"I'm not a sporting man, Fräulein”: The Tragedy and Farce of James Bond’s Heroic Prowess

Abstract

This article revolves around conceptualising temporality and drama, with the example of how the broken time sequestered by Karl Marx’s notion of historical repetition and the struggles relating to this, in his supplement to Hegel, is displayed in James Bond films. A focus of the inquiry is an hauntological analysis (in the Derridean sense) of how the connection between heroism and tragedy in films evokes haunting presences of older versions of Bond, between actors, between films, and within the specific story arcs. While the heroism of Bond is exemplified by his sportive endeavours, time and temporality are understood as repetition, and foremost in relation to the phenomenon of the reboot—a specialty of our protagonist. In his battles with various villains, Bond becomes embroiled in action sequences that are curiously spiced up with extreme sporting activities. Such sports are often transformed in the cinematic context: sometimes they are emphasised for stylisations of prowess and violence; sometimes they are distorted into parody and comic relief, in an oftentimes ironic fashion. Fulfilling Marx’s adage about how history repeats itself (“first as tragedy, then as farce”), Bond’s personage not only reappears in different incarnations, portrayed by different actors over time; each actor also repeats a similar pattern in their respective Bond biographies enacting a sustained heroism emanating from the extreme athletic displays in the agonal theatre of sports.