So for the last few weeks, my group and I have been working
on our project for our Pop Culture class. As I mentioned in a previous post,
our topic is James Bond and in particular, Casino Royale. We’ve met a handful
of times before class and communicated through email. We each took a separate
concept involved with Bond and went in our own directions with it. I decided to
look at Casino Royale, and Bond in particular, through the lens of theory,
namely Saussure and Derrida. Today in class, for my part of the presentation, I’ll
be discussing how Bond’s views of the world begin very structuralist but by the
end of the novel, become post-structuralist.
For my contributions to the group, I helped break the novel
down and analyze it as a whole. I helped divide the novel into possible chunks
or areas of discussion that we could be interested in exploring. I helped in
discussions with connecting and comparing the novel to the 2006 film and also
brought up some interesting differences between the many iterations of Bond
throughout the years. Other people in the group aided me in some areas of my
own topic and I also provided feedback on theirs. During the meetings, we all
contributed some ideas and feedback to each topic while also constructing the
general form of our presentation as a whole. As I’m not especially proficient
in power point creation, I mostly helped there by giving feedback and suggestions
on the structure and aesthetics of the power point presentation that the others
made.
Bond initially has no difficulty differentiating between
good and evil, hero and villain. His experience in the war, as well as all his
training, has made it clear to him that the US and England are the heroes and
that, at the very least, the Russians are now the villains. This is very
Saussurian in that Bond knows that he and his country (and their allies) are
good and since Russia is not an ally, they are clearly evil. He is able to
define who the heroes are by comparing them to those who aren’t, and vice
versa. However, after being tortured by Le Chiffre, Bond’s view changes
dramatically. As he is recovering, he has a very interesting discussion with
his French police aide, Mathis. Bond says that when he was younger it was
easier to tell the difference between good and evil, but it isn’t so easy
anymore. He says that somewhere, Le Chiffre was the hero and Bond was the
villain and what Le Chiffre was doing was heroic. He says politics and patriotism
and everything have an influence over the previous line of thinking but that he
is finding it too difficult to differentiate anymore. Bond’s crisis of identity
is so great that he decides to resign rather than try to solve his
psychological and ideological dilemma. He finds the line not so easily drawn
anymore and seems to be very much a post-structuralist. Bond now thinks in a
Derridian fashion in that the terms hero and villain and good and evil don’t
really have any meaning anymore because the definition is literally different
for every single person and changes for them from one instant to the next,
giving the concepts no true and universal truth.
