It’s hard to find a person alive
who doesn’t know who James Bond is. He has so permeated our society, that every
spy movie made since his debut has compared itself to the franchise. He is the spy, while Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan
and others are just spies. His name is also a genre unto itself; it’s easy to
describe a movie as being “a James Bond film.” The only other character I can
think of that has this distinction is Godzilla. (“It’s a Godzilla movie.” No
further synopsis required.)
We can argue about what the best
Bond movie is (Goldfinger) or the
worst (Die Another Day), but in the
end, we keep coming back to our gentleman spy, whether he is Connery, Moore,
Dalton, Brosnan, Craig or (god forbid) Lazenby. What is the attraction? Is it
the old cliché that “women want him and men want to be him”? Or is there
something deeper? Is the James Bond series popcorn entertainment personified,
or is there something about the alcoholic, womanizing assassin that speaks to
our deeper subconscious?
Or is it simply that, while there
are many imitators, there is only one Bond? As Carly Simon sang: “Nobody does
it better.”
