No Time to Die? 007 and the Spectre of Nihilism
For now, all secular culture has to offer for a shared destiny is the 24/7 consumer-entertainment-narcissism society
Crashing into the Future
After six decades of cool cars, sexy assassins, evil super-villains, and immortal cinematic imagery, the above scene from Spectre (2015) might be the most existentially profound in all the James Bond films. That’s because 007 is flat wrong. “It” didn’t stop “right here.” “It” keeps on coming, building momentum, a huge “unstoppable force.” Blofeld is spot on.
“It” is nihilism—the sprawling spectre that confronts 007 and humanity as it searches for a meaningful and hopeful narrative in the awe-inspiring universe revealed by its own science and technology. Nihilism was always the secret agent inside modernism.
Earth. Alone. Amid the stars. Silent. What of our species in this universe? What of the future? What of 007?
As a secret agent trapped between the pages of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathrustra and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, James Bond is the being that confronts nothingness — the would-be Ubermensch in a future filled with double 0s. That’s why 007 is single, sexy, drinks martinis (“shaken, not stirred”), and drives sleek futuristic cars, almost always shaken and wrecked in the films. Though he never dies, 007 can’t quite get to “the future.” He keeps crashing into it. The “spectre” of another meaningless tomorrow haunts him. All that’s left is sex, martinis, and cool tech stuff to get through the day. Tomorrow always comes, but “the future” never arrives.
Time to Die
These existential issues are made clear in the 007 films of Sean Connery and Daniel Craig, the two actors starring in the Bond films with highest artistic quality. Though No Time to Die (2020) has yet to be released, there is little doubt it will echo most of the themes discussed here. In fact, the entire trajectory of the 007 films suggests it’s time to die for the dominant ideologies that run Planet Earth. That’s because humanity has yet to overcome challenges posed by Nietzsche and Sartre—the double 0s of the philosophical future.
The 007 films have been critiqued from many angles, including technological fetishism, misogyny and hyper-masculinity, and the philosophical issues raised in the book Questions are Forever: James Bond and Philosophy. Overlooked amidst the sexy-sexist spies and techno-gadgets is the “spectre” of modernity and the unstated nihilism in the fears of nuclear apocalypse and a meaningless universe born of Space Age discoveries.
Blofeld’s Crater: Symbol of Philosophy
The stars and meteors might be silent about our future, just as nihilism is the silent “spectre” confronting our species. Yet, all over Earth, our voices chatter away in our electrified metropolises, where humans feel centered, significant, and full of tribal meaning in the skyglow of electric light and the 24/7 spectacle radiating out from our ever-brighter screens.
Meanwhile, our most powerful eyes (the Hubble Space Telescope and our terrestrial telescopes) gaze upon a universe growing larger every day, rendering our species ever more infinitesimal. Two trillion galaxies, three sextillion stars, untold numbers of planets, life forms, and black holes, all stretching across 100 billion light years. Of course, it’s a tribute to our braininess and curiosity that we have unveiled this universe, by far our greatest intellectual achievement.
Blofeld speaks the truth to Madeleine and Bond in a meteor crater — the perfect symbol of the failure of art and philosophy to develop a widely-embraced narrative that connects our species to the vast and ancient universe from which we emerged. For most inhabitants on Earth, humanity’s telescopes mean little to nothing. Sure, some planets might be pretty, galaxies might inspire some awe, and black holes and other strange phenomenon might evoke some curiosity value.
Though there is evidence that social media and telescopes might be contributing to the decline in religion, there’s little indication that secular philosophy is poised to successfully counter the tribal, theological, and nationalist narratives that provide human meaning on planet Earth.
In Spectre, Blofeld’s crater is used for planetary surveillance, yet there are several telescopes clearly visible inside the crater. The Spectre special effects team dropped in the telescopes from the European Southern Observatory, located at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama of Chile. Home to numerous mind-blowing cosmic discoveries, Paranal is one of the greatest observatories on Earth and it was also the locale for key scenes in Quantum of Solace (2009).
Of course, the creators of Daniel Craig’s 007 films cannot imagine anything meaningful to do with the telescopes or deep space. After all, the Space Age of Sean Connery’s 007 films has been long dead, or perhaps upgraded to comatose in the Elon Musk 21st century version, poised to pollute the night skies with his Starlink satellites while suggesting we terraform Mars into a mirror suburb of Earth.
