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The National Interest
'Oh, James': 007 as International Man of History
by Jeremy Black
The Right won the battle of ideas in the late 20th-century, rendering Marxism so rapidly obsolete that states which had openly avowed their communism were happy to embrace the market and seek Western capital. But has the West also won the battle of images? This is an important question in an increasingly cosmopolitan political culture that takes its idioms, aspirations and views from visual sources, particularly television and film. Here there are two challenges: the destructive and sociopathic, or at least anti-social, character of much of the visual material produced within the West; and the decidedly mixed way in which a predominantly Western-dominated media is perceived elsewhere in the world.
This makes all the more fascinating the worldwide popularity of a film franchise celebrating the career of a white male British government agent--named James Bond--who combats and defeats evil challenges to the Western democratic and free-market order. The Bond films--and there are now twenty in the official series--are free of all sociopathic suggestions (unless one happens to share the views of militant feminism), and every one ends in a victory for the West. The series also pays homage to one of the oldest operating bilateral alliances in the world, that between the United States and Britain. The Bond films, and the Ian Fleming novels which were the source of the character and some of the plots, thus offer us an opportunity to see how perceptions of that "special" relationship have changed over the years--from both the British perspective (mostly in Fleming’s novels) and the American one (mostly in the films).
As such perceptions go, one might think that, through the thick and thin of it all, it was James Bond (and, by association, Britain) who saved America. As the seconds tick away toward the close of the films, Bond stops Dr. No from "toppling" a crucial American missile test (1962), prevents Goldfinger (and the Chinese) from making the Fort Knox gold reserves radioactive (1964), thwarts Largo’s attempt to blow up Miami (1965) and (in 1971) Bloefeld’s attempt to destroy Washington, dc (the villain rejects incinerating Kansas, for "the world might not notice"). Bond also foils Zorin’s plan for the devastation of Silicon Valley and with it, America’s high-technology sector (1985). Other megalomaniacs stopped by Bond, such as Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Drax in Moonraker (1979), would have destroyed America as part of a global cataclysm.
The truth, however, is that it was America that saved Bond. Launched into the world in Fleming’s 1953 novel, Casino Royale, Bond was a quintessentially British figure, and as such might have remained a character known only within the genre of spy fiction. But he was translated into a kind of Anglo-American hybrid for the film role, and it is the film rather than the literary Bond that is most familiar to millions around the world. The original intentions of the character’s creator are glimpsed at secondhand on the silver screen, and even then only fitfully so after the third film, Goldfinger, which appeared in 1964, the year of Fleming’s early death. After Fleming’s flame had gone out, the films more or less took on a life of their own. Let us then attend first to Fleming’s novels, afterwards to the films.
Fleming’s Cold War
Fleming’s Bond novels illustrate changing images of Britain, America and the world in the postwar era. The politics of Casino Royale, published in 1953, were located squarely in the Cold War; it was, after all, about an attempt to thwart Soviet influence in the French trade unions. That this plot line bore at least a glancing resemblance to reality is confirmed by the fact that, in 1947, "Wild Bill" Donovan, the former head of the OSS, had helped persuade the American government to fund opposition to Communist influence in these unions. In the novel, Bond’s attempt to out-gamble his Communist opponent is financed by Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, who loans him 32 million (old) francs, with which Bond subsequently defeats the villain in the casino.
Bond’s need for American money reflected the pre-eminent role of the United States in the defense of the West, as its arsenal and central bank. Leiter provides material assistance without difficulty and is happy to rely on Bond’s skill, suggesting a far smoother working of the Anglo-American intelligence alliance than was in fact the case. The two powers were cooperating in NATO and the UK-us Security Agreement covering signals espionage, and had fought together in Korea, but there were serious differences of opinion, particularly over the Middle East. Furthermore, American concern over the British spy system had risen greatly after the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. In 1952 (justifiable) distrust of Kim Philby, the Secret Services liaison officer in Washington, led the CIA to insist that he not return there.
Fleming did not press Anglo-American tensions in his novels, but he was aware of them. At times his plots can be seen as efforts to create an impression of the normality of British imperial rule and action, with Bond as the defender of empire. In Live and Let Die (1954), the sequel to Casino Royale, Fleming presented the United States as the threatened country. Bond remarks that New York "must be the fattest atomic-bomb target on the whole face of the world", and--revealing one of Fleming’s less than charming character traits--Black Power is seen as a tool of Soviet subversion. The sinister Mr. Big, who practices voodoo, has Bond seized in Harlem.
