James Bond might not be a superhero, but he does dedicate his life to battling bad guys. Plus he has a codename: 007. Yeah, that means he’s just one guy in a league of 00s, so nothing unique—same as any Green Lantern in the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Maybe Earth-based agencies are different, but then that would strike Black Widow from the superhero census list too. Also, like Natasha, James has no superpowers, at least not compared to Thor or Superman. He’d make a pretty good match for Batman though. He even sports his own utility belt’s worth of Q-engineered supergadgets.
Mr. Bond also wields Dr. Who’s shapeshifting powers. I watched his edited-for-TV Sean Connery incarnation from my parents’ couch as a kid, and his Roger Moore from theater seats as an adolescent. I even witnessed his awkward Timothy Dalton stage while I was finishing college and his franchise was waiting for Pierce Brosnan to come-of-age too. But I have to admit Daniel Craig is the David Tennant of the Bond universe. I’m looking forward to seeing his current Spectre adventure.
The character struggled after losing his mission-defining Evil Empire, but Skyfall’s Judi Dench gave him back his raison d’être:
“I’m frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They’re not nations. They’re individuals. Look around you. Who do you fear? Do you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No. Our world is not more transparent now. It’s all opaque. It’s in the shadows. That’s where we must do battle.”
Batman is all about shadows too, turning the darkness of his parents’ murders against the shady elements of murky Gotham. But, unlike a trigger-happy 00 agent, Batman would never kill anyone on purpose, right?
Well, actually the unlicensed Dark Knight racked up a Bond-level body count during his first year in Detective Comics. Not only did a holster hang from his utility belt back then, the batplane included a mounted machinegun: “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary!”
DC editors reined in his homicidal writing staff after Batman #1, but even the comparatively wholesome Superman had a killing streak then. In June 1939, same month Batman was kicking jewel thieves off skyscrapers, Superman was dropping a mobster to an identical death. Granted, it wasn’t Superman’s fault he lost his super grip: “If he hadn’t tried to stab me, he’d be alive now.—But the fate received was exactly what he deserved!” Though what did Superman think was going to happen when he destroyed the Ultra-Humanite’s propeller mid-flight? The supervillain somehow escaped the crash, but no thanks to the death-indifferent Man of Steel.
Comic books usually protect their heroes from having to kill directly. In that same Action Comics, a rotating blade shatters against Superman’s impervious skull and slices up a nearby thug. Or in another early Batman adventure, a “foreign agent” is accidentally impaled on his own sword, and Batman self-righteously declares: “It is better that he should die! He might have sent thousands of others to their death on a battlefield if his plans had been successful!”
If this makes your feel morally queasy, listen to Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko on superhero morality: superheroes are “moral avengers” who must kill criminals in order to show “a clear understanding of right and wrong,” even if that means violating the “pervading legal moral” code.
Mr. Ditko currently resides in the crazy-old-man dimension of the comics multiverse, because his Ann Rand philosophy isn’t a page in today’s superhero bible. Batman’s and Superman’s most recent film incarnations take little license with the Sixth Commandment. In fact, the plot of Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight pivots on Christian Bale’s Batman struggling not to kill the Joker—even though killing him is necessary to protect others and exactly “what he deserves.” And remember the fan outrage when Henry Cavill’s Superman snapped General Zod’s neck in Man of Steel? It was that or let the General’s laser vision slice up a family of cowering Metropolitans, but Superman’s super-wholesomeness got sliced up too.
Both Zod and Joker are weirdly suicidal supervillains, goading their arch-enemies into committing murder. But then that’s the point. Superheroes are supposed to oppose killing out of principle. So where’s that leave Mr. Bond?
We could say his license strikes the “super” from his heroness, maybe even replacing it with an “anti.” His comic book counterpart might be the Ditko-esque Punisher, a sometime supervillain depending on who’s penning the story. But in James’ defense, killing isn’t the core of his mission. It’s just the most efficient means for getting important jobs down. He’s paid to be indifferent to death.
And that’s the problem. I remember Roger Moore’s 007 dangling a “foreign agent” by his tie from the edge of a building. The thug had been gunning at him seconds earlier, so the scene meets the “what he deserved” test. But was it necessary? Couldn’t he have holstered his license and knocked the guy out instead of dropping him to his death? Sure, the guy was a cog in the Cold War wheel trying to squash Democracy, but did Roger Moore have to grin? Did the movie have to play the scene for laughs, toying with the villain’s tie as he quivered for life?
I don’t blame his character though. James Bond was designed to be a cold-blooded Cold Warrior. You could argue the hero type was a product of its times—and so a bad fit with ours. Connery, Moore, Dalton, they all performed indifference so their 60s, 70s and 80s audiences could forget about the nuclear arsenal aimed at their hometown theaters. Take Bond out of that context and he just seems callous. The same way the original Superman and Batman made more moral sense as their readers teetered on the brink of a Nazi-driven World War.
