Of Migrants and Men: Networks and Nations in the Millennial Bond Text

This essay traces the evolution of James Bond in both contemporary cinema and recent fiction. Its principal aim, after theorist Vilem Flusser, might be termed an assessment of heimat in these texts construed not only as homes “encased in mystification” and grown “hallowed by habit”, but also as homelands. As Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) taunts Bond (Daniel Craig), encircled by computers in Skyfall (2012), “England. The Empire. MI6. You’re living in a ruin”. Our argument, however, focuses less on the devolution of Britain than on the migrant flows and global networks that, for better or worse, vex the very notion of the nation-state in Skyfall and Spectre (2015). In this context, the recent cinematic incarnation Bond stands as a transformed figure who exists within digital networks that transcend the Cold War binaries recent Bond novels tend to perpetuate. That is to say, unlike previous Bonds who, in the films’ final moments, enjoy dalliances in lifeboats or mini-submarines not far from the gaze of M, British intelligence, or the military – or report for duty (Skyfall) or announce their continuing service (Quantum of Solace) – in the final scene of Spectre Bond and Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) speed away from London (and not in a new Aston Martin DB10 either, but in a replica of the almost talismanic DB5 that was destroyed in Skyfall). They and the fictional heimat where 007 once resided could be going anywhere – or everywhere. Keywords: James Bond; Daniel Craig films; nation; network; migrant; nomadicism.

franchise for over sixty years and continue to define the films' critical reception.
To be sure, scenes in Casino Royale like the chiselled Craig emerging from the ocean in imitation of Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) in Dr. No and Jinx (Halle Berry) in Die Another Day, as Cox argues (2014, 188-89), reposition Bond as the feminine object of the male gaze; and the last two Craig films do reveal the influence of neoliberal and neoconservative thought, as Anderson argues (2016, 5-13).
Yet, as we hope to demonstrate, in Skyfall and Spectre such gender and political binaries are superseded by global capital, mass migration, and invasive digital networks from which the "reborn" or "resurrected' Bond is finally inseparable.
Our analysis requires the juxtaposition of such recent Bond novels as Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (2008) and Anthony Horowitz's Trigger Mortis (2015) with films like Skyfall and Spectre, a pairing most studies of the Bond phenomenon ignore. We are interested in the tension between these genres, as the novels seem to extend, in content as well as form, more traditional and ritualised conceptions of home and homeland, while the films devise more dynamic depictions of the latter in particular. Such distinctions, we believe, are grounded in the traditions within which each form is produced as well as the audiences they are intended to reach: namely, a limited English speaking and reading audience, on the one hand, and an international and postcolonial one, on the other. While traversing this terrain of Fleming and post-Fleming texts, we privilege the latter for reasons pertaining to the intertextual peculiarities that typically emerge with any media reboot: first, their frequently hypertrophic allusions to prior texts that re-inflect our understanding of the Bond franchise as it once was and where it might be going; and, second, the films' efforts to erase all traces of Bond's nuclear and extended families within a tumultuous context of migrants, refugees, and data points in the information networks that constitute our new reality.
In other words, while, as James Chapman puts it, "the twin processes of continuity and change" are "key" to the "longevity" of the Bond series of films (2001,248), recent novels guarantee only the former -an instantly recognisable Cold War Bond and a 1960s made familiar by its residue of World War Two, an emergent Vietnam conflict, the nuclear Arms race, and more. The dust jacket for Devil May Care trumpets the news that Faulks is "Writing as Ian Fleming" (with Fleming's name printed in a larger font than Faulks'); the cover of Trigger Mortis advertises that "original material by Ian Fleming" is contained within. And it is. In his "Acknowledgements", Horowitz explains his slight appropriation from an unrealised Fleming teleplay about Grand Prix racing (2015,. Even what is arguably the most accomplished of these novels, William Boyd's Solo (2013), which E.P. Comentale and S. Watt · Of Migrants and Men: Networks and Nations in the Millennial Bond Text 3 makes no attempt to ventriloquise Fleming or adapt his style, cannot escape this history. Fleming lives in these pages; he desires our attention, as Roland Barthes' playful deployment of the fetish in The Pleasure of the Text suggests (1975,27), and we desire his "vocabulary", "readability", and "references". For over half a century, itz; after all, doesn't imitating a predecessor or "borrowing" imply that the text "being evoked through allusion" possesses "an admirable creative plenitude" the later ones hope to capture? (Machacek 2007, 524). Doesn't the presence of allusion "divide an audience into those who have a cultural kinship with the author and those who do not"? (526). Fleming and a Bond many of us grew up admiring constitute that "plenitude"; together, they forge a kinship with the informed reader and, in Derridean terms, an archive of features we construct into a domicile.
