What To Do About Bond?
“They turned him into a wimp!”
It’s an observation I’ve heard spoken about No Time To Die and its four predecessors as if there was anything else left to do with James Bond but humanize him. By adding a sense of emotional continuity to the character from movie to movie, we don’t just check in with him when the movie starts and check out after it's over. He becomes someone familiar, whose characteristics we recognize on subsequent chapters in a long journey. Emotions are what humanize us.
This kind of internal character development was teased little by little throughout the series. George Lazenby’s one-time appearance as Bond in the underrated On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), a Bond movie that’s both campy and grounded, showed us the agent as a person who could be emotional and vulnerable. He secretly wanted to be robbed of his swinging bachelorhood. Of course, his human link to a less insulated life was taken away in the movie’s downbeat finale.
The even more underrated License To Kill (1989) saw Timothy Dalton’s violent, deeply insulated Bond focused only on revenge against a Mexican drug lord for the torture and near-murder of his CIA friend, Felix Leiter and the murder of Leiter’s wife. But something much more interesting and unusual than vengeance happens in this R-Rated entry. Bond leaves MI6 and goes rogue, befriending the villain and poisoning his operation from the inside. He’s like Iago, planting the seeds of jealousy and distrust in a powerful and influential peer. Meanwhile, the shotgun-toting, feminist CIA pilot who saves his life comes to hate Bond for having to play second fiddle to this philanderer and his misogynist patronizing. Leading up to a fantastic finale involving tanker trucks, stinger missiles and light aircraft in the Mexican desert, we get a pretty toxic incarnation of the character, pulling everyone around him down into the morass of his rotten disposition.
Nasty, dark License To Kill and the abyss of the character at his most possessed and manipulative, just before it’s all remedied by a sequence that matches other 80’s action blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Road Warrior in its inventive use of trucks
It’s a sort of a hard pivot into a changing landscape, before director Martin Campbell would enlist a game Pierce Brosnan to demonstrate awareness of and comment on the absurdity of Bond in the 90’s in Goldeneye (1995) and then again in a new century with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale (2006). I would argue the Brosnan Bonds are some of the campiest there are. But in both Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough (1999), the threats to world peace are the result of disastrous choices made by the British Government and the shameful way it conducts itself. In tackling the problem of a disgruntled former agent whose parents were betrayed by the British Government after the Second World War in the former and then a resentful oil heiress whose father was instructed by M not to pay the ransom for her kidnapping by an anarchist terrorist in the latter, the corruption of Bond’s superiors is what renders his stoicism and film-to-film amnesia pointless.
Brosnan’s 007 was both a creature of his time and out of it, who took his government’s corruption and bad judgements in stride like a good chap
Brosnan’s Bond discovers the corruption of his superiors and in this, their frail humanity. But even considering how his government’s repeated betrayal would wear on his psyche, the Brosnan Bonds stop short of doing anything with his static nature in the wake of this discovery. They’re a sort of last hurrah for the traditional incarnation of the character. But they set up the circumstances for the chrysalis 007 enters before Daniel Craig’s tenure, from which he would emerge as a character armed (or cursed) with a cumulative memory that serves to inform both his worldview and his actions.
It’s at that point - well into the digital age - that evil forces out in the real world had begun to become invisible. And witnessing the metamorphosis of that evil, Craig’s Bond learns he has an insufficiently developed mechanism for dealing with it. So his victories cannot and will not fix the world. They will only see him freed as an individual. Freed of what, exactly? Of what David Mamet in his teaching text, Bambi Vs. Godzilla calls, “....the constant necessity of conscious service to the repressive mechanism.”
I have a soft spot for the James Bond series. They’re the one franchise that I cut a little slack, for two reasons. The first is personal. When Goldeneye was released in 1995, I saw it numerous times. I played the Nintendo 64 game all day and all night. TBS would broadcast all the previous Bond films on TV as a promotion for the new ones. I watched them all, with the commercial interruptions, starting with the Connery ones. Then I watched other movies I wouldn’t have watched otherwise because of them: Dr. Strangelove for understanding the politics of the era. Blow-Up for getting a sense of its flavor. Marnie, and then other Hitchcocks because of Connery. Billy Liar and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to see the other side of England. Monty Python to learn what it found funny. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold because it was spy-related. I must sound like one more millennial blogger screaming about “my childhood!” but I would attribute my lifelong fascination and curiosity about film to Bond. It was the touchstone. They were “old movies” that I could understand.
The second reason for my bias has to do with this particularly unique franchise. It should be noted that the Bond franchise is in uncharted cinematic waters. There hasn’t been a specific character with this kind of longevity (Sherlock Holmes has long since been unmoored). These movies have seen this character entrenched in the same struggles for too long while we, the viewers, get to vicariously enjoy his stoicism while undergoing no pain. The returning screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, having brought on Fleabag helmer Phoebe Waller-Bridge at Craig’s behest, have finally set out to address the problem of Bond’s monotony. So we must begin to feel his pain in the only way that movies know how - by starting to care about who he is.
