No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to… Pout ?

Some Bonds have more fun than others….

Let us dispense with childhood obsessions of the silver screen: Capes and cowls. Light sabers. DeLoreans that fly. Afternoons with the Baker Street Irregulars. Dreams of unearthing the Ark of the Covenant. All for one and one for all escapades. And never crossing the streams, ever…

The Good Book, let’s remember, beseeches us to put away childish things. So, for the sake of deadlines and commitments and bills and family obligations, away they have gone, to the attic, with all our other childhood artifacts... Sort of…  almost… not quite…

For there is still the case of a certain other obsession. He has been drug into adulthood with us, rather against his better judgment, kicking and screaming along the way, but only on the inside because his stiff upper lip prevents him from making a scene. He is, in other words, an Englishman, and in this particular case, he’s an Englishman who takes “particular interest” in certain passions: he is, for example, wildly fond of golf and chemin de fer; he is rather fiendishly drawn to dangerous, and sometimes taken, women; he harbors a rather expensive and copious obsession with bespoke suits, his four-liter Bentley, his Turkish-blend smokes, and any drink and every drink one could find, fathom, or fix (“It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst”).

We speak, of course, of James Bond, haberdasher’s muse and the world’s most famous secret agent. This fame – counterintuitive for a spy, no? – stems from his role as the protagonist of the most successful film franchise in cinema history, the first twenty entries of which see him living out every boy’s dream and epitomizing every grown man’s fantasy. Ditto the fourteen Fleming books which still provide source material. Of course, it has not all been baccarat and Bentleys. But that’s the point: When it’s death for breakfast, as it always is for dear old James, one must enjoy life with a certain exuberance, a certain attention to detail. The films and the novels traditionally did a decent, sometimes tacit, job of underscoring this point.

Unlike Coca-Cola, though, this formula was not meant to last. Mr. Bond was given a makeover at the turn of the century by his longtime handlers, all in the hopes of not only delivering him unto a new generation but also of repackaging him as “prestige” filmmaking, something fit and suitable for serious-minded people, namely: those who enjoy Sam Mendes dramas and who actually still care about the Academy Awards. If this was not the impelling cause of the makeover, it soon manifested as such.   

In hindsight, and in light of the rubbish that comprises much of the latest entry, No Time to Die, this decision to reboot the series has turned out to be a terrible debacle, at least to the extent that these things should ever be taken seriously enough to be called debacles. (The Bay of Pigs was a debacle. No Time to Die is really just a disappointment, although, in these hyper real times, one is tempted toward hyperbole; i.e., Donald Trump is the greatest President… Donald Trump is the worst President… and etc...)  

Casino Royale, the jumping off point for this prestige reboot, remains a celebrated piece of filmmaking, ushering in an elegant take on the superspy while jettisoning the double entendres and double-taking pigeons which had come to define the series prior. Daniel Craig, the new and improved blond Bond, seems, then as now, the right thespian for this more grounded job. Emotional. Wrought. Taciturn. In Casino, he is believably pained when his love interest turns coat. He is believably introspective in the grey and murky environs of cross-and-double-cross. And he is believably brutal as Her Majesty’s “blunt instrument.” Hence, looking back now on what the Craig era could have been, especially given Casino’s brilliance, one is left deeply frustrated at whatever seduced Broccoli and Wilson and certainly Craig towards perpetual pathos. For, increasingly with each film, and culminating with last year’s No Time to Die, Craig and his producers managed to achieve a level of immaturity that even the self-parodying Bonds of old could never quite reach, even had they tried. And the damnable thing of it all is that Craig & Co. managed all of this while taking smug bows for their prestige and their pathos and their broodiness. They needn’t have offered congratulations. It turns out, Commander Bond does not make for good adult drama. Perhaps this is because adults aren’t what we used to be.

Today we too easily conflate teen angst with adult suspense, perhaps because, as a society, we’ve never had to really deal with war or famine or the same grey and sterile environment from which Connery felt Bond was initially an escape. Sure, we’ve had economic crises, and, yes, world-bending terror attacks have landed at our doorstep, obviously, but how did we face these atrocities? By sending young men into foolish wars and by bailing out and propping up bad economic actors, all the while wiping our hands clean. We’ve not really been immersed in, or properly conditioned to recognize, adulthood, so we’ve rather missed the point in understanding the principle draw in juvenile, escapist fun. This is a failure not just of experience but of education. To understand why, consider for a moment the most heckled era, and thus the least “adult” era, of the Bondverse – the Roger Moore years, about which a few thoughts now seem relevant after bathing so long in the perpetual broodiness of Heathcliff Bond.

