A View to Kill

The gun barrel irises open, the brass section clears its throat, a man in evening dress turns and fires at you. Yes, you. Staring death down makes you feel more alive than ever. You’ll spend your life chasing the teenage dopamine that flooded your brain when you first heard this music. This melody fills your bones, the way Bach lives in you. Had you never heard the Goldberg variations, your body might recognize it first. Whenever you straighten your tie, you hum Bond’s violins and dat-dat-dat-dat the franchise brass.

Fleming concocted a “blunt instrument,” but film transformed his cold, amoral assassin into a stylish embodiment of masculine competence and detached cool, in an absurd world where mere Americans ran the world. This made Bond a generational figurehead for maleness, less a faithful adaptation, more a mythic upgrade that reflected, and shaped, before it was forced to critique 20th-century masculinity. If on the page Bond is an outsider, on the screen, he is the world’s most consummate jock; and born from geopolitical penis envy.

After Connery’s casting, Fleming’s character evolved to match so each commercial machine could complement each other. The irony of Connery’s shadow, which looms large over the franchise, is there’s not a single performance Connery delivers as Bond that could sit on a list of Connery’s best ten performances. Connery’s best performance as James Bond truly comes in Michael Bay’s The Rock, when James Bond was going under the codename, John Mason. (More on that, in a minute). The Connery films, salvaged by the charisma of its leading man, presents a different vision of the character than its creator intended. A process of class-transposition occurs when Connery and his Scottish roots is placed onto Commander Bond, the repressed Eton-educated spy with a slavish devotion to the finer things in life. The upper class, lacking in eroticism and appeal, is given the visage of something not real, and the construction of James Bond emerges. (This class transposition would be put on pause during the Moore era, before returning again. Dalton, and Brosnan, are Welsh, and Irish, respectively. In Skyfall, Craig is confirmed to be Scottish.)

Bond, much is made of the few known constants in his life. In the prose, a tender relationship exists between Bond and M, Bond’s boss. In real life, Fleming referred to his stern mother as, “M.” His mother’s first name? Evelyn. M’s secretary’s name? Eve Moneypenny. The film’s casting of Judi Dench as Bond’s mentor turns M into a surrogate mother figurehead for Bond and her recasting persisted even amidst the ‘reboot’ that introduced Daniel Craig. The Craig movies take this subtext literally when the villain in Skyfall refers to M as, “mother,” directly.

We’ve resorted to diving into the Oedipal retreats of Fleming’s mind, because along the way we stopped wondering what James Bond thought about anything. After a decade of Marvel films, I do know where Captain America’s politics lie on the surveillance state. Captain America has convictions, which means Captain America can age. Bond has habits. A martini order survives regime change in a way political positions cannot, which is why our fathers and their fathers watched the same character and saw two different men.

A martini order survives regime change in a way political positions cannot.

James Bond is so foundational to the core of 20th century cinema, that we ended the 20th century giving birth to a franchise that had enough material to sustain itself through three decent films starring Mike Myers. During the writing of this piece, I mentioned the subject to a woman on a date. She said, “I don’t really know anything about James Bond. I’ve seen the Austin Powers films though.”

The conversation around Bond lives beyond homages, constant parody allowed Bond to endure. Every gangster film is a film in dialogue with The Godfather, every spy film addresses Bond. When Matt Damon promotes Jason Bourne in a void black space, he tells Charlie Rose, “I never related to a guy like James Bond.” This same Damon broods through De Niro’s second directorial effort, in The Good Shepherd, about the origins of the CIA. In Alan Moore’s graphic novels, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we meet “Jimmy Bond,” a misogynist blowhard, who serves as a rebuke of Fleming. Ironic, in the film adaptation of this very graphic novel, it would star Sean Connery. His last role ever.

