James Bond and the End of History
It's been 30 years since James Bond made any sense at all. Longer still since Bond mattered to anyone but the heirs of Albert "Cubby" Broccoli. Even by 1961, when Sean Connery clad merely in sodden chest hair and skimpy swim trunks strode dripping from the water onto Crab Key Island, Bond was an anachronism.
In truth James Bond was a man of the 1950s. A Cold War construct of English novelist Ian Fleming (an upper class dilettante who had tried his hand at journalism, banking, and intelligence work), Bond was a feel-good fantasy of British manhood. He was a player on the world stage just when the remaining shreds of English imperial power were dissolving after WWII (like England he was perpetually being bailed out by the US, in the form of CIA spook Felix Leiter). Although he was licensed to kill, his moral authority was clear in a world full of conspiratorial, power brokering, vaguely Eastern European enemies (to what nationality do names like Ernest Stavro Blofeld and SMERSH belong?). He was a sexually liberated, love'em and leave'em type, kicked out of Eton as a boy for an unspecified incident with a maid, a man who would not have looked out of place in a smoking jacket at the Playboy mansion. It's hardly coincidental that Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, the same year that Playboy first hit the newsstands. Like Hugh Hefner, James Bond was a man of his times.
Fleming died in 1964, when the Bond film franchise was just three movies old, when all the flicks remained largely faithful to the source material, and when the idea of Bond was still believable, albeit barely.
The new film adaptation of Fleming's first Bond book is not the first Bond film to try to make Bond relevant in the post Cold War era. The Glasnost-era License to Kill adapted a gold-smuggling villain from a Fleming short story into a drug smuggling villain who ran a mediation center, casino, and bank as fronts (!?!). And 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies departed entirely from Fleming to feature an evil media baron who plots to start a war between England and China (!?!) in order to install a Chinese leader who will hand the villain complete control of China's broadcasting interests (take that Rupert Murdoch!).
The new Bond flick doesn't contort itself nearly as painfully to squeeze Fleming's material into a contemporary setting, but that's more a measure of how bad were movies like Tomorrow Never Dies than it is a measure of how good is Casino Royale. As exciting as the action set pieces are (and most of them are very good), they can't distract from the ludicrous spectacle of MI6 and the CIA fighting the global war on terror by sending not-so-undercover agents to play Texas Hold 'Em in Montenegro. (Next up, Bond goes head to head with Bin Laden in a high stakes match of Rock, Paper, Scissors in Cannes.) Despite the fact that most of the events of Casino Royale come straight from the novel, they lose all meaning when ripped from the context of time and place. The grim, vaguely S&M gay torture sequence that once packed cultural punch as an expression of guilt over an unchecked libido, now is just a weak excuse for a cheesy one-liner. Meanwhile, the plot twists of the original novel are reduced to an interminable 40-minute coda whose storytelling is so obtuse as to be almost unfathomable.
Unlike Watson, I find Daniel Craig to be excellently cast as Bond--believable both as a killer and a ruggedly handsome ladies' man, a bit of rough trade who somehow fell in with a better class of folks and who cleans up nice. But who cares? Bond no longer stands for anything; he carries no cultural weight, projects no cultural meaning. It might as well be Vin Diesel, Wesley Snipes, or Samuel L. Jackson playing Bond. And Bond might as well be helping passengers escape from a plane full of snakes. Today's Bond is a generic action hero, a brand-name excuse for car chases and product placements. (Only in a universe created by Sony Pictures are Vaio laptops standard issue for British intelligence. Must be the exploding batteries.)
None of this seemed to matter much to the packed house at the suburban multiplex where I watched the movie. Many in the audience cheered when the end credits rolled (and not for the same reason that I was tempted to cheer). Bond, it seems, has become like any other franchise--no one expects greatness from McDonald's and if the restaurant meets the dim expectations of customers then everyone is satisfied. Everyone knows that there's a difference between a Quarter Pounder and a real hamburger, but in the context of McDonald's we're conditioned to accept the ersatz burger as something that's just fine.
I'm still convinced that there's something special that a filmmaker with a shred of creativity could do with James Bond in the 21st century--Casino Royale as a period piece set in 1953 examining exactly how Bond became a womanizing killer in the service of the king working to preserve the last vestiges of British male privledge; or better yet, a contemporary movie starring Sean Connery as a 70-something Bond struggling with irrelevance in a post-Cold War, post-feminist world that's left him behind, strapping it on one last time for queen and country. But why risk the franchise if ersatz burgers will get you to over 1 billion served?
Just a small note, SMERSH is not a mysteriously pan-ethnic invention; it was the real name of the Soviet counterintelligence department founded during World War II, an abbreviation of "Smert Spionem"-- "Death to Spies."
Posted by:Simon | November 28, 2006 at 12:43 PM