"Skyfall': The allure of James Bond

Why do we still care about James Bond? It isn't for the reliability of the product. At best, five good movies out of 23 over the past half-century isn't a particularly strong score. (I'm counting From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Casino Royale, Skyfall and Goldeneye, which I haven't seen in more than ten years and upon further actual re-watching may prove less than I dimly recall.)

Nor is it the books, which Ian Fleming himself deemed as of "no social significance, except a deleterious one" (despite his robust bench of fans, including John F. Kennedy and Kingsley Amis).

Most of Bond's contemporary fans, at least in the U.S., are unlikely to have read Fleming's novels at all. I doubt they would be widely known today without the movies, and Fleming would be reduced to status of a minor spy novelist, comparable to Donald Hamilton. (Ask most people under 40 if they've heard of the author of the Matt Helm espionage novels. I thought not.)

Cringe-worthy prose

Obscurity might not be the worst thing for the super spy's reputation, unless you're dazzled by prose like, "He knew she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape" (from Casino Royale) or "All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was Bond's sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful" (from The Spy Who Loved Me). (I'm indebted to Yael Kohen of New York magazine for these quotes.)

Right, well, let's take it as a victory that no self-respecting author would seriously consider writing such a sentences today. And that no such brute misogyny exists in Bond himself these days (although the villains are another story).

So why were the majority of young people I know, male and female, so gleefully anticipating Daniel Craig as the newest incarnation of Bond in Skyfall? Why was I fielding giddy text messages from my mom and my sister on opening night and listening to a friend's tale of a Saturday evening with her boyfriend: Skyfall, chased with a three-martini date, served with the requisite shakings?

Shades of George Smiley

Part of it is Craig's novel take on Bond: brooding and embittered, which is as close to George Smiley as Fleming's suave master spy is ever likely to get.

Skyfall opens with Bond being ordered to abandon a mortally wounded colleague, a scene that quickly establishes the film's central theme: spycraft's crippling toll on those who practice it. This is something we expect from John Le Carré, not from our martini-sipping James, and it lends the proceedings a gravitas that elevates Skyfall to a level beyond, say, Moonraker.

The reason I keep coming back for Bond, and will continue to work my way through the Bond novels and watch the Bond films of yore, is the sheer fun of the conceit. I thrill to the custom suits and expensive cocktails, the exotic locales and the fantasia of uppercrust Englishness.

Briefings with M

That's why my favorite part of any Bond story, print or celluloid, is the opening hour or so, with its comfortable rituals before the villain's lair is infiltrated and things start heating up. I'll take another hour of the laconic Brit lounging around and making witticisms, please. (I especially relish the briefings with M, in which Bond gets his orders.)

No matter how absurd the plots or how silly the dialogue (thank God they didn't force Craig to do erection jokes, the special province of Roger Moore and Pierce Bronson), the iconic figure of the bulldog English rogue-gentleman, which hooked me at a young age, keeps me coming back.

As I grew older, watching the Bond movies on video, with their iconic status and predictable formula, provided a welcome retreat from the rigors of a Thanksgiving dinner with the family. Even as my enthusiasm for, say, Star Wars has waned, Bond remains a bewitching icon of fun and fashion.

With James Bond, you know what you're going to get no matter the actor inhabiting the icon, whether with the leaden George Lazenby or the Carré-inflected Craig. And that's no small thing, as hordes of grotesquely disappointed Star Wars fans will readily tell you.