Happily, James Bond dies at the end of the latest franchise outing No Time To Die. But unfortunately the formulaic advertising behemoth probably isnât dead yet.
The Spectator magazine claims, âNo Time to Die matters to Britain. Thereâs never been a more opportune time to deploy Bond and all the soft power he affords.
âIf the latest Bond movie is a box office hit, when Liz Truss next calls a foreign leader chances are the phone will get picked up in two rings, not four.â
The British state sort of agrees with this tosh. No Time To Die received ÂŁ47 million in tax credits on a production spend of ÂŁ200 million.
But the help does not stop there. MI6 torturer in chief Sir Alex Younger gave his personal green ink pen to his fictional equivalent on the set of No Time to Die âduring a top secret visitâ according to the press releases.
In No Time to Die, Bond sits on a beach in Jamaica, the label on his can of Heineken pointing to the screen.
The first Bond movie â1962âs Dr Noâwas released as Jamaica emerged as an independent nation away from the British Empire. Itâs where Ian Fleming wrote the books.
When his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, Britain was still at the centre of an empire, but it was collapsing fast.
The sexual attitudes were part of the reactionary wish fulfilment in which Bond basked. It is a world in which KGB agents disguised as English gents expose themselves as impostors by ordering red wine with fish. And tough lesbians called Pussy Galore secretly long to be converted by the cruel but handsome rapist hero.
The initial anti-Communist politics of the books were intended to be serious. In 1956 Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden spent a month at Flemingâs home after Edenâs health collapsed in the wake of the Suez Crisis. Fleming met John F Kennedy in 1960 to provide advice on assassinating Fidel Castro.
Bond was a reworking of a tradition of English gentlemen-spies defending empire. John Buchanâs Richard Hannay and Sappersâ Bulldog Drummond protected England from evil foreigners. The villainsâ epitomised by Sax Rohmerâs Fu Manchu âembody the racism and xenophobia of empire running.
Bond perpetuated this, creating a rogueâs gallery that exemplified a wide variety of stereotypes about people of mixed heritage âsuch as Mr. Big and Dr No. And anyone who did not share Bondâs brand of heterosexuality. Rosa Krebb is the psychopathic lesbian communist while Scaramanga is gay because he canât whistle!
Fleming gave his villains various physical impairments, injuries and disabilities. Hugo Drax has an overbite and scars, Oddjob has a cleft palate. The Craig era has been keen on the tedious trope and the baddies in No Time To Die both have facial disfigurements.
Each movie incarnation, from Sean Connery to Roger Moore and up to Daniel Craig, reacted to the changing climates to make cash. Not always positively. To Live and Let Die was cashing in on the success of Blaxploitation cinema and was a racist response to the growth of black politics.
Flemingâs reactionary politics would not have created the scripts of later Bond films, which water down much of the right wing politics implicit in the character. The imperialism is lowered a notch. But the spooks are the line of defence against âthe otherâ. Since the 1980s the bad guys are usually white.
The end of the Cold War meant Bond and the context around himâhis relationship with women and the nature of the threats that he facesâchanged to maintain the franchiseâs appeal. And to keep the cash flowing.
The villains have lost most of their more overtly racist and homophobic elements.
When Daniel Craig became Bond, the emphasis was shifted to redefining Bond with a superficial questioning of his place in the world.
The alcoholic assassin has always carried worldâweariness and melancholy along with his 70 cigarettes a day. So this element is not as new as the current franchise holders like to make out.
Violence
They updated the violence by copying the Jason Bourne films. They updated the politics by getting vaguely corporate, vaguely terrorist baddies.
But the sexual politics retained their essential creepiness throughout. Until nowâsort of.
The Sun has bemoaned the âwokeâ Bond and moaned that it wanted âhim shooting baddies and getting laidâand I donât want him apologising for it afterwardsâfor the sake of men everywhere.â
That the women arenât there for Bond to have sex with is progress of a sort.
But women remain simply plot devices. No Time to Die has removed sex, if not all the sexism, but the Bond universe is as it ever was.
Time to put it out of our misery.
Source: Socialistworker.co.uk