Page - 132 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

In San Monique, where the heroin is farmed, those who practise voodoo are black. Voodoo is depicted in scenes of ritual sacrifice, led by Mr. Big’s voodoo priest Baron Samedi. The villains use voodoo to ensure that people do not go into the poppy fields. Thus voodoo is simply a tool of manipulation. Mr. Big gets help from a virgin tarot card reader, Solitaire,47 who is able to see future events in the cards and who is said to have the power of the Obeah.48 The power of tarot cards and Solitaire’s clairvoyance are undermined when Bond ensures the pack is composed of “The Lovers” cards only, thus deceiving Soli- taire into having sex with him. As a consequence of losing her virginity, Solitaire loses her supernatural powers and becomes useless to Mr. Big. This marks her positional change from “religious” villain to part of Western rationality. In other words, Bond strips Solitaire of all that is not appropriate for “the West” and as a result she is able to be on his side. While I am not interested in whether this is Bond’s intent,49 the event fits very well with my general argument about the relevance of (particularly non-Christian) “religion” in constructing what does not belong to “the West”. When Solitaire has become useless to him, Mr. Big leaves her to be sacrificed in a voodoo ritual. Bond saves her at the last minute and throws the voodoo priest Baron Samedi into a coffin full of poisonous snakes. Many of those who are under the influence of Mr. Big are voodoo believers, whereas Bond, rep- resentative of the West, is not. This setting supports the racist and imperial- ist interpretations we have noted in which the other is seen as something that threatens us and therefore needs to be controlled. As Jeremy Black argues, the film “linked black power in the cities with crime and implied that a failure to con- trol both black neighbourhoods and small Caribbean islands could undermine America. Dr Kananga is a harsh depiction of Caribbean independence.”50 The final scene of the film is arguably the only supernatural moment in the whole Bond series. Bond and Solitaire are on a train and a laughing Samedi is perched on the front of the train. Yet by the standards of the Bond world, Sa- medi should be dead. This, however, has no bearing on the plot.51 For the most 47 Solitaire is without doubt the main religion-related female figure in the Bond film series. Octopussy’s women are living in a spiritual retreat and the character played by Hale Berry in Die Another Day is named Jinx, but these references play a minor role in the plot. This raises the question of why women do not have a more prominent representation among “the Rest”. The answer could be that women are generally not conceptualized as threatening in Bond films, especially in early ones, and “the Rest” should be threatening to a certain extent to mark its difference from “the West”. 48 “Obeah” refers to a system of sorcery in the West Indies and the Caribbean. The term is mentioned in the film but not explained. 49 See Daas 2011, 165. 50 Black 2005, 134. 51 Chapman 2007, 138–141. 132 | Teemu Taira www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 119–139