Adele’s title song for Skyfall, the new James Bond movie, was released a few weeks ago, about a month in advance of the film’s release. Eon Productions refers to Skyfall as “the 23rd James Bond movie”—but it’s the 25th if you count such non-Eon productions as the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale, not to mention Never Say Never Again, 1983’s virtual remake of Thunderball.
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| Barry Nelson as "Jimmy Bond" (1954) |
So, to be clear, October 2012 isn’t the 50th Anniversary of James Bond. It’s the 50th anniversary of the James Bond movies.
As a fictional British character, James Bond lies somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who—people still read the stories but it’s the visual incarnations they tend to cherish. More like the Doctor, it’s the visual incarnations that have really influenced mass culture. A James Bond movie is an archetypal genre. People know what it means, and they know what to expect from that sort of movie.
And almost the very first thing they expect from a James Bond movie is a James Bond main title theme. Truth be told, the idea of what a James Bond theme song is like has been more consistent over the years than the idea of what James Bond is like. Bond songs are almost always genre exercises for their performers, much like a 21st century poet writing an Elizabethan sonnet. The song needs to be big and bombastic, probably with brass, maybe with electric guitar, and frequently with a chord progression based in that original, indelible James Bond theme.
This theme was arranged by John Barry, but it was written by Monty Norman. As Robert Siegel once pointed out on NPR, this song is a little relic of the declining days of British colonialism. The tune, which sets Bond off to Jamaica, was originally written for a musical version of V, S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, a novel about an East Indian community in Trinidad. As the presence in the Doctor No soundtrack of such songs as the reiterated "Underneath the Mango Tree" and a calypso version of "Three Blind Mice" might suggest, Monty Norman had no qualms as an English composer about mining the source music of the Commonwealth for films about Her Royal Highness' most loyal servant. As I have argued in a previous post, in Fleming’s novels in particular, Bond can often function as the last agent of the old British Empire, tracking down commodities (gold, diamonds, etc.) that have somehow escaped Her Majesty’s excise duties.
John Barry’s arrangement of Norman’s tune didn’t come off as colonialist, however. Its lead guitar line sounded just enough like the Ventures to make it a Top Ten hit in the UK in the fall of 1962. Despite this success, Barry wasn’t the producers’ first choice to replace Norman as composer for the second Bond film, From Russia with Love (1963). They wanted Lionel Bart, who several years earlier had written the most globally successful British musical to date in Oliver! Bart, however, was an autodidact (not to mention alcoholic) composer, who hummed his tunes to the less well-known Eric Rogers, who then transcribed them. Bart rightfully concluded that this compositional method was not quite adequate for scoring an entire film, but he did offer to write a title song for the film. Barry was asked to serve as the film's overall composer.
Bart’s “From Russia with Love” isn’t sung over the opening titles of the second Bond film, though. It’s wrapped into an instrumental medley that also includes Norman's theme to the first film. Then, about a half an hour into the film itself, a vocal rendition of Bart's song is heard, in part, over a passing transistor radio during Bond's punting expedition with Sylvia Trench. It’s not a particularly notable song, and it’s a little hard to figure out what Bart's lyrics might have to do with the film’s plot. The only way the song makes sense in relation to the movie is if you assume it is sung by Tatiana Romanova, Daniela Bianchi’s character, who is a pawn in an elaborate SPECTRE plot to thwart MI6 and kill Bond in the process.
One of the reasons I love this song is that it reflects Case's dominant attitudes toward Bond for most of the film: suspicion and rejection. Almost half the Bond themes are songs written in the persona of a female character singing to 007, but most of the characters singing aren't as fesity as Bassey's Case is here.
This trend had actually begun with "From Russia with Love," of course, and continued with the mysterious anima figure whom Nancy Sinatra embodied in the theme to 1967's You Only Live Twice. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, this type of song became a convention in the Bond films. As Sean Connery's Scottish brawler gave way to Roger Moore's British fop, the so-called "Bond girls" took on more of a pining "Oh, James!" quality, and the theme songs responded accordingly.
From 1977's "Nobody Does It Better" (the theme to The Spy Who Loved Me) to 1979's aforementioned "Moonraker," from 1981's "For Your Eyes Only" to 1983's "All Time High" (the theme to Octopussy), right down to 1989's instantly forgettable "License to Kill" (quite possibly the worst Bond song sung by an otherwise truly great singer), all these songs give voice to characters who are waiting for their dashing James to rescue them. License to Kill even added insult to injury by running a second wimpy song over the end credits, a song just as inappropriate for Pam Bouvier, Carey Lowell's well-trained CIA pilot in the film--indeed, a song so passive and saccharin that it would be recorded a few years later by Celene Dion.
For over two decades, virtually the only female voice in a James Bond theme that could truly match Bond in passion and even aggression was Grace Jones' May Day from A View to a Kill (1985), whose persona fits that film's theme song far better than Tanya Roberts' drippy Stacy Sutton. In the film, May Day not only matches Moore in his last, visibly older appearance as Bond, she tops him--literally.. Of course, the song itself was sung not by the accomplished Jones--who probably would have nailed it cold--but by the foppish Brit boytoys of the moment Duran Duran. (It was the 1980s: we were all conspicuously performing our sexual identities, and sometimes other people's too.)