The current Daniel Craig incarnation fixes that. He still shows his killer license when needed, but he’s not indifferent about it. He understands what it means to take a life. Like the 2013 Superman, he only snaps a villainous neck when it means saving innocent ones. He takes no pleasure in it. If anything, that hint of inner turmoil makes him almost superheroic. He does the dirty work so no one else has to. He’s not a 00 by self-righteous nature, but by self-sacrificing choice.
Great post, Chris — and appropriate after the attacks in Beirut and Paris. I think there can be a moral responsibility to kill in the defense of others. That responsibility is based on the value of human life, not contrary to it. Nevertheless, you point out correctly that it should never be taken lightly. I also like your points about the differences between what audiences needed and found acceptable during the Cold War and now.
Yesterday, I heard a BBC reporter interviewing a Chatham House expert on the French airstrikes in Syria. It struck me that even now, her first or second question was on estimated civilian (really, noncombatant) casualties. The interviewee went on to explain why the particular circumstances of these strikes meant that such casualties were probably minimal or nonexistent.
We are right to care this much, and we should always be cautious. But if we allow that caution to become paralysis, we are as morally wrong as if we were indifferent, because the effect is the same: Innocents die avoidable deaths.
What occurred to me watching Spectre was not the high body count among the bad guys, but the number of times Bond’s actions endangered bystanders — from the very opening scene. If he was not indifferent to them, he was either supremely confident in his abilities or absolutely assured that his mission justified those risks. This was true even before he really knew what he was fighting. I don’t think people are often that resolute in real life.
Regardless, Daniel Craig has been an outstanding Bond for this era, and the movies are doing a great job of entertaining us while addressing current issues.
Yet another point: I know that the typical superhero stance against killing was originally about making comics acceptable to parents. In continuity, however, I have always read more into it than just a moral stance. Neither Batman nor Superman take issue if a police officer uses lethal force in defense of self or others, but the standard to which they hold themselves is (usually) different. On some level, I think it’s been about making themselves acceptable to the public as volunteer first responders (a la Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels). On another, I think it’s implicitly rejecting the kind of self-sacrifice you see in Bond. They choose never, or nearly never, to be the judge, jury, and executioner. They take a tremendous burden of responsibility upon themselves, but there is a line, and that is beyond it — a choice they don’t want to make or live with. Of course, as I said above, that doesn’t absolve them from their responsibility to act to save others, so it is left to the writer to make sure lethal force is never the only way to stop the villain.
Fans had more than one reaction to the death of Zod in Man of Steel. Some asked why Superman had to kill, but given the massive destruction and probable loss of life in Metropolis, others asked why he waited so long.
I think the superhero genre is largely about romanticizing vigilantism. So that often means toning down the lethal force so the superhero does not appear to be judge-jury, but just a helpful citizen giving incompetent law enforcement much needed volunteer work. Push a little harder though, and the anti-government and specifically anti-democratic principles of vigilantism puts the character type into contradiction.
But James Bond isn’t about vigilantism–he’s a heroic embodiment of hypercompetent law enforcement. He’s big government at its best. Which is probably why the character comes from Brit lit and not American where a division with government is often a necessary quality for being a hero.
I haven’t seen thew new film yet, but from your description, John, he sounds like the embodiment of US policy on collateral damage.
Chris, I assure you that the truth is exactly opposite of your assessment.
I concur about romanticizing vigilantism, but James Bond as a representative of big government is complicated. In every Daniel Craig Bond film (and several others), he is working against orders to some degree. I think the real message is that while big government is hypercompetent at producing people like him, it can’t seem to make a good decision in a crisis. This is reminiscent of both Michael Moore’s “We love our troops, but can’t stand their generals,” stance and the right’s similar position for the troops but against their civilian leadership.
Is that a result of Hollywood’s behind-the-camera Americanization of Bond, or is dissatisfaction with the post-9/11 national security establishment just as endemic in the UK? These sociological and anthropological questions demand answers. It’s time for you (or Noah, or Osvaldo, or somebody…) to write another book!
@John
“I think there can be a moral responsibility to kill in the defense of others. That responsibility is based on the value of human life, not contrary to it.”
I think everywhere I’ve ever seen this moral principle implemented in real life, it has refuted itself. Drone strikes, the death penalty, the war on , all have essentially refuted the reasons for their own existence in practice. Drone strikes have incredibly high rates of collateral/civilian casualties despite a serpentine approval process and “precision” targeting. The death penalty fails as a deterrent to violent crime and routinely executes innocent people, and even when the guilty are executed, they are often executed for arbitrary, even explicitly racist reasons. And any war includes massive collateral damage and destruction. Even in some magical war where only soldiers ever died, they would still be gone from their families and communities, which would suffer as a result. So there is no implementation of this principle in human history (or imaginable, frankly) that avoids the death/suffering of innocents.
