GB Bond: A 60 y.o. narcissistic masturbation phantasy with ‘the other’

1.
The visual prerogatives that endowed Bond movies in the 60s and 70s are replayed today in a cinematic ritual akin to masturbation. Bond the actor performs the same ritual on Bond, oblivious he’s re-enacting a narcissistic phantasy where the main paradigm shift are the upgraded sex toys, soundbites and the new additions to his impressive harem of women. Any new or old Bond won’t take exception to that, for the reason that’s all Bond knows and he’s been doing for 60 years.

2.
The audience share as voyeurs a cinematic recipe of Pavlovian anticipation, where the name, the ritualistic act and the desired denouement are known in intention. Left to the audience is to discover the paradigm shifts including the object of Bond’s phantasy embodied by a new villain – how he rediscovers it with a Bond girl in tow.

3.
England and WhiteHall HQ are only there to iterate 007’s initiation and greatness as drivers pointing towards a narcissistic violent phantasy to come with a larger-than-life villain soon be identified. As with masturbation, the inflexion points of the action are there to postpone gratification through a series of episodes that only open the story for a bigger ritualistic encounter and confrontation. In this masturbation phantasy, given away by the suspension of disbelief required to take it in, Bond titillates himself by playing and replaying similar over-the-top stunts and scenarios that capture the attention of his women and the villain.

4.
The villain and his henchmen or women, are generally uncanny freaks that speak with foreign accents, behave strangely, they chase or give chase only to sexually enable Bond. All act to generate momentum for a violent feast where Bond will annihilate and dispatch the current object of his phantasy of greatness, embodied by the villain in all his forms. Dispatching this larger-than-life rival is the moment Bond’s narcissistic ritual climaxes and our world is returned to a state of glorious British self-righteousness.

5.
The super objective that any Bond movie ultimately pursues, is a state of narcissistic, unsustainable bliss beyond personal gratification, where Great British self-righteousness rules the world. This is supported by the violent feast on the world stage that is leading up to breaking and entering the villain’s lair in some distant land – which suggests the British still inhabit a world where the sun doesn’t set. The ritualistic exchange between Bond and the villain, peppered with phallic metaphors, it there to amplify his phantasy of greatness to fulfil its Pavlovian mission for the audience. In this context the relationship between Bond and the villain, always identified as a male, merits a deeper dive.

6.
Bond always meets his super objective by means of sexual violence and not by means of sexual copulation. In the process, he deflects his women from indulging in pre-coital or coital behaviour with other men – that includes his would-be wives, Moneypenny or M. That is the tell tale sign Bond like any masturbator is caught up in a phantasy world where women are there to be traded, replaced and swapped for his gratification, with ‘the one’ induced in his harem as the girl of choice that proved herself to him.

7.
Bond’s true object of desire is a replayed act of male-on-male sexual violence between him and the villain, performed in gargantuan ColdWar settings. He can’t tell us why this really is because that would be the end of Bond’s reason d’etre, as the producer and audience know it. We’re led to believe, in Pavlovian anticipation, that the current villain is the one that would satisfy Bond’s narcissistic appetites, but as it turns our that is never true, and a new phantasy villain always arises. The villain is ultimately Bond’s shadow that has taunted him all his life and turned him into a psychotic masturbator that is living a phantasy of greatness.

8.
In some sense Bond is fighting a less civilised self in his phantasy, and his unconscious taunts him only to fail to win the day. This could be the result of a non-British ancestry imprinted in his mind, or a criminal past, that manifests violently. At another level, Bond may have been abused by a man that he masturbates with psychotically in his desire to confront him. Perhaps someone he was attracted to and betrayed Bond’s expectations and unfulfilled his desires, unlike the women that make up his harem. The latter adds more weight to Bond’s sexually violent behaviour considering for how long this has been going on for him, that he’s vanquished his opponent in his phantasy time and again, only for this shadow to return unharmed under a different but similar guise.

