Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche

by John Higgs

James Bond celebrated the modern – sports cars, international travel, all the latest gadgets and so on. His desire for the new, however, was limited to the material world of things. In terms of attitudes – to women, to class, to non-British people – he remained resolutely traditional. We could have exciting new things, he suggests, but we shouldn’t change the way we see the world. The answer that the Beatles gave was the exact opposite. They embraced new ways of thinking, on topics such as sex, drugs, male identity and religion, because they thought the old ways were flawed and were holding us back. In the world of things, however, they often found value in the traditional, from the faux-Victoriana of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to mystery coach tours and the childhood nostalgia of songs like ‘Penny Lane’.

To be brave and protect others in this dangerous world was noble, but to do so required emotional numbness and the cruelty needed to kill. This emotional numbness then prevented Bond from ever having a long-lasting loving relationship. Vesper Lynd had to die, in other words, because Bond would not be able make the sacrifices needed to protect the world if he found happiness. The alternative was to make Bond asexual, but that was clearly no fun. The idea that the women who Bond touches die, by this logic, became an unavoidable aspect of the character. From this perspective, Bond was an honest, fully realised depiction of the masculine paradox. All the other knights in shining armour, in contrast, were little more than two-dimensional sketches. It was this mix of good and bad, and the uncensored honesty of the character’s depiction, which elevated him above so many other fictional heroes.

Judging the size and importance of the Beatles is a strangely disorientating task. They are like a Lovecraftian monster whose proportions and immensity are somehow beyond our perception. We know, rationally, that they are the biggest band in history and that, in terms of influence and record sales, they will probably never lose that position. We know that the phrase used to describe the ultimate in musical success is to say that someone will become ‘bigger than the Beatles’. Yet the Beatles have always felt homely and approachable, rather than enormous and untouchable. Their level of success was and is unthinkable, but they wore it so casually. They have always been part of the family, so familiar as to be unremarkable.

Viewers watching Peter Jackson’s eight-hour docuseries Get Back soon feel very comfortable with the four Beatles, because the way they relate, joke and discuss problems feels entirely normal and modern. It is not until the end of the series, when the cameras go outside into the streets of London, that you are hit by how far back in history all this was. The flat caps and bowler hats, along with the clipped accents and headscarves, plunge you into a very different, long-gone world. The four Beatles then appear like modern people marooned in the distant past, waiting for society to catch up with them.

Reviews of the film were generally mixed, with perhaps the most perceptive comment coming from Penelope Gilliatt in the Observer. ‘It is easy to get angry about Ian Fleming’s James Bond. He is snobbish, brutal and sneering, and his rapacious little character is full of the new upper-class thuggishness: he is a vile man to be given as a hero,’ she began, before admitting that ‘the first of what is obviously going to be a series of James Bond films, takes the wind out of one’s rage: it makes him seem funny. Instead of admiring his vodka martinis and his idle grabs at girls and his cool way of dumping a corpse on Government House, it gently sends him up. “Dr. No” is full of submerged self-parody.’ That crucial ingredient in the Bond formula, its strange ability to take itself seriously and not take itself seriously at the same time, was something that Sean Connery played beautifully.

It would seem crazy not to call the football-loving, tea-drinking land that the Beatles came from ‘England’. It is, after all, the society which the great majority of people who live in geographical England recognise. But if that is the ‘real’ England, then what is the strange place that the establishment also call ‘England’, the society that gave birth to James Bond? This is a network of great wealth which was established nearly a thousand years ago, when William the Bastard of Normandy defeated King Harold at Hastings and claimed this newly conquered land for himself. He then distributed that land among the Norman barons who assisted him. This pattern of ownership of the country has remained amazingly consistent over the centuries. Even today a third of the UK is still owned by just 1,200 aristocrats and their families. Gerald Grosvenor was the sixth Duke of Westminster and one of the richest people, and largest landowners, in the country. When asked to give advice to young entrepreneurs, he replied, ‘Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.’ An accurate term to describe this particular ‘England’, then, would be to call it the Norman Continuity Empire. This is not bound by geography in the way that the Beatles’ England is. The reason that its base is in southern England is a quirk of history – it lost its preferred lands in Aquitaine and southern France during the medieval period. The Norman Continuity Empire speaks with an in...

Concentrations of wealth are not automatically bad things. They are necessary for humanity to create its greatest achievements, such as the construction of cathedrals like Notre-Dame, landing a man on the moon, or the great medical breakthroughs achieved in treating a disease like AIDS. Great wealth can fund orchestras and support the artists whose work now hangs in the Louvre, just as it can build the Louvre itself. Often, however, great wealth is held by people who lack the imagination or empathy to know how to use it. Some of these people are so uninspired that all they can think to do, when they possess more money than they could ever use, is to try and make more. Typically, it does not occur to them to be embarrassed by this. Then there are the situations in which concentrations of wealth are actively harmful to a country. When a system designed to protect concentrations of wealth actively prevents talented, hard-working and creative people across the land from working for the good of the country, and places privileged but clearly mediocre people in important positions instead, the result is a dysfunctional dark comedy.