Consider first Live and Let Die, Moore’s debut. It plays now, many years on, as mere pulp, but perhaps pulp with a sense of the macabre and the bizarre. The next film, The Man with the Golden Gun, has a grimy smuttiness throughout, laced with what modern critics might call some problematic, white-savior imperialism. The Spy Who Loved Me is the only possible outlier here, masking, as it does, its more lurid details with a certain polish. But then, Moonraker is right back at it with a pulpy interplay between harrowing danger and sleazy sex, both of which are intertwined with some campy, not-quite-gaudy science fiction. (Or as Bond handler Cubby Broccoli called it, “science fact.”) All Bond films, of course, are pulp fictions, but the infamous “sex, sadism, and snobbery” associated with the character is at a particularly strange clip in Moore’s first four outings. Live and Let Die is perhaps the strangest Bond flick of all because of its voodoo elements and because of its rock-and-roll soundtrack (a first in the series) and because of its blaxploitation homages. However, its follow-up, The Man with the Golden Gun, is the film I have come to reassess the most. I once dismissively associated Golden Gun with its predecessor, not the least because in it, Moore is very clearly still trying to distance himself from Sean Connery. And distance himself he does, not through comedy or wit – nor through those other traits for which Moore would be known – but through taking a terribly cruel and rather sadistic turn. Consider the various transgressions of our hero in the film: he throws a child into a polluted river; he kicks a man in the groin; he threatens to shoot another man in the groin; he threatens to break a woman’s arm; and he allows this same woman to prostitute herself to him in return for his protection, a protection he does not in the end afford. But it’s not just Bond who is cruel. The film itself has a mean streak, not through double entendre or eyebrow-raising humor, but via things like: a smash-cut to a stripper’s ass; and a rather lurid episode where Bond hides a woman in a closet while he sleeps with another; and let’s not forget the crass set of lyrics in the theme song which clearly describe a man’s sexual organ. The movie also takes cheap shots at the “other.” For example:  All of Asia, midgets, third nipples, and sumo wrestlers share in the butts of the film’s several tasteless jokes.

So why defend it? Why reassess it?  Many reasons suffice: John Barry’s score; Moore’s acting; Christopher Lee; the gorgeous Maud Adams; the striking Britt Ekland. But what is really interesting is the political incorrectness of it all, taken in toto. Here we have Bond, the colonial Brit, saving the day and telling everybody else what’s what as he crashes his way across an amalgamation of Southeast Asia in which various countries and cultures are conflated with others. It is so outrageous and old-fashioned that it is amusing. My argument is that it would have also been amusing, and anachronistic, at the time of its release. That’s the thing the self-serious Bond fans of today don’t really grasp. This idea – that an old, colonial, Navy man, his occidental worldview in tow, would put on airs as he traipses across the Far East – was already anachronistic in 1974. To understand that this was so requires now, as it did then, a certain education and wit, which most modern audiences lack. Hence, Golden Gun is lost on most (not all) under thirty-five, an uninspired lot about whom it may fairly be asked: Have they ever read (or seen) “The Quiet American” or “The Year of Living Dangerously” or “The Honourable Schoolboy” (published after Golden Gun) or Sax Rohmer or Arthur Conan Doyle? In other words, understanding much about the world and about history and especially colonial history, and even a little about the history of the adventure novel and B-Movie hokum, is crucial to interpreting the classic era Bond films (think of Goldfinger’s laser beam, an ode to the buzzsaw of older cliffhangers). Meanwhile, in order to get the gist of Craig’s tenure, one need only understand boy-likes-girl-and-pouts-when-he-loses-her. Contrast this with the India-set, Macdonald Fraser-scripted Octopussy which somehow never mentions Kipling once. Because it didn’t have to. (Lest I be accused of glossing over cultural insensitivity, keep in mind that sometimes-fan-favorite J.W. Pepper, a send-up of Southern masculinity, is also a favorite of mine, despite my Southern sensibilities; i.e., one can laugh along if one chooses…)

This brings us to No Time to Die, which is the end of the line for Mr. Craig in more ways than one. Not only is it the last Bond film of Craig’s celebrated era, but in it, he and the producers conspire to write a final act in which (spoiler?) Bond dies a hero’s death.

But is it really a hero’s death? Does Bond really die for queen and country?

