The title itself seems little less than relevant – aside from offering a satisfying introduction to the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. In the beginning, we see Bond in a familiar situation, with a beautiful women, this time slightly more exotic than in previous incarnations in that she’s Chinese. But she, like many of his conquests, has a dark side – and she’s setting him up for assassination. As the doorbell rings, she closes the Murphy bed on which James sprawls, and he is, presumably trapped, and the bed it riddled with bullets.
As the vixen and the assassins make their escape, British Intelligence enters, unfolds the bed and sees Bond laying there, blood seeping from his back. His eyes closed. He is dead. However, this does not lead to cryogenic preservation, or even some sort of Frankensteinean resurrection. Rather, we see his visage plastered across many newspapers, watch his burial at sea, and witness his body returned to a submarine where it is revealed that he was merely faking his death and survived his underwater entombing with the help of an oxygen mask.
This is all well and good and a fine way to begin a film. It offers action and intrigue. But then it fizzles. Mostly because his “death,” aside from creating a decent transition to the Nancy Sinatra-performed song “You Only Live Twice,” serves no other purpose. Sure, at the end, the exclamation, “I thought Bond was dead!” is made, but this really has little to do with the rest of the narrative.
That aside, the meat of the film revolves around kidnapped American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. Each country feels that the other is responsible for the missing explorers and capsules, but Great Britain sets its aim on S.P.E.C.T.R.E — as does Bond.
However, there’s something a bit strange about You Only Live Twice. Like the faking of Bond’s death, the existence of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. seems inconsequential. The true motive of the film seems to be to fetishize the exotic, while at the same time limning a benevolent relationship with the Japanese.
As for the former: the beautiful Japanese women that surround Bond symbolize this, as does the attempt to place James undercover by making him look “Japanese” – something that is accomplished with a straighter, thicker hair, and the application of heavier eye lids that don’t really change his eyes at all. On the one hand, the design here could be to suggest that the Japanese and the West are more similar than they appear. On the other, this might channel the ignorance of the West about the East. On yet another, the makeup budget might have been minimal. Given Fleming’s tendency to attempt to fuse global relations throughout his novels, I’m more inclined to agree with the first offering, something that is doubly supported by the Japanese who speak English rather well and the glamourizing of their secret ninja boot camp, wherein James Bond learns to become a ninja in the span of seven to eight minutes.
As for the notion that You Only Live Twice is designed to create a benevolent relationship, I can refer back to the belief that this is what Fleming does throughout number of his novels. And the Japanese are not the exception here. The gist of the film is that the Americans and Russians will shortly enter into mutually assured destruction if not for help from both Great Britain and the Japanese. While the Chinese are still made out to the initial villains in the film, the shade of nefariousness ultimately leads to S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and the pale, disfigured No. 1, whose face we finally see in the form of Donald Pleasance.
However, the inclusion of the Japanese in You Only Live Twice is slightly misplaced when seen through the lens of the Fleming novel. Fleming’s novel comes after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which Bond loses his wife, and You Only Live Twice (the novel) is supposed to begin with Bond on a bender, drinking too much, messing up assignments, etc. This is why he is sent to Japan. Without this tidbit of information, the film version of You Only Live Twice feels a bit gimmicky – even more so than James Bond films in general, which detracts a bit from the story and offers us only memories of iconic moments throughout the film: the dastardly piranhas, or the reveal of No. 1.
