Page - 123 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

Bond” and a separate film genre, and the novels were seen as only one of the sources for the films.17 Thirdly, the films, but not the novels, offer quite a unique time frame for stud- ying a popular phenomenon. The first Bond film was released in 1962. Since then Bond films have been produced at a regular pace, the longest break be- tween releases being the six years between Licence to Kill (John Glen, GB/US 1989) and GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, GB/US 1995). The most recent, Spectre (Sam Mendes, GB/US 2015), makes for a total number of 25 films, if Never Say Never Again (Irvin Kershner, GB/US 1983), an “unofficial” Bond film because it was not produced by EON Productions, is counted. The series of films covers almost 55 years, from the Cold War to the present day. I watched all the Bond films, including Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball (Terence Young, GB 1965) that saw the return of Sean Connery as Bond. I also watched the spy comedy Casino Royale (Ken Hughes, GB/US 1967), starring David Niven as Bond, but as it is so different from the rest, I decided not to include it here. I made notes on every film whenever there was something that related to “religion”. Then I grouped the notes into various classes and themes to see whether any patterns would emerge – as is common in qualitative and ethnographic content analysis of media materials.18 This initial phase in organizing the material is followed by detailed discursive analysis of the patterns and the representations they include.19 The analysis here gives an overview of selected typical patterns related to “religion” in Bond films and, on that basis, proceeds to examine the more theoretically driven question about the relation between “religion” in Bond films and the wider social context. BOND AND “RELIGION” One of the first problems to resolve is the question of what counts as a refer- ence to “religion”. Solely for the heuristic purposes of this study, I utilize Ben- son Saler’s suggestion that “religion” can be conceived on the basis of Witt- gensteinian “family resemblance”, combined with the prototype theory, when used as a concept to select relevant data for a study.20 This means that there is no essence of “religion”, but our prototype of the category provides a starting point for deciding how close or far particular examples are from it. The proto- type of “religion” we have is based on Judeo-Christian heritage, but “religion” is not confined to any single, commonly shared criterion. When the material is 17 Bennett/Woollacott 1987, 8; 174; 179. 18 Altheide/Schneider 2013, 23–39; Bryman 2004, 392–393. 19 Taira 2013a; see also Hall 1992. 20 Saler 2000. Reading Bond Films through the Lens of “Religion” | 123www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 119–139