Learning from James Bond 3: Post-Soviet Chaos and the Age of Rage

The end of the trilogy! Part 1, part 2.
Between 1989’s License to Kill and 1995’s GoldenEye, the whole edifice of the USSR came down, and with it the environment that made sense of Bond. Throughout the 90s, political scientists were talking about a “unipolar world,” perhaps even “the end of history.” Defense budgets stagnated. Serial killers and Tarantino hitmen became the new sexy bogeymen.

It was the biggest existential threat the Bond franchise ever faced, arguably one from which it has never recovered. Because, like superheroes in general, Bond’s job was to put things back just as they were before the latest upset. Not to win the Cold War but to maintain it. For the first time, the studio was in serious doubt about whether Bond could carry on. It stuck this self-absorbed anxiety right in the mouth of former 006 Sean Bean, who spits across a graveyard of Lenin and Stalin statues:

“Did you ever ask why? Why we toppled all those dictators, undermined all those regimes, only to come home: “Well done, good job, but sorry, old boy, everything you risked your life and limb for has changed.””

That could be Cubby Broccoli or Ian Fleming talking. Or even George H W Bush, who suddenly had nothing to distract people from his Middle East and Latin America machinations, which had always been justified by the “greater evil” of Communism.

Worse, a bunch of pseudo-Bonds had outperformed Bond itself at the box office. With new characters and no massive legacy to weigh them down, they could experiment with different tones and mouthfeels and hatreds, from Arnie’s sneer to Tom Cruise’s sneak to Matt Damon’s deeply uncomfortable biro brawls, the world was awash with action infiltrators fighting their own corporate bosses, less tied to a monolithic external menace that had just gone up in smoke.

For seven years and four films Bond soldiered bravely on, dabbling with disillusionment and “maybe we were the villains all along” plots, but neither Bond’s iconic swagger nor Pierce Brosnan’s smiling mug could carry off a proper Kurt Cobain gloom. NPCs started challenging Bond to demonstrate that he wasn’t a dinosaur (a bit of lampshading that only grew more rococo through the reboot films), but it’s not clear what anyone wanted him to evolve into – he was a dinosaur not because he was incapable of understanding this venal, complex new world but because he was adapted to gnawing on megafauna that had abruptly become extinct.

Luckily in 2001 the zeitgeist changed again – terrorism and reboots were all the rage. Terrorism is the perfect foil for Supermen – it’s right there in the name. Be scared! No, it’s all right, Bond will save you. And George W Bush handily played along: a world leader shouting “be afraid! Give up your liberty for some present security!” gave Bond some room to reassure the public, once again – to be a lesser evil, to show there were grown-ups in charge somewhere. So how did he do?

With the reboot, Bond discovered emotions. And, like a lot of middle-aged men who suddenly discover their emotions, the first one he found was rage. Through the reboot films it has become slowly apparent that he himself is the only grown-up available. Once content to be M’s soldier, a carefree instrument of institutional orders, Bond has slowly become Jeeves to M’s Wooster. MI6 is now the senile mother he has to look after. And, where disposable sex used to be a signifier of Bond’s aloof power, befitting his new single parent status, his new relationships are where his power cracks. So Craig plays Bond with an unrelenting scowl, head thrust forward – he is the lone adult who has to constantly remind the production crew that all this villain-killing is serious business. Where Brosnan baffles the enemy with his unshakeable, quipping cheeriness, Craig dares the enemy to approach the thicket of his abandonment issues.

All that said, he remains a fairly boring character: he’s still too busy saving the day to have any convincing inner life. His “final” film (most comic book characters would have died a dozen times by now, so I’m not holding my breath) gives us the spectacle of what this new Bond does, left to his own devices, and it’s not fanservice sexual conquests. Instead it’s endless conquests over fish and waves: a depressing indictment of the retirement pitch. It’s still up to the villains to drive the stories forward.

Goldeneye (1995) brings the first whiff of distrust against Bond’s old boys’ network, via rogue MI6 agent Alec Trevelyan (the aforementioned Sean Bean), whom Bond himself left for dead. Laundered through the USSR machine, he resurfaces as a ruggedly muscular crime boss. He steals some Very Clever military technology in order to steal… all the money from the Bank of England, then erase all its financial records, covering his theft and destroying the UK economy, like a less ambitious Goldfinger. Now I’m wondering about finger and eye symbolism.

