James Bond at 60: Britain’s bulletproof cultural export is ripe for another rebirth
It’s the 60th anniversary of James Bond and the right time for all TikTok to be going crazy for “James Bond chord guy” – Jord, or @jrw21 – who’s got 1.4m views and climbing for his hilarious guitar tutorial on how to play the James Bond Chord, E minor with a major 7th and 9th, first used in the soundtrack for the first Bond film, Dr No, which premiered on 5 October 1962.
The tense, unresolved chord, says Jord, usually follows Bond saying something cool and then Jord himself demonstrates in a surreally broad Sheffield accent: “Oh Mr Goldfinger, yeah. Come in. We’ve got space for you to have a haircut. Come on, sit down here. Fuckin’ jokin, dickhead. I’m not really a barber. I’ m fuckin’ James Bond. Short back and blow your fuckin’ ’ead off? TWAT!” And then that eerie chord ….
Nothing demonstrates the phenomenal survival potency of the canonical 007 movie brand over 60 years, like that viral video. Somehow secret agent Bond, that preposterous dinnerjacketed imperial throwback, has persisted into 21st century popular culture as the exemplar of nonchalant alphamaleness, evolving in such a way as to absorb and assimilate all the irony and objection that has been thrown his way.It is the most bulletproof action franchise of all, whose basic unitary identity has carried on for six decades. Like Doctor Who, Bond has survived by regenerating – from Connery to Lazenby to Moore to Dalton to Brosnan to Craig – but Doctor Who doesn’t have the continuity or international recognition (or not quite). Like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, 007 is an addictive returning persona, but those legendary sleuths, however feted in the cinema, never had 007’s single movie marketplace dominance.
Harry Potter had a staggering run in tandem with the books’ appearance: but Daniel Radcliffe has now grown up. Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies and his Top Gun revival are colossal box office hits but even the Cruise can’t last for ever. Yet Bond carries on, apparently endlessly rebooting. But now, after the great apocalyptic ending of No Time to Die, the new Bond has to be finessed or retconned somehow. They must choose a new pope of luxury watch wearing and sexual banter from the various cardinals now assembling in Vatican City of Eon’s offices in London’s Piccadilly: Tom Hardy? Regé-Jean Page? Tom Hiddleston? Idris Elba? We do know that Eon are not looking for someone in their 20s. Gen Z is out. Brooklyn Beckham need not apply.James Bond’s appearance in the cinema was and continues to be a cash cow for Eon productions (now bought out, with MGM, by Amazon) and a global cultural phenomenon. It was a consolatory declinist fantasy for Britons, essentially the second world war action man of Ian Fleming’s conception in the books whose derring-do is cleverly presented as “secret” in a postwar world where Old England doesn’t count for as much.
And yet, when Dr No was released in cinemas in 1962, Britain still had quite a few imperial possessions, including Hong Kong, Grenada, Kenya, Malawi and Qatar. And Sean Connery’s Bond became the standard bearer for that new detumescent paradox of British prestige: soft power. Bond was a great ambassador for British style, British class. And throughout the ConneryLazenby-Moore years, international air travel and consumer gadgets were still not commonplace, at least not for the pennypinched, IMF-humiliated Brits who lapped it all up, and so Bond was a delicious Walter Mitty reverie which floated on to the present.
Soft power was the thing. And the irony was that this essentially conservative establishment figure became Britain’s soft power standard-bearer into the 1960s and beyond alongside those long-haired caterwauling non-establishment layabouts that Bond detested: British pop stars. In Goldfinger, Bond declares that drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees fahrenheit is as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs. That was a stuffy and pompous thing for Bond to say, but The Beatles really forgave him: Paul McCartney wrote one of the great Bond themes with Live and Let Die and Ringo Starr married Barbara Bach, who was, in the toe-curlingly sexist language of the time, a “Bond girl”.
And so Bond carried on; through the eras of Reagan-Thatcher, the fragile special relationship, 9/11, the “war on terror”, the 2012 London Olympics (in which Daniel Craig’s Bond co-starred with the Queen) and now the Brexit retreat into Fortress Britain, he somehow aligned himself with the exo-skeletal inhumanity of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and the wised-up ordinariness of Matt Damon’s Bourne, slightly modifying his style to accommodate these eddies in fashion. And in the last Bond movie, No Time to Die, in which the 007 title is given to a new agent, stylishly played by Lashana Lynch, there is even some mockery of Bond’s obsolete attitudes, his ageing and his dodgy knee.
Will the new Bond send himself up? I don’t think so. When Danny Boyle was hired to direct No Time to Die, he reportedly got himself fired from the project because he and writer John Hodge wanted to re-imagine the script and chuck some new ingredients into the Coca-Cola formula. Eon chiefs Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson balked. The point is that the audience and the pundits can do the re-imagining and the ironising but Bond himself plays it straight, with a few teases and quirks.
I have myself been one of those (many) people asking Eon if they might refresh the Bond brand by going back to basics or pre-basics and dramatise the original non-gadget Bond from the 1950s Ian Fleming novels. Well, the movies need the luxury and the glamour so that won’t fly, not even in a streaming TV series. But what about a prequel series imagining the dashing young M’s own adventures at the end of the war and then in rationing-hit London? That would leave the central icon untouched. Either way, Bond’s tux will probably come back from the dry cleaners good as new or thereabouts.