JamesBond is always an outsider of sorts, but in LiveandLetDie his outsider-ness feels like a reckoning
. That Roger Moore’s debut would so fixate on the limitations of death and the afterlife felt somewhat auspicious. How many times could the series handle reintroduction and continuation? Moore’s entrance followed Connery’s brief return in 1971’sin 1969. The future of Bond was somewhat uncertain.
The film begins with the death of three MI6 agents, one in New York, one in New Orleans and one in San Monique, a Montego Bay stand-in. Some of the film’s anxieties about race present themselves as generic reaction. 007 floats around different set pieces, tropes and cliches of blaxploitation cinema: The first Bond woman in the film, Rosie Carver , wields a gun not unlike Pam Grier in; Bond’s trip to Harlem features the use of “honky”; voodoo priests exist; and Dr. Kananga/Mr.
While Bond wanders around Harlem, New Orleans and San Monique, it is striking the way he occupies the spaces in the film. On the one hand, he effectively undoes the political ethos of blaxploitation, given that Bond must remain thehero, even if a subplot involving sex, trickery and tarot complicates his “goodness.” On the other, he navigates a space that is more deliberately out of reach for him; the character’s history implies that control of a space or situation is, for Bond, within reach.
White visions of blackness in the film clash with the implied reality of the ways in which that same white vision shapes cultural impressions of blackness or nonwhite culture. The resort where Bond buys decks of tarot cards is also where Baron Samedi, voodoo priest in skull white body paint, performs for a rapt audience of white tourists. The same can be said of the jazz club in which Bond and Felix Leiter see a singer perform the title song in a slinky, soul/R&B-influenced rendition.
Bond can afford that; Bond can be rebirthed for his own sake, and he continue living on and on. Black aesthetics can be repurposed by those in power. But the liberation of blackness and black artistry has rarely been provided with the same freedom for rebirth and reaction—on it own terms compared to the endless cycles of whiteness and images of white power—in mainstream culture.
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