It’s the Bond that Roger Moore left behind that gives us Austin Powers. A famous spy, gallivanting around the world, with a sexual revolution ethos is a Bond Connery just alluded to; like a limit in calculus, he approached ridiculousness but never quite hit it. Ridiculousness was the impression Moore leaned into, cemented, and in a way, codified. Moore was rebelling against a stuffy world, and his comic instincts were exactly what a generation in the throes of Vietnam’s woes needed.

Dalton’s run as the character is a regrettable event, even if it sets the stage for the darker turn Craig was ready for. After Thatcher, Martin Campbell was the first director to bring a true humanity to the character of James Bond. Campbell didn’t merely direct two Bond films, he reintroduced Bond twice. The old-world sensibility of Bond is updated with contemporary wit in Goldeneye, though Goldeneye is an original story released in 1995.

Martin Campbell impressed British audiences during the 1980s when he directed Edge of Darkness for BBC in 1985, after originally directing a slew of sex comedies, and musicals. No career moves in a straight line. Needing work after directing Darkness, Campbell accepted a job to direct the HBO film, Cast a Deadly Spell, and cast a then-unknown Julianne Moore due to budgetary restrictions. After the film performed well on HBO, Campbell’s next film, No Escape, struggled at the box office. Taste still counted for something once upon a time. One of the executives at United Artists saw No Escape, liked it, and thought Campbell did a terrific job. From there, they thought Campbell would be an excellent candidate for James Bond.

Would this happen today? In today’s Hollywood climate, a franchise is handed to either two camps of directors: new directors emerging from the indie festival scene, like Coogler, Nolan, and Gerwig, or proven studio names like Denis Villeneuve, and Edward Berger (who was ambiguously tapped to reimagine the Bourne franchise). There would not have been a healthy amount of data and comps to feed today’s Hollywood executive to justify hiring Martin Campbell for Goldeneye. Today’s executives would not find Campbell’s profile, “clutter-busting” or “cutting edge” enough for today’s saturated media climate where “the package” means everything. Three cheers for private equity who took culture and wrung ‘pop’ out of it.

In a conversation Campbell had on the Team Deakins podcast, Campbell admits that upon taking the job, he had something to prove. Brosnan shared this energy, getting the chance just after he’d been forced to pass when his TV contract for Remington Steele was abruptly extended, only for it to be canceled yet again. Fickle business.

For all the work Craig needed to do to inhabit someone he never felt comfortable becoming (the money helps), Brosnan’s swagger is effortless. Brosnan’s version of the character transformed Bond into a gentleman after Dalton. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant when Brosnan became Bond, there had not been a longer stretch of time when the world went without a Bond film. The specter of Communism subsided. Bond needed a new context. A supervillain, untethered to a particular nation or empire, but powerful enough to pose an existential threat to our global sense of freedom, became a fixture of the War on Terror. Blowback became an unavoidable subtext for Bond in a world after the Berlin Wall; Brosnan’s Bond was no longer on the side of clear good in his films, as his most famous villain was a spy just like him, wronged by the agency. In the Brosnan films, personal failing and individual greed emerges as the true anchor of the evil in the world, after the empire of the East has been vanquished. In Brosnan’s hands, then, Bond as a blunt instrument subsides. If we begin to call into question the fabric of the empire, then our hero has to be a tad more excellent than the average Joe, nay James, who marches in the Queen’s service.

The fan theories around Bond are more dissected than most. Some might say, it’s reached a religious fever. Every May, in London, the English department of Roehampton’s university releases original research to “appeal to scholars, academics, and cultural critics whose work focuses on Ian Fleming and James Bond, as well as to fans of the James Bond franchise who wish to supplement their knowledge in this area.” Given this, when we say ‘James Bond’ is an ‘institution,’ the remark might be a bit of an understatement. In general, the practice of managing a major Hollywood franchise is akin to a theological practice; both share the difficult task of sustaining the papacy and reinterpreting scripture.

