James Bond: America by Proxy
Part One
Nearly everyone can mimic the famous introduction, but longtime moviegoers may well remember the utterance that launched the franchise. The tuxedo-clad gentleman is asked his name by the elegant lady sitting across the casino table from him. He casually lights a cigarette, nonchalantly snaps his lighter shut, and murmurs: “Bond. James Bond.”
Why was James Bond written (and filmed) the way he was? What purpose did the character serve? How did Bond’s behavior, considered so “problematic” now, reflect the circumstances of the world in which he was created? There are good answers to those questions (or at least answers of value in the study of history), so it is my intention here to try and tackle them, exploring the character of James Bond as presented on film for the past 60-odd years. It will also examine the actors chosen to play Bond, and the historical context in which they portrayed the inimitable secret agent. It’s illuminating to consider how the character of Bond and the action of his films has changed along with American worldviews and self-concepts.
Methodologically, this is ground others have trod with different companions. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday (their duality requires they nearly always be written together) can be studied for similar reflection. Karen Merced Willner, writing in Cineaste, examines portrayals of Earp and Holliday over about 70 years, noting that the way both men are written and filmed has changed with the times, along with the way their friendship develops (or dissolves), the way both deal with the events of the OK Corral, and how and why ancillary details (like love interests or tuberculosis) have been included or not. Willner notes that films involving Earp and Holliday largely petered out after 1967’s Hour of the Gun and its treatment of the pair as embodiments of America’s existential dread in the Vietnam-Era Cold War. The pair’s specific brand of heroism seemed to grow old hat (so to speak) and hard to continue to put on screen, at least until Tombstone, but Librarian of Celaeno has covered that quite thoroughly in his stack. Regardless, it is not difficult to see a changing of the guard among the gunmen of American pop culture, from squinting cowboys to jet-set spies, happening through the 1960s.
A New Sheriff in Town
Perhaps symbolic of this change, Dr. No opens with one of the most iconic visuals of all time: the James Bond gunbarrel shot. Bond is seen walking across the screen from within the barrel of a gun being pointed at him. As he reaches the center of the screen, Bond turns suddenly and fires his own pistol (directly at the audience), and blood flows from the top of the screen as the barrel’s image wobbles, suggesting Bond has scored a mortal hit. Every Bond film from Dr. No to Die Another Day opens with the gunbarrel shot, keeping the promise of action from the first seconds of its runtime. From our view over 60 years later, this moment in Dr. No can also be viewed as an evolution of the old west gun duel fought by Bond’s cowboy progenitors. James Bond was announcing himself as the new sheriff in the town of American pop culture.
In May 1963, Dr. No entered theaters in the United States, six months behind its premiere in the UK, and was met with backhanded appreciation from the critical community. It was no secret that President Kennedy had been a fan of the Ian Fleming source novels, so much of society had a passing familiarity with the British secret agent’s name, though not all shared the President’s enthusiasm.
Of Fleming’s work film critic Stanley Kauffmann sniffed: “Blood-and-sex fantasy is part of every healthy person’s imaginative equipment, but after a certain age—say, 16—such fantasy … is unacceptable without modest literary competence.” Brendan Gill agreed with Kauffmann’s assessment of Fleming’s talent but found the film generally likeable. “Sean Connery,” Gill wrote, “makes an admirable Bond,” and “could go on starring in Fleming decalcomanias until his legs give out.”
Dr. No is the tale of British MI6 agent James Bond (code name 007) and his investigation into the doings of the title character. Dr. Julius No is a criminal mastermind: an eerily calm madman working with SPECTRE, an evil organization bent on world domination. He lives in a sumptuously furnished secret hideout on an island near Jamaica, complete with Goya’s “The Duke of Wellington” (stolen from the National Gallery in London in 1961) on prominent display, as well as an army of goons and his own personal nuclear reactor. No’s stated goal is assisting SPECTRE’s nefarious (if ill-defined) larger plot by interfering (vaguely) with the US space program. Bond foils this plot.
60-odd years on now, we may recognize that summary as containing clear ingredients of a formula which proved enormously successful, though at the time these were reasonably fresh plot beats. However, the plot’s action can charitably be called thin (No’s private nuclear reactor is only tenuously explained, serving mainly as a way for Bond to kill the evil doctor) which leads naturally to a question: why did this film make money? Why did American audiences eat James Bond up and demand more?
James Bond has been, throughout his career, a proxy for America—the film franchise can be read as a single uninterrupted metaphor for the United States’ collective cultural self-perception (sometimes conscious, sometimes subtle) of the nation’s role on the world stage. The way Bond films were made, from plot and character to gadgets and casting, all speak to where mainstream US culture believed the nation to be at that moment in time.
Let’s get into some details.
