Just when so much of our politics had spilled over into plain sight, James Bond came along right on time. Dramatic imperial courts, palace intrigue and backrooms redolent of cigarette smoke belong to a bygone era. But espionage has never been so important as when the first Bond novel debuted in 1953 and it is this kernel of reality that gives the spy thriller a cover of plausibility. Common sense dictates that espionage must be tedious, precarious and thankless work. But since it operates out of view, fiction can occupy our imagination and dazzle us with bottomless martinis, adrenaline-pumping capers, lustrous sports cars and foxy women playing not-so-hard-to-get.
The lineup of Bond movies starring Daniel Craig were released over a 15 year period between 2006 and 2021. This was a stretch when terrorism, digital surveillance, the rise of China and deadly viruses all took turns at the forefront of our collective attention. And these things are represented in the Bond films. In Casino Royale, there is terrorist financier Le Chiffre, who makes stock bets based on anticipated attacks. In Skyfall, there is Raoul Silva, an ex-MI6 agent who was detained by China and tortured over his espionage activities in Hong Kong. In Spectre, the “Nine Eyes” program—inspired by the actually existing Five Eyes intelligence alliance—becomes the target of a vast criminal enterprise. And No Time to Die revolves around a synthetic viral bioweapon made with nanotechnology.
The Geopolitics of James Bond
The pressing geopolitical issues of the day tend toward the background in Bond stories, including each Craig film. The flagpoles of global politics are no place for the criminal geniuses, the sharpshooters or duplicitous women who inhabit the world of James Bond. Bond himself can commandeer a bulldozer or cargo plane, shoot down helicopters with a pistol, swift-kick through drywall and implode stone buildings before cocktail hour. It’s difficult to imagine a man of his talents tasked with something so pedestrian as fetching China’s naval papers in the event of war over Taiwan. Besides, that issue would be of more concern to the Americans with all their Asian military bases.
When the CIA does show up they are often more of a nuisance than anything else. While CIA agent Felix Leiter is deferential to Bond, agent Logan Ash is an outright villain who betrays Bond and kills Felix. In Quantum of Solace the CIA side with the villain, Dominic Greene. With a promise of oil, they are easily duped into backing Greene’s plan to overthrow Bolivia’s democratic government. This part of the film is very believable, by the way, given the American government’s pernicious record of violent government overthrows around the world. Bond’s ministerial superior sides with Greene as well, suggesting that a villain with oil would be a preferable trading partner to “another Marxist giving national resources to the people.”
Of course, Bond does not end up in direct contact with the bloody and sordid politics of oil. His pursuit of Greene was personal, related to his ex-lover, Vesper Lynd. Greene’s character avoids real-world geopolitical complexity because oil was a ruse all along—it was actually water that he intended to hoard away from the Bolivian people. So Bond leaves him to to die of thirst in the desert, exacting his personal revenge in the process.
Bond as Übermensch
Daniel Craig’s Bond cannot tread at the level governmental affairs because he is not merely a man. He is an Overman of the Nietzschean variety; the highest human being with “the greatest multiplicity of drives, and in the greatest strength that can be endured.”1 His ability to operate any weapon, vehicle or device is astonishing. But his resoluteness under torture and savoir-faire in every interaction demonstrate an Overman who has mastered his drives, able to restrain or unleash them at will.
For a perfect construction like Bond, the most difficult part must be finding adversaries resistant to the onslaught he brings. The Craig films have Bond tangling with a shadowy organization known as Spectre, each film revealing another level to the organization that was previously unseen. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson’s description of conspiracy theories, Spectre is a criminal organization “so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves.”2
It must be no surprise when Bond runs into his own shadow once reaching the top boss of Spectre, as it is revealed that Ernst Stavro Blofeld is his foster brother from when both were children. Blofeld grew so jealous of his father’s relationship with Bond that he decided to kill his dad, fake his own death and found a criminal organization out of spite for James. In other words, it is only James Bond who is capable of creating an adversary to go against himself. Even in the labyrinthine underbelly of global commerce, corrupt dictators and criminal intrigue, there is no organic match for the indomitable 007.
The Fetish
Given the circuitousness of Bond’s storyline, it is a good question what the meaning of this British cultural icon actually is, as the face of one of cinema’s longest running film series. Writing for The Guardian, Dan Sabbagh bluntly states, “James Bond’s mission stays the same: letting Britain think it’s still a superpower.” Consider the context in which James Bond was thought up by his creator, Ian Fleming. Britain faced a massive debt at the conclusion of World War II, it had lost the bulk its empire and MI6 had just suffered a brace of defections to the Soviet Union. The United States would be taking up the Western imperial mantle and James Bond becomes the fetish to the British disavowal of this new reality.
Applying Slavoj Žižek’s conception of fetishistic disavowal to James Bond, the British public “knew very well” that their country would slide into irrelevance “but nevertheless cannot bring [themselves] to really believe it will.”3 The Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese—let them jockey for global supremacy. In James Bond, there is an agent whose abilities are actually too overwhelming for the humdrum of high stakes geopoliticking; it’s beneath him.
Daniel Craig’s character filled the interstices beneath the world stages, which is exactly the same space carved out for Bond by his 20th century creators. Given the truth of Britain’s diminished standing in the world, there is a heightened pleasure derived from the fetish object of Bond, and a disproportionate cultural significance attached to him. With the headwinds facing Britain at the moment, the next Bond film can’t come soon enough.
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Footnotes:
Friedrich Nietzsche quoted in John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford University Press, 1996), 69. ↩︎
Fredric Jameson quoted in Robert Tally Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (Pluto Press, 2014), 111. ↩︎
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010), x-xi. ↩︎