And forgetting all of that for a second, the idea that we must kill some people because all life is sacred seems, at best, bizarre. I don’t know if there is any intermediate logic that makes that statement makes sense, especially given the principle’s practical embodiment(s) throughout history.
@Chris & John
James Bond seems to perfectly encapsulate the superhero’s need for institutional support in order to function. Without the support of governments (or in Bruce Wayne’s case, a massive fortune not significantly threatened by property and capital gains taxes), James Bond would be non-viable as a character. Even the Punisher cooperates with SHIELD every once in a while.
The war on “blank”*
Petar, if you’re an absolute pacifist, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. Human violence may never solve a root problem, but history is replete with examples great and small where it was a moral and practical expedient for an immediate problem (e.g., the Holocaust, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and many other examples of expansionist state aggression, ISIL on a French train, and innumerable other violent crimes halted in the act). Nothing but heroic counter-violence would have stopped the terrorists in Beirut and Paris before they ran out of munitions; they had committed their lives to murder. For people who could have done something about it to stand idle would have been shameful. Fortunately, the police and even bystanders in those cities understood their responsibilities.
I’ll grant you that the idea that we must kill some people because all life is sacred is an apparent contradiction, but apparent contradictions are often true. Intermediate logic follows: First, two lives are worth more than one, so killing one to save many others is often necessary. Second, in many (but admittedly not all) of these cases, the person who presents the threat is a volunteer. He or she made a free will choice to take human lives. The end of their life in self-defense — or, in the case of a volunteer, legitimate, deliberative, government-monopolized retribution — is a natural and foreseeable consequence of that decision. An absence of consequences discounts the value of the lives of the slain and disrespects the murderer’s own decision.
Of course, your points that innocents have died under the death penalty, war causes the deaths of many innocents, and that soldiers’ lives matter, too, are all valid. Furthermore, I very much respect your concern for all these things, and I share them. I just believe that there are times when the magnitude of threat or the crime is greater than those concerns.
I agree 100% about institutional support. Even the Bond movies show only a sliver of all the money and effort that would be necessary to make his work possible. This was one of the great things about the two Justice League animated series. They acknowledged the League’s burgeoning support staff.
“Like the 2013 Superman, he only snaps a villainous neck when it means saving innocent ones”
Fictinal murders can be fun. But I really hate it when they try to make them meaningful with some ‘moral dilemma’, espicially constructed to justify the murder.
In DOCTOR WHO, a Prime Minister commits genocide on a epic scale, solely to send a shock and awe message to the intergalactic community. But because of this bullshit moral-dilemma angle, she ends up as a martyr, one of those deep ones who dares to ‘make the tough decisions’.
@John
As much as I loathe violence on principle, I have to agree with your point on self-defense. Any people (or the authorities deemed responsible) have the right, and perhaps the duty, to defend their own life and the lives of others that have called for them to do so.
And I totally forgot about the Justice League animated series’, but that is very true, at least of the Justice League: Unlimited. The original series didn’t show any support staff and kind of clung to the idea that this was a rogue venture by seven god-like beings. But Unlimited certainly did an excellent job of showing how the heroes’ positions as heroes depended on institutional support by their own staff, Bruce’s wealth, and the governments of the world. Actually, the Cadmus storyline could be construed as an attempt to show how the superhero’s position is complicated when it comes into conflict with government…although I’m not so sure about that interpretation.
Thanks, Petar. And I appreciate your loathing of violence on principle. If more people were like you, self-defense (and even national defense) would not be so necessary.
Thanks for the correction, Petar. I was afraid I might have given the first Justice League series too much credit, and your assessment of both series (including the Cadmus story) is spot-on.
Chris, you should definitely see Spectre. I was thinking about it again and realizing that it has both pro- and anti-democratic messages. Basically, when James Bond flouts the will of the government’s duly elected representatives, he is saving democracy from itself. It’s bad when other people do it, though, so it’s hard to find a universal moral principle in there. Maybe, “If you’re going to do wrong, make sure you’re right about it”?
Finally, Kaspar: I remember the plucky, righteous politician from the village who showed her dark side by slaughtering the bad guys that we, the audience, had been led to believe would not have returned. I thought it raised good questions even if it never fully addressed them. Was her violence justified? What if it were seen not as a deterrent, but as a provocation or even naked aggression by some interstellar mutual security alliance? What if she ended up costing the lives of the very people she intended to save? Anyway, the outraged Doctor certainly never gave her any martyr credit.
Re: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I think the general consensus now is that if the US ambassador had told the Iraqis not to invade when the Iraqis asked if it was okay to invade, there woudln’t have been an invasion. So, using this as an example of justified violence seems like a stretch.