But who exactly is this Cold War Bond? In "Narrative Structures in Fleming" (1984), Umberto Eco's answer inheres in the essay's title: in Bond, Fleming creates an "object" to locate in structures of opposition, an object too inhuman to benefit from the explanatory light of "psychiatry" or psychoanalysis. Eco takes seriously René Mathis's admonition to Bond near the end of Casino Royale (1953): "But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine" (Fleming 2002a, 139). And, all comic undercutting aside, Bond's mechanical quality, his physical prowess and lack of affect, is developed in numerous texts. The Man with the Golden Gun, which Eco discounts as an anomaly because of its emphasis on fetishism and phallic substitutions, contains an in-stance of this objectification: "And James Bond, if aimed straight at a known target -M put it in the language of battleships -was a supremely effective firingpiece" (Fleming 2002c, 25). More recently, in the film Casino Royale, M ( Judi Dench), angry that Bond has killed a bomb maker she wanted to question and broken into her apartment, lectures him on how Double-O agents should comport themselves. Remarking that "this may be too much for a blunt instrument to understand", she urges him to remove his "ego" from decision-making, thus in effect retaining his instrumental status. A "wonderful machine", "firing-piece", or "blunt instrument" -these characterisations support Eco's thesis that Fleming "renounces all psychology as the motive of narrative and decides to transfer characters and situations to the level of an objective structural strategy" (1984,145). And this "machine" is implicated in a relation to home in a starkly Freudian way that must be revised just as surely as Cold War politics are supplanted by a vastly different system of power in the new millennium. It is precisely these mechanical, habitual, and even ritualised structures that define not just Bond's relation to home and nation, but the Bond novel itself as a comforting dwelling place for its readers. More important, as a "machine" for producing and resolving binaries, Bond and the entire franchise still seem, despite Eco's account, implicated in a relationship to home that recalls psychoanalysis and must be revised.
Paramount in both the Fleming and twenty-first century text is the opposition between Bond and his adversary. In the former, "Bond represents Beauty and Virility as opposed to the villain, who often appears monstrous and sexually impotent" (Eco 148 her "animal instinct" that inside his "wonderful body there was an evil person" (Fleming 2002b, 8), just as the deranged mind of Chagrin, altered by Russian doctors who "cauterized an area of his temporal lobe" (Faulks 2002, 178), enables him to feel no pain and ruthlessly rip the tongues out of his victims' mouths with pliers. This monstrosity may include behaviours ranging from sadism to obsession and total asexuality, which contrast sharply with Bond's heterosexuality, even as it is influenced by his role as protector of British hegemony ("Oh, what I do for England!"). Grant in From Russia with Love "began to feel strange and violent compulsions around the time of the full moon" (2002b, 15); these feelings led him to strangle and mutilate animals, then to murder a tramp and later kill the E.P. Comentale and S. Watt · Of Migrants and Men: Networks and Nations in the Millennial Bond Text "occasional girl", although he did not "interfere" sexually with girls as heterosexual genital relations were "quite incomprehensible" to him (16). But in the later films this reliable Fleming opposition is put under pressure; the Bond who parries Silva's homoerotic advances in Skyfall with "What makes you think this is my first time?" for example, projects an ambiguity that intimates a wavering connection to home and nation. As Anderson observes, the "repeatedly affirmed heterosexuality" of Fleming's Bond acts as a "rejection of the ambiguity that Fleming saw in homosexuality, an ambiguity that was political as much as sexual" (2016,15 But, in the Craig era, a twenty-first century Bond emerges. Writing in 2006 before the first Craig film appeared, Bond novelist and aficionado Raymond Benson chronicles the shift from a "classic" Bond in the Sean Connery era, to the "action comedies" starring Roger Moore in the 1970s and 80s in which "everything was played for laughs" (2006,9). These were followed, in Benson's schema, by Timothy Dalton's "ruthless and serious" (and humourless) figure, and Pierce Brosnan's incorporation of "a little of every Bond actor who preceded him." Still, a "problem" exists, he concludes, for the future of 007: Bond simply "comes with too much baggage" (10-11).
