Bond, James Bond

As the world rushes out to luxuriate in the warm, churning waters Casino Royale ($40 million gross, almost enough to beat the dancing penguins), I find myself feeling like a Jew at Christmas.  There is a celebration going on all around and I can’t quite figure out what it has to do with me.

For some reason I’ve never “gotten” James Bond.  I’ve tried, I really have.

Maybe I’m the wrong age.  I remember seeing Goldfinger on TV when I was a kid, and enjoying it because my brothers and father liked it, and I liked the assassin with the killer hat and the fact that the bomb that Bond is chained to is shut off at 007 seconds.  But the first one I saw in the theaters was Moonraker when I was 17, and that put me off Bond until Goldeneye.  Bond just always seemed to be part of someone else’s mythology.

(Sensing a lack in my understanding of my cultural heritage, a few years ago I sat down to watch all of them, including the ridiculous ’67 Casino Royale and ’83’s Never Say Never Again.  I also started in on the books, but got through only three of them before giving up.)

Even from a young age, I could see that the Bond pictures are not dramas or even thrillers; they are pageants, as predictable and unchanging as the Passion Play.  Bond is an unflappable guy who dresses well, drives cool cars, kills men, sleeps with women, blows stuff up and moves on.  There is nothing at stake, no emotional involvement, no chance of development.  The movies aren’t about character and they’re not even really about politics or the nature of espionage.  Bond doesn’t love, hate or care about anything but, apparently, appearances.  No one can ever remember the plot of a Bond movie because the plot is the least important aspect of it. 

(In Goldfinger, the best-loved movie of the series, Bond wanders through the whole movie without having an iota of impact on the plot.  He sneaks around, witnesses things and puts together a puzzle, stands around and watches things happen.  He instigates no course of action and can’t even defuse an atom bomb when he’s chained to one — that job falls to a CIA guy who happens by at the right moment.  He doesn’t even kill Oddjob; Oddjob kills himself.  He can barely even take credit for offing Goldfinger himself; a stray bullet takes care of that.)

What’s important in the Bond movies is style.  What does he wear, what kind of car does he drive, who are the women he sleeps with, how does he kill men and chase people and destroy property, what deformity or perversion does the bad guy have, and is it all carried off with panache?

I think Bond is purposefully not a character at all but rather a deliberately empty suit, a model in the fashion sense, designed only to wear things,  to be an attractive cipher, to better sell us things.  Specifically, he is designed to sell men an idea of how they are supposed to behave.  In spite of most of us never having the chance or opportunity to legally kill men, sleep with superficially gorgeous women without consequence, blow stuff up or drive our cars over the speed limit, we are expected to turn to James Bond for lessons in, in, in something, I’m not sure what.  Self-reliance?  Charisma?  Brutality?  Grace under pressure?

There is, of course, an important capitalist element to the Bond pictures, and it’s not just about his brand of watch.  (Woman in the new Casino Royale: Nice watch.  Rolex?  Bond: Omega.  Woman: Beautiful.)  Bond is a brand unto himself, and “the new Bond” is always a kind of barometer of western culture.  If we can put together a better Bond, it seems, no matter how the political winds of the world are blowing, the capitalist machine is still operating well enough.  We parade the new Bond as proudly as the Russians once paraded their rows of ICBMs on Mayday.  They were advertising their militaristic might, we were (and still are) advertising our easy living, loose morals and conspicuous consumption.

There is a kind of world-wide anxiety about Bond.  Every time a new actor is announced, people everywhere get very concerned about the health of the franchise.  Is Bond going to be okay?  Why isn’t the studio making more Bond pictures?  Are they going to keep on making them?  Is he still relevant?  Was he ever?  Is he tough enough, too tough, too funny, too male, too emasculated, too brutal, too ironic?  Too blond?  He seems to be really important to people, to men anyway.  (Thinking of the capitalist perogative, maybe one of the reasons Bond has been so successful for so long is because the West needs to celebrate, above all, its power to be superficial, stupid and wasteful.  They’re like capitalist pornography.)

In any case, each time a new one comes along I find myself getting swept up in it because I’m in the business and I keep thinking maybe there’s something there.  With the new one, for instance, it has been mentioned that Bond has been reinvented in order to compete with Jason Bourne at the cineplex.  I love love love the Bourne movies and so does my wife (Me: You want to leave me and marry Matt Damon, don’t you?  Wife: No, not Matt Damon, Jason Bourne), so the prospect of Bond being toughened up in the Bourne sense sounded like a good idea to me.

Perhaps that’s where the seed of my disappointment in the new movie lies.  This Bond is still dressed in a tux, still plays games of leisure in the playgrounds of the wealthy, still lives the high life, trading superficial quips while driving fancy cars with beautiful women, and still has a cheesy, eye-rollingly stupid title sequence.  (There is some commentary this time around about how this Bond is closer to Ian Fleming’s original conception of the character, as if that meant anything, as if we were discussing freaking Hamlet here instead of a coat hanger with a gun.)  We are told that this time the woman means something, but we know that’s not true, because if the woman meant something she would stick around for another movie and we know that’s not going to happen because that would be antithetical to the whole Bond thing.  Bond doesn’t change, Bond can’t change.  Bond doesn’t fall in love, Bond moves on, like a shark, leaving destruction and broken hearts in his path.  The Bond movies keep promising thrills but keep delivering only spectacle.

As the movie and series continues to prove itself wildly popular, I welcome education as to why this is so.