@John:
The way that Harriet Jones martyrdom is constructed is rather clever. It has some similarities with the ‘shoot and cry’ genre. Basically, the fact that Doctor Who wholeheartedly denounces her actions is a fundamental building block in her martyr status. The obvious argument that her genocide is wrong is presented in full view, which leads to the inevitable “but …”
She is presented as an übermensch who dares make the tough decisions, even though they’re wrong. Moral dilemmas, you know.
If you look how she dies in The Stolen Earth, there is no question that she is a martyr:
SARAH: Only, excuse me, Harriet, but. Well, the thing is, if you’re looking for the Doctor, didn’t he depose you?
HARRIET: He did. And I’ve wondered about that for a long time, whether I was wrong. But I stand by my actions to this day, because I knew, I knew that one day, the Earth would be in danger, and the Doctor would fail to appear. I told him so myself, and he didn’t listen.
…
HARRIET: Yes, and they’ll trace it back to me. But my life doesn’t matter. Not if it saves the Earth.
(Jack salutes.)
JACK: Ma’am.
HARRIET: Thank you, Captain.
HARRIET: But there are people out there dying on the streets.
WILF: Marvellous woman. I voted for her.
…
HARRIET: It’s been an honour.
(Harriet gets up to face the three Daleks who have smashed their way in, and shows her ID.)
HARRIET: Harriet Jones. Former Prime Minister.
DALEK: Yes, we know who you are.
HARRIET: Oh, you know nothing of any human, and that will be your downfall.
DALEK: Exterminate.
A quick look at some wikipedia quotes tells us that her sacrifice is “super-heroics” and “glowing nobility”, she was right, her actions are “perfectly reasonable”, she has “noble intentions”, she is “one of the show’s most popular characters”, and that she is a “complex woman” who “came good in the end”.
This post missed the main point of James Bond, that he’s British; that he’s the fantasy delusion of a nation unable to accept its post-imperial decline. Why anyone else in the world would be enthusiastic about the character is beyond me.
I don’t really understand the need for moral discussion – Bond kills to serve the interests of a ruling class that gives him licence to do so.
Thats obviously out of order.
Kasper, I concede all your points. “Executed standing up to the Daleks” clearly makes her a Whovian martyr, and I think you’re right that the Doctor’s moralizing was part of the setup.
Noah — yes, I also have been told that the U.S Ambassador misspoke, and Saddam may have taken it as permission for rapacious conquest. Some have said that Kim il-Sung and Joseph Stalin similarly interpreted Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s speech before the National Press Club in 1950 as permission to invade South Korea, (Wikipedia says there’s some documentary evidence that it wasn’t an influence). Regardless, it wasn’t okay to invade Kuwait, it wasn’t okay to invade South Korea, and the international community was right to respond in both cases.
Yeah…I don’t know that it’s true that it was right to respond, really, especially not in the case of Iraq. Going to war put us on the path to invasion in 2003. Along the way we killed tons of people, put in place a withering and brutal sanctions regime, and now Iraq is a disaster.
Violence causes violence, war leads to war. It’s hard to know what the consequences would have been if we said about Iraq-Kuwait, as we often say about many local conflicts, you know, our national interests aren’t at stake in any meaningful way, and it isn’t moral or logical to try to interfere in every conflict around the globe because we can. But it’s hard to imagine that the long term effects would have been worse than what we got, which was two decades of conflict which haven’t ended yet.
Noah, I think that there were multiple bad decisions over a twelve year period that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and of course some of the decisions after that were bad, too. I don’t think the decision to liberate Kuwait was one of those. If a guy gets drunk and embarrasses himself at his wedding reception, it doesn’t necessarily mean he shouldn’t have gotten married; it might just mean he should’ve stopped at two glasses of champagne.
As a nation, we have a tendency to fail to think through the consequences of our actions. We identify objectives and actions that move us closer to the objective, but we don’t think realistically about what happens after that, and then what happens after that. It’s adolescent thinking, and you know I love my country, but I have read descriptions of America as an adolescent nation that make a lot of sense to me. We’re young, powerful, and overemotional. We switch rapidly from one passion to the next. We tend to see things in black and white. We have trouble accepting that some problems can’t be solved right away; they have to be managed until we’re in a position to solve them. Good leaders can and have (at times) encouraged us to be more mature, but that requires a degree of transparency that we don’t often get and a willingness to look past the next election.
So the three options that come to my mind are 1) withdraw; 2) stay active, but be more deliberate and learn from our mistakes; or 3) blindly and stubbornly flail harder. The second one is the most difficult to execute well, but I advocate it anyway.
I’m pretty firmly behind the idea that if we do less, the world, and we, will be better off.
@John & Noah
I hate to sound like some message-board peacenik, but I don’t necessarily think your positions are mutually exclusive. If we did less militarily, it would almost certainly benefit everybody quite a bit. Our hyper-extended military presence worldwide is one of the main factors contributing to radicalism and instability in the Muslim world, and many, if not most, foreign policy experts agree that a severely hedged US military presence abroad would not just save many billions of dollars, it would also go a very long way towards ameliorating many global problems and repairing our standing in the world. Much of the world sees us as a conglomerate of tyrannical, murderous bullies. That’s not a good look for the so-called bastion of democracy.