Again, I’m not sure how this theft is supposed to work if the currency is also dead. I guess you sell the entire Bank of England quickly for, say, dollars, then destroy the pound as an act of spite? But wouldn’t that leave a paper trail at the point of buying the dollars? And if it doesn’t, how does anyone know you have the dollars? I expect this plot to be recycled with cryptocurrencies, even less coherently, at least 4 times.

Anxieties are, obviously, (a) does Bond still have an ecological niche? and (b) what value is there more broadly in British institutions – particularly British currency? Britain in 1995 was thoroughly disillusioned with the Tories, and John Major in particular, because over a decade of financial austerity talk since 1979 had resulted in the collapse of the pound and yet another recession. So….. rogue elements in British institutions that are bent on destroying the economy? That was the spectre that got Tony Blair elected in 1997 (I would laugh hollowly here but it’s a distraction from Bond so I won’t). Notably, also, Major and co. had projected a deeply grave air, as they lined their pockets, about the terrible sacrifices everyone would have to make to keep the country afloat. Blair, on the other hand, smiled almost as much as Brosnan. It invited the voters to have confidence that he actually had a plan that would justify his own confidence. The other anxiety here regards the thieves getting away with it, which I’m tempted to say is just long-restrained Thatcher blowback. The McGuffin is a satellite that kills computer records, which definitely suits the paranoia of the post-Thatcher era – that gnawing conviction that all kinds of crimes had been swept under the rug by such an obvious bunch of crooks, which made the accusations against Leon Britten so easy to believe.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) is another rehash of Thunderball, but this time it’s WW3 with China, not the USSR. Who says the Cold War has to be over? Elliot Carver, a “power-mad media mogul,” is the villain: he wants to threaten to start WW3 to support a military coup in China, which will give him sole broadcasting rights in the new regime. Carver is presumably an amalgam of CNN and Rupert Murdoch. The former had scared a lot of politicians during the First Gulf War with its ability to steer policy through ratings; the latter remains a well-known threat to democracy to this day. The writer claimed, however, that the main inspiration was the bête noire of British media, Robert Maxwell, who had fallen off his yacht 6 years before and couldn’t sue. His daughter may yet show up in another Bond plot. The David and Goliath choice of little Britain as the phantom antagonist to emergent mighty China rests entirely on the destabilizing potential of nuclear weapons, which casts Britain as something of an unwitting terrorist state at the mercy of technocrats – or maybe the point is to reassure people that Britain’s missiles still work. Fears about loose nukes in the ruins of the Soviet Union are made explicit in the film’s opening pitch, when Bond, attending a terrorists’ weapons auction, has to rescue some airplane carrying nuclear missiles from a passing bomb blast.

In terms of anxieties, Tomorrow has a lot going on. It starts by reminding the audience that 1960s-style hair-trigger holocausts grow more likely, not less, with less control over nuclear weapons. Then it adds the new ubiquity and unreliability of instant news sources – a point that finally punctured the US’s social consciousness in 2016, but which was made eloquently in the same year Tomorrow came out by Mamet’s Wag the Dog, in which CNN invents a war out of whole cloth to manipulate a US election. The prospect of obviously-criminal news empires starting wars to boost ratings should have scared people more, but I guess it just seemed too surreal and improbable to sink in, in 1997.

The World Is Not Enough (1999) involves booby-trapped money, a personal friend of M who turns out to have an ambiguously-terrorist daughter, Elektra King, and post-Soviet fallout in the person of “Renard, a KGB agent-turned-terrorist.” The plot is all about Central Asian oil and gas pipelines – which still cause anxiety today but were the most pressing of issues in the late 90s (The BTC pipeline, long thought to be politically impossible, was finally completed in 2005, resolving a period of massive political and economic uncertainty (which is back again today). The film was made during its construction, when a dozen other pipeline plans for connecting Kazakhstan’s gas fields to the sea were in development, including some that passed through Afghanistan, leading to meetings between the Taliban and US government in the 90s).

