When cool was still cool

When cool was still cool
by David Benjamin

“Bond is important: this invincible superman that every man would like to copy, that every woman would like to conquer, this dream we all have of survival. And then one can’t help liking him…”         — Sean Connery

MADISON, Wis. — With every release of a new James Bond flick, a host of pop-culture intellectuals pop up to analyze why millions flock to view the latest farfetched, gadget-intensive installment of a film formula that should have gone the way of Tarzan and Andy Hardy many moons ago. Deep-thinking cineastes inevitably ponder the ever-shifting definition of machismo that tends to be weirdly magnified through the lens of Bond’s latest incarnation.
In an Esquire essay about the newest Bond film, Spectre, critic Stephen Marche deems Daniel Craig the best-ever Bond because he has “humanized” the character invented by Ian Fleming and played in 26 movies by seven different actors.
Marche has a point but it’s a dull one, because no one who loves the movies ever asked for James Bond to be human. God forbid. Bond wouldn’t have made it far past Dr. No if he’d even vaguely resembled a mere mortal. I’m pretty comfortable stating this because I was there at there at the Creation, a teenage boy when Bond came along just in time to replace comic-book heroes in my pubescent affections.
James Bond is the spawn of Superman, recast into the body of a mythical, impossible, phantasmagorical secret agent who had to be British. Not American. We were American, and we knew we were ordinary. If Bond couldn’t come from the planet Krypton, the next best thing was the mysterious London HQ of MI6 (whatever that was). He also needed multiple identities. Just as Superman was also Kal-El and Clark Kent, Bond was much better known — cryptically — as “007.” Cool!
Also important was that Bond wasn’t a “spy.” America had spies — with names like Herb Philbrick — mostly in the employ of a fat little martinet named J. Edgar Hoover. Spies were a product of the Cold War, a game of geopolitical chicken in which our enemies were real and obvious, and which doomed all my friends and me to nuclear obliteration probably before any of us got laid.
Spies were a drag. Bond was a “secret agent,” whose missions involved global conspiracies run by megalomaniac loners (Blofeld, Scaramanga) guarded by gruesome minions (Oddjob, Jaws). These fiends scoffed at nationhood and toyed with politics. They could only be foiled — in a spectacular battle of exploding gadgets and girls in bikinis — by the singular heroism of, well…
…Bond. James Bond.
Who even had his own Achilles-heel version of Kryptonite. It was Pussy…
…Galore (Goldfinger, 1964, my personal favorite).
Which reminds me of Honey Ryder, played by Ursula Andress (Dr. No, 1962), who was regarded almost unanimously in my circle as having the best rack in Hollywood. The lone heretic was Dick Albright, an anatomical purist who frequently insisted, “Aw, c’mon. They’re not that big. She’s just got a huge ribcage.”
This is the sort of argument that typifies the dept of thought inspired by a Bond movie. One of my high school heroes, Pat Keeffe, was a mindlessly loyal Bond fan, even though he was ( and remains today) demonstrably smarter than Sean Connery, Albert Broccoli and Terence Young all rolled into one. Pat liked Bond the way he had once liked Superman, for what Gen. Jack Ripper (Dr. Strangelove, 1964) called “purity of essence,” not because he was real or believable in any sense. Pat, Dick and I might have been mere adolescents, ill-formed and malleable, with stars in our eyes. But we knew we could no more emulate, copy, or imitate James Bond than we could follow in the footsteps of Batman, Wonder Woman or that insufferable twit, Peter Parker. We admired Bond, but we never took him seriously.
We ourselves yearned to be taken seriously. So, of course, we noticed that Sean Connery, both in real life or cast as 007, was always taken seriously, especially by beautiful women who had a hard time staying dressed. And why?
Because he was cool. None of us could be Bond (he was Superman, OK?), but we strove to be, at least in short bursts, cool. We could buy cool clothes — like those Ivy League slacks with the buckle in the back. We could talk cool, comb our hair cool, listen to cool music, drench ourselves in English Leather and unfold the coolest magazine you could possibly ever steal off the newsstand at Rennebohm’s Drugs. It was no coincidence that Playboy editor Hugh Hefner, the Fifties’ foremost avatar of “cool” (I mean, the guy took a mere pose and turned it into a “philosophy”that took fifty issues to explain!), intuitively recognized Sean Connery’s Bond as the paradigm of the Playboy ethos, the quintessence of cool.
Here was a fictional predator without any evident moral code. He was a government assassin “licensed to kill,” a chauvinist sexaholic who used women ruthlessly (and always ended up getting at least one of them murdered), who lacked almost all the qualities we admired among the best men we had known as we grew up. But he made us all care — more than we cared about world peace or social justice — about whether a vodka martini should be shaken or stirred.
Teenagers in those days were living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, looking down the barrel of Vietnam and slouching toward the birth of the counterculture. Not all of us survived. But James Bond coasted through it all, unfazed, unscathed, unchanged, immutable. And why?
Because he was cool. James Bond was (and still is, although Daniel Craig struggles to sublimate) a wise-cracking free spirit employed within the most established of Establishment institutions, contemptuous of its protocols and procedures but indispensable to the achievements of its every vital objective. He had his cake, and he ate it off Halle Berry’s naked body.
He is, in the words of one of his forebears, Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), “the stuff that dreams are made of.”