You Only Live Forever: James Bond and the Evolution of the National Enemy

Warning: Spoilers ahead for all James Bond films

James Bond is dead.

Infected with the most metaphorically and thematically brilliant biological weapon, trapped on an island somewhere off the coast of his traditional foe, Russia, Bond could only watch as the missiles careened towards him. With a wry smile, a deep breath and the final words, ‘You have all the time in the world,’ Bond resigned himself to his fate. No Time to Die came to a close with the rugged and iconic tones of Louis Armstrong’s We Have All the Time in the World washing over the credits.

Daniel Craig’s final outing saw the first and only death of Bond, after 25 films, seven actors and a fifty-eight year, emphatically British, love-affair with the character. From the early outings of Sean Connery’s patriotic icon in the height of the Cold War, through a rather bland blip in George Lazenby’s Australian-tinged incarnation; the suave, polite, if rather cheesy and camp Roger Moore interpretation, to the prototype of a grittier Bond in Timothy Dalton, and a return to the camp, with the almost parodic Pierce Brosnan films, and Daniel Craig’s truly modern, emotional, gritty and human iteration, Bond has faced stereotypical Soviet threats, grandiose crime lords and eccentric businessmen; home-grown internal threats, nuclear weapons, biological warfare, space-travel, terrorism and dictatorships.

What all these antagonists have in common, is that they’re just as much a product of their time as the character of Bond himself. As time marches on, ideologies and world powers shift, rise and fall, as political situations evolve and different threats take their turns as the most prominent, so too did Bond and his enemies. Whatever was a perceived threat to Britain’s security at the time, invariably ended up reflected in the latest instalment of the Bond franchise. This was common from the very beginning.

For Her Majesty’s National Service: The Birth of Bond

The scent and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

The opening words of Casino Royale, Fleming’s debut Bond novel, immediately draw the reader in and walks them, with all the suave nonchalance and incessant detail that was to become Fleming’s literary trademark, through the doors of the casino and into the author’s world. It was a world he knew intimately, personally, passionately; a world Fleming wished to invoke, a world he wanted the reader to become a part of. At the time Fleming first punched the letters of his gold-plated 1947 Royal Quiet Deluxe Portable typewriter, Britain was still reeling from the aftermath of the Second World War. As explained by Dr Christine Berberich, Reader in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, ‘At the end of the Second World War, Britain was faced with continued rationing and austerity. Large cities all across the country had suffered heavily during the Blitz, whole industries lay in ruins, and the process of rebuilding was a slow and laborious one’ (p.15).

It was from this grey, often dreary context that Ian Fleming’s James Bond emerged. Bond was a stark contrast to the rationed food, bombed-out businesses and homes; he was everything a British person wished they could be. While the British people were learning to survive on hand-me-down clothes, struggling to make ends meet, Bond was expensively dressed; as the British public put up with rationing and a limited diet, Bond only ate and drank expensive foods and alcohol; in the midst of a chronic housing shortage, and the inability to travel anywhere abroad, Bond frequented high-flying casinos, travelled to the most exotic locations, spent time with the best-looking people, and stayed in the best hotels. And, on occasion, he would also save the world. Bond can be seen as an answer to the woes of post-war Britain, he was the last stalwart of British power, decadence, authority, wit and style.

As Fleming’s biographer and espionage historian, Ben Macintyre wrote:

‘It is almost impossible to exaggerate the allure of Bond’s lifestyle to a postwar Britain strained by rationing, deprived of glamour and still bruised by the privations of war. Bond is, quite simply, a stylish, fast-shooting, high-living, sexually liberated advertisement for all the things ordinary Britons had never had, yet dreamed of’ (p.141).

And yet, he was also the optimistic herald of a new age. In the midst of 1950s austerity, Britain was celebrating the coronation of a new queen, the conquering of Mount Everest and the breaking of the four-minute mile by Roger Bannister. Bond emerged, not only as the last remnants of a bygone British Empire, but also as a symbol of what could yet still be. As remarked by Alan Judd in his 2012 introduction to Casino Royale, ‘[Bond] heralded the birth of an element of national - and later international - mythology as enduring and almost as credible as the real coronation, Everest or the four-minute mile’ (p.xi).

