Views to a Kill: An Essay On The Death of Heroes By J. M. Taylor

J. M. Taylor is a member and sit on the Board of the New England chapter of Mystery Writers of America. His short stories have appeared in Tough Crime, Thuglit, Crime Syndicate, and Wildside Black Cat, among others.

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Warning: this article contains spoilers. 

I’ve been a fan of James Bond for nearly my entire life. When I was in fourth grade, I found You Only Live Twice in my Catholic elementary school library, and, fascinated by the title, I devoured that, then Thunderball and The Spy Who Loved Me. Thanks to that chance find, I went on to be a writer myself, and I make no secret that Casino Royale guided me through my first novel.

So when COVID finally allowed me to venture out for the thrice-delayed No Time To Die, I was feeling the joyful anticipation and confidence in Bond’s once again foiling a worthy super-villain.

When I was in fourth grade, I found You Only Live Twice in my Catholic elementary school library…

I had carefully avoided spoilers, even hints, never really considering the emphasis placed on “Craig’s last appearance of Bond,” and I placed a child-like faith in those reports I couldn’t avoid that said 007 died—knowing full well that Lashana Lynch played a character who had taken on that number. Of course, what would happen is that she died in the beginning, and Bond would reclaim his rightful number.

But when Lynch’s Nomi didn’t die soon after her appearance, I began to grow uneasy. And as the audience realized that Bond was irreversibly poisoned, and those missiles rained down on Lyutisfer Safin’s island, I stared in disbelief. Louis Armstrong’s “All the Time in the World,” first heard in my favorite Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), swelled and I felt something akin to the loss George Lazenby’s incarnation of 007 felt as he held Tracy dead in his arms. Even as the credits declared that “James Bond Will Return,” I thought, no, no he won’t. There’s no return from that undiscovered country.

In the days that followed, I reflected on the fact that, in the midst of world-wide carnage inflicted by a virus I was mourning a fictional character. Why did it matter? It mattered because James Bond isn’t just a fictional hero. Ian Fleming conceived of him as a modern St. George, who slew the dragon and saved the princess, and as the books and especially films have grown in popularity and influence, Bond defends not only the realm, but the world. Somehow, a character created by a single author has taken on a legitimately iconic folk hero status.

But still, folk heroes don’t die. Or do they?

Heroes have to be mortal, of course. It’s a film trope that riding into the sunset is symbolic of an eventual death, but we rarely see the ultimate sacrifice on the page or screen.

The stakes are even higher when the hero is a national or cultural hero as Bond is. Ian Fleming himself considered killing Bond, changing a conventional ending in which the hero goes off happily with Tatiana Romanova in From Russia, With Love to the darker, ambiguous ending in which he was poisoned by Rosa Klebb’s shoe-knife and collapsed, possibly for good. But a definitive death on the page is not unprecedented.

For example, a thousand years ago, Beowulf opens with the funeral for Shild Sheafson, a self-made warrior king. In that anonymously-written epic, we then meet the hero as a young, talented, but essentially inexperienced warrior, just as Daniel Craig’s Bond appeared in Casino Royale. We follow him through several adventures, until the poem ends where it started: with the funeral for a hero that watched over his subjects for half a hundred years.

Beowulf defeated (like St. George) a dragon, but was killed himself, poisoned by the dragon’s claws. Beowulf’s death presaged the passing of Anglo-Saxon culture, which was in disarray even before the Norman Invasion of 1066 brought it to a decisive end.

Ancient ballads tell of the now-forgotten death of Robin Hood, whose fate is similar to Bond’s. In Child Ballad 153, “Robin Hood and the Valiant Knight,” Robin’s last adversary Sir William dies under a barrage of missiles. It seems that Robin Hood, too, is wounded in the exchange of arrows, as the next day, he is “taken ill” and his death is brought about by a treacherous monk, who lets him bleed to death:

The archers on both sides bent their bows,

And the clouds of arrows flew;

The very first flight, that honoured knight

Did there bid the world adieu.

Yet nevertheless their fight did last

From morning till almost noon;

Both parties were stout, and loath to give out;

This was on the last [day] of June.

At length they went off; one part they went

To London with right good will;

And Robin Hood he to the green-wood tree,

And there he was taken ill.

