Global Agency between Bond and Bourne : Skyfall and James Bond in Comparison to the Jason Bourne Film Series

Abstract

Skyfall (2012) signals a crisis in global espionage in a post-9/11 era of schizophrenic digital terror. James Bond and his enemy are both internally excluded from their agency—MI6—and this “abjection” leads to terrorist revenge and sovereign reaffirmation. The latter involves a survival test for 007’s vulnerable body while simultaneously recovering a national identity for the United Kingdom. In this sense, James Bond mirrors Jason Bourne, the ex-CIA agent in the Jason Bourne film series. Bourne undergoes a similar abjection yet becomes neither terrorist nor sovereign but instead a symptom of perpetual mind-games. This chapter compares Bond to Bourne to enable a cognitive mapping of the twenty-first-century espionage genre and its global system of sovereignty and abjection.