Learn from History: James Bond
Part Three
Find part 1 here.
Roger Moore Arrives
Diamonds Are Forever permanently altered the image of Bond. Reflecting the illusory wisdom America felt it had gained by surviving the sixties, audiences would now expect Bond to be a touch older, perhaps more dapper and mature. Indeed, much had happened by 1973, the year of Live and Let Die, that would perpetuate that illusion. Nixon made his historic trips to China and the USSR in 1972, following that with 1973's ceasefire in Vietnam.
However, now that major foreign affairs problems seemed to be resolving (or at least not actively worsening), domestic problems began to rear their heads. Ominously, the Watergate Committee was also seated in 1973, signaling dark times ahead for Tricky Dick. But a larger domestic issue could no longer be ignored: race relations, civil rights, and black activism, the great subplot of the sixties.
The Black Panthers were founded in 1966, but popular media was uncertain about their goals, portraying them as a pack of unstable delinquents. Such panic did not last, but neither did it give way to understanding in the glamour and faux-wisdom of the seventies. Nobody really understood anything, no lessons had truly been learned from the 60s, but oh how people loved to pretend. In such a time, black activists quickly became passé. The seventies thus saw the beginning of an unfortunate trend in portrayals of black activists, like the Black Panthers, just at the time when serious attention to their cause could have helped immeasurably. Wealthy white celebrities had parties and invited members of the Panthers more as a novelty than anything else.
This mindset, coupled with the rise of Blaxploitation filmmaking in the seventies, turned militant black activists into glitzy action heroes as in Shaft or Cleopatra Jones rather than consider their stated grievances. Racism hadn’t changed, the establishment simply started patronizing the blacks it had once ignored. William F. Buckley wrote: “the Black Panther Party exists primarily for the satisfaction of white people rather than black people. The white people like to strut their toleration.” Mainstream culture was aware of black activism, but viewed it as one would view a sideshow, with curiosity but no serious intent to do anything about it.
Into this came Live and Let Die, Roger Moore’s first film as James Bond. Patently awful and near-universally hated by critics (though with the first-among-equals best theme song of the franchise–yeah I said it, fight me), Live and Let Die pitted Bond against Kananga, the black ruler of a small Caribbean nation, high priest of a voodoo cult, and international heroin distributor with designs on monopolizing the drug trade in America.
Perhaps the writers and producers of Live and Let Die had good intentions in writing a story with so much opportunity for black actors, but the result is … deplorable. Live and Let Die is almost a minstrel show by way of Superfly, dealing wholesale in blacks as racist cartoons for whom Bond demonstrates nothing but contempt. He strides into Harlem alone, a white man in a suit. He attempts to “blend in” in a voodoo supply shop and a soul-music club. He outwits the villains at every turn as usual, but it leaves a nasty taste in Live and Let Die. Except for CIA Agent Strutter (a vaguely racist name in and of itself) and boat captain Quarrel, jr. (the son of a character from back in Dr. No, here to offer a flash of continuity), every black person in the film is slavishly devoted to Kananga; though the film attempts to explain this through voodoo occultism, the simple-minded black stereotype is unmistakable. It’s astonishing.
Roger Moore survived Live and Let Die (where George Lazenby did not survive On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) for two important reasons. First, he had been successful on television as Simon Templar in The Saint, which was itself one of the raft of television offerings appearing in the wake of Connery’s Bond films. Audiences were thus used to him in a dashing spy/detective role. Second, he retained the aged Bond look, where Lazenby was entirely too young. An interesting side note: Moore was actually older than Connery, though Connery aged less gracefully.
Roger Moore played a totally unruffled Bond. The number of times his hair was mussed can be counted on one hand. James Bond may be the most confident character in cinema, but there is a difference between not showing fear and failing to emote at all. Moore’s Bond would rarely emote, and even when he did it seemed as though the character was uncomfortable with any emotion besides cocksure sarcasm.
Metaphorically, however, it made sense. America in the seventies had learned to mask itself. On the surface, a mainstream return to normalcy began. Beneath, drugs and sex still pervaded, the dark underbelly of the glitzy decade. The seventies were the only decade of the twentieth century when drugs and sex had few, if any, physical consequences, due to the lack of major vice-related epidemics (like HIV/AIDS), and the widespread existence of birth control. Still, vice was reserved for certain times and places. There would never be another Woodstock, but Studio 54 in New York City opened its doors and welcomed the sensuality of the seventies. Much like the Nixon administration, things looked under control from the outside, but dark troubles were brewing behind closed doors.
This divide between the outer and the inner meant it was no problem for Bond to not be human anymore. Thus he carried on, saving the world and not caring a bit. This turned 1974's The Man with the Golden Gun into a dark reflection of how America had taken these contradictions and surface illusions to an extreme. Bond appears here stripped down to almost predatory animality, moving from fight to fight and sex to sex; defeating the mastermind is entirely superficial to the movement of the film. Expressing only enough humanity to get the job done, he takes care of business, hurrying to his next assignation with little emotion beyond disdain for those he meets. The Man with the Golden Gun was a silly film, disliked by critics, who called for an end to the Bond franchise; it seemed nine films was enough.
