Is Boris Johnson like James Bond—or more like Homer Simpson? [long read]

Is Boris Johnson like James Bond—or more like Homer Simpson? [long read]

The question may seem like an odd one, so let me approach it by sketching some context. 2024 has been a year of elections worldwide, with voters around the globe hitting the ballot boxes, from India (the most populous country in the world, with the largest electorate) to Venezuela to the UK. And needless to say, one of the most consequential of the 2024 elections looms on the horizon­—indeed, advance balloting via postal vote began as far back as September—with so much at stake in the US Presidential election in November.

By now the political tactics and rhetorical strategies of the major candidates and parties are more than familiar to us: Kamala is a commie, Donald is weird; Harris can’t be trusted with the border or the budget, Trump will be a disaster for abortion rights, the environment, and democracy itself. And so on.

One particular rhetorical weapon available to political actors, to diminish their opponents or to aggrandize themselves or their allies, is to liken them to other agents—even, or perhaps especially, those fictional agents known as characters. The commentariat likes to play this game too. This takes us back to Boris Johnson. In the 2019 election campaign—which Johnson and the Tory party won with a landslide victory—Johnson was likened by one group of polled votes to James Bond, the suave Secret Service/MI6 agent born in the fictions of Ian Fleming and developed through the movie franchise beginning with the adaptation of Dr No (1962).

Embraced in some quarters, this rather unlikely analogy was met with derision and push-back in others, in particular via a counter-comparison made by another group of voters in the same poll. Johnson isn’t much like James Bond, so this response went; he’s rather more like Homer Simpson. Strip away the trappings of his upper-class background, and what you’re left with is a bumbling, unkempt, uncouth oaf, prone to gaffs, a ‘bit like a buffoon…in the power plant, thinking what do I press here? What do I do?’

History weighs rather heavily in favour of the Homer Simpson comparison. What, I shouldn’t have broken my own social distancing laws during covid? I’m not allowed to mislead parliament? I can’t manipulate parliamentary procedure to suit the interests of my party? D’oh! But all such analogies will be partial, highlighting some attributes of the object, downplaying others, and suggesting a kind of ‘gestalt’—an overall shape—to the character of the figure under scrutiny.

The Johnson episode is not an isolated one. One of Johnson’s favourite figures of mockery while he was a journalist, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was also the target of a satirical comparison with a fictional character. Erdoğan has been likened to Gollum, the stunted, grasping, unreliable Hobbit from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Erdoğan didn’t take kindly to the unflattering analogy; at least three individuals were pursued in the courts for making the comparison (with varied outcomes). Erdoğan’s fellow autocrats, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are similarly reported to be unamused at comparisons made between them and Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dobby the House Elf (from Harry Potter), respectively. In all three cases, the comparisons have a serendipitous, physical basis—all three political figures look sufficiently like the fictional characters to whom they are likened for the comparison to stick; the popular ‘separated at birth’ trope trades on the same phenomenon of physical resemblance between figures who in other respects contrast strongly with one another.

Note, however, that there is variation here in the way the negative comparisons work. Winnie and Dobby are benign, child-like figures, pointedly contrasting with and ironically undercutting the authoritarian, strong-man demeanours Xi and Putin seek to project. By contrast, Gollum is menacing, pointing directly to a negative trait in Erdoğan (though in an interesting twist, in one of the Erdoğan cases, the defence successfully maintained—with support from the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson—that the specific images from the film depicted the naïve but good-natured Sméagol rather than his demonic alter-ego Gollum, and so the comparison could not be held to be insulting). But in all three cases, the strategy is to drain the target figures of their symbolic standing by likening them to fictional characters—usually absurd, pathetic, or comic—drawn from children’s fictions (Gollum first appeared in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, written for children). And in all three cases, the fictions from which the characters hail are in wide international circulation, making the satirical force of the comparisons readily understood across communities, cultures, and nations.

We think of characters as creatures of the imagination, but as these examples show, they enter our actual lives in a multitude of ways. Satirical character comparisons in the political domain are but the tip of the iceberg; we routinely consort with fictional characters first by imagining them, and then by comparing them with those in our individual social worlds—not just public figures, but friends, family members, colleagues, and not least, ourselves. Characters arise from our fascination with the varieties of human personality and agency, and they act as vehicles for contemplating and comparing our own agency with that of other agents, possible and actual.

