Keywords

James Bond in the film series is a highly sexualized hero—a hero with few inhibitions or constraints: he sleeps freely and openly with friends and enemies alike. Other action heroes, Superman, Batman, Rocky, Spiderman exhibit a more conventional sexuality; indeed, by comparison with Bond, they seem embarrassed when a woman shows erotic interest in them.

Though the Bond and Bourne films do not offer new fresh esthetic possibilities they are energetic, if not sometimes visually anarchic pieces when compared with the earlier more mechanically awkward action movies in which plot and dialog mattered more and moved at a snails pace. Clearly, neither Bond nor Bourne films are masterpieces of cinematic invention like Eisenstein’s works, or those of D. W. Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, or Orson Wells (Wood 2004). Above all, we are being entertained more than informed or edified about the synergetic qualities of crime, politics, and terrorists. The heroes in these films have a mission of sorts to let us see the world from a particular institutional rather than distinctive ideological slant. While there is no special politics or theory to espouse, each hero in his way defends the status quo.

Presumably, every inch of the world will be on film—the planet will be captured on an enormous reel of tape or captured in the charming pixels of a digital system. Life then will no longer possess a simultaneous quality, but seem more sequential with one “story” after another, as if the DNA of living things were extended; one strand, one byte at a time, to infinity.

A Pre-history of Treachery and Espionage

During World War II and through the onset of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American wartime spy agency, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the precursor of the Central Intelligence (CIA), and MI6 (the secret intelligence services of the United Kingdom) were involved in years of buildup and organization for the struggles against the Nazis and Japanese and then after the war, against new adversaries, the Soviet Union’s KGB and the Chinese secret service agencies.

It was in the war years against the Nazis that a young diplomat, John Cornwell (aka John Le Carre), introduced the public to a shadowy world of secret agents, double agents, and sundry espionage moles that shaped the contours of the Cold War. In the 1950s, international political tensions were heightened by spy scares involving the nuclear weapon projects of the superpowers. The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States for treason, along with the demagogic career of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his nemesis, Alger Hiss in the US State Department, only deepened suspicions and increased the collective political paranoia enveloping the country. Though the political atmosphere in Britain was less fervid, cases of espionage were even more alarming. There was a series of trials of “atomic spies” and the melodramatic disappearances of British double agents into the Soviet Union (Pincher 2009). In the United States the subject of spies and CIA intrigues has aroused rapt interest, but in different ways. Many Americans are still haunted by McCarthyism, “red baiting,” and witch hunts hounding imaginary spies. However, the fictional writings of Fleming (James Bond), and Robert Ludlum (Jason Bourne) operate explicitly on the premise that there really existed secret undergrounds—communist, or otherwise. With the British experience, where Burgess and Maclean vanish in the dead of night and resurface in Moscow, it was difficult to claim, as they initially had, that they were innocent victims of a frame-up. And so again when Phil by, followed by Anthony Blunt(the Queen’s consultant on art work) were exposed, there could be no retreat into denial or a plausible refusal to believe that anyone, anywhere, had ever been a communist, let alone a spy.

The public reactions to the threat of spies in the fragile atomic weapon arms race in America and Great Britain were indeed different and are reflected in the actions and behaviors of Bond and Bourne. The moody American spy, Jason Bourne, an operator in a super secret agency, is troubled by internal betrayals, by the pernicious outcomes of agency hidden agendas, by the subterfuges of agency administrators and by the climate of frame-ups. James Bond, on the other hand, reflects a different reality. In the bowels of British Cold War policy, many British intellectuals were enthralled by Communism which affected the emotional temperature of its intelligence environment. British political drama was not as inflamed by the fanaticism apparent in the American spy apparatus. Bond operates with few illusions—secure in his trust of his superiors; his seeming recklessness, and semi-comical and satirical antics where Bond saves helpless good guys; Bond is something of a “Lone Ranger”—an American Western hero.

Film Language

The idea of “film language” extends impressions into a discourse. One receives what one sees, you don’t have to think it out. One sees an illuminated and dressed scene, here are the music, the facial expressions, bodily movement, and the attitudes of the costumed and dressed actors—and one understands. Movie-going is an act of inference. In a sense, films are illiterate events. (This may be why some of the most fanciful prose written today is by film critics, who assiduously address themselves to films that are hardly worth the attention.) Why? It may be among the dreariest, most stupid of movies, and one must wonder, does it matter? The critic, like the late Pauline Kael, writes a cogent reaction to what she sees. However unconsciously, the critic is defending verbal culture, subjecting the pre-literate (or post-literate) film-going experience to the extensions of syntactical, analytical thought.

From the Page to the Stage and Studio

Film is time-driven, it shows the exterior of life, it depicts behavior. It tends to be the simplest of moral reasoning, which is why films such as The Caine Mutiny are more attractive to large audiences than a film that is more literate, that may be more of a philosophically profound moral tale such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And this may help to explain why the narrative simplification of a Bond or Bourne film concerning otherwise complex political, legal, and moral issues is appealing. Novels and plays can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness; films, do close-ups, exciting chases, and frightening explosions, as well as intimate scenes of love and compassion that engage the senses totally.

When movies began they were shown in storefronts, dumps, and open lots. Movie-goers paid a nickel and sat down on a bench. The films were silent one-reelers; everyone made them; they were cheap to make and people made them about their own lives. They told their stories of working, living, and dying, about labor strikes, riots, parades, scenes of bar rooms, women dancing and factory work, scenes of life lived in cities, on farms, in slums, and palatial estates. Sometimes a pianist played along with the theme or scene and audiences talked back to flickering screens, stood up to challenge, or applaud the images; audiences cried over tender sorrowful moments captured by the film or laughed hilariously at clownish sketches by Chaplin or Keaton.

Eventually, this anarchic activity gave rise to a classificatory order and this came about naturally as the competition among movies created a demand for longer, more complex movies. Consequently, filmmakers could no longer personally afford the cost of their films so they resorted to banks and insurance companies for financing. Money was duly tendered making banks and insurance companies the often sole judges of just what films were to be made. As a result of these developments, business class of film financiers and professional film-makers arose.

