Geopolitics, Gender, and Genre: The Work of Pre-Title/Title Sequences in James Bond Films

Introduction

Almost since the inception of the Bond series, one of the most recognizable features of the films has been the opening sequences. From the now iconic images of a male figure (Bond) seen through the barrel of a gun to undulating female bodies, the pre-title/title sequences mark the screen in ways that are both familiar and enticing to viewers. The pre-title sequence of the Cold War classic From Russia with Love (1963), for example, the second film in the James Bond series and the first to deploy the pre-title/title formula, opens with a shot of Bond seen through a gun barrel that then gives way to the figure of 007 walking guardedly through a formal garden in the dead of night. A man sneaks up on Bond and strangles him to death with a thin wire. At this moment, exterior lights illuminate the garden to reveal a large mansion with many people standing around. The agent is congratulated for his rapid kill, and then a mask is peeled from the dead body to reveal that it is not Bond who has been slain—the exercise was simply a practice session for the agent. The scene then cuts to the title sequence, where credits are projected onto the shimmying bodies of women in belly dancer costumes.¹ In almost every subsequent Bond film, the sequences function similarly, introducing the film’s hero and its broader gender politics as well as the security threat that Bond will thwart. In each new installment of the series, these high-impact, fast-moving pre-title/title sequences refer back to previous Bond films, forging intertextual linkages. At the same time, the pre-title/title sequences serve both diegetic and metonymic functions, re-presenting “real” international politics and global security threats within a normalizing male hegemony.

Despite their obvious relevance to the Bond series viability, curiously little has been written on the pre-titles and titles.² This article seeks to fill this gap, exploring the multiple functions of the sequences in three of the most recent Bond films, Die Another Day (2002), Casino Royale (2006), and Quantum of Solace (2008).³ These particular films are interesting because they mark the (at the time much-publicized) shift from Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig in the role of James Bond and because they also signal the changing risks presented by a turbulent international security situation. Taken together, these films not only provide a window into the ways in which pre-title/title sequences anchor the Bond series, they also offer a template for understanding the power of genre in structuring filmic articulations of contemporary geopolitics and gender politics and discourses. After a brief discussion of title and pre-title sequences and the role of genre in the Bond films, we turn to an examination of geopolitics and diegetic contemporaneity as found in Die Another Day, Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace. We then look more particularly at the pre-title/title sequences and their generic, diegetic, and metonymic functions, arguing that the sequences, like the films as a whole, telescope contemporary geopolitics and gender politics.

Pre-Titles, Titles, and Generic Imaginings

In “Reading the Title Sequence,” Georg Stanitzek points to the complexity and multiple functions of title sequences. These functions are economic and legal (i.e., production and distribution credits), aesthetic (49), and spatial, facilitating the transition from “outside” to “inside” and thus allowing viewers to engage the film. This opening then is both integral and “semi-autonomous” (45) because of its structure and because of the extra-diegetic information that it provides. As Stanitzek writes, “the title sequences come into being as an eminent space of cinematic intermediality” (45). The title sequence of the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), acts as Stanitzek’s article suggests, allowing the audience to leave the mundane everyday and enter the world of Bond. However, beginning with the second film in the series (From Russia with Love) the title sequence is preceded by an action sequence that is integral...