News from Nowhere: The Land of Bondage
This new Bond is, like today’s Britain, a strange mixture of old-fashioned and outmoded values and an ever-pressing awareness of its own incongruity, its placelessness, in the modern world.
Described by a reviewer in The Guardian newspaper as “the standard-bearer of British soft power”, the UK superspy James Bond is back at last on cinema screens, the release of his latest outing having been delayed 18 months by the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. No Time to Die is the 25th film in the 007 franchise which began some 59 years ago with the Caribbean adventure Dr. No, starring the iconic Sean Connery, who died a year ago at the age of 90. The new movie takes Bond back to Jamaica in his relentless struggle against the insidious international conspiracies of ruthless plutocrats (though ones rather less unpleasant than those revealed by the recent publication of the Pandora Papers); but, with a script boasting enhancements from the comic genius of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, it self-consciously strives to confront and overcome some of its franchise’s more chauvinistic history.
The appearance in our cinemas of this new James Bond film is an important moment in the industrialized world’s battle against COVID-19 (though it may be of rather less interest in many developing nations). It shows that big Hollywood money is now sufficiently convinced that audiences feel confident enough in the efficacy of their vaccinations to pack the movie theatres to capacity once again. In the UK at least, the early signs have been good, with advance ticket sales rivalling those for Marvel’s last Avengers blockbuster. The film took £5 million at the British box office on the last day of September, its opening day, a 13% increase on the previous Bond movie’s first-day takings in 2015, and £8.4 million on its first Saturday, reportedly the franchise’s best-ever day at the UK box office.
There’s a sense in which the British simply assume that everyone in the world is familiar with the suave secret agent James Bond, and is a little bit in love with him; and that everyone also believes that all British people are like him: clever, stylish, elegant and cool under pressure. One of the film’s stars, Léa Seydoux, joked (quite straight-faced) during a recent UK talk show appearance promoting the film that no one in her native France had ever heard of James Bond. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, until both the host and the studio audience realized she was teasing them. But that “moment’s silence” revealed something very significant about British society’s relationship with 007. What Seydoux’s comment both mocked and exposed was the fact that so many British people think of Bond as the best of their nation, an ambassador to the rest of the world, a younger version of Queen Elizabeth II or David Attenborough, say, or the UK’s Pelé or Nelson Mandela. When she suggested that the Bond phenomenon lacked global reach in its soft power – the power of cultural influence on the world stage – she was touching an unexpectedly raw nerve.
That’s, first of all, perhaps because the soft power of its cultural exports (from 007 to the BBC) is pretty much the extent of British power in the contemporary world. But it may well also be because James Bond as an icon, ambassador and role model of the spirit of Great Britishness is hardly someone of whom the country can be unequivocally and justifiably proud. Perhaps Seydoux’s remark betrayed fragility in that nation’s own regard for its greatest modern hero. James Bond, after all, represents the dying strains of a myth of British imperial supremacy; he is (or at least he has been) a murderous chauvinist, a racist and a xenophobe, jingoistic to the core. He embodies the paradox of Britishness, not the best of British so much as a canny (and sometimes nasty) parody of Britishness.
Way back in 1962, when his big-screen adventures began, Sean Connery’s original portrayal of the immortal spy hardly epitomised the noble values of British fair play. He was, in short, no boy scout. He was the opposite of, or the unpleasant truth behind, the archetypal English gentleman.
In his first film, Dr. No, Connery shoots dead a treacherous but unarmed geologist after having interrogated him (with two shots, just to make sure). The next year, in From Russia with Love, he hits a woman he is questioning. At the start of 1971’s Diamonds are Forever (in a moment often cut from modern broadcast screenings of the film), he disturbs a young woman sunbathing and forces her to answer his questions by ripping off her bikini top and starting to strangle her with it: “Speak up, darling,” he says, “I can’t hear you.”
In 1965’s Thunderball, while dancing at a nightclub with a female enemy agent, he spots a gun pointing in his direction from behind a curtain behind the band, and gracefully spins his dance-partner around without breaking the rhythm of his steps, so that she gets shot rather than him; he then quietly puts a finger over the bullet-hole in her back before depositing her in a chair, while smiling charmingly at some other party-goers: “She’s just dead.” The man is clearly a psychopath; and John Barry’s music (played by the band in the background) became known, appropriately enough, as ‘Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’. This was reputedly the nickname that Japanese fans gave to Mr. Bond himself.
Two years later, Roald Dahl’s orientally stereotyping script for You Only Live Twice, the majority of which is set in Japan, would return the jibe against the people of that archipelago. It manages to be horribly racist even while it is very obviously trying not to be so. The scene in which Connery is (entirely unconvincingly) transformed by a combination of hairpieces and lemon juice into a Japanese man is particularly embarrassing to modern audiences. Indeed, it makes the so-called ‘yellowfacing’ five years earlier of Jewish-Canadian actor Joseph Wiseman to play the eponymous, half-Chinese Dr. No (or for that matter Louis Jourdan’s casting as an Afghan prince in 1983) seems almost innocent by comparison. This kind of production practice recalls the appalling and overt racism of Hollywood’s first epic, 1915’s The Birth of a Nation (replete with its use of ‘blackface’ make-up and its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan).
