TY - CHAP

T1 - 'Gallivanting around the world' : Bond, the gaze and mobility.

AU - Baker, Brian

PY - 2010

Y1 - 2010

N2 - This chapter will argue that Martin Campbell’s recent version of Casino Royale (2006) adheres to contemporary spectacle cinema’s mobility of the gaze, a mobility and spectacle different from the consumption-oriented, postcard panoramas (or huge Ken Adam sets) of earlier Bond films. The chapter analyses key scenes in A View To A Kill (1985) and Casino Royale through the lens of critical work on mobility and the gaze by Tim Cresswell, John Urry and Anna Friedberg. Through Casino Royale Daniel Craig’s Bond, unlike his predecessors, runs, vertically as well as horizontally. The aesthetic of total mobilisation in terms of spectatorial gaze and free-running bodies in motion, signals a rupture in the visual regime of the Bond series, negotiating contemporary globalised capital’s emphasis upon free movement: of information, of resources, and of the gaze. Casino Royale, with its narrative emphasis on gambling, international finance and terrorism also signals anxiety about globalised mobility in the post-9/11 world, with the ‘safe’ Western tourist gaze dispersed among ‘other’ subjectivities that, it seems, easily become the dangerous, free-running ‘bomber’, and are only controlled by visual technologies such as surveillance and computerised mapping, and Bond himself.

AB - This chapter will argue that Martin Campbell’s recent version of Casino Royale (2006) adheres to contemporary spectacle cinema’s mobility of the gaze, a mobility and spectacle different from the consumption-oriented, postcard panoramas (or huge Ken Adam sets) of earlier Bond films. The chapter analyses key scenes in A View To A Kill (1985) and Casino Royale through the lens of critical work on mobility and the gaze by Tim Cresswell, John Urry and Anna Friedberg. Through Casino Royale Daniel Craig’s Bond, unlike his predecessors, runs, vertically as well as horizontally. The aesthetic of total mobilisation in terms of spectatorial gaze and free-running bodies in motion, signals a rupture in the visual regime of the Bond series, negotiating contemporary globalised capital’s emphasis upon free movement: of information, of resources, and of the gaze. Casino Royale, with its narrative emphasis on gambling, international finance and terrorism also signals anxiety about globalised mobility in the post-9/11 world, with the ‘safe’ Western tourist gaze dispersed among ‘other’ subjectivities that, it seems, easily become the dangerous, free-running ‘bomber’, and are only controlled by visual technologies such as surveillance and computerised mapping, and Bond himself.

KW - Bond

KW - mobility

KW - gaze

KW - capital

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781906660192

SP - 144

EP - 158

BT - Revisioning 007: James Bond and Casino Royale

A2 - Lindner, Christoph

PB - Wallflower Press

CY - London and New York

ER -