The Opening Sequence: Existing Scholarship
While Dr. No introduced the trademark gunbarrel shot that opens every Bond film, the 1963 sequel, From Russia with Love, introduced a pre-credits opening sequence. Every Bond film made since has one: a scene following the gunbarrel shot but before the opening credits. These often set up the action of the film and have given fans of the series some of the greatest moments in the franchise, with highlights like Bond's jetpack flight in Thunderball, parachute ski jump in The Spy Who Loved Me, jeep chase down the Rock of Gibraltar in The Living Daylights, bungee-jump off a Russian dam in GoldenEye, and four-minute single-take walk through Mexico City’s Day of the Dead celebration in Spectre. Just as these opening sequences set up the action of the film to follow, it is only fitting in a discussion of how and why Bond mattered to America to first provide some setup. To do so, let us examine some facets of the state of scholarship on Bond.
James Bond as a character gets called problematic from several directions. A paragon of what is now called toxic masculinity, the disgust with which the character is viewed by “right-thinking” people today is only exacerbated by his portrayal as a global actor, strutting the world treating other people as lessers (when he does not remorselessly kill them or, um, colonize them) anywhere he travels. That he has been doing it for 60 years, however, makes the development of scholarship on Bond inevitable. Very few fiction properties actively produce new material for decades, and as film after film has been added, a body of art (tasteless and juvenile as the haters may complain) has grown up that was bound to receive analysis.
Fleming may not have intended the hero of his single-minded anti-Communist spy novels to function as a stand-in for Western Civilization, but his choice of adversaries (always representatives of the scheming Communists, international or Soviet) demanded that the West generate a mythic hero to fight them. Klaus Dodds and Lisa Funnell, two scholars associated with much of the literary analysis of Bond, hold that Bond is representative of Britain’s collective perception of its geopolitical role. I disagree, but only insofar as (for better or for worse) Britain has not had a geopolitical view capable of being divorced from that of the US since the end of World War II. Bond is British solely because he was British in the Ian Fleming source novels. While this allows him to operate on screen largely outside of American policy and presence, as a metaphor he is America.
Most recently, the 2006 release of Casino Royale brought on a fresh wave of journal submissions. As the Daniel Craig era represents a reboot of the character and franchise, the previous 20 films form a completed body of work with both a beginning and end. They can therefore be considered in their totality; historians and other scholars need not worry about how their various article frames might break with a new entry into the series. The Craig era in the films also lasted 15 years (the longest of any actor to play the role, beating Roger Moore’s 12) and the Craig films have existed entirely within the academic era marked by both the rise of intersectionality and enormous expansions in online indexing and archiving. Thus, not only have all manner of angles been taken to dig into the franchise, but the results are indexed and findable in ways they have never been before. Still, the general unease with which the modern academic world can view a character as potentially offensive as Bond has meant that much of the scholarship on the character and films picks around the edges, choosing a specific facet of James Bond to analyze.
An additional consideration for problematizing Bond is that his negatively perceived traits are already built into and accepted from the character. Put more bluntly, nobody disagrees about who or what Bond is. Disagreement instead lies almost entirely in concepts of response. Put more bluntly, why or why not should anyone care? Those who find Bond offensive do not write about it in journals. Those who embrace Bond’s cold war “misogyny” avoid the journals as well. What then is left?
What is left is a mass of scholarship in which nothing finds itself directly at odds with anything else. Funnell and Dodds can write “James Bond is a body-focused spy whose physique and touch communicate powerful messages about identity and power in the franchise,” going on to declare the casting of Sean Connery (a former bodybuilder) the result of a desire to display “animalistic virility” visually to the moviegoing audience, and there is no real room to disagree. Even Bond’s treatment of women is broadly accepted, even if it is scoffed at as adolescent fantasy, if not a darker tapestry of, um, colonization. Many authors expend many pages problematizing the female characters in Bond films, and here most agree that the early Connery days were literally the worst for women, though later female characters in the franchise have gained power and empowerment.
This is made easier for academics because James Bond has become a character separable from his source material—an archetype joining the likes of Robin Hood, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Billy the Kid, and Sam Spade. Thus, scholars can consider as separate from other facets of his characterization Bond’s substance abuse, noting that while Bond himself may smoke less as the films progressed, 20% of his sexual partners smoke onscreen. Likewise, Bond has had over 100 alcoholic drinks onscreen, and based on the specifics of certain scenes may at some point have been operating with a blood alcohol level as high as 0.36, sufficient to kill some people (and perhaps explaining some of his appetite for risk). Even his consumption of eggs has been analyzed.
Serious consideration of Bond’s totality has happened largely outside the journals of academia. While every new movie release produces a new set of “Ultimate Encyclopedia” trivia guides, it is in the evolving online space that a surprisingly articulate set of fan-scholars has set up shop to observe and consider the films. They lack credentials (at least so far as can be readily found, anonymity being a hallmark of the internet), but compensate for that absence with passion for the source material; they can speak with relative objectivity about Bond’s faults precisely because they love him. The online space also allows analysis of multimedia components of the Bond franchise. Thus, the Being James Bond channel on YouTube can produce a podcast on Bond film theme songs with intriguing insights on why certain filmmaking decisions were made about those opening songs.
And it is a song that will lead us forward in part 2 of this series. Find it here.