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Bond told the story in simple terms, with good men and bad men, like an adventure story out of a book. —Ian Fleming, Dr. No What do you believe in? The preservation of capital? —Renard (Robert Carlyle) in The World Is Not Enough A hero takes shape only in relation to his enemies. In the case of the James Bond films, these enemies, whether incarnated as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Emilio Largo, Auric Goldfinger, Hugo Drax, Elliot Carver, Mr. Big, Franz Sanchez, General Georgi Koskov, Karl Stromberg, or under some other suggestive name, seem intent on total global domination through the disruption of national boundaries and governments, the manipulation of the global economy , or the utter extinction of humanity as we know it. The depiction of villainy in Bond films differs somewhat from that in creator Ian Fleming’s novels , where James Bond’s patriotic feelings, sense of decency, and restrained heterosexual appetite play against criminal barbarity, communist deceit, colonial corruption, and rampant sexual perversion. To be sure, the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), used Fleming’s polarities while significantly enlarging Bond’s sexual appetite. But as the film series has progressed to the present time (through twenty-two films and six incarnations of Bond: Sean Connery, David Niven, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan), the moral, political, and sexual landscapes C H A P T E R E L E V E N The Arch Archenemies of James Bond STEVEN WOODWARD 173 of our culture have become hazier, the distinction between dignity and depravity less easy to make in everyday life. As Rick Lyman recently observed in the New York Times, “When it comes to choosing villains for big popcorn movies— a task that used to be as easy as ‘Where did we put those Nazi uniforms?’—it is becoming more and more difficult to take a step without treading on someone ’s tender toes” (2002). If in response the scriptwriters have gradually reduced the most politically incorrect markers (such as, for example, the use of Harlem as a setting for a massive drug deal in Live and Let Die [1973]), they nevertheless seem to have found the means to keep intact the sexual coding and Oedipal drama of Fleming’s narratives, primarily through the self-conscious irony embodied in Bond himself. James Bond’s masculinity, in other words, is no longer for men only. As Toby Miller has observed, “Masculinity is no longer the exclusive province of men, either as spectators, consumers, or agents of power. And Bond was an unlikely harbinger of this trend” (2001, 245). Although the Bond stories always attempt to anchor their narratives in historical specifics, they are, as Romano Calisi notes, more akin to romance or fairy tale in their use of a character typology: “James Bond does not exist, his Antagonist really does not exist, their characters do not exist in contour. There only exists a rhythmic succession of type-situations—which are significant socially and culturally” (1966, 83). Both Bond and his adversary have been carefully maintained as symbols rather than as individuals, symbols that take their meaning from their relationship with each other rather than from any iconic or indexical ground of truth. So it is that even in the novels, which have often been criticized for their jingoism, the exact content of Bond’s ideals, encapsulated in his Englishness, remains, as Kingsley Amis noted, vague: “The England for which Bond is prepared to die, like the reasons why he’s prepared to die for it, is largely taken for granted” (1965, 95). Amis identifies the result of Fleming’s motives and methods as a particular “ethical frame of reference”: Some things are regarded as good: loyalty, fortitude, a sense of responsibility, a readiness to regard one’s safety, even one’s life, as less important than the major interests of one’s organization and one’s country. Other things are regarded as bad: tyranny, readiness to inflict pain on the weak or helpless, the unscrupulous pursuit of money or power. (85) These ideals, however, can be summarized more or less in one conception for Fleming: Englishness. The producers of the films, ever aware of the need to address a global market with their British-produced product, have had to downplay the novels’ use of Englishness as a moral anchor. Many of the actors they chose, perhaps unconsciously, for Bond were not English (a Scot, an Australian, a Welshman, an Irishman), as Anthony Lane has recently commented...

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