“The latest film, Skyfall, took us deeper into Bond than any of the previous ones, to the very brink of identifiable psychology. The death of the mother figure in the remote chapel, the plunge through the ice, the resurrection motifs: we seemed at moments to be entering the phantasmagoria of the Bond title sequences themselves, those underworld (undersea, sometimes) montages of flames and bullets and writhing women, occasionally churned by shock waves of Shirley Bassey.
“Fleming’s novels, too, skirt the droning vacuum of Bond’s inner life.”
Hahahahah, not to mention the SCREAMING VAGINA IMAGERY in those underwater images.
I disagree with this article, though. The idea of the traditional depiction of Bond as being without psychology? In the movies, yes. In the movies, he is the apotheosis of our society’s conception of malehood. The movies’ James Bond is everything men are told they should want and be. He’s a hedonist, a sophisticate, a thug, a killer, who nonetheless kills only those who warrant it (but you can tell who those are because Bond has killed them), a rapist who doesn’t need to rape because women shower their consent on him like a ticker tape parade.
But that is not who he is in the books. He’s shallow, yes, but that’s not without critical judgement from the author. Fleming never presents Bond as if it’s a good thing that he can do all this so easily and that he almost never thinks about it much. Fleming worked with people like Bond; he knew the toll it took on a human psyche to be that person (if they weren’t psychopaths to begin with), and he explicitly stated more than once that Bond was an amalgamation of men he had known in service (Fleming’s commentary on his own character makes for interesting reading, by the way; it’s an insight on how such a character is developed, and also an intimate glimpse into a morally ambiguous world; and the think the writer of that article erred in going too far back and assuming that Fleming’s most formative years re: Bond happened in his youth).
And when he wrote Bond, there was always a sense of something not being right with the man. Absolutely, he presented Bond’s attitude and lifestyle as seductive and sexy, but I think where people get confused is that they mistake attractive for being the same as admirable. It isn’t, and Fleming never pretended it was. I always walked away from the Bond novels with an abiding sense of the isolation of Bond’s chosen way of life, the emotional hollowness he had worked himself into and then filled with sensual vices, and pity for a man empty enough that he could enjoy living that way.
This is also the Bond of the Daniel Craig movies…and I find it interesting how the character has come around again. From the 1960s onward, the movie Bond became the perfect glossy action hero. Uncritical, surrounded by a positive miasma of male machismo and offhanded misogyny. Yet at the same time, the Bond of the books was very much part of a cultural dialogue, with the plots carrying a constant, evolving undercurrent of commentary on the political state of the world and Britain’s place in it. M’s reading of Tennyson at her inquest, for example, is not just some post-post-modern hipster commentary on the relevance of the Bond franchise; it’s entirely in line with Fleming’s thoughts on the UK’s post-war struggles to remain relevant as a world power. Neither the world as it was presented in those books, nor Bond himself, was ever anything except sordid (another influence, obvious once it’s mentioned, was the hard-boiled detective stories of Hammett and Chandler). And it’s just funny to me how, in due time, Bond has come around to his roots again in popular culture.
I’ll also point out that Skyfall isn’t the first Bond movie with embedded criticism/subversion of the Bond mythos in’t. I can bust out examples all the way back to Never Say Never Again (it’s a Bond movie! it counts!) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (that one line in the pre-credit sequence gives me LIFE) but it’s been a while since I’ve seen ‘em all, so that would take a while.
Do the Craig movies do more (go “deeper”) to subvert and examine Bond tropes than in previous films? Arguably, yes. But they’re not unique in that regard, and it would be cool to see an examination of Bond films through the ages and compare/contrast the different ‘Eras of Bond’ to see which themes were subverted when, in comparison to the social issues at hand in those times (when Bond stopped smoking, when the Safe Sex movement affected the depiction of sex onscreen, when female character depictions started to shift, etc).
…aw fuck, I’m going to have to do that, aren’t I.
Keep in mind that it’s tricky with the early ones, Saathi, because Fleming was still writing the books, and Bond as he was portrayed on screen had some influence on his portrayal in the novels. (For example, it’s widely considered that Connery is the reason that Fleming decided Bond had Scottish parentage.)