Abstract
This article discusses the train journey in the James Bond film series as a narrative and aesthetic device which produces specifically modern forms of mobility. Bond's trains transport imaginary geographies and identities, and we contend that they function within the Bond franchise as figures of both techno-cultural development and imperial nostalgia, as well as a means by which the mobility of the cinematic machinery itself is dramatised. The article addresses a gap in James Bond scholarship and argues that a close examination of the poetics of the railroad in the Bond films reveals that the train is central to the geopolitical imagination of the series.
Highlights
This article discusses the train journey in the James Bond film series as a narrative and aesthetic device which produces modern forms of mobility, and interrogates these mobilities
Many of them are on a global scale, and they are traversed by lines and networks that gesture towards the global circulation of people, objects, and information that is so characteristic of the Bond series
We would like to address this gap in scholarship and argue that a close examination of the poetics of the railroad in the films reveals that the train is central to the geopolitical imagination of the series
Summary
This article discusses the train journey in the James Bond film series as a narrative and aesthetic device which produces modern forms of mobility, and interrogates these mobilities. The only discussion of trains in the series that goes beyond a passing reference is offered by Klaus Dodds and Lisa Funnell, whose recent Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond (2017) includes a few pages on “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles” Along with changes in railway technology and the closure of railway lines in many countries including the UK, this led to a cultural re-evaluation of the train, which could signify technological nostalgia rather than progress (cf Revill 2012, 189-199).3 This is the mode in which the train is represented in Skyfall (2012) when we see Bond sitting in front of three paintings at the National Gallery. It should be noted that we do not want to trace a teleological narrative of the train’s gradual transformation from the epitome of modernity to an emblem of technological nostalgia. Instead, we contend that Bond’s railway
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