Craig-Bond, standing astride a corpse which is face-planted in a gritty, realistic urinal, thumbs through his Tom Ford wallet. As he checks between rumpled Tesco coupons and a thick stack of personal trainer business cards, the impatient local authorities of a remote South American outpost look on, twirling handcuffs. A skinny dog barks third-worldly in the background. At last! Craig-Bond smiles smugly and produces a small card with a pic of himself in a bad haircut which he had thought forgotten; beside this are listed his name, height (fudged), and eye color (“CGI alien blue”); beneath these items, the signature of the head of British intelligence; and above them, the title: “Licence to Kill.”
Craig-Bond it appears is free to go, murder excused.
This is the vision of Ian Fleming.
Or is it?
Growing up, even before I was a Bond fan, I had by an osmosis come to associate James Bond with a licence to kill. An evocative phrase, “licence to kill” at that point called me to associate and imagine it along the lines of other licences of which I was aware — a driving licence or a fishing licence or a gun licence. That is, I imagined a licence to kill as an official document or card that Bond kept on his person and would or could flash like a badge.
This is probably not what the filmmakers themselves have ever quite had in mind...but I’m not quite sure that they have ever made it clear themselves what they have had in mind.
LTK of course has M telling Bond his licence to kill is revoked. Which begs — along with the abandoned original title
Licence Revoked — comparison with a driving licence, hence some kind of physical document. And in fact in GE, Q does much the same in comparing Bond’s licence to kill directly with a driver’s licence (“You have a licence to kill, not to break the traffic laws.”)
The only other instance that comes to mind is in FYEO when Gonzales is directly looking at Bond’s ID/papers when he says, “Licence to kill, or be killed.”
These aside, most of the references to the idea in the movies put the phrase in the form of “licenced to kill.” The idea there being perhaps that this is something more akin to a medical licence (assuming here this is an example of something that you can have but do not carry it with you at all times)? In other words, a status on file.
In DN M says, “A double-o number means you're licenced to kill, not get killed.”
In GF we get Goldfinger telling Bond he’s been recognized by one of his opposite numbers “who is also licensed to kill.”
TMWTGG has Rog playing Scaramanga talking about himself: “James Bond 007, licenced to kill...”
TSWLM has Anya bring it up when rattling off what she knows about Bond (“...licensed to kill and has done so on a number of occasions...”)
OP has Maud Adams kind of doing the same thing.
And in AVTAK when Zorin is looking up Bond on his PC it is “LICENCED TO KILL” which flashes across the screen (and this kind of furthers the “status on file” idea).
So I came to assume this latter idea. If Bond did not carry any official card, then it was at least a status afforded him in the government database.
But how far afield, if at all, has the “licence to kill” idea run from what Fleming had in mind?
Using the power of Ctrl+F and the Canadian Gutenberg site which has all the Flemings as html ebooks, I have discovered that Fleming does not even use the term “licence to kill” until...six books in!
From
Doctor No, during the M briefing scene:
- Quote :
- Bond stiffened. His eyes looked resentfully into M’s. The licence to kill for the Secret Service, the double-0 prefix, was a great honor. It had been earned hardly.”
What strikes me as odd in this excerpt is the use of “the licence” as opposed to “a licence” or even “licensed.”
The article “the” here could indicate a different interpretation, where Fleming intended “licence” not in the (usual) primary definition sense of some bureaucratic official permit (be it physical or merely notational) but instead a secondary sense, as simply a word synonymous with “permission.” So more like:
“The permission to kill for the Secret Service, the double-0 prefix...”
This kind of makes “the double-0 prefix” phrase set off in commas which follows make more sense, as it comes into focus as clarification of how the permission is notated. This sidesteps one problem with the interpretation of the licence to kill being a permit or status, as there is redundancy in having Bond also have the double-0 prefix — another status — which itself encompasses Bond’s permission to kill. To put it another way, since all double-0s are licenced to kill, what is the point of a or being licence(d) to kill.
Right? If this all seems convoluted, overly anal, or like I’m trying to score points on a technicality, I don’t mean it to.
What I’m trying to get at, perhaps, is that Fleming didn’t quite envision “James Bond, licensed to kill” in the ubiquitous way we’ve come to know — he might have just envisioned the double-0 prefix.
Fleming appears to have drawn the line between the 00 number and the permission to kill prior to
Doctor No.
In
Casino Royale, Fleming seems to suggest that the qualification for a double-0 prefix is that one has proven capable of killing (and of the discernment that goes with that).
- Quote :
- Bond frowned. 'It's not difficult to get a Double O number if you're prepared to kill people,' he said. 'That's all the meaning it has...I've got the corpses of a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm to thank for being a Double O...It's a confusing business but if it's one's profession, one does what one's told.
Then in
Live and Let Die, Fleming ties the ability to kill in the past with the power to do so going forward. Mr. Big says,
- Quote :
- “You have a double-0 number, I believe--007, if I remember right. The significance of that double-0 number, they tell me, is that you have had to kill a man in the course of some assignment... Whom have you been sent over to kill here, Mister Bond? Not me by any chance?'
In
Diamonds Are Forever, Felix asks Bond
- Quote :
- "You still got that double 0 number that means you're allowed to kill?"
Likewise, in
From Russia With Love, we get General G explaining that,
- Quote :
- “The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service.”
Post-
Doctor No there are only two other books with the phrase “licence to kill.” First,
Goldfinger in which it is used twice, once at the beginning...
- Quote :
- As a secret agent who held the rare double-O prefix—the licence to kill in the Secret Service—it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon.
...where it is quite clearly equated with the double-0 prefix as signifier, and once in the middle of the book...
- Quote :
- He was a good man, more careful than Bond. M would know that Goldfinger had killed Bond and he would give 008 licence to kill in return.
...where it seems again to be used in the more secondary sense I speculated above.
“...and he would give 008 licence to kill in return.”The only other book where Fleming deploys the phrase is in
The Man With the Golden Gun. Bond tells Scaramanga,
- Quote :
- “I have the licence to kill you and I am going to kill you.”
where once again, it seems he is using it more in line with the secondary definition.
So have the films diverted from Fleming in this respect? What idea have you had in your head over the years? Is the double-0 prefix doing the same job as the licence to kill?
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