James Bond: A Guy’s Role Model

This is your modern guy’s fantasy-life encapsulated, at least those aspects of it that could not be classified as blatantly pornographic. Bond on the screen is not merely handsome (meaning played exclusively by handsome actors), but has an immense expense account, gets toys, and sleeps with only beautiful women. He can fight, he gets to travel, and he is relatively fearless. Everything most men wish they could be, combined with the things most men covet. The creators of the screen bond, more influenced by Ian Fleming than faithful translators of his work, are marketing geniuses. 

What’s more, I suspect that the Bond-fantasy is not merely a symbol of modern male obsessions as much as it is the cause of them.  I don’t think iPhones and Nissan 350zs would have sold nearly as well without him as a mainstay in western culture. He is basically an amalgam of manly status symbols. If you want to market your gadget you need to see the average guy using it. If he can see himself as Daniel Craig, or previously as Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Dalton, Roger Moore or Sean Connery, then it will be successful. 

Women (meaning average women) have their Lestat, or that guy from Twilight, they have their Fabios and their frill-shirted romance novel cover-boys, they have fantasies about shopping, fashion, and beauty, guys dream about gadgets, and having the guts and cash to crash expensive cars in Rome and Munich. All of it equally shallow, equally absurd but all of it is what makes commerce tick. Nobody is trying to sell you as you are, they are trying to sell to you as the guy you think you are, that’s what being a salesman is all about. It is the ability to delve into fantasy, to look into the customers’ head and see who they wish they were. 

Note that for the purposes of this little piece, when I use the word “guy”, I am referring to every male between the ages of 14 and 70, give or take a few years. 

When you see a 60 year-old man (still a guy) walk into your show-room full of cars he will have trouble getting into and that he won’t ever drive over 70mph, you don’t talk to him as if he was your father, you talk to him as if this was a 20 year-old kid about to get his first really fast car as a birthday present, or you can talk to him like he is your smooth super-spy and you are his Q, there to provide your latest masterpiece of technology.