Benson might be right, which is precisely why the Craig films work to strip Bond of cumbersome weight, starting in Casino Royale, as Katharine Cox observes, in a shower with Bond "maternally" licking blood stains from Vesper Lynd's hands and fingers after watching him kill two would-be assassins (2014,193 As this threat suggests, in the last two Craig films Bond's subjectivity moves to the foreground. So, for example, when the psychologist conducting a word association exercise with him in Skyfall utters the word "Skyfall", the dialogue changes abruptly, as does the tenor of the scene. Bond's earlier responses to "country" (England) and "murder" (employment) are immediate and cavalier; his association of "M" with "bitch" is followed by a quick cut to the viewing booth where she and her associates overhear his calculated impertinence. But when the psychologist says "Skyfall", the cheeky banter stops and, after another cut to the booth, Bond rises sturdily and says, "Done". The interview is over and the allusion to his childhood home suggests an early trauma, just as Silva reports. In short, Bond, no longer a blunt instrument, becomes something more human but ironically more fluid and emancipated as well. As the end of Spectre implies, the binaries which have grown so familiar have collapsed, as Bond is no longer an in-8 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Vol. I, Issue 1 · Spring 2017 strumentalised son; his "homes", like the Scottish ancestral manor in which he was raised, are forever altered or destroyed. Now, driving away from London, he is a refugee.
The institutions and rituals that would traditionally support Bond as a man, in other words, have dissolved beneath his feet. The destruction of both Skyfall and MI6 destabilises Bond's identity as a subject, a citizen, and an agent/worker.
In serving the nation both home and abroad, he has always followed a certain mapping of the world, one that is stable, ritualised, and hierarchical. More specifically, during the Cold War, Bond's work mostly involved restoring objects (commodities such as oil, gold, guano, etc.) to their proper places. Unlike most detectives, who work in a single place to reconstruct a sense of the past, Bond moved from one locale to the next in order to reconstruct a sense of place. In Fleming's novels and the films they inspired, he spent much of his time tracking material objects and physical bodies, using one lead after another to map out the world and the often bewildering political and economic relations between its parts. Recent novels function in much the same way, providing a nostalgic take on Bond as he maintains everything in its right place in relation to existing power structures. Same tobacco, same secretary, same car -"This was his world", according to the comfortably dry narration of Trigger Mortis (Horowitz 35). "Get a photograph. File a description. Find out more" -and in this world, Bond moves smoothly from object to object, place to place (81).
The last four Bond films imply that this world no longer functions effectively -not simply in national or imperial terms, as some have stressed, 2 but as a co- In all four recent films, the leaders of such networks are master manipulators of global capital -bureaucrats and functionaries, mostly -exploiting the gaps in national and international law to corner markets in mining, telecommunications, water resources, pharmaceuticals, and so on. Often, their tactics involve profitable destabilisations of local markets: Dominic Greene creates civic unrest in South American cities in order to erect his own puppet governments; Le Chiffre bets against the market to pad his coffers. Throughout, they remain "ghosts", as we learn from Intel in Skyfall, with "no known residence or country of origin".
