Pop Philosophy

The new Bond: burly, blue-collar and bespoke for this age

I trekked out to the megaplex this past weekend - along with quite a few of you, I was happy to note - to catch the new blond Bond, Daniel Craig, in Casino Royale.

Let me digress for a moment to point out that this is the first film in a long while that I was actually really excited to see. This is both a credit to the 'James Bond Marketing Machine', but also a sad commentary on how atomized a society we've become. It used to be that the opening weekend of a 'tent pole' (to use a movie industry term) film like this was a defining moment in our collective calendars, but that was before the iPod, TiVo, My Space and YouTube turned seminal social events into personal, private moments (and vice versa). Today, the mass audience has become so fragmented that it takes a rare convergence of marketing magic, marvellous buzz and a compelling movie to create an event film release. I miss those halcyon days ...

But back to Bond. Daniel Craig stepped in to some large brogues in taking over the 007 assignment from the most recent (and mostly appreciated) Pierce Brosnan as well as from the most famous Bond of them all, Sean Connery. Not surprisingly, it is through the prism of these two actors that Craig's Bond in particular - and Casino Royale in general - should be viewed.

This Bond is clearly a break from the recent past. Craig's 007 stands in stark contrast to the suave secret agent of Brosnan's films. Whereas Brosnan was smooth, almost effete in his unruffled portrayal of the gentleman spy, Craig is all rough edges and alpha male. While Brosnan was handsome, dashing and debonair, Craig is pug-nosed, pugilistic and rough-hewn. Whereas you can picture the refined Brosnan picking up a rapier and fencing his way past a villain (as he did in Die Another Day), you can equally imagine the more crass Craig as a bloke who breaks a bottle of Guinness and glasses his opponent in a dingy East End pub.

In this way, Craig's Bond marks a return to its historical roots and the paterfamilias of the franchise, Sean Connery. Craig brings to the role a raw physicality that's been lacking since the Scotsman last sipped shaken, not stirred, martinis. It might surprise you than Connery was a prize-winning bodybuilder before becoming Bond; it won't surprise you to know that Craig worked out 2 hours a day during filming to bring back 'burly' as an unexpectedly Bondian adjective. This Bond is menacing, physically intimidating, almost feral (as in the opening fight sequences). In an early exchange in the film, MI-6's M characterizes Bond as a 'blunt instrument', reprising the famous description Ian Fleming once gave of the 007 he envisioned in his novels. Craig is clearly more of a shiv in the Connery tradition than a dagger in the Moore | Brosnan mold.

This Bond is also more blue-collar than his predecessor. Craig's accent is markedly less plummy than Brosnan's smoothed-out Irish brogue, and his closely-cropped sandy mane is diametrically different to the former 007's almost pompadour-like coiffure in The World is not Enough. Craig frequently spits out his lines through clenched teeth and seemingly substitutes blood for hair gel, two stylistic signatures marking him as a considerably less mannerly and metrosexual Bond.

Clearly, the 2006 007 owes a significant debt to 1963's Dr. No, the film that introduced us to the definitive Bond in Connery. However, Craig's selection as Bond - and the back-to-basics approach taken in Casino Royale - probably owes even more to an unlikely trilogy of recent movies: I would argue that this Bond, and this Bond film, would not have happened without The Bourne Identity, Batman Begins and Layer Cake.

Director Doug Liman's take on Robert Ludlum's CIA assassin in 2002 gave the entire espionage genre a much needed modern makeover. Liman, who directed the classic Swingers, married brisk camera work, a deftly unspooling plot and everyman Matt Damon into an unexpected spy franchise in the making. Moreover, Damon's Jason Bourne proved to be a younger, edgier and more contemporary secret agent in tune with his time. He was instantly more relevant to the day's Gen X audience, who had grown tired of a Bond made increasingly irrelevant by poor movies (1999's Tomorrow Never Dies and 2002's Die Another Day) as well as all-too-successful parodies (the Austin Powers trilogy). In a nutshell, The Bourne Identity proved that the spy thriller was not dead yet.

