The Bonds that Never Die
Note: You’re in for spoilers if you haven’t seen No Time to Die, the coda to the 25 films in the James Bond film universe.
I said good-bye to James Bond on a rain-swept autumn afternoon, a deep chill portending snow, befitting the end of a relationship that lasted six decades.
And I waited for weeks to write this, until nearly everyone who wanted to experience Bond’s final act had seen the film: the heroic sacrifice, the Dickensian death of giving your life for the greater good.
So now it can be said. James Bond is dead. And long live Agent 007.
Sitting in a socially-distanced movie theatre between the twin Covid perils of Delta and Omicron, there is a reminder of our own mortality about bearing witness to the end of the arc, bringing an end to the run of luck for the Bonds that never died — from Sean Connery all the way through to Daniel Craig.
It took Daniel Craig, the most subtle Bond since Sean Connery, to bring this arc to its satisfying end. From the parental loss in Skyfall, where M died in his arms, to the last half hour of No Time to Die, Craig’s gifts as an actor are a welcome light in this winter darkness, with the ominous disruptions of the Covid pandemic constricting nearly all normalcy in our lives.
Ian Fleming’s James Bond books were an escape into exotic worlds, infusing one’s teenage years with the possibilities of a life that could be lived just over the horizon. It is only now, with the sensibilities imparted by our times, that one recognizes the raging misogyny (women were always objectified, either to be wooed or ravaged) and cringe at the attitudes of a bygone age (Bond looking forward to “the sweet tang of rape” when seducing a woman he wished to marry, in the original Bond book, Casino Royale).
And one recognises too, the hedonistic sadness in what one seemed an alluring life full of Taittinger champagne, caviar, foie gras, cocaine, and methamphetamine.
Yet the simple pleasure of the original Bond martini from Fleming’s novel Casino Royale — three measures of Gordon’s Gin, one measure of vodka, a half measure of Lillet vermouth, shaken, not stirred, and garnished with a zest of lemon — has worn well over the years. As has the idea of the Infuriator, the cheap and bracing red wine that sustained the spymaster M when the bleakness of the world threatened to overwhelm.
Better than any Bond since Sean Connery, Craig captured the cruelty and isolation of the character as etched in Fleming’s books. As did Eva Green, who brought to life the complexity of Eva Green, the woman Bond wished to marry in Casino Royale.
Which is why there is such satisfaction in the completed arc, in No Time to Die. After escaping every manner of villain and machination, snatching the most unlikely survival of every lethal hazard, stretching fantasy to its limits, there is something oddly comforting in witnessing James Bond give his life for love. To save the love of his life, and the daughter he scarcely knew. Here at last is a tribute to the inner life of the Bond in Ian Fleming’s original books: including verbatim quotes from Bond’s brief marriage to Tracy Draco before she was shot dead on their honeymoon by the arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld — “we have all the time in the world” — and a reminder that Bond of Fleming’s books had every element of his life defined by the absence of love.
And why the new 007 is a quantum leap into our times, from the toxic masculinity that raged like a river through all of Fleming’s Bond novels. Indeed, as the new bearer of the 007 Licence to Kill, Lashanna Lynch captures the coiled menace of Connery’s original, and the brooding eyes that recall the violence ever present in the ironic gaze.
As the One who will carry the 007 brand into the future, Lynch’s portrayal of a modern spy in Her Majesty
s Secret Service reflects also the essence of what British society, a fully post-colonial country that embraces and celebrates diversity.
Yet this complete reversal of Fleming’s original image of Bond is also a tribute to Fleming, capturing the moral ambiguity and self-doubt that permeated 007 in every book. There is a rare satisfaction in finding a character evoked in a bygone age, reimagined and repurposed for our times, while retaining the spirit and the complexity of the original.
James Bond is dead. Long live 007.
