Who is James Bond, the gunman in a tux? And why do we love him so? As the latest Bond movie opens in South Africa, Peter Conrad considers a 20th-century icon
The image is contradictory. A man in a tuxedo tilts a gun; his arrogant smirk indicates that he is ready to use it. But the elegant clothes hardly match the lethal accessory. Who is he, a lounge lizard or a hit man? Despite the jarringly crossed signs, everyone knows his name, and also his number. He is – as he often smoothly repeats – called Bond, James Bond; his employers refer to him as 007, and the double zero encodes his licence to kill. The man who carries his firearm to a dinner party or the opera needs no introduction, because – in the decades since Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, and Sean Connery’s first performance as Bond in Dr No, released in 1962 – he has become one of our age’s ubiquitous icons.
Bond can be equated with his tux and his gun, just as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp consisted of a bowler hat and a twirling, resilient cane. And since he is no more than the sum total of his effects, anyone can become him. Connery turned himself into Bond by sleeping in a Savile Row suit and tie (as a former truck driver, he had to learn how to live up to his clothes) and by glueing on a pair of toupees – one, oiled and imperturbable, for scenes with dialogue, and another, ever so slightly dishevelled, for scenes when running and jumping were required.
George Lazenby, the talentless model who took over from Connery in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, fantasised his way into the role by acquiring the props. After buying a suit from the tailor who outfitted Connery, he was spotted by producer Cubby Broccoli having his hair cut in imitation of Connery.
Lazenby saw himself as a clone of Connery, but who was Connery’s Bond based on? No one and nothing; the character is a row of noughts. Fleming gave him a name which was deliberately anonymous. Kingsley Amis, analysing Bond’s persona in 1965, remarked that there was nothing to him: he resembled a pro forma invoice or a silhouette.
In 1969, the poster campaign for OHMSS inadvertently repeated Amis’s point. It showed Bond in silhouette, his face blacked out, since Lazenby’s identity remained a mystery. The fantasy is a vacant space which can be filled by any nobody who wants to feel important. When giving out the telephone number of his London penthouse, Jeffrey Archer draws smug attention to the letters 007: the previous tenant was John Barry, who composed many Bond scores, and Connery used to live on a lower floor, so by proxy Bond makes his own alluring contribution to Archer’s brashly inflated mystique.
Like all the figments of our collective imagination, Bond tells us some uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our precarious times. Dressing immaculately to kill, he announced a new attitude towards violence, and sponsored a new style of anaesthetised cynicism: he was a maker of our defensively unfeeling modern mood.
With his unruffled clothes and his insolent grin, he implied that killing, if carried out with the right contemptuous nonchalance, could be cool. In this he was a creature of the Sixties, the decade when the human race first discovered that, in a traumatic and murderous world, the wisest policy is not to care. One of the sacred, inalienable traditions of the Bond films is their pop-art gore. At the beginning Bond, seen through a viewfinder which is the barrel of a gun, strides out and fires at the camera. Blood – whose? ours? – showers the screen and obliterates it.
In 1964 Susan Sontag called this ruthless irony “camp”, and gave as an example of such impassive connoisseurship “stag movies seen without lust”. Another example might be death scenes seen without compassion or squeamish revulsion, and the Bond stories are full of them. Fleming’s Bond polices a world run by sardonic megalomaniacs, immune to natural feeling. One of these crazed despots plays a practical joke on him in OHMSS, assassinating Bond’s wife just after their marriage. In the Live and Let Die novel Bond discovers the mashed body of his friend Felix Leiter, who has been gnawed by a shark. A note attached to what remains of him reads: “He disagreed with something that ate him.”
Fleming’s Bond is dismayed by such cruelties, but on screen the character learned to retaliate in the same jocular way. Sean Connery amuses himself in Dr No by allowing one of his adversaries to scramble towards a gun which we know to be empty; having encouraged the man to expect a fair fight, he then casually shoots him dead with his own loaded weapon.
Nice Roger Moore, who recoiled from such sadism, eliminates the web-fingered amphibian Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me by firing at his groin. Moore was supposed to sneer “Ballseye, Fishfinger!” as he did so, but since he never learned to wrinkle his lip with the surly menace of Connery, he was spared the obscenity.
Freud predicted that our technology would make “prosthetic gods” of us. In most films, Q hands over to Bond a new range of toys which serve as his prostheses, entitling him to behave with godlike ruthlessness. In You Only Live Twice, his kit includes a cigarette fitted with a rocket-powered dart, while in the new film, Tomorrow Never Dies, his cigarette lighter doubles as a grenade.
His car in The Spy Who Loved Me is also a submarine, and in The Living Daylights it detonates missiles. Other characters challenge him with ingenious accessories of their own. Oddjob, the bullish retainer in Goldfinger, wears a hat with a razor-edged brim. If he aims at you, you’ll find yourself without a head to wear it on. The most robotic of the villains is Jaws, the owner of those serrated metal choppers in Moonraker: his dental prosthesis turns him into a man-eater.
This terminal battle between mankind and the machines which will either make us superhuman or render us redundant is the scariest subject of our expiring century, and the Bond films have done us all a service by dramatising the predicament we find ourselves in. Fleming inhabited a safer, more sedate world, before sheep could be cloned and an IBM computer had learned how to outwit Kasparov in a chess tournament.
