I am, I guess a Bond child. All the films have been made in my lifetime .. all of them. I own all the books of course. In well-thumbed Pan paperback. Rather fond of Bond, wise cracking, oddly worldly/naive. A character rather out of time to modern eyes. The books are rather anchored in their moment, documents of their time and the strange obsessions, excitements and prejudices of their author. The films are something else. 22 of them from Dr No in 1962
to the eerily anamatronic Quantum of Solace.
That’s a social document of a sort, one of modern entertainment’s longest and most lucratively enduring sequences. But the sense I had last night watching the new Daniel Craig was of just what a film of its time it was, what a bleak, soulless, unremitting blow to the head. Bond once lived on his wits, now he operates in some semi-human extremis. The licence to kill, duly administered, replaced by a motor-driven frenzy of almost psychotic slaying. Bond is no longer suave, no longer the faintly comic philanderer. If we are what we watch, then this new Bond is, in some small way, what we have become. Not pretty.