9.
The production team observes every time the strictures of Bond’s ritual with rigour, from the opening title. Watching Bond the actor perform the same masturbation phantasy on Bond, audiences buy a bigger or lesser stake into the value of the genre as a whole, by means of Bond they love best or just like – where all share the same narcissistic subtext. Any Bond phantasises of a global consumer society that has no limits, no fears and no substitutes – today almost risible in Ms ethos that nevertheless frees Bond to unleash sexual violence on the world stage.

10.
Through repetition, the Pavlovian gratification with narcissistic sexual violence gradually loses appeal until it can become exhausting for the audience to watch, if not exhausted. That is why every Bond culminates in a reboot where the same narrow ritual is re-applied to a new actor in the spirit that could be the paradigm shift audiences would pay to see. Bond’s fate is not tied to that of one actor, but to a cinematic construct where Bond inhabits the strict confines of a paradigmatic ritual, genre, brand and reboot – all integral for his survival with the audiences.

11.
No surprise then that Bond as cinematic genre has gown into a substitute limb for the fluctuating anger and guilt England feels over losing its colonies or its place in the wider world. Bond aims to restore a state of British self-righteousness where any challenge is vanquished, or not a direct threat, even if that is unsustainable and a feat of momentary escapism. The genre as a whole, suggests a continuation of colonialism by means of one’s duty to save the world as British ritual. Bond is a narcissistic projection of soft power that never speaks freely or truthfully about the past but reboots himself regularly to deliver the same message to a new audience.

12.
At hermeneutic level, any new Bond is a call for renewed narcissism – now clearly more destructive; for the use of indulgent phallic violence to defend Western values – now even more subverted by the powerful. The villain and his lair, generally placed in exotic locations around the world, are clearly a metaphor of past dominions. In this context, the ritualistic sexual violence visited on the world worries. It worries because it is a very ‘imperial’ reaction to an act of rejection of what colonialism stood for, though not for Bond or the British. These are hard proofs of a British post-colonial limb in place where once there was a colonial wound.

13.
Bond and Billy Liar, born the same year in 1963, should normally share the same counsellor in a psychiatric institution. But this is a different Britain, one where Bond can cheat fate with every reboot, while Billy would enjoys watching Bond movie for as long as his post-colonial limb maintains an erection and that Pavlovian reflex is satisfied by Bond, the villain and the sexual violence on the screen. Brexit Britain today is keener to remind everyone that embraces liberal values and past British glory, that it’s in their duty to indulge Bond more than to start anew.

14.
Bond is too important to lose for the people involved in such games, where 100 million is not a lot to spend for comparable consumer returns with the added bonus of humiliating on screen ones thinly disguised enemies. Regardless of box-office success, the genre has evolved into more than the sum of its parts and its rebooted longevity is assured to illicit that Pavlovian narcissistic reflex in many audiences.

15.
Bond will have to resell his message to the next generation of American-Anglophiles, as the spy needed to save our narcissistic, violent world from being ruled by a larger-than-life villain. That, plus the same ritual fixated on a perpetual male antagonist, a girl of choice, and an evil lair that Bond will penetrate surreptitiously to obliterate. These confirmed prerogatives are that of a cop or failed cop craving to police our world in his phantasy in the name of freedom under the guise he could serve everybody that is not an enemy of narcissism, consumerism and the use of phallic violence to defend it.

16.
Bond was the first spy-cop to police a consumer world with no limits and no substitutes. An act elevated in 60 years to a cinematic ritual for audiences that won’t deny Bond the meta label of ‘post-colonial master and man of this world’. This is Bond’s template, the one inherited by the top spy-cop that polices the world today, in countless formulaic thrillers. It was for the bigger cop to steer this template towards their own soft power aims in spy thrillers from Bourne Identity to Mission Impossible and to decide if Bond’s narcissistic appeal can still redeem itself at the box office and be rebooted as a shaken-not-stirred sideshow.

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