"Casino Royale": Bond Has Feelings Too

By Lucia Bozzola, Nov 28, 2006
In my library is a book containing an essay entitled “James Bond’s Penis.” Nothing like getting right to the point, as it were. I’m not quite sure what it actually says about James Bond’s penis—besides the fact that he has one and uses it often—because the academic jargon tends to make me nod off long before the end. Yep, the writer sucks the life right out of the subject. Nevertheless, the bluntness of said title underlines the fact that the associations that usually spring to mind when one hears “Bond film,” including Bond girls, gadgets, shaken martinis, DB5s, flamboyant villains, and all-around suavity, tend not to include the super spy’s actual goldmember. Granted, we never see it (and really, how could it live up to Bond’s rep?), but it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that its presence isn’t really that far from that list of Bond keywords. It’s as vital a piece of Bond’s arsenal as his Walther PPK. He rarely has to shoot the bad girl because he can nail her instead. No wonder the laser-aimed-at-Bond’s crotch in Goldfinger stands as the most memorable torture scene of the series. Until Casino Royale, that is.


Let’s make one thing clear. I love James Bond movies. Ever since I saw The Spy Who Loved Me way back in the hinterlands of the 1970s, I’ve been on the Bond wagon. Yes, Roger Moore was my first, formative Bond, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the finer, more brute force pleasures of Sean Connery. I was a little concerned about whether the Bond franchise would remain as reliable as death and taxes when Timothy Dalton took over, but Pierce Brosnan quickly put that to rest. All of those fab cars, exotic locales, jaw-dropping action sequences, nutty bad guys, and the pun-filled visits to Q’s lab of tricks more than made up for the fact that only girls with names like Pussy Galore, Honey Ryder, and Holly Goodhead seemed to be able to infiltrate the Bond world (Question: how did Bond survive 1970s feminism? Answer: Moore made him absurd). That Moore, Connery, and Brosnan all look as debonair as George Clooney in a tux certainly helps. Happily, Daniel Craig turns out to be an excellent Bond as well, but that shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who saw him in Layer Cake—all five of us in the U.S. He has cool to spare and he looks as fine out of his tux as he does in it. Oh, James.

Of course, one of the sequences featuring Craig stripped down is that aforementioned torture scene. Connery’s Bond at least had clothing to protect his dignity when Goldfinger attempted that high-tech castration. Not so Bond 6.0. He only has careful camera angles. Now, there are a lot of zeitgeisty reasons for why the filmmakers may have chosen to remain true to this aspect of Ian Fleming’s source material in this “official” adaptation of Casino Royale, beginning with a story line centering on a French banker for terrorists (ah, the French—the best source for villains when you want to be politically correct). Bond also shoots up an embassy in Africa in search of a bomber, leading to his unwanted appearance in the press as an example of westerners stomping all over the Third World. Oh, the resonance of it all. So why not give the audience a lesson in the horrors of torture? Why not, indeed. The superb, 1960s-style black and white opening number already let us know that this Bond film will cast a questioning eye on the bloodshed that comes with the spy’s brand-spanking-new license to kill, so it’s no surprise horrific violence is inflicted on a most vulnerable Bond. Thus the double-0 sociopath is born.

But that’s not the only thing going on in this scene, or in Casino Royale. After all, getting back to the topic of scholarly essays, James Bond screws as licentiously as he kills. In film after film, he treats willing female bodies as nonchalantly as villainous male (and sometimes female) flesh. And in recreating the Bond origin myth, the makers of Casino Royale actually realize “because he can” isn’t really a satisfactory answer to the “why does he do that” question. Instead, looking back to the first non-Connery Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the source of his ladykilling becomes intertwined with the necessary loss of “soul” his lethal job entails. Heartbreak (not ballbreak) consigns him to his fate of natty suits, sleek weapons, smooth kills, and—I suppose—eventually giving a damn whether his martini is shaken or stirred. Bond’s womanizing becomes part of his killer pathology. Wow. Such an unexpected pre-Christmas gift for the girls who have forever had to roll their eyes at the Octopussys and Plenty O’Tooles that came as an unquestioned part of the Bond package.

Granted, “because he can” is still part of the equation. It’s no accident that weepy-eyed torturer Le Chiffre goes after Bond’s testicles, taunting him that he’s going to deprive Bond of his reason for living. But the joke is as much predicated on our knowing the many previous movie lives of Bond as on anything he does in Casino Royale. Bond does have the requisite encounter with the married lady who can give him information (although he doesn’t finish the project). Yet his comment to true love Vesper Lynd that Vesper isn’t his type because she’s single suggests that he’s had at least five seconds of deep thought, nay, regret, about his prior fatal conquest. And when Vesper chides him that she’s not his type because she’s smart, well, we know that makes her different from many a Bond maiden (Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist? “Dr.” Holly Goodhead? Seriously?), including the unlucky married lady. That Eva Green seems reasonably intelligent certainly helps sell Vesper’s line. She makes Bond woo her, as far as a spy involved in a high stakes poker game with a murderous criminal mastermind can woo anyone. And when he comforts her after she witnesses him kill a thug with his bare hands, it’s a rare, exceptional moment of tender emotion in a franchise that usually eschews such things.

But alas, if Bond were to have a soul, and a soul mate, then he wouldn’t be the Bond we all know and love. Vesper has to be as elusive to Bond as the little girl in red who may or may not be haunting the alleys of Venice in Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 ghost trip Don’t Look Now. Unfortunately, Bond has to take down a Venetian palazzo in the process of figuring out whose side Vesper is really on. That’s almost as upsetting as the outcome of that battle. Yet, despite his agony, Bond still isn’t convinced that Vesper really was who he thought (hoped? dreamed? no way) she was. Leave it to Judi Dench’s tough MI-6 mama M to deliver that lesson. She’s a married woman who understands women, and she figures out what was really going on with Vesper while Bond was having his balls battered. But she’s no softy. She essentially assures Bond’s heartbreak when she tells him what Vesper did for him. She teaches him something about life and puts the finishing touches on the rock-hard surface Bond needs to do his job. Ouch. Yet, no one cries for Bond even though Craig ably communicates his inner grief. Instead, we cheer for his signature introduction in Casino Royale’s final moments. That would be disconcerting if the steely-eyed, heavily armed Bond, James Bond weren’t so damn entertaining.