Skyfall and Global Casino Culture

The notion that a particular logic and dynamic reside at the heart of the 007 franchise, lending it durability as a function of its capacity to project hipness, newness and traditional “Britishness” all at the same time, has become something of a truism in popular and scholarly writing on Bond. For example, in The Man Who Saved Britain, commercial author Simon Winder has outlined the many ways in which Bond has been rebooted to serve the economic and political aims of various parties involved in the production of the series over time. Similarly, Charlie Higson (2012, 37), on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Dr. No (UK: Terence Young, 1962) and the twenty-third outing of Bond in Skyfall (UK/USA: Sam Mendes, 2012), writes that “[e]ach new incarnation of Bond (very loosely) fits a decade and speaks to each new generation” so that it is “fascinating to chart how each Bond cleverly manages to personify an era and even define it.”

In scholarly work on 007, much has been made of the British spy's ability to trend-set, and to inform the periods in which the films were produced, hence Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott's (1987, 13) argument that James Bond functions as a mobile “sign of the times,” who is “capable of taking up and articulating quite different and even contradictory cultural and ideological values,” often rearticulating these values in such a way as to enunciate new, or at least revamped versions thereof, that also resonate with tradition.