Bond midterm

We know who Batman is. Batman is millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, whose parents were killed by a mugger outside a movie theater in Gotham City. At that moment, Bruce Wayne lost his identity and became a crime-fighting spirit of vengeance. Bruce Wayne is forever haunted by the deaths of his parents, and so puts on a scary costume and goes out every night on an impossible quest to rid Gotham City of crime. We know that Spider-Man is bespectacled-loser Peter Parker, we know that Luke Skywalker is a restless teenager aching to get off his crummy backwater planet, we know that Charlie Brown pines for the little red-haired girl who will never know he’s alive.

But what do we know about James Bond? In spite of having 21 movies made about him, he remains maddeningly elusive as a person. I was shocked to learn, in the new Casino Royale, that he’s an orphan, brought up as a ward of the state. That explains a lot, especially the glee evident in Daniel Craig’s demeanor at getting to live a life of luxurious splendor far beyond the station he was born to. But mostly in the movies Bond has no past to speak of, just a casually-worn knowledge of every subject in the universe, mostly-excellent taste in clothes, a life of drunken leisure and a desire to screw beautiful women.

(I was about to add his love of gadgets, but Bond has no love of gadgets — a car, a gun, a super-magnetic watch, they’re all just tools, things useful for getting the job done. Q has a love of gadgets, Bond couldn’t care less. If he can kill a guy with a coat-hanger, he will — he doesn’t need Q’s fancy crap, in spite of how often it comes in handy. And the car will inevitably be destroyed during a chase in some bad-guy’s warehouse. You don’t see James Bond worrying about his paint job.)

It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s Bond’s lack ofstory that has allowed him to have 21 movies made about him. The Bond movies occupy a peculiar narrative universe. They’re not a continuing narrative, they’re more of an attitude and a set of values, a formula if you will. A satisfying story demands a beginning, middle and end, but James Bond just goes on and on and on. Each adventure rolls off his back, rarely is a timeline or sense of past mentioned, he starts over fresh every time he slouches into M’s office. (“What do you know about a man named Scaramanga?” asks M at the beginning of The Man With The Golden Gun and Bond shrugs and recites, for about two minutes, every detail of Scaramanga’s life, as though it were common knowledge and barely worth mentioning.) Like pornography, Bond promises satisfaction and keeps you coming back in spite of never giving you what you’re accustomed to receiving in a movie theater. Perfect popcorn movies, the Bond features always taste more-or-less great, and you always want more in spite of the fact that they never really fill you up.

After watching Goldfinger the other day I began to wonder how Bond spends his time when he’s not blowing shit up and saving the world. He doesn’t seem to search out danger and intrigue, that’s just his job. Now me, when I’m not sitting at my computer writing I’m driving around town taking care of family errands and thinking about writing. Bond doesn’t seem to have this problem. When the job is done, he’s back to what he considers man’s natural state — sleeping late, playing cards, getting drunk and screwing beautiful women, preferably in the back of a boat adrift in some warm tropical sea.

(There was an excellent Saturday Night Live episode where Steve Martin played Bond on his off-hours, where he’s trying to live the Bond life in order to impress his date, but because he’s not on billable hours he has to pinch pennies, get free food from the casino bar and worry about dirtying his white dinner jacket.)

Indiana Jones has a similar narrative strategy, we only get little scraps of his life in dribs and drabs, and yet the Indiana Jones movies feel different, perhaps because of the scale of the adventures, perhaps because of the religious nature of the artifacts he searches for, perhaps because each movie takes him on an emotional and/or philosophical journey. Things affect Indiana Jones, he’s never the same man at the end of the story as he was at the beginning, but nothing seems to affect James Bond. I get the feeling that if it wasn’t his job to save the world, he wouldn’t particularly care if the world was saved or not. When he’s taken prisoner by Dr. No, and No tells Bond about SPECTRE’s plan to rule the world, Bond snorts with amused derision “World domination, the same old dream.” He has no serious worries that Dr. No has any real ability to pull off his mad scheme (whatever the hell it is, I still haven’t figured it out), it’s just his job to stop it. Or rather, it’s just his job to get the girl and get off the island alive, and if that involves stopping No’s scheme, then so be it. There’s always this feeling when he walks into M’s office that he’d just as soon turn right back around and go back to playing cards.

Maybe Bond exists best as a state of being. He does a lot of guy things — he parasails, bungee-jumps, punches people, chases women (well okay, he doesn’t do much chasing, the birds pretty much fall out of the trees when he walks by), drives fast cars, or cars fast anyway, consumes electronics. The consumer aspect of Bond is as powerful and important, I think, as any other. It’s not for nothing that brand-names are always being tossed around in Bond movies (from Casino Royale: WOMAN: “What’s that watch you’re wearing? BOND: “Omega.” WOMAN [visibly aroused]: “Perfect”). The only reason I know the term “Walther PPK” is because that’s, you know, James Bond’s gun. He’s a kind of style-sheet — a proper gentlemen wears X clothes, drives Y car, drinks Z drink, thinks about topic A, B and sometimes C, but only when necessary to do so for Queen and Country. A man, says Bond, learns everything in the world and is capable of performing any task imaginable, so that he may then live a life of luxurious decadence.