2005 marked the rebirth not of a genre but a fallen hero with Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. This movie established the precedent (which takes on disproportionate importance in a copy cat town like Hollywood) that fans would flock back to a film series if the central character's origins could be fleshed out for a new generation. Not quite a prequel, Batman Begins rebooted the franchise by pushing aside the excesses of previous sequels and ushering in a fresh, young and relatively unknown lead cast member to take over from his older and more illustrious predecessors. Does this sound familiar? Warner Brothers' gamble paid off handsomely, and you can bet that the Bond films' producers - EON Productions - took notice.

Finally, though, Daniel Craig would have never caught the eyes of those producers had Matthew Vaughn not cast and directed him in the excellent 2004 British gangster film noir, Layer Cake. Craig's star turn as a smooth, sophisticated and sharply-dressed London drug baron screamed out his suitability to play an edgier, more street-cred Bond. For the relatively few of you who saw this stylish thriller, Craig's casting as the new 007 came as no surprise.

It is said that over the 5 decades of Bond films society seems to get the 007 it deserves. According to the Bond Canon, Sean Connery gaves us a cool, iconic yet dark spy to reflect the JFK shadow and nuclear dread that hovered over the 1960s. Roger Moore was a more upper class, almost comedic Bond, a movie metaphor for the Thatcher | Reagan era of the 1970s and early 80s. After two stillborn Bond films with Timothy Dalton in 1987 and 1989, Pierce Brosnan's 007 was a familiar face to audiences and a reassuringly steady return to form for the franchise - gadgets and product placements galore - during the tech bubble-fuelled roaring 1990s. Finally, Daniel Craig's current Bond holds up a mirror to our considerably more grim contemporary era, beset by both real and potential climactic catastrophe (Hurrricane Katrina, global warming), torture (Abu Ghraib) and terrorism (9/11). Seen in this context, how we could have anything else but a more elemental, stripped-down, tightly-coiled 007? Time will tell if Daniel Craig is a Bond for the ages, but his promising debut in Casino Royale marks him, at the very least, as a 007 for this age.

The Sex Appeal of Single Moms

I had a girlfriend a few years ago who made me the envy of all my friends. She was the complete package: beautiful, smart, fun, sexy, affectionate and literate all at once. She read 100 books a year, could quote Sartre as well as Shakespeare - in their native tongues - and found the time, despite her management position in a Fortune 500 company, to teach aerobics three times a week. Oh, and one other thing: she was recently divorced with a two year-old son.

Surprised? Don't be. Single moms are in some ways the cream of the dating crop, and the sooner men discover this the better off they'll be. In fact many have, and whether you know it or not this concept has actually already entered the canon of popular culture.

Indeed, no one can describe an idea as novel if it has caught the eye of a Hollywood scriptwriter. A number of years ago, Tom Cruise portrayed agent and professional bachelor Jerry Maguire in the eponymous movie, one that immortalized on celluloid both the quintessential sports star slogan "show me the money" as well as the bewitching charm of a vulnerable single mother and her preternaturally cute offspring. But the best example of this phenomenon might very well be About A Boy, the cinematic adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling novel describing Hugh Grant's passage from a self-absorbed, child-less, professionally single London playboy to a responsible, selfless boyfriend and father figure. While the film's emotional charm emerged out of the relationship Grant's character develops with the quirky twelve-year old son of a divorced, schizophrenic mother, its' humor stemmed from his early attempts to impersonate a single Dad in order to infiltrate the ranks of this heretofore-untapped vein of available women.

Grant's character in the film may have been shallow, but he was no dummy. There is much to say about the sex appeal of single moms. First, the experience of weathering the storm of a marriage gone wrong or husband-less parenthood brings these women an exceptional combination of maturity and centeredness. Their lives are by necessity arrayed around the needs of their children, and this prevents them from lapsing into the indulgence of a single person's self-absorption. To men growing increasingly tired of nubile but vapid twenty-somethings, of Cristal-sipping, Aspen-holidaying sirens found frequenting Marquee in Manhattan and Ghost Bar in Las Vegas, that selflessness is sexy.

There is another, perhaps less obvious advantage to dating a recently divorced woman: single moms long for physical closeness. First, they are often in their early to mid-thirties, in the throes of the much-documented female sexual peak. As well, having been through the emotional epic of wedding, separation and finally divorce, they don't have the time or the inclination to trifle with many of the inhibitions that used to chill their sense of sensuality. Finally, their emergence from failed relationships frequently has one last but critical consequence: simply put, they have often not been intimate for a long time. As a result, they are both liberated and libertine in their approach towards sexuality.

