While Fleming's novels were ostensibly Cold War tales, the films shied away from such an overt political landscape and, unintentionally, anticipated the fluidity of our own more global world. East rarely clashed directly with West over nation-pawns in Africa or Asia. Instead, Soviet Russia and America themselves were usually pawns in the schemes of rogue, unaffiliated megalomaniacs like Blofeld, Doctor No or Hugo Drax. America and Russia ended up as strange bedfellows far more than as committed opponents. Bond's chief nemesis, SPECTRE, is like a cross between the awesome reach and amoral behavior of multinational corporations and an everywhere-and-nowhere confederation of bad guys, not unlike al Qaeda.
Bond's world has always been one of conflict between independent operators. Bond himself is more free agent than secret agent, legally sanctioned to perform all manner of illegal acts, swooping into this country or that for a few martinis and a few murders. Though loyal to the Queen and, more importantly, to his boss, M, he is freed from the boundaries of any nation-state and from the routines of intelligence-gathering. He is, as he once described himself in a movie, a problem eliminator. His is not the world of squabbling between intelligence agencies, bureaucratic recalcitrance or missed clues. It's a world of direct action.
The literary Bond operated in an era when Britain was undergoing the final withdrawals from its imperial heyday. Bond took blows from one corner of the world to another that were meant to prove Britain's final impotence. (In Casino Royale he takes them quite literally.) His ultimate triumph suggests that Britain, newly made sidekick to the United States, still mattered on its own terms. Meanwhile, Bond version 6.0 lives in a world where America, though still preeminently powerful, is feeling the strain on its resources in direct actions around the world. The feeling of eclipse, of peak, can sometimes be glimpsed at the horizon.
It seems silly, after watching the disappointing Superman Returns, to ask a hero like Superman why he isn't out fighting al Qaeda. Superman is too resolutely a comic-book hero. But we can ask it of Bond, because he is a little closer to the real world. For one group of viewers, calling on Bond to hunt down some bin Laden-esque terrorist is ludicrous—an escapist plot involving killer robots would be better. For another group, it's exactly what we want from our pop culture. Larger than life, yes, but still not entirely removed from the events of the day.
Casino Royale was Fleming's first novel. Published in 1953, it fits comfortably, if extravagantly, in the Cold War milieu. Soviet agent Le Chiffre has embezzled state funds on a string of failed brothels and must recoup his debts at a high-stakes baccarat table or face elimination by SMERSH, the bureau that kills Soviet traitors. Bond, the top gambler in the British secret service, is sent to bankrupt him. Update SMERSH to an unnamed terrorist organization and change the baccarat to poker (and add in the requisite high-flying stunts) and you've got what appears to be a smooth adaptation to today's tense world.
In the novel, having defeated Le Chiffre and nearly lost both his private parts and his life, a convalescing Bond reflects on the killings that got him his 00 ranking. He begins to wonder whether the world is so black and white. How can the villain Le Chiffre have delivered the hero Bond such a vicious beating? The heroes and villains have gotten all mixed up, he muses, and continues: "Patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly all right, but this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date." In Bond's day, the villain was communism. Fifty years ago, he laments, it would have been conservatism. Fifty years on, it's terrorism.
His French colleague, Mathis, dismisses Bond's lightweight philosophizing and tells him not to fight evil on abstract principles but to surround himself with human beings. Destroy evildoers to protect the ones he loves. "But don't let me down and become human yourself," Mathis finishes. "We would lose such a wonderful machine."
Bond is too blunt an instrument to take up the subtle moral dilemmas of the war on terrorism, its complex web of associations. 007 doesn't deal with root causes. He doesn't take on systems of evil, only individual monsters. This is good, because the more closely Bond hewed to the particular geopolitics of the age the more we would expect that the details be right. We don't need him for that.
But in mythic terms, a Bond who bleeds helps illuminate a broader but important question. What happens to us when we go off to fight the evils of the world? What happens when we find ourselves feeling like the villains? Because, niceties aside, Mathis is still right: There are plenty of "really black targets around."
This new Bond—who is really just the old Bond—doesn't so much engage these questions as embody them. He believes in his heroism, in the clarity of good guys and bad guys, and yet at the same time he is given to doubt both. He thinks he's on the side of the angels, and yet ... He teeters between the cold professional who feels nothing and a vulnerable man who feels too much. There's no doubt such a hero matters. The only relevant question now is whether that Bond will at last have his day onscreen.