe is utterly bizarre, inexplicable except by resorting to theories of mental illness in its holder. (I give this a glancing notice in a weblog I just started in order to have a little intelligent conversation introduced into my miserable life by talking to myself.)

I think we have two questions of Mr. Steyn: What, if anything, would make you angry? What would make you want to DO something?

Respectfully yours,
Mr. Anachronism

LA:

True, Steyn is resolutely unserious. But isn’t there something inhuman about such unseriousness when talking about such serious things? So it comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it? “Die, Europe!”

Some people, like you and me, see this insouciance about the most serious matters and think it a very strange, repellent quality. Others neither see it nor object to it.

Also, Steyn will never get angry because that would suggest that there’s something that can bother him, which would suggest that he’s not totally above it all, detached from everything, floating somewhere above the stratosphere. A correspondent recently said to me that the refusal to feel fear of things that ought to be feared comes from narcissism. The narcissist must feel completely autonomous. To admit there’s anything outside himself that can threaten him would mean that there’s a real world beyond the self, a world that matters, and this would violent his autonomy. So the narcissist is never fearful or serious about anything. He adopts a nonchalant tone even toward the death of his civilization.

Thanks for making me see this more clearly.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 08, 2006 04:23 PM | Send