HE’S BEEN CALLED AN embarrassing relic of the Cold War who should have been forcibly retired and put out to stud a generation ago, when the Berlin Wall fell. He’s been called a fascist, a racist, a neocolonial imperialist, and at the very least a shameless sexist, if not an outright misogynist. He’s been the butt of jokes and the subject of parodies almost from the day he first appeared in public, and he’s been described as a two-fisted, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, walking talking catalog of every bad behavior that can possibly be exhibited by the human male. It’s even been said that all you really need to know about him can be summed up in just two words: Pussy Galore.
With all of this embarrassing baggage, then, how can Commander James Bond, C.M.G., R.N.V.R., possibly have a useful place in the twenty-first century?
To answer this question, we must first ask another: who is he? Who is Secret Agent 007, Mr. Shaken Not Stirred, Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? Who is that man in the Saville Row suit, smiling with quiet confidence as he sits behind the wheel of that silver Aston Martin DB5, caressing the grip of his .32-caliber Walther PPK? Who is James Bond?
The answer to this question is not as easily found as it might seem. The peculiar challenge in assessing the proper place of James Bond in the modern world is in some respects quite similar to the challenge of picking the best brand of mineral water in the supermarket: there are so blasted many to choose from. Which one of them is the true, bona fide, and only Bond, James Bond?
As I often do with tough questions, I asked my wife. She said, “Sean Connery, no doubt about it. Very macho, very sexy, but with a roguish charm and a sardonic wit. Mm-mmm, Sean.” As an afterthought, she added, “Just like you, dear.” I decided to cut my losses and went to ask my friend John, the screenwriter.
“Definitely Roger Moore,” John said. “Look, Bond is a joke. He’s a superhero; a campy self-parody. He’s the guy who can save the world without mussing his hair or spilling his martini, and Moore is the only one who got the joke and played him that way.” I thanked John and left, and after that I asked more people, and got more answers. Some preferred Connery; others, Moore. Younger folks were more likely to pick Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton has his fans. No one would admit to liking George Lazenby.
But in the end, all my questioning proved fruitless. Everyone it seems has a favorite Bond, and not one single person answered, “James who?” All that my investigative efforts really produced was a wealth of opinions about the actors who had played the role, what they’d looked like while doing it, and how they’d played it. Along with a favorite Bond actor, it seems everyone has a favorite Bond villain, a favorite Bond girl, a favorite Bond car, a favorite Bond stunt, and a favorite Bond improbable gadget. None of these opinions helped me to get any closer to resolving the crucial issue of just who Bond is, though, and I still had no good answer to the question that lies at the heart of this essay: what is it about James Bond that saves him from occupying a prominent place in the dustbin of history, right next to Matt Helm?
So I went to the source.
The portrait of Bond that emerges from Ian Fleming’s original novels and short stories is markedly different from the collage that can be assembled by watching a series of twenty-some movies filmed over a span of forty-some years. For one thing, Fleming’s Bond doesn’t look much like any of the actors who have ever played him onscreen. In the words of Vesper Lynd in Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale: “He is very good looking. He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless in his. . . .” (Whatever Mademoiselle Lynd intended to say next, of course, was forever lost in the explosion that blew in the front windows of the Hermitage bar. These sorts of conversation-stoppers happen all the time around Mr. Bond.)
For another thing, it’s important to note that the novels and movies were not made in the same chronological order. Bond’s literary life begins with Casino Royale (1953), followed by Live and Let Die (1954), Moonraker (1955), Diamonds Are Forever (1956), From Russia With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958), and Goldfinger (1959). His cinematic life, on the other hand, began a decade later with Dr. No (1962), and continued with From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965). In some cases this resequencing of his story merely introduces continuity problems: for example, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was written and set before You Only Live Twice, and at the end of the latter book arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld is not merely dead, he is really most sincerely dead. But in the movies the sequence of these stories is reversed, so it became necessary for the moviemakers to equip Blofeld with the sort of cheesy last-ditch escape devices that Mike Myers later parodied to such great effect in Austin Powers. In still other cases—Moonraker, for example—it apparently proved more expedient to simply junk Fleming’s original story completely and start over from scratch, the result being that many of the later movies, and in particular the movies from the Roger Moore era, bear naught but an in-name-only relationship to the eponymous novels. This is a very important point, and we’ll return to it momentarily.
