Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

In this wistful elegy for 007, The Last Martini, I reflect on Raja Sen’s razor-sharp farewell to James Bond, a takedown so precise it leaves longtime fans grieving the loss of a cinematic myth. Both a tribute and a reckoning, it’s my effort to understand nostalgia, obsolescence, and the complicated joy of loving something that no longer fits the world.

Reading Raja Sen’s ‘Yesterday Never Dies’, I found myself in a peculiar state of mind: nodding in agreement at nearly every turn, laughing at the well-aimed barbs, and yet, by the end, strangely hollowed out, saddened in a way I had not expected. I felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under my nostalgia. His words were sharp, witty, devastatingly true. I found myself chuckling at his digs – the vegan food truck, the ritual online immolation of new casting choices – and nodding in recognition at his conclusion that James Bond is, at best, a fossil: gleaming, iconic, but fundamentally dead.

It is a rare thing for a critic to so persuasively dismantle something you hold dear while at the same time making you realize the dismantling was perhaps inevitable. Raja Sen argues, with wit and precision, that James Bond is obsolete, unrevivable, and best preserved as a gleaming relic, embalmed in the eternal smirk of Sean Connery. The tragedy is that he is right. And that is precisely what leaves me disconsolate. By the end of the piece, I wasn’t smiling. I was sad. Sad, because I am forced to admit that what he says leaves very little space for the old joy I still feel when the gun-barrel sequence rolls and the brass notes blare.

I still remember the first Bond film I ever saw. It was the 1980s, and Archana Theatre, that now houses the NDTV office, was then a lively, slightly scruffy cinema hall that proudly screened English films. One fateful week, it hosted a Bond festival: seven days of non-stop espionage, exotic locales, explosive gadgets, and of course, martinis shaken not stirred.

Among the films on offer was Octopussy. I watched it with my brother. And my mother. Now, let me tell you – if there’s one thing a 16-year-old boy should never do, it’s watch a Bond film with his mother seated next to him. I made that mistake once. Never again. For the rest of the festival, I wisely stuck to the company of friends.

Those screenings were events in themselves. Getting a ticket was an adventure more daring than any MI6 mission. One of my more acrobatic friends, clearly destined for a life of espionage or politics, managed to ride the human tide at the ticket counter by quite literally lying flat on the heads of the crowd, surfing over the chaos. He somehow thrust his hands into the ticket window and emerged triumphantly with five tickets in hand, while being loudly and creatively abused by everyone whose personal space (and dignity) he had trampled. Insults flew, mostly directed at his mother and sister, who I’m sure were fine women undeserving of such slander.

For a teenage boy on the cusp of discovering the adult world, this was heady stuff. A world of danger dressed in tuxedos, of violence cloaked in charm. Bond wasn’t just a spy; he was a seductive idea, equal parts menace and allure. And even now, decades later, the thrill of those films, their swagger, their style, lingers in the mind like the echo of a perfectly delivered punchline. Or a perfectly timed explosion.

Over the years, Bond became a private ritual. I remember playing hooky from office, feigning a headache, to catch Tomorrow Never Dies in a half-empty matinee, and running into a couple of other colleagues who were dating each other at the time. They had also fibbed to their office bosses to catch the show. We crossed our hearts to never tell on each other. Even today, often over dinner there’s nothing like catching half-an-hour of Bond over the shrill news and pathetic reality shows.

Every Bond film felt like entry into a parallel reality, where glamour and menace were always entwined. The films were, even then, anachronistic. But that anachronism was part of their charm. For those of us who grew up on Bond, the films were not just movies but mythologies in tuxedos. Sen is right, of course. Bond is sexist, imperialist, hopelessly retrograde. Even as teenagers, my friends and I joked about ‘Bond girls’ as if they were action figures with ridiculous names, interchangeable, expendable. We knew this wasn’t how women should be written or treated. But when the theme music kicked in, when the Aston Martin sprouted gadgets, when Bond raised an eyebrow and delivered a pun that groaned under its own weight, we were hooked. Enjoyment came not from endorsement, but from surrendering to a myth.

The Bond films represented a universe where violence carried the sheen of style, and where desire – problematic as it may now appear – was always interlaced with the possibility of danger. Even when we laughed at the sillier gadgets or rolled our eyes at the more preposterous plots, there was something reassuring about Bond’s world: its excesses, its predictability, its unshakable cool. To read Sen’s obituary is to realize that this reassurance, this entire mode of cinematic experience, is now seen as anachronism, or worse, toxicity.

Sen is correct when he calls Bond ‘too toxic to live amongst us, and too iconic to kill off entirely’. The sexism, the imperialist undertones, the swaggering entitlement – none of these can be smuggled unchanged into the twenty-first century without inviting outrage. Bond, as originally conceived, was the embodiment of post-war British confidence, an avatar of a country still pretending to run the world from its mahogany bars and Savile Row suits. Today Bond’s grandeur belongs to a Britain that exists only in memory, or perhaps in fantasy. To expect him to stride across our screens in 2025 with his old authority is absurd.

And yet. And yet, despite this incontrovertible truth, I cannot quite renounce my fondness. Here lies the paradox: it has become politically fraught, almost embarrassing, for a man today to say he enjoys James Bond films. To say so is to invite suspicion that one secretly endorses the retrograde values they so casually flaunted. That’s the paradox Sen exposes so well: it has become embarrassing, almost indefensible, to admit you enjoy Bond. What does it say about you? That you secretly approve of the sexism? That you wish you, too, could stride into rooms with entitlement, seduce women with half-sentences, or dispatch henchmen without guilt? I don’t believe so. Enjoying Bond isn’t about wanting to be Bond. It’s about enjoying the myth of Bond, the fantasy cocktail of danger, charm, absurdity and coolness.