Renard and Elektra want to nuke the Bosphorus (incidentally sealing its enormously important waterway) in order to disrupt a fictional but credible Istanbul pipeline and promote the villain’s alternative pipe. Bond has to go to Kazakhstan to find this out… but in order to look at nuclear missiles, not gas mines. Still, the connection is made. There’s a lot of perplexity about who to trust and whether a sexy woman can really be the central villain (which is a sort of feminist point, I guess), but thank god there’s a simple economic explanation underneath it all: Elektra’s pipeline stock depends on stopping the competitors.

Bond decides Elektra really is the villain and kills her, after she threatens to behead him, which is pretty art-history literate, for a Bond film. Confusingly, the villain’s bomb does go off at the end of the film, but somehow not in the right place to interrupt the all-important gas flow? And not hard enough to stop Bond claiming his reward in the form of hot nuclear scientist Dr. Christmas Jones. Which I guess is mild by the standards of Bond girl pun names. Anyway, don’t eat fish in Istanbul, in Bond’s world.

It’s tempting to say energy security was the anxiety behind the film but the public really doesn’t feel anxious about that unless it’s interrupted (I say as we go into winter with no Russian gas for Europe). Instead, I think the driving fear is of the ubiquitous murky criminality of big business. Previously, Bond’s very rich criminals were all neatly labeled – there was the clean world of legitimate business and then there were vile, immoral gangsters, with their weirdo muscleman bodyguards. But here, nice men like M and his friend can be put in danger by money from unclear (post-Soviet) sources. Crime mafias are becoming, or taking over, states (particularly post-Soviet ones), and everyone, M included, has to shake hands with the devil because he has all the oil.

Die Another Day (2002) is the 40th anniversary movie. It made a lot of money, experimented with merch, including Barbies, and there was even brief talk of a spinoff movie for Halle Berry’s character. Nonetheless, the production company seems to have agreed with critics that it was “too unrealistic:” after this they switched from Brosnan to Craig, who sells the possibility of failure much more convincingly.

The plot involves North Korea and satellite weapons (again). Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, disguised as some British guy, wants to use a sun-focusing satellite as a “sun gun” to cut a path through the Korean Demilitarized Zone with concentrated light (but not a laser), allowing North Korean troops to invade South Korea and reunite the countries through force. Along the way we learn the satellite is meant for farming, to give crops more light, and that Moon (geddit!) trades African conflict diamonds for weapons (bad bad man). And he has Bond tortured for 14 months, then lets him go (mistake). The final action shot recalls Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, which is the name of the satellite and continues a new tradition of quoting famous paintings. Then Bond and Berry have sex in a Buddhist temple, which is only their 3rd or 4th deadly insult to Koreans in the film.

It’s an oddity of long production schedules that Die Another Day, a film about traditional state actors, should come out after 9/11, shifting away from the terrorist focus established by World Is Not Enough. Nobody needs reminding these days that the Korean Civil War is still unfinished business, but it probably seemed an oblique move to viewers in 2002. But anyway I don’t think the very rational fear of Korean escalation is the main anxiety the film leans on. Instead it’s a mix of corruption and deception on one hand, and environmental worries on the other. M mistrusts Bond, after his months of torture in North Korea. Bond mistrusts MI6 because he’s sure there’s a mole (he’s right). Gene therapy can disguise Koreans as Englishmen, farming satellites can be misused as weapons, the UK hides bad NK men. And then there’s the whole thing with the villain’s ice palace. Nobody talks about global warming, but there’s a massive hot/cold theme going on – Bond’s betraying mole is called Frost, the villain’s secret identity name is Graves, and he hides out in Iceland, in a palace literally made of ice… which he melts when Bond confronts him. This could all be an elaborate metaphor for thawing relations between North and South Korea but the spectacle of disastrous flooding looks a lot more like beware the sun’s heat, preserve your water.

So much for Brosnan.

It is a mystery to me how Eon Productions thought Casino Royale (2006) would help it launch a “gritter, more realistic” movie series with a “less experienced, more vulnerable Bond.” There is a vein of silliness to the book, which made it perfect fodder for a parody film back in 1967. But thinking about it, I can see how the first Fleming novel might be appealing as the introduction to a new, less superhero-y Bond. And why it’s attractive to make Bond a little small and inadequate here – the reboot films are linked together in a continuous series for the first time, so the plot of this one feeds straight into the next and viewers are supposed to remember the characters and what they’ve done. In this serial context, it makes sense to have Bond grow through a dramatic arc that changes him – previously unthinkable for Bond, the very prototype of the Iconic Hero, to use Robin Laws’s term.

