Reflecting on James Bond

Taking James Bond down a peg has always offered a sort of thrill. It’s different but no less effective than, say, a dangerous chase on skis down a mountain or a run through the jungle. These moments, which have come and gone to varying levels of permanence in the franchise’s history, are of note because they suspend the idea, if ever so briefly, that James Bond is an invincible superhero.

In these scenarios, James Bond is a man with an ego, a misogynist, someone whose job it is to commit violence, and a human embodiment of British imperialism and white heteromasculinity. The most striking of these examples is in Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye (1995), where Pierce Brosnan’s Bond has traded the naiveté of a newbie for the vanity of an experienced, insufferably pompous pro. His new boss, M (Judi Dench), who’d been played by a man for the previous 33 years, sets him straight. In her chair, drinking the same hard liquor Bond deigns to imbibe, she leans back, coolly reading him for filth: “…I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms, though wasted on me, obviously appealed to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you.” Brosnan’s bland handsomeness cannot hide his attempt to recover from that remark, as he sits back, watching M sip her tumbler.

In recent years, the franchise has, if not explicitly course-corrected from M’s comments, at least rewritten the character and the dramaturgy of the films to address them. Sparked by Joanna Lumley’s racist assertion that Idris Elba shouldn’t play James Bond, The Guardian’s Caspar Salmon argues that no one should play him. According to Salmon, James Bond is a fundamentally toxic character, an “emotional [nihilist]” and “grotesque.” It’s curious to me that this argument should be made in spite of what the last decade of Bond films have done, and it reads to me as a rather ahistorical, limiting argument. It denies both the film series’ and creator Ian Fleming’s character’s complex relationship with the multiple factors which he is said to represent: national identity, masculinity, political agent, hero.

Because, since the “reboot” of Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale, which introduced Daniel Craig as 007, the entire function of this cycle has been to—explicitly or implicitly, textually or subtextually—have the character reconcile with the criticisms that have long been aimed at him. James Bond walks the ruins and through the ghosts of the places which the British Empire has laid its wrath in Spectre, and its entire history and ideological strategy is scrutinized in Skyfall. The “exotic” locales that have made the films famous are wastelands; the brutalist architecture of the MI6 building is blown to rubble, like, three times. Bond is fundamentally bad at his job, losing poker games and letting his anger get the best of him in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Skyfall and Spectre largely argue that a figure like Bond should not exist, given the rapid advancements in cyber terrorism and surveillance culture, evidenced by the dwindling number of field agents. He might as well be a man divided, not unlike Britain after Brexit.