They'll work with anyone, "the left or the right, dictators or revolutionaries", and they'll "kill anyone who disagrees". In these ways, the films reflect contemporary capitalism and its neoliberal manifestations, especially, according to Brian Baker, the latter's "emphasis upon free movement: of information, or resources and of the gaze", while they simultaneously advance "the necessity to police this movement and maintain borders or erect barriers to restrict this fluidity" (2009, Something of this reflection also informs the set piece of the novel, which concerns Sin's disclosure of his past. He recounts how his boyhood home was occupied first by the Japanese, noting that then his "identity" was stripped away twice from him in the North Korean attacks in 1950 and later by the retaliation of US troops, which forced him and his family to flee the region as refugees. He wit-  It is precisely Sin's fraught, violent relation to place and space that most seriously unnerves Bond, who is particularly disturbed by the extreme ambivalence with which his adversary relates to the concept of home itself. Bond wonders what "these strangely barren living conditions tell him about the man who owned the place?" "Already", we are told, "Bond feared the worse" (Horowitz 205); and it is within this crumbling order that the millennial Bond seeks to establish a place for himself. Especially in the later films, his adventures occur uncannily in deteriorating buildings and on urban construction sites, as if he is operating in a world constantly being unmade and remade beneath his very feet. At the same time, like Sin, he seems to be desperately seeking a home, breaking into M's digs seeking a kind of maternal solace (we hardly need to point out the aural similarities between "M", "Ma'am", and "Mom", with which Skyfall's script plays brilliantly). Vesper correctly pegs him as an "orphan", citing this as the origin of his desperate dedication to M and the Secret Service. The key scene -perhaps the turning point of this millennial reboot -occurs early in Skyfall, when Bond meets his new MI6 Quartermaster at the National Gallery to gather his usual set of weapons and gadgets. The encounter is immediately framed in generational terms when a younger and hipper Q compares Bond to the "grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap" in the Turner painting before them. Bond, in turn, laughs off the idea of taking orders from someone whose face still has "spots". But the men prove to be divided less by time than by technology. Q boasts he can do more damage on his laptop in his pyjamas before his first cup of tea than Bond can do in a year in the field.
As he sees it, Bond is little more than a tool programmed to pull a trigger when needed. Bond replies by affirming his humanity, specifically as it is rooted in his ability to make choices -to pull or not to pull -based on experience and some deeper, suppler ethical sense. The men reach an accord, however, in the meaning-laden exchange of a traditional gun outfitted with new technology. Q gives Bond a Walther PPK with a micro-dermal sensor in the grip that only Bond can fire, a modification that affirms the latter's unique identity as well as his ability to make choices in the field.
But this is an uneasy détente, and the structural opposition invoked by this scene continues to threaten Bond and the franchise's conventions with which we have become accustomed. Ultimately, the digital system's ability to render the spy and his shadowy crowd obsolete comes to a head in Spectre. As Director of a new Joint Intelligence Service, C proposes "More data, more analysis, less likelihood of terrorist attack", but he's secretly scheming for SPECTRE, and his plan will essentially put the world's major governments in the terrorists' hands. Ultimately, intelligence and counterintelligence merge into a single databank, one that can support any group powerful enough to access its contents -democratic or communist, nation state or corporation. As C smugly declares, after the Nine Eyes programme is officially sanctioned, "Global intelligence cooperation changes everything…[The Home Secretary] has decided to close down the Double-O programme effective immediately…It's not personal. It's the future".