Inventing Society

The commercial entrepreneurs who financed films and appreciated their potential for manipulating images of social reality initially encouraged motion pictures that depicted falsely tranquil social scenes; peace between unequal racial groups, happy workers and smiling factory foremen, well-dressed and well-fed children, monogamous husbands and wives, hyper functionally happy families going to church and picnics. Apart from the manipulation of social reality in political contexts, the movie era set the tone for the development of powerful tools in marketing products. People were seen driving autos, living in swank apartments, traveling by boat, plane, and car to exotic vacation locales and resorts. Eventually, the movies also embedded a realistic darker side of life of rough-looking sociopaths and gangsters standing apart from normal people and occasionally fairly accurately represented forms of social distress associated with political-economic situations. Gradually, a system of social archetypes and stereotypes evolved into which were fitted physically appropriate types of persons. In general, an orderly production base was established in California to generate films that functioned as a means to show people social norms and customs concerning behavior, what things were desirable to buy and own—in general, films showed forms of life in which audiences sitting in dark theaters could aspire to and desire.

Selling Thrills and Good Guys

Movies are always selling something; that is how they began and flourished in a materialistic, entrepreneurial business milieu. Here and there in Bond films are anti-American tropes. For instance, Tiger Tonaka (You Only Live Twice) bellows about baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, and neon lighting. The Hollywood revulsions and Vegas shallowness are ironies in Bond. The films are set in locales where bosoms matter and so does food. But what is remarkable about the Fleming and Broccoli creations is how well they perceived the post-Cold War social scene. The transition probably begins after From Russia with Love; a paranoid tale about the Bulgarians shooting the Pope in 1982. The stories behind the films are a kind of a bridge from the period of ideological warfare to our own, where the fear of a frigid totalitarian colossus or a nuclear exchange has been trumped by worries about uncorked psychopaths and dirty bombs in the hands of the true believers.

Fleming conjured up imagery that transcended the CIA, and KGB when he gave us Specter (an anagram for “Respect”), which was the world of the drug cartels, and political mafias as well as other “non-state actors” like al-Qaeda.

In Fleming’s and Broccoli’s hands James Bond has become one of pop culture’s most recognizable icons. He is a cultural symbol with fastidious tastes: driving only luxury automobiles; drinking only vodka martinis, and wearing exquisitely tailored suits. Bond vacations and engages in thrilling espionage adventures in the most glamorous locales, and gambles—high stakes—in only the swankiest hotels and casinos. He speaks all the most widely known languages, skis, scuba dives, plays golf and tennis at the best clubs, and is a gourmet who dabbles in haute cuisine.

In another vein, every movie fan must be impressed anew by the clear grasp of the tactical situations Bond, Bourne, and Ethan Hawke face in each film. Moreover, their undiminished aggressiveness when confronting heavy odds, their evident pride, and the devotion and loyalty of their bosses and superiors who are often exasperated by their field agent’s antics explains the camaraderie between field agents and headquarters and the enthusiastic responses of audiences worldwide. Film fans relish these moments which are enhanced visually by modern technological devices and modalities. In terms of influences, the films seem to owe more of their style and content to The Adventures of Robin Hood, Zorro, even Batman and Superman, and not one of the greatest of them all—The Spy who Came in From the Cold (1955). We come to that brilliant but depressing drama revived in its stark realism in a recent film that traces the history of the CIA: Good Shepherd.

Bond film is always fresh and portent the future. In the twenty-first century there are signs of aggressive behavior by states touting their nuclear arsenals. And if we are regressing into isolationist’s pacts, the twentieth century paranoia of Cold War ideology may return with a vengeance. In the early twenty-first century, threats of war, jihad, and religiously inspired civil conflicts are growing. The world’s population is larger; resource consumption of oil is staggering; and has already triggered many conflicts. There are more major powers, more nuclear-armed countries than ever, several of which are inhabited by aggressive and technologically savvy terrorists. To this depressing list may be added the teetering international financial system whose stability is fragile and potentially capable of destabilizing the integrated world economies.

Can Bond rescue us in this precarious environment? To say the least, loyalty to the anachronistic English monarchy is embarrassing; defending the crown, Queen, and England is slightly jingoist and must sound like a hollow roar in Bond’s head when he confronts his adversaries; but this is confounded by Bond’s love with the sentimental nostalgia of king and queen and country.

The Ethos and Style of Hollywood: Entertainments, Markets, and Brand Management

It has been authoritatively claimed that Hollywood—a state of mind and idea as much as a physical locale—and its various reincarnations such as “Bollywood,” are sophisticated networks of learning possessing a logic of money and power, driven by a cinematic, show-biz categorical imperative that could teach Madison avenue a thing or two (Epstein 2005). The grand inquisitors that cobbled the movie business together created the studios and supported the technologies that made film-making a new cultural entity. More than this, the hidden business side of movie making was (and is) vital to its existence. Faced with reports on how relevant audiences in different markets reacted to their films (products), Hollywood studios (corporations) analyzed the various elements (variables)—marketing, stars, music, action, color, technicians—and other parameters, and adjusted their subsequent production decisions in a cold-blooded, business-like manner. It is unlikely that Standard Oil, Kellogg, and Ford could perform better as commercial enterprises.

The Bond, Bourne, and Mission Impossible films are not specifically grounded in the studio enclaves of Hollywood any longer, but they reflect the tell-tale structural characteristics of the studio “system.” These extravaganzas of action require the ancillary services that Hollywood still supplies in terms of huge sound stages and the purely business components of film-making that includes agents, publicists, lawyers, numerous film technicians, accountants, and so on. Indeed, like sorcerers of old, filmmakers need to read the public’s entrails, if they are to satisfy its entertainment needs and tastes.

The Nature of the Enemy

What makes the most money in Hollywood are morally uncomplicated comic-book depictions of heroes and villains—simple stories in effect, that do not demand much curiosity. Their appeal across a broad scope of audience markets suggests that audiences do enjoy escapist entertainment.

How then is it that action films with political orientations that are admittedly superficial treatments of serious political issues nonetheless acquire and sustain audiences of movie-goers? Do films portray accurately who the enemies of the state might be? Are action films really thinly disguised propaganda pieces instructing us by way of entertainment? Who it is that we should worry about and fear? Some claim we are the enemy—the people (Reiber 2004). Others wonder if the films themselves inadvertently reveal the “real” enemy: high technology that fascinates, mesmerizes, that may mislead and misrepresent reality (Wood 2004).

High technologies hold a central place in all modern spy films. In some (Golden Eye, Mission Impossible II), the intricate machines of mass destruction constitute the main themes of the films. Yet it was only in film—State of Siege, for example—where the fateful consequences of clandestine surveillance were explored and where the role of high-tech penetrations of individual lives were featured but not fully examined in the context of the movie. What this film presented well was the potential threatening power of high technology to watch over us and to intimidate us in a Big Brother style.