The answer, it seems, is no: He dies out of self-pity and in shame. And to understand why requires some scene setting:

In the looming moments of the third act, Bond and a fellow 00 infiltrate the island lair of the film’s main villain. As far as baddies go, this villain is rather lackluster, but he has somehow manages to kidnap Bond’s daughter while also arranging to sell some biotech weaponry. The buyers are off-screen merchants; it seems important to me to know the identity of these merchants, but the screenplay disagrees. At any rate, the British fleet is waiting out at sea as backup. So is the American fleet and the Japanese fleet and maybe the Russian fleet (I strain to remember). These allies, though, have not been briefed about the nuances of the mission because M, Bond’s superior, wishes to keep much of Bond’s operation to destroy the tech a secret. After all, the biotech weaponry was British-built, at M’s urging and in violation of probably a few international conventions. Hence, informing the ships out at sea about what is really happening would embarrass the empire and perhaps upend M’s career. So, Bond does his ablest to save the day but missteps when he is poisoned with the same biotech he was sent to destroy. Knowing that the contagious poison (really, DNA-targeting nanobots) will kill his family, who he does manage to rescue, Bond sees no reason not to stay behind, ensuring the destruction of the biotech even though it means he must suffer the same explosion that will fireball the weaponry.  

His death, then, is partly out of pity (the poison won’t kill him, only his wife and daughter should he come into contact with them, a point the screenplay tries to sell by claiming the nanobots are incurable), and partly out of cynicism (he endeavors to keep the weaponry a secret, lest the wrong people get fired). This is a grave embarrassment to the M character. The M of old, Admiral Messervy, was never so mired. He would have never been so cynical as to send an agent to die to protect the reputation of his own career. Yes, M gets Bond to do some pretty dirty things in the books. In “For Your Eyes Only,” one such favor is to avenge the deaths of M’s friends (not exactly state business, that), but M was never quite so sullied by Watergate-like corruption, and one can’t help but be shocked that the producers think so little of Britain and the West and the Secret Service that they would write an ending like this, or that they care so little about the internal logic of the series that they wouldn’t at least scribble for Bond an objection of some sort (this is more my objection than anything; pushing envelopes is fine but why not have some character continuity every now and again?)

Because of these contrivances and inconsistencies, No Time to Die’s curtain call withers, offering us less a hero’s death and more a just-put-him-out-of-his-misery-already anticlimax. I.e., He’s pouted around for five films now, so we might as well end things and get on with it… True, Bond’s death is at least extravagant. Blown to bits he is, but with no fanfare, no whiff of the Bond tune, no final straightening of the tie or adjustment of the cuff, no last smoke or last gulp of Old Grand-Dad. No heroic sacrifice. Nothing but cynicism. Not exactly the last stand at Thermopylae.

The sad thing is Craig could be, and often is, a brilliant Bond. His first out was brilliant. And even in his swan song, there are sequences - notably the ones in Havana - which are maybe the best thing ever put to screen in a 007 picture. But ours is a generation which is obsessed with being unhappy. Thus, the takeaway, in the end, is this:

Craig’s tenure was supposed to give us an adult, serious Bond. It’s really, though, given us just a series of angsty teenage pouting. It’s sheer truck in the end, specifically in the final act of Craig’s last outing, which somehow colors the entirety of Craig’s self-contained arc. Golden Gun has more sense of wit and maturity in one page of its problematic screenplay than No Time to Die could ever hope to have, even had its screenplay been scores of volumes of pages. Yes, Golden Gun treats women cruelly and Asians interchangeably and Britain like an empire ensconced in amber, but I rather deal with these shortcomings truthfully and forthrightly than sit through the oikophobia so prevalent in the final act of No Time to Die. Truck indeed.

To be fair, the producers are wildly successful, intelligent, and powerful movie veterans who time and again have proven their mettle. Not only do they know their craft, but they very obviously owe fans and fanboys and audiences absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. But they owe dear old James something, one thinks. They owed him a certain amount of respect if they were going to bring him into adulthood and they owed him something other than a cynical bon voyage if they were going to kill him off. He’s been good to them. One is sure they did not mean to be so low and cruel toward James. But they were. Granted, this is only one writer’s take. But it seems inarguable to point out, at the very least, that the attenuation between Bond and, say, George Smiley is less than it used to be (and the irony is I never thought Smiley was as down and out as his creator pretended; he at least had a poetry of the soul; he didn’t sulk, even when he lamented).

Hopefully, some approximation of dear old James one day returns. Until then, James Bond is dead. Long live James Bond.