A Curmudgeon’s Guide To The New James Bond

Many lifelong James Bond fans are faced with a dilemma presented by No Time To Die – either get with the times or give up. Warning: spoilers ahead.

Sean Connery sitting next to Shirley Eaton as she lies on her stomach with her whole body covered with gold spray in a scene from the film ‘Goldfinger’, 1964. (Photo by United Artist/Getty Images)

Fans of James Bond queue up for No Time To Die because they remember enjoying Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and they hope, against hope, that they might see something sweetly nostalgic.

But hope is Pandora’s last demon.

I knew a review of the new Bond film would be hopeless, not just because of the hilariously abject plot, but because the franchise has already been dead for three decades. All they can do now is drag up the character, like grave robbers, to mock and degrade with hubris and irony, because they can’t invent archetypal characters or stories of their own anymore.

I won’t go into all the particulars of the film’s plot, but be warned there are some spoilers coming up immediately. This film revolves around Bond eventually ‘dying’ after being emotionally exposed as a very real and flawed human (yawn). All extremely typical and ridiculous ‘contemporary university screenwriting 101’ pseudo-intellectual tropes, tropes that are not only tired and trite but anathema to the entire point of a character like James Bond. Why do they bother holding the rights to him when they obviously despise this specific genre, spy pulp? Is it just in order to insult and frustrate the fans? 

What is the difference between this modern, flawed Bond, and the character Sean Connery was playing?

What is James Bond? What is the difference between this modern, flawed Bond, with his very real emotions and twee, unnecessary background story, and the character Sean Connery was playing? To understand what he is meant to be, what he really is, and can only be, we must look at the type of hero and stories of the time he was written. Bond was a type of character that was popular in pulp novels and magazines that were common adventure publications aimed at young men, which enjoyed a golden age from roughly the 1920’s up to the 1990’s. Fleming’s novels mirrored this archetype (now vanished in our emasculated culture) of a tough and capable polymath, single-minded in his duty.

Doc Savage was a character of the competent man hero type, first appearing in American pulp magazines during the 1930s and 1940s. Real name Clark Savage Jr., he is a doctor, scientist, adventurer, detective, and polymath who “rights wrongs and punishes evildoers.”

One of the original Bond adventure novel covers

The Shadow was a collection of serialised dramas, originally in 1930s pulp novels featured on the radio, in a long-running pulp magazine series, in American comic books, comic strips, television, serials, video games, and at least five feature films. The radio drama include episodes voiced by Orson Welles.

Our heroes are different now, they have feelings and three dimensions, which is infinitely more enjoyable to read and watch…isn’t it?

We might summarise this character type as ‘a man of mysterious background who is almost comically capable on all fronts, physical and mental’. He’s not meant to be a wallower in psychoanalysis or self-doubt. No reader of the time was interested in having Bond’s history or dirty laundry dragged out – his function is to be a hard man who doesn’t cry, never failing to be witty in the face of danger, and never giving up. Upon this immovable template is bounced fantastic difficulties involving mystery, sensualism, and action.

Think of Clint Eastwood in the Spaghetti Westerns: he just shows up, saying very little and shooting a few people, yet we know what he’s all about and what he’s there to do (and we sympathise). I refer to this archetype as the ‘Doc Savage’ character, who was an earlier pulp hero like Bond who was very smart, very strong and good at many often ridiculous things (he knows the year of the cognac after beating up five guys and getting the girl, etc).

This type of character was intended for young boys both as a vehicle for high action to sell serials and an ideal or symbolic mythic heroic figure for them to strive and emulate. By seeing the impossible archetype, a young man strives to imitate it the best he can. It doesn’t matter that it’s nearly impossible in real life to be an expert diver, martial arts master, and neuroscientist at the same time, but when you aim your bow high, the arrow lands far.

The reason this new incarnation of Bond does not work, fundamentally, is that they have rejected the heroic (at times quasi-comical) exaggerated invincible polymath format for just another flawed modern guy. The pulp heroes of Bond’s true era like Flash Gordon, The Shadow, and later Indiana Jones and Buckaroo Banzai, have one fundamental rule: take no shit from anyone.

The pulp heroes of Bond’s true era have one fundamental rule: take no shit from anyone.

Not women, not bosses, not supernatural evil, nobody. It is for this reason that the introduction of ‘the PC Bond’, played first by Pierce Brosnan, was the instant death of the character. Any follow up films have been for nostalgia, not entertainment. The last time a Bond film successfully portrayed him as he’s meant to be would likely be the much maligned Timothy Dalton films. Beginning with the Brosnan era the character began to officially compromise to political correctness. He was no longer ‘not taking shit from anybody’, but getting sassily henpecked by the new female M, among others.

This compromise of a simple format and the franchise’s limp wristed attempts to ‘humanise’ the character (understanding nothing about classic pulp fiction) has inevitably steamrolled. While Casino Royale was a near-worthy attempt at doing a classic Bond, it was, to quote Trainspotting, merely ‘a blip in an otherwise downward trajectory’. Bond is long dead, and now officially dead, and there is a clear demarcation where the concept slipped from kinetically virile to self-parody.

Rest well, old boy.

If more competent people had maintained the core idea after the death of Mr. Broccoli, maybe Bond could have lived on. But often concepts, like living things, have a shelf-life. Screenwriting committees meticulously review and edit each script draft, their ranks filled with Postmodern Lit PhD’s who laugh, smugly and shrilly, at the idea of actually reading the likes of Doc Savage. Sure, they saw Thunderball, but they remain sterile, uncreative ‘credentialists’ who work tirelessly to excise anything with virility or warlike confidence. The earnest and naive art that is pure, that one wears on one’s sleeve in the absence of irony, is unknown to these creatures.

So Bond, a character loved for his uncompromising masculinity, will be portrayed today as just another Postmodern everyman nobody. It is sadder to cling to the hope, and see these films – than it is to merely remember the classics, and move on. Storytelling is not nothing, it is of paramount importance, as are myths. Invest not in their inverted pantomime.