The Enemy and the Hero

Bond, Bourne, Hawke, and even Rocky seem to be heroes who share in common psychological traits and political/cultural orientations. The conjuring of hero-images is consistent with the marketing needs of films as business commodities. What seems clear is that the logic of audience ratings prompts producers to search for omnibus products that can be consumed by audiences of all backgrounds. Furthermore, competition regresses continually with the concentration of the apparatuses of production, and, as importantly, with the means of distribution. As is evident in broadcast schedules, multiple communication networks are on the air at the same time with similar products seeking maximum profits. Likewise, in TV media the frequent mergers between production and distribution groups culminates in a concentration of communication corporations that are vertically integrated with the consequences that distribution largely governs production which translates into the conclusion that distributors exercise a veritable censorship of money over artistic and creative production.

The issue is perhaps even more ominous if one accepts Ernst Gombrich’s perspectives on the importance of the “ecological conditions of art.” Gombrich argues that art dies when the complex support structure sustaining it collapses. The richness of the cinematic culture would appear to be threatened when the economic and social conditions in which it can develop are profoundly affected by the inexorable logic of profit in the advanced countries where there is already substantial accumulated capital (Gombrich 1994).

Bond, Bourne, etc. are reflections of a social microcosm that does not seem to recognize and value high art. Instead, we see an irruption of commercial cinema dominated by the big distributors with whom producers must reckon. The modern conflicts of film makers over the “final cut” and against the pretensions of producers to ultimate rights over a work may be somewhat similar to the struggles of the painters of the Renaissance with their patrons.

Actors and Stars: An Excursus

In theaters we are in the physical presence of actors; in a movie house, we are not. This fact of physical absence of the screen actor would seem to be very crucial concerning the differences between our responses to a play or a film. Panofsky offers some interesting observations:

Othello or Nora are definite, substantial figures created by the playwright. They can be played well or badly, and they can be “interpreted” in one way or another; but they most definitely exist, no matter who plays them or even whether they are played at all. The character in a film, however, lives and dies with the actor. It is not the entity “Othello” interpreted by Paul Robeson, or the entity “Nora” interpreted by the Duse, it is the entity “Greta Garbo” incarnate in a figure called Anna Christie or the entity “Robert Montgomery” incarnate in a murderer who, for all we know, or care to know, may forever remain anonymous but will never cease to haunt our memories (1959, p. 31).

If characters live and die with actors then should actors live and die with characters? To clarify further, for the stage, an actor works himself into a role; for the screen, the performer takes the role onto himself. Or, the stage actor explores his potentialities and the possibilities of his role simultaneously; in performance these meet at a point in nonmaterial space, or psychological space—where in short, the better the performance, the deeper, more lucid the point. In this respect, a role in a stage play is like a position in a game—middle line backer in a football game; various people can play it, but the great middle line backer is a person who has accepted and trained his skills and instincts most perfectly and matches them most intimately with his discoveries of the possibilities and necessities of the defensive middle line play position in football. The screen performers like Sean Connery as James Bond or Daniel Craig, or Matt Damon as Jason Bourne—explore their roles like an excursion in an attic and take stock of their physical and temperamental endowment; they lend their being to the role and accept only what fits. In an important sense, the screen actor is essentially not an actor at all: he or she is the subject of study and a study not his or her own (Cavell 1979).

An exemplary screen performance is one in which a star is born. After The Godfather a star arose, only distantly a person. “Marlon Brando” meant the figure created in a given set of films (On the Waterfront, A Street Car Named Desire, The Wild One, Sayonara). His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photo of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Brando would not exist, the name “Brando” would not mean what it does. The figure it names is not only in our presence, we are in his, in the only sense we could ever be. That is all the “presence” he has.

But it is complicated. A full development of all this is beyond the scope of this essay and would require us to place such facts as these: Marlon Brando was a man, and he appeared in movies both before and after the ones that created, “Brando.” Some of these films were not signature performances in that they did not create Brando’s stardom as a premier film artist; some may be actually incompatible with “Brando.” A case in point: (Candy 1968; The Island of Dr, Moreau 1996), where Val Kilmer, Brando’s Co-star, observed sardonically in an interview that Brando played the island!

To complicate matters further, exemplary stage performances occur all the time where actors create, and become identified with the character. Paul Scofield’s performance in King Lear is one in which we know who King Lear is, we have seen him in the flesh. The same may be said about Lawrence Olivier’s Richard III. In film, Orson Welles is Citizen Kane; Humphrey Bogart is Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon; and Rick in Casablanca; Sylvester Stallone is Rocky; Bette Davis is Eve in All About Eve; as Greer Garson is Mrs. Minniver. All were or are accomplished actors and vivid subjects for a camera.

Hollywood as America’s State Theater: Pathways of the Stars

Part of the difficulty for actors in action thrillers is aging. In Ride the High Country the pathos of the aging cowboy (Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea) depends upon their being enacted by aging men whom we can remember as young cowboys. With the “new” James Bond actors, there is a tacit recognition that Connery is, or has, “aged out” of the role. Plots no doubt change or are calibrated toward the athleticism of the new star. Still several re-incarnations of Bond after Connery have not succeeded in supplanting the original 007.

Satirical treatments of age (Dirty Old Men) featuring Jack Lemon, Sophia Loren, and Walter Matthew as old geezers attempting to revive some semblance of romance in their lives was not very successful. Rather than making movies with a Bond threatened by age why not turn to younger men? Connery himself realized his physical limitations and exploited this in films where he valorizes his age and equates it with his substantial experiences allowing him to work with younger co-stars. Humphrey Bogart did something similar where instead of facing the loss of his image as a tough guy, he made Beat the Devil where he moved past The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The nostalgia his performance released in The African Queen worked artistically. In both works, the pretense is that nothing of value has passed since his bravura performances in Casablanca, and The Maltese Falcon. Bogart’s parody of earlier roles, and his irony saved the day and his reputation as an actor.

Can one imagine a James Bond or Jason Bourne not in color? Could they succeed? One cannot imagine The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—a black and white cold war spy drama succeeding in Technicolor, but Our Man in Havana, a comedy spy film could because of the plot, actors, script, and setting. Neither Bond, Bourne, nor Ethan Hawke films are simply drama/comedy or even mystery films; they are action films—a category of moviemaking that managed to succeed in black and white.

Apocalyptic Change and Cinema

Why do superheroes like Bond, Bourne, and Ethan Hawke arise in the creative psyche and infuse themselves into the popular culture’s artistic productions? Are Bond and company, characters peculiar to the West? Or, are they more generally, symptomatic of the imagery that suffuses a sophisticated technological culture struggling through stages of change?

