What would Jesus say to – James Bond?
Philippians 4:8-9 and John 15:1-17
(Note - those who heard the original talk will notice that a story is missing - this is to protect our friends in the organisation I mentioned - honest!)
When Ian Fleming was writing his first spy novel in 1952 he struggled to find a name for his hero. I read somewhere that for a few weeks he toyed with the name Perrigrine Maltravers. Try that for size; “The names Maltravers… Perrigrine Maltravers”. Doesn’t quite work does it? In the end he decided on James Bond; “The name’s Bond… James Bond”; a blunt name for a man who was intended become, in Flemming’s words, “An anonymous blunt instrument in the hands of MI6”.
This is a clue to what James Bond is all about; image and fantasy. Fleming had worked in naval intelligence during the Second World War, but there is nothing real about Bond; a spy who goes around drawing attention to himself. Real spies blend in and go unnoticed for years. In the 1960’s MI5 detected that there was a spy in the Royal Navy’s research laboratories at Portland. A friend of mine, Sam Whitelaw, was one of a small number of suspects. When it turned out that the culprits were Henry Houghton and Ethel Gee, Sam could not believe it because they were so ordinary. How could an international woman of mystery be called - Ethel?
So James Bond is a highly romanticized spy. A man with the cash to be free of a routine job, the sexual energy to pull any girl he meets, and the power to shape the world around him. Yet he is a fantasy we all tune into, the movies are the second highest grossing film franchise in history after Star Wars, all the Bond movies are blockbusters, even the terrible ones!
One of the contributors to the recent BAFTA tribute to 007 said that women come out of a Bond movie dreaming of James, but the men come out walking tall. Watching a bond movie affects you, even if you don’t want it to. So is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Appreciating Bond
Christians tend, on the whole, to tackle things with a negative attitude, “What is wrong with this?” they ask. The Bible models a very different approach for us; you will find an example in Philippians 4:8-9. Everything we do is polluted with human sin, that is a given so don’t moan about it all the time; look instead for the things you can praise.
I think this transforms our attitude to our culture, to art, movies, music, theatre. Force yourself to ask the question, “What is good about this” before you criticize. So what is good about James Bond?
First, he is the classic action hero. The formula is common enough; brave hero fights an evil enemy, evil enemy gets the better of brave hero, hero is almost killed, recovers and vanquishes evil enemy. Despite his many faults, Bond is brave, chivalrous and loyal.
There is a moment in Andy McNab’s book, Bravo Two Zero when you see this clearly, but in real life. The book describes a doomed SAS mission to find Scud missiles during the first Iraq war. McNab and his seven team members were discovered in their hideaway by an Arab shepherd, a young teenager. Watching the boy climb the hill that would lead to their inevitable discovery McNab had the boy’s head in the sights of his rifle. His finger was on the trigger. In his book McNab wrote, “I thought to myself, we are the SAS, not the SS”. He didn’t shoot, they were discovered and the rest is history.
From the dawn of time human beings have told one another this kind of stories. The ancient Greeks told stories of Ulysses and the fall of Troy, I grew up on stories from World War two, today we use elaborate technology and film to tell stories like James Bond. Stories are of huge importance to us because they help us to learn how to live.
Philip Pullman is one of our finest story tellers, he wrote this recently:
“In depicting characters who struggle to do good or to be brave, and succeed, or who are tempted to be weak or greedy. but refrain, we the storytellers are providing our readers with friends whose own good behaviour … provides an image of how to behave well; and thus, we hope, we leave the world at least no worse then we found it.” [1]
Bond is no saint, but we can learn some values from him that are going out of fashion; he is a man of courage and deep commitment to his country, he has impeccable manners and always protects the girl. Bond will give everything he’s got in the fight to save the world; he is brilliant at what he does. And I admire the Englishness of Bond; he is always under control, when others are screaming their heads off he is always calm!
Two problems with Bond
So what would Jesus say to James? I think he would raise two issues.
The first is violence. The Bond movies are not nearly violent enough.
The second is relationships. Clearly, Bond has no problem pulling a girl, but does have a problem with intimacy – no-one can get near him.
Let’s take the violence first. The Bond movies are just not violent enough – they are far too tame!
A few years ago I took my mother to see the brilliant Steven Spielberg film, Saving Private Ryan. While we were waiting for the movie to start a group of men in their twenties arrived making a lot of noise, they had been drinking and were in a very boisterous mood, it was obvious to me that they were going to disrupt the movie.
You may know that the first thirty minutes or so of this film is an extended harrowing sequence of a landing-craft full of young men attacking Omah beach in Normandy. Speilberg spared no-ones feelings in making this sequence, real bullets fly past your ears, real intestines spill onto the wet sand, and young men die horrible bloody deaths crying for their mothers. Five minutes into the movie, the guys in their twenties were silent. I looked over at them and their thoughts were written all over their faces, “That could have been me”.
Bond swings into action, ten blokes with machine guns are firing at him. He stands in the open firing his Walther PPK at them and they fall over, one by one. But there is no blood and no crippling injuries. In reality, Bond would be cut to pieces in seconds; he would die in agony, crying for his mother.
The bloodless violence of the Bond movies is an insult to anyone who has ever had to go into combat to defend his country. The violence is so unreal, it leaves you with the feeling that getting into a gun battle could be quite stimulating fun!