Possible and actual? Aren’t characters, in the sense discussed here, by definition fictional? They are indeed. But even non-fictional representations which purport to represent the actual world rather than project an imagined world—documentaries, news reports, political campaign materials—offer characterizations of the agents that they represent. Joe Biden really exists, but when Trump dubs him ‘Crooked Joe’, he reduces the multifaceted real agent into what the novelist E. M. Forster described as a ‘flat’ (one-dimensional) character, casting him as the villain in a political melodrama. The ‘baby Trump’ blimp seen floating above London on the occasion of his visit in 2017 did the same for the former president, characterizing him as a bloated infant. The latter trope is restaged, alongside Trump’s more recent ‘Sleepy Joe’ characterization of Biden, playing on Biden’s perceived infirmity, in a political cartoon by Steve Breen. Johnson’s limerick characterizes Erdoğan as a voracious zoophile (and is rather mild compared with the poem by German comedian Jan Böhmermann that preceded it).

Cartoons have long been a vehicle for such polemical characterizations. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Nast’s political cartoons established the iconography of Republicans as Elephants and Democrats as Donkeys; in our own era, Spitting Image carried the tradition of the political cartoon caricature into the world of television. Through these examples we see that the characterizations can be spare and abstract, drawing on types rather than individuals: Democrats are likened with the donkey as an animal type, not with any specific donkey (say, Winnie’s gloomy friend Eeyore); Republicans with the elephant as a type, not any specific elephant (say, Dumbo or Nellie).

All of this points to some important metaphysical features of characters. The first is that characters are real. That might seem like an oxymoron, if we hold that characters are imaginary, and imagined objects are just those things that aren’t real. But we need to recognise a more expansive conception of reality. Characters are real in the same way that novels, or scientific theories, are real; that is why we can refer to and make use of them in the workaday world, including the sphere of politics. As abstract artifacts—recipes for possible persons—the reality of characters is distinct from the reality of flesh-and-blood individuals, but they have a reality and a utility as palpable as physical artifacts, from hammers to Humvees. Characters are part of the furniture of the world.

So characters are imaginary but real entities. And in the cases at hand, we see how they can function as a vehicle of imaginative cognition: the forging of metaphors and analogies, in which one entity is thought of in terms of some other entity. Consider the classic case of Charles Philipon’s satirical depiction of Louis-Philippe, which allows us not only to see the King in the drawing, but to see him as a pear, and thus by inference as a fool (‘poire’ meaning ‘dupe’ or ‘fathead’ in the Parisian vernacular of the period). And once again, we see that the idea of a ‘poire’ as a type is all that is necessary: no specific pear, or fool, need be invoked for the charged characterization to pack its punch.

Our examples also point to the portability of characters. A character will be invented in a given fiction, but they can take on an existence beyond that literal ‘origin story’, reappearing in subsequent fictions created not only by the original author, but others too. The case of James Bond is a rich and instructive example, appearing first in Fleming’s novel Casino Royale (1953). By now Bond has featured in dozens of later films and novels authorized by Fleming’s estate, not to mention his countless appearances in fanfics. There is a sense in which each one of these versions of Bond is different—as different as Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig, and all the other actors who’ve incarnated Bond in the films, are from one another. But a thread of continuity runs through these different renderings of the character; and it is this continuity which allows us to refer coherently to ‘James Bond’, and to transport that character from one fictional world to another, and, as we have seen, from the zone of fiction to the real world.

So the traffic between the real world and the worlds of fiction runs in both directions. Moving in one direction, the very concept of character designates the fictional analogue of an actual human agent, and many specific characters are modelled on and inspired by actual persons. Moving in the other direction, fictional characters are a tool for thinking about real people and the world itself. A web search reveals the strategy in full swing, as one might expect with the Presidential election just around the corner. Chris Wallace likens Nixon and Trump to the Joker; Trump’s critical remarks about wind power earn him comparisons with Don Quixote, swinging at the enemies populating his political fantasy as illusory as the windmills Quixote mistakes for giants. George R. R. Martin compares Trump with Joffrey Baratheon, while Stephen King points to two of his characters as Trump-types, and dozens of other commentators play the comparison game. And Trump himself can’t stop referring to Hannibal Lecter—a fictional serial killer modelled on a real one—though it isn’t always clear what the former President wants to say through these allusions, or even whether he thinks Lecter is a figure to love or to loathe. None of this means that the distinction between the actual world and the worlds of fiction has been swallowed by a post-truth vortex; indeed the force of these comparisons depends on our ability to keep the different status of the fictional figures and their real targets of comparison straight—a task that most of us manage effortlessly, all the time.

_{Featured image by Jr Korpa via Unsplash.}

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