James Bond & Super-heroes

I disagree with the direction of the latest bond (Casino Royal). Traditional Bond fits the bill of the super hero.

Basically film Bond (different from book Bond) is a boy's fantasy world. The main sexual figure is Miss Moneypenny who despite having the closest relationship with Bond is also off limits. This fits the role of a boys mother. When Bond is playing in the back garden (the World) we know he is never in any real trouble and no matter where he is, he can usually rely upon a meet up with Q (a deus ex machina - or at least his gadgets). Q is either his father, or an Uncle figure. Q treats Bond like the schoolboy he is. If Q is not his father, then his father is the serious bloke Bond has to report back to in Whitehall - i.e. Miss Moneypenny's boss (which fits family stereotypes well too). The world of Bond is very small - just his immediate family - , and it all revolves around him.

Now this would be boring for a school boy so he needs an adventure and an adversary to pit his wits against. We know that Bond is never going to fail. His adversary is good enough to make Bond look great when he defeats him, but not so good that Bond looses. Its a bit uncanny, almost as though the adversary is an imaginary creation of Bond as he plays with his toys in the back garden.

Bond needs to create this adversary in order to show how good he is. This dialectic between the Good Guy and the Bad Guy is universal. The Good Guy needs the Bad Guy in order to look good, indeed he actually creates the Bad Guy in his struggle to be Good. Its great in films, its a nightmare when politicians start playing these games for real!

On the other hand the Bad Guy is always this mad sociopath whose only real reason for existence is killing Bond. No-one else is smart enough to even bother with. When the crunch comes however the Bad-Guy can't kill Bond though, because without Bond his fun is gone, and more importantly Bond created him!

Bond appeals to the immature male Ego perfectly - he's a Man's-Boy playing in the security of our parents home, dreaming of saving the world and getting the girl.

Typical of all Super-Heros however were he ever to get the girl in reality it would blow everything apart because he would have to acknowledge another person outside his narcisistic world. Unlike Miss Moneypenny he can't reply upon this other person because they might reject him and leave. In opening up to another consciousness the Boy-Ego no longer has the universal power it did within the play ground of its own mind and so the girl would bring about a relativising of the Boy and his realisation that he is just another ordinary individual. Thus when Super-heros fall in love they lose their special powers.

When this happens Bond would become useless to the sociopathic Bad-Guy who would lose all reason for existence himself. The whole fantasy world would disintegrate, and the games in the play ground would end.

In Casion Royal however Bond is not a true hero. His narcisism is replaced by the logic that he can't trust other people, he becomes a cold and heartless individual - a victim of the world - far removed from the cheeky, playful boy in the earlier bonds where we can indulge in a revisit of our own fun childhoods.

On the other hand it is a very stylish film, and a cinematic breath of fresh air ventilating away the stuffy fast action, fast edited, cgi rubbish in Hollywood.

Regarding my own journey at the moment, I wonder if I have not been stuck in my own Super-hero fantasy world for the last 9 years - refusing to grow up. I may be 35, but I would confess to still being a boy at heart. The question for me is, do I grow up? and if so do I "get the girl" in future (which means an awful lot of other bits of growing up)? and does growing up mean seeking satisfaction from external sources?

In Buddhism/Hinduism as I understand it, everything that we experience is created by our own deep minds. And we understand that the world and our minds are the same. So, we do not need anything from the world (because that is really our mind) before we are satisfied.

Now what is the difference between that and Super-hero narcisism? It is interesting to me that being a monk could look very much like remaining a boy!