This impersonality is mirrored inside of Blofeld's lair, which seems to consist of little more than rows and rows of computer terminals, each manned by faceless drones. To Madeleine's query, "What is this place?" Blofeld responds, "Information. Information is all, is it not?" To capture both the dangers and the possibilities of a world in which "information is all", particularly as it upends more traditional experiences of home and place, we turn to media theorist Vilém Flusser, whose biography almost 14 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Vol. I, Issue 1 · Spring 2017 reads like that of Bond villain. Born in Prague to a family of Jewish intellectuals, he studied philosophy at the Charles University before fleeing from the Nazis in 1939 to London, where he studied economics, and then, Sao Paulo, where he developed his vision of a new techno-utopia. As he famously declared, "I am now without heimat because too many heimats reside within me" (2003,2), and something of this melancholy underlies his thoughts on technology and culture.
Flusser's work, especially his prophetic study Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), concerns the ways in which a world saturated by telecommunication networks and digitally-produced media images tends towards two "fantastic" possibilities: both a "centrally programmed, totalitarian society of image receivers and images collectors" and a democratic, decentralised, and "telematic society of image producers and image constructors" (2011,4). His formulation addresses the impact of digital media on structures and experiences of space, specifically home and nation, linking historical shifts in technology to micro-and macro-experiences of dwelling, community, and migration. According to Flusser, the Western world has recently written itself out of its own narratives, beyond history and its relation to space, and reduced the world to bits of data, particles, and quanta. The emotional terrain of this new universe is unsettling and will remain so until apparatuses are developed that can grasp the particles and freeze them, turning the abstract into the concrete. Flusser thus envisions a world crowded with devices -cameras, tape recorders, hard-drives -able to capture the particulate universe and give it new dimensionality, thereby making quotidian reality habitable once again. In turn, a growing number of functionaries and visionaries, structurally-positioned senders and receivers who decode and recode the images, will evaluate their ability to create a sense of balance in a dangerously disintegrated world (2011, 38).
Flusser's future recalls the scene at Blofeld's lair, where, standing amidst rows and rows of processors, he flatly declares himself a "visionary". Bond winces at his self-aggrandising delusion: "Visionaries", he replies. "Psychiatric wards are full of them". This same pathology is woven into Flusser's argument, as new technologies are dangerously hypnotic, he claims, with the potential to trap or absorb their users. Flusser fears the development of programmes that extend themselves in more invasive ways, ultimately incorporating all human activity within their functioning. "In this way", he writes, "the original terms human and apparatus are reversed, and human beings operate as functions of the apparatus. A man gives an apparatus instructions that the apparatus has instructed him to give" (2011,74). At the end of this process resides Blofeld's project, the merging of discrete programmes into one global superprogramme. Writing near the end of the Cold War, Flusser envisions America and Russia as two vast technological apparatuses whose programmes will ultimately meld into one, creating a "global totalitarianism of apparatuses" that programme the same culture all over the world (2011,(74)(75). Conversely, in the potential rewiring of the system and the redistribution of media production, he contends, receivers can also become the creators of images, engaging in true dialogue with others, creating a telematic utopia, the world coded and recoded in more democratic ways. Flusser optimistically predicted, in the development of more dynamic telematic communications, a global network, the World Wide Web, obviously, at its most utopian. As he wrote in 1985, The social structure that is now appearing represents a synchronization of radiating images with the dispersed, lonely, depersonalized people who sit at the terminals of these rays. Revolutionary visualization tries to replace this structure with another in such a way that the images bring new interpersonal relationships into being and lead to new social configurations… (2011,67).
This account of the utopian potentials of new digital media may sound quaint and naïve, but it rests on a unique argument about space and place in relation to the expansive networks of digital technology, one essential to further analysis of the millennial Bond films and the dramas of citizenship and homeland they stage.
