My Evolving Relationship with The Character of James Bond

I have a long, but oddly complicated relationship with James Bond ever since I laid eyes on the movies when I was very, very young. Obsessive fandom means that I've watched those movies repeatedly, to the point of rapidly and repeatedly watching each new one on its release. As a teenager, I turned to the novels and read those a few times each as well (well, the ones that I liked the most). I even started to read the continuation novels, starting with Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun (actually one of the best of all the novels, period), carrying on through John Gardener's tenure. But although I've bought every single one, I have to admit that I stopped actually reading the novels sometime during Raymond Benson's run.

I don't think that this was due to some quality issue on his part, but a change in my own tastes. Having said that, I keep buying them on the basis that I'm going to get around to reading them at some point. Although this occasionally holds true of other books I've bought, the chances of it happening for the newer Bond novels are presumably decreasing over time.

Hero is a pretty complicated word. While Ian Fleming undoubtedly did things that were heroic, my personal aversion to a lot of his politics (a feeling that's grown in me as I've grown up) and some of the (not always so casual) racism and misogyny in his writing have meant that the biography of him is also unread. Come to think of it, that tome may have well found its way to the charity shop (I checked - it hasn't, but it will).

The James Bond of the novels is also often difficult to describe as heroic. Is he a hero? Well, yes. And although he's probably not quite an anti-hero, his own snobbery, racism & misogyny (his role as Ian Fleming's alter ego is pretty well understood) make it difficult to root for him unequivocally. In some ways that makes him a perfect contemporary hero - people are complicated after all and nuanced writing through history tells us that good people sometimes do bad and bad people sometimes do good. Furthermore, heroism is sometimes a little more meaningful when achieved despite personal failings. In some ways however, this possibly makes him unadaptable to the screen in his purest form; screen heroes can be flawed, but movies tend to insist that they have some kind of inherent likeability or a similar sympathetic quality. Accurately depicting a 'hero' on screen who enjoys a sexual encounter tinged "with the sweet tang of rape" is beyond the pale and rightly so.

Maybe just for this reason, screen depictions have veered away from too pure a portrayal of Fleming's Bond (some Moore than others, of course) and given us various versions of a hero who's much easier to root for - predilections for alcohol and casual sex aren't really the worst things in the world. So my faith in the screen Bond as opposed to the literary one has been much easier to maintain as I've grown older (I nearly said 'grown up' but let's not go crazy). I still anticipate new Bond movies with the same fervour that I did decades ago and love movies that I loved years ago with undimmed intensity.

Fandom's a complicated thing and something I'm thinking of writing a lot more about as there are so many facets to it. Many people who are fans of something get a huge amount of pleasure from their fandom. But we shouldn't let blind devotion stop our fandom from evolving. After all, relationships begin, evolve, grow and sometimes end, so why wouldn't our fandom? I think it's safe to say that I've fallen out of love somewhat with the literary James Bond, but I think of him with the same warmth I might have for an ex-boyfriend. And that's not a bad thing.

Why I Love: Listening to Other People Talking About Movies

From long before I was born, film magazines were the only medium where audiences could find out about and engage in conversations about movies. During my own infatuation with movies, I've bought more magazines than I can count, including issue one of Empire (still going, of course) which had a really well-researched article on Bond title songs. I carried on buying Empire until I felt I'd outgrown it, getting rid of all my back issues when I stopped, except for the first five (nostalgia wouldn't let me). At various times, I also bought Sight & Sound (which is also still going), Neon, Cinescape, SFX, Cinefex (the US special effects quarterly), Deathray, 007, Premiere, Starlog, Starburst & Cinefantastique, while I'm still buying MI6.

I loved movies and movie magazines so much in fact that I even wrote for one after university. It may not have been the most impressive magazine; the look resulted from the editor's PC only having three fonts and without professional sub-editing, the editor was able to indulge design whims leading to things like unbroken, solid pages of text. But Movie Collector still has a special place in my heart as a magazine for people who genuinely loved movies.

The proliferation of media and the cost of paper have led to a slow decline of film magazines in print, which has had an impact in terms of numbers, quality of output and circulation. The ubiquitous internet has of course started to provide a lot of things we used to get from film magazines for free (or thereabouts, depending on how you look at it). There is of course an argument that the quality of what we get on the internet doesn't necessarily rival what we paid for in print, even if it is more timely. And although there may be occasions where this is merited, it should also be observed that internet clickbait (overhyped trivia designed to draw hits for advertising money) is matched by self-generated content of similar quality in print - I'm thinking particularly of articles listing 10 of the greatest car chases or the 10 greatest horror movies, which don't really give the reader anything new.

This kind of dull, generic content, whatever the medium, is the opposite of unique, engaged writing and surely the enemy of good film journalism of whatever flavour you're after. And its effect has been compounded by the break-up of film journalism into more niche areas. Movie magazines always used to deal in stars, fashion and glamour, but that's since been largely hived off into celebrity news and gossip. I have to admit to getting engaged by this until literally one day, I realised that I didn't care about most peoples' personal lives and just stopped. I also stopped years of reading Variety and The Hollywood Reporter when I realised that I wasn't genuinely that interested in the movie business as such (I used to believe that it gave me insight into what movies got made - which it did, but again, I just didn't care that much about that particular aspect). I stopped reading Cinefex when I realised that practical effects were becoming used less and less and the ingenuity that went into them was being replaced by a different kind of ingenuity (better and better CG) that I was just indifferent to.

I'm personally only interested in the final product - the actual movie. And hence I'm interested in interviews where filmmakers of whatever specific profession are able to talk about their intentions (not those awful press-junket write-ups), well-written reviews with properly articulated opinions (whether deciding on what to watch or - more often - after the movie to see if others' thoughts stimulate my own feelings in any way), other bits and pieces of critical thinking and sometimes just silly fan stuff.

Nowadays, my film journalism and commentary comes from The Playlist blog as well as Vulture, while I'm also catching up on several years of the James Bond Radio podcast, in addition to listening to directors interviewing directors as part of the Directors' Guild of America podcast. Although I've talked predominantly about film magazines, it's taken me a long time to realise that what I valued wasn't the magazines themselves (hence why they're not mentioned in the title of this post) but what I was getting from them; the reason I love reading other people writing about their love for movies is that it constantly rekindles the joy that I get myself from them. The passion and the voice are mandatory; anything less just passes the time.