The Bond of the novels is no superman. One of the things I like best about him is his churning fear of aerial turbulence: on a flight across the Adriatic in From Russia with Love, he stoically sweats through an electric storm, keeping his eyes on a patch of stitching on the back of the seat in front and a tight control on his sphincter. In the films, Bond suffers from no such lowly, grounded qualms. Moore grapples with Zorin’s zeppelin atop the Golden Gate bridge in A View to a Kill, and in Tomorrow Never Dies Pierce Brosnan (or, to be exact, his intrepid double) free-falls from a height of 8km and, to escape detection by radar, pulls his parachute cord only 70m above the ocean.
The films recklessly aggrandise the books, in which Bond the naive Little Englander thinks doner kebabs and papayas thrillingly exotic. In Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, the ogre Blofeld decadently cultivates a Japanese garden stocked with poisonous blooms and a few bloodthirsty fish. Roald Dahl’s script for the film gave Blofeld’s horticulture a more alarming and outlandish twist: the floral traps for flies or men became a carnivorous spaceship, which cruised the black intergalactic wastes and, whenever it came across a satellite or astronaut, opened its vent to gobble them whole.
Such extravagances shouldn’t make us forget how down-to-earth the films are in their sense of geopolitical peril. Fleming’s Bond tells his American colleague Leiter that for Britain “the war just doesn’t seem to have ended”, since there have been epilogues in Berlin, Cyprus, Kenya and Suez. In spite of Bond’s xenophobic snobbery, he and President John F Kennedy shared a mutual admiration. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy’s self-serving anthem in praise of bravado, is one of the few books in the library of Fleming’s Bond; JFK repaid the literary compliment in a 1961 Life magazine poll, when he listed From Russia with Love as the ninth of his 10 favourite books.
In 1962 he commandeered a print of Dr No from the producers, and showed it repeatedly at the White House. That, not coincidentally, was the year of the stand-off over Russian missiles in Cuba, when Kennedy’s infatuation with the politics of existential risk – fuelled by consignments of prescription drugs – brought the world very close to catastrophe.
Bond’s derring-do has never lost its appeal in Washington. Richard Nixon’s team of conspirators and burglars included Howard Hunt, who wrote his own sub-Fleming romances of international espionage. Though Ronald Reagan’s loony reverie about a nuclear umbrella which would protect the United States from bombardment by Russia was named after George Lucas’s Star Wars, it sounded more like the rabid scenario of a Bond villain: in Diamonds Are Forever, Blofeld’s hoarded gems are meant to encrust a death star which will terrorise the globe by emitting a fatal ray.
The films confect their plots from our cosmic paranoia, encouraging us to believe that our shared fate depends on the mad caprice of monsters like Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, whose solex agitator can painlessly convert light into energy, or Zorin in A View to a Kill, who schemes to monopolise the world’s store of microchips.
After all, why not? JFK, mimicking Bond, almost annihilated life on earth, and Saddam Hussein, if he chose to use his chemical arsenal, could probably achieve the same result by stealth. It would be interesting to know what Bill Gates learned from the precedent of Zorin. Meanwhile, as we await a final verdict on our species, Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner dictate our dreams to us, like the television magnate Carver (played by Jonathan Pryce) in Tomorrow Never Dies, who studies the pooled subconsciousness of mankind on a wall of television screens.
The Bond of the novels, nostalgic for his bouts of fisticuffs with Hitler’s Wehrmacht, never accustomed himself to the flabby demobilisation of the Fifties. Fleming called him “a man of war” and added that: “When, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline.”
The films more realistically recognise that there is always a war in progress somewhere. And what are those films but small, lurid wars, staged for our self-destructive delight? The technology paraded in Tomorrow Never Dies was designed for military use, and has only recently been decommissioned: the Hercules from which Bond jumps “has seen action in Bosnia and Saudi Arabia”, and his helicopter is a veteran of battles in Liberia, Albania and other theatres of war. Both aircraft, like Bond himself, proudly bear evidence of “combat damage”. Carver in the new film foments a war in order to boost subscriptions to his satellite television channels, choreographing the end of the world as the ultimate cinematic epic – the latest and definitively last Bond film.
Fleming said that he wrote his books “for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, aeroplanes, and beds”. The train and the plane indicate that he didn’t think of reading as a sedentary activity; it was meant to be a ride. Even the bed Fleming mentions is not intended for sleep, and in the Moonraker film Bond and an astral concubine have zero-gravity sex in a spacecraft. No wonder the cinematic Bond has experimented with so many different forms of propulsion: an underwater jet-pack in Thunderball, an automotive rickshaw in Octopussy, a sky-diving motorcycle in Tomorrow Never Dies.
Of course it has been necessary – as well as replacing Bonds who lose too much hair or become too stiff-jointed – to make the character answerable to a fickle, mutable Zeitgeist. Like any mythological being, Bond is adept at metamorphosis. Connery got the part, as Broccoli succinctly remarked, because “he had balls”. Once Connery gave the part up, Bond lost them. The publicists nowadays underline the caring credentials of Brosnan’s current Bond.
When Bond grows humane, can relegation be far off? Not just yet: we cannot afford to disarm him and pension him off. It is our killing he is licensed to do. Bond’s upper-class civility, like his black tie, is a camouflage. Actually he is a vigilante, a sprucer version of Dirty Harry or Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle.
In GoldenEye, Brosnan’s Bond tidied up the disintegrating Soviet Union and did some stocktaking of its nerve-gas supplies. I wonder if anyone has thought of dispatching him to Iraq to “take out” Saddam Hussein? The movies tell lies in which we long to believe, and we have still not outgrown the need for a saviour.