That or the priesthood: Bond’s queer calling
In the world of Bond, religion is often portrayed as being as hollow as a diamond smuggler’s Bible. But questioning an institution does not necessarily preclude believing in it. Queer Christian Kathleen Jowitt uncovers deep connections between religion and 007, revealing that a monk and a hitman might have more in common than we might think.
Madeleine: Why, given every other possible option, does a man choose the life of a paid assassin?
Bond: Well, it was that or the priesthood.
It’s a line designed to raise a laugh. James Bond, notorious womaniser, killer, hedonist: a priest? Haha, no, obviously not, what a ridiculous idea.
And yet.
Sometimes the things we say in jest give away more about ourselves than we realise. And that raises questions as well as a laugh. Where does that line come from? What might be the appeal of the priesthood to the man who would instead become 007? And why on earth would I be considering any of this over here?
In this post I explore my own experience as a queer Christian and the ways that some of the religious allusions in the James Bond films and books resonate with that. I should say at the start that of course I don’t mean to suggest that religion in general, any particular religion, or any particular denomination, is inherently queer – any more than, oh, I don’t know, the fact that the more bureaucratic end of MI6 as portrayed in Fleming’s novels resonates with my experience as a trade union officer makes the Bond franchise inherently left-wing. But this is a personal piece, and I can only ask you to bear with me as I pull at some threads.
Before I begin, I also have to acknowledge the immense, ongoing, harm done to thousands of LGBT+ people by churches, and Churches, through the ages. If anyone reading this has found themselves drawn to reconcile a queer identity with Christianity, please know that you’re not the only one. If you’ve given up on the whole thing, I really can’t blame you. Either way, I hope you’ve been able to find a place that’s right for you.
So, back to Bond, where religion is often as hollow as Miss Whistler’s Bible, but more present than perhaps we might expect for what is, on first glance, a very secular world. A certain amount of this is incidental, of course: it’s difficult to film in a beautiful European city without getting a church spire (or tower, or dome, or bell gable…) somewhere in shot. Elsewhere, however, it seems to be more deliberate, and it’s those occasions that I’ll be concentrating on.
Her mother would not have it: religion in the Bond books
It feels somewhat redundant to say that Bond is not a regular churchgoer. Mary Goodnight points out as much, when he arrives in London on Christmas Day: ‘You don’t seem to know much about Christmas. You make plum puddings at least two months before and let them sort of settle and mature. And church isn’t till eleven.’ (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) In Casino Royale he seems to imagine God and the Devil as personifications of abstract concepts and to have constructed an unorthodox, rough and ready theology around his own experiences: ‘By [Le Chiffre’s] evil existence… he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist.’ And The Man With The Golden Gun shows us that Bond isn’t sufficiently familiar with Roman Catholic prayer to recognise what Scaramanga’s spouting as strategic mumbo jumbo rather than a genuine preparation for the end of his life.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service tells us that Bond had a Scottish father and a Swiss mother: a combination that suggests Calvinism, though there are plenty of Catholics in both nations. Then Bond becomes more specific: ‘My father came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe.’ That line inevitably calls to mind the Massacre of Glencoe and, with it, the tension between [Catholic] Jacobitism and the [Protestant] monarchy. Much of the subsequent action takes place in Bond’s mother’s homeland. But Switzerland, a politically neutral space, isn’t religiously neutral at all. And I’ll argue that this tension between denominations, between Catholicism and Protestantism, echoes to a greater or lesser extent through many of the books and films. The revelation of his parentage – tossed out in an attempt to get Griffon Or to shut up – echoes a considerably less flippant exchange from a few chapters earlier. When Bond asks Marc-Ange Draco why he doesn’t get Tracy to see a priest, the explanation comes in the form of some family history. While Draco is Roman Catholic, Tracy’s mother was Presbyterian. Result: deadlock. And so this tension across denominational faultlines resonates with all the other liminal spaces, all the boundaries and crossings, that we’ve come to expect from Bond.
This religious mélange feels rather familiar to me. My ancestors include Yorkshire Quakers, German Jews, and Congregationalists from Kent. And somehow I still ended up baptised into the Church of England at the age of a month and a half. Sometimes I wonder if some kind of religious entropy makes a person drift to the most respectable option. Yet I’m still very conscious of existing at the intersection of several identities. My religious identity would be as difficult to excise from myself as my queer one. And, no matter how much I might occasionally wonder whether life could be easier, I’ve no idea who I’d be without them.