For me, the gun-barrel sequence alone still brings goose-bumps. I remember watching GoldenEye in the theatre, Pierce Brosnan’s first outing, and feeling the collective hush just before the music began. For those two hours, the audience wasn’t in a crumbling Indian theatre; we were in Monte Carlo, in Cuba, in a secret Russian base. It was escape of the purest kind.

Can that pleasure be defended today? Perhaps not easily. But I don’t think pleasure needs constant justification. Sometimes nostalgia is enough. Sometimes, watching From Russia With Love on a rainy evening is not about ideology but about memory, the memory of being young and gasping as the laser in Goldfinger crept upward, the memory of whispering along with the line, ‘Bond. James Bond’, and knowing you were part of something bigger than yourself.

But enjoyment is not endorsement. We do not watch Goldfinger or The Spy Who Loved Me because we aspire to be Bond, or even because we condone his behaviour. We watch because there is still a thrill in the orchestral blare of that theme, still a gasp of delight in the silhouettes against the opening credits, still a rush in seeing an Aston Martin skid through a mountain pass. We watch because, for all their datedness, these films remain sharply, almost defiantly pleasurable.

Sen’s proposal – that the role be given forever to a digitally resurrected Sean Connery – is both brilliantly mischievous and deeply melancholic. It underscores the impossibility of renewal. Connery was not merely the first Bond; he was the definitive mould, the one in whom the cocktail of charm and menace was mixed to perfection. Every successor has either diluted or overcompensated. Roger Moore smirked too much, Timothy Dalton brooded too much, Pierce Brosnan preened too much, Daniel Craig bled too much. Only Connery struck the impossible balance. To digitally preserve him, as Sen suggests, would be a fittingly Bondian act of technological necromancy. It would also be a tacit admission that no living actor could – or should – step into those shoes again.

But it would also be a melancholy admission: that Bond cannot be reborn. That the character belongs irretrievably to a past era, and that any attempt to modernize him would destroy what made him Bond in the first place. Can you imagine a woke Bond, apologizing after a seduction, sipping a plant-based smoothie instead of a martini? As Sen says, that would not be Bond. That would be James Beige.

What depresses me most about Sen’s essay is not that Bond is dead, but that his death feels inevitable, and worse, deserved. We live in an age of relentless moral audit, where every cultural artefact is re-examined under new ethical spotlights. Sometimes this is necessary; often it is overdue. Misogyny, racism, colonial fantasy are real toxins, and films that glorify them cannot be excused simply because they are entertaining. But where does that leave those of us who still find joy in them? Must we surrender every fragment of our cinematic past to the tribunal of progress? Or can we, as Sen half-suggests, treat Bond as a museum piece, enjoyed not as role model but as artefact?

I want to believe the latter is possible. For me, Bond is no longer a hero but a mythological creature, like Hercules or Odysseus, whose flaws are inseparable from his allure. One does not chastise Odysseus for his womanizing or Hercules for his violence; one accepts that myths reflect the values and excesses of the cultures that birthed them. Bond, too, is myth – an embodiment of a particular mid-century fantasy of masculinity, power and Britishness. To watch him today is not to endorse those fantasies but to observe, with a mixture of nostalgia and critique, how they once held sway.

And still, nostalgia cuts both ways. There is the ache of recognizing that the world which made Bond possible no longer exists; and perhaps should not exist again. There is also the ache of recognizing that in losing Bond, we lose a certain kind of cinematic pleasure: the unabashed glamour, the unapologetic camp, the fusion of violence and wit that action cinema today, with its superhero seriousness and franchise fatigue, so rarely achieves. Mission Impossible may offer stunts more breath-taking, John Wick choreography more precise, but neither gives us that absurd mixture of menace and martini, of menace delivered with a raised eyebrow.

This, I think, is what saddens me most. Not just that Bond is dead, but that his death marks the extinction of a species of film-making that no longer has a place in our cautious, self-conscious culture. To admit one still enjoys Bond is, as I said, to risk appearing politically insensitive. And yet the enjoyment persists. In that persistence lies a small defiance, or at least a wistful clinging to a time when films could be both deeply problematic and deliriously fun.

Raja Sen is right: there should be no new Bond. Amazon will, inevitably, ignore him, and churn out reinventions that will only dilute the myth further. But he is right that Bond’s essence cannot be updated without annihilating it. Better, then, to let him remain in his tuxedoed afterlife, preserved in Connery’s immortal smirk, forever ordering martinis in a loop of eternal reruns. But allow us, please, the guilty pleasure of raising a glass to him every now and then. Let us acknowledge the anachronism, wince at the sexism, and still allow ourselves the rush of that brass theme when it kicks in.

For those of us who grew up with him, Bond lives on in the private cinemas of memory. He lives in the memory of the half-forbidden thrill of late-night VHS viewings, in the hush before the gun-barrel, in the absurd delight of an ejector seat or a one-liner delivered on the edge of catastrophe. He lives in the sadness of knowing that pleasure is no longer innocent, but also in the stubborn refusal to let go of it entirely.

So yes, Bond is dead. Long live Bond. Not in Amazon’s inevitable reinventions, nor in the safe sanctuaries of cultural condemnation, but in the bittersweet nostalgia of those who still hear the brass theme and feel their pulse quicken. In that sense, he will never quite die.