Always an Icon, A Bond in the '90s

All the world's a movie, and young men have their favorite characters in it. At first the infant, amidst his mewling and puking, finds time for admiring a DC superhero--Batman, Superman or another. Then, the whining schoolboy serves his apprenticeship to a star athlete. Only in adolescence, however, do maturing young men, be they lovers or soldiers, recognize the virtues of British secret agents.

For those in the latter set (this writer included), the release of a new James Bond film is met with eager anticipation, followed by boyish glee. It is almost like Christmas, but rarer. And Bond's latest, The World Is Not Enough, is no exception.

In it, Bond (Pierce Brosnan) faces Russian terrorists bent on destroying Istanbul with hijacked plutonium so that they can wipe out three oil pipelines. This would allow for a fourth pipeline, running from Russia to the West, that would bear all of the oil, turning a tidy profit and endangering the United States' oil supply. In the end--sorry to ruin it--Bond kills the bad guys and sleeps with the heroine.

James Bond films--the first of which, Dr. No, premiered in 1962--were well-suited to the Cold War's ideological fervor. It must have been great fun to watch Bond outwit and outclass hapless Commies. World is the third Bond film since the end of the Cold War and, while its Russophobia is still pronounced, the conflict has lost most of its prior urgency. Avarice and vainglory have replaced zealous patriotism as the cardinal passions of Bond's adversaries.

Fortunately, Bond's passions remain. Just as birds fly and fish swim, James Bond beds beautiful women and kills Russians--it comes naturally to him.

A graduate of Oxford college and a loyal patriot, Bond is the paragon of thoughtful manliness, which is not always an oxymoron. He is intelligent but not reflective, independent (the "00" in "007" represents a license to kill) but not reckless, reliable but not predictable. Consider, by contrast, the brutish strength of professional athletes, or the thoughtless braggadocio of action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the like. Bond is a caricature of manliness, to be sure, but not an altogether unflattering one.

Nevertheless, feminists and misandrist critics often paint Bond as a heartless womanizer. This may be true, but it doesn't give Bond girls nearly enough credit. While most women in Bond films are, so to speak, "charmed" at least once by Bond, they are by no means undiscriminating. For instance, upon Bond's arrival at an Afghanistan construction site in World, a foreman, terse with unrequited affection, tells him that Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), a shapely airhead-cum-nuclear physicist, is a lesbian. Suffice to say, Bond proves the unlucky foreman wrong.

Also, most Bond girls pursue challenging careers in traditionally male-dominated fields. Pussy Galore was a pilot; Holly Goodhead, an astrophysicist; Xenia Onatopp, a world-class terrorist.

For all of its subtle feminism, though, World is not perfect. Past Bond movies tended, with several notable exceptions, to practice a principle preached on several occasions by Ronald Reagan, a frequent critic of Hollywood's insatiable libido. Said Reagan, "I have always thought it was more suggestive to see a hand reach out and hang a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door." The lesson: Merely suggesting sex is often more effective than showing it onscreen.

World seems more explicit than its predecessors; even James Bond seems to be slouching toward Gommorrah. Granted, Bond has never been a poster boy for family values, but his latest film makes his womanizing less palatable by making it more visible.

And several character flaws to which Bond seemed vulnerable in past films have now surfaced, much to his disadvantage. For instance, his stoicism cedes to jealous rage when he learns that his enemy, Renard (Robbie Coltrane), had previously taken advantage of Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), Bond's latest interest. Bond's was right anger, but revealed an unprecedented dependence and emotion all the same.

Despite its minor flaws, however, World is a fine film. With any luck, it will ensure that another generation of young men are educated in the Bond tradition--sans Cold War, sans original plots, sans homely women, sans everything.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.