Apocalyptic movements have been the motors and driving forces of religious, political, and economic change throughout history (Mannheim 1938; Kelly 1972). Perhaps the great cinematic epics of the past with oblique political overtones such as The Seven Samurai (1959), Captain Blood (1939), Robin Hood (1938), Potemkin are indicative of such trends. Before cinematic technology acquired the technological refinements it now possesses, comic books (action books that featured Batman, Superman, Capt. Marvel, Plastic Man, etc.) which were adventures against criminals and evil doers in a context of astounding action fraught with danger at virtually every turn. Across a broader historical canvas, the record suggests that Christian origins are inseparable from the spirit or apocalyptic that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity. Muhammad’s early mission cannot be explained without reference to the apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities, and the terror of the Day of Judgment apparent in the early suras (chapters) of the Koran (Amanat 2008). Movies found these texts and transformed them into brilliant scripts. For example, a variation on this theme of the “deliverer,” the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam, revered by Shiite Muslims, was evident in the Iranian Revolution when the Ayatollah Khomeini who mobilized disparate Iranians and demonized perceived enemies in a world where the people of God—the saved remnant of humanity—see themselves as the sole bearers of divine wisdom and knowledge. The utopian project of realizing paradise may be as devastating as the earthquakes, plagues, and wars of apocalyptic imaginings.

Khomeini appropriated the role of the Mahdi to himself—though shrewdly not claiming openly divine inspiration and infallibility. He shook the traditions of shi’ ism to its foundations by taking power so spectacularly (Takeyh 2009).

In Bond films 007 confronts a lunatic mastermind prepared to destroy or subdue the world through catastrophic violence and fierce intimidation. These themes of violent ends, apocalypse, lay at the heart of some of the most important European literature in the pre-World War II period—a time incidentally when Ian Fleming (the author of James Bond Stories) and John Le Carre (the author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) were beginning careers in government agencies involved in intelligence and espionage.

In Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities (1942), a literary masterpiece about the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in the World War I era, Ulrich, the hero of the novel becomes disillusioned and ambivalent as the Austro-Hungarian system begins to unravel. Ulrich, like Bond and Bourne depends on the external, ephemeral world to form his character. He exhibits keen analytical capacities but is also given to passive aggressiveness. His protagonists are the feckless bureaucrats, army officers, nobles, groveling, bourgeois entrepreneurs, and Moss burger (aka “Jaws” in the Fleming/Broccoli reincarnations on the screen.) Curiously, it seems only in the latest film, where Bond, pitted against a phantom organization, barely uncovers some of its operations. In contrast with the realism of Tinker, Tailor…. and The Spy Who Came in…, the Bond/Bourne thrillers require apocalyptic scenarios that set the scenes for the relentless actions. And the modern media is lavishly equipped to meet this need. Yet even those who enjoy films with breathtaking endings cannot discern the realities of the international political/criminal nexus because these are masked by extraordinary deviant personalities who blur the message. No doubt some countries, because of their inner disorder, the rigidity and failure of their political institutions and leaders, are on the verge of destructive apocalyptic change. The Bond films with their plots of government hypocrisy that lead to crises imply that the intellectual highways for social and economic growth, peace, and prosperity, are perilously clogged with psychopathological hustlers engaged in realpolitik. The films do not examine the societal conditions that contribute to crisis making as a chronic social-political-economic state of affairs. One wonders if that sort of political examination could hold an audience’s attention.

The Enemy Defines the Hero

The new Bond film, Quantum of Solace has all the usual entertainment items of a spy thriller: a sinister criminal organization, power hungry psychopaths, beautiful, distraught woman, high-tech gadgets, and a dauntless, unflappable hero, 007, who rarely loses his nerve—although he uncharacteristically exhibits fury over threats against M—his nanny/boss played by the English actress Judi Dench with persuasive maternal sang-froid.

The enemies in the Bond films are usually some eccentric Euro trash (with occasional Asian or South American variants). Typically, they seek world domination through a vast conspiracy of some fantastic criminal organization whose power challenges nations and ethnic groups. The enemies are deeply delusional but often intellectually apt which makes them even more dangerous. In both the Bond and Bourne films there are images that reinforce the sociological packaging and cultural identity of the star. For instance, as for automobiles, Quantum opens with a thrilling auto chase using two top-end cars: a fast, smart Alfa Romeo, and the elegant English automobile the Aston Martin. Bond’s fabulous scenes of action are chic and glamorous. On the other hand, Bourne resembles Bond only in terms of his indefatigable hardness; his wardrobe, however, is comparatively shabby, and his hangouts are tawdry, low rent, and lacking in taste.

Bourne’s conscience troubles him. In a dark night of the soul moment, he is deeply troubled by the fact that he did not know most of those whom he killed. However, in the Bourne saga, the villains are often colleagues in his secret security apparatus. The government is the enemy; for Bond, on the other hand, the baddies are not the Queen or M. who are often tactless and nuisances; Bond confronts rather ruthless crime wizards, like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale who weeps blood in moments of stress. These characters are clear and present danger. Bourne asks plaintively, “Who am I?” Bond on the other hand introduces himself with his famous insouciant assertion, “Bond, James Bond.”

Who are the Enemies? Sexual Innuendo and Misogyny

The typical enemies of Bond and Bourne are criminal elites with sophisticated resources and numerous sinister connections with corrupt government officials and business groups. All are strong men who pose a range of threats including economic catastrophes, destabilized political conditions, and massive violence or death, if their demands are not met. The action heroes seek to protect their nation states and their interests. That is the essence of the culture of modern heroism—a commitment to Rome, as it were. Enemy—making for the cinema is a very tricky business, as dangerous, one might suppose, as the olive oil business for early twentieth century Italian immigrants. Today, the situation is expressed in the brittle politics of the Middle East, which exemplify a vengeful emnification.

In connection with our theme, the hotbed of conflict has been touched peripherally with Bond running around the pyramids accompanied by a beautiful KGB agent and the huge bad guy, “Jaws” trundling along in grim pursuit. This film had a slightly comical turn in which the Egyptians and their Arab associates look utterly foolish while the Israelis, whose presence is low-keyed and shadowy, seem more rational, more competent.

A reviewer might surmise that the battle spaces of the future would appear to be third world cities, and as the urbanization of the world proceeds at a brisk pace, so will the urbanization of insurgencies. One further speculation: the Pentagon, the “Circus” (Piccadilly—the home of MI5 and MI6), and Moscow Center may emerge as the headquarters of global warlords. And despite all the sexual innuendo: Pussy Galore; Dr. Goodhead, Dr. No, Blofeld and Drax, Bond and Bourne are more like devices than persons: they are the wheels, gears, muscle, machine, and weapons with limits and weaknesses, strengths and skills in the exciting struggle against crime and evil.

