Re-Imagining a Connery Classic as a Dying Fever Dream
“I must be dreaming.” -James Bond, Goldfinger
James Bond cannot die. In his movies and in the annals of pop culture, he’s about as durable as diamonds (which, as we learned in one of his films, are forever). On screen he’s been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, choked, and had his testicles whacked like a pair of bongos. Off screen he’s survived countless new actors, directors, and producers, changing culturally trends and fads, box-office disappointments, and a sea of cheap imitators. All of these pretenders to throne (save for maybe Mission Impossible) lay dead his feet, the severed head of Xander Cage resting on a spike (apologies to Vin Diesel). James Bond is still shooting bad guys, sipping martinis, and bedding beautiful women. In the film world, he’s about as constant as a sunrise.
Killing James Bond seems to be the one taboo filmmakers won’t touch, at least not yet (the still unreleased No Time to Die could prove me wrong). Murdering beloved characters is fairly standard in mainstream art, but the death of Mr. Bond is an untouched subject.
Think about it: We’ve killed Superman. The Man of Steel, hero to millions, icon to legions of children, one of the most recognisable pop culture creations of the 20th century…was butchered by a roided-out rock monster in a comic book. Godzilla, a pop culture figurehead on par with Bond (and with a longer cinematic legacy) has died several times. Hell, he died in his debut film and that only seemed to make him stronger. Iron Man’s bit the dust, Han Solo sang a swan song, even Ash Ketchum died temporarily in The First (and best) Pokemon movie. But James Bond is still ticking.
The closest they’ve come to “killing” James Bond (aside from his fakeout murder in From Russia With Love) is by undercutting his playboy lifestyle through a marriage in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and a retirement-worthy romance in Casino Royale, both of which were immediately undone by the love interest’s brual murder. James Bond might want to change and settle down from time to time, but his franchise needs him horny and single, so any woman who forms a deeper connection than a one-night stand with him has to be made dead pronto.
Of course, filmmakers wouldn’t need to kill James Bond now if they’d already done so early in his cinematic history. A Bond who died in the 1960s is a Bond who doesn’t need to be killed again. And if the filmmakers could hide his death from us right under our noses, almost mocking us with the clues about his demise, all the better.
James Bond did die in the 60s, his hallucinatory death dream playing out on the silver screen. It was the dream of a man whose life already seemed like a dream, almost Freudian in its depiction of the character’s basest desires.
James Bond only lived once.
You Only Live Twice was released in 1967 to solid reviews and a $111 million box-office intake. The fifth entry in the Bond series, coming off the heels of Thunderball, the film was the last one to star Connery until his 1971 one-off return to the franchise with Diamonds Are Forever. You Only Live Twice is probably one of the most iconic Bond movies, featuring a classic villain lair in a volcano and countless tropes parodied in the Austin Powers movies. Despite its significance to the series, I’d personally rank it in the lower-B category of Bond films, although that’s neither here nor there.
For those who haven’t seen it, Twice is your standard Bond adventure, but in Japan. James Bond travels to the Land of the Rising Sun to thwart SPECTRE and his nemesis Blofeld’s scheme to start World War Three. Bond meets beautiful babes, visit gorgeous locales, and massacres dozens of people as he saves the world with a carefree smirk. Also, there are ninjas.
A crucial instigator to the plot is also the key into Bond’s death dream theory. After SPECTRE steals a spaceship in orbit (don’t ask), we see a familiar sight: James Bond bare-chested and in bed with a gorgeous woman. After asking his paramour, “Why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?” (what a charmer), Bond is trapped inside a fold-down bed. A pair of assassins enter the room and spray the bed with machine gun fire. No quips, no elaborate death traps, just straightforward murder. The police arrive on the scene to find Bond’s surprisingly-unperforated corpse. One officer says, “Well, at least he died on the job” as the dreamy title song kicks.
The film later reveals that MI6 faked Bond’s death so he could investigate SPECTRE’s scheme in Japan, a scheme that lasts approximately 10 minutes as Bond immediately blows his cover. The faked death gives the movie its zingy title and starts the plot off with a literal bang, psyching out the audience into temporarily believing their hero is dead. It’s just a diversion, right? They wouldn’t actually kill off James Bond, right? Oh, but they would.
James Bond isn’t just dead in You Only Live Twice; he’s experiencing a post-death vision of paradise.
The death dream theory relies on a key assumption that Bond is actually murdered at the start of the film. While I believe the movie provides several clues that Bond is going through a post-death fantasy, these revelations rest on the core hypothesis that he’s dead. It’s perfectly feasible in the world of 007 that MI6 would fake his death to provide a cover for him to immediately blow. But while the movie wants you think everything’s normal, its own story reveals it to be anything but.