The obituary in You Only Live Twice confirms Calvinism on both sides. It also gives us Eton, where Bond would certainly have encountered the established (and Establishment) Church of England in between his, er, extra-curricular activities.
The most sophisticated expression of a religious view comes, rather unexpectedly, from M. When he briefs Bond in For Your Eyes Only he introduces the mission thus: “‘Someone’s got to be tough. Someone’s got to decide in the end… Some people are religious – pass the decision on to God… I used to try that sometimes in the Service, but He always passed the buck back again – told me to get on and make up my own mind.’” I suspect this will be a familiar experience to many people who pray.
As we discover, M has a rather irregular mission in mind, which is perhaps what gives space for this (slightly embarrassing?) openness. The narrative tells us that “Bond didn’t like personal questions” – which seems to be as much a response to M’s uncharacteristic moment of openness as it is to the personal question he’s just asked. He hesitates a little and ends up proving M’s point: “‘Of course it’s not easy to know what is just and what isn’t. I suppose that when I’m given an unpleasant job in the Service the cause is a just one.’”
From a more personal point of view, I get the faint but distinct sense that my religious identity, my queer identity, my identity as a religious queer person, are rather awkward and embarrassing in a very similar way to each other: well of course we don’t mind you being like this, but do you have to make it so obvious? And I’m Church of England, the unmarked default, at least until you start actually practising it. We are talking about vastly different levels of privilege, of course – when I was at school, for example, the daily act of worship was mandatory while the “promotion of homosexuality” (i.e. any mention of queerness whatsoever) was illegal – but I can’t deny a certain resonance.
Embarrassment aside, M’s point is one that isn’t always appreciated: a religious faith very rarely gives one an infallible answer to the question of what’s the right thing to do, and sometimes you have to own your choices. The greater degree of autonomy afforded to someone of M’s seniority makes it more likely that such difficult choices come his way more often. ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s what I’m paid for. Someone’s got to drive the bloody train.’ And indeed, Bond’s at his most interesting when he’s feeling the weight of responsibility, or doubting the justness of his cause. And himself. I’ll come back to that later.
So much for the books. The films – before the Craig era, at least – don’t give us anything near as definitive or as coherent as the You Only Live Twice obituary. However, there are hints, and I would argue that the hints point in a specific direction.
A priest hole, from Reformation times: recusancy and respectability
I’m going to return to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For me, this is the point where the backstory of the Bond of the films diverges from that of the books. You’ll recall that Bond ends up learning that he may be a descendant of the Bond family of Peckham, Surrey, the Bonds who built Bond Street. In the book, as I noted above, he explicitly disavows that. In the film, he’s quite happy to roll with it.
Which begs the question: why make that change? Snobbery? Well, perhaps, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. My guess is that a series that was experimenting with a new actor in the title role for the first time needed to find a sense of stability quickly, and an aristocratic, slightly romantic heritage coupled with an address that everyone knows from the Monopoly board was as good a way as any to achieve that. It seems to work. Two actors and three decades later, Pierce Brosnan’s Bond acknowledges the connection, albeit obliquely: ‘Family motto’.
What’s interesting about the real-life Bond family is that they were recusants – Roman Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services after the Reformation. It seems to me that the film continuity pays at least lip service to this.
For example, I can never quite get past the fluency with which Bond utters the phrase, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned” in For Your Eyes Only. I know. It’s a pass phrase. And a cheap gag, particularly coupled as it is with Q’s reply (“That’s putting it mildly, 007”). And yet. This is Greece. That’s an Eastern Orthodox church, not a Roman Catholic one (and goodness only knows why there’s a confessional on the far side of the iconostasis, where only priests should go, unless Q put it there specially). And while it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone might use those words to confess to an Orthodox priest, it’s a very Roman Catholic line.
