While Sean Connery’s version comes the closest, in general, to the character as originally written by Ian Fleming, it’s the vulgar, smuttier, and anything-for-a-laugh interpretation, embodied by and in Roger Moore, who ends up most succinctly verbalising James Bond’s emotional link to killing, during a scene in The Man With The Golden Gun:
“When I kill, it’s on the specific orders of my government, and those I kill are themselves killers,” says Bond to Scaramanga.
“Come come, Mr. Bond,” the assassin replies. “You disappoint me. You get just as much fulfillment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”
“I admit killing you would be a pleasure.”
By 1974 and the ninth Bond movie, this aspect of the character—the way he blends violence and duty seamlessly; complements sadism with country—has already been acted out several times, most conspicuously in Dr. No, when he executes the disarmed and helpless Professor Dent under the auspices of avenging an Mi6 colleague. But this feels like the first time that Bond’s professional joie de mort is articulated so expressly in words, and when these two components of the character—he kills on behalf of Britain and in some contexts also enjoys that killing—are offered to us in such a way that we can’t help but to conflate them.
It seems fitting that the centrepiece of Scaramanga’s bizarro firing range, obstacle course, and funhouse hybrid is a lifesize replica of Bond himself; that the assassin is played by Christopher Lee, of the same Special Operations Executive as Fleming. Something is going on here with duality, reflections, and searching for the soul, as if Bond, when talking with Scaramanga from the opposite end of the hitman’s dining table, is in a conversation with a mirror self, a shade or so darker. They both kill people for money, after all, trading pain for pleasure.
This kind of sadomasochism appears often in Bond. Spend enough time with the original books and their direct screen adaptations, and you learn that Ian Fleming was precisely the kind of faintly tragic paraphiliac that is stereotypical of the English upper class, a world of men who were abandoned by their parents to boarding schools, and whose anger at being abandoned became self reproach, and who ventilated their self reproach using the physical sensation of hot candle wax on their testicles—men whose first, formative contacts with ‘attention’ and ‘nurturing’ were by way of a domineering nanny, a woman paid to discipline them. In the first ever Bond novel, Casino Royale, Le Chiffre kidnaps Bond and tortures him by whacking his genitals with a carpet beater. In Thunderball, a near-naked Bond is tied, hands and ankles, into a ‘spinal traction machine’; when a would-be assassin turns the speed dial, the apparatus stretches the prone Bond almost to death, in a way that makes it look like he’s being held down and roughly sodomised.
So much a part of its identity, these erotic brutalities survive in the Bond series way beyond Fleming himself—70 hand-rolled Morlands and a bottle of Old Man’s Punch every day meant Fleming was dead by 1964, but he wasn’t buried with his peccadilloes.
In 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, for example, an original script+ by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, Bond is tied to a garrotte and asphyxiated by Elektra King. “You know what happens when a man is strangled?” she says, smiling, straddling him, and turning the handle of the device until Bond’s neck is almost broken. “One last screw,” he chokes out.
When Da Silva captures Bond in Skyfall, he ties him to a chair, opens his shirt, and brushes his fingers over the scars on his chest. “We are the last two rats,” he says, “and we could eat each other.” He then looks into Bond’s eyes, smirks, and swallows.
In his book subtitled Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England, historian Ian Gibson refers to sadomasochism—and a number of its adjutant turpitudes—as “The English Vice”. Gibson’s focus is on identity; how the education ministry’s deployment of corporeal punishment impacted British sexual awakenings in the early 20th century. But you could easily turn the practice back on itself. Instead of asking how government-mandated whippings affected our society, you could ask why we even had a society where whippings were mandated in the first place. Why did we make admonishment and self censure, and the idea that betterment, or at least some kind of gratification, could be achieved by physical suffering, part of our national curriculum?
Maybe it was our empire, the fact that, for so many hundreds of years, when we inflicted barbarity on the people of India, Kenya, Singapore, and everywhere else, we also did it in the name of ‘their own good’; the prosecution of what our most lauded poet Rudyard Kipling called ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the “savage wars of peace”. Such was the propaganda of the British imperial project—we may annihilate them, but even if they themselves don’t realise it, it’s in their best interests, and eventually they’ll thank us. It’s no wonder we created (so many) men like Fleming. We ruled enough of the world that we effectively took control of reality, and then fashioned that reality into one where violence, murder, and genocide turned the victims more civilised. We entrenched sadism and masochism into our culture back home because if the premise that ‘brutality makes better’ was kicked from under it, or perhaps even loosened slightly, the moral justifiability of the Empire would collapse.
As Willa outlines at the beginning of her article, this is the world in which James Bond is formed. While the first novel actually comes out in 1953—after Indian independence, the outbreak of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and the emergence of America and Russia as the post-war superpowers, to the strangulation of Britain’s empire—Fleming first imagines the character during the war itself; when he sits down to write the first 2,000 words of Casino Royale on February 17th, 1952, he’s in his home in Oracabessa, in what is then still the colony of Jamaica.
Visiting upon foreign countries to kill people in the name of installing civility and order, even if he emerges at its relative tail end, Bond is still an imperial figure. Between the rugged good looks, the suits, the watches, the cars, and everything else, what he also does, quite literally, is make the deployment of British imperial power look good—in the same way that the product placements make you want to drink Gordon’s gin, wear an Omega watch, and drive an Aston Martin, Bond, as an entity, seduces you into Britain and British culture. ‘You either want to be him,’ they say, ‘or be with him’. At the height of the imperial age, we achieved something similar via our military and political power, forcing people around the world to believe that if they joined with us, their lives could be improved.
