An Open Letter to James Bond, Her Majesty's Secret Agent 007

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This November, Skyfall, the 23^rd James Bond movie in forty years, will debut in half-filled theatres across the country. In some circles, the release of a new Bond film is still meaningful; I bet the Flat-Earth Society is ecstatic.

When Dr. No, the first Bond movie, was released in 1962, it was a sensation. The Bond franchise hit its stride two years later with the third Bond film, the imaginative and stylish Goldfinger. Bond movies were churned out reliably every second year after that. As a boy growing up in the 1970s, I remember the re-run of a Bond movie on television as a bond-ing experience for my family. It trumped normal family activities, and we’d watch it together in the family room.   

James Bond was different from other movie heroes. American heroes came out of the “noble savage” literary tradition: The gunfighter of the American Western (think John Wayne, Gary Cooper) and the gumshoe detective of the Gangster movies (think James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart) were plain-spoken, rough-edged, and working class.

Bond was everything that American movie heroes were not: He was sophisticated to the point of snobby (note his put down of the Beatles in Goldfinger), formal in his dress, subtle in his wordplay, and practiced in the exotic—from martial arts to Baccarat. Bond-movie gadgets and pyrotechnics advanced the state of the art for action films. While American movie heroes saved a family or a town from a gang of bad guys, James Bond saved the entire world from international syndicates of superstar evildoers. He didn’t just get “the girl” at the end of the movie, he got girls all through the movie. To a generation of filmgoers, men wanted to be James Bond and women wanted to be with James Bond. 

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we know how influential Bond has been. 007 inspired hit television shows like The Man from the UNCLE, The Saint, and the Bond satire, Get Smart. Bond undergirded episodes of The Flintstones and the Beatles movie Help. Even a generation later, the Bond influence is seen in cartoons like Inspector Gadget and the Austin Powers movies.

But it isn’t 1964, or even 1994, anymore. Movie franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Matrix, The Terminator, and Transformers have long since surpassed Bond-movie action sequences and cinematography. Simplistic heroes like Rambo have more testosterone than Bond; Harry Potter has better gadgets. 

And Bond’s endless string of woman conquests and non-Anglo villains may strike a new generation of moviegoers as sexist, ethnocentric, and a little creepy.  The most recent Bond films have attempted to update the franchise a bit—i.e., introducing a woman (Judy Dench) as Bond’s boss, Christopher Walken as a relatively recent villain. But even with a few concessions to modernity, the Bond movie remains largely formulaic and outdated to a new generation of moviegoers.

James Bond is the 2^nd largest grossing movie franchise of all time. Bond was the cat’s pajamas way back when. But even with a blonde-haired, beer-drinking, edgier James Bond (Daniel Craig), 007 belongs in the Old Spies home. Skyfall will get generate respectable gate receipts in the U.S. because there are still aging Baby Boomers buying movie tickets. But the Boomers are aging, 007’s days are numbered.

“Oh, James…” coo the Bond girls as they are swept away by his charm and mo-jo at the end of the film. But they never finish the thought. So I will. “Oh, James… you’re so 20^th Century.”