Moral Equivalency
Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, and with his absence some of the final vestiges of the sixties were swept away. It is not hard to see the decade from the death of Kennedy to the resignation of Nixon as a long slide into the cultural turn of the seventies. As America tried to make sense of what had happened, the Bond producers took a bit of a break as well.
In 1975, the last American troops pulled out of Vietnam, and the Helsinki Accords outlined the policy of détente between East and West. American and Soviet astronauts linked Apollo 18 and Soyuz 19 in orbit and exchanged friendly greetings. By 1977, President Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers and smallpox was eradicated. Life had improved dramatically, and Hollywood’s public views on the Soviet Union changed markedly. Gone were the evil Russians bent on world domination. In were the Russians trying to save the world along with everyone else. In came 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me and Major Anya Amasova of the KGB, paired with Bond to investigate Karl Stromberg, a crazed shipping magnate with designs on exterminating mankind (in a provoked nuclear exchange brought on by three stolen nuclear missile submarines—one each from Britain, the US, and the USSR) and building a new civilization in an undersea city.
It had become vogue in Hollywood to try and draw parallels between East and West. This can be traced all the way back to the protests of the late 1960s and the communal ideas expressed by those protesters. Dr. Strangelove, released in 1964, presented an East and West equally incompetent and out of touch with their citizenry. And moral equivalency--the idea that the systems of the East and the West are equal in that they are both morally corrupt power sinks that attract only villains to their offices, was born. The people of each nation, Hollywood theorized, were the same. Only cloudy ideologies separated them. This was not an idea that got much traction through the Vietnam era (though as far back as From Russia with Love, the only truly bad Russians were renegades out to sow distrust among the great powers) but as Vietnam wound down and the cultural turn took hold, moral equivalency found its moment to bloom.
The Spy Who Loved Me was the most direct statement of moral equivalency in the Bond franchise to that point. Amasova dutifully spits out the occasional piece of Party rhetoric; when mastermind Stromberg’s supertanker is being discussed, she points out that Russians operate a bigger one. At the last, however, her interests lie with humanity at large, not the tenets of any one government. And she is not the only intergovernmental cooperator Bond encounters. Her superiors interact directly with Bond’s as equals, and in the climactic battle of the film Bond leads the combined submarine crews of the three nations in an assault to retake the villain’s command center.
Not since Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had Bond met a woman who could keep up with him. Amasova was still saddled with the frat-boy jokes of the Bond franchise (her KGB codename is Agent XXX), but she still partners with him to save the world. She does tumble into bed with Bond at the end, but not before threatening to kill him.
Either way, critics welcomed The Spy Who Loved Me. They found it essentially formulaic, but well-filmed and choreographed. Critic Christopher Porterfield wrote humorously of Bond films: “They’re attacked, dismissed, put out of mind, but keep coming back and back and back.”
Bond did continue coming back, next in 1979's Moonraker. Critics praised Moonraker more for delivering exactly what they expected than for any new and marvelous revelations concerning the character or the formula. The villainous Drax has a goal essentially the same as Stromberg’s from the previous film: exterminate humanity and repopulate the Earth from a handpicked stock of “perfect” people. The big conceit in Moonraker is that Drax is operating from, and keeps his Breeders on, a space station. That this could somehow be built, manned, supplied, and maintained without alerting any Earthbound observer is even more ridiculous than Blofeld’s volcano base from You Only Live Twice, and has been parodied just as thoroughly, but given the state of cinema in 1979 the science-fiction angle could come as no surprise to any viewer.
Moore’s Bond films had been up against science-fiction and fantasy since Live and Let Die was released in the same year as Superman. The Spy Who Loved Me was released the same year as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 1979 saw Moonraker as well as The Black Hole, Alien, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Science-fiction was on people’s minds, and so the Bond schedule was jimmied to move Moonraker’s production up.
Terror
The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker introduced a slightly different angle for the mastermind. Rather than simply subjugate humanity with financial, pharmaceutical, or nuclear threats, Stromberg and Drax seek to exterminate all human life on Earth, ruling over a handpicked colony that will grow into a new race.
Moonraker carried this idea further, however, introducing a new facet to Bond that was already on people’s minds: terrorism. Hugo Drax plans to exterminate humanity by ringing the Earth with a series of orbital canisters of nerve gas, and then dropping them onto the unsuspecting globe. The gas containers had no pilots–they were to operate by remote. Every other Bond villain had used human crews to assist his villainy. None had ever used such a sterile approach to the dealing of death.
That lack of a human element was a major factor in the fear of terrorism in 1970s America. The Olympics had been attacked in 1972, but by whom? Hostages in Iran in 1979 had been taken prisoner, but by whom? No names or faces were known, only that Americans were in peril because of faceless enemies in foreign places. Planes and buildings were destroyed by unknown assailants. Enemies could be anywhere. Given this shadowy threat to civilization, it became more important than ever (at least in the American mainstream) to keep order among the great powers of the world.
