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By Root 1628 0

by the late 1950s, as the bleeping, football-shaped Sputniks zipped by overhead and intelligence directors began dreaming of spy satellites. By 2004, when MI5 (the counterintelligence agency) openly placed recruiting advertisements in the press, we can be sure that Bond would have been best advised to seek employment elsewhere. Spies are supposed to be short—less than 180 centimeters (5 feet 11 inches) for men—and nondescript. As a branch of the civil service, MI5’s headquarters are presumably nonsmoking, and drinking on the job is frowned upon. As intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6 staffs aren’t in the business of ruthlessly wiping out enemies of the state: any decision to use lethal force lies with the Foreign Secretary, the COBRA committee, and other elements of the British government’s security oversight bureaucracy. An MI6 agent driving a 1933 Bentley racer with a supercharged engine, frequenting the high-stakes table at a casino as James Bond so memorably did in his first print appearance, is an almost perfect inversion of the real picture.

Nevertheless, the archetype has legs. James Bond continued to grow and evolve, even after his creator put away his cigarette holder for the last time. To some extent, this was the product of storytelling expediency. The film adaptations started in the middle of a continuing story arc—for Fleming wrote his novels with a modicum of continuity—and while Dr. No was the first to make it to celluloid, the novel was in fact a sequel to From Russia with Love (which was filmed second). Thus, various liberties were taken with the plot of the canonical novels right from the start. You can read the novels at length without finding anything of the banter between Bond and M’s secretary Moneypenny that is a recurrent theme of the films, for example, and that’s before we get into the bizarre deviations of the midperiod Roger Moore movies (notably The Spy Who Loved Me and Moon-raker ).

The literary James Bond is a creature of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic. Over the years, his cinematic alter ego has acquired the stamina of Superman, learned to defy the laws of physics, ventured into space—both outer and inner—and deflowered more maids than Don Juan. He’s also mutated to fit the prejudices and neuroses of the day, dabbling with (gasp!) monogamy, and hanging out with those heroic Afghan mujahedeen in the late-’80s AIDS-and-Soviets-era The Living Daylights. He’s worked under a ball-breaking postfeminist M in GoldenEye15, and even confronted a female arch-villain in The World Is Not Enough (an innovation that would surely have Fleming, who formed his views on appropriate behavior for the fairer sex in the 1920s, rolling in his grave). But other aspects of the Bond archetype remain timeless. Fleming was fascinated by fast cars, exotic locations, and intricate gadgetry, and all of these traits of the original novels have been amplified and extrapolated in the age of modern special effects.

Just how does James Bond—a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War,” to use the words the scriptwriters on GoldenEye so tellingly put into M’s mouth—survive in the popular imagination more than fifty years after his literary birth? What does it mean when Mary-Sue stalks the landscape of the imagination, blasting holes in the plot with a Walther PPK (or the P99 Bond upgraded to in Tomorrow Never Dies)? If we’re going to understand this, perhaps we ought to start by looking at Bond’s dark shadow, the Villain.

In Search of Mabuse

Bond is, if you judge him by his work, a nasty fellow and not one you’d choose to lend your car to. In order to make this rough diamond glitter, it is necessary to display him against a velvet backdrop of darkest villainy. If you strip the Bond archetype of the bacchanalia, glamorous locations, and fashion snobbery, you end up with an unappetizingly shallow, cold-blooded executioner