The comparison with Zorro is instructive because we don’t need to know anything about the history of California to root for Zorro. All we need to know is that he’s a rich man pretending to be a blackguard in order to defend the peasants against the military regime that’s taken over the region (Robin Hood was a nobleman who had had his title taken away, Zorro kept his title but put on a mask to disguise himself — both were fighting for the rights of the peasants against a cruel, wrongfully empowered, dictator).

So let’s remove Bond from the Cold War, Kruschchev, Kennedy, Cuba, Castro, all those hard K’s, and examine who he is personally.  Bond is a half-formed manchild, an eternal adolescent, good with tools, good with destruction, bad with forming long-lasting relationships. In the books he drinks too much and smokes too much and pays the price for it, in the movies Bond would never drink to excess and would certainly never have a hangover and hasn’t had a smoke since Roger Moore retired.

What does Bond want? What is his primary objective? It’s not to serve his Queen and country, although George Lazenby makes a gesture toward that in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s not to please M, although Bond does respect M and does follow his orders, more or less. (M, we could say, is Bond’s father figure. Bond does what he’s told because he’s a good boy, but he’s going to get the job done his way. This is, I think, why Q becomes an important character — Q is the father-figure whom Bond can disobey. To M, Bond is all “Yes, sir, right away sir,” but to Q he’s rude and dismissive and rebellious. And it drives Q crazy. M may purse his lips at Bond’s indiscretions, but underneath he wishes he were in Bond’s place, young enough to still have sex in a spaceship after blowing up a villains orbiting headquarters.)

(Does that make Moneypenny Bond’s mother? The sexual tension between them says no, and yet what would Freud say? Why can’t Moneypenny feel both maternal and lustful toward Bond? Isn’t Bond’s devotionto his work part respect for M [father] and lust for Moneypenny [mother]? Or is Moneypenny “family,” a sister or cousin, always flirting, never consummating, because to consummate would be the end of everything? [Casting Judi Dench as M makes the parental aspect of the character clearer than ever — M for “mother,” no doubt, with still plenty of sexual tension between her and Bond.])

(Samantha Bond’s Moneypenny is, for my money, the best of the bunch, because I really believe in the attraction between her and Bond. I feel like Bond travels the world screwing women who don’t matter to him but at the end of his adventure he always comes back to Moneypenny. Christmas Jones is the woman you date, Moneypenny is the woman you marry. Or does Moneypenny symbolize home itself, the home Bond “loves” but also is happy leaving at the drop of a hat [just like the overgrown teenage boy he is]? And is that why Bond is always introduced tossing his hat into Moneypenny’s office?)

Forget the Queen, forget England. None of that makes any difference to Bond. He doesn’t believe his country is right; he never gives a moment’s thought to his country at all (and when he’s being played by a Scot, an Irishman or an Australian, who can blame him?). Politics is all a show to Bond, just symptoms of an eternal power struggles, left and right, capitalist and communist, they’re all meaningless, flags of convenience, in and of themselves.  Most of the villains he fights don’t impact England directly anyway, and when they do (as in Goldeneye) the audience says “He’s going to blow up England? What kind of lame supervillain sets his sights on blowing up England?” When someone says to Bond that he’s doing something for Queen and country, they’re teasing him, calling him a momma’s boy.

The attacks in Bond’s world are, narratively speaking, attacks not on Queen and country but upon Bond’s family of M, Moneypenny and Q (again, made explicit in the ambitious but tangled TWINE). M provides authority, Moneypenny provides the “home fires,” the warm bosom waiting, ever waiting for the hero’s return, Q provides the tools that every handsome prince needs to go forth and slay dragons. To continue the medieval spin, M is the aging Arthur, Moneypenny is Guinivere, Q is Merlin. That would make Bond, hm, Lancelot I guess, or maybe Percival, going forth to seek the grail.

I think this is why Bond can’t be 60 years old — he has to be believable as an adolescent boy (which is what Fleming said he was) — rebellious, sex-mad, perpetually eager to experience life, fast on his feet, a good improvisor. He honors his parents and will always come home, but he might also take off with the car/boat/hovercraft/yacht/spaceship/submarine and use it to pick up girls when he’s done running his parents’ errands.

Bond is certainly a capitalist creation, a consumerist creation more precisely (Bond doesn’t make a very good capitalist, but he makes a wonderful consumer), but I think it’s a mistake to believe that he holds no intrinsic value. If he were valueless as an idea he would have faded away long ago.

It’s not the Cold War, or else Bond wouldn’t have survived the fall of the Soviet Union.  This is a franchise, a “brand” if you will, dating back to when my father was a young man.  Few other things (say, the ’65 Thunderbird) have retained the same appeal over the years.  And yet with a few exceptions, the early Bond films do not feel dated.  The best ones hold up just fine, feel timeless at the same time as they transport us to another time.  One has to remind oneself about the Cold War aspect of the Bond movies — they work perfectly well outside of the history that produced them.

It’s not Sean Connery, because Bond has survived many different casting hurdles, including Connery’s two returns to the role.  And each Bond has been different, yet somehow still the same.

