Live and let live: why does James Bond always survive?
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all
After this September’s No Time to Die, there will have been 25 official James Bond films (15 based on Ian Fleming’s novels). In all, one rule prevails: our tux-clad, Vesper-martini-swigging hero escapes an over-complicated death scenario while the bad guy ends up getting drilled (Tomorrow Never Dies’ Elliot Carver), boiled alive (Dr No) or ejected into outer space (Moonraker’s Hugo Drax). So how come Bond always escapes?
For example, Live and Let Die’s Dr Kananga dangles Roger Moore above a pool of man-eating sharks and – oops! – Bond gets away. Goldfinger straps Sean Connery to a testicle-splicing laser and – d’oh! – Bond survives. The Spy Who Loved Me’s Karl Stromberg pointlessly stalls for time by instructing Jaws to “Wait until they get to shore then kill them” and – whaddaya know? – Bond escapes. At no point do any of these evil “geniuses” manage to complete the job. As Scott Evil says in the Spy Who Loved Me spoof Austin Powers: “Why don’t you just shoot him? What are you waiting for?” “I have a better idea,” reasons Dr Evil, “I’m going to put him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.”
So – ignoring the fact that he has to survive in order to continue the franchise – why do Bond villains favour these convoluted deaths? We all know that Bond baddies are homicidal paranoiac egomaniacs with a hidden inferiority complex who must make a masterpiece of Bond’s death. Auric Goldfinger (a plutocrat), Karl Stromberg (an oil baron) and Licence to Kill’s Franz Sanchez (a drug lord) each have CVs full of criminal experience. They’ll score far more kudos in their industry for something elaborate like lowering Bond into a pit of sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.
Blofeld lives in a hollowed-out volcano, Stromberg an underwater base and Die Another Day’s Gustav Graves in an ice palace. They must be dying to have a houseguest to try out their overpriced death traps. Shark food, winch rope and trapdoor hinge polish: the expenses for maintaining a shark pit are endless. Goldfinger’s lasers can’t have come cheap. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr Bond, at 24.9% APR, I expect you to die … slowly.”
In the novel, Goldfinger stops chopping Bond in half with a chainsaw be
cause he realises Bond is worth more to him alive and might be able to help with a heist. It’s a convoluted set-up that ends with Goldfinger bizarrely letting Bond do some typing instead. So there’s another reason for not killing Bond: you can get him to do your admin. Plus, The Man With the Golden Gun’s Scaramanga is Spanish, Blofeld is German and Franz Sanchez is Mexican, so the longer Bond is alive, the longer he’ll keep dishing out free oral lessons in the Queen’s English.
It’s not as if the baddies aren’t exasperated, too. “Why can’t you just be a good boy and die?” exhorts 006 turned Russian agent Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye. “You first,” insists Bond. Meanwhile, Hugo Drax laments: “Mr Bond. You defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you.” There, perhaps, lies the answer: not simply shooting Bond is the result of good old-fashioned British politeness.