For a third thing, though, a reading of Fleming’s original novels quickly leads to the realization that Bond’s origins and backstory are in constant flux. In Casino Royale, for example, we get this small insight into Bond’s private life: “Bond’s car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 and had kept it in careful storage through the war.” Two years later, in Moonraker, Bond is described as being only eight years away from mandatory retirement at age forty-five, and yet nine years after that, in You Only Live Twice, Bond’s official obituary states that in 1941 he dropped out of school at age seventeen to enlist in the Royal Navy. From these apparent contradictions, and many more like them, we must draw one of only two possible conclusions: either Bond’s parents in 1933 were far more indulgent with their nine-year-old son than all but the worst of modern American parents, or else even Fleming himself didn’t give a rip about keeping Bond’s backstory straight. And if we can’t trust the putative facts put forth by his creator, then what hope do we have to know anything about the real James Bond?
What we can know is that which we are left with: his mood, tone, and character. In this regard, Fleming was quite consistent. Bond, as written by Fleming, was neither the wry stud-muffin played by Connery, the smirking quipster played by Moore, nor the smart-but-tough human action-figure played by Brosnan. Bond was a film noir character from the get-go, who had less in common with his later cinematic portrayals than with his literary contemporaries and immediate predecessors: Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Simon Templar, and the Continental Op. Fleming’s Bond was a thug. He could pass for a gentleman when required, but underneath the civilized veneer he was a cold-blooded killer in the employ of Her Majesty’s government. He could slit a sleeping man’s throat or kill someone with his bare hands and feel little more afterward than the need for a good stiff drink. He could make love to a woman in chapter five and shoot her in the back in chapter six. He was, as Fleming described him, “a neutral figure—an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department.” He was meant to be an emotionally detached and utterly deadly assassin, a man who got involved in interesting business but was not himself interesting. In short, Bond was—ironically—meant by Fleming to be most like the least-liked of his big-screen avatars: George Lazenby.
When you start hanging about with Bond, you’ll note, it is difficult to avoid becoming drenched in irony.
With this larger realization, many smaller ones finally begin to fall into place. The first is that the real James Bond is not the literary one that Ian Fleming created; it’s the ever-changing succession of movie Bonds who have appeared in the decades since. Without the movies James Bond would now be just another nearly forgotten fifty-year-old hard-boiled pulp thriller character, right up there with Sexton Blake or the Black Bat. Ian Fleming may have supplied the original template, but as with the tales of King Arthur or Charlemagne, it is the subsequent retelling and reshaping of these stories by others that has made Bond a legend.
The second realization is that there is no one true Bond. They are all true; even David Niven in the 1967 version of Casino Royale. Like all good legendary characters, Bond is profoundly malleable and often allegorical. He is an ageless hero, with no reliably fixed beginning and no apparent end in sight. His movies function as mirrors to their respective times, and the tales of Bond’s many adventures most strongly reflect the worries, hopes, fears, and joys of those who are telling the tales, and those who are eagerly listening. When considering the question of whether the world still needs Bond, then, it’s important not to let the then-contemporary trappings of previous tellings of his deeds interfere with the essential truths that he embodies.
But again, we’ll come back to this one in a bit.
The third realization is that deep down, in his heart of hearts, the real James Bond is not a spy. Yes, he ostensibly is an employee of a real intelligence agency, MI6, and his adventures take place in countries with real names and cities you can find on a map. But disregarding for a moment the oxymoronic concept of a famous secret agent, any attempt to draw a correlation between Bond’s gallivanting about the globe on a seemingly bottomless expense account and the tedious process of real covert intelligence work—
Okay, look. We could do the whole Tom Clancy thing here, get bogged down in acronymspeak, and lard this discussion with terms like HUMINT, ELINT, and SIGINT. We could discuss the relative effectiveness of various KGB and Mossad “wet work” methods, debate the usefulness of the Mersenne Twister 19337 algorithm in cryptography, or wander off into a long and tedious explication of cut-outs, dead drops, false flag operations, and all the other baroque feints and shadows that are the tools of the trade in the espionage business. But before we go any further, there are a few essential concepts you simply must understand.
Intelligence is all about discovering what your potential enemy’s plans and abilities are before he can use them against you. Counterintelligence is all about preventing your enemy from doing the same to you. Now, the perfect intelligence operation is one in which the enemy’s secrets are learned without his ever suspecting that his secrets are no longer secret. The perfect counterintelligence operation is one in which the enemy’s plans are disrupted before he can put them into effect and he blames only himself for their failure. Never should you let your enemy know just who exactly it is who has foiled his plans or how, because, like a parlor magic trick, an intelligence method that has been stripped of its veil of secrecy is an intelligence method that no longer works.
