Unpopular Opinion: The Filmic James Bond Doesn't Work

 I just read my first James Bond novel, “You Only Live Twice.”

Before going into detail over what the books or what some of the films do right, I would like to talk about my idiosyncratic reasons for having fallen out of love with the film version of the James Bond character. As always, please consider subscribing or paid subscribing.

1. James Bond is more or less immortal because the script demands it, and the film rarely acknowledges this. 

Sure, it gets parodied in Austin Powers, but the Bond series itself rarely acknowledges such implausible outcomes where if at least a dozen events were off by a few seconds, Bond would be toast. That the film series treats this all as a cosmic irony without so much as a wink makes the hero look cocky in a negative way. I see no reason to not have tweaked the scripts so luck would have been less of a factor.

In worst-case scenarios, it feels like a cheat, and in a cosmic way, as if Bond might be responsible for the deaths of those close to him since he has to survive and the script demands a sacrificial lamb. When secondary Bond girl Miranda Frost says to Bond, “sex for dinner, death for breakfast”, it’s not accurate in a literal sense: Bond does not kill or even fail to prevent the death of his sexual conquests through negligence.

However, take the example of You Only Live Twice when Bond has sex with Japanese agent Aki. As the two are sleeping after the act, an enemy ninja unfurls some poison that is meant to kill Bond but he sneezes and the poison is blown to Aki instead. Bond didn’t do it intentionally but if he were not a character in a movie and a news figure, why would he deserve to live over her?

2. Bond being the paragon of manliness but by all accounts being a “hit it and quit it” kind of guy.

Sure, it’s all between consenting adults (just kidding, there are at least two instances of rape that I remember off the top of my head), but why can’t he feel a sense of romantic love for anyone he encounters? Yes, there’s that one women he married, but that’s treated as a fluke. For the most part, Bond faces the convenience of the woman who doesn’t want strings, but that also means the character never has to face an actual point of possibly hurting someone and navigating a mature conversation about his partner’s feelings (except for the woman he raped in Thunderball, Patricia Fearing, who we see him dumping on screen; and sadly the Patricia Fearing rape/dumping is horrific but not fully out of character). What this implies is he’s likely dumping the Bond girls between movies, although who knows maybe a few of them might he mutual.

What does this all say about masculinity that this great hero of manhood conveniently gets to avoid any serious conversations.

There are a few exceptions before the Bond era: He shows genuine care about the secondary Bond girl (Paris Carver) in Tomorrow Never Dies, the main Bond girl in Living Daylights, and Sophia Marceanu in World is Not Enough. Bond also shows admirable restraint in View to a Kill; convincing enough that maybe he wasn’t thinking about bedding her the entire time.

3. Bond’s License to Kill- 

James Bond’s “License to Kill” has never made any sense. If it’s self-defense, then his right to kill is no different than anyone else’s. If it’s within the context of war or what a spy mission might entail, that would be governed by rules of engagement (i.e. the Geneva convention). But beyond that, you’re just a murderous a-hole. If the argument is that Bond can be trusted to make ethical decisions in the field over whether to pull the trigger, I see little evidence of this in practice.

Some might say “why does this matter? It’s just a movie?” Sure, but movies are carefully calibrated to lure audience sympathies to one side or another. The only reason to root for James Bond is that the other side is generally someone who will destroy the world if unchecked.

Sidenote: Proponents of intersectionality like to label James Bond as a prime example of all the isms: sexism, xenophobia, racism, etc. I will disagree there if we use the films as text that just because Bond is sexist, that he is also racist and xenophobic. I see no evidence that these traits of the literary character make their way onto the screen.