However, to concede a point to John, the US can’t completely retreat. But it’s engagement with the world really shouldn’t be military. The US should be active and engaged with world affairs. But the shape and nature of that engagement matters a LOT, and we have seen from our past foreign policy failures that merely doing anything is clearly not better than doing nothing.
@sean
Well, then why does Bond resonate so strongly with American audiences? Americans don’t necessarily grow up with the nostalgia for a fallen empire. Nor do they grow up with an ingrained respect of rigid class hierarchy, regardless of the authoritarian strain running through American culture. It seems strange to explain Bond as merely being a British fantasy when he is obviously a convenient template for Americans to project their own fantasies onto him, which, obviously, are not British fantasies.
Peter Duric –
Why does Bond resonate so strongly with American audiences…? Assuming he does – and I guess the size of the film budgets tend to back that up – thats a really good question!
I’m not really in a position to know, but would be interested in hearing any theories…
Petar, I agree with you. I believe in a strong military that is active when necessary, but the need has become excessive — partly because in many cases, the violence is begetting more violence (as Noah and the Bible point out). And our foreign policy and its action arms are out of balance. The military is actually quite small as a percentage of the population, but it’s the biggest part of the Executive Branch and a very significant chunk of the budget — behind only entitlements, I think. When Hilary Clinton was Secretary of State, she liked to point out that there were more people in military bands than in the State Department. And the State Department is huge compared to USAID or the international arms of USDA, Treasury, and FBI, and they have work to do worldwide. Defense Secretary Gates even told Congress that DoD could do a better job if Congress would fund and staff State better, and he was willing to give up budget and personnel to make it happen. It hasn’t happened yet. We’re still stuck with a toolbag of mostly hammers, and even many of the hammers are out of date or poorly suited to 21st century types of conflicts.
Oh, and worn out. Lots of stuff is worn out.
America is basically the new British empire, and sees itself as such.
Indeed. Jack Bauer supercedes James Bond
The British have hitched themselves to American imperialism as a way of compensating for their diminished importance, so… maybe an explanation for Bond’s appeal in the US comes out of that?
John — If Hillary Clinton really said there are more military band members than State Department employees, I think she’s full of crap. There are 24,000 foreign and civil service employees, and 45,000 local employees (most likely foreign nationals in the 250-odd posts around the world). That’s 69,000 people.
The Army band is the largest service band by far and has about 5,000 people. By contrast, I believe the Marine Corps has about 1,000 band members. My ballpark guess is that in all the services combined, there’s probably in the ballpark of between 10,000 to 11,000 band members. Musical performances are an integral part of traditional military formations, funerals, and other routine ceremonies.
And, by the way, the reason the State Department doesn’t have far more employees is because they heavily tap the US military for security and administrative attachés.
In addition, the Department of State budget is $57 billion a year, while the military bands budget is something like $300 million annually.
What a whiner Hillary is.
Russ–
Hillary Clinton didn’t say there were more band members than State Department employees. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense that Obama held over from the Bush Administration said that there were more band members than foreign service officers. Foreign service officers are a fraction of the personnel at the State Department. Clinton just seconded the criticism.
Robert Gates, if it isn’t obvious by the Bush Adminstation’s decision to employ him as Defense Secretary, is a Republican. So I guess if we’re going to call this whining, it’s pretty bipartisan.
@Noah
Abby Martin recently did a very good interview with Chris Hedges about the ways in which American and British imperialism differ, mainly because they rely on different mechanisms. It’s about half an hour, if you’d like to see it.
@Sean
I have a very hard time believing explanations for Bonds American appeal that rely on his Britishness. The running theory on this blog and in a lot of other places (if I summarize it accurately) is that the appeal comes from his virulent white maleness, and that, because America is a figure of empire even independent of Britain, his imperial themes and tropes resonate strongly with American audiences. Which explains why Jack Bauer and those god awful Tom Cruise movies come to mind as good analogues for Bond. That’s not a particularly well reasoned or thorough explanation, but I think any such explanation has to start with Bond’s imperialism and identity politics, not his nationality of British history necessarily.
“And, by the way, the reason the State Department doesn’t have far more employees is because they heavily tap the US military for security and administrative attachés. ”
Right. See, this is a bad thing. Turning the state department into an adjunct of the military is horrible. The state department should be independent. Diplomacy shouldn’t be a subset of military action. Quite the contrary.
I’m not exactly sure either why the US should be spending money on military bands either…though I’d much rather pay soldiers to play instruments than to shoot people, I suppose.
RSM — There are 13,000 foreign service officers — which is probably in the ballpark for total military band members. Then again, many of the band members are National Guard or Reserve members, and so they are part-timers.