He’s a mess. The perils of his job and what it puts him through have taken their toll, making him bitter and cynical. He no longer believes in good guys and bad guys. His own government is up to its neck in corruption. The Daniel Craig Bond entries, bit by bit, had the nerve to slowly make the case that it’s actually no fun being 007. His life sucks. His job is relentlessly wearing him down physically, emotionally and spiritually. There’s no room for him to be happy. The people he cares most about keep dying. He can’t trust anyone.
(left) Casino Royale (2006), (right) No Time To Die (2021); the job gets to you
But why should a killing machine employed by a government need to be happy? He’s no more than an instrument of an imperialist power conditioned to be a gun barrel. Happy? The nerve, right? After all, he has a sacred charge, which is greater than such paltry concerns as personal contentment.
Because - the Craig Bond entries tell us - who we are and how we feel matters. A character without feelings and desires is boring. The filmmakers have concluded that we no longer live in an age where we aspire not to feel. Otherwise, what is the point of fighting for the world? This is a rather surprising achievement of making a truly Politically Correct Bond series. I don’t mean Poltically Correct as in people are black or gay or women in high ranking positions or whatever. Those are ultimately shallow manifestations of modernity. The shame of their glaring absence up until recently is already quite apparent. I also don’t mean as in total condemnation of the series' more sexist and colonialist reflexes, which despite some moments of marvelous bad taste, were not the most damaging issue with the Bond movies in my opinion.
I think one reason for this is because those reflexes are so very much out in the open. To be honest, I find them laughable and innocuous as a result. Here’s a great example:
There’s a moment in The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), where Bond (Roger Moore in his sophomore outing) is in Thailand being pursued by boat through a rural area. He’s having trouble with the boat. A kid jumps in the boat and tries to sell him a trinket. The bizarrely dubbed kid goes, “For you Mister...20 Baht!” Bond goes, “I'll give you 20,000 Baht if you can make this thing go any faster.” Residing in a poor community of shacks built above the river on wooden platforms, the boy knows exactly what to do. This is his world. He flips a switch and smiles in anticipation for his reward. And then Bond just pushes him in the water and speeds away shouting, “I’m afraid I’ll have to owe you!” Despite the obnoxious colonialist nature of the attempt at humor in that moment, I always laugh at it. It has an honesty about British smugness abroad that’s very down-to-earth for me.
Roger Moore pitched the character from further behind the fourth wall than Sean Connery, as a guy who finds all of this business just wacky, and is a bit wacky himself.
What I mean by Politically Correct is the idea of a Bond liberated from his cultural autism. Bond as a dynamic character. The arrival of Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel in 1956 and of the first Bond feature in 1962 was sort of a reaction formation. He was used by Hollywood as a kind of propaganda tool for soothing the psyche of a worrisome populace (the way superhero movies are used now). James Bond's entrance into pop culture six decades ago was the product of a Western society that was overloaded by the events of the previous forty years, reimagining itself (though Bond) as emotionally uninvolved. His saving of the world was merely a job, unrelated to who Bond was himself. He could have sex but not love (except with the disasterous consequences in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and later, Casino Royale). His outings were ostensibly kinky and inconsequential.
His detachment from the gravity of a given situation served the (rather pathetic) needs of the culture at that time. He reassured the British about their Empire. Reassured worried men of their dominance over women and nature. Reassured the world-weary that the good guys were on top of things. This ushered in a whole new trope that would dominate action movies and the computer and video games they would inspire: the affectless hero. A killing machine not only licensed but lauded for his conscienceless state. He was John F. Kennedy’s favorite role model; a committed but saucy and vice-addled soldier for peace, who trotted the globe treating women like sex objects, despoiling the landscape and glamorizing self-destructive personal habits.
George Lazenby (who is an absolute delight on Twitter) in the underrated On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), was one of the most frivolous and emotionally vulnerable of all Bonds.
Such figures still abound in movies. As a matter of fact, despite the fresh angles from which studios keep approaching them, they’re boring as well. They thankfully may not be sexist pigs but their hyper-professionalism inspires no curiosity about them or the worlds in which they’re placed: Ethan Hunt, John Wick, Jason Bourne, Denzel’s “Equalizer,” the heroes of Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan. The absence of anything glamorous or frivolous about these glum, monosyllabic murder machines speaks of an ascendance of the accountant/Ivy League approach to writing movies that at some point decided that lean, quiet professionalism somehow was cooler and more cinematic than the ambiance of literature.
Attached to a movie franchise about to enter its sixth decade (half the lifespan of film history itself), the idea of 007 as this type of individual no longer feels like something worthy of clinging to. So he has to be this way. A fully developed adult for 21st century mores, who accepts his fate because he his life kind of stinks, despite the job he has to do. Understanding the nature of these unmet emotional needs is what enables him to make such necessary sacrifices.