I wasn’t going to talk about the books, but… every version of Casino Royale I’ve seen has beggared belief, so I wanted to know what the novel says. And it’s actually kind of touching. Le Chiffre is a French Union treasurer, who is gambling the money entrusted to him – very naughty, but also understandable. He is flawed, irrational; perhaps he has a gambling addiction. He’s also a Russian agent, so losing all his cash is doubly disastrous. MI6 sends Bond to gamble with him and clean him out, presumably so that he can be blackmailed into serving as a British agent. That bit doesn’t happen: everyone sees Le Chiffre lose his shirt, he goes after Bond (and Vesper Lynd, the Treasury agent sent to safeguard Britain’s stake), and the Russians kill him. Why would MI6 spend money on this nonsense? Because they could potentially get a well-placed agent out of it, someone with poor judgment who might be vulnerable to double agent work… except for Le Chiffre’s high visibility. But these are spies, nobody knows how high visibility they are.

The whole story works as a tale of human faults and folly. Yes, Le Chiffre shouldn’t gamble with money that’s not his own… but he does. But that kind of human failing doesn’t work so well when Bond levels up to superheroism. Because a superhero needs supervillains to beat – otherwise he’s just a super-bully.  If Bond becomes super intelligent and resourceful, then Le Chiffre has to be, too… in which case why is he taking these stupid risks over card games?

Strangely, the David Niven/Woody Allen screwball comedy version has better answers to these questions than Craig’s supposedly serious outing. Comedy Chiffre tries various more secure schemes, which are sabotaged by Bond(s), until in desperation he turns to card games, at which he cheats, using sneaky technology. Craig’s Chiffre… just thinks cards is a good way to replace what he lost when his stock market cheat failed, raising the question “why didn’t he play card in the first place?”

So anyway, the film. Terrorism is back, front and centre. Le Chiffre is an evil stock market genius who finances terrorism in order to short stocks on the terrorists’ targets. He shorts, the stocks go down due to attacks, he collects. Clever, but short-selling schemes are always hard to explain to the audience, and one wonders how many times he can do this without getting a reputation. It also apparently leaves him exposed financially, since he’s always working with debts and beyond his means, so when Bond foils just one attack, Le Chiffre is thrown into desperate financial straits. Maybe he’s not so clever after all.

(I do like that one of the people whose money he lost is Steven Obanno, though. Even though Obanno is part of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, which is no laughing matter, I can’t help thinking of him as American con man, drunkard, and shit-stirrer Steve Bannon.)

So Bond is sent to beat Le Chiffre at poker (which is always the moment I fall off the plot train) and so Le Chiffre captures and tortures Bond but his handlers show up, as in the book, only this time it’s not the Russians, it’s deep conspiracy mystery man, Mr. White. And, as in the book, even though Vesper Lynd is working for White, she and Bond fall in love. Unlike the book, Bond feels bad, despite her betrayal, when she dies.

What are the anxieties? Terrorism, obviously, and its links to high finance – that seems like a direct continuation of The World Is Not Enough. I would argue that it also captures a chunk of the 2006 zeitgeist in worrying about short selling. Contrary to claims of surprise after the 2007-8 financial crisis and Great Recession, there were plenty of people in 2006 saying that debt consolidation and sub-prime lending were unsafe. The Big Short would finally explain it all to the movie-going public in 2015, making Bond look prescient, but there had been a mood of instability since 2001, which market deregulation and Bush’s endless top-end tax cuts did nothing to defuse. Notably, Casino Royale never gets to the actual terrorist threat posed by White – that’s explicitly a teaser for the sequel – and he thwarts efforts to turn an airplane into a bomb in Act 1, so the threat through Acts 2 and 3 is purely financial. Equally notably, we don’t get to know what White wants, just that he’s a Very Bad Man.

