Le monde après la Guerre froide selon James Bond et Mission impossible. Postmodernité et post-politique

Abstract

In this article, we question the modalities of representation of the geopolitical upheavals that have occurred since the early 1990s in Western spy cinema. To do so, we study the political issues and their spatialization in the last eight films of the James Bond saga and the six of the Mission Impossible saga, all released between 1995 and 2018. These films make it difficult to think our world outside the binary markers of the Cold War; nevertheless, they draw the outlines of a "postmodern geopolitics", with characteristics that are particularly salient after September 11, 2001 (globalization, multipolarity and new challenges linked to networked powers and counter-powers). They describe an unstable, illegible world, marked by the widespread infiltration of the power structures by increasingly indistinct enemies. They stage the anxieties linked to cyberspace, the relative disappearance of nation-states and the omnipresence of a diffuse threat against the West, emanating from psychologically unstable individuals. In short, they participate in the elaboration of a discourse aiming to depoliticize geopolitics, reducing its stakes to the necessary protection of the established order against the assaults of geographically and politically poorly defined entities.

Keywords

• James Bond
• Mission Impossible
• film studies
• critical geopolitics
• popular geopolitics
• post-politics