The first thing to notice about James Bond is that he’s a
god. I’m not talking about the James
Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels, and I’m not talking about the James Bond of the
most recent film, Skyfall—a film that
makes the most significant departure from the cinematic tradition of James Bond
in the history of the franchise. I’m
talking about the James Bond most of us know: the Bond we watched in the movie
theaters, on video tape, on DVD, on late night television and in any of a
thousand forms of streaming video, from Dr.
No in 1962 to Quantum of Solace
in 2008. This is a Bond who doesn’t
stumble around like a mere mortal, growing from inadequacy to adequacy,
learning new things both true and false, fumbling to make a path for himself in
the world, to find a place where he fits, to build something like a family or a
life’s work that can itself start to grow and falter. In fact, a good part of this Bond’s appeal is
that he doesn’t have to do any of that messy stuff.
We can get a good sense of the Bond of cinematic tradition
if we think of him as less like the protagonist of a novel, and more like a
figure out of mythology. In its classic
manifestations, the novel offers us protagonists who grow and change. Sometimes they change externally, seeking and
finding a place for themselves in the world, Horatio Alger style (all of those
orphans traipsing around the nineteenth century novel are placeless people
seeking some kind of belonging). Often,
especially in the bildungsroman, we
get to watch the characters’ ethical growth: Huck Finn has his great “All right
then, I’ll go to hell” moment, rejecting the ideology of shore-based society
for a dream of friendship conceived on his river journeys with Jim; Jane Eyre
learns to balance her fiery, passionate desires with her self-possession. Sometimes we get to watch the slow, faltering
development of some skill or social ability, as we do when we see James Joyce’s
Stephen Dedalus slowly learn the art of language (from his lisping childhood to
his pretentious display of literary theory) and the way to relate to women
(from a full-on case of pathological virgin/whore dichotomy to a somewhat less
virulent case of the same, perhaps in remission). In any case, the real action of a great many
novels is to be found in watching the protagonist learn, grow, and change. All of this is in contradistinction to the
way certain characters—the gods—tend to operate in mythology. If the classic protagonist of a novel is a
creature of becoming, the gods in
mythology are creatures of pure being. That is, they are what they are, and will be
for eternity. Ares doesn’t grow and
learn and change, nor does he seek his true home, nor does Dionysus, nor does
Athena : they embody certain traits: indeed, they represent those traits, and it wouldn’t make sense for them to lose
or modify their warlikeness, their indulgentness, or their rationality. How could we speak of a Dionysian experience
if Dionysus went to A.A. and learned the twelve steps of self-reinvention? This seems to be true of mythology across
cultures: Loki never changes in the tales Norse mythology; nor does Tiki in the
Polynesian mythological cycles.
Like the gods of mythology, the classic film Bond never has
to grow or learn or seek out a place.
When we see him engaged in training exercises during the opening
sequences of several of the films, he’s never really in the process of
acquiring new skills: he’s merely performing feats of the sort we already know
he can perform: there are no surprises—instead, there’s an affirmation of the
traits we already attribute to Bond: awesomeness in physical combat; cleverness
in improvisation; coolheaded aloofness; and a propensity to collect the women
who fall, swooningly, into his arms.
It’s great. And we’d feel
betrayed if he actually had to pick up new ideas and master new things: the
whole point of him, like the whole point of, say, Zeus, is that he’s already
the perfect master of what he does and who he is. We’d also feel very strange if he was in any
significant way haunted by a past he needs to overcome, unable to allow himself
the pleasures of Pussy Galore because of some hang-ups about Honey Rider. The film Bond does not carry any real wounds
from one film to another, physical or psychological. With only very minor exceptions, he’s an
episodic figure, the film Bond, not a cumulative one: more at home in a cycle
of mythological tales than in the cohesive, ends-oriented narrative of a novel.
It is significant, I think, that the James Bond familiar to
readers of Ian Fleming’s novels is much more like a classic novelistic hero
than is the mythological Bond of the films.
Judith Roof, the sharpest writer on Bond to have trod this earth, puts
it succinctly. In the novels, she says, “Ian
Fleming’s Bond character does evolve; he reacts, learns, carries with him the
lessons of his own traumatic history.
