The Many Lives of 007: Negotiating Continuity in the Official James Bond Film Series

William Proctor

Will the real 007 please stand up?

We all know his name. But just how many James Bonds are there? Given that the character combats not only Cold War and post-9/11 saboteurs, terrorists and assassins, but, also, periodically regenerates to stave off the ravages of old age, is 007 simply a codename bestowed upon successive secret agents rather than the identity of a single man? In short, is there any such individual as the character we know as 'Bond. James Bond'?

For some, continuity between the various iterations of Bond is tenuous. But what I want to do in this chapter is explore how some fans provide textual evidence to support the notion that 007 is, indeed, one man with a cohesive biography. Like other long-running character-brands, such as Batman, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, Bond is a mutable and elastic figure capable of being activated in multiple ways to take account of shifts in the sociopolitical and cultural landscape, as argued by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott in their seminal study, Bond and Beyond (1987).

Despite this multiplicity, however, what I find fascinating is the way in which some fans navigate and negotiate the official film canon – the series produced by Eon Productions beginning with Dr No (Terence Young, 1962) through to Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012) 50 years later – to repudiate the 'codename theory' and rationalize the incredible life of 'Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' as one bound to the principle of continuity. In so doing, these fans act as what Matt Hills describes as 'textual conservationists' who work to preserve a rationale that follows serial principles of cause and effect thus constructing a constant narrative history even if the text resists taxonomies of durability and permanence.

Continuity, canon and hyperdiegesis

Continuity and canon are interrelated textual phenomena that govern the authenticity of what is 'real' or 'official' within a particular story-system, a system bound by spatiotemporal rules and an obeisance to principles of story logic. As Richard Reynolds puts it, the principle of continuity 'is a familiar idea for all followers of soap opera' where the backstory 'comprising all the episodes previously screened [...] needs to remain consistent with the current storyline as it develops'.

Tying in with continuity is the concept of canon, which Will Brooker describes as 'the strict sense of what counts and what happened, what is true and what isn't'. To further complicate matters, it is possible to have multiple story-systems – and thus multiple continuities and parallel canons – populated by the same dramatis personae. Eon Productions's Bond film series does not include the Ian Fleming novels as part of the continuity regardless of those books which have been adapted. In other words, Fleming's 007 oeuvre is a separate story-system to that of the film series and has a different canon and continuity. Further, Never Say Never Again (Irvin Kershner, 1983) is not a part of Eon continuity, despite the fact that Sean Connery returned to play Bond. The same goes for the US TV version of Casino Royale (CBS, 1954), the first audio-visual adaptation of a Fleming novel, and the 1967 spoof film of the same name, directed by John Huston and others. Thus, the Bond storyworld is comprised of multiple narrative co-systems that all connect dialogically, but remain separate entities at the level of story.

Of course, we understand that fictional texts are not 'real' at all, but for fans of this-or-that serial narrative, the veracity of continuity is a cornerstone of imaginary worlds. In this way, continuity is the bedrock, the foundation whereby individual chapters are welded to an overarching narrative architecture. By recognizing the importance of continuity in serial fiction, whether in TV, film or comics, or other narrative mediums, Matt Hills coined the term 'hyperdiegesis', which can be defined as 'the creation of a vast and detailed space [...] which [...] appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension'. This is not to imply that hyperdiegeses are strictly linear by design; indeed, many hyperdiegeses are created from an assemblage of temporal slices that may be produced 'out-of-sync' but combine and coalesce into a logical narrative sequence when cognitively rearranged by the reader.

This principle of seriality – or, more pointedly, sequentiality – is the sine qua non of continuity: from the soap opera through the vast world-building continuities of DC and Marvel Comics to film franchises and television series/serials, the concept of sequence or, following Roger Hagedorn, 'episodicity', is 'the crucial trait which differentiates series and serials from the "classic" single-unit narrative text'.

But what about James Bond? Can the Eon canon form an overarching 007 hyperdiegesis? Do the 23 official Bond films to date cultivate a 'serial effect', rather than a series of self-contained texts? Simply put, is there any such thing as a Bond storyworld?

It is certainly true that one can watch an individual Bond film without being concerned about continuity and sequence; but many fans turn to web 2.0 to marshal evidence to challenge the 'codename theory' and argue that 007 is one man, one secret agent with a licence to kill.

'Connect the Bonds'

In Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (2012), Paul Booth argues that certain online platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, wikis and Internet forums, are examples of what he terms 'transgenic media', which 'refers to the specific type of online/digital/social/new media that has become influential in the past ten years of our culture'. For Booth, transgenic media can be differentiated from all web content, and is 'specifically related to online media that invites user participation'. YouTube, for example, allows users to become producers through the creation of older media – I am thinking specifically of video here – which can then be uploaded to the platform and spread globally via Internet connectivity.

One such example of transgenic production is Bond fan Calvin Dyson's YouTube video 'James Bond Codename Theory Debunked', which was uploaded to the...