Golden Eye and the World
C April 4, 2004

There is an archetypical personality that drifts from person to person, manifesting itself now and again in everyone.

Even now, a police officer in New York inches sideways along the side of an alley, through which he has been carefully tracking his quarry. His breath deepens, but years of training and preparation hold his weapon aloft as though of its own volition. Despite the pressure his mind struggles for some witty one-liner to mumble, halfway to himself, for the confidence it will provide him, unsure what will happen next.

Somewhere, a man just learning to ski shudders at the thought of looking over the edge, his eyes shut tight against the howling wind as he perches just on the edge to decent. Suddenly his mind finds something to fix on, as though it were a point in space, which collects him. Magically, he stops shivering. He flashes the girl next to him a wry grin and throws himself down into the whiteness.

A young man, driving his mother’s bulky SUV on a brief visit to the store, sees the light turn yellow several feet in front of him. Leaning forward slightly in his seat, he presses down on the gas petal, eliciting a low rumble from beneath the hood. As he hits the corner he gives the wheel a tight spin, rocketing him to the right and giving the illusion that he is going much faster. Behind him the light turns red, but at least he made it, this time.

Somewhere, you know it, a man lies in bed beside his wife. As he bends to light a cigarette, he happens to catch his reflection in the mirror, which suddenly gives him pause. A smile touches his lips as he utters a name under his breath.

“Bond… James Bond,” he whispers in tune to the chorus of men all over the word simultaneous paying homage to this transcendental figure. Some may scarcely be aware of their tribute, or they may have just finished a movie, but each one knows, deep down, that they are sharing in some innate aspect of human personality. Each one is buying into a fantasy. Each one believes, for just a moment, that he is James Bond.

But then reality jerks us back into place. The James Bond myth is dying; rugged masculinity is going out of style. The old-fashioned traits of gambling, womanizing, speeding and playing with guns are no longer as socially acceptable as they used to be. In fact it was Judi Dench, playing M in Goldeneye, who herself said, “I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the cold war, whose boyish charms that are wasted on me obviously appeal to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you.” Point taken.

Considering the matter more clearly, however, the fact that Judi Dench is even in a position to make such a judgment is a sign of change, one might even say progress. From the casting change, to the innuendos, and even to Bond’s new domineering female boss, Goldeneye, the seventeenth James Bond movie filmed by MGM, ushered Bond into the 21st century, preserving all the wholesome manliness fans loved, while at the same time appealing to a new generation of viewers and making Brosnan, as Bond, into an action hero for the 90’s. At the very least it shows that that relic of the cold war, James Bond, while arguably dying, is not nearly dead.

There is a single, comprehensive reason why Goldeneye represented such a giant leap into the modern day: it had to. With MGM bogged down in legal disputes, six years managed to accrue between the releases of License to Kill and Goldeneye, a wider gap than for any other two sequential Bond movies. The sequence interrupted, filmmakers and fans alike descended into a murky, previously unthinkable line of thought, that James Bond was best left as an icon of things past. The public seemed content to abandon their hero to history, forgetting, for one unconscionable moment, that 007 could never be defeated so easily.

"It's a New World. With New Enemies and New Threats. But you can still rely on one man. 007", read an advertisement for the new Bond film, with little exaggeration. Indeed, the world can be born anew in only six years, and so it was between ’89 and ’95 as well. Feminism made progress to the point of universal acceptance, rendering the casual bottom slaps of Connery era obsolete, as did many other matters of style with which the old James Bond associated (although it is not until the opening of the next movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, that he officially denounces smoking as a “filthy habit”).

But, while the unwholesome aspects of human nature may now elicit a more negative connotation, the transition is not one with which Bond is unaccustomed. Even as early as 1969, Bond responded to an outcry against continual one night stands by getting married in On Her Majesties Secret Service, however briefly. As an archetypal figure, Bond cannot and could never be out of step with the times he lived in, and in this way the man grew and changed without comment or complaint.

To do this, MGM made elaborate plans for the opening scenes following the theme song. The car chase scene was a standard element, only this one incorporated two women, one alongside insisting that he stop and inventing coagulated psychological analysis of his personality, another competing and, in a move unprecedented by earlier movies, actually beating 007.