That wasn’t the first hint. In The Spy Who Loved Me Bond identifies the half-concealed stamp seen behind the blueprint of the submarine tracker as reading ORATORY (‘another word for chapel’, as Bond explains – and a word that’s probably most familiar to a British audience in the name of the Brompton Oratory, one of London’s most famous Roman Catholic churches). He interprets the logo as a bishop’s mitre. Meanwhile, (presumably atheist) Anya correctly recognises the word as part of LABORATORY and the picture as a fish. A little further back in time, there’s the funeral at the opening of Thunderball, a magnificently flamboyant affair in a French church with incense, tall candles, mourners in mantillas, and a coffin draped in black with a ‘JB’ monogram. No, it’s not James Bond’s – but it has us fooled for a second.
The Craig era leans rather harder on that Catholic heritage. In Casino Royale, Bond suggests that M wants him to be ‘half monk, half hitman’. The question of religion doesn’t come up during Bond’s and Vesper’s mutual cold reading on the train to Montenegro, but we learn when they arrive at the hotel that she’s a Roman Catholic, and they do seem to have a lot of other things in common. (‘I do hate it when religion comes between us,’ Bond observes.) Skyfall gives us a priest hole in his family home. (Although they do seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it. The Bonds of Bond Street were from Surrey, not Scotland.) And, of course, that line about the priesthood. The word ‘priesthood’ itself is very suggestive. You wouldn’t catch a Calvinist saying that. ‘Ministry’ would be more likely.
Particularly in England, there’s a continuing tendency for Roman Catholicism to be seen as other, the subject of romanticising and condescension, its members assumed to be loyal to the Pope rather than the Queen. This is something that dates back to the sixteenth century, and recent events have shown that this prejudice remains regrettably common in political discourse. Think back to the sixties and some of the rhetoric around the Kennedy presidency. Or look out of the window on the fifth of November. Guy Fawkes still goes to his annual bonfire.
And this is where some of the parallels with queerness come in: that experience – in this country, at least – as a distrusted minority. In the second half of the twentieth century, a Roman Catholic might well have been seen to be a security risk in much the same way as a gay man would have been seen as a security risk. The justification would be slightly different, divided loyalties rather than a potential blackmail target, but the sentiment behind it would be the same: not to be trusted, because not one of us. It doesn’t feel entirely coincidental that the 2006 Casino Royale makes Vesper a Catholic, or that the moment of her betrayal takes place in what appears to be some kind of religious house (shortly after she’s entered the account number into Mendel’s machine, you can see an out-of-focus figure in a religious habit). Even her tombstone (unmistakably Roman Catholic: compare it to Tracy’s) becomes a locus of mistrust and betrayal, though it isn’t immediately apparent whose.
It’s interesting, too, that the films that hint most strongly and consistently at a Catholic identity for Bond are those featuring Roger Moore and Daniel Craig, perhaps the most ‘English’ of them. In Pierce Brosnan’s tenure it isn’t mentioned at all beyond the “family motto” line. Well, maybe that was because it was the nineties and we famously ‘didn’t do God’ then, but I can’t help wondering whether it’s as much pandering to real or perceived prejudice against Irish Catholics. Sometimes it almost feels as if Bond’s otherness has to be maintained at a very specific level to keep the viewing public happy. Just enough. Not too much.
And that otherness is situated not only in the divergence from the norm (in this case, the Church of England) but in one particular, distinctive, expression of faith: celibacy. Celibacy, a deliberate choice not to engage in sexual activity, can be interpreted as a challenge to heteronormativity. [What I won’t explore here is the current approach taken by some churches and Christian groups, of acknowledging that some people have a queer identity but requiring them not to engage in sexual activity.This isn't really what I mean by 'celibacy'!]
Vesper’s Roman Catholic identity is certainly an obstacle to Bond’s pursuit of her in the 2006 Casino Royale. The mass (pun not intended) taking of the veil by all the girls in the 1967 version can actually be read as being pretty queer in its rejection of future heterosexual possibilities. Historically, entering the priesthood has been a way for a man to remain unmarried without raising eyebrows (and that’s been true in certain parts of the Church of England as well as in the Roman Catholic Church). With marriage rates plummeting over the last half century, it’s easy for us to underestimate how important that might have been in the 1960s. But “not the marrying kind” is a euphemism for a reason.