Lennon knew that the song would go over the heads of intellectuals who had a worldview which denied the possibility of transcendence. To counter this, he made a point of explaining how the song’s title had a double meaning. On the one hand, the phrase ‘All You Need Is Love’ suggests that love is the only important thing. This was an interpretation that he knew overly literal critics would take issue with, claiming that you need other things as well such as food, shelter and money. For those critics, the second meaning kicked in. These were people who are smart, sophisticated and proud of their intellect. They almost have it all, but they are missing something important – all they need is love.

When James Bond passes into the public domain – which in the UK should be by 2035, seventy years after Fleming’s death – anyone will be able to make films with Bond, M, Q, Moneypenny, Leiter, shaken-not-stirred martinis and the ‘007’ licence to kill. The only two key parts of the franchise that EON productions, the film company founded by Broccoli and Saltzman in 1962, will still have sole rights to are the theme and the gun-barrel sequence – both of which were established in the first twenty seconds of the first film.

The Wall can be criticised as rock-star navel-gazing, in which a self-obsessed isolated individual blames his descent into fascism on other people and events, such as the death of his father during the Second World War. In its favour, it is a scathing, brutally honest insider’s account of how a person can start out with the best intentions only to surrender their humanity before the glamour of success. As Waters details his mental descent, he shows what it is like when fame and wealth elevate a person above others, making them isolated and afraid. They become unable to meet others as equals because people always want things from them, be that money or the reflected glow of their celebrity. Drugs and alcohol appear to mask this disconnect, but in reality, they exaggerate it – cocaine in particular acts as fascism in powdered form. It erodes empathy and keeps the focus on the ever-hardening ego. Becoming a rock star offers money, luxuries and a lack of responsibility that all but the strongest cannot help but covet. The readily available drugs and casual sex keep the musician cocooned in an adolescent world they never want to leave. So what if this costs a person their ability to connect to other human beings? Rock stars, on the face of it, got a lot more for their soul than Faust did.

The stunt driver was Loren ‘Bumps’ Willert. To keep the balance correct during the spin, he had to lie down on his belly in the middle of the car, controlling the accelerator and brakes with his feet at the back. Bumps was dressed in black with his face painted black, so that he couldn’t be seen. A dummy of Bond and another of his passenger were in the front seats either side of him. His job was to hit the ramp at exactly 48mph and, if the computer simulations were to be believed, physics would take care of the rest. The stunt went perfectly – perhaps too perfectly, some observers felt, in that it almost didn’t look real. It was suggested that they try again for another take. Bumps exited the car with, Lee recalled, ‘the stark face I’ve seen on men returning from a tough mission in the war’.

After sixty years of interviews, it’s clear that McCartney does not understand why music comes so naturally to him, or flows out of him so easily, in a way that doesn’t happen to other people. He seems at times afraid that it might stop – he has never learned how to read music, for example, in case it breaks the way he works. As the Irish poet Paul Muldoon has said when discussing McCartney’s creativity, ‘It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.’

Did McCartney know, at this point, that he was more than a standard celebrity, someone destined to be forgotten when the next hot bands came along? Did he know that he was going to be an icon of British creativity whose stature would be similar to that of Shakespeare or Dickens? Did he know that, in the distant future, the twentieth century would be boiled down to the time of Einstein, Hitler, the moon landings and the Beatles? Or that it would be normal for people from around the world to know his name, centuries after he was dead? If so, how could anyone live with this knowledge? It is one thing to be famous, but quite another to be history. How does a legendary icon like that go about their daily lives among people that history will be quick to forget? That sort of knowledge could very easily turn someone into a monster. In that context, McCartney’s promotion of ordinariness appears to be a stroke of genius.

In an effort to match the prevailing trends in blockbuster movies, the Daniel Craig Bond films were reimagined as chapters in a larger story. According to the accepted rules of screenwriting theory, however, Bond films should not work. Writers are taught the necessity of a strong ‘character arc’ for their heroes. The hero needs to change and grow in a story, the theory goes, and plot events need to drive this change if the narrative is to be engaging and satisfying. In the great majority of Bond films, of course, Bond does not change in the slightest. His ‘character arc’ is non-existent, and in theory his films should therefore fail. Bond films exist outside the normal rules of cinema, and that includes the world of screenwriting theory.

The very essence of Tarzan now looks to us to be fundamentally racist and there seems little chance that such a character could be rebooted in a way that would attract a 21st-century audience. Could this be the fate of James Bond? Could imperialism and misogyny be, as Kill James Bond! maintain, so ingrained in his character that he can never be redeemed? Is his fate a relaunch that plays out to an ageing and dwindling audience before he is slowly forgotten? Such a fate would be out of character. Bond, as we have seen, is death, and therefore the one character who cannot die. Or perhaps we should now say, one who cannot die for long. He is also tradition, and the establishment’s ability to ‘keep buggering on’ is a strong one. But perhaps more importantly, he is a mythic avatar of male fantasy. This element of Bond’s makeup is continually changing, and it is these changes which have kept him alive over the past half-century. Men will always need a vision of who they want to be. It inspires them to keep striving to become better than they are. Bond does not represent what men should be, or could be, or need to be. He is instead what some men want to be. He is pure fantasy, and unashamedly so. This makes him ideologically and morally impossible to defend, but also inhuman to deny. Our fantasies may reflect badly on us when they are exposed to the cold light of day, but we still need to explore them, if we are ever to improve them.