Consumption license – Weekend – Kommersant
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James Bond films are the epitome of the spy genre, its benchmark. This is a curious case when a deviation, a departure from the very nature of the genre becomes a model. “Bond” does not talk about the Cold War, of which it is a product. On the contrary, he avoids talking about her and that is why he becomes one of the incarnations of the era.
Originating on the eve of World War I, fully formed on the eve of World War II, and truly flourishing during the era of the Cold War, the spy genre was based on the paranoia of a new world – both globalized and divided, porous. On the fact that the enemy can be unrecognizable – to secretly penetrate the fabric of society, and the same unrecognizability, the ability to change masks, is required to fight him. However, the real heyday of the genre happened in the 1960s, when the Cold War never thought of ending, but the ideology of the great confrontation that fed it began to crack – at least in the West.
This crisis gave birth to two lines in the genre, opposite to each other. The basis of the first was a doubt: perhaps espionage and counter-espionage are not at all a struggle between good and evil, but a dirty and often boring game in which opposites interfere, become indistinguishable from each other? The main incarnations of this intuition were films based on novels by John Le Carré: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by Martin Ritt (1965), The Suicide Case by Sidney Lumet (1967), the George Smiley series with Alec Guinness (The Spy Get Out! , 1979; Smiley’s People, 1982), but also John Huston’s ruthless Kremlin Letter (1970) and the more playful Harry Palmer trilogy with Michael Caine (The Ipcress File, 1965; Burial in Berlin, 1966 ; “The Brain at the Cost of a Billion Dollars”, 1967). It would be silly to talk about these – albeit wonderful – films as critical statements or moments of epiphany. They are the same products of popular culture, only growing on a new emotional soil – not paranoia, but melancholy, the anxiety of disappointment, the suspicion that the problem is not only dangerous “them”, but also “us”.
Anxiety goes away if you play it, but there is another answer – a cheerful antidote, an ecstasy that removes all questions. The films about agent 007 were such an answer. The beginning of the Bond film had perfect timing. Dr. No, featuring a millionaire villain preparing to take over American missiles from his base in Hawaii, came out just a couple of weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The threat of world catastrophe played out here as an easy adventure to the ukulele. From that moment on and over the next three decades, the Cold War became the backdrop for the projection of basic fantasies – about a charming and tenderly rude man, a gorgeous and accessible woman, a car, a gun, an always ready wit, a murderous smile. Unlike the canonical spy, Bond never hides, does not impersonate another, always plays with an open visor, introducing himself to every opponent and every woman: Bond, James Bond. The world of Bond is not a world of dangerous and often humiliating shifters, but of reckless bluff.
People who arrogantly criticize mass culture always look stupid themselves, but in all Western cinema there are no works that better correspond to all the clichés of this criticism. “Bond” and woven from cliches: films repeat each other, shuffling the same elements in new combinations from decade to decade. This applies to both the general structure of films (someone influential and powerful is plotting something that will turn the world order upside down, steals rockets, gold, information; Bond gets into his lair, seduces an assistant, almost dies in a pool or aviary with predatory animals, confuses all plans – and so on), as well as individual scenes, positions, gestures. So almost every film evokes a feeling of pleasant deja vu. Slight deviations help to slightly stir up and revive the stagnant canon, but after the experiment there is always a rollback back to the basic formula. The canon takes shape in the Connery era, cemented by films with Roger Moore, under attack by mild seriousness in one film with George Lazenby and two with Timothy Dalton. The Brosnan era after the end of the Cold War shows the disintegration of the formula, the washing out of the remnants of life from it, turning it into a self-parody. In the pictures with Craig, with varying degrees of success, they try to reassemble it, adding drama, but the core remains intact.
The pleasure of Bond is not the pleasure of surprise, but of repetition, the absence of surprises. It gives a sense of the absolute reliability of the world, the impotence of violence. The killed beauty will be replaced by another in two minutes; the shark, opening its mouth at the hero, will close it on the villain; in an already launched deadly machine, something will jam – and everything will be fine. (Bond’s death in the latest No Time to Die is a challenge to this tradition, of course, but not a big one: the end of the film still has the caption “James Bond will return” – the function will be resurrected in a new body.)
The world of Bond is paradoxically conflict-free. It grows out of Cold War fears, but represses them. Therefore (unlike Ian Fleming’s original novels) the Russians are not the enemy here. They are usually sly, sometimes slightly ridiculous rival partners in the game, like the charming General Gogol from the Moore era. If they are female, then the competition-partnership is transferred to bed. The source of evil is always an eccentric figure, a megalomaniac maniac, a mad schemer – not a representative of a different order in the eternal confrontation of the bipolar world, but a figure out of order and therefore doomed to exile and defeat. The political anxiety disappears from the spy game, it doesn’t even get carried into the subtext, like, say, the nuclear threat in the Godzilla films, but is simply removed. From the gloomy background of everyday life, the Cold War becomes an ideal object of consumption.
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