Culture warriors have heard a safety-catch being clicked firmly into place at London’s BFI Southbank for a forthcoming season of 60s movies – variously naughty, groovy and gritty – scored by the great composer John Barry: Soundtracking Bond and Beyond. The “Beyond” part means classics such as The Ipcress File and Midnight Cowboy, but obviously 007’s exploits are the main event.
And there’s a prominent warning: “Please note that many of these films contain languages, image and other content that reflect views prevalent in its time, but will cause offence today (as they did then).”
Those last four words will be savoured by historians of offence management: the additional pre-emptive assertion that some of this was iffy then, offensiveness is not relative and that was no excuse. But then why show these movies, if they are not being classified as mere historical archive material? Because they are presented as good films, clearly, because their cinematic value justifies the occasional wince.
Do audiences need a trigger warning? Are they entitled to suspect something supercilious and self-serving in it? Do we need a trigger warning for the trigger warning: “Caution: the following disclaimer is a mechanical form of words typed out by a middle-ranking employee tasked with avoiding social media disgrace.”
James Bond’s offences are after all numberless and well-known, almost always connected to his gruesome attempts to be funny. In Goldfinger, he dismisses a young woman with a problematic pat and the grotesquely sexist announcement that he needs “man talk” with a CIA colleague. He says you need “earmuffs” to listen to the Beatles. In You Only Live Twice he actually disguises himself as Japanese, a wince-making gag for which no trigger warning is loud enough and which surely does not herald the rehabilitation of Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu movies. And James Bond was always coolly outrageous and uncaring. Back in 1958, Paul Johnson (admittedly still in his New Statesman-contributor, progressive phase) was triggered by the novel Dr No, and denounced “the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex longings of a frustrated adolescent and the crude snob-cravings of a suburban adult” – thus inadvertently summarising precisely those ingredients that made 007 a commercial smash, not least with people who appreciated his absurdity.
The trigger warning is a curious genre, a kind of antibiotic sentiment designed to inoculate the user against getting into trouble. It is explicitly premised on the idea that we can see what is bad in movies or TV or literature of the past through contemporary enlightenment. But how about contemporary cultural events? How about, for example, Dave Chappelle’s huge new Netflix special The Dreamer, which has caused another row over trans gags? That doesn’t have a trigger warning, despite being produced by a corporate entity that is surely intensely aware of the issues. Why no trigger warning? Because of free speech and artistic expression, but those considerations apply to the old James Bond films too. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion trigger warnings don’t apply here because it might mean taking corporate responsibility for present-day sensibilities in the present day. There will come a time when trigger warnings will become as invisible and unread as the terms and conditions to which we assent with a click before buying anything online. At all events, we can enjoy the music of John Barry.
