“You Must Be Joking”: 007 in the Laboratory and Academia

“You must be joking”: 007 in the Laboratory and Academia With SPECTRE here -and a proper psychologist making an appearance in the film, to boot- Prof G Neil Martin looks at how scientists have studied Bond in the lab and in the ivory tower. Everyone knows Bond’s resident scientist. Major Basil Boothroyd, played by Desmond Llewelyn- the original Q- was a regular foil to Bond’s insouciance and cavalier disregard for office equipment. Desmond morphed into John Cleese who then transmogrified into the dry, youthful and voluminously coiffed Ben Whishaw, the man with the dermatology who operated intriguing security breeches from the matutinal comfort of his gingham pyjamas. His was the youthful demeanour which elicited the exasperated response from Bond in the title above. But Q, of course, has not been Bond’s only scientist. If you ignore the dispensible villains and their bacteriological or viral plans for world destruction, there are some notable meetings of minds between spook and boffin. There was arguably Bond’s first strong female lead, Dr Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles), the US astronaut from Moonraker. At the other end of the hotpants spectrum, there was Dr Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), The World Is Not Enough’s unorthodox physicist. The first Bond Girl of the Pierce Brosnan era was Caroline (no surname, just Caroline, like Sting, or Lulu, or Bono) who was sent to psychologically evaluate Bond in Goldeneye, ended up racing Xenia Onatopp (yes, stop it, we’ve done them all) and being seduced by Bond in his DB5. The pitifully monikered Dr Molly Warmflash (Serena Scott Thomas) did a similar job- this time rehabilitating Bond after his collision with the Millenium Dome- in The World Is Not Enough. Doctor Hall was the comically Freudian shrink in Skyfall. And, since we are in the year of SPECTRE, let’s not forget that the first Eon Bond film’s villain, Dr Julius No -treasurer of greatest criminal organization in China, SPECTRE member, dextrocardic (in Fleming’s novel, he was born with his heart on the right side)- went to medical school in Wisconsin but, due to an unfortunate radiation accident, ended up replacing his hands with pincers. Now, in SPECTRE, we have the appearance of Bond’s first proper psychologist, Dr Madeleine Swan (Lea Seydoux). 1 Speaking of psychology, a curious cottage industry exists examining films via the prism of psychological theory and research. Review papers have examined the veracity of the representation of amnesia in the movies and how neurology is presented. Books have been written on the mad scientist archetype, and the representation of mental illness in cinema. And let’s not get started on the Psychology of Batman. Because many people have already done so and it is best to leave them to it. The cottage industry extends to Bond. For example, tucked away underneath the seemingly innocuous title, ‘functional connectivity of the macaque brain across stimulus and arousal states’ lies an fMRI study of monkeys’ brain response to Tomorrow Never Dies. “In our first experiment,” Sebastian Moeller and co-authors begin, “we scanned two monkeys (monkeys L, H) while they viewed clips of the James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” interleaved with three blank periods.” Via this method, the authors found 20 cortical network regions involved in the processing of arousing visual stimuli (which probably excluded Elliott Carver’s portable keyboard taping etiquette), including the visual, auditory, somatosensory, motor, prefrontal and parietal cortices. Tomorrow Never Dies also crops up in another study, on imitation and smoking. Eighty four smokers watched a film which featured smoking or no smoking and which contained breaks for pro-smoking or anti-smoking ads. Watching the smoking in Bond had no effect on “smoking intensity”, according to the study published in Tobacco Control. Tomorrow Never Dies was also the subject of a paper in Magnetic Resonance Imaging -TND is obviously the scientists’ go-to Bond film of choice. This paper looked at alterations in EEG activity during the continuous viewing of a two-minute film clip (the first two minutes of TND) in seven participants. The researchers found that the perception of differences between visual contrasts in the film were correlated with EEG activation in area V1 (the primary visual cortex). Another psychophysiological study examined participants’ responses while they played the part of James Bond in the game, JB007: Nightfire. In the experiment, galvanic skin response and facial muscle activity were recorded while people either killed or wounded villains, or were themselves wounded and killed. The aim was to discover the psychophysiological responses generated by different emotional and moral perspectives. When an opponent was wounded or killed, participants’ skin conductance increased but some of the muscles in the face (zygomatic, orbicularis occuli and corrugator mucles, all found around the eyes and mouth) decreased. The more psychotic the participant, the less pronounced