Twice was the biggest Bond movie to date. I mean that in terms of budget, sets, and plot. It was so big the franchise felt the need to go back to (somewhat) basics with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and not even try to match Twice’s scale and scope until The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. The franchise had steadily evolved from the gritty, down-and-dirty nature of Dr. No into an all-out blockbuster that climaxed with ninjas laying siege to a volcano lair.
Bond himself had changed from a scrappy, somewhat classy government agent into a world-beating sex-god who foiled evil and averted nuclear holocausts while sipping martinis and raising an eyebrow or two.
Twice goes beyond anything seen before in the franchise. Everything in the film seems tailor-made to suit Bond’s voracious appetites for adventure, sex, and power. Once Bond dies and enters “Japan,” he steps into a fantasy realm designed to grant his every wish.
“In Japan, men always come first, women come second.” -Tiger Tanaka, You Only Live Twice
This line could be James Bond’s entire ethos. Not to burst any bubbles, but Mr. Bond is something of a misogynist, particularly when played by real-life misogynist Sean Connery. It makes perfect sense for Bond to construct a fantasy world where women fulfill his desires and smile while they do it. In perhaps one of the most gratutious scenes in the franchise, a legion of women wait on Bond in a spa, undressing and massaging him. He’s treated like a liege lord, the centre of female attention. The scene caps off with Aki, a Japanese spy who eluded Bond earlier in the movie, jumping into bed with him.
But James Bond can’t have any romantic attachments. After sleeping with Bond, Aki sticks around, helping with the plot and forming a connection (or bond, if you will) with Bond and the audience. In any other film, she’d be the love interest, the one for who the hero might make a sacrifice. But Bond, for all his skill and bravery, isn’t a typical hero, especially in his fantasy world. Bond is a man who cannot truly love, which is why Bond girls never stick around for more than one movie. He prefers to be a free spirit, able to hop from bed to bed without a care, which is why he killed Aki.
He didn’t kill her literally, but rather abstractly as the architect of the fantasy. Deep into the movie’s runtime, as Bond is training to be a ninja (and excelling at it, of course), Aki is assassinated while sleeping. She doesn’t get a heroic death by thwarting the villain before perishing; she just dies. Bond looks at her corpse like he was just told his taxes have to be refiled.
After mourning Aki (who, I should reiterate, was essentially the second main character in the movie) for precisely 30 seconds, Bond is simply given a new female companion called Kissy Suzuki. Kissy fulfills the exact same role as Aki by posing as Bond’s wife and helping him assault the volcano base, but she has the added bonus of being emotionally unattached to Bond. He can sleep with her without any pesky feelings cropping up. He simply swapped out women because Bond views women as interchangeable objects.
The action itself flatters Bond’s ego. Bond, who in previous films struggled against fellow agents and random goons, is here depicted as holding his own against trained ninjas. He receives a ridiculously-overpowered personalized autogyro and uses it to outflank and defeat four heavily-armed helicopters. He sneaks into a secret volcano lair, steals a spacesuit, and nearly gets on a spaceship to thwart the villain’s plan before he’s captured. While the villain Blofeld is monologuin, Bond’s ninja buddies start a fight and he manages escape Blofeld’s grasp, throw a guard into a piranha pool, and blow up the villain’s spaceship. Not bad for a day’s work. Bond had done big things before, but never on this level and never with so many vigourous pats on the back.
The plot itself serves Bond’s ego. After squaring off with the villainous SPECTRE in three films, Bond constructs a world where he finally confronts the enigmatic Blofeld, a character shrouded in mystery (and literal shadows) in Russia and Thunderball. Bond, pulling from his memory as he lays dying, flatters himself into meeting and defeating Blofeld, overcoming the mastermind behind several evil plots. But unlike previous villains, Blofeld escapes, managing to avoid Bond’s typical bloodlust. Blofeld’s survival only fuels the death dream theory. Forever trapped in a world based on his memories, Bond would naturally create endlessly repeating plots where Blofeld is defeated and escapes. Twice is only the beginning of a cycle.
If Twice is a death fantasy, it appears to be an ultimately grim one. Despite having everything he could ever want, Bond looks thoroughly bored in the film. He wears a perpetually glum expression on his face as if he knows these base pleasures cannot satisfy him for eternit. One could chalk it up to Connery’s fatigue with the franchise producing a mediocre performance, or his ennui could hint at a deeper theme of the ultimately unsatisfying nature of constant pleasure and wish-fulfillment. James Bond could only live once and perhaps he (and by extension us) should spend it in higher pursuits than mindless sex and violence.
“You only live twice, or so it seems/One life for yourself, and one for your dreams”-Lyrics to You Only Live Twice
Bond might have died in You Only Live Twice, but his legacy will probably outlive us all. He’s lived much more than twice up on the big screen. If there’s anything to be gleaned from his demise, aside from the need to live outside of pure fantasy, it’s this: Don’t sleep on a fold-down bed. That just makes you an easy target for assassins with machine guns. And then you’ll look silly with all those bullet holes. So be practical and sleep on a futon.