Okay, having just come back from the movie, I have got to get some thinks off my chest.
It’s okay, I’ll put in a read more. Also, no spoilers, yay!
It’s so DIFFERENT. That’s not a complaint! It’s just that I’ve loved James Bond all my life, and this Bond is so different from the others. The others had a simplicity to them, and why not? Bond as he was in the pre-Craig movies was a male power fantasy—hot suits, hot guns, fast cars, faster women. It was an uncomplicated formula that sold well, and why mess with what works? Bond himself didn’t get much character development (in the movies; the books were a somewhat different matter). He was a walking archetype, sometimes a stereotype, and sometimes even a parody of himself.
But now we’ve got Daniel Craig’s Bond. He’s still got all the power fantasy trappings—and I mean let’s face it, they are pretty great, who doesn’t like a bit of flash?—but these movies don’t let it go unquestioned. They complicate things by asking us, “What kind of man does it take to live like this? What does it mean, for him? What does it mean for the people who interact with and employ him? Is he even necessary? Or is he a leftover from a different time?”
I love how they get meta with that last one, too, because it’s a question worth asking about both the character in his world and the character in ours. Does James Bond still have a place? Why do we still love him? What IS he to us, in this day and age?
They also bring in a lot more of the undertones from the books. That nigh-psychopathic edge Bond has to him, for one. I don’t think Bond is a psychopath—he CAN care about and form bonds with people—but he does toe awfully close to that line. The old movies never pondered what sort of man could kill so casually—it’s a lot less fun to imagine yourself in a spy movie when you start thinking about the ugly realities—but the books raised that question every now and then. Fleming had worked as a spy; he’d seen what it did to people, and he addressed the fact that killing people as a job the way Bond does DOES things to a person’s head. (“Murder.” ”Employment.”) Fleming leaves you with the strong impression it has fucked Bond up in some deep and hard-to-quantify way. When I first read them, when I was a kid, the books left me with abiding questions about the psychological effects of killing, so I’m thrilled to see that element brought out and looked at, at least a little bit, in the movies.
(PS: One of the formative lilterary influences of my life right there, boys and girls, in case you ever wondered where the interest in twisted psychology came from.)
With these questions, the movies give Bond a psychology (psychopath? obsessive? throwback?), a history and an evolution. (M called him her blunt instrument, in Casino Royale; is he still that in Skyfall?) They problematize the things about him that are frankly problematic, even sometimes calling him on them to his face, and thus give him a depth of character and the potential for change by confronting him with his own (copious) weaknesses and forcing him to either confront or withdraw from himself. (I find it interesting, by the way, how often he seems to retreat from it; Bond is not being held up as a role model in these movies.) They also give him, not coincidentally, a potential for a future in film beyond the static, stagnating Bond of the old franchise.
It has an interesting counter-effect, too, of highlighting the crazy-awesome things about him, and of making you realize just how insane some of the things he does are. At the moment when the other established badasses in the movie stop and say, “This is as far as I can go,” Bond puts his car over the edge of the bridge and keeps right on going, and when you’ve faced the fact that this man has some serious fucking problems, you can appreciate that move for all the courage, tenacity, and absolute batshittery it truly represents.