It’s hard to imagine a development like this taking place within Sean Connery’s iconic opening of this role. There was a coldness and detachment to that Bond that fit Ian Fleming’s literary imagining of the character. Connery’s ability to retain this detachment while simultaneously working in a sense of minimally involved charm and kidding the absurd nature of the material - a moment which I venture begins in Goldfinger (1964) when he voices his incredulity to Q about the ejector seat in the Aston Martin - is a pretty impressive balancing act. It’s a narrow zone for a character who’s in almost every scene to exist in, and so much is done with it that gets your full attention. In fact, I’d go as far to say I think Connery-as-Bond is one of the great book-to-film casting decisions made in movies. Right up there with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightley in Breakfast At Tiffany’s and Fred Ward as Charles Willeford’s Detective Hoke Mosley in Miami Blues. But on the inside, Connery’s Bond is as much a furnishing of the period as the decor and the gadgets. Switch the dispositions of the two Bonds around - Connery’s for Craig’s and vice-versa - and it would have been a disaster. Like Craig, Connery’s 007 was a rendering suitable for the character at that time.
the prototype for movies in the postmodern practice of honoring source material by kidding it - my take, anyways
Of course, the implications of it are ghastly: a government agent, prepared to kill upon order, who feels nothing, and even goes as far to joke about his victims deaths while doing so. But perhaps even more ghastly are 21st century contract killers like Craig’s Bond, who can neatly compartmentalize (or at least attempt to before the encroachment of evil forces is beyond his control) those tasks into a balanced and rich life that includes family and leisure. Can one in this field be too well-adjusted?
I’m no pollyanna. We humans love to kill. We enjoy, both as fantasies and as histories, stories of murder. If the violence can be construed as Just, our perverse entertainment by it is less despicable. Our enshrinement of some of our toughest ancestors and their projections on screen enable us to co-opt what we, their descendants and fans, see as...well....their license to kill. But movies don’t justify carnage, only our enjoyment in contemplating it. That’s what makes the idea of a life-size human Bond interesting.
If killing for his country is not part of a lifestyle he approves of because of the emotional and spiritual wreckage left in its wake, where does this leave us? Could this metamorphosis be understood in relation to a world where spies and their deadly craft have been replaced by cyber warfare and surveillance? After all, even M in No Time To Die admits: “We used to be able to get into a room with the enemy. We could look him in the eye. And now the enemy is just floating in the ether. We don’t even know what they’re after.”
Where the previous Bond villains were simply well-equipped mercenaries, it’s significant that this outing features the only villain in the Craig series with an actual plot for world destruction. Before this, we got a benefactor for international terrorists, a false environmentalist assuming control of the Bolivian water supply, and two different mercenaries playing out grudges against Bond and/or MI6. Evil, sure, but they were no more than inventive and well-funded scumbags. The Bond villains in these films are even more world-weary than Bond. Why dominate the world? Much better to carve out a criminal niche of one’s own and do one’s thing therein. So Safin is another in a long line of movie villains who would destroy the world to save it, implying that it’s a world he at least thinks is worth going to the trouble. He’s right when he tells Bond, “Your skills die with your body.” He’s wrong in only seeing the agent as a walking set of skills.
At some point in evil plots, dominating the world became destroying the world to save it from itself. In today’s world, quirky, individual villainy has lost a lot of ground
It’s a time when traditional notions of masculinity have been hijacked by far-right ideologies and redefined as a practice of aggression divorced from virtue - what the conservative writer David French in an article for The Atlantic in December of last year calls, “The Cult Of Toughness.” So the idea of cutting 007 down to size is a bold gambit. Up to a point. I say up to a point because it’s hard to imagine any positive social consequences as a result of this development. It’s nervy to the degree that the closed world of internationally released tentpole productions would allow it to be.
What I think is interesting here though is the way that transformation redeems some elements of the weaker installments of this five-film stretch of the Bond series; the horrendous direction of Quantum of Solace and the moments in Spectre that feel like they were written by an eight year-old. Each film charts the learning of a lesson in the evolution of this individual into someone that decides he actually wants love and companionship, forgives himself for his mistakes, is cautious about opening up to the wrong person, feels worthy and valued by his superiors, all without losing a shred of motivation to do the job of protecting civilization from evildoers. He goes from being a thing boys would want to be to something any sane person would aim for.
This Bond’s commitment in the face of the mission is based on the fact that he’s basically a guy who’d rather not be doing this for a living anymore. He’s just trying to get to that point where he doesn’t have to. He’s one more 21st century dude who hates his job because it’s monopolizing his life and wrecking his prospects for finding happiness, like so many of us. If people responded especially well to this incarnation of the character, it may be because this disposition is precisely what makes him strongly and tragically relatable.
He is thus able to peel away the surface layers of himself and reach what Plato in his Symposium called, “The Agalma.” The treasured and mysterious thing inside, which triggers love and makes one worthy. In that sense, what we get in these five movies is not action but a slow character drama that might be action manqué. It sees the burden of the hero’s repression is lifted, only to be replaced by finality.
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