In Diamonds Are Forever (1956), Bond returns to the United States, appealing to British interest in a land of wealth and excitement, as well as illustrating America’s role as a model for consumer society. Fighting the Mafia provides Fleming with an opportunity to express yet another uncharitable view from his childhood, describing the mafiosi as "not Americans. Mostly a lot of Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meat-balls and squirting scent over themselves", a clear sign of then-contemporary British views on properly reserved masculinity.
In Dr. No (1958), Bond thwarts a Soviet-backed attempt to bring down American rockets; a sense of America under threat is also clear in Goldfinger (1959). The superintendent at Pennsylvania Station tells Goldfinger that travelers from Louisville report being sprayed from the air by the Soviets. If Bond saves the American gold reserves, the old world coming to the aid of the stronger new, he is also all that a post-Suez Britain can rely on. By this novel, Bond represented a shift from British brawn to British brains, resources to skill.
Anglo-American competition also echoed in the Bond short stories. In Fleming’s "Quantum of Solace" there is mention of rivalry on the Nassau-New York air route, and in "The Hildebrand Rarity", Milton Krest, a villainous American collector of rare species, treats Bond to an account of British inconsequence:
Nowadays, said Mr. Krest, there were only three powers--America, Russia and China. That was the big poker game and no other country had either the chips or the cards to come into it. Occasionally some pleasant little country . . . like England would be lent some money so that they could take a hand with the grown-ups. But that was just being polite like one sometimes had to be--to a chum in one’s club who’d gone broke.
Bond finds this argument naïve and recalls an aphorism about America lacking "a period of maturity", but Krest’s words reflect the growing perception of Britain as weak.
Bond’s dashing style could conceal the diminished British political and military presence in Cold War confrontations, but only barely. The British need to adapt to America was also an important, albeit subdued, theme in the politics of the Bond novels and the earlier films. In the person of the wife-beating Krest, who is in due course murdered, American wealth and power beget insensitivity and sadism, making for an unsettling account of what British weakness could lead to.
Thunderball (1961) represented a departure for Fleming with the introduction of SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion)--an evil, transnational network unconstrained by ideology. This shift can be seen as a surrender to fantasy occasioned, in part, by the decline of the British Empire and Fleming’s subsequent lack of certainty about, it seems, pretty much everything. Britain, however, is still presented as playing a major role in the world. "M" declares: "We’ve teamed up with the CIA to cover the world. Allen Dulles is putting every man he’s got on to it and so am I"--as if the two were equal. Bond is given CIA support in the Bahamas, providing an opportunity to probe the unsettled nature of the Anglo-American relationship. Bond fears he will be sent "a muscle-bound ex-college man with a crew-cut and a desire to show up the incompetence of the British . . . to gain credit with his chief." In fact, he again gets Leiter.
Bond is keen to borrow superior American weaponry, while an American nuclear submarine plays a role in helping thwart the villain. Its commander tells Bond, "These atomic weapons are just too damned dangerous. Why, any one of these little sandy cays around here could hold the whole of the United States to ransom--just with one of my missiles trained on Miami." This reflection not only pointed the way forward for a new genre of espionage/adventure novels, but it eerily anticipated the Cuban Missile Crisis. (In 1961, Kennedy had included Fleming’s From Russia, With Love in a list of his ten favorite books.)
You Only Live Twice (1964) reflected Fleming’s increasing melancholia about Britain, with the fictional Bond undoubtedly mirroring the author’s moods: Britain is in decline, the Americans are refusing to pass on information, in part because they now treat the Pacific as a "private preserve", and therefore the British seek their own intelligence information from Japan. In his 1959 tour to the region, Fleming had noted Britain’s greatly lessened influence in East Asia. In the book, a Soviet scheme to use nuclear blackmail to force the removal of American bases from Britain and British nuclear disarmament is thwarted by Kennedy’s willingness to threaten nuclear war--a step taken as a result of British intelligence information.
Published posthumously, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) warned about links between the KGB, the Mafia, the Black Power movement, terrorism and drug smuggling. Through Bond, Fleming expresses deep skepticism about the likely success of American pressure on Castro: "If the Americans once let up on their propaganda and needling and so forth, perhaps even make a friendly gesture or two, all the steam’ll go out of the little man." Of course, he was right, and the lesson, though now 37 years old, still waits to be learned today.