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, passive female worship dominated the Bond themes. Then in 1995, something miraculous happened. After a brief hiatus, the Bond films were restarted, with a new Bond, Pierce Brosnan. Eon asked Bono and the Edge (currently on their own hiatus from U2) to write the theme for Brosnan's first Bond film, Goldeneye, and they got Tina Turner, possessor of a truly Bond-ready voice, to sing it:
Yes, Tina Turner is a woman, but once again in a Bond theme the sex of the singer isn't necessarily the sex of the character who is singing. "Goldeneye" doesn't make sense coming from any of the film's female characters, not even Famke Janssen's murderously limber Xenia Onatopp. This song only makes sense coming from Sean Bean's Alex Trevelyan, former MI6 agent and Bond's nemesis in the film.
In other words, what Bono and the Edge wrote for Goldeneye was a love song--or at least a seduction song--from the villain to Bond. There had been a few Bond themes about villains before: "Goldfinger," of course, as well as 1975's "The Man with the Golden Gun" (nearly everyone's vote for Bond theme with the absolute worst lyrics). There was also at least one Bond theme about Bond himself: 1965's "Thunderball." But there had never before been a bad guy in a Bond film crooning over the opening titles about what he was going to do to Bond when he finally got him alone. NBC may think it's news in 2012 that James Bond may be bi, but Bono and the Edge were clearly willing to out him 17 years ago.
The theme for Brosnan's next film, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) was supposed to be another villainous seduction song, but late in the process a wimpier blast from the past was substituted. The theme for Brosnan's third Bond film, The World Is Not Enough (1999), however, went much, much farther: it featured a love song between two villains, with more than a hint of BDSM.
Many unfairly malign the Brosnan Bond films as lightweight, but the villains in all of them are truly chilling, with both nihilism and torture making an uneasy appearance in every film. Truth be told, Brosnan probably began the role of Bond with a more detailed psychological backstory for his character than any of the actors who had preceded him. He knew Bond's family history, why the character had fastened onto Sandhurst as a lifeline, why he compulsively pursued his pleasures and in a way refused to grow up. He understood that Bond's frequently inappropriate lightness was a necessary defense for him against the darkness. If nothing else, by the time he took over the role, Brosnan (like Bond) was a widower, and he knew exactly how that could affect a man.
With Brosnan's last film in the role, Die Another Day (2002), the Bond themes took another turn, most obviously with the customarily dancing maybe-naked female silhouettes who appear during the opening titles. In this case, they are seen to be Bond's hallucination while he is being tortured:
In this theme, Madonna sings in the persona of Bond himself, willing his own death at the hands of his torturers, but determined not to give up the only self-respect he has left. Madonna is not the first performer to sing a Bond theme as Bond--both Paul McCartney in 1973's "Live and Let Die" and a-ha in 1987's "The Living Daylights" had already done it--but those songs had been fairly flippant. In this song, there are mortal stakes. Many fans of the series will tell you that "Die Another Day" is their least favorite Bond title sequence, but that is probably because it makes them uncomfortable. It should.
And all of this brings us back, finally, to "Skyfall," which continues the trend of the last decade of Bond songs, but with a very new twist:
As always, the first question is who's singing. In this case, it's Bond (you may have my number, etc), but to whom is he singing? Not the villain, because it's a reconciliation song and they're going to walk hand in hand together at song's end. It's not a fellow agent either, not quite, and it's certain not a love interest. In fact, at points, it sounds like he's singing to his mother (In your loving arms/Keeping me from harm).
Given the details of the film's plot that have been released--particularly how it seem to be focused on some questionable past operations run by Judi Dench's M--it seems most likely that this is Bond's love song to his boss. Certainly lines like What you see I see/I know I'll never be without the security become fascinating when sung by an agent of MI6 to its Director. Marc Forster, the director of Quantum of Solace, had said that he wanted to feature Dench's M more in that film because that was Bond's most notable nonsexual relationship with a woman. But just because it's nonsexual doesn't mean it's not erotic.
One key fact of Bond's backstory, a detail that Brosnan explicitly used to sculpt his performance and that I suspect Craig has thought about too, is that Bond is an orphan, like so many other classic English characters. He turns to the Royal Navy and then to the Secret Service as a second home, when the home he had is torn away from him. When Dench's M first met Brosnan's Bond in Goldeneye (and why is this the one clip that's not up online somewhere?), she dresses him down for being an immature sexist. Over the course of the Brosnan films, though they develop a clear affection for each other. (I suspect this may be because, while Bond may not be a feminist, Brosnan almost certainly is.) Even though Casino Royale was supposed to be a reboot, Daniel Craig's relationship as Bond with Dench's character becomes even more intimate: he even breaks into her apartment to use her computer, a highly intimate act in our digital age.
As far as I am concerned, "Skyfall" could easily be the last James Bond theme song ever, because the cinematic Bond's fifty-year journey is now complete. In the 1960s, he launched his brash career as a secret agent. In the 1970s and 1980s, he carried on a succession of unchallenging relationships with women who simply adored him. In the 1990s, he questioned what this life was doing to him, were his ties to his adversaries stronger than the bonds in his personal life. In "Skyfall," he achieves sublimation and synthesis: the strongest bond in his life is to his work, yes, but especially to his boss who is also a standin for his late, lost mother.
Am I reading too much into all this? Perhaps. But then again . . .
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Admiral Roebuck: What is your man doing?
M: His job.
Pretitles sequence, Tomorrow Never Dies
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