The advantages of opening oneself up to dating single moms do not end there. For example, many of the issues that weigh heavily on a single man's mind - the ones that may have been the deal breakers of relationships past - no longer hold the potency or relevance in these post-marriage partnerships. Worried about that booming biological clock that drove some of you from your last girlfriend? That matter is moot when your new girlfriend already has a child of her own. How about the pressure to put a ring on her finger and consecrate your relationship in the bonds of holy matrimony? Divorced women, unsurprisingly, are reluctant to walk down the aisle any time soon after short-lived, 'starter' marriages.

Of course, this holds up in theory, but in practice matters are not nearly so black and white. I'd only be telling half the story - and the superficial side at that - if I dwelled on sex or the promise of perpetual singledom as the key selling points of dating a single mom. For instance, while women with a child from a previous union feel less pressure to start their family soon, that doesn't mean the desire goes away entirely. In fact, single moms of single children are likely to want to give their son or daughter brothers and sisters to round out the family they started. Moreover, an unsuccessful marriage teaches women matrimonial caution, but rarely results in their complete reluctance to re-enter the fray. Indeed, with their marriage 'mulligans' behind them, single moms often aspire to getting it right the second time, and netting the husband and family they thought they were getting in the first.

However, it must be said that single moms lack the 'form factor' of women without a marriage in their past and children in their present. For one, a divorced woman often brings an ex-husband with her in tow - a complication that makes one nostalgic for the halcyon days when all you had to deal with was her ex-boyfriends. That was never easy, any man will tell you; but coming to grips with a former husband - a man who your girlfriend once took an oath to cherish and to hold 'til death do them part - is another matter altogether. But wait, there's more: ex-husbands also frequently have their second starring role as fathers, a title conferring upon them an important veto power over your relationship with his now ex-wife: joint custody of the children. A father's right to see his children regularly is a wholly legitimate, if not entirely desirable circumstance; however, that right can also restrain the new couple from contemplating professional or personal opportunities that might require moving the family hearth. If you thought asking her Dad for her hand in marriage might be a difficult conversation, consider how you might go about soliciting her ex-husband's permission to move his former wife and children across the country.

Then there's the matter of the children. No single man is fully prepared, I should warn you, to go from the standing stop of bachelorhood to the putative fatherhood of dating a single mom. It's not just the modalities of child-rearing that are difficult to adjust to - the sleepless nights with young babies, or the reality that most hot dates with your girlfriend will take place at home, with a video, after the kids have gone to bed. There is also the realization, implied if not explicit, that as the boyfriend you can only ever hope to come in second in her life - appropriately, behind her children. Finally, there is the child - who represents a living, breathing totem to the existence of her previous relationship and, whether you understand this or not, a sacred trust which you undertake to shoulder to some greater or lesser degree. Being 'Mommy's boyfriend' brings very little power but certain responsibility, and that has to be factored into any decision to date a single mother.

Of course, her children can just as easily be a source of happiness than simply a dating hazard. One of my favorite activities with my former girlfriend was the ritual of putting her two-year-old to bed. From the elaborate set-piece of giving him a bath (where I played the small but crucial twin roles of bubble-blower and towel-dryer), followed by the teeth-brushing, cotton-swabbing, pajamas choosing and - saving the best for last - the reading of the bedtime story, I soaked up little Maxwell's unadulterated joy, his barely contained excitement at sharing his last moments of energy before sleep, his tiny, frail body slumping into my shoulder as I flipped the last page and heard his soft, sweet breaths turn to slumber and snoring. Sure, having Maxie in the picture brought complications to our relationship, but his smile and countenance shined a light so bright that, for the time I was involved with his mother, I could barely comprehend my luck at finding a wonderful woman and a wonderful family life all at once.

Despite these complications - perhaps as a result of them, even - single moms are, in many ways, the gold standard in the 21st century single scene. A post-marriage relationship may lack the simplicity and predictability that men have come to crave, but it more than makes up for it in substance, sensuality and simple pleasures. Hugh Grant and Tom Cruise had it right.