All countries require their national myths, the stories they tell themselves to show their distinctive difference, political exceptionalism, cultural uniqueness. Some of these myths are based on fact – usually sanitised or romanticised versions of what actually took place – and some are the product of fiction. But all of them combine to create a popular conception of what it means to be “Italian” or “French”, a “New Zealander” or “American”.
In the case of the UK, there is a whole range of off-the-shelf identities that say “British” in some more or less defining way. At the forefront of these is a character who was invented in 1953 and in the intervening 72 years has remained largely ageless, despite nearly dying almost as often as he has killed.
His name is Bond, James Bond, a charming, ruthless, womanising secret agent who has saved the world from billionaire megalomaniacs more times than most of us have saved a hot dinner from burning.
But now Bond is under existential threat from a billionaire megalomaniac. This time, it’s not one conjured up by Ian Fleming, the suave Englishman who wrote 12 novels and two short-story collections featuring the famous spy, but an actual 21st-century powerhouse: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who is said to be the second-richest person in the world.
Amazon has recently taken over creative responsibility for the 007 movie franchise. When Amazon bought MGM four years ago, Bezos spoke of its “much beloved intellectual property” and how MGM and Amazon Studios “can reimagine and develop that IP for the 21st century.”
At the time, Barbara Broccoli, an Anglophile raised in London, was still in charge of Bond. Now that she and her half-brother have moved aside, the man who likes his martinis shaken not stirred is answerable less to his nominal boss, M, than to the Amazon empire, a kind of SPECTRE of the consumer industry.
This is a particularly worrying time in history for Britain’s favourite cinematic hero to come under the control of an American corporate giant. Every British government likes to harp on about the “special relationship” with America, and indeed, it features in the Bond books and films in the character of Felix Leiter, the CIA operative who is Bond’s friend.
The Americans have never been quite so sentimental about this relationship, but have allowed the British to play it for all its worth, like some desperate hanger-on cosying up to a celebrity. For at least it was based on something loosely representing reality – namely the western alliance, which the US led and the UK gamely, and sometimes blindly, followed.
Now that we live in Trump world, no such geopolitical certainties exist. The US President speaks of his nation’s historic friends as freeloaders from whom he wants to distance America, and equally speaks of people like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un as kindred spirits he can do business with.
What’s more, Bezos, like his fellow tech-bro billionaires, has lined up four square behind Trump, nudging the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, into line, too. What might this mean for the IP that is Bond?
Could he be turned into a populist disruptor, charged with supporting Russian efforts in Ukraine and coming to the defence of white nationalists at home against the evil libtards? And that urbane English exterior may well have to go, replaced perhaps by blowhard pronouncements about being a very stable genius.
For those of us who thought that Bond was a rather dated, not to say sexist, role model, there is the distinct prospect of growing nostalgic for his plummy one-liners and reliable ability to put an end to the dreams of narcissistic criminal masterminds.
