Page - 125 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

MEGALOMANIAC VILLAINS IN A COSMIC DRAMA Villains are a good place to start, partly because they receive a great deal of attention in Bond scholarship and fandom in general and partly because they are defined as what threatens the world that Bond defends. The villains are typically, depending on the point of view, God-like or Satanic figures who play a part in a mythical, cosmic battle between good and evil.22 When Dr. No, the villain in the first Bond film (Dr. No, Terence Young, GB 1962), talks about his plan, Bond comments that his dream of world domination is the “same old”, that asylums are full of such people who dream of being Napoleon or God. Likewise, in Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, GB 1997) the media mogul Elliot Carver claims that he “will reach an influence big- ger than any human on this planet, save God himself”, after which Bond com- ments that Carver is totally crazy. These are examples of a typical pattern in the Bond world: people who pretend to be God-like in changing the status quo and bringing about the order s/he has designed can only be irrational. They are players in a cosmic drama in which the rational, modern world (“the West”) is under threat. Although there are references to cosmic drama typical of myths in several films, including Dr. No and Tomorrow Never Dies, many villains have more mundane goals: money and power. However, there are two villains whose aims are not reducible to material self-interest. While they would get all the riches imaginable if they succeeded in their plans, their motivation is different, as they plan to destroy the known civilization and start a new one. These are Hugo Drax in Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert, GB/FR/US 1979) and Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, GB 1977). The aim of Drax is “to create a master race in space based on his space station and to destroy the rest of the species by firing nerve gas back at the earth”.23 In the words of Drax, the future will see “a rebirth, a new world” with “a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens”. The mythical dimension of the pro- ject is made obvious, as there is an explicit reference to Noah’s Ark when Bond realizes that there are selected couples chosen for the spaceship. Furthermore, Drax compares the physically perfect couples chosen for the spaceship to gods whose descendants will return to earth after the world’s population has been wiped out. In the novel Bond describes Drax as “almighty – the man in the pad- ded cell who is God”, and in the same context he uses words and expressions such as “paranoia”, “delusion of grandeur” and “maniac” in reference to Drax.24 22 For instance, Max Zorin, the villain in A View to a Kill (John Glen, GB 1985), has been labelled a Satanic figure (Black 2005, 172–173). 23 Black 2005, 139. 24 Fleming 2012, 104. Reading Bond Films through the Lens of “Religion” | 125www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 119–139