Quantum of Solace (2008) also manages to avoid talking about the financial system melting down. Instead it’s (somewhat presciently) about water wars. Fake environmentalist Dominic Greene and exiled General Medrano plot to make Medrano president of Bolivia and give the water rights to Mr. White’s organization, Quantum. But nobody believes that water could be the most valuable liquid, so all of this is disguised as a more familiar petrol plot. In a replay of Chinatown (1974), Quantum are artificially drying out Bolivia with dams, to increase the price of water. A desert hotel dramatizes the urgent need for water, and Bond inflicts a Biblical punishment on Greene by giving him nothing but gasoline to drink, tying up the oil? No, water! thread.

In terms of water anxieties, it’s fairly clever to set the thing in Bolivia and use underground aquifers as secret dams – the setup allows loss of water to be dramatized as reversible theft, so that Bond can save the day and have Hispanics show their gratitude by bathing. There are so many other real situations where water shortages has no ready, easy solutions. But the main anxiety on screen actually isn’t thirst or water pollution, it’s social pollution: the destruction of trust, which calls back to Die Another Day. White is captured at the start of the film but he escapes when he reveals that his organization has agents everywhere, and M’s bodyguard promptly attacks M (two years before Iron Man 2 would reveal its own ubiquitous conspiracy). Greene is supposed to be an environmentalist but turns out to be a cynical environment-destroyer, there’s a shadowplay meeting of faceless Masters that implicates the CIA in Greene’s plot (they are but they think it’s all about oil, stupid CIA), and M mistrusts Bond again over the death of a British policeman. The actor who plays Greene, by the way, said he was going for “the smile of Tony Blair [and] the craziness of Sarkozy,” which is as neat a summary of Blair’s career and reputation, 1997-2008, as I could ask for.

And we still don’t know what White’s really up to.

Skyfall (2012) is a straightforward revenge plot, and seems like it’s built entirely around Dame Judi Densch’s retirement from the role of M. Former 00 agent Raoul Silver was left for dead and tortured by China. So obviously he becomes the head of a massive criminal organization, like all tortured ex-00 agents (except Bond). He blames M and wants to ruin her reputation before killing her. He achieves this by demonstrating how bad MI6 security is – he pwns their computer systems, escapes from their custody, and blows up their offices. Pretty damning for M, I’d say. Bond comes back from the dead and is the only person M can trust. Despite being judged totally unfit for duty, a dinosaur, and sexually unattractive, Bond (with M) lures Silva into a trap using his stately home, which we didn’t know he’d grown up in. The home is blown up, M dies, and so does Sean Connery, who plays the groundskeeper and can’t resist a good swan song.

Anxieties? There is some play with paranoia, as in Solace, when M looks at all her colleagues and realizes the only one she ever trusted was Bond, but I think this film really wears its heart on its sleeve with all the unfit for duty/dinosaur stuff. Silva offers Bond a retirement plan of his own: “Do you see what comes of all this running around, Mr. Bond? All this jumping and fighting, it’s exhausting! Relax.” …How long will this reboot keep Bond going? Is Judi getting out before the crash? is Ralph Fiennes likeable enough? (He certainly can be). And there’s something about Silva having once been the favoured son – he still knows his way into the castle, he still knows how spider M thinks. There’s a deep Mordred betrayal in there, that Bardem revels in.

Spectre (2015) finally shows what White gets up to when he’s not lurking behind other villains – he works for SPECTRE, right up to the point when they decide to kill him (we don’t know why). It turns out SPECTRE’s the agency behind every other villain this Bond has ever met. And SPECTRE is just that minute being taken over by Blofeld. Incidentally, Blofeld has hated Bond ever since he played Gwion Bach to Blofeld’s Afagddu (““Utter darkness,” on account of his gloomy appearance” – Blofeld gets disfigured when he and Bond meet again), interloping and stealing what Blofeld considers his birthright. So the villain’s deep motivations are all comfortingly Freudian.

SPECTRE’s scheme is to control all intelligence agencies by getting them to use its coordination software, “Nine Eyes.” (smart! So smart, the US and Germany did it. Also the US and Denmark). Once Bond figures out the jig and escapes being tortured, again. Then all he has to do is persuade M and his new rival C not to buy into the deal. This is complicated by M being mad at Bond for Bond’s continuing to follow dead former M’s posthumous instructions.

