You Only Live Twice

Amazon has a James Bond deal in April. If you're a Prime member you can stream a lot of the Sean Connery and Roger Moore James Bond films for free. Sunday night I finished watching You Only Live Twice (1967), starring an aging Sean Connery. Bond battles SPECTRE in a Roald Dahl screenplay.

Despite the fact that he is obviously just going through his paces (Connery would opt out of the next film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), to be lured back by a larger purse to play Bond one last time in 1971 in an Eon Productions' project, Diamonds Are Forever) the movie reminds one -- it's a threadbare thought at this point because it has been said so many times before but I'll go ahead and say it again -- there's only one James Bond and he's Sean Connery.

My father was a big Sean Connery-James Bond fan. From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964) are classics in 1960s virility. Roger Moore who would succeed Connery as Bond was too much the fop. Connery had that open, working-class Scottish face, a face Ian Fleming probably didn't have in mind when he wrote his Bond novels. But it was the face that made Bond a global movie franchise.

These Bond films of the 1960s are fascinating as a study in the shifting sands of male entitlement. The 1960s Bond, at least in You Only Live Twice, is an exercise in male infantile narcissism. Bond is a boy toddler and we're trying to build his confidence. Every beautiful woman wants to wrap her legs around him; every male combatant -- whether ninja assassin, sumo wrestler or Aryan strongman -- is bested. Bond can escape any deathtrap. Bond can master any gadget. For Bond the world only exists as an extension of his ego. Challenges are erected to inflate his sense of self. The endings of Bond movies are instructive, and You Only Live Twice is a good example. After killing innumerable human beings he ends up in a beautiful woman's arms (mommy) floating in a raft on the ocean (reminding one of the beginning of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and his discussion of the "oceanic feeling" and its relation, or not, to an innate religious impulse).

The latest iterations of the Bond franchise have been updated to reflect a capitalist society that has fully integrated women into the workforce. M, played by the Churchillian Bernard Lee in the Connery Bond movies, is now, at least up until her character's death in Skyfall, played by super-matron Judi Dench.