In the '50s and '60s, this is what made Bond propaganda—as the Empire clung onto the final years of its life, he became its disarming valet, stopping people at the proverbial bedroom door so they wouldn’t steal a glimpse of the tuberculoid master within. Sixty years later, his role is only slightly more complex. While we’ve generally become more aware of and prepared to admit the horrors of our colonial past, and also been confronted by nationalism’s various dead ends, there still lives, somewhere in the hearts and loins of a lot of true Englishmen, a fantasy of empire—a guilty little dream that our country still matters in the 21st century like it did 150 years ago.
Bond makes a kind of shadow theatre out of that dream, heightening, symbolising, and caricaturing it so that we can indulge in it emotionally while keeping our preferred distance from it morally and intellectually. He lets us vent and express our frustrated national identity without really making us confront the reasons that we need to vent and express our frustrated national identity in the first place. He takes the pain that we’ve created as a country and gives it back to us as visceral, spectacular pleasure. And if that still doesn’t work for us—if we need a less ambiguous valediction, and to go all the way, and to see even the most symbolic remnants of empire destroyed, to feel really morally cleansed—then Bond will get himself whipped, beaten, shot, and killed for us; he’ll die when we need him to. Regardless of how you feel about James Bond—whether you like him, think he’s a relic-symbol of imperial genocide, or somewhere in between—this context is a large part of what makes the character compelling. A faint word, but even if it’s only as a foul sociological phenomenon, this is why James Bond is ‘interesting’, something to be studied if not swallowed, like a presence of PFOA in water.
When you play as James Bond in 007 First Light, you don’t feel like the character has a lot of power. Structurally, the game is a succession of screeching halts—you spend a protracted amount of time devising an intricate, contrived, and out-of-harm’s-way method of unlocking one metaphorical (or literal) door, only to be confronted immediately on the other side by another. Bond’s progress through his world is comically staccato, best encapsulated in a mid-game sequence where, trying to access a secret underground tech lab, he’s stopped by a receptionist who tells him she won’t let him through without the correct uniform. To locate this uniform, Bond has to eavesdrop on a conversation between two lab employees, from which he learns that uniforms are kept in lockers. The key to these lockers however has been lost somewhere—by now, one of the technicians instructively conjectures out loud, it’s probably been sucked up by one of the many automated vacuum cleaner robots. Bond has to use his gadget watch to x-ray scan all of the robots, and then follow the one containing the key back to its disposal station, and then fish the key out from the bin, all to open a locker door and acquire a jacket, a jacket that he needs in order to get past, not a team of armed guards, or a rival secret agent, or a sophisticated security system of cameras and laser grids, but a receptionist.
Another example of this type of sequence, which Reid refers to as “nakedly mechanical”: later on, Bond is given the entirely pedestrian task of gathering his equipment from the various side offices and test chambers of the Q lab; the staff has been sent home and Bond is in there by himself. He approaches a door. The door is locked. He collects a fingerprint to open the biometric lock. The fingerprint is incomplete. He fetches another part of it. He gets into the room—and the door locks behind him, and now he has to complete another multi-step conundrum just to get back out. There is also the mission in Vietnam, where Bond’s target (not for assassination, just questioning) is staying in a villa, protected by private security. Bond tells the guard on the gate that he’s a yoga teacher, here to deliver a daily session. ‘Not without a yoga mat,’ the sentry replies. ‘The boss only does yoga with his blue yoga mat’. Defeated, James Bond has to go and try to find the blue yoga mat. In Mauritania, Bond needs $100,000 to buy his way into an illegal auction; in what is perhaps First Light’s most benumbing sequence of contrivances, he may obtain this money by earning the high score on a fairground firing range and then beating the dealer of a cups and balls game, both of which, for some reason, award victorious contestants with thirty thousand American dollars.
In Hitman, where we play as a sociopath—as an un-motherborn, artificial man created in a laboratory—this kind of game design forms part of a greater character portrait. Agent 47 is both alienated and repelled by our reality; whenever the Hitman games are uncanny or very obviously fictitious, it creates an impression of 47’s subjectivity, like we’re looking through the eyes of a man who sees people as predictable and lesser thinking, and the human world as a place where he doesn’t entirely belong; a non-man, for whom our everyday banalities are unusual puzzles.
But James Bond is very much a ‘man of the world’—he is THE man of the world. Partly this is expressed through his superficialities—he knows what drinks to order, how to ski, how to win at chemin de fer. But it’s also the fundamental core of his character. In the Royal Navy, he holds the rank of Commander. A glib summation of his dominion over anywhere he goes, the motto of James Bond’s aristocratic family (and of course the title of the previously mentioned 1999 film) is ‘the world is not enough’. He might use a pseudonym or go to some kind of length to maintain his cover and keep a low profile, for the benefit of the mission, but ultimately, wherever he goes, he takes what he wants. For James Bond, reality is not a bewildering, complex or obstructive place.
First Light, by contrast, makes Bond perennially subordinate to his environment—another door he has to find a way to unlock, another ledge he has to find a way up to, another series of hoops to painstakingly contrive a way through. Compared to every other interpretation, either on screen or in literature, this turns IO Interactive’s James Bond into a meek do-gooder, an anti version of the character who cares about means more than ends. Given that he rarely achieves his goals through any direct applications of force, and that every sparse instance of force is mitigated, equivocated, and given extensive, narratively and morally assuring context—and that he’s also presented to us as a subject or supplicant of his environment—First Light’s version of James Bond thus becomes a whitewash, a vision of the character separated from the activities and attitudes of his power-imposing imperial roots. Everything that James Bond does comes with history. It’s telling that so much of First Light is spent walking around, looking at the watch, pressing buttons, doing nearly nothing.
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+Repurposed from Reunion With Death, a screenplay originally written in 1993 for the Timothy Dalton Bond.
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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.