In honour of today being James Bond day, aka the 50th anniversary of Dr. No's release, I thought I'd post this article originally written for Flixist, which tells the story of how a youthful encounter with a certain debonair spy changed my life and turned me into one of the biggest Bond geeks you'll ever meet. For more Bond coverage, check out Flixist's Across The Bond feature, written by Matthew Razak and myself. I'll be posting collections of my individual contributions on this blog closer to Skyfall's release.
Real life at the age of six comprised mainly of three things for me:
falling out of trees, falling into stinging nettles and running into
lamp-posts. Since the loud, anarchic existence of a young boy is
rarely conducive to interacting with the adult world, my mum would
sit me down in front of the television whenever visiting her friends,
issuing strict instructions to Not Move! On
one such occasion, I had been perched on the white duvet of a bed
facing a small television, three floors above being able to destroy
the polite adult luncheon my mum had been invited to. After rummaging
through her bag, she realised with horror that the Postman
Pat
video designated as my afternoon viewing had been left behind.
Horror
struck on both sides: my fear of trying to sit quietly and endure the
boredom of civilised conversation, with her resigned acceptance that
it would only be a matter of time until my contribution to that
conversation descended into a cacophony of appalling jokes and
eructations. In that respect, not much has changed. Fortunately, my
mum's friend had a small video collection and brought out one he
thought I might enjoy. With no other choice, the television was
turned on and the cassette accepted into the VCR. I was alone,
certain there was no way this new video could live up to the
powerhouse that was Postman
Pat
and looking for some other way of entertaining myself until the
adults had finished being boring downstairs.
Six bars of blaring music pulled my attention back to the
screen. A single white circle rolled across, ballooning at the opposite end
into a broad lens following a mysterious man as an
electric guitar roared in the background. He turned, jumped
and fired! The screen bled as the lens dropped into the corner
and died.
The sequence is now so iconic it's easy to overlook what a
powerful and electrifying way to open a film the James Bond gunbarrel
is, evoking so many elements vital to the appeal of spy fiction:
being targeted by an unknown assailant, sudden bursts of violence,
the inevitable outcome of death. The beauty of
that simple imagery contrasted against the mercilessness of life on
the other end of the barrel. As an adult, it's a taste of action to
come. As a six-year old boy, sitting on someone else's bed and
waiting to sit through the same pacifying ritual as on any other
number of dull days, those twenty-three seconds tore open the doors
of my young mind to the side of life existing beyond the parental
safety net. A level of danger and adrenaline surpassing even stinging
nettles and tall trees.
Where
my life up until that point had been primary colours, building blocks
and playgrounds, Goldfinger
offered brutal fights, golden girls and a Korean butler with a
murderous hat being electrocuted in a cathedral of gold! Who could
have imagined what would happen should an aeroplane window be
smashed? That a car could hide machine guns, or eject its front
passenger seat through the roof? The most mundane areas of
everyday life were suddenly bursting with excitement.
I can't remember much of what happened once the film had finished.
Everything after Shirley Bassey bursting her lungs over Maurice
Binder's title sequence is a mental mess, more a series of feelings
playing over a scrapbook of moments and images than a single cohesive
memory. I almost certainly said 'Wow!' at some point, because I used
to say 'wow' about everything from big puddles to shaking dogs or
particularly delicious sweets. Marvellous though those things are,
none are in the same league as those first two hours in the company
of Mr. Bond and his duel with Auric Goldfinger.
What
I do know is what happened in the subsequent years. After the
astonishment of finding out that there was more than one Bond (or
should I say, Moore than one Bond) and the mystery of Licence
To Kill
being the only film I wasn't allowed to watch due to its '15' rating,
my life seemed intertwined with the Bond legacy at every step. I
discovered that the house I grew up in had been where Ian Fleming had
lived until his death in 1964. The first novel I read on my own was
From Russia, With
Love
(a piece of geeky trivia: only the book title has a comma after
Russia). While having tough time at school, I'd hide Bond novels in
my textbooks and make my friends jealous that while they were
memorising passages of French and physics, my reading featured a girl
walking out of the ocean with only a knife-belt to disguise her
nakedness. At boarding school, free time would be spent exploring the
maddest and most wonderful corners of cinema, fuelled by a desire to
recapture the elation that came from being pulled into Bond's world
for the first time.
At university, I started work on a series of
spy fiction novels of my own and began the search for an agent and
publisher this summer. Should that search prove successful, another
bind will be strung into the rope tying my life to Ian Fleming's
greatest creation. On that inconspicuous day so long ago,
sparked by a lapse of parental memory that left a videotape and
another life behind, not only was an enduring love of cinema,
reading and storytelling seeded in a young mind, but a little boy
found a hero.
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