these changes were. When the protagonist was wounded or killed, there was a 2 similar GSR increase but also an increase in two sets of facial muscles and a decrease in another set. These results suggest that the emotional consequences of attacking another or of being attacked can be characterised by subtle, facial muscle changes. On the subject of violence, a couple of studies have examined the extent of violence in the Bond movies. Violence in cinema and TV is a perennial favorite of social psychologists exploring the relationship between exposure to violent material and the subsequent expression of aggression or violence. A 2013 study published in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association Pediatrics found that the portrayal of serious violence in the Bond films increased significantly over time, even when accounting for film length. The most severely violent was Tomorrow Never Dies, which may explain why scientists have been so keen to use it in their studies. The 2008 re-boot, Casino Royale, featured 250 acts of violence involving a perpetrator, action or target, compared with 109 in Dr No. And it isn’t just violence that’s increased: sexual activity and more violence against women has increased, too. A 2010 study of 195 female characters across 20 Bond films, which was published in Sex Roles, also found that end-of-film mortality was “predicted by sexual activity, ethical status(good vs. bad), and attempting to kill Bond.” This article was titled “Shaken and stirred”. One of the more methodical papers investigated how people viewed changing situations or circumstances in films. One of those films was Moonraker (the others were Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, and Jeremiah Johnson). Participants made 85 change of situation judgments in Moonraker, mid-way between the other two. Shifts in time and movement were particularly noted. Staying with Moonraker, the same research team examined people’s ability to make predictions while watching the film- i.e., indicate what’s going to happen next. People were actually quite good at doing this, using visual and discourse clues in the film. Which either suggests that the participants were quite adept at this or that Moonraker is a predictable watch, at least if you’re asked to predict what is going to happen in it. The climax of the scene where Bond encounters Jaws on a plane, fights, bails out and the latter’s parachute fails to open and he falls onto a circus tent –a set of scenes grimly illustrated in the paper- is predicted by participants. None of the participants had seen the film before. The best predictors of what was going to happen were mise en scene, montage, framing and dialogue. Using these, participants made very specific predictions about what would occur in the film. Finally, let’s not, despite our better instincts, forget semiotics. Not a science, barely a discipline, in semiotics- where there are signifiers, there are interpreters to make a monumental meal of interpreting. Holly Cooper and colleagues from Griffith University in 3 Australia, for example, presented “a textual analysis of the brand narratives…specifically in the context of James Bond films.” which is as much of an incentive to carry on reading as any other. “In engaging with the text of popular culture,” Holly et al write, “consumers engage in the story and the embedded brand narratives in that text. Consumers readily draw on these texts for directions in constructing.” Not only that, “consuming, viewing, and engaging with films and the embedded brand narratives in film fuels consumer dreams and consumption ideals.” Crikey. Who would have thought that Heineken could reach those parts? Holly and colleagues examined the use of brands in all Bond films up to Casino Royale, including that Casino Royale. The first analysis begins with “ Vignette 1: The Bollinger Lover Brand Narrative” and goes quickly downhill from there. It describes Bond’s seduction of Caroline, the hapless MI6 bureaucrat tasked with psychologically evaluating Bond in Goldeneye. “The Bollinger brand”, write the authors, “embodies the masculine desire of James Bond and presents as a social tool of romance.” Oblivious to even Bond levels of innuendo, the authors thus set the tone of the analysis. The next vignette pits the Aston Martin against the Jaguar. I’ve always had a soft spot the Aston Martin –and not just for the nickname possibilities of employment at Birmingham’s second University. The sleek, understated sybariticity, the purring power and modesty, the cunning stealth…these are all devilish attractions but so is the fact that the company was named after Lionel (Martin) and his favorite hill (Aston). Here, Holly et al stray into the world of the esoteric, in a way that even Derek Akorah would admire. Commenting on the ice-chase between Zao and Bond in Die Another Day, they write: “The depiction of supernatural abilities can only nurture the aspirations of consumers, who are seeking a sophisticated and superhuman status.” (the supernatural abilities are those of the motors).

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