Lift Up Your Hearts!

Having finished watching all the available “Best Picture” Oscar-winners—all except for one or two he decided early on weren’t worth the wasting of his time—Porter is catching up on the James Bond movies he’d missed, which was many if not most of them.  Not feeling any lack whatsoever for having missed them myself, I’ve generally elected to indulge in what to me are more profitable activities, such as reading, writing, or sleeping.

Every once in a while, however, I’ll find myself sucked into the story, never long enough to see the entire movie, but enough to provoke a few of thoughts.

There’s a lot of fun in the Bond movies, or at least the early ones, which is all I’ve seen so far.   Many of the lines, and in particular the way they are delivered (by Sean Connery, anyway) are genuinely clever, and some of the scenes border on slapstick, which I was not expecting.

What surprised—and disturbed—me most, however, was how tame the movies have seemed so far.  In violence, sex, and foul language they are far outdone by today’s ordinary, broadcast television fare.  Yet I remember how shocking James Bond was when first he came to the theaters.  Few of my young teenaged friends actually managed to see the films, but reading the books—or pretending, or wishing, to have done so—was risqué and definitely cool.  I remember the birthday when my mother gave me The Diamond Smugglers in an attempt to satisfy my desire for a Bond book.  How ignorant and uncool could she be to have picked out one of the very few books by Ian Fleming that was not about James Bond and in fact was not even fiction?  Ignorant like a fox, my Phi Beta Kappa mother!

Even from a perspective 40 years in the future, there are scenes in the films I would not want an adolescent to see; I’d rather not have seen them myself.  To this day I remember lines from one of the Bond books I managed to read that I wish had not been burned into my brain.  (My naïve imagination was not up to visualizing the scenes very well, but words stick.)  Yet that from which we were sheltered is standard fare for elementary-aged students (most of the children in Janet’s middle class, suburban, second grade class had watched R-rated movies—and that was 20 years ago); many of today’s teenagers have had more sexual encounters than James Bond himself, and been exposed to more violence.  Without the cool gadgets.