After Fleming’s death, the novels continued. As a character, Bond could not be copyrighted, so the best way to deal with the threat of imitations was for Glidrose, the house that owned the publishing rights to the Bond novels, to commission a sequel. The first of these, Colonel Sun (1968), was written by Bond fan Kingsley Amis under the pseudonym Robert Markham. In it, the Chinese were the villains. Aside from post hoc novelizations of film screenplays, the writing of original novels was resumed in 1981 by John Gardner, who produced a whole sequence. The last of these was Cold Fall (1996), which depicts the thwarting of General Brutus Clay’s attempt to stage a fascist coup in America on behalf of the Children of the Last Days (cold). Gardner’s successor, Raymond Benson, an American board member of the Ian Fleming Foundation, is still producing Bond stories.
The Celluloid Bond
Fleming’s novels capture Britain’s sense of pride but also its decline in the Anglo-American context. The Bond films show instead a parade of evils with which America has had to deal, but luckily, always able to call upon plucky Britain to stand by its side. In an odd sort of way, the James Bond of film is like Churchill--brave, bold and utterly appealing. But what Churchill was to reality, Bond has been to a kind of Batmanesque comic book fantasy come to the screen--only in the Bond case the comic book stage has been skipped.
Ironically, the first portrayal of Bond on screen cast him as an American, "Jimmy Bond", in a 1954 CBS hour-long television version of Casino Royale. In contrast to the novel, it was a British agent named Clarence Leiter who assisted Bond. Thus was the Anglo-American relationship depicted in the book reversed for American consumption. But not for long.
Excluding the parody Casino Royale (1967) and the return of Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again (1983), all the Bond films have been the work of Eon Productions. Eon was established by Harry Saltzman, a Canadian, and Albert Broccoli, an American, who in 1961 persuaded United Artists to finance a six-picture set. (Broccoli eventually bought Saltzman out, and his family has retained control since.) Saltzman and Broccoli are the ones who established the tone of the series. Fleming had wanted David Niven, a stylish public-school gent, to play Bond, but Broccoli wanted a tougher, mid-Atlantic image that would appeal to American filmgoers as a man of action without jarring British mannerisms. Bond had to be self-contained, not self-satisfied, and thus, with Sean Connery, a star was born.
Perhaps half the world’s population has seen a Bond film, ensuring that billions of people have viewed an image of global struggle through Western eyes. Individual films in the series have not done as well as, say, Star Wars, but the series as a whole has been more profitable than any other. Its influence is harder to gauge. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB resident-designate in London (a long-term double-agent who defected to the British in 1985), revealed in January 2001 that he had to secure prints of the films for the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who liked to watch them; that the KGB was interested in the high-tech devices used by Bond; and that the films contributed to an impression of British competence that had influenced him. Indeed, Gordievsky’s real-life defection to the British rather than to the Americans reflects a long-standing motif in the Bond movies, where Soviet agents prefer to defect to the West via London rather than Washington--beginning with KGB Corporal Tatiana Romanova in From Russia, with Love (1963).
Aside from comforting British viewers about their state’s continued role and competence, and lacking any of the doubts expressed, for example, in Fleming’s novels (and even more clearly in the novels and films of Len Deighton and John Le Carré), the Bond series also charted shifts in the wider world. However improbable, the film plots, to work as adventure stories, had to resonate with the concerns of viewers. This they did, with themes such as the space race, the Red Chinese "menace", the energy crisis, nuclear confrontation and drug trafficking all played out.
Shifts in the Cold War were also noted. In You Only Live Twice (1967), the United States and the USSR are on the verge of a nuclear war after their spacecraft, siezed by SPECTRE, disappear in orbit. By Moonraker (1979), however, the Americans check with the Soviets when the radar shows the space station from which Drax is planning to fire germ-laden globes at the Earth. In Octopussy (1983) there are good and bad Soviets, and in A View To a Kill (1985), Zorin has escaped KGB control--and the Soviets are horrified at the prospect of the destruction of Silicon Valley, which supplies microchips for Soviet use as well. In The Living Daylights (1987), the KGB head emerges in a positive light as does the Afghan resistance; the villains turn out to be a KGB general and his American partner who plays at being a military commander. In License To Kill (1989), there is no Cold War component at all. Franz Sanchez, a sadistic drug king based in a thinly disguised Panama, is depositing much of his dirty money in the United States. Sanchez takes American orders for drugs and sets the price under the cover of his employee, Professor Joe Butcher, who operates as a television evangelist seeking pledges over the airwaves. Sanchez sees money as the universal solvent, and the "end of history" plays a cameo role through the total absence of competing grand ideologies.
