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ntil 24‘s Jack Bauer came along, saving the world was a peculiarly British obsession, the province of suave, globe-trotting spies and enigmatic timelords. The fact that James Bond and Doctor Who were launched, respectively, in 1962 and 1963, on the cusp of a decade that would cement Britain’s place at the nexus of pop culture now seems propitious. Britain’s political influence may have been in retreat, but its influence on style and fashion had rarely been greater. Although Bond and the Doctor represented two different types, they were at least two different types of outsider, the first a connoisseur of bespoke suits, baccarat, and women, the second a time traveling hobo characterized by ill-fitting clothes and a stoner vagueness. It was, unsurprisingly, Bond whose appeal had the farthest reach. For Raymond Chandler, an early fan of Ian Fleming’s novels, that reason was simple: "[He] is what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets."
More than four decades later, with a twenty-first Bond movie currently filming in the Bahamas, what’s remarkable is that it should be the doctor, not the spy, who more closely resembles Chandler’s paradigm. Mothballed since 1989, the doctor returned to British television last year in a radical makeover
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that saw Queer as Folk creator Russell T. Davies cast Christopher Eccleston (Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later) in the titular role. While past doctors seemed to be asexual eccentrics, Eccleston bought his moody, troubled sexuality to the character, shattering the old shibboleths overnight. As one blogger wrote: "It’s like suddenly finding Robert De Niro in Family Affairs. You think, ‘Christ, what happened when I wasn’t looking?’"
How did the once nerdy, knitted scarf-wearing doctor come to be cooler than Bond, who — post Austin Powers — is becoming a parody of a parody of a parody? Ironically, it seems, by reaching into Bond’s own history, and adopting Sean Connery as a template. In an interview with the UK’s Observer newspaper, Eccleston explained why he never liked Doctor Who as a child: "He seemed an authority figure; I felt a bit patronized by him. I loved Connery as Bond: he was part of the establishment, but maverick; he didn’t sound like he was a teacher at public school."
The fact that Eccleston took Connery as his model, and not, say, Roger Moore, speaks volumes of how the franchise continues to struggle for definition thirty-five years after Connery’s departure (excepting a misguided return for Never Say Never Again in 1983). Poll after poll shows that Connery remains the most popular Bond, even among viewers who weren’t alive when Connery checked out. If the series is to reclaim the vitality of the early years, it needs to reclaim Bond from the camp, cheesy joke that he became under Moore, and from which the spy has never recovered. Hiring Daniel Craig to replace Pierce Brosnan in the upcoming Casino Royale suggests that longtime producer Barbara Broccoli is thinking the
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Bond films rely on a Pavlovian relationship between danger and sex.
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right way. Watching Craig hold the screen in last year’s Brit flick Layer Cake, the guy feels contemporary in a way that Brosnan could never pull off, with a quiet emotional core that feels right without undermining the brooding masculinity essential to the character.
And Casino Royale is a great choice for the twenty-first Bond movie, too. It was the first novel Fleming wrote, and shows Bond in a more vulnerable light than audiences are used to seeing. Director Martin Campbell, who made Goldeneye, has wisely chosen to hew more closely to Fleming’s creation this time around. "We show that Bond will suffer from emotional and physical pain," he said. "Honestly, we couldn’t do that with Pierce [Brosnan]."
If you’ve never read a Bond novel, Casino Royale is something of a shock. For a start, Bond is more psychologically complex, almost sociopathic, than the one-dimensional version of the movies. He appears to harbor rape fantasies towards women, suggesting demons in his closet. In an early chapter we are casually informed that Bond "lit his seventieth cigarette of the day," shortly before taking a cold shower and slipping into bed, where "his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold." He smokes, he drinks, he takes cold showers! This is old school Bond, a million miles from the fussy figure he has become on screen. Forewarned that he is going to be saddled with a female accomplice, he is appalled: "Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around." Inevitably the woman is bad news; his attempt to save her leads to a remarkably candid torture scene, in which Bond is forced to strip and have his genitals brutalized until he loses consciousness. The message could hardly be clearer: women rob men of their power.
In the movies this subtext is still there, but largely neutralized by the treatment of sex. If Bond once epitomized the sexual liberation of the ’60s — the first bonafide hero for whom sex was about recreation — he seems increasingly, like Mike Myers’ caricature, to be frozen in time, unable to accommodate his attitudes to contemporary life. The producers are not blind to the problem — in Goldeneye, Judi Dench’s brisk, no-nonsense M, dismisses Bond as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" — but have been afraid to alter a formula that continues to translate into box office gold. That formula is remarkably consistent, relying on a Pavlovian relationship between danger and sex, in which the one inevitably anticipates (or is rewarded by) the other.