The Dr. No Bond remembers
painfully Diamonds Are Forever’s
Tiffany Case. Bond’s body and mind
become increasingly scarred…. The literary character James Bond, however, is
not coterminous with the cultural Bond figure…” In contrast, we have the
cinematic Bond, whom Roof describes as “a creature of almost pathological
consistency.” Unlike in the novels, the
Bond of film “appears as if it [Roof uses “it” rather than “he,” to emphasize
the semiotic nature of the Bond figure] always knew everything — as if it was
spawned with skills intact and little memory of past tortures which have no
cumulative effect on him.” Spawned with
skills intact and little memory—one could say this of Aphrodite as easily as of
the cinematic Bond.
But we can’t really make this kind of statement about the
Bond of Skyfall, the film that marks
the fiftieth anniversary of Bond as a cinematic phenomenon. As Bond himself puts it early in the movie,
the character is all about resurrection.
Skyfall’s
beginning sequence already gives us something different from the typical Bond
opening. Where we’re used to seeing a
kind of set-piece or overture in which Bond’s immutable awesomeness is, once
again, made plain, this time we see Bond falter and, more significantly,
die. His fellow agent (we later learn
she’s Moneypenny) is ordered to shoot at Bond’s opponent even as he wrestles
with Bond on top of a moving train. She
hesitates, saying she has no good shot, but on orders from M, who feels there
is too much at stake to risk not shooting, she fires, hitting Bond and knocking
him off the train. He falls a great
distance into a river, is washed down a waterfall, and disappears. He fails for to reappear, and back in
England, he is assumed dead, his obituary written, his flat and belongings sold
off. When we see him again, we’re not told
how he survived—and this is significant, because in some sense he did not survive,
he was resurrected.
Much in the film makes Bond out to be human and frail, in
ways alien to the Bond of cinematic tradition.
We see Bond accumulate new scars that do not heal; we see him fail his
tests in marksmanship, physical fitness, and psychological readiness for duty;
we hear of the early death of his parents, and of unspecified, unresolved
psychological wounds stemming from that loss.
We often see him from behind as he stands in a posture much like that of
Caspar David Freidrich’s Wanderer Among
the Clouds: a figure part defiance, part inwardness, and part
vulnerability, not the clear-eyed, swaggering man Sean Connery played.
It’s not only a humanized Bond we see in Skyfall: it’s quite explicitly a Christ
figure. Not only does he die and rise:
one of the main themes of Skyfall is
Bond’s ability to love and forgive those who have sinned against him. There’s a foil to Bond in Skyfall, a villain named Silva. Silva, like Bond, was sacrificed by M in the
name of a greater goal for the agency, and he lives to wreak vengeance on
her. His elaborate scheme involves
making M feel afraid, and repeatedly urging her to “think on her sins,”
including, of course, the sin of sacrificing him. Silva refers to M as “mother,” and there’s a
parent-hate here a little like that of Milton’s Satan, and a lot like that of
Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein. But the main thing is his refusal to forgive
the woman he clearly loved as a mother.
Bond has a similar relationship to M: deep affection, even love, and
anger at having been betrayed and sacrificed for a mission. But unlike Silva, Bond forgives those who
have sinned against him, and is ready to sacrifice himself again to save them. When M finally does die, the Christ parallels
are underlined by the posture in which Bond holds her: it is a reversed Pietà ,
with Bond in the Mary position and M in the position of the agony-wracked, dead Christ. He embodies pity and love and compassion
for someone who, in her human frailty and uncertainty, ordered violence against
him.
The name of the film refers to the Bond family estate, the
scene of the trauma to which he returns (it was where Bond’s parents were
murdered). But it’s also a symbolic
name, since the Bond that we see in Skyfall
is a Bond taken from the realm of the gods and brought down into the human
world, with human frailties. He is now,
for the first time in the history of Bond film, not a god per se but a god made flesh, and vulnerable, and capable of loving and
forgiving those who caused him pain. No
longer a Greek God, and certainly not a bearded father-God from the old
testament tradition, this Bond is a Christ.
And he may just resurrect the franchise.