What happens to the telescopes in Spectre? James Bond blows them up. They are incinerated in a fiery inferno, along with everything else in the crater. That’s pretty much a metaphor for how alternative futures are carpet-bombed by tribal, theist, nationalist, and pseudoscientific philosophies.
Nietzsche and Sartre: Double 0s of “the Future”
James Bond’s “007” code name cleverly alludes to the these existential conditions, for the double 0s mean he has a “license to kill,” to destroy the enemy. For 007, the big enemy is the secret global organization called “SPECTRE”—an acronym for Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. The name SPECTRE also evoke a menacing apparition haunting our world, overshadowing our future with visions of nihilism and apocalypse.
Bond on the “Rope Over an Abyss”
Nietzsche famously saw the “spectre” coming in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.Writing in the wake of Galileo, Darwin, and the scientific revolutions that removed our species from the center of the universe and from the center of life on Earth, Nietzsche knew that humanity faced a massive philosophical challenge—yet to be met, even in the 21st century.
Nietzsche speculated that since humans are the superior species that evolved from apes, there might be an equally greater species that would evolve from humans. This species is what he termed the “Overman” or “Ubermensch.” Nietzsche wondered:
“What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame ….man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.”[1]
What comes next? What will emerge in the next stage of human evolution, especially our intellectual evolution on a tiny planet in a Hubble universe of trillions of galaxies? What philosophical rope will span the abyss, traverse the voids to provide our species with a narrative of hope and meaning in a universe in which we are neither central nor particularly significant?
James Bond never dies, but he remains poised on the rope over the abyss, a would-be Ubermensch who can’t turn back and can only step forward on a tightrope stretched toward the infinite. Connery’s 007 stood astride the rising technological fetishism of consumer society and fears of nuclear annihilation of the Cold War — between man and the Superman, between civilization and oblivion.
In the initial Bond film, Dr. No, 007 is introduced in an exclusive and elegant club named “Le Cirque.” That’s appropriate, because inside every circle is the zero, the nothingness that confronts all being, the secret agent at the heart of all universes. It is against nothingness that all human activity exists, that all meaning is constructed, and that all futures are dreamt. And it is against the vast voids of space that secular philosophy has become lost, adrift amid 100 billion light years. That’s why the telescopes have no plot role in Blofeld’s crater. We know the telescopes are “out there,” but they have little to no meaning for our daily lives here on Planet Earth.
Existentialism and 007
The Sean Connery-James Bond films appeared at the height of the Cold War and Space Age, which also coincided with the peak influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy.
The first Bond film, Dr. No was released in 1962, the same year as President Kennedy’s immortal “moon speech” (which proclaimed the USA would land a human on the moon by the end of the decade) and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost triggered a nuclear war. Two years later, Goldfinger coincided with Sartre’s 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sartre wrote many plays that expressed his existentialism, but his great philosophical text was Being and Nothingness, mostly written during WWII and the Nazi occupation of Paris.
For Sartre, the human being is always confronting the zero, the void, the nothingness from which all freedom and human possibility emerge. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre details the voids and emptiness ever-present in the three “lacks” we face in the world, as individuals and a species. There’s the material lack of food and shelter, the intellectual lack of knowledge to successfully navigate the world, and the future lack — the absence of knowing what tomorrow should be in a quest for a meaningful and joyful existence.
For Sartre, there is no God, only existence and we’re in it, forced to face the future with eyes open. It’s the same with 007. There is no religion, only a secular existence and the “spectre” of chaos and domination that seeks to prevent civilization from finding its true meaning and purpose in the future. For Sartre and Bond, there is no exit.
The Space Age
The Space Age promised an exciting and meaningful future for the human species, a mostly utopian destiny amid the stars—space exploration, colonizing planets, overcoming our differences, and gaining some sense of enlightenment. No artwork expressed this vision better than Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, though the original Star Trek (1966–1969) certainly expressed the Space Age optimism and hopes for a unified and enlightened species.
