James Bond is a kind of consoling mascot, cherished by devotees from childhood into adult life; messing with him is bound to shake and stir. All the same, resistance to a female or non-white star is premised on a mistake
, the suspension of disbelief. Some disbeliefs are more suspendable than others. In six decades on screen, James Bond has been played by seven actors. He has barely aged. He has hopscotched on the backs of crocodiles, surfed a tsunami and enjoyed a run of enemies who, after capturing him, go in for windy pontification and needlessly elaborate murder methods. These violations of the laws of probability and physics have not disenchanted his fans.
“A character is created”, wrote the structuralist critic Roland Barthes, when a set of references “traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it”. For the Bond of cinema, the references have come to include car chases, gadgets, villains’ lairs, badinage with Moneypenny, the swooning, spot-lit theme-tune and those finickity martinis. Also an underdog derring-do and deadpan irony that are identifiably British. And, so far, the features of a white male actor.
Go further back, to Bond’s first entrance in “Casino Royale”, Ian Fleming’s novel of 1953, and the character is only dimly recognisable. The original Bond was an appalling misogynist, and not just compared with Mr Craig’s. “Women were for recreation,” Fleming’s protagonist thinks. “On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings.” Conversely, whereas the Bond of “No Time To Die” blithely kills hundreds of people, the original is oddly passive.
Among the Bond stories’ only consistent features, in fact, are a certain ennui—he has been looking for a way out ever since he arrived—as well as change, and the fear of change. “The world’s moved on,” Bond is warned in the new film. “History is moving pretty quickly these days,” he laments in the novel, “and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.” On screen, change has meant new adversaries to suit the times , intrusive product-placement and perpetually updated cultural allusions.
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