He sent for a monk, who let him blood,

And took his life away

Bond’s death appears to be an inversion of this, where first his blood is poisoned and then the modern arrows fall upon him. But where Robin Hood’s death is laid at the feet of a sneaky clergyman, perhaps a shot at the powerful ecclesiastics who were the rulers behind the rulers of Medieval England, Bond is sacrificed because he is now literally, not just symbolic of, toxic masculinity.

That symbolic end is the crux of the death of the hero. Here, I’m not talking about main characters who die, usually in a literal blaze of glory to save the rest, as Tony Stark/Ironman does in the Endgame, or Han Solo’s shocking patricidal murder in The Force Awakens. Such self-sacrifice and spectacle are common.

…Robin Hood’s death is laid at the feet of a sneaky clergyman, perhaps a shot at the powerful ecclesiastics…

In epic poetry, the hero is the personification of that culture’s values. So while Conan Doyle let Sherlock Holmes tumble from Reichenbach Falls (only to be miraculously resurrected for financial reasons) and Agatha Christie not only killed but also made guilty Hercule Poirot in Curtain, epic heroes are, like the cultures they represent, never shown to fall. For example, we know that Odysseus eventually dies, but only after completing one more journey that we no longer have.

Writers often anticipate cultural upheavals, and their heroes must reckon with those changes.

If we take the position that epic heroes represent an entire culture, then that makes the disturbing—or liberating—suggestion that the culture is ending. But that doesn’t necessarily mean any type of apocalypse. The Anglo-Saxons recognized that all things must pass. When Beowulf is killed by the dragon, a symbol of political corruption and greed, the king’s successor Wiglaf, recognizes that he will never live up to his mentor’s strength. In Seamus Heaney’s translation, Wiglaf declares,

So it is goodbye now to all you know and love

on your home ground, the open-handedness,

the giving of war-swords. Every one of you

with freeholds of land, our whole nation,

will be dispossessed, once princes from beyond

get tidings of how you turned and fled

and disgraced yourselves. (ll. 2884-90)

But they had recognized that other civilizations had come before them, and others would follow. Thus, Beowulf’s death is not so much the end of the world as we know it, as it is the passing of a torch to a new, unimagined one.

Joseph Campbell cites a Buddhist text that reads in part, “After the lapse of a hundred thousand years the cycle is to be renewed; this world will be destroyed…Therefore, sirs, cultivate friendliness; cultivate compassion, joy, and indifference; wait on your mothers, wait on your fathers; and honor your elders among your kinfolk.” He also points to Algonquin and Polynesian myths in which loved ones who are about to die teach that they should be buried in specific manners—and from their bodies spring sustaining bounty.

Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond has, from the beginning, been about reconstructing a cultural hero. Casino Royale has an early, spectacular chase through a construction site, where the steel girders of a skyscraper provide ample opportunities for Bond to wreak his usual havoc.

It ends with the sinking of a Venetian mansion that symbolizes the franchise itself: outwardly beautiful, dripping with superficial detail, but rotten inside, held up by nothing but air. It’s only after that gorgeous wreck collapses that Craig earns the right to introduce himself as “Bond. James Bond.”

Over the past fifteen since then, the culture has begun to recoil at the implications of Bond’s less-than-savory habits, which can no longer be covered over by boyish charm. It’s become increasingly difficult to revel in his exploits, even when he’s saving the world. No Time To Die, made before the pandemic, makes explicit the idea that less than St. George, who saves the maiden but declines the offer to marry her (in fact, he is martyred still a virgin), Bond’s womanizing, high-living, and hard drinking have become the hallmarks of toxic masculinity. He has to pay for that, in order to bring about a new, steel-girdered tradition.

Witnessing the death of our fictional heroes helps us to conceptualize the real-life connections they have with the real world. Literature is not only an escape from the everyday, often chaotic plane, but an escape to a world that has defined boundaries. Like the heroes, we travel to another realm, comprehend its entirety, and become, as Campbell says, the master of two worlds.

We sympathize with the hero, join them virtually in the crucible of danger, and undergo their transformation in a controlled setting. In that way, we come to understand the mechanics, even the reasons, for the real world changing around us, and can make adaptations where the fictional characters can not.

Which is why, even as Daniel Craig kneels before the incoming missile strike, we the living understand that

“James Bond Will Return.”

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