I think the criticism is still whining anyway, as such comparisons are meaningless. The FBI has 13,000 special agents — about the same as the State Department has foreign service officers. So what? The DOD probably has twice as many food services employees/contractors than the State Department has foreign service officers. So what?
The other thing that bugs me about the statement — especially if the SecDef said it — is it belittles the contributions of band members — many of who went to war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq to perform for the troops to boost morale.
One example of a deployed performance by a National Guard band member: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqxcrY7ybFw
@Chris
I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t just ask you this directly earlier, but you must have a running theory as to Bond’s appeal in America. So, what do you think about it?
Petar, I think Bond is now both gov agent and libertarian free agent who defies the gov. That second half I think is the Americanization of the character. And there’s where the 50s novels split from the 60s films that turned Bond into an American hero icon (despite being nominally British). The Cold War context is everything. The first film came out in 1962 and featured a space race plot, same as the Fantastic Four. Like the FF, Bond is a hero only more so. I won’t call him a superhero, but maybe a hyper hero, hypermasculine certainly. An American cowboy superimposed onto the Cold War. Like the Marvel pantheon, it’s the fear of MAD war fueling him–even though the novels use a simple anti-Commie rhetoric. Marvel superheroes are radioactive Godzillas redirected to protect what they otherwise would destroy. Bond is older school, more Manichean, born when a war with Russia still appeared winnable. But he hit big because he played to the same fears. And, like the Hulk and the Thing (who Stan Lee designed as a thuggish monster who the rest of the FF have to keep from destroying the world), he’s a stand-in for the gov’s nuclear arsenal, those horrific but horrifically necessary deterrents that both protect and threaten us. Thus Bond is monstrously cavalier about death. You don’t want your nuclear arsenal manned (“manned”) by someone who might hesitate before massacring millions. You build a monster for that job. And then give it a license and a charming grin.
But Bond survives in today’s market because he’s a known product. Hollywood will always reboot rather than invent, because the old character has name recognition. And Bond can always be juggled and reapplied to changing circumstances. But I don’t think it’s because there’s something especially enduring in his character. It’s just how Hollywood does business.
Russ and Robert — thanks for the clarification of my paraphrase and its accuracy (or lack thereof). My point was, the military is not designed to do everything, and many of the countries with whom America works need a lot of cooperation that is not military in nature. And it’s in our interests to help them with things like, oh, I don’t know, finding jobs for disaffected, alienated youth, or learning better airport security screening, or even hygienic practices in outbreak-prone villages. But in many places, the military ends up being the ones to look at justice systems and government ministries and city planning, because the rest of the executive branch is either tapped out or simply not organized, trained, equipped, or funded to go and do this on a global scale, especially in dicey areas. There some troops that specialize and do exceptionally well in this work, notably civil affairs, but they’re a small, niche capability that is continually deployed and completely inadequate to the magnitude of the requirement. So some artillerymen or whatever get stuck learning it on the fly, with predictably mixed results. And their capability at their real specialties suffers as a result.
Noah, Marine security guards and defense attachés are NOT a militarization of diplomacy. They have representational and security duties that are squarely within the military’s core competencies, and the Ambassador is the undisputed boss of the Mission. Attachés also maintain mil-to-mil relationships, which can be key to America’s interest and even to proselytizing concepts like civilian authority and protecting (not exploiting) the populace. We’re not talking about very many people, anyway.
Now if we were to flood a country with tens of thousands of troops (dwarfing the U.S. civil presence), many of whom were advisors for non-military fields and who showed up with aid money to spend, THAT would be a militarization of diplomacy. For reasons why such a silly thing might happen, please see the first paragraph.
And Russ, I intended no disrespect to military bands or their service. I don’t imagine the former SECDEF did, either.
John — No sweat. I’m no military band geek, but I’ve worked with a number of them over the years supporting various civilian community relations gigs. They are very good at what they do and very dedicated.
Yep — amazing performers willing to go anywhere for their audience.
Petar Duric –
That all makes sense about Bond’s broader appeal. Although I’d still suggest that his imperial and identity politics are very much tied in with nationality (but clearly resonate beyond)
I like Chris’ idea of Bond as a stand in for nukes, which in a British context are all about maintaining the fantasy status of world power (even as its completely dependent on the US). Worth noting that the film Bond first appeared at the point when Britain became a US client state (after the Suez intervention had underlined the extent of post-imperial decline), 1962 also being the year it made the deal for Polaris.
John F. Kennedy was a huge fan of the Ian Fleming novels. Which always seemed particularly terrifying to me.
Noah — Kennedy was also an honorary life member of the NRA — before the perception of the NRA shifted in some circles from a quasi-fraternal organization to a bogeyman.
Supposedly when they met, JFK asked Fleming for suggestions on how to get rid of Castro…
@R. Maheras
People do tend to start perceiving you as a monster when you actually become a monster (which in the case of the NRA happened in 1977 – https://pando.com/2015/06/26/brief-history-american-gun-nuts/).
