Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche

by John Higgs

The very essence of Tarzan now looks to us to be fundamentally racist and there seems little chance that such a character could be rebooted in a way that would attract a 21st-century audience. Could this be the fate of James Bond? Could imperialism and misogyny be, as Kill James Bond! maintain, so ingrained in his character that he can never be redeemed? Is his fate a relaunch that plays out to an ageing and dwindling audience before he is slowly forgotten? Such a fate would be out of character. Bond, as we have seen, is death, and therefore the one character who cannot die. Or perhaps we should now say, one who cannot die for long. He is also tradition, and the establishment’s ability to ‘keep buggering on’ is a strong one. But perhaps more importantly, he is a mythic avatar of male fantasy. This element of Bond’s makeup is continually changing, and it is these changes which have kept him alive over the past half-century. Men will always need a vision of who they want to be. It inspires them to keep striving to become better than they are. Bond does not represent what men should be, or could be, or need to be. He is instead what some men want to be. He is pure fantasy, and unashamedly so. This makes him ideologically and morally impossible to defend, but also inhuman to deny. Our fantasies may reflect badly on us when they are exposed to the cold light of day, but we still need to explore them, if we are ever to improve them.