Pierce Brosnan only has so much time left. He doesn’t know it yet, but this will be his last James Bond film. While it will gross almost half a billion dollars worldwide, it won’t take long for Die Another Day to become a punch line, sparring with a select few entries in the Bond canon for the dubious honor of series worst. (For a franchise that includes two dozen films, a parade of ethnic and gender stereotypes, five decades’ worth of questionable wardrobe choices, and a Duran Duran music video, this is saying something). But Brosnan knows none of this yet. His performance is a master class in overconfidence. You can see it in his eyes, the way they twinkle as he parasails on a tsunami. You can see it in his smirk, barely contained as he rides an invisible car through a melting ice hotel (such an on-the-nose metaphor for the sinking credibility of the franchise, I’m surprised it made it past the storyboard stage). You can hear it in his voice, as he stands in a luau shirt at a beachside cabana bar, lifts his glass in Halle Berry’s direction, and offers her a mojito, his over pronunciation so ridiculous that it would make an NPR correspondent blush.
How has it come to this, we will ask ourselves years later, watching the film on cable or on DVD or on disc twenty of the $200, twenty-four disc Blu-Ray box set that our saint-like wife bought us for our 30th birthday. How could James Bond, a character so timeless, so synonymous with class, be jumping on the bandwagon of a cocktail trend so stale by 2002 that it had already trickled down to gum flavors, the cocktail menu at TGIFriday’s, and Rachael Ray recipes? Here, in one moment, we have the perfect illustration of James Bond’s long fall from trendsetter to straw grasper. Whose name do you think of when a man wears a tuxedo? When someone orders a martini at a bar? When a friend drops a pun just after brutally murdering someone? By 2002, James Bond is nothing but a pastiche of poor choices, bad CGI, and transparent product placement. Why is James Bond drinking a fucking mojito?
* * *
It’s early 2004 and neat vodka is still my drink. Soon, I will drink enough of it, and get sick often enough, to begin moderating myself somewhat. But for now I don’t have time to waste with measuring and mixing and tasting. I want to get drunk—this is the only reason I’m drinking and the only way I’m interested in spending my time. It’s in this spirit that I invite my friend Meagan over to hang out one night in January—she’s scored a bottle of Skyy vodka through quasi-nefarious means. If her goal is to get rid of it, she’s come to the right place. I clean the house and get my favorite shot glasses ready (merchandising tie-ins from Ang Lee’s version of Hulk). Meagan and I had been friends for a few years, since the summer after our junior year of high school, when we met in a playwriting class at a summer program for overachievers. A little more than a year after this night we will start dating. We are still together as I write this. She is here now, sleeping in our bedroom while I listen to a Cat Stevens record and try my best to tell you about her, to describe for you the night that was almost the last time I saw her.
* * *
James Bond’s first moment of vulnerability in his proud 50 year cinematic history comes from an unexpected place. It comes from George Lazenby, in 1969’s retroactively beloved classic, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He has just been married, a development that would have been shocking if it hadn’t been so temporary. He drives along a winding mountain road, the type of road where he’s had car chase after car chase, but he’s not fighting now. He’s laid down his arms. He’s driving beside his new wife, Tracy, and—you never thought you’d see it—he’s smiling. He’s resigned from the British secret service and, for all we know, plans to spend the rest of his days as an insurance adjuster, or living off his father-in-law’s money. It’s not just the two bottles of champagne he had at the wedding talking—he’s happy. For the first time in his life, he feels at peace with himself. There is no anger raging inside him, no will to kill and destroy. Secret agents aren’t supposed to get happy endings. They’re supposed to die painfully and be disavowed by their governments, their names already forgotten by the time their bodies wash up downstream. But here he is, in spite of how little he deserves it, driving off into the sunset.
