Bond is at it again. He is back in the theatres, once more swilling martinis, bedding women, and battling villains, and to great box office effect. >Spectre>has already earned half a billion dollars worldwide , leaving all to wonder anew at the enduring appeal of the James Bond franchise. After 26 films spread over 54 years, Agent 007 can still seduce audiences as easily as he does women.
This evergreen quality, however, is no accident, but rather has been carefully engineered and nourished first by its original author, Ian Fleming, and later, the celluloid keepers of his legacy. Bond’s enduring nemesis, S.P.E.C.T.R.E (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), for example, was created by Fleming in 1959 to ensure the series’ longevity. Wiser for Bond to shift to battling a global crime syndicate from the once historically appropriate Soviets who could well be out of business in the future. A timeless secret agent needs a timeless enemy.
The real world on the big screen became pure window dressing; nuclear submarines, KGB agents, drug lords, all thrown in to make Bond seem up-to-date while carefully screening him from the need to actually deal with all that lay outside the cinema hall. Unlike the Jason Bourne movies, which updated Robert Ludlum’s novels to tackle the underside of the War on Terror or the Tom Clancy adaptations that are steeped in Cold War-era geopolitics, the James Bond franchise has always kept the real world firmly at arm’s length. But its success in doing so has come at a price that is beginning to show. Straining to hover above history rather than engage with it, the Bond movies trade increasingly on their audience’s sentimentality. In the place of relevance, we are offered nostalgia.
“The four-word epigraph that begins the film — ‘The dead are alive’ — reminds you that no film series has been better at raiding its own mausoleum and, throughout
“(E)very Bond movie inevitably shakes off ambition to get down to the blockbuster business of hurling everything — bodies, bullets, fireballs, debris, money — at the screen,” Manola Dahrgis complains in The New York Times . To be fair, this is hardly new. The Bond movies and its tropes — the macho secret agent, sexy bombshell, cool cars, criminal mastermind — have always been predictable. Perhaps what has changed is our own desire for complexity in a world no longer defined by the certainties of the Cold War.
A Bond flick’s studied distance from all things real starts to grate when it hits the big screen in a world that includes Boko Haram, 13/11, and drone warfare. Dahrgis herself can’t help but note that little of the elaborate plot “has anything to do with the world as it exists, with its environmental disasters and political uncertainties, religious wars and ordinary terrors. But then it’s hard to imagine Bond taking on, say, the Islamic State.”
That, in sum, is the crux of Bond’s problem. Our world is far too much for 007.
A terrorist plot, along with MI5’s Nine Eyes plan for global surveillance, is thrown in as a reflexive and facile hat tip to reality that has become the trademark of a Bond movie. The rogue nukes of the 20th century have been replaced by dirty bombs in the new millennium — but only as changing props for a historical evil genius. But it does little to clear the lingering air of irrelevance that hangs over the hero himself. A world characterised with ever-increasing chaos and bewildering violence, with multiple players and wars, is far harder to deploy only as colourful detail.
The solution that the scriptwriters find for this dilemma only compounds the problem. It is no accident that the recent Bond movies have waded deep into their hero’s back-story, replacing the old, sunnily confident Bond with a darker, scarred version.
Unable to provide political complexity, the films have made do with the psychological kind, but with decreasing success. What was praised as emotional heft in Skyfall begins to feel like inexcusable wallowing in Spectre , more so when paired with the franchise’s innate inability to deal with the world outside.
“Bond, meanwhile, is consumed by a personal vendetta. At one point he foils a terrorist plot in the process, but only by accident,” writes an annoyed Oliver Franklin Wallis on Wired.com, “Three major bombings occur and nobody bats an eyelid. Just what are MI6 supposed to be up to here — driving Aston Martins and chatting up women in the bar while civilians are dying?”
But would anyone air such a complaint against the determinedly lightweight Mission Impossible series? Perhaps what has undone the Bond franchise is the desire of his modern creators to have it all — gravitas and camp, golden nostalgia and emotional heft. It’s time to make a choice, Mr. Bond. Shaken or stirred?