If you have not yet seen the latest James Bond film, No Time to Die, and wish to do so spoiler free, you should not read the next sentence.
If you have seen the film (or aren’t fussed either way), the epic missile bombardment which marks the this-worldly demise of the until-now indestructible spy hero (Daniel Craig in his final outing in the role) seems like an opportune moment for an up-to-date assessment of the spy genre itself.
If you have seen any of the 27 Bond films you should have a pretty reliable grip on their essence: cars, motorcycles, and helicopters get flipped upside down; heads get punched and shot through; a lone hero and his fancy watch take on an army of thugs who try to wipe out humanity.
The details – exotic locations, women, villains, and evil plots – are different but are effectively variation-on-a-theme swap-ins. The same car gets a new paint job. This time it has flames on the side.
Judging by the longevity of the series there are folks out there who absolutely love cars enough that these surface level adaptations keep things interesting. Prominent among them, perhaps, is that subset of folks colloquially known as boys.
The boyish appeal of a Bond spy action hero probably has a lot to do with the fact that, for all his outward trappings of adulthood, he is in his bones really a big screen projection of the childhood fantasy at the heart of every adventure tale. There is a dragon (call him a terrorist), a damsel in distress (maybe at this point a self-sufficient martial arts master), a gallant steed (sporting a V8 engine), a sword (that shoots silenced pistol rounds), etc., etc.
You could slap the same man into a cowboy hat or a space helmet and the essentials would persist across superficially distinguishable genres. James Bond is the spy caper variation of the perennial childhood dream of the man.
There is a lot to be said for such archetypal melodrama: the love of good and loathing of evil, the fantastical expectation that these forces really do play out across the battlefield of real life. The boy’s instincts are right – the battle is real – even if the lines which divide good and evil are seldom so clean and clearly drawn between two great opposing lumps of humanity.
This kind of a perspective, like the origin of the spy genre itself, can perhaps be traced to the Cold War. There was a time, spanning much of the second half of the 20th century, when the destiny of the world really did appear to be caught in the conflict between two great superpowers and the stakes really did involve the possible destruction of everyone.
Spy stories were fresh as long as this geopolitical situation remained relevant, impressing the ageless elements of boyhood adventure onto the urgent details of the present. Both unions (literary and Soviet) hit their expiry date on Nov. 9, 1989.
All the spy stories since then have been born into a different world, and pretty much all have hit the scene in a kind of time-frozen state.
Instead of Russians with nuclear missiles it is now murky terrorist organizations whose weapons are biological. The core concerns endure, transposed into the key of a new era, yet lack the glamour and vitality that once came from plugging into the chief concerns of the age.
So have we reached the end of the age of spy romance?
In many respects, this latest Bond movie, and the last with Craig, would seem an appropriate place to call it quits. Even in their aesthetics, the series has for quite some time been getting darker and darker, almost as if delaying the inevitable by swirling faster and faster toward the shadowy bottom of oblivion.
This last film might claim that there is no time to die, but really, Mr. Bond, there is also no time like the present.