Except that he isn’t. It’s only 1969, and he has decades longer to go. We know this. He is beyond age, beyond the weakness of the flesh, beyond time. He can’t die, he can’t retire, and he certainly can’t live on peacefully, a quiet life in the countryside filled with grandchildren and Sunday suppers and Christmas cards. After a few minutes, he stops on the shoulder of this mountain road to clear the garlands and flowers and tin cans from his Aston Martin. A car comes screaming down the road. Bond’s arch nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, sits inside with a sidekick. With a savagery uncharacteristic of even the Bond films’ most violent moments, they gun Tracy down. Bond doesn’t realize that she’s gone, at first. He rushes back to the driver’s seat, ready to make chase. “It must be Blofeld,” he says, and you can hear the excitement in his voice. He doesn’t even know what’s happened yet—all it took was the slightest provocation, and he’s ready to go back into the breach. It’s his wedding day, but he’s already prepared to fight and kill and fuck his way through another adventure.
And he will, but not quite yet. First he has to realize that his wife is dead. He has to turn and see the bullet hole in her forehead, the blood running down her face. The credits are about to roll. He has about 45 seconds in which to mourn. He tries to make them count, but the director doesn’t let him. In an unused take, George Lazenby cried openly as he cradled his murdered wife in his arms. He never made another Bond movie. It makes a certain sense that the Bond most reviled for his performance is the one who so convincingly portrays emotional vulnerability. The crying take ended up on the cutting room floor, in favor of another in which Lazenby presses his head against Mrs. Bond’s, obscuring his face from the camera. As the director famously told Lazenby after calling cut, “James Bond doesn’t cry.”
* * *
Meagan and I spent the night listening to music and talking, pouring and knocking back shots of the Skyy, matching each other drink for drink. We’d always gotten along well, up to a point. We would spend hours talking to each other online, staying up late into the night swapping the names of favorite books and punk rock albums. We both went to college in Atlanta, and as soon as fall semester began, we started playing a game that neither of us would acknowledge out loud—were we just friends, or were we going to sleep together? One afternoon in October she came over and we kissed. She took off her shirt and we lay side by side in my bed, holding each other. But we stopped there. She was still off and on with her high school boyfriend, and I was such a self-absorbed, melodramatic mess of a person that I had no idea what I wanted. But that night, the bottle of vodka between us, slowly emptying itself into our stomachs, we got drunk enough that the moment came when we had to make a decision. She couldn’t drive home, so she had to stay the night. I wanted to ask her to come back to my room, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even admit to myself that it’s what I wanted. I brought out a spare blanket and pillow for her to sleep in the living room. When I woke up in the morning, she was already gone.
* * *
In the opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore visits Tracy Bond’s grave. He lays flowers against her headstone and bows his head in reverence. It’s a tender moment, or at least it should be. But it’s so ripped away from any context that it’s hard to feel what you’re meant to feel—a pang at the enormity of this loss, still haunting this man decades later. It was Lazenby who married Tracy, and Connery who took up the mission of avenging her death. Roger Moore never watched this woman die. He never cradled her mangled face in his hands, never cried tears destined for the cutting room floor. Watching him mourn her feels disorienting, like a dream in which you know the person in front of you is supposed to be your mother, or your friend, but they have a face you’ve never seen in waking life.
Ever since they murdered the character onscreen, the Bond producers have evoked Tracy to create sympathy, to show that Bond is more than a blunt instrument, that there is a man in there somewhere beneath the tuxedo and the scar tissue and the haircut. As years passed, attitudes shifted, and Bond stayed in place, this hidden vulnerability became a way to justify his behavior. Remind the viewer that his wife had died, and it can justify any atrocity. Of course he hates women—he lost the only one he loved. Of course he’s a killer—he doesn’t have anything to live for. This is the Bond canon’s brutal misreading of feminism. Of course women matter—as soon as they get murdered, the hero has his motivation to save the day.
* * *
Meagan and I didn’t speak for days, then weeks, then months. That summer, I moved on from shot after shot of vodka to can after can of malt liquor. I was working as a paid intern at a company that sold furniture to hotel chains. I spent my days sorting through fabric swatches and putting together spreadsheets to keep track of which Hilton had ordered the end tables with ebony veneer and which one had opted for teak. At night, I got drunk with whoever would hang out with me; when no one would, I got drunk alone. After work, I would take long walks on a “nature trail” that wound its way around the office park—really nothing but a thin band of asphalt weaving in between the strip of young pines that separated the building from the freeway.
