Back to Bond

What does everyone know about James Bond, as played by Daniel Craig? He has 'breathed new life into the character', or however you want to put it, he has given us our thrills and spills back, he has inspired lust and man-lust and a thousand diets and work-outs. And he has identified something unpleasant, thuggish, in the franchise and in the character. I'm not sure how much further he can take this charmless brutalism, or whether, to be honest, I'm really up for any more Bond.

But what I hadn't realised about his films was the way in which they would make me see earlier Bond incarnations with fresh eyes. Not by providing a new model for them, a new standard of technical or athletic excellence against which Sean and Roger and so on would look pale and jowly, but somehow by releasing something nasty in those old films that had been there all along. It was only last night, we were tired and wanted something to watch before going to bed, we put on the video of You Only Live Twice, ready for some good honest fun and jokes about chest-hair and men coming first in Japan - and couldn't believe what we were seeing. All of the charm had gone. We could only see the casual, patronizing misogyny; the glamour of location (all that glamour!) had disappeared and only the racial stereotypes remained. Those things must have been there while we were watching these movies in the past: why did we not see them head on? Why did it take a re-casting of that original to show us what the original was really like?

I still stand by the narratives of these early films. I still think they bring together discovery and adventure in an exciting way. I still think that a Bond who can discover everything from his laptop is not just a 'Bond for the modern age' but a man who no longer has to struggle to find anything out (and what is an adventure story, an adventure narrative, if discovery - discovery of the story - has no danger?). But I don't know whether I'll be watching them again in a hurry.