In many scenes Bond’s new female boss M, scolds him for his self-destructive, bravado which she rightly claims endangers missions. Bond is expected to utilize the abundant resources of the British secret services. M demands that Bond put a stop at once to his suicidal behavior and get on with his job. He always appears cool, rarely angry, always in his English way, only slightly beguiled by overwrought, seething villains. Of course the audience grins and titters, how can it not? Western heroes could afford to be romantic iconoclasts from time to time because they are unfettered by the problems of the non-western worlds. Bond and his colleagues re-affirm the values of the West. They are like the characters that inhabited the Counter-Reformation: like the Jesuit missionaries in so far as they are individualistic, educated, literate, disciplined, and committed to the political ideological ideals of their employers. Their heroics mixed with technology, violence, and non-stop action explains their huge global appeal. The non-West, the Third World has become the new western frontier for the heroes and gunfighters whose weapons are cell phones, planes, and high tech.

What do audiences see and feel in their heroes and in the film plots that make them so appealing? Are Bond, Bourne, and Ethan interchangeable? Perhaps their adversaries and enemies are alike, hence they too must adapt to the requirements of their struggles with opponents. To the extent that villains are alike, so are the hero protagonists struggling against them.

Has there been a radical transformation of the spy and espionage images in the action-filled Bond/Bourne/Ethan Hawke triumvirate? The modern spy film pretends to be apolitical but it reflects establishment political values. The logic stems from the cinematic technology that subsumes and subordinates politics and even love that is, parodied in Bond films and treated enigmatically in Bourne films.

All films share a dominant theme: the world is a place filled with all sorts of social upheavals and economic dislocations where evil people do terrible things and ridicule and denigrate the sober, serious truths that imbue western culture with its humanism, and other cherished values. Bond, patriot, and subject of the Queen, echoes this antique sense of duty to the crown without much reflection about what his duty serves. And though his boss M thinks he is a bad boy, she still supports his ludicrous deportments. Bourne faces another problem: he has had his memory erased and desperately searches to discover his true identity. Unlike Bond, Jason Bourne does not make random friendships because such actions tend to put his own life or that of his friends at risk in the world he inhabits of double crosses and treachery.

Matt Damon who plays the role of Jason Bourne, stated that he sees the character of James Bond as that of an establishment guy, or imperialist, to put it more strongly, and a misogynist; above all. Bond is the fading empire’s vigilante man—Dirty Harry with style and panache.

Apparently, the producers of the James Bond series of films brilliantly realized decades ago that the films would be popular if they are related to current Cold War events. Bond was cast as an upper-crust Brit working in MI5 against the Soviets and other enemies of the British Empire. He also became a key opponent of certain huge and powerful political-criminal syndicates such as SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) that appears as his principal adversary.

SPECTRE played upon the rivalries festering among Russia, China, the USA, and their multiple sate little states. It had no allegiances to any state or political ideology that, incidentally, is also true of organized crime in general. SPECTRE was the great crime machine against which Bond pitted his skills; the criminal organization dabbled in everything from stealing thermo-nuclear weapons to explicit extortion directed against large nation-states.

Naturally, some of the characterizations of the enemy are fantastical and brazenly play to historical stereotypes. Blofeld, the head of Specter is a wildly eccentric German who makes threats with a cat in his lap. Women appear in Bond films as sexual props; “Pussy Galore” is a luscious operative of Gold finger another dangerous German-type businessman who plots the robbery of Fort. Knox—America’s depository for its gold bullion resources. In Thunderball, Bond deftly positions his dance partner to take a bullet meant for him and wryly comments when he sets her down that she’s just dead on her feet—too tired to dance. Not surprisingly, its self-parody produced spoofs such as Austin Powers—a goofy take-off on Bond genre films.

It was in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War era, that the hero Jason Bourne appeared in the adventure fiction of Robert Ludlum. Ludlum who died in 2001, envisioned his fiction encompassing themes involving global corporations, crime syndicates, and rogue politicians conspiring to conserve a status quo of world economic, political, and military domination.

Interestingly, The Bourne Identity (2002) produced a year after 9/11 when the USA was in the psychological grip of heightened patriotism, where intelligence agencies were given broad authority to do what was necessary to combat terrorism. The film was not a pure propaganda piece for the “war on terror” but was premised on the idea that the CIA could inadvertently become an enemy of its own country. In the bloody arithmetic of the terror war, this theme was somewhat unusual, except that production may have been underway before 9/11.

Quantum of Solace: Bond Gets Bourne-Like

In a recent film, Quantum of Solace, Bond is played by the actor Daniel Craig—who starred in the 2006 hit Casino Royale as an ice-cold assassin, determined to settle scores. From a cinematographic perspective, the film has some similarity with the Bourne films. Gone are all the schmaltz gadgets and sleek machines; in its place are Bourne type, hand-to-hand combat and foot races, and other forms of violent physical activity.

The screenplay of Quantum of Solace includes topical concerns about global warming, the battle over oil, and the decline of dollars. The plot involves another secretive organization, Quantum, linked to a character, Dominic Greene, who leads a clandestine philanthropic enterprise known as Green planet that is a cover for more nefarious agendas. Though he pretends to be concerned with the devastation of rain forests, and rapidly melting glaciers, Greene seeks power and money, which means destabilizing the government of Bolivia, a nation that is pivotal in sustaining ecological equilibrium. Greene must install his General Medrano, a petty greedy thug, as the country’s new dictator, in order to control the uncertain fate of Bolivia and, alas, mankind.

As the plot unfolds Bond and M barely survive a surprise attack by Quantum agents in Spain. Bond gets to Haiti where he meets Greene’s lover whose on a mission of vengeance and seeks to use Greene to gain access to Medranoin order to kill him. The subsequent action scenes are non-stop.

War Mart: Action Heroes for Grown-Ups

Well-crafted action hero stories can give a lift to a film franchise and turn it into a billion dollar industry. As with Bourne and Ethan Hawke, Bond is a silhouette against a flow of vast historical forces that shape the dramas and give substance and plausibility to the characters. It may be a struggle against the criminal tides of drug traffickers, or military warlords and political kingpins, against brilliant lunatic rich eccentrics bent on conquering the entire world. And carefully wrought action films create box office success.