What follows is a typical gambling scene incorporating the same game through which James Bond makes his very first movie appearance ever, “Baccarat”, except this time he loses. The entire sequence is pays homage to that first James Bond movie, a tribute to what has come before and an observance of what has changed. It sets the standard, so that there are no surprises.

What did come as quite a surprise, both to the makers of James Bond movies and the world at large, was the fall of the Soviet empire. Decades of viewing the world in terms of black and white, with the United States and Britain clearly allied against an implacable enemy, came to a sudden end with the fall of Mr. Gorbachev’s wall. While no one would ever have argued that we liked the communists, or even that they served an important purpose, fantasy certainly became more difficult following the demise of the fearless leader, and suddenly things became a lot more complicated.

This is not to say that James Bond had no enemies besides the Russians. License to Kill pitted him, as an individual without the backing of his institution, against a Columbian drug lord. The Roger Moore era saw James Bond battling numerous psychopathic entrepreneurs who took their wealth as an excuse to remake the world, and even Sean Connery most often fought with the agents of SPECTRE, an independent cooperation with no purpose other than the extortion and destruction of whole nations. Yet in spite of this there always seemed to be a KGB tie, either in financial backing or troop support, or at the very least an Eastern European accent very popular among leading villains and henchmen. For thirty years this unspoken prejudice was the societal norm, and suddenly the trend was broken.

To combat this, MGM had to do something drastic. They had to pit a worldview against a worldview. They had to dredge up the past and somehow turn it into an imminent threat, fully aware that while they were doing so, they were essentially saying that James Bond himself was incapable of change. The task seemed a tricky one.

Despite the difficulty, this film does a relatively good job of shutting down the old system while finding a way to make the lead character dynamic. It took a lot of thought, but their device for doing this involved the entire plot, and it begins with the first shot.

As any established Bond aficionado knows, the standard formula for a Bond movie begins like this: logo, action scene that has little to do with the rest of the movie, theme song… and then the rest of the movie. In this instance, though, the action sequence, frequently called the best in the history of Bond, begins at the height of the Cold War. As his plane flies safely away from the chemical factory he blew up, concluding an amazing infiltration and escape, the spooky percussion notes of the Goldeneye theme start in and take the viewer away into a maelstrom of unconnected imagery. The theme song reaches it’s climax as a bullet fires from an super-enlarged handgun aimed at the viewer, at which point the camera is projected forward through the barrel, and into the first scene, set in 1995. The barrel of the gun, it would seem, is a time warp.

A most appropriate time warp, for reasons already mentioned, but something needs to carry over. In this case something that had never been attempted before; Alec Trevelyan, 006, James Bond’s former partner, goes renegade. The exact reason is a generally unknown bit of history that relates to the British betrayal of hundreds of Cossacks seeking asylum, but the results are obvious, the Russians are back in the picture. This time, Trevelyan carries a grudge from an era back, and in combating this threat, Bond somehow finds time to come to terms with his own anachronistic tendencies. Bond, however, rather than falling from several stories and then having a satellite dish drop on him, accepts the change, and the subject is never again touched on as seriously as it was in this movie.

There is one more change to this movie, the most superficial yet probably the most obvious, symbolically transitioning Bond out of the 80’s, and that was the casting change. With Timothy Dalton amicably splitting after License to Kill, a new face was necessary for our hero, and many would say there could be no better choice than Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan had already stared in some 32 movies by that point, but it was clear from his history that he was the epitome of the debonair Englishman. Above all, Bond must always be on top of the situation, and Brosnan was that, indubitably.

To my mind, however, the passing of the torch is indicative of some deeper point. Though men may come and go, be born, learn and die, there will always be something that connects us. James Bond has been saving the world since 1962 and shows no signs of slowing down. He does not age, he does not die, and he certainly does not fail. The character of James Bond is a universal concept that cannot be broken, because to destroy James Bond is to kill a part of the human spirit.

It is with this sentiment that I hope to see the legacy of James Bond carry over well into the next century without losing any of the grace, charm and class that has for so long defined this great tradition.

(special thanks to Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall for their book The Essential Bond: the authorized guide to the world of 007 and Mitchel Feffer for his paper Bond’s Film Evolution - a position paper by student Mitchel Feffer, both of which were used to assist the writing of this piece)