I was incredibly lonely. To my friends, I would bluster, make jokes about how desperate Meagan had been, and how I was too good for her. The way I was treating her was becoming a pattern. A way of dealing with women that involved convincing myself I was better than them and making sure they didn’t have a chance to forget it. In retrospect, it’s no surprise I had so much trouble getting close to anyone. The truth is that I had cared for Meagan more than I was willing to admit for a long time. One night, not long after we’d started chatting online, she’d called me on the phone just after signing off. “I wanted to hear your voice,” she said. It made me feel good in a way that no one had ever made me feel before. But the last thing I could ever do was admit it. The last thing I could ever allow myself to be, was myself.
* * *
Timothy Dalton is having the time of his life. His best friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, is getting married. For once, James Bond gets to relax. Maybe, after all these years, he can allow himself to be happy. It must be hard for him to go to weddings these days. After the cake and the champagne, he leaves the newlyweds at their door. Della, Felix’s new wife, tosses him the garter, teasing him that now he will have to get married. Things get somber. “No,” he tells her, his face dark as he drives off into the humid Key West night. “He was married once, but it was a long time ago,” Felix tells her. Dalton, to his credit, sells more anguish in this quiet moment than any Bond before him. This is the last time Tracy Bond is mentioned directly in the films. Once Bond is gone, Della is brutally murdered on her wedding night, like Tracy before her. Bond vows revenge, setting the plot of License to Kill in motion. There is an urgency to Bond’s mission, and a savagery to the violence he delivers that can’t be solely attributed to the R rating and the Miami Vice tone. This is a mission of vengeance. This is, as the old action movie cliché goes, personal. He’s not supposed to do this. He’s a professional. He doesn’t let his emotions get the better of him. But all these years later, after watching the same tragedy strike his friend that once struck him, he’s had enough. All the work he’s done, all the men he’s killed, all the plots he’s foiled—what good are they if he can’t keep anyone safe?
* * *
It frightens me now to think of the possibility that I might never have spoken to Meagan again. Being with her has opened me up to every worthwhile feeling I’ve ever had. I don’t like to think of the person I was back then—young, stupid, prideful, self-absorbed, believing sincerely that I was better than everyone I came in contact with. Treating people in terms of what I could get from them and what they could give me. Meagan emailed me toward the end of that summer, and after a few more awkward near misses, we started seeing each other early the next year. The first time I said that I loved her, I was drunk and she wasn’t even there. A friend was helping me stumble into bed, bringing me water, setting up a garbage can near the side of the bed. “I love her,” I shouted as my friend was stepping out my bedroom door. “I’ve known that for a long time,” my friend said. Of course. What, I wondered, as I drifted away into drunken sleep, had I been so afraid of?
* * *
Everything James Bond has ever done is behind Pierce Brosnan’s eyes. It’s a terrifying thought. As he knocks back that mojito, the screams of hundreds of dying men and women ring in his ears. He’s a different man, now. Change doesn’t happen overnight—it’s hard fought, a game of inches. But he’s enlarging himself, opening himself up, breaking old habits. For one thing, he works for a woman now. Surprisingly, he doesn’t mind. In fact, if pressed, he’d probably admit that she’s better than any boss he’s had. She challenges him in a way none has before. He treats women better than he used to, too. He’s got a long way to go, but he’s not slapping their asses, at least. He lets them come first, which Connery would never have considered. He’s keeping them on his side of the gun, for the most part. It’s impossible for him to forget the things he’s done. But he’s also learned that he’s not beholden to who he used to be. He doesn’t take himself so seriously. Martini, shaken not stirred—sure, there’s a time and a place for it. But he’s on the beach. The sun is shining. The sky and the sea are bluer than any he has seen. Fuck it, he says. He’s in Cuba. He’ll give it a try. He orders a mojito.