As the British Empire had practically disintegrated in the wake of the Second World War, James Bond presented Britain with a new figurehead for its national and potentially imperial myth. Explained succinctly by Sam Goodman for The Guardian, ‘Spies such as Fleming’s Bond in particular satisfied the need for reassurance that Britain was still as much of a player on the global stage as it had ever been.’

It seems as well that Fleming, and even Bond himself, were highly aware of this role. As Bond leaps to Britain’s defence against his Japanese contact, Tiger Tanaka, in You Only Live Twice, ‘England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of world wars, our welfare state politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel prizes’ (p.107).

As a figurehead of a resurgent British power, Bond also, naturally, became the hero of Britain’s Cold War.

The Novels are Not Enough: Bond, from Page to Screen

It didn’t take long for the Bond novels to be picked up as fertile ground for film. It was hardly ten years after Casino Royale’s publication that Bond’s first foray into cinema was produced. Dr. No (1962) was an interesting place to start. In this film, Bond faces off against a mad German/Chinese scientist (Dr. No) on his private island, where he intends to disrupt the ‘Project Mercury’ space launch from Cape Canaveral with his atomic-powered radio beam. As a villain, Dr. No is culturally perfect. He is of German descent, giving the audience distinct call-backs to the Nazi enemy Britain had so valiantly defeated years prior. But he is also of Chinese origin, a symbol of the threat of Chinese communist malevolence that was beginning to combat the Soviet Union for the title of western civilisation’s greatest threat. It was also a chance for an ugly imperial stereotype to rear its distinctly racist head again. In the words of Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Fu Manchu is Dr. No, basically’. Fu Manchu was created in 1913 by Sax Rohmer, and later became a symbol of the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the 1930s. He was the personification of the perceived ‘unemotional cruelty of the Chinese’ (The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, 1913), the symbol of the western world’s xenophobic stereotypes that coincided with an increase in Chinese emigration.

With the release of Dr. No, also came the Americanisation of Bond. Not only was he Britain’s Cold War hero, he also became a hero for America. Bond’s films began to be impacted by America’s foes just as much as Britain’s. The order of the books chosen for adaptation illustrates this. Drew Moniot, of the University Film and Video Association, noticed this trend, writing:

‘Can it be purely coincidental that Dr. No (which involved a mad scientist's attempts to divert the course of rockets launched from Cape Canaveral) happened to be selected as the first Bond thriller back in 1962 when [America’s] space program was actually plagued with rocket failures just prior to [America’s] first manned flight? Consider the cold war theme of From Russia with Love released in 1963, a year of fierce Soviet-American competition in the Arms and Space races; or the threat to the gold reserves at Fort Knox in Goldfinger (1964) at a time when De Gaulle had begun to set into motion a scheme to attack the U.S. gold reserves by converting $300 million into gold’ (p.27).

As the Cold War progressed, as different threats rose and fell, they were reflected in the Bond film series. Shifts in politics and public opinion directly affected what the audience would see in the upcoming film: as the emphasis on Russia as the main foe of the western world began to decrease, so did their portrayal in the films. Arguably, the Soviet Union ceased to be a major enemy for James Bond after Goldfinger in 1964. SPECTRE took over the role of the omnipresent, looming, evil power, with agents everywhere and a seeming inability to be defeated.

As the sixties came to a close and the seventies dawned, the political and public concerns, as well as the face of Bond, began to change. Sean Connery was replaced by Roger Moore in 1973, and in his first outing, he was not fighting SPECTRE, Blofeld, the Soviet Union, or any world superpower. Instead, Bond was squaring up to an American crime lord, Mr. Big. Who is also a dictator of a small Caribbean island. And a major proponent of America’s drug problem. And, if that wasn’t enough, he was also using the fear of a Voodoo cult to control the residents of his island, San Monique.

