Peter David, Agent 008

Originally published December 19, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1257

It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen in my young life.

There she was, the gorgeous woman lying in a bathtub. Standing just outside the door of the bathroom was the suave, imperturbable man with the cool-sounding accent. She didn’t seem to be shrieking in embarrassment or shouting for him to get the hell out, as I figured that any grown woman would under the circumstances. Instead she was regarding him with, at most, a slightly scolding look.

“Could you hand me something to put on?” she inquired.

He tossed her a pair of slippers and waited for her to get out of the tub. And she did.

I sat there in the movie theater, not even blinking. And I resolved right then and right there that I was going to grow up to be James Bond so that I, too, could hang out in bathrooms with naked women and not have them be upset.

I have two cinematic weaknesses. One is movie musicals. I’m a sucker for virtually any film where people break into song, no matter how lame or reviled the film might actually be. And the other is Bond films.

The films sparked an interest in the books, but the literary interest wasn’t as sustained, and I remember precisely the reason why. It was because of Goldfinger.

One of the best-known sequences in the film is when Bond is strapped down to a table, his legs spread-eagled, and a pencil-thin laser beam strikes the far end of the table and proceeds to work its way upward towards his crotch as Goldfinger and his people look on. None of this “Let’s all leave him alone so he can escape” stuff. They had Bond cold. He knew it and they knew it.

In the film he demands defiantly, “Do you expect me to talk?”

“No, Mr. Bond!” replies Goldfinger, amused at the notion that Bond knows anything worth torturing him for. “I expect you to die!”

And Bond, through bluff and resourcefulness, convinces Goldfinger not to bisect him.

There is a similar scene in the Ian Fleming novel upon which the film is based. In that version, Bond is menaced not by a laser, but by a circular saw. Significantly less cooler, but then again, Fleming did write it in the late 1950s, so it’s understandable that the device was not as high tech. But in that version, Bond doesn’t talk his way out of the situation. Instead, through careful training and discipline, he manages to pass out.

And I read that and thought, “He passed out? Passed out? There’s nothing cool about passing out!” Bugged the hell out of me.

I don’t say the foregoing out of any intention of dissing Ian Fleming or any fans of his work. It’s just that, to me at age eight or nine, I thought the movie Bond was cooler. Can you blame me? It was Sean Connery, for heaven’s sake.

And I decided that I wanted to be a spy.

My parents indulged me. They got me the little plastic James Bond action figures. And they also got me the single most beloved playtoy of my youth: My genuine James Bond attaché case. The kind of thing where, if you saw it on sale now in a dealer’s room, would probably be going for $300 or something.

It was cool beyond words. Coolness defined. It packed a high-powered rifle with silencer and shoulder mount. There was a secret decoder machine. There was a dagger that slipped out of a hidden slit in the side. I adored that attaché case. When I’d walk around the neighborhood in residential Bloomfield, New Jersey, I felt like I was the single most subtle spy in the world. It didn’t occur to me that the first thing a spy is supposed to be is capable of not drawing attention to himself, and considering the paucity of briefcase-toting nine-year-olds, I don’t think I exactly blended in with the crowd.

(Bloomfield, by the way, is not to be confused with the despised Verona, NJ, where I later moved—a town where the kids were so dim that they thought the character’s name was “Bond James Bond” because that’s how he introduced himself, no matter how much I tried to convince them it was simply “James Bond.”)

The only problem was, I knew in my heart of hearts that I couldn’t measure up to 007. Oddjob didn’t intimidate me. Doctor No and his metal hands didn’t phase me. But that whole laser-beam-up-the-crotch thing scared the snot out of me. I’d envision what it would be like to be strapped to a table with that laser beam aiming straight at my goodies, and I knew I’d be screaming my fool head off.

It was one thing to put on a cape and mask and jump around and pretend I was Batman (the kind of behavior that would prompt my frustrated parents to tell me that I should concentrate on my studies because I couldn’t make a living out of comic books). Batman was a pure fantasy figure. Bond, despite the outrageousness of his adventures, seemed more… real somehow. But there was just something about seeing Bond faced with that moment of truth on a Great Big Movie Screen that made me realize, deep down, that I couldn’t measure up to 007.

I wanted to be 008.

When Bond was Goldfinger’s prisoner, he informed Goldfinger that if he was killed, 008 would take his place. Even in the book, he takes private solace in the concept: “(He had to) hope that the other who would now follow him on Goldfinger’s trail would have better luck. Who would M choose? Probably 008, the second killer in the small section of three. He was a good man, more careful than Bond.”

