Thoughts on Bond and bums

Casino Royale (2006): directed by Martin Campbell

This week Carl and I let Sigmund come with us. But we made him sit in the row behind and he wasn’t allowed any nachos.

Amidst my furious lechery, I found myself, during Casino Royale, wondering what it is in Bond we continue to find so compelling. Not in the movies overall, which are full of things exploding and bright, shiny stuff to look at. I mean in the character of Bond himself – a character who acts so powerfully in our imaginations that we can tolerate him being played by half a dozen different actors without it seeming to make him any less clear and vivid a figure.

There are, of course, as many reasons for this as there are viewers of the movies, in fact more. But one of the themes that strikes me most powerfully coming back to Bond this time for Casino Royale is that of control. Bond is always in complete command of any situation, however unexpected, unlikely and apparently ineluctable. There is no end to his arcane skills, whether its his fluency in myriad languages, his deft touch with technology, or his astonishing gift for gambling. This last is, of course, central to the plot of Casino Royale but also to its meaning: such is James’s ability to command the world around his that even risk and chance are turned by him into certainty, intentionality and success. He can never be bested, is impossible to outwit, outfight or outmanoeuvre. He is thus the figure we retreat into to escape not only our own limitations but our fear of those limitations; he our refuge from the fear of failure.

He is even outside the control of time. Bond is a character with no narrative arc; even in this much-discussed film of Bond’s origins there is little genuine sense of seeing an early version of a man we know as an older and different. Some pieces are fitted into static jigsaw, no more than that. Bond has been played by a number of men and has aged as they have, to be rejuvenated with each new incarnation. He’s the opposite of the other face-changing contemporary hero, Doctor Who, whose reincarnation is named, discussed and made intrinsic to his story. For Bond age and change are irrelevant and unmentioned. And each of his stories, where the films are concerned, is the same story; the formula of the films is the core of what many people love about Bond, even though from a psychoanalytic perspective this repetition starts to look neurotic.

Bond himself is, of course, an instrument of control, the control of HM Government in its post imperial imperialist projects. In his apparently lawless and destructive violence he in fact a weapon for the imposition of order and the retention of control.

Bond’s lack of a history, of a life that moves forward, makes me think about our own fear of life, a fear that sometimes appears in the guise of a fear of death. We want to be young, never to suffer sickness or weakness, but this is a fear of being alive and having experience, not a horror of our own mortality. This desire for sterility, un-life, is reflected in Bond’s endless, convulsive fucking, which never seems to result in a pregnancy test, let alone a child – sex is divorced so thoroughly from reproduction in Bond movies it seems almost vulgar to reintroduce the association. There’s something oddly child-like in this sex play that can’t produce children, at least if you share Sigmund’s view of children as being always and at all times obsessed with sex. In Bond we are refusing to submit ourselves to life, we are demanding a total control that can only exist in fantasy.

So the reason Sigmund came with us is that you can’t really talk sensibly about control without thinking about Freud. The anal phase is possibly the best known , or most notorious, of the stages for infant development that he posited. Failure to pass successfully through the anal phase, he theorised, strands the adult in a drama of control and retention, still psychologically refusing to shit neatly and on the direction of the parent. Those arrested in this stage withhold, whether emotionally or financially. They can be preoccupied by dirt or money, they are drawn to and/or repelled by filth, destruction and disorder. Western societies may not now toilet train our children as brutally as did the Viennese bourgeoises who trailed across the Persian carpet in Freud’s consulting room but we all still must experience struggles for control of ourselves and our functions early on in the formation of our personalities. The experiences and ideas around these struggles remain with us in our adult lives.

Speaking of naughty shitting, this train of thought reminds me of the vision of the child Jung, a deeply religious and intensely mad little boy who was appalled and traumatised by his temptation, eventually given in to, to imagine God having a huge shit on a church. Jung, in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, relates the tremendous relief he felt when he finally ‘allowed’ himself this abominable vision – the thought itself being a kind parallel process to the relief of having a poo. . Having been brought up by his pastor father to think only with awe and solemnity of God, he found him self gifted with a vision of God’s arse as an act of grace, the gift of knowledge that others did not have.

Bond is never allowed the incredible relief that goes with the worst happening, with the release of what’s most shameful in us. The realisation of fear – the realisation of that awful stuff about ourselves being released, of our loss of control – means we can come out form under the burden of it. Bond is stuck, for Freud, in the fantasy of constipation in the struggle with his parent. For Jung, he is possessed by a neurotic fear of failure and of existence that is preventing him fully embracing life and God.

Bond in this sense, then, perhaps represents the force of our own repression and our love affair with it. He is the archetypal hiding place from our fear of our own lives and our own limitations. We rejoice in Bond as king on the bathroom throne, triumphantly refusing to shit.

And that’s never a sentence I thought I would write.

Next time, less poo, I promise.

Sigmund says: The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious… The unconscious is the true psychical reality.