From the start the movies were careful to amp up the sex quotient, doubling and even trebling the number of Bond’s conquests as they appeared in Ian Fleming’s books, a fact the studio was not shy to exploit. "69,000,007 James Bond Fans Live In a Throbbing World of Hot-Blooded Excitement," read the legend on a poster for 1964′s From
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Bond is screwing for England; he is, after all, the ultimate patriot.
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Russia with Love. The juxtaposition of "throbbing" and "hot-blooded excitement" (to say nothing of the figure of 69) is brilliantly illustrative of the way action and sex are conflated in the franchise.
What stops these movies being genuinely sexy, however, and keeps them — in true British tradition — in the coy realm of nudge nudge, wink wink innuendo is the way in which eroticism is punctuated by slapstick (a tradition Austin Powers deliciously satirizes). Interrupted by a phone call while he seduces Jill Masterson in Goldfinger, for example, Bond explains that he can’t make dinner because "something big’s come up." Add to this the idiotic names for the female characters (Pussy Galore most obviously, although Plenty O’Toole and Xenia Onatopp also spring to mind), and the tendency to turn Bond’s conquests into public spectacle, as in Moonraker, in which an earthbound Bond and Dr. Holly Goodhead materialize on a video screen at the Ministry of Defense (Minister: "My God! What’s Bond doing?" Q: "I think he’s attempting re-entry sir.") and the movies are entirely denuded of sexual energy. (Of course, the not-so-subliminal message of such scenes, in which Bond is caught in flagrante, is that he’s screwing for England; he is, after all, the ultimate patriot).
This is all very amusing for a fourteen year old, but hardly passes as adult fare. The truth is that sex in Bond has never been as interesting, as dark, and as mystifying as in real life. There was a rich irony in the arrest in January of former Bond director Lee Tamahori after he was caught in a sting, dressed as a woman and apparently soliciting clients for sex (the charges were subsequently dropped in a plea deal). If only sex was that messy in the movies. If only anything was messy in the movies. These days it’s a blessing if they’re even original, often reduced to plagiarizing their own archives, as in Die Another Day in which Halle Berry emerges from the surf a la Ursula Andress’s in Dr. No, and the deadly lasers from Goldfinger get a reprise. It’s a sad day when a franchise is reduced to replicating its greatest hits.
But salvation may be at hand. The lesson of Doctor Who is that a tired formula can be sexed up for a modern audience. “If you don’t grow and change, you die and we felt this was the right time, right story and Daniel was the right guy,” Barbara Brocolli recently said, just one indication, among many, that the producers plan to surprise us. Having ditched the tux, to predictable howls of outrage, might this be the Bond who ditches it all? "I have told bosses I’m prepared to do a full frontal scene," Craig recently told British tabloids. "I’m not shy and Bond wouldn’t be shy about it either." In the novels Bond is frequently nude, but Fleming leaves the details to the imagination, something full screen nudity can’t do. Showing 007′s cock might well humanize him, but it may also, conversely, leave him emasculated,
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The franchise has a history of sacrificing the stars under a deluge of fireworks. Casino Royale could be the exception.
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turning him into an object of scrutiny and disparagement. With his pants firmly on, Bond remains an object of fantasy for men and women alike; naked he loses something of his mystery, and mastery.
Regardless, the fact that Casino Royale‘s two stars have proved so comfortable with onscreen nudity seems like a harbinger of some genuinely adult sex, and Eva Green’s turn as the unbalanced, incestuous Isabelle in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers suggests she can project the twisted sexuality that her character, Vesper Lynde, requires. In the book Bond’s profound sexual humiliation is directly linked to the way in which Lynde exploits and uses her sexuality, a variety of fucked-up that the movies have traditionally avoided.
Yet the franchise has a history of sacrificing the stars under a deluge of fireworks, and the selection of Legend of Zorro director Campbell over Quentin Tarantino was a predictable cop-out, signaling that no one is yet ready to jettison the CGI. Casino Royale could be the honorable exception, in which the most thrilling scenes play out around the baccarat table, and explosions are just a coda to fully formed scenes, and not scenes in their own right. But don’t hold your breath. This is Bond, after all, and it’s a long time since he’s been capable of leaving us either shaken or stirred.
Casino Royale opens on November 17. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
Aaron Hicklin joined Black Book as editor-in-chief in April 2003, after five years with Gear, which he helped to launch in 1998. Prior to that he worked at The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday. He is the author of Boy Soldiers (Mainstream Press, 1995), and the editor of The Revolution Will Be Accessorized: The Best of BlackBook (HarperPerennial), to be published in May 2006. |