After the longest gap in the film series, Bond returned, in GoldenEye (1995), to the post-Cold War world. The film, set in post-Soviet Russia, revisited themes traditional to the series, not least megalomania and rogue space vehicles. GoldenEye is a space-based weapon that can destroy Western communications through electromagnetic pulses. Its use is hijacked by General Uroumov--head of the Space Division and a would-be strongman--and Alex Trevelyan, an ex-British agent who is head of Janus, a crime and terror group dedicated to exploiting the chaos of post-communist Russia. A satellite-control station hidden underneath a Cuban lake that cannot be spotted by American photo-reconnaissance plays a vital role in the plot. Bond’s CIA contact tells him that you cannot light a cigar in Cuba without the Americans knowing about it, while Bond’s controller "M", now a woman known as "the evil Queen of numbers", is convinced by analysis of the situation that the Russians cannot have a GoldenEye program. As ever in the films, Bond triumphs over even the most sophisticated of bureaucracies, overcoming the limits of his own system as well as the selfish opposition: indeed, there is much that is similar here to the lonely hero of the quintessentially American Clint Eastwood films.
In Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), a billionaire media mogul seeks to catalyze a war between Britain and China in order to provide him with marvellous copy and help his ally, General Chang, seize power in China and open the country to his communications empire. While pretending neutrality, the Americans provide Bond with a likely location for a sunken British warship and the plane from which he parachutes onto the site. Russia is now the ally of the West, and Afghanistan a locus of freelance menace rather than Cold War villainy (as it was in The Living Daylights). At the outset of the film, the options for attacking a terrorist bazaar in Afghanistan that Bond is reconnoitering include a Russian army assault as well as a British cruise missile. Similarly, in The World Is Not Enough (1999), the politics relate very much to the real world, in its setting in the volatile Caucasus and in its concern with the fate of the Bosporus and the control of oil supplies.
The recent film plots all seem to provide a setting for the struggle between Bond and assorted perverse megalomaniacs, but there is much else that makes up the attractive trademark of the celluloid Bond. Aside from the high-tech and special effects, not least the sharp cars and the red-glaring rockets, there are the girls.
The sexual theme had been set in Fleming’s novels from the start. In contrast to the sexless plots and women of interwar adventure stories, Fleming portrayed women whose goals were not defined by matrimony and motherhood. At the same time, central to the image of Bond’s sexuality in the novels is that he gives as well as receives pleasure. The films put the women on the screen and in so doing all thoughts of matrimony and motherhood simply disappear. Bond’s dapper sexuality, meanwhile, is made to work as a counterpoint to the classlessness of his film image. He has no sense of anxiety about his masculinity and no hint of sexual concern; there is no disease (or contraception) in the secret agent’s Eden. Bond’s appeal to women is sometimes irrelevant to the plot--as in the scene with the professor of Danish in Tomorrow Never Dies--but it is often instrumental in ensuring the "tipping point" from failure to success, as in the film versions of Goldfinger and Thunderball. Some women, however, such as Fiona Volpe in Thunderball, Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice, Fatima Blush in Never Say Never Again, and Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye, have sex with Bond and then try to kill him. In such episodes, female sexuality appears as a threat, but one that Bond is able to overcome. How very comforting.
The threat to James Bond today is not just from female enemies, however; he is also threatened by looming sanitization. He no longer smokes; indeed, he refers to smoking as a "filthy habit" in Tomorrow Never Dies. He appears to have given up drinking as well, and has had to adjust to fashionable norms on sexual behavior. All that is left is near-continuous violence, as the newest Bond release, Die Another Day, shows. Having once saved Bond, America is now in the process of making him into a stylish automaton--not quite yet on the order of a Schwartzeneggerean terminator, but then the series is not yet finished, is it?
Nor is that the only problem in Bond’s future. Quite aside from his roguishness, if he remains British, Bond must appear something of an anachronism. As Bloefeld mocked in Diamonds Are Forever, "Surely you haven’t come to negotiate, Mr. Bond. Your pitiful little island hasn’t even been threatened." Nevertheless, his Britishness is part of the frame of reference that ensures continuity for the films. It is difficult to see Bond as the servant of the European Union. If that is what he eventually becomes, one may doubt very much his future American sales potential.