Of course, the ultimate expression of the nuclear apocalypse was Planet of the Apes, the 1968 classic about astronauts hurled back in time, where the space age met the stone age. Atomic annihilation had wiped out civilization and the evolution-denying apes were running the show (not unlike Trump and Putin now). 2001 and Planet of the Apes were released the same week in 1968, side-by-wide, apotheosis and apocalypse. This was less than a year after 007 averted a nuclear war and saved the Space Age in You Only Live Twice (1967). For Connery’s 007, the Space Age had to be saved, precisely because it seemed to offer a real and meaningful future for the human species.
The Spectre of the Future
For Sartre, we have no choice but to hurl ourselves into the future, a future which we make meaningful in the universe as we understand it. We must step on the rope out into the terrific unknown, and make a new destiny, free from Gods, superstitions, nationalism, and warfare. Or we can continue the bad faith of making excuses for our actions, believing in Gods to save us and justify our wars, and pretending there is an exit from our responsibilities toward ourselves, society, and the rest of the lifeforms on this planet. Daniel Craig’s 007 practices bad faith in defending “Queen and Country,” but there is no other narrrative to justify his actions in the 21st century.
The future is the spectre that haunts humanity the most, for between now and tomorrow is the gaping void that gives us the freedom to remake ourselves, our world, fill our species with joy and meaning — but we don’t appear to have the courage or wherewithal to ever really do it. Why else the continual proliferation of self-help books and TED Talk therapy sessions?
So, in the quest for joy, happiness, and purpose, we fill the future void by falling back on meaning found in ancient rituals, sacred texts, astrology and pseudoscience, raising families and building careers, endless consumption and entertainment, and continuous tribal warfare (be it racist, nationalist, or religious warfare).
Here, 007 remains trapped between SPECTRE and Her Majesty’s Secret Service, battling to preserve “Queen and Country” because no better narrative seems available. In other words, Bond can never get to the future he saves. As best I can tell, 007 makes no excuses, worships no Gods, and takes on the responsibilities to act. Yet, facing Sartre’s voids while on Nietzsche’s rope over the abyss, Bond is trapped in the double 0s of the future.
Dr. No(thing)
The Sean Connery-James Bond films were a cinematic phenomenon of the 1960s, bearing some of the most memorable imagery of the decade. Released in 1962, Dr. No was the first James Bond film. The villain is “Dr. No,” an agent of SPECTRE and the first face of nihilism in the 007 films. From his secret base in the Caribbean, Dr. No topples NASA test rockets in hopes of triggering a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Why? So SPECTRE can rule the world.
Dr. No might as well be Dr. Nothing, for not much would be left of modern civilization or the Space Age in the aftermath of nuclear war. Dr. No correctly sees the ultimate futility of nationalism and its endless tribal warfare. Armed with 60,000 nuclear weapons, the Pentagon and the Kremlin were the agents of atomic annihilation, advanced primates empowered to take modern civilization back to the Planet of the Apes.
For Dr. No, there is no nation worth supporting, no belief in any political system beyond sheer power, no higher systems of logic and reason. For Dr. No, there is nothing beyond conquest and domination. No meaning, no purpose, no significant future. And that’s the future that 007 keeps crashing into across six decades of Bond films.
Connery’s 007: Saving The Space Age
In the 1960s, nothing symbolized possible futures more than the Space Age and nuclear annihilation. Side-by-side, future visions of apotheosis and apocalypse. Satellites, rockets, spacecraft, Kennedy’s speech, Star Trek and 2001, and 007 saving the Space Age, preventing nuclear apocalypse, and staving off the Planet of the Apes.
Bond saves the Space Age for the first time by killing Dr. No and destroying his control center for toppling rockets. The NASA launch goes off as scheduled and the future of space exploration stays on track. In the Connery-Bond films, SPECTRE is always involved in something with Cold War or Space Age technology — toppling U.S. rockets in Dr. No, stealing Soviet message decoders in From Russia With Love, making off with NATO nuclear missiles in Thunderball, and hijacking U.S. and Soviet spacecraft in You Only Live Twice.
Bond saves the Space Age a second time in You Only Live Twice, while also preventing a nuclear war between the USA and USSR. Against the heat of nuclear apocalypse, Connery’s 007 saves a future that seems “cool” in more ways than just a Cold War.
Exit from the Space Age
Tired of being typecast as 007, Connery famously stepped away from the Bond films after You Only Live Twice — just as the Space Age was reaching its euphoric pinnacle with the Apollo rockets reaching the moon in 1968 and 1969. Connery returned as 007 in Diamonds are Forever (1971), where he saves the Space Age a third time, just as NASA was pulling the plug on the Apollo program and it was clear the Space Age was dead.