I’m not going to ask you to change: disrupting relationships
So what of James Bond? I am of course not claiming that a man who gets laid on average twice per movie is a celibate. I do want to stress how incompatible his profession is with the stereotypical heteronormative lifestyle, and how often he is presented with a choice between marriage and his job. Usually he chooses the job. Sometimes the job chooses him. Either way, the narrative seems to tell us, this job is so demanding, so overwhelming, that it is going to ask for his soul as well as his body, and he will not be in a position to commit to another person until he is released from or resigns from his existing commitment. And sometimes the narrative removes the personified threat to that commitment, whether that’s tacitly, between episodes, or, as with Vesper and Tracy, violently, on screen. There’s a choice to be made.
Even in denominations where clergy are permitted to marry, a vocation presents significant disruption to heteronormative assumptions. No matter how much a priest loves their partner, something – someone – else comes first. Sometimes that’s healthy; sometimes it’s downright destructive. It runs all the way from a robust assertion of one’s own identity and priorities to the total subordination of the relationship to the institution. And plenty of partners have said, like Madeleine Swann, that they can’t choose this life: ‘And I’m not going to ask you to change; you are who you are.’ It’s a costly decision for everybody. For LGB clergy in the Church of England, marriage to a same-sex partner isn’t permitted (this, among other reasons, is why you won’t hear me saying that we have ‘equal marriage’ in the UK – yet) and we’ve ended up with a convoluted variation on the old ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy where a member of the clergy can be in a civil partnership with a member of the same sex but can’t marry them. (Because apparently people in civil partnerships don’t have sex while married people do…?! I know. I know.)
It’s not just Bond. MI6 is full of single people. That’s easy enough to explain: the nature of the job is such as to make maintaining a relationship challenging if not impossible, and that holds true for the backroom staff as much as for the front line. In the books, Bond is constantly wondering when Miss Moneypenny or Miss Ponsonby will get married. This is underpinned, of course, by a rather misogynist ambivalence: if they don’t do it soon, it will be ‘too late’ and they will no longer be attractive; on the other hand, marriage will remove them from the workplace (and Bond’s gaze) due to a real or perceived marriage bar. The further away the setting of the films gets from the setting of the books, the harder it becomes to remember that, and the more of a joke Miss Moneypenny’s spinsterhood becomes. But at the time of writing it would have been a stark choice between the job and a marriage. (As the films move out of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the social mores change, but the tension between your work and your life remains. The job drags you away from your date at the theatre. Or it shows up at your place when you’re preparing for an intimate dinner with your partner. I think a lot of clergy would sympathise.)
That’s before we get to M, who seems to spend most of his free time at his club and keeps a stereotypically ‘bachelor’ household. And that’s before we so much as mention the fact that obedience is a vital aspect of an agent’s identity. Bond and his colleagues are bound to follow orders – literally, to obedience. (Poverty and chastity, of course, not so much.) I’ve mentioned before that Ian Fleming frames this dynamic in terms of a religious vow – a marriage vow, to be precise. The films don’t put it quite like that, but, in a series that’s often flippant, it’s always taken seriously. ‘We’re not a country club,’ is how M responds to Bond’s resignation in Licence To Kill. Is it too much of a stretch to see M, the man who holds ‘a great deal of [Bond’s] affection, and all his loyalty and obedience’ (Diamonds Are Forever) as the abbot, the father of the house?
Defender of the so-called faith
However monastic the set-up appears to be, MI6 is by no means a Roman Catholic establishment. (Except for that one time in Moonraker when much of it gets temporarily relocated to an abbey which is supposed to be in Brazil.) There’s a portrait of the Head of a different Church in Miss Moneypenny’s office: our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth. However elaborate the recusancy backstory gets, Bond remains a part of that. By contrast with the Roman Catholic extravaganza in Thunderball, his own burial at sea in You Only Live Twice is impeccable Book of Common Prayer.
The Church of England’s unique role as the Established Church leaves it performing a balancing act, called both to hold the nation to account and to shore up what we vaguely understand as our way of life. This isn’t the place to assess how successful it is in either task, but I do see a parallel with the role of the secret service as shown in Bond.
Through the books, and up until the end of the Moore era, this is relatively straightforward. We’re on the side of right, anyone who disagrees with us is wrong, and Bond can be sure that the cause is a just one. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the traditional enemy disappears and things get complicated. (‘Christ, I miss the Cold War.’) MI6 is forced to take a look at itself, and it doesn’t always like what it sees.