Bonding and Bondage: The Captive Audience and Long Distance Spying

The progenitor of the enormous Bond Success was not the classic, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) rendered beautifully into film by Martin Ritt, Richard Burton, and Oscar Werner. However, enthralling, The Spy was not a Bond-type thriller; rather it was a grim study of espionage in the realism style of 1960s British cinema. In it we see the duplicities, hypocrisy, and traitorous relations of spies and secret police across, under, and around the Iron Curtain. The film was hailed not only because of its superb script and distinguished actors but also because of its fine monologues and dialogues and sophisticated political introspections about the futility of the Cold War. There were none of the hair-raising action scenes one finds in Bond/Bourne movies and kindred films. The hero dies of despair through a suicidal act of loyalty to an incidental love interest caught up in the swirl of events. This is a minor dramatic sequence; the real energy emerges in the western spy’s trial. In a riveting court room scene a clever double-cross occurs amid the fascinating debates about the ethical issues of the East/West political struggle. In Le Carre’s films (Tinker, Tailor…, The Spy…; The Drummer Girl), we also find characters caught up in morally and ethically ambiguous circumstances; whereas in the Fleming and Ludlum plots, the bad guys are standard psychotics and/or wonderfully wicked cads and scoundrels.

The spies represent an old but newly invigorated type of adversarial conflict fought in street clothes by a few individuals. And with the infusion of some hilarity, lone rangers such as Bond and Bourne, equipped with high-tech military gadgetry may frustrate and decisively check the willful and outrageous behavior of enemies decisively.

Aggressiveness of this sort can be immensely entertaining—and in a sense, edifying by setting up a “good guys-bad guys” political/military scenario that leads audiences to ignore the corruption, crackpot authoritarianism, and the unpopularity of warfare. It presents another kind of “shock and awe” struggle that is visually startling, very violent, and easily psychologically gratifying.

When Bourne is compared to Bond he seems like a rumpled, sometimes glowering figure because he lacks Bond’s gift for the easy, unrehearsed wisecracks or trenchant remark. On the other hand, those very qualities some deem as weaknesses—a lack of glitz and sparkle—these qualities seem like strengths in Jason Bourne. Another aspect of each is that Bond seems blessed with improbable luck, while Bourne appears doomed to a life of struggle and bad luck.

Bond was his typical heroic self in Casino Royale making clear that the 007 franchises have a will to live, with Bond reinventing himself as part Superman and part Batman. With Bourne, there is an apparent lack of aspiration for heroic grandeur. He elicits comparison through his American innocence combined with a fierce, cunning composite of personal traits that suggests with a nineteenth century frontier U.S. marshal.

Bond always needs a technician—usually an amusing fussy scientist type supplying 007 up with incredible gadgets. Bourne, meanwhile, is low-tech but self sufficient, fast thinking, and able to hobble together weapons and tactics that he needs for survival and the success of his mission. In effect, he is an ingrained American pragmatist able to improvise at a moment’s notice.

The Flat World of Globalization

With new character actors and new films the question is, does the Bond approach to the world still work? What are the operative paradigms shaping the Bond and Bourne cinematic stories and adventures?

In Casino Royale or Tomorrow Never Dies there are not explicit, Cold War foes. In the integrated world of globalization, the distinctive identities and borders of governments, criminal organizations, and nations are blurred and appear to be disintegrating. Adversaries are not clearly identified and the enemy becomes problematic; friends and allies often seem interchangeable. Indeed, the cast of enemies and friends is often in doubt until the bitter end.

At one level, the anxieties about jobs and economic survival now infect the affluent west. At another, the threats to our life-styles are challenged by ominous nuclear and terrorist threats. Our own communities offer haphazard sometimes unreliable facts about the daily scheme of things. All of this amounts to a potpourri of alienation and inner fear that affects many of us. Bourne plays out some of this psychological turmoil in interesting ways. He is bedeviled by lies and betrayals from those he most trusted and to whom he has sworn loyalty. These scenarios are departures from the conventional exotic bad guys whom Bond chases around the world. In general, Bourne’s adversaries are more familiar; they are also less cartoonish and perhaps less entertaining.

The sly smile on the face of the pert, beautiful secret security agent on hearing that Jason Bourne’s body had not been recovered from his ten story dive into the murky waters of New York’s East River suggests the Bourne Ultimatum was not to be a rousing finale of the action spy thrillers. A Bourne “resurrection” is as likely as are more James Bond films. Audiences want more of the silent, taciturn Matt Damon character as much as the sleek, James Bond/Daniel Craig whose life-style is a mix of danger and glamor. The two heroes could not be more different or increasingly more alike.

Spy Land and Gang Land: Film Authenticity and Censorship

To make the Godfather into a successful film, it had to be real, so realistic that the audience would smell the spaghetti. Italian-Americans were recruited to produce, direct, and star in the epic film. Ian Fleming’s and Robert Ludlum’s fictional inventions were successful in print—as was Mario Puzo’s novel. In order to provide some modicum of realism, Fleming (himself a former British MI5/6 officer) needed others to insure that his films possessed the subtle ruthlessness characteristic of the British secret services and at the same time some of the exciting ingredients of fancy cars, fancy and charming women, and compelling settings to attract audiences.

Thus began the contradictions in the search for authenticity. The head of Paramount movie studios hired as Albert “Al” Ruddy, a tall, tough, gravel voice, non-Italian to keep the project on track in New York.Footnote 1 Albert Broccoli put together the myriad components to make the Bond films. Broccoli was not a cinematic auteur, but a hardworking Hollywood moviemaker who saw great potential in the Bond stories.

In the case of The Godfather it had to be set in the 1940s consistent with the novel’s narrative while in the Bond stories, adjusting story lines in the films to current events seemed quite plausible in view of the political crises occurring almost daily.

In contrast to the American tradition of gangster films, The Godfather was a “talky” crime opera interspersed with short violent episodes of sheer depravity. Likewise, the Bond films broke with the successful traditions of spy thrillers that were largely talk-filled slow-moving stories, by injecting a good deal of high-velocity violence, car chases, and thrilling scenes of daring and high-risks.

Concerning the veracity of the scripts and reliability of the story lines, Puzo claimed that he did very little research and that he knew no Mafiosi personally. Fleming was himself a spy. But what movie fan could tell who of the two had more genuine, reliable information upon which to mold plots and characters?

