While the sui generis formulae of James Bond movies represents itself through constant renewal — via rotations in leading men, colorific shifts in landscape, vertiginous innovations in technology, and the turnstile flow of femme fatales and psychedelic villians — despite these changes, and notwithstanding the terms of a culture industry that demands if not artsy progress then industrial progression; it is — after 53 years, 21 movies, and 6 exemplars — at least interesting to note how the stable image of Bond, as imperious, inviolable and invulnerable, has moved from the nonaligned and pulp to the more-and-more formalized.
Thus the slow, half-century shift from the brusque Sean Connery to the anal-retentive Pierce Brosnan, and now an abrupt turn towards the pale, anodyne personification of Daniel Craig, who, compared with the previous versions, embodies a more aberrant cinematic image of Bond that is nonetheless closer to Ian Fleming's literary original. Described by Fleming in the first novel as "a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department", it is formally prescriptive that Craig look like a man who is fated to have his testicles ritualistically whipped with a carpet beater. And so it is the surprising appearance/grotesquerie of this scene in Casino Royale that irreverently upends the imperial image of Bond while making this contemporary version such an anachronism. Usually, the pro forma narrative of Bond movies is that its hero, an avatar of male sophistication and infallible Brit resolve, merely faces the threat of physical danger without suffering the consequences of actual physical pain. This empty threat, of course, plays itself out in the films as a resolution that is entirely image-conscious: the form-and-content product of a highly structured design that aligns an elegantly embodied archetype of stoic, arch perfection with its similarly minded methodical conception. Or rather: No style with imperfection. No pleasure with the mess of pain!
This impetus towards the high and formal — with the image of perfection as its objective — is, as Rodney Graham amusingly reveals, perfectly neurotic; and as an appropriately illogical artistic exercise, his sculpture/book/poster Casino Royale – Sculpture de Voyage (1990) burlesquely interpellates the testicle-beating scene of Fleming's novel as a visceral abstraction submitted within the square geometries of one of Donald Judd's specific objects. And so it is Graham's absurd conflation of emasculating torture with the rigorous features of minimal art that makes a mind-blowing point of leveling the distinctions between the corporeal with the material while simultaneously gesturing to blind the twin templates of male mastery (the high modernism of spy films and minimalism) by imposing them on top of each other and undermining their supposed autonomy in a weird, byzantine form of genre-specific vandalism. Therein lies the suggestion — that from the perspective of industrial production, the surfeit of perfection has the potential to generate its own latent forms of disorder. Or rather: More style with imperfection. More pleasure with the mess of pain!
