Page - 131 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

see Shah, he is being held in a Russian prison. He is unshaven and his hair is untrimmed, and when he claims that he has stolen nothing, the jailer responds: “You can tell Allah. When you see him.” At this point Shah is depicted as a rather mentally unstable Muslim, but when he escapes from the prison and teams up with Bond, he changes into a civilized (Muslim) leader of the Afghan resistance movement. When Bond visits Shah’s village, there are veiled women. Because Shah’s people fight alongside Bond, the film takes the side of the Afghan resist- ance against the Red Army, but at the same time the film presents Afghans as a “mounted horde” who fight with horses against the Russians, although in real- ity the CIA was distributing missiles to the fighters at that time.45 Furthermore, by portraying Afghan Muslim fighters dealing drugs, the film offers a morally ambivalent image, but it does not portray raging the Islamic fundamentalists so common in representations of Islam in Western popular culture. More than anything else, Islam is represented as exotic. Although many Bond films have followed, and sometimes anticipated, polit- ical conflicts, Islam has not been in focus since 9/11. Many other global political trends have been referred to, as in the case of North Korea in Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, GB/US 2002) – North Korea was defined as a rogue state and part of the “axis of evil” by George W. Bush. So while terrorist networks have been part of the plot of several films, Islamic terrorism has not. In sum, for the most part, “religion” in Bond films belongs to the exotic “Rest” and not to the modern, rational “West”. “Religion” is not usually an overtly negative issue but happens not to be part of “our” world. This strength- ens the plausibility of racist and imperialist interpretations of Bond films, par- tially those constructed through “religion”, but more significantly, this pattern highlights what “the West”, in its own imagination, is not. VOODOO AND TAROT Live and Let Die is the only Bond film in which “religion” plays a more central role. The plot revolves around heroin farming and selling controlled by Dr. Kananga, the president of the fictive Caribbean state of San Monique and known as Mr. Big in New York. Bond’s early visit to Harlem gives a taster of what is to come. Bond goes to a voodoo shop run by Mr. Big’s gang. On the shelf are skulls on sale “for rituals” and Bond buys a fake snake, a hint that snakes will have a role to play in the film. The signs of the occult in the shops in Harlem mark the difference between rational white civilization and Harlem’s black superstition, although the geographical location is in the United States.46 45 Black 2005, 151; Chapman 2007, 200. 46 See Black 2005, 13. Reading Bond Films through the Lens of “Religion” | 131www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 119–139