Between Progress and Nostalgia: Technology, Geopolitics, and James Bond's Railway Journeys

This article discusses the train journey in the James Bond film series as a narrative and aesthetic device which produces specifically modern forms of mobility. Bond's trains transport imaginary geographies and identities, and we contend that they function within the Bond franchise as figures of both techno-cultural development and imperial nostalgia, as well as a means by which the mobility of the cinematic machinery itself is dramatised. The article addresses a gap in James Bond scholarship and argues that a close examination of the poetics of the railroad in the Bond films reveals that the train is central to the geopolitical imagination of the series.