This was an entirely new antagonist for Bond. In the previous four films, he had been fighting Blofeld and SPECTRE. Now, he was pushed into the American ‘War on Drugs’, that had started in 1971. Bond was becoming an American political and cultural play-thing just as much as his literary origins had been in Britain.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union returned as a main antagonist for Bond’s films. This coincided with Ronald Reagan’s launching of a ‘Second Cold War’. As Mikhail Gorbachev himself would later remark, ‘Never, perhaps, in the postwar decades was the situation in the world as explosive and hence, more difficult and unfavourable, as in the first half of the 1980s.’ This was instantly reflected in the Bond films, with Roger Moore’s final four outings facing: the threat of Soviet space travel (Moonraker, 1979), the threat of KGB officers stealing a British ‘Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator’ (For Your Eyes Only, 1981), the further expansion of the Soviet Union into Europe (Octopussy, 1983), and a KGB-backed attack on Silicon Valley in A View to a Kill (1985). It’s clear to see that as the political situation and the perceived ‘national enemy’ evolved and changed in the real world, so too did Bond’s larger-than-life antagonists in the films.

When Pierce Brosnan first graced the screen as Bond in 1995’s GoldenEye, Britain had been in a recession and the Soviet Union had fallen in 1991. GoldenEye serves as a perfect transition piece between the newly ended Cold War and the new modern world. It begins in 1986, as Bond and Agent 006, Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), infiltrate a Soviet chemical weapons facility and destroy it. Nine years later, Trevelyan, having faked his death, returns, now as a criminal mastermind. He intends to steal money from the Bank of England, erase all its records with an electromagnetic pulse, and bring down the British economy. It could not have been a better bridge between the Cold War villainy of the Soviet Union, to the new, and painfully present threat of economic instability. The recession that hit Britain in the early 1990s was its longest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and now Bond was facing it too; just in his classically over-the-top fashion, with cheesy one-liners and plenty of explosions.

This trend continued in the Brosnan films, with the 1990s being a decade of Bond facing off against media moguls (Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies [1997] who reeks of similarities to Rupert Murdoch and his media empire) and oil tycoons and anarchist terrorists (envisioning the threat of Middle Eastern oil crises and embodying the growing fear of the coming millennia in The World is Not Enough [1999]).

You Only Live Forever: Bond Post-9/11 and Beyond

Then the world changed. On September 11th 2001, the World Trade Centre Towers were destroyed in the largest terrorist attack in history. Everything began to shift. Politics in America and Britain had to address this threat, and the consequences of this attack. Even books and films shifted in the wake of 9/11. This was no different in the Bond franchise.

Die Another Die was the first Bond film after 9/11. Such was the cultural impact that 9/11 had, that many fictional characters rushed to account for it, and some, like Superman, had to explain why they could not have stopped it. Marvel had Spider-Man and Cyclops help the emergency services clean up after 9/11 (Amazing Spider-Man Vol 2 #36, 2001) and DC Comics published a collection of comic stories entitled: ‘9-11: The World's Finest Comic Book Writers and Artists Tell Stories to Remember’ (2002), in which Superman looks up at a mural of the emergency services in awe and respect.

James Bond had to deal with this too. The way the screenwriters rationalised Bond’s inaction and his absence from the events of 9/11, was to have him being held captive for over a year before his escape in 2002. He couldn’t have helped prevent 9/11, he was captured by the North Koreans. 9/11 is also alluded to in the film, as M tells Bond that, since he was taken captive, the ‘world has changed’.

This was to be Brosnan’s final Bond outing. It served as a nostalgic, if incongruent with modern trends, retreading of some of Roger Moore’s Bond ideas. It was over-CGI’d, laughable at points, and ends up ranking among the worst Bond films ever made. And yet it was exactly what it needed to be. In the wake of the awful destruction and tragedy of 9/11, movie-goers needed a return to the camp, over-the-top friendliness of a Bond film. While not being a particularly good film, it gave the audience a reprieve from the dark reality of the new millennia and terror-stricken world. It’s one of the few Bond films that doesn’t directly address a national security threat of the time, and it didn’t need to. It would have been insensitive, even dangerous, to have a Bond film in which he fought terrorists and Islamist conspiracies against the west, releasing less than a year after 9/11.