The Mafia Makes an Offer…

When word spread that The Godfather was being developed into a blockbuster picture, one mafia boss rose up in defiance. While most mobsters shunned the spotlight, Joseph Colombo, the media-savvy head of one of the New York crime families, brazenly stepped up ready for prime time TV. Colombo was angry (or so it seemed) at the FBI’s interest in his activities—which included loan-sharking, jewel heists, income-tax invasion, and control of a $10 million a year interstate gambling operation that was a formidable sum of money in the 1970s. He turned the tables on the bureau, charging it with harassment not only of him and his family but also of all Italian-Americans. In an outrageously bold move, he helped create the Italian-American Civil Rights League, claiming that the FBI’s pursuit of the mob was in fact persecution and a violation of civil rights. Therefore, a major goal, a top priority of the League, was to eradicate the word “mafia” from the English language. Colombo contended that it had been turned into a one-word smear campaign. “Mafia? What is mafia?” he asked a reporter in 1970. “There is not a mafia. Am I the head of a family? Yes. My wife, and four sons and a daughter. That’s my family.”

What began with the picketing of FBI offices in March, 1970 soon grew into a crusade with a membership of 45,000 and $1 million war chest. An estimated quarter of a million people showed up at the inaugural rally of the league in New York City in order to put the feds and everyone else on notice. “Those who go against the league will feel [God’s] sting,” said a defiant Colombo.

The film The Godfather quickly became the league’s no.1 enemy. “A book like The Godfather leaves one with a sickening feeling,” reads a form letter the League addressed to Paramount and many elected government officials. A rally in Madison Square Garden in Manhattan raised $500,000 to stop production. It seemed that the mafia did not want the film made. In California, the Los Angeles Police Department warned Al Ruddy one of the major producers that he was being tailed by unknown persons.

Along with Joe Colombo and the mob, the producers of The Godfather had to contend with none other than Frank Sinatra. Sinatra despised The Godfather as a book and as a movie, and for good reason: Johnny Fontane, the drunken, whoring, mob-owned singer turned movie star enters Puzo’s novel drunk and fantasizing about murdering his “trampy wife when she got home.” This caricature was widely believed to have been based on Sinatra. In his desire to rise from singer to actor, Fontane also seemed to resemble Al Martino who had actually performed in mob night clubs and in Las Vegas. Phyllis McGuire, of the famous singing trio, the McGuire Sisters, who was the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, top Chicago gangster, thought that the Puzo character, Johnny Fontane, was modeled after Al Martino.

While Mario Puzo’s acquaintance with his subject matter was indirect, Ian Fleming himself may have been the model for James Bond. During World War II, he reached the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy (the uniform of which 007 disports himself from time to time.) It is very likely that Fleming’s activities in various clandestine operations helped to shape the plots and story lines of several of his novels and screenplays. Fleming most likely appropriated the details of events not well known by the public and fictionalized them in order to create entertaining, dramatic stories for novels and screen plays. However, the stories may have also served other more recondite purposes to facilitate and enhance political propaganda purposes. They may be utilized to describe the threats that enemies pose as well as depict the technological resources they are alleged to posses that makes their threats, real or potential, credible. Many Bond films in a uncanny way allude to real national threats from hostile state and non-state adversaries-real or imagined.

In the case of Robert Ludlum’s popular character spy, Jason Bourne, he reflects a paranoid view of the world in which global corporations, military cabals, and governmental organizations threaten to undermine the status quo. Jason Bourne is a hero enmeshed in a web of intrigues, where friends and enemies are often indistinguishable. The plots in Bourne films show the hero caught up in struggles initiated by right wing groups or surrounded by enemies outside his agency but also within it. This is a situation that Bond rarely confronts. What is note worthy about Jason Bourne is that he suffers from an agency induced amnesia where the memory of his former life has been erased.

Matt Damon, the star of the Bourne series of films, also had the principal role in the film The Good Shepherd which is loosely based on real events concerning the origins and early years of the CIA. Robert DeNiro who directed the film said in an interview that he disliked the flashy violence of the Bond type films. In his film, the violence and high powered action were muted as in the tradition of the Le Carre projects. Spying is a gentlemen’s game, apparently.

The Godfather Provenance

Mario Puzo said that he found a model for his godfather protagonist in the transcripts and videotapes of the nationally televised Kefauver Hearings in the early 1950s which paraded on live TV more than 600 gangsters, pimps, bookies, politicians, and shady lawyers before an incredulous, stunned American public. A major star of the televised Hearings that Senator Kefauver and his political cronies confronted on national television in the early 1950s, was the New York gangster Frank Costello, known as the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.” Costello (Francesco Castiglia) was a Mafioso and head of the Mangano Crime Family. His career involved gambling and political corruption. During the 1940s, Costello pulled the political strings in Tammany Hall, the democratic party headquarters of New York City. On wiretaps, court judges and political officials could be heard obsequiously thanking Costello for the assistance he furnished in making their careers advance. With his rough and raspy voice, his silky public persona, and personal elegance, Costello was the clay from which Puzo began to create his main character Don Vito Coreleone.

Puzo, Coppola, Brando, and others associated with the production of the film claimed that they saw The Godfather not so much as a crime drama—perhaps the greatest in American cinema—but as a “family movie,” a film that reveals the social and psychological journey of struggling immigrants facing prejudice because of their ethnic background, but who manage nonetheless, to deal with societal rejection and discrimination and manage by extraordinary means to achieve the American Dream.

But, the Coreleone family is scarcely believable as a typical American family struggling heroically in the way that families in I Remember Mama, To Kill a Mockingbird, Meet Me in St. Louis, and How Green was my Valley managed to cohere and love each other in terms of “family values” despite all the inequities they experienced. All these Hollywood productions were set in the elegiac past and focused on the stability of the family as a source of unwavering strength. The Godfather, on the other hand, focused on another, more ugly dimension of the struggle for social acceptance and social mobility. Its reception was indicative of its verisimilitude with reality.

The Godfather’s director and crew did their sociological homework insofar as their film depicted a criminal enterprise interspersed with scenes of everyday life—hardly bucolic though they were. The production offices were dominated by bulletin boards with 8 × 10 photos of gangsters, gangland slayings, and mobster funerals in the 1940s and 1950s along with endearing scenes of baptisms, marriages, graduations, marriages, and other scenes of ordinary life that might stimulate and encourage staff creativity.

The Mean Streets: Shock and Awe

In the meantime, Joe Colombo’s Italian–American Civil Rights League was strong-arming merchants and residents of Little Italy to buy League decals and put them in their shop windows in order to show their support of the League, as well as their condemnation of The Godfather. The League threatened to shut down the Teamsters union locals which included truck drivers and film crew members who were involved in making the film. On two occasions the Gulf and Western Corporation building in Manhattan was evacuated because of mob bomb threats. It is alleged that the Colombo family personally threatened the producers to stop production.

