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Posted Sunday, Nov 3, 2002; 2.02 p.m. GMT
On Nov. 18, Queen Elizabeth will go to the movies for the only time this year, to Die Another Day's world premiere at London's Royal Albert Hall. We'll probably never know whether the Queen was amused, but it's only proper that she should come out to support Bond: after all, he has been in Her Majesty's public service for 40 years (50 if you count the books) as a stalwart of the British film industry and global ambassador of British cool — even before Cool Britannia existed.
When Bond first introduced himself onscreen in 1962, Britain's geographic Empire was breaking up, but its cultural one was burgeoning. Even then, in the era of the Beatles and Carnaby Street, the dinner-jacketed Cambridge grad seemed curiously old school. Still, he has managed to age gracefully — that is, barely at all. His country is fixed in amber, too — which is also part of the appeal. In a Bond film, Britain is still a superpower. In The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the villain Stromberg captures three nuclear submarines — one American, one Soviet and one British — and only Britain, thanks to 007, can respond. In 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, China and Britain teeter on the brink of a bilateral war. Tony Blair may be accused of being George W. Bush's lapdog, but in Bond's world, "the Anglo-American special relationship is turned upside down," says James Chapman, a film historian and author of Licence to Thrill, a cultural history of Bond. Americans — from CIA agent Felix Leiter to the NSA's Falco (Michael Madsen) in Die Another Day — just play backup to the real global policeman who saves all in the name of Queen and Country. Bond — part trad gentleman, part liberated hedonist, all Brit — is, in Chapman's words, "an exception to the rule of American cultural imperialism [and] the Coca-Colonization of global culture."
Nobody seems to mind this form of British imperialism. In fact, we kind of like it. EON says that more than 2 billion people have seen a Bond film, and you only have to look around Cádiz to see the hold Bond has on the popular imagination. The 007 shoot makes the front pages every day; the Diario de Cádiz reports that Berry's "figure is so fine that it will give ammunition to the poets at Carnival time." Hundreds of locals play hooky from work and school to stake out shoot locations in the hopes of seeing stars. And even Crown Prince Felipe, in town for some official engagements, clears space in his diary for a chat with Brosnan.
If culture really is globalizing, then Bond is part of the movement. We know the catchphrases and we've seen the spoofs from Casino Royale to Austin Powers to The Simpsons (Homer goes to work for a Bondlike baddie), but far from hurting Bond, the parodies and takeoffs only keep him on our cultural radar.
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