Is it the character himelf?  If so, what about him?  Is it the clothes, the consumerist aspect, the ability to score with women even when one has crinkly neck-skin?  Is it the license to kill, the gadgets, the ability to negotiate a complex world with sang-froid?  Do men look up to government assassins?  Do women?

It’s not love of England, is it?  Queen and country?

Is it partly that we know so little about him, he’s a blank slate, we can put ourselves in his place?  Then why was the new, character-rich Casino Royale such a hit?

It’s not the direction; all the major “Bond Directors” have both superlative and substandard Bonds on their resumes.  One doesn’t scan the opening titles to see whether it’s Guy Hamilton or John Glen on this one.  And yet imagine how an Indiana Jones movie would be received if it was not directed by Steven Spielberg.  If you have trouble imagining that, think back to how Jurassic Park III was received.

Is it the producers?  All the “off-Brand” Bond movies have met with dismal posterity.

Let’s try to think of another character who has survived this many incarnations, from original novels to 21 movies to new novels and now video games.  Sherlock Holmes?  Dracula?  Frankenstein’s monster?  Bugs Bunny?  Mickey Mouse?  And yet, none of those fit either.  “Dracula” isn’t a character you care about — or is it that Dracula wasn’t guided through the production process as skillfully as Bond, he had his brand diluted through too many unlicensed product, and superseded by “vampires” in general?  Can you imagine Bond being replaced in the public imagination by “spies” in general?

Come to think of it, this goes back to the Cold War question.  Because Bond not only exists outside of the history that produced him, he exists outside of the genre that produced him.  One would not watch a Bond movie on a double feature with, say, The Bourne Identity or Gorky Park or Three Days of the Condor.  He’s his own thing; part spy, part detective, part superhero, part action star, part sex-machine.

But what, if anything, makes a Bond movie a Bond movie?  What must a Bond movie be or else it is not a Bond movie?

If the villain does not have a gigantic headquarters, is it still Bond?  I can count only one Bond movie that does not climax in a humongous, over-appointed room, and that is The World is Not Enough.

Must the villain capture Bond (and preferably the girl) at the end of Act II, leading to a protracted, silly, woefully inefficient murder attempt?  Why is this plot-point still tolerated, decades after being pointed out as silly?

We have found that the Bond movies gather many different genre disciplines, both in design and narrative.  Some emphasize detective skills (sometimes laughably) some emphasize action (almost always skillfully) some emphasize revenge, or suspense, or even romance.  There seems to be no set narrative template for a Bond movie.  They instead seem to have a dozen or so narrative strategies that get shuffled and re-shuffled at will, making each adventure seem fresh while actually being recycled.  But you could say the same thing about Star Wars.

Must the villain have a grand, slightly fantastic scheme to take over the world?  He does not in For Your Eyes Only, the movie probably least-remembered of the entire series, in spite of being skillfully written and directed, and featuring Roger Moore’s best performance.  If the villain were realistic, or if the villain were presented in a different way, would it still be Bond?  Could you switch the antagonists of, say, Goldfinger and The Bourne Identity?

Come to think of it, look at this: many of our greatly-loved espionage thrillers have had terribly pessimistic, anti-authoritarian stances, where the bad guy turns out to be the protagonist’s boss.  Can you imagine a Bond thriller where the government itself turns out to be the bad guy?  And yet it begs the question, what country does Bond live in, if the people with all the money and power never use it for evil ends?  How is it that the Bond movies could imagine Dr. Kananga, a prime minister who is also a drug pusher, but not imagine a monster on the scale of Margaret Thatcher, who gets playfully lampooned in, I think, A View to a Kill (or is it For Your Eyes Only)?

Must the women be disposable, replaceable and meaningless?  Could the brand survive a genuine love story?  Must the brand have any love story at all?  How many government assassins take time out to seduce every woman who crosses their paths on their ways to saving the world?  What would happen if Bond were married, or even had the same girlfriend two movies in a row?

Must Bond be flawless?  What if he screwed up now and then, if only for the purposes of suspense?  He’s so goddamn capable, always has the answers, always knows how to get out of a jam.  And if he can’t get out of a jam, knows someone who will come and get him.

Must Bond have gadgets, fast cars, action set-pieces?  If Bond never left the office for the length of a movie, would we still watch him?  That sounds ridiculous, and yet there are plenty of suspenseful thrillers that get by without action set-pieces.  All the President’s Men is one of the most nail-bitingly suspenseful movies ever made, and it’s 2 1/2 hours of men talking on phones.  And we already know how the story ends.

Is it, as one writer put it, that the world changes, but Bond doesn’t?  Is that his appeal, that he is always one step removed from the world he (and we) move in, casting a jaded eye at the turmoil and contortions of whatever time it is, knowing that, whatever the details, human villainy always comes down to sex and power and greed?  (Key line in Dr. No: Bond sighs and says “The same old dream, world domination,” as if there were nothing more predictable and boring than a gigantic organization of supercriminals with limitless resources at their disposal.)

Who, if anyone, can relate to Bond?  He’s a lower-class thug who’s somehow gotten into the ruling-class world.  There’s a kind of Esquire “Man at his Best” quality about him: he’s just as comfortable garroting a bad-guy as he is wearing a tux.  And what man is comfortable wearing a tux?