Why James Bond is a religion?

I was sitting at my desk, immersed in the role of the Calvinist church in Dutch history, the steady single flame of my concentration holding impressively steady, when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen ‘From Russia With Love’ for a few months. I hopped up from the chair to fix this.

The main credits sequence, with its famous theme music booming around the house, alerted both sons from their different rooms, and we were all happily in position well before our favourite line, when the Spectre trainer speaks fondly of the killer, Grant: “Homicidal paranoiac – superb material.”

I think that a convincing case can now be made for James Bond having become a religion. You would have to be retired to remember a world without Bond films, and very long retired to remember a world without the books. When the new film, ‘Spectre’, opens later this month,

millions of people (mostly men) all over the world will almost without thinking drift into cinemas to see the same kind of sequence of explosions, drinks, exotic locations, glamorous dresses and cars that their fathers and their fathers’ fathers experienced in an event on a scale, if not a level of profundity, that can only be compared to the Kumbh Mela.

There is almost no aspect of this religious formula that has changed since the 1960s, beyond perhaps, with Craig, an ignorable attempt to pretend that the immortal Bond has bruised feelings. It is not as though the films are interchangeable – in fact they are fascinatingly varied and different – but the changes are in feather-colouring, not genus.

The arc of threat, redemption and reward is unmoving and understood as such by millions of people – because it is not the individual film that matters, but the entire sequence or, in a classic religious paradox, the unending cycle.

The religious links spread in every direction. Most importantly, faith is impervious to failure. Several of the Bond films are dreadful, or have specific scenes that should disqualify them from ever being shown.

Everyone will have a different list of these – the boat-chase in ‘Quantum of Solace’, everything on the oil-rig in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, almost everything involving Pierce Brosnan.

But, just as the obscene, drunken priest waving to his bastard children from the pulpit demeans only himself and not his religion, so a producer’s decision to follow, say, a gigantic African-American henchman in ‘Live and Let Die’ with an absolutely tiny Franco-Filipino henchman in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ somehow just washes away. Any specific film may fail, but the series carries on regardless.

Why this should be the case is insufficiently thought about. There is no other film series that even comes close to Bond’s longevity. Obvious contenders such as the series begun by ‘Superman’, ‘Star Wars’, ‘Doctor in the House’ or ‘Die Hard’ all foundered.

Every studio, every investor would desperately love to have something similar – a film on average every two and a bit years from 1962 to the present, each with staggering profitability, and with a religious pantheon that allows every actor, even the principal, to be replaced at random intervals while generating just as bulky a congregation as ever. If this was a formula that could be copied, then it would be.

Simon Winder’s ‘The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal History of James Bond’, first published in 2006, is out in paperback.

The Guardian