We see the institution staring down the barrel of the twenty-first century, trying to work out how to remain relevant, attempting to correct some of the more glaring injustices of the past without alienating what it thinks is its core audience. I can’t help noting that the first women priests in the Church of England were ordained in 1994, a bare year before GoldenEye gave us the first female M. (It took another two decades to get the first female bishop, a more appropriate comparator.) Through the Brosnan and Craig years, the films constantly question the concepts of patriotism, Britain, capitalism, empire, and the British Establishment.
And the Church of England remains an intrinsic part of the British Establishment, with the monarch as its symbolic head and unique representation in the House of Lords. Trevelyan alludes to this – not flatteringly – when he calls Bond ‘Her Majesty’s loyal terrier. Defender of the so-called faith.’ It’s a neat transferral: usually ‘defender of the faith’ refers, of course, to the sovereign, not her agent. (Ironically enough, this was an epithet bestowed on Henry VIII by the Pope before the whole marriage question got out of hand; the British monarchy has hung onto it long after the Reformation.) Here he means, I think, that Bond is the defender and the faith is the idea of Britain. The only church we see in GoldenEye (a Russian Orthodox one) is a location of betrayal: Boris invites Natalya there so that she can be captured by Xenia.
Indeed, themes of betrayal criss-cross the film; very few people can be trusted. And Britain, from Trevelyan’s point of view, is faithless. His phrasing stacks the religion on top of the nation and renders both of them hollow. It’s a tempting but troubling equivalence, not as easily dismissed as we might like it to be. Bond has to acknowledge that the handing over of the Lienz Cossacks exposes the flaws in the nation he serves. ‘Not our finest hour.’
And the consciousness of MI6 being all too fallible echoes through the rest of the Brosnan era, laying the ground for a more thorough examination of the institution and its agent in the reboot. One of the most interesting things about the Craig tenure is the way it examines the role of M. Never before Skyfall had we had an M who not only ‘fucked up’, but also admitted it. I was rather worried that the reinstatement of the traditional wood-panelled office would signify a return to the infallible old man. That didn’t come to pass. Mallory’s M gets it wrong too. And that, I think, is healthy. For all that Brosnan’s Bond claims never to have grown up at all (Tomorrow Never Dies), he’s exploring a new sense of responsibility – and that’s something that holds true to a greater or lesser extent through all the subsequent films. He can’t, or he doesn’t, hide behind his orders any more. Like M in the For Your Eyes Only novella, he’s driving the bloody train.
Sometimes he seems uncertain of his destination, however, or, at least, of why he wants to go there. He tasks Renard with the assertion that he ‘believes in nothing’; when Renard retorts, ‘And what do you believe in? Preservation of capital?’ Bond is silent. A couple of films later, we get something that’s almost an answer, but it doesn’t come from Bond: Le Chiffre ‘believe[s] in a reasonable rate of return.’ As the old certainties continue to disintegrate, Quantum of Solace seems to align the Christian faith with a left-wing ideology in an idealistic system of government (‘The Haitians elect a priest who decides to raise the minimum wage from 38 cents to one dollar a day’) that’s fatally vulnerable in the face of the corrupt capitalism that the villains personify. How things change.
Die Another Day shows us that Bond is as expendable as any other agent – like Trevelyan before him, and like Silva in Skyfall, who is very ready to express his sense of betrayal in religious terms, urging M to ‘Think on your sins’ in message after message. There’s been a strong sense of cynicism around MI6 ever since the Dalton days. You might be one of the good ones. They won’t thank you for it.
For me, as a queer Anglican, this resonates. This sense of belonging to a body that may well be prepared to sacrifice me to what it sees as the greater good, in which it sometimes feels as if my acceptance is conditional upon my adhering to a particular set of values or behaviours, is more familiar than I’d like. As much as I draw a distinction between the kingdom and the Kingdom, as much as I mutter about patriotism being one of the great idols of this Established Church, I have to admit that I see the relationship between the individual and the institution reflected here. Like Bond, I could leave. I don’t.
And if you take the Established Church and add a dash of Roman flavour, you get Anglo-Catholicism, which tends to run pretty queer. A strong tradition of asceticism is balanced by aestheticism; the ‘beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 29) often becomes the holiness of beauty, an appreciation of the world and the good things in life. Christianity is a peculiarly physical religion, one which teaches that God has been and continues to be embodied (and who made sure there was some really, really good wine the one time he showed up at a wedding). The ritual of Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism express this in a particularly physical manner; it’s not altogether surprising that the spectacle of the Bond films makes use of the rich visual element of the religion.
