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Popular Culture Review
“007” which graphically suggests male genitalia; the famous double-0 connote
the testicles and the 7, which quickly became a stylized gun in its visual
representation, is indeed, and without much need of Freudian theory, a phallic
symbol.8 The testicles are associated with courage, as illustrated by common
metaphorical expressions to be found in English and in many romance
languages,9 and, along with the gun, can as well be read as metonymies of
sexual activity. This convergence is clearly illustrated by the first torture scene
ever to be presented in the novels, when Le Chiffre interrogates 007 to find the
missing check in Casino Royale: Bond is tied up to a chair with no seat, “his
buttocks and the underpart of his body” (132) protruding, and with a carpetbeater, Le Chiffre targets his “sensitive parts,” in an explicit attempt to break
both his courage and his virility: “It is not only the immediate agony, but also
the thought that your manhood is being gradually destroyed and that at the end,
if you will not yield, you will no longer be a man” (137). Bond’s testicles
represent more than just his will and his virility, they are Bond 007 himself,10
and it is highly significant that the first test the hero must endure is precisely a
direct attack against the very metonymy of his section number.
We are therefore able to establish a series of meaningful correlations
between the sign “James Bond 007” and the content of the narrative syntagm to
which it refers: the biblically authoritative James, serving King and Country,
bonds the order back together thanks to his 00s and his gun, and his function as
well as his two major attributes are already semiotically included in his name
and section number.
The endurance of the James Bond narrative syntagm is nothing short of
astonishing, but the reasons for its success may very well lie in the way the
message is presented as well as in the message itself. By associating both, this
particular narrative structure offers a very high degree of internal coherence,
which might explain why it has so successfully survived historical, political, and
cultural changes, as well as countless parodies: even Mr. Bean himself" has
been unable to defeat James Bond 007. The series has demonstrated once again
its staying power with the latest very well received installment, Casino Royale
(film), which presents a more primal 007 than ever, as if re-booting the franchise
had implied a need to return towards the very basic premises of a conflict as old
as time itself. In the end, the story is the eternal conflict between good and evil,
the difference being that this particular narrative syntagm seems to tell it better.
And so, naturally, James Bond will return.
West Virginia University
Daniel F. Ferreras
Notes
Besides the abundant fan-oriented literature devoted to the subject (i.e., Dougall’s
James Bond: The Secret World o f 007, Cork’s and Stutz’s James Bond Encyclopedia,
Benson’s The James Bond Bedside Companion, Cork’s Bond Girls are Forever: The
Women o f James Bond, or Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James