DanJaq/Eon Productions/Kobal Collection
Like
many enduring creations of collective consciousness—Stone Age cave
paintings or medieval cathedrals or the iPhone—the character of James
Bond is the work of lots of hands. Under the guidance of nearly a
hundred writers and directors and half a dozen actors of all appearances
and levels of skill, Bond has taken 50 years to develop and lives as an
amalgam of memory as much as a figure onscreen. Seeing him in Spectre
(out November 6) is like having a reunion with a favorite grizzled
uncle, an opportunity to once again face the question he has always
posed: Whom do men want to be now? Spectre will
almost certainly be the last time the question is answered by Daniel
Craig, the man who has done more than anyone else to redeem the
exhausted and often disgraceful figment of male fantasy we have given
the name James Bond.
Bond
was born not out of luxury but out of privation. Ian Fleming wrote him
into existence in the England of the early 1950s, when war rationing
had not yet ended and the British Empire was drifting into the
complacent irrelevance it currently enjoys. Stories of a British spy
became massively popular at the exact moment British spies no longer
mattered. Accompanying the fantasy of power was a fantasy of
permission—the license to kill—and an equally essential fantasy of
consumption. Bond ate luxurious meals when his audiences could not. He
smoked 60 custom-made cigarettes a day. He gambled. He traveled. He
spent as much money as he could. The qualification for playing James
Bond is to be the man of your generation who looks best in a Savile Row
suit.
Bond is not just a
character; he's also an adjective: Bond cars, Bond gear, Bond songs,
Bond villains, Bond girls. The series' continuity, which makes it so
easy to parody, is its chief selling point. The gadgets may change, but
the love of gadgets is forever. All Bond villains serve the same
function. The threat of global nuclear war, terrorism, technological
change, even media conglomerates—in Bond films it turns out that they're
all just guys with funny hair and slightly effeminate mannerisms.
The
Bond girls are the most distinctive feature of the franchise, of
course—beautiful women with silly names (Honey Ryder, Sylvia Trench,
Pussy Galore, Thumper, Mary Goodnight, Chew Mee, Holly Goodhead, Xenia
Onatopp, Dr. Molly Warmflash, and my personal favorite, Kissy Suzuki).
The best Bond movies—Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, and Casino Royale
constitute a separate category—have the most complex, most assertive,
most interesting women in them. But the overwhelming majority of the
films have been too lazy for female characters who are not simply
consumer products like the others. Interesting women are too
unpredictable, and Bond sells predictability.
Change
is inevitable, however, even in Bond movies, and the series, against
its will, reflects history. Each Bond is an argument concerning how men
felt about the masculine ideals of their period. In the early '60s,
before and during the sexual revolution, Sean Connery exuded the supreme
confidence of a man who has never questioned, nor been questioned
about, his sense of his own manhood. Through the Roger Moore years, the
'70s and '80s, Bond devolved into a relic of British gentility and
louche nightclub sexuality until the movies veered dangerously close to
being parodies of themselves, and sometimes crossed over—in Octopussy,
007 literally saves the world as a faded clown in a circus.
Many years
of confusion followed, during which Bond was little more than a branding
opportunity, fulfilling, halfheartedly, a tired contract with fans: the
woman in a bikini who utters "James" meltingly, the threat to the
world, the capture, the improbable escape, "shaken, not stirred" as a
joke somewhere in there. The portrait of male fantasy by way of James
Bond was not flattering to men: a sometimes stupid, sometimes violent
pompous joke addicted to cheap puns, executive toys, and vacuous women.
Sony Pictures
Then
came Daniel Craig. He kept all the Bond clichés in place while utterly
reinventing all of them; he played Bond as a real character rather than
as a cipher for adventure. He refused to take the man as a joke but was
willing to laugh at him nonetheless; he helped create a kinder, more
thoughtful Bond, who listens when women speak, but also a more dangerous
and more selfish Bond, who knows he prefers adultery to sex with
available women. You can sense the desperation in this 007.
Self-consciously traditional, he believes in the decrepit loyalties to
Britain but at the same time feels betrayed by his country and its
institutions. In short, Craig is the PTSD Bond. He is the Bond for an
era in which a million and a half American men and women, and a
significant number of British and Canadian and Australian men and women,
have been fighting actual shadow wars against actual madmen with actual
dreams of global domination, and have drifted home from their
encounters in various states of brokenness.
The
fantasy of the Craig Bond is the existence of a real person behind the
cloak of heroism—he is the Bond who has been willing to show his
suffering and failure. Craig comes the closest, of all the film
versions, to the Bond in the books—a character who emerged from
deprivation and the enduring sacrifices of war. He has perfectly
represented the past decade and the original story simultaneously. If
he's not the greatest Bond, it's only because he wasn't the first.
The question "Who will be the next Bond?"
is more than just Hollywood gossip or standard pop-culture speculation.
It is the question of what is missing from the lives of men and who
best fills the void. Bond has been a figure of confidence for an age of
anxiety, a figure of glamour for an age of plastic, a figure of
redemption for an age of degradation, a reliable man for unreliable
times. Only one thing is certain about the Bond who comes next: We will
need him, no matter whom he turns out to be.