Leaving aside the more superficial stereotypes (a fondness for gin, a pedantic concern with the precise length of lace on one’s cotta, an interest in the aesthetics of ecclesiastical fixtures and fittings – Sir Hilary Bray and his brass rubbings, anybody?), the ‘High’ end of the Church of England (i.e. the grouping that tends to acknowledge more of an influence from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches) has long been known as a safer space for gay people – well, gay men, at least; its record on the inclusion of women is more mixed – than the ‘Low’ end. (The priest at the beginning of For Your Eyes Only, incidentally, looks fairly High Church of England to me: he’s wearing a full collar and a cassock outside of service times, while his church is a standard-issue Anglican parish church.) My own comfort zone is somewhere in the middle. If only I could always be sure of a welcome.
A monk or a hitman
‘If they’d wanted his soul, they should have made a deal with a priest,’ Bond tells M in Quantum of Solace when she complains about Le Chiffre’s death. But looked at from a certain angle, the monk and the hitman, “the priesthood” and “that” aren’t so very far apart from each other. Both have a connection with death in a way that most of us prefer not to think about. The priest comes face to face with the worst aspects of human nature, and, through their sacramental actions, pronouncing forgiveness, restores the world to rightness. Particularly in the ‘darker’ films, there’s a certain subtext: Bond does the dirty work so that we don’t have to. His sacrifice – of a ‘normal life’, of his conscience – is what allows the rest of us to sleep safe in our beds. The scene in Casino Royale where he sucks imaginary blood from Vesper’s fingers makes for a visceral illustration of this. He’s taking her guilt on himself, but there’s a price: ‘You do what I do for too long and there won’t be any soul left to salvage.’
Much as I love thrillers, there’s usually a point in the plot when I’m reading or watching through my fingers, so to speak. It’s not the climactic final battle: I’m usually too absorbed by then. It’s not even the obvious trap that the hero’s blithely walking into about half-way through. No, it’s the moment when the protagonist is invited onto the mission in the first place. Someone tells them, This job needs doing. You’re the person to do it. It’s likely to be unpleasant and dangerous, and your life will never be the same again. Of course you’re free to refuse, but…
It’s the moment that Joseph Campbell describes as the “call to adventure”. Critics can be a bit overkeen on squeezing all sorts of plots into the Hero’s Journey structure, but I think it’s apposite here. The call to adventure is often followed by the “rejection of the call” but eventually the hero will answer it.
Because yes, I know perfectly well that our hero is going to take them up on the offer. Even if they refuse at first, something will happen in the next couple of scenes to make them reconsider. After all, there are still two hundred pages or an hour and a half to go and it’s going to be hard to fill those if they don’t. All the same, there’s usually a part of me that’s inwardly screaming, ‘No! Say no! Enjoy your quiet life!’
I say usually. In recent years there’s been one exception, and I’m pretty sure it says more about where I was at the time than about the book I was reading, excellent as it was. That book was The Night Manager by John Le Carré.
And when I got to that moment in The Night Manager, I understood. I understood that of course Jonathan Pine was going to give up his secure job as the night manager, was going to take this job, was going to put himself through whatever it took to get the job done and get to the end of the book. Not just because of the demands of the narrative, but because that was who the character was: he was someone who was going to say yes when that invitation came.
What was going on for me at the time? I was, for the second time in my life, exploring a call to ordained ministry in the Church of England – in layman’s (ha!) terms, I was trying to find out whether I was meant to become a priest/vicar/minister/someone with a dog collar, anyway. (No sniggering at the back there. As Dr Jones would say, I’ve heard all the jokes.) I was seriously considering upturning my whole life, leaving a secure, well-paying, job, in order to study for three years, take a pay cut, take on all kinds of unspeakable parish politics, take my work home with me (or, more accurately, invite my work into my home), and probably live in a freezing Victorian vicarage. Because that, at that moment, seemed to be who I was. Someone who would say yes when that was asked of her.
