JAMES BOND: TWILIGHT OF THE COOL
By Jim Trombetta
He was so cool he should have been taken into the skies like a hero of classical myth and made into a constellation. We would see him on clear nights in his characteristic pose, upright yet relaxed, one leg cocked, one hand holding up the slender pistol so tastefully silenced. Instead we see him on all the usual billboards. He has become one more blue-chip property.
No doubt James Bond will be garnering a healthy slice of our entertainment dollar for fiscal years to come. Yet his appeal is like light continuing to reach us from a star that in reality faded long ago. First he became camp, and now he is nearly quaint. But once he was the very form and model of cool.
Once his name was on everyone's lips. Once his movies were events that embodied the promise of wishes fulfilled. He was as big as the Beatles and merchandised just like them, in everything from tuxedoes to lingerie. "in today's world," a purveyor of 007 goods noted in the Sixties, "there are lots of people who think James Bond really existed. They even feel he is still operating somewhere." One of these people was a president of the United States who endorsed Bond and apparently identified with him - maybe a little too much.
Bond - his very name suggests the values that made him: sound currency, good whiskey, and a soupcon (at least) of actual integrity. Bond was the kind of whole man who, like the heroes of classical myth, was at home in every element of the world. He was at ease in underground caverns, beneath the sea, in the high snows, and in the air up to the verge of Space itself. In each realm he knew just what to do and just to how to handle himself. And while we might sometimes see a scene in which Bond, say, practiced his karate, there was no indication he'd ever struggled to learn anything. No, the skills he needed sprang immediately from his inborn being. What could be cooler than that?
Bond was surely a superman, but he was a superman in a suit and tie, and perhaps his coolest trait was that he was wonderful in such a middle-class way. His world, rife with terror as it was, was also one of great convenience, stocked with usable objects. That he cheerfully relied on every handy device science could give him (from the briefcase packed with throwing knife and folding Armalite Survival Gun to the Aston-Martin with ejection seat) hardly made him seem less resourceful. Indeed, all these products were as much a part of him as his DNA and, moreover, made him one with his audience. Every time we recognized a quality brand, every time we put our hands on the steering wheel and our foot on the accelerator, every time we delicately lifted the tone arm of our belt-driven turntable, we shared in Bond's cool mastery.
And, of course, he always had the Best Girls. The Best Girls were perhaps more memorable for their promotional layouts in Playboy than for their actual participation in Bond's adventures (Diana Rigg we remember for more than either), but they were tantalizing in their essence. In a sense, they merge into one lithe torso, set off by bikini parts and packed with action. The Best Girls were noble savages in swimsuits, postindustrial Pocahontases, children of nature beholden to no one, yet in dire need, exotics whose kisses were unlike all others ... Bond got them just by showing up. In him, even lust was cool.
Sorry, Roger
Sean Connery is entitled to a lion's share of credit for the coolness of Bond. He had the earthiness without which coolness becomes too ethereal and the strength to support elegance and selfdeprecating wit. In Connery's performances, Bond's subtle perception of style - like identifying a villain by the wine he orders - became more than the fetishistic nicety of a British Old Boy that it was in Fleming's books. It became something more universal - what Americans used to call "class." (Those who felt a little jealous of Bond's cool perfection could console themselves that Sean was getting bald in front.)
Roger Moore seems like a hell of a nice guy - rather winning, really - but he's more tepid than cool. One thing he lacks is the streak of true menace.
In Doctor No, a Bond sidekick grasps the wrist of a suspect girl and asks, "James, should I break her arm?" Bond shrugs. "Another time, perhaps." A guy as cool as Bond needed a conscience like he needed a crutch. Not for him the neuroses of his hardboiled ancestors; not for him the melancholia of Philip Marlowe, the venom of Sam Spade. No, this most cultivated of men was also most natural, and though he presumably served the abstract interests of nation-states, his graceful and efficient violence really expressed a healthy personal dislike for its deserving targets. Bond was that enviable man who could give into his impulses because his impulses were always on the money. It he followed a grieving widow home after a funeral and suddenly bashed her, sure enough, it was a SPECTRE bastard in drag.
