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14 - Skyfall and Global Casino Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the signifying potential of gambling and casino culture as a seminal feature of James Bond-ness and the 007-universe. It argues that gambling and casinos, both of which are updated with every new outing of James Bond, have important cultural, political and economic ramifications. In particular, the chapter asks how and what casino gambling signifies as it is updated in Skyfall (2012), in terms of the film's mise-en-scene as well as its geopolitical configuration as a colonizing industry in a global economy that is increasingly dependent on various forms of gambling. Finally, the chapter connects various aspects of what has been referred to as “cinematic revisionism” to the politics and economics of neoliberalization, 007, and global casino culture.
Keywords: Skyfall, gambling, casinos, globalization, finance, Macau
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.
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- The Cultural Life of James BondSpecters of 007, pp. 289 - 308Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020