And yes, while even “nice” governments have from time to time used assassins as instruments of policy, no one in their right mind would ever employ a man such as Bond in this role, if only for fear that he might someday retire from the service and publish his memoirs. Instead, the grisly truth is that assassins should be disposable people. The ideal assassin is an illiterate and mute suicide bomber: he can’t talk if captured, there’s little risk he’ll abort the mission if he finds that his escape route is blocked, and if he succeeds there is absolutely no chance of his ever coming back later and demanding more money to stay silent. A passable second choice is a man such as Mehmet Ali Ağca, the attempted assassin of Pope John Paul II. While many believe this operation was run by the Bulgarian Secret Service acting as a cut-out for the KGB, and Ağca himself was captured and has talked at length, there is little chance of ever learning the truth from his testimony. Ağca has spun tales of enormous conspiracies-within-conspiracies, and has at various times claimed to be a Bulgarian agent, a CIA agent, a Palestinian militant, an Italian military intelligence agent, an employee of a dissident faction in the Vatican Bank, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, here to fulfill the Third Prophecy of Fatima.
As I’ve said before: When it comes to the world of espionage, the truth is as slippery as a salamander in a jar of Vaseline.
In any case, a well-executed intelligence, counterintelligence, or assassination operation never requires sending in a lone agent to perform feats of derring-do, effect hair’s-breadth escapes, fight desperate battles against legions of hapless minions, completely demolish the enemy’s citadel in a cataclysmic fiery blast, or end up in a rubber life-raft with a rescued beautiful maiden. Are we all clear on this?
Good, because here is a case in point. In April of 1943, U.S. naval intelligence codebreakers intercepted and decrypted radio messages giving the exact whereabouts and travel plans of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s supreme naval commander and the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, if Bond had even a tenuous rooting in reality, the British Secret Service’s Special Operations Executive clearly would have responded to this information by sending in a lone undercover agent with an underpowered handgun. Posing as a Dutch East Indian rubber plantation owner, this British agent would no doubt have easily dispatched several dim-witted henchmen, had a quick but torrid roll on the futon with Yamamoto’s personal secretary and mistress, Kissy Suzuki, fought a thrilling katana duel with Yamamoto’s master assassin, Oddjob, been captured and then rescued from certain death at the last moment by the beautiful French Polynesian girl Improbable Chance, and in the final nick of time completed his mission by killing Yamamoto and narrowly escaping from the subsequent fiery explosion of Yamamoto’s secret lair to end up floating in a rubber life-raft with Ms. Chance somewhere in the Java Sea.
As it happened, though, the Americans were in charge of this operation, so they instead sent in a squadron of P-38 fighters to blast the living daylights out of Yamamoto’s military transport, the decoy transport, his fighter escort, and anyone else who happened to be in the general vicinity at about the same time. Yet for the remainder of the war, the Japanese continued to believe that Yamamoto’s flight plan had been discovered and betrayed by native coast-watchers, and failed to realize that the Americans had broken their naval codes and were reading their most secret communiques.
There. This is what a successful license-to-kill intelligence operation looks like in the real world.
If Bond has no place in the world of real espionage, and if the details of his life, his adventures, and even his face may be changed and changed again at the storyteller’s discretion, then where does he belong? Once again, we’re back to the challenge of trying to identify the one true Bond with only mood, tone, and character to work with, so let’s consider the things about him that never change from one tale to the next.
Bond is a warrior. He never serves mere political expedience or convenience. If any government actually had a man like Bond on the payroll they’d be unable resist the temptation to have him knock off a bothersome reporter or two every now and then, but Bond never does that. Instead, he fights only clearly identifiable villains who are at least his equals, if not more powerful. More to the point, he fights only enemies that can be defeated. In Bond’s world there are no insoluble problems or lingering diplomatic ambiguities.
Bond has a code of honor. He may have a license to kill, but he does so only reluctantly and takes no pleasure in doing it. He will try the disabling knee or shoulder shot rather than the killing shot if he can. (Except when battling his way through mobs of minions and henchmen, but who cares about peasants?) He never kills innocent victims, never accidentally kills the wrong person, and will let a mass-murderer escape to kill again rather than put women or children in the line of fire. In Bond’s world there is no collateral damage.
