Although I think I have said all I want to about the meeting of Bond and the queen, having gone back and added repeatedly to entries like this, this and this one, I find myself still fascinated by it. I am intrigue by the way it blurs fiction and reality; with how it forces together two aspects of british culture, one real and the other fiction, making it apparent that the two are interchangeable. In our postmodern world, there is no longer a definite boundary between fiction and reality: everything is a construct, part of the Lacanian symbolic which mediates the gap between the Real and the Imaginary. Thus this sketch simultaneously confirms the Bond franchise as a huge central part of our culture, and reveals the queens position as existing within the same sphere of cultural iconographies rather than above it, on a par with James Bond and any other fictional construct.

I am interested in where and how such fissions happen. The stunt with her majesty at the olympics was huge: under what other circumstances could you get a head of state to act, especially one held in such high regard. Whatever you think about the monarchy, you must admit that this was quite a big event, a big deal. It was, therefore, a one off – the queen will never act in a fiction again. I keep trying to find other such colossal events: it seems to me that examples of this type of cultural textual play only occur at events like the olympics. The only other place I can come up with is at charity telethons. Only there can you get the same strange type of forced entertainment, the same type of attention-seeking stunt, overtly intended to grab headlines. The only other example I could come up with is Can’t smeg, Wont smeg, where the cast of Red Dwarf appeared in character in an episode of Can’t cook Won’t Cook for red nose day. It isn’t on the same scale, of course, but there too you can see the same intrusion of imaginary-symbolic characters into something which calls itself real.

While I am aware of the repressive effect charity has, such events interest me, then, as they bring about the same type of circumstances where fictional spaces are opened up to reality and vice-versa. While they might seem mere bits of fun intended to grab attention, it seems to me that such devices open up realms where reality can be seen as the fiction it is, cultural iconographies are blurred and distorted, renowned institutions are shown to be constructs and constructs become real.Indeed, as my old film tutor Alan said after I shared my thoughts with him, ”What if Daniel Graig was really James Bond and the actor Daniel Craig was just an imaginary figment of the symbolic formation/fiction that we call ‘ordinary life’, the kind of entity that masquerades as part of social symbolic reality but is in fact a merely fictitious emblem of our collective desire for hero worship.” That is to say, for all we know, it is daniel Craig the actor who is a fictional construct, and the olympic film therefore showed a real man called James Bond walking alongside the queen.As I wrote here, though, that implies this country has a highly secret group of government assassins running about the place who are above the law – something totally undemocratic and very, very scary. Nevertheless, my point is that sketches like this raise such questions, in turn saying something of our culture. Given the large stage upon which they appear, they have a unique resonance too: yes they are forms of play, but I am starting to think they can be seen as lapses into the real through which certain truths about the constructed nature of society can be glimpsed.