At a meeting between the film producers and Joe Colombo, the mafia don wanted the word “Mafia” deleted from the script. Not a problem it turns out, since the word appeared only once in the shooting script, but Colombo had other fish to fry. He wanted the proceeds from the world premier of the film to be donated to his Italian American Civil Rights League as a goodwill gesture. The producers agreed. It turned out that the payoff never happened—or, no one will admit that a shakedown occurred.

Greg Scarpa, Sr., a mafia solider, was a potent and charismatic fixture at League events. A natural at politics, he would incite and inflame the meetings: climbing onto a flatbed truck; or grabbing a microphone and delivering an rousing speech attacking the federal government and the FBI, alleging that it harassed Italian-Americans as mafia thugs. It turns out that Scarpa was a major informant for the FBI on mafia activities.

The cinematic treatment of the Cold War glorifies politics and warfare. Moviegoers can abandon their petty concerns of daily life and fantasize—seeing themselves as players in momentous dramas. As with organized crime, wartime in the Cold War sense becomes theater. The world, as seen through the adventures of action heroes, becomes high drama.

The Cultural Nostalgia of Nationhood

The action hero films that occupy such a prominent place in the national cultural ethos promote and glorify the nation. Typically enemies in Bond/Bourne films are depraved and demonic. As depicted in action hero films, the social world is starkly divided into the forces of light and darkness. An interesting aspect of this kind of political genre is that both the good guys and the bad guy look at themselves as victims. This psychology of victimhood is common across a wide range of conflicts. It is studiously crafted in these types of films that are often considered as a sort of “entertainment.” The message is that the superheroes are good and just, and though their actions may seem extreme, they can be justified in terms of the stakes at risk.

In both Bond and Bourne films, victimhood or victimization is disguised but prevalent as an underlying theme in the portrayal of the enemies and antagonists. The bad guys are typically seeking to loot and plunder not only their own homeland but also those represented by Bond and Bourne—the good guys.

Peddling the Myths of Heroism

Even in the twenty-first century, it seems that we persist in clinging to the outdated notion of the single hero able to carry out daring feats of courage in the face of an overwhelming enemy. Such heroism, which audiences worldwide obviously enjoy, is about as relevant as mounting a bayonet charge against tanks and machine guns. But the myth of heroism is essentially political and legitimated by mass entertainment productions. As such they seem to be a powerful psychological affirmation of the culture of political power.

While it seems unlikely, whether or not the Bond/Bourne films and others like them are deliberately produced to promote specific political t values and perspectives, the fact is that the Bond/Bourne films are part of a larger package of entertainment industry vehicles like Rambo that distract audience attention from the realities of actual combat and warfare that culminates in appalling consequences and costs. Yet the syndrome of violence they depict is seductive. It can easily become addictive and at the least offers fascination and thrills. The same analyses may have relevance to the scenarios of action/heroes operating in visually luxurious settings where heroes like Batman, Shaft, and others are caught up in the violence of huge cities and squalid ghettos. In the Monte Carlo casinos or in the streets of Harlem similar moral dramas are acted out: good cops versus bad criminals and good secret agents versus international criminal political actors.

In The Service of Eros: Dangerous Sexual Liaisons

Bond and Bourne—especially Bond—are pre-occupied with sexual relationships. In each film, there is a kind of breathless sexual abandon and the suggestion of wanton carnal relationships. In Bourne’s case, he has lovers but they do not pre-occupy him. But like Bond he uses women to advance his other objectives. Is it about love? Indeed, love itself is dangerous politico-military environments is hard to sustain or establish. The erotic in war is like the rush of battle. It simply overwhelms. While these relationships may appear intense, however, they are also hollow. Bond and Bourne films are captivating in many ways because they convey an existential sense that nothing really matters except the elimination of the immediate threat. Their audiences are not beleaguered by larger issues concerning the justification of conflicts, yet the heroes are presented as “good guys”.

Nihilistic Relativism

The Bourne movies have yet to treat the Bosnian conflicts in the Kosovo/Serbia, but the Bond series of films approached them obliquely in connection with the great power struggle over access to oil resources (Ferguson 1998; Hedges 2009).

A disturbing consequence of these events are the relations of duplicity on the part of the “good guys”—if that dubious appellation can still be applied without embarrassment—that under the duress of war lying, prevarication, and the distortion of honest inquiry suffers irreparable harm (Gray 1998). The Serbs, to use another example, who eventually admitted that atrocities were carried out explained them away by claiming that everyone did such things in that war. The defense attorneys at Nuremberg for criminals like Goering, and Keitel as well as others claimed that the allied bombing campaigns over German cities were mass atrocities so that Nazi actions against Jews, Russians, etc., constituted a form of retaliation that sought to discourage the continuation of the allied assaults on innocent German civilians in the urban areas. Hannah Arendt pointed to this widespread attitude in Germany at the end of World War II. She labeled it “nihilistic relativism.” She believed that it stemmed from Nazi ideological propaganda which asserted the view that all facts could and would be altered and all Nazi lies should be made to appear true. Reality in this epistemological fantasy became a conglomerate of changing circumstances and slogans that could be true one day and false the next (Arendt 1966).

The point these considerations is that illusions punctuate our lives, just as movies do. Even the great anti-war film, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the novel by Maria Remarque (1958) was interpreted as a frank admission of what really happened, could happen, and has repeatedly happened but was written and the film made according to some critics, as a propaganda weapon to absolve German brutality and nationalist chauvinism. However, as the film made clear, German suffering was starkly painful and challenged the idea that only allies suffered grievously. It implied that one rationale or cause for fighting was as rotten or depraved as the others.

Conclusions

Typically, action spy films involve a hero facing multiple threats. Some act synergistically on the principal character, driving the victim down into an extinction vortex from which he (or she) miraculously emerges intact. However, the trend in such films is toward a uniformity of plot and character qualities which may spell an end to the distinctive structures and features of action hero genre, despite the brilliant technological accomplishments of film makers. The spy films genre is sometimes uplifting jingoistic or depressingly realistic but always entertaining. Bond and Bourne films, as with other successful spy and action movies, must possess a “plausibility factor” built into their plots and stylized presentations. Bond symbolizes the aristocrat as defender of the realm, and Bourne’s puritanical cast of mind and behavior—his countenance—is attuned to the vaunted individualism of American mythical history. Why such films are deeply appealing to broad mass audiences even though they are so predictable and violent illustrates the power of the culture to affect creative energy and its intrinsic appeals.