A “blunt instrument.” “Ironical, brutal and cold”. These are Ian Fleming’s early descriptions of his ruthless assassin, James Bond. This is the 007 that the Bond films’ producers returned to in 2005, when Daniel Craig’s casting was announced. This is the Bond who rescued cinema’s longest-running series from its anachronistic, turn-of-the-century torpor, and returned it, arguably for the first time since the Sixties, to a sleek, potent pop phenomenon: from flaccid to priapic at a single stroke.
We Brits have a funny thing about Bond, British men especially. He occupies a uniquely delicate position in the national psyche. He is a source of both pride and embarrassment. In his twisted way, he exemplifies qualities we believe distinguish us: he’s brave, he’s tough, he’s stylish, he’s drily witty, he’s worldly and he knows exactly what to do with Johnny Foreigner (shoot him) and Johnny Foreigner’s girlfriend (steal her, then let someone else shoot her).
It’s perhaps best not to linger too long on what it says about us that our most enduring aspirational male fantasy figure is a borderline sociopath with acute abandonment issues and a job that involves state-sponsored killing. But hey, he’s nicely turned out, knows an awful lot about wine and has a bitchin’ beach bod. Lose some, win some.
Get Bond right, as Craig has done so magnificently, and the films can be spectacular fun. Get him wrong and Bond risks seeming risible, a post-Imperial fantasy of a Britain that is still the leading player on the world stage, as well as a pub bore’s idea of traditional (white, straight) masculine cool. Unattached middle-aged men in overpowered two-seaters delude themselves into thinking the rest of us are looking on in admiration, when in fact we suspect they’re overcompensating for
a lack of thrust in the trouser department. And, at the risk of sounding like Jeremy Clarkson, another somewhat suspect exemplar of British blokeishness, a Bond with no thrust in the trouser department is – pause for emphasis, change down a gear – no Bond at all.
What he wears, drinks, drives: these things are important
It’s a heavy weight to carry, then. Bond matters to the Brits: as an idea, but also as a business. Along with a handful of others (The Beatles, the BBC, Burberry) Bond has, for 60 years, sold Britain to the world. For all the blunt instrumentation, his greatest power is soft, and the Britain that Bond flogs is upmarket, expensive and refined. Bond has long been, and remains, our luxury industry’s most muscular pitchman; the model, literally and figuratively, for a certain kind of high-spending sophistication. What he wears, drinks, drives: these things are important. At least they are if you are invested in him – and plenty of us are. He is our not-so-secret weapon, a maverick sales executive on the longest hot-streak in history. If Bond were working on commission, he’d have retired to the Bahamas years ago.
His associations (brand and otherwise) are familiar to generations, except when they’re not. We know he drives an Aston Martin, except when he doesn’t. We know his suits are from Savile Row, except when they’re from elsewhere. We know he drinks Vesper martinis, except when he orders a beer. We know he buys British, except when he shops overseas: Swiss watch, French fizz, German pistol.
And that’s the slightly odd thing. So established are his predilections in the public consciousness, so widely known are his tastes, that his image seems all but impervious to the lucrative global endorsement deals struck by his paymasters, some of which might have made Ian Fleming raise an eyebrow, Roger Moore-style.
In Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan drove a BMW Z3, a whiny little mosquito that even a shirtless Sean Connery would have struggled to make macho. Brosnan did, eventually, get his hands on an Aston, in the unspeakable Die Another Day. Unhappily, it was invisible. Since Skyfall, the most financially successful Bond film of them all, Craig has worn suits and shirts from Tom Ford, an American my dears. On the road in last year’s No Time to Die he wears Brunello Cucinelli shirts and Alexander Olch ties under his Massimo Alba suit. Yet still he projects a quintessential Britishness.
I’m not suggesting those international brands are wasting their marketing budgets. On the contrary, any association with 007 – certainly with Craig’s 007 – must be worth its weight in beluga caviar. Omega’s investment in Bond has surely paid off handsomely. When the brand and the man match, as they do in the case of his timepiece, it all makes sense. He’s only human, after all, as the final scenes of No Time to Die prove, and who wouldn’t want to go out in style, with a Seamaster on his wrist?
For the most part, though, we prefer to see MI6’s top operative flying the flag. In No Time to Die, the villains drive Land Rovers, the hero rides a Triumph. Bond carries a Globe-Trotter case. He wears a casual Connolly jacket over an Anderson & Sheppard T-shirt. His support for British brands – Orlebar Brown trunks, Sunspel polos, Crockett & Jones shoes – is not simply patriotic: these are labels that any smart, modern secret agent would be proud to sport, whichever nation he represents.
Now, as all the world knows, it is time for Craig to throw the keys of the DB5 to a younger model. Speculation as to who this replacement might be is, to put it mildly, feverish. I’m afraid that, at the time of writing, I have no more idea than any other Bond maniac. But to whoever does get behind the wheel, a word of advice: don’t trade it in for a Beamer. They’ve tried that before. Didn’t work.