In a way, Connery abandoning the Bond role was a portent of the future to come. With the Apollo images of Earth, revealing us floating alone in space, humanity peered into the abyss and quickly stepped back off Nietzsche’s rope. It was obvious that NASA, Apollo, and the Space Age were extending the projects of Galileo, Darwin, and Edwin Hubble, showing we are brainy-tiny species willing to explore the cosmic voids beyond Earth. Yet, the Cold War and lack of a new narrative, our unwillingness to step away from 2000 years of superstition, showed we were still tribal narcissists trapped on the Planet of the Apes. After all, the dance club in John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever (1977) is called “2001 Oddyssey”—the disco tombstone for the Space Age.
The Spectre of Modernism
The entire modern worldview, especially in the 20th century, was grounded in the premise that the future will be far better than the past — a creative, scientific, and technological future that is supposed to be just, abundant, meaningful, and hopeful. Unfortunately, the year 2020 tells us that those goals remain far in the future.
Absent a new secular philosophy for a scientific universe, 20th century modernism was always a secret agent for nihilism. Science and technology that showed there were no Gods, no inherent meaning to human existence, no cosmic significance to human events in a vast and ancient universe. It’s no surprise SPECTRE was almost always modernist, at least terms of architecture, apparel, and ambition. The megalomaniacal villains were often attired in minimalist uniforms and resided in headquarters that were designed with modernist or futuristic architectural styles.
“Look around you, James. Everything you believed in. A ruin.”
When Blofeld says these lines to Daniel Craig’s Bond in Spectre, he is mostly referring to things in Bond’s personal world, which Blofeld has been manipulating in order to crush Bond’s spirit and will. The lines are a metaphor for the larger scale of the world Bond inhabits in the 21st century.
Just look at America, Russia, and China and their leaders — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping are deranged would-be dictators leaving their footprints all over the world stage. Yet they are are worshipped by legions in the embrace of racism, fascism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. That a racist, sexist reality-TV star can become president with a promise to “Make America Great Again” shows the failure of secular philosophy to supplant the ideologies of racism and evangelicalism with a narrative that provides hope, justice, and meaning in the modern universe. All as scientific literacy collapses in America, now a bastion of pseudoscience, magical thinking, and QAnon conspiracies.
For now, all secular culture has to offer for a shared destiny is the 24/7 consumer-entertainment-narcissism society, ramped up via Amazon, Apple, Fsacebook, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, and numerous other corporations and institutions.
Skyfall America
It’s no wonder that the Skyfall and Spectre theme songs are apocalyptic. “This is the end” because the “writing’s on the wall.” Spectre even opens with the line “The Dead are Alive” and Bond is in Mexico City for the “Day of the Dead” celebration. Should we be surprised Daniel Craig’s 007 is still on Nietzsche’s rope — with no new future in sight and nothing to save but the status quo.
Craig’s Bond takes on roque British agent in Skyfall (2012). Javier Bardem is excellent as “Silva,” the bleach-blonde cyber terrorist who is a stand-in for Julian Assange, the bleach-blonde hacker who founded WikiLeaks, the website that released documents showing war crimes committed by the United States in the Terror War. Assange is now in a London jail and fighting extradition, while the actual war criminals are living free, including everyone in the White House and Pentagon who approved of the crimes — the use of torture, the killing of civilians, the droning of villages, and the invasion of Iraq.
Let’s face it: “Silva” is Assange so that the West and America can sleep at night in the Terror War, even as it faces the nightmares of its own intellectual collapse and embrace of torture. In fact, Trump’s America represents a massive intellectual and philosophical crater, with the virulent evangelicalism stoking racism, terrorism, mass shootings, conspiracy theories, and anti-science worldviews, now proliferating amid a global pandemic. Welcome to Skyfall America.
Quantum of Solitude
Bond takes on a faux environmentalist and eco-terrorist in Quantum of Solace (2008). The climatic scene in Quantum of Solace occurs at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located high in the desert mountains of Chile. The setting is spectacular. Director Marc Forster explained the philosophical meaning of the desert setting:
We’re shooting in a desert and that is a reflection of Bond’s character itself because the desert always brings along a certain loneliness, a certain solitude. And that solitude and loneliness reflects who Bond is at this point.