1981's For Your Eyes Only made it clear that Bond would be moving in different directions once this film was over. The end of the film finds Bond standing atop a mountain cliff, with Russia’s General Gogol. Bond is holding a device the General wants (and has contracted to buy): the ATAC, a controller for British submarine-carried nuclear missiles. Knowing he cannot get off the mountain without risking it falling into the hands of the Russians, Bond opts simply to destroy it by throwing it off the cliff. Gogol, rather than having Bond shot for his impudence, simply laughs and gets back in his helicopter. The lesson is clear: Russia and the U.S. are equal. The ATAC missile controller (a surrogate here for nuclear weapons in general) threatened to make them unequal, but with its (or their, meaning nuclear weapons) destruction, everyone can be equal again—even the Russians know this. Global conflict going forward will not be between superpowers, but between the balanced global order of superpowers and shadowy actors who seek to destabilize it.
However, this created a deep cognitive dissonance in American culture. On one hand, a swath of popular entertainment preached the gospel of moral equivalency between East and West. On the other hand lay political pronouncements of the Soviet Union as an evil empire, with the existential dread of nuclear annihilation threaded beneath everything. This hollowed out the glam and glitter of the seventies, turning popular culture into an ever-shallower illusion.
Moore’s embodiment of this American cultural illusion (surface nonchalance and control over fear of sudden death) was painted directly on his face in 1983's Octopussy. President Reagan’s anti-communist saber rattling was well known, and Octopussy played right to it, matching Bond against a Russian general who wants to start World War III by sneaking a nuclear warhead into East Berlin and leveling the city. In keeping with the growing theme of superpower balance, the general is a maverick who is acting with no authorization from Moscow. “Octopussy is one of the most inventive and satisfyingly preposterous of all the Bond movies,” wrote David Denby. Most critics agreed.
However, Bond defuses the nuclear bomb at the film’s climax while dressed and painted as a circus clown. The image is impossible to ignore. All the superpower-balancing in the world was ultimately so much cultural greasepaint, as the world could simply end in nuclear Armageddon at any moment. What were the governments of the world (all these clowns?) even doing anymore? What did all the spying and shooting and exotic location-filming matter?
Roger Moore: America by Proxy
Octopussy turned Moore into a reflection of the superfluousness of meaning in the eighties. Any analytical intent (however illusory) left over from the seventies was gone. Everything was just an endless circus, and beneath the glossy surface there was little substance. With the alternatives too terrible to contemplate, style came to mean everything in the “me” decade:
When [Bond] was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger, Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model.
–Richard Corliss, “The Bond Wagon Crawls Along,” Time, 27 June 1983: 71.
In the sense that models advertise products, Moore was certainly a model, as were his films. The Moore films introduced Bond audiences to product placement, something the modern audience knows well. Moonraker features a fight scene that moves from a cable car to an ambulance, all the while passing billboard after billboard for 7-Up soda. A pack of Marlboros is seen in a drawer, and Bond prominently wears a Seiko watch.
Later films would find Bond openly displaying his Omega watch or his Ericksson cellular phone, and he would be sure to read the labels of his vodka bottles in clear view of the camera. Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Ford, AMC, Lotus, and BMW (to say nothing of the Walther firearms company) have all had their moments onscreen with Bond.
In 1985's A View to a Kill, Bond uses a lockpick kit with the Sharper Image logo printed on it (Q must have taken the day off). Sony has one of their Walkman personal tape players prominently displayed. In and around the action, Bond had become a pitchman.
A View to a Kill also took the line of strong female characters to a new level, introducing a woman who could best him physically. May Day, played by Grace Jones, was a little bit scary and a little bit sexy all at once, the right-hand woman of Max Zorin, the mastermind intent on destroying Silicon Valley to facilitate his cornering the market on microchips. May Day’s physical prowess, however, was undercut by Moore’s age (57), which by 1985 was clearly showing. It is no surprise she can outfight him. In one of the fight scenes, Bond drops the shotgun he had been wielding, and in scrambling after it looks pathetic–a nearly 60-year-old man sliding around on a hardwood floor in slick-soled shoes.
A View to a Kill also seems to throw back to the Bond girl juxtapositions of Diamonds are Forever, feeling the need to highlight May Day’s strength by including a sex-puppet Bond girl for comparison. Tanya Roberts as Stacey Sutton was a classic damsel in distress, who was used to provide exposition on Zorin’s plan, but whose other dialogue consists mainly of “Look out!” or “Help!” said many many times. Paired in a film with Grace Jones, Roberts was reduced to the level of sex object; not allowed to really help Bond, the best she can do is be kidnapped or menaced at just the right moment so Bond can rescue her and advance the plot.
Speaking of advancing the plot, A View to a Kill was Moore’s last outing as 007.