This is a pathetic message – I suspect that George Bush, Tony Blair and Donald Rumsfeldt have seen many Bond movies… I wish they would go and take a close look at Saving Private Ryan. Maybe that would help them understand what it is they have sent young men to do.
And so to the second thing – relationships. Remember the standard formula? Brave hero fights an evil enemy, evil enemy gets the better of brave hero, hero is almost killed, recovers and vanquishes evil enemy. The James Bond movies vary the formula – brave hero goes to bed with two women, one is an innocent girl, the other is in cahoots with the evil enemy, the brave hero realizes in time, dumps the enemies’ girl and ends up with the good girl.
When it comes to women, Bond is chivalrous on the one hand; he will open a door for them, and beat up the bad guys. But he ruthlessly uses them and remains strangely detached from their feelings. If it were real life, the Bond girls would be miserable. He would give them Chlamydia, syphilis or AIDS; make them pregnant and leave them broken-hearted.
Sophie Marceau, Who played Elektra King in The World is not enough, put it brilliantly in an interview for a French magazine in 1999. She was asked to describe James Bond and she said he was, “Un lonesome cowboy en smoking” (a lonesome cowboy in a dinner jacket). I think that she got Bond bang to rights; he is a loner who is incapable of forming mature relationships.
Now if you know the story you will know why
In the 1969 film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, he falls in love and marries. However, as they set off for their honeymoon, Bond's archenemy Blofeld and his henchwoman Irma Bunt spray the car with bullets. His wife is killed and Bond is crushed.
He never got over this - in the opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only (1981), he is shown visiting her grave to leave flowers. Bond never commits himself to a relationship again. So Bond has a reason for his isolation. No, he has an excuse for it… he has given in!
In the story, this makes him attractive, but in real life it is a handicap that must be overcome. You need emotional healing and forgiveness. You need to face up to bitterness and the desire for revenge. Physically, Bond is indestructible, but in relationships he is a quitter. Let me put this bluntly (perhaps too bluntly, forgive me) Bond wants us to think he is invincible but he is really a looser, using the past as an excuse for his inadequacies in the present.
Intimacy, being yourself with someone and allowing them into your private world, is a task for heroes – it takes special courage, patience, honesty and the ability to trust. Bond has none of these qualities. Some of Bonds calmness is not English reserve, it is emotional constipation… he just can’t express his feelings.
One of the striking things about Jesus is the way he was prepared to be friends with people he knew would let him down. He knew that Judas would betray him, but remained friends, even to the end. He knew that Peter would deny him, and afterwards receives him back. He knows that I am not up to much either… but he is not going to let me go. Read Jesus words in John 15:1-17 and you see the heart of this. “Greater love has no man than this; that he gives up his life for his friends”.
James fights evil by killing villains, Jesus fought evil by loving them and dying for them. Kill a villain and another one springs up to take his place, give your life for a villain and it stops him in his tracks – well, quite often, anyway.
This is heroic, a life worth imitating. I can imagine Jesus talking to James Bond about the violence, and about his relationships. But there is one thing Jesus wants to challenge everyone about – what are you fighting for, what are you giving your life for?
Here’s another story…
In 1985 I helped present a live broadcast of a morning service from our church in Bournemouth. A few days later I received a letter in a wobbly handwriting from an elderly man called Charles Fraser-Smith. It was a long letter thanking us for the service and rambling on a bit about the war, MI6 and Ian Flemming. He seemed to think that he had some connection with the James Bond stories. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, but some time later. I was reading the daily telegraph when I turned the page and an item caught my eye – it was a long obituary for Charles Fraser-Smith.
Charles and his wife had left Britain in the late 1920’s to work in North Africa, they were part of an organization known as North Africa Mission and their purpose was to reach the Berber people in Morocco with the gospel. Charles Fraser-Smith and he was a brilliant engineer. Since they found themselves in a remote part of the country many miles from the nearest city he had to use his amazing skills to make the equipment they needed to survive. Before long, the locals were banging on his door to enlist his services making gadgets to make their lives easier.
In 1939 Charles and his wife returned to the UK to travel ‘round churches reporting on what they had been doing. One Sunday evening they were speaking in a gospel hall in Leeds, showing off some of the gadgets that Charles had made. On the back row were two MI6 agents, they were in Leeds on business and, as they listened to Charles were very impressed. Afterwards, they waited for the hall to empty and had a quiet word with Charles.
That night they recruited Charles to work in their department. For the duration of the World War II Charles was given everything he needed to make gadgets for secret agents. One of his favourites was a shaving brush that screwed open to reveal a sheet of silk. The screw was reversed, so if it was checked by Germans it would tighten instead of loosen. The silk sheet was a map printed in secret ink which revealed itself when the agent urinated on it. Charles called them his ‘wee maps’!
In the course of the war Fraser-Smith worked with a young naval intelligence agent called Ian Flemming. When Fleming came to write the James Bond novels after the war he used Charles Fraser-Smith as his model for Q – the genius engineer who made bond’s gadgets. The old gentleman who wrote to me in the 1980’s was the man who inspired at least part of the Bond stories.
Kill a villain and another one springs up to take his place – win a villain for the kingdom and he can only do one thing – win more villains.
It’s the only way to change the world – one by one!
[1] Voluntary Service an essay in Guardian Review 28.12.02