I didn’t really have the stomach to face the terrifying jeopardies into which 007 threw himself. But being 008—I could handle that. He had all of the perks that Bond had, and none of the hazards. He was 007′s stand-in. If 007 was killed, you bring in 008, and since 007 wasn’t going to get killed, this was guaranteed job security. By definition, 008 would be suave, debonair, have access to all the neat gadgets (including the beloved attaché case) and—best of all—plenty of leisure time, waiting around for the call-to-action that would never come.

So I would pretend I was a spy pretending I was on a mission, rehearsing for the unlikely need for my services. And in my nine-year-old imagination, there were plenty of sexy girls in a variety of environments who were always happy to see me. (Which, come to think of it, isn’t much different from my adult imagination. It may sound precocious, but I just never went through a period of development wherein I thought that girls were yucky—which is kind of amazing in retrospect, considering what a slow start I got off to in terms of dating.)

The thing that most struck me about Bond, I guess, was his ability to be suave and romantic one moment, and fully capable of coldly killing someone the next. Connery hit this note perfectly, making both killer and lover believable, in a way that George Lazenby and Roger Moore never did. Moore sold the romance aspect, but he lacked the cold-bloodedness that 007 should possess. Timothy Dalton, on the other hand, was a believable killer, but didn’t quite fly as a lover. Pierce Brosnan is the best Bond since Connery. In retrospect, NBC did him the biggest favor of his career by not letting him out of his Remington Steele contract ten years ago. He would have seemed too much like, well, Mr. Steele pretending to be Bond. The intervening decade not only distanced him from the role, but added a measure of experience and touch of world-weariness that makes for a truly memorable Bond.

However, the revitalization of the Bond franchise has led to a somewhat disconcerting trend. “Boys with toys,” was the dismissive assessment of Bond and his opponents by his female companion in Goldeneye, and there are indeed toys, but now they’re all aimed at adults. I’ve grown used to product placement within a movie, but the producers of the Bond films have taken it an additional step that I find, frankly, bothersome. Not only is the product placed within the film, but it’s being aggressively promoted outside the film as well, with Brosnan-as-Bond, or actor Desmond Llewelyn as master gadget-maker “Q,” doing the promoting.

(This relates to nothing I’m talking about at the moment, but if Llewelyn is ever unavailable, I think they should replace him with John de Lancie.)

We’ve seen this kind of thing before in small doses, with sunglasses companies getting some mileage out of Terminator 2 or a sneaker company using Ripley’s sneakers in Aliens to promote their line. (Although, in a burst of stupidity, they didn’t actually make a sneaker that looked like Ripley’s shoe. They received a ton of calls from Aliens fans, including me, who saw the print ads and wanted to know where we could purchase sneakers like the ones Ripley was wearing.) But I’ve never seen cross-campaigning to this degree, and frankly, it’s cheesing me off.

Okay, granted, the Visa ad (which shows Bond passing through umpty-ump identification devices, greeted by name, and then challenged on his ID when trying to cash a personal check) is kinda cute. And having a high-profile piece of merchandise as a central plot item is nothing new either (who can forget Bond’s incredible Aston-Martin?)

But watches, liquor, cars, all have TV or print ads promoting various items on display in the upcoming film, Tomorrow Never Dies. Not only does it start turning Tomorrow into the product placement equivalent of Where’s Waldo? (can you spot all the advertisers?) but it—I dunno—cheapens Bond somehow. It diminishes his coolness factor, which is one of his most lethal weapons, and turns him into a promoter for BMW, Smirnoff and Omega. Bond should be about danger and sex, not about hucksterism.

To a degree, I could almost be viewed as a spoilsport, I suppose. As a child, I loved the items that made me feel that much closer to the greatest spy on earth, such as my attaché case, so I could share in the Double-0-glow.

What manufacturers are doing now is simply assuming that the same mindset will carry over into adulthood—but whereas adults aren’t likely to tote a plastic briefcase, they’re more likely to wear the Omega watch or—if they’re really high-end—drive the 750iL sedan or $14,000 R 1200 C motorcycle he drives in Tomorrow.

And they’re probably right. But if this keeps up or gets worse, then the producers may very well wind up killing the goose that laid the Goldeneye.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He will be the subject of a profile on Sci-Fi Buzz on the Sci-Fi Channel around the weekend of December 5. Check local listings. Or watch something else. Or read a book, or go on a date, or catch a movie. It’s okay, I won’t be upset.)