Bond. James Bond. World Domination... Same Old Dream.

“Our asylums are full of people who think they’re Napoleon… Or God.”

Sean Connery as James Bond Dr.No (1962)

Bond. James Bond. Telling that the most enduring and prolific action hero in cinema is a blundering, sexist neo-colonial superman. From this irresistible figure, we have inherited the modern day blockbuster. The spy who slept with Fione Volpe for King and Country (“Don’t think I took any pleasure in it.” Thunderball (1965)) is a monolithic figure in mainstream cinema. A standard bearer for action set-pieces, double-entendres and brute force, we owe much to this divisive figure. God help us.

Much has been made of the correlation between James Bond and The Beatles, the towering pop-culture symbols of Britain’s swinging sixties. And there is no doubt that the Bond phenomenon, particularly in that decade represents a huge cultural event. The ‘action-movie’ which is now the staple of contemporary cinema –something we all take for granted –effectively begins in 1962 with Dr. No. If you examine the films of the previous decades it is actually difficult to find many examples of films entirely built around action scenes . You’ll find Westerns or Historical Epics or Adventure films –a whole host of films which contain action elements –but nothing comparable with contemporary Summer blockbusters.

In the sixties, in particular with Bond, we see the slow turn towards the slick, polished event movies has begun. We see the beginnings of MTV style editing under Peter Hunt, chic delirious set-design under Ken Adam and the gradual ascension of the B-movie. Characters like The Man With No Name and Bond are pop icons more than characters, with occasional exceptions. The first three or four Bond films show Connery’s Bond progress from the rugged any-hero who shoots a man in cold blood (“that’s a Smith and Wesson Doctor, and you’ve had your six’.) to a slick self-referential superman. In Thunderball, the screenplay directly references newspaper criticism of the previous film Goldfinger (1964).

In one of the great scenes in a Bond film –managing to be simultaneously funny, dramatic, cheekily knowing and profoundly ludicrous –Lucianna Paluzzi quotes the critics, saying,

I forgot your ego Mr. Bond. James Bond who only has to make love to a woman and she hears heavenly quires singing. She repents and immediately returns to the side of right and justice. But not this one.

Bond’s reply: “Well you can’t win them all.”

With the kind of self-confident aplomb that we see precedents for in Hitchcock’s Cary Grant collaborations in the 1950s, Thunderball sweeps all before it with cash, style and an indefatigable male juggernaut in Connery. Against the breaches in their crumbling empire, the British launch the last great gasp of their cultural imperialism. It is often said that modern blockbusters –even the ones which appear to be left-wing –are fundamentally conservative (Check out Fredrick Jameson among others). Later Bond films directly reference the imperialism and sexism of the earlier films, (GoldenEye, Die Another Day), while inversely continuing the same tradition. The character is an irresistible force. Before him he sweeps aside feminism, deconstructionism and all the anti-systemic movements of late-twentieth century. Dispersed from the wood panelled London head-quarters of MI6, he explodes into the 1970s, disregarding the loss of the colonies, ignoring the revolutions of the 1968 and sauntering through the Roger Moore years, justifying his imperial impetus with an ironic eye-brow or nod to the camera.

With the exception of an occasional attempt to infuse the character with more depth –Lazenby, Dalton, Craig --Bond moves across his lush backdrop of palm trees and bikini cups, a two-dimensional foil. He is a force of momentum, acting beyond the realms of logic or morality. He instinctively knows who the villain is, because…. Well because we know who the villain is, and we assume Bond knows what he know. Every woman is more beautiful than the next, every escape more elaborate, every enemy lair more gigantic, every explosion more impressive. It is the post-modern bent of contemporary films, inherited in the Reagon Era American actions films and continuing to today. Bond has little past. He is ageless, drifting imperceptibly from era to era, incarnation to incarnation, channelling the imaginary power of the British Empire; a regressive myth. Coincidently read Philip Knightly’s The Second Oldest Profession if you want to find out what a sordid business espionage really is and the class bigotry of early MI6.

Connery in 1962 became the first modern-day action hero. He had precedents in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and various other one-off heroes, but Bond is not a legend of the past. His own original, he opens onto the future by obliterating the past. A cipher in a tuxedo he makes us forget the little progress we have achieved.

Connery’s Bond refuses to humour Dr. No. He looks disdainfully at the good Doctor's portrait of Napoleon and quips over a Don Perignon, “World domination… Same old dream.” Ironic indeed: As Bond arbitrarily blows Dr. No’s plans asunder it is easy to forget that Bond is the world-conqueror. It is bond whose blundering successes echo the great colonial blunderers before which all those un-inoculated civilizations crumbled. With the charisma and drive of Hernando Cortez he invades, intervenes, kills, (occasionally practically rapes) and in Goldfinger gets two sisters murdered on his account. But we love him all the same. The stories zoom along, never looking back to access the damage. It is Bond who dreams of Empire. It is the ideology of Bond that saturates mainstream cinema for good and ill.