Seite - 121 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

The argument here is not that “religion” is a forgotten but necessary or priv- ileged lens for understanding Bond films compared to readings focusing on, for example, geopolitics, nationalism, or gender. Furthermore, the argument is not that Bond should be key material for studying religion and popular culture. The task here is much more modest: it is to explore what Bond films look like when “religion” is used as the lens for examining them. Thus, this article asks: Does reading Bond films through “religion” bring to the fore anything new, inter- esting and relevant to thinking about the Bond phenomenon, as well as to the study of religion and popular culture?5 The answer to both elements will be affirmative: there is something relevant “religion” brings to studying Bond and there is something scholars of religion and popular culture might learn from the Bond phenomenon. This article ex- plores “religion” in Bond films in detail and argues that if there is anything that ties portrayals of “religion” in Bond films together, it is what Stuart Hall has called the discourse of “the West and the Rest”.6 “The West” is primarily a his- torical and conceptual, rather than a geographical construct, although its geo- graphical anchors are in Europe (but not really in Eastern Europe) and in North America. “The West” refers to an imagined modern society that is developed, industrialized, urbanized, capitalist and, I would add, predominantly secular.7 Discourse refers here to a particular way of representing and organizing knowl- edge of the West, the Rest and their relations through an interlinked group of statements. This discourse operates by dividing the world into two separate blocks and representing the other as inferior in all respects. It “became a very common and influential discourse, helping to shape public perceptions and at- titudes down to the present”.8 In other words, the idea of “the West” has had real effects as it has produced and organized knowledge and power relations. While it is interesting to explore the variety of representations of “religion” in Bond films and to comment on them in detail, the analysis presented here sug- 5 Religion and popular culture as well as religion and film are broad and multifaceted areas of research. I therefore cannot claim that a single study of Bond films would be equally relevant for all possible approaches in the field. In religion and film, the field is often divided into two types, religious film and film as religion (Plate 2005, 3099–3101). Although Bond films contain “religious” images, representations and themes, I cannot think of anyone approaching them as “religious films” (Grace 2009) (or films where you find “God” [Detweiler and Taylor 2004]). Further, this article does not deal with “film as religion” approaches (Lyden 2003). If anything, I would like to challenge the relevance of such typology. Another typology divides the approaches into to theological, mythological and ideological (Martin 1995). This article does not follow approaches in which selected theological ideas are explored and sometimes developed (Johnston 2000; Marsh 2004); however, the relations between films and wider social discourses are explored, meaning that this study has some affinity with mythological and particularly ideological approaches. 6 Hall 1992. 7 Hall 1992, 277. 8 Hall 1992, 279. Reading Bond Films through the Lens of “Religion” | 121www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 119–139