Popular Culture Review Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2009 | Page 27

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