My experience of a religious calling has been eerily similar to my experience of queerness. There’s the consciousness that acting on this will have implications for the whole of the rest of my life, for my career, for my identity, for my relationships. There’s the conviction that acknowledging it is nevertheless vital for my personal integrity: if this is who I am, there’s no sense in hiding it from myself. There’s the sense that I didn’t choose this, but that it isn’t something that I can reject. There’s the endless second-guessing and self-doubt, resolved in my case – in both cases – by the realisation that nobody for whom this wasn’t true would spend this much time worrying about it.
We never see Bond’s call. By the time we meet in him in Casino Royale (1953 book or 2006 film) he’s been working for MI6 for a while. In the book, the call was part of his war service, done and dusted; in the film, he’s finishing off his induction, learning on the job – what we might call his curacy, if curacy involved killing people. With that out of the way, it’s routine. Each briefing we see him receive reinforces the assumption of his fundamental obedience: he committed to this long ago. As for his occasional rebellions, they always seem to me to be an expression of dissatisfaction with the institution rather than a rejection of the mindset that led him to belong to it in the first place. Refusing to kill first Kara and then Pushkin in The Living Daylights, because his belief is that the greater good will not be served by his so doing, he affirms rather than undercuts his sense of duty. His actions in Licence To Kill are more motivated by his relationship with Felix, but I get the sense that there’s a perception of injustice there that goes deeper than the personal. His more recent habit of disappearing off the radar only to reappear when something piques his professional curiosity or sense of duty demonstrates that it’s not a calling he’ll ever really leave behind. All the same, he’s moved on a long way from the man who would assume that ‘the cause is a just one’.
My vocation walked out on me in Paperchase in St Pancras station (liminal spaces, anyone?). I’d gone in to buy a new notebook in which to continue reflecting on my experience of vocation and the vocations process, and was struck by a sudden, emphatic sense that I wouldn’t need another one. The next day, on the way to church, I understood what that meant. I cried all through the service. Two days after that, the House of Bishops put out a statement on marriage and civil partnerships that was even more tin-eared than usual. The following Sunday I wore a rainbow skirt to lead the prayers. It was a bit of a week. Twenty months on, the faith remains. So does the queerness.
Once when you are born/and once when you look death in the face
As I’ve already noted, Bond’s encounters with what might be called ‘normal life’ are always slightly shaky. I began writing this piece long before the release of No Time To Die, but I couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of this point than the final moments, where his brief enjoyment of an unexpected family life has to be sacrificed in order to save the people who comprise it. We frequently see weddings and funerals used in the Bond films as a kind of shorthand for that ‘normal’ life, one from which Bond himself is excluded, but which is at the same time hollow and hypocritical.
I mentioned Mary Goodnight’s line about Bond’s not knowing much about Christmas in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service above, but I wonder whether it’s meant more to underscore the absence of any family life: going to church would have been an integral part of the Christmas festivities in 1963 to a much greater extent than it is today, and both characters couple the religious activity of churchgoing with the secular ritual of making the pudding. (By the way, I disagree with Mary Goodnight: the pudding should be made on the Sunday before Advent, which can’t be more than six weeks before Christmas.) This feels rather like a precursor to two repeated motifs: interrupted weddings and funerals that aren’t what they seem.
The familiar words of the liturgy – ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes,’ Bond remarks as Peter Franks’ body reaches the end of its journey – are evocative of a shared culture, a way to deal with an important life (or, in this case, death) experience. But they’re undermined either explicitly or implicitly. Familiar phrases are qualified and destabilised. ‘Till death us do part, or thereabouts.’ I’ve written before about the incongruous use of ‘love, honour and obey’ in From Russia With Love. We’ve heard those words, we’ve stood in the cemetery or the crematorium or the church, supporting or saying goodbye to loved ones at funerals or weddings. There’s always a slight dissonance when they show up in Bond, the verbal equivalent of the pageboys and flower girls hurrying to pick up Bond’s and Felix’s trailing parachutes as they enter the church for the Leiter wedding in a subversion of the visual of a bride’s train.
But what of the changes which these ceremonies represent?