I’m glad I’m an old fart, because I saw first-hand exactly how a lot of our current contentious issues unfolded.
In the case of the NRA, the reason I said it was a quasi-fraternal organization is because, based on what I remember, as a lobbying organization, it was almost invisible prior to the 1970s. However, as the anti-gun lobby grew in leaps and bounds, the NRA responded accordingly.
In short, the anti-gun lobby was Dr. Frankenstein and the NRA was the monster it created.
Being alive in the ’70s doesn’t mean you had any idea what was going on then, any more than being alive now means you have any idea what’s going on now.
Graham — Ah, but what’s nice about being alive now is that anyone with even a modicum of critical thinking can noodle around with their search engine of choice and relatively quickly find out who actually does or does not know what they are talking about.
I fearlessly stand by my assertion.
Sooo…Russ and Graham, you’re just going to frustrate yourself to no purpose here, and the NRA is only at best tangentially related to this post…so maybe get back on topic, or just drop it?
@sean & Chris
The “Bond as nukes” interpretation holds even more water when you just look at the prominent role nuclear weapons play in the movies, so that is a pretty satisfying reading of the character. But if Bond is about the fantasy of maintaining imperial power through new-fangled weaponry and institutions, here’s an interesting question (that will totally blow up this thread…); could James Bond ever be Russian (meaning a British national of stated Russian descent with ethic or historical ties to “the motherland”)?
@Noah Is it on topic if Maheras minds me of a Taylor Swift song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptSjNWnzpjg
I don’t think James Bond is nukes, exactly. He’s a different version of the lie that Harold Macmillian told himself around the same time: “We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ* as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”
A more recent version: I remember that it was fairly common 15 years ago for English people to assert in all seriousness that a British high school education was equivalent to an American college education. Maybe it still is.
In short: “Okay, fine, there are more of them, but we’re actually a race a supermen, so we’re still equals.” Bond is a demonstration of how one British-quality spy is worth more than 180 million Americans.
And of course the James Bond of the movies is also about how you, the post-Profumo affair modern male, can now have socially acceptable open casual sex with lots of young British women in hot outfits, and of course they all want to.
A Bond of Russian descent would be pretty cool. And, I would argue, it would bring him closer to the superhero genre, which almost always features a hero representing two worlds in conflict who turns the more powerful otherly world into service for the home world. So a Russian-descended KGB-fighter hits that mark.
@Graham
“Bond is a demonstration of how one British-quality spy is worth more than 180 million Americans.”
So THAT’S why he dragged around poor Felix Leiter to be his patsy! That makes a lot more sense now…
@Chris
What I’m really wondering is, what is the best formulation of this character, and of this super/hyper/plain-hero archetype, for subverting the genre? In other words, what would the most subversive possible Bond look like? Or, if it is subversive, would it not be Bond anymore? Or would it just be something that’s trying really hard to look like Bond but fails because it doesn’t adhere to the same regressive politics?
In short, I’m more interested in how to totally fuck with this archetype than to recreate it in weird ways that still somehow adhere to the same old politics.
Two ways to disrupt a formula: reverse or amplify. Reversing would get you an anti-Bond, a female secret agent of Russian descent with a deep spiritual core. Amplifying gets you The Comedian.
I think there are other options for disuprtion. Parody or satire is certainly one option. An incompetent Bond, for example, would probably be truer to the actual way various spy services work…
@Chris & Noah
Have either of you ever seen Agent 117 (I think that’s it). It’s a French parody of Bond where the Bond-character is an incompetent buffoon totally outshone by his female Israeli-agent counterpart. It is very funny as I remember it, although I haven’t seen it in a while (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1167660/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_20). And then there’s always Johnny English…
Agent 117 sounds worth checking out. I’m also curious how the Flint movies starring James Coburn hold up (haven’t seen em in about 15 years or so, remember them being okay though). The incompetent spy gag makes me think of Alan Ford, which also portrayed the agency he worked for as a bureaucratic joke (gadgets included a WWI-era plane with holes for the pilot’s legs a la a Flintstones car.)
More like the anti-British empire – a bourgeois continent forcing the rest of the world to open their markets to it, versus an aristocratic island conquering as many parts of the world as possible in order to close those markets to everybody else – with an elite who basically hate their own culture and wish they [i]were[/i] the British empire.
Though one thing we certainly have in common is that we’ve been running on fumes since shortly after our last major military victory (Napoleonic wars, World War II respectively).
Interesting that nobody has mentioned Austin Powers. Already forgotten?
There is another great buffoon-spy movie called The Tailor of Panama that is excellent. It even stars Pierce Brosnan as the incompetent, corrupt, vile, misogynistic British spy! Although, the movie is more bluntly about imperialism than the other parodies mentioned so far, and Pierce Brosnan’s character is not the protagonist. He’s a clear antagonist/corrupt human being that mucks everything up over the course of the movie, which is excellent. Stars Geoffrey Rush and that lady from the yogurt commercials (I never can remember her name).