Anxieties: the thing about thinking you were in control of your software but actually it was under someone else’s control all the time, seems pretty relevant to our online lives in general, especially to social media and google (and WordPress, no doubt). It’s a nice touch that this statement pertains not just to Nine Eyes but to Bond as well, since dead M is still controlling him under new M’s nose. I reckon fear and hatred of corporate acquisitions is another anxious element – C comes out of nowhere to acquire and reorganize MI6 and, as usual, he has no respect for the crown jewels, the 00 division. Meanwhile, he wants to procure Nine Eyes, which is designed to procure him by stealth. I feel like almost any office worker can identify with some part of that story.

Finally, Bond is very frequently assisted in his climactic villain-base raids by a sexy woman who is a surprisingly good fist-fighter. If there’s a villainess, usually it’s the female assistant’s job to kill her. White’s cute, helpful daughter, Swann, is that assistant in this movie. Uniquely, she reappears and is relevant in the next movie.

If Quentin Tarantino had directed No Time to Die (2021), it would have had a structure to make Pulp Fiction look straightforward, because there is so much background you need to catch up on, to make sense of the denouement, that I’m sitting here wondering what to say first. Cary Joji Fukunaga handles it with a long set of prologues, which works but did leave me wondering half an hour in where the film was going.

SPECTRE steals a very clever poison from M. It’s nanobots or something and it will only attack its intended target – everyone else is safe.* It can be airborne or spread from person to person by contact. Even though it’s safe to you, once you’ve been exposed to it, you will always be deadly to the target.

Lyutsifer Safin subverts SPECTRE’s plan to kill Bond and uses the poison to kill all the leaders of SPECTRE instead, which is to say, all of Bond’s enemies ever. Along the way, he also kills Felix Leiter, which has previously been enough to send Bond on a revenge rampage.

Now, you might think this would make MI6 jump up and down with joy, but they don’t even crack a smile. And that’s how you know it’s 2021: everyone is just “shit. A new threat. One we know less about than the last one.”

Then Safin goes after Bond. I don’t know why, I don’t know anything about his motives, except he wanted revenge against SPECTRE. Given everyone’s motives in this film, I’m guessing it’s personal. Bond probably killed someone he knew. So Bond and Swann raid his base, and everyone escapes except Bond, who gets infected with Swann-killer and learns he has a daughter just in time to sacrifice himself in the inevitable exploding villain base. the new 007 is a black woman who hated Bond.

OK, so there’s a bunch of tragic character theme stuff: Felix dies from retirony, Bond is almost killed by love when he visits Vesper’s grave, then almost kills his love for Swann, then is actually killed by love right after his reconciliation with Swann. It’s a lot.

But… what’s the plot, actually? And what are the anxieties? Well, obviously it’s a contagion passed from one person to another and it kills in a gruesome way, and that seems pretty current during Covid lockdown. Blofeld is sitting in his prison cell waiting to be infected and that probably feels pretty applicable to an audience that’s been told to shun movie theaters. But people are always scared of sickness, so what does Bond do with that?

1. I guess the poison is too dangerous for anyone to be trusted with it. Safin is a rogue loner who might do anything. He knows that, which is why he pre-empts MI6’s efforts to kill him.
2. The poison is Pandora’s Box, especially for MI6 and its 00 assassin division. Do you need assassins when you can just widely disseminate this undetectable, hyper-specific death sentence by putting it in breakfast cereal? What if you could infect Putin by infecting anyone he comes in contact with and there were no way for him to know? Now Putin has to live in a bubble with no physical communication to the outside.
3. I guess the big anxiety is, you never really know everything you need to about anyone’s back story. SPECTRE steals a poison scientist, not knowing he’s already been Safinated. Blofeld meets Bond, not knowing he’s a poison carrier. Leiter works with Ash, not knowing he’s a Safin goon. Swann has weird ancient connections to Safin, Safin to Swann’s dad, Vesper to Swann’s dad, Bond to Blofeld. The one person who suspects betrayal wrongly – Bond – gets cheated of several years with Swann and their daughter as a result. The moral of the story is… carpe diem and worry about the nanopoisons later?

I wonder who the next female Bond’s nemesis will be.

BTW, this trawl through movie construction led to a couple of thoughts about writing adventures.

* this statement has not been approved by the FDA