In this context, we also mustn’t forget the Bond series’ repeated fondness for supervillains with generic Eastern European accents but played by British and American actors: from Donald Pleasance in 1967, through Steven Berkoff in 1983 and Robert Carlyle in 1999, to Rami Malek in 2021. However, the disconcerting contrivance whereby the white English actor Toby Stephens got to play a North Korean Colonel in 2002’s Die Another Day is probably better left unmentioned.
Near the start of Thunderball, Connery’s Bond, having failed in his attempts to force his attentions upon a particular young woman, eventually blackmails her into sleeping with him. There’s a scene in 1964’s Goldfinger in which Sean Connery’s Bond physically wrestles with a female opponent while attempting to seduce her; she eventually submits to his forceful advances and afterwards, rather than calling him out for the rapist he so obviously is, finds that his violent charms have persuaded her round to his side. (We may observe that, the same year, Connery played a man who tries to rape his new wife into submission in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie.) This attitude was reflected in the mentality of the gangster boss in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service who offers Bond a million pounds to marry his daughter: “What she needs is a man to dominate her. A man to make love to her enough to make her love him.”
Way back in 1962, Dr. No described Bond as “a stupid policeman”. In a country in which a police officer was (on the day of the new Bond movie’s release) sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of a young woman he had abducted from a London street (and in which another officer was charged with rape just a few days later), any celebration of the heroism of such a brutal character as Connery's Bond might at this time seem particularly appalling. On 3 October, the British Prime Minister declared that his government would “stop at nothing to make sure that we get more rapists behind bars”; but there are those who might suggest that a better strategy might be to work to prevent rape in the first place. In the struggle to reinvent a culture of casual misogyny, UK society might therefore need to question – not to cancel but to recontextualize and reassess – some of the figures, both fictional and historical, whom we call our heroes; and we may need to put James Bond at the top of that list.
So much then, for Sean Connery’s James Bond. But, when Roger Moore took over as 007 in 1973, things didn’t get much better. When he first meets CIA agent Rosie Carver (a young African-American woman) in his first Bond movie, Live and Let Die, he stubs her hand with a lit cigar; later, immediately after they have had sex, he pulls a gun on her and reveals he’s aware she’s been working for the film’s villains. She says she believes he surely couldn’t shoot her after what they’ve just done; he responds that he “certainly wouldn’t have killed” her before it. She then runs off and gets shot. Ten years later, in Octopussy (yet another film in which Bond seduces a female antagonist to convert her to his cause), Moore hands an Indian colleague a wad of cash with the words that the money should keep him “in curry for a few weeks”. The patrician, paternalistic, imperialist chauvinist is rarely far beneath the international man of mystery’s veneer of cosmopolitan charm.
Of course, as the franchise has aged, or even matured, it has inevitably become aware of, and responded to, the problematic nature of these outdated ideologies. When Pierce Brosnan took on the role in 1995, he was paired with a new female boss (played with glorious authority by the brilliant Judi Dench) who famously described him as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” and “a relic of the Cold War”. When Daniel Craig became Bond in 2006, the producers included a scene in which he emerges from the sea in his tight trunks; in doing this, they were making a clear attempt to invert the sexist imagery of the classic shot of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in her bikini in 1962 (a shot which had been revisited by Halle Berry exactly 40 years later). The female form was no longer to be the exclusive object of the camera’s prurient gaze.
The latest incarnation of 007 is one very clearly influenced by the series’ influential producer, Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of its original producer Albert Broccoli, who founded the franchise in 1962. What she started with Pierce Brosnan’s films (most notably through the introduction of Judi Dench) she has developed and nurtured with Daniel Craig’s. Craig’s Bond (now in his fifth and final film) is as war-weary as his own weather-beaten face; a figure more soulful, more vulnerable and more human than his predecessors, yet one also prone to more explicit and shocking acts of violence; a man of violence certainly then, but one broken by his world of violence and loss.
This new Bond is, like today’s Britain, a strange mixture of old-fashioned and outmoded values and an ever-pressing awareness of its own incongruity, its placelessness, in the modern world. This zealous patriot remains a rootless wanderer; this saviour of the world a ruthless killer; this self-styled lover of women also their nemesis; a crusader for global justice and an irredeemable bigot; a warrior on whose greatest days the sun has long since set; a study in the sad ironies of faded glory. And yet don’t all those contradictory characteristics come together to create something which seems in many ways quite terribly, quintessentially British?
Because of this, and despite all this, British audiences can still raise a cheer when, at the end of the opening sequence of 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore’s Bond skis off the side of a mountain and, as his tiny form falls into the deep ravine below, dwarfed by the majestic peaks of the Austrian Alps around him, bereft of all hope of salvation, his backpack opens up into a parachute – and not just any old parachute, but a parachute resplendent with the image of Britain’s union flag spread across it like an advert for the last hours of empire. This is a cheer not of nationalism but of nostalgia perhaps, a cheer not of victory, but for the greatest of Great British virtues, a dogged display of wit, defiance and panache somehow uncowed in retreat and defeat, the valiant cry of a small, inconsequential nation in its final, dying fall.