It's a fact that most films are made for a contemporary audience, built to appeal to viewers with changing tastes and a modern sensibility. Even those set in the distant past or future can't help but reflect the world they are born into, utilizing today's techniques of filmmaking and storytelling while demonstrating the specific look and feel of the times. Through the last five decades the James Bond franchise has captured a snapshot of trends and attitudes at regular intervals, along the way chronicling half a century of modernity.
Bond's Broad Scope
Since 1962's Dr. No, Bond films have struck a chord with three generations of viewers: those brought to the films through Ian Fleming's novels, those who grew with the films, and those to whom the earlier films are little more than a part of entertainment history, stepping stones toward the Bond films of today. Part of this longevity is due to the franchise's built-in flexibility: six different actors to date, and an organic progression from spy story to action epic to gritty thriller.
Able to reinvent itself as needed, the series tells stories that extend to topical subjects, featuring subplots involving communists, terrorists, corporate scandal, any cybercrime. Bond's humor evolves as well, cycling from dry wit to silly one-liners, and back again. As a character, James Bond exudes an ever-changing (though always glamorous) style that generates real-life imitators while providing a visual catalog of what's hot in fashion, technology, and design.
Bond Ideology
The far-reaching legacy of the Bond franchise ensures a culturally embedded ideology, making it impossible to separate the films from the historical moment they engage with. Continuity comes from those fundamentals that remain the same. Though flawed, Bond is always heroic. As a renegade agent of a governmental bureaucracy he contains a shard of anarchy, playing to the distrust of authority that is so common. These elements come to define the major themes of the films, which are themselves responses to the political, military, and social conflicts of reality; in many cases Bond is the lone hero pitted against foreign masses led by a charismatic villain.
Bond's unwavering fashion sense and love of gadgets speak to a deep-seated materialism that is central to capitalist culture. His elite lifestyle, earned through noble deeds, is an exaggeration of the promises of freedom inherent in the American dream. Working for the interests of Britain and her ally, the United States, Bond projects a sort of post-colonial imperialism as the superpowers project their righteous will across the globe.
Perhaps the most important form of embedded ideology in the Bond films concerns notions of gender. Sex, it seems, is always in style and Bond's women (and they are almost always rendered as objects in his possession) reflect contemporary standards of femininity. Over the years they have been diminutive, coy, bold, and intelligent, in whichever combination best suited the story and era. The misogynistic Bond of the '60s mellowed significantly as second-wave feminism gained momentum, but by the '90s he was once again predatory, though this time pursuing a more liberated sort of prey.
The Bond Legacy
What the most recent Bond films suggest about our particular moment in history is too early to guess at. That information is evident only with the benefit of distance and, fortunately, the Bond films afford no shortage of opportunities for hindsight. By borrowing from the timeless model of heroic drama and infusing it with a dynamic flexibility that responds to modern tastes, they have come to form a richly diverse body of cinema that is united in its value not only as entertainment, but as an active cultural archive.
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