Flusser's examination of place comes as a response to the apparent "groundlessness" of the emerging digital world. At his most optimistic, he envisions a process that both scatters and realigns people into new relations with each another. Digital technology provides streams of information, which attack and erode persistent myths of region and belonging, as well as tools for creative redefinition of traffic and space. This groundless, decentralised existence is the precondition for new movement and social connections -multi-directional threadlike patterns of engagement with others, informed by a more generous sense of exchange (Flusser 2011, 64-65 Tuscany. The guiding principle is that nationalism, this invention of the enlightened seventeenth-and eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, has proven to be a catastrophic crime… (2003,(72)(73) Here, the network rises in opposition to the criminal logic of the nation, an idea that informs the four recent Bond films as intimated by the slippage between national and terrorist organisations in each. As a result, Bond's work in salvaging the national order is called into question, and the digital scheming of Silva and Blofeld are symptomatic of a future already here. Paradoxically, in order to survive at all, MI6, as protector of the nation, needs to side with the world of "shadows" against any global organisation as an agent of the future, of information, and of free exchange.
To conclude, we return to Skyfall, the film that most strenuously engages the relations between home, nation, terrorism, and digital technology. Whereas Bond once served to restore the international flows of material resources, he is now charged with the task of securing and managing data, tracking down a stolen disk that contains the names of undercover agents embedded across the globe. Here, perhaps, the film ventures into controversial territory, as it seems to advance a conservative agenda regarding the nation and security. In light of the breach, Mallory characterises the Secret Service as a "bunch of antiquated bloody idiots fighting a war we don't understand and can't possibly win".
"We can't keep working in the shadows", he insists. "There are no more shadows".
M's rejoinder affirms a more autocratic version of the nation. The terrorist in question is a former MI6 agent; "He knows us", she claims, "He comes from the same place as Bond. The same place that you say doesn't exist. The shadows".
The status of "this place" proves the central issue. If "this place" -the nationfunctions as a shadowy organisation, mirroring its enemies, it ceases to exist as a privileged place or even a place at all. Unaware of how her vision compromises the very status of the nation, M reasserts this equation of nation and shadows later in a public hearing before a Parliament oversight committee: 18 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Vol. I, Issue 1 · Spring 2017 I see a different world than you do, and…what I see frightens me. I'm frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They're not nations. They're individuals. Look around you.
Who do you fear? Can you see a face? A uniform? A flag? No. Our world is not more transparent now. It's more opaque. It's in the shadows. That's where we must do battle. 5 As Hasian argues, "The nostalgic longing here is for the return of a Cold-War ideology and form of state decision making that allows nations to fight in 'the shadows' without the encumbrances that come from too much democratic meddling" (2014, 572). But the battle seems already lost. As if on cue, Silva and his men disguised as police storm the courtroom, their entrance corroborating more than M's most immediate argument that the bad guys are very good at infiltrating national security. Rather, on some deeper level, it has become impossible to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys, to defend the nation as superior to any of the other organisations vying for rights and resources within it.
No doubt, this tension affects Bond on a personal level. After all, Silva is his professional and psychological double, and his difficult relation to MI6 and England threatens Bond's own. He has all of the data on Bond -his "pathetic love of country", his "faith in that old woman" -because they share the same profile. Their similarity makes them interchangeable and replaceable, especially within the programmatic apparatus of MI6. In this struggle, though, Bond begins to "resurrect" himself as a self, not simply by reasserting his humanity, but through his adoption of a new set of skills. Unlike M, the millennial Bond does not insist on the old ways or even the "shadowy" ways; he's handy with a laptop and can read data sets for new permutations. Indeed, Silva models a relation to data that Bond himself comes to adopt successfully. After capturing him, Silva roundly dismisses Bond's claim that he's made his own "choices" and mocks him as a mere function of M's own programme. Surrounded by computer screens and wiring, Silva depicts himself as the apotheosis of free will in the digital era: 5 As Anderson observes, M's rhetoric is eerily similar to that of former Vice President Dick Cheney's in his defence of covert state action after 9/11: "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion..." (quoted in Anderson, 10).
E.P. Comentale and S. Watt · Of Migrants and Men: Networks and Nations in the Millennial Bond Text