Austin Powers is almost too much. And after the first few times watching it, I felt it was a little too gleeful in its parodical embrace of Bond-esque tropes. Don’t know if that makes any sense, but the upshot is that it got boring quickly, IMO.
I can do without the sequels, but there’s at least a bit of brilliance in a movie where the super spy’s greatest moment of triumph consists in Mike Myers performing a striptease in a Union Jack speedo.
Hmmm, I never saw the Tailor of Panama but the book remains the only Le Carre I’ve ever read. IIRC it focuses more on the hapless informant who gets blackmailed by the narcissistic idiot spies.
Wow, I completely forgot Austin Powers.
Here is the link for Tailor of Panama (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236784/).
Oh, and the yogurt lady is Jamie Lee Curtis, found that in the cats list.
Unfortunately, I do remember the movie tends to erase the Panamanians in a movie about their country…so I guess it fails a bit (a LOT) in it’s parody of imperialism…
cast* list, not cats list…although it might have one of those too.
Back to the topic at hand, I’ve been toying around with the possibility of using some of the DC super-spy types as a subversion, or just a blatant challenge to Bond/superhero tropes, and one of my favorites for the purpose is KGBeast. You would have to tweak him (a LOT), but cast him as, say, an agent with a strong, Dostoyevsky-like spiritual center, operating in Russia’s immediate border countries (say Vlatava, Kasnia, Bialya, Qurac, and Kahndaq) and it could be really interesting.
If you to go really opposite, Petar, take out all the over-the-top heroics, too. Have him be a careful, methodical, patient planner who owes his success to minimizing risk in a dangerous job. Make me care about the quiet suspense of whether his contact will help him or turn him in just as much as I care about the car chase / firefight / MMA mash-ups in the Bond movies
The original and best Bond parody remains Get Smart, which (according to creator Buck Henry) an ABC executive rejected by saying “It’s creepy, it’s not funny and it’s basically un-American.”
Don’t know about a Russian Bond, but there are plenty of Indian and Pakistani versions – it might be interesting to see how they read as history of geo-political and/or nuclear ambition.
I’m more interested in what the Bond flicks will be like once the US is replaced as the leading global super power, and the British decide their interests are better served elsewhere; they’re already about to outsource intelligence IT to China…
Most accurate Bond parody – although I suppose it isn’t exactly a parody – is Jimmy from the Black Dossier.
Graham Clark-
That’s totally right about Bond’s superiority and British attitudes to the US… but I don’t think its particularly inconsistent with the nuke stuff to say Bond is about other things too. The films say quite a bit about modern Britain, but I’m not sure thats a part of the broader appeal.
About a dozen years ago, I attended the week-long National Security Forum at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. One of the seminars on the schedule included a CIA national security primer which, not surprisingly, was presented by a bona fide CIA officer. One of the take-aways I got from that briefing was her comment that the idea of a “license to kill” — at least in the CIA — was a popular culture myth.
That being the case, I would assume if there really were superheroes in the US, the government would frown at the thought of them wandering around on US soil knocking off people without a trial.
Then again, a dozen years ago, before asymmetrical warfare against “gray combatants” had kicked into high gear, we didn’t have a robust drone program where we routinely launched Hellfire missiles at bad guys in hot spots overseas.
Regardless, no government official would sanction such actions without a green light from the lawyers, so I guess it stands to reason Superman would never be allowed to officially knock off anyone without a thumbs-up from the Justice Department.
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
I suppose the US has often used proxy death squads for deniability, and of course your constitutional rights don’t apply to those of us who aren’t American citizens … even so, I still take the notion that American intelligence agencies don’t engage in illegal activities with a pinch of anthrax powder.
Sean — I’ve been a part of DoD for more than 30 years, and I can say categorically no policy of significance happens without a read from the lawyers.
However, because of the nature of US politics, government policies dramatically change depending on who’s in the White House. Each new administration appoints thousands of people (including lawyers) into key leadership positions in every single government agency, and policies routinely do a 180-degree shift every four or eight years. To see just how extensive this appointee network extends, see the “Government Policy and Supporting Positions” book (aka “The Plum Book” published by the US Government Printing Office.
What this means is each administration either brings in its own team of lawyers who lean the administration’s way, or they pressure career civil service lawyers into finding “a way to get to yes.”
But there will almost always be some sort of established legal framework or justification to do anything — including knocking people off. That’s why a blanket “license to kill” is probably cited by the CIA as a myth. Outside of killing in self-defense, I just can’t see a bureaucracy like the one I’m familiar with letting some loose cannon run around randomly killing people simply because he/she thinks they deserve it. The military has codified rules of engagement written by lawyers before every operation, and I have to assume the CIA does too.