Bond’s own marriage is famously doomed. A hurried affair (we don’t actually see the wedding in the film, just the reception; in the book it takes place in the British Consul General’s drawing-room), its tragic end forms the tragic finale. His sham marriage to Kissy Suzuki lasts longer – quite some time longer, in the novel. Mind you, that’s only sustained by dedicated deception on her part, and it doesn’t survive an encounter with the word Vladivostok. Like all of Bond’s relationships, The End marks the end. The films deal with this by tactfully ignoring it. We don’t hear anything of Kissy at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – not that we would really expect to. The amnesiac opening of the film of Diamonds Are Forever sits less comfortably.
Nor do other marriages fare much better. Felix and Della Leiter manage less than a day before the groom is deprived of his leg and the bride of her life. Elliot and Paris Carver’s relationship is marked by mutual distrust well before Bond interferes. Some unfortunate extras in Live And Let Die have their wedding cake demolished by a flying speedboat; it happens again in A View To A Kill, except Bond does it without the boat. Then there’s the utter alienation and bleakness of the marriage depicted in the short story Quantum of Solace. And there are probably operas with a more cynical take on the institution than The Marriage of Figaro, of which we get a few bars in The Living Daylights, but I’m having trouble thinking of them. There are pages more that could be written about Bond and marriage, but it tends to come down to the same conclusion: heteronormativity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Or, as we might put it these days, are the straights OK?
Funerals don’t stick, either – at least, not for the supposedly deceased. Think of the elegant floating hearse in Moonraker, the contents of whose coffin turns out to be very much alive and deadly. And in Live And Let Die the fake funeral seems to be an established assassination method. Very few corpses turn out to be a) who they’re advertised as; and b) genuinely dead. And in the case of both Sir Robert King in The World Is Not Enough and Marco Sciarra in Spectre not all of the mourners are 100% genuine.
I’ve already mentioned the funeral that opens Thunderball. Yet again, the deceased isn’t actually deceased. Bond himself gets in on the act in You Only Live Twice in another funeral that isn’t. In fact, that one reminds me more of a different ritual altogether. Dressed in white, plunged into water, he’s reborn with a new name. That, to me, sounds very much like a baptism. As with all these other ceremonies, it’s something more than a parody and something less than the truth. Bond’s new identity as Fisher (there’s a name with some associations, by the way) is a disguise, not his true self, and it doesn’t last much longer than his sexual liaisons. By the time we get to Skyfall, ‘resurrection’ has become ‘a hobby’.’
At one level, of course, it’s all very simple. Each episode needs to leave space for the next one. Bond needs to start the next film alive – and single. But the cumulative effect is to produce a sense of lassitude, of dissatisfaction. The stability that’s restored is only ever temporary. The world is not enough. And we do not hear of heaven.
That we, being defended from the fear of Blofeld, may sip our martinis in rest and quietness…
So where does that leave us? Bond shows us an institution rooted deep in the Establishment but bound to question it, fiercely protective of its ideals, while frequently brought face to face with its own shortcomings and remaining cynical about human nature; attracted by the aesthetics of Roman Catholicism while often rejecting them in favour of a muscular asceticism. It gives us a name that we know immediately, but one which identifies a multi-faceted identity that becomes more complicated the more you look into it. No wonder this queer Anglican finds the whole thing fascinating.
And on that note, I’m going to leave you with one of the finest fanworks I know. For those unfamiliar with the choral tradition (not, I may say, a noted hotbed of heterosexuality) of the Church of England, this might need a little context. The Book of Common Prayer directs that Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer should be said daily. In some places, ‘said’ has become ‘sung’. These services were adapted from the monastic ‘hours’: Evening Prayer, for example, is a combination of Vespers and Compline. A search for ‘Choral Evensong’ will give you the idea. And many composers have created musical settings of the words of the services.
One of those settings is this masterful set of responses. Performed exceptionally well by the choir (I’ve seen the sheet music: this is not an easy sing), with reverent irreverence, and some absolutely luscious harmonies, this is a tribute from one camp British institution to another. Enjoy.
Kathleen Jowitt is a trade union officer and novelist who writes contemporary literary fiction exploring themes of identity, redemption, integrity, and politics. She lives in Ely.
www.kathleenjowitt.com
Read about Kathleen’s life-changing decision in Paperchase here:
https://kathleenjowitt.com/2020/11/30/a-story-from-two-blue-notebooks/
Read Kathleen’s previous piece for Licence To Queer here:
Some images taken from the always invaluable Thunderballs