Top Cop in Town
It takes a civilized world to make a man as natural as Bond, and he had it. Bond's heyday was the future, the future which never quite came off: that sunny, electric, neotribal age we used to hear so much about, whose coming was announced when the astronauts took in the whole Earth at a glance. Bond was the sheriff of the Global Village, top cop of the whole strange but readily encompassed planet. In his world there was no wilderness so trackless it didn't conceal at least one secret fortress or superscientific installation. And the hybrid pedigrees of his antagonists - the blue-eyed Asiatic Doctor No or the Franco-Greco- Roman -Balkan Ernest Stavro Blofeld - came to embody not Ian Fleming's upper-class distrust of the half-caste, but bizarre cultural fusions popping up spontaneously, like new languages, as boundaries vanished in the imploding world.
As the Cold War got old, as detente came on, Bond's old Russian enemy SMERSH was retired in favor of SPECTRE, a consortium of free-lance badasses who transcended any nation. Bond's British identity was itself no more than a flag of convenience. At his best, he defended the consensus of Earth, the emerging global Utopia, against overweening outlaws.
Such conditions, it seems, no longer obtain. The world is once again too primitive, and too vast, to support a Bond.
He is no longer even affordable. There are new guys running the old intelligence agency now - for "M" has long since retired to his country house, where he sits, bleary-eyed, drink in hand, reminiscing for all comers - and these new guys bitch about what a prima donna Bond is. They query his expense reports, refuse to reimburse him for gas for the Aston-Martin. They ry to get him to drive a Cortina; they try to give him assignments: "James, when you get down to [deleted], proceed to he village of [deleted] and terminate the mayor - he's helping the guerillas. On the way back, stop off at the capital and help herd the losers into the football stadium. Oh, by the way, here's our newest Field Torture Kit - see, it's no bigger than a cigarette lighter..."
007 balks. This job is not his style. So the new guys pull a political number, and Bond finds himself forcibly retired, He shrugs and buys a house in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. There he toys with the idea of writing a book to expose his former employers, but one day someone comes along and offers him a spliff. He smokes them contentedly into his old age.
... Yet elsewhere, a much more secret and advanced agency has a sliver of skin from 007's fingertip. From cells therein they grow a New Cool Hero with all the genes of Bond. They bring him along and keep a close eye on him.
The New Cool Hero has forgotten all the standard brands, and in a world of name-droppers he cannot be impressed. He bides his time at a middle-class desk, he smokes cigarettes without really knowing why and thinks about giving them up; he pumps his own gas and hoards goods against a predicted earthquake. He dreams of leaping out of airplanes, given a parachute and one good reason. More than once he has glimpsed evil in the mirror, and at such times he sorely misses his old enemies, the old days when one man could juggle the Earth and a cool hero catch it in midair.
Surely his employers will have work for him soon. Surely they will say to him, "Do this for us and no more, James. No surprises, please." But he knows he will give them surprises.
His dream assignment arrives all at once with the flashing news: a string of assassinations in the Middle East, threatening to throw the whole region into chaos. Ayatollahs, sheiks, colonels, potentates of all stripes, left and right, go down like pins in an alley. The assassins do not flee; they stand and laugh; they bite down on the muzzles of their pistols and blow out the tops of their heads.
The man behind all this calls himself Hassan. He claims he is the reincarnation of Hassan-i-Sabbah, a.k.a. "The Old Man of the Mountain," the warlord who plagued the Crusaders, from whose names the words assassin and hashish are derived. Like his, namesake, the new Hassan has a mountain fortress in Central Asia. There he brings his assassin recruits, whom he plies with the most sophisticated drugs. A master of illusions, he pretends to kill them... and then he wakes them up. In his pleasure gardens they taste all the delights of Eden, most especially the magnificent women, the houris of Islamic paradise, whose lithe loins mold men's hearts. Then Hassan appears to his recruits as a severed head impaled on a high stake and speaks: "You have already died and are immortal. Have you not known Paradise? Therefore fear nothing. Go forth and do evil in my name." And they do.
To reach Hassan it is necessary to cross mountains full of peril, zealot legions, roving Soviet gunships, Afghan cavalrymen who grew up playing polo with the body of a dead goat and would just as soon play it with the living body of an intruder. And who can encompass these dangers? Who can infiltrate the fortress, seduce the houris, quell the tyrant? Only one man...
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