James Bond 007 and the Name of the Order
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itself by disordering the basic balance of society: Scaramanga in The Man with
the Golden Gun (novel) is scheming different plots with both the underworld
and the KGB to destabilize the West by controlling cane sugar exports and
flooding the U.S. with drugs. In the film, Scaramanga has developed a sunpowered laser canon which upsets the balance of sheer firepower and challenges
the hegemony of Western muscle. Hence, the only real structural changes
between the novel and the film, in spite of their apparently vast dissimilarities,
concern exclusively the paradigmatic aspects of the narration. The threat has
become both more technological and spectacular in the film, but the basic binary
opposition upon which the narrative syntagm relies remains identical: the order
is under attack and must be defended. Both the novel and the film end with a
duel between Bond and Scaramanga, and although the circumstances are very
different—as one takes place in a mangrove swamp and the other in
Scaramanga’s personal fun house—the basic opposition between ordered good,
represented by James Bond, and disorderly evil, incarnated by Paco
Scaramanga, is respected and satisfactorily resolved.
James Bond’s function will be that of eliminating the threat and hence, of
bonding the order back together. By an interesting semiotic shift, the bonding
with a female is a common ending to any Bond adventure: it is most of the
films’s closing shot and is present as well in many of Fleming’s texts (with
Solitaire in Live and Let Die, Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever,
Honeychile in Dr. No or Domino in Thunderball as well as in the short stories
“A View to a Kill” or “Risico”). Casino Royal and On Her Majesty's Secret
Service are the only two novels and films which present the death of the main
Bond girl at the end of the narration. It should be observed however that both
narrations show an extremely strong bonding in process between Bond and the
main female protagonist: 007 intends to marry Vesper Lynn in the novel Casino
Royale and he actually marries Tracy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in the
novel as well as in the film. I n both cases, a new order, that of marriage,
threatens the integrity of the narrative structure, which represents a collective
order rather than a localized, private one, such as that represented by the family;
logically, both Vesper Lynn and Mrs. Tracy Bond must be eliminated from the
narrative syntagm, the former before formalizing her engagement to James Bond
and the latter on the way to her honeymoon. At the end of the novel Moonraker,
Gala reveals to Bond that she is engaged to be married and in spite of the strong
attraction he feels towards her and against his womanizing habits, 007 lets her
go without much resistance, suggesting by his very resignation the selfexcluding parallel existence of both orders, the general and the particular. As a
representative of the Greater Order, Bond will never be allowed to partake in the
sacred institution of marriage, and the ending of On Her Majesty's Secret
Service is the most obvious demonstration of this impossibility. His final
thoughts, if we are to believe the accepted chronology of Ian Fleming’s works,
are those expressed at the end of The Man With the Golden Gun and revolve
precisely around the possibility of a steady relationship with a woman: “At the