The Real James Bond, Ch.3
Popular Culture
When Ian Fleming sat down to write his first novel in February 1952, the omens were not good. Fleming was a middle-aged man, bored with his life, slightly depressed because he was about to get married (and as all his friends knew, he wasn’t exactly the marrying kind). For years, he had been telling everyone about how he was going to write a novel, so he thought he should probably get it done before he tied the matrimonial noose.
At this point in his life, Fleming was not a successful man. When he was much younger he had had dreams of being a soldier – but in the end he had dropped out of Sandhurst without finishing the course. He had then tried to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office exam. For a while he had been a mediocre banker, then an unsuccessful stock broker; and now, in 1952, he was working as a middle-ranking journalist at the Sunday Times.
In fact, there had only been one time in his life when Fleming had been both successful and important, and that was during the Second World War. In 1939, by some incredible accident, Fleming had found himself working in naval intelligence. For the duration of the war, he had seen and experienced some truly incredible things. He had gone on secret missions to France, Morocco and Gibraltar. He had flown all over the world having high-level meetings with figures like J. Edgar Hoover. He had even set up his own special forces unit, and rubbed shoulders with real-life tough guys and heroes.
But now he was just a middle-aged nobody, sitting in his holiday home in Jamaica, wondering what to write. So he decided to write about this world, the spy world, that he knew so well from the Second World War.
To a certain degree, much of Britain in the 1950s felt the same way. During the war, Britain had felt like the centre of the universe. All the exiled governments of Europe had congregated in London, and the combined forces of all the western Allies had been stationed all over the country – not only Americans, but also the Free French, the Polish and Czech air forces, not to mention the troops from all over the Commonwealth and Empire. But once the war was over Britain became seemed suddenly to shrink. It was covered in bomb damage. Rationing not only continued, it increased. The economic miracle that revitalised Europe was never so strong here. Britain in the late 1940s and 50s was a drab place, with hardship and squalor everywhere. And the empire was crumbling. The days of global British dominance were already long gone.
It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that nostalgia for the war was everywhere. This was the era when all of the greatest British war memoirs and movies came out: Reach for the Sky, The Dambusters, The Colditz Story, The Great Escape, to name just a handful. To a certain degree, the James Bond books also tapped into this nostalgia: as I wrote in one of my earlier posts, all of the action in the early books is based on real-life events that happened during the Second World War.
But unlike the slew of memoirs that came out at the same time, the nostalgic elements in the Bond books are disguised as stories not about the past, but about the present and the future. The plots involve modern-day criminals in casinos and other exotic locations in far-flung parts of the world; and they often involve the new enemy rather than the old one, Soviets rather than Nazis. By outwitting and defeating these villains in the name of the British secret service, James Bond allowed his readers to enjoy a double fantasy: they could both remember a time when Britain was great, and pretend that that greatness still existed.
In the Bond books, especially the early ones, Britain could still feel like a world player, outwitting its enemies in the Cold War. America is an equal partner, not Britain’s big brother. If anything, the relationship favours the British: it is James Bond who always wins the day, even when he is working on the other side of the Atlantic. For example, in Fleming’s second novel, Live and Let Die, Bond is the one who saves America from Mr Big’s evil plot to destroy its economy. His American counterpart, Felix Leiter of the CIA, is never quite as smart or resilient as Bond is, and ends up being horrifically maimed by falling into the villain’s shark tank. (The plot of the film of the same name is slightly different, but the essentials are just the same. It is the British agent who saves the day: the Americans are just there to assist him.)
The character of James Bond himself also helps with this idea of wish-fulfilment. Bond is not a complex man: he is a killing machine, and a sex machine, who carries out his missions for the British authorities without question. He is effectively an empty vessel who allows readers to pour into him whatever qualities they wish – while also allowing them to indulge their own vicarious fantasies of sex, violence and power. This is what every uptight, repressed, frustrated, downtrodden British man craved in the 1950s. It was the ideal of personal freedom, mixed with a sense of communal greatness.
As Britain changed in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and beyond, Bond changed with it. And so did the villains. After revelations about how leaky the real-life British intelligence service was – particularly when Kim Philby was revealed as a Soviet double agent at the beginning of the 60s – it was impossible to carry on pretending that Britain was leading the way in the Cold War. So the new enemy became that of organised crime, especially when it came to the film remakes of the novels.
For example, in the 1954 novel Live and Let Die, the villain is working for the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation SMERSH; but in the 1973 film he becomes a straightforward drug-dealer, trying to flood America with heroin.
Likewise, the villain of The Man with the Golden Gun was originally a Cuban assassin working with the KGB in order to destabilise America. But in the 1974 film remake, his only motivation was to enrich himself with the sale of a solar weapon to the highest bidder.
Each film represented the concerns of its time. Moonraker tapped into the resurgence of science fiction at the end of the 1970s. A View to a Kill tapped into the 1980s obsession with microchips and Silicon Valley. GoldenEye tapped into 1990s anxieties about the geopolitical chaos generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In our own era, Skyfall documents our post-9/11 anxieties about the inability of our secret services to protect us, or even themselves, against rogue terrorists.
The character of Bond himself has also changed with the times. The adolescent wish-fulfilment of the 1950s gave way to the wise-cracking innuendo of the 1970s. By the 1990s we wanted more complex motivations for his character – a touch of revenge, a touch of sensitivity, even some moral responsibility. By the Daniel Craig era, and particularly after the #metoo scandals of the 2010s, Bond’s attitudes towards women also had to change. He became a much more complicated character, motivated as much by love as by sex.
The portrayal of women in the modern Bond films is a world away from what it once was. M is now a woman, and a surrogate mother for Bond. Bond’s girlfriends are no longer throw-away sex dolls as they once were. In the original 1955 novel Casino Royale, Bond’s lover Vesper Lynd admits to being a traitor in a suicide note: Bond’s reaction is simply to inform his superiors that “The bitch is dead now.” But in the Daniel Craig film remake he is utterly distraught by her death. His obsession with Vesper continues for the next four films. This is a Bond with real-life, adult emotions.
Who knows what obsessions and anxieties will make themselves felt in the next James Bond film? There are plenty of new enemies in the world, and plenty of new anxieties, from climate disaster to the rise of AI. But I have no doubt that the character of Bond will continue to develop too. We are no longer satisfied by a cardboard cutout hero. The world that we live in today is not nearly so black and white as it once was either: the moral certainties so many of us once believed in have been fragmented, and society no longer trusts the security services so blindly.
Will the new Bond film – the 26th in the franchise – reflect this? We will have to wait until 2028 to find out.