James Bond 007
and the Name of the Order
Along with “Shaken not stirred,” “Bond, James Bond” might be the most
well-known sound bite associated with 007, and these are precisely the initial
words pronounced by Sean Connery facing the camera in Dr. No, the first film
adaptation of an Ian Fleming novel. Since then, this self-introduction has
become a trademark of the character and has been repeated throughout every
installment, prompting the question of its actual significance. As James Bond
moved from the text to the screen, hence becoming a true popular culture
phenomenon, these words acquired a new semiotic content beyond their direct,
semantic value, and the name of James Bond 007 has come to suggest the entire
content of the narration to which it is associated.
After all, except for the slightly surrealistic notion of a secret agent
apparently always eager to introduce himself, this sequence offers very little
meaning, hardly enough to justify becoming one of the most famous lines of
modem cinematographic history. This celebrated one liner, as well as the
“shaken, not stirred” Martini bit, is far from occupying the same importance in
Fleming’s text as it does in the films and was never considered as a trade mark
of the protagonist until the story crossed from literature to cinema. On the
screen, these words found themselves magnified to the point of becoming a
micro-structure of the entire narration, suggesting by themselves the entire
James Bond universe; we have come to expect them in every installment of his
adventures, regardless of time and trends, and they appear symbolically at the
very end of the recent Casino Royale, which represents some fashion of a new
beginning for the series. The name Bond has acquired a greater importance as it
moved from a literary to a cinematographic universe, and this could be
explained by its very strong relationship with the content of the story itself, a
relationship which so far has eluded the critics and most likely Ian Fleming
himself.1
It has been established how and why Ian Fleming chose the name of James
Bond for his hero; as a fervent bird watcher, he owned a copy of Birds o f the
West Indies whose author is precisely James Bond, and the name appealed to
him for being “the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could
find.. . . Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a
neutral figure—an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government
department.”2The name James Bond had already been associated with plainness
and bluntness in British popular literature, specifically by Agatha Christie in her
short story “The Rajah’s Emerald,”3 the protagonist of which is a simple,
unsophisticated but righteous fellow named James Bond, who is being snubbed
by his would-be fiancee, Clara, and alienated by her high-class friends. In this
case, the association between the name “James Bond” and an ordinary, most