Bond is a gentleman. He is a master of every form of hand-to-hand combat known to man, but his signature weapon (which has its own name, by the way) is a small-caliber pistol, or as Sir Alec Guinness might say, “A weapon with a more civilized edge.” Bond always meets his adversaries face-to-face and challenges them to single combat; he never strikes first from hiding or without warning, and he would never call in an airstrike to level a crowded restaurant just to get the one evil man hiding in the basement. Bond’s adventures frequently end with götterdämmerung final battles, true, but it’s always left to a Felix Leiter or a Tiger Tanaka to do the scut-work of marshalling the faceless but loyal peasant infantry; Bond himself answers to a higher calling. In Bond’s world there are no drunken and unreliable CIA mercenaries.
Finally, Bond is a romantic. As he travels on his journey, beautiful women are constantly throwing themselves at his feet, and while he may have dalliances—in some stories, lots of dalliances—there is always one true love waiting for him at the end of the tale. Admittedly the earlier stories of his adventures were often quite bawdy, but that was more a reflection of then-current social mores and the bawdiness has been toned down considerably in recent years. In Bond’s world there are no sexually transmitted diseases or pregnant ex-girlfriends.
With all the evidence that has been presented, then, the answer finally begins to become clear. Who is James Bond? He’s no noir anti-hero, no undercover operative, and no brilliant intelligence analyst. He’s no government assassin, no cold-blooded killer, and certainly no spy.
What he is, in truth, is a paladin. He’s a modern knight-errant who roams the world, righting wrongs, fighting evil, and protecting the weak. He’s a fantasy hero, and the place he truly belongs is in the Land of Make-Believe and Should Have Been, standing shoulder to shoulder with Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, Sir Lancelot, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, and Roland and all his cavaliers, defending the borders of the peaceable kingdom from the never-resting forces of darkness that roam out there in the wild lands.
(P.S. And those of you who are still bothered by Bond’s bawdiness should go back and read some of the early chansons de geste, Orlando Furioso or, for that matter, an unexpurgated version of Canterbury Tales. The early aubades and tagelieder in particular are just full of tales of heroic and noble knights who nonetheless are a rather randy lot and never pass up the chance for a good roll in the hay with an unhappily married noblewoman. The idea that medieval heroes were somehow pure and chaste is mostly the work of eighteenth-century bluenose Thomas Bowdler and his imitators, not an accurate reflection of the actual songs and tales of the Middle Ages.)
Finally, we come back to the question we began with: does Commander James Bond, C.M.G., R.N.V.R., have a useful place in the twenty-first century? The answer is yes, but for not the most comforting of reasons.
The truth of the matter is that real deep-cover human intelligence work is a very disturbing, unpleasant, and ugly business. The truth is that in the world of espionage, “truth” itself is a very rare commodity, constantly attended by a bodyguard of lies and veiled by a smokescreen of ambiguities. The truth is that assassinations and executions—those intelligence operations which are euphemistically termed “wet work” in the trade—are utterly stomach-turning in their hideousness and frequently result in much blood, screaming, and injury to innocent bystanders.
The irony—some might say the hypocrisy—of western civilization is that we need those modern paladins who walk the wild forests at the edge of the known world, slaying dragons and goblins so that the petit bourgeoisie might sleep soundly in their beds. But the truth of the matter is that a clear look at the actions of those same paladins will give most people the screaming heebie-jeebies.
And so we need Commander James Bond, Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
Or put it this way: If you want a sickeningly realistic and unblinking look at the world of real wet work, go watch actor Daniel Craig portray Mossad assassin “Alan” in the movie Munich (2005). But if you want a comforting heroic fantasy, go watch actor Daniel Craig portray James Bond in the movie Casino Royale.
Personally, I know which one I would rather go to sleep thinking about.
BRUCE BETHKE works, writes, and when time permits, lives in beautiful, mosquito-infested Minnesota. In some circles, he is best known for his 1980 short story “Cyberpunk.” In others, he is better known for his Philip K. Dick Award–winning novel Headcrash. What very few people in either circle have known until recently is that he actually works for America’s leading maker of supercomputers, and all his best science fiction gets repackaged as “futurism studies” and sold at stunningly inflated prices to various government agencies, where it is promptly stamped SECRET and filed away, never to be seen again.
Bethke can be contacted via his Web site at www.brucebethke.com.