That would be the role of Daniel Craig’s Bond. Debuting in 2006, Craig presented a gritty, emotional, hardline, violent, realistic Bond. Casino Royale, despite being Fleming’s first novel, was to be Bond’s 21st film. It served as a kind of prologue, taking the audience back to when Bond first obtained his ‘licence to kill’, and followed his early days as a double-0 agent. Judi Dench returned as M, in an interesting and inspired move. It gave the Craig saga a kind of gravitas and legacy that it needed, with the outcry of Craig being the first ‘blonde Bond’ beginning to grow.

In the film adaptation of Casino Royale, the first scene is not the suave casino setting discussed earlier, instead, it is a down-to-earth, realistic, gritty hunt for a bomb maker through the dust-swept streets and perilous building sites of Madagascar. From this moment on, the audience realised that Craig’s Bond was to be unlike any Bond they had seen before. While he did carry over some elements of the previous incarnations, as identified by The Times: ‘Sean Connery's athleticism and cocksure swagger with Timothy Dalton's thrilling undercurrent of stone-cold cruelty’, Craig’s Bond was also innovative. For the first time, he was made to contemplate the reality of his job: the psychological effects, the soul-killing nature of being an assassin, the physical ramifications of always escaping from within an inch of his life, and the consequences of his flippant affairs with women and the potential of love.

As a response to the mocking parodies of Austin Powers and Johnny English, the Craig films truly bring Bond into the modern world, doing away with the cheesy double entendres of the previous decades, and bringing in a Bond that might, within reason, actually exist in this world.

It was also a shift in the film-making for Bond. For the first time, the franchise went from episodic to serialised storytelling. There was now a story arc, told over Craig’s five films. Never before had a story continued over numerous films. Bond had always reset between films, appearing ‘back to his best’ after every mission. With Craig, Bond had to deal with the physical pain and injury of his previous endeavours. For the first time, Bond had scars.

His antagonists were also emphatically modern. Gone were the overbearing, looming, world-powers of the Soviet Union or Communist China. Now, the villains were terror financiers (Casino Royale, 2006), environmental terrorists (Quantum of Solace, 2008), cyber-terrorists and the threat of information leakage [screaming of Edward Snowden, Julien Assange and WikiLeaks] (Skyfall, 2012), a global surveillance system and intelligence-sharing initiative secretly controlled by SPECTRE [at a time where the outcry over public surveillance in America and Britain were coming to the fore] (Spectre, 2015) and finally, a biological weapon set to destroy humanity [in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdowns] (No Time to Die, 2021).

James Bond has always been present, his antagonists always reminiscent of whatever threat Britain, or indeed, America, might have been facing at the time. And yet now we return to the opening words.

James Bond is dead.

Where does he go from here? One of the overarching themes of the Craig films (an idea started in the Brosnan films) is Bond’s relevance in the modern world. Do we need the sharp-end of British intelligence anymore? Is he a relic of the imperial age, doomed to always be a symbol of Britishness, always haunted by his outdated and imperialistic past? Does the world still work in a way that necessitates the existence of people like Bond? Can those elements of his character (his uber-masculinity, womanising, misogyny, over-drinking) exist in a world that has become so culturally opposed to them? Does Bond have a future?

If the history of James Bond has taught us anything, it must be that he will always find a way to survive. Whether it is escaping the lasers and sharks of his classical villains, or traversing a world where his methods might not be so useful, Bond always finds a way through. That’s what we love about him. And in the words of Alan Judd again, ‘Of course, we do not believe in James Bond but there’s some part of us that wants to believe in him, just as his creator did. We want to keep alive the possibility of him’ (p.xix).

Let us finish with one of my favourite quotes from a Bond film (which, at the time of writing I have not been able to verify, as No Time to Die is not yet released for home-viewing). Attempting to read a sign written in Russian, Bond quips something to the extent of:

‘What does it say, Q? My Russian is a bit rusty…’ 

Further Reading:

Drew Moniot, ‘James Bond and America in the Sixties: An Investigation of the Formula Film in Popular Culture’, Journal of the University Film Association, (1976).

James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, (Bloomsbury, 2008).

Janet Woollacott & Tony Bennett, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, (Methuen, 1987).

Ben Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, (Bloomsbury, 2009).

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