That Bond is lonely at the desert Observatory should not be surprising. After all, ESO and Paranal are home to the Very Large Observatory, the world’s most advanced optical telescope, peering into the depths of deep space to find “our cosmic origins.” And those origins imply a new destiny.
Blowing Up Telescopes and Observatories
In Quantum of Solace, the filmmakers have no use for telescopes or anything that might suggest a new destiny for our species in the vast universe unveiled by those same telescopes. Instead, the sleek modernist hotel (for scientists and visitors) at Paranal Observatory is used for the hideout of the villain, an eco-terrorist. As with the telescopes in Spectre, the entire hotel is destroyed in an inferno. The future is still aflame on an ever-heating planet.
Agents Cool and Hot
The Space Age was ultimately grounded in the awe and wonder of the vast universe, which generates a cool and chill sensibility. As Julia Hildebrand and I have written in our international award-winning essay, rockets and telescopes send humanity’s gaze away from itself, away from Earth and into deep space. This necessarily generates a cognitive chill, precisely because the universe is dark and vast, things are far apart, the immensity of it all, and the quiet twinkle of the stars above. We can’t help but think in terms of the human species, to become more reflective and philosophical about what we should be doing on this planet. Everything about the vast universe effects a cool stance and chill sensibility.
Connery’s smooth, chill, and often detached style captured the unstated zeitgeist of the Space Age, making 007 an agent of cool for that era.
Precisely as Connery’s 007 is smooth and cool, Craig’s 007 is rough and hot. Craig’s 007 is not saving the Space Age or any destiny for humanity, for he is trapped on the Planet of the Apes. That’s why Craig’s Bond is always engaged in brutal fistfights, bloody knife battles, and sweaty death matches in bathrooms and stairwells. Craig’s tux always looks a bit awkward over his muscled-up frame. We know he’s a brute on a heating planet.
If Skyfall America and Craig’s 007 films tell us anything, it’s that it is time to die for the dominant ideologies on Earth. And that includes all the virulent tribalisms, theisms, racisms, and nationalisms that stoke war, hate, envy, and domination.
A Future Shaken, Not Stirred
Eyes open, we’re still on Nietzsche’s rope facing Sartre’s nothingnesses. But there is hope to counter 21st century nihilism. What needs time to live is a radical new model for our future as a species. We need a future that is shaken free, not merely stirred into the status quo, not a future that we, as 007s will keep crashing into.
We need a destiny in which our species cooperates and unites as the enlightened species we claim to be—a future beyond the madness and nuclear rivalries of America, Russia, and China. It’s a shared destiny where we’re truly free, universal rights and responsibilities for everyone, while acting respectfully and benevolently toward each other, regardless of race, gender, class, identity, nationality, and so on. It’s a peaceful species that ends war, funds art and science on much greater scales, builds a more equitable society, and helps all those who desire to learn and expand their horizons.
It’s a species that cleans up its planet and greatly enlarges wilderness areas, national parks, and Dark Sky Reserves. It builds a sustainable civilization free of fossil fuels and mindless consumption. It’s a future where knowledge and wonder are more valued than logos and brands. It’s a shared destiny as a planetary civilization that goes into space as a single species—as thinkers, artists, scientists, and tourists who protect the landscapes of the celestial places they visit.
It’s a species with a collective consciousness inspired by art, science, and a secular philosophy—where we find meaning and purpose based on our actual place in the universe, here and now, as revealed by telescopes and 21st century cosmology.
A New 007 Plot: A Telescope and a Martini
Of course, the above future is a distant dream. Yet, it’s a vision with vistas, not Blofeld’s meteor craters. Maybe then, a future Bond will protect the telescopes. Perhaps this future 007 will even gaze through a telescope to see something to save beyond “Queen and County” on Planet Earth. Can we imagine a plot where 007 is talking with a SPECTRE villain in a massive observatory, gazing through telescopes at images of the cosmos, discussing possible alternative destinies amid the majesty of the universe? Now that would be an perfect time for a cosmic martini, an opening for a future shaken, not stirred.
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Much thanks to my friend Michelle Vardeman, whose editorial expertise made this a better essay.