Which brings us back to The Rock, and John Mason. The audience brings their experiences to the theater, and casting Connery as John Mason allowed audiences to conjure a fan theory of their own: though the film is not related to the series, it’s believed that this 1996 film is Connery’s last true iteration of James Bond. This fan theory sits alongside the fan theory that The Transporter’s Frank Martin shows up in Michael Mann’s Collateral, and that Pixar’s Cars takes place in a world after Anthropic and OpenAI render humanity obsolete.

The very idea of treating a fictional canon with the reverence of scripture is a British invention, and we can date it. In 1911, Ronald Knox stood before a college club to deliver a parody that applied the same methods German theologians used on the Bible to Sherlock Holmes stories, treating the detective as historical fact and interrogating the contradictions in Watson’s gospel. The joke refused to stay a joke. Conan Doyle wrote Knox a letter defending himself against the fake scholarship. Fans adopted the method with a straight face and called it the Great Game. Knox became one of England’s most serious Catholic thinkers and spent the rest of his life depressed that his one permanent achievement was a gag. Bond studies is that gag’s compound interest. Roehampton is the Grand Game with a DOI number.

Notice what the Mason theory gives people. It endures because it’s the only text where we see what happens to Bond once the empire is finished with him. No branded watch, no exit interview: a cell, and a government denying he was ever born. In my favorite fan theory lives the sacrilegious claim that there is no ‘James Bond,’ he is merely a codename passed on from one agent to another. How else would M remain constant amidst recasting? In both fan theories, Bond’s fans are asking for the accountability the franchise never will.

Every fan theory is a complaint dressed as a discovery.

The wry heights that Moore achieved would escape Craig during the entirety of his run of films. I’d argue, the comedic performances Craig delivered in Logan Lucky, and Knives Out, are overcompensating for the self-seriousness that was demanded of him for fifteen years. Pity, but his moment did not call for a wry tongue hanging in our cheeks. The Iraq War meant that the spiritual longing that underpinned the Vietnam generation suddenly became relevant once more. How else can we account for the renewed popularity of Star Wars, and the many Joseph Campbell-rip-offs that it inspired? Bond would not be immune to such cultural reframing. Like Peter Parker, this initial everyman would soon be edged into “chosen one” narratives sooner or later. In an era of rising fascism, encroaching authoritarianism, you wonder if our newfound obsession with powerful families, bloodlines, and the tides of destiny are a coincidence, maybe they’re a deeper convergence of some greater collective consciousness that we blithely call, ‘the zeitgeist.’ But rent is due, there are messages for Bumble matches for you to send. The collective conscious must go unexplored one day longer.

Casino Royale is an adaptation, and returns to Fleming’s novels. Craig is not the schoolyard bully that our dads aspired to be. Here in Casino Royale, the opening and its black-and-white world, Bond as an outsider emerges; we’re introduced to Bond amidst two qualifying kills. Two kills earn him his double-O status. Coloring in the lines of Bond’s license to kill is revolutionary, the dispassionate manner in which Craig kills enemies pays homage to Camus’ alienated hero.

Consider the voice of the outsider, how does The Stranger open?

“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday. I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says, YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.”

After Bond utters “Bond, James Bond” in Dr. No, the next film finds Bond in Turkey. Here, Fleming is guilty of rehashing the local government’s official propaganda about the threat of leftists and Communists in the country. Given the time Fleming spent as a journalist in the region, these mischaracterizations are conscious. Similar to Mark Antony, Fleming rewrites what happens in Turkey for the amusement of its visiting tourists. Turkey represents the ruins of another diminished empire whose faded glory foreshadowed Britain’s. Fleming’s Turkey was never Turkey. It was a mood board for a fading empire’s anxieties, dressed up as reportage by a man who’d been there and chose the lie. That’s the sleight of hand the films inherited and perfected: take a real place, subtract its politics, sell the postcard. By the time Connery says Bond’s name for the first time, this con runs three books deep. Bond would return to Turkey when Craig starred in Skyfall. What the franchise changed wasn’t the lie, but merely which excuses were needed to enjoy it, rendering it hard to separate Bond from the marketing problems that surround him.